Humanity is acquiring the right technology for all the wrong reasons. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people are facing an abrupt collision with the future. Citizens of the World’s richest and most technologically advanced nations, many of them are finding it increasingly painful to keep up with incessant demands for change that characterize our time. The New World for the past 350 years has been caught up in a typhoon of change. This storm, far from abating, now appears to be gathering force. Change sweeps through the highly industrialized counties with waves f ever accelerating speed and unprecedented impact. It spawns in its wake all sort of curious social flora—from psychedelic churches and “free universities” to fake new and science cities in the Artic. It breeds odd personalities, too: children who at twelve are no longer childlike; adults who at fifty are children of twelve. Our World is filled with self-absorbed, frightened, hollow people. There anarchists who, beneath their dirty denim shirts, are outrageous conformists, and conformists who, beneath their button-down collars, are outrageous anarchists. Popular literature rides the wave with best-selling titles that guarantee success with everything from money making to firming thighs. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

This not-so-magnificent obsession to “find ourselves” has spawned a whole set of counterfeit values; we worship fame, success, materialism, and celebrity. We want to “live for success” as we “look out for number one,” and we do not mind “winning through intimidation.” Our culture is being sucked dry, leaving is spiritually empty and economically weakened. A strange new society is apparently erupting in our midst. Is there a way to understand it, to shape its development? How can we come to terms with it? If we took a fresh look at the racing rate of change that makes reality seems, sometimes, like a kaleidoscope run wild, much that now strikes us as incomprehensible would be far less so. For the acceleration of change does not merely buffet industries or nation. It is a concrete force that reaches deep into our personal lives, compels us to act out new roles, and confronts us with the danger of a new and powerfully upsetting psychological disease. This new disease can be called “future shock,” and a knowledge of its sources and symptoms helps explain many things that otherwise defy rational analysis. The parallel term “culture shock” has already begun to creep into the popular vocabulary. Culture shock is the effect that immersion in a strange culture has on the unprepared visitor. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Culture shock is what one experiences when one enters a new land and everything is different. The laws are no always legal and only apply to certain people, where “fixed price” is negotiable, where people put on plays in the street like they are filming a television show, but no one is watching, where laughter signifies anger. It is what happens when the familiar psychological cues that help an individual to function in society are suddenly withdrawn and replaced by new ones that are strange or incomprehensible. The culture shock phenomenon accounts for much of the bewilderment, frustration, and disorientation that plagues Americans in their dealings with other societies. It cases a breakdown in communication, a misreading of reality, an inability to cope. Yet culture shock is relatively mild in comparison with the much more serious malady, future shock. Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future. It may well be the most important disease of tomorrow. Future shock will not be found in Index Medicus or any listing of psychological abnormalities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

However, unless intelligent steps are taken to combat future shock, millions of human beings will find themselves increasingly disoriented, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environments. The malaise, mass neurosis, irrationality, and free-floating violence already apparent in contemporary life are merely a forestate of what may lie ahead unless we come to understand and treat this disease. Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one’s own society. However, its impact is far worse. For many people who travel, they have the comforting knowledge that the culture they left behind will be there to return to. The victim of future shock is not. Take an individual out of one’s own culture and set one down suddenly in an environment sharply different from one’s own, with a different set of cues to react to—different conceptions of tie, space, work, love, religion, pleasures of the flesh, and everything else—then cut one off from any hope of retreat to a more familiar social landscape, and the dislocation one suffers is doubly severe. Moreover, if this new culture is itself in constant turmoil, and if—worse yet—its values are incessantly changing, the sense of disorientation will still be further intensified. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Given few clues as to what kind of behaviour is rational under the radically new circumstances, the victim may well become a hazard to oneself and others. Now imagine not merely an individual but an entire society, and entire generation—including its weakest, least intelligent, and most irrational members—suddenly transported into this new World. The result is mass disorientation, future shock on a grand scale. This is the prospect that humans now face. Change is avalanching upon our heads and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it. Is all this exaggerated? I think not. It has become a cliché to say that what we are now living through is a “second industrial revolution.” This phrase is supposed to impress us with the speed and profundity of the change around us. However, in addition to being platitudinous, it is misleading. For what is occurring now is, in all likelihood, bigger, deeper, and more important than the industrial revolution. Indeed, a growing body of reputable opinion asserts that the present movement represents nothing less than the second great divide in human history, comparable in magnitude only with that first great break in historic continuity, the shift from barbarism to civilization. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

