Chapter12: P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle

On June 15th, 2015, Jeb Bush, the 43rd Governor of Florida, announced he would run for president of the United States.  His father, George H.W. Bush, was the 41st president of the United States.  His brother, George W. Bush, was the 43rd president of the U.S..  He quickly raised well over $100 billion for his campaign from the Republican donor class.  Jeb had the full support of the Republican establishment, the wealthy, white elite that run most of America.  Barrack Obama, the first black president, was ending his second term.  The economy had been growing, but growing very slowly, since early 2009, a weak recovery from "The Great Recession" of 2008.  Jeb's only competition would be former First Lady, senator from New York, and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.  Most of America sighed, it was going to be another boring election between two political dynasties, neither of which most Americans liked very much.  Same ol', same ol'.  Nothing ever changes...  It's hard to remember now, but that was the mainstream America feeling in June of 2015.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

P. R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle

In an earlier chapter, I shared the most basic idea of the Toffler's concept of the Third Wave, a long transition from an Industrial-based society to an information-based society.  That was the first of the three big theories, that I think explain where we are now, and where we're all going.  This second theory is one virtually unknown in the United States.  As I mentioned in the last chapter, I know P. R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle from one chapter in Ravi Batra's 1989 book, The Great Depression of 1990.  It's written about in much more detail in Sarkar's second volume of Human Society, a book I've never been able to get my hands on to read.  Yet, it was that one chapter in Batra's book that really stuck in my head.  It's the chapter that gave me a sense of where America was heading, not only back in the 1990's, but much farther in the future, including now, 30 years later.  It was that one book chapter that explained to me why Jeb Bush, who seemed to have every aspect of political force behind him in June 2015, didn't have a shot in the 2016 presidential election.  Most people now, don't even remember Jeb ran for president.  The Law of Social Cycle helps explain why.  So what is the Law of Social Cycle?  Let me explain how I understand it.

Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle states that there are four basic mentalities in any society.  These are the Intellectual, the Acquisitor,  the Laborer, and the Warrior.  Sarkar comes from India, which had a very defined caste, or class system, that greatly defined people, by and large.  But he saw that some people were able to move to another level of society, despite the caste they were born into.  The four basic mentalities are not traditional classes, they are based on the way an individual makes their way, and earns a living, in the world.

The Intellectuals use their brains, their high intelligence, to earn a living.  They are exactly who you'd expect; professors, teachers, scientists, engineers, doctors, clergy, writers, artists, and similar professions.  The Acquisitors are also quite intelligent, but they focus their smarts on making money.  They are the landlords, investors, financiers, stock traders, and large business owners.  In most earlier cultures, they would also be the entrepreneurs.  I think some of today's entrepreneurs also share characteristics of two other categories, I'll get more into that in a bit.  The management in various businesses could be either Intellectuals or Acquisitors, and at the lower levels (like the assistant manager of your local 7-11), part of the Laborer mentality.  I think it depends on the particular business.  In most traditional businesses, I think upper management is primarily Intellectuals, but when you get into Wall Street's investment banks, real estate, and the world of stock, commodity, and bond traders, those management people are most likely Acquisitors.

 With a high concentration of successful business people and real estate investors, this is an Acquisitor heavy area.  Newport Harbor, Newport Beach, California.  Photo by Steve Emig

The next group is The Laborers.  These are the everyday working people, like the great American middle class (what's left of it), the low wage service workers, the farmers, and in ages past, the proletariat or the serfs.  This is, by far, the largest of the four groups.  The Laborers are the vast majority, by numbers, of any nation or society, and most of the time they work for whatever group is leading society at that time.

The last mentality is the Warriors.  The Warriors make their living using physical strength and ability, and raw courage.  They do the physically demanding work that's also scary and highly dangerous.  In most earlier societies this group was made up mostly of actual warriors, the soldiers, professional hunters, and perhaps a few professional athletes (fighters or boxers), and those in some other daring and dangerous professions, like sailors in the days of sailing ships.  The explorers who trekked to new lands would also be a part of the Warrior mentality.  In our modern society, the Warrior mentality includes soldiers, police, firefighters, professional athletes in traditional sports, and some of the more dangerous construction professions, like riggers and iron workers, for example.  I think those crab fishermen in Alaska, and others who do similar, highly dangerous jobs, also qualify.

