It's frustrating how he articulates so well the problems of modern society as it pertains to progress in human development, equality, and the environment, yet his actions were essentially the result of personal grievances against coworkers he didn't like. If only the 80's had twitter he'd be such a great poster.
Not really. It's a lot of disorganized nonsense with a high noise-to-signal ratio. Random excerpts:
> 14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.
> 15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
> 22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
> 35. Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical necessities of life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are made necessary by the climate. But the leisured aristocrat obtains these things without effort. Hence his boredom and demoralization.
Are those "random"? It seems like you chose them pretty specifically, actually. You seem like you're inching towards a point here, but not quite making one. Maybe you can expand a bit?
> 77. Not everyone in industrial-technological society suffers from psychological problems. Some people even profess to be quite satisfied with society as it is. We now discuss some of the reasons why people differ so greatly in their response to modern society.
> 97. Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what might be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a “free” man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual. Thus the bourgeois’s “free” man has economic freedom because that promotes growth and progress; he has freedom of the press because public criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders; he has a right to a fair trial because imprisonment at the whim of the powerful would be bad for the system. This was clearly the attitude of Simon Bolivar. To him, people deserved liberty only if they used it to promote progress (progress as conceived by the bourgeois). Other bourgeois thinkers have taken a similar view of freedom as a mere means to collective ends. Chester C. Tan, “Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century,” page 202, explains the philosophy of the Kuomintang leader Hu Han-min: “An individual is granted rights because he is a member of society and his community life requires such rights. By community Hu meant the whole society of the nation.” And on page 259 Tan states that according to Carsum Chang (Chang Chun-mai, head of the State Socialist Party in China) freedom had to be used in the interest of the state and of the people as a whole. But what kind of freedom does one have if one can use it only as someone else prescribes? FC’s conception of freedom is not that of Bolivar, Hu, Chang or other bourgeois theorists. The trouble with such theorists is that they have made the development and application of social theories their surrogate activity. Consequently the theories are designed to serve the needs of the theorists more than the needs of any people who may be unlucky enough to live in a society on which the theories are imposed.
> 116. Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society’s requirements: welfare leeches, youth-gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds.
No need to be ominous. Those topics are forever the high-noise, high-politics topics. It's not eyebrow-raising to find them in this kind of manifesto, or for somebody to disagree with them.
I haven't read it in years, but I think 35 was part of a bigger argument that past a certain point everything in modern life is either impossible or trivially easy to achieve, so people seek outlets in hobbies, etc. Not universally true, as anyone who's ever job hunted or quit smoking knows, but not just thoughtless rambling.
For the most part the underlying observations are hard to disagree, even if you disagree with the conclusions.
14: - Yep this is quite off. I disagree.
15: (Some) Leftists do operate under a slave morality, which does lead them to morally binary modes of thinking, resulting in things like supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine (because America is an imperialist, illegitimate state and therefore NATO is too).
22: Not unique to leftists - the political machine demands conflict to justify it's own existence
35: Mazlow's hierarchy of needs. This is undisputable. Why do billionaires waste money on backyard space experiments and vacuous social media platforms? Existential boredom and ego.
Reading Kaczynski is a little bit like reading the Bible: you shouldn't take everything literally but instead think about what's trying to be said, and you should ignore some bits.
e.g. paragraph "15" is excessive and inflammatory, but he wasn't wrong that some people will try to find fault for anything that happens in the West while ignoring much greater crimes in other countries. See e.g. all the HN posters who trivialize China's problems while attacking the US (I'm sure this thread will have some of those types of comments, too). This point also wasn't original to Kaczynski, e.g. George Orwell also wrote about it, as did many others.
Also remember much of this was written an era when people were literally collaborating with the USSR and East-Germany out of "socialist ideals" and (rightful) anger over the shady activities of the CIA or FBI, while also ignoring that those countries were significantly worse in almost every way.
Dang, I am not sure he is wrong. His comment is snarky, but there are reasons to think that the explosion of social networks has led to a major mental health crisis, especially among the young, and it may indeed be true that social networks are optimized to make you angry, depressed and resentful.
The FBI of course giving the credit to their "linguistic analysis team" and "fearless investigators" when Ted's brother literally turned him, told them where he lived, and that he had talked about bombing the targets in question.
Many, if not most, murder investigations are resolved by confessions, or someone turning the culprit in. Absent that, after...I want to say 48 hours, the police know that they should essentially write off the case. There are obvious exceptions, especially if there's public notoriety (crudely, young white coeds or "sexy shit"), but most murders are poor drug addicts murdering other poor drug addicts.
Source: worked 2 years in DC as a freelance reporter, was ultimately not successful there, but soaked up a lot of stories/cynicism
I guess he is a hero? I hope he didn't mail you anything before he died. He had a grudge and took it out on random people. He survived longer in prison than he did in nature. Weird/Toxic lifestyle, IMO.
I you talk big, you must act big. You can't go around using a post office and subjecting yourself to prison time and lawyers. It's as simple as that. Otherwise you are not pure and sane and a real naturalist. In fact you're insane and a hypocrite living in prison for ~40 years.
Can you zero on a particular espoused belief and how he practiced other than he preached? What specifically should he have done differently that would've made him not a hypocrite?
I'm honestly trying to figure out what your point is.
Credible? Absolutely - I wouldn't have read his manifesto had he not systematically engaged in the premeditated slaughter of human beings. That doesn't make his methods not reprehensible.
I think it's worth thinking about how climate science during the 80's and 90
s (at least) was suppressed by the very companies that were in business to profit from practices that actively harmed all life on Earth. There's rarely justice against huge multinationals. It's just business as usual.
I don't condone domestic terrorism (especially with so many innocent hurt), but I also don't condone climate change denial for shareholder profit. Is that ever going to stop? Given the velocity already created, I would say: not in my lifetime.
It's not about forgiveness, it's about the story. MKUltra is a critical factor in this tale. And from a journalistic and social point of view, society would be a far better place if more people knew about MKUltra [1] than do. Beyond that it's also important to ever emphasize that actions have consequences which may not always be easy to predict. One of the countless reasons Machiavellianism is absolutely idiotic.
They still do it. It's still under the cover of front organizations. It's called research. They usually target people that don't follow the grain. One group that is targeted are expats, nomads, etc... Due to the rules/laws/regulations that don't apply because their subjects are traveling and in a temporal state and are abroad they can get away with much more.
No. The only thing that's really documented is that he participated in a psychology experiment at Harvard.
People have alleged that it was part of MKULTRA, but there's nothing to support that beyond allegations and some circumstantial things (e.g., Murray consulted for the OSS on a profile of Hitler during the war). There were also just a lot of unethical experiments done on people in the 50s and 60s.
Isn't weird that Ted hasn't written about this? I mean, based on his writing style and ideas skipping talking about this experience as a lab rat seems like a missing piece of a specific puzzle.
This. The CIA story is likely based on the fact that Henry A. Murray did work for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. Kaczynski may have been taking part in the experiments that led to the creation of the Thematic Apperception Test. The CIA may have been interested in the results of these experiments as all intelligence agencies are.
This line of thinking has always puzzled me. At some point one’s brain must be so compromised that we really can’t expect them to function as a human, but most people’s reaction to that is “excusing” their behavior.
If you’re willing to admit that they don’t really have self-agency at that point, don’t they become an object at that point? Like we would have no problem putting down a dog that bit a child, let alone a dog that blew up buildings. The only reason we’re so accepting of putting down the dog is its lack of human status.
In our courts, claiming insanity seems to give you a defense against crimes you’ve committed but also maintaining all the rights and privileges of personhood.
Not really. Temporary insanity maybe but I think that’s harder to prove. Insanity pleas get you sent to a medical prison where they keep you low on zombifying drugs.
A big chunk of his manifesto reads like very personal grievances because it probably is. He’s doing the usual defensive thing of globalizing and generalizing something that is actually profoundly personal. Kaczynski was a victim of unethical human experimentation.
You'd have a point if other subjects of MK-Ultra allowed a similar trajectory as Kaczynski. Were there other cases of self-destruction? I don't even know how many people were subjected to these experiments.
MK ULTRA stopped in 1973 as far as I know. Claiming that Britney Spears’ mental issues are caused by this seems novel and I’ve never heard of this before. Do you have a news letter I can subscribe to to hear more of your insights?
The program continued under a different classified name. Spears gave testimony of abuse by various doctors during her trial. You’ll have to decide for yourself if you think this is related to mk-ultra or not, but many do. There’s also circumstantial evidence surrounding the Mickey Mouse Club and widespread abuse of child actors stretching back decades including everyone’s favorite intelligence asset: the late great Jeffery Epstein.
The modern conspiracy theory version of MKUltra is known as "Project Monarch"[0,1]. Basically that various celebrities are being conditioned by "trauma based mind control programming" to engage in satantic ritual sex slavery for "the elites."
I saw Charles Manson and a few others on the MKUltra Wikipedia page but they use phrases like "alleged", "according to author...". Without an idea of the sample size of people subjected to experimentation it's still inconclusive.
I’m sorry, is your point that MKUltra experimentation on people isn’t proven to be bad for them?
Unexpected high doses of LSD, attempts at programming, manipulation and what can only honestly be described as torture… the CIA destroyed all the records of this and because we don’t have complete records we just have to make a big shrug and say “ah well JKCalhoun isn’t convinced, guess it’s not bad for you.”
What would it take to convince you that dosing unexpecting people with high amounts of LSD could have a detrimental effect on their mental health, possibly making people crazy?
> is your point that MKUltra experimentation on people isn’t proven to be bad for them?
Not at all. Rather, drawing a line backward from Kaczynski's bombing spree to experiments done on him as a part of MK-Ultra I think is questionable "science".
I don’t think it’s science, but if you read about what was done to him, it puts a big asterisk by the discussion about how he could do such evil things.
Kanye West was drugged by his Personal trainer Harley Pasternak who has connection to Canadian Military where he talks about using mind-control drugs on soldiers.
Realistically, the CIA will not release full details on MK-ULTRA for another couple generations, so we will never get official confirmation of the alleged names in our lifetime. There is a starting list here under "Notable subjects", although presumably there are subjects that were just vanilla murderers and subjects that tried (and hopefully succeeded) to live a normal life[1].
When this information is finally released, the people around for that will say "wow, the CIA used to do some real evil stuff against our own people, good thing they would never do that these days!" as the CIA carries out some absurd level of evil that makes MK-ULTRA seem like a fender bender.
Why? Different people react differently to things. Especially psychologically. What might be merely uncomfortable for one person could push another person over the edge.
Melting the polar ice caps, killing most if not all life on Earth, is also wrong. While Ted overstepped his boundaries on a man-to-man basis, the argument can certainly be made that it's _more_ wrong to see the wreck of this sick society and where it leads (death to all Earthly life) and doing nothing to stop it.
I don't agree with Ted's actions that directly hurt other people (not random people by the way), but god damn he was hurting too. We should all feel the same pain he felt. The world would be better if we did, and maybe then we could kick our addiction to finite resources and short-term monkey-brain thinking.
The problem he realized was that there's no political solution. Bombing people is obviously wrong but if you're convinced that humanity is heading down a destructive path then doing whatever you can to stop it makes sense, where the damage/suffering of the bombings would be comparatively (way) less than letting said future play out.
The one thing I still wonder about Ted is actually how many more actually good and thought provoking "manifestos" like his are out there, only for nobody to push them to in the public's eye.
After all, almost all smart people that identify uncomfortable truths won't go to extremes to convince strangers of actually giving their non-mainstream ideas a chance.
There are way more Ted K's running around today - it's just that you don't need to kill people to get heard anymore. Nowadays the spectacle of ruining your own life is enough to get noticed. Anyone with an internet connection today has access to world stage provided they are interesting enough. Back then you'd need to catch the eye of a producer for a mainstream news broadcast to get any coverage. Now you can just fire up a camera and there's a 50% chance you'll end up on a podcast circuit and end up talking to Joe Rogan.
I'm skeptical enough though (having read books about the Zodiac Killer, for example) that I see it just as likely to have been an unexpected opportunity that Kaczynski exploited.
I guess I'm not surprised that a murderer, enjoying their new-found public lectern, might engage in rationalization of their murders.
And yet people in this internet age still go on shooting sprees and leave behind "manifestos".
My take away is that there are and always have been sick people. Citing lack of a megaphone shouldn't even be a sliver of rationale for a murderer's behavior.
Terrorism isn't marketing? Marketing is all about advertising your ideas and changing people's ideas. 9/11 wasn't marketing for Al-Quaeda?
Even if he was purely driven out of self-interest and ego, the result of his actions is that today we are discussing his ideas when we should be working.
I think it comes down to order of operations and intent. If we knew that he first had a manifesto to present, then decided to murder strangers to draw attention to it then I grant you it was terrorism as marketing.
> Between 1978 and 1995, Ted Kaczynski engaged in a mail bomb campaign[4] against people involved with modern technology.[5] His initial targets were universities and airlines, which the FBI shortened as UNABOM. In June 1995, Kaczynski offered to end his campaign if one of several publications (the Washington Post, New York Times, or Penthouse) would publish his critique of technology, titled Industrial Society and Its Future, which became widely known as the "Unabomber Manifesto".[6]
In a sense, he used the murders as a marketing strategy, but honestly it was more of a threat to force his manifesto to be published.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that "manifestos" are inherently elitist. I'm only aware of manifestos coming from people who speak with an air of self-importance. Kaczynski seems no different.
Had the American revolution not succeeded it would be relegated to being classified as a typical rebel manifesto that people basically do not care about
It's just a name; might as well call it a "book", "publication", "article", "website", or "blog post". It's also a name given by the FBI and the media, not Kaczynski himself.
The notion that industrialization and modernity in general bring about feelings of profound alienation has a rich lineage of philosophy and storytelling going back to the dawn of the modern era.
Nietchze, Carl Jung, Marshall McLuhan, William S Burroughs, Franz Kafka, Fritz Lang, PK Dick, Stanley Kubrick, Jared Diamond, Pink Floyd... this list could go on for a while.
He was literally a murderer... no one like that deserves a black bar here even if they did make important contributions to technology, sciences, and/or engineering
Edit: In all seriousness, it's been a while since I read it. His general ideas are that technology has been a disaster for humankind because, among other reasons, it's freed up time for us to be preoccupied with unimportant bullshit, to the point that it causes mental problems with people. People start to act out in various ways in resistance of our current state because we 'know' somewhere in our bodies that this existence is meaningless. People without the luxury of free time do not have to preoccupy themselves with this struggle for meaning.
He also goes on at length about how leftists are self-hating people and worship victimhood, and their mentality is partly a product of this existential dilemma.
But these are just a couple of points I took away. It's much more well-written than I could personally attempt to summarize in an internet comment.
It's really that. He falls for the same trap many modern critics of progress do: the nostalgia for a world that never existed, when men lived meaningful lives in peaceful harmony with nature... juxtaposed with all the purported moral, societal, and environmental decay of today.
Many people find it alluring today, but the themes are evergreen. They crop up in ancient Greece, in the Middle Ages, and throughout history.
Misplaced nostalgia aside, another problem with most such ideologies is that the prescription for returning to that utopian bygone era inevitably involves force: the premise is that our minds are too corrupted to understand what's right. Whether that's blowing things up or taking away your rights is just an implementation detail.
>He falls for the same trap many modern critics of progress do: the nostalgia for a world that never existed
There's the opposite problem most have: the inability to understand that there are people who have actually experienced the past (within their lives) and might prefer it for reasons other than the cliche "they were young then, that's why they like it" compared to the present.
And that, depending on your inclinations and ideas about how to live, it's not true that nothing better "ever existed".
>is that the prescription for returning to that utopian bygone era inevitably involves force: the premise is that our minds are too corrupted to understand what's right
Well, the future comes at people with force too. People thrown out of employment into poverty because of technology and being told "just learn to code" for example.
Or things getting integrated with the state and business world, and becoming increasingly necessary to have, even if you don't want them.
I’ve mentioned before and there was a thread yesterday about a modern Usenet which I think falls into this line of thinking. In the early 90s there was an egalitarian messaging system that wasn’t actively and continuously abused. I would love to be able to be in a world like that, however, that world can’t exist again (at least not in the way it did).
If your ideas of how to live include less childhood mortality, and long and healthy lives, then I doubt there is a better time than the last hundred years (except probably the next hundred years).
Everyone alive has only been in a modern time. Now what characteristics you want your world to have, certainly many people are fighting for different visions. The idea that a particular balance of corporate and legislative power is inevitable is just the messaging from those corporate powers. And it isn’t more than PR - when society gets unbalanced enough, you get changes even if most think it is impossible. Anything from the French Revolution to the end of Apartheid.
>If your ideas of how to live include less childhood mortality, and long and healthy lives, then I doubt there is a better time than the last hundred years
And if your ideas of how to live examine other metrics, there are much better times in the past.
Especially since if changes to bring back aspects of the past that were better were taken today, it wouldn't mean we have to give up technologies that improved the mortality rates. How about that, huh?
In fact, even if your ideas of how to live are solely about less childhood mortality and long and healthy lives, you might be better served with a couple decades past:
No other metrics really compare to chance my children will die early.And I lived a couple of decades past, and I am happy to still be alive, and looking forward with interest to the next few decades. If you don’t enjoy your time here, consider therapy, biking, a religious community, meditation, and a strong social network.
I do particularly look forward to the highways being dug up and rewilded, while we get around with Cat Buses or blimps or jet packs. I didn’t get the idea you were advocating that we improve what we have; it came across as what we have sucks and we need to go back, back to the closet, back to less power, back to less information, back to the culture of conformity for the powerful and the culture of fear for the oppressed.
Sadly, it seems that for one to be taken seriously as a thinker, it takes minimal coherence, median compatibility of ideals with the readers and maximal violence in advertising yourself.
I didn't read it like that, it was more like "I don't want a six lane highway in front of my house", "Oh, you're just against progress and modernism, so shut up", "Ok, maybe I blow your shit up"...
Something that blew my mind long ago was learning the scottish highlands used to be a massive forest. Ancient humans clear cut the entire landscape and it still hasn't recovered. That sort of broke the illusion of there being some forgotten past of arcadian perfection, where we lived in one and balance with nature. Humans have always been humans. Exploitative, expansionist, perfectly willing to destroy our long term prospects for short term gain. At least in modern western societies we have the power to recognize this part of ourselves, and put aside areas like national parks free from our grasping fingers.
That is post-agricultural revolution humanity. Sure it is ancient by the standards of an individual, but it is only a relatively recent and small part of the more than 100 thousand years of human pre-history.
Okay but humans did this in a ton of environments pre-agriculture. The Amazon was a large grassland with patches of forest that tribal peoples shaped into a giant rainforest over time. This is thought to be the case with tons of places in the old world as well. Humans have been doing mega engineering type stuff for at least 20-30000 years
I think you are forgetting that the "modern society" you are familiar with is not ubiquitous and in our present moment there are many people that lead completely different lives than you. If you are not ignorant of this, then you are supposing that no one in a different circumstance may prefer it and fight for it.
The real summary isn't just technology bad. He claims mankind as evolved is not compatible with the industrial world we have created therefore humanity will never be able to adapt to it. In order to force adaptation he then lists all the ways those in power will attempt to do so from psych drugs to pleasure bribes to gene editing in order to remove this trait of mankind of needing personal power over one's own destiny so we can better adapt to being serfs in the industrial world (his claims, not mine). He lists numerous scenarios where we will be an unrecognizable species in the future serving the machines too, many of them familiar like how medicine will become too complex to understand so reliance on machines to cure us of problems which in turn becomes irresistible to those in power to make us even more dependent on them for survival.
He also is definitely not any kind of primitive man utopia shill, that's why he rants in the beginning against 'green anarchy' type ideology. He is more of an evolutionist saying even if we returned to primitive life before the industrial revolution we would at least still be human and would have to accept all kinds of terrible things that come with primitive life as the alternative is being a spiritless organism serving machines (again his ideology not mine).
There is a section "The Future" which talks about Artificial Intelligence (AI):
The author postulates that if computer scientists develop intelligent machines that can do all things better than humans, all work will be done by machines and no human effort will be necessary.
There are two possibilities: either the machines make all their own decisions without human oversight or human control over the machines is retained.
173. If machines _are_ allowed to make all their own decisions, it is impossible to predict the outcome and the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. The author suggests that society may become so dependent on machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of their decisions, eventually leading to a stage where machines are in effective control and turning them off would amount to suicide.
174. If human control over machines is _retained_, the average person may have control over certain private machines, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite. The elite will have greater control over the masses and because human work will no longer be necessary, the masses will be superfluous.
If computer scientists do not succeed in developing artificial intelligence and human work remains necessary, machines will still take care of simpler tasks resulting in an increasing surplus of human workers at lower levels of ability. Employed workers will face ever-increasing demands and will need more training, ability and conformity. Their tasks will be increasingly specialized and out of touch with the real world.
The author envisions scenarios where machines take over most important work while humans are kept busy with relatively unimportant work in the service industries, which the author finds contemptible.
The author acknowledges that the outlined scenarios do not exhaust all possibilities but indicates that if the industrial-technological system survives the next 40 to 100 years, individuals will be more dependent on large organizations and their physical and mental qualities will be engineered into them.
Technology is creating a new physical and social environment for humans that is radically different from the environments to which natural selection has adapted the human race and humans will either be adjusted to this new environment by being artificially re-engineered or through natural selection.
179. The author concludes that it would be better to dump the whole system and take the consequences.
(That was all summarized by ChatGPT. I have removed concluding sentences from some paragraphs containing deeply pessimistic motives of insubordination, enslavement, and extermination)
Yes. Someone linked the manifesto in an HN thread ages ago, and I found more level-headed and thought-provoking than I would have imagined from someone able to commit such evil acts.