This idea crops us with increasing frequency in the writings of scientists and technologist. Sir George Thomson, the British physicist and Nobel prizewinner, suggests in The Foreseeable Future that the nearest historic parallel with today is not the industrial revolution but rather the “invention of agriculture in the Neolithic age.” John Diebold, the American automation expert, warns that “the effects of the technological revolution we are not living through will be deeper than any social change we have ever experienced before.” Sir Leon Bagrit, the British computer manufacturer, insists that automation by itself represents “the greatest change in the World history of mankind.” Nor are the men of science and technology alone in these views. Sir Herbert Read, the philosopher of art, tells us that we are living through “a revolution so fundamental that we must search many past centuries for a parallel. Possibly the only comparable change is the one that took place between the Old and the New Stone Age…” And Kurt W. Marek, who under the name C.W. Ceram is best-known as the author of God, Graves and Scholars, observes that in the twentieth century, we concluded “an era of mankind five thousand years in length…We are not, as Spengler supposed, in the situation of Rome at the beginning of the Christian West, but in that of the year 3000 B.C. We open our eyes like prehistoric man, we see a World totally new.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

One of the most striking statements of this theme has come from Kenneth Boulding, an eminent economist and imaginative social thinker. In justifying his view that the present moment represents a crucial turning point in human history, Boulding observes that “as far as many statistical series related to activities of mankind are concerned, the date the divides human history into two equal parts is well within living memory.” In effect, our century represents The Great Median Strip running down the center of human history. Thus he assets, “The World of today…is as different from the World in which I was born as that World was from Julius Caesar’s. I was born in the middle of human history, to date, roughly. Almost as much has happened since I was born as happened before.” This startling statement can be illustrated in a number of ways. It has been observed, for example, that if the last 50,000 years of human’s existence were divided int lifetimes of approximately sixty-two years each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes. Of these 800, fully 650 were spent in caves. Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it been possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to another—as writing made it possible to do. Only during the last six lifetimes did masses of humans ever see a printed word. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

Only during the last four lifetimes has it been possible to measure time with any precision. Only in the last two has anyone anywhere used an electric motor. Only in this last lifetime have people used the Internet. And the overwhelming majority of all the material goods we use in daily life today have been developed within the present, the 800^th, lifetime. The 800^th lifetime marks a sharp break with all past human experience because during this lifetime human’s relationship to resources has reversed itself. This is most evident in the field of economic development. Within a single lifetime, agriculture, the original basis of civilization, has lost its dominance in nation after nation. Today in a dozen major countries agriculture employs fewer than 15 percent of the economically active population. In the United States, whose farms feed 200,000,000 Americans plus the equivalent of another 160,000,000 people around the World, this figure is already blow 6 percent and it is still shrinking rapidly. Moreover, if agriculture is the first stage of economic development and industrialism the second, we can now see that still another stage—the third—has suddenly been reached. In about 1956 the Untied States of American became the first major power in which more than 50 percent of non-farm labour ceased to wear the blue-collar of factory or manual labour. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

Blue collars workers were outnumbered by those in the so-called white-collar occupations—in retail trade, administration, communications, research, education, and other service categories. Within the same lifetime a society for the first time in human history not only threw off the yoke of agriculture, but managed within a few brief decades to throw off the yoke of manual labour as well. The World’s first service economy had been born. Since then, one after another of the technologically advanced countries have moved in the same direction. The central stupendous truth about developed economies today is that they can have—in anything but the shortest run—the kind and scale of resources they decide to have. It is no longer resources that limit decisions. It is the decision that makes the resources. This is the fundamental revolutionary change—perhaps the most revolutionary humans have ever known. This monumental reversal has taken place in the 800^th lifetime. This lifetime is so different from all others because of the astonishing expansion of the scale and scope of change. Clearly, there have been other lifetimes in which epochal upheaval occurred. Wars, plagues, earthquakes, and famine rocked many an earlier social order. However, these shocks and upheavals were contained within the borders of one or a group of adjacent societies. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

