MANIFESTO REVIEW: Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and its Future"
EVERYTHING HEREIN CONSTITUTES FICTIONAL SATIRE
Welcome to a new series here on dog and pony show: MANIFESTO REVIEW. That’s right — your neighborhood court jester ringleader will be reading some of the most influential platforms of the psychotic persuasion and providing some semblance of coherent review. No rules, no rhyme, no reason to it; just settle in as we take a look at what makes the manifesto as a form of influence tick.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES HAVE BEEN A DISASTER FOR THE HUMAN RACE.
Could you survive a day without electricity? A week without refrigeration? If your indoor plumbing were gummed up from whatever the natives next door were flushing (broken crack pipes, a baby, some stillborn pit mutt pups, God only knows) and shit was backing up into your bathtub, how would you fare? Are you old enough to remember asking girls out IRL or has your entire sexual development happened through a screen? Did you build forts in the woods and imagine defending them among the forest spirits as your ancestors smiled down on you, or did you 100% those couple (or dozen or hundred) video games?
Personally, I can think of hardly any technology that has actually, really and truly, made my life more fulfilling. Sure, things have been made easier! Oh, so much easier! Isn’t life just so easy with all these efficient, technological improvements in every facet of our existence from cradle to grave? No? Do you really mean to tell me that we’re more anxious, depressed, psychotic, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, than our ancestors? That we’re afflicted with all manner of new inversions and perversions, that our society is rotting from the inside out, and that the large morass of the population is content to be transformed into globohomo cattle as long as their iphone has a charge and the autopay on netflix clears?
The most compelling and basic truth the Unabomber manifesto evokes is that technology is not the absolute good that it’s been sold to us as. Sure, the boomers had a bit of an idea about this because of the nuke and the psychic horror imprinted upon them as they were drilled to hide under their desks in case Tsar Bomba was dropped on their heads, but this just meant that the TV with howdy doody was all the better! We just had to use technology for good, and we’d have kumbaya world peace in no time!
An everyman approach
Kaczynski’s cogency is striking for someone that conducted a mailbombing campaign. Rather than ranting and raving, ISAIF is page after page of straightforward analysis of the modern world. Sure, Kaczynski killed 3 people and injured a couple dozen more, but electric toasters kill 700 people a year, so who is the real killer? Are electric toasters that much more convenient to justify 700 deaths a year??? What is the price we put on technology’s clear human costs?
However, Kaczynski doesn’t take that tack for the most part, which is smart since people typically aren’t persuaded by numbers if they don’t already fit their present biases. Toasters could kill tens of thousands of people a year, and someone sold on technology as an inherent good wouldn’t give a damn. We see the exact same phenomena presently with COVID. When the “numbers” show masks are effective, they’re praised, but when the numbers show they aren’t, it’s “not conclusive.” Likewise with our new glorious vaccines. The average member of the public isn’t persuaded by statistics in and of themselves; they have to be reached emotionally.
So Kaczynski manages to be much more persuasive in his arguments by relying on basic human experience and a stripped-down composite of standard 20th psychology. We don’t have to focus on mere survival like cavemen anymore, so we have “surrogate activities” that provide us with the sense of power that we need as humans. Yet technology abrogates these surrogate activities, leaving some of us programmed husks. You know countless people that watch TV or play video games, not just as a secondary or even primary hobby, but as their singular pursuit outside the drudgery of making a dime.
We hear all the time that you’re lucky if you get to “love what you do.” Kaczynski observes that these people’s surrogate activity — that which satisifies some inkling of the drive to power — is their profession. Everyone else, however, must find their fulfillment in the meagre time they have outside of work. Many people of course will be unable to find any fulfillment, so this is largely the cause of most psychological ills in our society.
Society, or the Ghost in the Machine
Kaczynski declares that technology has advanced so far that society as we now know it, “the system maaaaan,” is now no longer actually guided by ideology but by technical necessity.1 Society itself has become a ghost in the machine of unstoppable technological process. “When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo ‘retraining,’ no one asks whether it is humuliating for them to be pushed around in this way.”2 This was 50 years ago. No one in power asked then, and no one’s asking now.
However what happens when those at the helm of the system begin to ask another question: how do we program people out of dignity? The solution “will be some sort of eugenics program or extensive genetic engineering of human beings, so that man in the future will no longer be a creation of nature, or of chance, or of God, but a manufactured product.”3 While Kaczynski contemplated this as a result of massive dysgenics from medical advances preventing natural selection, the same goes for the spirit and soul of man as well. Our souls are only as strong and vital as our bodies, their very tether to this material plane.