I do not agree with everything he wrote in the manifesto, and certainly not with his violent methods, but it's stuck with me in this era of naive techno-optimism which I find myself more disillusioned with by the day.
If the name on the front page was not of a murderer, I truly believe it would be recommended reading in schools and philosophy clubs.
As a very progressive person, I quite enjoyed his critique of the modern Leftist ideals and why they would create the factionalism and alienation we see today; he's not arguing as a 21st century conservative, but as a third position that is not represented by any mainstream camp. I had to read the manifesto of a killer to remind myself that there is more social critique to explore than the binary Liberal vs Conservative that's all the rage in our politicised world.
> As a very progressive person, I quite enjoyed his critique of the modern Leftist ideals and why they would create the factionalism we see today, and he's arguing not as a conservative, but as a third position that is not represented by any mainstream camp.
Realistically his opinions are held by a substantial amount of people that most would label conservative, although it's not mainstream conservatism for sure. And certainly not mainstream republicanism.
As a non American, the dichotomy that is all the rage nowadays is two camps whose position is literally just "we hate everything the other side loves".
The point of Kaczynski is that both camps are mostly composed of middle-class Western academics living a sheltered life that are deciding who is socially accepted and who need to be cancelled. Our culture wars are not minorities shouting for a better life, our culture war is made of middle-class white people getting offended on behalf of minorities. They are no Martin Luther King, no Malcolm X, they just are posers that are making the racial (and gender and sexual) divide even worse than it is, by polarising or alienating the silent neutral majority.
This is a longer argument that's put more eloquently in the manifesto than I could ever write on a comment box.
Kaczynski was a middle-class Western academic who tried to literally cancel the lives of those he deemed unacceptable, which included people from both camps.
Thank god there's a divide, otherwise I would be obliged to agree with you.
And most of his arguments about the Left specifically is the generic list of conservative/right-wing characterisations of the Left (obviously the rest of his philosophy has little to do with conservatism, mainstream or otherwise!). Leftists hate strength and rationality. Leftists only pretend to care about minorities. Leftists are self-hating losers who are afraid of competition
Genuinely amazed someone identifying with the Left would find these ideas interesting, and if so, they're going to love the deep philosophical musings on leftism offered by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Ron de Sanctis!
Both are murderers, that doesn't mean they have the same ideas or ideals.
Breivik is a right-wing fascist obsessed with racial and religious purity, Kaczynski's manifesto is critique of the Industrial Age not very distant from any 19th century anarchist essay. I'm not sure if he got more politicised in his later work, I'm only talking about that document.
The point I'm trying to make is that people are more nuanced than your observation is trying to imply.
I think primitivism is a later invention. Certainly Kropotkin is very pro-mechanization. If there is a point of contention, it's to do with ownership, not technology itself.
"Right" or "left" wing is entirely meant as a sweeping generalized insult these days. The words are otherwise meaningless.
Or more, they only mean whatever the person speaking them means to say.
Example: Some of the most infamous acts of violence of the 20th century were sanctioned by a left-wing radical. Or a right-wing radical. It simply depends on which specific ideals you want to vilify when you by associating them with Hitler.
Were the 2020 US riots were ultra surprising to you because they mostly left wingers burning cities and violently declaring demilitarized zones, or were they "meh" because right wingers are the only violent ones?
This "third position" is basically anarchy, or anarcho-primitivism.
It's not really a political position, it's more like a pathological insistence that civilization should be destroyed. Kaczynski went as far as saying we're biologically wired to live primitive lives and we're misusing ourselves in perversions that he calls 'surrogate activities', which include science and art. To him, hunting or trying to survive while being hunted in the woods is the perfect utilization of the human mind-body, and we should all abandon society and go do that instead.
I'd say it's more about autonomy, self-sufficiency and freedom, rather than just "living primitive lives". Technological progress tends to stifle all of the above, in the grand scheme of things.
Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Compare that to a car which is manufactured somewhere far away with tons of special expertise and which basically cannot be repaired by a layman anymore (as opposed to not too many decades ago). And you rely on a huge infrastructure network for building and maintaining the roads.
There are probably better examples (horses just came to mind). We tend to choose the more "advanced" option because it seems more convenient, without considering the externalities of that convenience, whether that's pollution or handing over part of our self-sufficiency in order to do so.
Something like a Carrington event would cripple us and cause utter chaos. Just think of the huge amount of technology that we rely on in daily life and it's not changing direction. At all. We are not becoming more resilient, we're becoming less. We are quickly losing the skills required to adapt to a "lower" level of technology, meaning any quick disruption in the system could be catastrophical.
Technology can potentially enable us to have more freedom, autonomy and self-sufficiency, but for it to be sustainable it would need to be at the top of the decision-making tree.
Right now it's mostly a balancing act between convenience and affordability on behalf of consumers and profitability of producers. And well, mix in some environmental concerns (but those tend to be secondary as well as almost always reactionary).
And yes I'm probably somewhat of a neo-luddite. I take pride in being self-sufficient, to the extent possible. And I'm more than willing to sacrifice convenience for freedom. Technology creates more boundaries, rules and bureaucracy, not less. Technology controls us, rather than the other way around.
>Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Compare that to a car which is manufactured somewhere far away with tons of special expertise and which basically cannot be repaired by a layman anymore (as opposed to not too many decades ago). And you rely on a huge infrastructure network for building and maintaining the roads.
How about the externalities and technological advancements nessecary to domesticate wild horses, and also the infastructure networks which drove the need and ability to create a ship capable of transporting those horses across the Atlantic ocean to America, where they are not a native species.
> How about the externalities and technological advancements nessecary to domesticate wild horses, and also the infastructure networks which drove the need and ability to create a ship capable of transporting those horses across the Atlantic ocean to America, where they are not a native species.
Would've been easier had your example played out 10k years ago when there were still native horses in America. :)
For domesticating horses, it doesn't rely on huge factories. You need basic tools (stone would suffice) to cut down some trees in order to create an enclosure where you train the horses. Then basic tech like cloth and rope making, and/or leather, for making saddles and bridles etc. Nothing a couple of people can't cobble together with basic knowledge. No reliance on huge complicated factories and supply chains or tech unobtainable by resourceful people, locally.
For ships we've been building various boats for ages, with very simple tools. Building a small boat is something a single person can do in weeks to years depending on the size. And larger ones is mostly a question of adding more laborers (engineering calculations and considerations get more complicated with size so there are practical limits built in).
Making iron helps in both cases. That doesn't require a ton of technology either but granted it's quite difficult to bootstrap. Still, once up and running doesn't take more than a small community to maintain.
Ideally, in my mind, any "acceptable" tech should be manageable by a community of 150 people or less. I keep coming back to the Dunbar number whenever I think of human systems/societies.
Your questioning bring up an interesting comparison point:
Wood as building material vs. plastics. Wood being 100% recyclable plus it literally grows on trees, while plastics require immense knowledge and expertise in chemistry and raw materials include fossil fuels. The externalities for the latter are huge and will thus require an immense amount of interconnected people and technologies to create and maintain. Way more than 150.
I do also realize that there are edge cases where distinctions become difficult, but that's the case with everything. The main idea here is that I think technology should be judged on a spectrum of self-reliance/freedom. Defining a hard limit in the middle can be difficult (or impossible). Although, not impossible or necessarily even hard if the community of people deciding where the limit is is small enough.
> Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required.
Ok A) I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow, horse or no, unless you were in the Great Plains or smtn.
B) saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some” is like saying all you need to get a car is “simply build one”. Do you think the untold millions who died (and continue to die) of starvation in subsistence-farming based society were just dumb? It’s hard, dangerous, luck-driven work, assuming you don’t get killed by animals or other humans.
> We are quickly losing the skills required to adapt to a "lower" level of technology, meaning any quick disruption in the system could be catastrophical.
Disregarding the fact that modern population densities in most of the western world would make subsistence farming impossible, why is self-sufficiency an unquestioned virtue, so much so it gets to be up there with heavyweights like Autonomy and Freedom?
To illustrate my concerns more explicitly: If I invented a machine that could make any material or object appear instantly, would you destroy it, under the logic that it’s better to remember how to struggle? Or more near term, are you strongly against the prospect of interstellar travel?
I thought I clearly stated that people tend to choose out of convenience, just like you're pointing out:
> I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow
I never said it would be faster or easier.
> saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some” is like saying all you need to get a car is “simply build one”.
Yes! And you cannot build a modern car. You could, say, in 1940 (probably over quite a wide range of decades), but try building one now and getting it road-legal. You are arguing my point.
> Disregarding the fact that modern population densities in most of the western world would make subsistence farming impossible
I don't want to disregard that since you are yet again furthering my point. :) Our blind quest at throwing technological solutions at problems have lead us past this irreversible point (among many others). Money and greed made farming into huge corporations and technology (fertilizers made using fossil fuels) was one of the main tools to achieve that. To grow beyond the point of self-reliance.
This is why the realization of this tends to lead to the necessity of some kind of destruction - downscaling has simply gotten (seemingly) too difficult.
> why is self-sufficiency an unquestioned virtue, so much so it gets to be up there with heavyweights like Autonomy and Freedom?
I had a paragraph that I edited out in the end about many people not caring about self-sufficiency - many naturally gravitate towards relying on others. I thought I loosely covered this in the end paragraph by mentioning that I take pride in self-sufficiency, as did Kaczynski.
But also it becomes a basic incredient when you expand the scope of systems to small communities of people, rather than just one or a family. Or larger. But! The important idea is that the smaller the community of self-sufficiency is, the more resilience it has.
> To illustrate my concerns more explicitly: If I invented a machine that could make any material or object appear instantly, would you destroy it, under the logic that it’s better to remember how to struggle?
To assess the values and virtues of technology I think it should be judged in terms of characteristics like:
- can I create it myself (tools, raw materials, licensing)
- can I repair it myself?
- what's the life-cycle and if not practically infinite (Ship of Theseus) how much of it can be recycled/reused/repurposed?
- etc.
So if your material synthesizer relies on a proprietary miniature fusion-reactor with the proprietary tech owned by a multinational conglomerate where, once humanity has grown to rely on the device will effectively be enslaved by it, I don't think it's that great of an idea (although the tech by itself sounds awesome). I wouldn't destroy it, but I think it'd be a terrible idea to adopt it worldwide.
If however it was powered by open-source tech, where any reasonably equipped small factory can produce spare parts for it, that sould like it could be quite a revolutionary thing!
> Or more near term, are you strongly against the prospect of interstellar travel?
Not sure how this is more near-term but no, I have nothing against interstellar travel, that seems like the obvious thing for any life form to do - to try to propagate outwards/further as much as possible.
However! All life forms also tend to respect the boundaries in the environment and find an equilibrium. Animals tend to stay where there are resources available to sustain them. The problem with humans is that we, using our large brains and us-vs-them views, use technology to expand at the expense of everything else. If we were to solve this conundrum and find a happy balance, we might not even want to venture out to the stars (for much more than redundancy purposes as a species).
Our planet is quite an incredible place, as is our minds. If we'd started looking more inwards we mig...
Thank you for the very in depth explanation! Very interesting, and you’re one of the first people on this site who has coherently presented a world view that I’ll be thinking about for a long time.
I would say we fundamentally differ on basic assumptions, which I would perhaps characterize as: I think the world/universe is an inhospitable place that needs human cooperation to stave off some of the immense suffering it naturally causes, whereas you see the natural order as a fundamentally satisfying one. I guess when I say it like that it sounds like the obvious justification for primitivism, but still, your points are well received and novel to me.
The perfect expression of that is the “magical object-creation machine” and your decision that no, you would not embrace/encourage it (presumably such a thing would be far too complex to make or repair alone). Im personally thinking less about resilience than of people dying of cancer, a child without enough food, a family shivering in a harsh winter, etc.
Maybe another angle is “what is the purpose of life?” I’d say it is (at least partially) to reduce suffering in ourselves and our fellow man. I’m curious, if you have any more time - do you see your “natural balance > cooperative advancement” ethos as a better way to reach the same goal, or would you express your aim differently?
I agree with your entire comment, as another neo-luddite, but take exception with:
> Technology creates more boundaries, rules and bureaucracy, not less. Technology controls us, rather than the other way around.
Technology how it's wielded today, by lobbyists and government, controls and rules over us. But technology is a tool, and there is an unexplored problem space of using technology not to separate us from nature into rigid control structures, but to enhance our lives, to actually let us live longer, in harmony with nature.
Technology is neutral, but has mostly been used against us and this is becoming unsustainable and unacceptable.
" You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required."
Nope, only in steppe-like environments, where horses are native.
If anything, technical civilization tends to de-fragment environments worldwide. You can drive the same car in Patagonia or Borneo as long as the road is there, and your phone will use the same stack of communication protocols.
Of course, it has externalities. The question is how these externalities can be mitigated. But a humanity numbering 8 billion people can't realistically think of individual self-sufficiency at a scale, and not even tribes of hunters and gatherers, 1000x less numerous, were ever composed of self-sufficient individuals.
We might be more fragile than our ancestors, but we also gained some other forms of resiliency that they didn't have. Humanity actually passed through a bottleneck event about 70 thousand years ago.
Yeah but you're bringing up a kind of chicken/egg problem, where if we had thought about this properly from the beginning we wouldn't have ended up in a situation where we are now slaves to the technology, as in not having enough farm land for everyone without industrial fertilizers relying on fossil fuels, or not surviving without the car/truck infrastructure like you mention.
The initial adoption of those technologies should've been discussed and decided through a different lens rather than through convenience and monetary profits.
And now that we're past the point, any solution would involve destruction of some sort. That's a large conundrum.
> It's not really a political position, it's more like a pathological insistence that civilization should be destroyed. Kaczynski went as far as saying we're biologically wired to live primitive lives and we're misusing ourselves in perversions that he calls 'surrogate activities', which include science and art. To him, hunting or trying to survive while being hunted in the woods is the perfect utilization of the human mind-body, and we should all abandon society and go do that instead.
Which isn’t crazy if you strip it of its politics and just consider the lifestyle itself.
Many people latch onto what are effectively caveman diets (especially that). And other people justify doing whatever “weird” stuff by saying that it works similar to how we used to do things, like defecating in a squat position instead of sitting on a throne. And indeed, some of the biomechanics are corroborated by findings that tell us that “sitting is the new smoking”.
Then you have the deluge of news about how you literally can’t do anything, ever, in modern society (lightning, food, air quality) without giving yourself X and Y (bad stuff).
That “caveman” philosophy is basically the most conservative approach to living that exists; better the evil you know than the evil you don’t (modern society changing all the time; see for example smart phones which are quite new).
Of course, the caveat to the above paragraph is that we don’t truly know how to “caveman” since we didn’t grow up like that. So it’s not strictly true that it is an uber-conservative approach.
Where anarcho-primitivism fails is that we’re seven billion people on this earth, way too many to go back to hunting deer and rabbits and whatever. The Unabomber figured out that he couldn’t simply make the individualistic choice (see: liberalism) of going out into the woods and start living by himself, because the found out that Civilization would encroach on him. And what’s a hermit got to say to the federal government giving him an Eminent Domain claim or whatever it’s called?
I kinda think that caveman life was inherently temporary, as we advanced toward organized society. You could destroy society and information, sending us back into a caveman lifestyle, but it would only be temporary as we would immediately start to climb back toward organized society. Organized society emerges out of the drive for survival. As you seek to secure food and security for your group, you build tools and you become weary of neighboring groups. You compete, you iterate on tools and strategy, you develop borders and politics, and eventually we’re back to some kind of global infrastructure, with everything standing in a complex tension where it’s no longer easy to expand quickly.
> Organized society emerges out of the drive for survival. As you seek to secure food and security for your group, you build tools and you become weary of neighboring groups.
Ask an anthropologist if this is true.
You’re effectively just saying that whatever the status quo is right now, that’s what we naturally gravitate towards.
I think that we would get back to “organized society”, yes. But for different reasons. (Basically: more population density leads to agriculture which leads to food stores which leads to a ruling class that can hoard the food stores which leads to things that can be raided (what’s there to be steal from hunter-gatherers except for slaves?) which leads to competition, and so on.)
> I think that we would get back to “organized society”, yes.
This is roughly what I meant to express. Didn’t mean to imply we’d return to where we are now, but ultimately the drive to survive and thrive would bring us back to some kind of organized society.
My core point being that “cavemanship” isn’t some kind of stable state like Kaczynski insists. It’s an ephemeral/unstable state on the way to some higher level organized society that balances tensions.
Really “cavemanship” was small tribes with basically a socialist economy and that only scales so far, what we have today is 14,000 years worth of societal progress towards social structures that can support more than 150 people who all live together and know each other. If we fell back to that state we'd start developing past it as soon as there were enough resources available to support more than that amount of people - the end result might not be what we have today, but it probably would be more similar to it than to the starting point.
> If the name on the front page was not of a murderer, I truly believe it would be recommended reading in schools and philosophy clubs.
I disagree. His ideas are not novel or new. There are large bodies of work around the evils of technology, increasing polarization, isolation, disconnection from nature etc. Leftists are trending toward authoritarianism is old hat. It's all pretty standard stuff. There have been literally hundreds of popular books and films about these very subjects.
The only reason people are reading it is because he murdered people. He said as much:
“In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.”
You can get everything he said elsewhere, without accidentally or intentionally lionizing a murderer.
Out of curiosity, have you ever heard of operation condor? project mkultra?
As far as I know from studying history, it's impossible to win (= survive as a culture against encroachment from different cultures) without violence.
Today's mantra of pacifism and non-violence is just propaganda from current governments (all of which were originally installed through bloodshed, and kept in power through never-ending bloodshed) to keep the masses impotent and avoid being toppled like their predecessors
Interesting you mention MKUltra as one of the reasons claimed for Teds "extreme" personality is because he was unwillingly drafted into and forced to participate in MkUltra.
I had no idea that he may have been part of MKUltra. Thanks for that rabbit hole!
As I’m reading through The Devil’s Chessboard (recommend a few weeks ago in another thread) I’m increasingly despondent about the “people”’s role in the US (i.e. we are now just chattel for the ruling class), and I haven’t even gotten to MKUltra yet!
>"and avoid being toppled like their predecessors"
Ok. You topple one. If you do not create a replacement government you will have people preyed upon by violent gangs when eventually one become powerful enough to form new government. And if you do you are back to square one. So maybe it is better to try to fix what you have while trying to avoid violence. I am not telling it is always possible but at least it can be a goal.
As far as I know from studying history, it's impossible to win without violence
The threat of violence can be both effective and nonviolent. Every battle is won before it is ever fought- and by corollary, it is possible to win without ever having fought.
Heh. When I think of "nonviolence" I think of Gandhi and MLK. Maybe I should really be thinking about Edward Teller and the RAND corporation?
I'm not sure who would define "orthodox" nonviolence (ahimsa) -- maybe Mahavira? -- but whichever definition we chose, I suspect it would differ from yours on the subject of threats.
Not that you're wrong, necessarily.
But you can't play by only bluffing, can you? In optimal (say) poker play, the different actions, including what amounts to bluffing, are all chosen with some probability (a "mixed strategy"), fundamentally at random.
> As far as I know from studying history, it's impossible to win (= survive as a culture against encroachment from different cultures) without violence.
Have you ever read Jewish history? That's a culture that has survived for millenia, without perpetrating virtually any violence between the time they were exiled from Israel and the time they took over Palestine, while facing constant discrimination and violence against them.
Not to mention that their culture set the foundations of the two biggest religions on Earth today.
Even if Ted Kaczynski is in the top .1% of people worth listening to, which I don't think he is, that means that there are millions of people with equally profound ideas. You should prioritze learning from those people first rather than one who resorted to violence as a means to spread his message.
It hardly matters if millions of people have equally profound ideas if there's no way to reasonably seek those ideas out. I'm quite certain a lot of knowledge is lost to the ether as very few people have the ability to think about things very deeply, and of those that can, even fewer are able to articulate them, and from that small group, an even smaller group of people are able to actually turn those articulations into something accessible to everyone else. Then it's a matter of how anyone else can find those things. A lot of the times it can't be found.
Frankly, I don't see any reason to gate keep my own curiosity. Moral filtering just breeds ignorance.
His premises aren’t grounded in reality, and his conclusions don’t follow logically from his premises. It’s also lacks humanity or empathy.
It’s an interesting read, because you can really see a broken mind at work, but there’s really not anything to learn from the ideas themselves. E.g., his mental model of “leftists” is truly bizarre. It would be funny except I know what it lead to.
He can't even define who the leftists are and even admits it.
> Our discussion of leftism has a serious weakness. It
is still far from clear what we mean by the word “leftist.”
There doesn’t seem to be much we can do about this. To-
day leftism is fragmented into a whole spectrum of activist
movements ...
> To the extent that it is defined at all, our conception of leftism is defined
by the discussion of it that we have given in this article,
and we can only advise the reader to use his own judg-
ment in deciding who is a leftist.
So yeah, just pick whoever you want as leftist. Some characteristics of the leftists:
> He tends to be for gun control, for sex education and other psychologically “en-
lightened” educational methods, for social planning, for affirmative action, for multiculturalism. He tends to identify with victims.
Wow, sounds like those leftists are pretty cool, actually intelligent people!
Seriously, I could make fun of this shit all day, but perhaps I'll do something more productive.
Reading his manifesto at 14 after seeing endless newspaper descriptions of it as incoherent, rambling, crazy, etc. was an eye-opening moment for me:
I found the manifesto to be lucid and well-argued.
In a moment of shock I realized you can't trust the newspapers, at all -- a judgement I hold even more strongly today, with a few decades more of experience.
I'd encourage anyone who hasn't to read it themselves and form their own opinion!
> I found the manifesto to be lucid and well-argued.
> For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.
To paraphrase 'ole ted "You see, affirmative action makes white people feel bad and mad at black people which is the real secret goal of leftists".
