Will #QuestioningAdults create #AlvinToffler’s Third Wave as the #SystemicCivilization?
Please consider this as a thought experiment on the larger society’s governance and cultural environments that, for example, includes two polls in Spanish that are in two consecutive tweets of one tweets conversation that can be seen at the end of this story that ran for three days each with less than a day apart. Having the story of the second poll close to the end of this narrative, the story of the first was a YES and NO poll whose introductory text translations says:
The 3 principles of government in the book “The Third Wave” by Alvin Toffler of 1980 are “minority power,” “semi-direct democracy,” and “decision division.”
Do you think it is necessary to change the structure of government to the 3rd wave to improve behavior?
After 19 votes, the results were YES 84% and NO 16%.
Although there is one inconsistency with Twitter Analytics in the number of votes, neither on Retweets nor Likes, we can consider that “Detail expands” to represent voters population of 55 as the active followers. Discarding 10 votes for being less than the 12 Retweets, 19 votes is 35% of the active population.
In that context, I find very timely the cultural response to Natali Morad’s must read story Part 1: How To Be An Adult — Kegan’s Theory of Adult Development in which Brenda Ammon is concerned with “WHY can’t society move more people towards stage 5?” which is shown to be only 1% of the adult population. To address her concern, lets consider the people that move towards stage 5 as “Questioning Adults,” not just workers, but specially those of the governing elites and their experts in the public, private, and non profit sectors. Might the elites be responsible for society not having more Questioning Adults requires them to question their own authority while, for example, enabling knowledge workers to discuss when necessary their authority?
I proposed that elites unable to favor those two kinds of questioning is the result of a cultural ‘Groupthink’ under what I coined as the Dark Globalization, taking into consideration what Alvin Toffler described in his book “The Third Wave.” I suggest that by being in an intermediate stage between the 2nd wave or Industrial Civilization and the 3rd wave civilization, which I coined as the Systemic Civilization, the Dark Globalization benefits elites and their experts, but not people in general and knowledge workers in particular from the communicating Computing Big Shift whose precedent is the 500 years old communicating Printing Big Shift. I also suggest that the alternative for Questioning Adults’ ambition towards stage 5 is in the 3rd wave for what I also coined as the Bright Globalization.
Natali Morad seems to be going beyond Alvin Toffler’s 2nd wave worker’s education into his 3rd wave for knowledge workers and elites as Questioning Adults. On the leap from 1st wave to the 2nd wave, Toffler told us that:
Built on the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the “overt curriculum.” But beneath it lay an invisible or “covert curriculum” that was far more basic. It consisted — and still does in most industrial nations — of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work. Factory labor demanded workers who showed up on time, especially assembly-line hands. It demanded workers who would take orders from a management hierarchy without questioning. And it demanded men and women prepared to slave away at machines or in offices, performing brutally repetitious operations.
Unlike the shift from the 1st to the 2nd wave, in which according to Toffler “… it was ‘nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty.. into useful factory hands,’” we need to prove that wrong (see more below) to convert people from the 2nd to the 3rd wave by increasing Questioning Adults’ opportunities well beyond the present estimations that Natali reports, specially on Stage 5:
Stage 4 — Self-Authoring mind (35% of the adult population)
Stage 5 — Self-Transforming mind (1% of the adult population)
Having also two options, “Free thought” and “Obedient people,” the second poll story has an introductory text translations that says:
As the people of the 2nd wave were forced to be obedient, will it because of arrogance that the public and private elites, and their experts, are opposed to being beginners who promote the 3rd wave so that people can think freely?
Ref. THE BEGINNER’S CREED by Peter J. Denning, of August 2016.
After 10 votes, the results were YES 80% and NO 20%, which is kind of close to the first poll. However, this poll had 6 votes on “Free thought” and 0 on “Obedient people,” when one of the voters in the first poll tweeted “That question is wrongly formulated.” From then on only 2 votes on “Free thought” and 2 on “Obedient people,” were added corresponding to random behavior.
That happened even after several tweets were written asking to prove that assessment that seem to come from a non Questioning Adults as he or anyone else didn’t tweet anymore to try to prove it. Was the result that the doubt introduced changed the poll on non Questioning Adults that voted in the first poll without proving “That question is wrongly formulated,” but maybe proving the arrogance assumption? Does that roughly correlates with the 1% of the Questioning Adults population in Stage 5?
Similar to the first poll, although there is one inconsistency with Twitter Analytics in the number of votes, neither on Retweets nor Likes, we can consider that “Detail expands” to represent voters population of 41 as the active followers. Discarding 6 votes for being less than the 7 Retweets, 10 votes is 24% of the active population, which while being lower than in the first poll seem to roughly correlates with the 1% of the Questioning Adults population in Stage 5.
So in order to have more Questioning Adults, is it necessary to help emerge the 3rd wave that I have been calling the Systemic Civilization? In that line, please consider, for example, both what Peter J. Denning says in THE BEGINNER’S CREED and what’s said in the following narrative where we can consider Questioning Adults as effective people:
