Cracking the Code
Six interconnected principles that programmed the world.
Our civilization has a hidden code, a collection of principles that run through its actions like a concealed model. As industrialism conquered the Earth, this unseen model suddenly became noticeable. Six interconnected principles programmed the world for millions of people. These principles grew out of the divorce of production from consumption, transforming every aspect of life. The angry conflicts in our schools, neighborhoods, and governments can be traced to these six principles, as people stuck in the Second Wave mentality mechanically apply and guard them, and Third Wave people question and confront them.
Standardization is the most recognizable Second Wave principle. There is understanding industrial societies produce millions of the same products. However, few people stopped to notice how once the market became dominant, we did more than standardizing the stuff of production such as Coca-Cola cans, light bulbs, and car transmissions. We applied the same principle to many other things.
Now standardization applies to procedures and administration as well. It justifies companies swallowing up small companies in the name of standardization. Procedures and administrative routines— had to be standardized along with hardware. Today managers use tools like six sigma to squeeze the last ounce of productivity from their workers, with its so-called efficiency.
Second Wave societies rely on standardized tests. Standardized intelligence tests got used against the intellectually disadvantaged. School grading policies, admission procedures, and accreditation rules were similarly standardized. The multiple-choice test was born.
Mass media also came into existence so that millions saw the same advertisements, the same news. With mass media came the suppression of minority languages by central governments and the near disappearance of local and regional dialects or even whole languages, such as Cornish and Alsatian. The standardization of American, English, French or Russian languages aimed to replace nonstandard or indigenous languages.
Until the nineteenth century, people still haggled over a sale like an Arab bazaar. Yet this ended with the introduction of fixed prices for items. This price standardization cleared the way for the development of mass distribution. On many levels, the Second Wave flattened out differences through an overwhelming use of the principle of standardization.
Specialization was the second great principle that ran through all Second Wave societies. While Second Wave forces eliminated diversity in language and lifestyle, the more diverse it became in the arena of work. The Second Wave division of labor replaced the jack-of-all-trade farmhand with the anal-retentive specialist and the repetitive worker who did only one task.
By the nineteenth century, farm work was getting transferred to the factory system. And the human costs of specialization intensified consequently. Critics of industrialism claimed the new specialized monotonous labor dehumanized the worker. This dehumanizing practice was often by critics of capitalism but, it was a characteristic of socialism too. This extreme labor specialization was familiar to all Second Wave societies and was rooted in the divorce of production from consumption.
All industrial states followed this model, both capitalist and Marxist socialist. Also, as openings occurred, select groups of specialists monopolized knowledge and kept others out of their field, professions emerged. This is how the health-delivery bureaucracy eliminated midwives. Education became a system with a producer teacher versus student consumer base system.
As Alvin Toffler said, “Among communists, capitalists, executives, educators, priests, and politicians, the Second Wave produced a common mentality and a drive toward an ever more refined division of labor.”[i]
Synchronization led to the divorce between production and consumption also changed how Second Wave people thought about time. In the market-dependent system, where the market is free or planned, you grasp the concept that time equals money. Machines are too expensive to sit idle, so we get the third principle of industrial civilization: synchronization.
Early societies wisely structured their work time. Hunters worked in unity to catch their quarry. Fishermen sang songs to coordinate rowing or hauling in the nets. Think about the "Song of the Volga Boatmen" hauling a boat. It was Second Wave machinery that silenced the work songs that helped synchronized First Wave workers. This natural rhythm was tied to the seasons. Second Wave societies, by contrast, moved to the rhythm of the machine.
As the high cost of factory production increased, so did synchronization. Late workers impacted others down the assembly line. So, punctuality became important. In First Wave, agricultural society punctuality was not very important, but it became a social requirement in industrial society as clocks and watches became the fashion.
Soon it also became important for children in industrial societies to learn to tell time at a young age. School children became conditioned to the school bell as the ring trained them for adulthood when the whistle blew for the factory or office. Jobs became 9 to 5 for millions of workers.
The dominant Second Wave locked in the most intimate routines of life into the industrial pacing system. Around the world, families arose as one, ate as one, commuted, worked, returned home, went to bed, and slept, more or less in unison as the entire civilization.
The rise of the market gave birth to yet another rule of Second Wave civilization— the principle of concentration. First Wave societies lived off many different sources of energy. Second Wave societies became dependent on highly concentrated deposits of fossil fuel.
But the Second Wave concentrated not just energy but population too, rural workers were forced into urban centers. It even concentrated the workspaces. First Wave societies had de-centralized workspaces: in the home, in the village, and the fields. Second Wave societies forced labor under the factory roof. Industrialism altered society when criminals were concentrated in prisons, just as those with mental health issues got concentrated into lunatic asylums, and children in schools, precisely as workers got concentrated into factories. Even money got concentrated as the capital flow was also concentrated giving rise to the large corporation, then the monopoly.
The concentration principle is applied to all aspects of society: energy, population, work, education, or economic organization.
The divorce of production from consumption also led to an obsession with bigness and growth. Lengthy factory production runs produced lower unit costs, so it was also thought, large-scale activities would work too.
