INTERVIEW WITH ALVIN TOFFLER
QUESTION: Mr. Alvin Toffler, thank you for joining us
today.
Alvin Toffler: My pleasure.
QUESTION: I wanted to start by asking you about some of
your best known works. Could you tell us a bit about... first of all about
Future Shock; when it was written and a general idea of what it's about?
AT: Sure, sure, but first I need to tell you something
else, that needs to be underlined, particularly, I would say, in Japan.
And that is that Future Shock, and all the books that are attributed to me,
have been CO-written by my wife. They are really the products of two
minds, two people. Her name is Heidi Toffler. And when Future Shock came
out in Japan, my wife,who is blond, blue eyed, and very outspoken, got a
headline in Mainichi that said "Japan suffers from Heidi Shock." Anyway,
Heidi is my partner, and my intellectual partner, and everything we do we
work together.
So Future Shock was the product of about five years of research
that we did in the late 1960's, and was first published in America in its
first hardcover edition in 1970. It came out in Japan in 1971. And the
basic thesis of the book was first that change was going to accelerate;
things were moving fast, they were going to move faster. Second, that
information was one of the driving forces in the new economy. Third, that
what we were seeing was what we then called the general crisis of
industrialized society, and that we were on the edge of creating a new
society, a new form of society, based on a new kind of economy in which
knowledge was central. So that was... that was Future Shock, which dealt
with the difficulties that people, companies, and countries would have in
adapting to high speed change.
QUESTION: You mentioned that your wife had CO-written most
of those works, but early... in the early books you are listed as the
author, and in the later books it's a co-author situation.
AT: Right, right.
QUESTION: Why?
AT: Because I could never persuade her, until relatively
recently. She's basically a private person. She has never felt
comfortable, particularly, in the public eye. She has her own very strong
views about matters, but has never felt the writer's need to see a byline,
and so on. For years I tried to persuade her that it was important for her
to have her name on the books as well, and she says, "Well, I don't care,
maybe they'll sell better if they just have your name on them" and so forth
and so on. But eventually, I persuaded her, because after a while she got
tired of people assuming that they were just the work of one person. And
she was right.
QUESTION: You made some predictions in Future Shock. Which
ones did you see actually come to fruition, and were there any that were
off base?
AT: I think the central thesis of the book, that change
was going to accelerate, now is an accepted fact. When we wrote it, people
said, what do you mean by acceleration, what do you mean by change, and so
on. And indeed, some people just couldn't fathom it. I think today
everybody accepts that change has been accelerating. So the central thesis
was correct. The secondary thesis was that people would find it difficult
to cope with rapid change. And indeed many people do. And even more so,
many organizations and companies do. And that is why you see very large
institutions and companies who have become dinosaurs, or have been wiped
out even because they can't change and adapt quickly to all of these
complex changes. So at a level of the general thesis, or thesis of the
book, I think it has all been correct. There are details, of course, that
are wrong. First, I think you'll find that we almost never, if ever, use
the word predict, because we don't believe it's possible to predict the
future with complete certainty. We wrote in that book, one of the more
amusing things, was a passage about throwaway products. And one of the
throwaway products we refer to were paper clothes. And in fact, that was
one of the products that never succeeded in the marketplace. In fact, I
still have half a drawer full of paper underwear from those days. Those
products never made it in the marketplace, but throw away products became a
very common fact of life. And we now have throwaway everything,
practically. So again, the more general comments were correct. But I would
say that the main weakness of Future Shock, and the thing that Heidi and I
would probably now rewrite, were we to redo the book, were its economics
which is important. And the reason for that was, that back in the '60's, we
were, as we say, still young and naive. Naive enough to believe economists.
And the economists then were almost united in the judgment that they
understood how economies work. The economy was just a big machine, and if
you manipulated it correctly, you could make it do what you wanted. And
they therefore said in effect hat America would never have another
recession or depression, and that all they had to do was, and this was
their actual slogan, was fine tune the system.
Now, people complained, when we wrote Future Shock, that it was too
visionary; too radical. In fact, it wasn't radical enough. Had we
followed through our own thesis, all the way, we would have said, no, no,
they're wrong, that these changes will eventually destabilize the economy,
and force radical changes in the economy as well. But we didn't. We said
that, OK, probably we will continue to see linear growth of the economy,
without many ups and downs, and terrible upsets. So we missed the boat on
that, because we were ready to accept the words of experts. We don't do
that so readily now.