I also believe there are a lot of people in today's society who have the warrior mentality, but may do something else for their living.  In these cases, their lifestyle is centered around physical feats and courage, but they may have to pay for that lifestyle with Laborer or other types of jobs.  I believe the hardcore action sports athletes, like surfers, motocross riders, skateboarders, snowboarders, BMXers, rock climbers, parachuting enthusiasts (sky divers, BASE jumpers, proximity fliers), and and the other action sports  qualify as having the Warrior mentality.  As a long time BMX freestyler myself, I've seen that most of these people don't make a living at these sports, but their lifestyle is based on one or more of these sports, making them part of the warrior mentality.

I also think all the people seriously involved in adventure racing, like participants in the Raid Gualoises, mud runs, Spartan races, and even hardcore crossfit people, all have the Warrior mentality.  Even closer to the actual notion of "warriorship," martial artists and mixed martial arts (MMA) fighters, are part of today's Warrior mentality.  In today's world, there are many people whose lifestyle is centered around physical fitness, physical abilities, and courage-based activities, though they might not actually make a living at these things.  I consider all of these people part of the modern Warrior mentality.  If you go to a Crossfit gym three times a week for fitness, that doesn't make someone with the warrior mentality.  But it your entire lifestyle is based around crossfit, or Spartan races, or rock climbing, or any of these other activities, that does make you part of the Warrior mentality.  Also, being part of the Warrior mentality doesn't make you a warrior, in the traditional definition of the word.  If you're a pro snowboarder and go up to a Navy SEAL in a bar and say, "I'm a warrior," you're going to get your ass kicked. But at some level, these two, and the rest named, share many traits and outlooks on life.

World War II soldier, riding a motorcycle at speed, one handed, while aiming a Thomson submachine gun.  It doesn't get much more Warrior mentality than this.  Public domain photo.

Another aspect of the Warrior mentality is activists.  It takes great courage to stand up, usually against some large and powerful establishment institution or organization, and call out corruption, or other things that pose threats to some group of people.  While it make not take physical skill to hold a protest sign, to stand up against a major force in society, often with threats of their well being or even of bodily harm, or to stand up for the rights of others who can't stand for themselves, does take great courage.  Again, marching with 10,000 people holding a sign doesn't qualify you for the warrior mentality.  But the initial activists, and activist leaders, do need a great deal of courage, and I think some of them qualify as another aspect of the warrior mentality in modern society. 

So those are the four mentalities in P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle.  The theory states that at any given time, one of these mentalities dominates society.  That mentality favors a certain type of government, influences the business structure, and many of the social organizations.  That mentality is what most people want their children to grow up and be.  In an Intellectual society, people want their kids to be a professor or scientist or engineer.  In a Warrior society, people want their kids to be a soldier, a cop, a firefighter, or maybe a pro athlete.  In an Acquisitor society, people want their kids to grow up and make a lot of money, maybe be a businessman, an entrepreneur, a real estate mogul, or maybe Kanye, Diddy, or a Kardashian.

Another aspect of the Law of Social Cycle is that people can change from one mentality to another.  That means that even in a highly structured society with a set class or caste system, like India, some people can learn a different role, and move up in society to a position outside their traditional class. A intellectual can get int mountaineering, and go try to climb the world 7,000 meter peaks, shifting to the warrior mentality.

A good example from today's world is Joe Rogan.  He was a long time, very hardcore, martial artist, with black belts in tae kwon do and jujitsu.  He first became  well known as a commentator for the UFC fights, early on in that franchise's history.  So he was definitely a part of the Warrior mentality, no doubt about it.  But then he went on to become a stand-up comedian, which is an Intellectual, through and through.  Then he built a podcast, and has become a Larry King level interviewer, to a generation, most of whom don't know who Larry King was.  Joes podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, had over 190 million downloads a month, as of April 2019.  Again, his podcast is a serious Intellectual pursuit, but also a very successful and lucrative business.  At this point, he's probably more a part of the Intellectual group, as far as the mainstream influence of his work, but he's really a Warrior/Acquisitor/Intellectual.  In today's weird, internet powered society, I think we're seeing a lot of people who are mixtures of the mentalities, though at any given time, one will be the dominant. 

The eras when one of these mentalities dominates a society, can last for decades, or even hundreds of years, there's no set time period.  During these times, the dominant mentality will filter down through and shape, all of society.  It affects the type of government, the sports and games people play, the social organizations, the business world, and every aspect of society.  When a nation or society changes from one dominant mentality to another, it's a long, sticky transition, it doesn't happen overnight.  It can be a very chaotic time during that transition.

