Aging & Wisdom Quote by Jeremy Rifkin

Rifkin’s sentence is doing two things at once: selling urgency and laundering ambition through civic virtue. The plain text is procedural - “bring the public in quickly,” “informed debate” - but the cadence is crisis management. “We now have an opportunity” frames the present as a narrow window; “though” signals a corrective, as if history has granted a rare do-over. The industrial age becomes a cautionary parable: a period when technology outran politics, and ordinary people were treated less like citizens than like inputs.

The key phrase is “a leg up.” It’s colloquial, almost folksy, and that’s strategic. Rifkin is an economist-activist who often writes about epochal shifts (energy systems, digital networks, biotech). Here he’s trying to domesticate the scale of change by making it sound like practical advantage rather than ideological contest. “Get a leg up on this” also implies inevitability: “this” is coming regardless; the only question is whether society will be ahead of it or crushed by it.

The subtext is a critique of technocracy and corporate capture without naming either. “Bring the public in quickly” reads like democratic inclusion, but it also hints that exclusion is the default setting of innovation. “Informed debate” is a preemptive strike against panic and populist backlash: he’s asking for legitimacy before the fight starts, while the rules can still be written.

Contextually, it fits Rifkin’s long-running argument that each technological revolution rewires power. He’s urging deliberation at the moment when new systems harden into infrastructure - the point where choices stop being choices and start being “how the world works.”