QUESTION: Now in 1980, you published your next work, The
Third Wave.
AT: It wasn't our next book, but it was our next major
book.
QUESTION: Tell us about The Third Wave.
AT: The Third Wave, which took even longer to write, is a
book that said that a new kind of society, or civilization, as we'd call
it, is emerging. And what we said was that, perhaps ten thousand years ago,
the human race invented agriculture. It was some unknown
Einstein...probably a woman, who planted the first seed, and taught us that
you could make nature do what you wanted it to do. And that led to a
gradual shift, from hunting and gathering populations, and small tribal
groups, to the emergence of great agrarian civilizations: permanent
settlements; hierarchical political systems; decentralized, local agrarian
economies, all kinds of new religions, and so forth and so on. For about
ten thousand years, those were... that was the dominant way of life on the
planet. It's the way of life that still billions of human beings lead. All
you have to do is go into hinterland in China, for example, India, many
parts of the world. But about three hundred years ago, a second gigantic
change occurred. The first wave of change was caused by the agrarian
revolution. The second wave of change was the industrial revolution. And
that led to the creation of societies that were based on the substitution,
or the amplification, I should say, of human muscle power, through the
application of new energy sources. So that we then invented the steam
engine, and we began to invent a whole sort of brute force technologies,
and eventually gave rise to a new form of civilization, which is
characterized by mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption,
mass education, mass media, mass sports, mass entertainment, and even
weapons of mass destruction. What happened, as the sociologists and
historians teach us, was that the industrial revolution gave rise to a mass
industrial society. And that was true, whether in Japan, or in Sweden, or
in Korea, or in Russia, or in the United States, wherever you had
industrialization, despite cultural and historical differences, you had
these features, common structures, in the economy, in the society.
And basically what the third wave said is that that civilization is now
in its twilight, and that a new civilization, and a third gigantic wave of
transformatory change was taking... was underway. That this new way of
life would see the de-massification of mass production, the
de-massification of consumption, the de-massification of the media,
ultimately the de-massification of education, the de-massification of
entertainment, recreation, and even of military matters. And in fact we
think that is what is happening, that there are great centrifugal
pressures, pressures toward diversity, and internal differentiation, in all
of our societies, as we go through the transition from the smokestack age
to the computer age.
QUESTION: Now, when you say "de-massification..."
AT: Well, I'll give you some examples, if you like.
QUESTION: Is that the same as decentralization?
AT: No, but decentralization comes with it. What we mean
by de-massification... a good example is this. Heidi and I both, when we
were young, worked in factories, with our hands, not in white shirts and
ties. We worked on the automobile assembly line, she worked in the
aluminum steel... the aluminum foundry, I worked in the steel foundry. Our
job, as was the job of all the workers, was to turn out the longest
possible run of identical products. Well, that was what we knew as mass
production. And we'd been told by Karl Marx, by Henry Ford, by all the
schools of management, and so on, that mass production was the most
efficient way to produce products. Now if you go to the most advanced
factories, and this is certainly true in Japan, but also true in the United
States, and elsewhere in the world, you find that they're producing not
necessarily long runs of identical products, but customizing the products.
So there may be, you know, twenty seven hundred different models or
versions of a particular automobile. Or there may be choices that were
never available before. And in the US, the leading retailer, WalMart, in
an average WalMart store there are a hundred and ten thousand different
products. So why did this happen? Why did we go from a mass production
system, to what we call a de-massified production system? And the answer
is that whereas the mass production system depended upon brute force, dumb
technologies, the new production system depends on brain power instead of
muscle power, and it all based on computerization, automation,
robotization, and so on, which reduces the cost of diversity, so it is now
cheap to turn out customized products, whereas before it was very
expensive.
