Coping With Future Shock

His picture was, until recently, everywhere: on television, on posters that stared out at one in airports and railroad stations, on leaflets, matchbooks and magazines. He was an inspired creation of Madison Avenue--a fictional character with whom millions could subconsciously identify. Young and clean-cut, he carried an attaché case, glanced at his watch and looked like an ordinary businessman off to his next appointment--except for an enormous protuberance on his back. Sticking out from between his shoulder blades was a great, butterfly-shaped key of the type used to wind up mechanical toys. The text that accompanied his picture urged keyed-up executives to "unwind" at the Sheraton Hotels. This wound-up man on the go was, and still is, a striking symbol of our times.

The average individual knows little and cares less about such abstract issues as the rate of change in society as a whole. But he is keenly aware of the pace of his own life. And this pace is a product of change. Today, the techno-societies--the United States, western Europe and Japan--are caught in a revolution that is rocketing them into the future at fantastically accelerated speeds. Anyone who mistakes the present period for one of normal change, or for a simple straight-line extension of the Industrial Revolution, dangerously underestimates the impact and velocity of the changes that lie immediately ahead. Millenniums of change will be compressed into the next 30 or 40 years, as a wholly novel civilization--superindustrialism--explodes into being in our midst.

This new society will embody values radically different from today's--with the drive for material success subordinated to bizarre new aesthetic, religious, moral and social goals. It will be crammed with new forms of anti-bureaucratic organization--rapidly shifting, kinetic Ad-Hocracies. It will offer a dazzling variety of choice with respect to products, culture, jobs and life styles. Yet the single most important feature of this new society will be its pace. For superindustrialism will not be a single, stable society but a sequence of temporary societies, with kaleido-scopically changing institutions, relationships and ground rules. In this Pirandellian world of tomorrow, the individual will be forced to make and break his ties with the environment at a relentlessly quickening tempo. Things, places, people, organizations and information will, in effect, speed through his life, compelling him to learn, dislearn and relearn, to commit and uncommit himself, to adapt and readapt--in short, to live--at a faster pace than ever before.

This acceleration in the pace of daily life is already producing severe distress in millions of us. Vast numbers of us seem frazzled, strung out, numbed, overwhelmed, shocked by change. Many can no longer manage their own lives competently. They are, in fact, the early victims of what could turn out to be tomorrow's most significant social sickness: future shock. As defined in last month's article, future shock is the adaptive breakdown that even the strongest and most stable individual suffers when demands for change overwhelm his bodily defenses and mental capacities. Ask a man to change his life too quickly and even if he doesn't fall physically ill, he is likely to plunge into bewilderment, anxiety and sick irritability. Like a worker on an assembly line that's running too fast, he becomes all thumbs, falling farther and farther behind as he attempts to cope with even the simplest problems of daily life. His personal priorities become confused. He careens through his personal world, frenetically on the go, but without any durable sense of direction. Things begin to go wrong. As they do, he lashes out senselessly, even at those who most want to help him. Eventually, after a crescendo of anger or aggression, he collapses into emotional exhaustion. What follows is an apathy so deep as to be self-destructive, like the arctic sleep of the blizzard-bound explorer. Some of today's young people who have chosen to drop out or disengage--holing up in caves and communes, looking blankly at the sky, showing no emotion even when confronted by news that would shake a normal person--may well be suffering from this last stage of overstimulation. For others, drug abuse is the end point of future shock.

But the flight from reality and from emotion is not the only form of maladaptation to rapid change. Much of the anxiety, irrationality and seemingly senseless violence in today's society may also be symptoms of future shock. For the accelerative thrust places a dangerous strain on all our habitual methods for dealing with change. To survive the superindustrial revolution, we must take a fresh look at all our personal and social coping mechanisms. We must build future-shock absorbers into our lives and into the emerging institutions of tomorrow's society.

At the most personal level, we can improve our ability to cope with change by doing consciously some of the things that we already do unconsciously. For example, we can deliberately set aside time for examining our bodily and psychological reactions to change, briefly tuning out the external environment to evaluate our inner environment. This is not a matter of wallowing in subjectivity but of coolly appraising our own performance. In the words of Hans Selye, whose work on stress opened new frontiers in biology and psychiatry, the individual can "consciously look for signs of being keyed up too much." Heart palpitations, tremors, insomnia or unexplained fatigue may well signal overstimulation, just as confusion, unusual irritability, profound lassitude and a panicky sense that things are slipping out of control are psychological indications. By asking ourselves if we are living too fast, we can attempt, quite consciously, to assess our own life pace.