Do you, or have you ever, felt mad a black person because of affirmative action? I can even grant that you think affirmative action was a bad idea for any reason you like, that's not the question. The question is, did it make you or anyone you know mad at black people? My guess is anyone mad at a black person because of affirmative action would still be mad at them without it.
This is what people mean when they say it's incoherent. He rambles for several paragraphs offering no evidence for his position (after all, he was pooping in a bucket in the middle of the woods... so not much opportunity to cross reference things). The examples he comes up with are laughably dumb.
I don't mean this too harshly, but maybe you reread the manifesto with a more critical eye. 14 is too young to be reading stuff like this critically. You simply weren't old enough to spot the bullshit.
> To paraphrase 'ole ted "You see, affirmative action makes white people feel bad and mad at black people which is the real secret goal of leftists".
No. It's more like "Leftist activists push AA and other policies with no concern for the impact on the communities they're purportedly intended to help."
> Do you, or have you ever, felt mad a black person because of affirmative action?
I'm pretty sure you could find a ton of people who do if you searched for it. But even if the harm wasn't real I think the point is that activists don't care about collateral damage.
> I think the point is that activists don't care about collateral damage.
I disagree mainly because of this:
> Helping black people is not their real goal.
It's a weakening of Kaczynski's argument to say it's about activists not caring about collateral. His point is more that "leftist crave power and hate themselves so they'll push policies to punish their race and social class using a moral justification. These policies actively hurt those they are supposed to help"
He absolutely mixes in there insinuations that this is all by some secret design. He spends ungodly amounts of paper writing secret about the motives of the leftist.
> It's a weakening of Kaczynski's argument to say it's about activists not caring about collateral.
Maybe, but what you say here isn't supported by the bit you quoted.
That bit actually seemed completely level headed and well written. He defined his terms (leftist) and admitted it's a sloppy term, and then he wrote something I feel is true about most political ideologues - that they care more about their arguments and winning than the correctness of the arguments or value of their opinions.
> He absolutely mixes in there insinuations that this is all by some secret design.
Again, maybe in the overall manifesto, but not there. In the quote provided he just says "Xs works for the goals of X, even if their message is 'Save the Ys'"
That's not hard to believe, it's something we all need to try to avoid in our own thinking.
> ungodly amounts of paper writing about the motives of the leftist.
:D Have you ever read what leftists themselves write? You could fill libraries just with analyses of Marx.
I think the scary thing is that Ted is very well read and could be writing for the New Yorker ... and he justifies violence.
But not because he's the only one doing so, he's just the one who decided to take it into his own hands instead of the acceptable ways to call for violence - to advocate using our military to do it, or hoping that someone 'punches' them for 'being a nazi'.
He's scary because he disproves the narrative of a barely literate, ignorant, conservative-adjacent, god-fearing, terrorist who hates us because of our freedoms, or whatever. He is us, one of the best of us at one time, and we can be vicious.
Yep. I read this last year after watching some Unabomber related show. And there are interesting ideas in there about technology and society, but a lot of it is just dumb shit.
>To the extent that it is defined at all, our conception of leftism is defined by the discussion of it that we have given in this article, and we can only advise the reader to use his own judgment in deciding who is a leftist.
"You'll know one when you see it" is lazy handwaving for a guy who spent this much time blaming leftism, and it conveniently sets up the reader to rely on their own prejudice when determining who belongs to his problem group. Pass.
This sort of rhetoric is SUPER old and really common in conspiratorial thinking/circles.
It has it's roots in antisemitism and is likely older than that. We've been having pogroms for centuries because of the fear of what outsiders might be doing behind closed doors. [1]
not sure why people are so surprised he got some things right or was at least able to create compelling arguments for this ideas, the guy was a legit genius. Got into Harvard at 16, youngest math professor ever at Cal Berkley at the time he was hired
I know I am stereotyping, but you're describing for me exactly why he was probably emotionally immature.
Maybe related to something like Piaget's theory of cognitive development, I believe that if you advance too fast intellectually, there are other things, developmentally, that are trodden on, or left completely behind.
Ironically his manifesto is apparently what led to FBI arresting him.
> The big break in the case came in 1995. The Unabomber sent us a 35,000 word essay claiming to explain his motives and views of the ills of modern society. After much debate about the wisdom of “giving in to terrorists,” FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno approved the task force’s recommendation to publish the essay in hopes that a reader could identify the author.
> After the manifesto appeared in The Washington Post, thousands of people suggested possible suspects. One stood out: David Kaczynski described his troubled brother Ted, who had grown up in Chicago, taught at the University of California at Berkeley (where two of the bombs had been placed), then lived for a time in Salt Lake City before settling permanently into the primitive 10’ x 14’ cabin that the brothers had constructed near Lincoln, Montana.
> Most importantly, David provided letters and documents written by his brother. Our linguistic analysis determined that the author of those papers and the manifesto were almost certainly the same. When combined with facts gleaned from the bombings and Kaczynski’s life, that analysis provided the basis for a search warrant.
I'm one that believes that advances in technology aren't necessarily a plus for society. We have a brain that was tuned for survival over millions of years. Our ancestors survived therefore those surviving traits were passed on to us. Technology is changing our environment in an evolutionary blink of the eyes. Our brain cannot adapt fast enough so we will use those survival traits as our technology gets more powerful. Survival in the past has mostly meant force. We literally fight to stay alive and that means we create ever and ever stronger weapons. Technology has already shown that we can and have created weapons that can destroy earth as we know it. New technology will only make that worse since we have never invented any new tech without ultimately using it for war. No, tech is not necessarily a plus for society and our world.
My issue with reading Kaczynski, which I have not but have an idea of his manifesto, is that he was trying to bring about change through force and destruction. Through out the history of men, force has always been a temporary fix. It may seem like a relatively easy fix but once force is removed, we all return to whatever the force was trying to change.
The only way change can thrive is through consensus. The majority needs to agree that a change should happen. That type of change is very time consuming, messy and long. But it's the only way to bring about long term change.
There are better more deserving thought-leaders that people should read. Kaczynski is not one of them. His actions should really erase him from history rather than praise him.
User californiadreem posted a few authors on a comment here that can get people started.
It's weird reading the first page and realizing that this was written in 1995. I didn't get a sense that any of these would have been relevant at that time in the country I was living though it seems highly relevant today everywhere. The problem seems to have spread like a contagion.
Anyone who disagrees with Kaczynski's ideas because they came from a convicted terrorist should read the works of Jacques Ellul instead, of which Kaczynski's was largely a popular reduction. The Technological Society is the clearest influence on Kaczynski's manifesto, but Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes is possibly more pertinent in this day and age.
Ellul was a professor, a pacifist, and a Christian anarchist. Attacks the ideas, not the man.
unless you can show with substantive research that there are some ideas that cannot be held by violent terrorists I don't see why that would color these particular ideas.
People are human and not logical, purely rational (whatever that would mean), data machines. We're emotional. I can certainly understand the perspective when the above commenter has seen the pain and suffering that those ideas, threaded amplified through either mental illness and/or pathological personality, led to. Okay, maybe Kaczynski had some points that resonate and concur with other more respected scholars and critics, but it is quite difficult to dissociate his ideas from his actions, especially when one can easily find others who did not violently kill and maim others with the same ideas.
The substantive research is all of human psychology, biology, and sociology.
It's not their ideas, exactly. It's their moral judgment.
See, the unabomber manifesto was essentially a moral argument. "These things cause damage" is a moral observation. (Because how are you going to define "damage" without moral judgment?) "Therefore we should destroy technology" is a moral judgment (because you can't get there without the moral judgment of "humans should not be damaged").
So, the point is, I'm not going to trust the moral judgment of a murderer. Every fact he says in the manifesto may be correct. But his moral judgment is self-evidently terrible. And he reaches his conclusions through that moral judgment.
That still does not imply we should listen to people like Kaczynsky or take his ideas seriously. He sux and should not matter. If someone else with better decisions making recond expresses same ideas in another context, we can listen to him.
The only thing that distinguishes Kaczynsky from, well, any random dude, are the bombs. Otherwise he is a no one. And random dude that did not send bombs makes more sense to listen to.
Ted's claim is that these people must die because they are propagating suffering via technology.
I don't see how "but proponents of technology died" is an argument against his claim that stopping technology will stop suffering caused by technology.
It's not really about intellectual honesty or validity, but about morality.
The only reason any of us are discussing Kaczynski now is because he sent those bombs; he would almost certainly be an unknown if he had not. This gives us an moral quandary, because do we really want to make murderers famous, even when they have something interesting to say? Won't this incentivise future acts of murder and terrorism?
And for what it's worth, I read his book and I thought it raised interesting points, but I am somewhat troubled by this, and I can 100% understand if someone would choose different, even more so if they personally know one of his victims.
I never intended to make an argument against Kaczynski's ideas, I'm just pointing out that people could have reasonable moral objections against distributing his work. It's "negotiating with terrorists" kind of stuff. Whether his ideas are good or bad is an entirely separate matter.
> We can have an intellectual dialogue without devolving to "this made me feel bad therefore you're wrong!"
The people who are dead or wounded feel very bad indeed. And I never said you're wrong, either, or that Kaczynski's ideas are wrong.
See, Kaczynski's theory is also about morality. He's complaining about the damage that technology does. Well, why do we care that it does damage? That's a moral question, not a scientific or technical one. He's making a moral argument.
So, if he's making a moral argument and murdering people, that means that I for one am unwilling to trust his moral judgment. It means I can't trust him when he says that we would be better off without technology. I can't trust his whole argument, because it's primarily a moral one.
I am writing now as earnestly and charitably as possible: could you tell me how what I wrote is a personal attack?
I want to engage on HN in a productive way and I do not mean to personally attack anyone.
I think the reason you were able to link to so many instances of me personally attacking someone is because I genuinely do not understand what you consider a personal attack. I thought I was arguing against ideas and statements, not attacking anyone individually.
I'd consider personal attacks to be ad hominem, which is exactly the opposite of what I am trying to do in my comment — I am trying to point out what is and what isn't a logically valid and argument.
Would you please help me understand? I'd like to learn and be able to engage in a manner that is accepted.
No it's not. It's a technical term which means that the person is knowingly making an argument that is not valid.
See the definition of validity [0] in logic.
When I say they are "intellectually dishonest" I mean they are attempting to persuade others with an appeal to emotion in a subtly-crafted paragraph that looks like a rational argument, but technically is not a rational argument --- because it is invalid --- and they know it is invalid.
They are attempting to win by emotional persuasion rather than a series of rigorous rational conclusions.
How my statement that someone is intellectually dishonest is a personal attack, I do not know. Perhaps people skip over the "intellectually" qualifier and jump straight to the "dishonest" part?
"Knowingly making". You don't know. And, in fact, I wrote the comment that you were replying to, and I was absolutely not knowingly making an argument that is not valid, and I still disagree with your argument where you claim that it is invalid.
You're not psychic; you're not omniscient. You're wrong sometimes. And you're wrong here in your judging of my honesty.
And when you act like you can judge what you can't, and you judge negatively, and you say so publicly, that is at least indistinguishable from a personal attack.
So: Calling someone dishonest is almost always going to be considered a personal attack, whether you intended it that way or not. And if you do it here, it will eventually get you banned. Attack the logic or the data, not the person's intentions.
I'm sorry, I'm still not trying to personally attack anyone. I didn't even realize my comment would be interpreted as offensive rather than a statement of fact.
This is the definition of intellectual dishonesty according to Wikipedia:
"Intentionally committed fallacies in debates and reasoning are called intellectual dishonesty."
I read your argument as "this man emotionally affected me via a personal connection I have, therefore his argument is invalid" and interpreted it as a logical fallacy. I assumed you made this knowingly because that is like a super basic logic 101 fallacy. I wasn't trying to personally attack you or say anything about your character or intellect. I was just trying to point out that you had committed a logical fallacy and that I assumed you already knew this.
I've replied to you more fully at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36277721, but want to mention something here too. The problem with what you're saying here is that word "intentionally". You can't know someone else's intent from internet comments. Overwhelmingly, when person A says something negative about B's intent, B will react with hurt feelings, anger, or outrage, because they don't think that was their intent at all. (This is exactly what happened in this case, as you can see from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36277408.)
It will get you a very long way indeed if you simply remind yourself that you can't know someone else's intent and edit your comments until they no longer include any assumptions about intent. If, in addition to that, you make your comments without pejoratives (and especially without pejoratives that have anything to do with other commenters), you should be in good shape.
I believe that you're sincerely asking for clarity here, so I hope this helps!
On the internet, combining a second-person pronoun with a pejorative is going to come across as a personal attack.
Even this:
> what you have written is intellectually dishonest
is likely to land as a personal attack.
Moreover, (1) you can't know whether someone is being dishonest because you can't know their internal state. Nobody says to themselves "i'm being dishonest right now", so a comment like this is almost always going to get flamewar-style pushback, which is what we're trying to avoid here. Also,
(2) you don't need this! You can make your substantive points entirely without calling names, getting personal, etc. If you'd please do that in the future, we'd be grateful.
While this is totally understandable, it's also an example of the Identfiable Victim Effect. Kaczysnki's actions are humanly understandable with the ability to impute human motivations. He intentionally maimed and killed people.
Yet, from a utilitarian perspective, I honestly don't know if intent matters when we're talking about third-party maiming and death. Our society disrupts and injures the bodies, minds, and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, if not billions, on a daily basis.
And in that sense, Kaczynski, Ellul, or really any dissident of the status quo could, can, and do point out victims of society that outnumber Kaczynski's by several orders of magnitude. The victims are not directly and immediately visible, don't have power-holding advocates, and have little to no incentive to disrupt their own lives to discover, let alone undo, the causes of their problems. And if they do, they encounter a system most unwilling to listen or change.
All of this contributes to these innocents being left unmourned and the causes of their tragedies, like minefields for future generations, left unresolved (Kaczynski mails mines and dies in prison; Kissinger sows fields of mines and lives to be a centenarian and the eldest diplomat).
For an example directly related to maiming, consider the allegations of SawStop. A technology was invented to prevent serious maiming when operating table saws in 2002. The inventor attempted to license the technology to manufacturers only to (allegedly, their lawsuit was dismissed due to supposed tardiness in filing) encounter a cartel among tool manufacturers that colluded to prevent adoption of the technology because it would become obligate to all models to prevent legal liability, which would largely eliminate budget saw models.
The number of finger or hand amputations in the US annually is in the thousands, for one type of tool.
Or consider meat packing (excluding power-butchering injuries that typically include hand and finger amputation):
"There are many serious safety and health hazards in the meat packing industry. These hazards include exposure to high noise levels, dangerous equipment, slippery floors, musculoskeletal disorders, and hazardous chemicals (including ammonia that is used as a refrigerant). Musculoskeletal disorders comprise a large part of these serious injuries and continue to be common among meat packing workers. In addition, meat packing workers can be exposed to biological hazards associated with handling live animals or exposures to feces and blood which can increase their risk for many diseases."
And this is an industry where undocumented workers are prioritized because they lack the language and advocacy to receive adequate compensation and legal protections.
Even something as benign-seeming as a Nalgene bottle follows a similar kind of delayed statistical violence. BPA, shown to be independently unsafe, gets replaced with Triton, unshown to be anything. Triton is effectively an analog with likely xenoestrogenic and endocrine disrupting capabilities, yet can slip through a loophole with decades of profitability before the externalities start directly emerging.
I lost my grandmother to ovarian cancer, likely caused by long-term use of asbestos-laced baby powder. A certain corporation gets a single $9 billion penalty for poisoning millions over decades; I and countless others lose their family members. This corporation's gross profit last year was something like $64 billion.
Now I also understand the argument that if industrial society has caused these things, they have also enabled untold material prosperity globally and billions of additional lives to live. Maiming, industrial accidents, and toxicity are the price to pay for this and they all "happen" to be the aberration rather than the norm, with constant incremental improvements as circumstances allow.
And yet, I think I'd rather have less sophisticated stuff and fewer unhappy ...
who knows who Kaczynski would have ended up as a person if not for the horrible, abusive mind control experiments that he had to endure through in his early adulthood.
He stopped because he was arrested. At that time they found two completed bombs in his cabin, so he was planning to renege on his deal not to plant any more bombs.
I'm not claiming to know the timeline, but he could have built them before "the deal", then made the deal and decided not to plant them.
Innocent until proven guilty. There is more than enough evidence to put away Teddy K for life. Lean on real evidence. Don't stretch the truth and muddy the waters for the innocent. Your line of reasoning could be used to convict the innocent.
There was only one live bomb found and he did intend to use it.
> Kaczynski replied Penthouse was less "respectable" than The New York Times and The Washington Post, and said that, "to increase our chances of getting our stuff published in some 'respectable' periodical", he would "reserve the right to plant one (and only one) bomb intended to kill, after our manuscript has been published" if Penthouse published the document instead of The Times or The Post.
Don't do victims of terrorism a disservice by suggesting a mass murderer deserves the benefit of the doubt as to whether he has any qualms about reneging on "deals" made with a society he doesn't respect. His calculus for who got to live and die hinged on factors as arbitrary as nitpicking over which periodical was willing to publish his bullshit. He was a fucking Narcissist to the extreme, who would waste no time coming out of retirement at the next perceived slight.
"Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply to the fucking Unabomber. Bombing people is kind of his thing. He proved it, what, 16 times?
Just because he bombed people previously doesn't mean he intended to do it again. You have to have stronger evidence, like writings or postage stamps, to prove beyond reasonable doubt that these two bombs were going to be planted. (I'm not arguing this evidence doesn't exist.)
I don't get what the big deal is. We already have more than enough evidence from his previous plantings to convict him as a bomb planter and put him away for life. Is it just that you can't compartmentalize and separate the two things in your mind?
Yeah but I only have to come up with a reasonable doubt.
It's analogous to coming up with one counterexample to disprove something in mathematics.
I can reasonably theorize that he fully intended to stop bombing people based on this "deal". There. Done. I can doubt he planned to bomb people in a reasonable way.
The onus is on you to remove all reasonable doubt. You have not done so by simply showing that there are bombs in his cabin. He could have built them before he made the deal to stop bombing people. That's a completely reasonable scenario.
>Again, that's the standard for criminal punishment. Not moral judgement.
I never said anything about moral judgement. I was never talking about moral judgement.
> And have you heard of civil law? Despite the high stakes that's usually decided based on the preponderance of evidence.
Unrelated. Please, do share a link where Ted Kaczynski was convicted of a crime in connection with the unplanted bombs in question, because that's what I have been talking about in this entire string of comments.
I am exonerated by fact. Ted was not convicted of a crime for the unplanted bomb because there was insufficient evidence to do so. End of story ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
> I never said anything about moral judgement. I was never talking about moral judgement.
"Just because he bombed people previously doesn't mean he intended to do it again. You have to have stronger evidence, like writings or postage stamps, to prove beyond reasonable doubt that these two bombs were going to be planted."
"He is doing moral judgement and that one requires only reasonable probability."
"Yeah but I only have to come up with a reasonable doubt."
Aren't those lines all replies in order? Then you're using "reasonable doubt" as a couterargument to a moral judgement.
I should have made it more clear that "Yeah but I only have to come up with..." meant "With respect to what I claimed..."
Sorry, I really am trying to be as charitable as possible with my interpretations of these comments.
I just hate to see people conflate emotion with logical soundness and validity. Appeals to emotion are human and valid and expose interesting points, but I can't stand to see them used to tear down the intellectual value (whether or not something is logically true) of ideas.
> I should have made it more clear that "Yeah but I only have to come up with..." meant "With respect to what I claimed..."
That's fine with respect to your claims, but it means your claims can't be used as-is to counter other claims that aren't on the same framework. Those people aren't trying to convict him.
> I just hate to see people conflate emotion with logical soundness and validity. Appeals to emotion are human and valid and expose interesting points, but I can't stand to see them used to tear down the intellectual value (whether or not something is logically true) of ideas.
I don't think anyone is doing that in this thread? "he stopped because he was arrested" isn't an invalid takedown of his ideas. There was a mention of ideas further upstream, but from that comment on they don't come up.
I'm not defending him. I'm simply stating the fact that him having a bomb in his possession is insufficient evidence to convict him of the crime in question.
I am exonerated by fact. The prosecutors did not have enough evidence to convict him of a crime related to the live bomb they found.
What are you going to do to argue against that? Deny history? It already happened. He wasn't convicted.
I didn't even call you out, yet here you are acting like you've been personally attacked. You weren't. Whatever your fascination with Kaczynski, his manifesto is only of significance because of his terrorism. We're better off that he was found, arrested, and convicted.
As asinine as it sounds, I agree with them. In this specific case, there’s no reason to believe that a completed bomb is the same as an intent to bomb anybody. I’d be surprised if any 20-year veteran bomb builder didn’t have a couple fully-working prototypes, the same reason I’d be surprised a 20-year veteran coder had no fully functional prototypes.
Crafting is crafting, whether you’re doing woodworking or killing. Is it impossible to believe that someone like Ted might find bomb building every bit as gratifying as we find programming?
He was unhinged. But it’s hard to argue he wasn’t a master craftsman. Few lone-wolf bomb makers survive 20 years without accidents, let alone evade authorities till their family turned them in.
I know very little about Ted, and almost nothing about his philosophies or any of the subject matter. But it seems entirely consistent and reasonable that there would be deployable bombs that were sitting around for unknown amounts of time when he was captured.
Dude’s a murderer. I’m glad he was stopped, and it’s sad he wasn’t caught on day one.
Is there? Whoops. I’ve been doing it wrong for about 20 years now.
(My sense of humor has gotten me in hot water more than once, so I may as well go all-in. Probably a matter of time till it nips me though.)
In seriousness, the goal here is to have curious conversation, and follow that curiosity wherever it leads. I agree it sounds asinine, but think of the sheer number of details he had to get right merely to survive. He was one inch away from blowing himself up, quite literally, for years. I’m not at all ashamed to point out the obvious skill required.