If you then look beyond the factory and look at how we distribute goods,
well, there's more and more direct mail, there's more and more niche
marketing, and the visionary marketers in the United States today don't
speak about mass marketing. They talk about particle marketing, marketing
one to one. That is, they then sell a product to one individual family, or
one person. And that, too, is made possible by data banks of information,
about the purchasing and consumption habits, interests of populations that
have been very very finely screened and identified. So you de-massify
production, you de-massify distribution and retailing and marketing, and
then you look at the media, and you find in the United States, and not yet
in Japan, and this is a major drawback for the Japanese,the fact that the
average American home, 65% of the American homes have cable, with 30
channels, and we're moving toward an infinity of channels coming into each
home.
So what we're doing is de-massifying the media. And if you look at
family structure, if you look at political life, if you look at, even
military matters, you find the mass movements are breaking down into small
grass roots movements devoted to special interests, like "save the whales",
or "change the tax system," or feminism, or a wide variety of political
issues. And they are becoming more important, politically, in this
country, than the political parties, which were essentially mass movements
of the past.
QUESTION: Is the corollary in government the
decentralization of power from Washington to your local city council?
AT: Yes, I believe that's true. Yes. And in fact if we
look at what's happening in business, large companies are increasingly
breaking themselves down into smaller profit centers, and smaller units,
which have more autonomy and freedom to operate as though they were small
businesses, then we see a great growth in small business in the United
States. I think the figures are something like, whereas the companies with
over five thousand employees have over the past x number of years reduced
their employment by about 2%, companies with under four employees have
increased 8%. So we see a great growth of small business, and the units
are becoming smaller, and there is a move toward decentralization. Now
when you begin to restructure the business sector and the economy, and
that's being done not because of some management theories,that's being done
because that's the only way to operate in today's... profitably in today's
world, then you're going to see parallel developments in the political
structure, and in the United States, under the new Republican majority in
the House of Representatives and the Senate, there is a tremendous push to
move certain Washington powers back down to, in our case, the states.
Moving it to the states may in fact be a mistake, but our constitution says
that those powers not directly granted by the states, or the constitution,
to the feds, must go back to the states. It may be that a wiser course
would be to send some of those powers back to regions, or directly to
cities, or even to non-geographical communities.
And of course you have the same discussion in Japan, I mean you have...
I can remember when prime minister Tanaka came forth with a plan for
remodeling the archipelago, as he called it, which was both a real estate
scam, and a plan for decentralization, and nothing ever happened, except
that he lost his power. But in a much better way, I believe this is what
Ohmae Kenichi is talking about. And I believe that in many many ways he is
correct.
QUESTION: What are the dangers that accompany the third
wave?
AT: There are dangers. There are many dangers. I think
that there are very subtle dangers that come with computerization. There
are.. and some not so subtle. For example, the information... the process
of informationalizing a society is accompanied by the informationalization
of militaries around the world. And that is, all armies, including the
self defense forces, and the Chinese People's Liberation Army, are all
racing to computerize, and also, we are developing new approaches to very
dangerous weaponry. An example of that is a shift from the manufacture of
special purpose weapons, to the creation of weapons made out of civilian
products, configured in ways that give them lethal potentials. This is in
our book Senso Do Heiwa. We call that the civilianization of the military.
And there's a great danger that what we now call dual use products could
wind up in the hands of very dangerous regimes around the world.
In Asia, I think that there's a great danger of instability. I think
that in China,we will not know probably for another ten or fifteen years
how the succession to Dung Xiao Ping has played itself out. Remember that
when Mao died, they installed Hau Kua Phung, he only lasted a year and a
half or two years. In Yugoslavia, it took ten years after Tito died before
the country exploded. China is bigger, more complex, and what you now have
in China is a good example of what we call wave conflict. You have perhaps
600 million peasants, who continue to live as their ancestors did,
scrabbling for survival in the fields, you have perhaps 100, 200, 250
million people who are living a kind of industrial, second wave way of
life. And now you're beginning to see introduction of third wave
technologies and third wave people, who use cellular telephones, drive
around in Mercedes, are... have more in common with their friends and
relatives in Taiwan, and Singapore, and Vancouver, than they do with the
rest of the Chinese population. And I believe that we're going to see deep
stresses within the Chinese political structure that arise from the
collision of these three different ways of life: an agrarian way of life, a
traditional smokestack, industrial, blue collar way of life, and now a
third wave way of life, and that... the changes are taking place at
extremely high speed, which makes it difficult for them to adapt to them,
and at a point which the communist regime has lost all credibility; Deng is
about to die, or perhaps has died, by the time this is broadcast who knows.