Here's the kicker for P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycles.  The four mentalities always rise to prominence, in a certain order.  That order is Intellectual, Acquisitor, Laborer, Warrior, then back to the Intellectuals.

So where is the United States in this cycle?  For that we go back to economist Ravi Batra's 1989 book, The Great Depression of 1990.  After looking at many societies in history, to check this theory out and validate it, Batra concluded that the United States has been in the Acquisitor age since the colonial days.  We were a country built by enterprising entrepreneurs.  Over the 400 years since the Pilgrims landed, this has been a country where business was highly influential.  We've run the arc of the Acquisitor age, and in the late 1980's, Ravi Batra saw us in the late stage of the Acquisitor era, a time when corruption rise dramatically, and the living standard for workers stagnates.  That was Batra's assessment in his book, in 1989.

So what happens after that?  The next mentality to rise up is the Laborers, the everyday working people.  Things are a bit different with the Laborer era, than with the other three mentalities.  This era, in Sarkar's theory, is called the Acquisitor cum Laborer era.  In effect, the society gets so incredibly corrupt, and the conditions for average people get so bad, that the Laborers rise up in a major populist uprising.  So that's what Batra saw coming in the future of the U.S., way back in 1989.  Now his focus in The Great Depression of 1990, was on the economic situation happening then, not on a populist movement sometime far off in the future.  So he combined Sarkar's Law of Social Cycles with the 30 year and 60 year economic cycles, and predicted a Great Depression happening in 1990.  Instead, as I mentioned in the last chapter, we got a long, drawn out, "double dip" recession during that period.

I watched most of what Batra predicted actually happen in the early 90's, though not to the depth he expected.  I also started paying close attention to the financial markets.  But I was a BMX freestyle guy, living cheap with other BMX guys.  I worked on TV show crews in the summer, and worked all sorts of odd jobs the rest of the year, and just scraped by financially.  Riding my bike as much as possible was the priority.  Batra's ideas and Sarkar's Law of Social Cycles were something interesting, but not really a major aspect of my life.  I checked up on the financial markets day to day, and the other ideas were in the back of my mind.

As time rolled on, and mountain biking and snowboarding popularity exploded in the early 1990's, I began to think about the future that the Law of Social Cycles predicted.  I got Batra's book out, and read through it again.  If the Law of Social Cycle held true, American business (and the government, influenced by big business) would get more and more corrupt, and at some point, there would be a major populist uprising.  At that point, either the society collapses (bad option), or the Warrior mentality rises up to positions of leadership, and they take over society (hopefully a good option).

At some point around 1994 or 1995, I suddenly realized that the exponential growth of the action sports world, my world at the time, was an aspect of the Warrior mentality.  Sarkar's theory predicted that the Warriors were drawn more to individual oriented sports, that also involved physical skill and courage.  So action sports, from surfing to motocross to BMXers like me and my friends, were Warrior mentality sports.  We were one aspect, of many, of the Warrior mentality growing in American society.  Some sports, like skydiving, were often done by former soldiers, who were paratroopers in the military.  I realized the warrior mentality was already rising in popularity, even before any sign of a populist uprising.

I also realized that the Law of Social Cycle was an ultra long term cycle.  From the time I tied action sports to the warrior mentality, around 1995, it could be another 5-10-20-40 years, before the populist uprising began.  So I went on with my weird life, but I kept an eye out for something that looked like the beginning of a populist uprising.  In September 2011, I saw the Occupy Wall Street protests on TV.

Occupy Wall Street Protestors in New York City, getting arrested by NYPD, 2011

The Occupy Wall Street protests seemed to come out of nowhere, and they spread like gasoline doused wildfires.  It started as one protest, with activists camping out, in Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street, in New York City.  But within a couple of weeks, Occupy protests were taking place in dozens of cities in the U.S. and even other countries.  It was haphazard and disorganized, but the theme, "We are the 99%," struck a chord with millions of workers.  The protests lasted a few months total, and were stamped out by authorities as quick as they possible.

