One of the books that had the most influence on my life was “The Third Wave” by Alvin Toffler. After reading this book I never needed to read another history book. The answers that I sought from history books were some kind of guidance and security about how to deal with the future. Mr Toffler solved that little problem for me.

In his book he describes how the fate of mankind was forever changed by the influence of new ideas and technologies that led to new economic methods for humans to live by. The first wave was the agricultural revolution (I prefer to think of these things as evolutions, not revolutions but I won’t quibble here). The discovery that crops and animals could be farmed led the societies that adopted these methods away from the nomadic hunter gatherer existence to a settled existence where land capable of supporting farming became of the utmost importance. Land supported the new economy and those societies with the most fertile land usually became the wealthiest. The abundance of food created from farming freed people from having to fend only for themselves. This allowed others to create new ways of making a living such as craftsmen and soldiers.

A class of warriors and aristocrats could be supported and it was at this time that organized war became a feature of civilized societies. As the way of agricultural living spread so began the ancient empires which gained power largely according to how much land and agriculture they controlled.

This civilized development continued mostly unchanged for thousands of years up until around three hundred years ago when the industrial revolution started, the second wave. The new technologies involved changed the nature of how economic systems worked. The emphasis now was upon converting raw materials into manufactured goods. The empires of Britain and France became rich through taking raw materials cheaply from colonized locations, sending them back to the homeland, converting them into manufactured goods and then selling them back to the colonies.

Simultaneous advances in boosting agricultural yields meant that fewer people were needed on the land and so more and more people moved to cities to work in factories and the trend to urbanization occurred. To support the change from agriculture to manufacturing and from rural societies to urbanized societies new developments were needed. It was at this time that compulsory schooling, jobs, careers, pensions, welfare, nuclear families, universal suffrage, higher education, income tax and a whole host of other new innovations came into existence.

This was the part of the book that had the deepest influence upon me. Previously I had taken all of the those innovations just listed for granted. I had accepted them without question and yet suddenly came the realization that these things were relatively recent innovations. They had not existed for long and mankind had lived without them for countless millennia prior to the last few hundred years yet we had become so incredibly dependent upon them. A lot of worry about my future at that time was caused by the fact that these innovations that seemed to form the bedrock of society were clearly crumbling away. The news was constantly reporting how pensions, welfare, nuclear families, traditional jobs and similar things were no longer working.

In the book “The Third Wave” I learnt why this was happening and knowing the cause brought much relief to me and it allowed me to understand what was going on and how I should react to it.

We are currently going through the early stages of the third wave because in advanced economies we are moving away from manufacturing as the basis of our economy into a new way of making money based upon knowledge working. Innovation and design have now become huge drivers in creating wealth. These are high-value added activities and they tend to increase productivity and these are two main factors in creating step changes in wealth generation.

One of the themes of “The Third Wave” is that when new economic revolutions come along they initially cause chaos as we have to restructure our societies to deal with the changes. Great problems occur in advanced economic societies right now because we attempt to force the systems that were necessary and that worked well for an industrial-based economy to fit a society that in many respects no longer exists.

At this time it is unclear what changes need to be made and so populist politicians attempt to shore up the systems that people are used to and that once provided solutions to their needs. In his book, Alvin Toffler makes many suggestions as to what might replace these creaking systems but I won’t go into that here. In my opinion, individuals who embrace the advantages of new technologies and innovations and who wish to avoid the encumbrances of previous systems and previous solutions that no longer work well, will end up blazing the trail for others to follow.

We live with uncertainty at all times but this is compounded at this time by failure of systems that we expected to rely upon; systems that would take the risk out of living and that would make decision-making easy. Each of us now has to accept those uncertainties an to live more experimentally. After reading “The Third Wave” it became clear to me a long time ago that if I attempted to mould myself and my life around those old expectations that I would end up severely disappointed. Instead I have kept looking for ways to create personal independence so that I don’t have to rely upon the state to provide for my needs. I knew that the old ‘tried and trusted’ probably would not give me what I wanted.

In fact, the more I thought about what I learned from “The Third Wave” the more I wanted to become like a pre-civilized man. Before agrarian societies began individuals were much more able to fend for themselves. They learned all of the necessary skills to live off of the land. They were highly-skilled and highly-independent and almost entirely self-sufficient. As an urban man I wondered how far I could go with becoming self-sufficient. To do so would set me free from the restrictions of societies that insist on using out-dated industrial style solutions to cope with modern living. The answer is that it is possible and I will reveal the necessary strategies in posts to come.

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[Photo by shrillczar]