You may have habits that weaken you. The most significant change in a person’s life is a change of attitude. All change involves problems, and all successful change involves solving those problems. The individuals who will succeed and flourish will also be master of change. Even the medieval alchemists had noted that there were two general classes of materials. Material of the one class remined essentially unchanged after being heated and then allowed to cool. Salt would glow red hot, lead would melt, water would vaporize—but on being cooled each material would revert to its original appearance and properties, evidently none the worse for wear. It was entirely different with materials of other classes. Sugar would char when heated and would not regain its original condition when cooled. Olive oil, like water, would vaporize, but, unlike water, it would not return to liquid on cooling. Eventually it was noted that the heat-resisting materials were of inanimate origin, coming directly from the Earth, air, or sea; on the other hand, the materials that were easily modified or destroyed by heat all seemed to drive from living organisms. In the early 1800s the two classes of substance were given the names inorganic and organic, respectively. In this determination by observation of the existence of two classes of materials and the adoption of labels for their convenient identification the methos was scientific and the logic unassailable. Unfortunately, at this point the leading scientists of the day concurred in a not very scientific guess, and they guessed wrong. “Guess” is not precisely the word to describe the mental exercise in question here—what the scientists did was in effect to update and reaffirm the old idea of the essential mystery and unknowability of the life process. The success of Dr. Harvey and his followers in explaining the functions of the organs of many animals in purely physical terms made it impossible, at the start of the nineteenth century, to retrain a vitalistic doctrine as all embracing as that of previous ears. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12

Nevertheless, it was still possible to postulate a vitalistic chasm separating the materials of living organisms from those of inanimate objects. This was done: the doctrine was put forth that there exists an unbridgeable gulf between inorganic and organic matter—that the ordinary physical laws which might be excepted ultimately to explain the construction and properties of the other. In particular, a mysterious “vital force,” it was held, was involved in the formation of organic matter. Since this force lay completely beyond the reach or comprehension of the chemist, there was no way that organic materials could be made except Nature’s way—by the mysterious workings of Life in the bodies of plants and animals. However, even this more restricted, materials-oriented doctrine of vitalism was in for a rough time. As early as 1827 a discovery was announced that rendered it at least partially untenable. There was a trace of irony in this development, for the instrument for the event, a German chemist called Friedrich Wohler, was a former pupil of the Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius, whose great authority and prestige had been responsible for the wide acceptance of the vitalistic theory of materials in the first place. In modern terms Dr. Wohler’s epoch-making discovery seems ridiculously simple. He put two well-known inorganic chemicals in test tube, gently heated the mixture, and found the result to be an organic substance. The initial inorganic ingredients were ammonia and cyanic acid, while the organic end product was urea, a common animal waste product. It was no easier 200 years ago than it is now for a young scientist to find the courage to report a finding that completely contradicted the longstanding convictions of one’s elders. Therefore, Dr. Wohler proceeded cautiously in developing one’s conclusions. Four years elapsed between one’s original experiment and one’s final publication, during which time one repeated the experiment many times and devised many chemical tests of one’s raw materials and end product to ensure that one’s interpretation was correct. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12

Finally, there could be no doubt about it. Although his published paper was written in more formal terms, its essential claim was colourfully stated in a letter Dr. Wohler wrote to Dr. Berzelius: “I must now tell you that I can make urea without calling on my kidneys and indeed without the aid of animal, but its man or dog. Ammonium cyanate is urea.” Of course, one robin does not make a spring. Urea might have been some kind of rare exception, not really typical of organic matter. However, it was not. In 1838 Dr. Wohler and a collaborating chemist, J. von Liebig, reported the synthesis from inorganic ingredients of no fewer than sixteen additional organic substances. By the changing of matter from one form to another, the nineteenth century saw raid progress in the growth of basic understanding of the science of chemistry. Such fundamental knowledge was to be of overriding importance in the determination of the ultimate fear of the material-oriented doctrine of vitalism. The chemists, for example, came to realize that the thousands of different substances occurring in nature were composed on only a few dozen different kinds of fundamental construction materials. These basic ingredients of ordinary matter were isolated and identified by a variety of new techniques. For example, it was found that electricity passing through water tore the water part into two colourless gases, which were known as hydrogen and oxygen. However, these ingredients could not be further broken down into simpler materials. If either of them were tightly confined and protected from contamination by other materials, it could be heated, cooled, compressed, subjected to ultraviolet lights, electric discharge, or any other kind of torture that could be invented by the chemist without any perceptible effect on its properties—it would remain the same colourless gas, would still combine with the other gas under the proper conditions to form water, and so on. One of the principal preoccupations of the nineteenth-century chemists became the invention of methods of breaking down familiar substances into their seemingly fundamental and indestructible components and determining how many different types of such components and determining how many different types of such components could be isolated and identified. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12

