The New Micro Forces that Will Shape the Future

 This is a continuing essay derived from the 1980’s Millennial Files. It begins with a discussion of the four structures of industrialization. The first is the tangible structure of a production superstructure consisting today of factories, mines and power plants. The second structure is tangible infrastructure of roads, railroads, ports, and canals. The third structure is INTANGIBLE– a financial structure that is responsible for allocating and controlling the capital within the economy, it is composed of banks, insurance companies and foundations. And finally a fourth intangible structure – the organizational structure composed of things like corporations, foundations, and non-profits around which everything is organized. 

 

The Great Depression of the 1930’s collapsed the third intangible structure – the financial and monetary structure and the small independent, uninsured and unregulated banks. Today we are faced with the collapse of another intangible structure – the structure around which everything is organized. The downsizing, the dysfunction of the political system and the courts, the perceived lack of safety on the streets, and the distrust of the mass media are all manifestations of this collapse. When the third structure collapsed in the 1930’s, all of society's weaknesses were manifested as financial problems. Today the collapse of the fourth structure means that all our problems are manifested as organizational problems. This must be understood if we are to have any hope of solving these problems. 

 

The collapse of the third structure in the 1930’s was remedied by a series of reforms such as the stock market changes and monetary reforms like putting the full faith and credit of the U.S. government behind the financial system– FDIC. This fixed the weakness of the third structure. Today a new series of reforms must be implemented to change the organizational structure– based on a new mindset of conflict resolution.

 

It is important to understand that the third structural reforms fell to a generation – the Lost Generation – to use the name given it by Strauss and Howe in their critical book “Generations”. The reforms to the financial structure were, in fact, made by the Lost Generation in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930’s. The new mindset that must be created today is the responsibility of the youngest of Generation X and the Millennials. They must begin to think differently, of a new world that is not built upon the Cold War ideas of endless conflict and winners and losers.

 

The new way of thinking may seem impossible, but it is no less transformational than the one undertaken in the wake of the Great Depression. This transformation will be resisted by the old way of thinking but it is the way of the future, and the next essay will discuss the macro forces pushing that future.