If he pulled the pin on a few grenades and casually tossed them at people, we’d be having a different conversation. But he built things, just as we do. Certainly a different kind of thing, as you say, but he was still a builder.
It was a live bomb. You don’t just keep live bombs sitting around your house unless you plan on using them…
Also wait what even is this comment. Why are you just praising the Unabomber unprompted? That’s not what the person you’re replying to was even talking about…
I suppose it would be like how the U.S has a history of using nuclear bombs, has a bunch more assembled and ready to be used, but claims to have no plans to actually use them.
Also Lewis Mumford [1], Günther Anders [2], or if you want to go truly underground, Gilbert Simondon [3] [4] or Friedrich Kittler [5].
If there are thinkers who have been in the conceptual space of the 23rd century and beyond, Simondon was surely one. Also radically of the future and forgotten is FM-2030 [6] [7].
All in all, blowing up people is easy, blowing up antiquated concepts, grasping for the grounds of a new metaphysics, painstakingly implementing and debugging is the hard part.
Besides, to think that there even is such a thing called technology (as distinguished from what) is incredibly naive after following to conclusions systems such as the Grotthuss proton translocation mechanism driving motion in a F_0/F_1-ATP synthase rotation mechanism [8] [9].
This is an ideological position, termed Capitalist Realism [1]. Given the failing of social reproduction, environmental protection, long term planning against existential and systemic risk, the mental health crisis and the collapse of civil and political life, under entrenched and victorious capitalism - an increasingly absurd one.
Yes, and I can even bet that unless a species is a hive mind, any intelligent species will have something like capitalism. The inverse is that to enforce a non-capitalist system, you have to brutally shape a society into something that is like a hive mind.
This seems true from our experiences attempting to implement non-capitalist systems in large societies. I think there could be a caveat for very small societies, especially those voluntarily joined, in which sharing goods and labor is possible with democratic modes of conflict management. There are also non-democratic capitalist systems that resort to extreme repression in order to resolve or suppress internal conflict. At scale, I agree no other economic system seems as compatible with democracy and individual choice, but as recent history has shown in Russia and China, capitalism itself doesn't seem sufficient to give rise to liberty.
One can say “non-capitalist society” yet mean that capitalism is the only thing that there ever is. Capitalism is a way to look at things, and it doesn’t require a modern society—social capital and economics of prestige is a thing since forever[0].
Indeed, in all large-scale supposed “non-capitalist” societies today there is capital—it doesn’t stop being so if a few people use unlimited power and oppression to install arbitrary rules and restrictions on capital for others without having being subject to any checks or balances themselves; it just becomes more contrived and perhaps perverted.
Some would probably say that it’s the infectious external influence of other capitalist countries that precludes full abolition of capital, but another way to look at it is that said external influence is in fact what gives such a regime life in the first place—i.e., if you remove the agitating antagonistic existence of “capitalism”, the pretend “non-capitalism capitalism” would not suddenly turn into a perfectly “non-capitalism non-capitalism” but rather revert to capitalism, regardless of whether it would be called so or not or whether it would happen violently or peacefully.
I personally don't see these failing that you mention, far from it. Whatever you believe, this kind of propoganda claims stating your opinion as a fact, is very transparent, and just discredits your argument.
That's exactly what people with indefensible politics say during political discussions, when somebody raises a point they don't like and can't counter.
If your politics are too vile to discuss and defend, then don't participate in political discussions. And stop trying to inject your own politics while telling others not to mention their, like you've been hypocritically doing repeatedly.
None of those mentioned are ecofascists, especially not Simondon [1], that was the point: the true radicals destroy the future worlds, not directly the present one. Alan Turing destroyed all the multiverse branches [2] in which we don't use computation. Norman Borlaug [3] destroyed all the multiverse branches in which we don't have high-yield wheat.
Perhaps an even better parallel would have been Alexander Grothendieck [3], the mathematician of the 20th century (maybe even of the 21st century if concepts as the topos [4] are made into usable tools for deep neural networks [5]), but also a person who was teaching mathematics in Vietnam [6] while hiding from bombs. When the world burns, all that remains is the Glasperlenspiel [7].
Reading comprehension is certainly irrelevant if one is interested only in their tunnel-visioned thesis.
At no point the impromptu syllabus from above defends anyone or anything. In fact, it is so tame it didn't even mention more problematic, although arguably important and interesting, works such as Martin Heidegger's [1]. To think referencing someone as Günther Anders defends fascism is just too ludicrously functionally illiterate for any other words to be further possible.
His published works aside, it seems he was corresponding with people and answering letters until fairly recently. Many of these letters (or quite convincing forgeries) are archived in your favourite 4chan archive of choice.
Also worth mentioning what was essentially a partial autobiography by Kaczynsky: Truth Versus Lies[1]. I'm not sure it was ever completed and there are a couple versions floating around. He was still working on it well into the mid 2010s.
You know how sometimes you'll see someone [dead] on here making salient points, then wonder why they're dead? Then you check them out, and every so often they go off on incoherent tirades.
That's Ted Kaczynski. He may have had two good ideas for every bad one, but he was still a piece of shit who deserved to be isolated from society where he couldn't hurt anyone, and there are better advocates for whatever good came out of his head.
Or to paraphrase the dril classic: you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"
edit: to be clear, I think the dude was little more than an ecofascist and not worth taking seriously. But if you're going to, you ought to know he was the worst advocate for any position he held. You can do better than propping up a dead asshole.
Funnily, Kaczynski was an ecofascist, he was also an anti-leftest.
You have to remember that when he performed the bombing in the 70s environmental protections had bipartisan support (Nixon famously created the EPA [1]).
It wasn't until much later that being green turned into a radical partisan issue. I mostly blame Rush Limbaugh [2] and the Koch brothers [3] for that shift. Turns out, a lot of big oil propaganda [4] can really sway public opinion.
Plugging in my (tongue-in-cheek, but maybe not a 100%) conspiracy theory that Big Oil was the financier and culprit behind the flat earth, anti-vax, moon landing conspiracies, and many others -
As a way to discret the whole of the scientific and academic establishment in the minds of enough (voting) people, so as to delay the inevitable consensus that fossil fuel consumption is killing everyone slowly
One of his later letters he said was against Eco-fascisim. basically saying that a lot of it is driven by racism or some sort of political/social ideal. That these factors are not distributed equally globally means that it would never work as a long term strategy.
If one half of the global turned to ecofascisim and they got a non-technical world they desired, the other half would immediately capitalize on this and take over.
In a way I find Ted's idea fascinating in the same way I find a lot of smarter spiritual teacher fascinating. Here is this simple base idea, now here is 500 things you have to watch out for how the most simplistic path will cause more harm than good. To that, I don't think he had a complete picture on how to achieve what he wanted.
Like Ram Dass saying, be here now, but take it too far and you will go insane!
That is the saddest thing. He had some great ideas and knew how to communicate them. He just didn't think he would be taken seriously unless he used the bomb cheat code on life to get notoriety. I suspect that if he had gone the path of writer with publishing, not only would his works be more popular, there would have actually been a realistic means of implementing some of his ideas.
He had some great ideas and simultaneously pushed back any real change by decades for his own self gain interest.
Read his manifesto, they’re detailed. I was shocked for a straight week when I read it, I couldn’t believe I have been lied to my entire life. Or better yet his book Technological Slavery: https://archive.org/details/tk-Technological-Slavery
Yeah... I appreciate you taking the time to respond but "read this 35,000 word manifesto by a schizophrenic idealogical serial killer whose conclusions you already know you find vapid and deplorable" is not a great pitch lol. Was just hoping to hear some highlights. I think I'll just have to wander along for the rest of my life without gaining any insight as to why Hacker News is so in love with that work, beyond some variety of SV-guilt!
Since we had know TK had been sick for a while and that this was coming soon, for about a month for I have been trying to distill TK's work down as an article about how others have gravitated towards his writing. It is not in praise of him it is just a study of some key points and as to why so many have seen solace in these works - especially over the last decade.
Normally I could write something like that over a week end but this article... it is an absolute doozy and the further in I go the worse it gets!
The issue is, you cannot really condense his writings down without doing a total dis-service to the points being made. Either you are going to misrepresent a point and it get wildly misinterpreted OR you come off a little to in praise of it.
It is very clear that TK had an academic background, even going so far as numbering the paragraphs - and in his book, The Anti-tech revolution : Why and how - he is very clear at the beginnings that these writings are not meant to be just read but studied. I don't disagree, they are written in a very tight manner. So while Industrial society and its future is 35,000 words, it is very specific in those words. It is about a 2 hour read, or you can just find a audio version on youtube.
If I had to summarize the essence of his works, he had a very decent analysis of the flaws of technology based societies. He had absolutely no idea on how to actually bring about change or even know where to start. The subsequent 27 years of writing from jail showed that he could analyses the problems and potential failings of revolutionary tactics but had no idea of how to actually analyze what technology as good or bad.
There is a reason he was called an insane Genius.
Personally speaking, yeah he was right on a lot of things... now what?
I ain't going to do what he did and try to bomb the world into submission, that is just idiotic. It is all just a some really good analysis but with no means of achievable execution. I more worry about others that are coming after him that will do a lot more damage. Anders Beivik who killed many at a youth summer came in 2011 also deeply reference TK's works in his manifest - an example of how this line of thinking can only lead down a dark and terrible path. But doesn't mean you shouldn't read these things.
One can read these things and take away some very good points without having to internalize the whole thing. Aristotle said something like that, you can read and think about ideas as though they are true and not necessarily have to believe them.
What points resonate with you? With as much sincerity as I can express, I’ve gotta ask: why aren’t you living in the woods if you think the guy who said that industrial society was a mistake “had some good points”?
If you think that Buddhist monks have some good points, do you need to go live in a remote monastery? Kaczynski's critique can make us think about the extremes of modern life; it can encourage us to step back a little and live in more harmony with nature and less so in the grind of industrial society.
So you (y’all) are focusing on some of his incidental points, not the conclusions/purpose of the manifesto. Makes sense! Thanks for taking the time to explain.
I was writing a whole thing about why I find looking for nuggets of wisdom in a work that you fundamentally find severely flawed is a waste of time, but I think it’s best dropped. “Did you find these critiques interesting” isn’t even something I could really convince somebody to change their mind on lol, given all the paragraphs in Hacker News
Oddly, the "why don't you go live in the woods", is the extremist view. Like "if you believe in God, why are you not going to church every day and out proselytizing", "If you are a vegan why aren't you out shutting down factory farms.", "If you care about environment why don't you live in a hut".
Why do you have to be an extremist about something or it doesn't count.
Think this is all the same mistaken view that a lot of extremists have. IF you can't be 100% dedicated without any slips then you are a failure and hypocrite.
So what if a vegan is stuck in an airport and has to cheat once and eat a burger, or I have family over for dinner and we do 'waste' more, or if I am vegan but on Thanksgiving, it is easier to eat some turkey and not argue about it.
You see, your view is the extreme one.
And also there is always Moloch. I may see technology and capitalism heading toward a brick wall, but I still do have to eat and live in the world. I'm not an extremists.
I don’t think he had just some “good points”, I think he’s completely right on the matter that modern (post steam engine & guns) technology is harmful for human life.
People don't disagree with him because he was a convicted terrorist, they disagree with him because of the specific things he did to be convicted of terrorism. That's reasonable (correct, even). People might know or not know each opinion he expressed, and might reasonably agree or disagree with each one, but that's not the same thing.
He forced his way into the conversation through terrorism. It seems reasonable enough to reject his ideas out of hand rather than give them respectful hearing.
This gets messy quick. If for example you lived under a dictator and that dictator didn't like your conversation then you wouldn't expect to have a venue unless you took extreme measures.
Now let's say that you think AI was an existential threat to humanity and we were all going to die because of it. In your mind would it matter if you blew up 10 people? 100 people? 1000000 people? I mean in your mind they are all dead anyway and if this is the price to pay to stop it, it will have been worth it.
Yes, it should matter, because sane people admit there is a chance they could be wrong. You can walk back ideas, you can’t walk back deaths.
Also unless you’re a government you probably shouldn’t be applying utilitarian ideas of ethics to your actions, you do not have a right to decide on behalf of anyone but yourself as an individual, so even by utilitarian standards you are likely being unethical.
Anyway, if we want to apply utilitarian reasoning, taking someone’s ideas seriously simply because he garnered attention through random killings would seem to encourage more people to do violence for various different causes.
First, I'm not sure you're using "quick" properly here. There is no trajectory - only individual cases. We can easily consider his actions unjustifiable and yet consider similar actions against a brutal dictator justifiable without straying into hypocrisy.
Second, the "imagine you truly believed X" defense is a good argument for sympathy, but not a good argument for justification or credence.
With respect this is not correct. What you are describing is Ad Hominem driven by some kind of moralist knee-jerk reaction. The absurd extreme of this line of reasoning would be to refuse to acknowledge the existence of snow because Hitler mentioned in passing in a letter or a speech at some point.
Not correct? Ad hominem? Moralist knee-jerk reaction? Absurd? Extreme? There is probably a more reasonable version of this disagreement, to put it lightly.
Unlike Hitler's opinions on snow, Ted Kaczynski's murders are inextricably linked to his ideology.
And how would you know what, exactly? Have you actually taken the time to read any of the man's writing? Because I've been picking my way through his manifesto off and on this evening and so far what I'm encountering is calm, lucid, internally consistent, and a fairly accurate critique. Something about this exchange is reminding me of all of the decades of inarticulate hyperventilating about "communism" by individuals who hadn't bothered to so much as read the manifesto, much less examine Marx's writings.
Fascinating how good writing and surface intelligence can make absolutely insane ideas seem sensible. Deductive reasoning is, unfortunately, not absolutely reliable for people who have pattern loving brains and good enough memory to make long chains of deductions; evaluating the entire chain as a gestalt and with an eye towards the great amount of data we lack, about the present and past and true material causes, is a necessary step. Like the German electorate that voted for a madman without seeing thru him, or TK in the woods, we are all equipped with he neural machinery to go down this path.
Can you point at something in his manifesto that you'd classify as an "absolutely insane idea" ? I have the vague impression that people either don't engage at all with TK philosophy -but are happy to pass verdict nonetheless- or if they do, simply can't handle the cognitive dissonance that arises and immediately reach for quick relief ("madman", "insane ideas", "MKUltra" etc)
Few if any called Ellul a madman or characterized his ides as absolutely insane, but as far as I know he didn't kill anyone.
“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” First sentence. Does he object to the diminution of child hood death or violent death, or in his mind does being alienated from nature (fixable in principal by personal choices) outweigh the death of ones children? Totally insane.
On a more personal note, I am always getting panicked by emails from virus vendors about some grand new threat till I walk around for fifteen minutes. I bought toed shoes believing it would transform my experience of walking and hiking. I worried about Congress canceling NPR back in the 90s. When I try to remove some plastic toxic stuff from my diet,mit is extremely hard to avoid a big slide into “purity eating” where a choice to make a slight alteration to the effects on my world i to a matter of moral virtue. From “less antibiotics for the chickens slowing the spread of anti-biopics” to “why do you ask me to consume this swill of the devil?!” Is a small delta in my mind.
For a year or so I listened to all kinds of crypto podcasts or YouTubes / twitter spaces, and it was never long till people brought up anti-vax or global finance conspiracy ideas. I have watched flat earth / scientist debates, and the words of the flat earthers don’t parse as insane.
A more accurate Hitler analogy would probably be to reject his racial theories out of hand since they led to the world's first industrial-scale genocide.
Rejection out of hand is bankrupt regardless of what motivation one cares to use as a hood ornament. If one can't be assed to even examine the claims in question, one certainly isn't qualified to field a critique thereof. At minimum, one should know one's enemy.
My time and attention is limited and I'd rather not spend it on the scribblings of someone whose intellectual work is only read because of its association with his more famous work sending letter bombs.
Your accusations are dramatic. It's OK to not consider this particular person's writings on the topic as required reading, or even particularly valuable, without rejecting the topic as a whole. And more subjectively, you shouldn't try to bully people into giving credence to murderers.
I've done neither. I simply point out that no meaningful conclusions can be drawn about a body of work without first examining it. Not sure why y'all think that's controversial.
If I linked you to a 35,000 word essay on why you're wrong about this, would you read it? What if I told you it was generated by GPT-2? How much of it would you have to read before you could decide the rest wasn't worthwhile?
I think you're falling prey to the trap many engineers and scientists do, by assuming that they are ultimately capable of pure logical discussion and analysis, and that their biases are known and minimal - and that others can be seen in that light, too. In such a world, perhaps it would make sense to give Hitler a fair shake.
In our current world, I see us all as flawed little monkeys who can be pulled this way and that by provocative rhetoric and incomplete information. Dismissing someone's ideology completely because it was a central part of their campaign to kill millions is by far the logical and ethical choice. To do otherwise is intellectual hubris, IMO.
All this is, of course, in addition to the "there's a billion books out there, why does Hitler get to the top of the list? What about his life, ideas, or the summaries of his books makes you think that his ideas are any better than a million political blogs you have yet to read?"
A) the hitler metaphor isn’t quite right - the parent isn’t saying that all of his ideas are inherently 100% false, but rather that reading his work is wasteful and disrespectful and dangerous. (Ok well some of that’s me but I’m guessing they’d agree) In my eyes, a better metaphor would be “refuse to read mein kampf even though it has some true paragraphs about the harms of monetary inflation”. Which, by god, I hope we can all agree is the right choice!
B) seeing “moralist” in this context seems a little absurd. He didn’t swear a lot or start an OnlyFans, he tried to kill dozens of people…
I disagree with this characterization. It’s not that reading Mein Kampf would brainwash you, it’s that reading it for it’s “nuggets of wisdom” is an insane, dangerous thing to do. I sorta thought that part would be uncontroversial but who knows
Considering his lack of success and the fact that he had better military thinkers as subordinates, looking for "military wisdom" from Hitler sounds like the kind of thing you'd do because you had an ulterior motive.
Thank you for the reference to Jacques Ellul, as I hadn't heard of him before. From looking a few reviews, I'm liking what appears to be him having a critique of the worship of technique, which is an interesting thought.
It's unfortunate that people stop at the Manifesto, as Kaczynski has other critiques, but also admits to limitations or failures in his thinking. In one correspondence he admits he has no criteria to decide if a given technology is benign (small scale) or harmful (organization-dependent), a critical distinction! He tries to shore it up with analyzing a primitive Steam Engine, but I would point to Bronze as a contradiction harboring both characteristics. My interpretation is that the distinction is political, not based on any aspect of the technology itself including production. Technology acts as a magnitude, and how we apply it is the essence of our social/political organization.
This is, of course, one interpretation among many. Like professor Ellul, there are many other voices. There is Society of the Spectacle (a style ISAIF is imitating), or the works of Jean Baudrillard where he (early years) analyzes commodities under Consumerism or (later years) his work on Spectacle and Image. Even Karl Marx has a detailed understanding and critique of Machine Society in Chapter 15 of Capital [0].
Finally, Kaczynski is harmful to many anarchist spaces. His True Crime reputation attracts tons of media footage and mystique, which furthers misunderstandings. Crimethink has a great essay, "The Unabomber’s Unending 15 Minutes of Fame" [1], which details how this warps perceptions and action while ignoring who the victims are.
> As individuals within a movement professing a desire to reconstitute the world on the basis of love, harmony, peace, and sharing, an ethical question arises when a means inconsistent with an end is presented. In this case, the tactic of non-self-defense violence. This is not a question of armed defense such as was the case during the 1930s Spanish revolution, for instance, but rather, the validity of aggressive violence against those who are designated as The Enemy.
> The question of who is our enemy is a slippery one. Most of the dead and maimed from the Unabomber campaign were involved in this massive, almost entirely inclusive system of destruction and repression in a manner little different from most of us. Under the Unabomber rubric of complicity, almost all of us are potential targets. It should be remembered, his toll of three dead and 29 wounded was severely limited only when his bombs failed to go off in an airliner and outside a university classroom. Apparently, all of us were indiscriminately designated as The Enemy.
> I don’t have a lot of interest in people who advocate “armed struggle.” In this country, it usually comes down to those enthusiasts for armed adventures constituting a rooting section without taking the leap into the fray themselves. This is often accompanied by an arrogance and set of judgmental politics that condemn anyone not in the claque as timid, or reformist, or worse, counter-revolutionary. The latter, by the way, has historically been a pre-execution category, so I watch my back when ever I hear that phrase being thrown my way even by someone claiming to be an anarchist.
> My experience is that advocates of violence have a short shelf life. They break windows or plant a few bombs while furiously condemning everyone else for a lack of revolutionary ardor and then they are gone, usually with some wreckage that has to be cleaned up by those committed to long range organizing.
Thank you for the anarchist references, with how conservative his ideas were and not only against "leftists" / libs I was looking for this perspective here (given anarchism gets unfairly lumped in with leftism or authoritarian communisms even as post-left anarchism is a thing)
I'm curious to hear what in Ellul echoes Ted's manifesto? Ellul seems very like a very astute and interesting thinker, and Ted obviously referenced him, but to say that it's a "popular reduction" seems like a stretch to me. I say this based on this understanding of Ellul, pulled from his wikipedia page:
> The solution is to simply view technique as objects that can be useful to us and recognize it for what it is, just another thing among many others, instead of believing in technique for its own sake or that of society.
Which I would summarize as "we should examine technology as a means to an end, rather than a good unto itself". On the other hand, I would summarize Ted's thoughts (without having read the manifesto myself) as "technology of all kinds is inherently evil, and we have a moral imperative to dismantle and destroy basically all of it as quickly as possible."
Those two ideas seem related in that they're talking about some of the same concepts, but it kinda ends there for me...