As this was happening, and I was watching these protests on TV, while living in North Carolina, and then I saw protests in Winston-Salem, a highly conservative area, where I was living.  I knew it was something big beginning.  I thought, "OK, here we go, this is the beginning of the populist uprising The Law of Social Cycles predicted."  While the protests were met with major establishment force to quell them, and they seemed to completely disappear, something had begun.  Those activists went back to their homes, some after a bit of time in jail.  Many of them became local activists, working under the mainstream radar, on local issues, in their different cities.  But the dissension of "the 99%," against the wealth inequality of "the 1%," grew.  I sensed it was bubbling under the surface, and it would pop up again, much bigger, and much more powerful.  In September of 2011, with the Occupy Wall Street protest, the Acquisitor cum Laborer age began.

As I wrote at the top of this chapter, the 2016 election cycle began in the summer of 2015, and looked like another boring, and largely hopeless, race between one status quo and the other, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton.  We all know what happened, Senator Bernie Sanders on the political Left, and Donald Trump on the political Right, sprung to popularity out of nowhere.  They both tapped into huge numbers of average working people (or unemployed, formerly working people) upset with the same basic issue, the declining standard of living for average Americans.  But, they tapped into different aspects of this populist movement.  Finally, the beaten down working people, on both sides of the political spectrum, had presidential candidates that seemed exciting to them.  Once Donald Trump got going, he quickly blew establishment Republican Jeb Bush out of the water.  Hillary Clinton had a much tougher time dealing with Bernie Sanders, and things got dirty behind the scenes as she fought him off.  Hillary won the popular vote by more than 3 million votes.  But the Trump-infused Republican machine squeaked out some narrow state victories, clinching a solid electoral victory, and taking the Presidency, much to most people's surprise.

As I type up this chapter, on January 24th, 2020, we are just over three years into Donald Trump's presidency, and in Day 4 of the Trump impeachment trial.  We are just now hitting peak corruption in the United States, as Senate leader Mitch Mcconnell tries to slip a sham trial past the American public.  Time will tell how that works out, but the Laborer class are still rising, and will force massive change at some point.  This is not even close to over.  In the mid term, over the next 3 to 5 years, things will shift favor the political Left, the truly populist part of the populist uprising.  It's going to get a lot crazier before (and if) we see something close to "normalcy" in American society.

Blogger's note- 9/12/2023- I have not changed anything in these posts since I wrote them in 2019-2020, except these notes at the bottom.  I even left in the typos I initially missed.  As of the late summer of 2023, I'm doing most of my writing on Substack.  Check it out.

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack .

Chapter13: The Big Transition: The Unplanned Revolution of Everything

Internet marketing expert, entrepreneur, author, and speaker, Seth Godin.  He was one of the very first people to write about how the internet and related technologies were changing the business world at a fundamental level.  In this keynote speech from about 2012, Seth describes that unplanned revolution.  He describes how we've gone from a mass manufacturing, mass market, and mass media driven society, to one of thousands, maybe even millions of small niches.  These "tribes" of people are smaller groups of people who come together because of a common interest, and they don't buy products made for everyone, they want products designed by, and for, their little group or tribe, their particular area of interest. 

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

"What revolutions do is, they destroy the perfect, and enable the impossible." 

- Seth Godin, in the keynote speech above.

In the previous chapters, I told you about the first two big theories that I think best explain the underlying changes happening in society.  From futurists, the late Alvin, and Heidi Toffler, we get the concept of the Third Wave.  That concept tells us our society is making the transformation from an industrial-based society to an information-based society.  This is a type of massive shift in how humans live that has only happened two other times in our known human history.  The First Wave was when the tribal hunter/gatherer people turned into farmers, the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago.  The Second Wave was when these farmers turned into a world of factory workers, the Industrial Revolution, which began about 350 years ago.  So now we're in the Third Wave, when the U.S. and other developed nations are moving from the Industrial Age into the Information Age.  Except this time, this massive revolution, this huge wave of change, is happening in a single human lifetime, not over hundreds of years.  So this Third Wave of change is a huge part of what's happening in our world today.  

In this Third Wave, this chaotic transition into the Information Age, the old, Industrial Age businesses, systems, and institutions end.  Then new, Information Age businesses, systems, and institutions are built.  One way this happens is by a group of people understanding this is happening, and intentionally restructuring their business, organization, or system, into something compatible with the world of the Information Age.  But that is not the way most of this change happens.  In most cases, some new visionary sees this new technology and change,and sees it creating an opportunity for something new in the future.  Then that person and their cohorts build a new model, based on the technologies emerging in today's world.  If this new idea catches on and takes hold, people begin to adopt it.  Change happens, and this disrupts the old way of doing things.  The Industrial Age version of that thing collapses.and goes out of business.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built the Apple 1 computer to show their friends at the Homegrown Club in 1975.  Nine years later, after envisioning the possibilities of a world where everyone had a computer, the Apple Macintosh debuted in 1984.  Young Bill Gates and Paul Allen started a tiny computer software company in 1975, and a few years later they sold the MS-DOS operating system to corporate giant IBM, and got a royalty from each sale.  These two little companies, and their computers and software, revolutionized business and life for nearly every person on Earth.  They disrupted the old business systems in the process.  