I'll tell you a joke my wife and I make about China. We say that there
are three basic scenarios. One is, Deng Xiao Ping dies, and there is a
smooth succession. The second is that Deng Xiao Ping dies, and there is a
violent succession. And the third is, Deng Xiao Ping refuses to die.
So anyway, I think that there are dangers, military dangers emerging,
that are very closely related to the emergence of the third wave, there are
political instabilities coming, and there are also subtle and personal
things. For example, we are now developing technologies that digitize
imagery, as we all know. In fact, the television camera, by the time it
gets on the air, will have been digitized, and so on. I don't know how many
Japanese viewers saw the American movies In the Line of Fire or Forest
Gump, but in these movies you see how it is possible to take pictures, and
living people today, and digitize them, and put their images into
historical settings, so that it is impossible to tell the difference.
Nobody seeing In the Line of Fire could guess that Clint Eastwood is not a
Secret Service man in John F. Kennedy's protective squad. Nobody seeing
Gump could guess that Tom Hanks did not talk to President Nixon. And there
was a recent article in a publication called Scientific American, which
discussed these technologies, and gave three photographs as examples of
what could be done.
Photograph one: President Bush and Margaret Thatcher. He's walking, it
looks like they're in the Rose Garden outside the White House. He's
walking, and she's about six feet behind him. Picture two: slightly
manipulated. They're walking side by side. Picture three: They're now
walking side by side, they're holding hands, and he's whispering in her
ear. All digitized, and you can't tell the difference. So what is
happening, I believe, is that Hollywood... with the help of special
effects from Hollywood, and from the new technologies, we're creating the
capability of using that camera to lie to you in ways that were never
before possible. And not just television, but movies as well, and so on.
QUESTION: And future societies will have no way of knowing
whether something is accurate or not.
AT: Very difficult. Therefore what we're seeing is an
attack in a sense on truth itself. And what we've said elsewhere is that
the technologies of deception are outrunning the technologies of
verification. So there are a lot of dark sides and problems that we have to
deal with, and perhaps the deepest of these all will be those that arise
out genetic manipulation, manipulating the gene to create new life forms
and new creatures. And even, who knows, a radical extension of human life;
a whole set of ethical and moral questions, that none of our political
systems, and not even in our religions are prepared to cope with.
QUESTION: How important will it be for...
AT: By the way, we wrote about that 25 years ago in Future
Shock, but they're coming to roost today.
QUESTION: How important will it be for religious and moral
principals and values to continue to prevent the kind of things you're
talking about, or is there a role for that in the future?
AT: Well, I think we're seeing a great resurgence of
religion, in the... which is a consequence of the breakdown of not only
industrial technology and industrial society, but of the morality and
values that came with an industrial society. As we move out of the
industrial age, into what some have called the post-industrial age, or the
third wave society, everything changes. Family structures begin to change,
political structures eventually will have to change. And as... And in
parallel with that, I think we will see, and are seeing all ready, a great
searching. And that helps explain the rise of all kinds of peculiar cults
like Aum Shinrikyo, or many, many in this country, perhaps less dangerous,
but some, who knows will be more dangerous. And it also, by the way, it
also, it helps explain the great rise of Islam as a political force, and of
the Vatican as a political force.
QUESTION: I guess what I'm asking you is...
BLACK OUT
QUESTION: The new Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, is a
big fan of yours, has been talking about your books, and I think he
actually asked his colleagues to read your books, and has a reading list.
AT: Oh, yes. He held up a reading list to all members of
congress, and indeed, by extension, to the whole country, and said there
are several very important books to read, and we were sort of honored,
flattered, and surprised to see ourselves on list with the Declaration of
Independence, the Federalist Papers, the works of De Toqueville, all of
which are very important in American history. And of course, we enjoyed, we
enjoyed the excitement that followed that.
But we've known Newt Gingrich for many, many years before he became,
not only before he became Speaker of the House, but we knew him before he
even became a politician, because we've known him and his wife Marianne for
many, many years. We first met him when he was a young college professor.