It took generations, even centuries, for shocks of upheavals of other nations to spread beyond their borders. In our lifetime the boundaries have burst. Today the network of social ties is so tightly woven that the consequences of contemporary events radiate instantaneously around the World. Indeed, not only do contemporary events radiate instantaneously—now we can be said to be feeling the impact of all past events in a new way. For the past is doubling back on us. We are caught in what might be called “time skip.” An event that affected only a handful of people at the time of its occurrence in the past can have a largescale consequence today. Much like globalization in the late 1990s started outsource many high paying management and manufacturing jobs to other countries and was the start of the erosion of the middle-class Americans. From 2001-2018, approximately 4 million jobs were lost as a result. We have also started outsourcing farming and meat production to other countries and that is hurting many America famers today. America has lost 100,000 farms and only 25 percent of the 1.9 million remaining farms are making a profit. Whatever happened to some people in the past affects virtually all humans today. This was not always true. In short, all history is catching up with us, and this very difference, paradoxically, underscores our break with the past. Thus the scope of change is fundamentally altered. Across space and through tie, change has a power and reach in this, the 800^th lifetime, that it never did before. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

We have not merely extended the scope and scale of change; we have radically altered its pace. We have in our time released a totally new social force—a stream of change so accelerated that it influences our sense of time, revolutionizes the tempo of daily life, and affects the very way we “feel” the World around us. We no longer “feel” life as humans did in the past. And this is the ultimate difference, the distinction that separates the truly contemporary humans from all others. For this acceleration lies behind the impermanence—the transience—that penetrates and tinctures our consciousness, radically affecting the way we relate to other people, to things, to the entire Universe of ideas, art and values. To understand what is happening to us as we move into the age of super-industrialism, we must analyze the process of acceleration and confront the concept of transience. If acceleration is a new social force, transience is its psychosocial counterpart, and without an understanding of the role it plays in contemporary human behaviour, all our theories of personality, all our psychology, must remain pre-modern. Psychology without the concept of transience cannot take account of precisely those phenomena that are peculiarly contemporary. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

By changing our relationship to the resources that surround us, by violently expanding the scope of change, and, most crucially, by accelerating its pace, we have broken irretrievably with the past. We have cut ourselves off from the old ways of thinking, of feeling, of adapting. We have set the stage for a completely new society and we are now racing toward it. This is the crux of the 800^th lifetime. And it is this that calls into question human’s capacity for adaptation—how will they fare in this new society? Can humans adapt to its imperatives? And if not, can they alter these imperatives? Before even attempting to answer such questions, we must focus on the twin forces of acceleration and transience. We must learn how they alter the texture of existence, hammering our lives and psyches into new and unfamiliar shapes. We must understand how—and why—they confront us, for the first time, with the explosive potential of future shock. The establishment of a system that guarantees the provision of basic necessities for all means the disappearance of dominant classes. Humans will have to cease to live under “zoo” conditions—id est, their full freedom will have t be restored and all forms of exploitative control will have to disappear. That humans are incapable of dispensing with controlling leaders is a myth disproved by all those societies that function well without hierarchies. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Such a dramatic change would, of course, involve radical political and social changes that would alter all human relations, including the family structure, the structure of education, or religion, and relations between individuals in work and leisure. It would basically take the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to manifest to make this possible. In the meantime, Christianity is recognized as a rational and realistic solution which serves the basic biological program of humans: the preservation and growth of both the individual and the human species. The most pleasurable journey you take is through yourself…they only sustaining love involvement is with yourself. When you look back on your life and try to figure out where you have been and where you are going, when you look at your work, your love affairs, your marriage, your children, your pain, your happiness—when you examine all that closely, what you really find out is that the only person you really go to bed with is yourself. The only thing you have is working to the consummation of your own identity. And that is what many have been trying to do all their life. The greatest commandment of all, Jesus said, is “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Find the true person God wants you to be and the true purpose of your life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

