Future Shock

Chapter 12 THE ORIGINS OF OVERCHOICE

The Super-industrial Revolution will consign to the archives of ignorance most of what we now believe about democracy and the future of human choice. Today in the techno-societies there is an almost ironclad consensus about the future of freedom. Maximum individual choice is regarded as the democratic ideal. Yet most writers predict that we shall move further and further from this ideal. They conjure up a dark vision of the future, in which people appear as mindless consumer-creatures, surrounded by standardized goods, educated in standardized schools, fed a diet of standardized mass culture, and forced to adopt standardized styles of life.

Such predictions have spawned a generation of future-haters and technophobes, as one might expect. One of the most extreme of these is a French religious mystic, Jacques Ellul, whose books are enjoying a campus vogue. According to Ellul, man was far freer in the past when "Choice was a real possibility for him." By contrast, today, "The human being is no longer in any sense the agent of choice." And, as for tomorrow: "In the future, man will apparently be confined to the role of a recording device." Robbed of choice, he will be acted upon, not active. He will live, Ellul warns, in a totalitarian state run by a velvet-gloved Gestapo.

This same theme – the loss of choice – runs through much of the work of Arnold Toynbee. It is repeated by everyone from hippie gurus to Supreme Court justices, tabloid editorialists and existentialist philosophers. Put in its simplest form, this Theory of Vanishing Choice rests on a crude syllogism: Science and technology have fostered standardization. Science and technology will advance, making the future even more standardized than the present. Ergo: Man will progressively lose his freedom of choice.

If instead of blindly accepting this syllogism, we stop to analyze it, however, we make an extraordinary discovery. For not only is the logic itself faulty, the entire idea is premised on sheer factual ignorance about the nature, the meaning and the direction of the Superindustrial Revolution.

Ironically, the people of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice, but from a paralyzing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.

No person traveling across Europe or the United States can fail to be impressed by the architectural similarity of one gas station or airport to another. Anyone thirsting for a soft drink will find one bottle of Coca-Cola to be almost identical with the next. Clearly a consequence of mass production techniques, the uniformity of certain aspects of our physical environment has long outraged intellectuals. Some decry the Hiltonization of our hotels; others charge that we are homogenizing the entire human race.

Certainly, it would be difficult to deny that industrialism has had a leveling effect. Our ability to produce millions of nearly identical units is the crowning achievement of the industrial age. Thus, when intellectuals bewail the sameness of our material goods, they accurately reflect the state of affairs under industrialism.

In the same breath, however, they reveal shocking ignorance about the character of super-industrialism. Focused on what society was, they are blind to what it is fast becoming. For the society of the future will offer not a restricted, standardized flow of goods, but the greatest variety of unstandardized goods and services any society has ever seen. We are moving not toward a further extension of material standardization, but toward its dialectical negation.

The end of standardization is already in sight. The pace varies from industry to industry, and from country to country. In Europe, the peak of standardization has not yet been crested. (It may take another twenty or thirty years to run its course.) But in the United States, there is compelling evidence that a historic corner has been turned.

Some years ago, for example, an American marketing expert named Kenneth Schwartz made a surprising discovery. "It is nothing less than a revolutionary transformation that has come over the mass consumer market during the past five years," he wrote. "From a single homogenous unit, the mass market has exploded into a series of segmented, fragmented markets, each with its own needs, tastes and way of life." This fact has begun to alter American industry beyond recognition. The result is an astonishing change in the actual outpouring of goods offered to the consumer.

Philip Morris, for example, sold a single major brand of cigarettes for twenty-one years. Since 1954 by contrast, it has introduced six new brands and so many options with respect to size, filter and menthol that the smoker now has a choice among sixteen different variations. This fact would be trivial, were it not duplicated in virtually every major product field. Gasoline? Until a few years ago, the American motorist took his pick of either "regular" or "premium." Today he drives up to a Sunoco pump and is asked to choose among eight different blends and mixes. Groceries? Between 1950 and 1963 the number of different soaps and detergents on the American grocery shelf increased from sixty-five to 200; frozen foods from 121 to 350; baking mixes and flour from eighty-four to 200. Even the variety of pet foods increased from fifty-eight to eighty-one.

One major company, Corn Products, produces a pancake syrup called Karo. Instead of offering the same product nationally, however, it sells two different viscosities, having found that Pennsylvanians, for some regional reason, prefer their syrup thicker than other Americans. In the field of office décor and furniture, the same process is at work. "There are ten times the new styles and colors there were a decade ago," says John A. Saunders, president of General Fireproofing Company, a major manufacturer in the field. "Every architect wants his own shade of green." Companies, in other words, are discovering wide variations in consumer wants and are adapting their production lines to accommodate them. Two economic factors encourage this trend: first, consumers have more money to lavish on their specialized wants; second, and even more important, as technology becomes more sophisticated, the cost of introducing variations declines.

This is the point that our social critics – most of whom are technologically naive – fail to understand: it is only primitive technology that imposes standardization. Automation, in contrast, frees the path to endless, blinding, mind-numbing diversity.

"The rigid uniformity and long runs of identical products which characterize our traditional mass production plants are becoming less important" reports industrial engineer Boris Yavitz. "Numerically controlled machines can readily shift from one product model or size to another by a simple change of programs ... Short product runs become economically feasible." According to Professor Van Court Hare, Jr., of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, "Automated equipment ... permits the production of a wide variety of products in short runs at almost 'mass production' costs." Many engineers and business experts foresee the day when diversity will cost no more than uniformity.

The finding that pre-automation technology yields standardization, while advanced technology permits diversity is borne out by even a casual look at that controversial American innovation, the supermarket. Like gas stations and airports, supermarkets tend to look alike whether they are in Milan or Milwaukee. By wiping out thousands of little "mom and pop" stores they have without doubt contributed to uniformity in the architectural environment. Yet the array of goods they offer the consumer is incomparably more diverse than any corner store could afford to stock. Thus at the very moment that they encourage architectural sameness, they foster gastronomic diversity.

The reason for this contrast is simple: Food and food packaging technology is far more advanced than construction techniques. Indeed, construction has scarcely reached the level of mass production; it remains, in large measure, a pre-industrial craft. Strangled by local building codes and conservative trade unions, the industry's rate of technological advance is far below that of other industries. The more advanced the technology, the cheaper it is to introduce variation in output. We can safely predict, therefore, that when the construction industry catches up with manufacture in technological sophistication, gas stations, airports, and hotels, as well as supermarkets, will stop looking as if they had been poured from the same mold. Uniformity will give way to diversity. (Where the process has begun, the results are striking. In Washington, D.C., for example, there is a computer-designed apartment house – Watergate East – in which no two floors are alike. Of 240 apartments, 167 have different floor plans. And there are no continuous straight lines in the building anywhere.)

While certain parts of Europe and Japan are still building their first all-purpose supermarkets, the United States has already leaped to the next stage – the creation of specialized super-stores that widen still further (indeed, almost beyond belief) the variety of goods available to the consumer. In Washington, D.C., one such store specializes in foreign foods, offering such delicacies as hippopotamus steak, alligator meat, wild snow hare, and thirty-five different kinds of honey.

The idea that primitive industrial techniques foster uniformity, while advanced automated techniques favor diversity, is dramatized by recent changes in the automobile industry. The widespread introduction of European and Japanese cars into the American market in the late 1950's opened many new options for the buyer – increasing his choice from half a dozen to some fifty makes. Today even this wide range of choice seems narrow and constricted.

Faced with foreign competition, Detroit took a new look at the so-called "mass consumer." It found not a single uniform mass market, but an aggregation of transient minimarkets. It also found, as one writer put it, that "customers wanted custom-like cars that would give them an illusion of having one-of-a-kind." To provide that illusion would have been impossible with the old technology; the new computerized assembly systems, however, make possible not merely the illusion, but even – before long – the reality.

Thus the beautiful and spectacularly successful Mustang is promoted by Ford as "the one you design yourself," because, as critic Reyner Banham explains, there "isn't a dungregular Mustang any more, just a stockpile of options to meld in combinations of 3 (bodies) × 4 (engines) × 3 (transmissions) × 4 (basic sets of high-performance engine modifications) – 1 (rock-bottom six cylinder car to which these modifications don't apply) + 2 (Shelby grandtouring and racing set-ups applying to only one body shell and not all engine/ transmission combinations)."

This does not even take into account the possible variations in color, upholstery and optional equipment.

Both car buyers and auto salesmen are increasingly disconcerted by the sheer multiplicity of options. The buyer's problem of choice has become far more complicated, the addition of each option creating the need for more information, more decisions and subdecisions. Thus, anyone who has attempted to buy a car lately, as I have, soon finds that the task of learning about the various brands, lines, models and options (even within a fixed price range) requires days of shopping and reading. In short, the auto industry may soon reach the point at which its technology can economically produce more diversity than the consumer needs or wants.

Yet we are only beginning the march toward destandardization of our material culture. Marshall McLuhan has noted that "Even today, most United States automobiles are, in a sense, custom-produced. Figuring all possible combinations of styles, options and colors available on a certain new family sports car, for example, a computer expert came up with 25,000,000 different versions of it for a buyer ... When automated electronic production reaches full potential, it will be just about as cheap to turn out a million differing objects as a million exact duplicates. The only limits on production and consumption will be the human imagination." Many of McLuhan's other assertions are highly debatable. This one is not. He is absolutely correct about the direction in which technology is moving. The material goods of the future will be many things; but they will not be standardized. We are, in fact, racing toward "overchoice" – the point at which the advantages of diversity and individualization are cancelled by the complexity of the buyer's decision-making process.

Does any of this matter? Some people argue that diversity in the material environment is insignificant so long as we are racing toward cultural or spiritual homogeneity. "It's what's inside that counts," they say, paraphrasing a well-known cigarette commercial.

This view gravely underestimates the importance of material goods as symbolic expressions of human personality differences, and it foolishly denies a connection between the inner and outer environment. Those who fear the standardization of human beings should warmly welcome the destandardization of goods. For by increasing the diversity of goods available to man we increase the mathematical probability of differences in the way men actually live.

More important, however, is the very premise that we are racing toward cultural homogeneity, since a close look at this also suggests that just the opposite is true. It is unpopular to say this, but we are moving swiftly toward fragmentation and diversity not only in material production, but in art, education and mass culture as well.

