The author states that the values of scholarship that have created his worldview are being eclipsed by a new paradigm shaped by technology, globalization, and postindustrial affluence. Those factors have spawned a culture that celebrates and empowers the individual. The author asserts that a symptom of that pervasive shift is the decline of deference to traditional authority including the church, the schoolteacher, the family doctor, the business executive, the union leader, the politician, and the intellectual. The author postulates that the "infosphere," as he calls it, needs new and decentralized mechanisms of self-regulation and self-organization, just as economist Adam Smith realized more than two centuries ago that a complex economy needs the guidance of an invisible hand.