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-
How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation | vodoraslo
+
How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation | vodoraslo
@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ nano /etc/matrix-synapse/homeserver.yaml and go all the way to the bottom or sea
-How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation
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- 2023 May 04 – How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation 2023 May 04 – How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation 2023 Jan 12 – Recover Lost Anki Streak 2023 Jan 04 – Meta Description in Hugo 2023 Jan 03 – Multiple Index Pages in Hugo -
-
How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation
+ How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation
Thu, 04 May 2023 10:12:26 +0300
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+meow
+
+I THINK you can just download this folder as a zip and place it into wherever you put your images
diff --git a/public/index.html b/public/index.html
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2023 May 04 –
- How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation - Federation issues I for the life of me couldn’t get synapse’s (matrix’s) federation to work. It said that the encryption … Read more (1 minute read). Recent content in 🪸 vodoraslo 🪸 on vodoraslo
Hugo -- gohugo.io
en-us
- Thu, 04 May 2023 10:12:26 +0300
+ Sat, 06 May 2023 10:12:26 +0300
-
-
How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation
+ How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation
Thu, 04 May 2023 10:12:26 +0300
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+
+
+
+ Lain Webring | vodoraslo
+
+
+
+View the lainring (lain webring)
+the html is from https://webring.lain.la/
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
diff --git a/public/lainring/index.xml b/public/lainring/index.xml
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+
+
+ vodoraslo
+ Recent content in Lain Webring on vodoraslo
+ Hugo -- gohugo.io
+ en-us
+ Sat, 06 May 2023 10:12:26 +0300
+
+ -
+
How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation
+ Thu, 04 May 2023 10:12:26 +0300
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/blog/how-i-fixed-my-synapse-matrix-federation/
+ <h2 id="federation-issues">Federation issues</h2>
+<p>I for the life of me couldn’t get synapse’s (matrix’s) federation to work. It said that the encryption couldn’t be trusted, i could join public rooms but i couldn’t start any chats, i couldn’t invite people to my rooms, i couldn’t get invited to rooms.</p>
+<h2 id="how-i-fixed-it">How I fixed it</h2>
+<p>Go to your <code>homeserver.yaml</code> file</p>
+<div class="highlight"><pre tabindex="0" style="color:#b0c4de;background-color:#282c34;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4;"><code class="language-bash" data-lang="bash"><span style="display:flex;"><span>nano /etc/matrix-synapse/homeserver.yaml
+</span></span></code></pre></div><p>and go all the way to the bottom or search for <code>trusted_key_servers</code>. it’s probably going to be <code>matrix.org</code>. You should change it to the following by removing <code>matrix.org</code> and leave blank square brackets:</p>
+<pre tabindex="0"><code>trusted_key_servers: []
+</code></pre>
+
+
+ -
+
The Techie's Wet-Dreams
+ Sat, 15 Apr 2023 18:58:23 +0300
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-wet-dreams/
+ <p>There is a current of thought that appears to be carrying many technophiles out of the realm of science and into that of science fiction.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> For convenience, let’s refer to those who ride this current as “the techies.”<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> The current runs through several channels; not all techies think alike. What they have in common is that they take highly speculative ideas about the future of technology as near certainties, and on that basis predict the arrival within the next few decades of a kind of technological utopia. Some of the techies’ fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that “within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe.”<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup> The writing of Kevin Kelly, another techie, is often so vague as to border on the meaningless, but he seems to say much the same thing that Kurzweil does about human conquest of the universe: “The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium…”<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> “The technium” is Kelly’s name for the technological world-system that humans have created here on Earth.<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">5</a></sup></p>
+<p>Most versions of the technological utopia include immortality (at least for techies) among their other marvels. The immortality to which the techies believe themselves destined is conceived in any one of three forms:</p>
+<ul>
+<li>the indefinite preservation of the living human body as it exists today; <sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">6</a></sup></li>
+<li>the merging of humans with machines and the indefinite survival of the resulting man-machine hybrids;<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">7</a></sup></li>
+<li>the “uploading” of minds from human brains into robots or computers, after which the uploaded minds are to live forever within the machines.<sup id="fnref:8"><a href="#fn:8" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">8</a></sup></li>
+</ul>
+<p>Of course, if the technological world-system is going to collapse in the not-too-distant future, as we’ve argued it must, then no one is going to achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we’re wrong and that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the techies’ dream of an unlimited life-span is still illusory. We need not doubt that it will be technically feasible in the future to keep a human body, or a man-machine hybrid, alive indefinitely. It is seriously to be doubted that it will ever be feasible to “upload” a human brain into electronic form with sufficient accuracy so that the uploaded entity can reasonably be regarded as a functioning duplicate of the original brain. Nevertheless, we will assume in what follows that each of the solutions (i), (ii), and (iii) will become technically feasible at some time within the next several decades.</p>
+<p>It is an index of the techies’ self-deception that they habitually assume that anything they consider desirable will actually be done when it becomes technically feasible. Of course, there are lots of wonderful things that already are and for a long time have been technically feasible, but don’t get done. Intelligent people have said again and again: “How easily men could make things much better than they are—if they only all tried together!”<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> But people never do “all try together,” because the principle of natural selection guarantees that self-propagating systems will act mainly for their own survival and propagation in competition with other self-propagating systems, and will not sacrifice competitive advantages for the achievement of philanthropic goals.<sup id="fnref:10"><a href="#fn:10" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">10</a></sup></p>
+<p>Because immortality, as the techies conceive it, will be technically feasible, the techies take it for granted that some system to which they belong can and will keep them alive indefinitely, or provide them with what they need to keep themselves alive. Today it would no doubt be technically feasible to provide everyone in the world with everything that he or she needs in the way of food, clothing, shelter, protection from violence, and what by present standards is considered adequate medical care—if only all of the world’s more important self-propagating systems would devote themselves unreservedly to that task. But that never happens, because the self-propagating systems are occupied primarily with the endless struggle for power and therefore act philanthropically only when it is to their advantage to do so. That’s why billions of people in the world today suffer from malnutrition, or are exposed to violence, or lack what is considered adequate medical care.</p>
+<p>In view of all this, it is patently absurd to suppose that the technological world-system is ever going to provide seven billion human beings with everything they need to stay alive indefinitely. If the projected immortality were possible at all, it could only be for some tiny subset of the seven billion—an elite minority. Some techies acknowledge this.<sup id="fnref:11"><a href="#fn:11" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">11</a></sup> One has to suspect that a great many more recognize it but refrain from acknowledging it openly, for it is obviously imprudent to tell the public that immortality will be for an elite minority only and that ordinary people will be left out.</p>
+<p>The techies of course assume that they themselves will be included in the elite minority that supposedly will be kept alive indefinitely. What they find convenient to overlook is that self-propagating systems, in the long run, will take care of human beings—even members of the elite—only to the extent that it is to the systems’ advantage to take care of them. When they are no longer useful to the dominant self-propagating systems, humans—elite or not—will be eliminated. In order to survive, humans not only will have to be useful; they will have to be more useful in relation to the cost of maintaining them—in other words, they will have to provide a better cost-versus-benefit balance—than any non-human substitutes. This is a tall order, for humans are far more costly to maintain than machines are.<sup id="fnref:12"><a href="#fn:12" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">12</a></sup></p>
+<p>It will be answered that many self-propagating systems—governments, corporations, labor unions, etc.—do take care of numerous individuals who are utterly useless to them: old people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, even criminals serving life sentences. But this is only because the systems in question still need the services of the majority of people in order to function. Humans have been endowed by evolution with feelings of compassion, because hunting-and-gathering bands thrive best when their members show consideration for one another and help one another.<sup id="fnref:13"><a href="#fn:13" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">13</a></sup> As long as self-propagating systems still need people, it would be to the systems’ disadvantage to offend the compassionate feelings of the useful majority through ruthless treatment of the useless minority. More important than compassion, however, is the self-interest of human individuals: People would bitterly resent any system to which they belonged if they believed that when they grew old, or if they became disabled, they would be thrown on the trash-heap.</p>
+<p>But when all people have become useless, self-propagating systems will find no advantage in taking care of anyone. The techies themselves insist that machines will soon surpass humans in intelligence.<sup id="fnref:14"><a href="#fn:14" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">14</a></sup> When that happens, people will be superfluous and natural selection will favor systems that eliminate them—if not abruptly, then in a series of stages so that the risk of rebellion will be minimized.</p>
+<p>Even though the technological world-system still needs large numbers of people for the present, there are now more superfluous humans than there have been in the past because technology has replaced people in many jobs and is making inroads even into occupations formerly thought to require human intelligence.<sup id="fnref:15"><a href="#fn:15" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">15</a></sup> Consequently, under the pressure of economic competition, the world’s dominant self-propagating systems are already allowing a certain degree of callousness to creep into their treatment of superfluous individuals. In the United States and Europe, pensions and other benefits for retired, disabled, unemployed, and other unproductive persons are being substantially reduced;<sup id="fnref:16"><a href="#fn:16" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">16</a></sup> at least in the U. S., poverty is increasing;<sup id="fnref:17"><a href="#fn:17" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">17</a></sup> and these facts may well indicate the general trend of the future, though there will doubtless be ups and downs.</p>
+<p>It’s important to understand that in order to make people superfluous, machines will not have to surpass them in general intelligence but only in certain specialized kinds of intelligence. For example, the machines will not have to create or understand art, music, or literature, they will not need the ability to carry on an intelligent, non-technical conversation (the “Turing test”<sup id="fnref:18"><a href="#fn:18" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">18</a></sup>), they will not have to exercise tact or understand human nature, because these skills will have no application if humans are to be eliminated anyway. To make humans superfluous, the machines will only need to outperform them in making the technical decisions that have to be made for the purpose of promoting the short-term survival and propagation of the dominant self-propagating systems. So, even without going as far as the techies themselves do in assuming intelligence on the part of future machines, we still have to conclude that humans will become obsolete. Immortality in the form (i)—the indefinite preservation of the human body as it exists today—is highly improbable.</p>
+<p>The techies—or more specifically the transhumanists—will argue that even if the human body and brain as we know them become obsolete, immortality in the form (ii) can still be achieved: Man-machine hybrids will permanently retain their usefulness, because by linking themselves with ever-more-powerful machines human beings (or what is left of them) will be able to remain competitive with pure machines.<sup id="fnref:19"><a href="#fn:19" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">19</a></sup></p>
+<p>But man-machine hybrids will retain a biological component derived from human beings only as long as the human-derived biological component remains useful. When purely artificial components become available that provide a better cost-versus-benefit balance than human-derived biological components do, the latter will be discarded and the man-machine hybrids will lose their human aspect to become wholly artificial.<sup id="fnref:20"><a href="#fn:20" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">20</a></sup> Even if the human-derived biological components are retained they will be purged, step by step, of the human qualities that detract from their usefulness. The self-propagating systems to which the man-machine hybrids belong will have no need for such human weaknesses as love, compassion, ethical feelings, esthetic appreciation, or desire for freedom. Human emotions in general will get in the way of the self-propagating systems’ utilization of the man-machine hybrids, so if the latter are to remain competitive they will have to be altered to remove their human emotions and replace these with other motivating forces. In short, even in the unlikely event that some biological remnants of the human race are preserved in the form of man-machine hybrids, these will be transformed into something totally alien to human beings as we know them today.</p>
+<p>The same applies to the hypothesized survival of human minds in “uploaded” form inside machines. The uploaded minds will not be tolerated indefinitely unless they remain useful (that is, more useful than any substitutes not derived from human beings), and in order to remain useful they will have to be transformed until they no longer have anything in common with the human minds that exist today.</p>
+<p>Some techies may consider this acceptable. But their dream of immortality is illusory nonetheless. Competition for survival among entities derived from human beings (whether man-machine hybrids, purely artificial entities evolved from such hybrids, or human minds uploaded into machines), as well as competition between human-derived entities and those machines or other entities that are not derived from human beings, will lead to the elimination of all but some minute percentage of all the entities involved. This has nothing to do with any specific traits of human beings or of their machines; it is a general principle of evolution through natural selection. Look at biological evolution: Of all the species that have ever existed on Earth, only some tiny percentage have direct descendants that are still alive today.<sup id="fnref:21"><a href="#fn:21" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">21</a></sup> On the basis of this principle alone, and even discounting everything else we’ve said in this chapter, the chances that any given techie will survive indefinitely are minute.</p>
+<p>The techies may answer that even if almost all biological species are eliminated eventually, many species survive for thousands or millions of years, so maybe techies too can survive for thousands or millions of years. But when large, rapid changes occur in the environment of biological species, both the rate of appearance of new species and the rate of extinction of existing species are greatly increased.<sup id="fnref:22"><a href="#fn:22" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">22</a></sup> Technological progress constantly accelerates, and techies like Ray Kurzweil insist that it will soon become virtually explosive;<sup id="fnref:23"><a href="#fn:23" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">23</a></sup> consequently, changes come more and more rapidly, everything happens faster and faster, competition among self-propagating systems becomes more and more intense, and as the process gathers speed the losers in the struggle for survival will be eliminated ever more quickly. So, on the basis of the techies’ own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it’s safe to say that the life-expectancies of human-derived entities, such as man-machine hybrids and human minds uploaded into machines, will actually be quite short. The seven-hundred year or thousand-year life-span to which some techies aspire<sup id="fnref:24"><a href="#fn:24" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">24</a></sup> is nothing but a pipe-dream.</p>
+<p>Singularity University, which we discussed in Part VI of Chapter One of this book, purportedly was created to help technophiles “guide research” and “shape the advances” so that technology would “improve society.” We pointed out that Singularity University served in practice to promote the interests of technology-orientated businessmen, and we expressed doubt that the majority of technophiles fully believed in the drivel about “shaping the advances” to “improve society.” It does seem, however, that the techies—the subset of the technophiles that we specified at the beginning of this Part V of the present chapter—are entirely sincere in their belief that organizations like Singularity University<sup id="fnref:25"><a href="#fn:25" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">25</a></sup> will help them to “shape the advances” of technology and keep the technological society on the road to a utopian future. A utopian future will have to exclude the competitive processes that would deprive the techies of their thousand-year life-span. But we showed in Chapter One that the development of our society can never be subject to rational control: The techies won’t be able to “shape the advances” of technology, guide the course of technological progress, or exclude the intense competition that will eliminate nearly all techies in short order.</p>
+<p>In view of everything we’ve said up to this point, and in view moreover of the fact that the techies’ vision of the future is based on pure speculation and is unsupported by evidence,<sup id="fnref:26"><a href="#fn:26" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">26</a></sup> one has to ask how they can believe in that vision. Some techies, e.g. , Kurzweil, do concede a slight degree of uncertainty as to whether their expectations for the future will be realized,<sup id="fnref:27"><a href="#fn:27" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">27</a></sup> but this seems to be no more than a sop that they throw to the skeptics, something they have to concede in order to avoid making themselves too obviously ridiculous in the eyes of rational people. Despite their pro forma admission of uncertainty, it’s clear that most techies confidently expect to live for many centuries, if not forever, in a world that will be in some vaguely defined sense a utopia.<sup id="fnref:28"><a href="#fn:28" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">28</a></sup> Thus Kurzweil states flatly: “We will be able to live as long as we want… .”<sup id="fnref:29"><a href="#fn:29" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">29</a></sup> He adds no qualifiers—no “probably,” no “if things turn out as expected.” His whole book reveals a man intoxicated with a vision of the future in which, as an immortal machine, he will participate in the conquest of the universe. In fact, Kurzweil and other techies are living in a fantasy world.</p>
+<p>The techies’ belief-system can best be explained as a religious phenomenon,<sup id="fnref:30"><a href="#fn:30" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">30</a></sup> to which we may give the name “Technianity.” It’s true that Technianity at this point is not strictly speaking a religion, because it has not yet developed anything resembling a uniform body of doctrine; the techies’ beliefs are widely varied.<sup id="fnref:31"><a href="#fn:31" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">31</a></sup> In this respect Technianity probably resembles the inceptive stages of many other religions.<sup id="fnref:32"><a href="#fn:32" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">32</a></sup> Nevertheless, Technianity already has the earmarks of an apocalyptic and millenarian cult: In most versions it anticipates a cataclysmic event, the Singularity,<sup id="fnref:33"><a href="#fn:33" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">33</a></sup> which is the point at which technological progress is supposed to become so rapid as to resemble an explosion. This is analogous to the Judgment Day<sup id="fnref:34"><a href="#fn:34" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">34</a></sup> of Christian mythology or the Revolution of Marxist mythology. The cataclysmic event is supposed to be followed by the arrival of techno-utopia (analogous to the Kingdom of God or the Worker’s Paradise). Technianity has a favored minority—the Elect—consisting of the techies (equivalent to the True Believers of Christianity or the Proletariat of the Marxists<sup id="fnref:35"><a href="#fn:35" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">35</a></sup>). The Elect of Technianity, like that of Christianity, is destined to Eternal Life; though this element is missing from Marxism.<sup id="fnref:36"><a href="#fn:36" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">36</a></sup></p>
+<p>Historically, millenarian cults have tended to emerge at “times of great social change or crisis.”<sup id="fnref:37"><a href="#fn:37" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">37</a></sup> This suggests that the techies’ beliefs reflect not a genuine confidence in technology, but rather their own anxieties about the future of the technological society—anxieties from which they try to escape by creating a quasi-religious myth.</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p>It is significant that Ray Kurzweil, the best-known of the techie prophets, started out as a science-fiction enthusiast. Kurzweil, p. 1. Kim Eric Drexler, the prophet of nanotechnology, started out “specializing in theories of space travel and space colonization.” Keiper, p. 20. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p>The techies of course include the transhumanists, but some techies—as we use the term—do not appear to be transhumanists. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:3">
+<p>Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368. <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:4">
+<p>Kelly, p. 357. <a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:5">
+<p>Ibid., pp. 11–12. <a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:6">
+<p>Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320. <a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:7">
+<p>Grossman, p. 44, col. 3. Kurzweil, pp. 194–95, 309, 377. Vance, p. 1, col. 3; p. 6, col. 1. <a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:8">
+<p>Grossman, p. 44, col. 3; p. 48, col. 1; p. 49, col. 1. Kurzweil, pp. 198–203, 325–26, 377. The techies—or more specifically the transhumanists—seem to assume that their own consciousness will survive the uploading process. On that subject Kurzweil is somewhat equivocal, but in the end seems to assume that his consciousness will survive if his brain is replaced with nonbiological components not all at once, but bit by bit over a period of time. Kurzweil, pp. 383–86. <a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:9">
+<p>Winston Churchill, Sept. 15, 1909, quoted by Jenkins, p. 212. Other examples: “… liberty, toleration, equality of opportunity, socialism… there is no reason why any of them should not be fully realised, in a society or in the world, if it were the united purpose of a society or of the world to realise it.” Bury, p. 1 (originally published in 1920; see ibid., p. xvi). On July 22, 1944, John Maynard Keynes noted that forty-four nations had been learning to “work together.” He added: “If we can so continue… the brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase.” (Fat chance!) Skidelsky, p. 355. <a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:10">
+<p>This of course does not mean that no self-prop system ever does anything beneficent that is contrary to its own interest, but the occasional exceptions are relatively insignificant. Bear in mind that many apparently beneficent actions are actually to the advantage of the self-prop system that carries them out. <a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:11">
+<p>Grossman, p. 48, col. 3 (“Who decides who gets to be immortal?”). Vance, p. 6, col. 1. <a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:12">
+<p>Humans need to be fed, clothed, housed, educated, entertained, disciplined, and provided with medical care. Whereas machines can work continuously with only occasional down-time for repairs, humans need to spend a great deal of time sleeping and resting. <a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:13">
+<p>Also, modern societies find it advantageous to encourage people’s compassionate feelings through propaganda. See Kaczynski, “The System’s Neatest Trick,” Part 4. <a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:14">
+<p>Grossman, pp. 44–46. Kurzweil, pp. 135ff and passim. Machines that surpass humans in intelligence might not be digital computers as we know them today. They might have to depend on quantum-theoretic phenomena, or they might have to make use of complex molecules as biological systems do. Grossman, p. 48, col. 2; Kurzweil, pp. 111–122; USA Today, March 8, 2017, p. 5B (IBM & other companies are working to develop computers that make use of quantum-theoretic phenomena). This writer has little doubt that, with commitment of sufficient resources over a sufficient period of time, it would be technically feasible to develop artificial devices having general intelligence that surpasses that of humans (“strong artificial intelligence,” or “strong AI,” Kurzweil, p. 260). See Kaczynski, Letter to David Skrbina: April 5, 2005, first two paragraphs. Whether it would be technically feasible to develop strong AI as soon as Kurzweil, p. 262, predicts is another matter. Moreover, it is seriously to be doubted whether the world’s leading self-prop systems will ever have any need for strong AI. If they don’t, then there’s no reason to assume that they will commit to it sufficient resources for its development. See Somers, pp. 93–94. Contra: The Atlantic, July/Aug. 2013, pp. 40–41; The Week, Nov. 4, 2011, p. 18. However, the assumption that strong AI will soon appear plays an important role in Kurzweil’s vision of the future, so we could accept that assumption and proceed to debunk Kurzweil’s vision by reductio ad absurdum. But the argument of Part V of this chapter does not require the assumption that strong AI will ever exist. <a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:15">
+<p>E.g.: The Week, Sept. 30, 2011, p. 14 (“Capitalism is killing the middle class”); Feb. 17, 2012, p. 42 (“No reason to favor manufacturing”); April 6, 2012, p. 11; May 4, 2012, p. 39 (“The half-life of software engineers”); Jan. 29, 2016, p. 32. USA Today, July 9, 2010, pp. 1B–2B (machines as stock-market traders); April 24, 2012, p. 3A (computer scoring of essays); Sept. 14, 2012, p. 4F; May 20, 2014, pp. 1A–2A; July 28, 2014, p. 6A; Oct. 29, 2014, pp. 1A, 9A; Feb. 11, 2015, p. 3B; Dec. 22, 2015, p. 1B; Feb. 21, 2017, p. 3B. The Economist, Sept. 10, 2011, p. 11 and “Special report: The future of jobs”; Nov. 19, 2011, p. 84. The Atlantic, June 2013, pp. 18–20. Wall Street Journal, June 13, 2013, p. B6. Davidson, pp. 60–70. Carr, pp. 78–80. Foroohar, “What Happened to Upward Mobility?,” pp. 29–30, 34. Markoff, “Skilled Work Without the Worker,” pp. A1, A19. Lohr, p. B3. Rotman (entire article). Robots can even perform functions formerly thought to require a “human touch,” e.g., they can serve as companions with which people connect emotionally just as they connect with other people. Popular Science, June 2013, p. 28. The Atlantic, Jan./Feb. 2016, p. 31; March 2017, p. 29. <a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:16">
+<p>E.g.: USA Today, July 20, 2011, p. 3A (“Painful plan in R.I.”); Sept. 29, 2011, pp. 1A, 4A; Oct. 24, 2011, p. 1A; Sept. 14, 2012, p. 5A (Spain); Sept. 24, 2012, p. 6B (several European countries); Sept. 28, 2012, p. 5B (Spain); Aug. 5, 2013, p. 3A; Oct. 16–18, 2015, p. 1A; April 26, 2017, pp. 1A–2A. The Economist, June 11, 2011, p. 58 (Sweden). The Week, April 6, 2012, p. 14 (Greece, Spain); July 29, 2011, p. 12 (“The end of the age of entitlements”). Drehle, p. 32. Sharkey, pp. 36–38. A friend of the author wrote on Oct. 3, 2012: “[^My parents]: don’t have any set up for long term care… and at this point many states… are doing what is called estate recovery and the like, which means that if Dad were to go in a nursing home… either his Veteran’s stipend, social security, and pension would all go into paying for the care, meaning Mom would not have enough to live on… or, in a different scenario, Medicaid would put a lien on their house and when he dies, mom would be out of luck so Medicaid could be repaid for his ‘care’—which at that low level is very poor care, by selling the house.” In regard to probable future treatment of people who seek immortality: “The frozen head of baseball legend Ted Williams has not been treated well… . At one point Williams’s head, which the slugger ordered frozen in hopes of one day being brought back to life, was propped up by an empty tuna-fish can and became stuck to it. To detach the can… staff whacked it repeatedly with a monkey wrench, sending ‘tiny pieces of frozen head’ flying around the room.” The Week, Oct. 16, 2009, p. 14. <a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:17">
+<p>E.g.: USA Today, Sept. 29, 2011, pp. 1A–2A; Sept. 12, 2016, p. 3A. The Week, Sept. 30, 2011, p. 21 (“Poverty: Decades of progress, slipping away”); July 27, 2012, p. 16 (“Why the poor are getting poorer”). Kiviat, pp. 35–37. Also: “Half of all U.S. workers earned less than $26,364 in 2010—the lowest median wage since 1999, adjusted for inflation.” The Week, Nov. 4, 2011, p. 18. “The average American family’s net worth dropped almost 40 percent… between 2007 and 2010.” Ibid., June 22, 2012, p. 34. USA Today, Sept. 14, 2016, p. 1A, reports: “Household incomes see first big gain since 2007.” This no doubt reflects the current (up to Jan. 2018) high point in the economic cycle. As the economic cycle approaches the next low point, incomes likely will decline again. <a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:18">
+<p>NEB (2003), Vol. 12, “Turing test,” p. 56. NEB is more accurate on the Turing test than is Kurzweil, p. 294: In order to pass the test, machines may not have to “emulate the flexibility, subtlety, and suppleness of human intelligence.” See, e.g., The Week, Nov. 4, 2011, p. 18. <a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:19">
+<p>Grossman, p. 44, col. 3. Vance, p. 6, col. 4. Kurzweil, pp. 24–25, 309, 377. Man-machine hybrids are also called “cyborgs.” <a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:20">
+<p>Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree. <a href="#fnref:20" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:21">
+<p>“Species come and go continually—around 99.9 per cent of all those that have ever existed are now extinct.” Benton, p. ii. We assume this means that 99.9 percent have become extinct without leaving any direct descendants that are alive today. Independently of that assumption, it’s clear from the general pattern of evolution that only some minute percentage of all species that have ever existed can have descendants that are alive today. See, e.g., NEB (2003), Vol. 14, “Biosphere,” pp. 1154–59; Vol. 19, “Fishes,” p. 198, and “Geochronology,” especially pp. 750–52, 785, 792, 794–95, 797, 802, 813–14, 819, 820, 825–27, 831–32, 836, 838–39, 848–49, 858–59, 866–67, 872. Extinctions have by no means been limited to a few major “extinction events”; they have occurred continually throughout the evolutionary process, though at a rate that has varied widely over time. See Benton, p. ii; NEB (2003), Vol. 18, “Evolution, Theory of,” pp. 878–79; NEB (2007), Vol. 17, “Dinosaurs,” p. 318. <a href="#fnref:21" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:22">
+<p>We don’t have explicit authority for this statement, though it receives some support from Sodhi, Brook & Bradshaw, p. 518. We make the statement mainly because it’s just common sense and seems generally consistent with the facts of evolution. We’re betting that most evolutionary biologists would agree with it, though they might add various reservations and qualifications. <a href="#fnref:22" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:23">
+<p>Grossman, pp. 44–46, 49. Vance, p. 6, cols. 3–5. Kurzweil, e.g., pp. 9, 25 (“an hour would result in a century of progress”). <a href="#fnref:23" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:24">
+<p>Vance, p. 7, col. 1 (700 years). “Mr. Immortality,” The Week, Nov. 16, 2007, pp. 52–53 (1,000 years). <a href="#fnref:24" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:25">
+<p>Other such organizations are the Foresight Institute, Keiper, p. 29; Kurzweil, pp. 229, 395, 411, 418–19, and the Singularity Institute, Grossman, p. 48, col. 3; Kurzweil, p. 599n45. <a href="#fnref:25" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:26">
+<p>There is of course evidence to support many of the techies’ beliefs about particular technological developments, e.g., their belief that the power of computers will increase at an ever-accelerating rate, or that it will some day be technically feasible to keep a human body alive indefinitely. But there is no evidence to support the techies’ beliefs about the future of society, e.g., their belief that our society will actually keep some people alive for hundreds of years, or will be motivated to expand over the entire universe. <a href="#fnref:26" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:27">
+<p>Grossman, p. 48, col. 3; p. 49, col. 1 (“the future beyond the Singularity is not knowable”). Vance, p. 7, col. 4. See Kurzweil, pp. 420, 424. <a href="#fnref:27" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:28">
+<p>“Some people see the future of computing as a kind of heaven.” Christian, p. 68. The utopian cast of techie beliefs is reflected in the name of Keiper’s journal, The New Atlantis, evidently borrowed from the title of an incomplete sketch of a technological “ideal state” that Francis Bacon wrote in 1623. Bury, pp. 59–60&n1. Probably most techies would deny that they are anticipating a utopia, but that doesn’t make their vision less utopian. For example, Kelly, p. 358, writes: “The technium… is not utopia.” But on the very next page he launches into a utopian rhapsody: “The technium… expands life’s fundamental goodness. … The technium… expands the mind’s fundamental goodness. Technology… will populate the world with all conceivable ways of comprehending the infinite.” Etc. Kelly’s book as a whole can best be described as a declaration of faith. <a href="#fnref:28" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:29">
+<p>Kurzweil, p. 9. <a href="#fnref:29" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:30">
+<p>Several observers have noticed the religious quality of the techies’ beliefs. Grossman, p. 48, col. 1. Vance, p. 1, col. 4. Markoff, “Ay Robot!,” p. 4, col. 2 (columns occupied by advertisements are not counted). Keiper, p. 24. Kurzweil, p. 370, acknowledges the comment of one such observer, then shrugs it off by remarking, “I did not come to my perspective as a result of searching for an alternative to customary faith.” But this is irrelevant. St. Paul, according to the biblical account, was not searching for a new faith when he experienced the most famous of all conversions; in fact, he had been energetically persecuting Christians right up to the moment when Jesus allegedly spoke to him. Acts 9: 1–31. Saul = Paul, Acts 13: 9. Certainly many, perhaps the majority, of those who undergo a religious conversion do so not because they have consciously searched for one, but because it has simply come to them.
+Like Kurzweil, many techies stand to profit financially from Technianity, but it is entirely possible to hold a religious belief quite sincerely even while one profits from it. See, e.g., The Economist, Oct. 29, 2011, pp. 71–72. <a href="#fnref:30" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:31">
+<p>E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2. <a href="#fnref:31" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:32">
+<p>Christianity in its inceptive stages lacked a uniform body of doctrine, and Christian beliefs were widely varied. Freeman, passim, e.g., pp. xiii–xiv, 109–110, 119, 141, 146. <a href="#fnref:32" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:33">
+<p>Grossman, pp. 44–46. Kurzweil, p. 9. Another version of the Singularity is the “assembler breakthrough” posited by nanotechnology buffs. Keiper, pp. 23–24. <a href="#fnref:33" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:34">
+<p>It’s not entirely clear whether the Day of Judgment and the Second Coming of Jesus are supposed to occur at the same time or are to be separated by a thousand years. Compare Relevation 20: 1–7, 12–13 with NEB (2003), Vol. 17, “Doctrines and Dogmas, Religious,” p. 406 (referring to “the Second Coming… of Christ… to judge the living and the dead”) and ibid., Vol. 7, “Last Judgment,” p. 175. But for our purposes this is of little importance. <a href="#fnref:34" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:35">
+<p>A correspondent (perhaps under the mistaken impression that the proletariat included all of the “lower” classes) has raised the objection that the proletariat was not a minority. Marxist literature is not consistent as to who belongs to the proletariat. For instance, Lenin in 1899 held that the poor peasants constituted a “rural proletariat.” See “The Development of Capitalism in Russia,” e.g., Conclusions to Chapter II, section 5; in Christman, p. 19. But in 1917 Lenin clearly implied that the peasantry, including the poor peasants, did not belong to the proletariat, which he now identified as “the armed vanguard of all the exploited, of all the toilers.” See “The State and Revolution,” Chapt. II, section 1; Chapt. III, sections 1 & 3; respectively pp. 287–88, 299, 307 in Christman. It is the proletariat in this sense—the vanguard of all the toilers—that we have in mind when we speak of the Elect of Marxist mythology, and it’s clear from Marxist theory generally that the proletariat in this sense was to consist mainly if not exclusively of industrial workers. E.g., Lenin wrote in 1902: “the strength of the modern [^socialist]: movement lies in the awakening of the masses (principally the industrial proletariat)…” (emphasis added). “What is to be Done?,” Chapt. II, first paragraph; in Christman, pp. 72–73. Stalin, History of the Communist Party, likewise made clear that the proletariat consisted of industrial workers and that these at the time of the 1917 revolution comprised only a minority of the population; e.g., first chapter, Section 2, pp. 18, 22; third chapter, Section 3, pp. 104–05 and Section 6, p. 126; fifth chapter, Section 1, p. 201 and Section 2, p. 211. Almost certainly, industrial workers have never constituted a majority of the population of any large country. <a href="#fnref:35" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:36">
+<p>On the subject of apocalyptic and millenarian cults, see NEB (2003), Vol. 1, “apocalyptic literature” and “apocalypticism,” p. 482; Vol. 17, “Doctrines and Dogmas, Religious,” pp. 402, 406, 408. Also the Bible, Revelation 20. <a href="#fnref:36" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:37">
+<p>NEB (2003), Vol. 8, “millennium,” p. 133. See also Vol. 17, “Doctrines and Dogmas, Religious,” p. 401 (“Eschatological themes thrive particularly in crisis situations…”). See Freeman, p. 15. For millenarian cults in China, see Ebrey, pp. 71, 73, 190, 240; Mote, pp. 502, 518, 520, 529, 533. <a href="#fnref:37" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
Forward to Technological Slavery
+ Sat, 15 Apr 2023 18:57:52 +0300
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/forward-to-technological-slavery/
+ <p>I have to begin by saying that I am deeply dissatisfied with this book. It should have been an organized and systematic exposition of a series of related ideas. Instead, it is an unorganized collection of writings that expound the ideas unsystematically. And some ideas that I consider important are not even mentioned. I simply have not had the time to organize, rewrite, and complete the contents of this book. The principal reason why I have not had time is that agencies of the United States government have created unnecessary legal difficulties for me. To mention only the most important of these difficulties, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of California has formally proposed to round up and confiscate the original and every copy of everything I have ever written and turn over all such papers to my alleged “victims” through a fictitious sale that will allow the “victims” to acquire all of the papers without having to pay anything for them. Under this plan, the government would even confiscate papers that I have given to libraries, including papers that have been on library shelves for several years. The documents in which the United States Attorney has put forward this proposal are available to the public: They are Document 704 and Document 713, Case Number CR-S-96-2S9 GEB, United States District Court for the Eastern District of California.</p>
+<p>At this writing, I have the assistance of lawyers in resisting the government’s actions in regard to my papers. But I have learned from hard experience that it is unwise to leave everything in the hands of lawyers; one is well advised to research the legal issues oneself, keep track of what the lawyers are doing, and intervene when necessary. Such work is time-consuming, especially when one is confined in a maximum-security prison and therefore has only very limited access to law books.</p>
+<p>I would have preferred to delay publication of the present book until I’d had time to prepare its contents properly, but it seemed advisable to publish before the government took action to confiscate all my papers. I have, moreover, another reason to avoid delay: The Federal Bureau of Prisons has proposed new regulations that would allow prison wardens to cut off almost all communications between allegedly “terrorist” prisoners and the outside world. The proposed regulations are published in the Federal Register, Volume 71, Number 63, pages 16520–25.</p>
+<p>I have no idea when the new regulations may be approved, but if and when that happens it is all too possible that my communications will be cut off. Obviously it is important for me to publish while I can still communicate relatively freely, and that is why this book has to appear now in an unfinished state.</p>
+<p>The version of “Industrial Society and its Future” that appears in this book differs from the original manuscript only in trivial ways; spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and the like have been corrected or improved here and there. As far as I know, all earlier versions of “Industrial Society and its Future” published in English or French contain numerous errors, such as the omission of parts of sentences and even of whole sentences, and some of these errors are serious enough so that they change or obscure the meaning of an entire paragraph. What is much more serious is that at least one completely spurious article has been published under my name. I recently received word from a correspondent in Spain that an article titled “La Rehabilitación del Estado por los Izquierdistas” (“The Rehabilitation of the State by the Leftists”) had been published and attributed to me. But I most certainly did not write such an article. So the reader should not assume that everything published under my name has actually been written by me. Needless to say, all writings attributed to me in the present book are authentic.</p>
+<p>I would like to thank Dr. David Skrbina for having asked questions and raised arguments that spurred me to formulate and write down certain ideas that I had been incubating for years.</p>
+<p>I owe thanks to a number of other people also. At the end of “The Truth About Primitive Life” I have thanked by name (and with their permission) several people who provided me with materials for that essay, and some of those people have helped me enormously in other ways as well. In particular, I owe a heavy debt of gratihlde to Facundo Bermudez, Marjorie Kennedy, and Patrick Scardo. I owe special thanks to my Spanish correspondent who writes under the pseudonym “Último Reducto,” and to a female friend of his, both of whom provided stimulating argument; and Último Reducto moreover has ably translated many of my writings into Spanish. I hesitate to name others to whom I owe thanks, because I’m not sure that they would want to be named publicly. For the sake of clarity, I want to state here in summary form the four main points that I’ve tried to make in my writings.</p>
+<p>1.Technological progress is carrying us to inevitable disaster. There may be physical disaster (for example, some form of environmental catastrophe), or there may be disaster in terms of human dignity (reduction of the human race to a degraded and servile condition). But disaster of one kind or another will certainly result from continued technological progress.</p>
+<p>This is not an eccentric opinion. Among those frightened by the probable consequences of technological progress are Bill Joy, whose article “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> is now famous, Martin Rees, author of the book Our Final Century,<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> and Richard A. Posner, author of Catastrophe: Risk and Response.<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup> None of these three is by any stretch of the imagination radical or predisposed to find fault with the existing structure of society. Richard Posner is a conservative judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Bill Joy is a well-known computer wizard, and Martin Rees is the Astronomer Royal of Britain. These last two men, having devoted their lives to technology, would hardly be likely to fear it without having good reason to do so. Joy, Rees, and Posner are concerned mainly with physical disaster and with the possibility or indeed the likelihood that human beings will be supplanted by machines. The disaster that technological progress implies for human dignity has been discussed by men like Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, whose books are widely read and respected. Neither man is considered to be out on the fringe or even close to it.</p>
+<p>2.Only the collapse of modern technological civilization can avert disaster. Of course, the collapse of technological civilization will itself bring disaster. But the longer the technoindustrial system continues to expand, the worse will be the eventual disaster. A lesser disaster now will avert a greater one later. The development of the technoindustrial system cannot be controlled, restrained, or guided, nor can its eftects be moderated to any substantial degree.</p>
+<p>This, again, is not an eccentric opinion. Many writers, beginning with Karl Marx, have noted the fundamental importance of technology in determining the course of society’s development. In effect, they have recognized that it is technology that rules society, not the other way around. Ellul especially has emphasized the autonomy of technology, i.e., the fact that modern technology has taken on a life of its own and is not subject to human control. Ellul, moreover, was not the first to formulate this conclusion. Already in 1934 the Mexican thinker Samuel Ramos<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> clearly stated the principle of technological autonomy, and this insight was adumbrated as early as the 1860s by Samuel Butler. Of course, no one questions the obvious fact that human individuals or groups can control technology in the sense that at a given point in time they can decide what to do with a particular item of technology. What the principle of technological autonomy asserts is that the overall development of technology, and its long-term consequences for society, are not subject to human control. Hence, as long as modern technology continues to exist, there is little we can do to moderate its effects.</p>
+<p>A corollary is that nothing short of the collapse of technological society can avert a greater disaster. Thus, if we want to defend ourselves against technology, the only action we can take that might prove effective is an effort to precipitate the collapse of technological society. Though this conclusion is an obvious consequence of the principle of technological autonomy, and though it possibly is implied by certain statements of Ellul, I know of no conventionally published writer who has explicitly recognized that our only way out is through the collapse of technological society. This seeming blindness to the obvious can only be explained as the result of timidity.</p>
+<p>If we want to precipitate the collapse of technological society, then our goal is a revolutionary one under any reasonable definition of that term. What we are faced with, therefore, is a need for out-and-out revolution.</p>
+<p>3.The political left is technological society’s first line of defense against revolution. In fact, the left today serves as a kind of fire extinguisher that douses and quenches any nascent revolutionary movement. What do I mean by “the left”? If you think that racism, sexism, gay rights, animal rights, indigenous people’s rights, and “social justice” in general are among the most important issues that the world currently faces, then you are a leftist as I use that term. If you don’t like this application of the world “leftist,” then you are free to designate the people I’m referring to by some other term. But, whatever you call them, the people who extinguish revolutionary movements are the people who are drawn indiscriminately to causes: racism, sexism, gay rights, animal rights, the environment, poverty, sweatshops, neocolonialism…it’s all the same to them. These people constitute a subculture that has been labeled “the adversary culture.”<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">5</a></sup> Whenever a movement of resistance begins to emerge, these leftists (or whatever you choose to call them) come swarming to it like flies to honey until they outnumber the original members of the movement, take it over, and turn it into just another leftist faction, thereby emasculating it. The history of “Earth First!” provides an elegant example of this process.<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">6</a></sup></p>
+<p>4.What is needed is a new revolutionary movement, dedicated to the elimination of technological society, that will take measures to exclude all leftists, as well as the assorted neurotics, lazies, incompetents, charlatans, and persons deficient in self-control who are drawn to resistance movements in America today. Just what form a revolutionary movement should take remains open to discussion. What is clear is that, for a start, people who are serious about addressing the problem of technology must establish systematic contact with one another and a sense of common purpose; they must strictly separate themselves from the “adversary culture”; they must be oriented toward practical action, without renouncing a priori the most extreme forms of action; and they must take as their goal nothing less than the dissolution of technological civilization.</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p>Wired magazine, April 2000. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p>Published by William Heinemann, 2003. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:3">
+<p>Oxford University Press, 2004. <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:4">
+<p>El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México, Décima Edición, Espasa-Calpe Mexicana, Mexico City 1982 (originally published in 1934), pages 104—105. <a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:5">
+<p>See Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture. <a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:6">
+<p>The process is ably documented by Martha E Lee, Earth First!: Environmental Apocalypse, Syracuse University Press, 1995. <a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
Progress vs Liberty
+ Sat, 15 Apr 2023 18:57:32 +0300
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/progress-vs-liberty/
+ <p>In these pages it is argued that continued scientific and technical progress will inevitably result in the extinction of individual liberty. I use the word “inevitably” in the following sense: One might—possibly—imagine certain conditions of society in which freedom could coexist with unfettered technology, but these conditions do not actually exist, and we know of no way to bring them about, so that, in practice, scientific progress will result in the extinction of individual liberty. Toward the end of this essay we propose what appears to be the only thing that bears any resemblance to a practical remedy for this situation.</p>
+<p>I hope that the reader will bear with me when I recite arguments and facts with which he may already be familiar. I make no claim to originality. I simply think that the case for the thesis stated above is convincing, and I am attempting to set forth the arguments, new and old, in as clear a manner as possible, in the hope that the reader will be persuaded to support the solution here suggested—which certainly is a very obvious solution, but rather hard for many people to swallow.</p>
+<p>The power of society to control the individual person has recently been expanding very rapidly, and is expected to expand even more rapidly in the near future. Let us list a few of the more ominous developments as a reminder.</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Propaganda and image-making techniques. In this context we must not neglect the role of movies, television, and literature, which commonly are regarded either as art or as entertainment, but which often consciously adopt certain points of view and thus serve as propaganda. Even when they do not consciously adopt an explicit point of view they still serve to indoctrinate the viewer or reader with certain values. We venerate the great writers of the past, but one who considers the matter objectively must admit that modern artistic techniques have developed to the point where the more skillfully constructed movies, novels, etc. of today are far more psychologically potent than, say, Shakespeare ever was. The best of them are capable of gripping and involving the reader very powerfully and thus are presumably quite effective in influencing his values. Also note the increasing extent to which the average person today is “living in the movies” as the saying is. People spend a large and increasing amount of time submitting to canned entertainment rather than participating in spontaneous activities. As overcrowding and rules and regulations curtail opportunities for spontaneous activity, and as the developing techniques of entertainment make the canned product ever more attractive, we can assume that people will live more and more in the world of mass entertainment.</li>
+<li>A growing emphasis among educators on “guiding” the child’s emotional development, coupled with an increasingly scientific attitude toward education. Of course, educators have always in some degree attempted to mold the attitudes of their pupils, but formerly they achieved only a limited degree of success, simply because their methods were unscientific. Educational psychology is changing this.</li>
+<li>Operant conditioning, after the manner of B.F. Skinner and friends. (Of course, this cannot be entirely separated from item (2)).</li>
+<li>Direct physical control of the emotions via electrodes and “chemitrodes” inserted in the brain. (See Jose M.R. Delgado’s book “Physical Control of the Mind.”)</li>
+<li>Biofeedback training, after the manner of Joseph Kamiya and others.</li>
+<li>Predicted “memory pills” or other drugs designed to improve memory or increase intelligence. (The reader possibly assumes that items (5) and (6) present no danger to freedom because their use is supposed to be voluntary, but I will argue that point later. See page 8.)</li>
+<li>Predicted genetic engineering, eugenics, related techniques.</li>
+<li>Marvin Minsky of MIT (one of the foremost computer experts in the country) and other computer scientists predict that within fifteen years or possibly much less there will be superhuman computers with intellectual capacities far beyond anything of which humans are capable. It is to be emphasized that these computers will not merely perform so-called “mechanical” operations; they will be capable of creative thought. Many people are incredulous at the idea of a creative computer, but let it be remembered that (unless one resorts to supernatural explanations of human thought) the human brain itself is an electro-chemical computer, operating according to the laws of physics and chemistry. Furthermore, the men who have predicted these computers are not crackpots but first-class scientists. It is difficult to say in advance just how much power these computers will put into the hands of what is vulgarly termed the establishment, but this power will probably be very great. Bear in mind that these computers will be wholly under the control of the scientific, bureaucratic, and business elite. The average person will have no access to them. Unlike the human brain, computers are more or less unrestricted as to size (and, more important, there is no restriction on the number of computers that can be linked together over a long distance to form a single brain), so that there is no restriction on their memories or on the amount of information they can assimilate and correlate. Computers are not subject to fatigue, daydreaming, or emotional problems. They work at fantastic speed. Given that a computer can duplicate the functions of the human brain, it seems clear in view of the advantages listed above that no human brain could possibly compete with such a computer in any field of endeavor.</li>
+<li>Various electronic devices for surveillance. These are being used. For example, according to newspaper reports, the police of New York City have recently instituted a system of 24-hour television surveillance over certain problem areas of the city.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>These are some of the more strikingly ominous facets of scientific progress, but it is perhaps more important to look at the effect of technology as a whole on our society. Technological progress is the basic cause of the continual increase in the number of rules and regulations. This is because many of our technological devices are more powerful and therefore more potentially destructive than the more primitive devices they replace (e.g., compare autos and horses) and also because the increasing complexity of the system makes necessary a more delicate coordination of its parts. Moreover, many devices of functional importance (e.g., electronic computers, television broadcasting equipment, jet planes) cannot be owned by the average person because of their size and costliness. These devices are controlled by large organizations such as corporations and governments and are used to further the purposes of the establishment. A larger and larger proportion of the individual’s environment—not only his physical environment, but such factors as the kind of work he does, the nature of his entertainment, etc.–comes to be created and controlled by large organizations rather than by the individual himself. And this is a necessary consequence of technological progress, because to allow technology to be exploited in an unregulated, unorganized way would result in disaster.</p>
+<p>Note that the problem here is not simply to make sure that technology is used only for good purposes. In fact, we can be reasonably certain that the powers which technology is putting into the hands of the establishment will be used to promote good and eliminate evil. These powers will be so great that within a few decades virtually all evil will have been eliminated. But, of course, “good” and “evil” here mean good and evil as interpreted by the social mainstream. In other words, technology will enable the social mainstream to impose its values universally. This will not come about through the machinations of power-hungry scoundrels, but through the efforts of socially responsible people who sincerely want to do good and who sincerely believe in freedom—but whose concept of freedom will be shaped by their own values, which will not necessarily be the same as your values or my values.</p>
+<p>The most important aspect of this process will perhaps be the education of children, so let us use education as an example to illustrate the way the process works. Children will be taught—by methods which will become increasingly effective as educational psychology develops—to be creative, inquiring, appreciative of the arts and sciences, interested in their studies—perhaps they will even be taught nonconformity. But of course this will not be merely random nonconformity but “creative” nonconformity. Creative nonconformity simply means nonconformity that is directed toward socially desirable ends. For example, children may be taught (in the name of freedom) to liberate themselves from irrational prejudices of their elders, “irrational prejudices” being those values which are not conducive to the kind of society that most educators choose to regard as healthy. Children will be educated to be racially unbiased, to abhor violence, to fit into society without excessive conflict. By a series of small steps—each of which will be regarded not as a step toward behavioral engineering but as an improvement in educational technique—this system will become so effective that hardly any child will turn out to be other than what the educators desire. The educational system will then have become a form of psychological compulsion. The means employed in this “education” will be expanded to include methods which we currently would consider disgusting, but since these methods will be introduced in a series of small steps, most people will not object—especially since children trained to take a “scientific” or “rational” attitude toward education will be growing up to replace their elders as they die off.</p>
+<p>For instance, chemical and electrical manipulation of the brain will at first be used only on children considered to be insane, or at least severely disturbed. As people become accustomed to such practices, they will come to be used on children who are only moderately disturbed. Now, whatever is on the furthest fringes of the abnormal generally comes to be regarded with abhorrence. As the more severe forms of disturbances are eliminated, the less severe forms will come to constitute the outer fringe; they will thus be regarded as abhorrent and hence as fair game for chemical and electrical manipulation. Eventually, all forms of disturbance will be eliminated—and anything that brings an individual into conflict with his society will make him unhappy and therefore will be a disturbance. Note that this whole process does not presuppose any antilibertarian philosophy on the part of educators or psychologists, but only a desire to do their jobs more effectively.</p>
+<p>Consider: Today, how can one argue against sex education? Sex education is designed not simply to present children with the bald facts of sex; it is designed to guide children to a healthy attitude toward sex. And who can argue against that? Think of all the misery suffered as a result of Victorian repressions, sexual perversions, frigidity, unwanted pregnancies, and venerial [sic.] disease. If much of this can be eliminated by instilling “healthy” (as the social mainstream interprets that word) sexual attitudes in children, who can deny it to them? But it will be equally impossible to argue against any of the other steps that will eventually lead to the complete engineering of the human personality. Each step will be equally humanitarian in its goals.</p>
+<p>There is no distinct line between “guidance” or “influence” and manipulation. When a technique of influence becomes so effective that it achieves its desired effect in nearly every case, then it is no longer influence but compulsion. Thus influence evolves into compulsion as science improves technique.</p>
+<p>Research has shown that exposure to television violence makes the viewer more prone to violence himself. The very existence of this knowledge makes it a foregone conclusion that restrictions will eventually be placed on televized violence, either by the government or by the TV industry itself, in order to make children less prone to develop violent personalities. This is an element of manipulation. It may be that you feel an end to television violence is desirable and that the degree of manipulation involved is insignificant. But science will reveal, one at a time, a hundred other factors in entertainment that have a “desirable” or “undesirable” effect on personality. In the case of each one of these factors, knowledge will make manipulation inevitable. When the whole array of factors has become known, we will have drifted into large-scale manipulation. In this way, research leads automatically to calculated indoctrination.</p>
+<p>By way of a further example, let us consider genetic engineering. This will not come into use as a result of a conscious decision by the majority of people to introduce genetic engineering. It will begin with certain “progressive” parents who will voluntarily avail themselves of genetic engineering opportunities in order to eliminate the risk of certain gross physical defects in their offspring. Later, this engineering will be extended to include elimination of mental defects and treatment which will predispose the child to somewhat higher intelligence. (Note that the question of what constitutes a mental “defect” is a value-judgement. Is homosexuality, for example, a defect? Some homosexuals would say “no.” But there is no objectively true or false answer to such a question.) As methods are improved to the point where the minority of parents who use genetic engineering are producing noticeably healthier, smarter offspring, more and more parents will want genetic engineering. When the majority of children are genetically engineered, even those parents who might otherwise be antagonistic toward genetic engineering will feel obliged to use it so that their children will be able to compete in a world of superior people—superior, at least relative to the social milieu in which they live. In the end, genetic engineering will be made compulsory because it will be regarded as cruel and irresponsible for a few eccentric parents to produce inferior offspring by refusing to use it. Bear in mind that this engineering will involve mental as well as physical characteristics; indeed, as scientists explain mental traits on the basis of physiology, neurology, and biochemistry, it will become more and more difficult to distinguish between “mental” and “physical” traits.</p>
+<p>Observe that once a society based on psychological, genetic, and other forms of human engineering has come into being, it will presumably last forever, because people will all be engineered to favor human engineering and the totally collective society, so that they will never become dissatisfied with this kind of society. Furthermore, once human engineering, the linking of human minds with computers, and other things of that nature have come into extensive use, people will probably be altered so much that it will no longer be possible for them to exist as independent beings, either physically or psychologically. Indeed, technology has already made it impossible for us to live as physically independent beings, for the skills which enabled primitive man to live off the country have been lost. We can survive only by acting as components of a huge machine which provides for our physical needs; and as technology invades the domain of mind, it is safe to assume that human beings will become as dependent psychologically on technology as they now are physically. We can see the beginning of this already in the inability of some people to avoid boredom without television and in the need of others to use tranquilizers in order to cope with the tensions of modern society.</p>
+<p>The foregoing predictions are supported by the opinions of at least some responsible writers. See especially Jacques Ellul’s “The Technological Society” and the section titled “Social Controls” in Kahn and Wiener’s “The Year 2,000.”</p>
+<p>Now we come to the question: What can be done to prevent all this? Let us first consider the solution sketched by Perry London in his book “Behavior Control.” This solution makes a convenient example because its defects are typical of other proposed solutions. London’s idea is, briefly, this: Let us not attempt to interfere with the development of behavioral technology, but let us all try to be as aware of and as knowledgeable about this technology as we can; let us not keep this technology in the hands of a scientific elite, but disseminate it among the population at large; people can then use this technology to manipulate themselves and protect themselves from manipulation by others. However, on the grounds that “there must be some limits” London advocates that behavior control should be imposed by society in certain areas. For example, he suggests that people should be made to abhor violence and that psychological means should be used to make businessmen stop destroying the forests. (NOTE: I do not currently have access to a copy of London’s book, and so I have had to rely on memory in describing his views. My memory is probably correct here, but in order to be honest I should admit the possibility of error.)</p>
+<p>My first objection to London’s scheme is a personal one. I simply find the sphere of freedom that he favors too narrow for me to accept. But his solution suffers from other flaws.</p>
+<p>He proposes to use psychological controls where they are not necessary, and more for the purpose of gratifying the liberal intellectual’s esthetic sensibilities than because of a practical need. It is true that “there must be some limits”–on violence, for example—but the threat of imprisonment seems to be an adequate limitation. To read about violence is frightening, but violent crime is not a significant cause of mortality in comparison to other causes. Far more people are killed in automobile accidents than through violent crime. Would London also advocate psychological elimination of those personalities that are inclined to careless driving? The fact that liberal intellectuals and many others get far more excited over violence than they do over careless driving would seem to indicate that their antagonism toward violence arises not primarily from a concern for human life but from a strong emotional antipathy toward violence itself. Thus it appears that London’s proposal to eliminate violence through psychological control results not from practical necessity but from a desire on London’s part to engineer some of his own values into the public at large.</p>
+<p>This becomes even clearer when we consider London’s willingness to use psychological engineering to stop businessmen from destroying forests. Obviously, psychological engineering cannot accomplish this until the establishment can be persuaded to carry out the appropriate program of engineering. But if the establishment can be persuaded to do this, then they can equally well be persuaded to pass conservation laws strict enough to accomplish the same purpose. And if such laws are passed, the psychological engineering is superfluous. It seems clear that here, again, London is attracted to psychological engineering simply because he would like to see the general public share certain of his values.</p>
+<p>When London proposes to us systematic psychological controls over certain aspects of the personality, with the intention that these controls shall not be extended to others areas, he is assuming that the generation following his own will agree with his judgment as to how far the psychological controls should reach. This assumption is almost certainly false. The introduction of psychological controls in some areas (which London approves) will set the stage for the later introduction of controls in other areas (which London would not approve), because it will change the culture in such a way as to make people more receptive to the concept of psychological controls. As long as any behavior is permitted which is not in the best interests of the collective social organization, there will always be the temptation to eliminate the worst of this behavior through human engineering. People will introduce new controls to eliminate only the worst of this behavior, without intending that any further extension of the controls should take place afterward; but in fact they will be indirectly causing further extensions of the controls because whenever new controls are introduced, the public, as it becomes used to the controls, will change its conception of what constitutes an appropriate degree of control. In other words, whatever the amount of control to which people have become accustomed, they will regard that amount as right and good and they will regard a little further extension of control as negligible price to pay for the elimination of some form of behavior that they find shocking.</p>
+<p>London regards the wide dissemination of behavioral technology among the public as a means by which the people can protect themselves against psychological manipulation by the established powers. But if it is really true that people can use this knowledge to avoid manipulation in most areas, why won’t they also be able to use it to avoid being made to abhor violence, or to avoid control in other areas where London thinks they should be controlled? London seems to assume that people will be unable to avoid control in just those areas where he thinks they should be controlled, but that they will be able to avoid control in just those areas where he thinks they should not be controlled.</p>
+<p>London refers to “awareness” (of sciences relating to the mind) as the individual’s “sword and buckler” against manipulation by the establishment. In Roman times a man might have a real sword and buckler just as good as those of the emperor’s legionaries, but that did not enable him to escape oppression. Similarly, if a man of the future has a complete knowledge of behavioral psychology it will not enable him to escape psychological control any more than the possession of a machine-gun or a tank would enable him to escape physical control. The resources of an organized society are just too great for any individual to resist no matter how much he knows.</p>
+<p>With the vast expansion of knowledge in the behavioral sciences, biochemistry, cybernetics, physiology, genetics, and other disciplines which have the potential to affect human behavior, it is probably already impossible (and, if not, it will soon become impossible) for any individual to keep abreast of it all. In any case, we would all have to become, to some degree, specialists in behavior control in order to maintain London’s “awareness.” What about those people who just don’t happen to be attracted to that kind of science, or to any science? It would be agony for them to have to spend long hours studying behavioral technology in order to maintain their freedom.</p>
+<p>Even if London’s scheme of freedom through “awareness” were feasible, it could, or at least would, be carried out only by an elite of intellectuals, businessmen, etc. Can you imagine the members of uneducated minority groups, or, for that matter, the average middle-class person, having the will and the ability to learn enough to compete in a world of psychological manipulation? It will be a case of the smart and the powerful getting more powerful while the stupid and the weak get (relatively) stupider and weaker; for it is the smart and the powerful who will have the readiest access to behavioral technology and the greatest ability to use it effectively.</p>
+<p>This is one reason why devices for improving one’s mental or psychological capabilities (e.g., biofeedback training, memory pills, linking of human minds with computers) are dangerous to freedom even though their use is voluntary. For example, it will not be physically possible for everyone to have his own full-scale computer in his basement to which he can link his brain. The best computer facilities will be reserved for those whom society judges most worthy: government officials, scientists, etc. Thus the already powerful will be made more powerful.</p>
+<p>Also, the use of such mind-augmentation devices will not remain voluntary. All our modern conveniences were originally introduced as optional benefits which one could take or leave as one chose. However, as a result of the introduction of these benefits, society changed its structure in such a way that the use of modern conveniences is now compulsory: for it would be physically impossible to live in modern society without extensively using devices provided by technology. Similarly, the use of mind-augmenting devices, though nominally voluntary, will become in practice compulsory. When these devices have reached a high development and have come into wide use, a person refusing to use them would be putting himself in the position of a dumb animal in a world of supermen. He would simply be unable to function in a society structured around the assumption that most people have vastly augmented mental abilities.</p>
+<p>By virtue of their very power, the devices for augmenting or modifying the human mind and personality will have to be governed by extensive rules and regulations. As the human mind comes to be more and more an artifact created by means of such devices, these rules and regulations will come to be rules and regulations governing the structure of the human mind.</p>
+<p>An important point: London does not even consider the question of human engineering in infancy (let alone genetic engineering before conception). A two-year-old obviously would not be able to apply London’s philosophy of “awareness”; yet it will be possible in the future to engineer a young child so that he will grow up to have the type of personality that is desired by whoever has charge of him. What is the meaning of freedom for a person whose entire personality has been planned and created by someone else?</p>
+<p>London’s solution suffers from another flaw that is of particular importance because it is shared by all libertarian solutions to the technology problem that have ever come to my attention. The problem is supposed to be solved by propounding and popularizing a certain libertarian philosophy. This approach is unlikely to achieve anything. Our liberty is not deteriorating as a result of any antilibertarian philosophy. Most people in this country profess to believe in freedom. Our liberty is deteriorating as a result of the way people do their jobs and behave in relation to technology on a day-to-day basis. The system has come to be set up in such a way that it is usually comfortable to do that which strengthens the organization. When a person in a position of responsibility sets to eliminate that which is contrary to established values, he is rewarded with the esteem of his fellows and in other ways. Police officials who introduce new surveillance devices, educators who introduce more advanced techniques for molding children, do not do so through disrespect for freedom; they do so because they are rewarded with the approval of other police officials or educators and also because they get an inward satisfaction from having accomplished their assigned tasks not only competently, but creatively. A hands-off approach toward the child’s personality would be best from the point of view of freedom, but this approach will not be taken because the most intelligent and capable educators crave the satisfaction of doing their work creatively. They want to do more with the child, not less. The greatest reward that a person gets from furthering the ends of the organization may well be simply the opportunity for purposeful, challenging, important activity—an opportunity that is otherwise hard to come by in society. For example, Marvin Minsky does not work on computers because he is antagonistic to freedom, but because he loves the intellectual challenge. Probably he believes in freedom, but since he is a computer specialist he manages to persuade himself that computers will tend to liberate man.</p>
+<p>The main point here is that the danger to freedom is caused by the way people work and behave on a day-to-day basis in relation to technology; and the way people behave in relation to technology is determined by powerful social and psychological forces. To oppose these forces a comparatively weak force like a body of philosophy is simply hopeless. You may persuade the public to accept your philosophy, but most people will not significantly change their behavior as a result. They will invent rationalizations to reconcile their behavior with the philosophy, or they will say that what they do as individuals is too insignificant to change the course of events, or they will simply confess themselves too weak to live up to the philosophy. Conceivably a school of philosophy might change a culture over a long period of time if the social forces tending in the opposite direction were weak. But the social forces guiding the present development of our society are obviously strong, and we have very little time left—another three decades likely will take us past the point of no return.</p>
+<p>Thus a philosophy will be ineffective unless that philosophy is accompanied by a program of concrete action of a type which does not ask people to voluntarily change the way they live and work—a program which demands little effort or willpower on the part of most people. Such a program would probably have to be a political or legislative one. A philosophy is not likely to make people change their daily behavior, but it might (with luck) induce them to vote for politicians who support a certain program. Casting a vote requires only a casual commitment, not a strenuous application of willpower. So we are left with the question: What kind of legislative program would have a chance of saving freedom?</p>
+<p>I can think of only two possibilities that are halfway plausible. The discussion of one of these I will leave until later. The other, and the one that I advocate, is this: In simple terms, stop scientific progress by withdrawing all major sources of research funds. In more detail, begin by withdrawing all or most federal aid to research. If an abrupt withdrawal would cause economic problems, then phase it out as rapidly as is practical. Next, pass legislation to limit or phase out research support by educational institutions which accept public funds. Finally, one would hope to pass legislation prohibiting all large corporations and other large organizations from supporting scientific research. Of course, it would be necessary to eventually bring about similar changes throughout the world, but, being Americans, we must start with the United States; which is just as well, since the United States is the world’s most technologically advanced country. As for economic or other disruption that might be caused by the elimination of scientific progress—this disruption is likely to be much less than that which would be caused by the extremely rapid changes brought on by science itself.</p>
+<p>I admit that, in view of the firmly entrenched position of Big Science, it is unlikely that such a legislative program could be enacted. However, I think there is at least some chance that such a program could be put through in stages over a period of years, if one or more active organizations were formed to make the public aware of the probable consequences of continued scientific progress and to push for the appropriate legislation. Even if there is only a small chance of success, I think that chance is worth working for, since the alternative appears to be the loss of all human freedom.</p>
+<p>This solution is bound to be attacked as “simplistic.” But this ignores the fundamental question, namely: Is there any better solution or indeed any other solution at all? My personal opinion is that there is no other solution. However, let us not be dogmatic. Maybe there is a better solution. But the point is this: If there is such a solution, no one at present seems to know just what it is. Matters have progressed to the point where we can no longer afford to sit around just waiting for something to turn up. By stopping scientific progress now, or at any rate slowing it drastically, we could at least give ourselves breathing space during which we could attempt to work out another solution, if one is possible.</p>
+<p>There is one putative solution the discussion of which I have reserved until now. One might consider enacting some kind of bill of rights designed to protect freedom from technological encroachment. For the following reasons I do not believe that such a solution would be effective.</p>
+<p>In the first place, a document which attempted to define our sphere of freedom in a few simple principles would either be too weak to afford real protection, or too strong to be compatible with the functioning of the present society. Thus, a suitable bill of rights would have to be excessively complex, and full of exceptions, qualifications, and delicate compromises. Such a bill would be subject to repeated amendments for the sake of social expedience; and where formal amendment is inconvenient, the document would simply be reinterpreted. Recent decisions of the Supreme Court, whether one approves of them or not, show how much the import of a document can be altered through reinterpretations. Our present Bill of Rights would have been ineffective if there had been in America strong social forces acting against freedom of speech, freedom of worship, etc. Compare what is happening to the right to bear arms, which currently runs counter to basic social trends. Whether you approve or disapprove of that “right” is beside the point—the point is that the constitutional guarantee cannot stand indefinitely against powerful social forces.</p>
+<p>If you are an advocate of the bill-of-rights approach to the technology problem, test yourself by attempting to write a sample section on, say, genetic engineering. Just how will you define the term “genetic engineering” and how will you draw the line, in words, between that engineering which is to be permitted and that which is to be prohibited? Your law will either have to be too strong to pass; or so vague that it can be readily reinterpreted as social standards evolve; or excessively complex and detailed. In this last case, the law will not pass as a constitutional amendment, because for practical reasons a law that attempts to deal with such a problem in great detail will have to be relatively easy to change as needs and circumstances change. But then, of course, the law will be changed continually for the sake of social expedience and so will not serve as a barrier to the erosion of freedom.</p>
+<p>And who would actually work out the details of such a bill of rights? Undoubtedly, a committee of congressmen, or a commission appointed by the president, or some other group of organization men. They would give us some fine libertarian rhetoric, but they would be unwilling to pay the price of real, substantial freedom—they would not write a bill that would sacrifice any significant amount of the organization’s power.</p>
+<p>I have said that a bill of rights would not be able to stand for long against the pressures for science, progress, and improvement. But laws that bring a halt to scientific research would be quite different in this respect. The prestige of science would be broken. With the financial basis gone, few young people would find it practical to enter scientific careers. After, say three decades or so, our society would have ceased to be progress-oriented and the most dangerous of the pressures that currently threaten our freedom would have relaxed. A bill of rights would not bring about this relaxation.</p>
+<p>This, by the way, is one reason why the elimination of research merely in a few sensitive areas would be inadequate. As long as science is a large and going concern, there will be the persistent temptation to apply it in new areas; but this pressure would be broken if science were reduced to a minor role.</p>
+<p>Let us try to summarize the role of technology in relation to freedom. The principal effect of technology is to increase the power of society collectively. Now, there is a more or less unlimited number of value-judgments that lie before us: for example: whether an individual should or should not have puritanical attitudes toward sex; whether it is better to have rain fall at night or during the day. When society acquires power over such a situation, generally a preponderance of the social forces look upon one or the other of the alternatives as Right. These social forces are then able to use the machinery of society to impose their choice universally; for example, they may mold children so successfully that none ever grows up to have puritanical attitudes toward sex, or they may use weather engineering to guarantee that the rain falls only at night. In this way there is a continual narrowing of the possibilities that exist in the world. The eventual result will be a world in which there is only one system of values. The only way out seems to be to halt the ceaseless extension of society’s power.</p>
