ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the alternatives that present themselves for the future of industrial society. One is decline and fall. A second, is a command economy. A third possibility is democratic participation – a system in which each member of society not only feels that he has, but in which he actually has, an equal share in the fruits of production. The second is the one towards which society seems to be drifting. It implies more economic and social planning and less economic insecurity; more state intervention and less freedom for the individual; the replacement of property-founded hierarchies by hierarchies of positional status; the replacement of the fear of unemployment and poverty by the fear of administratively determined penalties for the non-fulfillment of production targets, and the substitution of profit incentives by bureaucratically fixed rewards; and the transformation of our strongly introspective ethics into a formalistic system of morality.
