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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.