But the very fact that Kaczynski's ideas were widely published and read directly led to his arrest. If the consideration is to be purely strategic, his case should be an argument in favor of dissemination.
Invariably, people take the opportunity to publicly declare how opposed they are to various abhorrent people, indirectly making others aware of them and their ideas. This entire page of comments on HN is a good example.
It's hilarious that people don't recognize that when they say "I will not read this" it is an advertisement.
Would you apply the same logic then to Winston Churchill, the British monarchy and its government? Under the guise of "civilizing natives", they were responsible for exterminating and murdering large sections of the population across Ireland, Africa, India, Middle-East and East Asia. Churchill was racist and a terrorist to many in the colonized world but was a prolific author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. What's the difference between him and the unabomber?
“Do you like the unabomber’s ideas but get embarrassed when you talk about the unabomber in front of your friends? Try talking about Ellul instead, you might sound more worldly that way”
If you’re embarrassed to talk about anti-technological ideas in this current technological dystopia, you’re as oversocialized as Ted described you in his works.
What do you mean? Half of US will like you for doing the latter two.
Ted Kaczynski is more acceptable to like than most terrorists because of MKUltra and since his ideas are more advanced than "my religion is good" or "I hate $minority!". Doesn't mean it's not wrong to bomb people, but he is easier to understand than a guy who brings an AK47 to a concert.
Ted Kaczynski was a genius, a mathematical child prodigy, became a professor at Berkeley at 25 and had a bright future. I completely blame CIA experiments for his downfall into radicalism and extremism. His ideas were very valid, but his mind was too tortured to deal with them in a healthy manner.
The media will report on this as the death of a terrorist. None of the real terrorists will be brought to justice - the CIA has done so many abhorrent things here and abroad.
We act like the KGB/FSB is this unfathomable, foreign evil. We have the bigger, scarier thing that killed it in our backyard.
I mean, Ted was definitely a terrorist, but the size of his crimes pales in comparison to the institution that experimented on him and continues to exist to this day.
There was never any evidence to begin with. The author of the often cited investigative report even refutes the assertion that the CIA was involved. It’s pure fantasy.
from what I have been able to determine, this does not seem to be true—people who die from multiple self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head seem to be quite few and far between.
To stick to the facts, LA's biggest cocaine supplier got his stuff from a pair of Nicaraguans were members of the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras raising money for the organization. A journalist named Gary Webb covered the whole thing, who later murdered by two gunshots, and his death was ruled a suicide.
There does not seem to be any evidence that corroborates this. The most I can find are claims that some records were destroyed, so we won't know. That doesn't automatically mean there is a connection, though.
It seems pretty uncontroversial that Kaczynski has participated in series of psychological experiments by Henry Murray. Do you accept this fact?
It seems to be well supported via anecdotal evidence that these experiments were quite brutal and stressful, one might even call them torture. Do you agree with this?
We know that the psychologist in question (Henry Murray) was associated with the Office of Strategic Services. Are you with me on this?
We know that the Office of Strategic Services is the predecessor of the CIA.
So what we know is that we have a researcher in the orbit of OSS/CIA who conducted brutal experiments on Kaczynski. So that is the connection you are looking for.
We do not know if these experiments were part of the CIA program running under the codename MKUltra, or if they were part of some other CIA supported program under some other codename.
> The most I can find are claims that some records were destroyed, so we won't know.
You are making it sound like mice got to archived papers or the ink faded. But that is not the case. The CIA director ordered all documentation regarding MKUltra to be destroyed in 1973. That is it. Those papers would have told us for certain what is the truth. They made sure they are destroyed.
As you say the fact that the documents were destroyed doesn't prove that Henry Murray's experiments were CIA backed. That would be crazy speak.
But it is also not entirely fair to say that there is no connection whatsoever. In the absence of hard evidence we won't ever know for certain, but we can make reasonable inferences.
If you disagree with anything I wrote in the above please be specific which part of it do you disagree with.
The CIA is still a piece of shit organization that has performed disgusting acts all over the world, and we don't even know about all of them (but, to be fair, the ones we don't know about shouldn't count in our opinion of the org). To talk about how Ted K. being a target of the CIA's MKUltra program as a "conspiracy theory" and "CIA FUD" seems laughably absurd, not because you may be correct that Kaczynski was never experimented on by the CIA, but rather because we know for a fact that MKUltra happened.
So on the one hand, we have an organization that drugged and tortured people as part of an experiment, and on the other, we have a potential lie that Ted Kaczynski was one of the people on whom they experimented. You're getting upset about the latter in order to defend the organization doing the former from "FUD."
You've literally chosen to stand up against "CIA FUD" to assert that even though the CIA performed these psychological torture experiments on people, Ted Kaczynski was not one of them! Or perhaps you don't believe MKUltra ever happened, I don't know.
> Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra)[a] was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken people and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.[1][2][3][4] It began in 1953 and was halted in 1973.
The CIA has done some bad shit, even to their own citizens, but are they really on the level of the KGB? Seems like the KGB was a more overt daily-life terror, whereas the CIA has a more 'occasional' history of atrocities.
Always seemed to me the CIA were more creative: fish robot, sewing transmitters inside cats, arranging for their former director to die days before he was to give testimony. KGB and GRU were just "we're going to push you out the window" or "murder your family."
"A Freedom of Information Act document released by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2018 states that "a considerable amount of credible circumstantial evidence suggests that Theodore Kaczynski. also known as the Unabomber, participated in CIA-sponsored MK-ULTRA experiments conducted at Harvard University from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962".[26] Chase and others have also suggested that this experience may have motivated Kaczynski's criminal activities"
> [1] The CIA was carrying out its mind control program at this university, using the most varied techniques for this purpose. Thus, he endured the administration of substances, hypnosis, electric shocks, and sophisticated psychological techniques. This Harvard experiment lasted almost three years and Kaczynski was one of those experimental subjects.
He participated in about 200 hours of experiments from the age of 16 to 19 which basically consisted of "roasting" and bullying him. The experimenters intentionally sought out the most insecure "maladjusted" students at Harvard (Kaczynski was accepted at 16) and lied about what the experiment was going to do.
The entire thing was horrible and profoundly unethical. His brother has stated it really changed Kaczynski.
Some people have claimed that it was run by the CIA as part of MKUltra. This is certainly possible but not really substantiated by clear evidence as far as I've seen, and even if the CIA has some relationship they probably didn't instigate the experiments but just asked for research notes or something relatively benign like that. We'll probably never know for sure though.
Whatever the case may be, of the group of students that were subjected to these abusive experiments only one became a terrorist, so "the CIA created the Unabomber" is rather simplistic IMO. The primary blame remains with Kaczynski, no matter what.
I don't have any data or sources on this; if my memory is correct the participants were actually anonymous and the only reason we know Ted Kaczynski participated is because of his brother, so we don't even know who the other people were. However, I expect if another one had also become a terrorist, we would have heard about it. There were just a handful of participants (1 or 2 dozen or thereabouts), so it's not really enough for a "proper study" anyway.
Also: many people (myself included) were extensively and viciously bullied in their childhood and/or teen years. Many suffer profoundly negative effects from this, sometimes for decades or even their entire lives, but most are not terrorists. And even if it did turn out that the incidence of terrorists was higher: that still doesn't absolve them or their own responsibility in committing violent acts against random people (i.e. terrorism).
Are you claiming that childhood
bullying is equivalent to a program run by the CIA exploring the use of psychological torture and mind-altering substances?
It was not run by the CIA, as I have mentioned, and it certainly didn't involve mind-altering substances. The specific experiments he participated in involved abusive interrogation sessions to measure stress responses, which is roughly analogous to bullying, yes.
In the article it says he made an appointment to see a psychiatrist but left the waiting room before actually meeting with the psychiatrist (and then had an epiphany to kill people instead).
Not sure you can really blame that on the University or psychiatrist.
I would generally discount any claims that someone that is a problem for the CIA is a sexual deviant.
He had a serious problem with authority, needed to draft dodge and had a meeting with a psychiatrist where he planned to practise discussing feelings of being a woman with a psychiatrist.. I'm not really sure I should believe a forensic psychiatric evaluation decades later by a psychiatrist with a motive on what evaluation to give.
No one is saying you owe convicted murderers better, but if you're participating here, you owe better to this community than empty pejorative comments.
Certain points in Kaczynski's manifesto greatly influenced how I view the world, and I feel they have positively influenced my life in many ways (e.g., trying to live life less wastefully, using nature to ground oneself in reality, evaluating the true total cost of ownership of products of industry).
The person who erected the Georgia Guidestones had a similar philosophy, and engraved his own manifesto for peaceful and sustainable living on slabs of granite as a monument for all to enjoy.
It’s fun to drop verbatim quotes from his manifesto into random internet discussions without attribution. A lot of people agree with his ideas without realizing it.
one of the funniest things for me is the fact that many left-wing people add Kaczynski quotes without realizing that left-wing people are basically the first people to be criticized and almost mocked in Ted's main piece, "Industrial society and its future"
This doesn't seem like the tough question you think it is. I assume Hitler had some opinions that, taken away from the context of his goals, are reasonable to agree with. What makes you think it's an exception to the parent's point?
His "criticisms" of the left read like something a denizen of /pol/ or Reddit would come up with. It's entirely possible to see the merits of his arguments against technology while dismissing his deranged hatred of leftists, feminists, etc.
The OP literally asked to "attack the ideas, not the man", and here you go attacking the ideas solely because of the kind of men who share it...
What do you mean by " it reads like something /pol/ or reddit would write "? Does Kaczynsky use tired cartoon memes? Does he accuse the left of insufficient weightlifting? Does he challenge them to a 1v1 in a Nintendo fighting game?
What part of his criticism do you actually find wrong?
Lol had not heard this one. The left has "insufficient weightlifting".
Might be true.
Could it be that on the left there are more endurance sports, for health. And on the right there are more muscle building sports, so they can strike cool poses with their guns?
It's pretty common. Don't be surprised if you get called a dyel (DYEL, Do You Even Lift) lanklet (small, not fat or muscular) runcell (someone who runs to try to get women, but would be better off lifting).
That's unfortunate because he expanded on ISAIF at length in his prison writing and took a more thoughtful and look at a lot of existing political tropes. For example, in his Anti-Tech Revolution* he lauds the tactics of early feminists' campaigns to obtain voting rights for women, and similarly deconstructs a lot of flaws in right wing ideology.
I disagree with a lot of Kaczynski's ideas and methods, but I still regard him as an important thinker and wish people would read his output in full rather than rushing to have the hottest take (not meant as a dig at you, rather the avalanche of attempted zingers on Twitter and in the media over the weekend).
His criticisms of leftist activism in the 1990s is that it will always seek to control and exploit technology to implement their ideology so followers of his anti-tech movement should not rely on them. He then rants against 'green anarchy' claiming it is a kind of naive forest worshipping cult that also should not be included in whatever anti-tech movement. It is a small part of his overall manifesto on who you shouldn't trust to join a specific (terrorist) movement and likely came from his time in academia.
It's definitely not the standard fare you would find on those 2 sites you mentioned just a brief 'don't trust these activists they want the philosopher stone for themselves'.
A lot of the "leftists" Ted K disagrees with in that work are not proper Marxists but SJW/radical liberals (what's called the American Left but has little relation to Marxist thought)
Virtually everyone who quotes Kaczynski is aware of his statements on the political Left, it's just that nobody takes that particular aspect very personal or seriously given that ecological anarchism, Kaczynski's position, has always been overwhelmingly a left-wing position.
I would describe myself as left-wing, and I agree with some (not all) of his criticisms of "the left" in general. Turns out that left-wing people can have disagreements. Furthermore, I can reject argument X while simultaneously also accepting argument Y from the same person or book.
Isn't that backwards? In-group criticism is how you get so-called "fracturing", which is arguably healthier (if less politically useful) than the alternative: "loyalty". I'd be highly suspicious if any group of tens of millions of people all ostensibly agreed on everything.
"Leftists" offended by these sentiments are most likely centrists. The goal of neoliberalism (read: the DNC) has been to shift the left to the center. This has been their objective for years. See: Obama, Biden, the Clintons.
Why do you think they don't realize (or don't disagree with your premise)? I think you'd be surprised by how many people are not in fact one-dimensional stereotypes who must disagree with everything a person says just because they disagree with some things that person says. I'm also confused as to why you seem to imply that people should be that way.
I haven’t read the entirety of his manifesto, but his ideas always struck me as typical narratives that resonated with people’s anxieties about modernity.
A bit of a bait and switch. Get attention with something shocking and violent, then appeal to worries through apocalyptic boogeymen. The solution, of course, is a sense of comforting tradition that the naturalness of the past is safe. A killer combo!
What are some good Nero quotes? Wikiquotes only has two; one of which is "I wish I could not write." which seems a bit ironic since it seems most of his writings are now gone.
This isn't as indicative of ignorance or hypocrisy as it implies (and it comes off as a petty "gotcha" with an attitude of superiority). He said and did a lot of things. It's normal to variously agree and disagree with each thing in a vacuum. This is true of most political/societal figures, no matter how horrific they are, taken as a whole.
I just wonder how many people who could have done better were blocked by the actions of all these artists people want to make excuses for. How many great works were we denied because someone insisted on making space for someone who repelled (or worse) better people?
The zero-sum command-economy view of free speech: we have to exercise prior restraint on what people can say to ensure that there’s room for the people we approve of to speak.
This seems pretty un-generous. The parent is citing a real, straight-forward cause-and-effect which does not necessitate or even imply a zero-sum game, nor does it imply the extremist solution you're accusing them of supporting.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
My post was a call for being smarter about who we invest in. I always wonder about people who call for separating art and artist over such mediocre artistry.
If we're talking about individual out-of-context quotes, I don't think it's correct to separate the art from the artist. Human language is very imprecise, and knowing the author of a quote can significantly change the meaning of a sentence.
I'm just going to make up an example: let's say the quote in question is "Democracy requires active participation." If I saw this posted by an anonymous internet commenter in a political discussion, I would completely agree. The obvious interpretation is that democracy works better when people vote, speak to your representative, organize, etc.
Now let's say the commenter reveals that this is a quote from a presidential assassin. Well, now I'm a little uncomfortable. Why did they choose this particular quote? Do they agree with the assassin's fringe definition of "active participation"? The intended meaning has completely changed with this new information. The identity of the author is part of the message, because we aren't talking about objectively true or false statements, we're talking about philosophical ideas that are much bigger than the quote provided.
> [Death in the battlefield] is what the youth is for, after all
...Which suggests (cpr. the "treasure" quote) how quote dropping is mostly a leisurely activity, given broad statements.
> I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few
...Which suggests - hopefully - how quote dropping is mostly a leisurely activity, given its non exhaustive intrinsic nature.
--
Edit: related (with the first branch):
> He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future
Put the three together ("treasure", "battlefield", "owning"), the whole idea gets a sinister tone; take "treasure" alone, it may even raise "awww"s - without substance.
That's because he took virtually all of his ideas from other people who said it better, and thus I'm not sure why one wouldn't quote those sources rather than a known terrorist and murderer? Young minds are often easily influenced and bad at separating the person and the message of the writing. It's kind of like inverse MAGA, where the cult of personality is the important thing and the content doesn't really matter, only its source.
Many of the comments are taking the occasion to speak favorably of the Unabomber's manifesto.
IMHO, there's a time to consider ideas, but I think it would be better not to do that when talking about a terrorist who attacked innocents to promote exposure of those ideas.
Otherwise, it would seem to be validating and rewarding terrorism, and thereby encouraging future terrorists.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 337 ms ] thread> 14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.
> 15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
> 22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
> 35. Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical necessities of life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are made necessary by the climate. But the leisured aristocrat obtains these things without effort. Hence his boredom and demoralization.
> 97. Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what might be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a “free” man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual. Thus the bourgeois’s “free” man has economic freedom because that promotes growth and progress; he has freedom of the press because public criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders; he has a right to a fair trial because imprisonment at the whim of the powerful would be bad for the system. This was clearly the attitude of Simon Bolivar. To him, people deserved liberty only if they used it to promote progress (progress as conceived by the bourgeois). Other bourgeois thinkers have taken a similar view of freedom as a mere means to collective ends. Chester C. Tan, “Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century,” page 202, explains the philosophy of the Kuomintang leader Hu Han-min: “An individual is granted rights because he is a member of society and his community life requires such rights. By community Hu meant the whole society of the nation.” And on page 259 Tan states that according to Carsum Chang (Chang Chun-mai, head of the State Socialist Party in China) freedom had to be used in the interest of the state and of the people as a whole. But what kind of freedom does one have if one can use it only as someone else prescribes? FC’s conception of freedom is not that of Bolivar, Hu, Chang or other bourgeois theorists. The trouble with such theorists is that they have made the development and application of social theories their surrogate activity. Consequently the theories are designed to serve the needs of the theorists more than the needs of any people who may be unlucky enough to live in a society on which the theories are imposed.
> 116. Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society’s requirements: welfare leeches, youth-gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds.
As I said, a whole bunch of nonsense.
15 seems spot on to me. It’s definitely how conservatives see leftists.
22 and 35 do seem like rambling
14: - Yep this is quite off. I disagree.
15: (Some) Leftists do operate under a slave morality, which does lead them to morally binary modes of thinking, resulting in things like supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine (because America is an imperialist, illegitimate state and therefore NATO is too).
22: Not unique to leftists - the political machine demands conflict to justify it's own existence
35: Mazlow's hierarchy of needs. This is undisputable. Why do billionaires waste money on backyard space experiments and vacuous social media platforms? Existential boredom and ego.
e.g. paragraph "15" is excessive and inflammatory, but he wasn't wrong that some people will try to find fault for anything that happens in the West while ignoring much greater crimes in other countries. See e.g. all the HN posters who trivialize China's problems while attacking the US (I'm sure this thread will have some of those types of comments, too). This point also wasn't original to Kaczynski, e.g. George Orwell also wrote about it, as did many others.
Also remember much of this was written an era when people were literally collaborating with the USSR and East-Germany out of "socialist ideals" and (rightful) anger over the shady activities of the CIA or FBI, while also ignoring that those countries were significantly worse in almost every way.
See https://exploringyourmind.com/the-harvard-experiment-that-le....
Your longer explanation would have been fine as the GP, for example, but the GP comment wasn't anything like that.
Many, if not most, murder investigations are resolved by confessions, or someone turning the culprit in. Absent that, after...I want to say 48 hours, the police know that they should essentially write off the case. There are obvious exceptions, especially if there's public notoriety (crudely, young white coeds or "sexy shit"), but most murders are poor drug addicts murdering other poor drug addicts.
Source: worked 2 years in DC as a freelance reporter, was ultimately not successful there, but soaked up a lot of stories/cynicism
I'm honestly trying to figure out what your point is.
You are usually not asked whether you want to go to prison or not.
A travesty how he was treated in those medical experiments. It's always tragic to find out reasons why people hurt others.
I don't condone domestic terrorism (especially with so many innocent hurt), but I also don't condone climate change denial for shareholder profit. Is that ever going to stop? Given the velocity already created, I would say: not in my lifetime.
Morality doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not objective, it's collectively determined by society.
As a society we have decided en masse that blowing up randomly selected people to draw attention to one's political views is not acceptable.
As a society we also have decided that violent actions taken against the German government in the early 1940s were acceptable.
This isn't a contradiction, nor hypocrisy, simply the ability to have nuanced opinions.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
People have alleged that it was part of MKULTRA, but there's nothing to support that beyond allegations and some circumstantial things (e.g., Murray consulted for the OSS on a profile of Hitler during the war). There were also just a lot of unethical experiments done on people in the 50s and 60s.
If you’re willing to admit that they don’t really have self-agency at that point, don’t they become an object at that point? Like we would have no problem putting down a dog that bit a child, let alone a dog that blew up buildings. The only reason we’re so accepting of putting down the dog is its lack of human status.
In our courts, claiming insanity seems to give you a defense against crimes you’ve committed but also maintaining all the rights and privileges of personhood.
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/24/1009858617/britney-spears-tra...
[0]https://www.vice.com/en/article/9bne7e/the-monarch-mind-cont...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_O%27Brien_(conspiracy_th...
Sirhan sirhan and Charles Manson come to mind.
Unexpected high doses of LSD, attempts at programming, manipulation and what can only honestly be described as torture… the CIA destroyed all the records of this and because we don’t have complete records we just have to make a big shrug and say “ah well JKCalhoun isn’t convinced, guess it’s not bad for you.”
What would it take to convince you that dosing unexpecting people with high amounts of LSD could have a detrimental effect on their mental health, possibly making people crazy?
Not at all. Rather, drawing a line backward from Kaczynski's bombing spree to experiments done on him as a part of MK-Ultra I think is questionable "science".
https://vigilantcitizen.com/latestnews/did-kanye-expose-holl...
When this information is finally released, the people around for that will say "wow, the CIA used to do some real evil stuff against our own people, good thing they would never do that these days!" as the CIA carries out some absurd level of evil that makes MK-ULTRA seem like a fender bender.
---
[1] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/project%20mk-ultra%5B15...
So is performing torture experiments on them to see what happens them locking them up when they crack.
I don't agree with Ted's actions that directly hurt other people (not random people by the way), but god damn he was hurting too. We should all feel the same pain he felt. The world would be better if we did, and maybe then we could kick our addiction to finite resources and short-term monkey-brain thinking.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Murray#Harvard_human_exp...>
Covered in Harvard and the Unabomber : the education of an American terrorist:
<https://archive.org/details/harvardunabomber00chas/page/18/m...>
a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
After all, almost all smart people that identify uncomfortable truths won't go to extremes to convince strangers of actually giving their non-mainstream ideas a chance.
Quoting from memory - may not be word for word.
So, if you can believe him, then yes, he murdered as a marketing strategy.
I'm skeptical enough though (having read books about the Zodiac Killer, for example) that I see it just as likely to have been an unexpected opportunity that Kaczynski exploited.