"I had a moment where I asked myself, 'Is this morally correct?  Technology's advancing, this is going to happen anyway.'"

Ali Alyadar, ally of Shawn Fanning, Napster creator

In July 1994, tech nerd Jeff Bezos decided to sell books online through a website.  He sold his first book in 1995.  He named his company Amazon.com, In 1999, computer enthusiast Shawn Fanning wrote a program to allow people to share files across the internet, called Napster, and completely disrupted the entire business model of the music industry, overnight.  In 2003, Harvard freshman and computer geek, Mark Zuckerberg and friends were lamenting that Harvard didn't have a "facebook," like other colleges.  In the early 2000's, a "facebook" was a yearbook-like, printed volume, that showed all the people enrolled at the school.  Students would look through the facebooks, and pick out the other students they wanted to meet, date, and hook up with.  Mark and his friends decided to make an internet version of a facebook for Harvard.  He made an initial site, and later a better one called  The Facebook.  The idea gained popularity quickly, and that morphed into the social media juggernaut, Facebook.  Each of these ideas, and many like them, started with some tech enthusiast thinking, "Hey, wouldn't if be cool if we _______?"  They filled in the blank, and took action.  The machines or systems they built, grew into foundational parts of a new, Information Age infrastructure, the building blocks of the Information Age.  These computers, software, websites, and all the other similar inventions, disrupted the old models, and created something new.  Those innovations set the stage for waves of more innovation and change across the entire society.

"A couple of geeks, who sketched out some software... (laughing) could destroy Sears Roebuck?"

- Bob Simon, 60 Minutes host, in 1997 segment about Amazon

Because of this disruption, the old, established, Industrial Age business and institutions began to lose their viability, and then their market share, and then their market share in their industries.  The old dinosaurs began to die off.  New technologies and industrial robots made it cheaper to do many industrial jobs, and many factories lost profitability.  At the same time, the rise of more international trade, and larger, multi-national corporations, made it viable to shift manufacturing to regions, and other countries, with a cheaper labor force.  This technology and outsourcing disrupted the U.S. manufacturing sector, and began the major collapse of the Industrial Age.  These underlying technologies and social shifts had been happening for many years already.  But they began to reach critical mass in the 1970's, as us Generation X kids were staring at the TV for hours.  This series of technological and social shifts is what the Tofflers explored in their first bestselling book, Future Shock, in 1970, and then in The Third Wave in 1980, and in their subsequent books.  So that's one major shift that's happening right now, The Third Wave, the shift from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.  

At the same time, another huge transition was beginning to take shape, the end of the Acquisitor Age, as defined by P. R. Sarkar in The Law of Social Cycle.   As the Industrial Age began to be disrupted, the United States was also shifting into a higher gear of corruption, in the business and political world.  A small group of people in the fundamentalist Christian world began to intensely focus on political power in the mid 1970's.  This happened at the same time that computer and other technologies were beginning to take hold in the business world.  Behind the scenes organizations, like The Family, headed by Doug Coe, and the beginnings of the Moral Majority by Jerry Falwell, Sr., brought Southern-style cronyism into the national political sphere in a big way.  This rise of the Christian Right, and similar groups, took control of the Republican Party.  They began to exert tremendous influence and force on the mainstream business world of the United States, as well as everyday Christians of all denominations.  As technology looked toward the future, white Conservative Christians yearned for the security they felt in the past.  

Cronyism is corruption, at the most basic level, and can be fairly benign, or catastrophically detrimental, depending on the situation.  In essence, it favors people who show devout loyalty to a leader or group, as opposed to people who who are fundamentally competent at their jobs.  This leads to bloated, poorly run companies, organizations, and networks, who succeed primarily by rigging the game in their favor, rather than focusing on being good at the game itself.  This can work for decades... until someone comes along with a new business model or disrupting technology, which changes the paradigm.  

