Ted Kaczynski Quotes

History is made by active, determined minorities, not by the majority, which seldom has a clear and consistent idea of what it really wants.

The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.

Modern man must satisfy his need for the power process largely through pursuit of the artificial needs created by the advertising and marketing industry,11 and through surrogate activities.

Our lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our food or how much pollution into our air; on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is; whether we lose or get a job may depend on decisions made by government economists or corporation executives; and so forth. Most individuals are not in a position to secure themselves against these threats to more [than] a very limited extent.

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

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.

Sol sneered. “The Unabomber was a mathematician.” “What Ted Kaczynski did can barely be called math,” David said.  “Boundary conditions! Totally irrelevant.” “He had a PhD.” “From the University of Michigan. I don’t know if that even counts. And don’t think I don’t know that it was his brother who turned him in.” Sol looked at him closely. “Whose name was David. That’s your name, right?” “I would never turn you in.” Sol shrugged. “Of course not,” he said and drove on.

That’s what Harvard was like: thinking you’re pretty good at something, then meeting someone who is really good or even one of the best in the world. And that doesn’t mean they get good grades. A lot of the most famous alumni left without graduating because their work became more important than school. People like Bill Gates, Matt Damon, and Mark Zuckerberg. And you know who did graduate? The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. The point is: Never graduate from Harvard.

Genetics, accidents of birth or events in early childhood have left criminals' brains and bodies with measurable flaws predisposing them to committing assault, murder and other antisocial acts. .... Many offenders also have impairments in their autonomic nervous system, the system responsible for the edgy, nervous feeling that can come with emotional arousal. This leads to a fearless, risk-taking personality, perhaps to compensate for chronic under-arousal. Many convicted criminals, like the Unabomber, have slow heartbeats. It also gives them lower heart rates, which explains why heart rate is such a good predictor of criminal tendencies. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, for example, had a resting heart rate of just 54 beats per minute, which put him in the bottom 3 per cent of the population.

I continued toward Atlanta with a Merle Haggard C.D. playing on the stereo. They weren't great hosts, but those guys in The Ted Kaczynski Fan Club had great taste in music. It was all classic country music- none of that sissy, boy-band country that they played on the radio all the time. I drove down the road while Merle preferred to just stay where he was and drink.

Words like “self-confidence,” “self-reliance,” “initiative,” “enterprise,” “optimism,” etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs.

Even though their crimes were completely different, the one thing the maladjusted genius Ted Kaczynski and the sadistic but banal underachiever Dennis Rader shared was a monumental sense of ego. Neither one of them could bear to let his brilliance go unrecognized by the public, and that was their downfall in both cases.

On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car of his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite -- just as it is today, but with two difference. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless the may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consist of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his "problem." Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.

An extreme representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at UC Berkeley. But you’ve only ever heard of him because of the 17-year terror campaign he waged with pipe bombs against professors, technologists, and businesspeople. In late 1995, the authorities didn’t know who or where the Unabomber was. The biggest clue was a 35,000-word manifesto that Kaczynski had written and anonymously mailed to the press. The FBI asked some prominent newspapers to publish it, hoping for a break in the case. It worked: Kaczynski’s brother recognized his writing style and turned him in. You might expect that writing style to have shown obvious signs of insanity, but the manifesto is eerily cogent. Kaczynski claimed that in order to be happy, every individual “needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.” He divided human goals into three groups: 1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort; 2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and 3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes. This is the classic trichotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world’s hard problems have already been solved. What’s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can’t do, even Einstein couldn’t have done. So Kaczynski’s idea was to destroy existing institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard problems anew. Kaczynski’s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.

(Paragraph 128) Since many people may find paradoxical the notion that a large number of good things can add up to a bad thing, we illustrate with an analogy. Suppose Mr. A is playing chess with Mr. B. Mr. C, a Grand Master, is looking over Mr. A’s shoulder. Mr. A of course wants to win his game, so if Mr. C points out a good move for him to make, he is doing Mr. A a favor. But suppose now that Mr. C tells Mr. A how to make ALL of his moves. In each particular instance he does Mr. A a favor by showing him his best move, but by making ALL of his moves for him he spoils his game, since there is not point in Mr. A’s playing the game at all if someone else makes all his moves. The situation of modern man is analogous to that of Mr. A. The system makes an individual’s life easier for him in innumerable ways, but in doing so it deprives him of control over his own fate.