+<p>I propose that you join me and a few other people to whom I am writing in an attempt to found an organization dedicated to stopping federal aid to scientific research. It would be a mistake, I think, to reject this suggestion out of hand on the basis of some vague dogma such as “knowledge is good” or “science is the hope of man.” Sure, knowledge is good, but how high a price, in terms of freedom, are we going to pay for knowledge? You may be understandably reluctant to join an organization about which you know nothing, but you know as much about it as I do. It hasn’t been started yet. You would be one of the founding members. I claim to have no particular qualifications for trying to start such an organization, and I have no idea how to go about it, I am only making an attempt because no better qualified person has yet done so. I am simply trying to bring together a few highly intelligent and thoughtful people who would be willing to take over the task.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
The Littering Ape
+ Sat, 15 Apr 2023 18:57:04 +0300
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-littering-ape/
+ <p>A number of anthropologically inclined individuals have in recent years gained fame and fortune by authoring books of the “Naked Ape” genre. These writers, by explaining human behavior in terms of territorial imperative, dominance rankings, and other instincts originating before the dawn of Paleolithic times, have succeeded in attaching an aura of romance to our most mundane actions. Nowadays, when a man makes love to his wife, he is no longer just a man making love to his wife; he is a muscular, aggressive cavemen enacting a savage rite inherited from the misty past. When a junior executive bosses a subordinate, he is proving his virility by reinforcing his position in the dominance hierarchy; and when he attends a business conference, he can envision himself and his associates as a pack of skin-clad Neanderthals […] on their muscular haunches about a campfire, planning a hunt.</p>
+<p>However, one aspect of human instinctual behavior, of particular importance in these pollution-conscious times, seems to have been overlooked. Despite extensive propaganda campaigns and the ubiquitous presence of very convenient waste receptacles, the authorities still have not succeeded in inducing people to stop littering. The reason is that they have not grasped the psychological and anthropological roots of the problem. Why do people litter?</p>
+<p>Animals subject to the territorial imperative must have means of making out the bounds of their territories. With most animals, this is accomplished through deposition of excreta—which is why we see dogs going from one tree to another, leaving a calling card at each. Many wild animals do the same thing. As they have a keen sense of smell, they can readily recognize the signatures of other animals and so avoid trespassing. But man, depending basically on sight rather than on sense of smell, has had to find visual means of leaving his signature. We used to carve our initials on tress; but trees are scarce in our cities now, and we aren’t allowed to carve them up any more. So what do we do? We strew cigarette packages and gum wrappers. It’s our way of saying “Kilroy was here.”</p>
+<p>The instinctual origins of the problem being clear, the solution becomes obvious. People refuse to deposit their litter on the trash receptacles because the receptacles conceal their litter. It is therefore an imperative condition of social progress that we erect posts (analogous to the “scent posts” of animals) provided with spikes or hooks on which litter can be impaled in such a manner as to be conspicuously displayed. When decorated to capacity, these posts can be carted off to the city dump, and the litter problem will be fully solved.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
Morality and Revolution
+ Sat, 15 Apr 2023 18:54:10 +0300
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/morality-and-revolution/
+ <p>“Morality, guilt and fear of condemnation act as cops in our heads, destroying our spontaneity, our wildness, our ability to live our lives to the full…. I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without caring what others think of me…. I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all possibilities…. This means… destroying all morality.” — Feral Faun, “The Cops in Our Heads: Some Thoughts on Anarchy and Morality.”<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
+<p>It is true that the concept of morality as conventionally understood is one of the most important tools that the system uses to control us, and we must liberate ourselves from it.</p>
+<p>But suppose you’re in a bad mood one day. You see an inoffensive but ugly old lady; her appearance irritates you, and your “spontaneous urges” impel you to knock her down and kick her. Or suppose you have a “thing” for little girls, so your “spontaneous urges” lead you to pick out a cute four-year-old, rip off her clothes, and rape her as she screams in terror.</p>
+<p>I would be willing to bet that there is not one anarchist reading this who would not be disgusted by such actions, or who would not try to prevent them if he saw them being carried out. Is this only a consequence of the moral conditioning that our society imposes on us?</p>
+<p>I argue that it is not. I propose that there is a kind of natural “morality” (note the quotation marks), or a conception of fairness, that runs as a common thread through all cultures and tends to appear in them in some form or other, though it may often be submerged or modified by forces specific to a particular culture. Perhaps this conception of fairness is biologically predisposed. At any rate it can be summarized in the following Six Principles:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>
+<p>Do not harm anyone who has not previously harmed you, or threatened to do so.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>(Principle of self-defense and retaliation) You can harm others in order to forestall harm with which they threaten you, or in retaliation for harm that they have already inflicted on you.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>One good turn deserves another: If someone has done you a favor, you should be willing to do her or him a comparable favor if and when he or she should need one.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The strong should have consideration for the weak.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Do not lie.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Abide faithfully by any promises or agreements that you make.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<p>To take a couple of examples of the ways in which the Six Principles often are submerged by cultural forces, among the Navajo, traditionally, it was considered “morally acceptable” to use deception when trading with anyone who was not a member of the tribe (WA. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, 9th ed., p. 207), though this contravenes principles 1, 5, and 6. And in our society many people will reject the principle of retaliation: Because of industrial society’s imperative need for social order and because of the disruptive potential of personal retaliatory action, we are trained to suppress our retaliatory impulses and leave any serious retaliation (called “justice”) to the legal system.</p>
+<p>In spite of such examples, I maintain that the Six Principles tend toward universality. But whether or not one accepts that the Six Principles are to any extent universal, I feel safe in assuming that almost all readers of this article will agree with the principles (with the possible exception of the principle of retaliation) in some shape or other. Hence the Six Principles can serve as a basis for the present discussion.</p>
+<p>I argue that the Six Principles should not be regarded as a moral code, for several reasons.</p>
+<p>First. The principles are vague and can be interpreted in such widely ways that there will be no consistent agreement as to their application in concrete cases. For instance, if Smith insists on playing his radio so loud that it prevents Jones from sleeping, and if Jones smashes Smith’s radio for him, is Jones’s action unprovoked harm inflicted on Smith, or is it legitimate self-defense against harm that Smith is inflicting on Jones? On this question Smith and Jones are not likely to agree! (All the same, there are limits to the interpretation of the Six Principles. I imagine it would be difficult to find anyone in any culture who would interpret the principles in such a way as to justify brutal physical abuse of unoffending old ladies or the rape of four-year-old girls.)</p>
+<p>Second. Most people will agree that it is sometimes “morally” justifiable to make exceptions to the Six Principles. If your friend has destroyed logging equipment belonging to a large timber corporation, and if the police come around to ask you who did it, any green anarchist will agree that it is justifiable to lie and say, “I don’t know”.</p>
+<p>Third. The Six Principles have not generally been treated as if they possessed the force and rigidity of true moral laws. People often violate the Six Principles even when there is no “moral” justification for doing so. Moreover, as already noted, the moral codes of particular societies frequently conflict with and override the Six Principles. Rather than laws, the principles are only a kind of guide, an expression of our more generous impulses that reminds us not to do certain things that we may later look back on with disgust.</p>
+<p>Fourth. I suggest that the term “morality” should be used only to designate socially imposed codes of behavior that are specific to certain societies, cultures, or subcultures. Since the Six Principles, in some form or other, tend to be universal and may well be biologically predisposed, they should not be described as morality.</p>
+<p>Assuming that most anarchists will accept the Six Principles, what the anarchist (or, at least, the anarchist of individualistic type) does is claim the right to interpret the principles for himself in any concrete situation in which he is involved and decide for himself when to make exceptions to the principles, rather than letting any authority make such decisions for him.</p>
+<p>However, when people interpret the Six principles for themselves, conflicts arise because different individuals interpret the principles differently. For this reason among others, practically all societies have evolved rules that restrict behavior in more precise ways than the Six Principles do. In other words, whenever a number of people are together for an extended period of time, it is almost inevitable that some degree of morality will develop. Only the hermit is completely free. This is not an attempt to debunk the idea of anarchy. Even if there is no such thing as a society perfectly free of morality, still there is a big difference between a society in which the burden of morality is light and one in which it is heavy. The pygmies of the African rain forest, as described by Colin Turnbull in his books The Forest People and Wayward Servants: The Two Worlds of the African Pygmies, provide an example of a society that is not far from the anarchist ideal. Their rules are few and flexible and allow a very generous measure of personal liberty. (Yet, even though they have no cops, courts or prisons, Turnbull mentions no case of homicide among them.)</p>
+<p>In contrast, in technologically advanced societies the social mechanism is complex and rigid, and can function only when human behavior is closely regulated. Consequently such societies require a far more restrictive system of law and morality. (For present purposes we don’t need to distinguish between law and morality. We will simply consider law as a particular kind of morality, which is not unreasonable, since in our society it is widely regarded as immoral to break the law.) Old-fashioned people complain of moral looseness in modern society, and it is true that in some respects our society is relatively free of morality. But I would argue that our society’s relaxation of morality in sex, art, literature, dress, religion, etc., is in large part a reaction to the severe tightening of controls on human behavior in the practical domain. Art, literature and the like provide a harmless outlet for rebellious impulses that would be dangerous to the system if they took a more practical direction, and hedonistic satisfactions such as overindulgence in sex or food, or intensely stimulating forms of entertainment, help people to forget the loss of their freedom.</p>
+<p>At any rate, it is clear that in any society some morality serves practical functions. One of these functions is that of forestalling conflicts or making it possible to resolve them without recourse to violence. (According to Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s book The Harmless People, Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1989, pages 10, 82, 83, the Bushmen of Southern Africa own as private property the right to gather food in specified areas of the veldt, and they respect these property rights strictly. It is easy to see how such rules can prevent conflicts over the use of food resources.)</p>
+<p>Since anarchists place a high value on personal liberty, they presumably will want to keep morality to a minimum, even if this costs them something in personal safety or other practical advantages. It’s not my purpose here to try to determine where to strike the balance between freedom and the practical advantages of morality, but I do want to call attention to a point that is often overlooked: the practical or materialistic benefits of morality are counterbalanced by the psychological cost of repressing our “immoral” impulses. Common among moralists is a concept of “progress” according to which the human race is supposed to become ever more moral. More and more “immoral” impulses are to be suppressed and replaced by “civilized” behavior. To these people morality apparently is an end in itself. They never seem to ask why human beings should become more moral. What end is to be served by morality? If the end is anything resembling human well-being then an ever more sweeping and intensive morality can only be counterproductive, since it is certain that the psychological cost of suppressing “immoral” impulses will eventually outweigh any advantages conferred by morality (if it does not do so already). In fact, it is clear that, whatever excuses they may invent, the real motive of the moralists is to satisfy some psychological need of their own by imposing their morality on other people. Their drive toward morality is not an outcome of any rational program for improving the lot of the human race.</p>
+<p>This aggressive morality has nothing to do with the Six Principles of fairness. It is actually inconsistent with them. By trying to impose their morality on other people, whether by force or through propaganda and training, the moralists are doing them unprovoked harm in contravention of the first of the Six Principles. One thinks of nineteenth-century missionaries who made primitive people feel guilty about their sexual practices, or modern leftists who try to suppress politically incorrect speech.</p>
+<p>Morality often is antagonistic toward the Six Principles in other ways as well. To take just a few examples:</p>
+<p>In our society private property is not what it is among the Bushmen — a simple device for avoiding conflict over the use of resources. Instead, it is a system whereby certain persons or organizations arrogate control over vast quantities of resources that they use to exert power over other people. In this they certainly violate the first and fourth principles of fairness. By requiring us to respect property, the morality of our society helps to perpetuate a system that is clearly in conflict with the Six Principles.</p>
+<p>Among many primitive peoples, deformed babies are killed at birth (see, e.g., Paul Schebesta, Die Bambuti-Pygmäen vom Ituri, I.Band, Institut Royal Colonial Belge, Brus- sels, 1938, page 138), and a similar practice apparently was widespread in the United States up to about the middle of the 20th century. “Babies who were born malformed or too small or just blue and not breathing well were listed [by doctors] as stillborn, placed out of sight and left to die.” Autl Gawande, “The Score,” The New Yorker, October 9, 2006, page 64. Nowadays any such practice would be regarded as shockingly immoral. But mental-health professionals who study the psychological problems of the disabled can tell us how severe these problems often are. True, even among the severely deformed — for example, those born without arms or legs — there may be occasional individuals who achieve satisfying lives. But most persons with such a degree of disability are condemned to lives of inferiority and helplessness, and to rear a baby with extreme deformities until it is old enough to be conscious of its own helplessness is usually an act of cruelty. In any given case, of course, it may be difficult to balance the likelihood that a deformed baby will lead a miserable existence, if reared, against the chance that it will achieve a worthwhile life. The point is, however, that the moral code of modern society does not permit such balancing. It automatically requires every baby to be reared, no matter how extreme its physical or mental disabilities, and no matter how remote the chances that its life can be anything but wretched. This is one of the most ruthless aspects of modern morality.</p>
+<p>The military is expected to kill or refrain from killing in blind obedience to orders from the government; policemen and judges are expected to imprison or release persons in mechanical obedience to the law. It would be regarded as “unethical” and “irresponsible” for soldiers, judges, or policemen to act according to their own sense of fairness rather than in conformity with the rules of the system. A moral and “responsible” judge will send a man to prison if the law tells him to do so, even if the man is blameless according to the Six Principles.</p>
+<p>A claim of morality often serves as a cloak for what would otherwise be seen as the naked imposition of one’s own will on other people. Thus, if a person said, “I am going to prevent you from having an abortion (or from having sex or eating meat or something else) just because I personally find it offensive”, his attempt to impose his will would be considered arrogant and unreasonable. But if he claims to have a moral basis for what he is doing, if he says, “I’m going to prevent you from having an abortion because it’s immoral”, then his attempt to impose his will acquires a certain legitimacy, or at least tends to be treated with more respect than it would be if he made no moral claim.</p>
+<p>People who are strongly attached to the morality of their own society often are oblivious to the principles of fairness. The highly moral and Christian businessman John D. Rockefeller used underhand methods to achieve success, as is admitted by Allan Nevin in his admiring biography of Rockefeller. Today, screwing people in one way or another is almost an inevitable part of any large-scale business enterprise. Willful distortion of the truth, serious enough so that it amounts to lying, is in practice treated as acceptable behavior among politicians and journalists, though most of them undoubtedly regard themselves as moral people.</p>
+<p>I have before me a flyer sent out by a magazine called The National Interest. In it I find the following:</p>
+<p>“Your task at hand is to defend our nation’s interests abroad, and rally support at home for your efforts.</p>
+<p>“You are not, of course, naive. You believe that, for better or worse, international politics remains essentially power politics– that as Thomas Hobbes observed, when there is no agreement among states, clubs are always trumps.”</p>
+<p>This is a nearly naked advocacy of Machiavellianism in international affairs, though it is safe to assume that the people responsible for the flyer I’ve just quoted are firm adherents of conventional morality within the United States. For such people, I suggest, conventional morality serves as a substitute for the Six Principles. As long as these people comply with conventional morality, they have a sense of righteousness that enables them to disregard the principles of fairness without discomfort.</p>
+<p>Another way in which morality is antagonistic toward the Six Principles is that it often serves as an excuse for mistreatment or exploitation of persons who have violated the moral code or the laws of a given society. In the United States, politicians promotetheir careers by “getting tough on crime” and advocating harsh penalties for people who have broken the law. Prosecutors often seek personal advancement by being as hard on defendants as the law allows them to be. This satisfies certain sadistic and authoritarian impulses of the public and allays the privileged classes’ fear of social disorder. It all has little to do with the Six Principles of fairness. Many of the “criminals” who are subjected to harsh penalties–for example, people convicted of possessing marijuana–have in no sense violated the Six Principles. But even where culprits have violated the Six Principles their harsh treatment is motivated not by a concern for fairness, or even for morality, but politicians’ and prosecutors’ personal ambitions or by the public’s sadistic and punitive appetites. Morality merely provides the excuse.</p>
+<p>In sum, anyone who takes a detached look at modern society will see that, for all its emphasis on morality, it observes the principles of fairness very poorly indeed. Certainly less well than many primitive societies do.</p>
+<p>Allowing for various exceptions, the main purpose that morality serves in modern society is to facilitate the functioning of the technoindustrial system. Here’s how it works:</p>
+<p>Our conception both of fairness and of morality is heavily influenced by self-interest. For example, I feel strongly and sincerely that it is perfectly fair for me to smash up the equipment of someone who is cutting down the forest. Yet part of the reason why I feel this way is that the continued existence of the forest serves my personal needs. If I had no personal attachment to the forest I might feel differently. Similarly, most rich people probably feel sincerely that the laws that restrict the ways in which they use their property are unfair. There can be no doubt that, however sincere these feelings may be, they are motivated largely by self-interest.</p>
+<p>People who occupy positions of power within the system have an interest in promoting the security and the expansion of the system. When these people perceive that certain moral ideas strengthen the system or make it more secure, then, either from concious self-interest or because their moral feelings are influenced by self-interest, they apply pressure to the media and to educators to promote these moral ideas. Thus the requirements of respect for property, and of orderly, docile, rule-following, cooperative behavior, have become moral values in our society (even though these requirements can conflict with the principles of fairness) because they are necessary to the functioning of the system. Similarly; harmony and equality between different races and ethnic groups is a moral value of our society because iterracial and interethnic conflict impede the functioning of the system. Equal treatment of all races and ethnic groups may be required by the principles of fairness, but this is not why it is a moral value of our society. It is a moral value of our society because it is good for the technoindustrial system. Traditional moral restraints on sexual behavior have been relaxed becausethe people who have power see that these restraints are not necessary to the functioning of the system and that maintaining them produces tensions and conflicts that are harmful to the system.</p>
+<p>Particulary instructive is the moral prohibition of violence in our society. (By “violence” I mean physical attacks on human beings or the application of physical force to human beings.) Several hundred years ago, violence per se was not considered immoral in European society. In fact, under suitable conditions, it was admired. The most prestigious social class was the nobility, which was then a warrior caste. Even on the eve of the Industrial violence was not regarded as the greatest of all evils, and certain other values–personal liberty for example–were felt to be more important than the avoidance of violence. In America, well into the nineteenth century, public attitudes toward the police were negative, and police forces were kept weak and inefficient because it was felt that they were a threat to freedom. People preferred to see to their own defense and accept a fairly high level of violence in society rather than risk any of their personal liberty.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></p>
+<p>Since then, attitudes toward violence have changed dramatically. Today the media, the schools, and all who are committed to the system brainwash us to believe that violence is the one thing above all others that we must never commit. (Of course, when the system finds it convenient to use violence–via the police or the military–for its own purposes, it can always find an excuse for doing so.)</p>
+<p>It is sometimes claimed that the modern attitude toward violence is a result of the gentling influence of Christianity, but this makes no sense. The period during which Christianity was most powerful in Europe, the Middle Ages, was a particularly violent epoch. It has been during the course of the Industrial Revolution and the ensuing technological changes that attitudes toward violence have been altered, and over the same span of time the influence of Christianity has been markedly weakened. Clearly it has not been Christianity that has changed attitudes toward violence.</p>
+<p>It is necessary for the functioning of modern industrial society that people should cooperate in a rigid, machine-like way, obeying rules, following orders and schedules, carrying out prescribed procedures. Consequently the system requires, above all, human docility and social order. Of all human behaviors, violence is the one most disruptive of social order, hence the one most dangerous to the system. As the Industrial Revolution progressed, the powerful classes, perceiving that violence was increasingly contrary to their interest, changed their attitude toward it. Because their influence was predominant in determining what was printed by the press and taught in the schools, they gradually transformed the attitude of the entire society, so that today most middle-class people, and even the majority of those who think themselves rebels against the system, believe that violence is the ultimate sin. They imagine that their opposition to violence is the expression of a moral decision on their part, and in a sense it is, but it is based on a morality that is designed to serve the interest of the system and is instilled through propaganda. In fact, these people have simply been brainwashed.</p>
+<p>It goes without saying that in order to bring about a revolution against the technoindustrial system it will be necessary to discard conventional morality. One of the two main points that I’ve tried to make in this article is that even the most radical rejection of conventional morality does not necessarily entail the abandonment of human decency: there is a “natural” (and in some sense perhaps universal) morality–or, as I have preferred to call it, a concept of fairness–that tends to keep our conduct toward other people “decent” even when we have discarded all formal morality.</p>
+<p>The other main point I’ve tried to make is that the concept of morality is used for many purposes that have nothing to do with human decency or with what I’ve called “fairness”. Modern society in particular uses morality as a tool in manipulating human behavior for purposes that often are completely inconsistent with human decency.</p>
+<p>Thus, once revolutionaries have decided that the present form of society must be eliminated, there is no reason why they should hesitate to reject existing morality; and their rejection of morality will by no means be equivalent to a rejection of human decency.</p>
+<p>There’s no denying, however, that revolution against the technonindustrial system will violate human decency and the principles of fairness. With the collapse of the system, whether it is spontaneous or a result of revolution, countless innocent people will suffer and die. Our current situation is one of those in which we have to decide whether to commit injustice and cruelty in order to prevent a greater evil.</p>
+<p>For comparison, consider World War II. At that time the ambitions of ruthless dictators could be thwarted only by making war on a large scale, and, given the conditions of modern warfare, millions of innocent civilians inevitably were killed or mutilated. Few people will deny that this constituted an extreme and inexcusable injustice to the victims, yet fewer still will argue that Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese militarists should have been allowed to dominate the world.</p>
+<p>If it was acceptable to fight World War II in spite of the severe cruelty to millions of innocent people that that entailed, then a revolution against the technoindustrial system should be acceptable too. Had the fascists come to dominate the world, they doubtless would have treated their subject populations with brutality, would have reduced millions to slavery under harsh conditions, and would have exterminated many people outright. But, however horrible that might have been, it seems almost trivial in comparison with the disasters with which the technoindustrial system threatens us. Hitler and his allies merely tried to repeat on a larger scale the kinds of atrocities that have occurred again and again throughout the history of civilization. What modern technology threatens is absolutely without precedent. Today we have to ask ourselves whether nuclear war, biological disaster, or ecological collapse will produce casualties many times greater than those of World War II; whether the human race will continue to exist or whether it will be replaced by intelligent machines or genetically engineered freaks; whether the last vestiges of human dignity will disappear, not merely for the duration of a particular totalitarian regime but for all time; whether our world will even be inhabitable a couple of hundred years from now. Under these circumstances, who will claim that World War II was acceptable but that a revolution against the technoindustrial system is not?</p>
+<p>Though revolution will necessarily involve violation of the principles of fairness, revolutionaries should make every effort to avoid violating those principles any more than is really necessary–not only from respect for human decency, but also for practical reasons. By complying with the principles of fairness to the extent that doing so is not incompatible with revolutionary action, revolutionaries will win the respect of nonrevolutionaries, will be able to recruit better people to be revolutionaries, and will increase the self-respect of the revolutionary movement, thereby strengthening its esprit de corps.</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p>The Quest for the Spiritual: A Basis for a Radical Analysis of Religion, and Other Essays by Feral Faun, published by Green Anarchist, BCM 1715, London WC 1N 3XX, United Kingdom. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p>See Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (editors), Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Bantam Books, New York, 1970, Chapter 12, by Roger Lane; also, The New Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th Edition, 2003, Volume 25, article “Police,” pages 959–960. On medieval attitudes toward violence and the reasons why those attitudes changed, see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Revised Edition, Blackwell Publishing, 2000, pages 161–172. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
The System's Neatest Trick
+ Sat, 15 Apr 2023 18:50:50 +0300
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-systems-neatest-trick/
+ <blockquote>
+<p>The supreme luxury of the society of technical necessity will be to grant the bonus of useless revolt and of an acquiescent smile. —Jacques Ellul<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The System has played a trick on today’s would-be revolutionaries and rebels. The trick is so cute that if it had been consciously planned one would have to admire it for its almost mathematical elegance.</p>
+<h2 id="1-what-the-system-is-not">1. What the System Is Not</h2>
+<p>Let’s begin by making clear what the System is not. The System is not George W. Bush and his advisers and appointees, it is not the cops who maltreat protesters, it is not the CEOs of the multinational corporations, and it is not the Frankensteins in their laboratories who criminally tinker with the genes of living things. All of these people are servants of the System, but in themselves they do not constitute the System. In particular, the personal and individual values, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of any of these people may be significantly in conflict with the needs of the System.</p>
+<p>To illustrate with an example, the System requires respect for property rights, yet CEOs, cops, scientists, and politicians sometimes steal. (In speaking of stealing we don’t have to confine ourselves to actual lifting of physical objects. We can include all illegal means of acquiring property, such as cheating on income tax, accepting bribes, and any other form of graft or corruption.) But the fact that CEOs, cops, scientists, and politicians sometimes steal does not mean that stealing is part of the System. On the contrary, when a cop or a politician steals something he is rebelling against the System’s requirement of respect for law and property. Yet, even when they are stealing, these people remain servants of the System as long as they publicly maintain their support for law and property.</p>
+<p>Whatever illegal acts may be committed by politicians, cops, or CEOs as individuals, theft, bribery, and graft are not part of the System but diseases of the System. The less stealing there is, the better the System functions, and that is why the servants and boosters of the System always advocate obedience to the law in public, even if they may sometimes find it convenient to break the law in private.</p>
+<p>Take another example. Although the police are the System’s enforcers police brutality is not part of the System. When the cops beat the crap out of a suspect they are not doing the System’s work, they are only letting out their own anger and hostility. The System’s goal is not brutality or the expression of anger. As far as police work is concerned, the System’s goal is to compel obedience to its rules and to do so with the least possible amount of disruption, violence, and bad publicity. Thus, from the System’s point of view, the ideal cop is one who never gets angry, never uses any more violence than necessary, and as far as possible relies on manipulation rather than force to keep people under control. Police brutality is only another disease of the System, not part of the System.</p>
+<p>For proof, look at the attitude of the media. The mainstream media almost universally condemn police brutality. Of course, the attitude of the mainstream media represents, as a rule, the consensus of opinion among the powerful classes in our society as to what is good for the System.</p>
+<p>What has just been said about theft, graft, and police brutality applies also to issues of discrimination and victimization such as racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, and sweatshops. All of these are bad for the System. For example, the more that black people feel themselves scorned or excluded, the more likely they are to turn to crime and the less likely they are to educate themselves for careers that will make them useful to the System.</p>
+<p>Modern technology, with its rapid long-distance transportation and its disruption of traditional ways of life, has led to the mixing of populations, so that nowadays people of different races, nationalities, cultures, and religions have to live and work side by side. If people hate or reject one another on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, etc., the resulting conflicts interfere with the functioning of the System. Apart from a few old fossilized relics of the past like Jesse Helms, the leaders of the System know this very well, and that is why we are taught in school and through the media to believe that racism, sexism, homophobia, and so forth are social evils to be eliminated.</p>
+<p>No doubt some of the leaders of the System, some of the politicians, scientists, and CEOs, privately feel that a woman’s place is in the home, or that homosexuality and interracial marriage are repugnant. But even if the majority of them felt that way it would not mean that racism, sexism, and homophobia were part of the System—any more than the existence of stealing among the leaders means that stealing is part of the System. Just as the System must promote respect for law and property for the sake of its own security, the System must also discourage racism and other forms of victimization, for the same reason. That is why the System, notwithstanding any private deviations by individual members of the elite, is basically committed to suppressing discrimination and victimization.</p>
+<p>For proof, look again at the attitude of the mainstream media. In spite of occasional timid dissent by a few of the more daring and reactionary commentators, media propaganda overwhelmingly favors racial and gender equality and acceptance of homosexuality and interracial marriage.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></p>
+<p>The System needs a population that is meek, nonviolent, domesticated, docile, and obedient. It needs to avoid any conflict or disruption that could interfere with the orderly functioning of the social machine. In addition to suppressing racial, ethnic, religious, and other group hostilities, it also has to suppress or harness for its own advantage all other tendencies that could lead to disruption or disorder, such as machismo, aggressive impulses, and any inclination to violence.</p>
+<p>Naturally, traditional racial and ethnic antagonisms die slowly, machismo, aggressiveness, and violent impulses are not easily suppressed, and attitudes toward sex and gender identity are not transformed overnight. Therefore there are many individuals who resist these changes, and the System is faced with the problem of overcoming their resistance.<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup></p>
+<h2 id="2-how-the-system-exploits-the-impulse-to-rebel">2. How the System Exploits the Impulse to Rebel</h2>
+<p>All of us in modern society are hemmed in by a dense network of rules and regulations. We are at the mercy of large organizations such as corporations, governments, labor unions, universities, churches, and political parties, and consequently we are powerless. As a result of the servitude, the powerlessness, and the other indignities that the System inflicts on us, there is widespread frustration, which leads to an impulse to rebel. And this is where the System plays its neatest trick: Through a brilliant sleight of hand, it turns rebellion to its own advantage.</p>
+<p>Many people do not understand the roots of their own frustration, hence their rebellion is directionless. They know that they want to rebel, but they don’t know what they want to rebel against. Luckily, the System is able to fill their need by providing them with a list of standard and stereotyped grievances in the name of which to rebel: racism, homophobia, women’s issues, poverty, sweatshops…the whole laundry-bag of “activist” issues.</p>
+<p>Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait. In fighting racism, sexism, etc., etc., they are only doing the System’s work for it. In spite of this, they imagine that they are rebelling against the System. How is this possible?</p>
+<p>First, 50 years ago the System was not yet committed to equality for black people, women and homosexuals, so that action in favor of these causes really was a form of rebellion. Consequently these causes came to be conventionally regarded as rebel causes. They have retained that status today simply as a matter of tradition; that is, because each rebel generation imitates the preceding generations.</p>
+<p>Second, there are still significant numbers of people, as I pointed out earlier, who resist the social changes that the System requires, and some of these people even are authority figures such as cops, judges, or politicians. These resisters provide a target for the would-be rebels, someone for them to rebel against. Commentators like Rush Limbaugh help the process by ranting against the activists: Seeing that they have made someone angry fosters the activists’ illusion that they are rebelling.</p>
+<p>Third, in order to bring themselves into conflict even with that majority of the System’s leaders who fully accept the social changes that the System demands, the would-be rebels insist on solutions that go farther than what the System’s leaders consider prudent, and they show exaggerated anger over trivial matters. For example, they demand payment of reparations to black people, and they often become enraged at any criticism of a minority group, no matter how cautious and reasonable.</p>
+<p>In this way the activists are able to maintain the illusion that they are rebelling against the System. But the illusion is absurd. Agitation against racism, sexism, homophobia and the like no more constitutes rebellion against the System than does agitation against political graft and corruption. Those who work against graft and corruption are not rebelling but acting as the System’s enforcers: They are helping to keep the politicians obedient to the rules of the System. Those who work against racism, sexism, and homophobia similarly are acting as the Systems’ enforcers: They help the System to suppress the deviant racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes that cause problems for the System.</p>
+<p>But the activists don’t act only as the System’s enforcers. They also serve as a kind of lightning rod that protects the System by drawing public resentment away from the System and its institutions. For example, there were several reasons why it was to the System’s advantage to get women out of the home and into the workplace. Fifty years ago, if the System, as represented by the government or the media, had begun out of the blue a propaganda campaign designed to make it socially acceptable for women to center their lives on careers rather than on the home, the natural human resistance to change would have caused widespread public resentment. What actually happened was that the changes were spearheaded by radical feminists, behind whom the System’s institutions trailed at a safe distance. The resentment of the more conservative members of society was directed primarily against the radical feminists rather than against the System and its institutions, because the changes sponsored by the System seemed slow and moderate in comparison with the more radical solutions advocated by feminists, and even these relatively slow changes were seen as having been forced on the System by pressure from the radicals.</p>
+<h2 id="3-the-systems-neatest-trick">3. The System’s Neatest Trick</h2>
+<p>So, in a nutshell, the System’s neatest trick is this:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>
+<p>For the sake of its own efficiency and security, the System needs to bring about deep and radical social changes to match the changed conditions resulting from technological progress.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The frustration of life under the circumstances imposed by the System leads to rebellious impulses.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Rebellious impulses are co-opted by the System in the service of the social changes it requires; activists “rebel” against the old and outmoded values that are no longer of use to the System and in favor of the new values that the System needs us to accept.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>In this way rebellious impulses, which otherwise might have been dangerous to the System, are given an outlet that is not only harmless to the System, but useful to it.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Much of the public resentment resulting from the imposition of social changes is drawn away from the System and its institutions and is directed instead at the radicals who spearhead the social changes.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<p>Of course, this trick was not planned in advance by the System’s leaders, who are not conscious of having played a trick at all. The way it works is something like this:</p>
+<p>In deciding what position to take on any issue, the editors, publishers, and owners of the media must consciously or unconsciously balance several factors. They must consider how their readers or viewers will react to what they print or broadcast about the issue, they must consider how their advertisers, their peers in the media, and other powerful persons will react, and they must consider the effect on the security of the System of what they print or broadcast.</p>
+<p>These practical considerations will usually outweigh whatever personal feelings they may have about the issue. The personal feelings of the media leaders, their advertisers, and other powerful persons are varied. They may be liberal or conservative, religious or atheistic. The only universal common ground among the leaders is their commitment to the System, its security, and its power. Therefore, within the limits imposed by what the public is willing to accept, the principal factor determining the attitudes propagated by the media is a rough consensus of opinion among the media leaders and other powerful people as to what is good for the System.</p>
+<p>Thus, when an editor or other media leader sets out to decide what attitude to take toward a movement or a cause, his first thought is whether the movement includes anything that is good or bad for the System. Maybe he tells himself that his decision is based on moral, philosophical, or religious grounds, but it is an observable fact that in practice the security of the System takes precedence over all other factors in determining the attitude of the media.</p>
+<p>For example, if a news-magazine editor looks at the militia movement, he may or may not sympathize personally with some of its grievances and goals, but he also sees that there will be a strong consensus among his advertisers and his peers in the media that the militia movement is potentially dangerous to the System and therefore should be discouraged. Under these circumstances he knows that his magazine had better take a negative attitude toward the militia movement. The negative attitude of the media presumably is part of the reason why the militia movement has died down.</p>
+<p>When the same editor looks at radical feminism he sees that some of its more extreme solutions would be dangerous to the System, but he also sees that feminism holds much that is useful to the System. Women’s participation in the business and technical world integrates them and their families better into the System. Their talents are of service to the System in business and technical matters. Feminist emphasis on ending domestic abuse and rape also serves the System’s needs, since rape and abuse, like other forms of violence, are dangerous to the System. Perhaps most important, the editor recognizes that the pettiness and meaninglessness of modern housework and the social isolation of the modern housewife can lead to serious frustration for many women; frustration that will cause problems for the System unless women are allowed an outlet through careers in the business and technical world.</p>
+<p>Even if this editor is a macho type who personally feels more comfortable with women in a subordinate position, he knows that feminism, at least in a relatively moderate form, is good for the System. He knows that his editorial posture must be favorable toward moderate feminism, otherwise he will face the disapproval of his advertisers and other powerful people. This is why the mainstream media’s attitude has been generally supportive of moderate feminism, mixed toward radical feminism, and consistently hostile only toward the most extreme feminist positions.</p>
+<p>Through this type of process, rebel movements that are dangerous to the System are subjected to negative propaganda, while rebel movements that are believed to be useful to the System are given cautious encouragement in the media. Unconscious absorption of media propaganda influences would-be rebels to “rebel” in ways that serve the interests of the System.</p>
+<p>The university intellectuals also play an important role in carrying out the System’s trick. Though they like to fancy themselves independent thinkers, the intellectuals are (allowing for individual exceptions) the most oversocialized, the most conformist, the tamest and most domesticated, the most pampered, dependent, and spineless group in America today. As a result, their impulse to rebel is particularly strong. But, because they are incapable of independent thought, real rebellion is impossible for them. Consequently they are suckers for the System’s trick, which allows them to irritate people and enjoy the illusion of rebelling without ever having to challenge the System’s basic values.</p>
+<p>Because they are the teachers of young people, the university intellectuals are in a position to help the System play its trick on the young, which they do by steering young people’s rebellious impulses toward the standard, stereotyped targets: racism, colonialism, women’s issues, etc. Young people who are not college students learn through the media, or through personal contact, of the “social justice” issues for which students rebel, and they imitate the students. Thus a youth culture develops in which there is a stereotyped mode of rebellion that spreads through imitation of peers—just as hairstyles, clothing styles, and other fads spread through imitation.</p>
+<h2 id="4-the-trick-is-not-perfect">4. The Trick Is Not Perfect</h2>
+<p>Naturally, the System’s trick does not work perfectly. Not all of the positions adopted by the “activist” community are consistent with the needs of the System. In this connection, some of the most important difficulties that confront the System are related to the conflict between the two different types of propaganda that the System has to use, integration propaganda and agitation propaganda.<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup></p>
+<p>Integration propaganda is the principal mechanism of socialization in modern society. It is propaganda that is designed to instill in people the attitudes, beliefs, values, and habits that they need to have in order to be safe and useful tools of the System. It teaches people to permanently repress or sublimate those emotional impulses that are dangerous to the System. Its focus is on long-term attitudes and deep-seated values of broad applicability, rather than on attitudes toward specific, current issues.</p>
+<p>Agitation propaganda plays on people’s emotions so as to bring out certain attitudes or behaviors in specific, current situations. Instead of teaching people to suppress dangerous emotional impulses, it seeks to stimulate certain emotions for well-defined purposes localized in time.</p>
+<p>The System needs an orderly, docile, cooperative, passive, dependent population. Above all it requires a nonviolent population, since it needs the government to have a monopoly on the use of physical force. For this reason, integration propaganda has to teach us to be horrified, frightened, and appalled by violence, so that we will not be tempted to use it even when we are very angry. (By “violence” I mean physical attacks on human beings.) More generally, integration propaganda has to teach us soft, cuddly values that emphasize nonaggressiveness, interdependence, and cooperation.</p>
+<p>On the other hand, in certain contexts the System itself finds it useful or necessary to resort to brutal, aggressive methods to achieve its own objectives. The most obvious example of such methods is warfare. In wartime the System relies on agitation propaganda: In order to win public approval of military action, it plays on people’s emotions to make them feel frightened and angry at their real or supposed enemy.</p>
+<p>In this situation there is a conflict between integration propaganda and agitation propaganda. Those people in whom the cuddly values and the aversion to violence have been most deeply planted can’t easily be persuaded to approve a bloody military operation.</p>
+<p>Here the System’s trick backfires to some extent. The activists, who have been “rebelling” all along in favor of the values of integration propaganda, continue to do so during wartime. They oppose the war effort not only because it is violent but because it is “racist,” “colonialist,” “imperialist,” etc., all of which are contrary to the soft, cuddly values taught by integration propaganda.</p>
+<p>The System’s trick also backfires where the treatment of animals is concerned. Inevitably, many people extend to animals the soft values and the aversion to violence that they are taught with respect to humans. They are horrified by the slaughter of animals for meat and by other practices harmful to animals, such as the reduction of chickens to egg-laying machines kept in tiny cages or the use of animals in scientific experiments. Up to a point, the resulting opposition to mistreatment of animals may be useful to the System: Because a vegan diet is more efficient in terms of resource-utilization than a carnivorous one is, veganism, if widely adopted, will help to ease the burden placed on the Earth’s limited resources by the growth of the human population. But activists’ insistence on ending the use of animals in scientific experiments is squarely in conflict with the System’s needs, since for the foreseeable future there is not likely to be any workable substitute for living animals as research subjects.</p>
+<p>All the same, the fact that the System’s trick does backfire here and there does not prevent it from being on the whole a remarkably effective device for turning rebellious impulses to the System’s advantage.</p>
+<p>It has to be conceded that the trick described here is not the only factor determining the direction that rebellious impulses take in our society. Many people today feel weak and powerless (for the very good reason that the System really does make us weak and powerless), and therefore identify obsessively with victims, with the weak and the oppressed. That’s part of the reason why victimization issues, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and neocolonialism have become standard activist issues.</p>
+<h2 id="5-an-example">5. An Example</h2>
+<p>I have with me an anthropology textbook<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">5</a></sup> in which I’ve noticed several nice examples of the way in which university intellectuals help the System with its trick by disguising conformity as criticism of modern society. The cutest of these examples is found on pages 132–36, where the author quotes, in “adapted” form, an article by one Rhonda Kay Williamson, an intersexed person (that is, a person born with both male and female physical characteristics).</p>
+<p>Williamson states that the American Indians not only accepted intersexed persons but especially valued them.<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">6</a></sup> She contrasts this attitude with the Euro-American attitude, which she equates with the attitude that her own parents adopted toward her.</p>
+<p>Williamson’s parents mistreated her cruelly. They held her in contempt for her intersexed condition. They told her she was “cursed and given over to the devil,” and they took her to charismatic churches to have the “demon” cast out of her. She was even given napkins into which she was supposed to “cough out the demon.”</p>
+<p>But it is obviously ridiculous to equate this with the modern Euro-American attitude. It may approximate the Euro-American attitude of 150 years ago, but nowadays almost any American educator psychologist, or mainstream clergyman would be horrified at that kind of treatment of an intersexed person. The media would never dream of portraying such treatment in a favorable light. Average middle-class Americans today may not be as accepting of the intersexed condition as the Indians were, but few would fail to recognize the cruelty of the way in which Williamson was treated.</p>
+<p>Williamson’s parents obviously were deviants, religious kooks whose attitudes and beliefs were way out of line with the values of the System. Thus, while putting on a show of criticizing modern Euro-American society, Williamson really is attacking only deviant minorities and cultural laggards who have not yet adapted to the dominant values of present-day America.</p>
+<p>Haviland, the author of the book, on page 12 portrays cultural anthropology as iconoclastic, as challenging the assumptions of modern Western society. This is so far contrary to the truth that it would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic. The mainstream of modern American anthropology is abjectly subservient to the values and assumptions of the System. When today’s anthropologists pretend to challenge the values of their society, typically they challenge only the values of the past—obsolete and outmoded values now held by no one but deviants and laggards who have not kept up with the cultural changes that the System requires of us.</p>
+<p>Haviland’s use of Williamson’s article illustrates this very well, and it represents the general slant of Haviland’s book. Haviland plays up ethnographic facts that teach his readers politically correct lessons, but he understates or omits altogether ethnographic facts that are politically incorrect. Thus, while he quotes Williamson’s account to emphasize the Indians’ acceptance of intersexed persons, he does not mention, for example, that among many of the Indian tribes women who committed adultery had their noses cut off,<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">7</a></sup> whereas no such punishment was inflicted on male adulterers; or that among the Crow Indians a warrior who was struck by a stranger had to kill the offender immediately, else he was irretrievably disgraced in the eyes of his tribe;<sup id="fnref:8"><a href="#fn:8" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">8</a></sup> nor does Haviland discuss the habitual use of torture by the Indians of the eastern United States.<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> Of course, facts of that kind represent violence, machismo, and gender-discrimination, hence they are inconsistent with the present-day values of the System and tend to get censored out as politically incorrect.</p>
+<p>Yet I don’t doubt that Haviland is perfectly sincere in his belief that anthropologists challenge the assumptions of Western society. The capacity for self-deception of our university intellectuals will easily stretch that far.</p>
+<p>To conclude, I want to make clear that I’m not suggesting that it is good to cut off noses for adultery, or that any other abuse of women should be tolerated, nor would I want to see anybody scorned or rejected because they are intersexed or because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, etc., etc., etc. But in our society today these matters are, at most, issues of reform. The System’s neatest trick consists in having turned powerful rebellious impulses, which otherwise might have taken a revolutionary direction, to the service of these modest reforms.</p>
+<p>United States: “Public Displays of Affection,” U.S. News & World Report, September 9, 2002, pages 42-43. This article provides a nice example of the way propaganda functions. It takes an ostensibly objective or neutral position on homosexual partnerships, giving some space to the views of those who oppose public acceptance of homosexuality. But anyone reading the article, with its distinctly sympathetic treatment of a homosexual couple, will be left with the impression that acceptance of homosexuality is desirable and, in the long run, inevitable. Particularly important is the photograph of the homosexual couple in question: A physically attractive pair has been selected and has been photographed attractively. No one with the slightest understanding of propaganda can fail to see that the article constitutes propaganda in favor of acceptance of homosexuality. And bear in mind that U.S. News & World Report is a right-of-center magazine.</p>
+<p>Russia: “Putin Denounces Intolerance,” The Denver Post, July 26, 2002, page 16A. “MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin strongly denounced racial and religious prejudice on Thursday…‘If we let this chauvinistic bacteria of either national or religious intolerance develop, we will ruin the country’, Putin said in remarks prominently replayed on Russian television on Thursday night.” Etc., etc.</p>
+<p>Mexico: “Persiste racismo contra indígenas” (“Racism against indigenous people persists”), El Sol de México, January 11, 2002, page 1/B. Photo caption: “In spite of efforts to give dignity to the indigenous people of our country, they continue to suffer discrimination….” The article reports on the efforts of the bishops of Mexico to combat discrimination, but says that the bishops want to “purity” indigenous customs in order to liberate the women from their traditionally inferior status. El Sol de México is reputed to be a right-of-center newspaper.</p>
+<p>Anyone who wanted to take the trouble could multiply these examples a thousand times over. The evidence that the System itself is set on eliminating discrimination and victimization is so obvious and so massive that one boggles at the radicals’ belief that fighting these evils is a form of rebellion. One can only attribute it to a phenomenon well known to professional propagandists: People tend to block out, to fail to perceive or to remember, information that conflicts with their ideology. See the interesting article, “Propaganda,” in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Volume 26, Macropaedia, 15th Edition, 1997, pages 171–79, specifically page 176.</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p>Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, translated by John Wilkinson, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1964, page 427. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p>Even the most superficial review of the mass media in modern industrialized countries, or even in countries that merely aspire to modernity, will confirm that the System is committed to eliminating discrimination in regard to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc., etc., etc. It would be easy to find thousands of examples that illustrate this, but here we cite only three, from three disparate countries. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:3">
+<p>In this section I’ve said something about what the System is not, but I haven’t said what the System is. A friend of mine has pointed out that this may leave the reader nonplussed, so I’d better explain that for the purposes of this article it isn’t necessary to have a precise definition of what the System is. I couldn’t think of any way of defining the System in a single, well-rounded sentence and I didn’t want to break the continuity of the article with a long, awkward, and unnecessary digression addressing the question of what the System is, so I left that question unanswered. I don’t think my failure to answer it will seriously impair the reader’s understanding of the point that I want to make in this article. <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:4">
+<p>The concepts of “integration propaganda” and “agitation propaganda” are discussed by Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965. <a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:5">
+<p>William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Ninth Edition, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999. <a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:6">
+<p>I assume that this statement is accurate. It certainly reflects the Navaho attitude. See Gladys A. Reichard, Navaho Religion: A Study of Symbolism, Princeton University Press, 1990, page 141. This book was originally copyrighted in 1950, well before American anthropology became heavily politicized, so I see no reason to suppose that its information is slanted. <a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:7">
+<p>This is well known. See, e.g., Angie Debo, Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place, University of Oklahoma Press, 1976, page 225; Thomas B. Marquis (interpreter), Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer, Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press, 1967, page 97; Stanley Vestal, Sitting Bull, Champion of the Sioux: A Biography, University of Oklahoma Press, 1989, page 6; The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 13, Macropaedia, 15th Edition, 1997, article “American Peoples, Native,” page 380. <a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:8">
+<p>Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books edition, page 147. <a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:9">
+<p>Use of torture by the Indians of the eastern U.S. is well known. See, e.g., Clark Wissler, Indians of the United States, Revised Edition, Anchor Books, Random House, New York, 1989, pages 131, 140, 145, 165, 282; Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, Anchor Books, Random House, New York, 1988, page 135; The New Encydopaedia Britannica, Vol. 13, Macropaedia, 15th Edition, 1997, article “American Peoples, Native,” page 385; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, Oxford University Press, 1985, page citation not available. <a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
Hit Where It Hurts
+ Sat, 15 Apr 2023 18:43:18 +0300
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/hit-where-it-hurts/
+ <h2 id="1-the-purpose-of-this-article">1. The Purpose Of This Article.</h2>
+<p>The purpose of this article is to point out a very simple principle of human conflict, a principle that opponents of the techno-industrial system seem to be overlooking. The principle is that in any form of conflict, if you want to win, you must hit your adversary where it hurts.</p>
+<p>I have to explain that when I talk about “hitting where it hurts” I am not necessarily referring to physical blows or to any other form of physical violence. For example, in oral debate, “hitting where it hurts” would mean making the arguments to which your opponents position is most vulnerable. In a presidential election, “hitting where it hurts” would mean winning from your opponent the states that have the most electoral votes. Still, in discussing this principle I will use the analogy of physical combat, because it is vivid and clear.</p>
+<p>If a man punches you, you can’t defend yourself by hitting back at his fist, because you can’t hurt the man that way. In order to win the fight, you have to hit him where it hurts. That means you have to go behind the fist and hit the sensitive and vulnerable parts of the man’s body.</p>
+<p>Suppose a bulldozer belonging to a logging company has been tearing up the woods near your home and you want to stop it. It is the blade of the bulldozer that rips the earth and knocks trees over, but it would be a waste of time to take a sledgehammer to the blade. if you spent a long, hard day working on the blade with the sledge, you might succeed in damaging it enough so that it became useless. But, in comparison with the rest of the bulldozer, the blade is relatively inexpensive and easy to replace. The blade is only the “fist” with which the bulldozer hits the earth. To defeat the machine you must go behind the “fist” and attack the bulldozers vital parts. The engine, for example, can be ruined with very little expenditure of time and effort by means well known to many radicals.</p>
+<p>At this point I must make clear that I am not recommending that anyone should damage a bulldozer (unless it is his own property). Nor should anything in this article be interpreted as recommending illegal activity of any kind. I am a prisoner, and if I were to encourage illegal activity this article would not even be allowed to leave the prison. I use the bulldozer analogy only because it it clear and vivid and will be appreciated by radicals.</p>
+<h2 id="2-technology-is-the-target">2. Technology Is The Target.</h2>
+<p>It is widely recognized that “the basic variable which determines the contemporary historic process is provided by technological development” (Celso Furtado*). Technology, above all else, is responsible for the current condition of the world and will control its future development. Thus, the “bulldozer” that we have to destroy is modern technology itself. Many radicals are aware of this, and therefore realize that there task is to eliminate the entire techno-industrial system. But unfortunately they have paid little attention to the need to hit the system where it hurts.</p>
+<p>Smashing up McDonald’s or Starbuck’s is pointless. Not that I give a damn about McDonald’s or Starbuck’s. I don’t care whether anyone smashes them up or not. But that is not a revolutionary activity. Even if every fast-food chain in the world were wiped out the techno-industrial system would suffer only minimal harm as a result, since it could easily survive without fast-food chains. When you attack McDonald’s or Starbuck’s, you are not hitting where it hurts.</p>
+<p>Some months ago I received a letter from a young man in Denmark who believed that the techno-industrial system had to be eliminated because, as he put it, “What will happen if we go on this way?” Apparently, however, his form of “revolutionary” activity was raiding fur farms. As a means of weakening the techno-industrial system this activity is utterly useless. Even if animal liberationists succeed in eliminating the fur industry completely they would do no harm at all to the system, because the system can get along perfectly well without furs.</p>
+<p>I agree that keeping wild animals in cages is intolerable, and that putting an end to such practices is a noble cause. But there are many other noble causes, such as preventing traffic accidents, providing shelter for the homeless, recycling, or helping old people cross the street. Yet no one is foolish enough to mistake these for revolutionary activities, or to imagine that they do anything to weaken the system.</p>
+<h2 id="3-the-timber-industry-is-a-side-issue">3. The Timber Industry Is A Side Issue.</h2>
+<p>To take another example, no one in his right mind believes that anything like real wilderness can survive very long if the techno-industrial system continues to exist. Many environmental radicals agree that this is the case and hope for the collapse of the system. But in practice all they do is attack the timber industry.</p>
+<p>I certainly have no objection to their attack on the timber industry. In fact, it’s an issue that is close to my heart and I’m delighted by any successes that radicals may have against the timber industry. In addition, for reasons that I need to explain here, I think that opposition to the timber industry should be one component of the efforts to overthrow the system.</p>
+<p>But, by itself, attacking the timber industry is not an effective way of working against the system, for even in the unlikely event that radicals succeeded in stopping all logging everywhere in the world, that would not bring down the system. And it would not permanently save wilderness. Sooner or later the political climate would change and logging would resume. Even if logging never resumed, there would be other venues through which wilderness would be destroyed, or if not destroyed then tamed and domesticated. Mining and mineral exploration, acid rain, climate changes, and species extinction destroy wilderness; wilderness is tamed and domesticated through recreation, scientific study, and resource management, including among other things electronic tracking of animals, stocking of streams with hatchery-bred fish, and planting of genetically-engineered trees.</p>
+<p>Wilderness can be saved permanently only by eliminating the techno-industrial system, and you cannot eliminate the system by attacking the timber industry. The system would easily survive the death of the timber industry because wood products, though very useful to the system, can if necessary be replaced with other materials.</p>
+<p>Consequently, when you attack the timber industry, you are not hitting the system where it hurts. The timber industry is only the “fist” (or one of the fists) with which the system destroys wilderness, and, just as in a fist-fight, you can’t win by hitting at the fist. You have to go behind the fist and strike at the most sensitive and vital organs of the system. By legal means, of course, such as peaceful protests.</p>
+<h2 id="4-why-the-system-is-tough">4. Why The System Is Tough.</h2>
+<p>The techno-industrial system is exceptionally tough due to its so-called “democratic” structure and its resulting flexibility. Because dictatorial systems tend to be rigid, social tensions and resistance can be built up in them to the point where they damage and weaken the system and may lead to revolution. But in a “democratic” system, when social tension and resistance build up dangerously the system backs off enough, it compromises enough, to bring the tensions down to a safe level.</p>
+<p>During the 1960s people first became aware that environmental pollution was a serious problem, the more so because the visible and smellable filth in the air over our major cities was beginning to make people physically uncomfortable. Enough protest arose so that an Environmental Protection Agency was established and other measures were taken to alleviate the problem. Of course, we all know that our pollution problems are a long, long way from being solved. But enough was done so that public complaints subsided and the pressure on the system was reduced for a number of years.</p>
+<p>Thus, attacking the system is like hitting a piece of rubber. A blow with a hammer can shatter cast iron, because caste iron is rigid and brittle. But you can pound a piece of rubber without hurting it because it is flexible: It gives way before protest, just enough so that the protest loses its force and momentum. Then the system bounces back.</p>
+<p>So, in order to hit the system where it hurts, you need to select issues on which the system will not back off, in which it will fight to the finish. For what you need is not compromise with the system but a life-and-death struggle.</p>
+<h2 id="5-it-is-useless-to-attack-the-system-in-terms-of-its-own-values">5. It Is Useless To Attack The System In Terms Of Its Own Values.</h2>
+<p>It is absolutely essential to attack the system not in terms of its own technologically-oriented values, but in terms of values that are inconsistent with the values of the system. As long as you attack the system in terms of its own values, you do not hit the system where it hurts, and you allow the system to deflate protest by giving way, by backing off.</p>
+<p>For example, if you attack the timber industry primarily on the basis that forests are needed to preserve water resources and recreational opportunities, then the system can give ground to defuse protest without compromising its own values: Water resources and recreation are fully consistent with the values of the system, and if the system backs off, if it restricts logging in the name of water resources and recreation, then it only makes a tactical retreat and does not suffer a strategic defeat for its code of values.</p>
+<p>If you push victimization issues (such as racism, sexism, homophobia, or poverty) you are not challenging the system’s values and you are not even forcing the system to back off or compromise. You are directly helping the system. All of the wisest proponents of the system recognize that racism, sexism, homophobia, and poverty are harmful to the system, and this is why the system itself works to combat these and similar forms of victimization.</p>
+<p>“Sweatshops,” with their low pay and wretched working conditions, may bring profit to certain corporations, but wise proponents of the system know very well that the system as a whole functions better when workers are treated decently. In making an issue of sweatshops, you are helping the system, not weakening it.</p>
+<p>Many radicals fall into the temptation of focusing on non-essential issues like racism, sexism and sweatshops because it is easy. They pick an issue on which the system can afford a compromise and on which they will get support from people like Ralph Nader, Winona La Duke, the labor unions, and all the other pink reformers. Perhaps the system, under pressure, will back off a bit, the activists will see some visible result from their efforts, and they will have the satisfying illusion that they have accomplished something. But in reality they have accomplished nothing at all toward eliminating the techno-industrial system.</p>
+<p>The globalization issue is not completely irrelevant to the technology problem. The package of economic and political measures termed “globalization” does promote economic growth and, consequently, technological progress. Still, globalization is an issue of marginal importance and not a well-chosen target of revolutionaries. The system can afford to give ground on the globalization issue. Without giving up globalization as such, the system can take steps to mitigate the negative environmental and economic consequences of globalization so as to defuse protest. At a pinch, the system could even afford to give up globalization altogether. Growth and progress would still continue, only at a slightly lower rate. And when you fight globalization you are not attacking the systems fundamental values. Opposition to globalization is motivated in terms of securing decent wages for workers and protecting the environment, both of which are completely consistent with the values of the system. (The system, for its own survival, can’t afford to let environmental degradation go too far.) Consequently, in fighting globalization you do not hit the system where it really hurts. Your efforts may promote reform, but they are useless for the purpose of overthrowing the techno-industrial system.</p>
+<h2 id="6-radicals-must-attack-the-system-at-the-decisive-points">6. Radicals Must Attack The System At The Decisive Points.</h2>
+<p>To work effectively toward the elimination of the techno-industrial system, revolutionaries must attack the system at points at which it cannot afford to give ground. They must attack the vital organs of the system. Of course, when I use the word “attack,” I am not referring to physical attack but only to legal forms of protest and resistance.</p>
+<p>Some examples of vital organs of the system are:</p>
+<ol type="a" style="list-style-type: upper-alpha;">
+ <li>The electric-power industry. The system is utterly dependent on its electric-power grid.</li>
+ <li>The communications industry. Without rapid communications, as by telephone, radio, television, e-mail, and so forth, the system could not survive.</li>
+ <li>The computer industry. We all know that without computers the system would promptly collapse.</li>
+ <li>The propaganda industry. The propaganda industry includes the entertainment industry, the educational system, journalism, advertising, public relations, and much of politics and of the mental-health industry. The system can’t function unless people are sufficiently docile and conforming and have the attitudes that the system needs them to have. It is the function of the propaganda industry to teach people that kind of thought and behavior.</li>
+ <li>The biotechnology industry. The system is not yet (as far as I know) physically dependent on advanced biotechnology. Nevertheless, the system cannot afford to give way on the biotechnology issue, which is a critically important issue for the system, as I will argue in a moment.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>Again: When you attack these vital organs of the system, it is essential not to attack them in terms of the system’s own values but in terms of values inconsistent with those of the system. For example, if you attack the electric-power industry on the basis that it pollutes the environment, the system can defuse protest by developing cleaner methods of generating electricity. If worse came to worse, the system could even switch entirely to wind and solar power. This might do a great deal to reduce environmental damage, but it would not put an end to the techno-industrial system. Nor would it represent a defeat for the system’s fundamental values. To accomplish anything against the system you have to attack all electric-power generation as a matter of principle, on the ground that dependence on electricity makes people dependent on the system. This is a ground incompatible with the system’s values.</p>
+<h2 id="7-biotechnology-may-be-the-best-target-for-political-attack">7. Biotechnology May Be The Best Target For Political Attack.</h2>
+<p>Probably the most promising target for political attack is the biotechnology industry. Though revolutions are generally carried out by minorities, it is very useful to have some degree of support, sympathy, or at least acquiescence from the general population. To get that kind of support or acquiescence is one of the goals of political action. If you concentrated your political attack on, for example, the electric-power industry, it would be extremely difficult to get any support outside of a radical minority, because most people resist change to their way of living, especially any change that inconveniences them. For this reason, few would be willing to give up electricity.</p>
+<p>But people do not yet feel themselves dependent on advanced biotechnology as they do on electricity. Eliminating biotechnology will not radically change their lives. On the contrary, it would be possible to show people that the continued development of biotechnology will transform their way of life and wipe out age-old human values. Thus, in challenging biotechnology, radicals should be able to mobilize in their own favor the natural human resistance to change.</p>
+<p>And biotechnology is an issue on which the system cannot afford to lose. It is an issue on which the system will have to fight to the finish, which is exactly what we need. But — to repeat once more — it is essential to attack biotechnology not in terms of the system’s own values but in terms of values inconsistent with those of the system. For example, if you attack biotechnology, primarily on the basis that it may damage the environment, or that genetically-modified foods may be harmful to health, then the system can and will cushion your attack by giving ground or compromising — for instance, by introducing increased supervision of genetic research and more rigorous testing and regulation of genetically-modified crops. People’s anxiety will then subside and protest with wither.</p>
+<h2 id="8-all-biotechnology-must-be-attacked-as-a-matter-of-principle">8. All Biotechnology Must Be Attacked As A Matter Of Principle.</h2>
+<p>So, instead of protesting one or another negative consequence of biotechnology, you have to attack all modern biotechnology on principle, on grounds such as (a) that it is an insult to all living things; (b) that it puts too much power in the hands of the system; (c) that it will radically transform fundamental human values that have existed for thousands of years; and similar grounds that are inconsistent with the values of the system.</p>
+<p>In response to this kind of attack the system will have to stand and fight. It cannot afford to cushion your attack by backing off to any great extent, because biotechnology is too central to the whole enterprise of technological progress, and because in backing off the system would not be making only a tactical retreat, but would be taking a major strategic defeat to its code of values. Those values would be undermined and the door would be opened to further political attacks that would hack away at the foundations of the system.</p>
+<p>Now it’s true that the U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to ban cloning of human beings, and at least some congressmen even gave the right kinds of reasons for doing so. The reasons I read about were framed in religious terms, but whatever you may think of the religious terms involved, these reasons were not technologically acceptable reasons. And that is what counts.</p>
+<p>Thus, the congressmen’s vote on human cloning was a genuine defeat for the system. But it was only a very, very small defeat, because of the narrow scope of the ban — only one tiny part of biotechnology was affected — and because for the near future cloning of human beings would be of little practical use to the system anyway. But the House of Representatives’ action does suggest that this may be a point at which the system is vulnerable, and that a broader attack on all of biotechnology might inflict severe damage on the system and its values.</p>
+<h2 id="9-radicals-are-not-yet-attacking-biotech-effectively">9. Radicals Are Not Yet Attacking Biotech Effectively.</h2>
+<p>Some radicals do attack the biotechnology, whether politically or physically, but as far as I know they explain their opposition to biotech in terms of the system’s own values. That is, their main complaints are the risks of environmental damage and of harm to health.</p>
+<p>And they are not hitting the biotech industry where it hurts. To use an analogy of physical combat once again, suppose you had to defend yourself against a giant octopus. You would not be able to fight back effectively by hacking at the tips of its tentacles. You have to strike at its head. From what I’ve read of their activities, radicals who work against biotechnology still do no more than hack at the tips of the octopus’s tentacles. They try to persuade ordinary farmers, individually, to refrain from planting genetically-engineered seed. But there are many thousands of farms in America, so that persuading farmers individually is an extremely inefficient way to combat genetic engineering. It would be much more effective to persuade research scientists engaged in biotechnological work, or executives of companies like Monsanto, to leave the biotech industry. Good research scientists are people who have special talents and extensive training, so they are difficult to replace. The same is true of top corporate executives. Persuading just a few of these people to get out of biotech would do more damage to the biotechnology industry than persuading a thousand farmers not to plant genetically-engineered seed.</p>
+<h2 id="10-hit-where-it-hurts">10. Hit Where It Hurts.</h2>
+<p>It is open to argument whether I am right in thinking that biotechnology is the best issue on which to attack the system politically. But it is beyond argument that radicals today are wasting much of their energy on issues that have little or no relevance to the survival of the technological system. And even when they do address the right issues, radicals do not hit where it hurts. So instead of trotting off to the next world trade summit to have temper tantrums over globalization, radicals ought to put in some time thinking how to hit the system where it really hurts. By legal means, of course.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
Updated the Css Again (prefers-color-scheme)
+ Wed, 05 Apr 2023 16:58:44 +0300
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/updates/updated-the-css-again/
+ <p>I actually updated the css once more.</p>
+<p>If you’re using a dark theme in your browser, the website will follow suit and change to darker colors.</p>
+<p>I did this by setting the light theme to be by default for more readability:</p>
+<div class="highlight"><pre tabindex="0" style="color:#b0c4de;background-color:#282c34;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4;"><code class="language-css" data-lang="css"><span style="display:flex;"><span>:<span style="color:#e5c07b">root</span> {
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span> <span style="color:#dcaeea">--bg</span>: <span style="color:#d19a66">#fafafa</span>;
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span> <span style="color:#dcaeea">--fg</span>: <span style="color:#d19a66">#2f343f</span>;
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span> <span style="color:#dcaeea">--links</span>: <span style="color:#d19a66">#4084d6</span>;
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span> <span style="color:#dcaeea">--muted_text</span>: <span style="color:#ef8383">rgb</span>(<span style="color:#d19a66">93</span>, <span style="color:#d19a66">93</span>, <span style="color:#d19a66">99</span>);
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span>}
+</span></span></code></pre></div><p>and then this checks that if the user prefers a darker theme, they shall get a dark theme. Simple as that really, I didn’t know this stuff existed, thought webshits just use java script for everything, but I guess I’m wrong.</p>
+<div class="highlight"><pre tabindex="0" style="color:#b0c4de;background-color:#282c34;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4;"><code class="language-css" data-lang="css"><span style="display:flex;"><span>@<span style="color:#c678dd">media</span> <span style="color:#c7bf54">(</span><span style="color:#e06c75">prefers-color-scheme</span><span style="color:#c7bf54">:</span> <span style="color:#e06c75">dark</span><span style="color:#c7bf54">)</span> {
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span> :<span style="color:#e5c07b">root</span> {
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span> <span style="color:#dcaeea">--bg</span>: <span style="color:#d19a66">#141414</span>;
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span> <span style="color:#dcaeea">--fg</span>: <span style="color:#ef8383">rgb</span>(<span style="color:#d19a66">232</span>, <span style="color:#d19a66">228</span>, <span style="color:#d19a66">228</span>);
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span> <span style="color:#dcaeea">--links</span>: <span style="color:#d19a66">#5da0f2</span>;
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span> <span style="color:#dcaeea">--muted_text</span>: <span style="color:#ef8383">rgb</span>(<span style="color:#d19a66">179</span>, <span style="color:#d19a66">182</span>, <span style="color:#d19a66">186</span>);
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span> }
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span>}
+</span></span></code></pre></div><p>And this is how CSS variables are used:</p>
+<div class="highlight"><pre tabindex="0" style="color:#b0c4de;background-color:#282c34;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4;"><code class="language-css" data-lang="css"><span style="display:flex;"><span><span style="color:#e06c75">body</span> {
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span> <span style="color:#c678dd">font-family</span>: <span style="color:#b756ff;font-weight:bold">sans-serif</span>;
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span> <span style="color:#c678dd">background</span>: <span style="color:#00b1f7">var</span>(<span style="color:#c7bf54">--</span><span style="color:#c1abea">bg</span>);
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span> <span style="color:#c678dd">color</span>: <span style="color:#00b1f7">var</span>(<span style="color:#c7bf54">--</span><span style="color:#c1abea">fg</span>);