How many times in the past few years have we moved, changed jobs or schools, traveled to new places, entered into new, emotionally demanding relationships, been ill, suffered a family crisis, fallen into debt, been promoted, shifted to a new style of life? How does this pace compare with that of the years immediately before? By crudely appraising the frequency and depth of our life changes, we can gain some indication of whether the instability in our personal lives is increasing or approaching a danger point. Having done this, we can also begin consciously to influence it--first with respect to small things, the microenvironment, and then in terms of the larger, structural patterns of experience.

Change acts as a stimulant. But prolonged exposure to an overstimulating environment can have serious physiological and psychological consequences. When the level of stimulation rises too high, we begin to show the symptoms of future shock.

The fact is that, whether or not we are aware of it, much of our daily behavior is an attempt to ward off future shock. We employ conscious and unconscious techniques to lower levels of environmental stimulation when they threaten to drive us above our adaptive range. We employ a destimulating tactic, for example, when we storm into a room to turn off a stereo rig that has been battering our eardrums with unwanted and interruptive sounds. We act to reduce sensory bombardment in other ways, too--when we pull down the blinds to darken a room or search for solitude on a deserted strip of beach. We close doors, wear sunglasses, avoid smelly places and shy away from touching strange surfaces when we want to decrease novel sensory input. In short, we employ sensory shielding--a thousand subtle behavioral tricks to turn off sensory stimuli when they approach our upper adaptive limit.

We use similar tactics to prevent information overload. The best of students periodically gazes out the window, blocking out his professor, shutting off the flow of new data from that source. Even voracious readers sometimes go through periods when they cannot bear to pick up a book or a magazine.

Why, during a gregarious evening at a friend's house, does one person in the group refuse to learn a new card or board game while others urge him on? Many factors play a part: the self-esteem of the individual, the fear of seeming foolish, and so on. But one overlooked factor affecting willingness to learn may well be the general level of cognitive stimulation or change in the individual's life at the time. "Don't bother me with facts!" is a phrase usually uttered in jest. But the joke often disguises a real wish to avoid being pressed too hard by new data.

We also attempt to regulate the pace of decision making. We postpone decisions or delegate them to others when we are suffering from decision overload. When I joined a woman sociologist and her husband for dinner at a restaurant after she had just returned from a crowded, highly stimulating professional conference, she absolutely refused to make any decisions whatever about her meal. "What would you like?" her husband asked. "You decide for me," she replied. When pressed to choose between specific alternatives, she still refused, insisting angrily that she lacked the energy to make the decision.

Through such methods we attempt, as best we can, to modulate the flow of sensory, cognitive and decisional stimulation. But we have stronger ways of coping with the threat of overstimulation. We can, for example, cut down on change and stimulation by consciously maintaining longer-term relationships with the various elements of our physical environment. Thus, we can refuse to purchase throwaway products. We can hang onto the old jacket for another season; we can stoutly refuse to follow the latest fashion trend; we can resist when the salesman tells us it's time to trade in our automobile. In this way, we reduce the need to make and break ties with the physical objects around us.

We can use the same tactic with respect to people and the other dimensions of experience. There are times when even the most gregarious person feels antisocial and refuses invitations to parties or other events that call for social interaction. We consciously disconnect. In the same way, we can minimize travel. We can resist pointless reorganizations in our company, church, fraternal or community groups. In making important decisions, we can consciously weigh the hidden costs of change against the benefits.

None of this is to suggest that change can or should be stopped. Nothing is less sensible than the advice of the Duke of Cambridge, who is said to have harrumphed: "Any change, at any time, for any reason is to be deplored." Some level of change is as vital to health, to avert boredom, as too much change is damaging. Yet we need to control this level, to manage it rather than let it control us.