Everyone matters, Elena.” “But don’t some people matter more than others?” I asked. “I mean, if we’re talking about saving humanity, doesn’t it make sense to save the best and brightest of us?” Freddie’s laughter had faded. “So you’re saying it’s better to save a world-famous physicist than say, a modest merchant who was a partner in a bed feathers company.” “That’s a really odd comparison, but yeah.” “Except no,” Freddie said. “That merchant and his wife would go on to birth and raise Albert Einstein.” She paused dramatically. “Hermann and Pauline Einstein might not have seemed like anyone special at the time, but their son changed how we look at the universe.” “That’s one example.” “Here’s another. Who should you save? A genius mathematician admitted to Harvard at sixteen or a single mom living on welfare?” “This is a trick question.” “Are you allergic to answering questions, or what?” “The mathematician,” I said. “Ted Kaczynski. Otherwise known as the Unabomber. And that single mom would go on to write Harry Potter.

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.

Many convicted criminals, like the Unabomber, have slow heartbeats. It also gives them lower heart rates, which explains why heart rate is such a good predictor of criminal tendencies. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, for example, had a resting heart rate of just 54 beats per minute, which put him in the bottom 3 per cent of the population.

What do you get when you cross Ted Kaczynski with Monica Lewinsky? A dynamite blowjob!

he acknowledges that “man is a social animal, meant to live in groups” but the ideal size of these units is about 100 people. It is therefore intellectually dishonest to claim that the massive impersonal organizations which now literally span the entire globe are legitimate examples of the kind of social groups man had evolved over millions of years to live under. In the fragment, he explicitly contrasts this natural social form with the present condition to which man has been reduced: an atom in a vast social organization.

One might argue that technical deficiency is the sole condition which would allow genuine choice to exist. It is only in a world where crude tools are not good enough to accomplish tasks without the aid of a skilled human labourer that a free subject can shoulder the burden of making real choices rather than just submit to a fate already decided in advance by an autonomous technical apparatus. Only if a minimal gap holds between an imperfect tool and a completed task (in which a skilled labourer must intervene) can the subject exist, since the subject’s realm of existence is in this space between. A machine running fully on auto-pilot destroys subjectivity by collapsing this space between tool and task into nothingness. Being qua Being transforms according to a new standard which bears no room for a thinking subject to achieve real existence.

In the letter, he acknowledges that “anarchist” is an inherently “vague word” which must be supplemented by some explicit definition in order to distinguish his own understanding of the term from its many other unrelated applications. Fortunately, in this letter he provides just such an explicit definition of what the word meant to him. Above all, in this fragment he understands Anarchism to mean the goal of breaking society up into “very small, completely autonomous units.” Perhaps his reason for choosing the term “Anarchism” was that these units, which would seem to reflect the average size of prehistoric hunter gatherer bands, would obviously be intrinsically too small to be compatible with any of the artificial constraints and bureaucracy associated with the industrial system.

The family or the village was small enough so that individuals within it were not powerless. Even where all authority was theoretically vested in the paterfamilias, in practice he could not retain his power unless he listened and responded to the grievances and problems of the individual members of his family. Today, however, we are at the mercy of organizations, such as corporations, governments, and political parties, that are too large to be responsive to single individuals. These organizations leave us a great deal of latitude where harmless recreational activities are concerned, but they keep under their own control the life-and-death issues on which our existence depends. With respect to these issues, individuals are powerless.

Even within many full-fledged civilizations in the past, the subject was, at the very least, theoretically free to flee from a given social context and reinvent himself in some new context.

In former times, for those who were willing to take serious risks, it was often possible to escape the bonds of the family, of the village, or of the feudal structures. In Medieval Western Europe, serfs ran away to become peddlers, robbers, or town-dwellers. Later, Russian peasants ran away to become Cossacks, black slaves ran away to live in the wilderness as ‘Maroons,’ and indentured servants in the West Indies ran away to become buccaneers. But in the modern world there is nowhere left to run. Wherever you go, you can be traced by your credit card, your social-security number, [and] your fingerprints. You, Mr. N., live in California. Can you get a hotel or motel room without showing your picture I.D.? You can’t survive unless you fit into a slot in the system, otherwise known as a ‘job.’ And it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a job without making your whole past history accessible to prospective employers.

