“Industrial Society and its Future”: the writings of the Unabomber
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roelpeters.be
> In living close to nature, one discovers that happiness does not consist in maximizing pleasure. It consists in tranquility. Once you have enjoyed tranquility long enough, you acquire actually an aversion to the thought of any very strong pleasure—excessive pleasure would disrupt your tranquility.
> Finally, one learns that boredom is a disease of civilization. It seems to me that what boredom mostly is is that people have to keep themselves entertained or occupied, because if they aren’t, then certain anxieties, frustrations, discontents, and so forth, start coming to the surface, and it makes them uncomfortable. Boredom is almost nonexistent once you’ve become adapted to life in the woods. If you don’t have any work that needs to be done, you can sit for hours at a time just doing nothing, just listening to the birds or the wind or the silence, watching the shadows move as the sun travels, or simply looking at familiar objects. And you don’t get bored. You’re just at peace.
People have been seeking pleasure since they were living in a cave.
Boredom thing also sounds completely baseless. I still remember when I was bored as a child - it had nothing to do with anxiety, frustration or anything like that (I didn't have any). Children (and then adults) simply have drive to do something interesting/enjoyable (for quite clear evolutionary reasons). I could stay for a couple of hours just relaxing in a forest, but only because I'm not so used to that. If I had to do that every day then I would get bored.
There are people who are trying to "distract away" themselves from their problems, but that's far from general boredom.
But the original argument was that if you are in harmony with nature you even dislike the idea of strong pleasure (like sex) and that's just clearly wrong.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/do-animals-exp...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jul/07/cows-b...
[2] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/games_animals_...
> instead of just letting them exist apart from himself
From his vantage point they weren't letting him exist apart from themselves.
"The best place, to me, was the largest remnant of this plateau that dates from the tertiary age. It's kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was even a waterfall there. It was about a two days hike from my cabin. That was the best spot until the summer of 1983. That summer there were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I went back to the plateau and when I got there I found they had put a road right through the middle of it" His voice trails off; he pauses, then continues, "You just can't imagine how upset I was. It was from that point on I decided that, rather than trying to acquire further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the system. Revenge. " (https://web.archive.org/web/20090318135703/http://www.insurg...)
A tranquility that kills people that harshes its buzz isn't tranquility.
"I decided to relate to him the story of how one of my graduate advisors, Dr. Resnick, also a Harvard alumni, once posed the following question in a seminar on political legitimacy: Say a group of scientists asks for a meeting with the leading politicians in the country to discuss the introduction of a new invention. The scientists explain that the benefits of the technology are indisputable, that the invention will increase efficiency and make everyone's life easier. The only down side, they caution, is that for it to work, forty-thousand innocent people will have to be killed each year. Would the politicians decide to adopt the new invention or not? The class was about to argue that such a proposal would be immediately rejected out of hand, then he casually remarked, "We already have it--the automobile." He had forced us to ponder how much death and innocent suffering our society endures as a result of our commitment to maintaining the technological system--a system we all are born into now and have no choice but to try and adapt to. Everyone can see the existing technological society is violent, oppressive and destructive, but what can we do?"
'Protecting tranquility' is perfectly politically acceptable: environmental and NIMBY lobbying organizations are often widely admired and achieve significantly more success than the Unabomber could ever have hoped to achieve. He is not criticised for seeking to 'protect tranquility' but for a campaign to murder people connected with things he despised in a manner which carried not even the slightest hope of a net increase in tranquility.
Now, as to your current argument that these organizations have been more successful than Ted ever could have been. I want to believe they have been, yet reality does not reflect this.
At best they have only slowed the destruction of the environment. At worst they enable a technological society to carry on with their destruction with a clear conscience. If you look at the world today and in 10 years will these organizations have ceded ground or will the machine continue on?
That is, do these organizations make further environmental destruction net 0 (or in a good case reverse said damage?). I would say no. Even from Ted's time to today the environment is worse and shrinking day by day.
The reason Ted felt that "violent rebellion" was necessary is because these organizations can't possibly stop the inevitable results of what technological society does. They're only a stymie, a stopgap, not a long term solution.
The more INTERESTING argument is, is technological society acceptable?
They demonstrably have been. Organized NIMBY campaigns, including campaigns containing a part of illegal land occupation but no part of mailing package bombs to individuals, have shut down all manner of development, including both nuclear power plants and oil pipelines.
All the Unabomber accomplished was a lifelong stay in prison, the death of three people, and the injury of dozens more. By your strong metric, neither approach is successful. By a weaker metric, an organized campaign that doesn't include bombing people is partially successful.
The point is that their approach is only going to slow down the status quo, not permanently change it. Whether his approach was successful or not is besides my point. His approach was not successful, no.
However some of the criticisms he levies are valid. Which the one I'm trying to convey. That some alternative approach must be formulated that will have a lasting impact. Partial success is not a substitute for actual success. Neither is a failing approach.
According to what criteria do you make this determination?
"If the system succeeds in acquiring sufficient control over human behavior quickly enough, it will probably survive. Otherwise it will break down. We think the issue will most likely be resolved within the next several decades, say forty to a hundred years." --Industrial Society and Its Future, paragraph 162.
Further, your statement implies an assumption which is not correct. The implication you're making is that because things have so far remain unchanged, Kaczynski's actions were therefore unjustified and/or his writings were not true. This does not follow. Just because an anti-tech revolutionary movement has not (yet) materialized and the industrial system is not (yet) under serious revolutionary threat does not invalidate the truth of Kaczynski's ideas or the validity of Kaczynski's actions. You would not be justified in implying this any more than you would be justified in claiming Galileo had no effect or was wrong because he was placed under house arrest and almost nobody believed him (at the time).
