Unabomber Quotes

The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.

There is goоd reason to believe that primitive mаn suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern mаn is.

You're still riding home with me right?" He asks Courtney watching me at the corner of his eye. What's with this guy? he looks like he's about one second from taking a baseballbat to my knees. Or wanting to. I wonder if this is how serial killers start out. Wasn't Unabomber really goos at math?

The System has played a trick on today’s would-be revolutionaries and rebels. The trick is so cute that if it had been consciously planned one would have to admire it for its almost mathematical elegance.

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

Manifesto. Read my Manifesto. I`ve written a Manifesto. It`s all in the Manfesto!

She only really enjoyed her own company. She tolerated mine, but fundamentally she was a recluse at heart, like J.D. Salinger or the Unabomber.

Discouragement is a moral state, a failure of heart; you treat it by taking courage, not Prozac.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Today people live more by virtue of what the system does FOR them or TO them than by virtue of what they do for themselves.

a society is a system in which all parts are interrelated, and you can’t permanently change any important part without changing all other parts as well.

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.

If I'm going to be working out here in a place that at least feels like the middle of nowhere, I'm going to need access to the outside world. It's important to have access. Solitude is one thing, but you could turn into the Unabomber if you don't have some connection to people.

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.

The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth.

It was not a Zodiac attack until the Zodiac said it was a Zodiac attack.

We can do anything we like as long as it is UNIMPORTANT. But in all IMPORTANT matters the system tends increasingly to regulate our behavior.

To make a lasting change in the direction of development of any important aspect of a society, reform is insufficient and revolution is required.

she had to wonder how Cain always seemed to get away with murder. He wore glasses, dressed like the Unabomber, and talked in class, none of which ever seemed to get him in trouble.

By the time Keith was sitting on my sofa with a cup of tea, Glen had disappeared. She only really enjoyed her own company. She tolerated mine, but fundamentally she was a recluse at heart, like J. D. Salinger or the Unabomber.

A reporter had once asked the unabomber if he was afraid of losing his mind in prison. “No, what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget, I may begin to lose my memories of the mountains and the woods and that’s what really worries me, that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild nature in general.

Intelligent people have said again and again: "How easily men could make things much better than they are-if they only all tried togetherl". But people never do "all try together," because the principle of natural selection guarantees that self-prop systems will act mainly for their own survival and propagation in competition with other self-prop systems, and will not sacrifice competitive advantages for the achievement of philanthropic goals.

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.

It was reported in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago that many of the franchise-granting companies require applicants for franchises to take a personality test that is designed to EXCLUDE those who have creativity and initiative, because such persons are not sufficiently docile to go along obediently with the franchise system.

The leftist NEEDS to believe in leftism; it plays a vital role in his psychological economy. His beliefs are not easily modified by logic or facts.

One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.

for most people identification with a large organization or a mass movement does not fully satisfy the need for power.

The degree of personal freedom that exists in a society is determined more by the economic and technological structure of the society than by its laws or its form of government.

In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.

Political correctness has its stronghold among university professors,

Freedom means having power; not the power to control other people but the power to control the circumstances of one’s own life.

Besides, we all have to die some time, and it may be better to die fighting for survival, or for a cause, than to live a long but empty and purposeless life.

A reform movement designed to clean up political corruption in a society rarely has more than a short-term effect; sooner or later the reformers relax and corruption creeps back in.

37, Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.

11. When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced among minority rights activists, whether or not they belong to the minority groups whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about the words used to designate minorities and about anything that is said concerning minorities.

(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.

(“We live in a world in which relatively few people—maybe 500 or 1,000—make the important decisions”—Philip B. Heymann of Harvard Law School, quoted by Anthony Lewis, New York Times, April 21, 1995.) 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.

Thus most individuals are unable to influence measurably the major decisions that affect their lives. There is no conceivable way to remedy this in a technologically advanced society. The system tries to “solve” this problem by using propaganda to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them, but even if this “solution” were completely successful in making people feel better, it would be demeaning.

many people put into their work far more effort than is necessary to earn whatever money and status they require, and this extra effort constitutes a surrogate activity. This extra effort, together with the emotional investment that accompanies it, is one of the most potent forces acting toward the continual development and perfecting of the system, with negative consequences for individual freedom (see paragraph 131).

