This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most influential books of the 20th century, Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler, who died in 2016. His death was followed three years later by that of his wife and longtime collaborator, Heidi Toffler. The organization Toffler Associates is still active, and explores the Tofflers’ impact on the page The Toffler Legacy.
To mark the 50th anniversary, the Abundant World Institute will soon publish a book of essays, After Shock: The World’s Foremost Futurists Reflect on 50 Years of Future Shock―and Look Ahead to the Next 50, with a lengthy and distinguished list of contributors.
In returning to the original, here are 15 quotes that will stimulate your thinking about the present and the future:
Change and novelty boost the psychic price of decision-making. – page 357
Conditioned to think in straight lines, economists have great difficulty imaging alternatives to communism and capitalism. – page 219
Every person carries within his head a mental model of the world—a subjective representation of external reality. – page 155
Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. – page 11
Long before the year 2000, the entire antiquated structure of degrees, majors and credits will be a shambles. – page 273
One needs imagination to confront a revolution. – page 186
Rational behavior, in particular, depends upon a ceaseless flow of data from the environment. – page 350
Society has many built-in time spanners that help to link the present generation with the past. – page 423
Technocrats suffer from myopia. – page 458
The book itself, like much of the information it holds, has become more transient. – page 161
The embryonic Ad-hocracies of today demand a radically different constellation of human characteristics. – page 146
The inhabitants of the earth are divided not only by race, nation, religion or ideology, but also, in a sense, by their position in time. – page 37
The thrust toward some form of man-machine symbiosis is furthered by our increasing ingenuity in communicating with machines. – page 211
To plan for a more distant future does not mean to tie oneself to dogmatic programs. – page 459
We need to train thousands of young people in the perspectives and techniques of scientific futurism, inviting them to share in the exciting venture of mapping probable futures. – page 469
Then there is the famous quote often attributed to Alvin Toffler from the book, usually rendered as: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” I used it in a 2014 post for Next Avenue, 5 Ways to Infuse Meaning in Your Second Act. However, in conducting research for this post, I discovered via the blogger FLEXNIB that the reference is actually Toffler quoting psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy on page 414 of the Bantam paperback edition. It’s a somewhat differently worded quotation, but will probably be forever attributed to Toffler.
In 2010, at the 40th anniversary of Future Shock, NPR ran an interesting feature that included an interview with the Tofflers, Futurist 40 Years Later: Possibilities, Not Predictions. Discussing the idea of the rapid nature of change predicted in the book, and how it had played out since then, Alvin Toffler remarked, “In the past, you made a decision and that was it. Now, you make a decision and you say, ‘What happens next?’ There’s always a next.”