So in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's, we had one track of Industrial Age crony capitalism getting more and more corrupt, part of the corrupt aspect of the late Acquisitor Age that P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle predicts.  At the same time, we had evolving new technology, and emerging businesses run largely by younger, unexperienced business people, that were beginning to disrupt one industry after another.  These two major forces grew parallel to each other for years.

In the late 1970's we also had the rise of a shareholder's rights movement, which shifted the focus of public companies from longer term thinking, to a more short-term, quarterly profit oriented mentality, with a focus on making the most money for shareholders.  This rise, and the greed it spawned, helped create the atmosphere for President Ronald Reagan to sign the Tax Cut bill of 1986.  This made much, much larger corporate and personal fortunes possible, enabled larger corporations, and led to the exponential rise of wealth inequality.  

On the tech side, the rise of personal computers and all the other transformative technologies led to the first geek mega-entrepreneurs, like Steve's Jobs and Wozniak at Apple, Bill Gates and Paul Allen at Microsoft, Michael Dell at Dell Computers, and the others who have followed.  This disruption by technology led to the fastest building of huge fortunes in human history, by the most successful of the tech entrepreneurs.  For the first time ever, we had self-made billionaires in their 20's.  Last year, in 2019, 21-year-old young woman and reality star, Kylie Jenner, became the world's youngest self-made billionaire.  At 21 years old.  You can argue with the "self-made" part, but not with her business' sales.  So much for the billionaire boys club.

So, on one side of the coin, we had growing cronyism and greed in the Industrial Age business world, leading to huge fortunes, the exponential rise in power of Wall Street, and opportunities for all kinds of corruption.  On the other side of the coin, at the same time, we had brand new mega fortunes being built by the early Information Age companies, who were disrupting some of the Industrial Age industries.  

This is the late Acquisitor Age in The Law of Social Cycle.  While many large corporations have gone bankrupt, or are struggling to survive, the largest group of losers in this period are The Laborers.  A small number of people built mega fortunes, some with corrupt practices, some simply by using the laws and business friendly environment, and some by creating huge businesses built on new technology.  As this happened, the high paying American factory jobs mostly disappeared.  Some of the American Middle Class learned tech skills, and moved into high paying tech jobs.  But a much larger number of people were left with working much lower paying service jobs.  These low paying service jobs now make up around 45% of the American workforce (see 2nd chart).  Real wages have been stagnant for average people for about 40 years now.  

After 40 years of stagnation, the seeds for a populist uprising exploded into the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, and since into large populist movements on both the political Left and the political Right.  This brings us into the Acquisitor cum Laborer Age, predicted by Sarkar's Law of Social Cycles.  We're in a time of historical levels of wealth inequality, peak corruption, and massive discord among the working class Laborers.  In short, were at the point where the shit hits the fan, and the fan is on high.

As I saw these trends emerge over the last 25 years, and I began to realize that these two social theories largely explained what was going on, I began to ask myself questions.  
What happens now?  
What else will be disrupted?  
How long can this era of massive disruption go on?  

I realized that, ultimately, everything, every single aspect of our Industrial Age society, has to fall away.  It all has to be intentionally restructured or disrupted, and rebuilt, into a new Information Age world.  That's when I began to piece together my idea of The Big Transition.  This is my personal thinking, resting on the foundation of the Tofflers' Third Wave concept, and P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle.  The Industrial Age didn't end in, say 1984, with the release of the Apple Macintosh personal computer.  No one flipped a switch and said, "OK, the Industrial Age is over.  Give up your high hourly wage assembly line job, as of tomorrow you'll be a tech worker, sitting on a giant kickball at a desk, writing computer code."  I realized, this transition has been going on since 1956, according to the Tofflers.  It started very slowly, and has been increasing in speed, slowly at first, and now much faster.  It's a sticky, chaotic, disruptive transition.  It's messy.  It pulls the rug out from under many traditional power structures, as industries and institutions are disrupted.  People go nuts when shit they don't expect disrupts their job, their lifestyle, their source of income, and their power in their local area or the larger world.  In short, The Big Transition is a fucking crazy mess, it's been going on for 64 years now, and still has at least 15 or 20 more years to go.  