In a certain sense, the Power Process is a neutral term to describe what can only ever be actualized in one of these two modes of construal; there is no such thing as “Power Process” in itself, except as an abstraction from some instantiation taken from either the natural mode or the technological mode. In the natural mode of construal, the Power Process is actualized as freedom,

We use the term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the ‘fulfillment’ that they get from pursuing the goal. Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate activities. Given a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote most of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use his physical and mental faculties in a varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal X?

It is not a question of finding just the right level of technological intermediation which some previous civilization achieved before the balance was tipped to the clearly unacceptable level which modern industrialism exhibits today. Rather, civilization itself logically implies technology. A civilization of any kind requires a physical apparatus of tools or machines. It also requires an epistemological orientation towards discovering rationalized means to manipulate natural matter (even including human bodies) and repurpose it to artificial ends. Finally, it requires a compulsory means of social organization by which people might be retrofitted into cogs in a social machine that blots out individual identity in favour of achieving some schematic image of a massive artificial super-organism; this techno-organism will of course act in the interest of promoting its own survival and expansion with no regard for its members, each of whom would have been devalued to subordinate parts of this great monstrous whole.

It’s important to understand that in order to make people superfluous, machines will not have to surpass them in general intelligence but only in certain specialized kinds of intelligence. For example, the machines will not have to create or understand art, music, or literature, they will not need the ability to carry on intelligent, non-technical conversation (the “Turing Test”), they will not have to exercise tact or understand human nature, because these skills will have no application if humans are to be eliminated anyway.

Regardless of its ultimate origin, the natural morality differs from the conventional morality in that it does not consist of explicit statements which dictate behaviour in specific contexts. Instead, the natural morality is really just a set of six principles which provide a foundation for the subject to judge given situations individually. The first principle, for example, forbids harming anyone who has not harmed or threatened to harm you. The second principle justifies self-defence.[220] The third principle encourages returning favours to those who have helped you before.[221] The fourth principle encourages the strong to have consideration for the weak. The fifth principle discourages lying. Finally, the sixth principle encourages one to keep one’s word and honour agreements to which one had committed oneself.

[O]ne learns that boredom is a disease of civilization. It seems to me that what boredom mostly is is that people have to keep themselves entertained or occupied, because if they aren’t, then certain anxieties, frustrations, discontents, and so forth, start coming to the surface, and it makes them uncomfortable. Boredom is almost non-existent once you’ve adapted to life in the woods. If you don’t have any work that needs to be done, you can sit for hours at a time just doing nothing, just listening to the birds or the wind or the silence, watching the shadows move as the sun travels, or simply looking at familiar objects. And you don’t get bored. You’re just at peace.

These dramatic cases—Weston, Laudor, Ted Kaczynski or John Hinckley—are not the typical stories of schizophrenia. Mostly it is a story of quiet suffering.

Our society is so fatally dependent today on computers that Kaczynski’s doomsday scenario in the Manifesto is now simply taken for granted as everyday reality. He warned that someday outsourcing decision making from human minds to electronic brains would force humans into a state of constantly maintaining the machines, since turning them off even for one day would amount to suicide:

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

[I]n the field of complex systems, cause-to-effect relationships are very difficult to analyse: hardly ever does one given parameter depend on just one other factor. What happens is that all factors and parameters are interrelated by multiple feedback loops, the structure of which is far from obvious.[339]

Self-propagating systems all have a hardwired tendency to pursue short-term advantage in order to outcompete other systems’ in a context of Natural Selection, even if doing so destroys the superset of which it was a smaller part. The real paradox is that just as a civilization achieves sufficient technological sophistication to be able to attempt intergalactic space travel, it would have already advanced far enough along the trajectory of competitive behaviour to have destroyed itself or its environment. The crucial window of time between the two is therefore more like a vanishing mediator or an impossible object than something which could be achieved in reality, since achieving the ultimate technological feat requires the system to advance beyond the point of self-destruction.

Both of the first two chapters of Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How deal with rationally impossible objects. The first chapter exposed that the self-predicting system is impossible because such a system would have to have complete knowledge of itself in order to make a prediction, but such a prediction would in turn modify the system and shatter its claim to complete self-knowledge. The second chapter exposed that a civilization capable of intergalactic space travel is an impossible object because it would have to surpass the level of self-destruction in order to achieve the level of technological sophistication necessary to attempt such a feat. The third chapter breaks with this trend by dealing with an object which is not necessarily impossible, but whose lifespan would be so brief that action would have to be seized immediately in order to not miss the opportunity to enact lasting change before it passes away forever.

