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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.
There's a rule here for Make your point reasonably clear and plain. It's not clear to me what your point is, so why don't you just say it, whatever it is? Why are you making it all about me and my experiences? Exactly what is the "lie" that you are referring to at the end?
For me it is a reasonable answer. There is a bias that you are upfront with that the ideas you are critiquing are from a terrorist, thus you are not separating the ideas from the man. But the thing is that it is not TK who is the originator of the ideas. It is Ellul! The core is simple, humanity is not supposed to serve the "machine" but the "machine" is supposed to serve humanity! And you wrote several paragraphs saying that we are supposed to serve the machine because it benefits all of humanity. I'm not so sure...
The parent I responded to there had written a longer response with more detail that I was meaning to respond to now, but I guess he deleted it. (It was pretty long but reasonably charitable and clear IMO, so I thought it deserved a reasonably high-effort response). Oh well, I guess I'll say most of the same stuff here.
I was actually biased to think moderately positively of TK before I read his piece, as most of the areas I read seem at least modestly biased towards him. I wrote about it a bit on this site. I wrote in that thread what actually changed my mind. I had basically presumed that his ideas were too censored and too difficult to get out there such that it drove him to terrorism. But he actually wrote himself in that very essay in P96 that he did violence because he did have opportunities to put it out there, but not to be distributed to his satisfaction. As I wrote there, I reject the idea that you get to do violence because nobody thinks your ideas are interesting. If nobody thinks your ideas are interesting enough to pay attention to, you should work on improving them and presenting them better, not blow people up.
That Mr. Ellul wrote similar things I think more proves my point than refutes it (I believe you both that he wrote similar things, but I'm not sure to what extent he rejected or endorsed violence to spread his ideas) - it's perfectly possible to have such views and advocate for them in normal and peaceful ways. I think that, considering the public image TK has gained from his bombing campaign (since we're all talking about him), it's perfectly reasonable to point out the holes in his ideas and remind people that he did make the decision that his ideas were important enough to justify aggressive violence - not even towards specific people responsible for opposing him or rejecting his ideas, but people he felt were part of the industrial system that he wanted to tear down.
I also believe that part of the generous interpretation many have given to his work is due to the re-definition of freedom that he used. A casual reading of many of his sections with the implicit belief among the general public in the western world that "freedom" refers to basically classical liberalism, things like free speech, free press, rule of law, etc leads many of his ideas to sound significantly more insightful and reasonable. But once you know that he redefined it to mean the "right"/need of individuals to go through the "Power Process" of doing substantial work for their basic needs, it all sounds rather different. Whether Industrial Society is inherently destructive of "classical liberalism" freedom is yet to be determined - that could be a complex and interesting discussion. But Industrial Society being inherently destructive to "power process" freedom is trivially obvious. I have a feeling that this may have been done on purpose. An honest writer simply looking to promote his ideas rather than mislead people would pick a different word, rather than one so loaded with pre-existing cultural baggage in the West.
Parent post also seems to be accusing me of not knowing enough about nature, hunter-gatherer lifestyles, etc. Presumably this is meant to lead to an argument that such lifestyles are actually much better than I had presented them as. At least, that's the most charitable interpretation IMO, part of my issue there is that he didn't actually make an argument for whatever it is he believed, just implied that I was ignorant. If I am, please go ahead and let me know what facts you know that make the arguments less valid, don't just imply that they're there.
I could counter-argue that while I am no expert on such lifestyles, he in turn may not know much about just how complex the logistical chain is that makes available all of the modern goods that we take for granted and exactly what life may be like when they are completely impossible to obtain. I specifically mean the "safety net" concept that I mention elsewhere in this thread. It may not be terribly hard to live a lifestyle superficially similar to what is described by TK, presumably Ellul, and others - I wouldn't be surprised if the number of people in the continental US voluntarily living like that is in the hundreds of thousands. But it's only superficial if you still have the grocery store to solve any food production problems that come up, the hospital to solve any medical problems, the hardware store for any tools you can't fabricate, etc. Even if you never actually go to any of those, the mere fact that it's possible tends to change peoples' behavior. How many people volunteer to put all of those perpetually out of reach for their entire extended family for all eternity?
Ellul is the originator of the ideas and he also rejected violence to spread them. Last time I checked the wikipedia article wasn't that bad. And to quote wikipedia... 'Ellul explained his view in this way: "By anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence."'
This is the main reason I think you got caught in such a critical response. It is that there is no separation of the ideas that Kaczynski based on Elluls work and Kaczynskis campaign of violence. It is not clear what are Kaczynskis contributions that you are criticizing here or if you are criticizing Ellul.
The Amish reject modernity but when their children come of age they get to decide through 'Rumschpringe' if they want to join the community or get access to all of modernity has to offer. Also the Amish are not hunter-gatherers so there is that.
I'm not here to accuse you of being ignorant but I could claim that there is not enough imagination what it could mean to resist industrialized society. The ideas resisting it has continued with people of like Paul Kingsnorth. But because someone decided to mail out bombs you are rejecting the ideas around resisting "the machine" even if there are people that have ideas that predate and supersede it without violence.
The new top-level post has better in-depth discussion on the relative merits of TK vs Ellul and their ideas, so I'll leave further discussion of that point there.
I do think a necessary point here is that TK explicitly advocated for the violent overthrow of technological society worldwide. I'm not an expert on Ellul, I've only skimmed his Wikipedia article, but he doesn't seem to go that way. He makes some of the same arguments, but he seems to push for broader awareness and acceptance of his viewpoint and possibly setting up some independent communities that implement them as much as possible on a voluntary basis. I think that's a critical distinction, and a good reason why Ellul deserves tolerant consideration and discussion while TK deserves much harsher criticism.
I'm perfectly fine with the Amish and other such societies because 1. They walk the walk, actually setting up long-lasting communities to practice their lifestyle that are about as non-dependent on mainstream society as you can reasonably be while living in a first-world industrialized nation, and 2. They don't seek to impose anything on anyone - they just want to live their way, and don't care at all how anybody outside their community lives. Rumspringa is proof that even their own children are encouraged to get a real and fair view of the world outside so that they can make a legitimate, free, and fully-informed choice on whether to stay within the community or leave it. TK did the opposite - he advocated for and actively tried to force everyone else to live in the way he thought was best while not doing so himself.
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The lie of the social contract, whig history, and man's capability to set himself aside from the constraints of nature -- he seems (to me) to be saying reasonably clearly.
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