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span>}
+</span></span></code></pre></div>
+
+
+ -
+
Ship of Fools
+ Sat, 01 Apr 2023 14:48:01 +0300
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/ship-of-fools/
+ <p>Once upon a time, the captain and the mates of a ship grew so vain of their seamanship, so full of hubris and so impressed with themselves, that they went mad. They turned the ship north and sailed until they met with icebergs and dangerous floes, and they kept sailing north into more and more perilous waters, solely in order to give themselves opportunities to perform ever-more-brilliant feats of seamanship.</p>
+<p>As the ship reached higher and higher latitudes, the passengers and crew became increasingly uncomfortable. They began quarreling among themselves and complaining of the conditions under which they lived.</p>
+<p>“Shiver me timbers,” said an able seaman, “if this ain’t the worst voyage I’ve ever been on. The deck is slick with ice; when I’m on lookout the wind cuts through me jacket like a knife; every time I reef the foresail I blamed-near freeze me fingers; and all I get for it is a miserable five shillings a month!”</p>
+<p>“You think you have it bad!” said a lady passenger. “I can’t sleep at night for the cold. Ladies on this ship don’t get as many blankets as the men. It isn’t fair!”</p>
+<p>A Mexican sailor chimed in: “¡Chingado! I’m only getting half the wages of the Anglo seamen. We need plenty of food to keep us warm in this climate, and I’m not getting my share; the Anglos get more. And the worst of it is that the mates always give me orders in English instead of Spanish.”</p>
+<p>“I have more reason to complain than anybody,” said an American Indian sailor. “If the palefaces hadn’t robbed me of my ancestral lands, I wouldn’t even be on this ship, here among the icebergs and arctic winds. I would just be paddling a canoe on a nice, placid lake. I deserve compensation. At the very least, the captain should let me run a crap game so that I can make some money.”</p>
+<p>The bosun spoke up: “Yesterday the first mate called me a ‘fruit’ just because I suck cocks. I have a right to suck cocks without being called names for it!”</p>
+<p>It’s not only humans who are mistreated on this ship,” interjected an animal-lover among the passengers, her voice quivering with indignation. “Why, last week I saw the second mate kick the ship’s dog twice!”</p>
+<p>One of the passengers was a college professor. Wringing his hands he exclaimed,</p>
+<p>“All this is just awful! It’s immoral! It’s racism, sexism, speciesism, homophobia, and exploitation of the working class! It’s discrimination! We must have social justice: Equal wages for the Mexican sailor, higher wages for all sailors, compensation for the Indian, equal blankets for the ladies, a guaranteed right to suck cocks, and no more kicking the dog!”</p>
+<p>“Yes, yes!” shouted the passengers. “Aye-aye!” shouted the crew. “It’s discrimination! We have to demand our rights!”</p>
+<p>The cabin boy cleared his throat.</p>
+<p>“Ahem. You all have good reasons to complain. But it seems to me that what we really have to do is get this ship turned around and headed back south, because if we keep going north we’re sure to be wrecked sooner or later, and then your wages, your blankets, and your right to suck cocks won’t do you any good, because we’ll all drown.”</p>
+<p>But no one paid any attention to him, because he was only the cabin boy.</p>
+<p>The captain and the mates, from their station on the poop deck, had been watching and listening. Now they smiled and winked at one another, and at a gesture from the captain the third mate came down from the poop deck, sauntered over to where the passengers and crew were gathered, and shouldered his way in amongst them. He put a very serious expression on his face and spoke thusly:</p>
+<p>“We officers have to admit that some really inexcusable things have been happening on this ship. We hadn’t realized how bad the situation was until we heard your complaints. We are men of good will and want to do right by you. But — well — the captain is rather conservative and set in his ways, and may have to be prodded a bit before he’ll make any substantial changes. My personal opinion is that if you protest vigorously — but always peacefully and without violating any of the ship’s rules — you would shake the captain out of his inertia and force him to address the problems of which you so justly complain.”</p>
+<p>Having said this, the third mate headed back toward the poop deck. As he went, the passengers and crew called after him, “Moderate! Reformer! Goody-liberal! Captain’s stooge!” But they nevertheless did as he said. They gathered in a body before the poop deck, shouted insults at the officers, and demanded their rights: “I want higher wages and better working conditions,” cried the able seaman. “Equal blankets for women,” cried the lady passenger. “I want to receive my orders in Spanish,” cried the Mexican sailor. “I want the right to run a crap game,” cried the Indian sailor. “I don’t want to be called a fruit,” cried the bosun. “No more kicking the dog,” cried the animal lover. “Revolution now,” cried the professor.</p>
+<p>The captain and the mates huddled together and conferred for several minutes, winking, nodding and smiling at one another all the while. Then the captain stepped to the front of the poop deck and, with a great show of benevolence, announced that the able seaman’s wages would be raised to six shillings a month; the Mexican sailor’s wages would be raised to two-thirds the wages of an Anglo seaman, and the order to reef the foresail would be given in Spanish; lady passengers would receive one more blanket; the Indian sailor would be allowed to run a crap game on Saturday nights; the bosun wouldn’t be called a fruit as long as he kept his cocksucking strictly private; and the dog wouldn’t be kicked unless he did something really naughty, such as stealing food from the galley.</p>
+<p>The passengers and crew celebrated these concessions as a great victory, but the next morning, they were again feeling dissatisfied.</p>
+<p>“Six shillings a month is a pittance, and I still freeze me fingers when I reef the foresail,” grumbled the able seaman. “I’m still not getting the same wages as the Anglos, or enough food for this climate,” said the Mexican sailor. “We women still don’t have enough blankets to keep us warm,” said the lady passenger. The other crewmen and passengers voiced similar complaints, and the professor egged them on.</p>
+<p>When they were done, the cabin boy spoke up — louder this time so that the others could not easily ignore him:</p>
+<p>“It’s really terrible that the dog gets kicked for stealing a bit of bread from the galley, and that women don’t have equal blankets, and that the able seaman gets his fingers frozen; and I don’t see why the bosun shouldn’t suck cocks if he wants to. But look how thick the icebergs are now, and how the wind blows harder and harder! We’ve got to turn this ship back toward the south, because if we keep going north we’ll be wrecked and drowned.”</p>
+<p>“Oh yes,” said the bosun, “It’s just so awful that we keep heading north. But why should I have to keep cocksucking in the closet? Why should I be called a fruit? Ain’t I as good as everyone else?”</p>
+<p>“Sailing north is terrible,” said the lady passenger. “But don’t you see? That’s exactly why women need more blankets to keep them warm. I demand equal blankets for women now!”</p>
+<p>“It’s quite true,” said the professor, “that sailing to the north imposes great hardships on all of us. But changing course toward the south would be unrealistic. You can’t turn back the clock. We must find a mature way of dealing with the situation.”</p>
+<p>“Look,” said the cabin boy, “If we let those four madmen up on the poop deck have their way, we’ll all be drowned. If we ever get the ship out of danger, then we can worry about working conditions, blankets for women, and the right to suck cocks. But first we’ve got to get this vessel turned around. If a few of us get together, make a plan, and show some courage, we can save ourselves. It wouldn’t take many of us — six or eight would do. We could charge the poop, chuck those lunatics overboard, and turn the ship to the south.”</p>
+<p>The professor elevated his nose and said sternly, “I don’t believe in violence. It’s immoral.”</p>
+<p>“It’s unethical ever to use violence,” said the bosun.</p>
+<p>“I’m terrified of violence,” said the lady passenger.</p>
+<p>The captain and the mates had been watching and listening all the while. At a signal from the captain, the third mate stepped down to the main deck. He went about among the passengers and crew, telling them that there were still many problems on the ship.</p>
+<p>“We have made much progress,” he said, “But much remains to be done. Working conditions for the able seaman are still hard, the Mexican still isn’t getting the same wages as the Anglos, the women still don’t have quite as many blankets as the men, the Indian’s Saturday-night crap game is a paltry compensation for his lost lands, it’s unfair to the bosun that he has to keep his cocksucking in the closet, and the dog still gets kicked at times.</p>
+<p>“I think the captain needs to be prodded again. It would help if you all would put on another protest — as long as it remains nonviolent.”</p>
+<p>As the third mate walked back toward the stern, the passengers and the crew shouted insults after him, but they nevertheless did what he said and gathered in front of the poop deck for another protest. They ranted and raved and brandished their fists, and they even threw a rotten egg at the captain (which he skillfully dodged).</p>
+<p>After hearing their complaints, the captain and the mates huddled for a conference, during which they winked and grinned broadly at one another. Then the captain stepped to the front of the poop deck and announced that the able seaman would be given gloves to keep his fingers warm, the Mexican sailor would receive wages equal to three-fourths the wages of an Anglo seaman, the women would receive yet another blanket, the Indian sailor could run a crap game on Saturday and Sunday nights, the bosun would be allowed to suck cocks publicly after dark, and no one could kick the dog without special permission from the captain.</p>
+<p>The passengers and crew were ecstatic over this great revolutionary victory, but by the next morning they were again feeling dissatisfied and began grumbling about the same old hardships.</p>
+<p>The cabin boy this time was getting angry.</p>
+<p>“You damn fools!” he shouted. “Don’t you see what the captain and the mates are doing? They’re keeping you occupied with your trivial grievances about blankets and wages and the dog being kicked so that you won’t think about what is really wrong with this ship — that it’s getting farther and farther to the north and we’re all going to be drowned. If just a few of you would come to your senses, get together, and charge the poop deck, we could turn this ship around and save ourselves. But all you do is whine about petty little issues like working conditions and crap games and the right to suck cocks.”</p>
+<p>The passengers and the crew were incensed.</p>
+<p>“Petty!!” cried the Mexican, “Do you think it’s reasonable that I get only three-fourths the wages of an Anglo sailor? Is that petty?”</p>
+<p>“How can you call my grievance trivial? shouted the bosun. “Don’t you know how humiliating it is to be called a fruit?”</p>
+<p>“Kicking the dog is not a ‘petty little issue!’” screamed the animal-lover. “It’s heartless, cruel, and brutal!”</p>
+<p>“Alright then,” answered the cabin boy. “These issues are not petty and trivial. Kicking the dog is cruel and brutal and it is humiliating to be called a fruit. But in comparison to our real problem — in comparison to the fact that the ship is still heading north — your grievances are petty and trivial, because if we don’t get this ship turned around soon, we’re all going to drown.”</p>
+<p>“Fascist!” said the professor.</p>
+<p>“Counterrevolutionary!” said the lady passenger. And all of the passengers and crew chimed in one after another, calling the cabin boy a fascist and a counterrevolutionary. They pushed him away and went back to grumbling about wages, and about blankets for women, and about the right to suck cocks, and about how the dog was treated. The ship kept sailing north, and after a while it was crushed between two icebergs and everyone drowned.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<p><a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library">Back to the Library</a> - <a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski">More from Ted Kaczynski</a></p>
+</div>
+<hr>
+
+
+ -
+
The Long Term Outcome of Geo Engineering
+ Sat, 01 Apr 2023 14:46:30 +0300
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-long-term-outcome-of-geo-engineering/
+ <p>In 2009, a correspondent asked me whether I thought nuclear weapons were the most dangerous aspect of modern technology. What follows is my reply, heavily rewritten. The most dangerous aspect of modern technology probably is not nuclear weapons. It could plausibly be argued that the remedies for global warming that are likely to be adopted constitute the most dangerous aspect of modern technology.</p>
+<p>Nations have a strong incentive to avoid using nuclear weapons, at least on any large scale, because such use would probably be suicidal. This doesn’t mean that nuclear war can never happen. On the contrary, the risk of it is very real. But a major nuclear war at least is not a strong probability for the foreseeable future.</p>
+<p>On the other hand, it is virtually certain that nations will fail to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide sufficiently and in time to prevent global warming from becoming disastrous. Instead, global warming will be kept in check through “geo-engineering.” This means that the Earth’s climate will be artificially managed to keep it within acceptable limits. Of the many tools that have been proposed for management of the Earth’s climate, three examples may be mentioned here:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>
+<p>Powdered iron can be dumped into the oceans to stimulate the growth of plankton that will absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Microbes or other organisms may be genetically engineered to consume atmospheric carbon dioxide.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Carbon dioxide may be pumped into underground reservoirs for permanent storage there.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<p>Any attempt at geo-engineering will entail a grave risk of immediate catastrophe. “Geo-engineering makes the problem of ballistic-missile defense look easy. It has to work the first time, and just right.” Novel technological solutions usually have to be corrected repeatedly through trial and error; rarely do they work “the first time, and just right,” and that’s why people “quite rightly see [geo-engineering] as a scary thing.”</p>
+<p>But let’s assume that geo-engineering does work the first time and just right. Even so, there is every reason to expect that the longer-term consequences will be catastrophic.</p>
+<p>First: Attempts to meddle with the environment almost always have unforeseen, undesirable consequences. In order to correct the undesirable consequences, further meddling with the environment is required. This in turn has other unforeseen consequences … and so forth. In trying to solve our problems by tinkering with the environment we just get ourselves deeper and deeper into trouble.</p>
+<p>Second: For hundreds of millions of years, natural processes have kept the Earth’s climate and the composition of its atmosphere within limits that have allowed the survival and evolution of complex forms of life. Sometimes during this period the climate has varied enough to cause the extinction of numerous species, but it has not become so extreme as to wipe out all of the most complex organisms. When human beings have taken over the management of the Earth’s climate, the natural processes that have kept the climate within livable limits will lose their capacity to perform that function. The climate will then be entirely dependent on human management. Since the Earth’s climate is a worldwide phenomenon, it cannot be managed by independent local groups; its management will have to be organized on a worldwide basis and therefore will require rapid, worldwide communication. For this reason among others, management of the Earth’s climate will be dependent on technological civilization. Every past civilization has broken down eventually, and modern technological civilization likewise will break down sooner or later. When that happens, the system of human climate-management necessarily will break down too. Because the natural processes that kept the climate within certain limits will be defunct, the Earth’s climate can be expected to go haywire. In all probability the Earth will become too hot or too cold for the survival of complex life-forms, or the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere will sink too low, or the atmosphere will become contaminated with toxic gasses, or some other atmospheric disaster will occur.</p>
+<p>Third: When the Earth has a managed climate, maintenance of the technological system will be considered essential for survival because, as has just been pointed out, the breakdown of the technological system will probably lead to radical and fatal disruption of the climate. The elimination of the technological system, through revolution or by any other means, would be almost equivalent to suicide. Because the system will be seen as indispensable for survival, it will be virtually immune to challenge. The elite of our society-the scientists and engineers, the corporation executives, the government officials and the politicians-are afraid of nuclear war because it would lead to their own destruction. But they will be delighted to see the system that gives them their power and their status become indispensable and therefore immune to any serious challenge. Consequently, while they will make every effort to avoid nuclear war, they will be quite pleased to undertake management of the Earth’s climate.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<p><a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library">Back to the Library</a> - <a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski">More from Ted Kaczynski</a></p>
+</div>
+<hr>
+
+
+ -
+
Ecofascism an Aberrant Branch of Leftism
+ Sat, 01 Apr 2023 14:45:00 +0300
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/ecofascism-an-aberrant-branch-of-leftism/
+ <p>The “ecofascists,” as I understand that term, share, at a minimum, two traits:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>They do not advocate total rejection of modern technology; instead, they want to create a society in which technology will be “limited and “wisely” used in such a way as to ensure the ecological health of our planet.</li>
+<li>They support, if not white supremacism, then at least white separatism.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>First let’s take trait I. In essence, the ecofascists want a planned society, which means quite simply that they are socialists, for the fundamental idea of socialism is that of the planned society.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> The illusion of the planned society originated in the Enlightenment, when certain philosophers, misled by the successful application of scientific rationality to the physical world, imagined that scientific rationality could be applied with equal success to the development of human societies. This illusion should long since have been dispelled by what we have learned since the 18th century; but the leftists of today, including the ecofascists, persist in clinging to it.</p>
+<p>Back in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, many people on the left referred to my writings as if I were an ideological comrade of theirs. They were able to do this only as a result of selective reading: They failed to perceive or failed to remember the parts of my work that were radically inconsistent with their ideology. These ecofascists who cite my work today, or claim me as an inspiration, are similarly engaged in selective reading: They completely overlook crucial parts of my work; for example, Chapter One of Anti-Tech Revolution, wherein it is demonstrated that the development of a society can never be subject to rational human guidance. On this basis alone, one can predict with perfect certainty that any attempt on the part of ecofascists — or anyone else — to establish and maintain a stable, worldwide balance between technology and ecological health will fail.</p>
+<p>Now let’s look at trait II. The true anti-tech movement rejects every form of racism or ethnocentrism. This has nothing to do with “tolerance,” “diversity,” “pluralism,” “multiculturalism,” “equality,” or “social justice.” The rejection of racism and ethnocentrism is — purely and simply — a cardinal point of strategy.</p>
+<p>Any movement that aims to limit technology has to be worldwide because if technological progress is cut back in one part of the world while another part of the world continues to follow the path of unrestrained technological development, then the fully technological pact of the world will have a vast preponderance of power over the less technological part. Sooner or later (probably sooner) the fully technological part of the world will take control of the other part in order to exploit its resources. To mention only the most obvious example, if technological progress is restrained in the United States while China continues down its present technological path, then China will dominate the world and will take whatever it wants of America’s natural resources — regardless of the wishes of Americans.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></p>
+<p>For obvious reasons, a white-supremacist movement cannot be worldwide. Even if a movement does not claim superiority for any one race or culture, but merely insists on keeping the world’s various races or cultures separate and distinct, it will not be able to bring technology under control, because its separatist attitude will inevitably promote rivalry and/or suspicion among the various races or ethnic groups. Each race or ethnic group, for the sake of its own security, will try to make sure that it has more power — and therefore more technology — than other races or ethnic groups. It follows that any movement that seeks to limit technology must make every effort to minimize divisions or differences among races or ethnic groups.<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup> Purely as a matter of strategy, racial and cultural blending must be promoted.</p>
+<p>The ecofascists need to read ISAIF, Technological Slavery, and Anti-Tech Revolution CAREFULLY. Doing so will not change their beliefs — which are based solely on emotion, not on reason — but at least it may prevent them from calling me an “inspiration” and citing my works in support of their ideology. It should show them that I am their adversary.</p>
+<p>The ecofascists’ fixation on race puts them in the same family with the leftists, who likewise are fixated on race. The difference between the two is only that to the ecofascists the “white” race is the hero of the story, whereas the ordinary left makes the same race into the villain. The ecofascists and the ordinary leftists are only two sides of the same (counterfeit) coin.</p>
+<p>Ted Kaczynski</p>
+<p>September 29, 2020</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<p><a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library">Back to the Library</a> - <a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski">More from Ted Kaczynski</a></p>
+</div><div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p>Sophisticated modern socialists don’t contemplate the elimination of all private enterprise; they merely want private enterprise to be limited and controlled in such a way that it will play the role assigned to it in their overall plan for society. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p>See ISAIF, paragraph 195. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:3">
+<p>See ISAIF, paragraphs 191&192, and Technological Slavery, 2019 Fitch & Madison edition, Volume One, page 178. <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
The Road to Revolution
+ Sat, 01 Apr 2023 14:37:31 +0300
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-road-to-revolution/
+ <blockquote>
+<p>The revolution is not a dinner party… – Mao Zedong<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>A great revolution is brewing. What this means is that the necessary preconditions for revolution are being created. Whether the revolution will become a reality will depend on the courage, determination, persistence, and effectiveness of revolutionaries.</p>
+<p>The necessary preconditions for revolution<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> are these: There must be a strong development of values that are inconsistent with the values of the dominant classes in society, and the realization of the new values must be impossible without a collapse of the existing structure of society.</p>
+<p>When these conditions are present, there arises an irreconcilable conflict between the new values and the values that are necessary for the maintenance of the existing structure. The tension between the two systems of values grows and can be resolved only through the eventual defeat of one of the two. If the new system of values is vigorous enough, it will prove victorious and the existing structure of society will be destroyed.</p>
+<p>This is the way in which the two greatest revolutions of modern times—the French and Russian Revolutions—came about. Just such a conflict of values is building up in our society today. If the conflict becomes sufficiently intense, it will lead to the greatest revolution that the world has ever seen.</p>
+<p>The central structure of modern society, the key element on which everything else depends, is technology. Technology is the principal factor determining the way in which modern people live and is the decisive force in modern history. This is the expressed opinion of various learned thinkers,<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup> and I doubt that many serious historians could be found who would venture to disagree with it. However, you don’t have to rely on learned opinions to realize that technology is the decisive factor in the modern world. Just look around you and you can see it yourself. Despite the vast differences that formerly existed between the cultures of the various industrialized countries, all of these countries are now converging rapidly toward a common culture and a common way of life, and they are doing so because of their common technology.</p>
+<p>Because technology is the central structure of modern society—the structure on which everything else depends—the strong development of values totally inconsistent with the needs of the technological system would fulfill the preconditions for revolution. This kind of development is taking place right now.</p>
+<p>Fifty years ago, when I was a kid, warm approval or even enthusiasm for technology were almost universal. By 1962 I had become hostile toward technology myself, but I wouldn’t have dared to express that opinion openly, for in those days nearly everyone assumed that only a kook, or maybe a Bible-thumper from the backwoods of Mississippi, could oppose technology. I now know that even at that time there were a few thinkers who wrote critically about technology. But they were so rare and so little heard from that until I was almost 30 years old I never knew that anyone but myself opposed technological progress.</p>
+<p>Since then there has been a profound change in attitudes toward technology. Of course, most people in our society don’t have an attitude toward technology, because they never bother to think about technology as such. If the advertising industry teaches them to buy some new techno-gizmo, then they will buy it and play with it, but they won’t think about it. The change in attitudes toward technology has occurred among the minority of people who think seriously about the society in which they live.</p>
+<p>As far as I know, almost the only thinking people who remain enthusiastic about technology are those who stand to profit from it in some way, such as scientists, engineers, corporate executives and military men. A much larger number of people are cynical about modern society and have lost faith in its institutions. They no longer respect a political system in which the most despicable candidates can be successfully sold to the public through sophisticated propaganda techniques. They are contemptuous of an electronic entertainment industry that feeds us garbage. They know that schoolchildren are being drugged (with Ritalin, etc.) to keep them docile in the classroom, they know that species are becoming extinct at an abnormal rate, that environmental catastrophe is a very real possibility, and that technology is driving us all into the unknown at reckless speed, with consequences that may be utterly disastrous. But, because they have no hope that the technological juggernaut can be stopped, they have grown apathetic. They simply accept technological progress and its consequences as unavoidable evils, and they try not to think about the future.</p>
+<p>But at the same time there are growing numbers of people, especially young people, who are willing to face squarely the appalling character of what the technoindustrial system is doing to the world. They are prepared to reject the values of the technoindustrial system and replace them with opposing values. They are willing to dispense with the physical security and comfort, the Disney-like toys, and the easy solutions to all problems that technology provides. They don’t need the kind of status that comes from owning more and better material goods than one’s neighbor does. In place of these spiritually empty values they are ready to embrace a lifestyle of moderation that rejects the obscene level of consumption that characterizes the technoindustrial way of life; they are capable of opting for courage and independence in place of modern man’s cowardly servitude; and above all they are prepared to discard the technological ideal of human control over nature and replace it with reverence for the totality of all life on Earth—free and wild as it was created through hundreds of millions of years of evolution.</p>
+<p>How can we use this change of attitude to lay the foundation for a revolution?</p>
+<p>One of our tasks, obviously, is to help promote the growth of the new values and spread revolutionary ideas that will encourage active opposition to the technoindustrial system. But spreading ideas, by itself, is not very effective. Consider the response of a person who is exposed to revolutionary ideas. Let’s assume that she or he is a thoughtful person who is sickened on hearing or reading of the horrors that technology has in store for the world, but feels stimulated and hopeful on learning that better, richer, more fulfilling ways of life are possible. What happens next?</p>
+<p>Maybe nothing. In order to maintain an interest in revolutionary ideas, people have to have hope that those ideas will actually be put into effect, and they need to have an opportunity to participate personally in carrying out the ideas. If a person who has been exposed to revolutionary ideas is not offered anything practical that she can do against the techosystem, and if nothing significant is going on to keep her hope alive, she will probably lose interest. Additional exposures to the revolutionary message will have less and less effect on her the more times they are repeated, until eventually she becomes completely apathetic and refuses to think any further about the technology problem.</p>
+<p>In order to hold people’s interest, revolutionaries have to show them that things are happening—significant things—and they have to give people an opportunity to participate actively in working toward revolution. For this reason an effective revolutionary movement is necessary, a movement that is capable of making things happen, and that interested people can join or cooperate with so as to take an active part in preparing the way for revolution. Unless such a movement grows hand-in-hand with the spread of ideas, the ideas will prove relatively useless.</p>
+<p>For the present, therefore, the most important task of revolutionaries is to build an effective movement.</p>
+<p>The effectiveness of a revolutionary movement is not measured only by the number of people who belong to it. Far more important than the numerical strength of a movement are its cohesiveness, its determination, its commitment to a well-defined goal, its courage, and its stubborn persistence. Possessing these qualities, a surprisingly small number of people can outweigh the vacillating and uncommitted majority. For example, the Bolsheviks were never a numerically large party, yet it was they who determined the course that the Russian Revolution took. (I hasten to add that I am NOT an admirer of the Bolsheviks. To them, human beings were of value only as gears in the technological system. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn lessons from the history of Bolshevism.)</p>
+<p>An effective revolutionary movement will not worry too much about public opinion. Of course, a revolutionary movement should not offend public opinion when it has no good reason to do so. But the movement should never sacrifice its integrity by compromising its basic principles in the face of public hostility. Catering to public opinion may bring short-term advantage, but in the long run the movement will have its best chance of success if it sticks to its principles through thick and thin, no matter how unpopular those principles may become, and if it is willing to go head-to-head against the system on the fundamental issues even when the odds are all against the movement. A movement that backs off or compromises when the going gets tough is likely to lose its cohesiveness or turn into a wishy-washy reform movement. Maintaining the cohesion and integrity of the movement, and proving its courage, are far more important than keeping the goodwill of the general public. The public is fickle, and its goodwill can turn to hostility and back again overnight.</p>
+<p>A revolutionary movement needs patience and persistence. It may have to wait several decades before the occasion for revolution arrives, and during those decades it has to occupy itself with preparing the way for revolution This was what the revolutionary movement in Russia did. Patience and persistence often payoff in the long run, even contrary to all expectation. History provides many examples of seemingly lost causes that won out in the end because of the stubborn persistence of their adherents, their refusal to accept defeat.</p>
+<p>On the other hand, the occasion for revolution may arrive unexpectedly, and a revolutionary movement has to be well prepared in advance to take advantage of the occasion when it does arrive. It is said that the Bolsheviks never expected to see a revolution in their own lifetimes, yet, because their movement was well constituted for decisive action at any time, they were able to make effective use of the unforeseen breakdown of the Tsarist regime and the ensuing chaos.</p>
+<p>Above all, a revolutionary movement must have courage. A revolution in the modern world will be no dinner party. It will be deadly and brutal. You can be sure that when the technoindustrial system begins to break down, the result will not be the sudden conversion of the entire human race into flower children. Instead, various groups will compete for power. If the opponents of technology prove toughest, they will be able to assure that the breakdown of the technosystem becomes complete and final. If other groups prove tougher, they may be able to salvage the technosystem and get it running again. Thus, an effective revolutionary movement must consist of people who are willing to pay the price that a real revolution demands: They must be ready to face disaster, suffering, and death.</p>
+<p>There already is a revolutionary movement of sorts, but it is of low effectiveness.</p>
+<p>First, the existing movement is of low effectiveness because it is not focused on a clear, definite goal. Instead, it has a hodgepodge of vaguely-defined goals such as an end to “domination,” protection of the environment, and “justice” (whatever that means) for women, gays, and animals.</p>
+<p>Most of these goals are not even revolutionary ones. As was pointed out at the beginning of this article, a precondition for revolution is the development of values that can be realized only through the destruction of the existing structure of society. But, to take an example, feminist goals such as equal status for women and an end to rape and domestic abuse are perfectly compatible with the existing structure of society. In fact, realization of these goals would even make the technoindustrial system function more efficiently. The same applies to most other “activist” goals. Consequently, these goals are reformist.</p>
+<p>Among so many other goals, the one truly revolutionary goal—namely, the destruction of the technoindustrial system itself—tends to get lost in the shuffle. For revolution to become a reality, it is necessary that there should emerge a movement that has a distinct identify of its own, and is dedicated solely to eliminating the technosystem. It must not be distracted by reformist goals such as justice for this or that group.</p>
+<p>Second, the existing movement is of low effectiveness because too many of the people in the movement are there for the wrong reasons. For some of them, revolution is just a vague and indefinite hope rather than a real and practical goal. Some are concerned more with their own special grievances than with the overall problem of technological civilization. For others, revolution is only a kind of game that they play as an outlet for rebellious impulses. For still others, participation in the movement is an ego-trip. They compete for status, or they write “analyses” and “critiques” that serve more to feed their own vanity than to advance the revolutionary cause.</p>
+<p>To create an effective revolutionary movement it will be necessary to gather together people for whom revolution is not an abstract theory, a vague fantasy, a mere hope for the indefinite future, or a game played as an outlet for rebellious impulses, but a real, definite, and practical goal to be worked for in a practical way.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<p><a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library">Back to the Library</a> - <a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski">More from Ted Kaczynski</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p>“Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,” in Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tsetung [=Zedong]:, Foreign Languages Press, Peking, 1971, page 30. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p>As used in this article, the term “revolution” means a radical and rapid collapse of the existing structure of a society, intentionally brought about from within the society rather than by some external factor, and contrary to the will of the dominant classes of the society. An armed rebellion, even one that overthrows a government, is not a revolution in this sense of the word unless it sweeps away the existing structure of the society in which the rebellion occurs. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:3">
+<p>Karl Marx maintained that the means of production constituted the decisive factor in determining the character of a society, but Marx lived in a time when the principal problem to which technology was applied was that of production. Because technology has so brilliantly solved the problem of production, production is no longer the decisive factor. More critical today are other problems to which technology is applied, such as processing of information and the regulation of human behavior (e.g., through propaganda). Thus Marx’s conception of the force determining the character of a society must be broadened to include all of technology and not just the technology of production. If Marx were alive today he would undoubtedly agree. <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
The Truth About Primitive Life a Critique of Anarchoprimitivism
+ Sat, 01 Apr 2023 14:34:31 +0300
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-truth-about-primitive-life-a-critique-of-anarchoprimitivism/
+ <h2 id="the-truth-about-primitive-life-a-critique-of-anarchoprimitivism">The Truth About Primitive Life a Critique of Anarchoprimitivism</h2>
+<h3 id="1">1.</h3>
+<p>As the Industrial Revolution proceeded, modern society created for itself a self-congratulatory myth, the myth of “progress”: From the time of our remote, ape-like ancestors, human history had been an unremitting march toward a better and brighter future, with everyone joyously welcoming each new technological advance: animal husbandry, agriculture, the wheel, the construction of cities, the invention of writing and of money, sailing ships, the compass, gunpowder, the printing press, the steam engine, and, at last, the crowning human achievement-modern industrial society! Prior to industrialization, nearly everyone was condemned to a miserable life of constant, backbreaking labor, malnutrition disease, and an early death. Aren’t we so lucky that we live in modern times and have lots of leisure and an array of technological conveniences to make our lives easy? Today I think there are relatively few thoughtful, honest and well-informed people who still believe in this myth. To lose one’s faith in “progress” one has only to look around and see the devastation of our environment, the spread of nuclear weapons, the excessive frequency of depression, anxiety disorders and psychological stress, the spiritual emptiness of a society that nourishes itself principally with television and computer games … one could go on and on.</p>
+<p>The myth of progress may not yet be dead, but it is dying. In its place another myth has been growing up, a myth that has been promoted especially by the anarchoprimitivists, though it is widespread in other quarters as well. According to this myth, prior to the advent of civilization no one ever had to work, people just plucked their food from the trees and popped it into their mouths and spent the rest of their time playing ring-around-the-rosie with the flower children. Men and women were equal, there was no disease, no competition, no racism, sexism or homophobia, people lived in harmony with the animals and all was love, sharing and cooperation.</p>
+<p>Admittedly, the foregoing is a caricature of the anarchoprimitivists’ vision. Most of them — I hope — are not quite as far out of touch with reality as that. They nevertheless are pretty far out of touch with it, and it’s high time for someone to debunk their myth. Because that is the purpose of this article, I will say little here about the positive aspects of primitive societies. I do want to make clear, however, that one can truthfully say about such societies a great deal that is positive. In other words, the anarchoprimitivist myth is not one hundred percent myth; it does include some elements of reality.</p>
+<h3 id="2">2.</h3>
+<p>Let’s begin with the concept of “primitive affluence”. It seems to be an article of faith among anarchoprimitivists that our hunting-and-gathering ancestors had to work an average of only two to three hours a day, or two to four hours a day … the figures given vary, but the maximum stated never exceeds four hours a day, or 28 hours a week (average). <sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> People who give these figures usually do not state precisely what they mean by “work”, but the reader is led to assume that it includes all of the activities necessary to meet the practical exigencies of the hunter-gatherers’ way of life.</p>
+<p>Characteristically, the anarchoprimitivists usually fail to cite their source for this supposed information, but it seems to be derived mainly from two essays, one by Marshall Sahlins (The Original Afluent Society <sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup>), and the other by Bob Black (Primitive Afluence <sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup>). Sahlins claimed that for the Bushmen of the Dobe region of Southern Africa, the “work week was approximately 15 hours.” <sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> For this information he relied on the studies of Richard B. Lee. I do not have direct access to Lee’s works, but I do have a copy of an article by Elizabeth Cashdan in which she summarizes Lee’s results much more carefully and completely than Sahlins does. <sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">5</a></sup> Cashdan flatly contradicts Sahlins: According to her, Lee found that the Bushmen he studied worked more than forty hours per week. <sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">6</a></sup></p>
+<p>In a part of his essay that many anarchoprimitivists have found convenient to overlook, Bob Black acknowledges the forty-hour work-week and explains the foregoing contradiction: Sahlins followed early work of Lee that considered only time spent in hunting and foraging. When all necessary work was considered, the work-week was more than doubled. <sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">7</a></sup> The work omitted from consideration by Sahlins and the anarchoprimitivists was probably the most disagreeable part of the Bushmen’s work-week, too, since it consisted largely of food-preparation and firewood collection. <sup id="fnref:8"><a href="#fn:8" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">8</a></sup> I speak from extensive personal experience with wild foods: Preparing such foods for use is very often a pain in the neck. It is far more pleasant to gather nuts, dig roots, or hunt game than it is to crack nuts, clean roots, or skin and butcher game — or to collect firewood and cook over an open fire.</p>
+<p>The anarchoprimitivists also err in assuming that Lee’s findings can be applied to hunter-gatherers generally. It’s not even clear that those findings are applicable on a year-round basis to the Bushmen studied by Lee. Cashdan cites evidence that Lee’s research may have been done at the time of year when his Bushmen worked least. <sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> She also mentions two other hunting-and-gathering peoples who have been shown quantitatively to spend far more time in hunting and foraging than Lee’s Bushmen did, <sup id="fnref:10"><a href="#fn:10" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">10</a></sup> and she points out that Lee may have seriously underestimated women’s working time because he failed to include time spent on childcare. <sup id="fnref:11"><a href="#fn:11" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">11</a></sup></p>
+<p>I’m not familiar with any other exact quantitative studies of hunter gatherers’ working time, but it is certain that at least some additional hunter-gatherers worked a great deal more than the forty-hour week of Lee’s Bushmen. Gontran de Poncins stated that the Eskimos with whom he lived about 1939–1940 had “no significant degree of leisure”, and that they “toiled and moiled fifteen hours a day merely in order to get food and stay alive.” <sup id="fnref:12"><a href="#fn:12" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">12</a></sup> He probably did not mean that they worked fifteen hours every day; but it’s clear from his account that his Eskimos worked plenty hard.</p>
+<p>Among the Mbuti pygmies principally studied by Paul Schebesta, on days when the women did not fetch a supply of fruits and vegetables from the gardens of their village-dwelling neighbors, their gathering excursions in the forest lasted between five and six hours. Apart from their food-gathering, the women had considerable additional work to do. Each afternoon, for example, a woman had to go again into the forest and come back to camp panting and bowed under a huge load of firewood. The women worked far more than the men, but it seems clear from Schebesta’s account that the men nevertheless worked much more than the three or four hours a day claimed by the anarchoprimitivists. <sup id="fnref:13"><a href="#fn:13" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">13</a></sup> Colin Turnbull studied Mbuti pygmies who hunted with nets. Due to the advantage conferred by the nets, these Mbuti only needed to hunt about twenty hours per week. But for them: “Netmaking is virtually a full-time occupation… in which both men and women indulge whenever they have both the spare time and the inclination.” <sup id="fnref:14"><a href="#fn:14" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">14</a></sup> The Siriono, who lived in a tropical forest in Bolivia, were not pure hunter-gatherers, since they did plant crops to a limited extent at certain times of the year. But they lived mostly by hunting and gathering. <sup id="fnref:15"><a href="#fn:15" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">15</a></sup> According to the anthropologist Holmberg, Siriono men hunted, on average, every other day. <sup id="fnref:16"><a href="#fn:16" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">16</a></sup> They started at daybreak and returned to camp typically between four and six o’clock in the afternoon. <sup id="fnref:17"><a href="#fn:17" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">17</a></sup> This makes on average at least eleven hours of hunting, and at three and a half days a week it comes to 38 hours of hunting per week, at the least. Since the men also did a significant amount of work on days when they did not hunt, <sup id="fnref:18"><a href="#fn:18" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">18</a></sup> their work-week, averaged over the year, had to be far more than 40 hours. And but little of this was agricultural work. <sup id="fnref:19"><a href="#fn:19" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">19</a></sup> Actually, Holmberg estimated that the Siriono spent about half their waking time in hunting and foraging, <sup id="fnref:20"><a href="#fn:20" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">20</a></sup> which would mean roughly 56 hours a week in these activities alone. With other work included, the work-week would have had to be far more than 60 hours. The Siriono woman “enjoys even less respite from labor than her husband”, and “the obligation of bringing her children to maturity leaves little time for rest.” <sup id="fnref:21"><a href="#fn:21" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">21</a></sup> Holmberg’s book contains many other indications of how hard the Siriono had to work. <sup id="fnref:22"><a href="#fn:22" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">22</a></sup></p>
+<p>In The Original Affluent Society, Sahlins gives, in addition to Lee’s Bushmen, other examples of hunting-and-gathering peoples who supposedly worked little, but in most of these cases he either offers no quantitative estimate of working time, or he offers an estimate only of time spent in hunting and gathering. If Lee’s Bushmen can be taken as a guide, this would be well under half the total working time. <sup id="fnref:23"><a href="#fn:23" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">23</a></sup> However, for two groups of Australian Aborigines Sahlins does give quantitative estimates of time spent in “hunting, plant collecting, preparing foods and repairing weapons.” In the first group the average weekly time each worker spent in these activities was about 26 1/2 hours; in the second group about 36 hours. But this does not include all work; it says nothing, for example, about time spent on child care, in collecting firewood, in moving camp, or in making and repairing implements other than weapons. If all necessary work were counted, the work-week of the second group would surely be over 40 hours. The work-week of the first group did not represent that of a normal hunting-and-gathering band, since the first group had no children to feed. Sahlins himself, moreover, questions the validity of inferences drawn from these data. <sup id="fnref:24"><a href="#fn:24" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">24</a></sup> Of course, even if occasional examples could be found of hunting-and-gathering peoples whose total working time was as little as three hours a day, that would matter little for present purposes, since we are concerned here not with exceptional cases but with the typical working time of hunter-gatherers. Whatever hunter-gatherers’ working hours may have been, much of their work was physically very strenuous. Siriono men typically covered about fifteen miles a day on their hunting excursions, and they sometimes covered as much as forty miles. <sup id="fnref:25"><a href="#fn:25" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">25</a></sup> Covering such a distance in trackless wilderness <sup id="fnref:26"><a href="#fn:26" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">26</a></sup> requires far more effort than covering the same distance over a road or a groomed trail.</p>
+<p>“In walking and running through swamp and jungle the naked hunter is exposed to thorns, to spines, and to insect pests… While the food quest is differentially rewarding because food for survival is always eventually obtained, it is also always punishing because of the fatigue and pain inevitably associated with hunting, fishing and collecting food.” <sup id="fnref:27"><a href="#fn:27" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">27</a></sup> “Men often dissipate their anger toward other men by hunting. … Even if they do not kill anything they return home too to be angry.” <sup id="fnref:28"><a href="#fn:28" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">28</a></sup></p>
+<p>Even picking wild fruit could be dangerous<sup id="fnref:29"><a href="#fn:29" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">29</a></sup> and could take considerable work<sup id="fnref:30"><a href="#fn:30" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">30</a></sup> for the Siriono. <sup id="fnref:31"><a href="#fn:31" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">31</a></sup> The Siriono made little use of wild roots, <sup id="fnref:32"><a href="#fn:32" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">32</a></sup> but it is well known that many hunter-gatherers relied heavily on roots for food. Usually, gathering edible roots in the wilderness is not like pulling carrots out of the soft, cultivated soil of a garden. More typically the ground is hard, or covered with tough sod that you have to hack through in order to get at the roots. I wish I could take certain anarchoprimitivists out in the mountains, show them where the edible roots grow, and invite them to get their dinner by digging for it. By the time they had enough yampa roots or camas bulbs for a halfway square meal, their blistered hands would disabuse them of any idea that primitives didn’t have to work for a living . Hunter gatherers’, work was often monotonous, too. This is true for example of root-digging when the roots are small, as is the case with many of the roots that were used by the Indians of western North America, such as bitterroot and the aforementioned yampa and camas. Picking berries is monotonous if you spend many hours at it.</p>
+<p>Or try tanning a deerskin. A raw, dry deerskin is stiff, like cardboard, and if you bend it, it will crack, just as cardboard will.</p>
+<p>In order to become usable as clothing or blankets, animal skins must be tanned. Assuming you want to leave the hair on the skin, as for winter clothing, there are only three indispensable steps to tanning a deerskin. First, you must carefully remove every bit of flesh from the skin. Fat in particular must be removed with scrupulous care, because any bit of fat left on the skin will rot it. Next, the skin must be softened. Finally, it must be smoked. If not smoked it will dry stiff and hard after a wetting and will have to be softened all over again. By far the most time-consuming step is the softening. It takes many hours of kneading the skin in your hands, or drawing it back and forth over the head of a spike driven into a block of wood, and the work is very monotonous indeed. I speak from personal experience. An argument sometimes offered is that hunter-gatherers who survived into recent times lived in tough environments, since all of the more hospitable lands had been taken over by agricultural peoples. Supposedly, prehistoric hunter-gatherers who occupied fertile country must have worked far less than recent hunter-gatherers living in deserts or other unproductive environments. <sup id="fnref:33"><a href="#fn:33" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">33</a></sup> This may be true, but the argument is speculative, and I’m skeptical of it.</p>
+<p>I’m a bit rusty now, but I used to have considerable familiarity with the edible wild plants of the eastern United States, which is one of the most fertile regions in the world, and I would be surprised if one could live and raise a family there by hunting and gathering with less than a forty-hour work-week. The region contains a wide variety of edible plants, but living off them would not be as easy as you might think. Take nuts, for example. Black walnuts, white walnuts (butternuts), and hickory nuts are extremely nutritious and often abundant. The Indians used to collect huge piles of them. <sup id="fnref:34"><a href="#fn:34" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">34</a></sup> If you found a few good trees in October, you could probably gather enough nuts in an hour or less to feed yourself for a whole day. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Yes, it does sound great — if you’ve never tried to crack a black walnut. Maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger could crack a black walnut with an ordinary nutcracker — if the nutcracker didn’t break first — but a person of average physique couldn’t do it. You have to whack the nut with a hammer; and the inside of the nut is divided up by partitions that are as thick and hard as the outer shell, so you have to break the nut into several fragments and then tediously pick out the bits of meat. The process is time-consuming. In order to get enough food for a day, you might have to spend most of the day just cracking nuts and picking out the bits of meat. Wild white walnuts (not to be confused with the domesticated English walnuts that you buy in the store) are much like black ones. Hickory nuts are not as difficult to cack, but they still have the hard internal partitions and they are usually much smaller than black walnuts. The Indians got around these problems by putting the nuts into a mortar and pounding them into tiny bits, shells, meats, and all. Then they would boil the mixture and put it aside to cool. The fragments of shell would settle to the bottom of the pot while the pulverized meats would settle in a layer above the shells; thus the meats could be separated from the shells. <sup id="fnref:35"><a href="#fn:35" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">35</a></sup> This was certainly more efficient than cracking the nuts individually, but as you can see it still required considerable work. The Indians of the eastern U.S. utilized other wild foods that required more-or-less laborious preparation to make them edible. <sup id="fnref:36"><a href="#fn:36" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">36</a></sup> It is hardly likely that they would have used such foods if foods that were more easily prepared had been readily available in sufficient quantity.</p>
+<p>Euell Gibbons, an expert on edible wild plants, reported an episode of living off the country in the eastern United States. <sup id="fnref:37"><a href="#fn:37" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">37</a></sup> It’s difficult to say what his experience tells us about primitive people’s working hours, since he did not give a quantitative accounting of the time he spent in foraging. In any case, he and his partners only foraged for food and processed it; they did not have to tan skins or make their own clothing, tools, utensils, or shelter; they had no children to feed; and they supplemented their diet with high-calorie store-bought foods: cooking-oil, sugar, and flour. On at least one occasion they used an automobile for transportation.</p>
+<p>But let’s assume for the sake of argument that in the fertile regions of the world wild foods were once so abundant that it was possible to live off the country year round with an average of only, say, three hours of work per day. With such abundant resources it would not be necessary for hunter-gatherers to travel in search of food. One would expect them to become sedentary, and in that case they would be able to accumulate wealth and form well-developed social hierarchies. Hence they would lose at least some of the qualities that anarchoprimitivists value in nomadic hunter-gatherers. Even the anarchoprimitivists do not deny that the Indians of the Northwest Coast of North America were sedentary hunter-gatherers who accumulated wealth and had well-developed social hierarchies. <sup id="fnref:38"><a href="#fn:38" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">38</a></sup> The evidence suggests the existence of similar hunting-and-gathering societies elsewhere where the abundance of natural resources permitted it, for example, along the major rivers of Europe. <sup id="fnref:39"><a href="#fn:39" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">39</a></sup> Thus the anarchoprimitivists are caught in a bind: Where natural resources were abundant enough to minimize work, they also maximized the likelihood of the social hierarchies that anarchoprimitivists abhor.</p>
+<p>However, I have not been trying to prove that primitive man was less fortunate in his working life than modern man is. In my opinion the contrary was true. Probably at least some nomadic hunter-gatherers had more leisure time than modern employed Americans do. It’s true that the roughly forty-hour work-week of Richard Lee’s Bushmen was about equal to the standard American work-week. But modern Americans are burdened with many demands on their time outside their hours of employment. I myself, when working at a forty-hour job, have generally felt busy: I’ve had to shop for groceries, go to the bank, do the laundry, fill out income-tax forms, take the car in for maintenance, get a haircut, go to the dentist …there was always something that needed to be done. Many of the people I now correspond with likewise complain of being busy. In contrast, the male Bushman’s time was genuinely his own outside of his working hours; he could spend his non-working time as he pleased. Bushman women of reproductive age may have had much less leisure time because, like women of all societies, they were burdened with the care of small children.</p>
+<p>But leisure is a modern concept, and the emphasis that anarchoprimitivists put on it is evidence of their servitude to the values of the civilization that they claim to reject. The amount of time expended in work is not what matters. Many authors have discussed what is wrong with work in modern society, and I see no reason to go over that ground again. What does matter is that, apart from monotony, what is wrong with work in modern society is not wrong with the work of nomadic hunter-gatherers. The hunter-gatherer’s work is challenging, both in terms of physical effort and in terms of the level of skill required. <sup id="fnref:40"><a href="#fn:40" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">40</a></sup> The hunter-gatherer’s work is purposeful, and its purpose is not abstract, remote, or artificial but concrete, very real, and directly important to the worker: He works to satisfy the physical needs of himself, his family, and other people to whom he is personally close. Above all, the nomadic hunter-gatherer is a free worker: He is not exploited, he is subservient to no boss, no one gives him orders; <sup id="fnref:41"><a href="#fn:41" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">41</a></sup> he designs is own work-day, if not as an individual then as a member of a group that is small enough so that every individual can participate meaningfully in the decisions that are made <sup id="fnref:42"><a href="#fn:42" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">42</a></sup>. Modern jobs tend to be psychologically stressful, but there are reasons to believe that primitive people’s work typically involved little psychological stress. <sup id="fnref:43"><a href="#fn:43" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">43</a></sup> Hunter-gatherers’ work often monotonous, but it is my view that monotony generally causes primitive people relatively little discomfort. Boredom, I think, is largely a civilized phenomenon and is a product of psychological stresses that are characteristic of civilized life. This admittedly is a matter of personal opinion, I can ‘t prove it, and a discussion of it would take us beyond the scope of this article. Here I will only say that my opinion is based largely on my own experience of living outside the technoindustrial system. How hunter-gatherers felt about their own work is difficult to say, since anthropologists and others who visited primitive peoples (at least those whose reports I’ve read) usually do not seem to have asked such questions. But the following from Holmberg’s worth noting: “They are relatively apathetic to work (taba taba), which includes such distasteful tasks as housebuilding, gathering firewood, clearing, planting, and tilling of fields. In quite a different class, however, are such pleasant occupations as hunting (gwata gwata) and collecting (deka deka, ‘to look for’), which are regarded more as diversions than as work.” <sup id="fnref:44"><a href="#fn:44" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">44</a></sup></p>
+<p>This despite the fact that, as we saw earlier, the Siriono’s hunting and collecting activities were exceedingly time-consuming, fatiguing, strenuous, and physically demanding.</p>
+<h3 id="3">3.</h3>
+<p>Another element of the anarchoprimitivist myth is the belief that hunter-gatherers, at least the nomadic ones, had gender equality. John Zerzan, for example, has asserted this in Future Primitive <sup id="fnref:45"><a href="#fn:45" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">45</a></sup> and elsewhere. <sup id="fnref:46"><a href="#fn:46" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">46</a></sup> Probably some hunter-gatherer societies did have full gender equality, though I don ‘t know of a single unarguable example. I do know of hunting-and-gathering cultures that had a relatively high degree of gender equality but fell short of full equality. In other nomadic hunter-gatherer societies male dominance was unmistakable, and in some such societies it reached the level of out-and-out brutality toward women. Probably the most touted example of gender equality among hunter-gatherers is that of Richard Lee’s Bushmen, whom we mentioned earlier in our discussion of the hunter-gatherer’s working life. It should be noted at the outset that it would be very risky to assume that Lee’s conclusions concerning the Dobe Bushmen could be applied to the Bushmen of the Kalahari region generally. Different groups of Bushmen differed culturally; <sup id="fnref:47"><a href="#fn:47" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">47</a></sup> they didn’t even all speak the same language. <sup id="fnref:48"><a href="#fn:48" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">48</a></sup> At any rate, relying largely on Richard Lee’s studies, Nancy Bonvillain states that among the Dobe Bushmen (whom she calls “Ju/’hoansi”), “social norms clearly support the notion of equality of women and men,” <sup id="fnref:49"><a href="#fn:49" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">49</a></sup> and that their “society overtly validates equality of women and men.” <sup id="fnref:50"><a href="#fn:50" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">50</a></sup> So the Dobe Bushmen had gender equality, right?</p>
+<p>Well, maybe not. Look at some of the facts that Bonvillain herself offers in the same book: “Most leaders and camp spokespersons are men. Although women and men participate in group discussions and decision making, …men’s talk in discussions involving both genders amounts to about two-thirds of the total.” <sup id="fnref:51"><a href="#fn:51" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">51</a></sup></p>
+<p>Much worse are the forced marriages of girls in their early teens to men much older than themselves. <sup id="fnref:52"><a href="#fn:52" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">52</a></sup> It’s true that practices that seem cruel to us may not be experienced as cruel by people of other cultures on whom they are imposed. But Bonvillain quotes words of a Bushman woman that show that at least some girls did experience their forced marriages as cruel: “I cried and cried”; <sup id="fnref:53"><a href="#fn:53" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">53</a></sup> “I ran away again and again. A part of my heart kept thinking: ‘how come I’m a child and have taken a husband?’” <sup id="fnref:54"><a href="#fn:54" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">54</a></sup> Moreover, “because seniority confers prestige…, the greater age, experience, and maturity of husbands may make wives socially, if not personally, subordinate.” <sup id="fnref:55"><a href="#fn:55" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">55</a></sup> Thus, while the Dobe Bushmen no doubt had some of the elements of gender equality, one would have to stretch a point pretty far to claim that they had full gender equality. On the basis of his personal experience, Colin Turnbull stated that among the Mbuti pygmies of Africa, a “woman is in no way the social inferior of a man,” <sup id="fnref:56"><a href="#fn:56" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">56</a></sup> and that “the woman is not discriminated against. <sup id="fnref:57"><a href="#fn:57" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">57</a></sup> That sounds like gender equality …until you look at the concrete facts that Turnbull himself offers in the very same books: “ A certain amount of wife-beating is considered good, and the wife is expected to fight back; <sup id="fnref:58"><a href="#fn:58" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">58</a></sup> “He said that he was very content with his wife, and he had not found it necessary to beat her at all often,” <sup id="fnref:59"><a href="#fn:59" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">59</a></sup>; Man throws wife to the ground and slaps her; <sup id="fnref:60"><a href="#fn:60" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">60</a></sup> Husband beats wife; <sup id="fnref:61"><a href="#fn:61" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">61</a></sup> Man beats sister; <sup id="fnref:62"><a href="#fn:62" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">62</a></sup> Kenge beats his sister; <sup id="fnref:63"><a href="#fn:63" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">63</a></sup> “Perhaps he should have beaten her harder, Tungana [an old man] said, for some girls like being beaten,” <sup id="fnref:64"><a href="#fn:64" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">64</a></sup>; “Amabosu countered by smacking her firmly across the face. Normally Ekianga would have approved of such manly assertion of authority over a disloyal wife.” <sup id="fnref:65"><a href="#fn:65" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">65</a></sup> Turnbull mentions two instances of men giving orders to their wives. <sup id="fnref:66"><a href="#fn:66" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">66</a></sup> I have not found any instance in Turnbull’ s books of wives giving orders to their husbands. Pipestem obtained by wife is referred to as husband’s property. <sup id="fnref:67"><a href="#fn:67" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">67</a></sup> “[A boy] has to have [a girl’s] permission before intercourse can take place. The men say that once they lie down with a girl, however, if they want her they take her by surprise, when petting her, and force her to their will.” <sup id="fnref:68"><a href="#fn:68" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">68</a></sup> Nowadays we would call that “date rape”, and the young man involved would risk a long prison sentence.</p>
+<p>For the sake of balance, let’s note that Turnbull found among the Mbuti no instance of what we would call “street rape” as opposed to “date rape”; <sup id="fnref:69"><a href="#fn:69" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">69</a></sup> husbands were not supposed to hit their wives on the head or in the face; <sup id="fnref:70"><a href="#fn:70" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">70</a></sup> and in at least one case in which a man took to beating his wife too frequently and severly, his campmates eventually found means to end the abuse without the use of force and without overt interference. <sup id="fnref:71"><a href="#fn:71" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">71</a></sup> It should also be borne in mind that the significance of a beating depends on the cultural context. In our society it is a great humiliation to be struck by another person, especially by one who is bigger and stronger than oneself. But since blows were commonplace among the Mbuti, <sup id="fnref:72"><a href="#fn:72" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">72</a></sup> it is probably safe to assume that they were not felt as particularly humiliating . Nevertheless it is quite clear that some degree of male dominance was present among the Mbuti. Among the Siriono: “A woman is subservient to her husband”; <sup id="fnref:73"><a href="#fn:73" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">73</a></sup> “The extended family is generally dominated by the oldest active male”; <sup id="fnref:74"><a href="#fn:74" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">74</a></sup> “[Women] are dominated by the men”; <sup id="fnref:75"><a href="#fn:75" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">75</a></sup> “If a man is out in the forest alone with a woman, …he may throw her to the ground roughly and take his prize [sex] without so much as saying a word”; <sup id="fnref:76"><a href="#fn:76" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">76</a></sup> Parents definitely preferred to have male children; <sup id="fnref:77"><a href="#fn:77" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">77</a></sup> “Although the title ererekwa is reserved by the men for a chief, it one asks a woman: ‘who is your ererekwa?’ she will invariably reply: ‘my husband’.” <sup id="fnref:78"><a href="#fn:78" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">78</a></sup> On the other hand, the Siriono never beat their wives, <sup id="fnref:79"><a href="#fn:79" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">79</a></sup> and “Women enjoy about the same privileges as men. They get as much or more food to eat, and they enjoy the same sexual freedom.” <sup id="fnref:80"><a href="#fn:80" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">80</a></sup> According to Bonvillain, Eskimo men “dominate their wives and daughters. Men’s dominance is not total, however……” <sup id="fnref:81"><a href="#fn:81" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">81</a></sup> She describes gender relations among the Eskimos in some detail, <sup id="fnref:82"><a href="#fn:82" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">82</a></sup> which may or may not be slanted to reflect her feminist ideology.</p>
+<p>Among the Eskimos with whom Gontran de Poncins lived, husbands clearly held overt authority over their wives <sup id="fnref:83"><a href="#fn:83" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">83</a></sup> and sometimes beat them. <sup id="fnref:84"><a href="#fn:84" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">84</a></sup> Yet, through their talent for persuasion, wives had great power over their husbands: “It might seem … that the native woman lived altogether in a state of abject inferiority to the male Eskimo, but this is not the case. What she loses in authority, as compared to the white woman, she makes up, by superior cunning, in many other ways. Native women are very shrewd, and they almost never fail to get what they want”; “ It was a perpetual joy to watch this comedy, this almost wordless struggle in which the wife… inevitably got the better of the husband. There does not exist an Eskimo woman untrained in the art of wheedling, not one unable to repeat with tireless and yet insinuating insistence the mention of what she wants, until the husband, worn down by her persistence, gives way”; “ Women were behind everything in this Eskimo world”; <sup id="fnref:85"><a href="#fn:85" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">85</a></sup> “It is not necessary to be a feminist to ask: ‘but what of the status of Eskimo women?’ Their status suits them well enough; and I have indicated here and there in these pages that they are not only the mistresses of their households but also, in most Eskimo families, the shrewd prompters of their husbands’ decisions.” <sup id="fnref:86"><a href="#fn:86" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">86</a></sup> However, Poncins may have overstated the extent of Eskimo women’s power, since it was not sufficient to enable them to avoid unwanted sex: Wife-lending among these Eskimos was determined by the men, and the wives had to accept being lent whether they liked it or not. <sup id="fnref:87"><a href="#fn:87" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">87</a></sup> At least in some cases, apparently, the women resented this rather strongly. <sup id="fnref:88"><a href="#fn:88" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">88</a></sup> The Australian Aborigines’ treatment of their women was nothing short of abominable. Women had almost no power to choose their own husbands. <sup id="fnref:89"><a href="#fn:89" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">89</a></sup> They are described as having been “owned” by the men, who chose their husbands for them. <sup id="fnref:90"><a href="#fn:90" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">90</a></sup> Young women were often forced to marry old men, and then they had to work to provide their aged husbands with the necessities of life. <sup id="fnref:91"><a href="#fn:91" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">91</a></sup> Not surprisingly, a young woman frequently resisted a forced marriage by running away. She was then beaten severely with a club and returned to her husband. If she persisted in running away, she might even have a spear driven into her thigh. <sup id="fnref:92"><a href="#fn:92" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">92</a></sup> A woman trapped in a distasteful marriage might enjoy the consolation of having a lover on the side, but, while this was “semitolerated”, it could lead to violence. <sup id="fnref:93"><a href="#fn:93" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">93</a></sup> A woman might even go to the length of eloping with her lover. However: “They would be followed, and if caught, as a punishment the girl became, for the time being, the common property of her pursuers. The couple were then brought back to the camp where, if they were of the right totem division to marry, the man would have to stand up to a trial by having spears thrown at him by the husband and his relations… and the girl was given beating by her relatives. If [the couple] were not of the right totem division to marry, they would both be speared when found, as their sin was unforgivable.” <sup id="fnref:94"><a href="#fn:94" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">94</a></sup></p>
+<p>Although there was “real harmony and mutual understanding in most Aboriginal families”, wife-beating was practiced. <sup id="fnref:95"><a href="#fn:95" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">95</a></sup> According to A. P. Elkin, under some circumstances-for example, on certain ceremonial occasions-women had to submit to compulsory sex, which “implies that woman is but an object to be used in certain socially established ways.” <sup id="fnref:96"><a href="#fn:96" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">96</a></sup> The women, says Elkin, “may often not object,” <sup id="fnref:97"><a href="#fn:97" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">97</a></sup> but: “They sometimes live in terror of the use which is made of them at some ceremonial times.” <sup id="fnref:98"><a href="#fn:98" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">98</a></sup> Of course, no claim is made here that all of the foregoing conditions prevailed in all parts of aboriginal Australia. Culture was not uniform across the continent. Coon says that the Australians were nomadic, but he also states that in parts of southeastern Australia, namely “The better-watered parts, particularly Victoria and the Murray River country”, the aborigines were “relatively sedentary.” <sup id="fnref:99"><a href="#fn:99" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">99</a></sup> According to Massola, in the drier parts of southeastern Australia the aborigines had to cover long distances between fast-drying wells in times of drought. <sup id="fnref:100"><a href="#fn:100" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">100</a></sup> This corresponds with the high degree of nomadism described for other arid parts of Australia, where “Aboigines moved from waterhole to waterhole along well-defined tracks in small family groups. The whole camp moved and rarely established bases.” <sup id="fnref:101"><a href="#fn:101" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">101</a></sup> In stating that in “the better-watered parts” the aborigines were “relatively sedentary”, Coon doubtless means that “in fertile regions there were well-established camping areas, close to water, where people always camped at certain times of year. Camps were bases from which people made forays into the surrounding bush for food, returning in the late afternoon or spending a few days away.” <sup id="fnref:102"><a href="#fn:102" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">102</a></sup> Coon says that in part of the well-watered Murray River country each territorial clan had a headman and a council consisting mainly of men, though in a few cases women were also elected to the council; whereas, farther to the north and west, there was little formal leadership and “control over the women and younger males was shared between” the men aged from thirty to fifty. <sup id="fnref:103"><a href="#fn:103" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">103</a></sup> Thus Australian women had very little overt political power. Yet, as among Poncins’s Eskimos, certainly in our society, and probably in every society, the women often exercised great influence their menfolk <sup id="fnref:104"><a href="#fn:104" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">104</a></sup>.</p>
+<p>The Tasmanians also were nomadic hunter-gatherers (though some were “relatively sedentary”), <sup id="fnref:105"><a href="#fn:105" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">105</a></sup> and it’s not clear that they treated women any better than the Australians did. “In one account we are told that a band living near Hobart Town before the colonists’ arrival was raided by neighbors who killed the men who tried to stop them and took away their women. And there are other accounts of individual cases of marriage by capture. Sometimes when a man from a neighboring band had the right to marry a girl, but neither she nor her parents liked him, it is said that they killed the girl rather than give her up”; <sup id="fnref:106"><a href="#fn:106" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">106</a></sup> “The other tribes considered [a certain tribe] cowards, and raided them to steal their women”; <sup id="fnref:107"><a href="#fn:107" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">107</a></sup> “Woorrady raped and killed a sister-in-law.” <sup id="fnref:108"><a href="#fn:108" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">108</a></sup></p>
+<p>Here I should make clear that it is not my intention to argue against gender equality. I myself am enough a product of modern industrial society to feel that women and men should have equal status. My purpose at this point is simply to exhibit the facts concerning the relations between the sexes in hunting-and-gathering societies.</p>
+<h3 id="4">4.</h3>
+<p>There is a problem involved in any attempt to draw conclusions about original, “pure” hunter-gatherer cultures from reported observations of living hunter-gatherer societies. If we have a description of a primitive culture, it ordinarily will have been written by some civilized person. If the description is detailed, then, by the time it was written, the primitive people described very likely will have had significant contact, direct or indirect, with civilization, and such contact can bring about dramatic changes in a primitive culture. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, in the epilogue to the 1989 edition of her book The Harmless People, <sup id="fnref:109"><a href="#fn:109" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">109</a></sup> describes the catastrophically destructive effect of civilization on the Bushmen she knew. Harold B. Barclay has pointed out that (for example) modern Eskimos “are quite pleased with their high powered rifles, motorboats and so forth.” <sup id="fnref:110"><a href="#fn:110" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">110</a></sup> “So forth” would include snowmobiles. Hence, Barclay says, “hunter gatherers today are in no sense identical to hunter gatherers of a thousand or ten thousand year ago.” <sup id="fnref:111"><a href="#fn:111" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">111</a></sup> According to Cashdan, writing in 1989, “all hunter-gatherers in the world today are in contact, directly or indirectly, with the world economy. This fact should caution us against viewing today’s hunter-gatherers as ‘snapshots’ of the past.” <sup id="fnref:112"><a href="#fn:112" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">112</a></sup> Of course, in seeking evidence of the way human beings lived prior to the advent of civilization, no one in his right mind would turn to peoples who used motorboats, snowmobiles, and high-powered rifles, <sup id="fnref:113"><a href="#fn:113" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">113</a></sup> or to peoples whose cultures had obviously been grossly disrupted by the intrusion of civilized societies. We look for accounts of hunter-gatherers written (at least) several decades ago and at a time when — as far as we can tell — their cultures had not been seriously altered by contact with civilization. But it’s not always easy to tell whether contact with civilization has altered a primitive culture. Coon is clearly aware of this problem, and in his excellent survey of hunter-gatherer cultures he gives the following example of how seemingly slight interference from civilization can have a dramatic effect on a primitive culture: When “well-meaning missionaries handed out steel axes” to the Yir Yoront aborigines of Australia, the “Yir Yoront world almost came to an end. The men lost their authority over their wives, a generation gap appeared,” and a system of trade stretching over hundreds of miles was disrupted. <sup id="fnref:114"><a href="#fn:114" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">114</a></sup> Richard Lee’s Bushmen are perhaps the favorite example for anarchoprimitivists and leftish anthropologists who want to present a politically-correct image of hunter-gatherers, and Lee’s Bushmen were among the least “pure” of the hunter-gatherers we’ve mentioned here. They may not even have always been hunter gatherers. <sup id="fnref:115"><a href="#fn:115" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">115</a></sup> In any case they had probably been trading with agricultural and pastoral peoples for a couple of thousand years. <sup id="fnref:116"><a href="#fn:116" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">116</a></sup> The Kung Bushmen whom Mrs. Thomas knew had metal acquired through trade, <sup id="fnref:117"><a href="#fn:117" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">117</a></sup> and the same apparently was true of Lee’s Bushmen. <sup id="fnref:118"><a href="#fn:118" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">118</a></sup> Mrs. Thomas writes: “In the ten to twenty years after we started our work, many academics [this presumably includes Richard Lee] developed an enormous interest in the Bushmen. Many of them went to Botswana to visit groups of Kung Bushmen, and for a time in Botswana, the anthropologists/Bushmen ratio seemed almost one to one.” <sup id="fnref:119"><a href="#fn:119" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">119</a></sup> Obviously, the presence of so many anthropologists may itself have affected the behavior of the Bushmen. In the 1950’s, <sup id="fnref:120"><a href="#fn:120" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">120</a></sup> when Turnbull studied them, still more in the 1920’s and 1930’s <sup id="fnref:121"><a href="#fn:121" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">121</a></sup> when Schebesta studied them, the Mbuti apparently had not had much direct contact with civilization, so that Schebesta went so far as to claim that “the Mbuti not only racially, but also psychologically and in terms of cultural history, are a primeval phenomenon (Urphanomen) among the races and peoples of the Earth.” <sup id="fnref:122"><a href="#fn:122" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">122</a></sup> Yet the Mbuti had already begun to be somewhat affected by civilization a few years before Schebesta’s first visit to them. <sup id="fnref:123"><a href="#fn:123" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">123</a></sup> And for centuries before that, the Mbuti had lived in close contact (which included extensive trade relations) with non-civilized, village-dwelling cultivators of crops. <sup id="fnref:124"><a href="#fn:124" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">124</a></sup> As Schebesta wrote, “The belief that the Mbuti have been hermetically sealed off from the outer world has been laid to rest once and for all.” <sup id="fnref:125"><a href="#fn:125" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">125</a></sup> Turnbull goes farther: “’This is in no way to say that the [social] structure to be found among the Mbuti is representative of an original pygmy hunting and gathering structure; in fact probably far from it, for the repercussions of the invasion of the forest by the village cultivators have been enormous.” <sup id="fnref:126"><a href="#fn:126" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">126</a></sup></p>
+<p>Though some of Gontran de Poncins’s Eskimos were “purer” than others, <sup id="fnref:127"><a href="#fn:127" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">127</a></sup> it appears that all of them had at least some trade goods from the whites. If any reader cares to take the trouble to track down the earliest primary sources — perhaps some of Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s work — so as to approach as closely as possible to an original and “pure” Eskimo culture, I would be interested to hear of his or her findings. But it is possible that even long before European contact the Eskimos’ culture may have been affected by something that they received from a non-hunting society; for their sled dogs may not have originated with hunter-gatherers. <sup id="fnref:128"><a href="#fn:128" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">128</a></sup></p>