It is not what we do that matter, but what a sovereign God chooses to do through us. God does not want our success; He wants us. God does not demand our achievements; He demands our obedience. The kingdom of God is a kingdom of paradox, where through the ugly defeat of a cross, a holy God is utterly glorified. Victory comes through defeat; healing through brokenness; finding self through losing self. The Christian Bible promised that a new kingdom of peace would come. God does not want us living in future shock where the experience of life is like a strange twilight World where any moment might be our last. When we accept God, we will realize that the anger and hatred and violence in our own soul has vanished. The meaning of Earthly existence lies, not as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul. The Holy Spirit has communicated one fact to us: what God demands of us is obedience, no matter what. Single-minded obedience in faith. What God wants from His people is obedience, no matter what the circumstances, no matter how unknown the outcome. It has always been this way. God calling His people to obedience and giving them at best a glimpse of the outcome of their effort. Most of the great figures of the Old Testament died without ever seeing the fulfillment of the promises they relied upon. Saint Paul expended himself building the early church, but as his drew to a close he could see only a sting of tiny outposts along the Mediterranean, many weakened by fleshly indulgence or divided over doctrinal disputes. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Some might think this divine pattern cruel, but I am convinced there is a sovereign wisdom to it. Knowing how susceptible we are to success’s siren call, God does not allow us to see, and therefore glory in, what is done through us. The very nature of the obedience He demands is that it be given without regard to circumstances. Unquestioning acceptance of and obedience to Jesus’ authority is the foundation of the Christian life. Everything else rests upon this. It also provides the key to understanding what is for many the great mystery of Christianity: Faith. Saving faith—that by which we are justified, made right with God—is a gift of God; and yes, it involved a rational process as well since it comes from hearing the Word of God. For maturing faith—faith which deepens and grows as we live our Christian life—is not just knowledge, but knowledge acted upon. It is not just belief, but belief lived out—practiced. Only one who believes if obedient; only one who is obedient believes. Realizing it is possible, we remember our instructions and begin to follow them. They work. Like learning to drive an Ultimate Driving Machine at age 16 or mastering another language, faith is a state of mind that grows out of our actions, just as it also governs them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

So obedience is the key to real faith—the unshakable kind of faith so powerfully illustrated by Job’s life. Job lost his home, his family (expect for a nagging wife), his health, even his hope. The advice from friends was no help. No matter where he turned, he could find no answers to his plight. Eventually he stood alone. However, though it appeared God had abandoned him, Job clung to the assurance that God is who He is. Job confirmed his obedience with those classic words of faith: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” This is real faith: believing and acting obediently regardless of circumstances or contrary evidence. After all, if faith depended on visible evidence, it would not be faith “We walk by faith, not by sight,” the apostle Paul wrote. It is absurd for Christians to constantly seek new demonstrations of God’s power, to expect a miraculous answer to every need, from curing ingrown toenails to finding parking spaces; this only leads to faith in miracles rather than the Maker. Truth faith depends not upon mysterious signs, celestial fireworks, or grandiose dispensations from a God who is seen as a rich, benevolent uncle; true faith, as Job understood, rests on the assurance that God is who He is. Indeed, on that we must be willing to stake our very lives. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

The spiritual nature can only be discovered spiritually—not intellectually, not emotionally, and certainly not physically. Such a spiritual discovery can only be attained intuitively. Christianity must evoke from the believer the same response it drew from the first disciples: a passionate desire to obey and please God—a willingly entered-int discipline. That is the beginning of true discipleship. That is the beginning of loving God. The power of God’s Word is all by itself, life-changing. What power those Scriptures hold! People of great intellect and compelling personality have been utterly transformed by the Word of God. The Christian Bible—banned, burned, beloved. More widely read, more frequently attacked than any other book in history. Generations of intellectuals have attempted to discredit it; dictators of every age have outlawed it and executed those who read it. Yet soldiers carry it into battle believing it more powerful than their weapons. Fragments of it smuggled into solitary prison cells have transformed ruthless killers into gentle saints. Yearly, the Christian Bible outsells every best-seller. Five hundred million copies were published last year alone. Portions have been translated into more than 1800 languages and even carried to the moon. We own to the Scriptures the same reverence which we own to God. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

