Word: toffler
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Whether the gaunt, peculiarly nandsome Toffler is a moral paragon, or whether he simply likes the travel and excitement of the lecture circuit is debatable. Rarely are a person's real motives ever known. But whatever lies beneath the exterior, Toffler comes across as sincere, perspicacious, dedicated, and above all, convincing. Disregarding the actual merit of his pop sociology, he does an excellent job of salesmanship. Not only does he synthesize his ideas into a provocative theory, but he presents this synthesis so articulately that you begin to wonder if the ivory towers really hold the answers and if academics...
...Toffler, and others like him, serve a purpose, especially on academically pretentious campuses like Harvard. Although obviously an intellectual, Toffler is not a professor, and he is not particularly concerned about tenure or academic respectability. It is probably safe to speculate that Toffler has not read all the important books that you end up reading sooner or later if you hang around New Haven, Cambridge and Berkeley long enough. Nevertheless, Toffler and his breed seem to show striking originality and an absence of timidity which allows them insouciantly to ignore 300 years of social theory and discredit the work...
ALTHOUGH many of his ideas are absurd, they are all interesting. For instance, Toffler prefaced his stormy-weather warnings by questioning the validity of science and knowledge as our society conceives it. The modern notion of causality, Toffler proferred, may be nothing more than an unprovable idea that would quite predictably emanate from any highly industrial, interdependent society victimized by a time fetish. The linear consumption of time--which gave rise to society's belief in causality--is just the type of idea one would expect a society run by clocks to adopt. Modern society, Toffler contends, is quite narrow...
Well, that is an interesting notion. Nihilism of that sort creates the perfect Catch-22 situation. Exactly how does one go about proving--proofs being rooted in the acceptance of causality--that causality does not exist? Needless to say, Toffler did not pursue that interesting philosophical question too far. After all, he had only an hour to speak. It is difficult to dismantle the foundations of knowledge and still have time to warn your audience of the third great revolution that is sweeping the world...
...Toffler's theories about the disaffection of many members of modern society would infuriate any Marxist. The problem with society today, Toffler says, has little to do with the separation of the wage-earner form the fruits of his labor or the inability of modern man to realize himself through his work activity (alienation). Quite to the contrary, Marx was making his own biased psychological presuppositions when he decided that man could never be a happy cog in the industrial machine, even if he were well-greased. Toffler attributes modern man's problems to natural difficulties in adapting...