In Defense of Violence,” Kacyznski noted that the System’s call to eliminate violence does not extend to itself, since it “depends on force and violence to maintain itself— that’s what the police and army are for.”[396] Of course, he clarifies that he does not advocate “indiscriminate or automatic violence” nor does he have any interest in “violence for its own sake”; in fact he acknowledges that in most situations non-violent tactics are the most effective. However, even at a purely logical level one must admit that it is just another example of Orwellian doublethink

In Defense of Violence” he noted that “[m]odern middle class culture is exceptional in the degree to which it tries to suppress aggression,” despite the fact that aggression is a “normal part of the behavioural repertoire of human beings and of most other mammals.”[400] Some responsible therapists lament that among their clients, many men exhibit frighteningly low testosterone levels because the society actively deprives them of traditional opportunities to maintain high levels and shames activities which embody masculinity. This is not to suggest, of course, that acceptance of violence in pre-modern times was uniquely exhibited by men. He notes near the end of the essay that tribal warfare was common among some Native American tribes precisely because the women in the tribes tended to egg on the fighting.

the sophisticated pottery production methodologies and facilities which thrived at the height of the Roman Empire proved utterly incapable of surviving beyond the empire’s demise, proving that “organization-dependent technology DOES regress when the social organization on which it depends breaks down.”[

The System imposes the universal ban on violence simply because it is required to maximize the technical efficiency of the social machine: “The reason the system teaches us to be horrified at violence is that violence of any kind is dangerous to the system [because] the system requires order above all [and a population] which is docile and obedient and who don’t make trouble.”[

When the Roman Empire fell apart the Romans’ small-scale technology survived because any clever village craftsman could build, for instance, a water wheel, any skilled smith could make steel by Roman methods, and so forth. But the Romans’ organization-dependent technology DID regress. Their aqueducts fell into disrepair and were never rebuilt. Their techniques of road construction were lost. The Roman system of urban sanitation was forgotten, so that not until rather recent times did the sanitation of European cities equal that of Ancient Rome.[

At the very end of the short essay “The Coming Revolution,” Kaczynski challenges the idea that aversion to violence can be traced back to moral virtue at all, since in many cases this is actually to be attributed to “cowardice.” It is simply one more example of oversocialization to be “horrified at physical violence,” since this reaction is not at all natural but had to be learned. It was only taught on a massive scale because a “passive and obedient” society is useful to the System. As a result, we actually have become less virtuous in the Ancient Greek sense of virtue as a trait of a good human being:[398] “the conditions of modern life are conducive to laziness, softness, and cowardice. Those who want to be revolutionaries will have to overcome these weaknesses.”[

Though they like to fancy themselves independent thinkers, the intellectuals are the most oversocialized, the most conformist, the tamest and most domesticated... and spineless group today

One need not wait for the post-collapse future to find evidence that pacifism amounts to suicide in the absence of a just social order. Even Ward Churchill, a former college professor and self-described radical leftist, had reached the conclusion that calls for unadulterated pacifism are logically and ethically incompatible with his own stance as an indigenist Native American intellectual who seeks to seriously challenge the ongoing colonization of North America. Churchill’s essay “Pacifism as Pathology” demonstrated the naivety of thinking that every historical conflict, in retrospect, could have been solved by peaceful negotiation.[

The main reason why these values have become . . . the official values of our society is that they are useful to the industrial system. Violence is discouraged because it disrupts the functioning of the system. Racism is discouraged because ethnic conflicts also disrupt the system, and discrimination wastes the talents of minority-group members who could be useful to the system. Poverty must be ‘cured’ because the underclass causes problems for the system and contact with the underclass lowers the morale of the other classes. Women are encouraged to have careers because their talents are useful to the system and, more importantly, because by having regular jobs women become integrated into the system and tied directly to it rather than to their families. This helps to weaken family solidarity [which is also useful to the system.][285] Obviously, this is not at all to say that arguing for the opposite of these values should be preferred. The entire point is, rather, that obsessions over the currently-accepted linguistic labels by which to formulate racial, gender, and “queer” definitions (or, what amounts to the same thing, to use these terms to argue against the existence of their essences) is simply an abstract game that leaves the underlying essence of the System untouched.