And I gave a speech... after we wrote Future Shock, I gave a speech in
Chicago, to an educational conference, and this young professor from
Georgia flew up to hear me speak. And so that's where we first met. And as
I say, we've had a very warm, friendly relationship all of these years. In
fact our daughter sometimes calls him Uncle Newt.
QUESTION: How is Newt Gingrich implementing Heidi and Alvin
Toffler's ideas?
AT: Very selectively and partially. Newt is a politician,
he has to keep his party with him, he has to respond to powerful
constituencies within the Republican Party, which include some
constituencies that Heidi and I sharply disagree with. And as a result, I
think that he has been primarily preoccupied in the last year with what I
would call old business. I mean the Contract with America, which were ten
particular promises that the Republicans under Newt's leadership made; they
were going to accomplish these things... were primarily things that have
been on their agenda for many, many years, and not terribly exciting, or
novel, or interesting. However, there were certain key things that were.
The central thrust, of the Gingrich revolution, as it has been called, is
to devolve power out of Washington. That is directly in line with what we
have written in The Third Wave, and Future Shock, and almost all of our
works. So that is the central direction of the change he is pushing, falls
directly in place. There... The places where America by now is pretty well
aware, we disagree with our friend, we disagree with him over some very
important moral issues. For example, whereas Newt has to respond to a very
powerful Republican constituency that hates the very thought of abortion,
my wife and I believe that women should have the right to choose. And
that's a source of great, passionate disagreement in America.
QUESTION: Do you think he doesn't actually believe that, or
does he believe it and respond to his constituency?
AT: I think that Newt... Let's put it this way. Among the
politicians we know, Newt probably believes more of what he says than most
other politicians. I do know that, oh, fifteen years ago, Heidi and I and
his own wife were up late at night arguing with him these very issues. And
his wife and my wife said Newt will kill you if you don't say (joking )
that this is wrong. But we would like to see him take a very firm stand
in favor of choice. I doubt he will do that, because it risks losing a
major chunk of the Republican support.
Similarly, we believe very strongly in religion... in religious
freedom, but also freedom for non-believers, people who do not have any
explicit religious beliefs. And we believe that there needs to be a very
clear separation between what we call in America, church and state. Newt is
himself religious, and argues that the traditional distinctions between
church and state, that existed going back to the American revolution, that
his definition of the distinction between, or the barrier between church
and state are different from our definition, and so there are many issues
on which we disagree.
But Newt, for example... one of the key changes in America, in the work
force. That we have seen, and that indeed we wrote about in The Third....
in Future Shock, 25 years ago, and in Die San Tsunami, 15 years ago, was
that we said that people would start working at home. At the time that
that was published, we were ridiculed. We were called visionaries, fools,
for suggesting anything as crazy as that. Well, today
in the US something between 25, and 30, or 40 million people do some or
all of their work at home. And increasing... The numbers are increasing
very very rapidly with the use of PCs, communication technologies, and so
on. Now, we regard that as a move toward the third wave. That's a move
out of the 9 to 5, rote repetitive, muscle work of the factory; that
pattern of work.
Who's in favor of it, and who's against it? What you find is that the
two groups, institution groups in America who oppose it, are the trade
unions, because it's much harder to organize people when they work at home,
and the tax people; the Internal Revenue Service. Who's in favor of it?
Newt Gingrich. Newt wants to make it easier for people to work at home,
rather than more difficult. Look at the Internet. Just recently, a
Democrat senator, from Nebraska Exon, pushed through a bill in the American
Senate to censor pornography on the Internet. It was indeed a truly stupid
bill, because the internee is not an American phenomenon. It is a global
phenomenon, and there is no way that it's going to be able to... there's no
way that law can even be properly enforced, because information and images
and stuff flow across borders instantaneously. It was Newt Gingrich who
publicly attacked that censorship, and said, while of course, we're against
pornography addressed to children, that you can't deal with it with the new
technology of the Internet, the way you tried to deal with movies, or
television or previous technologies that are radically different. So he...
he became an instant hero to the computer community, and the... and the
young people basically who have made the Internet into a phenomenal new
communications vehicle for the third wave.
