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I started reading and thinking about Theodore Kaczynski's Industrial Society And It's Future around the time that he died and everyone was talking about it. I think everyone was talking about it in rather generous terms, mining it for the most truthful and insightful things and only talking about that. I think that's excesively generous, considering it came to be known to us thanks to a homicidal terroristic bombing campaign. I think it deserves to be cut to the core of it's true arguments that he believed justified his bombing campaign. And I also think that if you actually do so, it's pretty low quality. Here is the original text of it if you care to verify or make a counter-argument.
The core of, and most important thing to remember about Industrial Society and it's Future is the Power Process argument, as written starting in paragraph 33. TK's argument is that in order to be truly happy and satisfied with life, a person must need to exert substantial effort, labor, and creativity towards satisfying the most basic physical needs of food, water, shelter, and security. Exerting their creative efforts towards other pursuits, including art, science, engineering, etc. isn't good enough, it's got to be for core survival. Exerting substantial effort in a conventional job, earning money, and using that money to purchase the elements of survival is also not good enough, it has to be direct. This is his definition of "freedom" - one is "free" in his opinion if they need to exert substantial effort directly towards basic survival. Thus, industrial society is fundamentally destructive to "freedom" in this definition in that it enables the majority of humanity to satisfy their needs of survival very easily and reliably, usually by doing things that have no direct relation to those needs. See him doubling down on this in paragraph 94.
I believe this argument is fundamentally nonsensical. Perhaps our society is lost and missing something, but I'm doubtful that large-scale hunter-gatherer societies (or at least as large scale as such societies can be) are overall substantially happier and more satisfied with life. It may be true that some individuals who are disaffected from mainstream society for various reasons are happier in such a situation, but I don't think society as a whole is. I frankly doubt it for individuals too - how many such people ever truly disconnect fully from industrial society and stay that way? I don't think TK is has any experience in anthropology, or has spent any significant amount of time with societies that currently do live in ways similar to what he advocates. Maybe he should have spent a few years living with the Amish or something before going on a bombing campaign, or visited some primitive tribes that are still around in various parts of Africa and South America.
He has some other interesting observations, but that's the core of it and why I wholly reject the philosophy.
One of his other points is around how society tends to bend people to fit it, rather than adjusting to fit people. Maybe there's a little point in how hard it sometimes tries to bend people. But there are plenty of options out there already for other ways to live, if you are willing to go looking for them and actually adopt them. In fact, it's not really "society" trying to bend people in my opinion, it's usually the people themselves or their close family members trying to fit in. Are "we" supposed to go find the guy who thinks he should try anti-depressants to fit in better and tell him he really ought to try joining a sailboat crew first instead? Maybe it's your job to realize you don't like your place in society and change it. And however you decide to deal with your disaffection with society, what gives you the right to claim you know what's best for everyone? Doesn't the fact that you are disaffected from society fundamentally mean that you don't understand it and aren't by any measure qualified to speak for it?
Speaking of people not fitting into society, what happens when it goes the other way? If we actually adopt his supposed preferred lifestyle and it goes exactly the way he hopes it does, I'd bet anything at least a few people would think that running water, grocery stores full of food, and antibiotics are actually pretty nice, can I please go back to that? Will the result of that just be, tough shit, this is all there is, starve and die if you don't like it? Has he done any sort of research or experiment at all to determine that 100% of humanity will actually be happer living like this, even when some of them starve to death because a harvest or hunt went bad for some reason and there's no such thing as long-distance trade, or they watch their loved ones die of things that are fixable in industrial society but pre-industrial hunter-gatherers are helpless against?
I think the bigger point though is - what do you want for the future of the Human Race?
If we go TK's way, we will be hunter-gatherers chasing buffalo around and picking berries forever. Your kids and their kids as far into the future as you want to go will never live any better than you. Some day, the rising output of the sun will destroy the Earth's biosphere, or maybe we get hit by an asteroid or gamma ray burst or something, and the entire human race goes extinct. We won't have a prayer of even knowing it's coming, much less doing anything about it, because being too busy working on basic survival to notice or think about such things is apparently the correct way to live. We were given this tremendous gift of intelligence, by evolution or God or whatever you believe, and we're supposed to just throw it in the trash because some guy was sad?
Or we go our own way and take industrial society as far as it can go. Maybe we build awesome spaceships and colonize the stars. Maybe we conduct diplomacy as equals with alien civilizations. Maybe we turn ourselves into a global hive mind somehow. Or maybe we blow ourselves up with antimatter bombs or get turned into paperclips by our superintelligent AIs or get enslaved by hostile aliens. Who knows what the future holds, but it sounds a lot better than being hunter-gatherers forever.
Didn’t he literally move to a shack in the woods?
He did, but it's not clear to what extent he was actually living the kind of life he advertised, which would include getting all of his own food, water, and other supplies from nature by himself and never from stores or other things sourced from the "industrial economy". At the very least, the materials required for the bombing campaign most likely couldn't have been built without outside supplies. I rather doubt he did considering how little knowledge of living off the land he started with and how much time he must have devoted to the bombing campaign.
There's also the point of safety nets. In TK's advocated world, if you fail to hunt and gather or farm enough food, then you starve and possibly die, tough shit. Living in a shack in the woods in the United States, even if you mostly get your own food, you still have the option of going to a store if you fall short, or to a hospital if you get injured or sick. Maybe he would voluntarily refrain from those options, but I don't think we know.
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