Some people, for reasons still not clear, are pitched at a much higher level of stimulus hunger than others. They seem to crave change even when others are reeling from it. A new house, a new car, another trip, another crisis on the job, more house guests, visits, financial adventures and misadventures--they seem to accept all these and more without apparent ill effect. Yet close analysis of such people often reveals the existence in their lives of what might be called stability zones--certain enduring relationships that are carefully maintained despite all kinds of other changes. One scientist I know has run through a series of love affairs, a divorce and remarriage--all within a very short time. He thrives on change, enjoys travel, new foods and new ideas, new movies, plays and books. He has a high intellect and a low threshold of boredom, is impatient with tradition and restlessly eager for novelty. Ostensibly, he is a walking exemplar of change. When we look more closely, however, we find that he has stayed on the same job for ten years. He drives a battered seven-year-old automobile. His clothes are a few years out of style. His closest friends are longtime professional associates and even a few old college buddies.

A different form of stability zone is the habit pattern that goes with some people wherever they travel, no matter what other changes alter their lives--like the professor who has made seven residential relocations in ten years, travels constantly in the U. S., South America, Europe and Africa, has changed jobs repeatedly, yet pursues the same daily regimen wherever he is. He reads between eight and nine in the morning, takes 45 minutes for exercise at lunchtime and then catches a half-hour cat nap before plunging into work that keeps him busy until ten P.M.

The secret of coping with future shock is not, therefore, to suppress change, which cannot be done, but to manage it. A broken engagement probably should not be too closely followed by a job transfer. Since the birth of a child alters all the human ties within a family, it probably ought not be followed too closely by a relocation, which causes tremendous turnover in human ties outside the family. The recent widow should not, perhaps, rush to sell her house. If we opt for rapid change in certain sectors of life, we can consciously attempt to build stability zones elsewhere. Nor is this a purely negative process--a struggle to suppress or limit change. The issue for any individual attempting to cope with rapid change is how to maintain himself within his adaptive range and, beyond that, how to find the optimum point at which he lives at peak effectiveness. Dr. John L. Fuller, a senior scientist at the Jackson Laboratory, a biomedical research center in Bar Harbor, Maine, has conducted experiments on the impact of experiential deprivation and overload. "Some people," he says, "achieve a certain sense of serenity, even in the midst of turmoil, not because they are immune to emotion, but because they have found ways to get just the 'right' amount of change in their lives." The search for that optimum may be what much of the pursuit of happiness is about.

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The trouble is that such personal tactics for regulating stimulation become (continued on page 96)Coping With Future Shock(continued from page 90) less effective with every passing day. As the rate of change climbs, it becomes harder for individuals to create the personal stability zones they need. The costs of nonchange escalate. We stay in the old apartment--only to see the neighborhood transformed. We keep the old car--only to see repair bills mount beyond reach. We refuse to transfer to a new location--only to lose out on a better job as a result. For while there are steps we can take to reduce the impact of change in our personal lives, the real problem lies outside ourselves.

To create an environment in which change enlivens and enriches the individual but does not overwhelm him, we should employ not merely personal tactics but social strategies. If we are to carry people through the accelerative period, we must begin now to build future-shock absorbers into the very core of superindustrial society. And this requires a fresh way of thinking about change and non-change in our lives. It even requires a different way of classifying people.

Today, we tend to categorize individuals not according to the changes they happen to be undergoing at the moment but according to their status or position between changes. We consider a union man as someone who has joined a union and not yet quit. Our designation refers not to joining or to quitting but to the nonchange that happens in between. Playwright, college student, Methodist, executive--all refer to the person's condition between changes. There is, however, a radically different way to view people. The classifications "one who is changing his job" or "one who is getting a divorce" or "one who is entering or leaving a college" are all based on temporary, transitional conditions, rather than on the more enduring conditions between transitions. This sudden shift of focus, from thinking about what people are to thinking about what they are becoming, suggests a whole array of new approaches to adaptation. One of the most imaginative and simplest of these comes from Dr. Herbert Gerjuoy, a psychologist on the staff of the Human Resources Research Organization. He terms it "situational grouping" and, like most good ideas, it sounds obvious once it is described. Yet it has never been systematically utilized.

Dr. Gerjuoy argues that we should provide temporary organizations--situational groups--for people who happen to be passing through similar life transitions at the same time. Such situational groups should be established, Dr. Gerjuoy contends, "for families caught in the upheaval of relocation, for transfer students, for men and women about to be divorced, for people about to lose a parent or a spouse, for those about to gain a child, for men preparing to switch to a new occupation, for families that have just moved into a community, for those about to marry off their last child, for those facing imminent retirement--for anyone, in other words, who faces an important life change. Membership in these groups would, of course, be temporary--just long enough to help each member with his transitional difficulties. Some groups might meet for a few months, others might not do more than hold a single meeting." By bringing together people who are sharing or are about to share a common adaptive experience, claims Dr. Gerjuoy, we help equip them to cope with it. "A man required to adapt to a new life situation loses some of his bases for self-esteem. He begins to doubt his own abilities. If we bring him together with others who are moving through the same experience, people he can identify with and respect, we strengthen him. The members of the group come to share, even if briefly, some sense of identity. They see their problems more objectively. They trade useful ideas and insights. Most important, they suggest future alternatives for one another."

This emphasis on the future, says Dr. Gerjuoy, is critical. Unlike some group-therapy sessions, the meetings of situational groups should not be devoted to hashing over the past but to planning practical strategies for the new life situation. Members might watch movies of similar groups wrestling with the same kinds of problems. They might hear from others who are more advanced in the transition than they are. In short, they would be given the opportunity to pool their personal experiences and ideas before the moment of change was upon them.

Last month in these pages, we pointed to the proliferation of countless ad hoc organizations as a prime symptom of the accelerating pace of change. If the advocacy here of more such groupings sounds like fighting fire with fire, it is. Admittedly, there is an adaptational cost involved in relating to any transient organization, including a situational group. But the enhancement of adaptability that such a group can achieve far out-weighs its cost.

In essence, there is nothing novel about this approach. Even now, certain organizations are based on situational principles. A group of Peace Corps volunteers preparing for an overseas mission is, in effect, just such a grouping, as are pre- and postnatal classes. Freshman orientation groups are similar in principle, though often pathetically poor in practice. Many American towns have a Newcomers' Club that invites new residents to dinners or socials, permitting them to mix with other recent arrivals and compare problems and plans. Perhaps there ought to be Out-movers' Clubs as well. What is new is the suggestion that we systematically honeycomb the society with such "coping classrooms."

Not all help for the individual, of course, can or necessarily should come from groups. In many cases, what the change-pressed person needs most in one-to-one counseling during the crisis of adaptation. Today, persons in transitional crises turn to a variety of experts--doctors, marriage counselors, psychiatrists, vocational specialists and others--for individualized advice. Yet for many kinds of crisis, there are no appropriate experts. Who helps the family or individual faced with the need to move to a new city for the third time in five years? Who is there to help the junior executive who has just been bounced back to a lesser job? People like this are not sick. They neither need nor should receive psychiatric attention; yet there is, by and large, no counseling machinery available to them.

The answer to this problem is a counterpart to the situational-grouping system--a counseling setup that draws not only on the full-time, professional advice giver but on multitudes of lay experts as well. We must recognize that what makes a person an expert in one type of crisis is not necessarily formal education but the very experience of having undergone a similar crisis himself. To help tide millions of people over the difficult transitions they are likely to face, we might well deputize large numbers of nonprofessional people in the community--students, businessmen, teachers workers and others--to serve as crises counselors. They will be experts not in such conventional disciplines as psychology or health but in specific transitions--such as relocation, job promotion, divorce or the shift from one group of friends to another.

Obviously, there is nothing new about people seeking advice from one another. But our ability, through the use of computerized systems, to assemble situational groups swiftly, to match up individuals with counselors and to do both with considerable respects for privacy and anonymity is new. Under such systems, the giving and getting of advice becomes not a social service in the usual bureaucratic, impersonal sense but a highly personalized process that helps individuals crest the currents of change in their own lives and also works to cement the entire society together in an integrative system based on the principle of "I need you as much as you need me." Situational grouping and person-to-person crisis counseling are significant part of everyone's life as we all move together into the uncertainties of the future.

A future-shock absorber of a quite different type is the halfway-house idea already employed by progressive prison authorities to ease the convict's way back (continued on page 174)Coping With Future Shock(continued from page 96) into normal life. According to criminologist Daniel Glaser, the distinctive feature of correctional institutions of the future will be the idea of gradual release. Instead of taking a man out of the under-stimulating, tightly regimented life of the prison and plunging him violently and without preparation into open society, he is moved first to an intermediate institution that permits him to work in the community by day while continuing to return to the institution at night. Gradually, restrictions are lifted, until he is fully adjusted to the outside world. The same principle has been explored by various mental institutions.