+<p>With the Siriono we come closer to purity than we do with the Bushmen, the Mbuti, or Poncins’s Eskimos. The Siriono did not even have dogs, <sup id="fnref:129"><a href="#fn:129" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">129</a></sup> and even though they cultivated crops to a limited extent anthropologists regarded their culture as Paleolithic (Old Stone Age). <sup id="fnref:130"><a href="#fn:130" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">130</a></sup> Some of the Siriono studied by Holmberg had had little or no contact with whites prior to Holmberg’s arrival <sup id="fnref:131"><a href="#fn:131" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">131</a></sup> and, among those Siriono, European tools were rarely encountered <sup id="fnref:132"><a href="#fn:132" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">132</a></sup> until Holmberg himself introduced them. <sup id="fnref:133"><a href="#fn:133" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">133</a></sup> Instead, the Siriono made their tools of naturally-occurring local materials.<sup id="fnref:134"><a href="#fn:134" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">134</a></sup> The Siriono moreover were so primitive that they could not count beyond three. <sup id="fnref:135"><a href="#fn:135" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">135</a></sup> Nevertheless, Siriono culture might have been affected by contact with more “advanced” societies, since Holmberg thought the Siriono were “probably a remnant of an ancient population that was exterminated, absorbed, or engulfed by more civilized invaders.” <sup id="fnref:136"><a href="#fn:136" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">136</a></sup> Lauriston Sharp even suggested that the Siriono might have “degenerated” [sic] “from a more advanced technical condition,” though Holmberg rejected this view and Sharp himself considered it “irrelevant.” <sup id="fnref:137"><a href="#fn:137" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">137</a></sup> In addition, the Siriono might have been affected indirectly by European civilization, since probably at least some of the diseases from which they suffered, e.g., malaria, had been brought to the Americas by Europeans. <sup id="fnref:138"><a href="#fn:138" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">138</a></sup> It’s not surprising that most of the hunter-gatherers I’ve mentioned here — like those cited by the anarchoprimitivists and the politically-correct anthropologists — were affected by direct or indirect contact with agricultural or pastoral peoples even long before their first contact with Europeans, because outside of Australia, Tasmania, and the far west and north of North America “populations which remained faithful to the old hunter-gatherer way of live were small and scattered.” <sup id="fnref:139"><a href="#fn:139" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">139</a></sup> Consequently, with the possible exception of some who lived on small islands, they necessarily had some form of contact with surrounding non-hunter-gatherer populations.</p>
+<p>Probably the Australian Aborigines and the Tasmanians were the hunter-gatherers who were purest when Europeans first found them. Australia was the only continent that was inhabited exclusively by hunter-gatherers until the white man’s arrival, and Tasmania, an island just to the south of Australia, was even more isolated. But Tasmania may have been visited by Polynesians, and in the north of Australia there was some limited contact with people from Indonesia and New Guinea prior to the arrival of Europeans. <sup id="fnref:140"><a href="#fn:140" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">140</a></sup> Still earlier contact with outsiders, who mayor may not have been hunter-gatherers, is probable. <sup id="fnref:141"><a href="#fn:141" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">141</a></sup> Thus we have no conclusive proof that hunter-gatherer cultures that survived into recent times had not been seriously affected by contact with non-hunter-gatherers by the time the first descriptions of them were written. Consequently, more or less uncertainty is involved in using reports on recent hunter-gatherer societies to draw conclusions about gender relations among prehistoric hunter-gatherers. And any conclusions drawn from archaeological remains about the social relationships between men and women can only be highly speculative. So, if you like, you can reject all evidence from descriptions of recent hunter-gatherer cultures, and in that case we know almost nothing about the gender relations of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. Or (with the necessary reservations) you can accept the evidence from recent hunter-gatherer societies, and in that case the evidence clearly points to a significant degree of male dominance. In either case, there is no evidence to support the anarchoprimitivists’ belief that all or most human societies had full gender equality prior to the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry some ten thousand years ago.</p>
+<h3 id="5">5.</h3>
+<p>Our review of the facts concerning gender relations in recent hunter-gatherers societies helps to reveal something of the psychology of the anarchoprimitivists and that of their cousins, the politically-correct anthropologists.</p>
+<p>The anarchoprimitivists, and many politically-correct anthropologists, cite any evidence they can find that hunter-gatherers had gender equality, while systematically ignoring the abundant evidence of gender inequality found in eyewitness reports of hunter-gatherer cultures. For example, the anthropologist Haviland, in his textbook Cultural Anthropology, states that an “important characteristic of the food-foraging [hunther-gatherer] society is its egalitarianism.” <sup id="fnref:142"><a href="#fn:142" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">142</a></sup> He acknowledges that the two sexes may have had different status in such societies, but claims that “status differences by themselves do not imply any necessary inequality”, and that in “traditional food-foraging societies, nothing necessitated special deference of women to men.” <sup id="fnref:143"><a href="#fn:143" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">143</a></sup> If you check the pages listed in Haviland’s index for the entries “Bushmen”, “Ju/’hoansi” (another name for the Dobe Bushmen), “Eskimo”, “Inuit” (another name for Eskimos), “Mbuti”, “Tasma-nian”, “Australian”, and “Aborigine” (the Siriono are not listed in the index), you will find no mention of wife-beating, forced marriage, forced sexual intercourse, or any of the other indications of male dominance that I’ve cited above. Haviland does not deny that these things occurred. He does not claim, for example, that Turnbull merely invented his stories of wife-beating among the Mbuti, or that such-and-such evidence shows that Australian Aboriginal women were not subjected to involuntary sex before the arrival of Europeans. He simply ignores these issues, as if they didn’t exist. And it’s not that Haviland isn’t aware of the issues. For example, he quotes from A. P. Elkin’s book, The Australian Aborigines, <sup id="fnref:144"><a href="#fn:144" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">144</a></sup> an indication that he not only is familiar with the book but considers it a reliable source of information. Yet Elkin’s book, which I cited earlier, provides ample evidence of Australian Aboriginal men’s tyranny over their women <sup id="fnref:145"><a href="#fn:145" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">145</a></sup> — evidence that Haviland fails to mention. It’s pretty clear what is going on: Equality of the sexes is a fundamental tenet of the mainstream ideology of modern society. As highly-socialized members of that society, politically-correct anthropologists believe in the principle of gender equality with something akin to religious conviction, and they feel a need to give us little moral lessons by holding up for our admiration examples of the gender equality that supposedly prevailed when the human race was in a pristine and unspoiled state. This portrayal of primitive cultures is driven by the anthropologists’ own need to reaffirm their faith, and has nothing to do with an honest search for truth.</p>
+<p>To take another example, I’ve written to John Zerzan four times inviting him to back up his claims about gender equality among hunter-gatherers. <sup id="fnref:146"><a href="#fn:146" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">146</a></sup> The answers he gave me were vague and evasive. <sup id="fnref:147"><a href="#fn:147" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">147</a></sup> I would gladly publish here Zerzan’s letters to me on this subject so that the reader could judge them for himself. However, I wrote to Zerzan requesting permission to publish his letters, and he denied me that permission. <sup id="fnref:148"><a href="#fn:148" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">148</a></sup> With his letters he sent me photocopies of pages from a few books that contained vague, general statements ostensibly supporting his claims about gender equality; for instance, this statement by John E Pfeiffer, who is neither a specialist nor an eyewitness of primitive behavior, but a popularizer: “For reasons unknown sexism arrived with settling and farming, with the emergence of complex society.” <sup id="fnref:149"><a href="#fn:149" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">149</a></sup></p>
+<p>Zerzan also sent me a photocopy of a page from Bonvillain’s book containing the following statement: “In foraging band [hunter-gatherer] societies, the potential for gender equality is perhaps the greatest…” <sup id="fnref:150"><a href="#fn:150" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">150</a></sup> But Zerzan did not include copies of the pages on which Bonvillain said that male dominance was evident in some hunter-gatherer societies such as that of the Eskimos, or the pages on which she gave information that cast gave doubt on her own claim of gender equality among the Dobe Bushmen, as I discussed above.</p>
+<p>Zerzan himself acknowledged that the material he sent me was “obviously not definitive”, though he asserted that it was “completely representative in general.” <sup id="fnref:151"><a href="#fn:151" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">151</a></sup> When I pressed him for further backing for his claims, <sup id="fnref:152"><a href="#fn:152" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">152</a></sup> he sent me a copy of his essay Future Primitive, from the book of the same name. <sup id="fnref:153"><a href="#fn:153" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">153</a></sup> In this essay he cites most of his sources by giving only the authors’ last names and their publications’ dates; the reader presumably is expected to look up further information in a table of references provided elsewhere in the book. Since Zerzan did not send me a copy of the table of references, I had no way of checking his sources. I pointed this out to him, <sup id="fnref:154"><a href="#fn:154" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">154</a></sup> but he still failed to send me a copy of his table of references. In any case, there is good reason to suspect that Zerzan was uncritical in selecting his sources. For example, he quotes the late Laurens van der Post; <sup id="fnref:155"><a href="#fn:155" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">155</a></sup> but in his book Teller of Many Tales, J. D. F. Jones, a former admirer of Laurens van der Post, has exposed the latter as a liar and a fraud.</p>
+<p>Even if taken at face value, the information in Future Primitive gives us nothing solid on the subject of gender relations. Vague, general statements are of little use. As I pointed out earlier; Bonvillain and Turnbull made general assertions about gender equality among the Bushmen and the Mbuti respectively, and those assertions were contradicted by concrete facts that Bonvillain and Turnbull themselves reported in the same books. On subjects other than gender equality, some of the statements in Future Primitive are demonstrably false. To take a couple of examples:</p>
+<p>Zerzan, relying on one “De Vries”, claims that among hunter-gatherers childbirth is ’without difficulty of pain.” <sup id="fnref:156"><a href="#fn:156" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">156</a></sup> Oh, really? Here’s Mrs. Thomas, writing from her personal experience among the Bushmen: “Bushmen women give birth alone … unless a girl is bearing her first child, in which case her mother may help her, or unless the birth is extremely difficult, in which case a woman may ask the help of her mother or another woman. A woman in labor may clench her teeth, may let her tears come or bite her hands until blood flows, but she may never cry out to show her agony.” <sup id="fnref:157"><a href="#fn:157" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">157</a></sup></p>
+<p>Since natural selection eliminates the weak and the defective among hunter-gatherers and since primitive women’s work keeps them in good physical condition, it is probably true that childbirth, on average, was not as difficult among hunter-gatherers as it is for modern women. For Mbuti women, according to Schebesta, delivery was usually easy (though this does not imply that it was free of pain). On the other hand, breech deliveries were much feared and usually ended fatally both for the mother and the for child. <sup id="fnref:158"><a href="#fn:158" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">158</a></sup></p>
+<p>Relying on one “Duffy”, Zerzan claims that the Mbuti “look on any form of violence between one person and another with great abhorrence and distaste, and never represent it in their dancing or their playacting.” <sup id="fnref:159"><a href="#fn:159" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">159</a></sup> But Hutereau and Turnbull independently have provided eyewitness accounts according to which the Mbuti did indeed playact violence between human beings. <sup id="fnref:160"><a href="#fn:160" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">160</a></sup> More important, there was plenty of real-life violence among the Mbuti. Accounts of physical fights and beatings are scattered throughout Turnbull’s books, The Forest People and Wayward Servants. To cite just one of the numerous examples, Turnbull mentions a woman who lost three teeth in fighting with another woman over a man. <sup id="fnref:161"><a href="#fn:161" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">161</a></sup> I’ve already mentioned Turn-bull’s statements about wife-beating among the Mbuti.</p>
+<p>It’s worth noting that Zerzan apparently believes that our ancestors were capable of mental telepathy. <sup id="fnref:162"><a href="#fn:162" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">162</a></sup> But particularly revealing is Zerzan’ s quotation of “Shanks and Tilley”: “The point of archaeology is not merely to interpret the past but to change the manner in which the past is interpreted in the service of social reconstruction in the present.” <sup id="fnref:163"><a href="#fn:163" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">163</a></sup> This is virtually open advocacy of the proposition that archaeologists should slant their findings for political purposes. What better evidence could there be of the massive politicization that has taken place in American anthropology over the last 35 or 40 years? In view of this politicization, anything in recent anthropological literature that portrays primitive peoples’ behavior as politically correct must be viewed with the utmost skepticism.</p>
+<p>After citing to Zerzan some of the examples of gender inequality that I’ve discussed above, I questioned his honesty on the ground that he had “systematically excluded nearly all of the evidence that undercuts the idealized picture of hunter-gatherer societies” that he wanted to present. <sup id="fnref:164"><a href="#fn:164" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">164</a></sup> Zerzan answered that he “did not find many credible sources that contradicted his outlook. <sup id="fnref:165"><a href="#fn:165" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">165</a></sup> This statement strains credulity. Some of the examples that I cited to Zerzan (and have discussed above) were from books on which he himself had relied-those of Bonvillain and Turnbull. <sup id="fnref:166"><a href="#fn:166" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">166</a></sup> Yet he somehow managed to overlook all of the evidence in those books that contradicted his claims. Since Zerzan has read widely about hunter-gatherer societies, and the Australian Aborigines are among the best-known hunter-gatherers, I find it very difficult to believe that he has never come across any accounts of the Australians’ mistreatment of women. Yet he never mentions such accounts-not even for the purpose of refuting them.</p>
+<p>One does not necessarily have to assume any conscious dishonesty on Zerzan’s part. As Nietzsche said, “The most common lie is the lie one tells to oneself; lying to others is relatively the exception.” <sup id="fnref:167"><a href="#fn:167" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">167</a></sup> In other words, self-deception often precedes deception of others. An important factor here may be one that is well known to professional propagandists: people tend to block out — to fail to perceive or to remember — information that they find uncongenial<sup id="fnref:168"><a href="#fn:168" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">168</a></sup>. Since information that discredits one’s ideology is highly uncongenial, it follows that people will tend to block out such information. A young anarchoprimitivist with whom I’ve corresponded has provided me with an amazing example of this phenomenon. He wrote to me: “there is no question about the persistence [sic] of patriarchy in all other oceanic societies, but none seems apparent in the [Australian] Aborigines — According to A. P. Elkin’s The Australian Aborigines wives were not held in a restrictive marriage at all.” <sup id="fnref:169"><a href="#fn:169" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">169</a></sup> It was apparent that my anarchoprimitivist friend had read Elkin’s discussion of women’s position in Australian Aboriginal society. I’ve cited above some of the relevant pages of Elkin’s book, such as those on which he states that Australian Aboriginal women sometimes lived in terror of the compulsory sex to which they were subjected at some ceremonial times. Any reasonably rational person who will take the trouble to read those pages <sup id="fnref:170"><a href="#fn:170" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">170</a></sup> will find himself hard-pressed to explain how my anarchoprimitivist friend could have read that material and then claimed in all seriousness that no patriarchy seemed apparent in Australian Aboriginal society — unless my friend simply blocked out of his mind the information that he found ideologically unacceptable. My friend did not question the accuracy of Elkin I s information; in fact, he was relying on Elkin as an authority. He simply remained oblivious to the information that indicated patriarchy among the Australian Aborigines. But this time it should be sufficiently clear to the reader that what the anarchoprimitivists (and many anthropologists) are up to has nothing to do with a rational search for the truth about primitive cultures. Instead, they have been developing a myth.</p>
+<h3 id="6">6.</h3>
+<p>I’ve already had occasion at several points to mention violence among nomadic hunter-gatherers. Examples of violence, including deadly violence, among hunter-gatherers are abundant. To mention only a few such examples: “One account has been published of a mortal battle between an inland band of Tasmanians having access to ochre, and a coastal band who had agreed to exchange seashells for the other’s product. The inland people brought their ochre, but the coastal people arrived empty handed. Men were killed because of a breach of faith over the two materials, neither of which was edible or of any other practical use. In other words, the Tasmanians were just as ‘human’ as the rest of US.” <sup id="fnref:171"><a href="#fn:171" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">171</a></sup> The Tasmanians made their spears “in two lengths…the shorter ones were for hunting, the longer ones for fighting.” <sup id="fnref:172"><a href="#fn:172" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">172</a></sup> Among the hunter-gatherers of the Andaman Islands, “grievances were remembered, and revenge might be taken later. The raiders either crept through the jungle or approached in canoes. They leaped on their victims by surprise, quickly shot [with arrows] all the men and women unable to escape, and took away any uninjured children, to adopt them…”; “If enough members of the group survived to reconstitute the band, they might eventually grow numerous enough to seek revenge, and a lengthy feud might arise. [Peace efforts were] initiated by the women because it was they who had kept the hostilities alive, egging on their men.” <sup id="fnref:173"><a href="#fn:173" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">173</a></sup></p>
+<p>Among at least some groups of Australian Aborigines, women at times would provoke their menfolk to deadly violence against other men. <sup id="fnref:174"><a href="#fn:174" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">174</a></sup> Among the Eskimos with whom Gontran de Poncins lived, there was “a good deal of killing”, and it was sometimes a woman who persuaded a man to kill another man. <sup id="fnref:175"><a href="#fn:175" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">175</a></sup> Paintings made in rock shelters by prehistoric hunter-gatherers of eastern Spain show groups of men fighting each other with bows and arrows. <sup id="fnref:176"><a href="#fn:176" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">176</a></sup></p>
+<p>One could go on and on. But I don’t want to give the impression that all hunter-gatherer were violent. Turnbull refers to numerous nonlethal fights and beatings among the Mbuti, but in those of his books that I’ve read he mentions not a single case of homicide. <sup id="fnref:177"><a href="#fn:177" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">177</a></sup> This suggests that deadly violence was rare among the Mbuti at the time when Turnbull knew them. Siriono women sometimes fought physically, striking each other with sticks, and there was a good deal of aggression among the children, even with sticks or burning brands used as weapons. <sup id="fnref:178"><a href="#fn:178" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">178</a></sup> But men rarely fought each other with weapons, <sup id="fnref:179"><a href="#fn:179" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">179</a></sup> and the Siriono were not warlike. <sup id="fnref:180"><a href="#fn:180" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">180</a></sup> Under extreme provocation they did kill certain whites and missionized Indians, <sup id="fnref:181"><a href="#fn:181" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">181</a></sup> but among the Siriono themselves intentional homicide was almost unknown. <sup id="fnref:182"><a href="#fn:182" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">182</a></sup> Among the Bushmen whom Mrs. Thomas knew aggression of any kind was minimal, though she makes clear that this was not necessarily true of all Bushman groups. <sup id="fnref:183"><a href="#fn:183" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">183</a></sup></p>
+<p>It is important, too, to realize that deadly violence among primitives is not even remotely comparable to modern warfare. When primitives fight, two little bands of men shoot arrows or swing war-clubs at one another because they want to fight; or because they are defending themselves, their families, or their territory. In the modern world soldiers fight because they are forced to do so, or, at best, because they have been brainwashed into believing in some kook ideology such as that of Nazism, socialism, or what American politicians choose to call “freedom”. In any case the modern soldier is merely a pawn, a dupe who dies not for his family or his tribe but for the politicians who exploit him. If he’s unlucky, maybe he does not die but comes home horribly crippled in a way that would never result from an arrow- or a spear-wound. Meanwhile, thousands of non-combatants are killed or mutilated. The environment is ravaged, not only in the war zone, but also back home, due to the accelerated consumption of natural resources needed to feed the war machine. In comparison, the violence of primitive man is relatively innocuous. That, however, it isn’t good enough for the anarchoprimitivists or for today’s politically correct anthropologists. They can’t deny altogether the existence of violence among hunter-gatherers, since the evidence for it is incontrovertible. But they will stretch the truth as far as they think they can get away with in order to minimize the amount of violence in the human past. It’s worthwhile to give an example that illustrates the silliness of some of the reasoning that they use. In reference to Homo habilis, a physically primitive ancestor of modern man, the anthropologist Haviland writes: “They obtained their meat not by killing live animals but by scavenging Homo habilis got meat by scavenging from carcasses of dead animals, rather than hunting live ones. We know this because the marks of stone tools on the bones of butchered animals commonly overlie marks the teeth of carnivores made. Clearly, Homo habilis did not get to the prey first.” <sup id="fnref:184"><a href="#fn:184" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">184</a></sup></p>
+<p>But, as Haviland certainly ought to know, many or most predatory animals engage both in hunting and in scavenging. For example, bears, African lions, martens, wolverines, wolves, coyotes, foxes, jackals, hyenas, the raccoon dog of Asia, the Komodo dragon, and some vultures both hunt and scavenge. <sup id="fnref:185"><a href="#fn:185" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">185</a></sup> Thus, the fact that Homo habilis engaged in scavenging provides no evidence whatsoever that he did not also hunt. I emphasize that I do not know or care whether Homo habilis hunted. I see no reason why it should be important for us to know whether our half-human ancestors two million years ago were bloodthirsty killers, peaceful vegetarians, or something in between. The point here is simply to show what kind of reasoning some anthropologists will resort to in their effort to make the human past look as politically correct as possible. Since political correctness has warped the portrayal not only of the human past but of wild nature generally, it should be pointed out that deadly violence among wild animals is not confined to predation of one species upon another. Killing of one member of a species by another member of the same species does occur. For example, it is well known that wild chimpanzees often kill other chimpanzees. <sup id="fnref:186"><a href="#fn:186" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">186</a></sup> Elephants sometimes kill one another in fights, and the same is true of wild pigs. <sup id="fnref:187"><a href="#fn:187" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">187</a></sup> Among the sea birds called brown boobies, two eggs are laid in each nest. After the eggs are hatched, one of the chicks attacks the other and forces it out of the nest, so that it dies. <sup id="fnref:188"><a href="#fn:188" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">188</a></sup> Komodo dragons sometimes eat one another, <sup id="fnref:189"><a href="#fn:189" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">189</a></sup> and there is evidence that cannibalism occurred among some dinosaurs. <sup id="fnref:190"><a href="#fn:190" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">190</a></sup> (Evidence of cannibalism among prehistoric humans is controversial.) <sup id="fnref:191"><a href="#fn:191" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">191</a></sup></p>
+<p>I do want to make clear that it is by no means my intention to exalt violence. I prefer to see people (and animals) get along smoothly with one another. My purpose is only to expose the irrationality of the politically-correct image of primitive peoples and of wild nature.</p>
+<h3 id="7">7.</h3>
+<p>An important element of the anarchoprimitivist myth is the belief that hunter-gatherer societies were free of competition and were characterized instead by sharing and cooperation. Collin Turnbull’s early writings on the Mbuti pygmies seem to be quite frank, but his work leaned increasingly toward political correctness as time went by. <sup id="fnref:192"><a href="#fn:192" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">192</a></sup> Writing in 1983 (18 and 21 years, respectively, after he had published Wayward Servants and The Forest People), Turnbull noted that Mbuti children had no competitive games, <sup id="fnref:193"><a href="#fn:193" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">193</a></sup> and after referring to the high value that he claimed modern society placed on “competition” and “economic independence,” <sup id="fnref:194"><a href="#fn:194" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">194</a></sup> he contrasted these with “the well-tried primitive values of family-writ-large: interdependence, cooperation, and reliance on community …rather than on self…” <sup id="fnref:195"><a href="#fn:195" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">195</a></sup></p>
+<p>But according to Turnbull’s own earlier work, physical fighting was commonplace among the Mbuti. <sup id="fnref:196"><a href="#fn:196" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">196</a></sup> If a physical fight isn’t a form of competition, then what is? It’s clear in fact that the Mbuti were a very quarrelsome people, and, in addition to physical fights, there were many verbal disputes among them. <sup id="fnref:197"><a href="#fn:197" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">197</a></sup> Generally speaking, any dispute, whether it is settled physically or verbally; is a form of competition: the interests of one person conflict with those of another, and their quarreling is an effort by each to promote his own interests at the other’s expense. The Mbuti’s jealousies also were evidence of competitive impulses. <sup id="fnref:198"><a href="#fn:198" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">198</a></sup></p>
+<p>Two things for which the Mbuti competed were mates and food. I’ve already mentioned a case of two women who fought over a man, <sup id="fnref:199"><a href="#fn:199" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">199</a></sup> and quarreling over food apparently was common. <sup id="fnref:200"><a href="#fn:200" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">200</a></sup> It’s worth noting that Turnbull, in his early work, described the Mbuti as “individualists.” <sup id="fnref:201"><a href="#fn:201" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">201</a></sup> There is abundant evidence of competitiveness and/or individualism among other primitive peoples. The Nuer (African pastoralists), the pagan Germanic tribes, the Carib Indians, the Siriono (who lived mainly by hunting and gathering), the Navajo, the Apaches, the Plains Indians, and North American Indians generally have all been described explicitly as “individualistic.” <sup id="fnref:202"><a href="#fn:202" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">202</a></sup> But “individualism” is a vague word that may mean different things to different people, so it’s more helpful to look at definite facts that have been reported. Some of the works that I cite in Note 202 do back up with facts their application of the term “individualistic” to the peoples mentioned. Holmberg writes:</p>
+<p>“When an Indian [Siriono] has reached adulthood he displays an individualism and apathy toward his fellows that is remarkable. The apparent unconcern of one individual for another-even within the family-never ceased to amaze me while I was living with the Siriono. Frequently men would depart for the hunt alone-without so much as a goodbye-and remain away from the band for weeks at a time without any concern on the part of their fellow tribesmen or even their wives….”. “Unconcern with one’s fellows is manifested on every hand. On one occasion Ekwataia went hunting. On his return darkness overcame him about five hundred yards from camp. The night was black as ink, and Ekwataia lost his way. He began to call for help-for someone to bring him fire or to guide him into camp by calls. No one paid heed to his request. After about half an hour, his cries ceased, and his sister Seaci, said: ‘A jaguar probably got him’. When Ekwataia returned the following morning, he told me that he had spent the night sitting on the branch of a tree to avoid being eaten by jaguars.” <sup id="fnref:203"><a href="#fn:203" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">203</a></sup> Holmberg repeatedly remarks on the uncooperative character of the Siriono, and says that those of them who became disabled by age or sickness were simply abandoned by the others. <sup id="fnref:204"><a href="#fn:204" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">204</a></sup> Among other primitive peoples, individualism takes other forms. For example, among most of the North American Indians, warfare was a decidedly individualistic enterprise. “The Indians, being highly individualistic and often fighting more for personal glory than group advantage, never developed a science of warfare.” <sup id="fnref:205"><a href="#fn:205" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">205</a></sup> According to the Cheyenne Indian Wooden Leg: “When any battle actually began it was a case of every man for himself. There were no ordered groupings, no systematic movements in concert, no compulsory goings and comings. Warriors mingled indiscriminately, every one looked out for himself only, or each helped a friend if such help were needed and if the able one’s personal inclination just then was toward friendly helpfulness. The Sioux tribes fought their battles as a band of individuals, the same as we fought ours, and the same as was the way of all Indians I ever knew.” <sup id="fnref:206"><a href="#fn:206" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">206</a></sup></p>
+<p>During the first half of the 20th century, Stanley Vestal interviewed many Plains Indians who still remembered the old days. According to him:</p>
+<p>“It cannot be too often repeated that-except when defending his camp-the Indian was totally indifferent to the general result of a fight: all he cared about was his own coups. Time and again old men have said to me, in discussing a given battle, ‘Nothing happened that day’, meaning simply that the speaker had been unable to count a coups”; <sup id="fnref:207"><a href="#fn:207" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">207</a></sup> “Plains Indians could not wage war by plan. They had no discipline. On the rare occasions when they did have a plan, some ambitious young man was sure to launch a premature attack.” <sup id="fnref:208"><a href="#fn:208" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">208</a></sup></p>
+<p>Compare this with modern man’s way of waging war: Troops move in obedience to carefully elaborated plans; every man has a specific task to perform in cooperation with other men, and he performs it not for personal glory but for the advantage of the army as a whole. Thus, in warfare, it is modern man who is cooperative and primitive man who is, generally speaking, an individualist.</p>
+<p>Primitive individualism is not confined to warfare. Among the Indians of subarctic North America, who were hunter-gatherers, there was an “individualistic relationship to the supernatural,” “self-reliance,” and a “high value placed on personal autonomy.” <sup id="fnref:209"><a href="#fn:209" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">209</a></sup> Australian Aboriginal children were “taught to be self reliant.” <sup id="fnref:210"><a href="#fn:210" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">210</a></sup> Among the Woodland Indians of the eastern United States, “great emphasis was placed on self-reliance and individual competence,” <sup id="fnref:211"><a href="#fn:211" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">211</a></sup> and the Navajo “insisted upon self-reliance.” <sup id="fnref:212"><a href="#fn:212" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">212</a></sup> The Nuer of Africa extolled the virtues of “stubbornness” and “independence”; “Their only test of character is whether one can stand up for oneself.” <sup id="fnref:213"><a href="#fn:213" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">213</a></sup> Evidence of competition among primitives is ample. In addition to the Mbuti, at least some other hunter-gatherers competed for mates or for food. “One cannot remain long with the Siriono without noting that quarreling and wrangling are ubiquitous.” <sup id="fnref:214"><a href="#fn:214" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">214</a></sup> The majority of quarrels “arose directly over questions of food”, but sexual jealousy also led to fights and quarrels among the Siriono. <sup id="fnref:215"><a href="#fn:215" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">215</a></sup> The Australian Aborigines fought for the possession of women. <sup id="fnref:216"><a href="#fn:216" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">216</a></sup> Poncins reports the case of one Eskimo who killed another in order to take his wife, and he states that any Eskimo would kill in order to prevent his wife from being taken from him. <sup id="fnref:217"><a href="#fn:217" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">217</a></sup></p>
+<p>Notwithstanding Turnbull’s remark that Mbuti children had no competitive games, some Mbuti adults did play tug-of-war, which clearly is a competitive game; <sup id="fnref:218"><a href="#fn:218" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">218</a></sup> and certain other primitive peoples too had competitive games. Massola mentions war games among the Australian Aborigines, and a ball game in which “the boy who caught the ball the greatest number of times was considered to be the winner.” <sup id="fnref:219"><a href="#fn:219" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">219</a></sup> The game of lacrosse originated among the Algonkin Indians. <sup id="fnref:220"><a href="#fn:220" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">220</a></sup> Navaho children of both sexes had foot-races, <sup id="fnref:221"><a href="#fn:221" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">221</a></sup> and among the Plains Indians almost all of the boys’ games were competitive. <sup id="fnref:222"><a href="#fn:222" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">222</a></sup> The Cheyenne Indian Wooden Leg described some of the competitive sports in which his people had engaged: “Horse races, foot races, wrestling matches, target shooting with guns or with arrows, tossing the arrows by hand, swimming, jumping and other like contests.” <sup id="fnref:223"><a href="#fn:223" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">223</a></sup> The Cheyenne also competed in war, in hunting, and “in all worthy activities.” <sup id="fnref:224"><a href="#fn:224" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">224</a></sup></p>
+<p>Richard E. Leakey quotes Richard Lee thusly: “Sharing deeply pervades the behavior and values of !Kung [Bushmen] foragers. Sharing is central to the conduct of life in foraging societies.” Leakey adds: “This ethnic is not confined to the !Kung: it is a feature of hunter-gatherers in general.” <sup id="fnref:225"><a href="#fn:225" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">225</a></sup> Of course, we share too. We pay taxes. Our tax money is used to help poor or disabled people through public-assistance programs, and to carry on other public activities that are supposed to promote the general welfare. Employers share with their employees by paying them wages. But aha! you answer, we share only because we are forced to do so. If we tried to evade payment of taxes we would go to prison; if an employer offered insufficient wages and benefits, no one would work for him, or perhaps he would have trouble with the union or with the minimum-wage laws. The difference is that hunter-gatherers shared voluntarily, out of loving, open-hearted generosity …right?</p>
+<p>Well, not exactly. Just as our sharing is governed by tax laws, union contracts, and the like, sharing in hunter-gatherer societies was commonly governed by “rigid procedural rules” that “must be followed in order to keep the peace.” <sup id="fnref:226"><a href="#fn:226" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">226</a></sup> Many hunter-gatherers were just as grudging about sharing their food as we are about paying our taxes, and just as anxious to make sure that they got not a bit less than what the rules entitled them to. Among Richard Lee’s Bushmen: “Distribution [of meat] is done with great care, according to a set of rules. Improper meat distributions can be the cause of bitter wrangling among close relatives.” <sup id="fnref:227"><a href="#fn:227" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">227</a></sup> Among the Tikerarmiut Eskimos, even though the rules for distribution of whale meat “were scrupulously followed, there still might be vociferous arguments.” <sup id="fnref:228"><a href="#fn:228" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">228</a></sup> The Siriono had food taboos that might have served as rules for the distribution of meat, but the taboos were very often disregarded. <sup id="fnref:229"><a href="#fn:229" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">229</a></sup> Though the Siriono did share food, they did so with extreme reluctance: <sup id="fnref:230"><a href="#fn:230" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">230</a></sup> “People constantly complain and quarrel about the distribution of food. Enia said to me one night: “When someone comes near the house, women hide the meat. Women even push meat up their vaginas to hide it.” <sup id="fnref:231"><a href="#fn:231" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">231</a></sup> “If, for instance, a person does share food with a kinsman, he has the right to expect some in return. Reciprocity, however, is almost always forced, and is sometimes even hostile. Indeed, sharing rarely occurs without a certain amount of mutual distrust and misunderstanding.” <sup id="fnref:232"><a href="#fn:232" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">232</a></sup> The Mbuti had rules for sharing meat, <sup id="fnref:233"><a href="#fn:233" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">233</a></sup> but there was, “often as not, a great deal of squabbling over the division of the game.” <sup id="fnref:234"><a href="#fn:234" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">234</a></sup> “Once an animal is killed, it is taken to be shared out on return to the camp. This is not to say that sharing takes place without any dispute or acrimony. On the contrary, the arguments that ensue when the hunt returns to camp are frequently long and loud;” <sup id="fnref:235"><a href="#fn:235" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">235</a></sup> “When the hunt returns to camp, men and women alike, but particularly women, may be seen furtively concealing some of their spoils under the leaves on their roofs, or in empty pots nearly”; <sup id="fnref:236"><a href="#fn:236" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">236</a></sup> “It would be a rare Mbuti woman who did not conceal a portion of the catch in case she was forced to share with others.” <sup id="fnref:237"><a href="#fn:237" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">237</a></sup> The fact that some hunter-gatherers often quarreled over the distribution conflicts with the anarchoprimitivists’ claims about “primitive affluence.” If food was so easy to get, then why would people quarrel over it? It should also be noted that the general rule of sharing among hunter-gatherers applied mainly to meat. There was relatively little sharing of vegetable foods, <sup id="fnref:238"><a href="#fn:238" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">238</a></sup> even though vegetable foods often constituted the greater part of the diet. <sup id="fnref:239"><a href="#fn:239" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">239</a></sup></p>
+<p>But I don’t want to give the impression that all primitive peoples or all hunter-gatherers were radical individualists who never cooperated and never shared except under compulsion. The Siriono, in terms of their selfishness, callousness, and unco-operativeness, were an extreme case. Among most of the primitive peoples about whom I’ve read there seems to have been a reasonable balance between cooperation and competition, sharing and selfishness, individualism and community spirit. In stating that hunter-gatherers did not usually share vegetable foods, shellfish, or the like outside of the household, Coon also indicates that such foods might indeed be shared with other families if the latter were hungry. <sup id="fnref:240"><a href="#fn:240" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">240</a></sup> Notwithstanding their individualistic traits, the Cheyenne (and probably other Plains Indians) placed a high value on generosity (i.e., voluntary sharing), <sup id="fnref:241"><a href="#fn:241" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">241</a></sup> and the same was true of the Nuer. <sup id="fnref:242"><a href="#fn:242" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">242</a></sup> The Eskimos with whom Gontran de Poncins lived were so generous in sharing their belongings that Poncins described their community as “quasi-communist” and stated that “all labored in common with no hint of selfishness.” <sup id="fnref:243"><a href="#fn:243" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">243</a></sup> (Poncins did note, however, that an Eskimo expected every gift to be repaid eventually with a return gift.) <sup id="fnref:244"><a href="#fn:244" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">244</a></sup> The importance to the Mbuti of cooperation in hunting and in some other activities is described by Turnbull, <sup id="fnref:245"><a href="#fn:245" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">245</a></sup> who also states that failure to share in time of need was a “crime,” <sup id="fnref:246"><a href="#fn:246" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">246</a></sup> and that the Mbuti shared to some extent even when there was no necessity for sharing. <sup id="fnref:247"><a href="#fn:247" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">247</a></sup></p>
+<p>In contrast to the callousness shown by the Siriono, the old or crippled among the Mbuti were treated with a care and respect that derived mainly from affection and a sense of responsibility. <sup id="fnref:248"><a href="#fn:248" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">248</a></sup> Poncins’s Eskimos would abandon helpless old people to die when it became too difficult to take care of them any longer, but they must have done this reluctantly, because as long as they had the old people with them, “they look after the aged on the trail, running back so often to the sled to see if the old people are warm enough, if they are comfortable, if they are not perhaps hungry and want a bit of fish.” <sup id="fnref:249"><a href="#fn:249" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">249</a></sup></p>
+<p>Just as one could go on and on citing examples of selfishness, competition, and aggression among hunter-gatherers, so one could go on and on citing examples of generosity, cooperation, and love among them. I’ve emphasized primarily examples showing selfishness, competition, and aggression only because of the need to debunk the anarchoprimitivist myth that portrays the life of hunter-gatherers as a kind of politically-correct Garden of Eden.</p>
+<p>In any case, when Colin Turnbull contrasts modern “competition,” “independence,” and reliance on “self” with “the well-tried primitive values of interdependence, cooperation, and reliance on community,” he simply makes a fool of himself. As we’ve already seen, the latter values are not particularly characteristic of primitive societies. And a moment’s thought shows that in modern society self-reliance has become practically impossible, while cooperation and interdependence are developed to an infinitely greater degree than could ever be the case in a primitive society.</p>
+<p>A modern nation is a vast, highly-organized system in which every part is dependent on every other part. The factories and oil refineries could not function without the electricity provided by power plants, the power plants need replacement parts produced in the factories, the factories require materials that could not be transported without the fuel provided by oil refineries. The factories, refineries, and power plants could not function without the workers. The workers need food produced on farms, the farms require fuel and spare parts for tractors and machinery, hence cannot do without the refineries and factories and so forth. And even a modern nation is no longer a self-sufficient unit. Increasingly, every country is dependent on the global economy. Since the modern individual could not survive without the goods and services provided by the worldwide technoindustrial machine, it is absurd today to speak of self-reliance. To keep the whole machine running, a vast, elaborately-choreographed system of cooperation is necessary. People have to arrive at their places of employment at precisely designated times, and do their work in accord with detailed rules and procedures in order to ensure that every individual’s performance meshes with everyone else’s. In order for traffic to flow smoothly and without accidents or congestion, people must cooperate by complying, with numerous traffic regulations. Appointments must be kept, taxes paid, licenses procured, laws obeyed, etc., etc., etc. There has never existed a primitive society that has had such a far-reaching and elaborate system of cooperation, or one that has regulated the behavior of the individual in such detail. Under these circumstances, the claim that modern society is charecterized by “independence” and “self-reliance,” in opposition to primitive “interdependence” and “cooperation,” appears bizarre.</p>
+<p>It might be answered that modern people cooperate with the system only because they are forced to do so, whereas at least part of primitive man’s cooperation is more or less voluntary. This of course is true, and the reason for it is clear. Precisely because our system of cooperation is so highly developed, it is exceedingly demanding and therefore so burdensome to the individual that few people would comply with it if they didn’t fear losing their jobs, paying a fine, or going to jail. Primitive man’s cooperation can be partly voluntary for the very reason that far less cooperation is required of primitive man than of modern man. What gives modern society a superficial appearance of individualism, independence, and self-reliance is the vanishing of the ties that formerly linked individuals into small-scale communities. Today, nuclear families commonly have little connection to their next-door neighbors or even to their cousins. Most people have friends, but friends nowadays tend to use each other only for entertainment. They do not usually cooperate in economic or other serious, practical activities, nor do they offer each other much physical or economic security. If you become disabled, you don ‘t expect your friends to support you. You depend on insurance or on the welfare department. But the ties of cooperation and mutual assistance that once bound the hunter-gatherer to his band have not simply vanished into thin air. They have been replaced by ties that bind us to the technoindustrial system as a whole, and bind us much more tightly than the hunter-gatherer was bound to his band. It is absurd to say that a person is independent, self-reliant, or an individualist because he belongs to a collectivity of hundreds of millions of people rather than to one of thirty or fifty people. As for competition, it is more firmly leashed in our society than it was in most primitive societies. As we’ve seen, two Mbuti women might compete for a man with their fists; they might compete for food by filching some or by having a shouting match over the division of meat. Australian Aboriginal men fought over women with deadly weapons. <sup id="fnref:250"><a href="#fn:250" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">250</a></sup> But such direct and unrestrained competition cannot be tolerated in modern society because it would disrupt the elaborate and finely-tuned system of cooperation. So our society has developed outlets for the competitive impulse that are harmless, or even useful, to the system. Men today do not compete for women, or vice versa, by fighting. Men compete for women by earning money and driving prestigious cars; women compete for men by cultivating charm and appearance. Corporation executives compete by striving for promotions. In this context, competition among the executives is a device that encourages them to cooperate with the corporation, for the person who wins the promotion is the one who best serves the corporation. It could plausibly be argued that competitive sports in modern society function as an outlet for aggressive and competitive impulses that would have serious disruptive consequences if they were expressed in the way that many primitive peoples express such impulses. Clearly, the system needs people who are cooperative, obedient, and willing to accept dependence As the historian Von Laue puts it: “Industrial society, after all, requires an incredible docility at the base of its freedoms [sic].” <sup id="fnref:251"><a href="#fn:251" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">251</a></sup> For this reason, community, cooperation, and helping others have become deeply-ingrained, fundamental values of modern society. But what about the value supposedly placed on independence, individualism, and competition? Whereas the words “community”, “cooperation”, and “helping” in our society are unequivocally accepted as “good”, the words “individualism” and “competition” are tense, two-edged words that must be used with some care if one wishes to avoid risk of a negative reaction. To illustrate with an anecdote, when I was in the seventh or eighth grade our teacher, who was apt to be somewhat rough with the kids, asked a girl to name the country that she lived in. The girl was not very bright and apparently did not know the full name of the United States of America, so she answered simply: “The States”. “The United States of what?” asked the teacher. The girl just sat there with a blank expression. The teacher kept badgering her for an answer until she ventured a guess: “The States of Community?”.</p>
+<p>Why “community”? Because of course “community” was a goody-goody word, the kind of word that a kid would use to get brownie points with a teacher. Would any kid in a similar situation have answered “United States of Competition” or “United States of Individualism”? Not likely!</p>
+<p>It is routinely taken for granted that words like “community,” “cooperation,” “helping,” and “sharing” represent something positive, but “individualism” is seldom used in the mainstream media or in the educational system in an unequivocally positive sense. “Competition” is more often used in a positive sense, but typically it us used that way only in specific contexts in which competition is useful (or at least harmless) to the system. For example, competition is considered desirable in the business word because it weeds out inefficient companies, spurs other companies to become more efficient, and promotes economic and technological progress. But only leashed competition — that is, competition that abides by rules designed to make it harmless or useful — is commonly spoken of favorably. And, when treated in a positive sense, competition is always justified in terms of communitarian values. Thus, business competition is considered good because it promotes efficiency and progress, which supposedly are good for the community as a whole. “Independence,” too, is a “good” word only when used in certain ways. For example, when one speaks of making disabled people “independent” one never thinks of making them independent of the system. One means only that they are to be provided with gainful employment so that the community will not be burdened with the cost of supporting them. Once they have found a job they are every bit as dependent on the system as they were when they lived on welfare, and they have a great deal less freedom to decide how to spend their time. So why do politically-correct anthropologists and others like them contrast the supposedly primitive values of “community,” “cooperation,” “sharing,” and “interdependence” with what they claim are the modern values of “competition,” “individualism” and “independence”? Certainly an important part of the answer is that politically-correct people have absorbed too well the values that the system’s propaganda has taught them, including the values of “cooperation,” “community,” “helping,” and so forth. Another value they have absorbed from propaganda is that of “tolerance,” which in cross-cultural contexts tends to translate into condescending approval of non-Western cultures. A well-socialized modern anthropologist is therefore faced with a conflict: Since he is supposed to be tolerant, he finds it difficult to say anything bad about primitive cultures. But primitive cultures provide abundant examples of behavior that is decidedly bad from the point of view of modern Western values. So the anthropologist has to censor much of the “bad” behavior out of his descriptions of primitive cultures in order to avoid showing them in a negative light. In addition, due to his own excessively thorough socialization, the politically-correct anthropologist has a need to rebel. <sup id="fnref:252"><a href="#fn:252" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">252</a></sup> He is too well socialized to discard the fundamental values of modern society, so he expresses his hostility toward that society by distorting facts to make it seem that modern society deviates from its own stated values to a much greater extent than it actually does. Thus the anthropologist ends by magnifying the competitive and individualistic aspects of modern society while grossly understating these aspects of primitive societies.</p>
+<p>There’s more to it than that, of course, and I can’t claim to understand fully the psychology of these people. It seems obvious, for example, that the politically-correct portrayal of hunter-gatherers is motivated in part by an impulse to construct an image of a pure and innocent world existing at the dawn of time, analogous to the Garden of Eden, but the basis of this impulse is not clear to me.</p>
+<h3 id="8">8.</h3>
+<p>What about hunter-gatherers’ relations with animals? Some anarchoprimitivists seem to think that animals and humans once “coexisted” and that although animals nowadays sometimes eat humans, “such attacks by animals are comparatively rare,” and “these animals are short of food due to the encroachment of civilization and are acting more out of extreme hunger and desperation. It is also due to our ignorance of the animal’s gestures and scents, despoiled foliage or other signals our ancestor’s [sic] knew but our domestication has now denied us.” <sup id="fnref:253"><a href="#fn:253" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">253</a></sup> It is certainly true that the hunter-gatherer’s knowledge of animals’ habits made him safer in the wilderness than a modern man would be. It is also true that attacks on humans by wild animals are and have been relatively infrequent, probably because animals have learned the hard way that it is risky to prey on humans. But to hunter-gatherers in many environments wild animals did represent a significant danger. The Siriono hunter was “occasionally exposed to attacks from jaguars, crocodiles, and poisonous snakes.” <sup id="fnref:254"><a href="#fn:254" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">254</a></sup> Leopards, forest buffalo, and crocodiles were a real threat to the Mbuti. <sup id="fnref:255"><a href="#fn:255" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">255</a></sup> On the other hand, remarkably, the Kadar (hunter-gatherers of India) were said to have “a truce with tigers, which in the old days left them strictly alone. <sup id="fnref:256"><a href="#fn:256" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">256</a></sup> This is the only case of the kind that I know of. Hunter-gatherers represented a much greater danger to animals than vice versa, since of course they hunted animals for food. Even the Kadar, who had no hunting weapons and lived mainly on wild yams, occasionally used their digging sticks to kill small animals for food. <sup id="fnref:257"><a href="#fn:257" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">257</a></sup> Hunting methods could be cruel. Mbuti pygmies would stab an elephant in the belly with a poisoned spear; the animal would then die of peritonitis (inflammation of the abdominal lining) during the next 24 hours.<sup id="fnref:258"><a href="#fn:258" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">258</a></sup> The Bushmen shot game with poisoned arrows, and the animals died slowly over a period that could be as long as three days. <sup id="fnref:259"><a href="#fn:259" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">259</a></sup> Prehistoric hunter-gatherers slaughtered animals on a mass basis by driving herds over cliffs or bluffs. <sup id="fnref:260"><a href="#fn:260" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">260</a></sup> The process was fairly gruesome and presumably was painful to the animals, since some of them were not killed outright by their fall but only disabled. The Indian Wooden Leg said: “I have helped in the chasing of antelope bands over a cliff. Many of them were killed or got broken legs. We clubbed to death the injured ones.” <sup id="fnref:261"><a href="#fn:261" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">261</a></sup> This is not exactly the kind of thing that appeals to animal-rights activists. Anarchoprimitivists may want to claim that hunter-gatherers inflicted suffering on animals only to the extent that they had to do so in order to get meat. But this is not true. A good deal of hunter-gatherers’ cruelty was gratuitous. In The Forest People, Turnbull reported:</p>
+<p>“The youngster had speared [the sindula] with his first thrust, pinning the animal to the ground through the fleshy part of the stomach. But the animal was still very much alive, fighting for freedom. Maipe put another spear into its neck, but it still writhed and fought. Not until a third spear pierced its heart did it give up the struggle…</p>
+<p>“The pygmies stood around in an excited group, pointing at the dying animal and laughing. One boy, about nine years old, threw himself on the ground and curled up in a grotesque heap and imitated the sindula’s last convulsions…</p>
+<p>“At other times I have seen Pygmies singeing feathers off birds that were still alive, explaining that the meat is more tender if death comes slowly. And the hunting dogs, valuable as they are, get kicked around mercilessly from the day they are born to the day they die.” <sup id="fnref:262"><a href="#fn:262" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">262</a></sup></p>
+<p>A few years later, in Wayward Servants, Turnbull wrote: “The moment of killing is best described as a moment of intense compassion and reverence. The fun that is sometimes subsequently made of the dead animal, particularly by the youths, appears to be almost a nervous reaction, and there is an element of fear in their behavior. On the other hand, a bird caught alive may deliberately be toyed with, its feathers singed off over the fire while it is still fluttering and squawking until it is finally burned or suffocated to death. This again is usually done by the youths who take the same nervous pleasure in the act; very rarely a young hunter may absent-mindedly [^!?] do the same thing. Older hunters and elders generally disapprove, but do not interfere.”; “The respect seems to be not for animal life but for the game as a gift of the forest…” <sup id="fnref:263"><a href="#fn:263" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">263</a></sup> This does not seem entirely consistent with what Turnbull reported earlier in The Forest People. Maybe Turnbull was already beginning to swing toward political correctness when he wrote Wayward Servants. But even if we take the statements of Wayward Servants at face value, the fact remains that the Mbuti did treat animals with unnecessary cruelty, whether or not they felt “compassion and reverence” for them. If the Mbuti did have compassion for animals, they were probably exceptional in that regard. Hunter-gatherers seem typically to be callous toward animals. The Eskimos with whom Gontran de Poncins lived kicked and beat their dogs brutally. <sup id="fnref:264"><a href="#fn:264" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">264</a></sup> The Siriono sometimes captured young animals alive and brought them back to camp, but they gave them nothing to eat, and the animals were treated so roughly by the children that they soon died. <sup id="fnref:265"><a href="#fn:265" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">265</a></sup> It should be noted that many hunting-and-gathering peoples did have a sense of reverence for or closeness to wild animals. I’ve already quoted Colin Turnbull’s statement to that effect in the case of the Mbuti. Coon states that “it is virtually a standard rule among hunters that they should never mock or otherwise insult any wild creature whose life they have brought to an end.” <sup id="fnref:266"><a href="#fn:266" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">266</a></sup> (As the passages I’ve quoted from Turnbull show, there were exceptions to this “standard rule”.) Venturing into speculation, Coon adds that “hunters sense the unity of nature and the combination of humility and responsibility of their role in it.” <sup id="fnref:267"><a href="#fn:267" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">267</a></sup> Wissler describes the closeness to and reverence toward nature (including wild animals) of the North American Indians. <sup id="fnref:268"><a href="#fn:268" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">268</a></sup> Holmberg mentions the Siriono’s “bonds” and “kinship” with the animal world. <sup id="fnref:269"><a href="#fn:269" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">269</a></sup> But, as we’ve already seen, these “bonds” and this “kinship” did not prevent physical cruelty to animals. Clearly, animal-rights activists would be horrified at the way hunter-gatherers often treated animals. For people who look to hunting and gathering cultures as their social ideal, it therefore makes no sense to maintain alliances with the animal-rights movement.</p>
+<h3 id="9">9.</h3>
+<p>To mop up as it were, I’ll mention briefly a few other elements of the anarchoprimitivist myth. According to the myth, racism is an artifact of civilization. But it’s not clear that this is actually true. Of course, most primitive peoples couldn’t be racists, because they never came in contact with any member of a race different from their own. But where contacts between different races did occur, I’m not aware of any reason to believe that hunter-gatherers were less prone to racism than modern man is. The Mbuti pygmies were distinguishable from their village-dwelling neighbors not only by their shorter stature but also by their facial features and by the lighter color of their skin. <sup id="fnref:270"><a href="#fn:270" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">270</a></sup> The Mbuti referred to the villagers as “black savages” and “animals”, and did not consider them to be real people. <sup id="fnref:271"><a href="#fn:271" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">271</a></sup> The villagers similarly referred to the Mbuti as “savages” and “animals”, nor did they consider the Mbuti to be real people. <sup id="fnref:272"><a href="#fn:272" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">272</a></sup> It’s true that the villagers often took Mbuti wives, but this seems to have been only because their own women, in the forest environment, had very low fertility, whereas Mbuti women bore plenty of children. <sup id="fnref:273"><a href="#fn:273" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">273</a></sup> First-generation offspring of mixed marriages were considered inferior. <sup id="fnref:274"><a href="#fn:274" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">274</a></sup> (Worth noting is that while Mbuti women often married villagers and lived in the villages, villager women hardly ever married Mbuti men, because the women “shunned the hard Gypsy life of the forest nomads and preferred the settled village life.” <sup id="fnref:275"><a href="#fn:275" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">275</a></sup> Moreover, the mixed-blood offspring of Mbuti-villager unions usually remained in the villages and “only rarely found their way back to the forest, because they preferred the more comfortable village life to the tough life of the forest.” <sup id="fnref:276"><a href="#fn:276" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">276</a></sup> This is hardly consistent with the anarchoprimitivists’ image of the hunter-gatherer’s life as one of ease and plenty.) In the foregoing case of mutual racial antagonism only one side — the Mbuti — consisted of hunter-gatherers, the villagers being cultivators of crops. For a possible example of racism in which both sides were hunter-gatherers, the Indians of the North American subarctic and the Eskimos hated and feared one another; they seldom met except to fight. <sup id="fnref:277"><a href="#fn:277" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">277</a></sup> How about homophobia? That wasn’t unknown among hunter-gatherers either. According to Mrs. Thomas, homosexuality was not permitted among the Bushmen whom she knew <sup id="fnref:278"><a href="#fn:278" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">278</a></sup> (though it does not necessarily follow that this was true of all Bushman groups). Among the Mbuti, according to Turnbull, “homosexuality is never alluded to except as a great insult, under the most dire provocation.” <sup id="fnref:279"><a href="#fn:279" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">279</a></sup></p>
+<p>The publisher of the anarchoprimitivist “zine” Species Traitor stated in a letter to me that in hunter-gatherer cultures “people had no property.” <sup id="fnref:280"><a href="#fn:280" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">280</a></sup> This is not true. Various forms of private property did exist among hunter-gatherers — and not only among sedentary ones like the Northwest Coast Indians. It is well known that most hunting-and-gathering peoples had collective property in land. That is, each band of 30 to 130 people owned the territory in which it lived. Coon provides an extended discussion of this. <sup id="fnref:281"><a href="#fn:281" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">281</a></sup> It is less well known that hunter-gatherers, even nomadic ones, could also hold rights to natural resources as individual property, and in some cases such rights could even be inherited. <sup id="fnref:282"><a href="#fn:282" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">282</a></sup> For example, among Mrs. Thomas’s Bushmen: “Each group has a very specific territory which that group alone may use, and they respect their boundaries rigidly. If a person is born in a certain area he or she has a right to eat the melons that grow there and all the veld food. A man may eat the melons wherever his wife can and wherever his father and mother could, so that every Bushman has in this way some kind of rights in many places. Gai, for example, ate melons at Ai a ha’o because his wife’s mother was born there, as well as at his own birthplace, the Okwa Omaramba.” <sup id="fnref:283"><a href="#fn:283" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">283</a></sup></p>
+<p>Arnong the Veddas (hunter-gatherers of Ceylon), “the band territory was subdivided for individual band members, who could pass their property on to their children.” <sup id="fnref:284"><a href="#fn:284" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">284</a></sup> Arnong certain Australian Aborigines there existed a system of inherited rights to goods obtained in trade for stones extracted from a quarry. <sup id="fnref:285"><a href="#fn:285" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">285</a></sup> Among some other Australian Aborigines, certain fruit trees were privately owned. <sup id="fnref:286"><a href="#fn:286" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">286</a></sup> The Mbuti used termites as food, and among them termite hills could be owned by individuals. <sup id="fnref:287"><a href="#fn:287" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">287</a></sup> Portable items such as tools, clothing, and ornaments usually were owned by individual hunter-gatherers. <sup id="fnref:288"><a href="#fn:288" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">288</a></sup></p>
+<p>Turnbull mentions the argument of one W. Nippold to the effect that hunter-gatherers, including the Mbuti, had a highly developed sense of private property. Turnbull counters that this is “debatable point, and largely a semantic problem.” <sup id="fnref:289"><a href="#fn:289" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">289</a></sup> Here there is is no need for us to split hairs about what does and what does not constitute private property, or what would be a “highly developed sense” of it. Suffice it to say that the unqualified belief that hunter-gatherers did not have private property is only another element of the anarchoprimitivist myth. It’s important to note, however, that nomadic hunter-gatherers did not accumulate property to the extent of being able to use their wealth to dominate other people. <sup id="fnref:290"><a href="#fn:290" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">290</a></sup> The hunter-gatherer ordinarily had to carry all of his property on his own back whenever he shifted camp, or at best he had to carry it in a canoe or on a dog-sled or travois. <sup id="fnref:291"><a href="#fn:291" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">291</a></sup> By any of these means only a limited amount of property can be transported, hence an upper bound is imposed on the amount of property that a nomad can usefully accumulate.</p>
+<p>Property in rights to natural resources does not need to be transported so in theory even a nomadic hunter-gatherer could accumulate an unlimited amount of that kind of property. But in practice I am not aware of any instance in which anyone belonging to a nomadic hunting-and-gathering band accumulated enough property in rights to natural resources to enable him to dominate other people by means of it. Under the conditions of the nomadic hunting-and-gathering life, it would obviously be very difficult for any individual to enforce an exclusive right to more natural resources than he could utilize personally. Given the absence of accumulated wealth among nomadic hunter-gatherers, it might be supposed that there would be no social hierarchies among the latter, but this is not quite true. Clearly there is not much room for social hierarchy in a nomadic band that contains at most 130 people (including children), and typically well under half that number. Moreover, some hunting-and-gathering peoples made a conscious, consistent, and apparently quite successful effort to prevent anyone from setting himself or herself up above the level of the others. For example, among the Mbuti, there were “no chiefs or councils of elders,” <sup id="fnref:292"><a href="#fn:292" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">292</a></sup> “Individual authority is unthinkable,” <sup id="fnref:293"><a href="#fn:293" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">293</a></sup> and “any attempt at the assumption of individual authority, or even of excessive influence, is sharply countered by ridicule or ostracism.” <sup id="fnref:294"><a href="#fn:294" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">294</a></sup> In fact, Turnbull emphasizes throughout his books the Mbuti’s zeal in opposing the assumption by anyone of an elevated status. <sup id="fnref:295"><a href="#fn:295" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">295</a></sup></p>
+<p>The Indians of sub-arctic North America had no chiefs. <sup id="fnref:296"><a href="#fn:296" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">296</a></sup> The Siriono did have chiefs, but: “The prerogatives of chieftainship are few. A chief makes suggestions as to migrations, hunting trips, etc., but these are not always followed by his tribesmen. As a mark of status, however, a chief always possesses more than one wife”; “While chiefs complain a great deal that other members of the band do not satisfy their obligations to them, little heed is paid to their requests”; “In general, however, chiefs fare better than other members of the band. Their requests more frequently bear fruit than those of others.” <sup id="fnref:297"><a href="#fn:297" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">297</a></sup></p>
+<p>The Bushmen whom Mrs. Thomas knew “have no chiefs or kings, only headmen who in function are virtually indistinguishable from the people they lead, and sometimes a band will not even have a headman.” <sup id="fnref:298"><a href="#fn:298" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">298</a></sup> Richard Lee’s Kung Bushmen had no chiefs, <sup id="fnref:299"><a href="#fn:299" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">299</a></sup> and like the Mbuti they made a conscious effort to prevent anyone from setting himself up above the others. <sup id="fnref:300"><a href="#fn:300" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">300</a></sup> However, some other Kung Bushmen did have chiefs or headmen, the headmanship was hereditary, and the headmen had real authority, for the “headman or chief decides who shall go where and when on collecting expeditions, because the timing of the yearly round is critical to ensure the food supply.” <sup id="fnref:301"><a href="#fn:301" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">301</a></sup> This is what Coon says about the Bushmen in the area of the Gautscha water hole, and since Mrs. Thomas knew these Bushmen, <sup id="fnref:302"><a href="#fn:302" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">302</a></sup> it’s not clear how one would reconcile Coon’s statement with her remark that “headmen in function are virtually indistinguishable from the people the lead.” I don’t have access to proper library facilities; I don’t even have a complete copy of Mrs. Thomas’s book, only photocopies of some pages, so I’ll have to leave this problem to any reader who may be sufficiently interested to take it up.</p>
+<p>Be that as it may, in some parts of Australia there were “powerful chiefs, whom the settlers called kings. The king wore a very elaborate turban crown and was always carried on the shoulders of the men.” <sup id="fnref:303"><a href="#fn:303" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">303</a></sup> In Tasmania too there were “territorial chiefs of considerable power, and in some cases at lest their office was hereditary.” <sup id="fnref:304"><a href="#fn:304" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">304</a></sup></p>
+<p>Thus, while social stratification was absent or slight in many or most nomadic hunting-and-gathering societies, the sweeping assumption that all hierarchy was absent in all such societies is not true.</p>
+<p>It is commonly assumed, and not only by anarchoprimitivists, that hunter-gatherer were good conservationists. On this subject I don’t have much information, but from what I do know it seems that hunter-gatherers had a mixed record as conservationists. The Mbuti look very good. Schebesta believed that they had voluntarily limited their population in order to avoid overburdening their natural resources <sup id="fnref:305"><a href="#fn:305" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">305</a></sup> (though, at least in the part of his work that I have read, he does not explain his grounds for this belief). According to Turnbull, “there is very definitely a strongly felt and stated urge to use every part of the animal, and never to kill more than is necessary for the band’s needs for the day. This is in fact may be one reason why the Mbuti are so reluctant to kill an excess of game and preserve it for exchange with the villagers. <sup id="fnref:306"><a href="#fn:306" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">306</a></sup></p>
+<p>Turnbull also states that “in the view of mammalogists such as Van Gelder the [Mbuti] hunters are indeed the finest conservationists any conservation-minded government could wish for.” <sup id="fnref:307"><a href="#fn:307" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">307</a></sup> On the other hand, when Turnbull took an Mbuti named Kenge to visit a game preserve out on the plains, Kenge was told “that he would see more game than he had ever seen in the forest, but he was not to try and hunt any. Kenge could not understand this, because to his mind game is meant to be hunted.” <sup id="fnref:308"><a href="#fn:308" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">308</a></sup>. According to Coon, the ethic of the Tikerarmiut Eskimos forbade them to trap more than four wolves, wolverines, foxes, or marmots on any one day. However, this ethic quickly broke down when white traders arrived and tempted the Tikerarmiut with trade goods that they could obtain in exchange for the pelts of the animals named. <sup id="fnref:309"><a href="#fn:309" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">309</a></sup></p>
+<p>As soon as they acquired steel axes, the Siriono began destroying the wild fruit trees of their region because it was easier to harvest the fruit by cutting the tree down than by climbing it. <sup id="fnref:310"><a href="#fn:310" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">310</a></sup></p>
+<p>It is well known that some hunter-gatherers intentionally set wildfires because they knew that burned-over land would produce more of the edible plants that they favored. <sup id="fnref:311"><a href="#fn:311" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">311</a></sup> I consider this practice recklessly destructive. It is believed that prehistoric hunter-gatherers, through over-hunting, caused or at least contributed to the extinction of some species of large mammals, <sup id="fnref:312"><a href="#fn:312" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">312</a></sup> though as far as I know this has never been definitely proved. The foregoing doesn’t even scratch the surface of the question of conservation versus environmental recklessness on the part of hunter-gatherers. It’s a question that deserves thorough investigation.</p>
+<h3 id="10">10.</h3>
+<p>I can’t generalize broadly since I’ve communicated personally with only a few anarchoprimitivists, but it’s clear that the beliefs of at least some anarchoprimitivists are impervious to any facts that conflict with them. One can point out to these people any number of facts of the kind I’ve presented here and quote the words of writers who actually visited hunter-gatherers at a time when the latter were still relatively unspoiled, yet the true-believing anarchoprimitivist will always find rationalizations, no matter how strained, to discount all inconvenient facts and maintain his belief in the myth.</p>
+<p>One is reminded of the response of fundamentalist Christians to any rational attack on their beliefs. Whatever facts one may point out, the fundamentalist will always find some argument, however far-fetched, to explain them away and justify his belief in the literal, word-for-word truth of the Bible. Actually, there is about anarchoprimitivism a distinct flavor of early Christianity. The anarchoprimitivists’ hunting-and-gathering utopia corresponds to the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve lived in ease and without sin (Genesis 2). The invention of agriculture and civilization corresponds to the Fall: Adam and Eve ate fruit from the tree of knowledge (Genesis 3:6), were cast out of the Garden (Genesis 3:24), and thereafter had to earn their bread with the sweat of their brow by tilling the soil (Genesis 3: 19,23). They moreover lost gender equality, since Eve became subordinate to her husband (Genesis 3:16). The revolution that anarchoprimitivists hope will overthrow civilization corresponds to the Day of Judgment, the day of destruction on which Babylon will fall (Revelation 18:2). The return to primitive utopia corresponds to the arrival of the Kingdom of God, wherein “there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be.any more pain” (Revelation 21:4).</p>
+<p>Today’s activists who risk their bodies by engaging in masochistic resistance tactics, such as chaining themselves across roads to prevent the passage of logging trucks, correspond to the Christian martyrs-the true believers who “were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God” (Revelation 20:4). Veganism corresponds to the dietary restrictions of many religions, such as the Christian fast during Lent. Like anarchoprimitivists, the early Christians emphasized egalitarianism (“whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased”, Matthew 23:12) and sharing (“distribution was made unto every man according as he had need”, Acts 4:35). The psychological affinity between anarchoprimitivism and early Christianity does not augur well. As soon as the emperor Constantine gave the Christians an opportunity to become powerful they sold out, and ever since then Christianity, more often than not, has served as a prop for the established powers.</p>
+<h3 id="11">11.</h3>
+<p>In the present article I’ve been mainly concerned to debunk the anarchoprimitivist myth, and for that reason I’ve emphasized certain aspects of primitive societies that will be seen as negative from the standpoint of modern values. But there is another side to this coin: Nomadic hunting-and-gathering societies showed many traits that were highly attractive. Among other things, there is reason to believe that such societies were relatively free of the psychological problems that bedevil modern man, such as chronic stress, anxiety or frustration, depression, eating and sleep disorders, and so forth; that people in such societies, in certain critically important respects (though not in all respects) had far more personal autonomy than modern man does; and that hunter-gatherers were better satisfied with their way of life than modern man is with his.</p>
+<p>Why does this matter? Because it shows that chronic stress, anxiety and frustration, depression, and so forth, are not inevitable parts of the human condition, but are disorders brought on by modern civilization. Nor is servitude an inevitable part of the human condition: The example of at least some nomadic hunter-gatherer shows that true freedom is possible. Even more important: Regardless of whether they were good conservationists or poor ones, primitive peoples were incapable of damaging their environment to anything remotely approaching the extent to which modern man is damaging his. Primitives simply didn’t have the power to do that much damage. They may have used fire recklessly and they may have exterminated some species through overhunting, but they had no way to dam large rivers, to cover thousands of square miles of the Earth’s surface with cities and pavement, or to produce the vast quantities of toxic chemicals and radioactive waste with which modern civilization threatens to ruin the world for good and all. Nor did primitives have any means of releasing the deadly-dangerous forces represented by genetic engineering and by the super-intelligent computers that may soon be developed. These are dangers that scare even the technophiles themselves. <sup id="fnref:313"><a href="#fn:313" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">313</a></sup> So I agree with the anarchoprimitivists that the advent of civilization was a great disaster and that the Industrial Revolution was an even greater one. I further agree that a revolution against modernity, and against civilization in general, is necessary. But you can’t build an effective revolutionary movement out of soft-headed dreamers, lazies, and charlatans. You have to have tough-minded, realistic, practical people, and people of that kind don’t need the anarchoprimitivists’ mushy utopian myth.</p>
+<h2 id="concluding-note">Concluding Note</h2>
+<p>When I wrote this article I had only begun to read II. Band, I. Teil [vol. 2, part 1] of Schebesta’s Die Bambuti-Pygmiien vom Ituri. Since reading the latter, and owing to the nature of the discrepancies that I found between Turnbull’s account and that of Schebesta, I’ve been forced to entertain serious doubts about the reliability of Turnbull’s work on the Mbuti pygmies. I now suspect that Turnbull consciously or unconsciously slanted his description of the Mbuti to make them appear more attractive to modern leftish intellectuals like himself. However, I do not consider it necessary now to rewrite this article in such a way as to eliminate the reliance on Turnbull, because I’ve cited Turnbull mainly for information that makes the Mbuti appear unattractive, e.g., for their wife-beating, fighting, and quarreling over food. Given the nature of Turnbull’s bias, it seems safe to assume that, if anything, he would have understated the amount of wife-beating, fighting, and quarreling that he observed. But I think it is only fair to warn the reader that where Turnbull ascribes attractive or politically correct traits to the Mbuti, a certain degree of skepticism may be in order. I would like to thank a number of people who sent me books, articles, or other information pertaining to primitive societies, and without whose help the present article could not have been written: Facundo Bermudez, Chris J., Maijorie Kennedy, Alex Obledo, Patrick Scardo, Kevin Tucker, John Zerzan, and six other people who perhaps would not want their names to be mentioned publicly. But most of all I want to thank the woman I love, who provided me with more useful information than anyone else did, including two volumes of Paul Schebesta’s wonderful work on the Mbuti pygmies.
+List of Works Cited</p>
+<p>Due to the fact that I am a prisoner and have no direct access to library facilities, the bibliographical information given in this list is in some instances incomplete. In most cases, however, I do not think this will lead to any serious difficulty in locating the works cited.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<p><a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library">Back to the Library</a> - <a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski">More from Ted Kaczynski</a></p>
+</div>
+<hr>
+<h2 id="works-listed-alphabetically-by-authors-last-name">Works Listed Alphabetically by Author’s Last Name</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Barclay, Harold B., letter to editor, in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, spring/summer 2002, pages 70–71.</li>
+<li>Black, Bob, “Primitive Aff1uence”, in The Abolition of Work / Primitive Affluence: Essays against work by Bob Black, Green Anarchist Books, BCM 1715, London WC1N3XX. Date: 1998.</li>
+<li>Bonvillain, Nancy, Women and Men: Cultural Constructs of Gender, second edition, Prentice Hall, Upper saddle River, New Jersey, 1998.</li>
+<li>Cashdan, Elizabeth, “Hunters and Gatherers: Economic Behavior in Bands”, in Stuart Plattner (editor), Economic Anthropology, Stanford University Press, 1989, pages 21–48.</li>
+<li>Coon, Carleton S., The Hunting Peoples, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, Toronto, 1971.</li>
+<li>Davidson, H. R. Ellis, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe, Penguin Books, 1990.</li>
+<li>Debo, Angie, Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place, University of Oklahoma Press, 1976.</li>
+<li>Elkin, A. P., The Australian Aborigines, fourth edition, Anchor Books, Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1964.</li>
+<li>Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Nuer, Oxford University Press, 1972.</li>
+<li>Fernald, Merritt Lyndon, and Alfred Charles Kinsey, Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America, Revised Edition, Dover, New York, 1996.</li>
+<li>Gibbons, Euell, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, Field Guide Edition, David McKay Company, New York, 1972.</li>
+<li>Haviland, William A., Cultural Anthropology, ninth edition, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1999.</li>
+<li>Holmberg, Allan R., Nomads of the Long Bow: The Siriono of Eastern Bolivia, The Natural History Press, Garden City, New York, 1969.</li>
+<li>Joy, Bill, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”, Wired magazine, April 2000, pages 238–262.</li>
+<li>Leach, Douglas Edward, History of Indian-White Relations, Wilcomb E. Washburn, volume editor. Leakey, Richard E., The Making of Mankind, E. P. Dutton, New York, 1981.</li>
+<li>Marquis, Thomas B. (interpreter), Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer, Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press, 1967.</li>
+<li>Massola, Aldo, The Aborigines of South-Eastern Australia: As They Were, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1971.</li>
+<li>Mercader, Julio (editor), Under the Canopy: The Archaeology of Tropical Rain Forests, Rutgers University Press, 2003.</li>
+<li>Nietzsche, Friedrich, “The Antichrist”, §55; in Twilight of the Idols / The Antichrist, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Classics, 1990.</li>
+<li>Nitzberg, Julien, “Back to the Future Primitive” (interview with John Zerzan), Mean magazine, April 2001, pages 68, 69, 78.</li>
+<li>Pfeiffer, John E., The Emergence of Man, Harper & Row, New York, Evanston, and London, 1969.</li>
+<li>Pfeiffer, John E., The Emergence of Society, New York, 1977.</li>
+<li>Poncins, Gontran de, Kabloona, Time-Life Books Inc., Alexandria, Virginia, 1980.</li>
+<li>Rees, Martin, Our Final Century, Heinemann, 2003.</li>
+<li>Richard, Gladys A., Navaho Religion: A Study of Symbolism, Princeton University Press, 1990.</li>
+<li>Sahlins, Marshall, Stone Age Economics, Aldine Atherton, 1972.</li>
+<li>Schbesta, Paul, Die Bambuti-Pygmaen vom Ituri, Institut Royal Colonial Belge, Brussels; I. Band, 1938; II. Band, I. Teil, 1941.</li>
+<li>Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall, The Harmless People, Second Vintage Books Edition Random House, New York, 1989.</li>
+<li>Turnbull, Colin M., The Forest People, Simon and Schuster, text copyright 161, Foreword copyright, 1962.</li>
+<li>Turnbull, Colin M., Wayward Servants: The Two Worlds of the African Pygmies, The Natural History Press, Garden City, New York, 1965.</li>
+<li>Turnbull, Colin M., The Mbuti Pygmies: Change and Adaptation, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1983.</li>
+<li>Vestal, Stanley, Sitting Bull, Champion of the Sioux: A Biography, University of Oklahoma Press, 1989.</li>
+<li>Von Laue, Theodore H., Why Lenin? Why Stalin?, J. B. Lippencott, Co., New York, 1971.</li>
+<li>Wissler, Clark, Indians of the United States, Revised Edition, Anchor Books, Random House, New York, 1989.</li>
+<li>Zerzan, John, “Future Primitive”, in Future Primitive and Other Essays, by the same author, 1994 edition.</li>
+<li>Zerzan, John, “Whose Future?” in Species Traitor No.1.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2 id="works-without-named-author">Works Without Named Author</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Encyclopedia Americana. International Edition, 1998.</li>
+<li>The New Encyclopaedia Britannica. fifteenth edition, 2003 (abbreviated as Encycl. Brit.). Note: Copies of the Encyclopaedia Britannica labeled “fifteenth edition” but bearing a copyright date other than 2003 are not necessarily identical to the Britannica of 2003.</li>
+<li>The Unabomber Manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future.</li>
+</ul>
+<h2 id="periodicals">Periodicals</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. P. O. Box 3448. Berkeley CA 94703, U.S.A.</li>
+<li>Green Anarchy. P. 0. Box 11331. Eugene. OR 97440.</li>
+<li>Mean magazine.</li>
+<li>Science News.</li>
+<li>Species Traitor. P. 0. Box 835. Greensburg. PA 15601.</li>
+<li>Time magazine.</li>
+<li>Wired magazine.</li>
+</ul>
+<p>Because most of the works cited here are cited repeatedly; citations are given in abbreviated form. For bibliographical details, see the accompanying List of Works Cited (p. 167). “Encycl. Brit.” means “The New Encyclopaedia Britannica”, Fifteenth 2003.</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p>Example: “What is ‘Green Anarchy’?”, by the Black and Green Network, Green Anarchy #9, September 2002, page 13 (“the hunter-gatherer workday usually did not exceed three hours”). <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p>Sahlins, pages 1–39. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:3">
+<p>Bob Black, Primitive Affluence; see List of Works Cited. <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:4">
+<p>Sahlins, page 21. <a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:5">
+<p>Cashdan, Hunters and Gatherers: Economic Behavior in Bands. <a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:6">
+<p>Ibid., page 23. <a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:7">
+<p>Bob Black, pages 12–13. Cashdan, page 23. <a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:8">
+<p>Cashdan, pages 23–24. <a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:9">
+<p>Ibid., page 24. <a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:10">
+<p>Ibid., pages 24–25. <a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:11">
+<p>Ibid., page 26. <a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:12">
+<p>Poncins, pages 11- 126. <a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:13">
+<p>Schebesta, II. Band, I. Teil, pages 9, 17–20,89, 93–96, 119, 159–160 (men make implements during their “leisure” hours), 170, Bildtafel X (photo of women with huge loads of firewood on their backs). <a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:14">
+<p>Turnbull, Change and Adaptation, page 18; Forest People, page 131. <a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:15">
+<p>Holmberg, pages 48–51, 63, 67, 76–77, 82–83, 223,265. <a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:16">
+<p>Ibid., pages 75–76. <a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:17">
+<p>Ibid., pages 100–101. <a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:18">
+<p>Ibid., pages 63,76,100. <a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:19">
+<p>Ibid., page 223. <a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:20">
+<p>Ibid., page 222. <a href="#fnref:20" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:21">
+<p>Ibid., page 224. <a href="#fnref:21" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:22">
+<p>Ibid., pages 87, 107, 157, 213, 220, 246, 248–49, 254, 268. <a href="#fnref:22" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:23">
+<p>Cashdan, page23. <a href="#fnref:23" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:24">
+<p>Sahlins, pages 15–17, 38–39. <a href="#fnref:24" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:25">
+<p>Holmberg, pages 107, 222. <a href="#fnref:25" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:26">
+<p>The Siriono’s wilderness was not strictly trackless, since they did develop paths by repeatedly using the same routes. Holmberg, page 105. How little these paths resembled the groomed trails found in our national forests may be judged from the fact that they were “scarcely visible” (page 51), “never cleared” (page 105), and “impossible for the uninitiated to follow” (page 106). <a href="#fnref:26" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:27">
+<p>Holmberg, page 249. <a href="#fnref:27" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:28">
+<p>Ibid., page 157. <a href="#fnref:28" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:29">
+<p>Ibid., pages 65,249. <a href="#fnref:29" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:30">
+<p>Ibid., page 65. <a href="#fnref:30" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:31">
+<p>There was nothing exceptional about the strenuousness of the Siriono’s hunting and foraging activities. E.g.: “The bushmen had followed the wildebeest’s trail through thorns and over the parching desert…” Thomas. page 198. “The men had followed the buffalo’s track for three Days…” Ibid., page 190. The strenuousness of the Eskimos. life can be judged from a reading of Poncins, Kabloona. See the accounts of hunting excursions by Wooden Leg, a Northern Cheyenne Indian (fatigue. snow-blindness, frozen feet). Marquis. pages 8–9. <a href="#fnref:31" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:32">
+<p>Holmberg, page 65. <a href="#fnref:32" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:33">
+<p>This argument is suggested. for example. by Haviland. page 167. <a href="#fnref:33" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:34">
+<p>Fernald and Kinsey. page 149. <a href="#fnref:34" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:35">
+<p>Ibid., page 148. Gibbons, page 217. <a href="#fnref:35" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:36">
+<p>Examples are found in Fernald and Kinsey, passim. <a href="#fnref:36" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:37">
+<p>Gibbons, chapter titled “The Proof of the Pudding”. <a href="#fnref:37" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:38">
+<p>Coon, pages 36. 179–180. 226, 228. 230, 262. <a href="#fnref:38" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:39">
+<p>Cashdan, page 22. Coon. pages 268–69, 390; see also page 253. <a href="#fnref:39" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:40">
+<p>For skill see. e.g., Poncins. pages 14–15, 38–39, 160. 209–210; Schebesta, II. Band, I. Teil, page 7; Holmberg. pages 120–21, 275; Coon. pages 14. 49, 75, 82–83. <a href="#fnref:40" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:41">
+<p>This is somewhat of an oversimplification, since compulsory authority and the giving of orders were not unknown among nomadic hunter-gatherers, but generally speaking a high level of personal autonomy in such societies is indicated by a reading of the works cited in this article. See. e.g.. Turnbull, Forest People. page 83; Poncins, page 174. <a href="#fnref:41" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:42">
+<p>Nomadic hunter-gatherers ordinarily lived in bands that contained between 30 and 130 individuals. including children and babies, and in many cases these bands split up into still smaller groups. Coon, page 191. Cashdan, page 21. Siriono often hunted singly or in pairs; maximum size of hunting party was six or seven men. Holmberg. page 51. Efe pygmies commonly hunted in groups of two to four. Coon, page 88. <a href="#fnref:42" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:43">
+<p>I’ll reserve the discussion of stress for some other occasion, but see. e.g.. Poncins. pages 212–13, 273. 292. Schebesta. II. Band. I. Teil. page 18, writes: “The economic activity of the hunter-gatherer knows neither haste nor hurry. nor agonizing worry over the daily bread.” <a href="#fnref:43" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:44">
+<p>Holmberg. page 101. <a href="#fnref:44" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:45">
+<p>“Life before domestication/agriculture was in fact largely one of leisure. …sexual equality.” Zerzan, Future Primitive. page 16. <a href="#fnref:45" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:46">
+<p>“Until just 10.000 years ago …humans lived in keeping with an egalitarian ethos with ample leisure time. gender equality…” Zerzan, “Whose Future?”, Species Traitor N° 1. Pages in this publication are not numbered. <a href="#fnref:46" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:47">
+<p>Thomas. pages 11.284–87. <a href="#fnref:47" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:48">
+<p>Encycl. Brit., Vol. 22, article “Languages of the Worldu. section “African Languages”, subsection “Khoisan Languages”, pages 757–760. <a href="#fnref:48" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:49">
+<p>Bonvillain, page 21. <a href="#fnref:49" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:50">
+<p>Ibid., page 24. <a href="#fnref:50" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:51">
+<p>Ibid., page 21. <a href="#fnref:51" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:52">
+<p>Ibid., pages 21–22. <a href="#fnref:52" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:53">
+<p>Ibid., page 22. <a href="#fnref:53" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:54">
+<p>Ibid., page 23. <a href="#fnref:54" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:55">
+<p>Ibid., pages 21–22. <a href="#fnref:55" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:56">
+<p>Turnbull, Wayward Servants, page 270. <a href="#fnref:56" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:57">
+<p>Turnbull, Forest People, page 154. <a href="#fnref:57" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:58">
+<p>Turnbull, Wayward Servants, page 287. <a href="#fnref:58" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:59">
+<p>Turnbull, Forest People, page 205. <a href="#fnref:59" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:60">
+<p>Turnbull, Wayward Servants, page 211. <a href="#fnref:60" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:61">
+<p>Ibid., page 192. <a href="#fnref:61" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:62">
+<p>Turnbull, Forest People, page 204. <a href="#fnref:62" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:63">
+<p>Ibid., pages 207–08. <a href="#fnref:63" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:64">
+<p>Ibid., page 208. <a href="#fnref:64" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:65">
+<p>Ibid., page 122. <a href="#fnref:65" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:66">
+<p>Turnbull, Wayward Servants, pages 288–89. Forest People, page 265. <a href="#fnref:66" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:67">
+<p>Turnbull, Forest People, pages 115–16. <a href="#fnref:67" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:68">
+<p>Turnbull, Wayward Servants, page 137. <a href="#fnref:68" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:69">
+<p>“I know of no cases of rape.. “ Turnbull, Wayward Servants, page 121. I can account for the apparent contradiction between this statement and the passage quoted a moment ago only by supposing that since Turnbull was writing before the concept of “date rape” had emerged, he did not consider that forced intercourse in the elima hut, under the circumstances he described, constituted rape. Hence, when he said he knew of no rape among the Mbuti, he was probably referring to something more or less equivalent to what we would call “street rape” as opposed to “date rape” <a href="#fnref:69" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:70">
+<p>Turnbull, Wayward Servants, page 189. However, Turnbull is perhaps inconsistent on this point. Note the passage I quoted a moment ago about Amabosu smacking his wife across the face and Ekianga’s reaction. <a href="#fnref:70" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:71">
+<p>Ibid., pages 287–89. <a href="#fnref:71" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:72">
+<p>Numerous examples are scattered through Wayward Servants and Forest People. <a href="#fnref:72" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:73">
+<p>Holmberg, page 125. <a href="#fnref:73" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:74">
+<p>Ibid., page 129. <a href="#fnref:74" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:75">
+<p>Ibid., page 147. <a href="#fnref:75" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:76">
+<p>Ibid., page 163. <a href="#fnref:76" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:77">
+<p>Ibid., page 202. <a href="#fnref:77" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:78">
+<p>Ibid., page 148. <a href="#fnref:78" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:79">
+<p>Ibid., page 128. <a href="#fnref:79" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:80">
+<p>Ibid., page 147. <a href="#fnref:80" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:81">
+<p>Bonvillain, page 295. <a href="#fnref:81" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:82">
+<p>Ibid., pages 38–45. <a href="#fnref:82" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:83">
+<p>Poncins, pages 113–14, 126. <a href="#fnref:83" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:84">
+<p>Ibid., pages 198. See also page 117. <a href="#fnref:84" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:85">
+<p>Ibid., pages 114–15. <a href="#fnref:85" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:86">
+<p>Ibid., page 126. <a href="#fnref:86" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:87">
+<p>Ibid., page 113. <a href="#fnref:87" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:88">
+<p>Ibid., pages 112–13. See also Coon. page 223 (“often the wives lent say that they do not enjoy this”). <a href="#fnref:88" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:89">
+<p>(Elkin, pages 132–33). Massola, page 73. <a href="#fnref:89" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:90">
+<p>Massola, pages 74, 76. <a href="#fnref:90" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:91">
+<p>Ibid., page 75. Elkin, pages 133–34. <a href="#fnref:91" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:92">
+<p>Massola. page 76. <a href="#fnref:92" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:93">
+<p>Elkin, page 136. Massola, pages 73, 75. Coon, pages 260–61. <a href="#fnref:93" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:94">
+<p>Massola, pages 75–76. <a href="#fnref:94" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:95">
+<p>Ibid., pages 76–77. <a href="#fnref:95" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:96">
+<p>Elkin, pages 135, 137–38. <a href="#fnref:96" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:97">
+<p>Ibid. .page 138. <a href="#fnref:97" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:98">
+<p>Ibid., page 138 (footnote 12). <a href="#fnref:98" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:99">
+<p>Coon. pages 105, 217, 253. <a href="#fnref:99" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:100">
+<p>Massola, page 78. , <a href="#fnref:100" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:101">
+<p>Encycl. Brit., Vol. 14, article “Australia”, page 437. <a href="#fnref:101" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:102">
+<p>Ibid. <a href="#fnref:102" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:103">
+<p>Coon, pages 253, 255. <a href="#fnref:103" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:104">
+<p>Massola, page 77. <a href="#fnref:104" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:105">
+<p>Coon, pages 105,217. <a href="#fnref:105" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:106">
+<p>Ibid., page 215. <a href="#fnref:106" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:107">
+<p>Ibid., page 336. <a href="#fnref:107" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:108">
+<p>Ibid., page 252. <a href="#fnref:108" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:109">
+<p>Thomas, pages 262–303. <a href="#fnref:109" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:110">
+<p>Harold B. Barclay, letter to editor, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, Spring/Summer 2002, pages 70–71. <a href="#fnref:110" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:111">
+<p>Ibid. <a href="#fnref:111" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:112">
+<p>Cashdan, page 21. <a href="#fnref:112" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:113">
+<p>The Eskimos described by Poncins used rifles to some extent, but these apparently were not their main means of procuring food; and they had no motorboats or snowmobiles. <a href="#fnref:113" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:114">
+<p>Coon, page 276. <a href="#fnref:114" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:115">
+<p>Haviland, page 168 (“some of the Bushmen of Southern Africa, have at times been farmers and at others pastoral nomads”). <a href="#fnref:115" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:116">
+<p>Ibid., page 167. Cashdan, pages 43–44. <a href="#fnref:116" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:117">
+<p>Thomas, page 94. <a href="#fnref:117" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:118">
+<p>Pfeiffer. Emergence of Man. pages 345–46. Pfeiffer is not a reliable source of information, but anyone with access to good library facilities will be able to consult Richard Lee’s own writings. <a href="#fnref:118" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:119">
+<p>Thomas. page 284. <a href="#fnref:119" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:120">
+<p>Turnbull. Forest People. pages 20, 21, 27 & unnumbered page of information at end of book. <a href="#fnref:120" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:121">
+<p>Schebesta, I. Band. pages 37. 46, 48. <a href="#fnref:121" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:122">
+<p>Ibid.. page 404. <a href="#fnref:122" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:123">
+<p>Ibid.. pages 141–42. <a href="#fnref:123" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:124">
+<p>Ibid., passim. E.g., I. Band. page 87; II. Band, I. Teil. page 11. <a href="#fnref:124" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:125">
+<p>Ibid., I. Band, page 92. <a href="#fnref:125" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:126">
+<p>Turnbull. Wayward Servants. page 16. See also pages 88–89. <a href="#fnref:126" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:127">
+<p>Poncins. pages 161–62. <a href="#fnref:127" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:128">
+<p>Coon, pages 58–59. <a href="#fnref:128" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:129">
+<p>Holmberg, page 69. Richard Lee’s Bushmen did have dogs. Sahlins “The Original Affluent Society”. So did the Mbuti. Turnbull. Forest People, page 101. Schebesta, II. Band. I. Teil. pages 89–93. <a href="#fnref:129" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:130">
+<p>Lauriston Sharp, in Holmberg. page xii. <a href="#fnref:130" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:131">
+<p>Holmberg, pages xx-xxii, 1–3. <a href="#fnref:131" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:132">
+<p>Ibid., page 26. <a href="#fnref:132" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:133">
+<p>Ibid., page xxiii. <a href="#fnref:133" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:134">
+<p>Ibid., pages 25–26. <a href="#fnref:134" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:135">
+<p>Ibid.. page 121. <a href="#fnref:135" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:136">
+<p>Ibid., page 10. <a href="#fnref:136" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:137">
+<p>Ibid., page xii. <a href="#fnref:137" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:138">
+<p>See Ibid., pages 207. 225–26, “The principal ailments of which the Siriono are victims are malaria, dysentery. hookworm. and skin diseases”, page 226. Malaria, at least, was probably introduced to the Americas by Europeans. Encycl. Brit., Vol. 7. article “malaria”, page 725. <a href="#fnref:138" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:139">
+<p>Leakey. page 201 (map caption). <a href="#fnref:139" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:140">
+<p>Coon. pages 25 (footnote), 67. <a href="#fnref:140" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:141">
+<p>Encycl. Brit.. Vol. 14, article “Australia”, page 434. <a href="#fnref:141" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:142">
+<p>Haviland, page 173. <a href="#fnref:142" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:143">
+<p>Ibid. <a href="#fnref:143" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:144">
+<p>Ibid., page 395. <a href="#fnref:144" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:145">
+<p>Elkin, pages 130–38. <a href="#fnref:145" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:146">
+<p>Letters from the author to John Zerzan: 2/13/03. page 2; 3/16/03; 5/2/3, pages 5–6; 4/18/04. page 1. <a href="#fnref:146" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:147">
+<p>Letters from John Zerzan to the author: 3/2/03; 3/18/03; 3/26/03; 5/1203; 4/28/04; 5/22/04. The only thing Zerzan said in his letters that I considered worth answering at this point is his claim that the sources I had cited to him were “out of date” (Letter to the author, 5/22/04, page 2). He offered no explanation of this statement. As a former student of history. Zerzan should be aware of the importance of going back to primary sources whenever possible. In the present context, that means going back to eyewitness accounts based on observation of hunter-gatherer societies at a time when these were still relatively unspoiled. But for at least thirty years there have been no more unspoiled primitive peoples. Hence, any primary sources that are useful for present purposes must date back at least thirty years (i.e., to before 1975) and usually longer than that. It’s true that here and in my letters to Zerzan I’ve relied not only on primary but also on secondary sources. due to the fact that my incarceration limits my access to primary sources. But Zerzan offered no evidence whatever to discredit the information that I cited to him from secondary sources (or from primary ones, either). Nor have any of the more “up to date” sources that I’ve seen offered anything to disprove the information in question. They mostly just ignore that information. as if it didn’t exist. The whole issue gets shoved under the carpet. <a href="#fnref:147" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:148">
+<p>Letter from the author to John Zerzan, 5/11/04. Letter from John Zerzan to the author, 5/20/04. <a href="#fnref:148" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:149">
+<p>Pfeiffer, Emergence of Society, page 464? I can’t give the page number with certainty, because it is “cut off” on the photocopy that Zerzan sent me. <a href="#fnref:149" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:150">
+<p>Bonvillain. page 294. The photocopy that Zerzan sent me was actually from the 1995 edition of the same book, in which the identical sentence appears on page 271. <a href="#fnref:150" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:151">
+<p>Letter from John Zerzan to the author, 3/2/03 (footnote). <a href="#fnref:151" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:152">
+<p>Letter from the author to John Zerzan, 5/2/03. pages 5–6. <a href="#fnref:152" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:153">
+<p>Zerzan, Future Primitive and Others Essays. <a href="#fnref:153" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:154">
+<p>Letter from the author to John Zerzan. 4/18/04, page 1. <a href="#fnref:154" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:155">
+<p>Zerzan, “Future primitive”, page 32. <a href="#fnref:155" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:156">
+<p>Ibid., page 33. <a href="#fnref:156" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:157">
+<p>Thomas. pages 156–57. <a href="#fnref:157" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:158">
+<p>Schebesta. I. Band, page 203. <a href="#fnref:158" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:159">
+<p>Zerzan. “Future Primitive”. page 36. <a href="#fnref:159" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:160">
+<p>Turnbull. Wayward Servants. page 138 & footnote 2. <a href="#fnref:160" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:161">
+<p>Turnbull. Wayward Servants, page 206. <a href="#fnref:161" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:162">
+<p>Zerzan. “Future Primitive”, page 26. In an interview with Julien Nitzberg, Mean magazine. April 2001, page 69, Zerzan said. “Freud… believed that before language, it’s likely that people were pretty telepathic “. In my letter to him of 5/2/03. page 6. I asked Zerzan to refer me to the place in Freud’s works where Freud had made such a statement, but Zerzan never answered that question. <a href="#fnref:162" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:163">
+<p>Zerzan. “Future Primitive”. page 15. <a href="#fnref:163" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:164">
+<p>Letter from the author to John Zerzan. 4/18/04. page 6. <a href="#fnref:164" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:165">
+<p>Letter from John Zerzan to the author. 4/28/04. <a href="#fnref:165" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:166">
+<p>Zerzan sent me a photocopy of a page from Bonvillain’s book with his letter of 3/2/03. In “Future Primitive”. pages 34. 36. Zerzan cites “Turnbull (1962)” and “Turnbull (1965)”. This presumably refers to Forest People and Wayward Servants. In “Future Primitive”, page 33. Zerzan also cites Mrs. Thomas’s book, yet he conveniently forgets Mrs. Thomas’s statements about childbirth when he claims (on the same page of “Future Primitive”) that childbirth is “without difficulty or pain” among hunter-gatherers. <a href="#fnref:166" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:167">
+<p>Nietzsche. page 186. <a href="#fnref:167" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:168">
+<p>Encycl. Brit. Vol. 26, article “Propaganda” page 176. <a href="#fnref:168" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:169">
+<p>Letter from the publisher of Species Traitor to the author, 417 /03. page 6. <a href="#fnref:169" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:170">
+<p>Elkin. pages 130–38. <a href="#fnref:170" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:171">
+<p>Coon. page 172. <a href="#fnref:171" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:172">
+<p>Ibid.. page 75. <a href="#fnref:172" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:173">
+<p>Ibid.. pages 243–44. <a href="#fnref:173" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:174">
+<p>Massola, page 77. <a href="#fnref:174" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:175">
+<p>Poncins. pages 115–120, 125.162–65.237–38.244. <a href="#fnref:175" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:176">
+<p>Encycl. Brit.. Vol. 28. article “Spain”, page 18. <a href="#fnref:176" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:177">
+<p>Apart from infanticide. Schebesta and Turnbull agree that when twins were born only one member of the pair was allowed to live. Schebesta. I. Band. page 138. Turnbull, Wayward Servants. page 130. Schebesta further states (same page) that babies born crippled were done away with. Turnbull, however, mentions a girl who was born with a “diseased” hip but was allowed to live. Turnbull, Forest People, page 265. Schebesta, II. Band I. Teil, pages 274, 277, indicates that trespassing and theft could lead to deadly violence, but Turnbull mentions no such thing. <a href="#fnref:177" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:178">
+<p>Holmberg, pages 126–27, 157, 209–210. <a href="#fnref:178" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:179">
+<p>Ibid., page 157. <a href="#fnref:179" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:180">
+<p>Ibid., pages 11, 158–59. <a href="#fnref:180" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:181">
+<p>Ibid., pages 114, 159. <a href="#fnref:181" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:182">
+<p>Ibid., page 152. <a href="#fnref:182" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:183">
+<p>Thomas, pages 284–87. <a href="#fnref:183" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:184">
+<p>Haviland, pages 77, 78. <a href="#fnref:184" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:185">
+<p>It’s common knowledge that coyotes and at least some species of bears both hunt and scavenge. For lions, martens, foxes, jackals, hyenas, raccoon dogs, Komodo dragons, and vultures, see Encycl. Brit., Vol. 4, page 910; Vol. 6, pages 196, 454, 945; Vol. 7, pages 383, 884; Vol. 9, page 876; Vol. 12, page 439; Vol. 17, page 449; Vol. 23, page 421. For wolves and wolverines, see Encycopedia Americana, International Edition, 1998, Vol. 29, pages 94–95, 102. <a href="#fnref:185" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:186">
+<p>See, e.g., Time magazine, 8/19/02, page 56. <a href="#fnref:186" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:187">
+<p>Encycl. Brit., Vol. 23, article “Mammals”, pages 436, 449–450. <a href="#fnref:187" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:188">
+<p>“Sibling Desperado”, Science News, Vol. 163, February 15, 2003. <a href="#fnref:188" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:189">
+<p>Encycl. Brjt., Vol. 6, article “Komodo dragon”, page 945. <a href="#fnref:189" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:190">
+<p>Ibid., Vol. 17, article “Dinosaurs”, page 319. <a href="#fnref:190" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:191">
+<p>Ibid., Vol. 6, article “Krapina remains”, pages 981–82; Vol. 26, article “Prehistoric Peoples and Cultures”, page 66. <a href="#fnref:191" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:192">
+<p>Here are a couple of examples that illustrate the politically-correct tendency of Turnbull’s later work: In 1983, Turnbull wrote that he objected to the word “pygmy” because “it invites the assumption that height is a significant factor, whereas, in the Ituri it is of remarkable insignificance to both the Mbuti and their neighbors, the taller Africans who live around them.” Change and Adaptation, first page of the Introduction. But 21 years earlier Turnbull had written: “The fact that they [the Mbuti]: average less than four and a half feet in height is of no concern to them; their taller neighbors. Who jeer at them for being So puny, are as clumsy as elephants…”, Forest People, page 14. “They [a certain group of pygmies]: pitied me for my height, which made me So clumsy “, Ibid., page 239. Turnbull also claimed in 1983 that the Mbuti had never fought in resistance to the taller Africans. invasion of their forest, Change and Adaptation, page 20. But Schebesta, I. Band. pages 81–84, reported oral traditions according to which many of the Mbuti had indeed fought the villagers, and so effectively that they had driven them (for a time) entirely out of the eastern part of the forest at some point during the first half of the 19th century. Oral traditions are unreliable. but these stories were so widespread as to indicate a certain probability that Some such fighting had occurred. Turnbull did not explain how he knew that these traditions were wrong and that the Mbuti had not fought. Turnbull was familiar with Schebesta’s work. See. e.g., Forest People, page 20. <a href="#fnref:192" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:193">
+<p>Turnbull, Change and Adaptation, page 44. <a href="#fnref:193" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:194">
+<p>Ibid., page 154. <a href="#fnref:194" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:195">
+<p>Ibid., page 158. <a href="#fnref:195" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:196">
+<p>Turnbull mentions physical fighting in Forest People, pages 110, 122–23, and in Wayward Servants, pages 188, 191, 201, 205, 206, 212. <a href="#fnref:196" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:197">
+<p>Turnbull, Forest People, pages 33, 107, 110; Wayward Servants, pages 105,106,113, 157,212,216. <a href="#fnref:197" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:198">
+<p>Turnbull mentions jealousies in Wayward Servants, pages 103, 118,157. <a href="#fnref:198" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:199">
+<p>Turnbull, Wayward Servants, page 206. <a href="#fnref:199" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:200">
+<p>Turnbull, Forest People, page 107; Wayward Servants, pages 157, 191,198, 201. <a href="#fnref:200" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:201">
+<p>Turnbull, Wayward Servants, page 183. <a href="#fnref:201" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:202">
+<p>Evans-Pritchard, page 90. Davidson, pages 10, 205. Reichard, pages xviii, xxi, xxxvii. Debo, page 71. Wissler, page 287. Holmberg, pages 151, 259, 270 (footnote 5)). Encycl. Brit., Vol. 2, article “Carib”, page 866; Vol. 13, article “American Peoples, Native”, page 380. <a href="#fnref:202" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:203">
+<p>Holmberg, pages 259–260. <a href="#fnref:203" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:204">
+<p>Ibid., pages 93, 102, 224–26, 228, .256–57, 259, 270 (footnote 5)). <a href="#fnref:204" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:205">
+<p>Leach, page 130. <a href="#fnref:205" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:206">
+<p>Marquis, pages 119–122. <a href="#fnref:206" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:207">
+<p>Vestal, page 60. <a href="#fnref:207" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:208">
+<p>Ibid., page 179. <a href="#fnref:208" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:209">
+<p>Encycl. Brit., Vol. 13, article “American Peoples, Native”, pages 351–52,360. <a href="#fnref:209" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:210">
+<p>Massola, page 72. <a href="#fnref:210" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:211">
+<p>Encycl. Brit.. Vol. 13, article “American Peoples, Native., pages 384,386. <a href="#fnref:211" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:212">
+<p>Reichard. page xxxix. <a href="#fnref:212" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:213">
+<p>Evans-Pritchard. pages 90, 181–83. <a href="#fnref:213" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:214">
+<p>Holmberg. page 153. <a href="#fnref:214" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:215">
+<p>Ibid.. pages 126–27, 141. 154. <a href="#fnref:215" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:216">
+<p>Coon, pages 260–61. <a href="#fnref:216" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:217">
+<p>Poncins, pages 125, 244. <a href="#fnref:217" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:218">
+<p>Schebesta, II. Band, I. Teil. page 241. <a href="#fnref:218" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:219">
+<p>Massola, pages 78–80. <a href="#fnref:219" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:220">
+<p>Wissler, pages 223, 304. <a href="#fnref:220" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:221">
+<p>Reichard, page 265. <a href="#fnref:221" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:222">
+<p>Encycl. Brit., Vol. 13, article “American Peoples, Native’, page 381. <a href="#fnref:222" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:223">
+<p>Marquis, page 39. <a href="#fnref:223" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:224">
+<p>Ibid., pages 64,66.120,277. <a href="#fnref:224" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:225">
+<p>Leakey, page 107. <a href="#fnref:225" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:226">
+<p>Coon, pages 176- 77. Cashdan, pages 37–38. refers to “precise” or “formal” rules of meat-sharing among Australian Aborigines. Mbuti pygmies, and Kung Bushmen. <a href="#fnref:226" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:227">
+<p>Richard B. Lee, quoted by Bonvillain, page 20. <a href="#fnref:227" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:228">
+<p>Coon, page 125. <a href="#fnref:228" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:229">
+<p>Holmberg, pages 79–81. <a href="#fnref:229" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:230">
+<p>Ibid., pages 87–89, 154–56. <a href="#fnref:230" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:231">
+<p>Ibid., pages 154–55. <a href="#fnref:231" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:232">
+<p>Ibid., page 151. <a href="#fnref:232" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:233">
+<p>Cashdan, page 37. Turnbull, Forest People, pages 96–97. Schbesta, II. Band, I. Teil, pages 96,97. <a href="#fnref:233" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:234">
+<p>Turnbull, Forest People, page 107. <a href="#fnref:234" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:235">
+<p>Turnbull, Wayward Servants, pages 157–58. Schebesta, II. Band, I. Teil, page 97, mentions a fierce quarrel over the distribution of meat that “almost led to bloodshed”. <a href="#fnref:235" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:236">
+<p>Turnbull, Wayward Servants, page 120. <a href="#fnref:236" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:237">
+<p>Ibid., page 198. <a href="#fnref:237" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:238">
+<p>Coon, page 176. Cashdan, page 38. Bonvillain, page 20. Turnbull, Wayward Servants, page 167. Encycl. Brit., Vol. 14, article “Australia”, page 438. <a href="#fnref:238" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:239">
+<p>Cashdan, page 28. Coon, pages 72–73. Bonvillain, page 20. Encycl. Brit., Vol. 14, article “Australia”, page 438. Turnbull, Wayward Servants, page 178, possibly underestimated the importance of vegetable foods in the Mbuti’s diet (“hunting and gathering being equally important to the economy”). According to Schebesta, I. Band, pages 70–71, 198; II. Band, I. Teil, pages 11, 13–14, the Mbuti nourished themselves principally on vegetable products. At most 30% of their diet consisted of animal products, and of that 30% a considerable part consisted not of meat but of foods such as snails and caterpillars that were gathered like vegetables, not hunted. <a href="#fnref:239" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:240">
+<p>Coon, page 176. <a href="#fnref:240" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:241">
+<p>Marquis, page 159. <a href="#fnref:241" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:242">
+<p>Evans-Pritchard, page 90. <a href="#fnref:242" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:243">
+<p>Poncins, pages 78–79. <a href="#fnref:243" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:244">
+<p>Ibid., page 121. <a href="#fnref:244" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:245">
+<p>Turnbull, Wayward and Servants, e.g., page 105. <a href="#fnref:245" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:246">
+<p>Ibid., pages 199–200 (footnote 5). <a href="#fnref:246" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:247">
+<p>Ibid., page 113. <a href="#fnref:247" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:248">
+<p>Ibid., page 153. <a href="#fnref:248" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:249">
+<p>Poncins, page 237. <a href="#fnref:249" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:250">
+<p>Coon, page 260. <a href="#fnref:250" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:251">
+<p>Van Laue, page 202. <a href="#fnref:251" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:252">
+<p>For discussion of this and some of the other psychological points made in this paragraph, see the Unabomber Manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future”, paragraphs 6–32, 213–230. <a href="#fnref:252" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:253">
+<p>“The Forgotten Language Among Humans and Nature”, Species Traitor, Issue 2, Winter 2002. Pages in this publication are not numbered. <a href="#fnref:253" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:254">
+<p>Holmberg. page 249. See also pages 61. 117. 260. <a href="#fnref:254" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:255">
+<p>Turnbull, Forest People, pages 35. 58. 79. 179; Wayward Servants. pages 165, 168. Schebesta. I. Band. page 68. Coon. page 71. <a href="#fnref:255" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:256">
+<p>Coon, page 156. <a href="#fnref:256" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:257">
+<p>Ibid., pages 156, 158, 196. <a href="#fnref:257" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:258">
+<p>Turnbull, Change and Adaptation, page 20; Wayward Servants, page 164. Schebesta, II. Band, I. Teil, pages 107–111. describes other cruel methods of killing elephants. <a href="#fnref:258" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:259">
+<p>Thomas. pages 94. 190. <a href="#fnref:259" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:260">
+<p>Wissler. pages 14. 270. Coon, page 88. <a href="#fnref:260" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:261">
+<p>Marquis, page 88. <a href="#fnref:261" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:262">
+<p>Turnbull, Forest People, page 101. Schebesta. II. Band, I. Teil, page 90, also states that the Mbuti kicked their hunting dogs. <a href="#fnref:262" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:263">
+<p>Turnbull. Wayward Servants, page 161. <a href="#fnref:263" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:264">
+<p>Poncins, pages 29, 30,49, 189, 196, 198–99, 212, 216. <a href="#fnref:264" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:265">
+<p>Holmberg, pages 69–70,208. <a href="#fnref:265" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:266">
+<p>Coon, page 119. <a href="#fnref:266" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:267">
+<p>Ibid. <a href="#fnref:267" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:268">
+<p>Wissler, pages 124. 304–06. <a href="#fnref:268" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:269">
+<p>Holmberg. pages 111, 195. <a href="#fnref:269" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:270">
+<p>Turnbull, Forest People, pages 14, 33. Schebesta. I. Band, passim, e.g., pages 107, 181–84, 355. <a href="#fnref:270" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:271">
+<p>Turnbull. Forest People, pages 47. 120, 167; Wayward Servants. pages 61, 82; Change and Adaptation, page 92. <a href="#fnref:271" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:272">
+<p>Turnbull, Forest People. pages 47,234. <a href="#fnref:272" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:273">
+<p>Schebesta, I. Band, pages 106–07, 137. <a href="#fnref:273" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:274">
+<p>Ibid.. page 107. <a href="#fnref:274" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:275">
+<p>Ibid., page 108. <a href="#fnref:275" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:276">
+<p>Ibid., page 110. <a href="#fnref:276" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:277">
+<p>Wissler, page 221. See also Poncins, page 165 (Eskimo kills two Indians), and Encycl. Brit., Vol. 13, article “American Peoples, Native”, page 360 (subarctic Indians fight Eskimos). <a href="#fnref:277" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:278">
+<p>Thomas, page 87. <a href="#fnref:278" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:279">
+<p>Turnbull, Wayward Servants, page 122. <a href="#fnref:279" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:280">
+<p>Letter to the author from publisher of Species Traitor, 4/7 /03, page 7. <a href="#fnref:280" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:281">
+<p>Coon,pages 191–95. <a href="#fnref:281" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:282">
+<p>Ibid., page 194. <a href="#fnref:282" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:283">
+<p>Thomas, pages 10, 82–83. See also Cashdan. page 41. <a href="#fnref:283" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:284">
+<p>Cashdan, page 41. See also Coon, page 198. <a href="#fnref:284" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:285">
+<p>Coon, page 275. <a href="#fnref:285" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:286">
+<p>Ibid., page 168. <a href="#fnref:286" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:287">
+<p>Schebesta, II. Band, I. Teil, pages 14,21–22,275–76. <a href="#fnref:287" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:288">
+<p>Cashdan, page 40. See also ibid., page 37, and Schebesta, II. Band, I. Teil, pages 276–78. <a href="#fnref:288" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:289">
+<p>Turnbull, Wayward Servants, page 199 (footnote 5). <a href="#fnref:289" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:290">
+<p>See Coon, page 268. Schebesta, II. Band, I. Teil, pages 8, 18, remarks on the Mbuti’s lack of interest in accumulating wealth. <a href="#fnref:290" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:291">
+<p>See Coon, pages 57–67. <a href="#fnref:291" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:292">
+<p>Turnbull, Wayward Servants, page 14. <a href="#fnref:292" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:293">
+<p>Ibid., page 181. <a href="#fnref:293" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:294">
+<p>Ibid., page 228. <a href="#fnref:294" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:295">
+<p>Turnbull, Forest People, pages 110, 125; Wayward Servants, pages 27, 28, 42, 178–181, 183, 187, 256, 274, 294, 300. Schebesta, II. Band, I. Teil, page 8, says that the Mbuti lacked any inclination to be domineering (Herrschsucht). <a href="#fnref:295" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:296">
+<p>Encycl. Brit., Vol. 13, article “American Peoples, Native”, page 360. <a href="#fnref:296" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:297">
+<p>Holmberg, pages 148–49. <a href="#fnref:297" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:298">
+<p>Thomas. page 10. <a href="#fnref:298" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:299">
+<p>Coon, page 238. <a href="#fnref:299" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:300">
+<p>Bonvillain, pages 20–21. <a href="#fnref:300" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:301">
+<p>Coon, page 210. <a href="#fnref:301" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:302">
+<p>Thomas, e.g., pages 146–47,199. <a href="#fnref:302" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:303">
+<p>Coon. page 253. <a href="#fnref:303" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:304">
+<p>Ibid., page 251. <a href="#fnref:304" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:305">
+<p>Schebesta. I. Band, page 106. <a href="#fnref:305" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:306">
+<p>Turnbull, Wayward Servants, page 161. <a href="#fnref:306" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:307">
+<p>Turnbull. Change and Adaptation. page 18. <a href="#fnref:307" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:308">
+<p>Turnbull, Forest People, page 250. <a href="#fnref:308" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:309">
+<p>Coon, page 104. <a href="#fnref:309" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:310">
+<p>Hotmberg, pages 63–64. 268. <a href="#fnref:310" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:311">
+<p>E.g., Encycl. Brit., Vol. 14, article “Biosphere”, pages 1191.1197; Mercader, pages 2, 235, 238, 241. 282. 306. 309. On other reckless use of fire, see Coon. page 6. <a href="#fnref:311" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:312">
+<p>Mercader, page 233. Encycl. Brit., Vol. 14, article “Biosphere”, pages 1159, 1196; Vol. 23, article “Mammals”, pages 435,448. <a href="#fnref:312" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:313">
+<p>see Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”, Wired magazine. April 2000; and Our Final Century, by the British Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees. <a href="#fnref:313" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
When Non-Violence Is Suicide
+ Sat, 01 Apr 2023 14:32:25 +0300
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/when-non-violence-is-suicide/
+ <p>It’s the autumn of 2025 AD. The technoindustrial system fell apart a year ago, but you and your friends are doing alright. Your garden has flourished this past summer and in your cabin you have a good supply of dried vegetables, dried beans and other foodstuffs to get you through the coming winter. Just now you’re harvesting your potatoes. With your spades, you and your friends uproot one potato after another and pick the plump tubers out of the soil.</p>
+<p>Suddenly the friend at your elbow nudges you and you look up. Uh-oh. A gang of mean-looking men is coming up your trail. They have guns. They look like trouble, but you stand firm. The leader of the gang walks up to you and says,</p>
+<p>“Nice looking potatoes you got there.”</p>
+<p>“Yeah,” you reply. “They’re nice-looking potatoes.”</p>
+<p>“We’re going to take them” says the gang leader.</p>
+<p>“The hell you are!” you answer. “We spent a long summer of hard work growing those potatoes…”</p>
+<p>The gang leader points his rifle at your face and says, “—— you, punk.” To his men he adds, “Dick, Ziggy, check the cabin and see what kind of food they got. We might just move in and spend the winter here. Mick, grab that bitch over there before she gets away. She got a nice ass. We’ll all screw her tonight.”</p>
+<p>You get angry and start shouting, “You bastard! You can’t…”</p>
+<p>The rifle goes BANG. You’re dead.</p>
+<hr>
+<p>Nonviolence works only when you have the police to protect you. In the absence of police protection, nonviolence is very nearly the equivalent to suicide.</p>
+<p>Admittedly this has not been true at all times and places. Among the African Pygmies as described by Colin Turnbull, deadly violence against humans was almost unknown. In other nomadic hunting and gathering societies people sometimes kill one another in fights, but they never conquer one another’s territory or systematically slaughter other tribes. Under these conditions, nonviolence is not inconsistent with survival.</p>
+<p>But, realistically, these are not the conditions that will prevail if and when the technoindustrial system collapses. There are a lot of mean people out there: Nazis, Hell’s Angels, Ku Klux Klanners, the Mafia…many others do not belong to recognized groups. They aren’t going to disappear into thin air when the system falls apart. They will still be around. They probably wouldn’t be successful at growing their own food even if they tried, and they won’t try, because people of that type will find it much more congenial to take someone else’s food than to grow their own. And since they are vicious, they may kill you or rape you just for the fun of it, even when they don’t need your food.</p>
+<p>Many ordinary people, too, who under present conditions are peaceful and mild-mannered, may turn vicious when they are desperate for food or good agricultural land in which to grow it. Food shortages may not be critical in so-called “backward” areas of the world where the peasants are still relatively self-sufficient, but in the industrialized countries, where agriculture is completely dependent on pesticides, chemical fertilizers and fuel for tractors (among other things) and in which few people have the skill to grow their own food efficiently, food shortages are sure to be acute when the system collapses.</p>
+<p>Let’s even assume for the sake of argument that industrialized countries have enough arable land so that all people will, in theory, be able to grow their own food by primitive methods. In the absence of a functioning government, there will no way of distributing the city dwellers over the countryside and systematically assigning each family its own plot of land. Consequently, there will be chaos and confusion. Some people will try to grab the most or the best land for themselves, other will oppose them and deadly fights will break out. Armed groups will organize themselves for their own protection or for aggressive purposes. If you want to survive the collapse of this system, you had better be armed yourself and prepared to use your weapon efficiently. This means being prepared psychologically as well as physically.</p>
+<p>Being armed and prepared to fight in self defense will not only be a necessary condition for your own survival, it will be your duty. The Nazi’s, Hell’s Angels and the Ku Klux Klanners will not be the most dangerous enemies of freedom. Because these people are unruly, turbulent and lawless, they are unlikely to create large, efficient organizations. Far more dangerous will be the kind of people who form the backbone of the present system, the people who are adapted to life in disciplined organizations: the “bourgeois” types—the engineers, business executives, bureaucrats, military officers, some police and so forth. These people will be anxious to reestablish order, organization and the technological system as quickly as possible. Their methods will be less crude than those of the Nazis and Hell’s Angels but they won’t hesitate to use force and violence when these are necessary for the achievement of their objectives. You MUST be prepared to defend yourself physically against these people.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<p><a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library">Back to the Library</a> - <a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski">More from Ted Kaczynski</a></p>
+</div>
+<hr>
+
+
+ -
+
Why the Technological System Will Destroy Itself
+ Sat, 01 Apr 2023 14:24:10 +0300
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/why-the-technological-system-will-destroy-itself/
+ <h2 id="i">I.</h2>
+<p>Our discussion deals with self-propagating systems. By a self-propagating system (‘self-prop system’ for short) we mean a system that tends to promote its own survival and propagation. A system may propagate itself in either or both of two ways: The system may indefinitely increase its own size and/or power, or it may give rise to new systems that possess some of its own traits.</p>
+<p>The most obvious examples of self-propagating systems are biological organisms. Groups of biological organisms can also constitute self-prop systems; e.g., wolf packs and hives of honeybees. Particularly important for our purposes are self-prop systems that consist of groups of human beings. For example, nations, corporations, labor unions, and political parties; also some groups that are not clearly delimited and lack formal organization, such as schools of thought, social networks, and subcultures. Just as wolf packs and beehives are self-propagating without any conscious intention on the part of wolves or bees to propagate their packs or their hives, there is no reason why a human group cannot be self-propagating independently of any intention on the part of the individuals who comprise the group.</p>
+<p>If A and B are systems of any kind (self-propagating or not), and if A is a functioning component of B, then we will call A a subsystem of B, and we will call B a supersystem of A. For example, in human hunting-and-gathering societies, individuals are members of bands, and bands often are organized into tribes. Individuals, bands, and tribes are all self-prop systems. The individual is a subsystem of the band, the band is a subsystem of the tribe, the tribe is a supersystem of each band that belongs to it, and each band is a supersystem of every individual who belongs to that band. It is also true that each individual is a subsystem of the tribe and that the tribe is a supersystem of every individual who belongs to a band that belongs to the tribe.</p>
+<p>The principle of natural selection is operative not only in biology, but in any environment in which self-propagating systems are present. The principle can be stated roughly as follows:</p>
+<p>Those self-propagating systems having the traits that best suit them to survive and propagate themselves tend to survive and propagate themselves better than other self-propagating systems.</p>
+<p>This of course is an obvious tautology, so it tells us nothing new. But it can serve to call our attention to factors that we might otherwise overlook.</p>
+<p>We are about to advance several propositions. We can’t prove these propositions, but they are intuitively plausible and they seem consistent with the observable behavior of self-propagating systems as represented by biological organisms and human (formal and informal) organizations. In short, we believe these propositions to be true, or as close to the truth as they need to be for present purposes.</p>
+<p>Proposition 1. In any environment that is sufficiently rich, self-propagating systems will arise, and natural selection will lead to the evolution of self-propagating systems having increasingly complex, subtle, and sophisticated means of surviving and propagating themselves.</p>
+<p>Natural selection operates relative to particular periods of time. Let’s start at some given point in time that we can call Time Zero. Those self-prop systems that are most likely to survive (or have surviving progeny) five-years from Time Zero are those that are best suited to survive and propagate themselves (in competition<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> with other self-prop systems) during the five-year period following Time Zero. These will not necessarily be the same as those self-prop systems that, in the absence of competition during the five-year period, would be best suited to survive and propagate themselves during the thirty years following Time Zero. Similarly, the systems best suited to survive competition during the first thirty years following Time Zero are not necessarily those that, in the absence of competition during the thirty-year period, would be best suited to survive and propagate themselves for two hundred years. And so forth.</p>
+<p>For example, suppose a forested region is occupied by a number of small, rival kingdoms. Those kingdoms that clear the most land for agricultural use can plant more crops and therefore can support a larger population than other kingdoms. This gives them a military advantage over their rivals. If any kingdom restrains itself from excessive forest clearance out of concern for the long-term consequences, then that kingdom places itself at a military disadvantage and is eliminated by the more powerful kingdoms. Thus the region comes to be dominated by kingdoms that cut down their forests recklessly. The resulting deforestation leads eventually to ecological disaster and therefore to the collapse of all the kingdoms. Here a trait that is advantageous or even indispensable for a kingdoms short-term survival—recklessness in cutting trees—leads in the long term to the demise of the same kingdom.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></p>
+<p>This example illustrates the fact that, where a self-prop system exercises foresight, in the sense that concern for its own long-term survival and propagation leads it to place limitations on its efforts for short-term survival and propagation, the system puts itself at a competitive disadvantage relative to those self-prop systems that pursue short-term survival and propagation without restraint. This leads us to</p>
+<p>Proposition 2. In the short term, natural selection favors self-propagating systems that pursue<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup> their own short-term advantage with little or no regard for long-term consequences.</p>
+<p>A corollary to Proposition 2 is</p>
+<p>Proposition 3. Self-propagating subsystems of a given supersystem tend to become dependent on the supersystem and on the specific conditions that prevail within the supersystem.</p>
+<p>This means that between the supersystem and its self-prop subsystems, there tends to develop a relationship of such a nature that, in the event of the destruction of the supersystem or of any drastic acceleration of changes in the conditions prevailing within the supersystem, the subsystems can neither survive nor propagate themselves. A self-prop system with sufficient foresight would make provision for its own or its descendants’ survival in the event of the collapse or destabilization of the supersystem. But as long as the supersystem exists and. remains more or less stable, natural selection favors those subsystems that take fullest advantage of the opportunities available within the supersystem, and disfavors those subsystems that “waste” some of their resources in preparing themselves to survive the eventual destabilization of the supersystem. Under these conditions, self-prop systems will tend very strongly to become incapable of surviving the destabilization of any supersystem to which they belong.</p>
+<p>Like the other propositions put forward in this essay, Proposition 3 has to be applied with a dose of common sense. If the supersystem in question is weak and loosely organized, or if it has no more than a modest effect on the conditions in which its subsystems exist, the subsystems may not become strongly dependent on the supersystem. Among hunter-gatherers in some (not all) environments, a nuclear family would be able to survive and propagate itself independently of the band to which it belongs. Because tribes of hunter-gatherers are loosely organized, it seems certain that in almost all cases a hunting-and-gathering band would be able to survive independently of the tribe to which it belongs. Many labor unions might be able to survive the demise of a confederation of labor unions such as the AFL-CIO, because such an event might not fundamentally affect the conditions under which labor unions have to function. But labor unions could not survive the demise of the modem industrial society, or even the demise merely of the legal and constitutional framework that makes it possible for labor unions as we know them to operate.</p>
+<p>Clearly a system cannot be effectively organized for its own survival and propagation unless the different parts of the system can promptly communicate with one another and lend aid-to one another. Moreover, in order to operate effectively throughout a given geographical region, a self-prop system must be able to receive prompt information from, and act promptly upon, every part of the region. Consequently,</p>
+<p>Proposition 4. Problems of transportation and communication impose a limit on the size of the geographical region over which a self-prop system can extend its operations.</p>
+<p>Human experience suggests:</p>
+<p>Proposition 5. The most important and the only consistent limit on the size of the geographical regions over which self-propagating human groups extend their operations, is the limit imposed by the available means of transportation and communication. In other words, while not all self-propagating human groups tend to extend their operations over a region of maximum size, natural selection tends to produce some self-propagating human groups that operate over regions approaching the maximum size allowed by the available means of transportation and communication.</p>
+<p>Today there is quick transportation and almost instant communication between any two parts of the world. Hence,</p>
+<p>Proposition 6. In modern times, natural selection tends to produce some self-propagating human groups whose operations span the entire globe. Moreover, even if humans are someday replaced by machines or other entities, natural selection will still tend to produce some self-propagating systems whose operations span the entire globe.</p>
+<p>Current experience strongly confirms this proposition: We see global “superpowers”, global corporations, global political movements, global religions, global criminal networks, etc. Proposition 6, we argue, is not dependent on any particular traits of human beings but only on the general properties of self-prop systems, so there is no reason to doubt that the proposition will remain true if and when humans are replaced by other entities: Natural selection will continue to produce or maintain self-prop systems whose operations span the entire globe.</p>
+<p>Let’s refer to such systems as global self-prop systems. Instant worldwide communications are still a relatively new phenomenon and their full consequences have yet to be developed; in the future we can expect global self-prop systems to play an even more important role than they do today.</p>
+<p>Proposition 7. Where (as today) problems of transportation and communication do not constitute effective limitations on the size of the geographical regions over which self-propagating systems operate, natural selection tends to create a world in which power is mostly concentrated in the possession of a relatively small number of global self-propagating systems.</p>
+<p>This proposition too is suggested by human experience. But it’s easy to see why the proposition is true independently of anything specifically human: Among global self-prop systems, natural selection will favor those that have the greatest power; global or large-scale self-prop systems that are weaker will tend to be eliminated or subjugated. Small-scale self-prop systems that are too numerous or too subtle to be noticed individually by the dominant global self-prop systems may retain some degree of autonomy, but each of them will have only local influence. It may be answered that a coalition of small-scale self-prop systems could challenge the global self-prop systems, but if small-scale self-prop systems organize themselves into a coalition having worldwide influence, the coalition will itself become a global self-prop system.</p>
+<p>We can speak of the “world-system”, meaning all things that exist on Earth, together with the functional relations among them. The world-system probably should not be regarded as a self-prop system, but whether it is or not is irrelevant for present purposes.</p>
+<p>To summarize, then, the world-system is approaching a condition in which it will be dominated by a relatively small number of extremely powerful global self-prop systems. These global systems will compete for power—as they must do in order to have any chance of survival—and they will compete for power in the short term, with little or no regard for long-term consequences (Proposition 2). Under these conditions, intuition tells us that desperate competition among the global self-prop systems will tear the world-system apart.</p>
+<p>Let’s try to formulate this intuition more clearly. For some hundreds of millions of years the terrestrial environment has had some degree of stability, in the sense that conditions on Earth, though variable, have remained within certain limits that have allowed the evolution of complex life-forms such as fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. In the immediate future, all self-prop systems on this planet, including self-propagating human groups and any purely machine-based systems derived from them, will have evolved while conditions have remained within these same limits, or at most within somewhat wider ones. By Proposition 3, the Earth’s self-prop systems will have become dependent for their survival on the fact that conditions have remained within these limits. Large-scale self-prop human groups, as well as any purely machine-based self-prop systems, will be dependent also on conditions of more recent origin relating to the way the world-system is organized; for example, conditions pertaining to economic relationships. The rapidity with which these conditions change must remain within certain limits, else the self-prop systems will not survive.</p>
+<p>This doesn’t mean that all of the world’s self-prop systems will die if future conditions, or the rapidity with which they change, slightly exceed some of these limits, but it does mean that if conditions go far enough beyond some of the limits many self-prop systems are likely to die, and if conditions ever vary wildly enough outside of the limits, then, with near certainty, all of the world’s more complex self-prop systems will die without progeny.</p>
+<p>With several self-prop systems of global reach, armed with the colossal powers of modem technology and competing for immediate power while exercising no self-restraint from concern for long-term consequences, it is extremely difficult to imagine that conditions on this planet will not be pushed far outside of all earlier limits and battered around erratically, with the result that all of the Earth’s more complex self-prop systems will die without progeny.</p>
+<p>Notice that the crucial factor here is the availability of rapid, worldwide transportation and communication, as a consequence of which there exist global self-prop systems. There is another way of seeing that this situation will lead to radical disruption of the world-system. Students of industrial accidents know that a system is most likely to suffer a catastrophic breakdown when (i) the system is highly complex (meaning that small disruptions can produce unpredictable consequences), and (ii) tightly linked (meaning that a breakdown in one part of the system spreads quickly to other parts).<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> The world-system has been highly complex for a long time. The new factor is that of rapid, worldwide transportation and communication, as a result of which the world-system and all global self-prop systems are now tightly linked. Until relatively recently, self-prop systems were local phenomena, hence the destructive effects of their competition also were usually local. Today, because global self-prop systems compete worldwide, because they are tightly linked, because the world-system as a whole is tightly linked, and because technology provides global self-prop systems with colossal power, global disaster sooner or later is a near certainty.</p>
+<p>An obvious answer to the foregoing arguments will be to assert that destructive competition among global self-prop systems isn’t inevitable: A single global self-prop system might succeed in eliminating all of its competitors and thereafter dominate the world alone; or, because global self-prop systems would be relatively few in number, they might come to an agreement among themselves whereby they would refrain from all dangerous or destructive forms of competition. However, while it is easy to talk about such an agreement, it is vastly more difficult to actually conclude one and enforce it. Just look: The world’s leading powers today have not been able to agree on the elimination of war or of nuclear weapons, or on the limitation of emissions’ of carbon dioxide.</p>
+<p>But let’s be optimistic and assume that the world has come under the domination of a single, unified system, which may consist of a single global self-prop system victorious over all its rivals, or may be a composite of several global self-prop systems that have bound themselves together through an agreement that eliminates all destructive competition among them. The resulting “world peace” will be unstable for three separate reasons.</p>
+<p>First, the world-system will still be highly complex and tightly linked.</p>
+<p>Second, prior to the arrival of “world peace” and for the sake of their own survival and propagation, the self-prop subsystems of a given global self-prop system (their supersystem) will have put aside, or at least moderated, their mutual conflicts in order to present a united front against any immediate external threats or challenges to the supersystem (which are also threats or challenges to themselves). In fact, the supersystem would never have been successful enough to become a global self-prop system if competition between its most powerful self-prop subsystems had not been moderated.</p>
+<p>But once a global self-prop system has eliminated its competitors, or has entered into an agreement that frees it from dangerous competition from other global self-prop systems, there will no longer be an immediate external threat to induce unity or a moderation of conflict among the self-prop system. In view of Proposition 2—which tells us that self-prop systems will compete with little regard for long-term consequences—unrestrained and therefore destructive competition will break out among the most powerful self-prop subsystems of the global self-prop system in question. This argument of course assumes that the most powerful self-prop subsystems will be “intelligent” enough to distinguish between a situation in which their supersystem is subject to an immediate external threat, and a situation in which their supersystem is not subject to an immediate external threat. The assumption, however, seems highly probable.</p>
+<p>Benjamin Franklin pointed out that “the great Affairs of the World, the Wars Revolutions, &c. are carried on and effected by Parties.” Each of the “Parties”, according to Franklin, is pursuing its own collective advantage, but “as soon as a Party has gain’d its general Point”—and therefore, presumably, no longer faces immediate conflict with an external adversary—“each Member becomes Intent upon his particular Interest, which thwarting others, breaks that Party into Divisions, and occasions…Confusion.”<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">5</a></sup></p>
+<p>Franklin’s statement doubtless represents somewhat of an oversimplification, but history does generally confirm that when large human groups are not held together by any immediate external challenge, they tend strongly to break up into factions that compete with one another regardless of long-term consequences. What we are arguing here is that this does not apply only to human groups, but expresses a tendency of self-propagating systems in. general as they develop under the influence of natural selection. Thus, the tendency is independent of any flaws of character peculiar to human beings and the tendency will persist even if humans are “cured” of their purported defects or are replaced by intelligent machines.</p>
+<p>Let’s nevertheless assume that the most powerful self-prop subsystems of global self-prop systems will not begin to compete destructively when the external challenges to their supersystems have been removed. There is still a third reason why the kind of “world peace” described above will be unstable.</p>
+<p>By Proposition 1, within the new “peaceful” world-system new self-prop systems will arise that, under the influence of natural selection, will evolve increasingly subtle and sophisticated ways of evading recognition—or, once they are recognized, evading suppression—by the dominant global self-prop systems. By the same process that led to the evolution of self-prop systems in the first place, new self-prop systems of greater and greater power will develop until some are powerful enough to challenge the existing global self-prop systems, whereupon destructive competition on a global scale will resume.</p>
+<p>For the sake of clarity we have described the process in simplified form, as if a world-system relatively free of dangerous competition would first be established and afterward would be undone by new self-prop systems that would arise. But it’s more likely that new self-prop systems will be arising all along to challenge the existing global self-prop systems, and will prevent the hypothesized “world peace” from ever being the in the first place. In fact, we can see this happening before our eyes. The most crudely obvious of the (relatively) new self-prop systems are those that challenge law and order head on, such as terrorist networks, drug cartels, and hackers groups (e.g., Anonymous, or the now-defunct LulzSec<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">6</a></sup>). Such self-prop systems not only can disrupt the normal course of political life, as drug cartels have done in Mexico and terrorists have done in the United States; they even have the potential to take control of important nations, as drug cartels arguably have come close to doing in Kenya.<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">7</a></sup> A subordinate system that a government creates for its own protection—its military establishment—can turn into a self-prop system in its own right and become dominant over the government, either replacing it through a military coup, or exercising effective power behind the scenes while allowing the government to retain the appearance of full sovereignty.<sup id="fnref:8"><a href="#fn:8" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">8</a></sup></p>
+<p>Probably more significant at the present time are emerging self-prop systems that use entirely legal methods (new corporations are continually being formed; some grow powerful enough to challenge older corporations and gain covert political power) and those that try to keep their use of illegal methods to a minimum (as in the case of the movement that recently overthrew Hosni Mubarak in Egypt). Legal self-prop systems are especially important in those parts of the world where democracy is firmly established, because democracy gives new groups the opportunity-to compete for (and possibly win) power by legal means. Two competing, entirely legal self-prop systems that have arisen in the U.S. during the last several decades are the politically correct left and the dogmatic right (not to be confused with the liberals and conservatives of earlier times in America). This essay is not the place to speculate about the outcome of the struggle between these two forces; suffice it to say that in the long run their bitter conflict may do more to prevent the establishment of a lastingly peaceful world order than all the bombs of AI Qaeda and all the murders of the Mexican drug gangs.</p>
+<p>Some people may imagine that it would be possible to design and construct a world-system in such a way that the foregoing processes leading to destructive competition would not occur. But there are several reasons why such a project could never be carried out in practice. Here we mention only one of the reasons: the extreme complexity that the world-system would necessarily have, and the impossibility of predicting (especially at long term) the behavior of complex systems.<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup></p>
+<p>It will be objected that a mammal, (or other complex biological organism) is a self-prop system that is a composite of millions of other self-prop systems, namely, the cells of its own body. Yet (unless and until the animal cancer) no destructive competition arises among cells or groups of cells within the animal’s body. Instead, all the cells loyally serve the interests of the animal as a whole. Moreover, no external threat to the animal is necessary to keep the cell faithful to their duty. There is (it will be argued) no reason why the world-system could not be as well organized as the body of a mammal, so that no destructive competition would arise among its self-prop systems.</p>
+<p>But the body of a mammal is, a product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution through natural selection. This means that it has been-created through a trial-and-error process involving many millions of successive trials. If we suppose the duration of a generation to be a period of time Δ, those members of the first generation that contributed to the second generation by producing offspring were only those that passed the test of selection over time Δ. Those lineages<sup id="fnref:10"><a href="#fn:10" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">10</a></sup> that survived to the third generation were only those that passed the test of selection over time 2Δ. Those lineages that survived to the fourth generation were only those that passed the test of selection over time 3Δ. And so forth. Those lineages that survived to the nth generation were only those that passed the test of selection over the time-interval (n-1)Δ as well as the test of selection over every shorter time-interval. Though the foregoing explanation is grossly simplified, it shows that in order to have survived up to the present, a lineage of organisms has to have passed the test of selection many millions of times and over all time-intervals, short, medium, and long. To put it another way, the lineage of organisms has had to pass through a series of many millions of filters, each of which has allowed the passage only of those lineages that were “fittest” (in the Darwinian sense) to survive over time-intervals of widely varying length. It is only through this process that the body of a mammal has evolved, with its incredibly complex and subtle mechanisms that promote the survival of the animal’s lineage at short, medium, and long term. These mechanisms include those that prevent destructive competition between cells or groups of cells within the animal’s body.</p>
+<p>But once self-prop systems have attained global scale, certain crucial differences emerge that make the selection process highly inefficient.</p>
+<p>First, at each trial in the process of trial and error that is evolution through natural selection, there are too few individuals from among which to select the “fittest”. In a biological species there ordinarily are, at the least, several million individuals from among which the “fittest” in each generation are selected by their ability to survive and reproduce.<sup id="fnref:11"><a href="#fn:11" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">11</a></sup> Self-prop systems sufficiently big and powerful to be plausible contenders for global dominance will probably number in the dozens or possibly in the hundreds; they certainly will not number in the millions.</p>
+<p>Second, in the absence of rapid, worldwide transportation and communication, the breakdown or the destructive action of a small-scale self-prop system has only local repercussions. But, where rapid, worldwide transportation and communication have led to the emergence of global self-prop systems, the breakdown or the destructive action of anyone such system shakes the entire world-system. Consequently, in the process of trial and error that is evolution through natural selection, it is highly probable that after only a relatively small number of “trials” resulting in “errors”, the world-system will break down or be so severely disrupted that none of the world’s larger or more complex self-prop systems will be able to survive (see Proposition 3). Thus, for such self-prop systems, the trial-and-error process comes to an end; evolution through natural selection cannot continue long enough to create global self-prop systems possessing the subtle and sophisticated mechanisms that prevent destructive internal competition within complex biological organisms.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, fierce competition among global self-prop systems will have led to such drastic and rapid alterations in the Earth’s climate, the composition of its atmosphere, the chemistry of its oceans, and so forth, that among biological species none will be left alive except, maybe, some of the simplest organisms—certain bacteria, algae and the like that are capable of surviving under extreme conditions.<sup id="fnref:12"><a href="#fn:12" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">12</a></sup></p>
+<p>The theory we’ve outline here provides a plausible explanation for the so-called “Fermi Paradox”. It is believed that there should be numerous planets on which technologically advanced civilizations have evolved, and which are not so remote from us that we could not by this time have detected the radio transmissions of those civilizations. The Fermi Paradox consists in the fact that our astronomers have never been able to detect any radio signals that seem to have originated form an intelligent extraterrestrial source.<sup id="fnref:13"><a href="#fn:13" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">13</a></sup></p>
+<p>According to Ray Kurzweil, one common explanation of the Fermi Paradox is “that a civilization may obliterate itself once it reaches radio capability. This explanation might be acceptable if we were talking about only a few such civilizations, but [if such civilizations have been numerous], it is not credible to believe that every one of them destroyed itself.”<sup id="fnref:14"><a href="#fn:14" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">14</a></sup></p>
+<p>Kurzweil would be right if the self-destruction of a civilization were merely a matter of chance. But there is nothing implausible about the foregoing explanation of the Fermi Paradox if there is a process common to all technologically advanced civilizations that consistently leads them to self-destruction. In this essay we have argued that there is such a process.</p>