There are many, many issues on which we would agree with Newt. Newt is a
strong supporter of the space program. We agree with that. Newt
understands the value of technology. He... He also... He is not a blind
pro-technology person, but he understands how important it is. We agree
with that. Newt understands also, as far as foreign policy is concerned,
that this is in fact a dangerous world, that the Cold War... the so-called
end of the Cold War has not eliminated risk, but has made a much more
disorderly world. And he is... he is much more he understands a lot about
the role of the military in world power, not just as a tool used for force,
but as a way to avoid violence. And the most important uses of the
American military over the past 50, 45-50 years, has in fact been to deter
violence, rather than to create violence. There have been exceptions, but
certainly in the US - Japanese relationship, our military relationship
has been the great stabilizer for the Asia/Pacific region, and as I say,
Newt understands the nonviolent uses of the military. I think that's
really important. So, there are many, many things on which we agree, and
there are a few things on which we sharply disagree.
(Question, then answer is interrupted)
(After break)
QUESTION: Many Americans in one form or another fear a
strong central government of some kind will accompany this third wave
technology a one world type government. Are those legitimate fears, and
what are your thoughts?
AT: Well, I think that there's a great deal of foolishness
and naïveté on all sides with respect to that issue. On the one side, you
have a bunch of people marching around in the forests wearing camouflage
suits, and carrying the current equivalent of muskets, and they're going to
protect the great American nation against the invasion of UN forces.
This is such a lunatic notion; the UN could not fight its way out of a
wet paper bag. Nor could it make a sense... a bunch of sensible decisions
about any of this. The UN is an extremely weak organization, and is not
to be taken seriously in these terms.
Now, what is underlying the fear is not the United Nations, which is
bureaucratic, and obsolete in many ways, and so on, but in fact the growing
integration of the world economy. It is, it is the fact that more and more
countries are more and more closely interconnected economically that gives
a sense of the loss of sovereignty. People worry about that, and feel
strongly that they're losing control of their own existence.
A very good example... Our analysis of this issue of nations, and
nationalism, and sovereignty goes like this; that if you are a basically,
backward, agrarian economy, people in that kind of a society see the nation
building, the creation of independence and sovereignty as a step toward
modernization, by which they typically mean industrialization, second wave
industrialization. And that is why you see in many parts of the world,
agrarian groups, or very... or communities that are just in the early
stages of industrialization demanding nation-state status, a seat in the
United Nations, a flag, an army, a currency of their own, and are
passionately... passionate nationalists.
Now the irony of all of this is that when you look at the more... the
societies with more advanced economies, including the US and Japan, you
see that sovereignty itself and the nature of the nation itself is being
totally redefined. I wouldn't perhaps go quite as far as Ohmae Kenichi in
saying it's the end of the nation-state, but the nation-state is becoming
less important because other groups and forces are becoming more important
on the global stage.
Islam is not a nation-state, but it sure has political and international
power. The same thing is true, as I said earlier, of the Vatican. The same
thing is true of other forces, like Green Peace.
Not long ago, there was a big dispute between the Shell oil company and
the European Union. The Shell oil company was going to sink an oil
platform, I believe in the North Sea. And Green Peace, a civil society
organization, an organization made up of ecology oriented individuals
protested this. And before you knew it, Shell had been forced to back
down. And they decided they would not then sink it, they would dismantle it
and do something else.
Now what happened there is Green Peace compelled action by the European
Union as a whole, and by Germany and so on. So here you have an
organization that is not a nation, that is not a state, that is not a
corporation, that is not a religion, but has the power to shape decisions
made by governments, and even by groups of governments. This is a different
world than the world of nation-states that grew up with the industrial
revolution.