One highly revealing test of cultural diversity in any literate society has to do with the number of different books published per million of population. The more standardized the tastes of the public, the fewer titles will be published per million; the more diverse these tastes, the greater the number of titles. The increase or decrease of this figure over time is a significant clue to the direction of cultural change in the society. This was the reasoning behind a study of world book trends published by UNESCO. Conducted by Robert Escarpit director of the Center for the Sociology of Literature at the University of Bordeaux, it provided dramatic evidence of a powerful international shift toward cultural destandardization.

Thus, between 1952 and 1962 the index of diversity rose in fully twenty-one of the twenty-nine chief book-producing nations. Among the countries registering the highest shifts toward literary diversity were Canada, the United States and Sweden, all with increases in excess of 50 percent or more. The United Kingdom, France, Japan and the Netherlands all moved from 10 to 25 percent in the same direction. The eight countries that moved in the opposite direction – i.e., toward greater standardization of literary outputwere India, Mexico, Argentina, Italy, Poland, Yugoslavia, Belgium, and Austria. In short, the more advanced the technology in a country, the greater the likelihood that it would be moving in the direction of literary diversity and away from uniformity.

The same push toward pluralism is evident in painting, too, where we find an almost incredibly wide spectrum of production. Representationalism, expressionism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, hard-edge, pop, kinetic, and a hundred other styles are pumped into the society at the same time. One or another may dominate the galleries temporarily, but there are no universal standards or styles. It is a pluralistic marketplace.

When art was a tribal-religious activity, the painter worked for the whole community. Later he worked for a single small aristocratic elite. Still later the audience appeared as a single undifferentiated mass. Today he faces a large audience split into a milling mass of subgroups. According to John McHale: "The most uniform cultural contexts are typically primitive enclaves. The most striking feature of our contemporary 'mass' culture is the vast range and diversity of its alternative cultural choices ... The 'mass,' on even cursory examination, breaks down into many different 'audiences."'

Indeed, artists no longer attempt to work for a universal public. Even when they think they are doing so, they are usually responding to the tastes and styles preferred by one or another sub-group in the society. Like the manufacturers of pancake syrup and automobiles, artists, too, produce for "mini-markets." And as these markets multiply, artistic output diversifies.

The push for diversity, meanwhile, is igniting bitter conflict in education. Ever since the rise of industrialism, education in the West, and particularly in the United States, has been organized for the mass production of basically standardized educational packages. It is not accidental that at the precise moment when the consumer has begun to demand and obtain greater diversity, the same moment when new technology promises to make destandardization possible, a wave of revolt has begun to sweep the college campus. Though the connection is seldom noticed, events on the campus and events in the consumer market are intimately connected.

One basic complaint of the student is that he is not treated as an individual, that he is served up an undifferentiated gruel, rather than a personalized product. Like the Mustang buyer, the student wants to design his own. The difference is that while industry is highly responsive to consumer demand, education typically has been indifferent to student wants. (In one case we say, "the customer knows best"; in the other, we insist that "Papa – or his educational surrogate – knows best.") Thus the student-consumer is forced to fight to make the education industry responsive to his demand for diversity.

While most colleges and universities have greatly broadened the variety of their course offerings, they are still wedded to complex standardizing systems based on degrees, majors and the like. These systems lay down basic tracks along which all students must progress. While educators are rapidly multiplying the number of alternative paths, the pace of diversification is by no means swift enough for the students. This explains why young people have set up "para-universities" – experimental colleges and so-called free universities – in which each student is free to choose what he wishes from a mind-shattering smorgasbord of courses that range from guerrilla tactics and stock market techniques to Zen Buddhism and "underground theater."

Long before the year 2000, the entire antiquated structure of degrees, majors and credits will be a shambles. No two students will move along exactly the same educational track. For the students now pressuring higher education to destandardize, to move toward superindustrial diversity, will win their battle.

It is significant, for example, that one of the chief results of the student strike in France was a massive decentralization of the university system. Decentralization makes possible greater regional diversity, local authority to alter curriculum, student regulations and administrative practices.

A parallel revolution is brewing in the public schools as well. It has already flared into open violence. Like the disturbance at Berkeley that initiated the worldwide wave of student protest, it has begun with something that appears at first glimpse to be a purely local issue.

Thus New York City, whose public education system encompasses nearly 900 schools and is responsible for one out of every forty American public school pupils, has suffered the worst teachers' strike in history – precisely over the issue of decentralization. Teacher picket lines, parent boycotts, and near riot have become everyday occurrences in the city's schools. Angered by the ineffectiveness of the schools, and by what they rightfully regard as blatant race prejudice, black parents, backed by various community forces, have demanded that the entire school system be cut up into smaller "community-run" school systems.

In effect, New York's black population, having failed to achieve racial integration and quality education, wants its own school system. It wants courses in Negro history. It wants greater parental involvement with the schools than is possible in the present large, bureaucratic and ossified system. It claims, in short, the right to be different.

The essential issues far transcend racial prejudice, however. Until now the big urban school systems in the United States have been powerful homogenizing influences. By fixing city-wide standards and curricula, by choosing texts and personnel on a city-wide basis, they have imposed considerable uniformity on the schools.

Today, the pressure for decentralization, which has already spread to Detroit, Washington, Milwaukee, and other major cities in the United States (and which will, in different forms, spread to Europe as well), is an attempt not simply to improve the education of Negroes, but to smash the very idea of centralized, city-wide school policies. It is an attempt to generate local variety in public education by turning over control of the schools to local authorities. It is, in short, part of a larger struggle to diversify education in the last third of the twentieth century. That the effort has been temporarily blocked in New York, largely through the stubborn resistance of an entrenched trade union, does not mean that the historic forces pushing toward destandardization will forever be contained.

Failure to diversify education within the system will simply lead to the growth of alternative educational opportunities outside the system. Thus we have today the suggestions of prominent educators and sociologists, including Kenneth B. Clark and Christopher Jencks, for the creation of new schools outside of, and competitive with, the official public school systems. Clark has called for regional and state schools, federal schools, schools run by colleges, trade unions, corporations and even military units. Such competing schools would, he contends, help create the diversity that education desperately needs. Simultaneously, in a less formal way, a variety of "para-schools" are already being established by hippie communes and other groups who find the mainstream educational system too homogeneous.

We see here, therefore, a major cultural force in the society – education – being pushed to diversify its output, exactly as the economy is doing. And here, exactly as in the realm of material production, the new technology, rather than fostering standardization, carries us toward super-industrial diversity.

Computers, for example, make it easier for a large school to schedule more flexibly. They make it easier for the school to cope with independent study, with a wider range of course offerings and more varied extracurricular activities. More important, computerassisted education, programmed instruction and other such techniques, despite popular misconceptions, radically enhance the possibility of diversity in the classroom. They permit each student to advance at his own purely personal pace. They permit him to follow a custom-cut path toward knowledge, rather than a rigid syllabus as in the traditional industrial era classroom.

Moreover, in the educational world of tomorrow, that relic of mass production, the centralized work place, will also become less important. Just as economic mass production required large numbers of workers to be assembled in factories, educational mass production required large numbers of students to be assembled in schools. This itself, with its demands for uniform discipline, regular hours, attendance checks and the like, was a standardizing force. Advanced technology will, in the future, make much of this unnecessary. A good deal of education will take place in the student's own room at home or in a dorm, at hours of his own choosing. With vast libraries of data available to him via computerized information retrieval systems, with his own tapes and video units, his own language laboratory and his own electronically equipped study carrel, he will be freed, for much of the time, of the restrictions and unpleasantness that dogged him in the lockstep classroom.

The technology upon which these new freedoms will be based will inevitably spread through the schools in the years ahead – aggressively pushed, no doubt, by major corporations like IBM, RCA, and Xerox. Within thirty years, the educational systems of the United States, and several Western European countries as well, will have broken decisively with the mass production pedagogy of the past, and will have advanced into an era of educational diversity based on the liberating power of the new machines.

In education, therefore, as in the production of material goods, the society is shifting irresistibly away from, rather than toward, standardization. It is not simply a matter of more varied automobiles, detergents and cigarettes. The social thrust toward diversity and increased individual choice affects our mental, as well as our material surroundings.

Of all the forces accused of homogenizing the modern mind, few have been so continuously and bitterly criticized as the mass media. Intellectuals in the United States and Europe have lambasted television, in particular, for standardizing speech, habits, and tastes. They have pictured it as a vast lawnroller flattening out our regional differences, crushing the last vestiges of cultural variety. A thriving academic industry has leveled similar charges against magazines and movies.

While there is truth in some of these charges, they overlook critically important counter-trends that generate diversity, not standardization. Television, with its high costs of production and its limited number of channels, is still necessarily dependent upon very large audiences. But in almost every other communications medium we can trace a decreasing reliance on mass audiences. Everywhere the "market segmentation" process is at work.

A generation ago, American movie-goers saw almost nothing but Hollywood-made films aimed at capturing the so-called mass audience. Today in cities across the country these "mainstream" movies are supplemented by foreign movies, art films, sex movies, and a whole stream of specialized motion pictures consciously designed to appeal to sub-markets – surfers, hot-rodders, motorcyclists, and the like. Output is so specialized that it is even possible, in New York at least, to find a theater patronized almost exclusively by homosexuals who watch the antics of transvestites and "drag queens" filmed especially for them.

All this helps account for the trend toward smaller movie theaters in the United States and Europe. According to the Economist, "The days of the 4000-seater Trocadero ... are over ... The old-style mass cinema audience of regular once-a-weekers has gone for good." Instead, multiple small audiences turn out for particular kinds of films, and the economics of the industry are up-ended. Thus Cinecenta has opened a cluster of four 150-seat theaters on a single site in London, and other exhibitors are planning midget movie houses. Once again, advanced technology fosters dehomogenization: the development of in-flight movies has led to new low-cost 16 mm. projection systems that are made to order for the mini-movie. They require no projectionist and only a single machine, instead of the customary two. United Artists is marketing these "cineautomats" on a franchise basis.

Radio, too, though still heavily oriented toward the mass market, shows some signs of differentiation. Some American stations beam nothing but classical music to upper-income, high education listeners, while others specialize in news, and still others in rock music. (Rock stations are rapidly subdividing into still finer categories: some aim their fare for the undereighteen market; others for a somewhat older group; still others for Negroes.) There are even rudimentary attempts to set up radio stations programming solely for a single profession – physicians, for example. In the future, we can anticipate networks that broadcast for such specialized occupational groups as engineers, accountants and attorneys. Still later, there will be market segmentation not simply along occupational lines, but along socio-economic and psycho-social lines as well.

It is in publishing, however, that the signs of destandardization are most unmistakable. Until the rise of television, mass magazines were the chief standardizing media in most countries. Carrying the same fiction, the same articles and the same advertisements to hundreds of thousands, even millions of homes, they rapidly spread fashions, political opinions and styles. Like radio broadcasters and moviemakers, publishers tended to seek the largest and most universal audience.

The competition of television killed off a number of major American magazines such as Collier's and Woman's Home Companion. Those mass market publications that have survived the post-TV shake-up have done so, in part, by turning themselves into a collection of regional and segmentalized editions. Between 1959 and 1969, the number of American magazines offering specialized editions jumped from 126 to 235. Thus every large circulation magazine in the United States today prints slightly different editions for different regions of the country – some publishers offering as many as one hundred variations. Special editions are also addressed to occupational and other groups. The 80,000 physicians and dentists who receive Time each week get a somewhat different magazine than that received by teachers whose edition, in turn, is different from that sent to college students. These "demographic editions" are growing increasingly refined and specialized. In short, mass magazine publishers are busily destandardizing, diversifying their output exactly as the automakers and appliance manufacturers have done.

Furthermore, the rate of new magazine births has shot way up. According to the Magazine Publishers Association, approximately four new magazines have come into being for every one that died during the past decade. Every week sees a new small-circulation magazine on the stands or in the mails, magazines aimed at mini-markets of surfers, scubadivers and senior citizens, at hot-rodders, credit-card holders, skiers and jet passengers. A varied crop of teenage magazines has sprung up, and most recently we have witnessed something no "mass society" pundit would have dared predict a few years ago: a rebirth of local monthlies. Today scores of American cities such as Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Diego and Atlanta, boast fat, slick, well-supported new magazines devoted entirely to local or regional matters. This is hardly a sign of the erosion of differences. Rather, we are getting a richer mix, a far greater choice of magazines than ever before. And, as the UNESCO survey showed, the same is true of books.

The number of different titles published each year has risen so sharply, and is now so large (more than 30,000 in the United States) that one suburban matron has complained, "It's getting hard to find someone who's read the same book as you. How can you even carry on a conversation about reading?" She may be overstating the case, but book clubs, for example, are finding it increasingly more difficult to choose monthly selections that appeal to large numbers of divergent readers.

Nor is the process of media differentiation confined to commercial publishing alone. Non-commercial literary magazines are proliferating. "Never in American history have there been as many such magazines as there are today," reports The New York Times Book Review. Similarly, "underground newspapers" have sprung up in dozens of American and European cities. There are at least 200 of these in the United States, many of them supported by advertising placed by leading record manufacturers. Appealing chiefly to hippies, campus radicals and the rock audience, they have become a tangible force in the formation of opinion among the young. From London's IT and the East Village Other in New York, to the Kudzu in Jackson, Mississippi, they are heavily illustrated, often color-printed, and jammed with ads for "psychedelicatessens" and dating services. Underground papers are even published in high schools. To observe the growth of these grass-roots publications and to speak of "mass culture" or "standardization" is to blind oneself to the new realities.

Significantly, this thrust toward media diversity is based not on affluence alone, but, as we have seen before, on the new technology – the very machines that are supposedly going to homogenize us and crush all vestiges of variety. Advances in offset printing and xerography have radically lowered the costs of short-run publishing, to the point at which high school students can (and do) finance publication of their underground press with pocket money. Indeed, the office copying machine – some versions selling now for as little as thirty dollars – makes possible such extremely short production runs that, as McLuhan puts it, every man can now be his own publisher. In America, where the office copying machine is almost as universal as the adding machine, it would appear that every man is. The rocketing number of periodicals that land on one's desk is dramatic testimony to the ease of publication.

Meanwhile, hand-held cameras and new video-tape equipment are similarly revolutionizing the ground rules of cinema. New technology has put camera and film into the hands of thousands of students and amateurs, and the underground movie – crude, colorful, perverse, highly individualized and localized – is flourishing even more than the underground press.

These technological advances have their analog in audio commmunications, too, where the omnipresence of tape recorders permits every man to be his own "broadcaster." Andre Moosmann, chief Eastern European expert for Radio-Television Française, reports the existence of widely known pop singers in Russia and Poland who have never appeared on radio or television, but whose songs and voices have been popularized through the medium of tape recordings alone. Tapings of Bulat Okudzava's songs, for example, pass from hand to hand, each listener making his own duplicate – a process that totalitarian governments find difficult to prevent or police. "It goes quickly," says Moosmann, "if a man makes one tape and a friend makes two, the rate of increase can be very fast."

Radicals have often complained that the means of communication are monopolized by a few. Sociologist C. Wright Mills went so far, if my memory is correct, as to urge cultural workers to take over the means of communication. This turns out to be hardly necessary. The advance of communications technology is quietly and rapidly de-monopolizing communications without a shot being fired. The result is a rich destandardization of cultural output.

Television, therefore, may still be homogenizing taste; but the other media have already passed beyond the technological state at which standardization is necessary. When technical breakthroughs alter the economics of television by providing more channels and lowering costs of production, we can anticipate that that medium, too, will begin to fragment its output and cater to, rather than counter, the increasing diversity of the consuming public. Such breakthroughs are, in fact, closer than the horizon. The invention of electronic video recording, the spread of cable television, the possibility of broadcasting direct from satellite to cable systems, all point to vast increases in program variety. For it should now be clear that tendencies toward uniformity represent only one stage in the development of any technology. A dialectical process is at work, and we are on the edge of a long leap toward unparalleled cultural diversity.

The day is already in sight when books, magazines, newspapers, films and other media will, like the Mustang, be offered to the consumer on a design-it-yourself basis. Thus in the mid-sixties, Joseph Naughton, a mathematician and computer specialist at the University of Pittsburgh, suggested a system that would store a consumer's profile – data about his occupation and interests – in a central computer. Machines would then scan newspapers, magazines, video tapes, films and other material, match them against the individual's interest profile, and instantaneously notify him when something appears that concerns him. The system could be hitched to facsimile machines and TV transmitters that would actually display or print out the material in his own living room. By 1969 the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun was publicly demonstrating a low cost "Telenews" system for printing newspapers in the home, and Matsushita Industries of Osaka was displaying a competitive system known as TV Fax (H). These are the first steps toward the newspaper of the future – a peculiar newspaper, indeed, offering no two viewer-readers the same content. Mass communication, under a system like this, is "de-massified." We move from homogeneity to heterogeneity.

It is obstinate nonsense to insist, in the face of all this, that the machines of tomorrow will turn us into robots, steal our individuality, eliminate cultural variety, etc., etc. Because primitive mass production imposed certain uniformities, does not mean that super-industrial machines will do the same. The fact is that the entire thrust of the future carries away from standardization – away from uniform goods, away from homogenized art, mass produced education and "mass" culture. We have reached a dialectical turning point in the technological development of society. And technology, far from restricting our individuality, will multiply our choices – and our freedom – exponentially.

Whether man is prepared to cope with the increased choice of material and cultural wares available to him is, however, a totally different question. For there comes a time when choice, rather than freeing the individual, becomes so complex, difficult and costly, that it turns into its opposite. There comes a time, in short, when choice turns into overchoice and freedom into un-freedom.

To understand why, we must go beyond this examination of our expanding material and cultural choice. We must look at what is happening to social choice as well.

Chapter 13 A SURFEIT OF SUBCULTS

Thirty miles north of New York City, within easy reach of its towers, its traffic and its urban temptations, lives a young taxicab driver, a former soldier, who boasts 700 surgical stitches in his body. These stitches are not the result of combat wounds, nor of an accident involving his taxi. Instead, they are the result of his chief recreation: rodeo riding.

On a cab driver's modest salary, this man spends more than $1200 a year to own a horse, stable it, and keep it in perfect trim. Periodically hitching a horsetrailer to his auto, he drives a little over one hundred miles to a place outside Philadelphia called "Cow Town." There, with others like himself, he participates in roping, steer wrestling, bronco busting, and other strenuous contests, the chief prize of which have been repeated visits to a hospital emergency ward.

Despite its proximity, New York holds no fascination for this fellow. When I met him he was twenty-three, and he had visited it only once or twice in his life. His entire interest is focused on the cow ring, and he is a member of a tiny group of rodeo fanatics who form a little-known underground in the United States. They are not professionals who earn a living from this atavistic sport. Nor are they simply people who affect Western-style boots, hats, denim jackets and leather belts. They are a tiny, but authentic subcult lost within the vastness and complexity of the most highly technological civilization in the world.

This odd group not only engages the cab driver's passion, it consumes his time and money. It affects his family, his friends, his ideas. It provides a set of standards against which he measures himself. In short, it rewards him with something that many of us have difficulty finding: an identity.

The techno-societies, far from being drab and homogenized, are honeycombed with just such colorful groupings – hippies and hot rodders, theosophists and flying saucer fans, skindivers and skydivers, homosexuals, computerniks, vegetarians, bodybuilders and Black Muslims.

Today the hammerblows of the super-industrial revolution are literally splintering the society. We are multiplying these social enclaves, tribes and minicults among us almost as fast as we are multiplying automotive options. The same destandardizing forces that make for greater individual choice with respect to products and cultural wares, are also destandardizing our social structures. This is why, seemingly overnight, new subcults like the hippies burst into being. We are, in fact, living through a "subcult explosion."

The importance of this cannot be overstated. For we are all deeply influenced, our identities are shaped, by the subcults with which we choose, unconsciously or not, to identify ourselves. It is easy to ridicule a hippie or an uneducated young man who is willing to suffer 700 stitches in an effort to test and "find" himself. Yet we are all rodeo riders or hippies in one sense: we, too, search for identity by attaching ourselves to informal cults, tribes or groups of various kinds. And the more numerous the choices, the more difficult the quest.