These basic ingredients of matter, like hydrogen and oxygen, were named elements, while the more complex substance which could be broken down into two or more different elements were called compounds. The chemist soon were able to identify and determine the properties of a few dozen elements that seemed able to form an almost limitless variety of chemical compounds by combining in various proportions. Nitrogen was another colourless gaseous element like hydrogen and oxygen but with different combinatorial properties (thereby entering into the formation of different compound substances). Carbon was a black, sooty material. Sulfur was a yellow, solid element that burned in air with a blue flame and produced a distinctly acrid gaseous product as a result. And so on. From the point of view of our present interests the importance of these developments is that organic and inorganic substances were found to be composed of the same elementary construction materials. The sugars, starches, fats, and oils manufactured in living plants and oxygen bound together in various definite proportions. The albuminous substances, later to be called proteins, also contained substantial amounts of nitrogen, together with smaller quantities of other elements such as sulfur and phosphorous. And the same basic chemical elements, bound together in different proportions, made up all the inorganic substances of Earth, air and sea. Such discoveries, of course, were entirely compatible with the experimental demonstrations of Dr. Wohler and others that organic substances could be synthesized from inorganic ingredients. Common construction materials were used. If the chemist could rearrange these materials by heating the inorganic compounds, shining light on them, passing electricity through them, or by doing any of the rest of one’s growing bag of tricks, there seemed to be no reason, in principle, why an “organic” arrangement of the construction materials could not result. Apparently, at least in special cases, it did. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12

In these instances, there was certainly no unbridgeable chasm between inorganic and organic matter. If a vital force principle, residing outside the domain of natural law, was involved in the construction of living matter, it could not be involved in all the ingredients of animate organisms. It seemed clear that a vitalistic doctrine of material construction, to survive, would at least have to introduce its nonphysical compounds. Thus the logical nest step for our investigation to take must consist of an inquiry into more complex organic compounds than the simple ones we have treated so far. However, before we can take such a step, we shall have to devote some attention to the structure, as well as the ingredients, of organic compounds. As novel civilization erupts into our everyday lives, we are left wondering whether we, too, are obsolete. If we sometimes feel like people of the past, relics of the Third Wave, with so many of our habits, values, routines, and responses called into question, it is hardly surprising. However, if some of the future among us—anticipatory citizens, as it were, of the Fourth Wave civilization to come? Once we look past the decay and disintegration around us, can we see the emerging outlines of the personality of the future—the coming, so to speak, of a “new human”? If so, it would not be the first time un homme nouveau was supposedly detected on the horizon. In a brilliant essay, Andre Reszler, director of the Center for European Culture, has described earlier attempts to forecast the coming of a new type of human being. At the end of the eighteenth century there was, for example, the American Adam—man born anew in North America, supposedly without the vices and weaknesses of the Old World. In the middle of the twentieth century, the new man was supposed to appear. Christianity and The American Dream had become more than just a religion; it was the will to create the Superman. This sturdy “Aryan” would be humble, a warrior, and God. Some have seen the new man; he was intrepid and cruel. Many stood in fear before him. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12

The image of a new man (few ever speak of a “new woman,” except as an afterthought) also haunted the Communists. The Russians still speak of the coming of “Socialist Man.” However, it was Mr. Trostsky who rhapsodized most vividly about the future human. “Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser, and more perceptive. His body will become incomparably stronger, wiser, and more rhythmical, his voice more melodious. His ways of life will acquire a powerfully dramatic quality. The average man will attain the level of an Aristotle, of a Goethe, of a Marx.” As recently as a decade or two ago, Frantz Fanon heralded the coming of yet another new human who would have a “new mind.” Che Guevara saw his ideal man of the future as having a richer interior life. Each image is different. Yet Reszler persuasively point out that behind most of these images of the “new man” there lurks that familiar old fellow, the Noble Savages, a mythic creature endowed with all sorts of qualities that civilization has supposedly corrupted or won away. Reszler properly questions this romanticization of the primitive, reminding us that regimes which set out consciously to foster a “new man” have usually brought totalitarian havoc in their wake. It would be foolish, therefore, to herald yet once more the birth of a “new man” (unless, now that the genetic engineers are at work, we mean that in a frightening, strictly biological sense). The idea suggests a prototype, a single ideal model that the entire civilization strains to emulate. And in a society moving rapidly toward de-massification, nothing is more unlikely. Nevertheless, it would be equally foolish to believe that fundamentally changed material conditions of life leave personality or, more accurately, social character, unaffected. As we change the deep structure of society, we also modify people. Even if one believed in some unchanging human nature, a commonly held view I do not share, society would still reward and elicit certain character traits and penalize others, leading to evolutionary changes in the distribution of traits in the population. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who has perhaps written best about social character, defines it s “tht part of their character structure that is common to most members of the group.” In any culture, he tells us, there are widely shared traits that make up the social character. In turn, social character shapes people so that “their behaviour is not a matter of conscious decision as to whether or not to follow the social pattern, but one of wanting to act as they have to act and at the same time finding gratification in acting according to the requirements of the culture.” What the Fourth Wave is doing, therefore, is not creating some ideal superman, some new heroic species stalking through our midst, but producing dramatic changes in the traits distributed through society—not a new mand but a new social character. Our task, therefore, is not to hunt for the mythic “man” but for the traits most likely to be valued by the civilization of tomorrow. These character trains do not simply arise from (or reflect) outside pressures on people. They spring from the tension that exists between the inner drives or desires of many individual and the outer drives or pressures of the society. However, once formed, these shared character traits play an influential role in the economic and social development of the society. The coming of the Third Wave, for example, was accompanied by the spread of the Protestant Ethic with its emphasis on thrift, unremitting, toil, and the deferral of gratification—traits which channeled enormous energies into the tasks of economic development. The Third Wave also brought changes in objectivity, subjectivity, individualism, attitudes toward authority, and the ability to think abstractly, to empathize and to image. For the less affluent to be machined into n industrial work force, they had to be given the rudiments of literacy. They had to be educated, informed, and molded. They had to understand that another way of life was possible. Large numbers of people were needed, therefore, with the capacity to imagine themselves in a new role and setting. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12

