According to the Tofflers, majority rule will become obsolete, while minorities will
assume an increasingly important role. The government will operate
through a semi-direct democracy, characterized by more individual
participation through sophisticated technological systems. "Decisional
division," which involves reallocating decisions from the national level
to the subnational or transnational level and "opening the system to more
minority power," will cure institutional logjams (p. 99).
Creating a New Civilization succeeds in portraying the Third Wave
future as the welcome and natural result of human evolution. As
cheerleaders for the future, the Tofflers offer a comforting framework in
which to place late twentieth-century disjunction. There is an undeniable
temptation to accept, without further quibbling, their justification for
speedily abandoning the system that has functioned respectably for
several centuries. Yet their failure to explain in greater detail the
potential drawbacks of a knowledge-based civilization weakens their
argument. In the Third Wave economy, placing a premium on knowledge
will likely skew traditional valuation and incentive schemes, with
uncertain results. As Barbara Ehrenreich noted in a New York Times
commentary, power structures are unlikely to function in the Third Wave
as they did in the agricultural and industrial eras, during which power
was based upon tangible property in the form of possession of land or
industrial means of production. The consequences of this radical shift
deserve more attention than the Tofflers have allotted.
In addition, the Third Wave may wreak havoc on one age-old
motivation for labor: the desire to pass on something of value (the
family business or farm, for example) to future generations. This aspect
of the work ethic may be undermined by parents' inability to transfer
knowledge, imagination, or innovation effectively to their children.
Perhaps this incentive will survive in the struggle to acquire the financial
means to provide children with the education and training necessary to
flourish in this knowledge-based civilization.
Further, while the Tofflers advocate the revamping of the factorybased
model of education as essential to the Third Wave transition, they
do not offer firm blueprints for reform. These specifics are critical,
because failure to reform the educational system might allow the
intellectual and educational elite to gain exclusive control of the
indispensable resources of the Third Wave, thereby thwarting the "great
democratic leap forward" that the Tofflers envision (p. 1
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