The fourth stage of human development is coming, and perhaps its least predictable feature is the new name under which it will be known. Call it "PostModern." Call it the "Cyber Society" or the "Information Age." Or make up your own name. No one knows what conceptual glue will stick a nickname to the next phase of history ....

Notwithstanding the many dramatic changes that have unfolded since the time of Moses, only a few heretics have bothered to think about how the transitions from one phase of civilization to another actually unfold, How are they triggered? What do they have in common? What patterns can help you tell when they begin and know when they are over? When will Great Britain or the United States come to an end? These are questions for which you would be hard-pressed to find conventional answers ...

The Taboo on Foresight

To see "outside" an existing system is like being a stagehand trying to force a dialogue with a character in a play. It breaches a convention that helps keep the system functioning....

The more apparent it is that a system is nearing an end, the more reluctant people will be to adhere to its laws. Any social organization will therefore tend to discourage or play down analyses that anticipate its demise. This alone helps ensure that history's great transitions are seldom spotted as they happen. If you know nothing else about the future, you can rest assured that dramatic changes will be neither welcomed nor advertised by conventional thinkers....

You cannot depend upon conventional information sources to give you an objective and timely warning about how the world is changing and why. If you wish to understand the great transition now under way, you have little choice but to figure it out for yourself....

Another important contributing factor to Rome's collapse was a demographic deficit caused by the Antonine plagues. The coil apse of the Roman population in many areas obviously contributed to economic and military weakness. Nothing of that kind has happened today, at least not yet. Taking a longer view, perhaps. the scourge of new "plagues" will compound the challenges of technological devolution in the new millennium. The unprecedented bulge in human population in the twentieth century creates a tempting target for rapidly mutating microparasites. Fears about the Ebola virus, or something like it, invading metropolitan populations may be well founded. But this is not the place to consider the coevolution of humans and diseases. As interesting a topic as that is, our argument at this juncture is not about why Rome fell, or even about whether the world today is vulnerable to some of the same influences that contributed to Roman decline. It is about something different-namely, the way that history's great transformations are perceived, or rather, misperceived as they happen.

People are always and everywhere to some degree conservative, with a small "C." That implies a reluctance to think in terms of dissolving venerable social conventions, overturning the accepted institutions, and defying the laws and values from which they drew their bearings. Few are inclined to imagine that apparently minor changes in climate or technology or some other variable can somehow be responsible for severing connections to the world of their fathers. The Romans were reluctant to acknowledge the changes unfolding around them. So are we.

Yet recognize it or not, we are living through a change of historical season, a transformation in the way people organize their livelihoods and defend themselves that is so profound that it will inevitably transform the whole of society. The change will be so profound, in fact, that to understand it will require taking almost nothing for granted. ¹

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