Their minds had to be liberated from the proximate present. Thus, just as to some extent it had to democratize communications and politics, industrialism was also forced to democratize the imagination. The result of such psychocultural changes was changed distribution of traits—a new social character. And today we are once more at the edge of a similar psychocultural upheaval. The fact that we are racing away from the Third Wave Clinton uniformity makes it difficult to generalize about the emerging psyche. Here, even more than elsewhere in dealing with the future, we can only speculate. Nevertheless, we can point to powerful changes that are likely to influence psychological development in the Fourth Wave society. And, if not conclusions, this leads us to fascinating questions. For these changes affect child-rearing, education, adolescence, work, and even the way we form our own self-image. And it is impossible to change all these without deeply altering the entire social character of the future. To begins with, the child of tomorrow is likely to grow up in a society far less child-centered than our own. The “graying” or aging of the population in all high-technology countries implies greater public attention to the need of the elderly and a correspondingly reduced focus of the young. Furthermore, as women develop jobs or careers in the exchange economy, the traditional need to channel all their energies into motherhood is diminished. During the Third Wave, millions of parents were still able to live out their own dream through their children—because the population in America was not as high, people could afford a nice house, in a nice community on one salary, and they could reasonably expect their children to do better socially and economically than they themselves have done. This expectation of upward mobility encouraged parents to concentrate enormous psychic energies on their children. Today, many middle-class parents face agonizing disillusionment as their children—in a far more difficult World—move down, rather than up, the socio-economic scale. The likelihood of surrogate fulfillment is evaporating. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12

For these reasons, the techno-pagan tomorrow is likely to enter a society no longer obsessed with—perhaps not even terribly interested in—the needs, wants, psychological development, and instant gratification of the child. If so, the Dr. Will Halstead or Dr. Blakes of tomorrow will urge a more structured and demanding childhood. Parents will be less permissive. Nor, one suspects, will adolescence be as prolonged and painful a process as it is today for so many. Millions of children are being brought up in a single-parent households, with working mothers (or fathers) squeezed by an erratic economy, and with less of the luxury and time available to the 1990s generation. Others, later on, are likely to be reared in work-at-home or electronic-cottages families. Just as in many Second Wave families built around a mom-and-pop business, we can expect the children of tomorrow’s electronic cottage to be drawn directly into the family’s work tasks and given growing responsibility from an early age. Such facts suggest a shorter childhood and youth but a more responsible and productive one Working alongside adults, children in such homes are also likely to be less subject to per pressures. They may well turn out to be the high achievers of tomorrow. During the transition to the new society, wherever jobs remain scarce, Third Wave labour unions will undoubtedly fight to exclude young people from the job market outside the home. Unions (and teachers, whether unionized or not) will lobby for ever-longer years of compulsory or near-compulsory schooling. To the extent that they succeed, millions of young people who grow up fast because of early work responsibilities in the electronic cottage and those who mature more slowly outside. Over the long pull, however, we can expect education also to change. More learning will occur outside, rather than inside, the classroom Despite the pressures from union, the years of compulsory schooling will grow shorter, not longer. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12

