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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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certainly seems like us transgressors of God are doing quite well for ourselves as a matter of fact.

I don't really care to go into the large argument about how miserable industrial society has made everyone, go read Ted if you want to see those arguments, but on the face of it I do want to address the most painfully ridiculous elephant in the room, which Nietzsche famously predicted as a direct consequence of this transgression:

How many people died in the XXth century?

We've got you beat on the violence as well buddy.

This doesn't alter the moral calculus a iota for me. But I also don't believe you. Otherwise you'd be holding Afghanistan right about now.

How many people died in the XXth century?

How many did not? For most of recorded history, one third of all born children died in infancy, quite often taking their mother with them; of course these billions died quietly, often unnamed and unrecorded, and a death tax of a child every three in nearly every household is not so notable and exciting as a holocaust killing a hundredth of that number all in one event. The survivors didn't even find it all that noteworthy; after all it was all natural, and probably the will of God. Now the death tax is gone from most of the world, and on its way to be gone from the rest of it.

Granted, Mao is still to blame for the worst famine in history. But famines with a death tolls in the millions were quite common before the 20th century; before mechanized agriculture and the Green Revolution, it did not take a mad ideologue to starve millions in India or China; it happened quite naturally whenever the weather was too dry or too wet or too warm or too cold for a few years in a row.

Smallpox killed half a billion people just in its last century of existence (its thirtieth, give or take). It killed a significant fraction of all humans who ever lived, and left most of the survivors crippled, blinded, or disfigured. Now it's gone; and nazism and communism and religious fundamentalism and all other deranged ideologies ever dreamed up have a long, long way to go before they even get close to the death toll of one of these perfectly natural facets of the human condition.

"Accept nature", if taken as seriously as those other slogans, could be stained with quite a lot more blood than "proletarians of the world, unite" or "work will set you free".

https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-evidence-on-violent-deaths Proportionally less than in any previous century from violence. Or in early childhood, thanks to modern medicine. Or from starvation, thanks to industrial fertilizers. As for happiness, Ted might have had a better point if he went for the invention of agriculture. But pre-industrial agricultural society meant that the vast majority of humanity were subsistence farmers subject to frequent violence.

My impression is that, while Ted Kaczynski has interesting points about runaway tendencies in technocracy and the potential for social control and all that, any of his arguments about human misery have to be taken in the context of him being abused in what was probably a literal psy-op. Ted may say it didn't permanently affect him, but I dunno...