"Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time." -Alvin Toffler
There's this sociodynamic of humans beings as an industrial society, something which seems to go completely unacknowledged. Its not natural hardly any of the world so many of us are surrounded by, especially the fact this this whole idea of populations bombarded with cradle to grave TV induced impulsiveness mindsets... this stuff is less than 100 years in the making, this grand experiment in which we're in uncharted territory as a species.
It's not that its gone undetected, but its certainly going unacknowledged. Alvin Toffler called it the Future Shock, of which the full long term potential side effects yet remain unknown.
We could delve into how these ramifications have been playing out over in robo utopia Japan, where their bizarre suicide rates are internationally renowned. There's also happenings over int he EU, with their migration influx from the Islamic World. Although that's a more complex issue, Future Shock surely is a large part of their reaction to the modernized world. An interesting trend going on there is these insane terror attacks we keep hearing about. Tales of mobs being run down by trucks, axe murderers on trains, and so on this disturbing constant pattern.
While I'm no expert on how the MSM over there works, I've long suspected that their media methodologies are a sure parallel of the MSM we have here in the USA. A significant portion that is the trend of these (typically school) mass shooting events is what is known as the Mass Shooter Contagion Effect. The "Copy Cat Killer" concept is an old one, and the media inducement is a well known pattern as lampooned in Natural Born Killers (1994). Today we have academic studies clearly demonstrating that media methods are key in maintaining a constant cycle of these kinds of events.
I find it simply breath taking that events such as this recent massacre at Mandalay Bay aren't even more commonplace. I mean just by the fact we have over 300 million people at the 'high' death rate we do have is so low. For one thing, that many people it just goes without saying every vision of nutbaggery is all going to play out any given year. Then we have the toob, this warrior culture of glorified imperialistic violence it constantly delivers us. It preys the most on our least privileged segments, bombarding them with this self-image that if you ain't bling bling then you ain't shit. The pitfall of course being that bling bling status can only ever be achieved via a life of crime for the overwhelming majority of them.
So with those two scenes we've been seeing the dark side play out ad infinitum. Meanwhile, we're all under perpetual Future Shock whether we know it or not. I'm starting to believe that Future Shock in conjunction with the Propaganda Model the corporatacracy bombards us all with, explains this obscene levels of drug addiction across our culture. Remember it's not just the street drugs that there is a ruthless War being waged on, it's also the pharmaceutical drug industry where when you combine the consumption rates the numbers are out of this world. When you look around the world, even int he downturns we still have a great life here. Yet there's this nagging tug of war going on inside of us all, and the sources of the rope between the Future Shock and the Propaganda Model are not to be unacknowledged.