I guess I'm not surprised that a murderer, enjoying their new-found public lectern, might engage in rationalization of their murders.
My take away is that there are and always have been sick people. Citing lack of a megaphone shouldn't even be a sliver of rationale for a murderer's behavior.
Even if he was purely driven out of self-interest and ego, the result of his actions is that today we are discussing his ideas when we should be working.
I'm just suspicious whether this was the case.
> Between 1978 and 1995, Ted Kaczynski engaged in a mail bomb campaign[4] against people involved with modern technology.[5] His initial targets were universities and airlines, which the FBI shortened as UNABOM. In June 1995, Kaczynski offered to end his campaign if one of several publications (the Washington Post, New York Times, or Penthouse) would publish his critique of technology, titled Industrial Society and Its Future, which became widely known as the "Unabomber Manifesto".[6]
In a sense, he used the murders as a marketing strategy, but honestly it was more of a threat to force his manifesto to be published.
Had the American revolution not succeeded it would be relegated to being classified as a typical rebel manifesto that people basically do not care about
Same with writing books, asking people to subscribe to your blog newsletter, shouting on a street corner or asking people to vote for you.
That said, who says having some self-importance is inherently bad? Trying to be humble is a cultural and religious virtue, not an absolute truth.
Nietchze, Carl Jung, Marshall McLuhan, William S Burroughs, Franz Kafka, Fritz Lang, PK Dick, Stanley Kubrick, Jared Diamond, Pink Floyd... this list could go on for a while.
We should blame the CIA, not him. He was just a math nerd in the beginning.
http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf
Edit: In all seriousness, it's been a while since I read it. His general ideas are that technology has been a disaster for humankind because, among other reasons, it's freed up time for us to be preoccupied with unimportant bullshit, to the point that it causes mental problems with people. People start to act out in various ways in resistance of our current state because we 'know' somewhere in our bodies that this existence is meaningless. People without the luxury of free time do not have to preoccupy themselves with this struggle for meaning.
He also goes on at length about how leftists are self-hating people and worship victimhood, and their mentality is partly a product of this existential dilemma.
But these are just a couple of points I took away. It's much more well-written than I could personally attempt to summarize in an internet comment.
It's really that. He falls for the same trap many modern critics of progress do: the nostalgia for a world that never existed, when men lived meaningful lives in peaceful harmony with nature... juxtaposed with all the purported moral, societal, and environmental decay of today.
Many people find it alluring today, but the themes are evergreen. They crop up in ancient Greece, in the Middle Ages, and throughout history.
Misplaced nostalgia aside, another problem with most such ideologies is that the prescription for returning to that utopian bygone era inevitably involves force: the premise is that our minds are too corrupted to understand what's right. Whether that's blowing things up or taking away your rights is just an implementation detail.
There's the opposite problem most have: the inability to understand that there are people who have actually experienced the past (within their lives) and might prefer it for reasons other than the cliche "they were young then, that's why they like it" compared to the present.
And that, depending on your inclinations and ideas about how to live, it's not true that nothing better "ever existed".
>is that the prescription for returning to that utopian bygone era inevitably involves force: the premise is that our minds are too corrupted to understand what's right
Well, the future comes at people with force too. People thrown out of employment into poverty because of technology and being told "just learn to code" for example.
Or things getting integrated with the state and business world, and becoming increasingly necessary to have, even if you don't want them.
As the saying goes, the only constant is change.
Everyone alive has only been in a modern time. Now what characteristics you want your world to have, certainly many people are fighting for different visions. The idea that a particular balance of corporate and legislative power is inevitable is just the messaging from those corporate powers. And it isn’t more than PR - when society gets unbalanced enough, you get changes even if most think it is impossible. Anything from the French Revolution to the end of Apartheid.
And if your ideas of how to live examine other metrics, there are much better times in the past.
Especially since if changes to bring back aspects of the past that were better were taken today, it wouldn't mean we have to give up technologies that improved the mortality rates. How about that, huh?
In fact, even if your ideas of how to live are solely about less childhood mortality and long and healthy lives, you might be better served with a couple decades past:
https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2023/04/26/research-update-u-s-se...
I do particularly look forward to the highways being dug up and rewilded, while we get around with Cat Buses or blimps or jet packs. I didn’t get the idea you were advocating that we improve what we have; it came across as what we have sucks and we need to go back, back to the closet, back to less power, back to less information, back to the culture of conformity for the powerful and the culture of fear for the oppressed.
People should read “Beginning of Infinity” for a strong counter argument.
I didn't read it like that, it was more like "I don't want a six lane highway in front of my house", "Oh, you're just against progress and modernism, so shut up", "Ok, maybe I blow your shit up"...
Someone like the Unabomber doesn’t long back to the past of being a Middle Age serf…! Get real.
He also is definitely not any kind of primitive man utopia shill, that's why he rants in the beginning against 'green anarchy' type ideology. He is more of an evolutionist saying even if we returned to primitive life before the industrial revolution we would at least still be human and would have to accept all kinds of terrible things that come with primitive life as the alternative is being a spiritless organism serving machines (again his ideology not mine).
The author postulates that if computer scientists develop intelligent machines that can do all things better than humans, all work will be done by machines and no human effort will be necessary.
There are two possibilities: either the machines make all their own decisions without human oversight or human control over the machines is retained.
173. If machines _are_ allowed to make all their own decisions, it is impossible to predict the outcome and the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. The author suggests that society may become so dependent on machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of their decisions, eventually leading to a stage where machines are in effective control and turning them off would amount to suicide.
174. If human control over machines is _retained_, the average person may have control over certain private machines, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite. The elite will have greater control over the masses and because human work will no longer be necessary, the masses will be superfluous.
If computer scientists do not succeed in developing artificial intelligence and human work remains necessary, machines will still take care of simpler tasks resulting in an increasing surplus of human workers at lower levels of ability. Employed workers will face ever-increasing demands and will need more training, ability and conformity. Their tasks will be increasingly specialized and out of touch with the real world.
The author envisions scenarios where machines take over most important work while humans are kept busy with relatively unimportant work in the service industries, which the author finds contemptible.
The author acknowledges that the outlined scenarios do not exhaust all possibilities but indicates that if the industrial-technological system survives the next 40 to 100 years, individuals will be more dependent on large organizations and their physical and mental qualities will be engineered into them.
Technology is creating a new physical and social environment for humans that is radically different from the environments to which natural selection has adapted the human race and humans will either be adjusted to this new environment by being artificially re-engineered or through natural selection.
179. The author concludes that it would be better to dump the whole system and take the consequences.
(That was all summarized by ChatGPT. I have removed concluding sentences from some paragraphs containing deeply pessimistic motives of insubordination, enslavement, and extermination)
I do not agree with everything he wrote in the manifesto, and certainly not with his violent methods, but it's stuck with me in this era of naive techno-optimism which I find myself more disillusioned with by the day.
If the name on the front page was not of a murderer, I truly believe it would be recommended reading in schools and philosophy clubs.
As a very progressive person, I quite enjoyed his critique of the modern Leftist ideals and why they would create the factionalism and alienation we see today; he's not arguing as a 21st century conservative, but as a third position that is not represented by any mainstream camp. I had to read the manifesto of a killer to remind myself that there is more social critique to explore than the binary Liberal vs Conservative that's all the rage in our politicised world.
Realistically his opinions are held by a substantial amount of people that most would label conservative, although it's not mainstream conservatism for sure. And certainly not mainstream republicanism.
The point of Kaczynski is that both camps are mostly composed of middle-class Western academics living a sheltered life that are deciding who is socially accepted and who need to be cancelled. Our culture wars are not minorities shouting for a better life, our culture war is made of middle-class white people getting offended on behalf of minorities. They are no Martin Luther King, no Malcolm X, they just are posers that are making the racial (and gender and sexual) divide even worse than it is, by polarising or alienating the silent neutral majority.
This is a longer argument that's put more eloquently in the manifesto than I could ever write on a comment box.
Thank god there's a divide, otherwise I would be obliged to agree with you.
Genuinely amazed someone identifying with the Left would find these ideas interesting, and if so, they're going to love the deep philosophical musings on leftism offered by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Ron de Sanctis!
Andreas Breivik copied large part of it in his manifesto, but then again he is murderer too.
Breivik is a right-wing fascist obsessed with racial and religious purity, Kaczynski's manifesto is critique of the Industrial Age not very distant from any 19th century anarchist essay. I'm not sure if he got more politicised in his later work, I'm only talking about that document.
The point I'm trying to make is that people are more nuanced than your observation is trying to imply.
I think primitivism is a later invention. Certainly Kropotkin is very pro-mechanization. If there is a point of contention, it's to do with ownership, not technology itself.
I assure you a lot of incredibly smart writing doing absolutely accurate predictions is ignored by schools and clubs.
Literally only thing that sets Kaczynsky apart are the bombs.
> , I quite enjoyed his critique of the modern Leftist ideals and why they would create the factionalism and alienation we see today
Considering overwhelming majority of violence, authoritarianism and fictionalized is from right, by a large margin, this is massive meh.
Or more, they only mean whatever the person speaking them means to say.
Example: Some of the most infamous acts of violence of the 20th century were sanctioned by a left-wing radical. Or a right-wing radical. It simply depends on which specific ideals you want to vilify when you by associating them with Hitler.
Were the 2020 US riots were ultra surprising to you because they mostly left wingers burning cities and violently declaring demilitarized zones, or were they "meh" because right wingers are the only violent ones?
It's not really a political position, it's more like a pathological insistence that civilization should be destroyed. Kaczynski went as far as saying we're biologically wired to live primitive lives and we're misusing ourselves in perversions that he calls 'surrogate activities', which include science and art. To him, hunting or trying to survive while being hunted in the woods is the perfect utilization of the human mind-body, and we should all abandon society and go do that instead.
Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Compare that to a car which is manufactured somewhere far away with tons of special expertise and which basically cannot be repaired by a layman anymore (as opposed to not too many decades ago). And you rely on a huge infrastructure network for building and maintaining the roads.
There are probably better examples (horses just came to mind). We tend to choose the more "advanced" option because it seems more convenient, without considering the externalities of that convenience, whether that's pollution or handing over part of our self-sufficiency in order to do so.
Something like a Carrington event would cripple us and cause utter chaos. Just think of the huge amount of technology that we rely on in daily life and it's not changing direction. At all. We are not becoming more resilient, we're becoming less. We are quickly losing the skills required to adapt to a "lower" level of technology, meaning any quick disruption in the system could be catastrophical.
Technology can potentially enable us to have more freedom, autonomy and self-sufficiency, but for it to be sustainable it would need to be at the top of the decision-making tree.
Right now it's mostly a balancing act between convenience and affordability on behalf of consumers and profitability of producers. And well, mix in some environmental concerns (but those tend to be secondary as well as almost always reactionary).
And yes I'm probably somewhat of a neo-luddite. I take pride in being self-sufficient, to the extent possible. And I'm more than willing to sacrifice convenience for freedom. Technology creates more boundaries, rules and bureaucracy, not less. Technology controls us, rather than the other way around.
How about the externalities and technological advancements nessecary to domesticate wild horses, and also the infastructure networks which drove the need and ability to create a ship capable of transporting those horses across the Atlantic ocean to America, where they are not a native species.
Would've been easier had your example played out 10k years ago when there were still native horses in America. :)
For domesticating horses, it doesn't rely on huge factories. You need basic tools (stone would suffice) to cut down some trees in order to create an enclosure where you train the horses. Then basic tech like cloth and rope making, and/or leather, for making saddles and bridles etc. Nothing a couple of people can't cobble together with basic knowledge. No reliance on huge complicated factories and supply chains or tech unobtainable by resourceful people, locally.
For ships we've been building various boats for ages, with very simple tools. Building a small boat is something a single person can do in weeks to years depending on the size. And larger ones is mostly a question of adding more laborers (engineering calculations and considerations get more complicated with size so there are practical limits built in).
Making iron helps in both cases. That doesn't require a ton of technology either but granted it's quite difficult to bootstrap. Still, once up and running doesn't take more than a small community to maintain.
Ideally, in my mind, any "acceptable" tech should be manageable by a community of 150 people or less. I keep coming back to the Dunbar number whenever I think of human systems/societies.
Your questioning bring up an interesting comparison point:
Wood as building material vs. plastics. Wood being 100% recyclable plus it literally grows on trees, while plastics require immense knowledge and expertise in chemistry and raw materials include fossil fuels. The externalities for the latter are huge and will thus require an immense amount of interconnected people and technologies to create and maintain. Way more than 150.
I do also realize that there are edge cases where distinctions become difficult, but that's the case with everything. The main idea here is that I think technology should be judged on a spectrum of self-reliance/freedom. Defining a hard limit in the middle can be difficult (or impossible). Although, not impossible or necessarily even hard if the community of people deciding where the limit is is small enough.
Ok A) I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow, horse or no, unless you were in the Great Plains or smtn.
B) saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some” is like saying all you need to get a car is “simply build one”. Do you think the untold millions who died (and continue to die) of starvation in subsistence-farming based society were just dumb? It’s hard, dangerous, luck-driven work, assuming you don’t get killed by animals or other humans.
> We are quickly losing the skills required to adapt to a "lower" level of technology, meaning any quick disruption in the system could be catastrophical.
Disregarding the fact that modern population densities in most of the western world would make subsistence farming impossible, why is self-sufficiency an unquestioned virtue, so much so it gets to be up there with heavyweights like Autonomy and Freedom?
To illustrate my concerns more explicitly: If I invented a machine that could make any material or object appear instantly, would you destroy it, under the logic that it’s better to remember how to struggle? Or more near term, are you strongly against the prospect of interstellar travel?
> I don’t know much about the past but I’m pretty sure trying to travel unmapped backcountry terrain was super dangerous and hard and slow
I never said it would be faster or easier.
> saying that all it takes to get horses is “simply breed some” is like saying all you need to get a car is “simply build one”.
Yes! And you cannot build a modern car. You could, say, in 1940 (probably over quite a wide range of decades), but try building one now and getting it road-legal. You are arguing my point.
> Disregarding the fact that modern population densities in most of the western world would make subsistence farming impossible
I don't want to disregard that since you are yet again furthering my point. :) Our blind quest at throwing technological solutions at problems have lead us past this irreversible point (among many others). Money and greed made farming into huge corporations and technology (fertilizers made using fossil fuels) was one of the main tools to achieve that. To grow beyond the point of self-reliance.
This is why the realization of this tends to lead to the necessity of some kind of destruction - downscaling has simply gotten (seemingly) too difficult.
> why is self-sufficiency an unquestioned virtue, so much so it gets to be up there with heavyweights like Autonomy and Freedom?
I had a paragraph that I edited out in the end about many people not caring about self-sufficiency - many naturally gravitate towards relying on others. I thought I loosely covered this in the end paragraph by mentioning that I take pride in self-sufficiency, as did Kaczynski.
But also it becomes a basic incredient when you expand the scope of systems to small communities of people, rather than just one or a family. Or larger. But! The important idea is that the smaller the community of self-sufficiency is, the more resilience it has.
> To illustrate my concerns more explicitly: If I invented a machine that could make any material or object appear instantly, would you destroy it, under the logic that it’s better to remember how to struggle?
To assess the values and virtues of technology I think it should be judged in terms of characteristics like:
- can I create it myself (tools, raw materials, licensing) - can I repair it myself? - what's the life-cycle and if not practically infinite (Ship of Theseus) how much of it can be recycled/reused/repurposed? - etc.
So if your material synthesizer relies on a proprietary miniature fusion-reactor with the proprietary tech owned by a multinational conglomerate where, once humanity has grown to rely on the device will effectively be enslaved by it, I don't think it's that great of an idea (although the tech by itself sounds awesome). I wouldn't destroy it, but I think it'd be a terrible idea to adopt it worldwide.
If however it was powered by open-source tech, where any reasonably equipped small factory can produce spare parts for it, that sould like it could be quite a revolutionary thing!
> Or more near term, are you strongly against the prospect of interstellar travel?
Not sure how this is more near-term but no, I have nothing against interstellar travel, that seems like the obvious thing for any life form to do - to try to propagate outwards/further as much as possible.
However! All life forms also tend to respect the boundaries in the environment and find an equilibrium. Animals tend to stay where there are resources available to sustain them. The problem with humans is that we, using our large brains and us-vs-them views, use technology to expand at the expense of everything else. If we were to solve this conundrum and find a happy balance, we might not even want to venture out to the stars (for much more than redundancy purposes as a species).
Our planet is quite an incredible place, as is our minds. If we'd started looking more inwards we mig...
I would say we fundamentally differ on basic assumptions, which I would perhaps characterize as: I think the world/universe is an inhospitable place that needs human cooperation to stave off some of the immense suffering it naturally causes, whereas you see the natural order as a fundamentally satisfying one. I guess when I say it like that it sounds like the obvious justification for primitivism, but still, your points are well received and novel to me.
The perfect expression of that is the “magical object-creation machine” and your decision that no, you would not embrace/encourage it (presumably such a thing would be far too complex to make or repair alone). Im personally thinking less about resilience than of people dying of cancer, a child without enough food, a family shivering in a harsh winter, etc.
Maybe another angle is “what is the purpose of life?” I’d say it is (at least partially) to reduce suffering in ourselves and our fellow man. I’m curious, if you have any more time - do you see your “natural balance > cooperative advancement” ethos as a better way to reach the same goal, or would you express your aim differently?
> Technology creates more boundaries, rules and bureaucracy, not less. Technology controls us, rather than the other way around.
Technology how it's wielded today, by lobbyists and government, controls and rules over us. But technology is a tool, and there is an unexplored problem space of using technology not to separate us from nature into rigid control structures, but to enhance our lives, to actually let us live longer, in harmony with nature.
Technology is neutral, but has mostly been used against us and this is becoming unsustainable and unacceptable.
Nope, only in steppe-like environments, where horses are native.
If anything, technical civilization tends to de-fragment environments worldwide. You can drive the same car in Patagonia or Borneo as long as the road is there, and your phone will use the same stack of communication protocols.
Of course, it has externalities. The question is how these externalities can be mitigated. But a humanity numbering 8 billion people can't realistically think of individual self-sufficiency at a scale, and not even tribes of hunters and gatherers, 1000x less numerous, were ever composed of self-sufficient individuals.
We might be more fragile than our ancestors, but we also gained some other forms of resiliency that they didn't have. Humanity actually passed through a bottleneck event about 70 thousand years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#:~:tex....
It would be a lot harder for a single natural disaster to threaten survival of the entire Homo sapiens species today.
The initial adoption of those technologies should've been discussed and decided through a different lens rather than through convenience and monetary profits.
And now that we're past the point, any solution would involve destruction of some sort. That's a large conundrum.
Which isn’t crazy if you strip it of its politics and just consider the lifestyle itself.
Many people latch onto what are effectively caveman diets (especially that). And other people justify doing whatever “weird” stuff by saying that it works similar to how we used to do things, like defecating in a squat position instead of sitting on a throne. And indeed, some of the biomechanics are corroborated by findings that tell us that “sitting is the new smoking”.
Then you have the deluge of news about how you literally can’t do anything, ever, in modern society (lightning, food, air quality) without giving yourself X and Y (bad stuff).
That “caveman” philosophy is basically the most conservative approach to living that exists; better the evil you know than the evil you don’t (modern society changing all the time; see for example smart phones which are quite new).
Of course, the caveat to the above paragraph is that we don’t truly know how to “caveman” since we didn’t grow up like that. So it’s not strictly true that it is an uber-conservative approach.
Where anarcho-primitivism fails is that we’re seven billion people on this earth, way too many to go back to hunting deer and rabbits and whatever. The Unabomber figured out that he couldn’t simply make the individualistic choice (see: liberalism) of going out into the woods and start living by himself, because the found out that Civilization would encroach on him. And what’s a hermit got to say to the federal government giving him an Eminent Domain claim or whatever it’s called?
And then he took it in a bad political direction.
Ask an anthropologist if this is true.
You’re effectively just saying that whatever the status quo is right now, that’s what we naturally gravitate towards.
I think that we would get back to “organized society”, yes. But for different reasons. (Basically: more population density leads to agriculture which leads to food stores which leads to a ruling class that can hoard the food stores which leads to things that can be raided (what’s there to be steal from hunter-gatherers except for slaves?) which leads to competition, and so on.)
This is roughly what I meant to express. Didn’t mean to imply we’d return to where we are now, but ultimately the drive to survive and thrive would bring us back to some kind of organized society.
My core point being that “cavemanship” isn’t some kind of stable state like Kaczynski insists. It’s an ephemeral/unstable state on the way to some higher level organized society that balances tensions.
This is the saddest part, he didn't have to do it the way he did.
No one thinks themselves evil. Every evil act, or most of them, was conducted by a person who thought they were doing what’s best.
I disagree. His ideas are not novel or new. There are large bodies of work around the evils of technology, increasing polarization, isolation, disconnection from nature etc. Leftists are trending toward authoritarianism is old hat. It's all pretty standard stuff. There have been literally hundreds of popular books and films about these very subjects.
The only reason people are reading it is because he murdered people. He said as much:
“In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.”
You can get everything he said elsewhere, without accidentally or intentionally lionizing a murderer.
Especially as his predictions were also true in technology in the past decades and is now more relevant with AI.
As far as I know from studying history, it's impossible to win (= survive as a culture against encroachment from different cultures) without violence.
Today's mantra of pacifism and non-violence is just propaganda from current governments (all of which were originally installed through bloodshed, and kept in power through never-ending bloodshed) to keep the masses impotent and avoid being toppled like their predecessors
Nonviolent change (toward peace)is somewhere down the imaginary page, but it can be effective. It is both less timely and long lasting.
