A friend recently forwarded this article to me and I found it most interesting even though I don’t agree with all the writer’s characterizations. The author, Charles. D. Hayes, is an unabashed liberal
and a self-taught philosopher. He was a U.S. Marine and a police officer before a career in the oil industry. His insights remind me of Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman turned author who wrote the 1951 classic, The True Believer. I read Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock while in graduate school and found it to be very credible. Hayes’ article is printed here in its entirety.
Future Shock and the Trumpsters
By Charles D. Hayes
I think I posted this one not too long ago, but I have just updated it. A half century ago, Alvin Toffler published Future Shock. He said it was his thesis “that there are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb, and that by endlessly accelerating change without first determining these limits, we may submit masses of men to demands they simply can’t tolerate.”
I have always felt Toffler’s observations about change are spot-on, especially for people without the benefit of a rigorous education that gives them a sense of independence, beyond being easily manipulated for political purposes.
Future shock is what Toffler says we get from overstimulation. I wish he were here today, because I would like to hear his views on what happens when overstimulation is interrupted incessantly with distraction, disgust, and partisan politics, based not upon reasoned ideology but nothing but tribal identity, and the slippery slope that people experiencing future shock are so easily drawn toward fascism. The more complicated life becomes; the more powerful one’s intellect needs to be to manage stress.
The pace of change from when Toffler published Future Shock is on an exponential upward trajectory, that in my experience, for many of us makes aging an act of becoming a stranger in one’s own land. My parent’s generation, born in the early 1920s, would be lost today, and my grandparents’ generation before them would be so bewildered, they would not know how to cope with everyday life.
My world at age 78, is shrinking rapidly, technology is leaving me behind. I have had a dozen or so computers since my first IBM PC and with each new system, I am overwhelmed with features I do not use or even understand. Today’s music increasingly just sounds like loud noise and I keep seeing groups, that are reported to be great, that I have never heard of, and for the life of me, I cannot figure out what made them popular.
Exacerbating the negative effects of rapid change are the physical changes that come with aging: memory loss, poor vision, a lack of control of bodily functions we have always taken for granted, and in my case, aggravated clumsiness. These irritations add up to a lack of control that make them subtle little reminders of death, and thus they are hellishly annoying. I do not, however, feel compelled to blame immigrants for my problems. Thankfully, I can handle my own existential angst, without the need of scapegoats.
My point, in this dismal post is that I think Toffler’s observations apply in spades to Trump supporters. I believe we have indeed discovered the limits of people’s ability to cope with change, but we have yet to acknowledge that this is what is happening. Blazing tribalism based strictly on identity, in my view, is what occurs when regions of the country receive a grossly inadequate education, that renders their resident’s incapable of coping even with life 101, which means life 401 is out of the question.
It takes a broad perspective from a liberal education that makes room for others, and debunks mindless stereotypes about minorities these days, to provide a perspective capable of handling the angst, that naturally comes with aging, and accelerating change just ratchets the whole thing up, for people who are ill equipped intellectually to deal with so much change and uncertainty.
Trumpsters have nothing solid to hang on to, but a worldview comprised of conspiratorial nonsense, and too often a Medieval worldview fueled by fear and contempt, which leaves them assuming, that they have no choice, but to find someone to blame, for whatever is making their world seem out of control, and this kind of ignorance feeds on itself, with a ravenous appetite.
The process of aging during times of warp speed change is bad enough, but for people fundamentally ignorant about the human condition, the tendency to believe the worst about people unfamiliar to them, makes them exceptionally easy to manipulate by political despots, which has been clearly demonstrated by the “build the wall” mania, regarding our border with Mexico.
It is much too late to provide an existential education for today’s citizens; whose beliefs are the result of having been socially indoctrinated with batshit crazy assumptions about what is going on in the world—a case in point: Viewing Donald Trump as the savior of Christianity.
It is damned near impossible to remember what it is like not to know something once it has been learned, but it is easy for those of us who feel we are being left behind because of our age to relate to Trump supporters in readily understanding how they feel in not being able to make sense of the world around them. The vital difference is that a liberal education steeped in the humanities enables one to dissipate the need for scapegoats by dispelling the mindless accusations used against them.
What makes ignorance so dangerous is that it feeds on itself and it takes extraordinarily little effort to manipulate uneducated people, who are already fearful, into believing that others are the cause of their problems. Trump started a chain reaction of fearful animosity and his targets don’t have the intellectual wherewithal to see that it is contrived nonsense, so it just keeps going, ricocheting from one person to another and January 6th, 2021 gave us a literal visualization of the process. But arming future generations to deal with their own existential angst has much more potential in my view than turning those already lost.
But to have any hope of addressing this social malady in the realm of education for the future, we must keep the House of Representatives in 2022 and increase our numbers in the Senate, to have any hope of making it possible to provide future generations, with the kind of formal learning that will render them capable of dealing with uncertainty, without the need of bigotry, racism, mindless conspiracy theories, and of experiencing lives fueled by hatred and contempt for everything they don’t understand. Thoughts.