The Big Transition, and the disruption that's a key part of it, caused the Factory Apocalypse of the late 20th century, and the Retail Apocalypse we're seeing now.  It led to the fracturing of both political parties into smaller, more divisive groups.  The Big Transiton is the explanation for the depression-like era we're heading into right now.  It's the explanation for the Financial Apocalypse, which is what the next few years will feel like for most people.  The Big Transition is the explanation for the coming College Apocalypse (seriously, it has begun), the current Political Apocalypse, the Real Estate Apocalypse, and the coming disruption of our legal system, our government systems, our transportation systems, and everything else that hasn't transitioned through major Disruption yet.  Yes, this sounds horrible.  But now we have models to look to.  We've seen the changes in the music industry, the publishing industry, the TV and movie industries.  We've seen Amazon win over the once dominant mall department stores, the same way Sears & Roebucks disrupted small town general stores 120 to 130 years ago, with mail order catalogs.  We have an idea where things are headed now, and that it is possible to survive major disruption.  It's not easy.  It's not fun, but it's possible.   

 When things look bad on many fronts, creativity and new ideas can lead to amazing places.  The Wright Brothers bike shop in Ohio, around 1905 or so.  A couple of bike shop owners created the aviation industry.  Every big thing starts as an idea in one person's brain.  Big ideas can come from some pretty unlikely places.

Because there is so much disruptive change on so many fronts, most people are busy dealing with their own piece of it.  For whatever reason, partly because of my interest in The Third Wave concept, and the Law of Social Cycle concept, I'm one of the few who has stepped back, to look at this all from a much bigger perspective, a much wider angle.  All of these massive changes are part of what I now call The Big Transition.  It all ties together, and from a eye in the sky view, all these different levels of change and disruption make sense.  

The Big Transition is the chaotic and sticky shift from the Industrial Age into the Information Age, which is paralleling the mental shift from the Acquisitor Age through the Acquisitor cum Laborer Age, and into the Warrior Age.  These two major societal shifts have converged.  This mega transition started in 1956, according to the Tofflers, and I estimate it will continue until at least 2040.  In effect, us Generation X people are living our entire lives in a period of transition.  

Our Dystopia is not a post-apocalyptic wasteland with a handful of people driving rat rods around, like in The Road Warrior movies.  it's not an Orwellian worldwide totalitarian state, like in 1984 or V for Vendetta.  Our Dystopia is The Big Transition.  We get the (good or bad) luck of living in a period of continual change, on multiple levels, that just doesn't seem like it will ever end.  It's multiple changes happening at once, on every possible level, and it's happening faster than at any time in known human history.  Change is our "normal."  Welcome to our Dystopia.  Wait 20 minutes, something will be different.  That's our world right now.

Blogger's note- 8/12/2022- I just went back and re-read this chapter, fixed a few typos, and made a few minor changes.  I had the idea for "Dystopia" in October of  2019, and started writing it in late October, and wrote most of the rough draft ideas in November 2019, while living homeless in the Studio City area of Southern California.  That's in the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles city proper, and just over the hill from Hollywood.  I created this blog with 20 chapters, in late December of 2019, and wrote it, chapter by chapter from late December 2019 through early June 2020.  While I was researching and writing this, I learned that Los Angeles in November of 2019 was the setting of the 1982 movie Blade Runner, which seemed a really weird, synchronistic coincidence.  I'm not sure exactly when I wrote this chapter, but I think it was in late January or early February of 2020.  Covid-19 was just popping up on our radar here in the U.S., but the shutdowns had not begun.  I wrote the last chapter in early June 2020.  I was homeless while writing most of this, but a friend let me stay at her place in Newport Beach form late December 2019 to mid-February 2020.  I wrote several of the chapters there.  

Now, 2 1/2 years later, it's much more apparent for other people that something really crazy is happening in our society.  In my opinion, as I wrote above, there's a lot more to come.  Change.  That's our Dystopia... change.  

As for the Orwellian side of things.  Yes, Big Brother is watching.  But so is "Little Sister," and she has faster thumbs.  Orwell didn't expect everyone to have a worldwide media publishing computer in their pocket.  Heh, heh, heh.  2022 appears to be the new 2008.  Things are about to get REALLY interesting...

I drew this drawing of Harley Quinn in December of 2019.  Click on it and read the little pencil line I wrote beneath the drawing.

Blogger's note: 9/12/2023- I have not changed anything in these posts since I wrote them in 2019-2020, except these notes at the bottom.  I even left in the typos I missed initially.  As of late 2023, I'm doing most of my writing on Substack.  Check it out.  

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack