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I can't disagree strongly enough.
I don't know or care about Ellul, or Weil. I know and care about Kaczynski, and the reason I know and care about him is because he was willing to commit violence in service of his ideals. The very fact that he is willing to kill or
dielive in prison for his ideals gives them weight that simply writing never can.Ted was a man of both words and actions, where too many people are simply men of words. That engenders admiration, and rightly so. His "domestic terrorism" was him following his thoughts to their natural conclusions and then acting on them. It is that last part that is so rare, and it is the last part that gives the Unabomber the long shadow across history that Ellul can't ever match.
I don't care if he was wrong or right, not really. I admire him for being willing to risk his life and his freedom on ideals, so long as those ideals have the least bit of appeal to me.
See, this comment is a perfect encapsulation of why I find vitalism and its offshoots so frustrating. No no no no, a million times no, the vast majority of people should not “fight for their ideals”, let alone “die for their ideals,” because their ideas suck ass. Ted K’s ideas sucked ass pretty much across the board, despite the fact that he was an evidently brilliant and cognitively-gifted man. If a guy that smart couldn’t manage to come up with ideas any better than those, what hope is there for the great mass of the rest of humanity?
Men should be willing to fight and die in defense of their specific people/nation/homeland, and it is even right and proper for them to be willing to fight and die for the betterment and glorification of the same - but absolutely not for something as bloodless and fallible as “ideals”. Absolutely nobody gained anything from Ted K’s actions, and nor could anyone even theoretically have gained anything from them, which demonstrates pretty conclusively as far as I’m concerned that the ideals motivating them probably weren’t worth much.
Say what you will about Ted K, he at least had coherent and falsifiable ideas. "Vitalism" on the e-right is nothing but a haze of grievance and nostalgia for aesthetics disconnected from their original application, and it breeds intellectual carelessness in its adherents that rivals right-populists and 'woke's.
Concrete peoples, nations, and homelands are exactly as fallible as 'ideas'. Is the Azeri who dies to annex an unimportant province of Armenia glorious? Or soldiers in the 300th post-colonial African coup? Is the individual soldier still glorious if military success is granted entirely due to alliances and imported technology and not the military prowess of their soldiers? Does it matter that these globally insignificant squabbles only serve to dig holes of economic instability and irrelevance deeper? War is itself a technology, and the material cause of its glorification was spreading genes and then growing states. Is it still the most effective means of doing either of those?
Armenia is at least a real place, and Azeri a real people. They are both made up of matter, unlike ideas, which are not. Blood and soil, to borrow a phrase, are real and true things in a way that ideas are not and have never been.
The retort writes itself. The land Armenia sits on is real, sure, but the material importance it has is limited - drop the exact same population into Kansas or Nigeria and the ethnic Armenians would be able to farm and organize just as well. A communist who defends communism that happens to sit on a particular piece of land is different - how - from someone who holds an idea of a blood-and-soil tie to a particular piece of dirt that - in a literal sense - they'd be able to hold perfectly well on another piece of dirt? At best, the 'soil' is a metaphor for the people and their folkways. Unfortunately for Azerbaijan and Armenia, and every other country on the planet, material concerns have caused them to adopt the "folkways" of modern America and western Europe. Can you even name a concrete way of life or difference in genetic tendencies that differs between Armenians and Azerbaijanis? One that's worth killing over? And those are ... still differences in ideas. If Europeans are slightly more individualist than the Chinese, how is that more real than an entirely different political philosophy and strucure? And the difference in 'people' between Armenia and Azerbaijan are caused more by historical geopolitics between greater powers than they are anything else.
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