The basic idea of providing change in controlled, graduated stages rather than in abrupt transitions is crucial to any society that wishes to cope with rapid social or technological upheaval. Retirement, for example, does not need to be the abrupt, all-or-nothing, ego-crushing change that it now is for most men. There is no reason why it cannot be gradualized. Military induction, which typically separates a young man from his family in a sudden and almost violent fashion, could be done in stages. Legal separation, which is supposed to serve as a kind of halfway house on the way to divorce, could be made less legally complicated and psychologically costly. Trial marriage could be encouraged instead of denigrated. In short, wherever a change of status is contemplated, the possibility of gradualizing it should be considered.

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Despite all such strategies and social services, however, no society racing through the turbulence of the next several decades will be able to do without yet another form of future-shock absorber: specialized centers in which the rate of change is artificially depressed. To phrase it differently, we shall need enclaves of the past--communities in which turnover, novelty and choice are deliberately limited.

Among them should be communities where history is partially frozen, like the Amish villages of Pennsylvania, or places in which the past is artfully simulated, like Williamsburg, Virginia, or Mystic, Connecticut. Unlike Williamsburg or Mystic, however, through which visitors stream at a steady and rapid clip, tomorrow's enclaves of the past should be places where people faced with future shock can escape the pressures of over-stimulation for weeks, months, even years, if they choose.

In such slow-paced communities, individuals who needed or wanted a more relaxed, less stimulating existence could find it. The communities should be consciously encapsulated, selectively cut off from the surrounding society. Vehicular access should be limited to avoid traffic. Newspapers should be weeklies instead of dailies. If allowed at all, radio and television should be broadcast only for a few hours a day, instead of round the clock. Only special emergency services--those for health, for example--would be maintained at the maximum efficiency permitted by advanced technology. Such communities should be subsidized by the larger society as a form of mental and social insurance.

These living museums could also serve as experiential teaching machines. Children from the outside world might spend a few months in a simulated feudal village, living and working as children did centuries ago. Teenagers might be asked to spend some time living in a typical early industrial community and even to work in its mill or factory. Such living education would give them a historical perspective no book could ever provide. In these communities, men and women who wanted a slower life could make a career out of "being" Shakespeare or Ben Franklin or Napoleon or their less illustrious contemporaries--not merely acting out their parts on stage but living, eating, sleeping as they did. The career of historical simulant would attract a great many naturally talented actors. In short, every society will need subsocieties whose members are committed to staying away from the latest fads. We may even want to pay people not to use the latest goods, not to enjoy the most automated and sophisticated conveniences.

By the same token, just as we should make it possible for some people to live at the slower pace of the past, we should also make it possible for individuals to experience aspects of their future in advance. Before dispatching a worker to a new location, he and his family ought to be shown detailed movies of the neighborhood they will live in, the school their children will attend, the stores in which they will shop, perhaps even the teachers, shopkeepers and neighbors they will meet. By preadapting them in this way, we can lower their anxieties about the unknown and prepare them, in advance, to cope with many of the problems they are likely to encounter.

Tomorrow, as the technology of experiential simulation advances, we shall be able to go much further. The pre-adapting individual will be able not merely to see and hear but to touch, taste and smell the environment he is about to enter. He will be able to interact vicariously with the people in his future and to undergo carefully contrived experiences designed to improve his coping abilities. The "psych-corps" of the future--giant corporations marketing psychological services--will find a fertile market in the design and operation of such preadaptive facilities. Whole families may go to "work-learn-and-play" enclaves that will, in effect, constitute museums of the future, preparing them to cope with their own personal tomorrows.

Until we are able to build such temporal enclaves, we may have to rely on, perhaps even re-create, more traditional future-shock absorbers. In the past, for example, ritual served as an important change buffer. Anthropologists tell us that certain repeated ceremonial forms--rituals surrounding birth, death, puberty, marriage, and so on--helped individuals in primitive societies re-establish equilibrium after some major adaptive event had taken place. "There is no evidence," writes S. T. Kimball, "that a secularized urban world has lessened the need for ritualized expression." Carleton Coon points out that ritual survives today in the public appearances of heads of state, in religion, in business. These, however, represent the merest tip of the ritual iceberg. In Western societies, for example, the sending of Christmas cards is an annual ritual that not only represents continuity in its own right but also helps individuals prolong their all-too-temporary friendships or acquaintanceships. The celebrations of birthdays, holidays and anniversaries are additional examples.