Some incidents of facial profiling have been more inconvenient than others. I’ll never forget walking through airport security when I was flying to give a speech to a Christian men’s group in Montana. The Department of Homeland Security screeners obviously didn’t recognize me as “Jase the Duckman” from Duck Dynasty, and I felt like I was one wrong answer away from being led to an interrogation room in a pair of handcuffs! Hunting season had recently ended, so my hair and beard were in full bloom! The security screeners saw a Bible in my bag, and I guess they figured I was a Christian nut because of my long hair and bushy beard. Somehow, I made it through the metal detector and an additional pat-down, and I guess they couldn’t find a justifiable reason to detain me. But as I was getting my belongings back together, I accidentally bumped into a woman. She screamed! It must have been an involuntary reflex. It was a natural response, because she thought I was going to attack her. Once she finally settled down, I made my way to the gate and sat down to compose myself. After a few minutes, a young boy walked up and asked me for my autograph. Finally, I thought to myself. Somebody recognizes me from Duck Dynasty. Not everyone here believes I’m the Unabomber! Man, I could have used the kid about twenty minutes earlier, when I was trying to get through security! I looked over at the boy’s mother, and she was smiling from ear to ear. I realized they were very big fans. I signed my name on a piece of paper and handed it to the kid. “Can I ask you a question?” he said. “Sure, buddy,” I said. “Ask me anything you want.” “How much does Geico pay y’all?” he asked. My jaw dropped as I looked at the kid. “Wait a minute, man,” I said. “I’m not a caveman!” “What do you mean?” the boy asked. “I’m Jase the Duckman,” I said. “You know--from Duck Dynasty? Quack, quack?” It didn’t take me long to realize the boy had no idea what I was talking about. In a matter of minutes, I went from being a potential terrorist to being a caveman selling insurance.

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.

69. It is true that primitive man is powerless against some of the things that threaten him; disease for example. But he can accept the risk of disease stoically. It is part of the nature of things, it is no one’s fault, unless it is the fault of some imaginary, impersonal demon. But threats to the modern individual tend to be MAN-MADE. They are not the results of chance but are IMPOSED on him by other persons whose decisions he, as an individual, is unable to influence. Consequently he feels frustrated, humiliated and angry.

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.

Another way in which people satisfy their need for the power process is through surrogate activities. As we explained in paragraphs 38-40, a surrogate activity is an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that the individual pursues for the sake of the “fulfillment” that he gets from pursuing the goal, not because he needs to attain the goal itself. For instance, there is no practical motive for building enormous muscles, hitting a little ball into a hole or acquiring a complete series of postage stamps. Yet many people in our society devote themselves with passion to bodybuilding, golf or stamp-collecting. Some people are more “other-directed” than others, and therefore will more readily attach importance to a surrogate activity simply because the people around them treat it as important or because society tells them it is important. That is why some people get very serious about essentially trivial activities such as sports, or bridge, or chess, or arcane scholarly pursuits, whereas others who are more clear-sighted never see these things as anything but the surrogate activities that they are, and consequently never attach enough importance to them to satisfy their need for the power process in that way. It only remains to point out that in many cases a person’s way of earning a living is also a surrogate activity.

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.

In the United States, a couple of decades ago when leftists were a minority in our universities, leftist professors were vigorous proponents of academic freedom, but today, in those of our universities where leftists have become dominant, they have shown themselves ready to take away from everyone else’s academic freedom. (This is “political correctness.”)

La tecnología tiene a la raza humana en un aprieto del cual no es probable que haya ninguna salida fácil. XXIII.

There are 6.7 billion people on earth, and we can't all go back to living as hunter-gatherers. The notion of returning to an idealized paradise of simple, gentle, small-group living has been advocated by diverse visionaries throughout history: Buddha, Laozi, Epicurus, Thoreau, Engels, Gandhi, Margaret Mead, and the Unabomber. Often these visionaries attract followers, who form religions, political movements, or whole cultures: Taoists, Shakers, Luddites, Marxists, anarchists, hippies and Emo kids.

106. FIFTH PRINCIPLE. People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under rational human control.

47. Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe.

too much control is imposed by the system through explicit regulation or through socialization, which results in a deficiency of autonomy, and in frustration due to the impossibility of attaining certain goals and the necessity of restraining too many impulses.