Largeness equaled efficiency and, maximization became the fifth principle.
Cities and nations would boast the tallest building, the largest airport, or the biggest dam. Because largeness was the effect of growth, governments and corporations engage in a fanatical adherence to the idea of growth. Maximization was more than simple profit maximization. Karl Marx believed in “increasing scale of industrial establishments”[ii]. Lenin said, “huge enterprises, trusts, and syndicates had brought the mass production technique to its highest level of development.”[iii]
Stalin forced even tougher maximization on the soviet people and built enormous projects— like the gigantic steel complex at Magnitogorsk.[iv]
Along with the belief in large-scale endeavors came narrow Second Wave assumptions about efficiency. Now statistical data became a tool as bureaucrats only measured the economy by Gross National Product. They measured the size of an economy by tallying up goods and services. This method by Second Wave economists had shortcomings. The GNP did not measure if the output was in the form of food, construction, health care, or arms. Also, because GNP only measured market activity, it demoted to unimportance such vital segments of the economy based on unpaid production such as childcare and so much women's work.
Such flaws, by Second Wave governments the world over led a single-minded race to grow GNP at all costs. They even maximized economic growth at the expense of ecological and social disasters. Their maximization principle was so ingrained in their minds that anything else seemed unreasonable.
Finally, we come to centralization. All industrial nations established a high degree of centralization. While religions and many First Wave rulers practiced centralization, it was far less complex in their simple societies. Yet unified national economies of the Second Wave societies led to radically new methods for centralizing power.
How the Second Wave encouraged political centralization is best viewed by looking at the United States in the late 1780s. Our new Republic struggled to replace an ineffective, de-centralized Articles of Confederation with a more centralized Constitution. The rural southern and western interests who adhered to First Wave ideals did not want the concentration of power in the national government. The Second Wave Federalist commercial interests led by Alexander Hamilton argued, for a strong central government, primarily for military, foreign policy, and economic reasons.
Our Constitution of 1787 was an inventive compromise. First Wave forces ensured significant power stayed with the states and not with the central government. To counteract an overly strong central government the new Constitution included the separation of powers between the legislative, executive, and judicial powers. Yet the new constitution also included flexibility, which in due course permitted the federal government to extend its power.
Second Wave industrialization created our centralized constitutional political system. As the government in Washington took on ever-increased powers and responsibilities, power shifted away from Congress and the courts to the Executive branch.
Aiding centralization was the invention of the central bank. In 1694, at the dawn of the Second Wave, William Paterson founded the Bank of England[v]. It became the model for centralized banks in most Second Wave countries. The central control of money and credit is so important to Second Wave countries, no country could function without this economic phase. This allowed centralized governments to centralize their previously de-centralized economies.
Alvin Toffler wrote “In the United States the collision between First and Second Wave forces led to a major battle over central banking shortly after the adoption of the Constitution. Hamilton, the most brilliant advocate of Second Wave policies, argued for a national bank on the English model. The South and the frontier West, still wedded to agriculture, opposed him. Nevertheless, with the support of the industrializing Northeast, he succeeded in forcing through legislation that created the Bank of the United States— the forerunner of today's Federal Reserve System.”[vi]
Now governments started to regulate market activity in capitalist economies. Central banks pulled strings in unofficial short-range planning. Money ran through every conduit in Second Wave societies, regardless of if they were capitalist or Marxist socialist. Centralized banking and centralized government work hand in hand. Centralization was a controlling principle of Second Wave civilization.
Second Wave countries worked within a six-principle program. These six principles: standardization, specialization, synchronization, concentration, maximization, and centralization, applied to both capitalist and Marxist socialist countries. The industrial society grew from the division between producer and consumer and escalating market forces.
Each principle in kind reinforced the other and helped create some of the largest, most inflexible, bureaucratic organizations the world had ever seen. They left behind the individual to feel tiny and insignificant. So many of us feel repressed and crushed by the world, yet we fail to examine our problems as they relate to the unseen code that programmed Second Wave civilization. Yet today, each of these Second Wave fundamental principles is currently under attack by the forces of the Third Wave.
The Second Wave elites are still employing these same principles in business, banking, and government. The rise of a new Third Wave civilization confronts all the monied and special interests.
In the upheaval ahead, the elites accustomed to making their own rules may go the way of the medieval overlords. Some will get ignored, while others may get overthrown. The remaining, who are smart, and adaptive will emerge as allies of the Third Wave civilization.
Author: John Foley is a writer and military analyst. He is a retired U.S. Army officer.
References:
[i] Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. New York NY: Bantam Books, 1981
[ii] Merman, Leon M., “The Cult of Bigness in Soviet Economic Planning” p.4349
[iii] Pearce, Joseph. “Small Is Still Beautiful”, Economics as If Families Mattered, 2014
[iv] Kotkin, Stephen, Stalin, Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, p.75 Penguin Books, 2017
[v] Paterson, Williams, writings of, https://archive.org/details/cu31924092591936
[vi] Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. New York NY: Bantam Books, 1981