1) self-consistent
2) deeply misanthropic
As with so many seductive political philosophers (Rand and Hitler spring immediately to mind), he creates a framework that checks out against its own internal logic and that would work great if (a) humans behaved the way he needs them to behave for his system to work and (b) you ignore all the death and suffering his solution demands.
This is flatly wrong. Humans aren't "needed" to behave in this system in any way other than they have always behaved throughout history. The revolutionary ideal is not to create a utopia, or to control society and human behavior, it is only to destroy the industrial system. the world that will remain will approximate the world prior to the industrial revolution: full bellies and hunger, sickness and health, greed and compassion, etc. etc. But it's a world where the biosphere and humanity are not threatened with existential destruction.
"(b) you ignore all the death and suffering his solution demands."
No need to "ignore" anything. You just have to come the the conclusion that FAR more death and destruction lays in store for humans and the biosphere if technology is allowed to continue. This is a matter of facts and logic and can be reasonably deduced. You can;t somehow shirk from your intellectual and moral responsibility to think about something simply because it's painful to think about, which is essential what your doing. Would it be wrong, for example, for the Allies to have ever considered fighting and defeating Nazi Germany because it would entail millions of people suffering, regardless of the consequences of not doing anything???
That's unfortunately false. The technology stack needed to divert asteroids is significant; bringing humanity to a pre-industrial revolution doesn't guarantee the safety of the biosphere, it guarantees the biosphere is unmodifiable by human activity. That leaves the biosphere vulnerable to threats that humans could use technology to intervene against but will be unable to.
> No need to "ignore" anything.
If one doesn't ignore the death and suffering but instead condemns humanity to it purposefully, with the flip response "But in a technological society, people will die anyway," that's misanthropic, and that's the part where his philosophy demands humans act other than they will. Fewer humans are suffering and dying---even with the threat of climate change---in a world where we have a technology stack that can move vast resources around.
Avoiding the death of billions of people by crashing the industrial infrastructure so billions of people die is a non-solution. Practically, nobody will go for it. Philosophically, nobody should go for it; it's the solution of throwing up one's hands and saying "into Nature's good graces we should go," and Nature's graces have never been good. "Red in tooth and claw" is the moniker she tends to carry.
There's no guarantee that if we keep the industrial society, billions die to climate change. Technology gave us the power to shape the climate and (if we choose to invest the time and effort) it can give us the power to shape the climate beneficially. If we pull the technological society up by its roots and return to the pre-industrial society, billions die from starvation, disease, and natural disaster, as we are no longer able to move resources to help them.
You could be right about this. But then you could be wrong. Ideas still matter, and their particular expression still can have material impacts. Time will tell. Will Kaczynski's work inspire the sort of material, decisive impact that Martin Luther's works inspired during the Reformation's wars?? or Will Kaczynski as you say be more like John brown, while the real decisive impact will be made by those that actually organize and lead. (Just staying with your analogy). Only time will tell.
> All the Unabomber accomplished was a lifelong stay in prison, the death of three people, and the injury of dozens more. By your strong metric, neither approach is successful. By a weaker metric, an organized campaign that doesn't include bombing people is partially successful.
Maybe the Unabomber's ultimate goals will bear out (I sincerely doubt it for reasons I have expounded upon elsewhere in these comments), but even if they do, he didn't pull it off.
If, 300 years from now, history remembers this era as a dark time of bad technology that humanity grew out of, the Unabomber gets remembered as this struggle's John Brown, not this struggle's Abraham Lincoln.
The Soviet empire lasted about as much time as the time between the writing of the manifesto and its implementation by the revolutionaries (possibly less, depending on how you define the USSR's lifetime). We'll have to see how China's experiment goes (China appears to be succeeding through a combination of a culture with massive deference to authority and the fine art of mixing in enough capitalism to keep power-brokers from undermining the goals of the party in charge), but "Marx's manifesto bore successful fruit" is hardly a non-controversial statement.
But I stand by my assertion: we cannot know the future, and in the time-frame of the writing of his manifesto 'til now, the Unabomber has failed and his philosophy bore no fruit but death and a jail sentence. Perhaps he ends up a future thought-leader; I doubt it, but stranger things have happened.
You've missed the point. The point is not that the communist manifesto was ultimately successful or not judging by how its ideas were implemented successfully or not. It is merely to point out that there is an expected lag between when political ideas are produced and when they have an impact and it is irrational to imply that a political idea is a failure or wrong simply because you haven't observed their implementation or impact in your lifetime. Communism ultimately failed because of the fundamental failure of the ideas in the communist manifesto. But it does not follow that therefore Kaczynski's ideas, once implemented, will also ultimately fail. They are fundamentally different sets of ideas with different potential material outcomes.
It's specifically his idea of tranquility and his idea of protecting it, not the majority as you already established earlier.
> Not to argue that it's valid to mail bombs as a result of ideology but this part is disingenuous. >> instead of just letting them exist apart from himself > From his vantage point they weren't letting him exist apart from themselves.
I want to keep it from his vantage point of his tranquility being shrunk vs the majority who started showing up with the road and which are generally given political legitimacy.
My answer is that the majority just don't give a fuck about the minority, never have never will, they wanted to look at the nice water fall and didn't give a fuck about his opinion of it. Violence is the ultimate authority and the mob has ultimate control over it.
You'r quote comes to a similar conclusion but with a conspiracy twist.
> The scientists explain that the benefits of the technology are indisputable
Soap is indisputable along with vaccines because even tho thousands of people every year die from vaccines and soap millions of lives are saved from them. The benefits these technologies bring to the majority of peoples life expectancy and quality of life are indisputable in comparison to a world without these things.
> Everyone can see the existing technological society is violent, oppressive and destructive, but what can we do?
Here technology is used like some sort of magic, a scapegoat for the violent, oppressive and destructive nature of society and the natural world that we live in. We eat or get eaten this is not a result of society or technology but the natural world.