The problems of the leftist are indicative of the problems of our society as a whole. Low self-esteem, depressive tendencies and defeatism are not restricted to the left. Though they are especially noticeable in the left, they are widespread in our society. And today’s society tries to socialize us to a greater extent than any previous society. We are even told by experts how to eat, how to exercise, how to make love, how to raise our kids and so forth.

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.

For me one of the main satisfactions of being out in the woods is getting out of the social machine.

And the proof of his insanity? His belief that the U.S. government was a repressive conspiracy that muzzled radical opinion. Only an insane person would believe that! The Unabomber had really, really liked Leila.

Em segundo lugar, vale a pena lutar e morrer contra a perda da liberdade e da dignidade? Para muitos de nós, liberdade e dignidade são mais importantes que uma vida longa ou fugir do sofrimento físico. De qualquer forma, todos temos que morrer algum dia e pode ser melhor morrer lutando por uma vida plena, ou por uma causa, do que viver uma vida longa mas vazia e carente de sentido.

Da mesma maneira, no momento em que o sistema industrial cai enfermo devemos destruí-lo. Se transigirmos e o deixamos recuperar-se de sua doença, logo destruirá toda nossa liberdade.

It takes compassion to truly understand another person.

Once she finally settled down, I made my way to the gate and sat down to compose myself. After a few minutes, a young boy walked up and asked me for my autograph. Finally, I thought to myself. Somebody recognizes me from Duck Dynasty. Not everyone here believes I’m the Unabomber! Man, I could have used the kid about twenty minutes earlier, when I was trying to get through security! I looked over at the boy’s mother, and she was smiling from ear to ear. I realized they were very big fans. I signed my name on a piece of paper and handed it to the kid. “Can I ask you a question?” he said. “Sure, buddy,” I said. “Ask me anything you want.” “How much does Geico pay y’all?” he asked. My jaw dropped as I looked at the kid. “Wait a minute, man,” I said. “I’m not a caveman!” “What do you mean?” the boy asked. “I’m Jase the Duckman,” I said. “You know--from Duck Dynasty? Quack, quack?” It didn’t take me long to realize the boy had no idea what I was talking about. In a matter of minutes, I went from being a potential terrorist to being a caveman selling insurance.

By force-marching his exhausted men through the unknown, rain-swept wilderness of the German-infested Teutoburg Forest, this guy had just made a brain-explodingly boneheaded mistake so amazing in its incompetence that it makes the Roman consuls at Cannae look like a conjoined triplet made out of Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, and that dude from Total Recall who had the baby coming out of his stomach. In terms of career moves, marching three legions into the Teutoberg was the Classical Age equivalent of coauthoring an academic paper with the Unabomber or asking Charles Manson to write you a letter of recommendation for law school. Unsurprisingly, this came back to bite him in the ass. We don’t know exactly how many Germans were hiding in the woods, watching the column of imperial invaders trudge past. The Germans didn’t bother to write anything down more detailed than “killed sum d00ds 2day lulz,” and the only Romans who managed to run screaming out of this forest alive were the ones who knew better than to sit there and try to count how many GWAR fans were currently trying to brutally dismember them with axes. Let’s just say it was probably a crapload, and that when these long-haired death metal freaks unleashed a bloodcurdling shout and started charging through the forest like a bunch of gigantic mutant Ewok-Wookies ambushing the Imperial Stormtroopers on the Forest Moon of Endor it wasn’t exactly the sort of hilarious laugh riot you might see in an animated GIF involving unicorns, rainbows, and cartoon kitties with Pop-Tarts where their bodies are supposed to be. Bellowing like madmen, these balls-out, frothing-at-the-mouth, beer-swilling sausage fiends went Leeroy Jenkins toward the enemy, blitzkrieging out of the woods from every side seemingly at the same time, their ferociousness magnified not only by their savage blood rage, but by the fact that some of the dudes had taken to painting their entire bodies black with mud to help them hide in the dark forest like how Schwarzenegger hid from the Predator’s infrared vision. It was so damned terrifying that it took every ounce of Roman discipline to not simply spontaneously combust into blood vapor on the spot.

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.”[

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.