+<h2 id="ii">II.</h2>
+<p>Our discussion of self-propagating systems merely describes in general and abstract terms what we see going on all around us in concrete form: Organizations, movements, ideologies are locked in an unremitting struggle for power. Those that fail to compete successfully are eliminated or subjugated.<sup id="fnref:15"><a href="#fn:15" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">15</a></sup> The struggle is almost exclusively for power in the short term; the competitors pay scant attention even to their own long-term survival,<sup id="fnref:16"><a href="#fn:16" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">16</a></sup> let alone to the welfare of the human race or of the biosphere. That’s why nuclear weapons have not been banned, emissions of carbon dioxide have not been reduced to a safe level, the Earth’s resources are being exploited at an utterly reckless rate, and no limitation has been placed on development of powerful but dangerous technologies.</p>
+<p>The purpose of describing the process in general and abstract terms, as we’ve done here, is to show that what is happening to our world is not accidental; it is not the result of some chance conjunction of historical circumstances or of some flaw of character peculiar to human beings. Given the nature of self-propagating systems in general, the destructive process that we see today is made inevitable by a combination of two factors: the colossal power of modern technology and the availability of rapid transportation and communication between any two parts of the world.</p>
+<p>Recognition of this may help us to avoid wasting time on naïve efforts to solve our current problems. For example, on efforts to teach people to conserve energy and resources. Such efforts accomplish nothing whatever.</p>
+<p>It seems amazing that those who advocate energy conservation haven’t noticed what happens: As soon as some energy is freed up by conservation, the technological world-system gobbles it up and demands more. No matter how much energy is provided, the system always expands rapidly until it is using all available energy, and then it demands still more. The same is true of other resources. The technological world-system infallibly expands until it reaches a limit imposed by an insufficiency of resources, and then it tries to push beyond that limit regardless of consequences.</p>
+<p>This is explained by the theory of self-propagating systems: Those organizations (or other self-prop systems) that least allow respect for the environment to interfere with their pursuit of power here and now, tend to acquire more power than those that limit their pursuit of power from concern about what will happen to our environment fifty years from now, or even ten years (Proposition 2). Thus, through a process of natural selection, the world comes to be dominated by organizations that make maximum possible use of all available resources to augment their own power without regard to long-term consequences.</p>
+<p>Environmental do-gooders may answer that if the public has been persuaded to take environmental concerns seriously it will be disadvantageous in terms of natural selection for an organization to abuse the environment, because citizens can offer resistance to environmentally reckless organizations. For example, people might refuse to buy products manufactured by companies that are environmentally destructive. However, human behavior and human attitudes can be manipulated. Environmental damage can be shielded, up to a point, from public scrutiny; with the help of public-relations firms, a corporation can persuade people that it is environmentally responsible; advertising and marketing techniques can give people such an itch to possess a corporation’s products that few individuals will refuse to buy them from concern for the environment; computer games, electronic social networking, and other mechanisms of escape keep people absorbed in hedonistic pursuits so that they don’t have time for environmental worries. More importantly, people are made to see themselves as utterly dependent on the products and services provided by the corporations. Because people have to earn money to buy the products and services on which they are dependent, they need jobs. Economic growth is necessary for the creation of jobs, therefore people accept environmental damage when it is portrayed as a price that must be paid for economic growth. Nationalism too is brought into play both by corporations and by governments. Citizens are made to feel that outside forces are threatening: “The Chinese will get ahead of us if we don’t increase our rate of economic growth. Al Qaeda will blow us up if we don’t improve our technology and our weaponry fast enough.”</p>
+<p>These are some of the tools that organizations use to counter environmentalists’ efforts to arouse public concern; similar tools can help to blunt other forms of resistance to the organizations’ pursuit of power. The organizations that are most successful in blunting public resistance to their pursuit of power tend to increase their power more rapidly than organizations that are less successful in blunting public resistance to their power-seeking activities, whatever the degree of environmental damage involved. Because such organizations have great wealth at their disposal, environmentalists do not have the resources to compete with them in the propaganda war.</p>
+<p>This is the reason, or an important part of the reason, why attempts to teach people to be environmentally responsible have done so little to slow the destruction of our environment. And again—note well—the process we’ve described is not contingent on any accidental set of circumstances or on any defect in human character. Given the availability of advanced technology, the process of inevitability accompanies the action of natural selection upon self-propagating systems.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<p><a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library">Back to the Library</a> - <a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski">More from Ted Kaczynski</a></p>
+</div><div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p>When we refer to “competition” we don’t necessarily mean intentional or willful competition. Competition, as we use the term, is just something that happens. For example, plants certainly have no intention to compete with one another. It is simply a fact that the plants that most effectively survive and propagate thesmelves tend to replace those plants that less effectively survive and propagate themselves. “Competition” in this sense of the word is just an inevitable process that goes on with or without any intention on the part of the competitors. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p>Something along these lines, but more complicated; probably happened among the ancient Maya. See Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Penguin, New York, 2011, pp. 157-177. Probably many good examples could be drawn from the realm of economics. I don’t know enough about economics to cite any specific examples, but something like the following might well occur: Two savings-and-loan associations, X and Y, compete for the same depositors. During a real estate boom X makes money hand over fist by investing massively in real estate and therefore is able to offer its depositors a higher rate of interest than does,Y, which follows a more cautiousinvestment policy. As a result, Y loses most of its depositors to X. Perhaps Y will go out of business; if not, it will certainly be greatly weakened. A few years later the. real estate bubble bursts and X goes broke. Thus, a trait (willingness to take risks) that is conducive, and perhaps necessary, to the survival of X in the short term, leads to the demise of X in the long term. I rather suspect that this example represents in grossly simplified form a phenomenon that occurs fairly often in the world of finance. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:3">
+<p>When we refer to the exercise of “foresight” or to the “pursuit” of advantage, our reference is not limited to the conscious, intelligent foresight or to the intentional pursuit of advantage. We include any behavior (interpreting that word in the broadest possible sense) that has the same effect as the exercise of foresight, or the same effect as the pursuit of advantages, regardless of whether the behavior is guided by any mechanism that could be described as “intelligence”. (Compare Note 1.) For example, any vertebrates that, inthe process of evolving into land animals, had the “foresight” to “attempt” to retain their gills (an advantage if they ever had to return to water) were at a disadvantage due to the biological cost of maintaining organs that were useless on land. Hence, they lost out in “competition” with those incipient land animals that “pursued” their short-term advantage by getting rid of their gills. By losing their gills, reptiles, birds, and mammals have become dependent on access to the atmosphere, and that’s why whales today will drown if forced to remain submerged too long. <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:4">
+<p>See “Of toxic bonds and crippled nuke plants”, The Week, January 28, 2011, p. 42. <a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:5">
+<p>Kenneth Silverman (editor), Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and Other Writings, Penguin, New York, 1986, p. 103. <a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:6">
+<p>“An anonymous foe”, The Economist, June 18, 2011, pp. 67-68. Bill Saporito, “Hack Attack”, Time, July 4, 2011, pp. 50-52, 55. Byron Acohido, “Hacktivist group seeks ‘satisfaction’” and “LulzSec’s gone, but its effect lives on”, USA Today, June 20, 2011, p. 1B, and June 28, 2011, p. 1B. <a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:7">
+<p>“A state in the thrall of drug lords”, The Week, January 14, 2011, p. 18. <a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:8">
+<p>As in Pakistan, for example. See Time, May 23, 2011, p. 41; The Week, November 26, 2010, p. 15; The Economist, February 12, 2011, p. 48, and February 26, 2011, p. 65 (“General Ashfaq Kayani…[is] widely seen as the most powerful in [Pakistan].”). <a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:9">
+<p>See The New Encyclopcedia Britannica, 15th ed., 2003, Vol. 25, article “Physical Science, Principles of”, pp. 826-827. <a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:10">
+<p>For the sake of simplicity we define a lineage to be any sequence of organisms O1, O2, O3,…,On such that O2 is an offspring of O1, O3 is an offspring of O2, O4 is an offspring of O3, and so on down to On. We say that such a lineage has survived to the n" generation. But if On produces no offspring, then the lineage does not survive to generation n+1. For example, if John is the son of Mary and George is the son of John and Laura is the daughter of George, the Mary-John-George-Laura is a lineage that survives to the fourth generation. But if Laura produces no offspring, then the lineage does not survive to the fifth generation. <a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:11">
+<p>Among very large animals the number of individuals in each generation may be in the thousands rather than in the millions. But biological species that consist of a relatively—small number of large individuals—such as mammoths, giant sloths, and the “megafauna” generally—have proven to be far more vulnerable to extinction than species that consist of a large number of small individuals. <a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:12">
+<p>As explained here, we think competition between global self-propagating systems will almost certainly lead to devastation of the world if modern technology is allowed to continue its progress. But the remarkable powers that technology makes available might result in worldwide devastation independently of the existence of global self-prop systems. For example, as Bill Joy has pointed out (“Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”, Wired, April 2000), it may in the future be possible to create tiny self-propagating systems (biological or not) that could reproduce themselves uncontrollably and spread over the world with devastating effect. Because the equipment needed to create such self-prop systems would be simple and inexpensive as compared with, for example, the equipment needed to produce nuclear weapons, some small group of amateurs could accidentally or intentionally create deadly self-prop systems without anyone’s being aware of what they were doing until it was too late. Small groups of amateurs are already dabbling in genetic engineering. See Elizabeth Weise, “DIY ‘biopunks’ want science in hands of people”, USA Today, June 1, 2011, p. 7A. These amateurs wouldn’t necessarily have to create synthetic life or do anything highly sophisticated in order to bring on a disaster; merely changing a few genes in an existing organism could have catastrophic consequences. The chances of disaster in any one instance may be remote, but there are potentially thousands or millions of amateurs who could begin monkeying with the genes of microorganisms, and thousands or millions of minute risks can add up to a very substantial risk. <a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:13">
+<p>Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, Penguin, New York, 2005, pp. 344-349. <a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:14">
+<p>Ibid., p. 348. Kurzweil refers to an estimate that there should be “billions” of technologically advanced civilizations within the range of our observation, but he plausibly argues that the assumptions on which this estimate is based are highly uncertain and probably overoptimistic (this writer would say wildly overoptimistic). Ibid., pp. 346-47. Still, an explanation is needed for the fact that our astronomers have detected no indication of any extraterrestrial civilizations at all. See ibid., p. 357. See also Michael D. Lemonick, “Is Anybody Out There? The universe may be more hospitable to life than we thought”, Time, June 6, 2011, p. 18; “A planet in the ‘Goldilocks zone’”, The Week, June 3, 2011, p. 21. On the basis of no evidence or reasoning whatever, Kurzweil writes that “sudden [self-]:destruction is likely to be only a modest factor in reducing the number of radio-capable civilizations.” Ibid., p. 346. As we’ve argued, he’s dead wrong. <a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:15">
+<p>It is not our intention to exalt competition or to portray it as desirable. We are not making value judgments here. Our purpose is only to set forth the relevant facts, however painful those facts may be. <a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:16">
+<p>E.g.: “As [Barbara] Tuchman put it…, ‘Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power… .’” Diamond, op. cit., p. 431. “Governments… regularly operate on a short-term focus: they… pay attention only to problems that are on the verge of explosion. For example, a friend of mine who is closely connected to the current [George W. Bush] federal administration in Washington, D.C., told me that, when he visited Washington for the first time after the 2000 national elections he found that our government’s new leaders had what he termed a ‘90-day focus’: they talked only about those problems with the potential to cause a disaster within the next 90 days.” Ibid., p. 434. Diamond is wasting his time in preaching against these tendencies because these tendencies are inevitable products of natural selection operating upon self-prop systems under present-day conditions. <a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
Industrial Society and Its Future
+ Thu, 23 Mar 2023 18:06:34 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/industrial-society-and-its-future/
+ <h2 id="introduction">Introduction</h2>
+<ol>
+<li>
+<p>The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>In this article we give attention to only some of the negative developments that have grown out of the industrial-technological system. Other such developments we mention only briefly or ignore altogether. This does not mean that we regard these other developments as unimportant. For practical reasons we have to confine our discussion to areas that have received insufficient public attention or in which we have something new to say. For example, since there are well-developed environmental and wilderness movements, we have written very little about environmental degradation or the destruction of wild nature, even though we consider these to be highly important.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="the-psychology-of-modern-leftism">The Psychology of Modern Leftism</h2>
+<ol start="6">
+<li>
+<p>Almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply troubled society. One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism, so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern society in general.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th century leftism could have been practically identified with socialism. Today the movement is fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be called a leftist. When we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists, collectivists, “politically correct” types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like. But not everyone who is associated with one of these movements is a leftist. What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so much a movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or rather a collection of related types. Thus, what we mean by “leftism” will emerge more clearly in the course of our discussion of leftist psychology. (Also, see paragraphs 227–230.)</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Even so, our conception of leftism will remain a good deal less clear than we would wish, but there doesn’t seem to be any remedy for this. All we are trying to do here is indicate in a rough and approximate way the two psychological tendencies that we believe are the main driving force of modern leftism. We by no means claim to be telling the WHOLE truth about leftist psychology. Also, our discussion is meant to apply to modern leftism only. We leave open the question of the extent to which our discussion could be applied to the leftists of the 19th and early 20th centuries.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call feelings of inferiority and oversocialization. Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="feelings-of-inferiority">Feelings of Inferiority</h2>
+<ol start="10">
+<li>
+<p>By “feelings of inferiority” we mean not only inferiority feelings in the strict sense but a whole spectrum of related traits: low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend to have some such feelings (possibly more or less repressed), and that these feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern leftism.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies), we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced among minority-rights activists, whether or not they belong to the minority groups whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about the words used to designate minorities and about anything that is said concerning minorities. The terms “Negro,” “oriental,” “handicapped,” or “chick” for an African, an Asian, a disabled person or a woman originally had no derogatory connotation. “Broad” and “chick” were merely the feminine equivalents of “guy,” “dude” or “fellow.” The negative connotations have been attached to these terms by the activists themselves. Some animal rights activists have gone so far as to reject the word “pet” and insist on its replacement by “animal companion.” Leftish anthropologists go to great lengths to avoid saying anything about primitive peoples that could conceivably be interpreted as negative. They want to replace the word “primitive” by “nonliterate.” They seem almost paranoid about anything that might suggest that any primitive culture is inferior to our own. (We do not mean to imply that primitive cultures ARE inferior to ours. We merely point out the hypersensitivity of leftish anthropologists.)</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Those who are most sensitive about “politically incorrect” terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any “oppressed” group but come from privileged strata of society. Political correctness has its stronghold among university professors, who have secure employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual white males from middle to upper-class families.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent (homosexuals), or otherwise inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with their problems. (We do not mean to suggest that women, Indians, etc., ARE inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology.)</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc., clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Words like “self-confidence,” “self-reliance,” “initiative,” “enterprise,” “optimism,” etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Art forms that appeal to modern leftish intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been brought up properly.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose feelings of inferiority make him a braggart, an egotist, a bully, a self-promoter, a ruthless competitor. This kind of person has not wholly lost faith in himself. He has a deficit in his sense of power and self-worth, but he can still conceive of himself as having the capacity to be strong, and his efforts to make himself strong produce his unpleasant behavior.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> But the leftist is too far gone for that. His feelings of inferiority are so ingrained that he cannot conceive of himself as individually strong and valuable. Hence the collectivism of the leftist. He can feel strong only as a member of a large organization or a mass movement with which he identifies himself.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Notice the masochistic tendency of leftist tactics. Leftists protest by lying down in front of vehicles, they intentionally provoke police or racists to abuse them, etc. These tactics may often be effective, but many leftists use them not as a means to an end but because they PREFER masochistic tactics. Self-hatred is a leftist trait.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>We emphasize that the foregoing does not pretend to be an accurate description of everyone who might be considered a leftist. It is only a rough indication of a general tendency of leftism.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="oversocialization">Oversocialization</h2>
+<ol start="24">
+<li>
+<p>Psychologists use the term “socialization” to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. It may seem senseless to say that many leftists are oversocialized, since the leftist is perceived as a rebel. Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such rebels as they seem.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin. We use the term “oversocialized” to describe such people.<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Oversocialization can lead to low self-esteem, a sense of powerlessness, defeatism, guilt, etc. One of the most important means by which our society socializes children is by making them feel ashamed of behavior or speech that is contrary to society’s expectations. If this is overdone, or if a particular child is especially susceptible to such feelings, he ends by feeling ashamed of HIMSELF. Moreover the thought and the behavior of the over-socialized person are more restricted by society’s expectations than are those of the lightly socialized person. The majority of people engage in a significant amount of naughty behavior. They lie, they commit petty thefts, they break traffic laws, they goof off at work, they hate someone, they say spiteful things or they use some underhanded trick to get ahead of the other guy. The oversocialized person cannot do these things, or if he does do them he generates in himself a sense of shame and self-hatred. The oversocialized person cannot even experience, without guilt, thoughts or feelings that are contrary to the accepted morality; he cannot think “unclean” thoughts. And socialization is not just a matter of morality; we are socialized to conform to many norms of behavior that do not fall under the heading of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him. In many oversocialized people this results in a sense of constraint and powerlessness that can be a severe hardship. We suggest that oversocialization is among the more serious cruelties that human beings inflict on one another.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>We argue that a very important and influential segment of the modern left is oversocialized and that their oversocialization is of great importance in determining the direction of modern leftism. Leftists of the oversocialized type tend to be intellectuals or members of the upper middle class. Notice that university intellectuals<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup> constitute the most highly socialized segment of our society and also the most left-wing segment.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. More fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society (or at least of its middle and upper classes<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup>) for a long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up to these principles.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Here is an illustration of the way in which the oversocialized leftist shows his real attachment to the conventional attitudes of our society while pretending to be in rebellion against it. Many leftists push for affirmative action, for moving black people into high-prestige jobs, for improved education in black schools and more money for such schools; the way of life of the black “underclass” they regard as a social disgrace. They want to integrate the black man into the system, make him a business executive, a lawyer, a scientist just like upper middle-class white people. The leftists will reply that the last thing they want is to make the black man into a copy of the white man; instead, they want to preserve African-American culture. But in what does this preservation of African-American culture consist? It can hardly consist in anything more than eating black-style food, listening to black-style music, wearing black-style clothing and going to a black-style church or mosque. In other words, it can express itself only in superficial matters. In all ESSENTIAL respects most leftists of the oversocialized type want to make the black man conform to white middle-class ideals. They want to make him study technical subjects, become an executive or a scientist, spend his life climbing the status ladder to prove that black people are as good as white. They want to make black fathers “responsible,” they want black gangs to become nonviolent, etc. But these are exactly the values of the industrial-technological system. The system couldn’t care less what kind of music a man listens to, what kind of clothes he wears or what religion he believes in as long as he studies in school, holds a respectable job, climbs the status ladder, is a “responsible” parent, is nonviolent and so forth. In effect, however much he may deny it, the oversocialized leftist wants to integrate the black man into the system and make him adopt its values.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>We certainly do not claim that leftists, even of the over-socialized type, NEVER rebel against the fundamental values of our society. Clearly they sometimes do. Some oversocialized leftists have gone so far as to rebel against one of modern society’s most important principles by engaging in physical violence. By their own account, violence is for them a form of “liberation.” In other words, by committing violence they break through the psychological restraints that have been trained into them. Because they are oversocialized these restraints have been more confining for them than for others; hence their need to break free of them. But they usually justify their rebellion in terms of mainstream values. If they engage in violence they claim to be fighting against racism or the like.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>We realize that many objections could be raised to the foregoing thumbnail sketch of leftist psychology. The real situation is complex, and anything like a complete description of it would take several volumes even if the necessary data were available. We claim only to have indicated very roughly the two most important tendencies in the psychology of modern leftism.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The problems of the leftist are indicative of the problems of our society as a whole. Low self-esteem, depressive tendencies and defeatism are not restricted to the left. Though they are especially noticeable in the left, they are widespread in our society. And today’s society tries to socialize us to a greater extent than any previous society. We are even told by experts how to eat, how to exercise, how to make love, how to raise our kids and so forth.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="the-power-process">The Power Process</h2>
+<ol start="33">
+<li>
+<p>Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something that we will call the power process. This is closely related to the need for power (which is widely recognized) but is not quite the same thing. The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it autonomy and will discuss it later (paragraphs 42–44).</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems. At first he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually he may become clinically depressed. History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent. This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power. But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical necessities of life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are made necessary by the climate. But the leisured aristocrat obtains these things without effort. Hence his boredom and demoralization.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Non-attainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical necessities, and in frustration if non-attainment of the goals is compatible with survival. Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="surrogate-activities">Surrogate Activities</h2>
+<ol start="38">
+<li>
+<p>But not every leisured aristocrat becomes bored and demoralized. For example, the emperor Hirohito, instead of sinking into decadent hedonism, devoted himself to marine biology, a field in which he became distinguished. When people do not have to exert themselves to satisfy their physical needs they often set up artificial goals for themselves. In many cases they then pursue these goals with the same energy and emotional involvement that they otherwise would have put into the search for physical necessities. Thus the aristocrats of the Roman Empire had their literary pretensions; many European aristocrats a few centuries ago invested tremendous time and energy in hunting, though they certainly didn’t need the meat; other aristocracies have competed for status through elaborate displays of wealth; and a few aristocrats, like Hirohito, have turned to science.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>We use the term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or, let us say, merely for the sake of the “fulfillment” that they get from pursuing the goal. Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate activities. Given a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote most of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use his physical and mental faculties in a varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal X? If the answer is no, then the person’s pursuit of a goal X is a surrogate activity. Hirohito’s studies in marine biology clearly constituted a surrogate activity, since it is pretty certain that if Hirohito had had to spend his time working at interesting non-scientific tasks in order to obtain the necessities of life, he would not have felt deprived because he didn’t know all about the anatomy and life-cycles of marine animals. On the other hand the pursuit of sex and love (for example) is not a surrogate activity, because most people, even if their existence were otherwise satisfactory, would feel deprived if they passed their lives without ever having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. (But pursuit of an excessive amount of sex, more than one really needs, can be a surrogate activity.)</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one’s physical needs. It is enough to go through a training program to acquire some petty technical skill, then come to work on time and exert the very modest effort needed to hold a job. The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence and, most of all, simple OBEDIENCE. If one has those, society takes care of one from cradle to grave. (Yes, there is an underclass that cannot take the physical necessities for granted, but we are speaking here of mainstream society.) Thus it is not surprising that modern society is full of surrogate activities. These include scientific work, athletic achievement, humanitarian work, artistic and literary creation, climbing the corporate ladder, acquisition of money and material goods far beyond the point at which they cease to give any additional physical satisfaction, and social activism when it addresses issues that are not important for the activist personally, as in the case of white activists who work for the rights of nonwhite minorities. These are not always PURE surrogate activities, since for many people they may be motivated in part by needs other than the need to have some goal to pursue. Scientific work may be motivated in part by a drive for prestige, artistic creation by a need to express feelings, militant social activism by hostility. But for most people who pursue them, these activities are in large part surrogate activities. For example, the majority of scientists will probably agree that the “fulfillment” they get from their work is more important than the money and prestige they earn.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>For many if not most people, surrogate activities are less satistying than the pursuit of real goals (that is, goals that people would want to attain even if their need for the power process were already fulfilled). One indication of this is the fact that, in many or most cases, people who are deeply involved in surrogate activities are never satisfied, never at rest. Thus the money-maker constantly strives for more and more wealth. The scientist no sooner solves one problem than he moves on to the next. The long-distance runner drives himself to run always farther and faster. Many people who pursue surrogate activities will say that they get far more fulfillment from these activities than they do from the “mundane” business of satisfying their biological needs, but that is because in our society the effort required to satisfy the biological needs has been reduced to triviality. More importantly, in our society people do not satisty their biological needs AUTONOMOUSLY but by functioning as parts of an immense social machine. In contrast, people generally have a great deal of autonomy in pursuing their surrogate activities.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="autonomy">Autonomy</h2>
+<ol start="42">
+<li>
+<p>Autonomy as a part of the power process may not be necessary for every individual. But most people need a greater or lesser degree of autonomy in working toward their goals. Their efforts must be undertaken on their own initiative and must be under their own direction and control. Yet most people do not have to exert this initiative, direction and control as single individuals. It is usually enough to act as a member of a SMALL group. Thus if half a dozen people discuss a goal among themselves and make a successful joint effort to attain that goal, their need for the power process will be served. But if they work under rigid orders handed down from above that leave them no room for autonomous decision and initiative, then their need for the power process will not be served. The same is true when decisions are made on a collective basis if the group making the collective decision is so large that the role of each individual is insignificant.<sup id="fnref:5"><a href="#fn:5" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">5</a></sup></p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>It is true that some individuals seem to have little need for autonomy. Either their drive for power is weak or they satisfy it by identifYing themselves with some powerful organization to which they belong. And then there are unthinking, animal types who seem to be satisfied with a purely physical sense of power (the good combat soldier, who gets his sense of power by developing fighting skills that he is quite content to use in blind obedience to his superiors).</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>But for most people it is through the power process—having a goal, making an AUTONOMOUS effort and attaining the goal—that self-esteem, self-confidence and a sense of power are acquired. When one does not have adequate opportunity to go through the power process the consequences are (depending on the individual and on the way the power process is disrupted) boredom, demoralization, low self-esteem, inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression, anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, spouse or child abuse, insatiable hedonism, abnormal sexual behavior, sleep disorders, eating disorders, etc.<sup id="fnref:6"><a href="#fn:6" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">6</a></sup></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="sources-of-social-problems">Sources of Social Problems</h2>
+<ol start="45">
+<li>
+<p>Any of the foregoing symptoms can occur in any society, but in modern industrial society they are present on a massive scale. We aren’t the first to mention that the world today seems to be going crazy. This sort of thing is not normal for human societies. There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is. It is true that not all was sweetness and light in primitive societies. Abuse of women was common among the Australian aborigines, transsexuality was fairly common among some of the American Indian tribes. But it does appear that GENERALLY SPEAKING the kinds of problems that we have listed in the preceding paragraph were far less common among primitive peoples than they are in modern society.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>We attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved and to behave in ways that conflict with the patterns of behavior that the human race developed while living under the earlier conditions. It is clear from what we have already written that we consider lack of opportunity to properly experience the power process as the most important of the abnormal conditions to which modern society subjects people. But it is not the only one. Before dealing with disruption of the power process as a source of social problems we will discuss some of the other sources.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>It is well known that crowding increases stress and aggression. The degree of crowding that exists today and the isolation of man from nature are consequences of technological progress. All preindustrial societies were predominantly rural. The Industrial Revolution vastly increased the size of cities and the proportion of the population that lives in them, and modern agricultural technology has made it possible for the Earth to support a far denser population than it ever did before. (Also, technology exacerbates the effects of crowding because it puts increased disruptive powers in people’s hands. For example, a variety of noise-making devices: power mowers, radios, motorcycles, etc. If the use of these devices is unrestricted, people who want peace and quiet are frustrated by the noise. If their use is restricted, people who use the devices are frustrated by the regulations. But if these machines had never been invented there would have been no conflict and no frustration generated by them.)</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>For primitive societies the natural world (which usually changes only slowly) provided a stable framework and therefore a sense of security. In the modern world it is human society that dominates nature rather than the other way around, and modern society changes very rapidly owing to technological change. Thus there is no stable framework.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities. Beyond that, a technological society HAS TO weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual’s loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Suppose that a public official or a corporation executive appoints his cousin, his friend or his coreligionist to a position rather than appointing the person best qualified for the job. He has permitted personal loyalty to supersede his loyalty to the system, and that is “nepotism” or “discrimination,” both of which are terrible sins in modern society. Would-be industrial societies that have done a poor job of subordinating personal or local loyalties to loyalty to the system are usually very inefficient. (Look at Latin America.) Thus an advanced industrial society can tolerate only those small-scale communities that are emasculated, tamed and made into tools of the system.<sup id="fnref:7"><a href="#fn:7" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">7</a></sup></p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Crowding, rapid change and the breakdown of communities have been widely recognized as sources of social problems. But we do not believe they are enough to account for the extent of the problems that are seen today.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>A few preindustrial cities were very large and crowded, yet their inhabitants do not seem to have suffered from psychological problems to the same extent as modern man. In America today there still are uncrowded rural areas, and we find there the same problems as in urban areas, though the problems tend to be less acute in the rural areas. Thus crowding does not seem to be the decisive factor.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>On the growing edge of the American frontier during the 19th century, the mobility of the population probably broke down extended families and small-scale social groups to at least the same extent as these are broken down today. In fact, many nuclear families lived by choice in such isolation, having no neighbors within several miles, that they belonged to no community at all, yet they do not seem to have developed problems as a result.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Furthermore, change in American frontier society was very rapid and deep. A man might be born and raised in a log cabin, outside the reach of law and order and fed largely on wild meat; and by the time he arrived at old age he might be working at a regular job and living in an ordered community with effective law enforcement. This was a deeper change than that which typically occurs in the life of a modern individual, yet it does not seem to have led to psychological problems. In fact, 19th century American society had an optimistic and self-confident tone, quite unlike that of today’s society.<sup id="fnref:8"><a href="#fn:8" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">8</a></sup></p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The difference, we argue, is that modern man has the sense (largely justified) that change is IMPOSED on him, whereas the 19th century frontiersman had the sense (also largely justified) that he created change himself, by his own choice. Thus a pioneer settled on a piece of land of his own choosing and made it into a farm through his own effort. In those days an entire country might have only a couple of hundred inhabitants and was a far more isolated and autonomous entity than a modern county is. Hence the pioneer farmer participated as a member of a relatively small group in the creation of a new, ordered community. One may well question whether the creation of this community was an improvement, but at any rate it satisfied the pioneer’s need for the power process.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>It would be possible to give other examples of societies in which there has been rapid change and/or lack of close community ties without the kind of massive behavioral aberration that is seen in today’s industrial society. We contend that the most important cause of social and psychological problems in modern society is the fact that people have insufficient opportunity to go through the power process in a normal way. We don’t mean to say that modern society is the only one in which the power process has been disrupted. Probably most if not all civilized societies have interfered with the power process to a greater or lesser extent. But in modern industrial society the problem has become particularly acute. Leftism, at least in its recent (mid- to late-20th century) form, is in part a symptom of deprivation with respect to the power process.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="disruption-of-the-power-process-in-modern-society">Disruption of the Power Process in Modern Society</h2>
+<ol start="59">
+<li>
+<p>We divide human drives into three groups: (1) those drives that can be satisfied with minimal effort; (2) those that can be satisfied but only at the cost of serious effort; (3) those that cannot be adequately satisfied no matter how much effort one makes. The power process is the process of satistying the drives of the second group. The more drives there are in the third group, the more there is frustration, anger, eventually defeatism, depression, etc.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>In modern industrial society natural human drives tend to be pushed into the first and third groups, and the second group tends to consist increasingly of artificially created drives.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>In primitive societies, physical necessities generally fall into group 2: They can be obtained, but only at the cost of serious effort. But modern society tends to guarantee the physical necessities to everyone<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> in exchange for only minimal effort, hence physical needs are pushed into group 1. (There may be disagreement about whether the effort needed to hold a job is “minimal”; but usually, in lower- to middle-level jobs, whatever effort is required is merely that of OBEDIENCE. You sit or stand where you are told to sit or stand and do what you are told to do in the way you are told to do it. Seldom do you have to exert yourself seriously, and in any case you have hardly any autonomy in work, so that the need for the power process is not well served.)</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Social needs, such as sex, love and status, often remain in group 2 in modern society, depending on the situation of the individual.<sup id="fnref:10"><a href="#fn:10" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">10</a></sup> But, except for people who have a particularly strong drive for status, the effort required to fulfill the social drives is insufficient to satisfy adequately the need for the power process.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>So certain artificial needs have been created that fall into group 2, hence serve the need for the power process. Advertising and marketing techniques have been developed that make many people feel they need things that their grandparents never desired or even dreamed of. It requires serious effort to earn enough money to satisfy these artificial needs, hence they fall into group 2. (But see paragraphs 80–82.) Modern man must satisfy his need for the power process largely through pursuit of the artificial needs created by the advertising and marketing industry,<sup id="fnref:11"><a href="#fn:11" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">11</a></sup> and through surrogate activities.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>It seems that for many people, maybe the majority, these artificial forms of the power process are insufficient. A theme that appears repeatedly in the writings of the social critics of the second half of the 20th century is the sense of purposelessness that afflicts many people in modern society. (This purposelessness is often called by other names such as “anomie” or “middle-class vacuity.”) We suggest that the so-called “identity crisis” is actually a search for a sense of purpose, often for commitment to a suitable surrogate activity. It may be that existentialism is in large part a response to the purposelessness of modern life.<sup id="fnref:12"><a href="#fn:12" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">12</a></sup> Very widespread in modern society is the search for “fulfillment.” But we think that for the majority of people an activity whose main goal is fulfillment (that is, a surrogate activity) does not bring completely satisfactory fulfillment. In other words, it does not fully satisfy the need for the power process. (See paragraph 41.) That need can be fully satisfied only through activities that have some external goal, such as physical necessities, sex, love, status, revenge, etc.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Moreover, where goals are pursued through earning money, climbing the status ladder or functioning as part of the system in some other way, most people are not in a position to pursue their goals AUTONOMOUSLY. Most workers are someone else’s employee and, as we pointed out in paragraph 61, must spend their days doing what they are told to do in the way they are told to do it. Even most people who are in business for themselves have only limited autonomy. It is a chronic complaint of small-business persons and entrepreneurs that their hands are tied by excessive government regulation. Some of these regulations are doubtless unnecessary, but for the most part government regulations are essential and inevitable parts of our extremely complex society. A large portion of small business today operates on the franchise system. It was reported in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago that many of the franchise-granting companies require applicants for franchises to take a personality test that is designed to EXCLUDE those who have creativity and initiative, because such persons are not sufficiently docile to go along obediently with the franchise system. This excludes from small business many of the people who most need autonomy.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Today people live more by virtue of what the system does FOR them or TO them than by virtue of what they do for themselves. And what they do for themselves is done more and more along channels laid down by the system. Opportunities tend to be those that the system provides, the opportunities must be exploited in accord with the rules and regulations<sup id="fnref:13"><a href="#fn:13" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">13</a></sup> and techniques prescribed by experts must be followed if there is to be a chance of success.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Thus the power process is disrupted in our society through a deficiency of real goals and a deficiency of autonomy in the pursuit of goals. But it is also disrupted because of those human drives that fall into group 3: the drives that one cannot adequately satisfy no matter how much effort one makes. One of these drives is the need for security. Our lives depend on decisions made by other people; we have no control over these decisions and usually we do not even know the people who make them. (“We live in a world in which relatively few people—maybe 500 or 1,000—make the important decisions,” Philip B. Heymann of Harvard Law School, quoted by Anthony Lewis, New York Times, April 21, 1995.) Our lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our food or how much pollution into our air; on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is; whether we lose or get a job may depend on decisions made by government economists or corporation executives; and so forth. Most individuals are not in a position to secure themselves against these threats to more than a very limited extent. The individual’s search for security is therefore frustrated, which leads to a sense of powerlessness.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>It may be objected that primitive man is physically less secure than modern man, as is shown by his shorter life expectancy; hence modern man suffers from less, not more than the amount of insecurity that is normal for human beings. But psychological security does not closely correspond with physical security. What makes us FEEL seeure is not so much objective security as a sense of confidence in our ability to take care of ourselves. Primitive man, threatened by a fierce animal or by hunger, can fight in self-defense or travel in search of food. He has no certainty of success in these efforts, but he is by no means helpless against the things that threaten him. The modern individual on the other hand is threatened by many things against which he is helpless; nuclear accidents, carcinogens in food, environmental pollution, war, increasing taxes, invasion of his privacy by large organizations, nationwide social or economic phenomena that may disrupt his way of life.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>It is true that primitive man is powerless against some of the things that threaten him; disease for example. But he can accept the risk of disease stoically. It is part of the nature of things, it is no one’s fault, unless it is the fault of some imaginary, impersonal demon. But threats to the modern individual tend to be MAN-MADE. They are not the results of chance but are IMPOSED on him by other persons whose decisions he, as an individual, is unable to influence. Consequently he feels frustrated, humiliated and angry.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Thus primitive man for the most part has his security in his own hands (either as an individual or as a member of a SMALL group), whereas the security of modern man is in the hands of persons or organizations that are too remote or too large for him to be able personally to influence them. So modern man’s drive for security tends to fall into groups 1 and 3; in some areas (food, shelter, etc.) his security is assured at the cost of only trivial effort, whereas in other areas he CANNOT attain security. (The foregoing greatly simplifies the real situation, but it does indicate in a rough, general way how the condition of modern man differs from that of primitive man.)</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>People have many transitory drives or impulses that are necessarily frustrated in modern life, hence fall into group 3. One may become angry, but modern society cannot permit fighting. In many situations it does not even permit verbal aggression. When going somewhere one may be in a hurry, or one may be in a mood to travel slowly, but one generally has no choice but to move with the flow of traffic and obey the traffic signals. One may want to do one’s work in a different way, but usually one can work only according to the rules laid down by one’s employer. In many other ways as well, modern man is strapped down by a network of rules and regulations (explicit or implicit) that frustrate many of his impulses and thus interfere with the power process. Most of these regulations cannot be dispensed with, because they are necessary for the functioning of industrial society.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Modern society is in certain respects extremely permissive. In matters that are irrelevant to the functioning of the system we can generally do what we please. We can believe in any religion we like (as long as it does not encourage behavior that is dangerous to the system). We can go to bed with anyone we like (as long as we practice “safe sex”). We can do anything we like as long as it is UNIMPORTANT. But in all IMPORTANT matters the system tends increasingly to regulate our behavior.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Behavior is regulated not only through explicit rules and not only by the government. Control is often exercised through indirect coercion or through psychological pressure or manipulation, and by organizations other than the government, or by the system as a whole. Most large organizations use some form of propaganda<sup id="fnref:14"><a href="#fn:14" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">14</a></sup> to manipulate public attitudes or behavior. Propaganda is not limited to “commercials” and advertisements, and sometimes it is not even consciously intended as propaganda by the people who make it. For instance, the content of entertainment programming is a powerful form of propaganda. An example of indirect coercion: There is no law that says we have to go to work every day and follow our employer’s orders. Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners. Hence most of us can survive only as someone else’s employee.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>We suggest that modern man’s obsession with longevity, and with maintaining physical vigor and sexual attractiveness to an advanced age, is a symptom of unfulfillment resulting from deprivation with respect to the power process. The “mid-life crisis” also is such a symptom. So is the lack of interest in having children that is fairly common in modern society but almost unheard-of in primitive societies.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>In primitive societies life is a succession of stages. The needs and purposes of one stage having been fulfilled, there is no particular reluctance about passing on to the next stage. A young man goes through the power process by becoming a hunter, hunting not for sport or for fulfillment but to get meat that is necessary for food. (In young women the process is more complex, with greater emphasis on social power; we won’t discuss that here.) This phase having been successfully passed through, the young man has no reluctance about settling down to the responsibilities of raising a family. (In contrast, some modern people indefinitely postpone having children because they are too busy seeking some kind of “fulfillment.” We suggest that the fulfillment they need is adequate experience of the power process—with real goals instead of the artificial goals of surrogate activities.) Again, having successfully raised his children, going through the power process by providing them with the physical necessities, the primitive man feels that his work is done and he is prepared to accept old age (if he survives that long) and death. Many modern people, on the other hand, are disturbed by the prospect of physical deterioration and death, as is shown by the amount of effort they expend trying to maintain their physical condition, appearance and health. We argue that this is due to unfulfillment resulting from the fact that they have never put their physical powers to any practical use, have never gone through the power process using their bodies in a serious way. It is not the primitive man, who has used his body daily for practical purposes, who fears the deterioration of age, but the modern man, who has never had a practical use for his body beyond walking from his car to his house. It is the man whose need for the power process has been satisfied during his life who is best prepared to accept the end of that life.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>In response to the arguments of this section someone will say, “Society must find a way to give people the opportunity to go through the power process.” This won’t work for those who need autonomy in the power process. For such people the value of the opportunity is destroyed by the very fact that society gives it to them. What they need is to find or make their own opportunities. As long as the system GIVES them their opportunities it still has them on a leash. To attain autonomy they must get off that leash.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="how-some-people-adjust">How Some People Adjust</h2>
+<ol start="77">
+<li>
+<p>Not everyone in industrial-technological society suffers from psychological problems. Some people even profess to be quite satisfied with society as it is. We now discuss some of the reasons why people differ so greatly in their response to modern society.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>First, there doubtless are innate differences in the strength of the drive for power. Individuals with a weak drive for power may have relatively little need to go through the power process, or at least relatively little need for autonomy in the power process. These are docile types who would have been happy as plantation darkies in the Old South. (We don’t mean to sneer at the “plantation darkies” of the Old South. To their credit, most of the slaves were NOT content with their servitude. We do sneer at people who ARE content with servitude.)</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Some people may have some exceptional drive, in pursuing which they satisfy their need for the power process. For example, those who have an unusually strong drive for social status may spend their whole lives climbing the status ladder without ever getting bored with that game.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>People vary in their susceptibility to advertising and marketing techniques. Some people are so susceptible that, even if they make a great deal of money, they cannot satisfy their constant craving for the shiny new toys that the marketing industry dangles before their eyes. So they always feel hard-pressed financially even if their income is large, and their cravings are frustrated.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Some people have low susceptibility to advertising and marketing techniques. These are the people who aren’t interested in money. Material acquisition does not serve their need for the power process.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>People who have medium susceptibility to advertising and marketing techniques are able to earn enough money to satisfy their craving for goods and services, but only at the cost of serious effort (putting in overtime, taking a second job, earning promotions, etc.). Thus material acquisition serves their need for the power process. But it does not necessarily follow that their need is fully satisfied. They may have insufficient autonomy in the power process (their work may consist of following orders) and some of their drives may be frustrated (e.g., security, aggression). (We are guilty of oversimplification in paragraphs 80–82.)<sup id="fnref1:11"><a href="#fn:11" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">11</a></sup></p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Some people partly satisfy their need for power by identifying themselves with a powerful organization or mass movement. An individual lacking goals or power joins a movement or an organization, adopts its goals as his own, then works toward these goals. When some of the goals are attained, the individual, even though his personal efforts have played only an insignificant part in the attainment of the goals, feels (through his identification with the movement or organization) as if he had gone through the power process. This phenomenon was exploited by the Fascists, Nazis and Communists. Our society uses it too, though less crudely. Example: Manuel Noriega was an irritant to the U.S. (goal: punish Noriega). The U.S. invaded Panama (effort) and punished Noriega (attainment of goal). The U.S. went through the power process and many Americans, because of their identification with the U.S., experienced the power process vicariously. Hence the widespread public approval of the Panama invasion; it gave people a sense of power.<sup id="fnref:15"><a href="#fn:15" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">15</a></sup> We see the same phenomenon in armies, corporations, political parties, humanitarian organizations, religious or ideological movements. In particular, leftist movements tend to attract people who are seeking to satisfy their need for power. But for most people identification with a large organization or a mass movement does not fully satisfy the need for power.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Another way in which people satisfy their need for the power process is through surrogate activities. As we explained in paragraphs 38–40, a surrogate activity is an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that the individual pursues for the sake of the “fulfillment” that he gets from pursuing the goal, not because he needs to attain the goal itself. For instance, there is no practical motive for building enormous muscles, hitting a little white ball into a hole or acquiring a complete series of postage stamps. Yet many people in our society devote themselves with passion to bodybuilding, golf or stamp-collecting. Some people are more “other-directed” than others, and therefore will more readily attach importance to a surrogate activity simply because the people around them treat it as important or because society tells them it is important. That is why some people get very serious about essentially trivial activities such as sports, or bridge, or chess, or arcane scholarly pursuits, whereas others who are more clear-sighted never see these things as anything but the surrogate activities that they are, and consequently never attach enough importance to them to satisfy their need for the power process in that way. It only remains to point out that in many cases a person’s way of earning a living is also a surrogate activity. Not a PURE surrogate activity, since part of the motive for the activity is to gain the physical necessities and (for some people) social status and the luxuries that advertising makes them want. But many people put into their work far more effort than is necessary to earn whatever money and status they require,</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>In this section we have explained how many people in modern society do satisfy their need for the power process to a greater or lesser extent. But we think that for the majority of people the need for the power process is not fully satisfied. In the first place, those who have an insatiable drive for status, or who get firmly “hooked” on a surrogate activity, or who identify strongly enough with a movement or organization to satisfy their need for power in that way, are exceptional personalities. Others are not fully satisfied with surrogate activities or by identification with an organization. (See paragraphs 41.) In the second place, too much control is imposed by the system through explicit regulation or through socialization, which results in a deficiency of autonomy, and in frustration due to the impossibility of attaining certain goals and the necessity of restraining too many impulses.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>But even if most people in industrial-technological society were well satisfied, we (FC) would still be opposed to that form of society, because (among other reasons) we consider it demeaning to fulfill one’s need for the power process through surrogate activities or through identification with an organization, rather than through pursuit of real goals.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="the-motives-of-scientists">The Motives of Scientists</h2>
+<ol start="87">
+<li>
+<p>Science and technology provide the most important examples of surrogate activities. Some scientists claim that they are motivated by “curiosity” or by a desire to “benefit humanity.” But it is easy to see that neither of these can be the principal motive of most scientists. As for “curiosity,” that notion is simply absurd. Most scientists work on highly specialized problems that are not the object of any normal curiosity. For example, is an astronomer, a mathematician or an entomologist curious about the properties of isopropyltrimethylmethane? Of course not. Only a chemist is curious about such a thing, and he is curious about it only because chemistry is his surrogate activity. Is the chemist curious about the appropriate classification of a new species of beetle? No. That question is of interest only to the entomologist, and he is interested in it only because entomology is his surrogate activity. If the chemist and the entomologist had to exert themselves seriously to obtain the physical necessities, and if that effort exercised their abilities in an interesting way but in some nonscientific pursuit, then they wouldn’t give a damn about isopropyltrimethylmethane or the classification of beetles. Suppose that lack of funds for postgraduate education had led the chemist to become an insurance broker instead of a chemist. In that case he would have been very interested in insurance matters but would have cared nothing about isopropyltrimcthylmethane. In any case it is not normal to put into the satisfaction of mere curiosity the amount of time and effort that scientists put into their work. The “curiosity” explanation for the scientists’ motive just doesn’t stand up.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The “benefit of humanity” explanation doesn’t work any better. Some scientific work has no conceivable relation to the welfare of the human race—most of archaeology or comparative linguistics for example. Some other areas of science present obviously dangerous possibilities. Yet scientists in these areas are just as enthusiastic about their work as those who develop vaccines or study air pollution. Consider the case of Dr. Edward Teller, who had an obvious emotional involvement in promoting nuclear power plants. Did this involvement stem from a desire to benefit humanity? If so, then why didn’t Dr. Teller get emotional about other “humanitarian” causes? If he was such a humanitarian then why did he help to develop the H-bomb? As with many other scientific achievements, it is very much open to question whether nuclear power plants actually do benefit humanity. Does the cheap electricity outweigh the accumulating waste and the risk of accidents? Dr. Teller saw only one side of the question. Clearly his emotional involvement with nuclear power arose not from a desire to “benefit humanity” but from the personal fulfillment he got from his work and from seeing it put to practical use.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The same is true of scientists generally. With possible rare exceptions, their motive is neither curiosity nor a desire to benefit humanity but the need to go through the power process: to have a goal (a scientific problem to solve), to make an effort (research) and to attain the goal (solution of the problem). Science is a surrogate activity because scientists work mainly for the fulfillment they get out of the work itself.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Of course, it’s not that simple. Other motives do play a role for many scientists. Money and status for example. Some scientists may be persons of the type who have an insatiable drive for status (see paragraph 79) and this may provide much of the motivation for their work. No doubt the majority of scientists, like the majority of the general population, are more or less susceptible to advertising and marketing techniques and need money to satisfy their craving for goods and services. Thus science is not a PURE surrogate activity. But it is in large part a surrogate activity.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Also, science and technology constitute a powerful mass movement, and many scientists gratify their need for power through identification with this mass movement. (See paragraph 83.)</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="the-nature-of-freedom">The Nature of Freedom</h2>
+<ol start="93">
+<li>
+<p>We are going to argue that industrial-technological society cannot be reformed in such a way as to prevent it from progressively narrowing the sphere of human freedom. But because “freedom” is a word that can be interpreted in many ways, we must first make clear what kind of freedom we are concerned with.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>By “freedom” we mean the opportunity to go through the power process, with real goals not the artificial goals of surrogate activities, and without interference, manipulation or supervision from anyone, especially from any large organization. Freedom means being in control (either as an individual or as a member of a SMALL group) of the life-and-death issues of one’s existence: food, clothing, shelter and defense against whatever threats there may be in one’s environment. Freedom means having power; not the power to control other people but the power to control the circumstances of one’s own life. One does not have freedom if anyone else (especially a large organization) has power over one, no matter how benevolently, tolerantly and permissively that power may be exercised. It is important not to confuse freedom with mere permissiveness (see paragraph 72).</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>It is said that we live in a free society because we have a certain number of constitutionally guaranteed rights. But these are not as important as they seem. The degree of personal freedom that exists in a society is determined more by the economic and technological structure of the society than by its laws or its form of government.<sup id="fnref:16"><a href="#fn:16" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">16</a></sup> Most of the Indian nations of New England were monarchies, and many of the cities of the Italian Renaissance were controlled by dictators. But in reading about these societies one gets the impression that they allowed far more personal freedom than our society does. In part this was because they lacked efficient mechanisms for enforcing the ruler’s will: There were no modern, well-organized police forces, no rapid long-distance communications, no surveillance cameras, no dossiers of information about the lives of average citizens. Hence it was relatively easy to evade control.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>As for our constitutional rights, consider for example that of freedom of the press. We certainly don’t mean to knock that right; it is a very important tool for limiting concentration of political power and for keeping those who do have political power in line by publicly exposing any misbehavior on their part. But freedom of the press is of very little use to the average citizen as an individual. The mass media are mostly under the control of large organizations that are integrated into the system. Anyone who has a little money can have something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect. To make an impression on society with words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals and small groups. Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers, because it’s more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what might be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a “free” man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual. Thus the bourgeois’s “free” man has economic freedom because that promotes growth and progress; he has freedom of the press because public criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders; he has a right to a fair trial because imprisonment at the whim of the powerful would be bad for the system. This was clearly the attitude of Simón Bolívar. To him, people deserved liberty only if they used it to promote progress (progress as conceived by the bourgeois). Other bourgeois thinkers have taken a similar view of freedom as a mere means to collective ends. Chester C. Tan, Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century, page 202, explains the philosophy of the Kuomintang leader Hu Han-Min: “An individual is granted rights because he is a member of society and his community life requires such rights. By community Hu meant the whole society or the nation.” And on page 259 Tan states that according to Carsun Chang (Chang Chun-Mai, head of the State Socialist Party in China) freedom had to be used in the interest of the state and of the people as a whole. But what kind of freedom does one have if one can use it only as someone else prescribes? FC’s conception of freedom is not that of Bolivar, Hu, Chang or other bourgeois theorists. The trouble with such theorists is that they have made the development and application of social theories their surrogate activity. Consequently the theories are designed to serve the needs of the theorists more than the needs of any people who may be unlucky enough to live in a society on which the theories are imposed.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>One more point to be made in this section: It should not be assumed that a person has enough freedom just because he SAYS he has enough. Freedom is restricted in part by psychological controls of which people are unconscious, and moreover many people’s ideas of what constitutes freedom are governed more by social convention than by their real needs. For example, it’s likely that many leftists of the oversocialized type would say that most people, including themselves, are socialized too little rather than too much, yet the oversocialized leftist pays a heavy psychological price for his high level of socialization.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="some-principles-of-history">Some Principles of History</h2>
+<ol start="99">
+<li>
+<p>Think of history as being the sum of two components: an erratic component that consists of unpredictable events that follow no discernible pattern, and a regular component that consists of long-term historical trends. Here we are concerned with the long-term trends.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>FIRST PRINCIPLE. If a SMALL change is made that affects a long-term historical trend, then the effect of that change will almost always be transitory—the trend will soon revert to its original state. (Example: A reform movement designed to clean up political corruption in a society rarely has more than a short-term effect; sooner or later the reformers relax and corruption creeps back in. The level of political corruption in a given society tends to remain constant, or to change only slowly with the evolution of the society. Normally, a political cleanup will be permanent only if accompanied by widespread social changes; a SMALL change in the society won’t be enough.) If a small change in a long-term historical trend appears to be permanent, it is only because the change acts in the direction in which the trend is already moving, so that the trend is not altered but only pushed a step ahead.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The first principle is almost a tautology. If a trend were not stable with respect to small changes, it would wander at random rather than following a definite direction; in other words it would not be a long-term trend at all.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>SECOND PRINCIPLE. If a change is made that is sufficiently large to alter permanently a long-term historical trend, then it will alter the society as a whole. In other words, a society is a system in which all parts are interrelated, and you can’t permanently change any important part without changing all other parts as well.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>THIRD PRINCIPLE. If a change is made that is large enough to alter permanently a long-term trend, then the consequences for the society as a whole cannot be predicted in advance. (Unless various other societies have passed through the same change and have all experienced the same consequences, in which case one can predict on empirical grounds that another society that passes through the same change will be likely to experience similar consequences.)</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>FOURTH PRINCIPLE. A new kind of society cannot be designed on paper. That is, you cannot plan out a new form of society in advance, then set it up and expect it to function as it was designed to do.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The third and fourth principles result from the complexity of human societies. A change in human behavior will affect the economy of a society and its physical environment; the economy will affect the environment and vice versa, and the changes in the economy and the environment will affect human behavior in complex, unpredictable ways; and so forth. The network of causes and effects is far too complex to be untangled and understood.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>FIFTH PRINCIPLE. People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under rational human control.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The fifth principle is a consequence of the other four.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>To illustrate: By the first principle, generally speaking an attempt at social reform either acts in the direction in which the society is developing anyway (so that it merely accelerates a change that would have occurred in any case) or else it has only a transitory effect, so that the society soon slips back into its old groove. To make a lasting change in the direction of development of any important aspect of a society, reform is insufficient and revolution is required. (A revolution does not necessarily involve an armed uprising or the overthrow of a government.) By the second principle, a revolution never changes only one aspect of a society, it changes the whole society; and by the third principle changes occur that were never expected or desired by the revolutionaries. By the fourth principle, when revolutionaries or utopians set up a new kind of society, it never works out as planned.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The American Revolution does not provide a counterexample. The American “Revolution” was not a revolution in our sense of the word, but a war of independence followed by a rather far-reaching political reform. The Founding Fathers did not change the direction of development of American society, nor did they aspire to do so. They only freed the development of American society from the retarding effect of British rule. Their political reform did not change any basic trend, but only pushed American political culture along its natural direction of development. British society, of which American society was an offshoot, had been moving for a long time in the direction of representative democracy. And prior to the War of Independence the Americans were already practicing a significant degree of representative democracy in the colonial assemblies. The political system established by the Constitution was modeled on the British system and on the colonial assemblies. With major alterations, to be sure—there is no doubt that the Founding Fathers took a very important step. But it was a step along the road that the English-speaking world was already traveling. The proof is that Britain and all of its colonies that were populated predominantly by people of British descent ended up with systems of representative democracy essentially similar to that of the United States. If the Founding Fathers had lost their nerve and declined to sign the Declaration of Independence, our way of life today would not have been significantly different. Maybe we would have had somewhat closer ties to Britain, and would have had a Parliament and Prime Minister instead of a Congress and President. No big deal. Thus the American Revolution provides not a counterexample to our principles but a good illustration of them.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Still, one has to use common sense in applying the principles. They are expressed in imprecise language that allows latitude for interpretation, and exceptions to them can be found. So we present these principles not as inviolable laws but as rules of thumb, or guides to thinking, that may provide a partial antidote to naive ideas about the future of society. The principles should be borne constantly in mind, and whenever one reaches a conclusion that conflicts with them one should carefully reexamine one’s thinking and retain the conclusion only if one has good, solid reasons for doing so.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="industrial-technological-society-cannot-be-reformed">Industrial-Technological Society Cannot Be Reformed</h2>
+<ol start="111">
+<li>
+<p>The foregoing principles help to show how hopelessly difficult it would be to reform the industrial system in such a way as to prevent it from progressively narrowing our sphere of freedom. There has been a consistent tendency, going back at least to the Industrial Revolution, for technology to strengthen the system at a high cost in individual freedom and local autonomy. Hence any change designed to protect freedom from technology would be contrary to a fundamental trend in the development of our society. Consequently, such a change either would be a transitory one—soon swamped by the tide of history—or, if large enough to be permanent, would alter the nature of our whole society. This by the first and second principles. Moreover, since society would be altered in a way that could not be predicted in advance (third principle) there would be great risk. Changes large enough to make a lasting difference in favor of freedom would not be initiated because it would be realized that they would gravely disrupt the system. So any attempts at reform would be too timid to be effective. Even if changes large enough to make a lasting difference were initiated, they would be retracted when their disruptive effects became apparent. Thus, permanent changes in favor of freedom could be brought about only by persons prepared to accept radical, dangerous and unpredictable alteration of the entire system. In other words by revolutionaries, not reformers.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>People anxious to rescue freedom without sacrificing the supposed benefits of technology will suggest naive schemes for some new form of society that would reconcile freedom with technology. Apart from the fact that people who make such suggestions seldom propose any practical means by which the new form of society could be set up in the first place, it follows from the fourth principle that even if the new form of society could be once established, it either would collapse or would give results very different from those expected.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>So even on very general grounds it seems highly improbable that any way of changing society could be found that would reconcile freedom with modern technology. In the next few sections we will give more specific reasons for concluding that freedom and technological progress are incompatible.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="restriction-of-freedom-is-unavoidable-in-industrial-society">Restriction of Freedom is Unavoidable in Industrial Society</h2>
+<ol start="114">
+<li>