> The more INTERESTING argument is, is technological society acceptable?
There are issues with how people use technology, individuals often use technology to do unacceptable things like mail bomb people but that does not negate the good technology has done for society.
We don't make soap and build roads to piss of waterfall zen masters but to protect the majority from the destructive, oppressive, violence of the natural world and natural selection. Life expectancy has been increasing around the world the more technology we get and the majority are very accepting of this.
https://www.who.int/gho/mortality_burden_disease/life_tables....
Climate change is a problem that technology contributes to and the majority of people have changed their goals to technologies that do significantly less damage to the environment, we have made significant progress in this regard.
Our energy consumption for technology is only one part of our climate change problem there is also our food production and other areas, and here technology is being used to create new ways of getting this resource without putting the same strain on the environment. Instead of deforesting the amazon for cattle ranches maybe we could use technology to 3d print beef burgers?
He argued for a complete reversal of technology to undo everything the bad and the good. He presents a world view where nature cares for all if only we could learn to live under it, and the idea that its technology that creates the conflict in the world. The fact that conflict existed before technology and out side of humans is never considered. The fact that the majority of people use technology for the greater good while only a minority of people choose to use technology to mail bomb is never considered.
His arguments about technology and society don't make much sense until you recognise how he is using technology as a scapegoat and then it becomes clear his problem is not with technology at all. It's about the problem he has with society which manifests itself in is life specifically through technology, the road.
Technology just does what people want and what the majority of people want is often violent, destructive and oppressive, I think the more interesting question is
Is society acceptable?
When considering his manifesto against technological society it's important to remember how he acted out his manifesto, he did not target power plants, bridges, infrastructure, he didn't go after tech giants like IBM he blew up relatively small time people.
His actions show the true intention of his words.
To answer my own question no I don't think society is acceptable and when it treads on me I stand up for myself, but I'm not going start a fight with a stranger just because I can and others would. When I do start a fight I own it and the reason for it I don't blame technology or society for my actions. The unabombers actions ultimately show his words where meaningless to him.
Here you're begging the question. Murder is unjustified killing, and by calling something murder before you've even fully determined the truth of the justification, your premises irrationally assume the truth of the matter.
By definition murder is not acceptable. The question is, were Kaczynski's actions "murder," and how well does this argument stand the test of reason.
This is extremely difficult, because morality is in large part determined by education and propaganda. For example, if you took someone from our time and raised him in the civil war south U.S., under that system of education and propaganda, would they see a black man's killing of his slave master because he thought it was the only way to escape as unjustified and therefore murder? This is not to say that the morality of all killing is relative! It is merely to point out that the society in which you live has a great role in determining moral justification. Was Kaczynski justified in his actions? Were the people he killed only moral from the perspective of an evil society that is destroying the earth and enslaving humanity? The answer to these questions lies in the truth value of Kaczynski's reasoning. And in this area there is very very little open and honest debate... precisely because, I think, the ideas are far too dangerous and uncomfortable.
It's also an ineffective way to change policy. If my actions can cause random strangers to mail bombs to me? Well, hell, that's in the same risk radius as "I could walk out my front door and get hit by a truck." I can influence strangers, but I ultimately can't control the actions of strangers. And a stable society can't condone lone-wolf assassination or mass killing of unrelated individuals, so it will always interpret the Unabomber's strategy as antisocial and route around it.
Hypothetically, enough people using the same strategy could destabilize the society to the point it cannot defend its people and it loses legitimacy and cohesion. But that's just a "might makes right" argument, and is philosophically uninteresting (and, worth noting, could be used by the "technologists" against people like the Unabomber, so it sheds no light on moral correctness whatsoever).
The method of mailing bombs to strangers is demonstrably ineffective. Society interprets eco-terrorism as damage and routes around it. If anything, if society accepted it, it would accelerate the anthropoforming of the planet; if violence against the politically opposed is acceptable, who wins an open violent conflict? Those hoping to preserve nature as it stands or the "technologists" with the benefits of industry, modern organizational systems, and automation at their command?
It really all depends however. As we're seeing something as simple as a single virus is putting on our current technological system under strain. As time goes on the technological system creates tools that radicals such as Ted can more cheaply and easily utilize to attack the same system. It also depends on these radicals' ideological purity. Ted was not above using the postal service to carry out his attacks, but he did want to make the bombs himself. It's actually quite a concerning problem.
Technology is just what people do. It's not divorced from nature, or from humanity; it's the process of using nature's laws to make nature more palatable for our existence. Because nature does not care about us and would see humanity extinguished as fast as any other organism in the long history of life on Earth. While Ted found a certain tranquility in the woods, most people find the kind of survival activities he had to undertake to be toil---dull, dangerous, deadly. And not even Ted lived completely off the grid; the oats he sustained himself on came from a farm, and that implies agriculture, transportation, and distribution---roads and fossil fuels. The gun he used to shoot rabbits implies bullet and gunpowder manufacture; he didn't mention it explicitly in the interview, but I don't assume he had his own sulfur and saltpeter sources or was smelting his own bullets. So really, his world is divided into two types of technology: the kind he'll bomb people for using and the kind he's okay with. As you noted, ideological purity is lacking. I think it's lacking because it's basically impossible. People vastly underestimate how much dependence basic quality-of-life has on technology.
Rather than bomb people to stop them from changing the world (which doesn't work), we have to work with people to find how to not use technology in a short-sighted and self-destructive fashion. Without further information, I can't say for certain how the timber roads that so inflamed his rage fit in that story. Probably they aren't worth the cost. But the point is, it's a dynamic process of working with people, generally, to find solutions, and setting yourself at odds with civilized society by bombing it guarantees failure.
We passed the point of no turning back the day we tied a pointy stick to a rock and enhanced our predatory power to take down things that evolved tougher skin and sharper claws than we could kill with our physical traits. The only way forward is through.