the essence of Leftism certainly does include feelings of inferiority and oversocialization, yet these are themselves just structural features of an all-too-familiar essence: Modern Technology. Leftism cannot rebel against Modern Technology, because Leftism quite literally is Modern Technology. The powerlessness of submitting to oversocialization generates feelings of inferiority that must be projected into the hopes for a massive movement which everyone is forced to join (i.e., the universal adoption of Socialism, the universal rejection of Religion, the universal acceptance of 68 genders etc.) Yet this collectivization is simply a structural description of living under Modern Technology.

Kaczynski’s dismissal of Relativist Philosophy in the Manifesto, however, also exposes the extent to which all of this anti-essentialist relativist posturing occurs against the backdrop of one absolute standard: the need to go through the Power Process. The grand irony is that relativism is only possible in the context of one non-relativized exception, the drive for power:     Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analysing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs . . . [T]heir attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power.

Ellul had similarly noticed that one of the necessary effects of Technique upon human behaviour was uniform collectivization: Human activity in the technical milieu must correspond to this milieu and also must be collective. It must belong to the order of the conditioned reflex. Complete human discipline must respond to technical necessity. And as the technical milieu concerns all men, no mere handful of them but the totality of society is to be conditioned in this way. The reflex must be a collective one.

Human extinction may occur through the evolution of a purely-technological robotic system with no need for fallible human intellects. Ironically enough, this would occur even if Ray Kurzweil’s fantasy of a purely technical solution to death were discovered. Even if it were possible to keep humans alive forever, it would violate the laws of self-propagating systems to do so if these humans had lost their usefulness. The latter is guaranteed by exactly these laws, since the robotic minds would continually develop themselves in order to gain competitive advantage in the context of Natural Selection:

.The [technophiles] of course assume that they themselves will be included in the elite minority that supposedly will be kept alive indefinitely. What they find convenient to overlook is that self-prop systems, in the long run, will take care of human beings — even members of the elite — only to the extent that it is to the system’s advantage to take care of them. When they are no longer useful to the dominant self-prop systems, humans — elite or not— will be eliminated.[45]

Kaczynski’s references to “freedom” do not amount to an unclarified mysticism or empty abstraction. He is perfectly specific that the kind of freedom which the leftist is denied is the freedom to go through the Power Process.[17] He defines the Power Process as “a need (probably based in Biology)” which decomposes to the following four components, three of which are essential: to establish a goal; to expend effort in working towards the goal; to attain the goal; and preferably, though optionally, to do so with an acceptable level of autonomy.

The Manifesto emphasized that the leftists’ supposed rejection of the System amounts to a blatant example of Orwellian doublethink,[23] in that this simply amounts to finding ways to incorporate people even more deeply into the System. Leftist political activism in favour of minority groups, for example, is literally just a euphemism for attempts to find ways for more people to “rise up” to high-paying corporate, government, or academic careers within the System:

Oversocialization is defined as the tendency to do exactly what society demands, despite claims to radical opposition to the System. It is curious, for example, that the main centres for institutionalized leftist thought are not the blue collar factories, rural farms, or minimum wage jobs populated by the exploited proletariat. Rather, leftist thought is a staple of major universities and Silicon Valley corporations, institutions flooded with billions of dollars and unspeakable political power yet somehow claim to be rebels against the System.

this dependence upon giant social media companies to stage this faux-protest against the System misses the irony that social media is the System and the hours consumed in this posturing simply translate into more money and power for the companies themselves, not to mention more carbon dioxide pollution for the environment both claim to love so much.

One should be reminded that these leftist academics who literally make their living by bullying people into throwing away their cultures in exchange for a massified, artificial, homogeneous adoption of the cultural biases of upper middle class corporate Western professionals are the very same people who leap at every opportunity to publicly express nominal concern for allowing indigenous peoples to preserve their cultures “against the onslaught of global capitalism,” an irony which would be comical if it were not so troubling.

Kaczynski’s observation that leftist psychology a priori rules out the destruction of Modern Technology should not be read as a biased empirical judgment against one particular political party. Rather, Kaczynski just identified the leftist collective movement as one instantiation of a general type of system: the self-propagating system.

