I don’t understand why people are so fascinated with talking about the ideals of insane serial killers.
There are plenty of other highly intelligent individuals with the same ideologies to discuss. Why glorify a murderer?
So surrogate activities replace the authentic struggle for survival. I can get that. But why is the struggle for survival better? Isn’t it just another game?
Kaczynski like many other romantics rails against the system, but isn’t nature just another system? It’s an older one that we didn’t design, but didn’t we learn in the end that the matrix was inside an even older matrix which was inside an even older one…?
What would it even mean to escape the “system?” How can you do that except death? If you are breathing you are playing some kind of game.
Instead the question is: can we exercise some choice over what systems we give our energy to and can we influence these systems? I do think we give our energy to a lot of dumb pointless or even evil systems today, so how do we turn our attention elsewhere?
For the natural system of subsistence hunting and gathering or farming the answers to these questions are “no” (little choice, play or die) and “no” (the system is billions of years old and isn’t even ours). We have more choice today in our complicated mesh of systems, or at least we have the potential of choice.
This is ultimately a big part of why I am not a primitivist, reactionary, or traditionalist. Sure what we have sucks sometimes. Are we sure it was better back then? Or was it just different? I always want to ask “trads” of various types if they are sure they would be happy in the traditional state they imagine.
Maybe the people who railed against nature and sought to command it with science to escape its constraints were malcontents not entirely different from Kaczynski in their emotional and personality structure. Send Ted back to 1400 and you might have an enlightenment radical materialist.
If you combine this with his notion of the power process, surrogate activities ultimately unsatisfying in the context of that. Modern man lacks the ability to fulfill the power process, and surrogate activities is the result. Kaczynski draws arrows from the fact that that man lacks autonomy and fulfillment of the power process, to surrogate activities, then to various societal problems (of which he enumerates many).
So, the point isn't that surrogate activities is the terrible end state to be avoided at all costs, it's what results when they're load-bearing at a societal level.
What I really think is that most humans have never had meaning. They’ve just been too busy surviving to stop and think about it. When societies get rich enough to afford time to think and universal literacy to discuss then we start noticing that life is “meaningless” and discussing the metaphysical emptiness that was always there below the surface.
Huxley’s brave new world is accurate but is neither brave nor new.
You always get a faction that thinks the absence of such discourse in the past meant we had meaning back then. They’re wrong.
Going back in time to when we were still deeply embedded in the “power process” or whatever you call it is no different from drowning yourself in TikTok or MMORPGs. It’s just another way to stop thinking about big deep questions that in fact have never been solved.
We do not truly know what we are, where we came from, if we truly have any “purpose” beyond just catalyzing the dissipation of energy, whether consciousness ends at death or has some eternal component, etc. We can have various religious and spiritual faiths but these do not come with proof. The honest ones tell you that up front.
Becoming too busy to care, whether in the old traditional way or some new way, does not change this.
I think yogic/buddhist enlightenment or nirvana is freedom from constraints due to nature.. the solution (as far as I understand) is essentially a state like death or physical non-existence but somehow still fully conscious and absolutely blissful
I listen to all sorts of music and I love them. More often than not the artists are degenerates and drug addicts. I hate it but I can still enjoy the genius of their music. For example, Nirvana. Kurt committed suicide but his music is genius. Does not mean i gloirfy suicide or worship Kurt.
I think this might be a part of what Ted was talking about.
Ted was actually a very interesting thinker, very underrated in my opinion, and definitely misrepresented.