The proliferation of subcults is most evident in the world of work. Many subcults spring up around occupational specialties. Thus, as the society moves toward greater specialization, it generates more and more subcultural variety.

The scientific community, for example, is splitting into finer and finer fragments. It is criss-crossed with formal organizations and associations whose specialized journals, conferences and meetings are rapidly multiplying in number. But these "open" distinctions according to subject matter are matched by "hidden" distinctions as well. It is not simply that cancer researchers and astronomers do different things; they talk different languages, tend to have different personality types; they think, dress and live differently. (So marked are these distinctions that they often interfere with interpersonal relationships. Says a woman scientist: "My husband is a microbiologist and I am a theoretical physicist, and sometimes I wonder if we mutually exist.")

Scientists within a specialty tend to hang together with their own kind, forming themselves into tight little subcultural cells, to which they turn for approval and prestige, as well as for guidance about such things as dress, political opinions, and life style.

As science expands and the scientific population grows, new specialties spring up, fostering more and still more diversity at this "hidden" or informal level. In short, specialization breeds subcults.

This process of cellular division within a profession is dramatically marked in finance. Wall Street was once a relatively homogeneous community. "It used to be," says one prominent sociological observer of the money men, "that you came down here from St. Paul's and you made a lot of money and belonged to the Racquet Club and you had an estate on the North Shore, and your daughters were debutantes. You did it all by selling bonds to your exclassmates." The remark is perhaps slightly exaggerated, but Wall Street was, in fact, one big White Anglo-Saxon Protestant subcult, and its members did tend to go to the same schools, join the same clubs, engage in the same sports (tennis, golf and squash), attend the same churches (Presbyterian and Episcopalian), and vote for the same party (Republican).

Anybody who still thinks of Wall Street in these terms, however, is getting his ideas from the novels of Auchincloss or Marquand rather than from the new, fast-changing reality. Today, Wall Street has splintered, and a young man entering the business has a choice of a whole clutch of competing subcultural affiliations. In investment banking the old conservative WASP grouping still lingers on. There are still some old-line "white shoe" firms of which it is said "They'll have a black partner before they hire a few." Yet in the mutual fund field, a relatively new specialized segment of the financial industry, Greek, Jewish and Chinese names abound, and some star salesmen are black. Here the entire style of life, the implicit values of the group, are quite different. Mutual fund people are a separate tribe.

"Not everyone even wants to be a WASP any more," says a leading financial writer. Indeed, many young, aggressive Wall Streeters, even when they do happen to be WASP in origin, reject the classical Wall Street subcult and identify themselves instead with one or more of the pluralistic social groupings that now swarm and sometimes collide in the canyons of Lower Manhattan.

As specialization continues, as research extends into new fields and probes more deeply into old ones, as the economy continues to create new technologies and services, subcults will continue to multiply. Those social critics who inveigh against "mass society" in one breath and denounce "over-specialization" in the next are simply flapping their tongues. Specialization means a movement away from sameness.

Despite much loose talk about the need for "generalists," there is little evidence that the technology of tomorrow can be run without armies of highly trained specialists. We are rapidly changing the types of expertise needed. We are demanding more "multi-specialists" (men who know one field deeply, but who can cross over into another as well) rather than rigid, "mono-specialists." But we shall continue to need and breed ever more refined work specialties as the technical base of society increases in complexity For this reason alone, we must expect the variety and number of subcults in the society to increase.

Even if technology were to free millions of people from the need to work in the future, we would find the same push toward diversity operating among those who are left free to play. For we are already producing large numbers of "fun specialists." We are rapidly multiplying not merely types of work, but types of play as well.

The number of acceptable pastimes, hobbies, games, sports and entertainments is climbing rapidly, and the growth of a distinct subcult built around surfing, for example, demonstrates that, at least for some, a leisure-time commitment can also serve as the basis for an entire life style. The surfing subcult is a signpost pointing to the future.

"Surfing has already developed a kind of symbolism that gives it the character of a secret fraternity or a religious order," writes Remi Nadeau. "The identifying sign is a shark's tooth, St. Christopher medal, or Maltese cross hung loosely about one's neck ... For a long time, the most accepted form of transportation has been a wood-paneled Ford station wagon of ancient vintage." Surfers display sores and nodules on their knees and feet as proud proof of their involvement. Suntan is de rigeur. Hair is styled in a distinctive way. Members of the tribe spend endless hours debating the prowess of such in-group heroes as J. J. Moon, and his followers buy J. J. Moon T-shirts, surfboards, and fan club memberships.

Surfers are only one of many such play-based subcults. Among skydivers, for example, the name J. J. Moon is virtually unknown, and so are the peculiar rituals and fashions of the wave-cresters. Skydivers talk, instead, about the feat of Rod Pack, who not long ago jumped from an airplane without a parachute, was handed one by a companion in mid-air, put it on, opened it, and landed safely. Skydivers have their own little world, as do glider enthusiasts, scuba-divers, hot rodders, drag racers and motorcyclists. Each of these represents a leisurebased subcult organized around a technological device. As the new technology makes new sports possible, we can anticipate the formation of highly varied new play cults.

Leisure-time pursuits will become an increasingly important basis for differences between people, as the society itself shifts from a work orientation toward greater involvement in leisure. In the United States, since the turn of the century alone, the society's measurable commitment to work has plummeted by nearly a third. This is a massive redeployment of the society's time and energy. As this commitment declines further, we shall advance into an era of breathtaking fun specialism – much of it based on sophisticated technology.

We can anticipate the formation of subcults built around space activity, holography, mind-control, deep-sea diving, submarining, computer gaming and the like. We can even see on the horizon the creation of certain anti-social leisure cults – tightly organized groups of people who will disrupt the workings of society not for material gain, but for the sheer sport of "beating the system" – a development foreshadowed in such films as Duffy and The Thomas Crown Affair. Such groups may attempt to tamper with governmental or corporate computer programs, re-route mail, intercept and alter radio and television broadcasts, perform elaborately theatrical hoaxes, tinker with the stock market, corrupt the random samples upon which political or other polls are based, and even, perhaps, commit complexly plotted robberies and assassinations. Novelist Thomas Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49 describes a fictional underground group who have organized their own private postal system and maintained it for generations. Science fiction writer Robert Sheckley has gone so far as to propose, in a terrifying short story called The Seventh Victim, the possibility that society might legalize murder among certain specified "players" who hunt one another and are, in turn, hunted. This ultimate game would permit those who are dangerously violent to work off their aggressions within a managed framework.

Bizarre as some of this may sound, it would be well not to rule out the seemingly improbable, for the realm of leisure, unlike that of work, is little constrained by practical considerations. Here imagination has free play, and the mind of man can conjure up incredible varieties of "fun." Given enough time, money and, for some of these, technical skill, the men of tomorrow will be capable of playing in ways never dreamed of before. They will play strange sexual games. They will play games with the mind. They will play games with society And in so doing, by choosing among the unimaginably broad options, they will form subcults and further set themselves off from one another.

Subcults are multiplying – the society is cracking – along age lines, too. We are becoming "age specialists" as well as work and play specialists There was a time when people were divided roughly into children, "young persons," and adults. It wasn't until the forties that the loosely defined term "young persons" began to be replaced by the more restrictive term "teenager," referring specifically to the years thirteen to nineteen. (In fact, the word was virtually unknown in England until after World War II.)

Today this crude, three-way division is clearly inadequate, and we are busy inventing far more specific categories. We now have a classification called "pre-teens" or "sub-teens" that sits perched between childhood and adolescence. We are also beginning to hear of "postteens" and, after that, "young marrieds." Each of these terms is a linguistic recognition of the fact that we can no longer usefully lump all "young persons" together. Increasingly deep cleavages separate one age group from another. So sharp are these differences that sociologist John Lofland of the University of Michigan predicts they will become the "conflict equivalent of southerner and northerner, capitalist and worker, immigrant and 'native stock,' suffragette and male, white and Negro."

Lofland supports this startling suggestion by documenting the rise of what he calls the "youth ghetto" – large communities occupied almost entirely by college students. Like the Negro ghetto, the youth ghetto is often characterized by poor housing, rent and price gouging, very high mobility, unrest and conflict with the police. Like the Negro ghetto, it, too, is quite heterogeneous, with many subcults competing for the attention and allegiance of the ghettoites.

Robbed of adult heroes or role models other than their own parents, children of streamlined, nuclear families are increasingly flung into the arms of the only other people available to them – other children. They spend more time with one another, and they become more responsive to the influence of peers than ever before. Rather than idolizing an uncle, they idolize Bob Dylan or Donovan or whomever else the peer group holds up for a life style model. Thus we are beginning to form not only a college student ghetto, but even semighettos of pre-teens and teenagers, each with its own peculiar tribal characteristics, its own fads, fashions, heroes and villains.

We are simultaneously segmenting the adult population along age lines, too. There are suburbs occupied largely by young married couples with small children, or by middle-aged couples with teenagers, or by older couples whose children have already left home. We have specially-designed "retirement communities" for retirees. "There may come a day," Professor Lofland warns, "... when some cities will find that their politics revolve around the voting strength of various age category ghettos, in the same way that Chicago politics has long revolved around ethnic and racial enclaves."

This emergence of age-based subcultures can now be seen as part of a stunning historical shift in the basis of social differentiation. Time is becoming more important as a source of differences among men; space is becoming less so.

Thus communications theorist James W. Carey of the University of Illinois, points out that "among primitive societies and in the earlier stages of western history, relatively small discontinuities in space led to vast differences in culture ... Tribal societies separated by a hundred miles could have ... grossly dissimilar systems of expressive symbolism, myth and ritual." Within these same societies, however, there was "great continuity ... over generations ... vast differences between societies but relatively little variation between generations within a given society."

Today, he continues, space "progressively disappears as a differentiating factor." But if there has been some reduction in regional variation, Carey takes pains to point out, "one must not assume that differences between groups are being obliterated ... as some mass society theorists [suggest]." Rather, Carey points out, "the axis of diversity shifts from a spatial ... to a temporal or generational dimension." Thus we get jagged breaks between the generations – and Mario Savio summed it up with the revolutionary slogan, "Don't trust anyone over thirty!" In no previous society could such a slogan have caught on so quickly.