Repetitive behavior, whatever else its functions, helps give meaning to nonrepetitive events by providing the backdrop against which novelty is silhouetted. After examining 100 published autobiographies, sociologists James Bossard and Eleanor Boll found 73 in which the writers described procedures that were "unequivocally classifiable as family rituals." These rituals, arising from "some simple or random bits of family interaction, started to set, because they were so successful or satisfying to members, and through repetition they 'jelled' into very definite forms." As the pace of change accelerates, many of these rituals are broken down or denatured. Yet we struggle to maintain them. One nonreligious family periodically offers a secular grace at the dinner table, to honor such benefactors of mankind as Johann Sebastian Bach or Martin Luther King, Jr. Husbands and wives often speak of "our song" and periodically revisit the place they first met. As we accelerate and introduce arhythmic patterns into the pace of change, we need to mark off certain regularities for preservation, exactly the way we now mark off certain parks, forests, historical monuments or animal sanctuaries for protection. We may even need to manufacture ritual.

No longer at the mercy of the elements, as we once were, no longer condemned to darkness at night or frost in the morning, no longer positioned in an unchanging physical environment, we are helped to orient ourselves in space and time by social, as distinct from natural, regularities. In the U. S., the arrival of spring is marked for most urban dwellers not by a sudden greenness--there is little green in Manhattan--but by the opening of the baseball season. The first ball is thrown by the President or some other dignitary and, thereafter, millions of citizens follow the day-by-day unfolding of a mass ritual. Similarly, the end of summer is marked as much by the world series as by any natural symbol.

Even those who ignore sports cannot help but be aware of these large and pleasantly predictable events. Radio and television carry baseball into every home. Newspapers are filled with sports news. Images of baseball form a kind of musical obbligato that enters our awareness. Whatever happens to the stock market, or to world politics, or to family life, the American League and the National League run through their expected motions. Outcomes of individual games vary. The standings of the teams go up and down. The Mets astonish us all. But the drama plays itself out within a set of reassuringly durable rules.

The opening of Congress every January, the appearance of new car models in the fall, the seasonal variations in fashion, the April 15 deadline for filing income tax, the arrival of Christmas, the New Year's Eve party, the fixed national holidays--all these punctuate our time predictably, supplying a background of temporal regularity that is necessary (though hardly sufficient) for mental health.

The pressure of change is to loosen many such events from the calendar, to irregularize them. These pressures should usually be resisted; and, indeed, regularities should be introduced where they do not now exist. Boxing championship matches, for example, are held at unpredictable intervals. Perhaps these highly ritualistic events should be held on fixed dates, as the Olympic games are. As leisure increases, we have the opportunity to introduce additional stability points and rituals, such as new holidays, pageants and games. Such mechanisms would provide a backdrop of continuity in everyday life, serving to integrate societies and cushion them somewhat against the fragmenting impact of superindustrialism. We might, for example, create holidays to honor Galileo or Mozart, John Lennon or Gale Sayers, Einstein or Cézanne. We might create a global pageant based on man's conquest of outer space.

Even now, the succession of dramatic space launchings and capsule retrievals is beginning to take on a kind of ritual dramatic pattern. By regularizing such events and by greatly adding to the pageantry that surrounds them, we can weave them into the ritual framework of the new society and use them as sanity-preserving points of temporal reference.

Such measures--the search for personal stability zones, the provision of creative new social services, the design of ritual and regularity into the emergent civilization--cannot, by themselves, guarantee a livable future. To master the accelerative thrust, we shall require far more radical steps. We shall need to regulate the technological drive. We shall need a revolution in our schools. We shall need a new stance toward the future itself, along with research centers for probing and postulating futures. We shall need more intelligent Utopian experiments. We shall need to humanize and democratize our attempts to control large-scale social change.

Nevertheless, in dealing with the great issues, we must never forget the crucial, potentially explosive small-scale realities. Unless we begin now to apply social imagination to the problems of adaptation, unless we learn to prepare people for change and to cushion them against it, we condemn them--and ultimately ourselves--to the disease of change. Unless we take account of the adaptive limitations of the smallest, most important unit of all--the individual human organism--tomorrow will founder on future shock.

This is the second of two articles on "Future Shock." The first appeared in February.