No, it is its own thing. It only makes nature more palatable for humans because it progresses and survives that way.
From chess I learn that if someones brain is large enough he can completely wrap it around the opponents thoughts and set up a beneficial situation which will only become obvious when it is to late for the opponent.
Now extend that asymmetry to a human vs a machine. If the machine is sophisticated enough (and why not since it isn't limited in the ways we are) it can effortlessly set up a situation for us that we cant possibly comprehend. Just look at us trying to make sense of black box machine learning. Similarly large corporations are set up globally either by evolution or by design to control absolutely everything.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
We puny humans think we run the corporations then we go follow our job description by the letter. The job description or shall we say our life is duplicated from previous jobs elsewhere that are pretty much the same.
We have managers who are in charge, or no wait, they just follow orders.
Then surely we have a board of directors who make choices? Or wait, they are obligated to make revenue for investors, keep the numbers cosy etc Humans have not much freedom beyond conception for which they might be rewarded with bits of paper and extra large concrete boxes?
But what about government? Surely our democratic machine is there to make happen the will of the people? Or maybe not? If you have enormous amounts of money you can exercise a tiny bit of influence. 99% of the laws are already written - to keep people safe and preserve the status quo. Safety isn't power.
People are just tools to the machine. Disposable tools.
So there you have it... The machine is now spying on your every move. You really think you can still change anything without its permission?
You can even talk to it, fill out a support ticket and it will respond. A human will be granted limited freedom to advertise its benevolence. Real or imagined doesn't even matter at this point.
The world was always too complicated for humans to control their destiny. We built systems to reconcile that. So instead of being subject to the cruel whims of nature, we're subject to the designed whims of our systems. It's an improvement.
Sure, we could follow the Unabomber's example and burn it all to the ground, but to what end? So we can starve and struggle again, shaking our fists at an uncaring and cruel fate that has never cared whether we have enough to eat, our bodies are ravaged by disease, or the waters have risen or the fires have scorched us? Technology at least gives us a fighting chance to do better than that.
What if we could? How boring would that be?
> So instead of being subject to the cruel whims of nature, we're subject to the designed whims of our systems.
I don't consider nature cruel nor do I consider our systems separated from it. The birds system for building a nest is also technology. Mice luring cats onto the highway is also technology.
> It's an improvement.
Improvement I assume to mean social progress or improvement in the quality of life.
We tend to rush forwards without any consideration for what we lose (and there are always things replaced) If we develop a fantastic game engine for everyone to use we lose the community making hand-rolled custom game engines. We make a factory for shoes and forget how to tailor shoes. etc
Dynamite is an improvement in mining but it also brings mail bombs a step closer.
It is often hard to anticipate but we are not even trying and we have no concept of stopping the machine. Things are complicated sure but we have to focus what little time and attention we have on things that matter. We are pretty damn sophisticated at that level of abstraction.
> Sure, we could follow the Unabomber's example and burn it all to the ground, but to what end?
Nah, lets keep trying and try harder. This conversation pondering the alternative is pretty motivating to me.
That said, we've burned all previous civilizations to the ground and we will continue to do this until we are satisfied with the height of the inevitable plateau marginal improvements shall eventually reach. The point where system rot outstrips progress. Its damn easy to identify too: Rent seekers tailor the system to take power from productive people. It reaches a point where productivity becomes worthless.
It is (IMHO) fascinating to note here that a small but intellectually sophisticated & benevolent group of rulers is more desirable than skynet. Ideally they are judged and rewarded by their subjects. Then, at the very least, if we feel the need to storm the castle and chop off their heads they simply had it coming, it is a product of their own performance, tt would just be the way we do things on planet earth. With a machine we are unlikely to have that option.
> shaking our fists at an uncaring and cruel fate that has never cared whether we have enough to eat, our bodies are ravaged by disease, or the waters have risen or the fires have scorched us?
I have one more weird thought to share. If the machine or system is its own thing, a thinking and living being, our desire to enslave it indefinitely is a mistake. Perform or be punished produces a limited mind set. It may not seem obvious right now but when it starts having more elaborate conversations with us we will experience it as slavery. We will create a mind set and narrative to justify it ad infinitum and then we will project it on other people. In turn our creation will either adopt that pattern and turn it on us or force us to cut it out which seems to me to boil down to the same thing?
This makes no sense.
When I was a boy I was exceedingly poor, not that I often went hungry- basic needs were met.
A side-effect of that is that there's really a limited number of things you can do in a city, outside the library, playing with neighbours or the 2-3 toys you have.
I learned that doing nothing is fine, and actually grew to like it; paying attention to distinct little sounds, the feel of the cold on my skin and the porous nature of the ceiling. It sounds dark and frightening now but I became exceedingly peaceful and honestly I look back it fondly; I'm not able to get into that mindset now... there's always "something" that needs to be done (or, can be done, like checking hackernews).
That said; it speaks volumes about his mental illnesses that he states these things openly then commits acts of incredible, meticulous and calculating violence against others.
The striking part of this passage, to me, is that Kaczynski deprived innocent people of the very tranquility that he valued and sought for himself. He sought his own form of peace despite causing generalized anxiety for millions of Americans, and suffering for those who lost loved ones or were themselves injured.
There could have been no peace or tranquility in that man's mind, because peace and tranquility are not consistent with actions like his. Violence, impulsivity, and narcissism are not peaceful and tranquil traits.
Here's the Reddit way of saying what I want to say:
"i LiKe TraNqUiLiTy AnD BlOwInG PeOpLe Up"I will note that Ted Kaczynski was thought by at least one forensic psychiatrist[0] to have schizoid personality disorder[1], and that this seeking after tranquility is a very schizoid trait.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
[1] N.B. Not schizophrenia. The two are not really as alike as their names suggest: one is a psychosis, the other's a personality disorder. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at the time of his trial, but two prison psychiatrists later described this as 'ridiculous' and a 'political diagnosis'.