Instead of rigid age segregation, young and old will mingle. Education will become more interspersed and interwoven with work, and more spread out over a lifetime. And work itself—whether production for the market or presumption for use in the home—will probably begin earlier in life than it has in the last generation or two. For just such reasons, Fourth Wave civilization may well favour quite different traits among the young—less responsiveness to peers, less consumption-orientation, and less hedonistic self-involvement. Whether this is so or not, one thing is certain. Growing up will be different. And so will the resultant personalities. As the adolescent matures and enters the job arena, new forces come into play on one’s personality, rewarding some traits and punishing or penalizing others. Throughout the Third Wave era, work in the factories and offices steadily grew more repetitive, specialized, and time-pressured, and employers wanted workers who were obedient, punctual, and willing to perform rote tasks. The corresponding traits were fostered by the schools and rewarded by the corporation. As Fourth Wave cuts across our society, work grows less, not more, repetitive. It becomes less fragmented, with each person doing a somewhat larger, rather than smaller, task. Flextime and self-pacing replace the old need for mass synchronization (which I actually liked, people getting up at the same time, going to work, sending the kid to school, it kept everything uniform and peaceful in the community) of behaviour. Workers are forced to cope with more frequent changes in their tasks, as well as a blinding succession of personnel transfers, product changes, and reorganizations. What Third Wave employers increasingly need, therefore, are men and women who accept responsibility, who understand how their work dovetails with that of others, who can handle ever larger tasks, who adapt swiftly to changed circumstances, and who are sensitively tuned in to the people around them. #RandolpHarris 10 of 12

The Third Wave firm frequently paid off for plodding bureaucratic behaviour. The Third Wave firm requires people who are less pre-programmed and faster on their feet. The difference, says President Donald Trump, is like that between classical musicians who play each note according to a predetermined, pre-set pattern, and jazz improvisers who, once having decided what song to play, sensitively provisors who, sensitively pick up cues from one another and, on the basis of that, decide what notes to play next. Such people are complex, individualistic, proud of the ways in which they differ from other people. They typify the de-massified work force needed by the Fourth Wave industry. Only 60 percent of the U.S. workers—mainly the older ones—are still motivated by traditional incentives. They are happiest with strict work guidelines and clear tasks. That is how they learn a skill well and find meaning in their work. By contrast, as much as 20 percent of the work force already reflects newer values emerging from the Fourth Wave. Largely young middle-managers, they are, the hungriest for more responsibility and more vital work with a commitment worthy of their talent and skills.” They seek meaning along with financial reward. To recruit such workers, employers are beginning to offer individualized rewards. This helps explain why a few advance companies (like TRW Inc., the Cleveland-based high-technology firm) now offers employees not a fixed set of fringe benefits but a smorgasbord of optional holidays, medical benefits, pensions, and insurance. Each worker can tailor a package to one’s own needs. There is one set of incentive with which to motivate the full spectrum of the work force, and that is compensation. Moreover, in the mix of rewards for work, money has more of a motivating power than it did just a few years ago. These workers want money. They certainly do. And once certain income level is reached, they want more. Additional increments of money have a strong impact on behaviour, unless it involves taking a reduction in pay and losing money to save something you care about. President Trump lost a lot of money trying to save America by becoming president of this great nation, and his work was very appreciated. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12

However, for many people when it comes to accepting a promotion which involves a longer commute, they often refuse to accept the carrot. They do not want to commute. A decade ago, only 10 percent of employees resisted a corporate move. Because of the increase in population, growth of traffic jams, and more people want to stay in the homes forever, the number has jumped to half of employees, even though moves are often accompanied by a higher than usual pay raise. The balance has definitely shifted away from saluting the company and marching off to Timbuktu toward a greater emphasis on family and lifestyle. Like the Fourth Wave corporation, which must respond to more than profit, the employee, too, has multiple bottom lines. Meanwhile, the most ingrained patterns of authority are also changing. In Third Wave firms every employee has a single boss. Disputes among employees are taken to the boss to be resolved. In the new matrix organizations, the style is entirely different. Workers have more than one boss as a time. People of different rank and different skills meet in temporary, “ad-hocratic” groups. And difference are resolved without a common boss readily available to arbitrate. The assumption in a matrix is that this conflict can be healthy, differences are valued and people express their views even when they know that others may disagree. This system rewards workers show blind obedience, and great discernment. It rewards those who—within limits—talk back respectfully, at the right time and right place. Workers who seek meaning, who respectfully ask for clarification, who want to exercise discretion, or who demand that their work be socially responsible. Fourth Wave industries cannot run without them. Across the board, therefore, we are seeing a subtle but profound change in the personality traits rewarded by the economic system—a change which cannot help but shape the emerging social character. However, let us not forget about family. It is important to unite our loved ones. We must embrace them with love, courage, hope, respect, education, opportunity, and let the imperatives of our arms race fix our national priorities so that no child in America shall in effect be denied the right to The American Dream. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12

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