Carey explains this shift from spatial to temporal differentiation by calling attention to the advance of communications and transportation technology which spans great distances, and, in effect, conquers space. Yet there is another, easily overlooked factor at work: the acceleration of change. For as the pace of change in the external environment steps up, the inner differences between young and old become necessarily more marked. In fact, the pace of change is already so blinding that even a few years can make a great difference in the life experience of the individual. This is why some brothers and sisters, separated in age by a mere three or four years, subjectively feel themselves to be members of quite different "generations." It is why among those radicals who participated in the strike at Columbia University, seniors spoke of the "generation gap" that separated them from sophomores.

Splintering along occupational, recreational and age lines, the society is also fragmenting along sexual-familial lines. Even now, however, we are already creating distinctive new subcults based on marital status. Once people might be loosely classified as either single, married or widowed. Today this three-way categorization is no longer adequate. Divorce rates are so high in most of the techno-societies today that a distinct new social grouping has emerged – those who are no longer married or who are between marriages. Thus Morton Hunt, an authority on the subject, describes what he terms "the world of the formerly married."

This group, says Hunt, is a "subculture ... with its own mechanisms for bringing people together, its own patterns of adjustment to the separated or divorced life, its own opportunities for friendship, social life and love." As its members break away from their married friends, they become progressively isolated from those still in "married life" and "exmarrieds," like "teen-agers" or "surfers," tend to form social enclaves of their own with their own favored meeting places, their own attitudes toward time, their own distinct sexual codes and conventions.

Strong trends make it likely that this particular social category will swell in the future. And when this happens, the world of the formerly married will, in turn, split into multiple worlds, more and still more sub-cultural groupings. For the bigger a subcult becomes, the more likely it is to fragment and give birth to new subcults.

If the first clue to the future of social organization lies, therefore, in the idea of proliferating subcults, the second lies in sheer size. This basic principle is largely overlooked by those who are most exercised over "mass society," and it helps explain the persistence of diversity even under extreme standardizing pressures. Because of in-built limitations in social communication, size itself acts as a force pushing toward diversity of organization. The larger the population of a modern city, for example, the more numerous – and diverse – the subcults within it. Similarly, the larger the subcult, the higher the odds that it will fragment and diversify. The hippies provide a perfect example.

In the mid-fifties, a small group of writers, artists and assorted hangers-on coalesced in San Francisco and around Carmel and Big Sur on the California coast. Quickly dubbed "beats" or "beatniks," they pieced together a distinctive way of life.

Its most conspicuous elements were the glorification of poverty – jeans, sandals, pads and hovels; a predilection for Negro jazz and jargon; an interest in Eastern mysticism and French existentialism; and a general antagonism to technologically based society.

Despite extensive press coverage, the beats remained a tiny sect until a technological innovation – lysergic acid, better known as LSD – appeared on the scene. Pushed by the messianic advertising of Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey, distributed free to thousands of young people by irresponsible enthusiasts, LSD soon began to claim a following on the American campus, and almost as quickly spread to Europe as well. The infatuation with LSD was accompanied by a new interest in marijuana, a drug with which the beats had long experimented. Out of these two sources, the beat subcult of the mid-fifties and the "acid" subcult of the early sixties, sprang a larger group – a new subcult that might be described as a corporate merger of the two: the hippie movement. Blending the blue jeans of the beats with the beads and bangles of the acid crowd, the hippies became the newest and most hotly publicized subcult on the American scene.

Soon, however, the pressures of growth proved too much for it. Thousands of teenagers joined the ranks; millions of pre-teens watched their television sets, read magazine articles about the movement, and undulated in sympathy; some suburban adults even became "plastic" or weekend hippies. The result was predictable. The hippie subcult – exactly like General Motors or General Electric – was forced to divisionalize, to break down into subsidiaries. Thus out of the hippie subcult came a shower of progeny.

To the eye of the uninitiated, all young people with long hair seemed alike. Yet important sub-units emerged within the movement. According to David Andrew Seeley, an acute young observer, there were at its height "perhaps a score of recognizable and distinct groups." These varied not only by certain subtleties of dress but by interest. Thus, Seeley reported, their activities ranged "from beer parties to poetry readings, from pot-smoking to modern dance – and often those who indulge in one wouldn't touch the other." Seeley then proceeded to explain the differences that set apart such groups as the teeny-boppers (now largely vanished from the scene), the political activist beatniks, the folk beatniks, and then, and only then, the original hippies per se.

Members of these subcultural subsidiaries wore identifying badges that held meaning for insiders. Teeny-boppers, for example, were beardless, many, in fact, being too young to shave. Sandals were "in" with the folk set, but not some of the others. The tightness of one's trousers varied according to subcult.

At the level of ideas, there were many common complaints about the dominant culture. But sharp differences emerged with respect to political and social action. Attitudes ranged from the conscious withdrawal of the acid hippie, through the ignorant unconcern of the teeny-bopper, to the intense involvement of the New Left activist and the politics-of-theabsurd activities of groupings like the Dutch provos, the Crazies, and the guerrilla theater crowd.

The hippie corporation, so to speak, grew too large to handle all its business in a standardized way. It had to diversify and it did. It spawned a flock of fledgling subcultural enterprises.

Even as this happened, however, the movement began to die. The most passionate LSD advocates of yesterday began to admit that "acid was a bad scene" and various underground newspapers began warning followers against getting too involved with "tripsters." A mock funeral was held in San Francisco to "bury" the hippie subcult, and its favored locations, Haight-Ashbury and the East Village turned into tourist meccas as the original movement writhed and disintegrated, forming new and odder, but smaller and weaker subcults and minitribes. Then, as though to start the process all over again, yet another subcult, the "skinheads," surfaced. Skinheads had their own characteristic outfits – suspenders, boots, short haircuts – and an unsettling predilection for violence.

The death of the hippie movement and the rise of the skinheads provide a crucial new insight into the subcultural structure of tomorrow's society. For we are not merely multiplying subcults. We are turning them over more rapidly. The principle of transience is at work here, too. As the rate of change accelerates in all other aspects of the society, subcults, too, grow more ephemeral.

Evidence pointing toward a decrease in the life span of subcults also lies in the disappearance of that violent subcult of the fifties, the fighting street gang. Throughout that decade certain streets in New York were regularly devastated by a peculiar form of urban warfare called the "rumble." During a rumble, scores, if not hundreds, of youths would attack one another with flailing chains, switchblade knives, broken bottles and zip-guns. Rumbles occurred in Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and even as far away as London and Tokyo.

While there was no direct connection between these far-flung outbreaks, rumbles were by no means chance events. They were planned and carried out with military precision by highly organized "bopping gangs." In New York these gangs affected colorful names – Cobras, Corsair Lords, Apaches, Egyptian Kings and the like. They fought one another for dominance in their "turf" – the specific geographic area they staked out for themselves.

At their peak there were some 200 such gangs in New York alone, and in a single year, 1958, they accounted for no fewer than eleven homicides. Yet by 1966, according to police officials, the bopping gangs had virtually vanished. Only one gang was left in New York, and The New York Times reported: "No one knows on what garbage strewn street ... the last rumble took place. But it happened four or five years ago [which would date the death of the rumble a mere two or three years after the 1958 peak]. Then, suddenly, after a decade of mounting violence the era of the fighting gangs of New York came to an end." The same appeared to be true in Washington, Newark, Philadelphia and elsewhere as well.

The disappearance of the violent street gangs has not, of course, led to an era of urban tranquility. The aggressive passions that led poor Puerto Rican and Negro youths in New York to wage war on rival gangs is now directed at the social system itself, and totally new kinds of social organizations, subcults and life style groupings are emerging in the ghetto.

What we sense, therefore, is a process by which subcults multiply at an ever accelerating rate, and in turn die off to make room for still more and newer subcults. A kind of metabolic process is taking place in the bloodstream of the society, and it is speeding up exactly as other aspects of social interaction are quickening.

For the individual, this raises the problems of choice to a totally new level of intensity. It is not simply that the number of tribes is expanding rapidly. It is not even that these tribes or subcults are bouncing off one another, shifting and changing their relationships to one another more and more rapidly. It is also that many of them will not hold still long enough to permit an individual to make a rational investigation of the presumed advantages or disadvantages of affiliation.

The individual searching for some sense of belonging, looking for the kind of social connection that confers some sense of identity, moves through a blurry environment in which the possible targets of affiliation are all in high-speed motion. He must choose from among a growing number of moving targets. The problems of choice thus escalate not arithmetically, but geometrically.

At the very instant when his choices among material goods, education, culture consumption, recreation and entertainment are all multiplying, he is also given a bewildering array of social choices. And just as there is a limit to how much choice he may wish to exercise in buying a car – at a certain point the addition of options requires more decisionmaking than they are worth – so, too, we may soon approach the moment of social overchoice.

The level of personality disorder, neurosis, and just plain psychological distress in our society suggests that it is already difficult for many individuals to create a sensible, integrated, and reasonably stable personal style. Yet there is every evidence that the thrust toward social diversity, paralleling that at the level of goods and culture, is just beginning. We face a tempting and terrifying extension of freedom.

The more subcultural groupings in a society, the greater the potential freedom of the individual. This is why pre-industrial man, despite romantic myths to the contrary, suffered so bitterly from lack of choice.

While sentimentalists prattle about the supposedly unfettered freedom of the primitive, evidence collected by anthropologists and historians contradicts them. John Gardner puts the matter tersely: "The primitive tribe or pre-industrial community has usually demanded far more profound submission of the individual to the group than has any modern society." As an Australian social scientist was told by a Temne tribesman in Sierra Leone: "When Temne people choose a thing, we must all agree with the decision – this is what we call cooperation."

This is, of course, what we call conformity.

The reason for the crushing conformity required of pre-industrial man, the reason the Temne tribesman has to "go along" with his fellows, is precisely that he has nowhere else to go. His society is monolithic, not yet broken into a liberating multiplicity of components. It is what sociologists call "undifferentiated."

Like a bullet smashing into a pane of glass, industrialism shatters these societies, splitting them up into thousands of specialized agencies – schools, corporations, government bureaus, churches, armies – each subdivided into smaller and still more specialized subunits. The same fragmentation occurs at the informal level, and a host of subcults spring up: rodeo riders, Black Muslims, motorcyclists, skinheads and all the rest.

This split-up of the social order is precisely analogous to the process of growth in biology. Embryos differentiate as they develop, forming more and more specialized organs. The entire march of evolution, from the virus to man, displays a relentless advance toward higher and higher degrees of differentiation. There appears to be a seemingly irresistible movement of living beings and social groups from less to more differentiated forms.

Thus it is not accidental that we witness parallel trends toward diversity – in the economy, in art, in education and mass culture, in the social order itself. These trends all fit together forming part of an immensely larger historic process. The Super-industrial Revolution can now be seen for what, in large measure, it is – the advance of human society to its next higher stage of differentiation.

This is why it often seems to us that our society is cracking at the seams. It is. This is why everything grows increasingly complex. Where once there stood 1000 organizational entities, there now stand 10,000 – interconnected by increasingly transient links. Where once there were a few relatively permanent subcults with which a person might identify, there now are thousands of temporary subcults milling about, colliding and multiplying. The powerful bonds that integrated industrial society – bonds of law, common values, centralized and standardized education and cultural production – are breaking down.

All this explains why cities suddenly seem to be "unmanageable" and universities "ungovernable." For the old ways of integrating a society, methods based on uniformity, simplicity, and permanence, are no longer effective. A new, more finely fragmented social order – a super-industrial order – is emerging. It is based on many more diverse and shortlived components than any previous social system – and we have not yet learned how to link them together, how to integrate the whole.

For the individual, this leap to a new level of differentiation holds awesome implications. But not the ones most people fear. We have been told so often that we are heading for faceless uniformity that we fail to appreciate the fantastic opportunities for individuality that the Super-industrial Revolution brings with it. And we have hardly begun to think about the dangers of over-individualization that are also implicit in it.

The "mass society" theorists are obsessed by a reality that has already begun to pass us by. The Cassandras who blindly hate technology and predict an ant-heap future are still responding in knee-jerk fashion to the conditions of industrialism. Yet this system is already being superseded.

To denounce the conditions that imprison the industrial worker today is admirable. To project these conditions into the future, and predict the death of individualism, diversity and choice, is to utter dangerous clichés.

The people of both past and present are still locked into relatively choiceless life ways. The people of the future, whose number increases daily, face not choice but overchoice. For them there comes an explosive extension of freedom.

And this freedom comes not in spite of the new technology but very largely because of it. For if the early technology of industrialism required mindless, robot-like men to perform endlessly repetitive tasks, the technology of tomorrow takes over precisely these tasks, leaving for men only those functions that require judgment, interpersonal skills and imagination. Super-industrialism requires, and will create, not identical "mass men," but people richly different from one another, individuals, not robots.

The human race, far from being flattened into monotonous conformity, will become far more diverse socially than it ever was before. The new society, the super-industrial society now beginning to take form, will encourage a crazy-quilt pattern of evanescent life styles.

Chapter 14 A DIVERSITY OF LIFE STYLES

In San Francisco, executives lunch at restaurants where they are served by bare-breasted waitresses. In New York, however, a kooky girl cellist is arrested for performing avant garde music in a topless costume. In St. Louis, scientists hire prostitutes and others to copulate under a camera as part of a study of the physiology of the orgasm. But in Columbus, Ohio, civic controversy erupts over the sale of so-called "Little Brother" dolls that come from the factory equipped with male genitalia. In Kansas City, a conference of homosexual organizations announces a campaign to lift a Pentagon ban on homosexuals in the armed forces and, in fact, the Pentagon discreetly does so. Yet American jails are well populated with men arrested for the crime of homosexuality.

Seldom has a single nation evinced greater confusion over its sexual values. Yet the same might be said for other kinds of values as well. America is tortured by uncertainty with respect to money, property, law and order, race, religion, God, family and self. Nor is the United States alone in suffering from a kind of value vertigo. All the techno-societies are caught up in the same massive upheaval. This collapse of the values of the past has hardly gone unnoticed. Every priest, politician and parent is reduced to head-shaking anxiety by it. Yet most discussions of value change are barren for they miss two essential points. The first of these is acceleration.

Value turnover is now faster than ever before in history. While in the past a man growing up in a society could expect that its public value system would remain largely unchanged in his lifetime, no such assumption is warranted today, except perhaps in the most isolated of pre-technological communities.

This implies temporariness in the structure of both public and personal value systems, and it suggests that whatever the content of values that arise to replace those of the industrial age, they will be shorter-lived, more ephemeral than the values of the past. There is no evidence whatsoever that the value systems of the techno-societies are likely to return to a "steady state" condition. For the foreseeable future, we must anticipate still more rapid value change.

Within this context, however, a second powerful trend is unfolding. For the fragmentation of societies brings with it a diversification of values. We are witnessing the crack-up of consensus.

Most previous societies have operated with a broad central core of commonly shared values. This core is now contracting, and there is little reason to anticipate the formation of a new broad consensus within the decades ahead. The pressures are outward toward diversity, not inward toward unity.

This accounts for the fantastically discordant propaganda that assails the mind in the techno-societies. Home, school, corporation, church, peer group, mass media – and myriad subcults – all advertise varying sets of values. The result for many is an "anything goes" attitude – which is, itself, still another value position. We are, declares Newsweek magazine, "a society that has lost its consensus ... a society that cannot agree on standards of conduct, language and manners, on what can be seen and heard."

This picture of a cracked consensus is confirmed by the findings of Walter Gruen, social science research coordinator at Rhode Island Hospital, who has conducted a series of statistical studies of what he terms "the American core culture." Rather than the monolithic system of beliefs attributed to the middle class by earlier investigators, Gruen found – to his own surprise – that "diversity in beliefs was more striking than the statistically supported uniformities. It is," he concluded, "perhaps already misleading to talk of an 'American' culture complex."

Gruen suggests that particularly among the affluent, educated group, consensus is giving way to what he calls "pockets" of values. We can expect that, as the number and variety of subcults continues to expand, these pockets will proliferate, too.

Faced with colliding value systems, confronted with a blinding array of new consumer goods, services, educational, occupational and recreational options, the people of the future are driven to make choices in a new way. They begin to "consume" life styles the way people of an earlier, less choice-choked time consumed ordinary products.

During Elizabethan times, the term "gentleman" referred to a whole way of life, not simply an accident of birth. Appropriate lineage may have been a prerequisite, but to be a gentleman one had also to live in a certain style: to be better educated, have better manners, wear better clothes than the masses; to engage in certain recreations (and not others); to live in a large, well-furnished house; to maintain a certain aloofness with subordinates; in short, never to lose sight of his class "superiority."

The merchant class had its own preferred life style and the peasantry still another. These life styles, like that of the gentleman, were pieced together out of many different components, ranging from residence, occupation and dress to jargon, gesture and religion. Today we still create our life styles by forming a mosaic of components. But much has changed. Life style is no longer simply a manifestation of class position. Classes themselves are breaking up into smaller units. Economic factors are declining in importance. Thus today it is not so much one's class base as one's ties with a subcult that determine the individual's style of life. The working-class hippie and the hippie who dropped out of Exeter or Eton share a common style of life but no common class.

Since life style has become the way in which the individual expresses his identification with this or that subcult, the explosive multiplication of subcults in society has brought with it an equally explosive multiplication of life styles. Thus the stranger launched into American or English or Japanese or Swedish society today must choose not among four or five classbased styles of life, but among literally hundreds of diverse possibilities. Tomorrow, as subcults proliferate, this number will be even larger.

How we choose a life style, and what it means to us, therefore, looms as one of the central issues of the psychology of tomorrow. For the selection of a life style, whether consciously done or not, powerfully shapes the individual's future. It does this by imposing order, a set of principles or criteria on the choices he makes in his daily life.

This becomes clear if we examine how such choices are actually made. The young couple setting out to furnish their apartment may look at literally hundreds of different lamps – Scandinavian, Japanese, French Provincial, Tiffany lamps, hurricane lamps, American colonial lamps – dozens, scores of different sizes, models and styles before selecting, say, the Tiffany lamp. Having surveyed a "universe" of possibilities, they zero in on one. In the furniture department, they again scan an array of alternatives, then settle on a Victorian end table. This scan-and-select procedure is repeated with respect to rugs, sofa, drapes, dining room chairs, etc. In fact, something like this same procedure is followed not merely in furnishing their home, but also in their adoption of ideas, friends, even the vocabulary they use and the values they espouse.

While the society bombards the individual with a swirling, seemingly patternless set of alternatives, the selections made are anything but random. The consumer (whether of end tables or ideas) comes armed with a pre-established set of tastes and preferences. Moreover, no choice is wholly independent. Each is conditioned by those made earlier. The couple's selection of an end table has been conditioned by their previous choice of a lamp. In short, there is a certain consistency, an attempt at personal style, in all our actions – whether consciously recognized or not.

The American male who wears a button-down collar and garter-length socks probably also wears wing-tip shoes and carries an attaché case. If we look closely, chances are we shall find a facial expression and brisk manner intended to approximate those of the stereotypical executive. The odds are astronomical that he will not let his hair grow wild in the manner of rock musician Jimi Hendrix. He knows, as we do, that certain clothes, manners, forms of speech, opinions and gestures hang together, while others do not. He may know this only by "feel," or "intuition," having picked it up by observing others in the society, but the knowledge shapes his actions.

The black-jacketed motorcyclist who wears steel-studded gauntlets and an obscene swastika dangling from his throat completes his costume with rugged boots, not loafers or wing-tips. He is likely to swagger as he walks and to grunt as he mouths his anti-authoritarian platitudes. For he, too, values consistency. He knows that any trace of gentility or articulateness would destroy the integrity of his style.

Why do the motorcyclists wear black jackets? Why not brown or blue? Why do executives in America prefer attaché cases, rather than the traditional briefcase? It is as though they were following some model, trying to attain some ideal laid down from above.

We know little about the origin of life style models. We do know, however, that popular heroes and celebrities, including fictional characters (James Bond, for example), have something to do with it.

Marlon Brando, swaggering in a black jacket as a motorcyclist, perhaps originated, and certainly publicized a life style model. Timothy Leary, robed, beaded, and muttering mystic pseudo profundities about love and LSD, provided a model for thousands of youths. Such heroes, as the sociologist Orrin Klapp puts it, help to "crystallize a social type." He cites the late James Dean who depicted the alienated adolescent in the movie Rebel Without a Cause or Elvis Presley who initially fixed the image of the guitar-twanging rock-'n'-roller. Later came the Beatles with their (at that time) outrageous hair and exotic costumes. "One of the prime functions of popular favorites," says Klapp, "is to make types visible, which in turn make new life styles and new tastes visible."

Yet the style-setter need not be a mass media idol. He may be almost unknown outside a particular subcult. Thus for years Lionel Trilling, an English professor at Columbia, was the father figure for the West Side Intellectuals, a New York subcult well known in literary and academic circles in the United States. The mother figure was Mary McCarthy, long before she achieved popular fame.

An acute article by John Speicher in a youth magazine called Cheetah listed some of the better-known life style models to which young people were responding in the late sixties. They ranged from Ché Guevara to William Buckley, from Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to Robert Kennedy. "The American youth bag," wrote Speicher, lapsing into hippie jargon, "is overcrowded with heroes." And, he adds, "where heroes are, there are followers, cultists."

To the subcult member, its heroes provide what Speicher calls the "crucial existential necessity of psychological identity." This is, of course, hardly new. Earlier generations identified with Charles Lindbergh or Theda Bara. What is new and highly significant, however, is the fabulous proliferation of such heroes and mini-heroes. As subcults multiply and values diversify, we find, in Speicher's words, "a national sense of identity hopelessly fragmented." For the individual, he says, this means greater choice: "There is a wide range of cults available, a wide range of heroes. You can do comparison shopping."

While charismatic figures may become style-setters, styles are fleshed out and marketed to the public by the sub-societies or tribe-lets we have termed subcults. Taking in raw symbolic matter from the mass media, they somehow piece together odd bits of dress, opinion, and expression and form them into a coherent package: a life style model. Once they have assembled a particular model, they proceed, like any good corporation, to merchandise it. They find customers for it.

Anyone doubting this is advised to read the letters of Allen Ginsberg to Timothy Leary, the two men most responsible for creating the hippie life style, with its heavy accent on drug use.

Says poet Ginsberg: "Yesterday got on TV with N. Mailer and Ashley Montagu and gave big speech ... recommending everybody get high ... Got in touch with all the liberal prodope people I know to have [a certain pro-drug report] publicized and circulated ... I wrote a five-page summary of the situation to this friend Kenny Love on The New York Times and he said he'd perhaps do a story (newswise) ... which could then be picked up by U.P. friend on national wire. Also gave copy to Al Aronowitz on New York Post and Rosalind Constable at Time and Bob Silvers on Harper's..."

No wonder LSD and the whole hippie phenomenon received the immense mass media publicity it did. This partial account of Ginsberg's energetic press agentry, complete with the Madison Avenue suffix "-wise" (as in newswise), reads precisely like an internal memo from Hill and Knowlton or any of the other giant public relations corporations whom hippies love to flagellate for manipulating public opinion. The successful "sale" of the hippie life style model to young people all over the techno-societies, is one of the classic merchandising stories of our time.

Not all subcults are so aggressive and talented at flackery, yet their cumulative power in the society is enormous. This power stems from our almost universal desperation to "belong." The primitive tribesman feels a strong attachment to his tribe. He knows that he "belongs" to it, and may even have difficulty imagining himself apart from it. The technosocieties are so large, however, and their complexities so far beyond the comprehension of any individual, that it is only by plugging in to one or more of their subcults, that we maintain some sense of identity and contact with the whole. Failure to identify with some such group or groups condemns us to feelings of loneliness, alienation and ineffectuality. We begin to wonder "who we are."

In contrast, the sense of belonging, of being part of a social cell larger than ourselves (yet small enough to be comprehensible) is often so rewarding that we feel deeply drawn, sometimes even against our own better judgment, to the values, attitudes and most-favored life style of the group.

However, we pay for the benefits we receive. For once we psychologically affiliate with a subcult, it begins to exert pressures on us. We find that it pays to "go along" with the group. It rewards us with warmth, friendship and approval when we conform to its life style model. But it punishes us ruthlessly with ridicule, ostracism or other tactics when we deviate from it.

Hawking their preferred life style models, subcults clamor for our attention. In so doing, they act directly on our most vulnerable psychological property, our self-image. "Join us," they whisper, "and you become a bigger, better, more effective, more respected and less lonely person." In choosing among the fast-proliferating subcults we may only vaguely sense that our identity will be shaped by our decision, but we feel the hot urgency of their appeals and counter-appeals. We are buffeted back and forth by their psychological promises.

At the moment of choice among them, we resemble the tourist walking down Bourbon Street in New Orleans. As he strolls past the honky-tonks and clip joints, doormen grab him by the arm, spin him around, and open a door so he can catch a titillating glimpse of the naked flesh of the strippers on the platform behind the bar. Subcults reach out to capture us and appeal to our most private fantasies in ways far more powerful and subtle than any yet devised by Madison Avenue.

What they offer is not simply a skin show or a new soap or detergent. They offer not a product, but a super-product. It is true they hold out the promise of human warmth, companionship, respect, a sense of community. But so do the advertisers of deodorants and beer. The "miracle ingredient," the exclusive component, the one thing that subcults offer that other hawkers cannot, is a respite from the strain of overchoice. For they offer not a single product or idea, but a way of organizing all products and ideas, not a single commodity but a whole style, a set of guidelines that help the individual reduce the increasing complexity of choice to manageable proportions.

Most of us are desperately eager to find precisely such guidelines. In the welter of conflicting moralities, in the confusion occasioned by overchoice, the most powerful, most useful "super-product" of all is an organizing principle for one's life. This is what a life style offers.

Of course, not just any life style will do. We live in a Cairo bazaar of competing models. In this psychological phantasmagoria we search for a style, a way of ordering our existence, that will fit our particular temperament and circumstances. We look for heroes or mini-heroes to emulate. The style-seeker is like the lady who flips through the pages of a fashion magazine to find a suitable dress pattern. She studies one after another, settles on one that appeals to her, and decides to create a dress based on it. Next she begins to collect the necessary materials – cloth, thread, piping, buttons, etc. In precisely the same way, the life style creator acquires the necessary props. He lets his hair grow. He buys art nouveau posters and a paperback of Guevara's writings. He learns to discuss Marcuse and Frantz Fanon. He picks up a particular jargon, using words like "relevance" and "establishment."

None of this means that his political actions are insignificant, or that his opinions are unjust or foolish. He may (or may not) be accurate in his views of society. Yet the particular way in which he chooses to express them is inescapably part of his search for personal style.

The lady, in constructing her dress, alters it here and there, deviating from the pattern in minor ways to make it fit her more perfectly. The end product is truly custom-made; yet it bears a striking resemblance to others sewn from the same design. In quite the same way we individualize our style of living, yet it usually winds up bearing a distinct resemblance to some life style model previously packaged and marketed by a subcult.

Often we are unaware of the moment when we commit ourselves to one life style model over all others. The decision to "be" an Executive or a Black Militant or a West Side Intellectual is seldom the result of purely logical analysis. Nor is the decision always made cleanly, all at once. The research scientist who switches from cigarettes to a pipe may do so for health reasons without recognizing that the pipe is part of a whole life style toward which he finds himself drawn. The couple who choose the Tiffany lamp think they are furnishing an apartment; they do not necessarily see their actions as an attempt to flesh out an overall style of life.

Most of us, in fact, do not think of our own lives in terms of life style, and we often have difficulty in talking about it objectively. We have even more trouble when we try to articulate the structure of values implicit in our style. The task is doubly hard because many of us do not adopt a single integrated style, but a composite of elements drawn from several different models. We may emulate both Hippie and Surfer. We may choose a cross between West Side Intellectual and Executive – a fusion that is, in fact, chosen by many publishing officials in New York. When one's personal style is a hybrid, it is frequently difficult to disentangle the multiple models on which it is based.

Once we commit ourselves to a particular model, however, we fight energetically to build it, and perhaps even more so to preserve it against challenge. For the style becomes extremely important to us. This is doubly true of the people of the future, among whom concern for style is downright passionate. This intense concern for style is not, however, what literary critics mean by formalism. It is not simply an interest in outward appearances. For style of life involves not merely the external forms of behavior, but the values implicit in that behavior, and one cannot change one's life style without working some change in one's selfimage. The people of the future are not "style conscious" but "life style conscious."

This is why little things often assume great significance for them. A single small detail of one's life may be charged with emotional power if it challenges a hard-won life style, if it threatens to break up the integrity of the style. Aunt Ethel gives us a wedding present. We are embarrassed by it, for it is in a style alien to our own. It irritates and upsets us, even though we know that "Aunt Ethel doesn't know any better." We banish it hastily to the top shelf of the closet.

Aunt Ethel's toaster or tablewear is not important, in and of itself. But it is a message from a different subcultural world, and unless we are weak in commitment to our own style, unless we happen to be in transition between styles, it represents a potent threat. The psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term "cognitive dissonance" to mean the tendency of a person to reject or deny information that challenges his preconceptions. We don't want to hear things that may upset our carefully worked out structure of beliefs. Similarly, Aunt Ethel's gift represents an element of "stylistic dissonance." It threatens to undermine our carefully worked out style of life.

Why does the life style have this power to preserve itself? What is the source of our commitment to it? A life style is a vehicle through which we express ourselves. It is a way of telling the world which particular subcult or subcults we belong to. Yet this hardly accounts for its enormous importance to us. The real reason why life styles are so significant – and increasingly so as the society diversifies – is that, above all else, the choice of a life style model to emulate is a crucial strategy in our private war against the crowding pressures of overchoice.

Deciding, whether consciously or not, to be "like" William Buckley or Joan Baez, Lionel Trilling or his surfer equivalent, J. J. Moon, rescues us from the need to make millions of minute life-decisions. Once a commitment to a style is made, we are able to rule out many forms of dress and behavior, many ideas and attitudes, as inappropriate to our adopted style. The college boy who chooses the Student Protester Model wastes little energy agonizing over whether to vote for Wallace, carry an attaché case, or invest in mutual funds.

By zeroing in on a particular life style we exclude a vast number of alternatives from further consideration. The fellow who opts for the Motorcyclist Model need no longer concern himself with the hundreds of types of gloves available to him on the open market, but which violate the spirit of his style. He need only choose among the far smaller repertoire of glove types that fit within the limits set by his model. And what is said of gloves is equally applicable to his ideas and social relationships as well.

The commitment to one style of life over another is thus a super-decision. It is a decision of a higher order than the general run of everyday life-decisions. It is a decision to narrow the range of alternatives that will concern us in the future. So long as we operate within the confines of the style we have chosen, our choices are relatively simple. The guidelines are clear. The subcult to which we belong helps us answer any questions; it keeps the guidelines in place.

But when our style is suddenly challenged, when something forces us to reconsider it, we are driven to make another super-decision. We face the painful need to transform not only ourselves, but our self-image as well.

It is painful because, freed of our commitment to any given style, cut adrift from the subcult that gave rise to it, we no longer "belong." Worse yet, our basic principles are called into question and we must face each new life-decision afresh, alone, without the security of a definite, fixed policy. We are, in short, confronted with the full, crushing burden of overchoice again.

To be "between styles" or "between subcults" is a life-crisis, and the people of the future spend more time in this condition, searching for styles, than do the people of the past or present. Altering his identity as he goes, super-industrial man traces a private trajectory through a world of colliding subcults. This is the social mobility of the future: not simply movement from one economic class to another, but from one tribal grouping to another. Restless movement from subcult to ephemeral subcult describes the arc of his life.

There are plenty of reasons for this restlessness. It is not merely that the individual's psychological needs change more often than in the past; the subcults also change. For these and other reasons, as subcult membership becomes ever more unstable, the search for a personal style will become increasingly intense, even frenetic in the decades to come. Again and again, we shall find ourselves bitter or bored, vaguely dissatisfied with "the way things are" – upset, in other words, with our present style. At that moment, we begin once more to search for a new principle around which to organize our choices. We arrive again at the moment of super-decision.

At this moment, if anyone studied our behavior closely, he would find a sharp increase in what might be called the Transience Index. The rate of turnover of things, places, people, organizational and informational relationships spurts upward. We get rid of that silk dress or tie, the old Tiffany lamp, that horror of a claw-footed Victorian end table – all those symbols of our links with the subcult of the past. We begin, bit by bit, to replace them with new items emblematic of our new identification. The same process occurs in our social lives – the through-put of people speeds up. We begin to reject ideas we have held (or to explain them or rationalize them in new ways). We are suddenly free of all the constraints that our subcult or style imposed on us. A Transience Index would prove a sensitive indicator of those moments in our lives when we are most free – but, at the same time, most lost.

It is in this interval that we exhibit the wild oscillation engineers call "searching behavior." We are most vulnerable now to the messages of new subcults, to the claims and counterclaims that rend the air. We lean this way and that. A powerful new friend, a new fad or idea, a new political movement, some new hero rising from the depths of the mass media – all these strike us with particular force at such a moment. We are more "open," more uncertain, more ready for someone or some group to tell us what to do, how to behave.

Decisions – even little ones – come harder. This is not accidental. To cope with the press of daily life we need more information about far more trivial matters than when we were locked into a firm life style. And so we feel anxious, pressured, alone, and we move on. We choose or allow ourselves to be sucked into a new subcult. We put on a new style.

As we rush toward super-industrialism, therefore, we find people adopting and discarding life styles at a rate that would have staggered the members of any previous generation. For the life style itself has become a throw-away item.

This is no small or easy matter. It accounts for the much lamented "loss of commitment" that is so characteristic of our time. As people shift from subcult to subcult, from style to style, they are conditioned to guard themselves against the inevitable pain of disaffiliation. They learn to armor themselves against the sweet sorrow of parting. The extremely devout Catholic who throws over his religion and plunges into the life of a New Left activist, then throws himself into some other cause or movement or subcult, cannot go on doing so forever. He becomes, to adapt Graham Greene's term, a "burnt out case." He learns from past disappointment never to lay too much of his old self on the line.

And so, even when he seemingly adopts a subcult or style, he withholds some part of himself. He conforms to the group's demands and revels in the belongingness that it gives him. But this belongingness is never the same as it once was, and secretly he remains ready to defect at a moment's notice. What this means is that even when he seems most firmly plugged in to his group or tribe, he listens, in the dark of night, to the short-wave signals of competing tribes.

In this sense, his membership in the group is shallow. He remains constantly in a posture of non-commitment, and without strong commitment to the values and styles of some group he lacks the explicit set of criteria that he needs to pick his way through the burgeoning jungle of overchoice.

The super-industrial revolution, consequently, forces the whole problem of overchoice to a qualitatively new level. It forces us now to make choices not merely among lamps and lampshades, but among lives, not among life style components, but among whole life styles.

This intensification of the problem of overchoice presses us toward orgies of selfexamination, soul-searching and introversion. It confronts us with that most popular of contemporary illnesses, the "identity crisis." Never before have masses of men faced a more complex set of choices. The hunt for identity arises not out of the supposed choicelessness of "mass society," but precisely from the plenitude and complexity of our choices.

Each time we make a style choice, a super-decision, each time we link up with some particular subcultural group or groups, we make some change in our self-image. We become, in some sense, a different person, and we perceive ourselves as different. Our old friends, those who knew us in some previous incarnation, raise their eyebrows. They have a harder and harder time recognizing us, and, in fact, we experience increasing difficulty in identifying with, or even sympathizing with, our own past selves.

The hippie becomes the straight-arrow executive, the executive becomes the skydiver without noting the exact steps of transition. In the process, he discards not only the externals of his style, but many of his underlying attitudes as well. And one day the question hits him like a splash of cold water in a sleep-sodden face: "What remains?" What is there of "self" or "personality" in the sense of a continuous, durable internal structure? For some, the answer is very little. For they are no longer dealing in "self" but in what might be called "serial selves."

The Super-industrial Revolution thus requires a basic change in man's conception of himself, a new theory of personality that takes into account the discontinuities in men's lives, as well as the continuities.

The Super-industrial Revolution also demands a new conception of freedom – a recognition that freedom, pressed to its ultimate, negates itself. Society's leap to a new level of differentiation necessarily brings with it new opportunities for individuation, and the new technology, the new temporary organizational forms, cry out for a new breed of man. This is why, despite "backlash" and temporary reversals, the line of social advance carries us toward a wider tolerance, a more easy acceptance of more and more diverse human types.

The sudden popularity of the slogan "do your thing" is a reflection of this historic movement. For the more fragmented or differentiated the society, the greater the number of varied life styles it promotes. And the more socially accepted life style models put forth by the society, the closer that society approaches a condition in which, in fact, each man does his own, unique thing.

Thus, despite all the anti-technological rhetoric of the Elluls and Fromms, the Mumfords and Marcuses, it is precisely the super-industrial society, the most advanced technological society ever, that extends the range of freedom. The people of the future enjoy greater opportunities for self-realization than any previous group in history.

The new society offers few roots in the sense of truly enduring relationships. But it does offer more varied life niches, more freedom to move in and out of these niches, and more opportunity to create one's own niche, than all earlier societies put together. It also offers the supreme exhilaration of riding change, cresting it, changing and growing with it – a process infinitely more exciting than riding the surf, wrestling steers, playing "knock hubcaps" on an eight-lane speedway, or the pursuit of pharmaceutical kicks. It presents the individual with a contest that requires self-mastery and high intelligence. For the individual who comes armed with these, and who makes the necessary effort to understand the fastemerging super-industrial social structure, for the person who finds the "right" life pace, the "right" sequence of subcults to join and life style models to emulate, the triumph is exquisite.

Undeniably, these grand words do not apply to the majority of men. Most people of the past and present remain imprisoned in life niches they have neither made nor have much hope, under present conditions, of ever escaping. For most human beings, the options remain excruciatingly few.

This imprisonment must – and will – be broken. Yet it will not be broken by tirades against technology. It will not be broken by calls for a return to passivity, mysticism and irrationality. It will not be broken by "feeling" or "intuiting" our way into the future while derogating empirical study, analysis, and rational effort. Rather than lashing out, Ludditefashion, against the machine, those who genuinely wish to break the prison-hold of the past and present would do well to hasten the controlled – selective – arrival of tomorrow's technologies. To accomplish this, however, intuition and "mystical insights" are hardly enough. It will take exact scientific knowledge, expertly applied to the crucial, most sensitive points of social control.

Nor does it help to offer the principle of the maximization of choice as the key to freedom. We must consider the possibility, suggested here, that choice may become overchoice, and freedom unfreedom.

Despite romantic rhetoric, freedom cannot be absolute. To argue for total choice (a meaningless concept) or total individuality is to argue against any form of community or society altogether. If each person, busily doing his thing, were to be wholly different from every other, no two humans would have any basis for communication. It is ironic that the people who complain most loudly that people cannot "relate" to one another, or cannot "communicate" with one another, are often the very same people who urge greater individuality. The sociologist Karl Mannheim recognized this contradiction when he wrote: "The more individualized people are, the more difficult it is to attain identification."

Unless we are literally prepared to plunge backward into pre-technological primitivism, and accept all the consequences – a shorter, more brutal life, more disease, pain, starvation, fear, superstition, xenophobia, bigotry and so on – we shall move forward to more and more differentiated societies. This raises severe problems of social integration. What bonds of education, politics, culture must we fashion to tie the super-industrial order together into a functioning whole? Can this be accomplished? "This integration," writes Bertram M. Gross of Wayne State University, "must be based upon certain commonly accepted values or some degree of perceived interdependence, if not mutually acceptable objectives."

A society fast fragmenting at the level of values and life styles challenges all the old integrative mechanisms and cries out for a totally new basis for reconstitution. We have by no means yet found this basis. Yet if we shall face disturbing problems of social integration, we shall confront even more agonizing problems of individual integration. For the multiplication of life styles challenges our ability to hold the very self together.

Which of many potential selves shall we choose to be? What sequence of serial selves will describe us? How, in short, must we deal with overchoice at this, the most intensely personal and emotion-laden level of all? In our headlong rush for variety, choice and freedom, we have not yet begun to examine the awesome implications of diversity.

When diversity, however, converges with transience and novelty, we rocket the society toward an historical crisis of adaptation. We create an environment so ephemeral, unfamiliar and complex as to threaten millions with adaptive breakdown. This breakdown is future shock.