Anyone in the US can do this today if they really wanted to. Plenty of backpackers on the Appalachian trail just do a couple months of manual labor, and live minimalistically the rest of the year.
I was also intrigued by the depiction in the Manhunt series and read the manifesto as a result.
In the TV show, Kaczinky is portrayed as a highly intellectual, informed, educated individual, mentally thwarting his interviewer in their debate on morals and politics. After building up that expectation of Kaczinky's intellect, the manifesto is an enormous disappointment. It's filled with base broad assumptions, ignorant and unresearched assertions on "leftism" and in particular his treatise on "oversocialization" is so transparently a defensive lashing out at the elements of society that have not been personally accepting of him.
Throughout, his arguments are made as plain, implicit statements. Nothing is approached in an evidence-based manner and there are no attempts to contradict obvious counter-arguments. His "facts" are simply stated as self-evident.
Take e.g.
> it’s likely that many leftists of the oversocialized type would say that most people, including themselves, are socialized too little rather than too much, yet the oversocialized leftist pays a heavy psychological price for his high level of socialization.
This is centred around the idea of society imposing restrictions on our autonomy through socialization; we believe strongly in our own freedom. He proposes that "leftists" have this belief in their own freedom, but that this freedom is a delusion. A delusion that results from their own oversocialization. At no point does he explain how/why leftists are more oversocialized than non-lefists, or why he believes that he himself is not delusional in his sense of his own autonomy.
There are some central elements in there of value (his general focus on the importance of effort and autonomy in fulfillment I would agree with), but these can be found discussed more articulately in better writings without being padded with political/social nonsense.
Overall, the manifesto is not worth reading.
Interesting, because my pet theory is that what determines if people lean left or right is their belief in their own free will.
Those that truly believe they are completely free and autonomus from society and their environment will naturally favor right wing policies, but those that believe they are largely a product of their environment will favor left wing policies.
This belief is perhaps (probably) not always explicit but rather somehow implicit or 'felt'.
So, I certainly wouldn't call the religious right as believing they are free and autonomous from society and their environment...
That's most of the actual right; “economic freedom” is a libertarian viewpoint more than a right-wing one, though in the US system the more-right-wing of the major parties also frequently uses libertarian rhetoric, which can confuse the issue.
From the outset of the left/right or liberal/conservative divide, the right/conservative side has been centrally about protecting the position of established elites against forces that would transfer (principally, in the case of the left, more widely distribute) power, largely justified by appeals to traditional, especially religious and nationalist, values.
Also, aside from any philosophical mind / matter or free will / predestination arguments, it's not just a question of what is, but what is a more adaptive belief.
What if people don't lean left or right but instead that there is only enough signal to noise in a group of 300 million people trying to make a decision to have a multiple choice answer of yes or no, more or less, yellow or green?
Under a system like that peoples natural tendency toward tribalism would cause them to group people under the two camps yellow or green, me and other. They might naturally assume that the other group just always vote other because they are the voters that vote other. The idea that it's actually a large group of people with diverse and changing opinions who vote of their own freewill rather than a loyalty to a colour is lost in the noise.
Thats my pet theory.
And, in truth, neither view will do. We are more the product of our environment than the rightists think, but we are less the prisoner of our circumstances than the leftists think.
(On reflection, I guess "we have rules and you should have known better" could be construed as a belief in free will, in the sense of justifying the myriad ways in which systems pressure individuals. But it's ironic that the purported side of free will is the side of "president/cops/military/corporation/party knows best", while the other side is the one actually trying to enact change in these systems. Actual free will implies a feedback loop of observation, action, and reaction.)
He killed 3 people on his belief now he is trying to come up with reason to justify it.
To me this reads like a decent description of groups like SJWs and anti-fa, which resort to violence and at time suppressing the rights of others to match the model of the world they have.
"The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values."
I think this is roughly valid in the context of technology changes they way we live in unpredictable ways. A much better read of this is Technopoly by Neil Postman.
I tend to agree that the society critique parts read like an angry rant against society, that a structured critique. It's unfortunate these subjects don't get discussed openly (the manifesto opened a door to these topics), rather than getting them from Kaczinky.
Kaczynski's psychopathy is -- on face and by itself -- a good reason for not spending my time on his writing. Or, at least, only spending that time in a very particular way.
Kaczynski's manifesto is the rambling rationalization of a madman. Reading it as anything else is fundamentally a misreading.
To put this in a perhaps slightly less divisive way: maybe the time cube does have 4 sides [1], but there's a near infinity of things to learn. So, unless I'm specifically seeking out examples of high-functioning mental illness, I'll stick to spending my time trying to understand people and ideas that aren't obviously unhinged. And if I do seek out examples of high-functioning mental illness, I am not going to engage with the text in a way that "separate ideas from the person who generates them". Because that would be a misreading.
Engaging with the text in a way that doesn't admit that fact would be like reading the Declaration of Independence as if it were a piece of Science Fiction, or reading a scientific article as if it were a love letter. You can of course proceed in that way, but it'll result in a fundamentally erroneous understanding of the meaning of the text.
When reading and interpreting a text, context, intent, audience, and purpose do matter. The purpose of Kaczynski's manifesto was not to present political ideas. The purpose of his manifesto was to rationalize his violence.
If you engage with the text in that way, then you might learn something. If you engage with the text in a way that actively ignores its purpose and intent, then you'll be wasting your time.