The mystery into which we have been born is not penetrable by weaving fancy or logical intellect. However, intuition, if we are patient enough and willing enough to follow it, can lead us into an overwhelming experience where we discover that God is there, always there. It is not through any intellectual process of reasoning from premise to conclusion that we come to know we exist, but through an immediate and spontaneous intuition. Intuition moves thought and penetrates feeling, so that it is often mistaken for them. Yet its true nature is something other than both theirs. Intuition is the mind’s inner light. Where ego merely believes, intuition definitely knows. There is an intermediate entity, compounded of the ego’s best part and the point of contact with God. If you wish, call it the higher mind, the conscience, or the intellectual intuition. The discovery of its presence makes possible a form of communication between person and God which is passive, not active. That is, one is directed guided or corrected in and through one’s human faculties, intuitively. As if one were doing so completely alone, the person acts, does, thinks, speaks, and decides. However, one is not: one id responding to God, to the effects of His presence, now unhindered by one’s ego. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

When we first face the mystery, which is at the heart’s core and in the mind’s essence, we know nothing about it other than that it is the source of our being and that it possesses a power and intelligence utterly transcending our own. Yet we feel that it draws our love, and in our best moments, inspires our character. We feel the Presence of something higher than ourselves, wise, noble, beautiful, and worthy of all reverence. Yet it is really ourselves—the best part come at last into unfoldment and expression. So there is no mystery in this. When people live in evil it is because of what is wrong on their “insides.” Similarly, the way to a life filled and fruitful with goodness is transformation of every dimension of the inner or “spiritual” side of the self. If life is to be transformed, you cannot bypass any of those dimensions.  Each one must of necessity be a source either of weakness or of strength. The renovation of the heart simply requires that each inner dimension of the human self be rectified and established in righteousness by effectively and thoroughly receiving into it—specifically into it, each particular dimension of the self—”the grace of God that brings salvation.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

 The “grace of God that brings salvation”—Saint Paul’s words, once again—“trains us (paideuousa) in denying ungodliness and Worldly desires and living sensibly, righteously and Godly in the present age,” expecting the glorious return of the one who saves us, Christ Jesus, “who gave himself for us, that he might buy us back from every lawless deed and cleanse for himself a people peculiarly his own, sold out to good works,” reports Titus 2.12-15. What is in itself and at once assembled as the highest concept of human beings, the greatest power ruling existence, the supreme Mind before which all other minds must bow, the primal consciousness which outlives every form of existence because God alone is, was and shall be? There is no name attached to God, this ineffable silent mystery of mysteries. Yet it is there. Everything tells us the spirit of God is there, from the vast Universe itself to those seers and sages of ancient Greece, India, and China who have broke through and away from human limitations. Can we wonder that with one God there came one energy and once substance? Mind, Life, and Power are in that being. God holds the Universe in His Mind: therefore we creatures of the Universe are held too. If this incomparable Being were not here, too, we would not live for a moment. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

It must needs be, according to what has been said before, that God loves more the better things. “The LORD tests the righteous, but his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence,” reports Psalm 11.5. For it has been shown, that God’s loving one thing more than another is nothing else than His willing for that thing a greater good: because God’s will is the cause of goodness in things; and the reason why some things are better than others, is that God wills for them a greater good. Hence it follows that He loves more the better things. “Make room in your hearts. We have wronged no one, we have corrupted no one, we have exploited no one. I do not say this to condemn you; I have said before that you have such a place in our hearts that we would live or die with you. I have great confidence in you; I take great pride in you. I am greatly encouraged; in all our troubles my joy knows no bounds,” reports 2 Corinthians 7.2-4. Lord of the enclosed land, ruler of the flowery plain, Almighty who first took this path: bring your kingdom to Earth and restore peace, sanity, and prosperity. May your blessings flourish in the land beyond. May we be happy in your land of joy. May we find rest and salvation. God sends out His commandment to the Earth; His word goes speedily forth. Praise ye the Lord from the Heavens; praise ye Him in the heights. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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