Future Shock
The stress of being overwhelmed by rapid change echoes in the Israelites’ bewilderment as “they said one to another, It is manna: for they wist not what it was” (Exodus 16:15).
Long before the futurist Alvin Toffler popularized the concept of future shock—that acute stress and disorientation suffered when human beings are subjected to “too much change in too short a time”—scripture had already mapped the profound spiritual dislocation that accompanies rapid transitions. Modeled on the spatial dislocation of culture shock, Toffler’s 1970 paradigm described a retreat into old habits or a hostility toward the new when the temporal horizon shifts too swiftly. While modern commentators typically frame future shock as a secular pathology of industrial and post-industrial societies, the revelations of the Restoration and the history of ancient Israel reveal a divine pedagogy at work. God deliberately paces the unfolding of light and knowledge to human capacity, while simultaneously condemning the complacency of those who refuse to receive more.
Manna and the Fleshpots of Egypt
The Israelites’ first precarious months in the wilderness serve as a profound scriptural case study in future shock. The relentless murmuring of the children of Israel against Moses is most frequently—and correctly—read as a tragic narrative of ingratitude. Yet, read through a psychological and sociological lens, their complaints track Toffler’s symptoms with striking precision. Here was a nation of captives, violently extracted from generations of bondage in a single night, suddenly thrust into a liminal wilderness. Within weeks, they awoke to a divine sustenance they could not even comprehend: “they said one to another, It is manna: for they wist not what it was” (Exodus 16:15). The Hebrew man hu’—often rendered as the bewildered question, “What is it?”—perfectly captures a people cognitively overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of heavenly grace.
Under the crushing strain of this paradigm shift, their gaze turned stubbornly backward. They yearned for the predictability of their captivity, wishing they had died “in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots” (Exodus 16:3). Later, their selective memory magnified “the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons,” while lamenting that “there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes” (Numbers 11:5–6). In their disorientation, they romanticized Egypt’s menu and entirely conveniently forgot its troubles.
Insightful interpreters have long recognized the forty years in the wilderness—a typological pattern later repeated in Lehi’s exodus—as a necessary period of preparation and pacing, rather than merely a punitive judgment. With the faithful exceptions of Joshua and Caleb, the generation fundamentally shaped by Egypt was not permitted to enter the promised land. It was their children, whose baseline reality was the daily miracle of manna, who possessed the capacity to cross the Jordan. Meaningful transformation on a national scale required a generation to process, establishing a principle of divine pacing that would be explicitly articulated in later dispensations.
Line upon Line
The revelations of the Restoration forcefully address both extremes of this spectrum: the stagnant refusal of further light, and the destabilizing demand to comprehend the entirety of God’s design all at once.
It is highly instructive that the prophet Nephi pairs both of these spiritual failures in a single discourse. He pronounces a woe upon the complacent who declare, “We have received the word of God, and we need no more of the word of God, for we have enough,” and subsequently outlines the Lord’s merciful alternative: “I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little” (2 Nephi 28:29–30). If stagnation is one peril, being spiritually crushed by an accelerated influx of truth is the other. As a revelation given in May 1831 tenderly reminded the early elders of the Church, “ye are little children and ye cannot bear all things now; ye must grow in grace and in the knowledge of the truth” (D&C 50:40). The Lord’s pedagogy is exquisitely calibrated to the developmental capacity of the Saints, with the expectation that this capacity will steadily enlarge.
The unfolding of the Restoration was itself a severe test of that capacity. When Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon beheld the sweeping, paradigm-shattering vision of the degrees of glory in 1832, it proved deeply unsettling for many converts who had been steeped in the strict heaven-and-hell binary of nineteenth-century Protestantism. Brigham Young famously acknowledged that the revelation was “a great trial to many,” admitting that it directly contradicted his own religious education. He wisely withheld judgment, reading and praying over the text until the cognitive dissonance resolved into spiritual comprehension. In our current dispensation—viewed by Mormon transhumanists as an era of unprecedented acceleration in knowledge and technology preceding Christ’s return—continuing revelation serves as the vital anchor, allowing a covenant people to absorb exponential change at a pace they can bear.
The Spiritual and Physical Creations
The exponential curve of contemporary technology imbues this ancient problem with unique urgency, yet Restoration scripture provides the theological framework necessary to navigate it.
The pattern of “too much change in too short a time” highlights why the Lord gives instruction “here a little and there a little” (2 Nephi 28:30).
The landscape of artificial intelligence now shifts drastically from month to month, vastly outpacing the ability of educational institutions, legal frameworks, and professions to adapt. When software can generate hyper-realistic video from mere text prompts—halting an $800 million studio expansion in early 2024—the shock is palpable. For those examining this acceleration through the lens of Mormon transhumanism, a crucial remedy is found in the profound temple doctrine of creation. As the Book of Moses records, the Lord God “created all things … spiritually, before they were naturally upon the face of the earth” (Moses 3:5). By internalizing this principle, a people armed with a clear, righteous vision of their eternal destiny can proactively direct the trajectory of technological change, rather than merely suffering its impacts. However, this doctrine is not without its mortal risks. Those who possess both the vision and the capital to construct this “physical creation” often dictate a pace of change that the rest of humanity is forced to absorb, leaving the heaviest burden of shock upon the marginalized and the voiceless.
Nowhere in scripture is there a promise that the pace of the last days will decelerate. When the Lord detailed the upheavals and gathering storms of the eschaton in March 1831, His disciples “were troubled.” His response was not to offer them a revised, gentler timeline, but to reorient their perspective: “Be not troubled, for, when all these things shall come to pass, ye may know that the promises which have been made unto you shall be fulfilled” (D&C 45:34–35). They were instructed to look through the turbulence, reading the rapid, shocking transformations of the world not as chaos, but as the inexorable keeping of divine covenants.