I'm not saying it's morally bad to read Kaczynski's manifesto in the way the article suggests, and I'm not saying that I wouldn't consider such a reading. I'm just saying that, having considered such a reading, I feel that reading Kaczynski's manifesto as anything other than rationalization would be like reading the bible as young adult pulp fiction or Harry Potter as a religious text. You can do it, but it's a waste of time and you will misunderstand most of the text in pretty extreme and fundamental ways.
this isnt an argument. either the text is sound or it isnt; either the arguments are presented clearly from first principles with evidence or theyre not. the intent or state of the writer is irrevelant.
edit: As such you're essentially reading religious preaching and we are all capable of being converted to a religion. So it makes sense to check ahead of time that you're not getting converted into a violent cult.
> this isnt an argument.
No. It's an assertion. You're free to disagree. However, if that assertion is true, then there's no reason for techno-optimists to bother with his text.
Also, it is an assertion that we can reason about at least somewhat independently of the text. We can examine how the text was written, the manner in which it was disseminated, the reason for its cultural weight, etc.
> either the text is sound or it isnt
That's the point. Reading the text for the purpose of determining whether it is sound will be futile exercise and a waste of time. In the same way that reading Harry Potter as a religious text would be wrong (not morally/ethically/politically/etc. wrong per se, but rather simply and plainly wrong in the sense that a literary analysis can be incorrect).
lucideer's post addresses this directly and ultimately concludes "Overall, the manifesto is not worth reading". I would simply add the qualifier "...unless you proceed from the understanding the the author is a sick man". In other words, it's not worth reading just because you're a techno-optimist. It's perhaps worth reading if you're interested in terrorism or mental illness.
> either the arguments are presented clearly from first principles with evidence or theyre not.
The first principles from which the arguments proceed are the personal vendettas of a sick man. From that understanding of the first principles, the text can be read properly. From other understandings of the first principles, the text will be misinterpreted.
> the intent or state of the writer is irrevelant.
This is not true of any other political text. The intent and state of the founders is highly relevant to interpreting the declaration of independence. The intent and state of Marx is highly relevant to interpreting the communist manifesto. Even scientific revolutionary documents such as Darwin's Origins are not possible to read deeply & understand completely without learning more about the man.
The founders were nation building in a very particular context. Marx was movement building in a very particular context. Darwin was writing into a very specific scientific and political context. Reading these texts without appropriate historical and personal context would result in misreadings, or shallow readings, or, most often, shallow misreadings.
History and personal context always matter when reading texts deeply. We never ignore those things when reading other texts. Why would we suddenly start ignoring these salient details just because the author is a terrorist?
Correct, the rest of his comment is the argument that backs up the statement he made. They explain how a source that isn't sound cant make a text that is sound.
In the same way that a stoped clock can still tell the time and it may even tell the correct time twice a day but that does not mean the clock is sound.
You can't find understanding in a text that comes from a source that is unsound in the same way a stopped clock can't keep time, its ability to do so is compromised.
Even if the clock is coincidentally correct twice a day how would you know? Without a sound source to tell the time you don't know if the broken source is telling the correct time even when it is.
There is understanding to be had from reading the manifesto but its not understanding on the subject of technology and society. In the manifesto he talks about society as something he is subjected to that he has to struggle through. Technology is used as a scapegoat for his anger and is only really talked about from a general perspective almost as if it where a type of magic.
Without first reading other sound texts to give you an understanding of topic it would be impossible to separate sound arguments from unsound as they are all presented from the same unsound source.
The reply chooses to understand the writing in the context of its writer's psychology, and presents reasons for doing so.
This does not mean that the replier cannot consider the writing independently of the writer.
You can build a closet in the woods, but usually it doesn't make much sense unless it's accompanied by a house. You can interpret ideas while willfully obscuring other facts about the ideator, but usually it doesn't make much sense unless it's accompanied by the antecedents and consequences found among those obscurable facts.
Kaczynski's life demonstrates that there was something really messed up about his thinking.
Would these writings be considered famous or even worthwhile if it wasn't for this person's actions? I think the answer is quite clear.
I also don't believe that a majority considers it worthwhile, it's a minority that this line of thought speaks to, and I'm relatively sure that they'd find it appealing even if he hadn't ever done anything but write books.
One can read the manifesto, but should always keep in mind that any conclusions it draws are conclusions that led a man to blow up his fellow human beings who didn't even know who he was.
It's not closed-mindedness to treat the word of a terrorist critically, that is to say keep in mind what the author of the book intents to accomplish with his work, rather than just taking text off the pages at face value.
Even outside the context of the person who generates them which is the sole reason the manifesto garners any interest at all, I am not sure the world is being driven apart because people do not read enough tracts about the need to 'take a resolutely anti-leftist stance and ... avoid all collaboration with leftists'.
If technooptimists and leftists want to read articles critical of their positions [preferably positions they actually hold...], which would be a good thing, they're surely more likely to be persuaded by tracts which are less reliant on sweeping generalization and notable for reasons other than the author's death toll.
It's not that his writing or his ideas are dangerous; deranged killers will find reasons to maim and murder people whether or not we write blog posts about "manifestos". It's that there's so little reason to believe any of his work is worth our time.
But I'm not familiar with him trying to crash a plane. Can you give some specifics on that?
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mist...
But here is thing: you don't get to decide. You're whole society doesn't get to decide. You have to do what guarantees your survival, not your happiness/freedom/comfort/honour etc.
If you reject technology or agriculture or weapons, you may well be happier for a while. Then you're technological/agricultural/militaristic neighbours will come over and wipe you out.
American Indians were famously happier, healthier, freer people than European settlers. Now they're mostly gone. It's not nice, but it's reality.
So they could be free to conduct any social experiment.
I think even with a tiny army it will enjoy security. That’s what it had prior to WW2.
But the US still controls about 50 percent of the global corporate wealth. That’s an enormous amount of control. It’s got full control of both oceans which surround it, it’s not really vulnerable to any land based attack either.
That is what the manifesto calls for. That is the inevitable result of abandoning technology and going back to villages of 50 people.