Now we come to Japan and the United States. I'm always amused at the
change in the nature of our relationship. Heidi and I were sitting in
the... in our suite at the Okura hotel, when we heard that as part of the
structural impediment initiative talks, the Americans were demanding of
Japan that Japan change its retail distribution system and allow chain
stores, and other mega stores to flourish. It struck us that the demand by
the Americans for Japan to change its retail distribution system was not
just a matter of just sort of economic technicalities, but in fact a very
important social change and political change. It threatens a whole strata
of what we call "Mom and Pop" small businesses; families, and so on. And so
Japan was being asked to make a social change, and not just an economic
change. And in addition, it was being asked... and the LDP was being asked
to make a political change, and it was dangerous for the LDP, because this
is a community that supports the LDP. It struck us that if the United
States had gone not to Tokyo, but had gone, say, to Brasilia, or gone to
any Latin American capital, with the same demands, the response would have
been burning effigies of Uncle Sam in front of embassies, marching crowds
screaming "Yankee go home," "Invasions of our national dignity," and so
forth and so on. But how did Japan respond? None of that happened. Japan's
response was very interesting to us. It took months before there was in
fact a formal response. And then the Japanese said, 'well, OK, we'll
accommodate you, we will make these changes, but we think America should
improve its education system, think long range,' and so on. Now what we
were doing, both of us, were invading each other's cultural and social
sovereignty in ways that former colonies would have found intolerable. And
I believe that as we move toward the third wave, the inter dependencies
become more dense between the advanced third wave economies. And that's why
you see a kind of neo-nationalism rising. And we now know that governments
are losing control of the levers of power. In the United States, and even
to some degree Japan, the governments are losing their monopoly of violence
or their control of violence. They're losing control of economic matters,
because the world currency markets, the foreign exchange is so tremendous
that the central banks aren't big enough to influence that market very
deeply or consistently. They're losing... certainly losing control over
information flows. Lee Kuan Yew can say all he wants, don't allow
satellites or cable television to bring certain kinds of programs into
Singapore, but if in fact he tried to make that happen, he would find it
extremely difficult to keep information out, as did the Russians. And the
Singaporean economy would suffer the consequences of such a policy. So. The
three basic levers of power that states have: the power violence, or the
control of violence, the power of money and economics, and the power of
information are all slipping from their grasp. And the result is that we're
moving into a completely new way of life which could bring with it a great
deal of instability, some chaos and anarchy, and people are frightened. And
so they go back to "Why can't we have the nation as it once was?" Well,
you can't have contradictory things simultaneously without great strains
and difficulty.
QUESTION: Would you tell us about a typical day in your
life these days, if there is such a thing?
AT: Well, the answer is there are several different kinds
of typical days. One typical day is just being on the telephone all day
long, talking and responding to outside requests and so on. A second kind
of typical day is spent on airplanes and airports, and moving across the
world, because in the last year for example we've been... either one of us
or both of us together have been everywhere from South Africa to Brazil,
Argentina, Colombia, Japan, Sing... not Singapore, Kuala Lam pore, Manila,
and so forth. We travel constantly - Switzerland, France - all over the
world. So we do an extreme... We have an extremely heavy travel schedule,
and that then puts us in touch with extremely interesting people all around
the world, who we think are either making change, or resisting change,
which helps us try to understand what's going on. A different typical day
is in between all of those things. It's staying home, it's reading, it's
going out to lunch with a note pad, and reading, or outlining a chapter or
an article, being quite alone and so on, so there are many kinds of typical
days, and then, like any family, we have our own personal, you know,
matters to deal with, such as health problems to deal with occasionally,
and so on. Not our own, mainly, but in our family.
QUESTION: How did you meet your wife, and did she have any
idea what she was getting into when she married you?
AT: Well, OK, we met in probably August of 1948. We've been
married for 45 years. From that first date, we were basically inseparable,
except for about three weeks, when, before we got married, we had the usual
fight, we separated for about three weeks, and then I was in a bookstore,
and I saw... I said, well, I'm going to have to get a new girlfriend. And
I saw a beautiful blonde from the back looking at some books, and I saddled
up to her, and I started to say "Do you find that book interesting?" so we
could... I could have a conversation with her, and she turned around, and
it was Heidi again. And from that day on, we've been inseparable. We met
through a college classmate. Somebody who was in my class, a young girl in
my class had gone to high school with Heidi, and introduced us. And the
answer is neither one of us knew what we were getting into. Neither one of
us would have dreamt that our lives would have taken exactly the turn we
did, except in one respect, that is that I knew from the time I was seven
years that my destiny was to write. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I had
role models in the family; an uncle and aunt who were intellectuals during
the Great Depression, and who... and my family as well greatly honored the
word, the written word, and so this is what I wanted to do since I was a
child. And Heidi and I have been lucky enough to have what we think are the
world's best jobs.
QUESTION: Thank you for joining us today.
AT: My pleasure