Yet technology is so ubiquitous that something as trivial as the soul is no obstacle for it. I am sure Kaczynski has received countless letter over the past year concerning COVID, a pure technological monster in every capacity (yes, it was developed in the Wuhan Institute of Virology that SCIENTIST SUPREME Fauci had direct involvement it, the vaccines have been developed in under a year compared to the typical 20-30 year timespan, and governments around the world have buckled under the influence and command of our beaurocratic technocrats). All around the world, we allowed scientists to close down churches — after a year of psychic warfare, there are plenty of good citizens who would offer up their very souls if asked by the “experts.”
A Way Forward
For a manifesto, Kaczynski does not include much in the way of any direct calls to action. Sure, he says that the system itself is irredeemable and must be taken out in toto while it is sick. He also provides a very basic roadmap of influence with two primary lanes: 1) promote social stress and instability in industrial society, and 2) develop and propagate an ideology that opposes technology and the indutrial system.4 He suggests the pattern would be akin to the French and Russian Revolutions in style and form but definitely NOT substance.
It seems to me that #1 is well under way by the system itself. We have never been more socially, culturally, and politically sick in the modern world. Our children have been biologically bombed by seed oils, microplastics, and literal poison resulting in a generation of obesity, sexual maldevelopment, and mental illness. The “industrialized” world is undergoing the effects of decades of low skilled mass migration with inescapable cultural and social differences to the native populations. Every day it is more and more apparent that the “system” is a ticking time bomb with a shorter and shorter fuse.
We owe this almost entirely to our leftist comrades. “In their attempts to end poverty and disease, engineer docile, happy personalities and so forth, the technophiles will create social systems that are terribly troubled, even more than the present one.”5 No average person in 1970 could have ever dreamed that we’d be castrating children in the name of tolerance and progress in 2021, yet here we are! Technology has made all things possible!
Kaczynski ends his manifesto with an ode to the dangers of Leftism and the need for zero tolerance when it comes to interacting with those of leftist bent. He notes that these types’ “drive for power has only one morally acceptable outlet, and that is in the struggle to impose their morality on everyone.” They infiltrate movements as a natural tendency, but quickly overtake them and make them a cog in their overall aim of globohomo, which Kaczynski interestingly had a finger on the pulse of 50 years ago.
A few final reflections
Anyone that is at odds with the current state of affairs will resonate to some degree with Kaczynski’s ideas. Technology is a force of a greater magnitude than almost any other social mechanism and has been for generations upon generations now. The beneficial returns appear to have diminished out to nothingness a long time ago. All the while, every other social institution and norm has continued to degenerate. While I believe the internet still holds some potential as a true consciousness amplifier, the system has almost completely neutured it. With the current push against “extremism,” expect this to get much, much worse.
If the current administration were actually intelligent, they would frame this new homeland war against ‘whitey as a Kaczynski acolyte movement. This would more easily rope in the gullible WASP boomers that are still watching TV; instead, they continue to frame it strictly as a white supremacy problem, which white america is being desensitized to more and more as a result. So it really begs the question of what the system’s current aim is. Maybe the elites are much more aligned with Kaczynski’s thinking than we would initially assume. Remember, the Georgia guidestones first “guideline” is to maintain global population under 500,000,000 and the last is to “Be not a cancer on the Earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.”
6 Of course, Uncle Ted spoke against the depopulation which is the subtext of the first guideline. But it is evident that the elites are aware of technology’s harmful effects. They certainly aren’t giving their 5 year olds ipads. Bill Gates is buying up all the farmland in the US.
Is a return to nature actually possible, though? With some kind of mass extinction level event, abosolutely! We would quickly be reduced to a more natural state of basic survival, and most institutional technology would be lost for generations. . . unless AI has advanced to the point of keeping things running.
I anticipate that ISAIF has only just begun to influence the public. It hasn’t made me destroy every electronic device I own and go back to kerosene and candlight. . . yet. It has given me a broader understanding of the current compulsion toward “SCIENCE” in our present Covid technocracy.
A final note: I remember my dad telling me about a black guy that was in his graduate class back in the day. In the library one evening, the brotha tells my dad that if the professional career they were in school far doesn’t work out he had the entire power grid mapped out and ready to blow up. My dad is sure he hadn’t read ISAIF, but must have gotten the idea from some black power circles. Whatever you do, don’t follow this brotha’s lead. But it’s interesting to think a 20 something black guy had a better plan to dismantle industrial society than Kaczynski’s mailbombing campaign. . .
para. 119, ISAIF
Id.
para. 122.
para. 166, 181.
para. 170
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Georgia_Guidestones_2014-03-18_01.jpg