+<p>As explained in paragraphs 65–67, 70–73, modern man is strapped down by a network of rules and regulations, and his fate depends on the actions of persons remote from him whose decisions he cannot influence. This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system HAS TO regulate human behavior closely in order to function. At work, people have to do what they are told to do, when they are told to do it and in the way they are told to do it, otherwise production would be thrown into chaos. Bureaucracies HAVE TO be run according to rigid rules. To allow any substantial personal discretion to lower-level bureaucrats would disrupt the system and lead to charges of unfairness due to differences in the way individual bureaucrats exercised their discretion. It is true that some restrictions on our freedom could be eliminated. but GENERALLY SPEAKING the regulation of our lives by large organizations is necessary for the functioning of industrial-technological society. The result is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the average person. It may be. however. that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by psychological tools that make us want to do what the system requires of us. (Propaganda,<sup id="fnref1:14"><a href="#fn:14" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">14</a></sup> educational techniques, “mental health” programs, etc.)</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The system HAS TO force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior. For example, the system needs scientists. mathematicians and engineers. It can’t function without them. So heavy pressure is put on children to excel in these fields. It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the real world. Among primitive peoples the things that children are trained to do tend to be in reasonable harmony with natural human impulses. Among the American Indians, for example, boys were trained in active outdoor pursuits—just the sort of things that boys like. But in our society children are pushed into studying technical subjects, which most do grudgingly.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society’s requirements: welfare leeches, youth-gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>In any technologically advanced society the individual’s fate MUST depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers of people. When a decision affects, say, a million people, then each of the affected individuals has, on the average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision. What usually happens in practice is that decisions are made by public officials or corporation executives, or by technical specialists, but even when the public votes on a decision the number of voters ordinarily is too large for the vote of anyone individual to be significant.<sup id="fnref:17"><a href="#fn:17" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">17</a></sup> Thus most individuals are unable to influence measurably the major decisions that affect their lives. There is no conceivable way to remedy this in a technologically advanced society. The system tries to “solve” this problem by using propaganda to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them, but even if this “solution” were completely successful in making people feel better, it would be demeaning.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Conservatives and some others advocate more “local autonomy.” Local communities once did have autonomy, but such autonomy becomes less and less possible as local communities become more enmeshed with and dependent on large-scale systems like public utilities, computer networks, highway systems, the mass communications media and the modern health-care system. Also operating against autonomy is the fact that technology applied in one location often affects people at other locations far away. Thus pesticide or chemical use near a creek may contaminate the water supply hundreds of miles downstream, and the greenhouse effect affects the whole world.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is not the fault of capitalism and it is not the fault of socialism. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.<sup id="fnref:18"><a href="#fn:18" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">18</a></sup> Of course the system does satisfy many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extent that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being. For example, the system provides people with food because the system couldn’t function if everyone starved; it attends to people’s psychological needs whenever it can CONVENIENTLY do so, because it couldn’t function if too many people became depressed or rebellious. But the system, for good, solid, practical reasons, must exert constant pressure on people to mold their behavior to the needs of the system. Too much waste accumulating? The government, the media, the educational system, environmentalists, everyone inundates us with a mass of propaganda about recycling. Need more technical personnel? A chorus of voices exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects that most of them hate. When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo “retraining,” no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical necessity. And for good reason: If human needs were put before technical necessity there would be economic problems, unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Efforts to make room for a sense of purpose and for autonomy within the system are no better than a joke. For example, one company, instead of having each of its employees assemble only one section of a catalogue, had each assemble a whole catalogue, and this was supposed to give them a sense of purpose and achievement. Some companies have tried to give their employees more autonomy in their work, but for practical reasons this usually can be done only to a very limited extent, and in any case employees are never given autonomy as to ultimate goals—their “autonomous” efforts can never be directed toward goals that they select personally, but only toward their employer’s goals, such as the survival and growth of the company. Any company would soon go out of business if it permitted its employees to act otherwise. Similarly, in any enterprise within a socialist system, workers must direct their efforts toward the goals of the enterprise, otherwise the enterprise will not serve its purpose as part of the system. Once again, for purely technical reasons it is not possible for most individuals or small groups to have much autonomy in industrial society. Even the small-business owner commonly has only limited autonomy. Apart from the necessity of government regulation, he is restricted by the fact that he must fit into the economic system and conform to its requirements. For instance, when someone develops a new technology, the small-business person often has to use that technology whether he wants to or not, in order to remain competitive.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="the-bad-parts-of-technology-cannot-be-separated-from-the-good-parts">The “Bad” Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated from the “Good” Parts</h2>
+<ol start="121">
+<li>
+<p>A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed in favor of freedom is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the “bad” parts of technology and retain only the “good” parts. Take modern medicine, for example. Progress in medical science depends on progress in chemistry, physics, biology, computer science and other fields. Advanced medical treatments require expensive, high-tech equipment that can be made available only by a technologically progressive, economically rich society. Clearly you can’t have much progress in medicine without the whole technological system and everything that goes with it.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Even if medical progress could be maintained without the rest of the technological system, it would by itself bring certain evils. Suppose for example that a cure for diabetes is discovered. People with a genetic tendency to diabetes will then be able to survive and reproduce as well as anyone else. Natural selection against genes for diabetes will cease and such genes will spread throughout the population. (This may be occurring to some extent already, since diabetes, while not curable, can be controlled through the use of insulin.) The same thing will happen with many other diseases susceptibility to which is affected by genetic factors (e.g., childhood cancer), resulting in massive genetic degradation of the population. The only 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 (depending on your religious or philosophical opinions), but a manufactured product.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>If you think that big government interferes in your life too much NOW, just wait till the government starts regulating the genetic constitution of your children. Such regulation will inevitably follow the introduction of genetic engineering of human beings, because the consequences of unregulated genetic engineering would be disastrous.<sup id="fnref:19"><a href="#fn:19" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">19</a></sup></p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The usual response to such concerns is to talk about “medical ethics.” But a code of ethics would not serve to protect freedom in the face of medical progress; it would only make matters worse. A code of ethics applicable to genetic engineering would be in effect a means of regulating the genetic constitution of human beings. Somebody (probably the upper middle class, mostly) would decide that such and such applications of genetic engineering were “ethical” and others were not, so that in effect they would be imposing their own values on the genetic constitution of the population at large. Even if a code of ethics were chosen on a completely democratic basis, the majority would be imposing their own values on any minorities who might have a different idea of what constituted an “ethical” use of genetic engineering. The only code of ethics that would truly protect freedom would be one that prohibited ANY genetic engineering of human beings, and you can be sure that no such code will ever be applied in a technological society. No code that reduced genetic engineering to a minor role could stand up for long, because the temptation presented by the immense power of biotechnology would be irresistible, especially since to the majority of people many of its applications will seem obviously and unequivocally good (eliminating physical and mental diseases, giving people the abilities they need to get along in today’s world). Inevitably, genetic engineering will be used extensively, but only in ways consistent with the needs of the industrial-technological system.<sup id="fnref:20"><a href="#fn:20" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">20</a></sup></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="technology-is-a-more-powerful-social-force-than-the-aspiration-for-freedom">Technology is a More Powerful Social Force than the Aspiration for Freedom</h2>
+<ol start="125">
+<li>
+<p>It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through REPEATED compromises. Imagine the case of two neighbors, each of whom at the outset owns the same amount of land, but one of whom is more powerful than the other. The powerful one demands a piece of the other’s land. The weak one refuses. The powerful one says, “Okay, let’s compromise. Give me half of what I asked.” The weak one has little choice but to give in. Some time later the powerful neighbor demands another piece of land, again there is a compromise, and so forth. By forcing a long series of compromises on the weaker man, the powerful one eventually gets all of his land. So it goes in the conflict between technology and freedom.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Let us explain why technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support systems. When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and farther than a walking man. But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace; one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car. Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.)</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable. Electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid long- distance communications…how could one argue against any of these things, or against any other of the innumerable technical advances that have made modern society? It would have been absurd to resist the introduction of the telephone, for example. It offered many advantages and no disadvantages. Yet, as we explained in paragraphs 59–76, all these technical advances taken together have created a world in which the average man’s fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of his neighbors and friends, but in those of politicians, corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power to influence.<sup id="fnref:21"><a href="#fn:21" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">21</a></sup> The same process will continue in the future. Take genetic engineering, for example. Few people will resist the introduction of a genetic technique that eliminates a hereditary disease. It does no apparent harm and prevents much suffering. Yet a large number of genetic improvements taken together will make the human being into an engineered product rather than a free creation of chance (or of God, or whatever, depending on your religious beliefs).</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation. Not only do people become dependent as individuals on a new item of technology, but, even more, the system as a whole becomes dependent on it. (Imagine what would happen to the system today if computers, for example, were eliminated.) Thus the system can move in only one direction, toward greater technologization. Technology repeatedly forces freedom to take a step back but technology can never take a step back—short of the overthrow of the whole technological system.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at many different points at the same time (crowding, rules and regulations, increasing dependence of individuals on large organizations, propaganda and other psychological techniques, genetic engineering, invasion of privacy through surveillance devices and computers, etc.). To hold back any ONE of the threats to freedom would require a long and difficult social struggle. Those who want to protect freedom are overwhelmed by the sheer number of new attacks and the rapidity with which they develop, hence they become apathetic and no longer resist. To fight each of the threats separately would be futile. Success can be hoped for only by fighting the technological system as a whole; but that is revolution, not reform.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Technicians (we use this term in its broad sense to describe all those who perform a specialized task that requires training) tend to be so involved in their work (their surrogate activity) that when a conflict arises between their technical work and freedom, they almost always decide in favor of their technical work. This is obvious in the case of scientists, but it also appears elsewhere: Educators, humanitarian groups, conservation organizations do not hesitate to use propaganda<sup id="fnref2:14"><a href="#fn:14" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">14</a></sup> or other psychological techniques to help them achieve their laudable ends. Corporations and government agencies, when they find it useful, do not hesitate to collect information about individuals without regard to their privacy. Law enforcement agencies are frequently inconvenienced by the constitutional rights of suspects and often of completely innocent persons, and they do whatever they can do legally (or sometimes illegally) to restrict or circumvent those rights. Most of these educators, government officials and law officers believe in freedom, privacy and constitutional rights, but when these conflict with their work, they usually feel that their work is more important.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>It is well known that people generally work better and more persistently when striving for a reward than when attempting to avoid a punishment or negative outcome. Scientists and other technicians are motivated mainly by the rewards they get through their work. But those who oppose technological invasions of freedom are working to avoid a negative outcome, consequently there are few who work persistently and well at this discouraging task. If reformers ever achieved a signal victory that seemed to set up a solid barrier against further erosion of freedom through technical progress, most would tend to relax and turn their attention to more agreeable pursuits. But the scientists would remain busy in their laboratories, and technology as it progressed would find ways, in spite of any barriers, to exert more and more control over individuals and make them always more dependent on the system.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>No social arrangements, whether laws, institutions, customs or ethical codes, can provide permanent protection against technology. History shows that all social arrangements are transitory; they all change or break down eventually. But technological advances are permanent within the context of a given civilization. Suppose for example that it were possible to arrive at some social arrangement that would prevent genetic engineering from being applied to human beings, or prevent it from being applied in such a way as to threaten freedom and dignity. Still, the technology would remain, waiting. Sooner or later the social arrangement would break down. Probably sooner, given the pace of change in our society. Then genetic engineering would begin to invade our sphere of freedom, and this invasion would be irreversible (short of a breakdown of technological civilization itself). Any illusions about achieving anything permanent through social arrangements should be dispelled by what is currently happening with environmental legislation. A few years ago it seemed that there were secure legal barriers preventing at least SOME of the worst forms of environmental degradation. A change in the political wind, and those barriers begin to crumble.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>For all of the foregoing reasons, technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom. But this statement requires an important qualification. It appears that during the next several decades the industrial-technological system will be undergoing severe stresses due to economic and environmental problems, and especially due to problems of human behavior (alienation, rebellion, hostility, a variety of social and psychological difficulties). We hope that the stresses through which the system is likely to pass will cause it to break down, or at least will weaken it sufficiently so that a revolution against it becomes possible. If such a revolution occurs and is successful, then at that particular moment the aspiration for freedom will have proved more powerful than technology.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>In paragraph 125 we used an analogy of a weak neighbor who is left destitute by a strong neighbor who takes all his land by forcing on him a series of compromises. But suppose now that the strong neighbor gets sick, so that he is unable to defend himself. The weak neighbor can force the strong one to give him his land back, or he can kill him. If he lets the strong man survive and only forces him to give the land back, he is a fool, because when the strong man gets well he will again take all the land for himself. The only sensible alternative for the weaker man is to kill the strong one while he has the chance. In the same way, while the industrial system is sick we must destroy it. If we compromise with it and let it recover from its sickness, it will eventually wipe out all of our freedom.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="simpler-social-problems-have-proved-intractable">Simpler Social Problems Have Proved Intractable</h2>
+<ol start="136">
+<li>
+<p>If anyone still imagines that it would be possible to reform the system in such a way as to protect freedom from technology, let him consider how clumsily and for the most part unsuccessfully our society has dealt with other social problems that are far more simple and straightforward. Among other things, the system has failed to stop environmental degradation, political corruption, drug trafficking or domestic abuse.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Take our environmental problems, for example. Here the conflict of values is straightforward: economic expedience now versus saving some of our natural resources for our grandchildren.<sup id="fnref:22"><a href="#fn:22" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">22</a></sup> But on this subject we get only a lot of blather and obfuscation from the people who have power, and nothing like a clear, consistent line of action, and we keep on piling up environmental problems that our grandchildren will have to live with. Attempts to resolve the environmental issue consist of struggles and compromises between different factions, some of which are ascendant at one moment, others at another moment. The line of struggle changes with the shifting currents of public opinion. This is not a rational process, nor is it one that is likely to lead to a timely and successful solution to the problem. Major social problems, if they get “solved” at all, are rarely or never solved through any rational, comprehensive plan. They just work themselves out through a process in which various competing groups pursuing their own (usually short-term) self-interest<sup id="fnref:23"><a href="#fn:23" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">23</a></sup> arrive (mainly by luck) at some more or less stable modus vivendi. In fact, the principles we formulated in paragraphs 100–106 make it seem doubtful that rational, long-term social planning can EVER be successful.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Thus it is clear that the human race has at best a very limited capacity for solving even relatively straightforward social problems. How then is it going to solve the far more difficult and subtle problem of reconciling freedom with technology? Technology presents clear-cut material advantages, whereas freedom is an abstraction that means different things to different people, and its loss is easily obscured by propaganda and fancy talk.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>And note this important difference: It is conceivable that our environmental problems (for example) may some day be settled through a rational, comprehensive plan, but if this happens it will be only because it is in the long-term interest of the system to solve these problems. But it is NOT in the interest of the system to preserve freedom or small-group autonomy. On the contrary, it is in the interest of the system to bring human behavior under control to the greatest possible extent.<sup id="fnref:24"><a href="#fn:24" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">24</a></sup> Thus, while practical considerations may eventually force the system to take a rational, prudent approach to environmental problems, equally practical considerations will force the system to regulate human behavior ever more closely (preferably by indirect means that will disguise the encroachment on freedom). This isn’t just our opinion. Eminent social scientists (e.g., James Q. Wilson) have stressed the importance of “socializing” people more effectively.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="revolution-is-easier-than-reform">Revolution is Easier than Reform</h2>
+<ol start="140">
+<li>
+<p>We hope we have convinced the reader that the system cannot be reformed in such a way as to reconcile freedom with technology. The only way out is to dispense with the industrial-technological system altogether. This implies revolution, not necessarily an armed uprising, but certainly a radical and fundamental change in the nature of society.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>People tend to assume that because a revolution involves a much greater change than reform does, it is more difficult to bring about than reform is. Actually, under certain circumstances revolution is much easier than reform. The reason is that a revolutionary movement can inspire an intensity of commitment that a reform movement cannot inspire. A reform movement merely offers to solve a particular social problem. A revolutionary movement offers to solve all problems at one stroke and create a whole new world; it provides the kind of ideal for which people will take great risks and make great sacrifices. For this reason it would be much easier to overthrow the whole technological system than to put effective, permanent restraints on the development or application of anyone segment of technology, such as genetic engineering, for example. Not many people will devote themselves with single-minded passion to imposing and maintaining restraints on genetic engineering, but under suitable conditions large numbers of people may devote themselves passionately to a revolution against the industrial-technological system. As we noted in paragraph 132, reformers seeking to limit certain aspects of technology would be working to avoid a negative outcome. But revolutionaries work to gain a powerful reward-fulfillment of their revolutionary vision-and therefore work harder and more persistently than reformers do.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Reform is always restrained by the fear of painful consequences if changes go too far. But once a revolutionary fever has taken hold of a society, people are willing to undergo unlimited hardships for the sake of their revolution. This was clearly shown in the French and Russian Revolutions. It may be that in such cases only a minoriry of the population is really committed to the revolution, but this minority is sufficiently large and active so that it becomes the dominant force in society. We will have more to say about revolution in paragraphs 180–205).</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="control-of-human-behavior">Control of Human Behavior</h2>
+<ol start="143">
+<li>
+<p>Since the beginning of civilization, organized societies have had to put pressures on human beings for the sake of the functioning of the social organism. The kinds of pressures vary greatly from one society to another. Some of the pressures are physical (poor diet, excessive labor, environmental pollution), some are psychological (noise, crowding, forcing human behavior into the mold that society requires). In the past, human nature has been approximately constant, or at any rate has varied only within certain bounds. Consequently, societies have been able to push people only up to certain limits. When the limit of human endurance has been passed, things start going wrong: rebellion, or crime, or corruption, or evasion of work, or depression and other mental problems, or an elevated death rate, or a declining birth rate or something else, so that either the society breaks down, or its functioning becomes too inefficient and it is (quickly or gradually, through conquest, attrition or evolution) replaced by some more efficient form of society.<sup id="fnref:25"><a href="#fn:25" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">25</a></sup></p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Thus human nature has in the past put certain limits on the development of societies. People could be pushed only so far and no farther. But today this may be changing, because modern technology is developing ways of modifying human beings.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. It is well known that the rate of clinical depression has been greatly increasing in recent decades. We believe that this is due to disruption of the power process, as explained in paragraphs 59–76.)</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Drugs that affect the mind are only one example of the methods of controlling human behavior that modern society is developing. Let us look at some of the other methods.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>To start with, there are the techniques of surveillance. Hidden video cameras are now used in most stores and in many other places, computers are used to collect and process vast amounts of information about individuals. Information so obtained greatly increases the effectiveness of physical coercion (i.e., law enforcement).<sup id="fnref:26"><a href="#fn:26" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">26</a></sup> Then there are the methods of propaganda, for which the mass communications media provide effective vehicles. Efficient techniques have been developed for winning elections, selling products, influencing public opinion. The entertainment industry serves as an important psychological tool of the system, possibly even when it is dishing out large amounts of sex and violence. Entertainment provides modern man with an essential means of escape. While absorbed in television, videos, etc., he can forget stress, anxiety, frustration, dissatisfaction. Many primitive peoples, when they don’t have any work to do, are quite content to sit for hours at a time doing nothing at all, because they are at peace with themselves and their world. But most modern people must be constantly occupied or entertained, otherwise they get “bored,” i.e., they get fidgety, uneasy, irritable.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Other techniques strike deeper that the foregoing. Education is no longer a simple affair of paddling a kid’s behind when he doesn’t know his lessons and patting him on the head when he does know them. It is becoming a scientific technique for controlling the child’s development. Sylvan Learning Centers, for example, have had great success in motivating children to study, and psychological techniques are also used with more or less success in many conventional schools. “Parenting” techniques that are taught to parents are designed to make children accept the fundamental values of the system and behave in ways that the system finds desirable. “Mental health” programs, “intervention” techniques, psychotherapy and so forth are ostensibly designed to benefit individuals, but in practice they usually serve as methods for inducing individuals to think and behave as the system requires. (There is no contradiction here; an individual whose attitudes or behavior bring him into conflict with the system is up against a force that is too powerful for him to conquer or escape from, hence he is likely to suffer from stress, frustration, defeat. His path will be much easier if he thinks and behaves as the system requires. In that sense the system is acting for the benefit of the individual when it brainwashes him into conformity.) Child abuse in its gross and obvious forms is disapproved in most if not all cultures. Tormenting a child for a trivial reason or no reason at all is something that appalls almost everyone. But many psychologists interpret the concept of abuse much more broadly. Is spanking, when used as part of a rational and consistent system of discipline, a form of abuse? The question will ultimately be decided by whether or not spanking tends to produce behavior that makes a person fit in well with the existing system of society. In practice, the word “abuse” tends to be interpreted to include any method of child-rearing that produces behavior inconvenient for the system. Thus, when they go beyond the prevention of obvious, senseless cruelty, programs for preventing “child abuse” are directed toward the control of human behavior on behalf of the system.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Presumably, research will continue to increase the effectiveness of psychological techniques for controlling human behavior. But we think it is unlikely that psychological techniques alone will be sufficient to adjust human beings to the kind of society that technology is creating. Biological methods probably will have to be used. We have already mentioned the use of drugs in this connection. Neurology may provide other avenues for modifying the human mind, Genetic engineering of human beings is already beginning to occur in the form of “gene therapy,” and there is no reason to assume that such methods will not eventually be used to modify those aspects of the body that affect mental functioning,</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>As we mentioned in paragraph 134, industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems, And a considerable proportion of the system’s economic and environmental problems result from the way human beings behave. Alienation, low self-esteem, depression, hostility, rebellion; children who won’t study, youth gangs, illegal drug use, rape, child abuse, other crimes, unsafe sex, teen pregnancy, population growth, political corruption, race hatred, ethnic rivalry, bitter ideological conflict (e.g., pro-choice vs. pro-life), political extremism, terrorism, sabotage, anti-government groups, hate groups. All these threaten the very survival of the system. The system will therefore be FORCED to use every practical means of controlling human behavior.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The social disruption that we see today is certainly not the result of mere chance. It can only be a result of the conditions of life that the system imposes on people. (We have argued that the most important of these conditions is disruption of the power process.) If the systems succeeds in imposing sufficient control over human behavior to assure its own survival, a new watershed in human history will have been passed. Whereas formerly the limits of human endurance have imposed limits on the development of societies (as we explained in paragraphs 143, 144), industrial-technological society will be able to pass those limits by modifying human beings, whether by psychological methods or biological methods or both. In the future, social systems will not be adjusted to suit the needs of human beings. Instead, human beings will be adjusted to suit the needs of the system.<sup id="fnref:27"><a href="#fn:27" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">27</a></sup></p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Generally speaking, technological control over human behavior will probably not be introduced with a totalitarian intention or even through a conscious desire to restrict human freedom.<sup id="fnref:28"><a href="#fn:28" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">28</a></sup> Each new step in the assertion of control over the human mind will be taken as a rational response to a problem that faces society, such as curing alcoholism, reducing the crime rate or inducing young people to study science and engineering. In many cases, there will be a humanitarian justification. For example, when a psychiatrist prescribes an antidepressant for a depressed patient, he is clearly doing that individual a favor. It would be inhumane to withhold the drug from someone who needs it. When parents send their children to Sylvan Learning Centers to have them manipulated into becoming enthusiastic about their studies, they do so from concern for their children’s welfare. It may be that some of these parents wish that one didn’t have to have specialized training to get a job and that their kid didn’t have to be brainwashed into becoming a computer nerd. But what can they do? They can’t change society, and their child may be unemployable if he doesn’t have certain skills. So they send him to Sylvan.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Thus control over human behavior will be introduced not by a calculated decision of the authorities but through a process of social evolution (RAPID evolution, however). The process will be impossible to resist, because each advance, considered by itself, will appear to be beneficial, or at least the evil involved in making the advance will seem to be less than that which would result from not making it. (See paragraph 127.) Propaganda for example is used for many good purposes, such as discouraging child abuse or race hatred.<sup id="fnref3:14"><a href="#fn:14" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">14</a></sup> Sex education is obviously useful, yet the effect of sex education (to the extent that it is successful) is to take the shaping of sexual attitudes away from the family and put it into the hands of the state as represented by the public school system.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Suppose a biological trait is discovered that increases the likelihood that a child will grow up to be a criminal, and suppose some sort of gene therapy can remove this trait.<sup id="fnref:29"><a href="#fn:29" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">29</a></sup> Of course most parents whose children possess the trait will have them undergo the therapy. It would be inhumane to do otherwise, since the child would probably have a miserable life if he grew up to be a criminal. But many or most primitive societies have a low crime rate in comparison with that of our society, even though they have neither high-tech methods of child-rearing nor harsh systems of punishment. Since there is no reason to suppose that more modern men than primitive men have innate predatory tendencies, the high crime rate of our society must be due to the pressures that modern conditions put on people, to which many cannot or will not adjust. Thus a treatment designed to remove potential criminal tendencies is at least in part a way of re-engineering people so that they suit the requirements of the system.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Our society tends to regard as a “sickness” any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system, and this is plausible, because when an individual doesn’t fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a “cure” for a “sickness” and therefore as good.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>In paragraph 127 we pointed out that if the use of a new item of technology is INITIALLY optional, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional, because the new technology tends to change society in such a way that it becomes difficult or impossible for an individual to function without using that technology. This applies also to the technology of human behavior. In a world in which most children are put through a program to make them enthusiastic about studying, a parent will almost be forced to put his kid through such a program, because if he does not, then the kid will grow up to be, comparatively speaking, an ignoramus and therefore unemployable. Or suppose a biological treatment is discovered that, without undesirable side-effects, will greatly reduce the psychological stress from which so many people suffer in our society. If large numbers of people choose to undergo the treatment, then the general level of stress in society will be reduced, so that it will be possible for the system to increase the stress-producing pressures. This will lead more people to undergo the treatment; and so forth, so that eventually the pressures may become so heavy that few people will be able to survive without undergoing the stress-reducing treatment. In fact, something like this seems to have happened already with one of our society’s most important psychological tools for enabling people to reduce (or at least temporarily escape from) stress, namely, mass entertainment (see paragraph 147). Our use of mass entertainment is “optional”: No law requires us to watch television, listen to the radio, read magazines. Yet mass entertainment is a means of escape and stress-reduction on which most of us have become dependent. Everyone complains about the trashiness of television, but almost everyone watches it. A few have kicked the TV habit, but it would be a rare person who could get along today without using ANY form of mass entertainment. (Yet until quite recently in human history most people got along very nicely with no other entertainment than that which each local community created for itself.) Without the entertainment industry the system probably would not have been able to get away with putting as much stress-producing pressure on us as it does.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Assuming that industrial society survives, it is likely that technology will eventually acquire something approaching complete control over human behavior. It has been established beyond any rational doubt that human thought and behavior have a largely biological basis. As experimenters have demonstrated, feelings such as hunger, pleasure, anger and fear can be turned on and off by electrical stimulation of appropriate parts of the brain. Memories can be destroyed by damaging parts of the brain or they can be brought to the surface by electrical stimulation. Hallucinations can be induced or moods changed by drugs. There may or may not be an immaterial human soul, but if there is one it clearly is less powerful than the biological mechanisms of human behavior. For if that were not the case then researchers would not be able so easily to manipulate human feelings and behavior with drugs and electrical currents.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>It presumably would be impractical for all people to have electrodes inserted in their heads so that they could be controlled by the authorities. But the fact that human thoughts and feelings are so open to biological intervention shows that the problem of controlling human behavior is mainly a technical problem; a problem of neurons, hormones and complex molecules; the kind of problem that is accessible to scientific attack. Given the outstanding record of our society in solving technical problems, it is overwhelmingly probable that great advances will be made in the control of human behavior.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Will public resistance prevent the introduction of technological control of human behavior? It certainly would if an attempt were made to introduce such control all at once. But since technological control will be introduced through a long sequence of small advances, there will be no rational and effective public resistance. (See paragraphs 127.)</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>To those who think that all this sounds like science fiction, we point out that yesterday’s science fiction is today’s fact. The Industrial Revolution has radically altered man’s environment and way of life, and it is only to be expected that as technology is increasingly applied to the human body and mind, man himself will be altered as radically as his environment and way of life have been.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="human-race-at-a-crossroads">Human Race at a Crossroads</h2>
+<ol start="161">
+<li>
+<p>But we have gotten ahead of our story. It is one thing to develop in the laboratory a series of psychological or biological techniques for manipulating human behavior and quite another to integrate these techniques into a functioning social system. The latter problem is the more difficult of the two. For example, while the techniques of educational psychology doubtless work quite well in the “lab schools” where they are developed, it is not necessarily easy to apply them effectively throughout our educational system. We all know what many of our schools are like. The teachers are too busy taking knives and guns away from the kids to subject them to the latest techniques for making them into computer nerds. Thus, in spite of all its technical advances relating to human behavior, the system to date has not been impressively successful in controlling human beings. The people whose behavior is fairly well under the control of the system are those of the type that might be called “bourgeois.” But there are growing numbers of people who in one way or another are rebels against the system: welfare leeches, youth gangs, cultists, satanists, Nazis, radical environmentalists, militia-men, etc.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The system is currently engaged in a desperate struggle to overcome certain problems that threaten its survival, among which the problems of human behavior are the most important. If the system succeeds in acquiring sufficient control over human behavior quickly enough, it will probably survive. Otherwise it will break down. We think the issue will most likely be resolved within the next several decades, say 40 to 100 years.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Suppose the system survives the crisis of the next several decades. By that time it will have to have solved, or at least brought under control, the principal problems that confront it, in particular that of “socializing” human beings; that is, making people sufficiently docile so that their behavior no longer threatens the system. That being accomplished, it does not appear that there would be any further obstacle to the development of technology, and it would presumably advance toward its logical conclusion, which is complete control over everything on Earth, including human beings and all other important organisms. The system may become a unitary, monolithic organization, or it may be more or less fragmented and consist of a number of organizations coexisting in a relationship that includes elements of both cooperation and competition, just as today the government, the corporations and other large organizations both cooperate and compete with one another. Human freedom mostly will have vanished, because individuals and small groups will be impotent vis-à-vis large organizations armed with supertechnology and an arsenal of advanced psychological and biological tools for manipulating human beings, besides instruments of surveillance and physical coercion. Only a small number of people will have any real power, and even these probably will have only very limited freedom, because their behavior too will be regulated; just as today our politicians and corporation executives can retain their positions of power only as long as their behavior remains within certain fairly narrow limits.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Don’t imagine that the system will stop developing further techniques for controlling human beings and nature once the crisis of the next few decades is over and increasing control is no longer necessary for the system’s survival. On the contrary, once the hard times are over the system will increase its control over people and nature more rapidly, because it will no longer be hampered by difficulties of the kind that it is currently experiencing. Survival is not the principal motive for extending control. As we explained in paragraphs 87–90, technicians and scientists carry on their work largely as a surrogate activity; that is, they satisfy their need for power by solving technical problems. They will continue to do this with unabated enthusiasm, and among the most interesting and challenging problems for them to solve will be those of understanding the human body and mind and intervening in their development. For the “good of humanity,” of course.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>But suppose on the other hand that the stresses of the coming decades prove to be too much for the system. If the system breaks down there may be a period of chaos, a “time of troubles” such as those that history has recorded at various epochs in the past. It is impossible to predict what would emerge from such a time of troubles, but at any rate the human race would be given a new chance. The greatest danger is that industrial society may begin to reconstitute itself within the first few years after the breakdown. Certainly there will be many people (power-hungry types especially) who will be anxious to get the factories running again.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Therefore two tasks confront those who hate the servitude to which the industrial system is reducing the human race. First, we must work to heighten the social stresses within the system so as to increase the likelihood that it will break down or be weakened sufficiently so that a revolution against it becomes possible. Second, it is necessary to develop and propagate an ideology that opposes technology and the industrial system. Such an ideology can become the basis for a revolution against industrial society if and when the system becomes sufficiently weakened. And such an ideology will help to assure that, if and when industrial society breaks down, its remnants will be smashed beyond repair, so that the system cannot be reconstituted. The factories should be destroyed, technical books burned, etc.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="human-suffering">Human Suffering</h2>
+<ol start="167">
+<li>
+<p>The industrial system will not break down purely as a result of revolutionary action. It will not be vulnerable to revolutionary attack unless its own internal problems of development lead it into very serious difficulties. So if the system breaks down it will do so either spontaneously, or through a process that is in part spontaneous but helped along by revolutionaries. If the breakdown is sudden, many people will die, since the world’s population has become so overblown that it cannot even feed itself any longer without advanced technology. Even if the breakdown is gradual enough so that reduction of the population can occur more through lowering of the birth rate than through elevation of the death rate, the process of de-industrialization probably will be very chaotic and involve much suffering. It is naive to think it likely that technology can be phased out in a smoothly managed, orderly way, especially since the technophiles will fight stubbornly at every step. Is it therefore cruel to work for the breakdown of the system? Maybe, but maybe not. In the first place, revolutionaries will not be able to break the system down unless it is already in enough trouble so that there would be a good chance of its eventually breaking down by itself anyway; and the bigger the system grows, the more disastrous the consequences of its breakdown will be; so it may be that revolutionaries, by hastening the onset of the breakdown, will be reducing the extent of the disaster.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>In the second place, one has to balance struggle and death against the loss of freedom and dignity. To many of us, freedom and dignity are more important than a long life or avoidance of physical pain. Besides, we all have to die sometime, and it may be better to die fighting for survival, or for a cause, than to live a long but empty and purposeless life.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>In the third place, it is not at all certain that survival of the system will lead to less suffering than the breakdown of the system would. The system has already caused, and is continuing to cause, immense suffering all over the world. Ancient cultures, that for hundreds or thousands of years gave people a satisfactory relationship with each other and with their environment, have been shattered by contact with industrial society, and the result has been a whole catalog of economic, environmental, social and psychological problems. One of the effects of the intrusion of industrial society has been that over much of the world traditional controls on population have been thrown out of balance. Hence the population explosion, with all that that implies. Then there is the psychological suffering that is widespread throughout the supposedly fortunate countries of the West (see paragraphs 44, 45). No one knows what will happen as a result of ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect and other environmental problems that cannot yet be foreseen. And, as nuclear proliferation has shown, new technology cannot be kept out of the hands of dictators and irresponsible Third World nations. Would you like to speculate about what Iraq or North Korea will do with genetic engineering?</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>“Oh!” say the technophiles, “Science is going to fix all that! We will conquer famine, eliminate psychological suffering, make everybody healthy and happy!” Yeah, sure. That’s what they said 200 years ago. The Industrial Revolution was supposed to eliminate poverty, make everybody happy, etc. The actual result has been quite different. The technophiles are hopelessly naive (or self-deceiving) in their understanding of social problems. They are unaware of (or choose to ignore) the fact that when large changes, even seemingly beneficial ones, are introduced into a society, they lead to a long sequence of other changes, most of which are impossible to predict (paragraph 103). In the mean time there will be great suffering. So it is not at all clear that the survival of industrial society would involve less suffering than the breakdown of that society would. Technology has gotten the human race into a fix from which there is not likely to be any easy escape.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="the-future">The Future</h2>
+<ol start="171">
+<li>
+<p>But suppose now that industrial society does survive the next several decades and that the bugs do eventually get worked out of the system, so that it functions smoothly. What kind of system will it be? We will consider several possibilities.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions we can’t make any conjecture as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite-just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consist of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>But suppose now that the computer scientists do not succeed in developing artificial intelligence, so that human work remains necessary. Even so, machines will take care of more and more of the simpler tasks so that there will be an increasing surplus of human workers at the lower levels of ability. (We see this happening already. There are many people who find it difficult or impossible to get work, because for intellectual or psychological reasons they cannot acquire the level of training necessary to make themselves useful in the present system.) On those who are employed, ever-increasing demands will be placed: They will need more and more training, more and more ability, and will have to be ever more reliable, conforming and docile, because they will be more and more like cells of a giant organism. Their tasks will be increasingly specialized so that their work will be, in a sense, out of touch with the real world, being concentrated on one tiny slice of reality. The system will have to use any means that it can, whether psychological or biological, to engineer people to be docile, to have the abilities that the system requires and to “sublimate” their drive for power into some specialized task. But the statement that the people of such a society will have to be docile may require qualification. The society may find competitiveness useful, provided that ways are found of directing competitiveness into channels that serve the needs of the system. We can imagine a future society in which there is endless competition for positions of prestige and power. But no more than a very few people will ever reach the top, where the only real power is (see end of paragraph 163). Very repellent is a society in which a person can satisfy his need for power only by pushing large numbers of other people out of the way and depriving them of THEIR opportunity for power.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>One can envision scenarios that incorporate aspects of more than one of the possibilities that we have just discussed. For instance, it may be that machines will take over most of the work that is of real, practical importance, but that human beings will be kept busy by being given relatively unimportant work. It has been suggested, for example, that a great development of the service industries might provide work for human beings. Thus people would spend their time shining each other’s shoes, driving each other around in taxicabs, making handicrafts for one another, waiting on each other’s tables, etc. This seems to us a thoroughly contemptible way for the human race to end up, and we doubt that many people would find fulfilling lives in such pointless busy-work. They would seek other, dangerous outlets (drugs, crime, “cults,” hate groups) unless they were biologically or psychologically engineered to adapt them to such a way of life.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Needless to say, the scenarios outlined above do not exhaust all the possibilities. They only indicate the kinds of outcomes that seem to us most likely. But we can envision no plausible scenarios that are any more palatable than the ones we’ve just described. It is overwhelmingly probable that if the industrial-technological system survives the next 40 to 100 years, it will by that time have developed certain general characteristics: Individuals (at least those of the “bourgeois” type, who are integrated into the system and make it run, and who therefore have all the power) will be more dependent than ever on large organizations; they will be more “socialized” than ever and their physical and mental qualities to a significant extent (possibly to a very great extent ) will be those that are engineered into them rather than being the results of chance (or of God’s will, or whatever); and whatever may be left of wild nature will be reduced to remnants preserved for scientific study and kept under the supervision and management of scientists (hence it will no longer be truly wild). In the long run (say a few centuries from now) it is likely that neither the human race nor any other important organisms will exist as we know them today, because once you start modifying organisms through genetic engineering there is no reason to stop at any particular point, so that the modifications will probably continue until man and other organisms have been utterly transformed.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Whatever else may be the case, it is certain that technology is creating for human beings a new physical and social environment radically different from the spectrum of environments to which natural selection has adapted the human race physically and psychologically. If man is not adjusted to this new environment by being artificially re-engineered, then he will be adapted to it through a long and painful process of natural selection. The former is far more likely than the latter.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="strategy">Strategy</h2>
+<ol start="180">
+<li>
+<p>The technophiles are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride into the unknown. Many people understand something of what technological progress is doing to us, yet take a passive attitude toward it because they think it is inevitable. But we (FC) don’t think it is inevitable. We think it can be stopped, and we will give here some indications of how to go about stopping it.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>As we stated in paragraph 166, the two main tasks for the present are to promote social stress and instability in industrial society and to develop and propagate an ideology that opposes technology and the industrial system. When the system becomes sufficiently stressed and unstable, a revolution against technology may be possible. The pattern would be similar to that of the French and Russian Revolutions. French society and Russian society, for several decades prior to their respective revolutions, showed increasing signs of stress and weakness. Meanwhile, ideologies were being developed that offered a new world-view that was quite different from the old one. In the Russian case revolutionaries were actively working to undermine the old order. Then, when the old system was put under sufficient additional stress (by financial crisis in France, by military defeat in Russia) it was swept away by revolution. What we propose is something along the same lines.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>It will be objected that the French and Russian Revolutions were failures. But most revolutions have two goals. One is to destroy an old form of society and the other is to set up the new form of society envisioned by the revolutionaries. The French and Russian revolutionaries failed (fortunately!) to create the new kind of society of which they dreamed, but they were quite successful in destroying the old society. We have no illusions about the feasibility of creating a new, ideal form of society. Our goal is only to destroy the existing form of society.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>But an ideology, in order to gain enthusiastic support, must have a positive ideal as well as a negative one; it must be FOR something as well as AGAINST something. The positive ideal that we propose is Nature. That is, WILD nature: Those aspects of the functioning of the Earth and its living things that are independent of human management and free of human interference and control. And with wild nature we include human nature, by which we mean those aspects of the functioning of the human individual that are not subject to regulation by organized society but are products of chance, or free will, or God (depending on your religious or philosophical opinions).</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Nature makes a perfect counter-ideal to technology for several reasons. Nature (that which is outside the power of the system) is the opposite of technology (which seeks to expand indefinitely the power of the system). Most people will agree that nature is beautiful; certainly it has tremendous popular appeal The radical environmentalists ALREADY hold an ideology that exalts nature and opposes technology.<sup id="fnref:30"><a href="#fn:30" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">30</a></sup> It is not necessary for the sake of nature to set up some chimerical utopia or any new kind of social order. Nature takes care of itself: It was a spontaneous creation that existed long before any human society, and for countless centuries many different kinds of human societies coexisted with nature without doing it an excessive amount of damage. Only with the Industrial Revolution did the effect of human society on nature become really devastating. To relieve the pressure on nature it is not necessary to create a special kind of social system, it is only necessary to get rid of industrial society. Granted, this will not solve all problems. Industrial society has already done tremendous damage to nature and it will take a very long time for the scars to heal. Besides, even preindustrial societies can do significant damage to nature. Nevertheless, getting rid of industrial society will accomplish a great deal. It will relieve the worst of the pressure on nature so that the scars can begin to heal. It will remove the capacity of organized society to keep increasing its control over nature (including human nature). Whatever kind of society may exist after the demise of the industrial system, it is certain that most people will live close to nature, because in the absence of advanced technology there is no other way that people CAN live. To feed themselves they must be peasants, or herdsmen, or fishermen, or hunters, etc. And, generally speaking, local autonomy should tend to increase, because lack of advanced technology and rapid communications will limit the capacity of governments or other large organizations to control local communities.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>As for the negative consequences of eliminating industrial society—well, you can’t eat your cake and have it too. To gain one thing you have to sacrifice another.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Most people hate psychological conflict. For this reason they avoid doing any serious thinking about difficult social issues, and they like to have such issues presented to them in simple, black-and-white terms: THIS is all good and THAT is all bad. The revolutionary ideology should therefore be developed on two levels.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>On the more sophisticated level the ideology should address itself to people who are intelligent, thoughtful and rational. The object should be to create a core of people who will be opposed to the industrial system on a rational, thought-out basis, with full appreciation of the problems and ambiguities involved, and of the price that has to be paid for getting rid of the system. It is particularly important to attract people of this type, as they are capable people and will be instrumental in influencing others. These people should be addressed on as rational a level as possible. Facts should never intentionally be distorted and intemperate language should be avoided. This does not mean that no appeal can be made to the emotions, but in making such appeal, care should be taken to avoid misrepresenting the truth or doing anything else that would destroy the intellectual respectability of the ideology.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>On a second level, the ideology should be propagated in a simplified form that will enable the unthinking majority to see the conflict of technology vs. nature in unambiguous terms. But even on this second level the ideology should not be expressed in language that is so cheap, intemperate or irrational that it alienates people of the thoughtful and rational type. Cheap, intemperate propaganda sometimes achieves impressive short-term gains, but it will be more advantageous in the long run to keep the loyalty of a small number of intelligently committed people than to arouse the passions of an unthinking, fickle mob who will change their attitude as soon as someone comes along with a better propaganda gimmick. However, propaganda of the rabble-rousing type may be necessary when the system is nearing the point of collapse and there is a final struggle between rival ideologies to determine which will become dominant when the old world-view goes under.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Prior to that final struggle, the revolutionaries should not expect to have a majority of people on their side. History is made by active, determined minorities, not by the majority, which seldom has a clear and consistent idea of what it really wants. Until the time comes for the final push toward revolution,<sup id="fnref:31"><a href="#fn:31" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">31</a></sup> the task of revolutionaries will be less to win the shallow support of the majority than to build a small core of deeply committed people. As for the majority, it will be enough to make them aware of the existence of the new ideology and remind them of it frequently; though of course it will be desirable to get majority support to the extent that this can be done without weakening the core of seriously committed people.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Any kind of social conflict helps to destabilize the system, but one should be careful about what kind of conflict one encourages. The line of conflict should be drawn between the mass of the people and the power-holding elite of industrial society (politicians, scientists, upper-level business executives, government officials, etc.). It should NOT be drawn between the revolutionaries and the mass of the people. For example, it would be bad strategy for the revolutionaries to condemn Americans for their habits of consumption. Instead, the average American should be portrayed as a victim of the advertising and marketing industry, which has suckered him into buying a lot of junk that he doesn’t need and that is very poor compensation for his lost freedom. Either approach is consistent with the facts. It is merely a matter of attitude whether you blame the advertising industry for manipulating the public or blame the public for allowing itself to be manipulated. As a matter of strategy one should generally avoid blaming the public.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>One should think twice before encouraging any other social conflict than that between the power-holding elite (which wields technology) and the general public (over which technology exerts its power). For one thing, other conflicts tend to distract attention from the important conflicts (between power-elite and ordinary people, between technology and nature); for another thing, other conflicts may actually tend to encourage technologization, because each side in such a conflict wants to use technological power to gain advantages over its adversary. This is clearly seen in rivalries between nations. It also appears in ethnic conflicts within nations. For example, in America many black leaders are anxious to gain power for African-Americans by placing black individuals in the technological power-elite. They want there to be many black government officials, scientists, corporation executives and so forth. In this way they are helping to absorb the African-American subculture into the technological system. Generally speaking, one should encourage only those social conflicts that can be fitted into the framework of the conflicts of power-elite vs. ordinary people, technology vs. nature.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>But the way to discourage ethnic conflict is NOT through militant advocacy of minority rights (see paragraphs 21). Instead, the revolutionaries should emphasize that although minorities do suffer more or less disadvantage, this disadvantage is of peripheral significance. Our real enemy is the industrial-technological system, and in the struggle against the system, ethnic distinctions are of no importance.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The kind of revolution we have in mind will not necessarily involve an armed uprising against any government. It may or may not involve physical violence, but it will not be a POLITICAL revolution. Its focus will be on technology and economics, not politics.<sup id="fnref:32"><a href="#fn:32" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">32</a></sup></p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Probably the revolutionaries should even AVOID assuming political power, whether by legal or illegal means, until the industrial system is stressed to the danger point and has proved itself to be a failure in the eyes of most people. Suppose for example that some “green” party should win control of the United States Congress in an election. In order to avoid betraying or watering down their own ideology they would have to take vigorous measures to turn economic growth into economic shrinkage. To the average man the results would appear disastrous: There would be massive unemployment, shortages of commodities, etc. Even if the grosser ill effects could be avoided through superhumanly skillful management, still people would have to begin giving up the luxuries to which they have become addicted. Dissatisfaction would grow, the “green” party would be voted out of office and the revolutionaries would have suffered a severe setback. For this reason the revolutionaries should not try to acquire political power until the system has gotten itself into such a mess that any hardships will be seen as resulting from the failures of the industrial system itself and not from the policies of the revolutionaries. The revolution against technology will probably have to be a revolution by outsiders, a revolution from below and not from above.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The revolution must be international and worldwide. It cannot be carried out on a nation-by-nation basis. Whenever it is suggested that the United States, for example, should cut back on technological progress or economic growth, people get hysterical and start screaming that if we fall behind in technology the Japanese will get ahead of us. Holy robots! The world will fly off its orbit if the Japanese ever sell more cars than we do! (Nationalism is a great promoter of technology.) More reasonably, it is argued that if the relatively democratic nations of the world fall behind in technology while nasty, dictatorial nations like China, Vietnam and North Korea continue to progress, eventually the dictators may come to dominate the world. That is why the industrial system should be attacked in all nations simultaneously, to the extent that this may be possible. True, there is no assurance that the industrial system can be destroyed at approximately the same time all over the world, and it is even conceivable that the attempt to overthrow the system could lead instead to the domination of the system by dictators. That is a risk that has to be taken. And it is worth taking, since the difference between a “democratic” industrial system and one controlled by dictators is small compared with the difference between an industrial system and a non-industrial one.<sup id="fnref:33"><a href="#fn:33" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">33</a></sup> It might even be argued that an industrial system controlled by dictators would be preferable, because dictator-controlled systems usually have proved inefficient, hence they are presumably more likely to break down. Look at Cuba.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Revolutionaries might consider favoring measures that tend to bind the world economy into a unified whole. Free trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT are probably harmful to the environment in the short run, but in the long run they may perhaps be advantageous because they foster economic interdependence between nations. It will be easier to destroy the industrial system on a worldwide basis if the world economy is so unified that its breakdown in any one major nation will lead to its breakdown in all industrialized nations.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Some people take the line that modern man has too much power, too much control over nature; they argue for a more passive attitude on the part of the human race. At best these people are expressing themselves unclearly, because they fail to distinguish between power for LARGE ORGANIZATIONS and power for INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS. It is a mistake to argue for powerlessness and passivity, because people NEED power. Modern man as a collective entity—that is, the industrial system—has immense power over nature, and we (FC) regard this as evil. But modern INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS OF INDIVIDUALS have far less power than primitive man ever did. Generally speaking, the vast power of “modern man” over nature is exercised not by individuals or small groups but by large organizations. To the extent that the average modern INDIVIDUAL can wield the power of technology, he is permitted to do so only within narrow limits and only under the supervision and control of the system. (You need a license for everything and with the license come rules and regulations.) The individual has only those technological powers with which the system chooses to provide him. His PERSONAL power over nature is slight.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Primitive INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS actually had considerable power over nature; or maybe it would be better to say power WITHIN nature. When primitive man needed food he knew how to find and prepare edible roots, how to track game and take it with homemade weapons. He knew how to protect himself from heat, cold, rain, dangerous animals, etc. But primitive man did relatively little damage to nature because the COLLECTIVE power of primitive society was negligible compared to the COLLECTIVE power of industrial society.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Instead of arguing for powerlessness and passivity, one should argue that the power of the INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM should be broken, and that this will greatly INCREASE the power and freedom of INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Until the industrial system has been thoroughly wrecked, the destruction of that system must be the revolutionaries’ ONLY goal. Other goals would distract attention and energy from the main goal. More importantly, if the revolutionaries permit themselves to have any other goal than the destruction of technology, they will be tempted to use technology as a tool for reaching that other goal. If they give in to that temptation, they will fall right back into the technological trap, because modern technology is a unified, tightly organized system, so that, in order to retain SOME technology, one finds oneself obliged to retain MOST technology, hence one ends up sacrificing only token amounts of technology.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Suppose for example that the revolutionaries took “social justice” as a goal. Human nature being what it is, social justice would not come about spontaneously; it would have to be enforced. In order to enforce it the revolutionaries would have to retain central organization and control. For that they would need rapid long-distance transportation and communication, and therefore all the technology needed to support the transportation and communication systems. To feed and clothe poor people they would have to use agricultural and manufacturing technology. And so forth. So that the attempt to ensure social justice would force them to retain most parts of the technological system. Not that we have anything against social justice, but it must not be allowed to interfere with the effort to get rid of the technological system.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>It would be hopeless for revolutionaries to try to attack the system without using SOME modern technology. If nothing else they must use the communications media to spread their message. But they should use modern technology for only ONE purpose: to attack the technological system.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Imagine an alcoholic sitting with a barrel of wine in front of him. Suppose he starts saying to himself, “Wine isn’t bad for you if used in moderation. Why, they say small amounts of wine, are even good for you! It won’t do me any harm if I take just one little drink…” Well, you know what is going to happen. Never forget that the human race with technology is just like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Revolutionaries should have as many children as they can. There is strong scientific evidence that social attitudes are to a significant extent inherited. No one suggests that a social attitude is a direct outcome of a person’s genetic constitution, but it appears that personality traits are partly inherited and that certain personality traits tend, within the context of our society, to make a person more likely to hold this or that social attitude. Objections to these findings have been raised, but the objections are feeble and seem to be ideologically motivated. In any event, no one denies that children tend on the average to hold social attitudes similar to those of their parents. From our point of view it doesn’t matter all that much whether the attitudes are passed on genetically or through childhood training. In either case they ARE passed on.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The trouble is that many of the people who are inclined to rebel against the industrial system are also concerned about the population problem, hence they are apt to have few or no children. In this way they may be handing the world over to the sort of people who support or at least accept the industrial system. To ensure the strength of the next generation of revolutionaries the present generation should reproduce itself abundantly. In doing so they will be worsening the population problem only slightly. And the most important problem is to get rid of the industrial system, because once the industrial system is gone the world’s population necessarily will decrease (see paragraph 167); whereas, if the industrial system survives, it will continue developing new techniques of food production that may enable the world’s population to keep increasing almost indefinitely.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>With regard to revolutionary strategy, the only points on which we absolutely insist are that the single, overriding goal must be the elimination of modern technology, and that no other goal can be allowed to compete with this one. For the rest, revolutionaries should take an empirical approach. If experience indicates that some of the recommendations made in the foregoing paragraphs are not going to give good results, then those recommendations should be discarded.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="two-kinds-of-technology">Two Kinds of Technology</h2>
+<ol start="207">
+<li>
+<p>An argument likely to be raised against our proposed revolution is that it is bound to fail, because (it is claimed) throughout history technology has always progressed, never regressed, hence technological regression is impossible. But this claim is false.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>We distinguish between two kinds of technology, which we will call small-scale technology and organization-dependent technology. Small-scale technology is technology that can be used by small-scale communities without outside assistance. Organization-dependent technology is technology that depends on large-scale social organization. We are aware of no significant cases of regression in small-scale technology. But organization-dependent technology DOES regress when the social organization on which it depends breaks down. Example: When the Roman Empire fell apart the Romans’ small-scale technology survived because any clever village craftsman could build, for instance, a water wheel, any skilled smith could make steel by Roman methods, and so forth. But the Romans’ organization-dependent technology DID regress. Their aqueducts fell into disrepair and were never rebuilt. Their techniques of road construction were lost. The Roman system of urban sanitation was forgotten, so that not until rather recent times did the sanitation of European cities equal that of ancient Rome.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The reason why technology has seemed always to progress is that, until perhaps a century or two before the Industrial Revolution, most technology was small-scale technology. But most of the technology developed since the Industrial Revolution is organization-dependent technology. Take the refrigerator for example. Without factory-made parts or the facilities of a post-industrial machine shop it would be virtually impossible for a handful of local craftsmen to build a refrigerator. If by some miracle they did succeed in building one it would be useless to them without a reliable source of electric power. So they would have to dam a stream and build a generator. Generators require large amounts of copper wire. Imagine trying to make that wire without modern machinery. And where would they get a gas suitable for refrigeration? It would be much easier to build an icehouse or preserve food by drying or pickling, as was done before the invention of the refrigerator.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>So it is clear that if the industrial system were once thoroughly broken down, refrigeration technology would quickly be lost. The same is true of other organization-dependent technology. And once this technology had been lost for a generation or so it would take centuries to rebuild it, just as it took centuries to build it the first time around. Surviving technical books would be few and scattered. An industrial society, if built from scratch without outside help, can only be built in a series of stages: You need tools to make tools to make tools to make tools…A long process of economic development and progress in social organization is required. And, even in the absence of an ideology opposed to technology, there is no reason to believe that anyone would be interested in rebuilding industrial society. The enthusiasm for “progress” is a phenomenon peculiar to the modern form of society, and it seems not to have existed prior to the 17th century or thereabouts.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>In the late Middle Ages there were four main civilizations that were about equally “advanced”: Europe, the Islamic world, India, and the Far East (China, Japan, Korea). Three of these civilizations remained more or less stable, and only Europe became dynamic. No one knows why Europe became dynamic at that time; historians have their theories but these are only speculation. At any rate it is clear that rapid development toward a technological form of society occurs only under special conditions. So there is no reason to assume that a long-lasting technological regression cannot be brought about.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Would society EVENTUALLY develop again toward an industrial-technological form? Maybe, but there is no use in worrying about it, since we can’t predict or control events 500 or 1,000 years in the future. Those problems must be dealt with by the people who will live at that time.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="the-danger-of-leftism">The Danger of Leftism</h2>
+<ol start="213">
+<li>