Because the self-hating leftist willingly deprives himself or herself of freedom by over-assimilating himself or herself to the dominant ideology of the system, his or her frustrated desire for power explodes into a need to identify with a collective movement which embodies the agency which he or she has renounced at the individual level.

The discontent and bitterness so palpably displayed by the salaried class in the United States is not completely without cause, however. It simply proves that having more material comforts than Ancient and Medieval Emperors will not be sufficient in itself, provided one has to sacrifice something far more important in return. They will remain perpetually dissatisfied because they have obtained these goods at the cost of their ability to go through the Power Process.

the two goals of achieving a totalizing political control over the society and destroying Modern Technology are logically incompatible goals because totalizing control over a modern nation, let alone the whole world, would be impossible on logistical and physical grounds without Modern Technology.

The System would tolerate these harmless activities as a means to allow people to go through the Power Process to meet contrived needs which pose no threat to its dominance. For example, rather than directly work towards obtaining food and shelter, one would occupy one’s time with innocuous pastimes like building model ships or cheering for a particular football team, despite the fact that one’s quality of life would not be improved at all even by seeing one’s favourite team win the top championship game. Kaczynski of course calls these surrogate activities.

self-propagating systems of all kinds can be explained by a set of fully-rationalized, abstract laws which transcend the empirical content of any one particular system which contingently instantiates them. Whether one is dealing with technology, human empires, buffalo herds, or viruses, these same laws will apply.

examination of Mussolini’s speeches and writings demonstrates that fascism embodied a very specific set of economic policies, political organizational principles, and even a fully-developed philosophy. Acknowledging that these exist and are worthy of examination (if nothing else, in order to see whether the term is actually being misused in almost all modern contexts) is not at all the same thing as endorsing them, yet we are prohibited by the System from investigating these matters out of the misguided belief that doing so would amount to a tacit approval of their content.

His short essay “When Non-Violence is Suicide” exposed the same stupidity by portraying the following hypothetical scenario: imagine a group of small-scale farmers who had taken personal responsibility after the collapse of the System by growing their own food and trying to live peacefully. Just as they are harvesting potatoes to prepare for winter, a gang arrives at their doorstep; they seize the potatoes and eye the women for rape. The discomforting truth is that “[n]onviolence works only when you have the police to protect you. In the absence of police protection, nonviolence is very nearly the equivalent to suicide.”[395] No one really rejects all violence; rather, we have just outsourced its use to the police and the military.

Consider the question posed at the beginning of this book’s penultimate chapter: how much do parents really matter? The data have by now made it clear that parents matter a great deal in some regards (most of which have been long determined by the time a child is born) and not at all in others (the ones we obsess about). You can’t blame parents for trying to do something — anything — to help their child succeed, even if it’s something as irrelevant as giving him a high-end first name. But there is also a huge random effect that rains down on even the best parenting efforts. If you are in any way typical, you have known some intelligent and devoted parents whose child went badly off the rails. You may have also known of the opposite instance, where a child succeeds despite his parents’ worst intentions and habits. Recall for a moment the two boys, one white and one black, who were described in chapter 5. The white boy who grew up outside Chicago had smart, solid, encouraging, loving parents who stressed education and family. The black boy from Daytona Beach was abandoned by his mother, was beaten by his father, and had become a full-fledged gangster by his teens. So what became of the two boys? The second child, now twenty-eight years old, is Roland G. Fryer Jr., the Harvard economist studying black underachievement. The white child also made it to Harvard. But soon after, things went badly for him. His name is Ted Kaczynski.

The aesthetics alone are inspiring. New York–based photographer Richard Barnes, best known for his starkly artistic portraits of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s cabin, released a captivating collection of black-and-white images of starling flocks over Rome in 2005. His photos are carefully framed against urban horizons. Some are simply beautiful, others sinister and Hitchcockian, but all are somehow magnetic (more on that later). In a statement accompanying Barnes’s images, author Jonathan Rosen observes, “Part of the fascination of the starlings is the way they seem to be inscribing some sort of language in the air, if only we could read it.

Even though their crimes were completely different, the one thing the maladjusted genius Ted Kaczynski and the sadistic but banal underachiever Dennis Rader shared was a monumental sense of ego.

But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge.

the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior.