Nonlinearity and Future Shock

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I stumbled on the post I quote below via the interesting Technoccult blog. It makes some points I've been wanting to get to, as touched upon in this recent post and this one and others. Specifically, I've been working toward some synthesis based on Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. I heard Klein lecture at the University of Illinois about a year ago, but since her book hasn't risen to the top of my reading list yet (it's very close, though), I've avoided referencing her thoughts directly. But here's an author named Charlie Stross, with whom I'm not familiar, that neatly draws connections between themes from those two books and the nonlinearity I've started trying to understand:

The term Future Shock was coined by Alvin and Heidi Toffler in the 1960s to describe a syndrome brought about by the experience of "too much change in too short a period of time". Per Wikipedia (my copy of Future Shock is buried in a heap of books in the room next door) "Toffler argues that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a 'super-industrial society'. This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving them disconnected and suffering from 'shattering stress and disorientation' — future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of the future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock, he also popularized the term information overload."

It's about forty years since "Future Shock" was published, and it seems to have withstood the test of time. More to the point, the Tofflers' predictions for how the symptoms would be manifest appear to be roughly on target. They predicted a growth of cults and religious fundamentalism; rejection of modernism: irrational authoritarianism: and widespread insecurity. They didn't nail the other great source of insecurity today, the hollowing-out of state infrastructure and externally imposed asset-stripping in the name of economic orthodoxy that Naomi Klein highlighted in The Shock Doctrine, but to the extent that Friedmanite disaster capitalism can be seen as a predatory corporate response to massive political and economic change, I'm inclined to put disaster capitalism down as being another facet of the same problem. (And it looks as if the UK and USA are finally on the receiving end of disaster capitalism at home, in the post-2008 banking crisis era.)

My working hypothesis to explain the 21st century is that the Toffler's underestimated how pervasive future shock would be. I think somewhere in the range from 15-30% of our fellow hairless primates are currently in the grip of future shock, to some degree. Symptoms include despair, anxiety, depression, disorientation, paranoia, and a desperate search for certainty in lives that are experiencing unpleasant and uninvited change. It's no surprise that anyone who can offer dogmatic absolute answers is popular, or that the paranoid style is again ascendant in American politics, or that religious certainty is more attractive to many than the nuanced complexities of scientific debate.

I'll quibble about the last clause in this quote, because there are also conflicts between "scientific certainty and the nuanced complexities of religious debate" (to use Stross' construct), and also between dogma versus open-mindedness in both "communities." But his working hypothesis, as his post is entitled, corresponds to key points of my own, so I'm happy to have him do some heavy lifting to help me progress on my own synthesis.

Incidentally, these Stross bon mots are extracted from a more specialized question that his post directly addresses: is religious tolerance beneficial? And his answer, similar to mine, is mixed. Yes, religious tolerance is beneficial because the opposite of tolerance never is. But tolerance should not venture up to the point where a "religion" adopts dogmas that dehumanize women, children, and The Other; or where religious proselytizing becomes intrusive, coercive, or mandated by law.