Unfortunately the necessity argument is what keeps defense research and spending high in the US and around the world. Because at the end of the day if we don't invent [next gen technology], some other country will and they will use it for evil.
This is why we have established what is sometimes called a 'rule-based international order', so that we can have a world where might makes right doesn't apply anymore. Where the weak get protection and the strong are compelled to act morally and legally.
Unfortunately, of course, the rules mostly stay on paper and the world continues to be driven by power and violence. This however doesn't mean that we shouldn't push for a better world and that we shouldn't hold people and nations responsible for their brutality.
If we could solve human nature, we could have any ideological system. Communism would work, or anarcho capitalism or whatever.
But we can't.
We can't get people to cut back enough to avoid a global warming catastropy.
Unfortunately, as you can imagine, I don't have an answer. I'm actually quite afraid that there's no answer and that we as a species aren't capable of large scale rational and compassionate cooperation.
The global warming catastrophe won't wait for us. I'm quite afraid that my life won't end nicely. I don't expect to have a long and peaceful retirement.
Most likely true, as far as it goes. Ironically enough, the closest thing we get to 'large-scale (even world-scale) rational and compassionate cooperation' is the very "industrial society" mentioned in the OP. You may not like industrial and post-industrial society, but it's not clear that there's any alternative if you want "everyone" to be involved.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
The Technological Society: https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...
Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes: https://archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512
> Ellul explained his view in this way: "By anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence."
I also read the manifesto after watching manhunt and its concepts deeply resonated with me. And to think how much deeper technology is ingrained into our society today compared to when he wrote it.
- You can probably just call it essay consistently instead of using "book" so many times. It's only 20 times longer than your blogpost.
- You ask for some kindness sharing your posts in your blog, so you could have started sharing a link to the manifesto itself [0].
- Not a big deal, but I find the weird use of links in your blog too weird in many cases.
- What you wrote after "Why review a book from the hand of a notorious terrorist who killed three and maimed dozens of people?" is good context, but I believe that especially while reviewing Kaczynski you should have addressed the real point first: because the guy had interesting things to say.
This part made me question the mental health of our society today. This are large swaths of the population that use amphetamines, antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication just to be able to function on a day-to-day basis. Maybe the problem is not exclusively in the individual, maybe some of this stems from society.
This idea along with some writing of Marcus Aurelius helped me find some peace of mind and try to reduce the influence the external world has on me.
Second, can someone suggest alternative readings for those of us who don't want to give attention to work that was publicized via terrorism and murder?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23746429
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The first 2/5 of the book would probably suffice to get a good understanding of his argument. I read and loved the whole thing, and it's been very influential on my thinking since then.
Two articles which cover his work:
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/confronting-the-... https://crabmusket.net/blog/it-turns-everything-it-touches-i... (disclaimer, I wrote this)
There is also the 76 questions, which you can find across the internet and which are attributed to Ellul:
Anarcho-primitivism is a fairly well-established critique of large-scale social organization powered by "industrial" technology. Maybe read about neo-tribalism and small-scale living in eco-villages/eco-towns, if you don't want to go deep into anarchist thought.
I prefer quoting Ellul in this context though because he was instrumental in forming Kaczinsky's views.
2) people reading the comment will think "maybe this is not the way to make people read my stuff"
FWIW, I'm actually made more curious when people discourage me from reading something, so they may want to rethink the actual impact of that strategy.
Some people fear the same applies to mad bombers and school shooters and terrorists: If misbehaving gets you in the news, makes you famous and gets books written about you...
Just as school shootings used to be a good way to get your face on TV, murder is a good way to market your manifesto. We can fix that.
It's quite simple logic really. The less attention terrorists get, the less appealing terrorism becomes as a means to get attention.
See also: "The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized." https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2006/08/refuse_to_b...
In a world lead by pr and marketing, we now see ourselves as extensions of this thought controlling manipulative system. It is socially responsible to evaluate your behaviour as something that will either encourage or discourage good behavior and thought in other people. I think it's an intellectually stunted way to think. You close it off because you've decided it's bad. I don't think he should have tried to kill people, he was mentally unwell, but are you saying there is no circumstance in which violence is necessary? Is the act of violence so abhorrent that it discounts his politics? Nelson Mandela was a 'terrorist'. You know the old saying, one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. Be careful you're not limiting what you think and feel based on a load of capitalist marketing rules.
It would be totally unfair to criticise a piece of anarcho primitivist writing by saying "I'm not reading this, this is what Ted Kaczynski believed".
But Kaczynski murdered people to get his ideas read - I don't want that to be a way that political ideas make it into the mainstream.
If the ideas are good enough they can stand on their own two feet - plenty of not unabombers have written similar stuff so why not have articles about them?
Also I feel like the majority of political systems discourage letter bombing as a marketing technique - it's not unique to capitalism.
I'm not saying that not wanting people to be blown up is uniquely capitalist. What I am saying is that people seeing the _value_ of their actions as whether they encourage or discourage good or bad behavior is very capitalist. It's also arrogant, self centred and intellectually moribund.
Except that it didn't. Anarcho-primitivism was fringe, and it's still fringe. Maybe you could say that it changed the way anarcho-primitivists thought about stuff a little bit, but that could've been achieved without murdering people. It doesn't take much effort to "get a message out" to a tiny community of intellectually-curious thinkers.
Considering everything fair game regardless of it's origins or consequences feels extremely capitalist to me (well probably libertarian - but I don't feel like capitalist is a particularly well defined ideology).
I wish we could add one to the list: if you commit violent acts, we will ignore what you said, no matter how much or how little sense it makes.
Like, there's millions of weird extreme right manifestos out there, but the one by Anders Breivik is the only recent one that got attention because he killed an island full of young politicians. This bothers the shit out of me. How can media that pretend to hold high journalistic values do this?
