Industrial Man

The Third Wave, Toffler

Industrial Man was different from all his forerunners. He was the master of ''energy slaves" that amplified his puny power enormously. He spent much of his life in a factory-style environment, in touch with machines and organizations that dwarfed the individual. He learned, almost from infancy, that survival depended as never before on money. He typically grew up in a nuclear family, and went to a factory-style school. He got his basic image of the world from the mass media. He worked for a large corporation or public agency, belonged to unions, churches, and other organizations—to each of which he parceled out a piece of his divided self. He identified less and less with his village or city than with his nation. He saw himself standing in opposition to nature—exploiting it daily in his work. Yet he paradoxically rushed to visit it on weekends. (Indeed, the more he savaged nature, the more he romanticized and revered it with words.) He learned to see himself as part of vast, interdependent economic, social, and political systems whose edges faded into complexities beyond his understanding.

Faced with this reality, he rebelled without success. He fought to make a living. He learned to play the games required by society, fitted into his assigned roles, often hating them and feeling himself a victim of the very system that improved his standard of living. He sensed straight-line time bearing him remorselessly toward the future with its waiting grave. And as his wristwatch ticked off the moments, he approached death knowing that the earth and every individual on it, including himself, were merely part of a larger cosmic machine whose motions were regular and relentless.