As I’m reading through The Devil’s Chessboard (recommend a few weeks ago in another thread) I’m increasingly despondent about the “people”’s role in the US (i.e. we are now just chattel for the ruling class), and I haven’t even gotten to MKUltra yet!
Ok. You topple one. If you do not create a replacement government you will have people preyed upon by violent gangs when eventually one become powerful enough to form new government. And if you do you are back to square one. So maybe it is better to try to fix what you have while trying to avoid violence. I am not telling it is always possible but at least it can be a goal.
The threat of violence can be both effective and nonviolent. Every battle is won before it is ever fought- and by corollary, it is possible to win without ever having fought.
I'm not sure who would define "orthodox" nonviolence (ahimsa) -- maybe Mahavira? -- but whichever definition we chose, I suspect it would differ from yours on the subject of threats.
Not that you're wrong, necessarily.
But you can't play by only bluffing, can you? In optimal (say) poker play, the different actions, including what amounts to bluffing, are all chosen with some probability (a "mixed strategy"), fundamentally at random.
Have you ever read Jewish history? That's a culture that has survived for millenia, without perpetrating virtually any violence between the time they were exiled from Israel and the time they took over Palestine, while facing constant discrimination and violence against them.
Not to mention that their culture set the foundations of the two biggest religions on Earth today.
Frankly, I don't see any reason to gate keep my own curiosity. Moral filtering just breeds ignorance.
His premises aren’t grounded in reality, and his conclusions don’t follow logically from his premises. It’s also lacks humanity or empathy.
It’s an interesting read, because you can really see a broken mind at work, but there’s really not anything to learn from the ideas themselves. E.g., his mental model of “leftists” is truly bizarre. It would be funny except I know what it lead to.
> Our discussion of leftism has a serious weakness. It is still far from clear what we mean by the word “leftist.” There doesn’t seem to be much we can do about this. To- day leftism is fragmented into a whole spectrum of activist movements ...
> To the extent that it is defined at all, our conception of leftism is defined by the discussion of it that we have given in this article, and we can only advise the reader to use his own judg- ment in deciding who is a leftist.
So yeah, just pick whoever you want as leftist. Some characteristics of the leftists:
> He tends to be for gun control, for sex education and other psychologically “en- lightened” educational methods, for social planning, for affirmative action, for multiculturalism. He tends to identify with victims.
Wow, sounds like those leftists are pretty cool, actually intelligent people!
Seriously, I could make fun of this shit all day, but perhaps I'll do something more productive.
Reading his manifesto at 14 after seeing endless newspaper descriptions of it as incoherent, rambling, crazy, etc. was an eye-opening moment for me:
I found the manifesto to be lucid and well-argued.
In a moment of shock I realized you can't trust the newspapers, at all -- a judgement I hold even more strongly today, with a few decades more of experience.
I'd encourage anyone who hasn't to read it themselves and form their own opinion!
> For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.
To paraphrase 'ole ted "You see, affirmative action makes white people feel bad and mad at black people which is the real secret goal of leftists".
Do you, or have you ever, felt mad a black person because of affirmative action? I can even grant that you think affirmative action was a bad idea for any reason you like, that's not the question. The question is, did it make you or anyone you know mad at black people? My guess is anyone mad at a black person because of affirmative action would still be mad at them without it.
This is what people mean when they say it's incoherent. He rambles for several paragraphs offering no evidence for his position (after all, he was pooping in a bucket in the middle of the woods... so not much opportunity to cross reference things). The examples he comes up with are laughably dumb.
I don't mean this too harshly, but maybe you reread the manifesto with a more critical eye. 14 is too young to be reading stuff like this critically. You simply weren't old enough to spot the bullshit.
No. It's more like "Leftist activists push AA and other policies with no concern for the impact on the communities they're purportedly intended to help."
> Do you, or have you ever, felt mad a black person because of affirmative action?
I'm pretty sure you could find a ton of people who do if you searched for it. But even if the harm wasn't real I think the point is that activists don't care about collateral damage.
I disagree mainly because of this:
> Helping black people is not their real goal.
It's a weakening of Kaczynski's argument to say it's about activists not caring about collateral. His point is more that "leftist crave power and hate themselves so they'll push policies to punish their race and social class using a moral justification. These policies actively hurt those they are supposed to help"
He absolutely mixes in there insinuations that this is all by some secret design. He spends ungodly amounts of paper writing secret about the motives of the leftist.
Maybe, but what you say here isn't supported by the bit you quoted.
That bit actually seemed completely level headed and well written. He defined his terms (leftist) and admitted it's a sloppy term, and then he wrote something I feel is true about most political ideologues - that they care more about their arguments and winning than the correctness of the arguments or value of their opinions.
> He absolutely mixes in there insinuations that this is all by some secret design.
Again, maybe in the overall manifesto, but not there. In the quote provided he just says "Xs works for the goals of X, even if their message is 'Save the Ys'"
That's not hard to believe, it's something we all need to try to avoid in our own thinking.
> ungodly amounts of paper writing about the motives of the leftist.
:D Have you ever read what leftists themselves write? You could fill libraries just with analyses of Marx.
I think the scary thing is that Ted is very well read and could be writing for the New Yorker ... and he justifies violence.
But not because he's the only one doing so, he's just the one who decided to take it into his own hands instead of the acceptable ways to call for violence - to advocate using our military to do it, or hoping that someone 'punches' them for 'being a nazi'.
He's scary because he disproves the narrative of a barely literate, ignorant, conservative-adjacent, god-fearing, terrorist who hates us because of our freedoms, or whatever. He is us, one of the best of us at one time, and we can be vicious.
>To the extent that it is defined at all, our conception of leftism is defined by the discussion of it that we have given in this article, and we can only advise the reader to use his own judgment in deciding who is a leftist.
"You'll know one when you see it" is lazy handwaving for a guy who spent this much time blaming leftism, and it conveniently sets up the reader to rely on their own prejudice when determining who belongs to his problem group. Pass.
It has it's roots in antisemitism and is likely older than that. We've been having pogroms for centuries because of the fear of what outsiders might be doing behind closed doors. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Jews_during_the...
Never seen that happen
Maybe related to something like Piaget's theory of cognitive development, I believe that if you advance too fast intellectually, there are other things, developmentally, that are trodden on, or left completely behind.
> The big break in the case came in 1995. The Unabomber sent us a 35,000 word essay claiming to explain his motives and views of the ills of modern society. After much debate about the wisdom of “giving in to terrorists,” FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno approved the task force’s recommendation to publish the essay in hopes that a reader could identify the author.
> After the manifesto appeared in The Washington Post, thousands of people suggested possible suspects. One stood out: David Kaczynski described his troubled brother Ted, who had grown up in Chicago, taught at the University of California at Berkeley (where two of the bombs had been placed), then lived for a time in Salt Lake City before settling permanently into the primitive 10’ x 14’ cabin that the brothers had constructed near Lincoln, Montana.
> Most importantly, David provided letters and documents written by his brother. Our linguistic analysis determined that the author of those papers and the manifesto were almost certainly the same. When combined with facts gleaned from the bombings and Kaczynski’s life, that analysis provided the basis for a search warrant.
https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/unabomber
My issue with reading Kaczynski, which I have not but have an idea of his manifesto, is that he was trying to bring about change through force and destruction. Through out the history of men, force has always been a temporary fix. It may seem like a relatively easy fix but once force is removed, we all return to whatever the force was trying to change.
The only way change can thrive is through consensus. The majority needs to agree that a change should happen. That type of change is very time consuming, messy and long. But it's the only way to bring about long term change.
There are better more deserving thought-leaders that people should read. Kaczynski is not one of them. His actions should really erase him from history rather than praise him.
User californiadreem posted a few authors on a comment here that can get people started.
Ellul was a professor, a pacifist, and a Christian anarchist. Attacks the ideas, not the man.
The substantive research is all of human psychology, biology, and sociology.
Those things endowed with the capability of effortful judgement, abstracting from more "primitive" (biologically ancestral) instances.
* Commitment to avoid causing physical or emotional harm to others.
* Absolute respect and preservation of all human lives, without exceptions.
* Unconditional rejection of violence under any circumstances.
* Belief that every human has the right to live, and recognition of the dignity, worth, and autonomy of every individual.
* Full acceptance of differing viewpoints, cultures, religions, and lifestyles.
* Consistent practice of understanding and sharing the feelings of others, and alleviating their suffering.
* Refraining from initiating force against others.
* Resolution of differences and conflict through conversation and mutual understanding, rather than force or coercion.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-...
See, the unabomber manifesto was essentially a moral argument. "These things cause damage" is a moral observation. (Because how are you going to define "damage" without moral judgment?) "Therefore we should destroy technology" is a moral judgment (because you can't get there without the moral judgment of "humans should not be damaged").
So, the point is, I'm not going to trust the moral judgment of a murderer. Every fact he says in the manifesto may be correct. But his moral judgment is self-evidently terrible. And he reaches his conclusions through that moral judgment.
The only thing that distinguishes Kaczynsky from, well, any random dude, are the bombs. Otherwise he is a no one. And random dude that did not send bombs makes more sense to listen to.
I don't see how "but proponents of technology died" is an argument against his claim that stopping technology will stop suffering caused by technology.
The only reason any of us are discussing Kaczynski now is because he sent those bombs; he would almost certainly be an unknown if he had not. This gives us an moral quandary, because do we really want to make murderers famous, even when they have something interesting to say? Won't this incentivise future acts of murder and terrorism?
And for what it's worth, I read his book and I thought it raised interesting points, but I am somewhat troubled by this, and I can 100% understand if someone would choose different, even more so if they personally know one of his victims.
Yes, that's what he was trying to do.
Ted claims we must stop technology, even with violent means, because technology causes greater suffering than the violent means to stop it.
You claim "but that's violent!"
That's not an argument. If you did try to make an argument (against Ted's ideas), I would agree with you. I would try to make that argument myself.
We can have an intellectual dialogue without devolving to "this made me feel bad therefore you're wrong!"
> We can have an intellectual dialogue without devolving to "this made me feel bad therefore you're wrong!"
The people who are dead or wounded feel very bad indeed. And I never said you're wrong, either, or that Kaczynski's ideas are wrong.
I misread your comments because I'm too triggered by people stating their emotions as if they're arguments.
See, Kaczynski's theory is also about morality. He's complaining about the damage that technology does. Well, why do we care that it does damage? That's a moral question, not a scientific or technical one. He's making a moral argument.
So, if he's making a moral argument and murdering people, that means that I for one am unwilling to trust his moral judgment. It means I can't trust him when he says that we would be better off without technology. I can't trust his whole argument, because it's primarily a moral one.
Are we not justified in killing Hitler to prevent the suffering of millions?
I think Ted is wrong, but I also think your counterargument is ridiculous.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it turns out, unfortunately, that you've been doing this repeatedly:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605613
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605547
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34558731
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34328210
That's seriously not ok and we need it to stop if you want to keep posting here.
I want to engage on HN in a productive way and I do not mean to personally attack anyone.
I think the reason you were able to link to so many instances of me personally attacking someone is because I genuinely do not understand what you consider a personal attack. I thought I was arguing against ideas and statements, not attacking anyone individually.
I'd consider personal attacks to be ad hominem, which is exactly the opposite of what I am trying to do in my comment — I am trying to point out what is and what isn't a logically valid and argument.
Would you please help me understand? I'd like to learn and be able to engage in a manner that is accepted.
See the definition of validity [0] in logic.
When I say they are "intellectually dishonest" I mean they are attempting to persuade others with an appeal to emotion in a subtly-crafted paragraph that looks like a rational argument, but technically is not a rational argument --- because it is invalid --- and they know it is invalid.
They are attempting to win by emotional persuasion rather than a series of rigorous rational conclusions.
How my statement that someone is intellectually dishonest is a personal attack, I do not know. Perhaps people skip over the "intellectually" qualifier and jump straight to the "dishonest" part?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Validity_(logic)
You're not psychic; you're not omniscient. You're wrong sometimes. And you're wrong here in your judging of my honesty.
And when you act like you can judge what you can't, and you judge negatively, and you say so publicly, that is at least indistinguishable from a personal attack.
So: Calling someone dishonest is almost always going to be considered a personal attack, whether you intended it that way or not. And if you do it here, it will eventually get you banned. Attack the logic or the data, not the person's intentions.
This is the definition of intellectual dishonesty according to Wikipedia:
"Intentionally committed fallacies in debates and reasoning are called intellectual dishonesty."
I read your argument as "this man emotionally affected me via a personal connection I have, therefore his argument is invalid" and interpreted it as a logical fallacy. I assumed you made this knowingly because that is like a super basic logic 101 fallacy. I wasn't trying to personally attack you or say anything about your character or intellect. I was just trying to point out that you had committed a logical fallacy and that I assumed you already knew this.
It will get you a very long way indeed if you simply remind yourself that you can't know someone else's intent and edit your comments until they no longer include any assumptions about intent. If, in addition to that, you make your comments without pejoratives (and especially without pejoratives that have anything to do with other commenters), you should be in good shape.
I believe that you're sincerely asking for clarity here, so I hope this helps!
> your intellectual dishonesty
On the internet, combining a second-person pronoun with a pejorative is going to come across as a personal attack.
Even this:
> what you have written is intellectually dishonest
is likely to land as a personal attack.
Moreover, (1) you can't know whether someone is being dishonest because you can't know their internal state. Nobody says to themselves "i'm being dishonest right now", so a comment like this is almost always going to get flamewar-style pushback, which is what we're trying to avoid here. Also,
(2) you don't need this! You can make your substantive points entirely without calling names, getting personal, etc. If you'd please do that in the future, we'd be grateful.
Does this help?
Yet, from a utilitarian perspective, I honestly don't know if intent matters when we're talking about third-party maiming and death. Our society disrupts and injures the bodies, minds, and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, if not billions, on a daily basis.
And in that sense, Kaczynski, Ellul, or really any dissident of the status quo could, can, and do point out victims of society that outnumber Kaczynski's by several orders of magnitude. The victims are not directly and immediately visible, don't have power-holding advocates, and have little to no incentive to disrupt their own lives to discover, let alone undo, the causes of their problems. And if they do, they encounter a system most unwilling to listen or change.
All of this contributes to these innocents being left unmourned and the causes of their tragedies, like minefields for future generations, left unresolved (Kaczynski mails mines and dies in prison; Kissinger sows fields of mines and lives to be a centenarian and the eldest diplomat).
For an example directly related to maiming, consider the allegations of SawStop. A technology was invented to prevent serious maiming when operating table saws in 2002. The inventor attempted to license the technology to manufacturers only to (allegedly, their lawsuit was dismissed due to supposed tardiness in filing) encounter a cartel among tool manufacturers that colluded to prevent adoption of the technology because it would become obligate to all models to prevent legal liability, which would largely eliminate budget saw models.
The number of finger or hand amputations in the US annually is in the thousands, for one type of tool.
Or consider meat packing (excluding power-butchering injuries that typically include hand and finger amputation):
"There are many serious safety and health hazards in the meat packing industry. These hazards include exposure to high noise levels, dangerous equipment, slippery floors, musculoskeletal disorders, and hazardous chemicals (including ammonia that is used as a refrigerant). Musculoskeletal disorders comprise a large part of these serious injuries and continue to be common among meat packing workers. In addition, meat packing workers can be exposed to biological hazards associated with handling live animals or exposures to feces and blood which can increase their risk for many diseases."
And this is an industry where undocumented workers are prioritized because they lack the language and advocacy to receive adequate compensation and legal protections.
Even something as benign-seeming as a Nalgene bottle follows a similar kind of delayed statistical violence. BPA, shown to be independently unsafe, gets replaced with Triton, unshown to be anything. Triton is effectively an analog with likely xenoestrogenic and endocrine disrupting capabilities, yet can slip through a loophole with decades of profitability before the externalities start directly emerging.
I lost my grandmother to ovarian cancer, likely caused by long-term use of asbestos-laced baby powder. A certain corporation gets a single $9 billion penalty for poisoning millions over decades; I and countless others lose their family members. This corporation's gross profit last year was something like $64 billion.
Now I also understand the argument that if industrial society has caused these things, they have also enabled untold material prosperity globally and billions of additional lives to live. Maiming, industrial accidents, and toxicity are the price to pay for this and they all "happen" to be the aberration rather than the norm, with constant incremental improvements as circumstances allow.
And yet, I think I'd rather have less sophisticated stuff and fewer unhappy ...
He stopped because he was arrested. At that time they found two completed bombs in his cabin, so he was planning to renege on his deal not to plant any more bombs.
Innocent until proven guilty. There is more than enough evidence to put away Teddy K for life. Lean on real evidence. Don't stretch the truth and muddy the waters for the innocent. Your line of reasoning could be used to convict the innocent.
> Kaczynski replied Penthouse was less "respectable" than The New York Times and The Washington Post, and said that, "to increase our chances of getting our stuff published in some 'respectable' periodical", he would "reserve the right to plant one (and only one) bomb intended to kill, after our manuscript has been published" if Penthouse published the document instead of The Times or The Post.
Don't do victims of terrorism a disservice by suggesting a mass murderer deserves the benefit of the doubt as to whether he has any qualms about reneging on "deals" made with a society he doesn't respect. His calculus for who got to live and die hinged on factors as arbitrary as nitpicking over which periodical was willing to publish his bullshit. He was a fucking Narcissist to the extreme, who would waste no time coming out of retirement at the next perceived slight.
"Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply to the fucking Unabomber. Bombing people is kind of his thing. He proved it, what, 16 times?
I don't get what the big deal is. We already have more than enough evidence from his previous plantings to convict him as a bomb planter and put him away for life. Is it just that you can't compartmentalize and separate the two things in your mind?
> Is it just that you can't compartmentalize and separate the two things in your mind?
They are not separate. Past behavior predicts future one. And ignoring probabilities is just demanding that people act as if they were stupid.
It's analogous to coming up with one counterexample to disprove something in mathematics.
I can reasonably theorize that he fully intended to stop bombing people based on this "deal". There. Done. I can doubt he planned to bomb people in a reasonable way.
The onus is on you to remove all reasonable doubt. You have not done so by simply showing that there are bombs in his cabin. He could have built them before he made the deal to stop bombing people. That's a completely reasonable scenario.
No it's not.
Again, that's the standard for criminal punishment. Not moral judgement.
And have you heard of civil law? Despite the high stakes that's usually decided based on the preponderance of evidence.
I never said anything about moral judgement. I was never talking about moral judgement.
> And have you heard of civil law? Despite the high stakes that's usually decided based on the preponderance of evidence.
Unrelated. Please, do share a link where Ted Kaczynski was convicted of a crime in connection with the unplanted bombs in question, because that's what I have been talking about in this entire string of comments.
I am exonerated by fact. Ted was not convicted of a crime for the unplanted bomb because there was insufficient evidence to do so. End of story ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
"Just because he bombed people previously doesn't mean he intended to do it again. You have to have stronger evidence, like writings or postage stamps, to prove beyond reasonable doubt that these two bombs were going to be planted."
"He is doing moral judgement and that one requires only reasonable probability."
"Yeah but I only have to come up with a reasonable doubt."
Aren't those lines all replies in order? Then you're using "reasonable doubt" as a couterargument to a moral judgement.
Either https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36275516 is trying to apply reasonable doubt to a moral judgement, or you're not reading the comments you're replying to.
I should have made it more clear that "Yeah but I only have to come up with..." meant "With respect to what I claimed..."
Sorry, I really am trying to be as charitable as possible with my interpretations of these comments.
I just hate to see people conflate emotion with logical soundness and validity. Appeals to emotion are human and valid and expose interesting points, but I can't stand to see them used to tear down the intellectual value (whether or not something is logically true) of ideas.
That's fine with respect to your claims, but it means your claims can't be used as-is to counter other claims that aren't on the same framework. Those people aren't trying to convict him.
> I just hate to see people conflate emotion with logical soundness and validity. Appeals to emotion are human and valid and expose interesting points, but I can't stand to see them used to tear down the intellectual value (whether or not something is logically true) of ideas.
I don't think anyone is doing that in this thread? "he stopped because he was arrested" isn't an invalid takedown of his ideas. There was a mention of ideas further upstream, but from that comment on they don't come up.
Reasonable doubt shifts based on past behavior. The parable of them scorpion is retold for a reason.
That won't stop people determined enough to defend him here, and as you can see people will die on that hill.
How many lives were saved due to his arrest? That we will never know, but I suspect the number is not zero.
I am exonerated by fact. The prosecutors did not have enough evidence to convict him of a crime related to the live bomb they found.
What are you going to do to argue against that? Deny history? It already happened. He wasn't convicted.
Crafting is crafting, whether you’re doing woodworking or killing. Is it impossible to believe that someone like Ted might find bomb building every bit as gratifying as we find programming?
He was unhinged. But it’s hard to argue he wasn’t a master craftsman. Few lone-wolf bomb makers survive 20 years without accidents, let alone evade authorities till their family turned them in.
I know very little about Ted, and almost nothing about his philosophies or any of the subject matter. But it seems entirely consistent and reasonable that there would be deployable bombs that were sitting around for unknown amounts of time when he was captured.
Dude’s a murderer. I’m glad he was stopped, and it’s sad he wasn’t caught on day one.
(My sense of humor has gotten me in hot water more than once, so I may as well go all-in. Probably a matter of time till it nips me though.)
In seriousness, the goal here is to have curious conversation, and follow that curiosity wherever it leads. I agree it sounds asinine, but think of the sheer number of details he had to get right merely to survive. He was one inch away from blowing himself up, quite literally, for years. I’m not at all ashamed to point out the obvious skill required.
If he pulled the pin on a few grenades and casually tossed them at people, we’d be having a different conversation. But he built things, just as we do. Certainly a different kind of thing, as you say, but he was still a builder.
Also wait what even is this comment. Why are you just praising the Unabomber unprompted? That’s not what the person you’re replying to was even talking about…
I don't see it, man, I think you just want to go against the grain, here.