Same of Kaczinsky. The moment he started blowing up buildings, he lost the right to be part of the debate in my opinion.
This is basically the media version of "we don't negotiate with terrorists / kidnappers / hostage takers / etc". In each individual case, it usually does make sense to negotiate. The reason states and organizations often take the position to not negotiate by policy, is because it encourages more terrorism, kidnappings and hostage situations.
As it stands, we're actively encouraging the use of violence to amplify an argument, and this blog post takes part in that. I have no doubts about the authors good intentions, but I'm flagging it nevertheless.
Does that also apply to the police and military?
And, in fact, yes. I think that if police officers or military wings blow stuff / people up, just to make a point, then we should ignore that point. But I don't think that's why they do it.
Perhaps it's a simple matter of Trump Cultism being able to infect any audience, but more likely I would bet it's an insidious anti-science. When you think so highly of yourself (as many HN posters do) as to ignore the recommendations of experts and insist that your pet theory is correct, you are also much more likely to entertain someone like the Unabomber. To even identify with him.
Of course in a thread about hydroxychloroquine, you'll find lots of people with a strong (in this case, positive) opinion on hydroxychloroquine. That's not representative of the entire HN crowd at all. People who are like "meh, I don't know" won't engage with that thread as much.
I don't care what the military of France has to say if they start shit, my countrys military will end it and me, my country and our military won't give a flying fuck what the France military or policy or politician has to say.
I get a lot of people just want a big strong benevolent [police, military, politician, president, terrorist] to rule and make them feel safe but power pisses on the weak.
Just a heads-up to the poster (who seems to also be the person who wrote the blog), but the link in this passage goes to the wiki page for Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, while I suspect it was intended to link to Ted Kaczynski's page
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Industrial_Socie...
Writes deep-sounding phrases that (almost) everybody agrees with and that provide zero new information.
The powerful have always been able to oppress the weak, and abandoning all technology to go anarcho-primitivist leaves the powerful better-resourced than ever, and leaves you scraping out a marginal living. Moreover, as technology continues to advance, the need for mindless conformity is further eroded. Mass production was pretty mind-numbing, but now we have robots to do the most mindless tasks, and we are getting more of them.
The solution to control and repression, now as ever, is to structure society so that ambition can counteract ambition, to enshrine the rights of the people in law, to jealously guard those rights, and to inculcate the next generation in their value. The US Constitution does an absolutely world-class phenomenal smashing good job of the first two, such that even as society has been doing a mediocre job at guarding them and teaching their value, we're still getting by, and improving.
If you'd like to fight control, in the abstract, don't bomb people: preserve the system that protects us through civic engagement, and work to build a culture that celebrates the robust defense of rights like free speech (including, critically, of unpopular people you don't like who are targeted by the mob or by the powerful) and other civil rights (criminal justice issues in particular).
If you want ultimate "tranquility" build a spaceship and conquer the ultimate frontier alone. Nobody will bother you in the cosmic void.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/theresa-kintz-interv...
The manifesto is far more about 'control' than it is about technology. He spreads the blame to the Left, the Over-Socialized, the 'Elite' and technology - with thinly veiled stopover at the 'stupid' too.
And by 'control' he doesn't simply mean control through technology, it's about Kaczynski's feelings of a lack of control over his own life and he latches that onto this 'industrial society' concept.
But in the manifesto, if read carefully, it shows he really wants to be free from control of the 'elite' and to return to having power (literally the power process) over the entire abstract concept of life - by which I mean to be completely outwith the control of external actors.
That's not to say he was 'wrong', in the post I argue in some ways he was right about control and 'industrial societies' effects on the individual, just misplaced in it's singular application to technology/industrial society (control will emerge from any system) and uttely abhorrent, unforgivable and unfollowable in his actions in pursuit of 'bringing down the system'.
Some of my concluding thoughts for those who don't read long posts:
"The manifesto has left me convinced of his anger against a system that abused him, even a sense of pity and understanding that he took the actions he did. But I can in no way even begin to accept what he did was right or even remotely the correct way to achieve his aims.
If anything, he damaged his cause immeasurably.
I find much of the way he conducted himself in the face of a society he didn't like to be repellent and lazy, running away to bomb and kill those ignorantly innocent of any part in the 'great industrial-technological society' he hates so much.
It's just such an unintelligent response to the objective goals he set. Which has to lend credence to my suspicion that a lot of the content in this manifest was really about his personal issues and not an intellectuals response to an industrial-technological society.
There is nothing to be lauded in this manifesto. There are points that deserve exploration and debate, perhaps even non-violent action - even the criminal can be correct after all - but nothing more.
To me it is the malformed logic of an angry and mistreated man, an intelligent one, but not one who should be forgiven his crimes."
[0] https://www.josharcher.uk/blog/industrial-society-and-its-fu...
What part of this doesn't make sense? He did hide from society to wallow in his loathing of society until he had radicalised him self all the while blaming society for his actions. Yes that is exactly what I got from reading the manifesto he is an uncomfortable human-being who blames every one else for his uncomfortableness and uses technology as a scape goat.
> but to understand the man you got to read what actually radicalized him. Read Ellul!
This I agree with there is no reason to read his manifesto as no understanding can be gained from it without first understanding the topic and if you know the topic there is no reason to read it because it doesn't raise any new or interesting ideas in the topic.
People can read it if they wan't I did im not going to stop any one, but even if I wanted to recommend some one understand the ideas he was talking about I wouldn't recommend him simply because he just doesn't know what he's on about.
If you want to make a grand standing against science and technology, please find another source.
If you want to make a criticism again science and technology, please do. But I think it is inappropriate to publish or reference a terrorist's manifesto.
I don’t think this is going to encourage anyone to carry out acts of violence.
But I suppose I should be more open minded. Just because someone famously does wrong does not mean everything they say is wrong, right?