The dimension Alvin Toffler fails to see

Alvin Toffler's capacity to understand how culture was changing was impressive, till now. In this video, he speaks broadly of advanced cyber infrastructure and conflicts over a biological revolution and genetic engineering.




When Toffler mentions that "Any theory of social change that doesn't have a theory of conflict attached to it isn't worth the space on a computer that it may occupy", he pays attention only to economic and social upheaval, including changes in social roles.


Toffler's still entranced by the conquest of space as the blossom of human promise. "The fourth wave will be when we, having grappled with our own genetics and understood ourselves biologically far better than we do now, when we finally do go significantly and seriously into space." Toffler shows no awareness that primitive brain function, exploited by memeplexes, is the black hood blinding us to the prison of DNA programming.



Orson Scott Card's science fiction trilogy Homecoming:Harmony (1992-1994) evinces more insight than Toffler into the way human genetic programming holds us back and leads us to destroy our planet.



Janet L Factor describes our dilemma best in Of Two Minds, Part 2, The Secular Humanist Bulletin, Vol 26, No. 1, Spring 2010, p 12-13.



"... the faith meme could be summed up as the rule 'Steer only by your emotions.' ... In the end 'Trust your heart, ignore your head' reduces to 'Listen to your DNA'!


"This neatly explains why as religions become more extreme, more rejecting of the world and its knowledge, they all seem to follow the same downward path: women are subjugated, sexually exploited, denied birth control, then married at younger and younger ages; a single male rises to absolute power; he surrounds himself with a cadre of male allies whom he rewards with sexual access to women; ultimately their children are brainwashed and brutalized. It is the primate troop re-created! All in the guise of spirituality.


"... To hand oneself over entirely to feeling, intoxicating though it may be, is not to transcend but to devolve." [bold mine]


Alvin Toffler's failure of imagination is not simply an ignorance of memetics, but failure to look inward critically. His critical eye dissects economics, culture, and war from an emotionally safe distance. He fails to dissect himself the way talented authors of fiction and feminist skeptics routinely do.