Explain yourself.
If there are thinkers who have been in the conceptual space of the 23rd century and beyond, Simondon was surely one. Also radically of the future and forgotten is FM-2030 [6] [7].
All in all, blowing up people is easy, blowing up antiquated concepts, grasping for the grounds of a new metaphysics, painstakingly implementing and debugging is the hard part.
Besides, to think that there even is such a thing called technology (as distinguished from what) is incredibly naive after following to conclusions systems such as the Grotthuss proton translocation mechanism driving motion in a F_0/F_1-ATP synthase rotation mechanism [8] [9].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnther_Anders
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Simondon
[4] Gilbert Simondon - 'The Technical Object as Such', https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXDtG74hCL4
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Kittler
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030
[7] Futurist FM-2030 Appears on CNN's Future Watch, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT__dTtX2ik
[8] Prof Levin, Prof Frasch (2022) Mitochondria, bioenergetics, information, electric fields, https://youtu.be/MEhrMR-Jaw0?t=3429
[9] 2021, Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines: Updating Mechanism Metaphors in Light of the Modern Science of Machine Behavior, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.65072...
The same could be said about Capitalism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism
Indeed, in all large-scale supposed “non-capitalist” societies today there is capital—it doesn’t stop being so if a few people use unlimited power and oppression to install arbitrary rules and restrictions on capital for others without having being subject to any checks or balances themselves; it just becomes more contrived and perhaps perverted.
Some would probably say that it’s the infectious external influence of other capitalist countries that precludes full abolition of capital, but another way to look at it is that said external influence is in fact what gives such a regime life in the first place—i.e., if you remove the agitating antagonistic existence of “capitalism”, the pretend “non-capitalism capitalism” would not suddenly turn into a perfectly “non-capitalism non-capitalism” but rather revert to capitalism, regardless of whether it would be called so or not or whether it would happen violently or peacefully.
[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/03/03/inequalities/
civil and political life is terrible and still better than it has ever been
>"He sounds like an ecofascist to me, someone willing to use violence in pursuit of a "green" ideology."
The use of "green" ideology is pretty sarcastic remark from the political right, or climate deniers.
If your politics are too vile to discuss and defend, then don't participate in political discussions. And stop trying to inject your own politics while telling others not to mention their, like you've been hypocritically doing repeatedly.
The 23rd Century shouldn't belong to ecofascists.
Perhaps an even better parallel would have been Alexander Grothendieck [3], the mathematician of the 20th century (maybe even of the 21st century if concepts as the topos [4] are made into usable tools for deep neural networks [5]), but also a person who was teaching mathematics in Vietnam [6] while hiding from bombs. When the world burns, all that remains is the Glasperlenspiel [7].
[1] 2022, Governing progress: From cybernetic homeostasis to Simondon’s politics of metastability, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380261221084...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topos
[5] 2021, Topos and Stacks of Deep Neural Networks, https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.14587
[6] 2013, Grothendieck’s 1967 Lectures in the Forest in Vietnam, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00283-013-9368-6
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Bead_Game
At no point the impromptu syllabus from above defends anyone or anything. In fact, it is so tame it didn't even mention more problematic, although arguably important and interesting, works such as Martin Heidegger's [1]. To think referencing someone as Günther Anders defends fascism is just too ludicrously functionally illiterate for any other words to be further possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Techno...
Whoever decided to not name him Adolf did the guy a huge favor.
Also worth mentioning what was essentially a partial autobiography by Kaczynsky: Truth Versus Lies[1]. I'm not sure it was ever completed and there are a couple versions floating around. He was still working on it well into the mid 2010s.
---
[1] One version: https://archive.org/details/TruthVersusLiesPart1
That's Ted Kaczynski. He may have had two good ideas for every bad one, but he was still a piece of shit who deserved to be isolated from society where he couldn't hurt anyone, and there are better advocates for whatever good came out of his head.
Or to paraphrase the dril classic: you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"
edit: to be clear, I think the dude was little more than an ecofascist and not worth taking seriously. But if you're going to, you ought to know he was the worst advocate for any position he held. You can do better than propping up a dead asshole.
You have to remember that when he performed the bombing in the 70s environmental protections had bipartisan support (Nixon famously created the EPA [1]).
It wasn't until much later that being green turned into a radical partisan issue. I mostly blame Rush Limbaugh [2] and the Koch brothers [3] for that shift. Turns out, a lot of big oil propaganda [4] can really sway public opinion.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa
[2] https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-cli...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/opinion/sunday/david-koch...
[4] https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/big-oils-electric-fight-aga...
As a way to discret the whole of the scientific and academic establishment in the minds of enough (voting) people, so as to delay the inevitable consensus that fossil fuel consumption is killing everyone slowly
If one half of the global turned to ecofascisim and they got a non-technical world they desired, the other half would immediately capitalize on this and take over.
In a way I find Ted's idea fascinating in the same way I find a lot of smarter spiritual teacher fascinating. Here is this simple base idea, now here is 500 things you have to watch out for how the most simplistic path will cause more harm than good. To that, I don't think he had a complete picture on how to achieve what he wanted.
Like Ram Dass saying, be here now, but take it too far and you will go insane!
He had some great ideas and simultaneously pushed back any real change by decades for his own self gain interest.
Normally I could write something like that over a week end but this article... it is an absolute doozy and the further in I go the worse it gets!
The issue is, you cannot really condense his writings down without doing a total dis-service to the points being made. Either you are going to misrepresent a point and it get wildly misinterpreted OR you come off a little to in praise of it.
It is very clear that TK had an academic background, even going so far as numbering the paragraphs - and in his book, The Anti-tech revolution : Why and how - he is very clear at the beginnings that these writings are not meant to be just read but studied. I don't disagree, they are written in a very tight manner. So while Industrial society and its future is 35,000 words, it is very specific in those words. It is about a 2 hour read, or you can just find a audio version on youtube.
If I had to summarize the essence of his works, he had a very decent analysis of the flaws of technology based societies. He had absolutely no idea on how to actually bring about change or even know where to start. The subsequent 27 years of writing from jail showed that he could analyses the problems and potential failings of revolutionary tactics but had no idea of how to actually analyze what technology as good or bad.
There is a reason he was called an insane Genius.
Personally speaking, yeah he was right on a lot of things... now what?
I ain't going to do what he did and try to bomb the world into submission, that is just idiotic. It is all just a some really good analysis but with no means of achievable execution. I more worry about others that are coming after him that will do a lot more damage. Anders Beivik who killed many at a youth summer came in 2011 also deeply reference TK's works in his manifest - an example of how this line of thinking can only lead down a dark and terrible path. But doesn't mean you shouldn't read these things.
One can read these things and take away some very good points without having to internalize the whole thing. Aristotle said something like that, you can read and think about ideas as though they are true and not necessarily have to believe them.
I was writing a whole thing about why I find looking for nuggets of wisdom in a work that you fundamentally find severely flawed is a waste of time, but I think it’s best dropped. “Did you find these critiques interesting” isn’t even something I could really convince somebody to change their mind on lol, given all the paragraphs in Hacker News
Why do you have to be an extremist about something or it doesn't count.
Think this is all the same mistaken view that a lot of extremists have. IF you can't be 100% dedicated without any slips then you are a failure and hypocrite.
So what if a vegan is stuck in an airport and has to cheat once and eat a burger, or I have family over for dinner and we do 'waste' more, or if I am vegan but on Thanksgiving, it is easier to eat some turkey and not argue about it.
You see, your view is the extreme one.
And also there is always Moloch. I may see technology and capitalism heading toward a brick wall, but I still do have to eat and live in the world. I'm not an extremists.
I don’t think he had just some “good points”, I think he’s completely right on the matter that modern (post steam engine & guns) technology is harmful for human life.
Isn't that the definition of agreeing (or not) with someone ?
> but that's not the same thing.
How so ?
Now let's say that you think AI was an existential threat to humanity and we were all going to die because of it. In your mind would it matter if you blew up 10 people? 100 people? 1000000 people? I mean in your mind they are all dead anyway and if this is the price to pay to stop it, it will have been worth it.
Also unless you’re a government you probably shouldn’t be applying utilitarian ideas of ethics to your actions, you do not have a right to decide on behalf of anyone but yourself as an individual, so even by utilitarian standards you are likely being unethical.
Second, the "imagine you truly believed X" defense is a good argument for sympathy, but not a good argument for justification or credence.
Unlike Hitler's opinions on snow, Ted Kaczynski's murders are inextricably linked to his ideology.
Few if any called Ellul a madman or characterized his ides as absolutely insane, but as far as I know he didn't kill anyone.
Yeah, probably some sort of causal relationship there.
On a more personal note, I am always getting panicked by emails from virus vendors about some grand new threat till I walk around for fifteen minutes. I bought toed shoes believing it would transform my experience of walking and hiking. I worried about Congress canceling NPR back in the 90s. When I try to remove some plastic toxic stuff from my diet,mit is extremely hard to avoid a big slide into “purity eating” where a choice to make a slight alteration to the effects on my world i to a matter of moral virtue. From “less antibiotics for the chickens slowing the spread of anti-biopics” to “why do you ask me to consume this swill of the devil?!” Is a small delta in my mind.
For a year or so I listened to all kinds of crypto podcasts or YouTubes / twitter spaces, and it was never long till people brought up anti-vax or global finance conspiracy ideas. I have watched flat earth / scientist debates, and the words of the flat earthers don’t parse as insane.
I think you're falling prey to the trap many engineers and scientists do, by assuming that they are ultimately capable of pure logical discussion and analysis, and that their biases are known and minimal - and that others can be seen in that light, too. In such a world, perhaps it would make sense to give Hitler a fair shake.
In our current world, I see us all as flawed little monkeys who can be pulled this way and that by provocative rhetoric and incomplete information. Dismissing someone's ideology completely because it was a central part of their campaign to kill millions is by far the logical and ethical choice. To do otherwise is intellectual hubris, IMO.
All this is, of course, in addition to the "there's a billion books out there, why does Hitler get to the top of the list? What about his life, ideas, or the summaries of his books makes you think that his ideas are any better than a million political blogs you have yet to read?"
B) seeing “moralist” in this context seems a little absurd. He didn’t swear a lot or start an OnlyFans, he tried to kill dozens of people…
It's unfortunate that people stop at the Manifesto, as Kaczynski has other critiques, but also admits to limitations or failures in his thinking. In one correspondence he admits he has no criteria to decide if a given technology is benign (small scale) or harmful (organization-dependent), a critical distinction! He tries to shore it up with analyzing a primitive Steam Engine, but I would point to Bronze as a contradiction harboring both characteristics. My interpretation is that the distinction is political, not based on any aspect of the technology itself including production. Technology acts as a magnitude, and how we apply it is the essence of our social/political organization.
This is, of course, one interpretation among many. Like professor Ellul, there are many other voices. There is Society of the Spectacle (a style ISAIF is imitating), or the works of Jean Baudrillard where he (early years) analyzes commodities under Consumerism or (later years) his work on Spectacle and Image. Even Karl Marx has a detailed understanding and critique of Machine Society in Chapter 15 of Capital [0].
Finally, Kaczynski is harmful to many anarchist spaces. His True Crime reputation attracts tons of media footage and mystique, which furthers misunderstandings. Crimethink has a great essay, "The Unabomber’s Unending 15 Minutes of Fame" [1], which details how this warps perceptions and action while ignoring who the victims are.
> As individuals within a movement professing a desire to reconstitute the world on the basis of love, harmony, peace, and sharing, an ethical question arises when a means inconsistent with an end is presented. In this case, the tactic of non-self-defense violence. This is not a question of armed defense such as was the case during the 1930s Spanish revolution, for instance, but rather, the validity of aggressive violence against those who are designated as The Enemy.
> The question of who is our enemy is a slippery one. Most of the dead and maimed from the Unabomber campaign were involved in this massive, almost entirely inclusive system of destruction and repression in a manner little different from most of us. Under the Unabomber rubric of complicity, almost all of us are potential targets. It should be remembered, his toll of three dead and 29 wounded was severely limited only when his bombs failed to go off in an airliner and outside a university classroom. Apparently, all of us were indiscriminately designated as The Enemy.
> I don’t have a lot of interest in people who advocate “armed struggle.” In this country, it usually comes down to those enthusiasts for armed adventures constituting a rooting section without taking the leap into the fray themselves. This is often accompanied by an arrogance and set of judgmental politics that condemn anyone not in the claque as timid, or reformist, or worse, counter-revolutionary. The latter, by the way, has historically been a pre-execution category, so I watch my back when ever I hear that phrase being thrown my way even by someone claiming to be an anarchist.
> My experience is that advocates of violence have a short shelf life. They break windows or plant a few bombs while furiously condemning everyone else for a lack of revolutionary ardor and then they are gone, usually with some wreckage that has to be cleaned up by those committed to long range organizing.
[0]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm
[1]: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/walker-lane-pseudony...
Who would care about Kaczynski's ravings without the murders?
> The solution is to simply view technique as objects that can be useful to us and recognize it for what it is, just another thing among many others, instead of believing in technique for its own sake or that of society.
Which I would summarize as "we should examine technology as a means to an end, rather than a good unto itself". On the other hand, I would summarize Ted's thoughts (without having read the manifesto myself) as "technology of all kinds is inherently evil, and we have a moral imperative to dismantle and destroy basically all of it as quickly as possible."
Those two ideas seem related in that they're talking about some of the same concepts, but it kinda ends there for me...
I refuse to read or become exposed to some ideas because one of their proponents murdered people.
I want this strategy to be less effective, not more.
Invariably, people take the opportunity to publicly declare how opposed they are to various abhorrent people, indirectly making others aware of them and their ideas. This entire page of comments on HN is a good example.
It's hilarious that people don't recognize that when they say "I will not read this" it is an advertisement.
Ted Kaczynski is more acceptable to like than most terrorists because of MKUltra and since his ideas are more advanced than "my religion is good" or "I hate $minority!". Doesn't mean it's not wrong to bomb people, but he is easier to understand than a guy who brings an AK47 to a concert.
Rest in peace.
We act like the KGB/FSB is this unfathomable, foreign evil. We have the bigger, scarier thing that killed it in our backyard.
Did the CIA fabricate and mail the bombs?
Do you suppose the elite hit squad that came to kill him simply added an extra bullet by mistake?
Make up your mind on this.
That said, if someone OTHER THAN YOU was paid by the post for posts akin to yours, and I was their boss, I would reassign that person to Reddit.
It seems pretty uncontroversial that Kaczynski has participated in series of psychological experiments by Henry Murray. Do you accept this fact?
It seems to be well supported via anecdotal evidence that these experiments were quite brutal and stressful, one might even call them torture. Do you agree with this?
We know that the psychologist in question (Henry Murray) was associated with the Office of Strategic Services. Are you with me on this?
We know that the Office of Strategic Services is the predecessor of the CIA.
So what we know is that we have a researcher in the orbit of OSS/CIA who conducted brutal experiments on Kaczynski. So that is the connection you are looking for.
We do not know if these experiments were part of the CIA program running under the codename MKUltra, or if they were part of some other CIA supported program under some other codename.
> The most I can find are claims that some records were destroyed, so we won't know.
You are making it sound like mice got to archived papers or the ink faded. But that is not the case. The CIA director ordered all documentation regarding MKUltra to be destroyed in 1973. That is it. Those papers would have told us for certain what is the truth. They made sure they are destroyed.
As you say the fact that the documents were destroyed doesn't prove that Henry Murray's experiments were CIA backed. That would be crazy speak.
But it is also not entirely fair to say that there is no connection whatsoever. In the absence of hard evidence we won't ever know for certain, but we can make reasonable inferences.
If you disagree with anything I wrote in the above please be specific which part of it do you disagree with.
I can't tell if you're being serious.
The CIA is still a piece of shit organization that has performed disgusting acts all over the world, and we don't even know about all of them (but, to be fair, the ones we don't know about shouldn't count in our opinion of the org). To talk about how Ted K. being a target of the CIA's MKUltra program as a "conspiracy theory" and "CIA FUD" seems laughably absurd, not because you may be correct that Kaczynski was never experimented on by the CIA, but rather because we know for a fact that MKUltra happened.
So on the one hand, we have an organization that drugged and tortured people as part of an experiment, and on the other, we have a potential lie that Ted Kaczynski was one of the people on whom they experimented. You're getting upset about the latter in order to defend the organization doing the former from "FUD."
You've literally chosen to stand up against "CIA FUD" to assert that even though the CIA performed these psychological torture experiments on people, Ted Kaczynski was not one of them! Or perhaps you don't believe MKUltra ever happened, I don't know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CIA_controversies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
> Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra)[a] was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken people and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture.[1][2][3][4] It began in 1953 and was halted in 1973.
How many redlines they gotta cross and ops they gotta run before they rival the KGB for you?
"A Freedom of Information Act document released by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2018 states that "a considerable amount of credible circumstantial evidence suggests that Theodore Kaczynski. also known as the Unabomber, participated in CIA-sponsored MK-ULTRA experiments conducted at Harvard University from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962".[26] Chase and others have also suggested that this experience may have motivated Kaczynski's criminal activities"
[1] https://exploringyourmind.com/the-harvard-experiment-that-le...
The entire thing was horrible and profoundly unethical. His brother has stated it really changed Kaczynski.
Some people have claimed that it was run by the CIA as part of MKUltra. This is certainly possible but not really substantiated by clear evidence as far as I've seen, and even if the CIA has some relationship they probably didn't instigate the experiments but just asked for research notes or something relatively benign like that. We'll probably never know for sure though.
Whatever the case may be, of the group of students that were subjected to these abusive experiments only one became a terrorist, so "the CIA created the Unabomber" is rather simplistic IMO. The primary blame remains with Kaczynski, no matter what.
Source? What is the incidence of terrorism in that group and in the general population?
Also: many people (myself included) were extensively and viciously bullied in their childhood and/or teen years. Many suffer profoundly negative effects from this, sometimes for decades or even their entire lives, but most are not terrorists. And even if it did turn out that the incidence of terrorists was higher: that still doesn't absolve them or their own responsibility in committing violent acts against random people (i.e. terrorism).
Not sure you can really blame that on the University or psychiatrist.
He had a serious problem with authority, needed to draft dodge and had a meeting with a psychiatrist where he planned to practise discussing feelings of being a woman with a psychiatrist.. I'm not really sure I should believe a forensic psychiatric evaluation decades later by a psychiatrist with a motive on what evaluation to give.
RIP.
It was recently bombed into rubble.
https://archive.ph/e8HVU
if the answer is no... there you go.
What do you mean by " it reads like something /pol/ or reddit would write "? Does Kaczynsky use tired cartoon memes? Does he accuse the left of insufficient weightlifting? Does he challenge them to a 1v1 in a Nintendo fighting game?
What part of his criticism do you actually find wrong?
Could it be that on the left there are more endurance sports, for health. And on the right there are more muscle building sports, so they can strike cool poses with their guns?
I disagree with a lot of Kaczynski's ideas and methods, but I still regard him as an important thinker and wish people would read his output in full rather than rushing to have the hottest take (not meant as a dig at you, rather the avalanche of attempted zingers on Twitter and in the media over the weekend).
It's definitely not the standard fare you would find on those 2 sites you mentioned just a brief 'don't trust these activists they want the philosopher stone for themselves'.
(set aside that it often builds up to violent inner conflicts)
they really don't, and this is one of the reasons why there is so much fracturing in the left, usually.
TK was post-left before it was cool.
A bit of a bait and switch. Get attention with something shocking and violent, then appeal to worries through apocalyptic boogeymen. The solution, of course, is a sense of comforting tradition that the naturalness of the past is safe. A killer combo!
I don't think it implies any of that. The GP just means some people can't or won't separate the art from the artist.
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
My post was a call for being smarter about who we invest in. I always wonder about people who call for separating art and artist over such mediocre artistry.
As the parent says in their reply below:
> My post was a call for being smarter about who we invest in.
Nobody said anything about a “final solution” or gulags.
“We can do better” and “calling for having taste” certainly seems to imply a command-economy approach to the marketplace of ideas.
If that’s not what you intended, what do you mean by “have taste” and “do better”?
No. This is a trunk of ideas, not a "marketplace of ideas." I have some wares in there. You can move on if none of it appeals to you.
I'm just some strings in your computer. I can't make you do anything. There's no policy work being done here.
What you said assumes that people will give up on that and jump to coercion. Maybe your cynicism is warranted.
I'm just going to make up an example: let's say the quote in question is "Democracy requires active participation." If I saw this posted by an anonymous internet commenter in a political discussion, I would completely agree. The obvious interpretation is that democracy works better when people vote, speak to your representative, organize, etc.
Now let's say the commenter reveals that this is a quote from a presidential assassin. Well, now I'm a little uncomfortable. Why did they choose this particular quote? Do they agree with the assassin's fringe definition of "active participation"? The intended meaning has completely changed with this new information. The identity of the author is part of the message, because we aren't talking about objectively true or false statements, we're talking about philosophical ideas that are much bigger than the quote provided.
"If freedom is short of weapons, we must compensate with willpower"
"The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people"
He was quite a speaker, old Adi.
...Which suggests (cpr. the "treasure" quote) how quote dropping is mostly a leisurely activity, given broad statements.
> I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few
...Which suggests - hopefully - how quote dropping is mostly a leisurely activity, given its non exhaustive intrinsic nature.
--
Edit: related (with the first branch):
> He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future
Put the three together ("treasure", "battlefield", "owning"), the whole idea gets a sinister tone; take "treasure" alone, it may even raise "awww"s - without substance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
IMHO, there's a time to consider ideas, but I think it would be better not to do that when talking about a terrorist who attacked innocents to promote exposure of those ideas.
Otherwise, it would seem to be validating and rewarding terrorism, and thereby encouraging future terrorists.