+<p>Because of their need for rebellion and for membership in a movement, leftists or persons of similar psychological type often are attracted to a rebellious or activist movement whose goals and membership are not initially leftist. The resulting influx of leftish types can easily turn a non-leftist movement into a leftist one, so that leftist goals replace or distort the original goals of the movement.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>To avoid this, a movement that exalts nature and opposes technology must take a resolutely anti-leftist stance and must avoid all collaboration with leftists. Leftism is in the long run inconsistent with wild nature, with human freedom and with the elimination of modern technology. Leftism is collectivist; it seeks to bind together the entire world (both nature and the human race) into a unified whole. But this implies management of nature and of human life by organized society, and it requires advanced technology. You can’t have a united world without rapid long-distance transportation and communication, you can’t make all people love one another without sophisticated psychological techniques, you can’t have a “planned society” without the necessary technological base. Above all, leftism is driven by the need for power, and the leftist seeks power on a collective basis, through identification with a mass movement or an organization. Leftism is unlikely ever to give up technology, because technology is too valuable a source of collective power.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The anarchist<sup id="fnref:34"><a href="#fn:34" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">34</a></sup> too seeks power, but he seeks it on an individual or small-group basis; he wants individuals and small groups to be able to control the circumstances of their own lives. He opposes technology because it makes small groups dependent on large organizations.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Some leftists may seem to oppose technology, but they will oppose it only so long as they are outsiders and the technological system is controlled by non-leftists. If leftism ever becomes dominant in society, so that the technological system becomes a tool in the hands of leftists, they will enthusiastically use it and promote its growth. In doing this they will be repeating a pattern that leftism has shown again and again in the past. When the Bolsheviks in Russia were outsiders, they vigorously opposed censorship and the secret police, they advocated self-determination for ethnic minorities, and so forth; but as soon as they came into power themselves, they imposed a tighter censorship and created a more ruthless secret police than any that had existed under the tsars, and they oppressed ethnic minorities at least as much as the tsars had done. In the United States, a couple of decades ago when leftists were a minority in our universities, leftist professors were vigorous proponents of academic freedom, but today, in those of our universities where leftists have become dominant, they have shown themselves ready to take away everyone else’s academic freedom. (This is “political correctness.”) The same will happen with leftists and technology: They will use it to oppress everyone else if they ever get it under their own control.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>In earlier revolutions, leftists of the most power-hungry type, repeatedly, have first cooperated with non-leftist revolutionaries, as well as with leftists of a more libertarian inclination, and later have double-crossed them to seize power for themselves. Robespierre did this in the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks did it in the Russian Revolution, the communists did it in Spain in 1938 and Castro and his followers did it in Cuba. Given the past history of leftism, it would be utterly foolish for non-leftist revolutionaries today to collaborate with leftists.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Various thinkers have pointed out that leftism is a kind of religion. Leftism is not a religion in the strict sense because leftist doctrine does not postulate the existence of any supernatural being. But for the leftist, leftism plays a psychological role much like that which religion plays for some people. The leftist NEEDS to believe in leftism; it plays a vital role in his psychological economy. His beliefs are not easily modified by logic or facts. He has a deep conviction that leftism is morally Right with a capital R, and that he has not only a right but a duty to impose leftist morality on everyone. (However, many of the people we are referring to as “leftists” do not think of themselves as leftists and would not describe their system of beliefs as leftism. We use the term “leftism” because we don’t know of any better word to designate the spectrum of related creeds that includes the feminist, gay rights, political correctness, etc., movements, and because these movements have a strong affinity with the old left. See paragraphs 227–230.)</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Leftism is totalitarian force. Wherever leftism is in a position of power it tends to invade every private corner and force every thought into a leftist mold. In part this is because of the quasi-religious character of leftism: Everything contrary to leftist beliefs represents Sin. More importantly, leftism is a totalitarian force because of the leftists’ drive for power. The leftist seeks to satisfy his need for power through identification with a social movement, and he tries to go through the power process by helping to pursue and attain the goals of the movement (see paragraph 83).That is, the leftist’s real motive is not to attain the ostensible goals of leftism; in reality he is motivated by the sense of power he gets from struggling for and then reaching a social goal.<sup id="fnref:35"><a href="#fn:35" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">35</a></sup> Consequently the leftist is never satisfied with the goals he has already attained; his need for the power process leads him always to pursue some new goal. The leftist wants equal opportunities for minorities. When that is attained he insists on statistical equality of achievement by minorities. And as long as anyone harbors in some corner of his mind a negative attitude toward some minority, the leftist has to re-educate him. And ethnic minorities are not enough; no one can be allowed to have a negative attitude toward homosexuals, disabled people, fat people, old people, ugly people, and on and on and on. It’s not enough that the public should be informed about the hazards of smoking; a warning has to be stamped on every package of cigarettes. Then cigarette advertising has to be restricted if not banned. The activists will never be satisfied until tobacco is outlawed, and after that it will be alcohol, then junk food, etc. Activists have fought gross child abuse, which is reasonable. But now they want to stop all spanking. When they have done that they will want to ban something else they consider unwholesome, then another thing and then another. They will never be satisfied until they have complete control over all child-rearing practices. And then they will move on to another cause.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Suppose you asked leftists to make a list of ALL the things that were wrong with society, and then suppose you instituted EVERY social change that they demanded. It is safe to say that within a couple of years the majority of leftists would find something new to complain about, some new social “evil” to correct; because, once again, the leftist is motivated less by distress at society’s ills than by the need to satisfy his drive for power by imposing his solutions on society.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Because of the restrictions placed on their thought and behavior by their high level of socialization, many leftists of the oversocialized type cannot pursue power in the ways that other people do. For them the drive for power has only one morally acceptable outlet, and that is in the struggle to impose their morality on everyone.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, are True Believers in the sense of Eric Hoffer’s book, The True Believer. But not all True Believers are of the same psychological type as leftists. Presumably a true-believing Nazi, for instance, is very different psychologically from a true-believing leftist. Because of their capacity for single-minded devotion to a cause, True Believers are a useful, perhaps a necessary, ingredient of any revolutionary movement. This presents a problem with which we must admit we don’t know how to deal. We aren’t sure how to harness the energies of the True Believer to a revolution against technology. At present all we can say is that no True Believer will make a safe recruit to the revolution unless his commitment is exclusively to the destruction of technology. If he is committed also to another ideal, he may want to use technology as a tool for pursuing that other ideal. (See paragraphs 200, 201.)</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Some readers may say, “This shit about leftism is a lot of crap. I know John and Jane who are leftish types and they don’t have all these totalitarian tendencies.” It’s quite true that many leftists, possibly even a numerical majority, are decent people who sincerely believe in tolerating others’ values (up to a point) and wouldn’t want to use high-handed methods to reach their social goals. Our remarks about leftism are not meant to apply to every individual leftist but to describe the general character of leftism as a movement. And the general character of a movement is not necessarily determined by the numerical proportions of the various kinds of people involved in the movement.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The people who rise to positions of power in leftist movements tend to be leftists of the most power-hungry type, because power-hungry people are those who strive hardest to get into positions of power. Once the power-hungry types have captured control of the movement, there are many leftists of a gentler breed who inwardly disapprove of many of the actions of the leaders, but cannot bring themselves to oppose them. They NEED their faith in the movement, and because they cannot give up this faith they go along with the leaders. True, SOME leftists do have the guts to oppose the totalitarian tendencies that emerge, but they generally lose, because the power-hungry types are better organized, are more ruthless and Machiavellian and have taken care to build themselves a strong power-base.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>These phenomena appeared clearly in Russia and other countries that were taken over by leftists. Similarly, before the breakdown of communism in the USSR, leftish types in the West would seldom criticize that country. If prodded they would admit that the USSR did many wrong things, but then they would try to find excuses for the communists and begin talking about the faults of the West. They always opposed Western military resistance to communist aggression. Leftish types all over the world vigorously protested the U.S. military action in Vietnam, but when the USSR invaded Afghanistan they did nothing. Not that they approved of the Soviet actions; but, because of their leftist faith, they just couldn’t bear to put themselves in opposition to communism. Today, in those of our universities where “political correctness” has become dominant, there are probably many leftish types who privately disapprove of the suppression of academic freedom, but they go along with it anyway.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Thus the fact that many individual leftists are personally mild and fairly tolerant people by no means prevents leftism as a whole from having a totalitarian tendency.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>Our discussion of leftism has a serious weakness. It is still far from clear what we mean by the word “leftist.” There doesn’t seem to be much we can do about this. Today leftism is fragmented into a whole spectrum of activist movements. Yet not all activist movements are leftist, and some activist movements (e.g., radical environmentalism) seem to include both personalities of the leftist type and personalities of thoroughly un-leftist types who ought to know better than to collaborate with leftists. Varieties of leftists fade out gradually into varieties of non-leftists and we ourselves would often be hard-pressed to decide whether a given individual is or is not a leftist. To the extent that it is defined at all, our conception of leftism is defined by the discussion of it that we have given in this article, and we can only advise the reader to use his own judgment in deciding who is a leftist.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>But it will be helpful to list some criteria for diagnosing leftism. These criteria cannot be applied in a cut and dried manner. Some individuals may meet some of the criteria without being leftists, some leftists may not meet any of the criteria. Again, you just have to use your judgment.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The leftist is oriented toward large-scale collectivism. He emphasizes the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. He has a negative attitude toward individualism. He often takes a moralistic tone. He tends to be for gun control, for sex education and other psychologically “enlightened” educational methods, for social planning, for affirmative action, for multiculturalism. He tends to identify with victims. He tends to be against competition and against violence, but he often finds excuses for those leftists who do commit violence. He is fond of using the common catchphrases of the left, like “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “capitalism,” “imperialism,” “neocolonialism,” “genocide,” “social change,” “social justice,” “social responsibility.” Maybe the best diagnostic trait of the leftist is his tendency to sympathize with the following movements: feminism, gay rights, ethnic rights, disability rights, animal rights political correctness. Anyone who strongly sympathizes with ALL of these movements is almost certainly a leftist.<sup id="fnref:36"><a href="#fn:36" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">36</a></sup></p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>The more dangerous leftists, that is, those who are most power-hungry, are often characterized by arrogance or by a dogmatic approach to ideology. However, the most dangerous leftists of all may be certain oversocialized types who avoid irritating displays of aggressiveness and refrain from advertising their leftism, but work quietly and unobtrusively to promote collectivist values, “enlightened” psychological techniques for socializing children, dependence of the individual on the system, and so forth. These crypto-leftists (as we may call them) approximate certain bourgeois types as far as practical action is concerned, but differ from them in psychology, ideology and motivation. The ordinary bourgeois tries to bring people under control of the system in order to protect his way of life, or he does so simply because his attitudes are conventional. The crypto-leftist tries to bring people under control of the system because he is a True Believer in a collectivistic ideology. The crypto-leftist is differentiated from the average leftist of the oversocialized type by the fact that his rebellious impulse is weaker and he is more securely socialized. He is differentiated from the ordinary well-socialized bourgeois by the fact that there is some deep lack within him that makes it necessary for him to devote himself to a cause and immerse himself in a collectivity. And maybe his (well-sublimated) drive for power is stronger than that of the average bourgeois.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="final-note">Final Note</h2>
+<ol start="231">
+<li>
+<p>Throughout this article we’ve made imprecise statements and statements that ought to have had all sorts of qualifications and reservations attached to them; and some of our statements may be flatly false. Lack of sufficient information and the need for brevity made it impossible for us to formulate our assertions more precisely or add all the necessary qualifications. And of course in a discussion of this kind one must rely heavily on intuitive judgment, and that can sometimes be wrong. So we don’t claim that this article expresses more than a crude approximation to the truth.</p>
+</li>
+<li>
+<p>All the same, we are reasonably confident that the general outlines of the picture we have painted here are roughly correct. Just one possible weak point needs to be mentioned. We have portrayed leftism in its modern form as a phenomenon peculiar to our time and as a symptom of the disruption of the power process. But we might possibly be wrong about this. Oversocialized types who try to satisfy their drive for power by imposing their morality on everyone have certainly been around for a long time. But we THINK that the decisive role played by feelings of inferiority, low self-esteem, powerlessness, identification with victims by people who are not themselves victims, is a peculiarity of modern leftism. Identification with victims by people not themselves victims can be seen to some extent in 19th-century leftism and early Christianity, but as far as we can make out, symptoms of low self-esteem, etc., were not nearly so evident in these movements, or in any other movements, as they are in modern leftism. But we are not in a position to assert confidently that no such movements have existed prior to modern leftism. This is a significant question to which historians ought to give their attention.</p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<p><a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library">Back to the Library</a> - <a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski">More from Ted Kaczynski</a></p>
+</div>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p>We are not asserting that all, or even most, bullies and ruthless competitors suffer from feelings of inferiority. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p>During the Victorian period many oversocialized people suffered from serious psychological problems as a result of repressing or trying to repress their sexual feelings. Freud apparently based his theories on people of this type. Today the focus of socialization has shifted from sex to aggression. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:3">
+<p>Not necessarily including specialists in engineering or the “hard” sciences. <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:4">
+<p>There are many individuals of the middle and upper classes who resist some of these values, but usually their resistance is more or less covert. Such resistance appears in the mass media only to a very limited extent. The main thrust of propaganda in our society is in favor of the stated values. The main reason why these values have become, so to speak, the official values of our society is that they are useful to the industrial system. Violence is discouraged because it disrupts the functioning of the system. Racism is discouraged because ethnic conflicts also disrupt the system, and discrimination wastes the talents of minority-group members who could be useful to the system. Poverty must be “cured” because the underclass causes problems for the system and contact with the underclass lowers the morale of the other classes. Women are encouraged to have careers because their talents are useful to the system and, more importantly, because by having regular jobs women become integrated into the system and tied directly to it rather than to their families. This helps to weaken family solidarity. (The leaders of the system say they want to strengthen the family, but what they really mean is that they want the family to serve as an effective tool for socializing children in accord with the needs of the system. We argue in paragraphs 51,52.) <a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:5">
+<p>It may be argued that the majority of people don’t want to make their own decisions but want leaders to do their thinking for them. There is an element of truth in this. People like to make their own decisions in small matters, but making decisions on difficult, fundamental questions requires facing up to psychological conflict, and most people hate psychological conflict. Hence they tend to lean on others in making difficult decisions. But it does not follow that they like to have decisions imposed on them without having any opportunity to influence those decisions. The majority of people are natural followers, not leaders, but they like to have direct personal access to their leaders, they want to be able to influence the leaders and participate to some extent in making even the difficult decisions. At least to that degree they need autonomy. <a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:6">
+<p>Some of the symptoms listed are similar to those shown by caged animals. To explain how these symptoms arise from deprivation with respect to the power process: common-sense understanding of human nature tells one that lack of goals whose attainment requires effort leads to boredom and that boredom, long continued, often leads eventually to depression. Failure to attain goals leads to frustration and lowering of self-esteem. Frustration leads to anger, anger to aggression, often in the form of spouse or child abuse. It has been shown that long-continued frustration commonly leads to depression and that depression tends to cause anxiety, guilt, sleep disorders, eating disorders and bad feelings about oneself. Those who are tending toward depression seek pleasure as an antidote; hence insatiable hedonism and excessive sex, with perversions as a means of getting new kicks. Boredom too tends to cause excessive pleasure-seeking since, lacking other goals, people often use pleasure as a goal. The foregoing is a simplification. Reality is more complex, and of course deprivation with respect to the power process is not the ONLY cause of the symptoms described. By the way, when we mention depression we do not necessarily mean depression that is severe enough to be treated by a psychiatrist. Often only mild forms of depression are involved. And when we speak of goals we do not necessarily mean long-term, thought-out goals. For many or most people through much of human history, the goals of a hand-to-mouth existence (merely providing oneself and one’s family with food from day to day) have been quite sufficient. <a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:7">
+<p>A partial exception may be made for a few passive, inward-looking groups, such as the Amish, which have little effect on the wider society. Apart from these, some genuine small-scale communities do exist in America today. For instance, youth gangs and “cults.” Everyone regards them as dangerous, and so they are, because the members of these groups are loyal primarily to one another rather than to the system, hence the system cannot control them. Or take the gypsies. The gypsies commonly get away with theft and fraud because their loyalties are such that they can always get other gypsies to give testimony that “proves” their innocence. Obviously the system would be in serious trouble if too many people belonged to such groups. Some of the early-20th-century Chinese thinkers who were concerned with modernizing China recognized the necessity of breaking down small-scale social groups such as the family: “[^According to Sun Yat-Sen]: the Chinese people needed a new surge of patriotism, which would lead to a transfer of loyalty from the family to the state…. [^according to Li Huang]: traditional attachments, particularly to the family, had to be abandoned if nationalism were to develop in China” (Chester C. Tan, Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth century, page 125, page 297). <a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:8">
+<p>Yes, we know that 19th-century America had its problems, and serious ones, but for the sake of brevity we have to express ourselves in simplified terms. <a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:9">
+<p>We leave aside the “underclass.” We are speaking of the mainstream. <a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:10">
+<p>Some social scientists, educators, “mental health” professionals and the like are doing their best to push the social drives into group 1 by trying to see to it that everyone has a satisfactory social life. <a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:11">
+<p>Is the drive for endless material acquisition really an artificial creation of the advertising and marketing industry? Certainly there is no innate human drive for material acquisition. There have been many cultures in which people have desired little material wealth beyond what was necessary to satisfy their basic physical needs (Australian aborigines, traditional Mexican peasant culture, some African cultures). On the other hand there have also been many preindustrial cultures in which material acquisition has played an important role. So we can’t claim that today’s acquisition-oriented culture is exclusively a creation of the advertising and marketing industry. But it IS clear that the advertising and marketing industry has had an important part in creating that culture. The big corporations that spend millions on advertising wouldn’t be spending that kind of money without solid proof that they were getting it back in increased sales. One member of FC met a sales manager a couple of years ago who was frank enough to tell him, “Our job is to make people buy things they don’t want and don’t need.” He then described how an untrained novice could present people with the facts about a product and make no sales at all, while a trained and experienced professional salesman would make lots of sales to the same people. This shows that people are manipulated into buying things they don’t really want. <a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a> <a href="#fnref1:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:12">
+<p>The problem of purposelessness seems to have become less serious during the last 15 years or so [^this refers to the 15 years preceding 1995]:, because people now feel less secure physically and economically than they did earlier, and the need for security provides them with a goal. But purposelessness has been replaced by frustration over the difficulty of attaining security. We emphasize the problem of purposelessness because the liberals and leftists would wish to solve our social problems by having society guarantee everyone’s security; but if that could be done it would only bring back the problem of purposelessness. The real issue is not whether society provides well or poorly for people’s security; the trouble is that people are dependent on the system for their security rather than having it in their own hands. This, by the way, is part of the reason why some people get worked up about the right to bear arms; possession of a gun puts that aspect of their security in their own hands. <a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:13">
+<p>Conservatives’ efforts to decrease the amount of government regulation are of little benefit to the average man. For one thing, only a fraction of the regulations can be eliminated because most regulations are necessary. For another thing, most of the deregulation affects business rather than the average individual, so that its main effect is to take power from the government and give it to private corporations. What this means for the average man is that government interference in his life is replaced by interference from big corporations, which may be permitted, for example, to dump more chemicals that get into his water supply and give him cancer. The conservatives are just taking the average man for a sucker, exploiting his resentment of Big Government to promote the power of Big Business. <a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:14">
+<p>When someone approves of the purpose for which propaganda is being used in a given case, he generally calls it “education” or applies to it some similar euphemism. But propaganda is propaganda regardless of the purpose for which it is used. <a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a> <a href="#fnref1:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a> <a href="#fnref2:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a> <a href="#fnref3:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:15">
+<p>We are not expressing approval or disapproval of the Panama invasion. We only use it to illustrate a point. <a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:16">
+<p>When the American colonies were under British rule there were fewer and less effective legal guarantees of freedom than there were after the American Constitution went into effect, yet there was more personal freedom in preindustrial America, both before and after the War of Independence, than there was after the Industrial Revolution took hold in this country. We quote from Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, edited by Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, chapter 12 by Roger Lane, pages 476–478: “The progressive heightening of standards of propriety, and with it the increasing reliance on official law enforcement [^in 19th-century America]:…were common to the whole society… [^T]:he change in social behavior is so long term and so wide-spread as to suggest a connection with the most fundamental of contemporary social processes; that of industrial urbanization itself….Massachusetts in 1835 had a populacion of some 660,940, 81 percent rural, overwhelmingly preindustrial and native born. Its citizens were used to considerable personal freedom. Whether teamsters, farmers or artisans, they were all accustomed to setting their own schedules, and the nature of their work made them physically independent of each other….Individual problems, sins or even crimes, were not generally cause for wider social concern ….But the impact of the twin movements to the city and to the factory, both just gathering force in 1835, had a progressive effect on personal behavior throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. The factory demanded regularity of behavior, a life governed by obedience to the rhythms of clock and calendar, the demands of foreman and supervisor. In the city or town, the needs of living in closely packed neighborhoods inhibited many actions previously unobjectionable. Both blue- and white-collar employees in larger establishments were mutually dependent on their fellows; as one man’s work fit into another’s, so one man’s business was no longer his own. The results of the new organization of life and work were apparent by 1900, when some 76 percent of the 2,805,346 inhabitants of Massachusetts were classified as urbanites. Much violent or irregular behavior which had been tolerable in a casual, independent society was no longer acceptable in the more formalized, cooperative atmosphere of the later period….The move to the cities had, in short, produced a more tractable, more socialized, more ‘civilized’ generation than its predecessors.” <a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:17">
+<p>Apologists for the system are fond of citing cases in which elections have been decided by one or two votes, but such cases are rare. <a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:18">
+<p>“Today, in technologically advanced lands, men live very similar lives in spite of geographical, religious, and political differences. The daily lives of a Christian bank clerk in Chicago, a Buddhist bank clerk in Tokyo, and a Communist bank clerk in Moscow are far more alike than the life any one of them is like that of any single man who lived a thousand years ago. These similarities are the result of a common technology….” L. Sprague de Camp, The Ancient Engineers, Ballantine edition, page 17. The lives of the three bank clerks are not IDENTICAL. Ideology does have SOME effect. But all technological societies, in order to survive, must evolve along APPROXIMATELY the same trajectory. <a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:19">
+<p>Just think, an irresponsible genetic engineer might create a lot of terrorists. <a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:20">
+<p>For a further example of undesirable consequences of medical progress, suppose a reliable cure for cancer is discovered. Even if the treatment is too expensive to be available to any bur the elite, it will greatly reduce their incentive to stop the escape of carcinogens into the environment. <a href="#fnref:20" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:21">
+<p>Since many people may find paradoxical the notion that a large number of good things can add up to a bad thing, we illustrate with an analogy. Suppose Mr. A is playing chess with Mr. B. Mr. C, a grand master, is looking over Mr. A’s shoulder. Mr. A of course wants to win his game, so if Mr. C points out a good move for him to make, he is doing Mr. A a favor. But suppose now that Mr. C tells Mr. A how to make ALL of his moves. In each particular instance he does Mr. A a favor by showing him his best move, but by making ALL of his moves for him he spoils his game, since there is no point in Mr. A’s playing the game at all if someone else makes all his moves. The situation of modern man is analogous to that of Mr. A. The system makes an individual’s life easier for him in innumerable ways, but in doing so it deprives him of control over his own fate. <a href="#fnref:21" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:22">
+<p>Here we are considering only the conflict of values within the mainstream. For the sake of simplicity we leave out of the picture “outsider” values like the idea that wild nature is more important than human economic welfare. <a href="#fnref:22" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:23">
+<p>Self-interest is not necessarily MATERIAL self-interest. It can consist in fulfillment of some psychological need, for example, by promoting one’s own ideology or religion. <a href="#fnref:23" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:24">
+<p>A qualification: It is in the interest of the system to permit a certain prescribed degree of freedom in some areas. For example, economic freedom (with suitable limitations and restraints) has proved effective in promoting economic growth. but only planned, circumscribed, limited freedom is in the interest of the system. The individual must always be kept on a leash, even if the leash is sometimes long. (See paragraphs 94, 97.) <a href="#fnref:24" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:25">
+<p>We don’t mean 10 suggest that the efficiency or the potential for survival of a society has always been inversely proportional to the amount of pressure or discomfort to which the society subjects people. That certainly is not the case. There is good reason to believe that many primitive societies subjected people to less pressure than European society did, but European society proved far more efficient than any primitive society and always won out in conflicts with such societies because of the advantages conferred by technology. <a href="#fnref:25" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:26">
+<p>If you think that more effective law enforcement is unequivocally good because it suppresses crime, then remember that crime as defined by the system is not necessarily what YOU would call crime. Today, smoking marijuana is a “crime,” and, in some places in the U.S., so is possession of an unregistered handgun. Tomorrow, possession of ANY firearm, registered or not, may be made a crime, and the same thing may happen with disapproved methods of child-rearing, such as spanking. In some countries, expression of dissident political opinions is a crime, and there is no certainty that this will never happen in the U.S., since no constitution or political system lasts forever. If a society needs a large, powerful law enforcement establishment, then there is something gravely wrong with that society; it must be subjecting people to severe pressures if so many refuse to follow the rules, or follow them only because forced. Many societies in the past have gotten by with little or no formal law-enforcement. <a href="#fnref:26" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:27">
+<p>To be sure past societies have had means of influencing human behavior, but these have been primitive and of low effectiveness compared with the technological means that are now being developed. <a href="#fnref:27" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:28">
+<p>However, some psychologists have publicly expressed opinions indicating their contempt for human freedom. And the mathematician Claude Shannon was quoted in Omni (August 1987) as saying, “I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.” <a href="#fnref:28" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:29">
+<p>This is no science fiction! After writing paragraph 154 we came across an article in Scientific American according to which scientists are actively developing techniques for identifying possible future criminals and for treating them by a combination of biological and psychological means. Some scientists advocate compulsory application of the treatment, which may be available in the near future. (See “Seeking the Criminal Element,” by W. Wayt Gibbs, Scientific American, March 1995.) Maybe you think this is okay because the treatment would be applied to those who might become violent criminals. But of course it won’t stop there. Next, a treatment will be applied to those who might become drunk drivers (they endanger human life too), then perhaps to people who spank their children, then to environmentalists who sabotage logging equipment, eventually to anyone whose behavior is inconvenient for the system. <a href="#fnref:29" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:30">
+<p>A further advantage of nature as a counter-ideal to technology is that, in many people, nature inspires the kind of reverence that is associated with religion, so that nature could perhaps be idealized on a religious basis. It is true that in many societies religion has served as a support and justification for the established order, but it is also true that religion has often provided a basis for rebellion. Thus it may be useful to introduce a religious element into the rebellion against technology, the more so because Western society today has no strong religious foundation. Religion nowadays either is used as cheap and transparent support for narrow, short-sighted selfishness (some conservatives use it this way), or even is cynically exploited to make easy money (by many evangelists), or has degenerated into crude irrationalism (fundamentalist protestant sects, “cults”), or is simply stagnant (Catholicism, mainline Protestantism). The nearest thing to a strong, widespread, dynamic religion that the West has seen in recent times has been the quasi-religion of leftism, but leftism today is fragmented and has no clear, unified, inspiring goal. Thus there is a religious vacuum in our society that could perhaps be filled by a religion focused on nature in opposition to technology. But it would be a mistake to try to concoct artificially a religion to fill this role. Such an invented religion would probably be a failure. Take the “Gaia” religion for example. Do its adherents REALLY believe in it or are they just play-acting? If they are just play-acting their religion will be a flop in the end. It is probably best not to try to introduce religion into the conflict of nature vs. technology unless you REALLY believe in that religion yourself and find that it arouses a deep, strong, genuine response in many other people. <a href="#fnref:30" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:31">
+<p>Assuming that such a final push occurs. Conceivably the industrial system might be eliminated in a somewhat gradual or piecemeal fashion. (See paragraphs 4, 167 and Note 32.) <a href="#fnref:31" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:32">
+<p>It is even conceivable (remotely) that the revolution might consist only of a massive change of attitudes toward technology resulting in a relatively gradual and painless disintegration of the industrial system. But if this happens we’ll be very lucky. It’s far more probable that the transition to a non-technological society will be very difficult and full of conflicts and disasters. <a href="#fnref:32" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:33">
+<p>The economic and technological structure of a society are far more important than its political structure in determining the way the average man lives. (See paragraphs 95, 119 and Notes 16, 18.) <a href="#fnref:33" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:34">
+<p>This statement refers to our particular brand of anarchism. A wide variety of social attitudes have been called “anarchist,” and it may be that many who consider themselves anarchists would not accept our statement of paragraph 215. It should be noted, by the way, that there is a nonviolent anarchist movement whose members probably would not accept FC as anarchist and certainly would not approve of FC’s violent methods. <a href="#fnref:34" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:35">
+<p>Many leftists are motivated also by hostility, but the hostility probably results in part from a frustrated need for power. <a href="#fnref:35" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:36">
+<p>It is important to understand that we mean someone who sympathizes with these movements as they exist today in our society. One who believes that women, homosexuals, etc., should have equal rights is not necessarily a leftist. The feminist, gay rights, etc., movements that exist in our society have the particular ideological tone that characterizes leftism, and if one believes, for example, that women should have equal rights it does not necessarily follow that one must sympathize with the feminist movement as it exists today. <a href="#fnref:36" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
Recover Lost Anki Streak
+ Thu, 12 Jan 2023 21:34:30 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/blog/recover-lost-anki-streak/
+ <h2 id="how-to-recover-a-lost-anki-streak">How to recover a lost anki streak</h2>
+<p>Word for word copy paste of what fixed my issue. <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/ndt6ag/comment/gycwiti/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3">Original post</a></p>
+<p><em>btw i had to create a seperate Custom Study for cards i had forgotten, i set it to 1 day, did one review and followed from step 7</em></p>
+<p>Happened to me as well, idk why. But there is a way to cheat streaks:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Check what was the date when you broke your streak, aka the date of that day when you had 0 reviews</li>
+<li>Turn Anki off</li>
+<li>Disable “Set time automatically” in Windows (assuming you’re using Windows)</li>
+<li>Manually set the date to that date when you missed a review</li>
+<li>Turn the Internet connection off (or just unplug your cable)</li>
+<li>Turn Anki on, do at least 1 review, turn Anki off again</li>
+<li>Enable “Set time automatically”, turn the Internet connection on</li>
+<li>Turn Anki on and you’ll see that it counts as if you really did a review on that day</li>
+</ol>
+
+
+
+ -
+
Meta Description in Hugo
+ Wed, 04 Jan 2023 22:52:24 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/blog/meta-description-in-hugo/
+ <h2 id="adding-meta-description-in-hugo">Adding meta description in Hugo</h2>
+<p>I assume you are using Luke Smith’s theme - Lugo, if you are not, you’d have to find these files yourself (e.g. search using vscode).</p>
+<h3 id="setting-a-global-meta-description">Setting a global meta description</h3>
+<ol>
+<li>Locate your config.toml or config.yaml file</li>
+<li>Add the following line inside it</li>
+</ol>
+<p>For config.toml</p>
+<div class="highlight"><pre tabindex="0" style="color:#b0c4de;background-color:#282c34;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4;"><code class="language-toml" data-lang="toml"><span style="display:flex;"><span>[<span style="color:#c1abea">params</span>]
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span> <span style="color:#c1abea">description</span> = <span style="color:#63c381">"The global meta description of your website"</span>
+</span></span></code></pre></div><p>For config.yaml</p>
+<div class="highlight"><pre tabindex="0" style="color:#b0c4de;background-color:#282c34;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4;"><code class="language-yaml" data-lang="yaml"><span style="display:flex;"><span><span style="color:#e06c75">params</span>:
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span> <span style="color:#e06c75">description</span>: <span style="color:#98c379">The global meta description of your website</span>
+</span></span></code></pre></div><p>It won’t work just yet because you have to update the <code>baseof.html</code> file.</p>
+<h3 id="updating-the-baseofhtml-file">Updating the baseof.html file</h3>
+<ol>
+<li>Locate baseof.html</li>
+<li>Add or change the meta description line with the following</li>
+</ol>
+<div class="highlight"><pre tabindex="0" style="color:#b0c4de;background-color:#282c34;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4;"><code class="language-html" data-lang="html"><span style="display:flex;"><span><<span style="color:#e06c75">meta</span> <span style="color:#b3d23c">name</span><span style="color:#c7bf54">=</span><span style="color:#98c379">"description"</span> <span style="color:#b3d23c">content</span><span style="color:#c7bf54">=</span><span style="color:#98c379">"{{ if .Page.Params.description }}{{ .Page.Params.description }}{{ else if .Summary}}{{ .Summary }}{{else}}{{ .Site.Params.description}}{{ end }}"</span>/>
+</span></span></code></pre></div><p>And now if you start your Hugo server locally with <code>hugo serve --noHTTPCache</code> and you right click on your page -> View Page Source -> Search for the meta description tag. It should match what you left in the config file.</p>
+<h3 id="replacing-the-global-description-with-a-custom-one">Replacing the global description with a custom one</h3>
+<ol>
+<li>Have a markdown file ready</li>
+<li>In the preamble, add</li>
+</ol>
+<div class="highlight"><pre tabindex="0" style="color:#b0c4de;background-color:#282c34;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4;"><code class="language-yaml" data-lang="yaml"><span style="display:flex;"><span><span style="color:#76a9f9">---</span>
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span><span style="color:#e06c75">description</span>: <span style="color:#63c381">"Your custom description for this page"</span>
+</span></span><span style="display:flex;"><span><span style="color:#76a9f9">---</span>
+</span></span></code></pre></div><p>Following these steps would guarantee that you have a meta description for everypage with the ability for creating a custom one whenever you need it!</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
Multiple Index Pages in Hugo
+ Tue, 03 Jan 2023 22:36:03 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/blog/multiple-index-pages-in-hugo/
+ <h2 id="this-is-how-to-create-multiple-index-pages-in-hugo">This is how to create multiple index pages in Hugo</h2>
+<p>I wanted to order <a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook">Hackbook</a> in reverse (i.e. oldest to newest) so that it’s easier for the reader to start at the correct page.</p>
+<p>I ran into the following problem - the default <code>list.html</code> does them from newest to oldest.</p>
+<p>So I found <a href="https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/two-home-pages/31312/9">this forum post</a> and I created a file in the <code>_default</code> directory as follows:</p>
+<pre tabindex="0"><code>layouts
+|----**_default**
+|-------**hackbook**
+|-----------**order-by-oldest.html**
+|-------baseof.html
+|-------index.html
+|-------list.html
+|-------single.html
+</code></pre>
+<figure ><img src="https://vodoraslo.xyz/img/custom-index-directory.PNG" alt="Picture of the directory"></figure>
+
+<p>I named my file order by oldest because I plan on reusing it in other places. This is what’s contained inside it:</p>
+<pre tabindex="0"><code>{{ define "title" -}}
+{{ .Title | title }}
+{{- end }}
+{{ define "main" -}}
+{{ .Content }}
+<ul>
+{{- range.Pages.Reverse }}
+ <li>
+ {{- if .Param "datesinlist" }}<time datetime="{{ .Date.Format "2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00" }}">{{ .Date.Format "2006 Jan 02" }}</time> &ndash; {{ end -}}
+ <a href="{{ .RelPermalink }}">{{ .Title }}</a>
+ {{- if .Param "authorsinlist" }}
+ {{- range .Param "authors" }} by {{ . }}{{ end -}}
+ {{ end -}}
+ </li>
+{{- end }}
+</ul>
+{{- end }}
+</code></pre><p>If you want to display the date on the left of the titles, you have to add <code>datesinlist=true</code> in your config.toml or <code>datesinlist: true</code> in your config.yaml</p>
+<p>You probably don’t need <code>enableGitInfo = true</code> as that will crash your website, I have no idea what it does, you don’t need it.</p>
+<h2 id="using-your-custom-_indexhtml">Using your custom _index.html</h2>
+<p>After creating your custom _index.html you’d use it as follows:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Create an _index.md file in your desired directory</li>
+<li>Add <code>layout: "hackbook/order-by-oldest"</code> to your preamble (if you named your folder and or file something else, you have to change it here)</li>
+</ol>
+
+<figure ><img src="https://vodoraslo.xyz/img/layout-custom-index.PNG" alt="Picture of the layout in the preamble"></figure>
+
+<p>And now you should have a custom _index.html for your pages! :)</p>
+<p>Here is a verbose copy paste of the original hugo forum answer in case it gets deleted:</p>
+<pre tabindex="0"><code>Content structure:
+
+content
+├── better
+│ └── _index.md
+├── post
+│ ├── post-1.md
+│ ├── post-2.md
+│ └── post-3.md
+└── _index.md
+
+content/better/_index.md
+
++++
+title = "Better"
+date = 2021-03-04T17:02:42-08:00
+draft = false
+type = "post"
+layout = "posts-by-lastmod"
++++
+
+Template structure:
+
+layouts
+├── _default
+│ ├── baseof.html
+│ ├── list.html
+│ └── single.html
+├── post
+│ └── posts-by-lastmod.html
+└── index.html
+
+layouts/post/posts-by-lastmod.html
+
+{{ define "main" }}
+ {{ .Content }}
+ {{ range (where .Site.RegularPages "Type" "post").ByLastmod.Reverse }}
+ <h2><a href="{{ .RelPermalink }}">{{ .Title }}</a></h2>
+ {{ end }}
+{{ end }}
+
+layouts/index.html
+
+{{ define "main" }}
+ {{ .Content }}
+ {{ range (where .Site.RegularPages "Type" "post").ByDate.Reverse }}
+ <h2><a href="{{ .RelPermalink }}">{{ .Title }}</a></h2>
+ {{ end }}
+{{ end }}
+
+config.toml (see https://gohugo.io/variables/git/#lastmod)
+
+enableGitInfo = true
+</code></pre>
+
+
+ -
+
Yoinked some Css and updated the site
+ Tue, 27 Dec 2022 14:24:24 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/updates/yoinked-css/
+ <p>yoinked lukes css and updated the site, its basically his colors for the headers and my cyan anchor links.. very pretty much wow</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
Fin
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 12:23:54 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/fin/
+ <div style="text-align: center;">
+<p><strong><a href="https://sites.google.com/site/hackbookeasypeasy/home">https://sites.google.com/site/hackbookeasypeasy/home</a></strong></p>
+</div>
+<p>April 2017</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
05-01 Scripts-05
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 12:22:57 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/05-01-scripts-05/
+ <h2 id="scripts-05">Scripts-05</h2>
+<p>“Go inside and try in vain to have the same problem. It was a terrible problem, wasn’t it? You want to make changes, haven’t you?… What would it be like when you have made those changes, now? In the future as you look back and see what it was like to have had that problem… as you think about it now, if you could make this change for yourself so that you could STOP… having made that change and see yourself now. Do you like the way you look if you could make that change and look back at yourself having made that change now!”</p>
+<p>Credit to <a href="http://www.hypnosis.com/scripts_full.php?id2=48">http://www.hypnosis.com/scripts_full.php?id2=48</a></p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
05-01 Scripts-04
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 12:21:45 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/05-01-scripts-04/
+ <h2 id="scripts-04">Scripts-04</h2>
+<p>To an individual who has had a PMO problem, porn is poison. It’s poison in two ways. First of all it’s poison because it breaks down the very will power, the very ego, the very faith in oneself that the individual is able to build up. And so it is a psychological poison because having once conquered the porn problem, if you ever allow it to get back into you again then you begin thinking about yourself all the thoughts that you thought about yourself before, namely, well I really am no good anyway, I really didn’t lick it and so on. So it’s a psychological poison.</p>
+<p>Now in addition to that for anyone who has ever had a porn problem, it’s a physical poison. It actually poisons your system. Because you’re allergic to porn just like other people are allergic to other things. And so if you’re allergic to something, even penicillin, it’s poison to you and you must never take it. The same is true with porn. If you’re allergic to it, you’re through with it. Now you’ve been allergic to porn. porn is a poison to you. What’s even more fascinating is that usually the reason why one is drawn to porn is not for most of the reasons that most people reiterate, namely that it makes me feel good, I like it, all these things. On the contrary, almost every person who has a porn problem will tell you just the opposite. I don’t like it. It’s ruining my life. It’s terrible.</p>
+<p>And if that’s true, then why are they drawn to it? For precisely that reason. Because it is a poison and because they in their subconscious mind need to commit suicide and so they do it the slow tortuous way. And so that’s why it’s so important that the underlying cause of the problem be completely removed so that you don’t need to punish yourself again with porn. And that’s why we have removed them.</p>
+<p>That’s why you don’t need to punish yourself anymore. Because you realize you’re not guilty to begin with. And if you’re not guilty you don’t have to punish yourself. And since you’re through punishing yourself, you’re through poisoning yourself. Yes porn is a poison. It’s important that you realize that it’s a poison and you are leaving poisons alone. Because you don’t need poison any more. You don’t need to poison yourself. You don’t need to punish yourself. You’re through with all that.</p>
+<p>You’re going to appreciate yourself. That’s what you’re going to do, appreciate yourself for the talents that you have, for the fact that you have life, for all the good that you can do in that life for yourself and others. In talking about porn we frequently say he got his fix. Interesting how drugs and porn go together. You’re through with porn. You don’t even take a peek at it. You’re just beginning to appreciate yourself, to value yourself, your mind and your body and to make them really work for you.</p>
+<p>You’re going to make yourself happy and you’re going to make others happy by staying abstinent, by avoiding completely like the plague any video which you are allergic to and porn especially for you’re most allergic to that. You have obtained a great victory in forever placing porn behind you for you have now placed a beautiful future before you. For no matter what may befall you, good, bad, indifferent, it’s still better and easier and happier to face the future as an ex-PMOer than a PMOer. Indeed, you’re going to have twice the fun as ex-PMOer than you ever had PMOed because when PMOing you never had any fun. You were only using porn to assassinate yourself, to poison yourself, to get rid of yourself, to fix yourself, and to become dead lover. And you almost succeeded in that. But you removed all those thoughts from your mind. You’re through punishing yourself. You’re through beating yourself down. You’re now going to build yourself up. You’re through assassinating and you’re going to appreciate and as you start appreciating instead of assassinating you’re going to build yourself up more and more and more with every breath you take as you go deeper and deeper relaxed, deeper and deeper and deeper. And all these suggestions are going to be reinforced in your mind every single day of your life. Now sleep.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
05-01 Scripts-03
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 12:20:17 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/05-01-scripts-03/
+ <h2 id="scripts-03">Scripts-03</h2>
+<p>Now as you sink deeper and deeper relaxed all of the sounds fade away in the distance. You pay no attention to any other sound but the sound of my voice. You sink deeper and deeper with every breath you take. Deeper and deeper and deeper, way down, deeper and deeper relaxed.</p>
+<p>In the past porn may have been to you something that meant life. In your mind you may have accepted a suggestion that porn saves your life from boredom or porn protects you from being injured socially, porn is good for you in some manner or another. But that was yesterday and we are in the future. All that was yesterday, because porn may have protected you from injury in the past socially, it could have even saved your life from boredom.</p>
+<p>And those suggestions may have been good suggestions at one time but they have outlived their usefulness and if any of those suggestions are present to any degree in your mind, they are completely removed as of now. And that suggestion takes complete and thorough effect upon your mind, body and spirit.</p>
+<p>Now to other people porn means death. It’s a way of punishing oneself. It’s a poison and some people want to poison themselves. It’s a method of slow suicide. Well, you don’t need that now. If porn ever meant death and suicide to you and you have a need to punish yourself, that need is now long gone and we remove that suggestion. The truth of the matter is that porn is just porn. It’s not life. It’s not death. As a matter of fact, it’s not anything to you anymore. It’s nothing, neutral feelings. It’s something that you don’t need nor do you want.</p>
+<p>You’ve lost all desire for porn in any form. You’re interested in YouTube. You love funny videos, National Geographic videos, Ted talks when it’s good. And there are many other videos that you like and that you can watch. There’s NFL and NBA, Food Network, and many game shows, a number of which you enjoy. But the one that doesn’t do you any good and that you don’t even care about anymore is porn. Now that was yesterday when porn may have saved your life from boredom or protected you from social injury or when it was a means of self punishment. That was when you ran yourself down and lost your self. That was yesterday when you thought ill of yourself. That was yesterday when you made yourself into a failure. And today is when you put porn aside forever. And when you put it aside, you put it aside with all the other failures. You put it aside with all the other means of self punishment, with all the fears and anxieties, and everything else.</p>
+<p>Because you don’t need any of that. Today is the day in which you make yourself successful. Today is the day in which you set goals and strive towards those goals. Today is the day in which you have a nice clean cut appearance, in which you feel vitality and can think straight and reason and make decisions upon good judgement and past experience. Today is the day in which you start loving yourself and appreciating yourself for the really good and intelligent individual that you are. Today is the day in which you turn yourself over and turn your life over to something higher than just you, not only to a higher principle, but to a higher inside power. Let that power run your life. Today is the day that you’ll bury your past mistakes and make something out of yourself. Today is the day that you wipe failure out of your book of life and that success becomes really meaningful to you in a very personal way. To be completely succinct about this, today is the day that you throw porn away. You throw it away for good. You don’t need it and you’ll never need it. You don’t want it and you’ll never want it. You can’t desire it and you don’t. You’re through with porn. You don’t need it, you don’t want it, and you can’t watch it. It is terrible. It acts terrible. And it makes you feel terrible.</p>
+<p>You’re going to enjoy life fully in every way and feel happy, live, laugh, love, and be happy for that’s what today means to you. Now all these suggestions take complete and thorough effect upon you mind, body and spirit as you sink deeper and deeper relaxed and they seal themselves into your subconscious mind and they reinforce themselves over and over again. I’m going to give you a period of silence in which all this takes effect and that period of silence begins now…</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
05-01 Scripts-02
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 12:18:50 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/05-01-scripts-02/
+ <h2 id="scripts-02">Scripts-02</h2>
+<p>As you go deeper and deeper relaxed all of the sounds fade away in the distance and you pay attention only to the sound of my voice. As you listen carefully to the sound of my voice, we are going to remove a number of suggestions which have been in your mind. We are going to remove them completely and as you listen carefully to them we’re simply going to dissolve them… throw them out of your mind completely and forever… Nothing disturbs you and nothing bothers you and nothing can distract you in any way from listening to the sound of my voice… and from completely accepting everything I tell you… for everything I tell you is the absolute truth to you… and we’re going to remove all suggestions from your mind that have been detrimental to you in the past.</p>
+<p>The first suggestion you had in your mind is that somehow or another that porn, an image, an illusion, has been of some use to you. Masturbating to porn is of no use to you and you know it. You’re through PMO for any reason. It doesn’t make you relax, it doesn’t make you sleep well, it doesn’t do anything for you. As a matter of fact it ruins your efficiency… and consequently you’re through with it. The fact that porn has ever been beneficial to you in any way is completely removed from your mind. I am going to count to five and that suggestion is completely removed from your mind never to return. One, Two, Three, Four, Five.</p>
+<p>The next suggestion that you may have accepted is that porn is a good means of punishing yourself. In the first place, you’re through punishing yourself and in the second place you’re through using porn as a means to do it. The only reason anyone ever punishes himself is because somewhere deep in his mind he feels guilty and you’re through allowing your-self to feel guilty. And so with one count we’re going to remove the guilt, whatever it is and from whatever source the punishment, the need for punishment, and that porn could be used as a vehicle to achieve it. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.</p>
+<p>Those ideas are all gone. Porn to you is a poison and a lousy inefficient poison at that… just enough poison to make you sick and ineffective. But then you’re through poisoning yourself and you’re through using porn and so that need is also removed from your mind. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.</p>
+<p>Now we’re going to remove any and all connection that porn has in your mind. The only kind of porn that you care about or know anything about anymore is YouTube. And the only use which it has is for education and entertainment purposes. Like funny videos of cats. Like videos of National Geographic channels. That’s wonderful for that. It’s a nice educational and entertainment media. That’s all it means to you. As a pleasure or crutch it’s out. And so you remove all connections in your mind that have to do with porn as a crutch or pleasure or any YouTube containing soft core videos, so that you don’t even think of it, you don’t ask for it, you don’t desire it, you don’t want it, you don’t need it, you don’t desire it in any form.</p>
+<p>Even if offered it, you’d refuse it, because you think of it as disgusting, foul tasting and vomit producing. And so the negative suggestions are now removed from your mind and those suggestions which I have given you now replace them. At the count of five. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.</p>
+<p>From this moment on you are free, free from the porn, free from it’s entangling octopus like tentacles, free from it’s degrading self-punishing nature, free from from its ruination, free from it’s ability to wreck your life. You’re completely free because all the connections in your mind with the porn and it’s substitutes have been completely removed. The wires have been pulled out and you are unable to restore them even if you should want to. Just imagine that a big telephone switchboard exists in your head and that we pulled out all of the wires connected to the hole marked “porn” so that even if something is plugged into it nothing will happen. You don’t want it. You can’t buy it. You don’t need it and if offered you’d refuse it. It’s disgusting to you. It’s awful. Has a terrible effect and makes you sick to your stomach to even think about it. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.</p>
+<p>Now you are going to be completely successful in every way and surprised and amazed at the self discipline and confidence that you have in yourself knowing that you’ve licked the problem and that it will stay licked. Now sleep. Sleep deeply. And your mind concentrates on the sound of my voice and you go deeper and deeper and deeper. Relax.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
05-01 Scripts-01
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 12:17:25 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/05-01-scripts-01/
+ <h2 id="scripts-01">Scripts-01</h2>
+<p>You are relaxed now and because you are so relaxed you begin to feel free from all tensions, anxiety and fear. You now realize that you are more confident and sure of yourself because you have taken the enormous first step toward helping yourself. Great!</p>
+<p>You begin to feel this strength from within, motivating you to overcome any and every obstacle that may stand in the way of your happiness, social life and home life. You are not a slave to PMO any more!</p>
+<p>You will find that from this moment on you are developing more self control. You will now face every situation in a calm, relaxed state of mind. Your thinking is very clear and sharp at all times. You are free!</p>
+<p>You begin to feel that your self respect and confidence are expanding more and more each and every day in every way. You now realize that in the past addiction was an escape and weakness that you are replacing with confidence, strength and self control. You are becoming a happy person now, with a positive attitude toward life. You are succeeding now and you have all the abilities for success.</p>
+<p>Therefore, if for any reason at this moment you are not completely relaxed I want you now to completely relax… let go of everything… let all your arms and your legs and your entire body completely let go and relax completely… Now that you are relaxed… relaxed more than you have ever been before, we come to this second point… The second point is realization.</p>
+<p>From this moment on you’re going to think well of yourself in every way. You’re going to be surprised and amazed at what a better person you are, not so much because of what you do but because of what you are; your composition, the fact that you are… From this moment on it is important to completely re-educate you, to get rid of the habit pattern because you finished with the relaxation and you finished with the realization and now comes the re-education.</p>
+<p>As so from this moment on, you have no compulsion toward porn, that’s been removed. You’re going to be surprised and amazed at how much better you feel. You’ve lost all desire to watch porn. The desire is gone for you. You’re no longer interested in porn in any form… And all those suggestions take complete and thorough effect on you… The fourth point is rehabilitation.</p>
+<p>That consists of breaking the habit pattern and strengthening the self. The habit pattern is only part of yesterday and yesterday’s habit pattern with regard to porn is gone. Your damaged ego has been repaired. For this is a dynamic way with dealing with PMOers. And it’s a dynamic pattern in dealing with you. For we removed your habit pattern, and porn to you is distasteful, you have no desire for it in any form and should you even accidentally glance it, it will be distasteful to you. Your faith in your own self is strengthened and these suggestions are reinforced which is the fifth point…</p>
+<p>… over and over again at regular intervals in you life. Now you sink deeper and deeper and deeper… And your PMO problem vanishes leaving you sound in mind, sound in spirit, sound in body and sound in health.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
04-02 REBT Coping Statements
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 12:14:53 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/04-02-rebt-coping-statements/
+ <h2 id="rebt-coping-statements">REBT Coping Statements</h2>
+<ul>
+<li><em>“I can stop PMO, even though it appears ‘hard’ to do so. It’s not too hard and no matter how much trouble it takes, it’s worth it!”</em></li>
+<li><em>“If I keep ignoring and never giving into my powerful urges to PMO, I will make it easier and easier to resist them”</em></li>
+<li><em>“I can fully and unconditionally accept myself- yes, even with all my flaws and failings”</em></li>
+<li><em>“PMO seems to quickly ‘cure’ my problems but actually makes them worse.”</em></li>
+<li><em>“At times, I’d like very much to drown my troubles in PMO but that is never a reason to do so.”</em></li>
+<li><em>“It’s most uncomfortable when I don’t get what I really want. But it’s not awful or terrible unless I choose to believe that it is and I choose to believe something more realistic and helpful.”</em></li>
+<li><em>“I’ll never like unfair treatment but I damned well can stand it and perhaps plot and scheme to stop it.”</em></li>
+<li><em>“No matter how many times I fail at this important pursuit, my failure never makes me an incompetent louse. It just makes me a person who may have acted incompetently at that time.”</em></li>
+<li><em>“I don’t absolutely need what I want but I can still be reasonably happy, though not as happy - when I don’t get it.”</em></li>
+<li><em>“I strongly prefer to be outstanding at my work, but I don’t have to be. Too bad if I’m not but it doesn’t make me inferior. I can always keep trying to do better without needing to do better.”</em></li>
+<li><em>“Many things can help make me sorry and disappointed but when I demand and command that these things must not exist, I then make myself panicked, depressed and enraged.”</em></li>
+<li><em>“Yes, I’ve often failed to do what I promised that I’d do, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t or won’t carry out this promise.”</em></li>
+<li><em>“I hate like hell being anxious and depressed but I don’t have to immediately dissolve these feelings in PMO. When I PMO, I temporarily feel better about my problems but I don’t get better. In the long run, PMO makes them worse.”</em></li>
+<li><em>“People don’t enrage me by treating me badly. I pigheadedly choose to enrage myself about their bad treatment by demanding and commanding that they act better.”</em></li>
+</ul>
+
+
+
+ -
+
04-01 The Instructions
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 12:13:26 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/04-01-the-instructions/
+ <h2 id="the-instructions">The Instructions</h2>
+<ol>
+<li>Follow all the instructions.</li>
+<li>Keep an open mind.</li>
+<li>Start with a feeling of elation.</li>
+<li>Ignore all advice and influences that conflict with EasyPeasyway</li>
+<li>Resist any promise of a temporary fix.</li>
+<li>Get it clear in your mind: PMO gives you no genuine pleasure or crutch; you are not making a sacrifice; there is nothing to give up and no reason to feel deprived.</li>
+<li>Don’t wait to quit. Do it now!</li>
+<li>Make a decision never to PMO again and never question it.</li>
+<li>Always remember there’s no such thing as “Just One Peek”.</li>
+<li>Never PMO again.</li>
+</ol>
+<h3 id="affirmations">Affirmations</h3>
+<ul>
+<li>I am free from the slavery of PMO.</li>
+<li>It is easy for me to ignore my thoughts about PMO.</li>
+<li>Bye bye thoughts, bye bye Urges. Oh, there goes my cravings.</li>
+<li>I focus my subconscious mind to overcome masturbation addiction.</li>
+<li>PMO zaps my time, energy and vitality.</li>
+<li>Beating PMO gets easier day by day and in every way.</li>
+<li>I enjoy and value my PMO free strong, happy, light and easy lifestyle.</li>
+<li>If I look back and think about my progress, it gives me great joy and pride in myself.</li>
+<li>Every time I see other PMOers I get more motivated to see myself break that chain.</li>
+<li>All that pent up energy is healing my body and my mind. And then I can do more productive and challenging work towards my values and my goals.</li>
+<li>My brain is getting back in the right shape as it gets exercised by me not doing what I was doing before.</li>
+<li>Now, all that pent up willpower is being used to handle the other lightweight stresses and
+strains of life.</li>
+<li>Great, I am free. I am not a slave any more!</li>
+</ul>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-44 Should I Tell My SO
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 11:36:58 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-44-should-i-tell-my-so/
+ <h2 id="should-i-tell-my-so">Should I Tell My SO</h2>
+<p>Should I tell my wife, girlfriend and SO about my PMO? The intention here is that it would help you in quitting. I am of the solid opinion that all these are not needed. It would only reinforce your weakness against PMO.</p>
+<p>If you slip, you will feel miserable and guilty if you are following the Willpower Method. Add to that the feeling of deceiving your loved one will definitely push you through the vicious cycle of slip-lapse-relapse.</p>
+<p>If you are caught once - just say you are feeling good that you got caught and you are out of the prison. And you don’t want to talk about it. Many women can’t digest it. Many men wrongly attribute the woman to be of loose morals and hence a bad person. And if the SO breaks up with you (even if for some other reason) you will feel guilty for having screwed up your sex life with PMO OR feeling you “sacrificed” so much if you were successful in quitting - adding to the heart ache.</p>
+<p>You will look very weak. They will treat you as a weak person - of course only subconsciously. But you can smell it. Why the stress?</p>
+<p>If no one knows about it, then let this thing get buried. No one needs to know.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-43 Advice to Non-PMOers
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 11:31:13 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-43-advice-to-non-pmoers/
+ <h2 id="advice-to-non-pmoers">Advice to Non-PMOers</h2>
+<h3 id="help-get-your-pmo-friends-to-read-this-book">HELP GET YOUR PMO FRIENDS TO READ THIS BOOK</h3>
+<p>First study the contents of this book and try to put yourself in the place of the PMOer. Do not force him to read this book or try to stop him by telling him he is ruining his health or playing with fire. He already knows this better than you do. PMOers do not continue in it because they enjoy it or because they want to. They only tell themselves and other people this in order to retain self-respect. They do it because they feel dependent on PMO because they think that it relaxes them and gives them courage and confidence (pleasure or crutch) and that life will never be enjoyable without “sex” - their version of it. If you try to force a PMOer to stop, he feels like a trapped animal and wants to be in his harem even more. This may turn him into a secret PMOer and in his mind the porn will become even more precious (see Chapter 26).</p>
+<p>Instead, concentrate on the other side of the coin. Get him into the company of ex-PMOers (there are many blogs, forums etc. YBOP, No-Fap etc.). Get them to tell the PMOer how they too thought they were hooked for life and how much better life is as a non-PMOer. Once you have got him believing that he can stop then his mind will start to open up. Then start explaining the delusion created by withdrawal pangs. Not only are the “dopamine rushes” not giving him a boost but they are destroying his confidence and making him irritable and tired.</p>
+<p>He should now be ready to read this book himself. He will be expecting to read pages and pages about unreliable arousal, fading penetrations, PIED, PE, etc. Explain that the approach is completely different and that references to illness are just a small fraction of the material in the book.</p>
+<h3 id="help-during-the-withdrawal-period">HELP DURING THE WITHDRAWAL PERIOD</h3>
+<p>If you are dealing with a girlfriend or boyfriend - whether the ex-PMOer is suffering or not, assume that she/he is. Do not try to minimize his suffering by telling him it is easy to stop; he can do that himself. Instead keep telling him how proud you are, how much better he is looking, how much sweeter it is to be with him, how much easier he is in general. It is particularly important to keep doing this. When a PMOer makes an attempt to stop, the euphoria of the attempt and the attention he gets from friends and colleagues can help him along. However, they tend to forget quickly, so keep that praise going.</p>
+<p>Because he is not talking about PMOing, you may think he has forgotten about it and don’t want to remind him. Usually the complete opposite is the case with the Willpower Method, as the ex-PMOer tends to be obsessed by nothing else. So do not be frightened to bring the subject up and keep praising him: he will tell you if he doesn’t want you to remind him of PMOing.</p>
+<p>Go out of your way to relieve him of pressures during the withdrawal period. Try to think of ways of making his life interesting and enjoyable. This can also be a trying period for non-PMOers - that is those of you who have never had this addiction. If one member of a group is irritable, it can cause general misery all round. So anticipate this if the ex-PMOer is feeling irritable. He may well take it out on you but do not retaliate: it is at this time that he needs your praise and sympathy the most. If you are feeling irritable yourself, try not to show it.</p>
+<p>One of the tricks an addict will play when trying to give up with the aid of the Willpower Method was to get into a tantrum, hoping that wife or friends would say, “I cannot bear to see you suffering like this. For goodness sake, have your poison.” The PMOer then does not lose face, as he isn’t “giving in” - he has been instructed. If the ex-PMOer uses this ploy, on no account encourage him to lapse. Instead say, “if that is what PMO does to you, thank goodness you will soon be free. How marvellous that you had the courage and sense to give up.”</p>
+<h3 id="help-end-this-scandal">HELP END THIS SCANDAL</h3>
+<p>In my opinion, internet porn is one of the dangers in a free society, piggy backing on the good willed efforts of personal freedoms. Surely the very basis of civilization, the reason why the human species has advanced so far, is that we are capable of communicating our knowledge and experiences not only to each other but to future generations. Even the lower species find it necessary to warn their offspring of the pitfalls in life.</p>
+<p>The producers of porn are not doing this in good faith, in the genuine belief that they help mankind, especially now as the addiction to internet porn is widely studied. Maybe in its initial stages people genuinely believed that porn taught intimacy to men and women but today the authorities know that it is a fallacy. Just watch any tube sites nowadays. They make no claims about education. The only claims they make are about the shock, novelty, escalation quality of their clips.</p>
+<p>The sheer hypocrisy is incredible. As a society we get uptight about school bullying and objectification of human body. Compared with internet porn, these problems are mere pimples in our society. Thirty five per cent of the population have been addicted to porn and most of them spend quality time with imaginary and illusory pixel people at the expense of health, virility, energy and time. Tens of thousands of people have their lives ruined every year because they become hooked. Internet high speed porn is by far the biggest killer in relationships and yet the biggest vested interest is our for-profit companies. Internet porn producers don’t spend on advertising the filth in mainstream publications - they don’t have to. Our biological urges will lead us to the thresholds of their well stocked internet harems. They give free samples just like your local drug dealer. Heck the tube sites don’t even stock the wares any more as they encourage visitors to post the content.</p>
+<p>How clever that porn companies show the 18+ warning at their home page as the deterrent for under age users. Some even don’t bother to do that. Internet porn affect everyone at all ages. “We have warned you of the danger. It is your choice.” Is the attitude they have. Anyway, do they take any steps to verify the age? No. That would discourage their customers. And of course if age verification is legislated they will find another country to host. Or they will pay some ‘elite’ to write how prohibition resulted in bootlegging and the creation of the Mafia. Conveniently forgotten is the question of why repealing prohibition did not result in the reduction of alcohol related casualty numbers. And the contribution of the failure of law enforcement to control the Mafia’s growth. So let’s not waste time in talking about them.</p>
+<p>I am confident we can address this differently. By educating our younger generation. If they can step around the cigarettes and alcohol aisles at the local grocery shops then they can do the same with Internet porn too. “Nicotine steals your health, porn steals your hottie.” A catchy meme indeed. The PMOer doesn’t have the choice any more than the heroin addict does. PMOers do not decide to become hooked; they are lured into a subtle trap. If PMOers had the choice, the only PMOers tomorrow morning would be the youngsters starting out and believing they could stop any time they wanted to.</p>
+<p>Why the phony standards? Why are heroin addicts seen as criminals, yet can register as addicts and get free heroin and proper medical treatment to help get off it? Just try registering as a porn addict. If you go to your doctor for help, either he will tell you: “stop doing it so much, try moderation,” which you already know won’t work or he will prescribe something else to address your “depression.” Worse is the advice to go and find real partners. Seriously? Do they know of PMOers who find porn better and do it behind their partner’s back? Some people just don’t get it.</p>
+<p>Scare campaigns do not help PMOers to stop. They make it harder. All they do is to frighten PMOers, which makes them want to PMO even more. They don’t even prevent teenagers from becoming hooked. Teenagers know that porn kills their libido but they also know one peek will not do it. Because the habit is so prevalent, sooner or later the teenager, through social pressures or curiosity, will try just one visit. And because the free porn has awful clips, he will probably become hooked.</p>
+<p>Why do we allow this scandal to go on? Why doesn’t our government come out with a proper campaign? Why doesn’t it tell us that internet porn is a drug and a killer poison, that it does not relax you or give you confidence but destroys your nerves and that it can take just one peek to become hooked? Why can’t they enforce age verification by requesting a registered credit card, maybe with a third party company?</p>
+<p>I remember reading H. G. Well’s The Time Machine. The book describes an incident in the distant future in which a man falls into a river. His companions merely sit around the bank like cattle, oblivious to his cries of desperation. I found that incident inhuman and very disturbing. I find the general apathy of our society to the PMO problem very similar. We find characters in movies and TV series talking about or even engaging in porn in a casual way.</p>
+<p>Why do we allow society to subject healthy young teenagers, youngsters whose lives are complete before they start to get online, to claim their independence just for the privilege of destroying themselves mentally and physically in a lifetime of slavery, a lifetime of filth and disease? You may feel that I over-dramatize the facts. Not so. There are cases where lives were cut down in his early years of marriage because of PMO. He was a strong man and might still have been alive today. I believe I was within an inch of PIED during my forties, although I would have attributed it to my divorce rather than to PMO. I now spend my life being consulted by people who have been crippled by the disease or are in the last stages. And, if you care to think about it, you probably know of many too.</p>
+<p>There is a wind of change in society. A snowball has started that I hope this book will help turn into an avalanche. You too can help by spreading the message.</p>
+<h3 id="final-warning">FINAL WARNING</h3>
+<p>You can now enjoy the rest of your life as a happy non-PMOer. In order to make sure that you do, you need to follow these simple instructions:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Keep this page in your bookmarks and refer to it as much as you need.</li>
+<li>If you ever start to envy another PMOer, realize that they will be envious of you. You are not being deprived. They are.</li>
+<li>Remember you did not enjoy being a PMOer. That’s why you stopped. You do enjoy being a non-PMOer.</li>
+<li>Remember, there is no such thing as just one peek.</li>
+<li>Never doubt your decision never to PMO again. You know it’s the correct decision.</li>
+<li>If you have any difficulties find and contact a therapist who is knowledgeable in internet porn. You will find a list of these online.</li>
+</ol>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-42 Help the PMOer Left on the Sinking Ship
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 11:28:29 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-42-help-the-pmoer-left-on-the-sinking-ship/
+ <h2 id="help-the-pmoer-left-on-the-sinking-ship">Help the PMOer Left on the Sinking Ship</h2>
+<p>PMOers are panicking nowadays. They sense that there is a change in the way internet porn is perceived by men and women. Internet porn’s addictive nature is being studied by more and more people. It is now rightly regarded not as the same as old traditional porn. It’s easy reach and effortless availability raises alarm even in the hearts of porn supporters. They also sense that their crusade for free speech and free thought is being hijacked by vicious elements. The wild wild west nature of the unpoliced internet makes it hard for enforcing age restrictive access to supranormal stimuli. Yet I don’t think this whole thing will be coming to an end anytime soon. Thousands of PMOers are now stopping and all porn users are conscious of the new brain studies that point their studied fingers to the similarities of drug and substance addiction. Every time a PMOer leaves the sinking ship, the ones left on it feel more miserable. Every PMOer instinctively knows that it is ridiculous to self sabotage and spend time in front of two dimensional pixels, treat the poor brain to super surges, develop porn brain water slides that will guarantee him unreliable erections and fading penetrations. If you still don’t think it is silly, try talking to a porn magazine standing at the centre of the city square and ask yourself what the difference is. Just one. You cannot get the pleasure of warmth and intimacy that way. If you can stop buying alcohol and cigarettes every time you go grocery shopping you can definitely stop visiting your online harems. PMOers cannot find a rational reason for PMOing but if someone else is doing it, they do not feel quite so silly.</p>
+<p>PMOers blatantly lie about their habit, not only to others and university researchers but worse of all to themselves. They have to. The brainwashing is essential if they are to retain some self-respect. They feel the need to justify their “habit” not only to themselves but to non-PMOers. They are therefore forever advertising the illusory advantages of porn and PMO by more subtler means.</p>
+<p>If a PMOer stops using the Willpower Method he still feels deprived and tends to become a moaner. All this does is to confirm to other PMOers how right they are to keep PMOing. If the ex-PMOer succeeds in kicking the habit, he is then grateful that he no longer has to go through life sabotaging himself or wasting energy. But he has no need to justify himself, he doesn’t sit there saying how marvellous it is not to be PMOing. He will do that only if he is asked and PMOers won’t ask that question. They wouldn’t like the answer. Remember: it is fear that keeps them in their addiction and they would rather keep their heads in the sand. The only time they ask that question is when it is time to stop. Help the PMOer. Remove these fears. Tell him how marvellous it is not to have to go through life living in a prison, how lovely it is to wake up in the morning feeling fit and healthy instead of lacking in energy and self loathing, how wonderful it is to be free of slavery, to be able to enjoy the whole of your life, to be rid of those awful black shadows. Or, better still; get him to read this book.</p>
+<p>It is essential not to belittle a married PMOer by indicating that he is deliberately ruining his relationship or is in some way a cheat and is unclean. There is a common conception that the ex-PMOer is the worst in this respect. I believe this conception has some substance but I think this is due to the Willpower Method of stopping. Because the ex-PMOer, although he has kicked the habit, retains part of the brainwashing - part of him still believes that he has made a sacrifice. He feels vulnerable and his natural defensive mechanism is to attack the PMOer.</p>
+<p>This may help the ex-PMOer but it does nothing to help the PMOer. All it does is put his back up, make him feel even more wretched and consequently make his need for PMO even greater. Although the change in the medical establishment’s attitude to internet porn is the main reason why many of PMOers are quitting, it doesn’t make it any easier for them to do so. In fact, it makes it a great deal harder. Most PMOers nowadays believe they are stopping mainly for health reasons. This is not strictly true.</p>
+<p>Although the enormous health risk is obviously the chief reason for quitting, PMOers have been sabotaging their virility for years and it has made not the slightest difference. The main reason why PMOers are stopping is because society is beginning to see PMOing for what it actually is: filthy drug addiction. The enjoyment was always an illusion; this attitude removes this illusion, so that the PMOer is left with nothing. Many women and girlfriends now would ask questions if you are on your laptop in the middle of the night.</p>
+<p>The complete ban on porn in some countries and or the unavailability of internet is a classic example of the travelling PMOer’s dilemma. The PMOer either takes the attitude: “OK, if I cannot PMO during this time, I will find a way to abscond,” which does no good for him if his job is hanging on it. Or he says: “Fine, it will help me cut down on my PMOing.” The result of this is that instead of one or two a day, neither of which he would have enjoyed, he abstains for an entire week. During this enforced period of abstinence however, not only will he be mentally deprived and waiting for his reward but his body will have been craving too. Oh, how precious that online harem visit will be when he is eventually allowed to go.</p>
+<p>Enforced abstinences do not actually cut down the intake because the PMOer just indulges himself even more when he is eventually allowed to be alone. All it does is to ingrain in the PMOer’s mind how precious internet porn and PMO are and how dependent he is upon them. I think the most insidious aspect of this enforced abstinence is its effect on younger population. We allow the “hijackers” of “freedom of expression” - the porn producers - to target unfortunate teenagers to get hooked in the first place. Then, at what is probably the most stressful period in their lives, when in their deluded minds they need PMO most of all, we blackmail them into giving up because of the harm they are causing to themselves.</p>
+<p>Many are unable to do so and are forced, through no fault of their own, to suffer a guilt complex for the rest of their lives. Many of them succeed and are pleased to do so, thinking, “Fine. I will do this for now and after it’s over I will be cured anyway.” Then comes the pain and fear of finding work etc. followed by the biggest “high” of their lives - finding a job. The pain and fear are over. Then they feel secure and the old trigger mechanism comes back into operation. Part of the brainwashing is still there and almost before the smell of the new work laptop is gone the PMOer is at the threshold of his favourite online harem. The elation of the occasion blocks the foul feelings from his or her mind. She has no intention of becoming hooked again. But… “just the one peek.” Too late! She is already hooked again.</p>
+<p>The little porn monster has got into her body again. The old craving will start and even if she doesn’t become hooked again straight away, post-high depression will probably catch her out. It is strange that although heroin addicts are criminals in law, our society’s attitude is quite rightly, “What can we do to help these pathetic individuals?” Let us adopt the same attitude to the poor PMOer. He is not doing it because he wants to but because he thinks he has got to and, unlike the heroin addict, he usually has to suffer years and years of mental and physical torture. We always say a quick death is better than a slow one, so do not envy the poor PMOer. He and she deserves your pity.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-41 Feedback
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 09:21:34 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-41-feedback/
+ <h2 id="feedback">Feedback</h2>
+<p>This method will be pooh-poohed by the so-called experts - as I have kept it thin, deliberately, on the ‘science’ side of porn addiction. This ‘hackbook’ is based on a very successful technique used by Alan Carr for quitting smoking, alcohol and gambling. I have personally broken away from the prisons of cigarette, alcohol and internet porn with this technique. I’d like to add here that I’ve tried some of the best programmes - such as CBT, DEADS and AVERT before arriving at the EasyWay. I could not close the deal. I was then led to studying about self hypnosis that deals with bad habits. The key idea that sold me on this method is his emphasis on the “feelings of misery and deprivation, misery and sacrifice, misery and guilt.” If you use the Will Power method you will invariably have all or one of these awful feelings that in themselves provide the grease to slide back to the addiction.</p>
+<p>I’m not a do-gooder. My war - which, I emphasize, is not against PMOers but against the porn trap, I wage for the purely selfish reason that I enjoy it. Every time I hear of a PMOer escaping from the prison I get a feeling of great pleasure, even when it has nothing to do with me. You can imagine also the immense pleasure I obtain from the grateful letters that I have received over time.</p>
+<p>There has also been considerable frustration. The frustration is caused mainly by two main categories of PMOer. First, in spite of the warning in the previous chapter, I am disturbed by the number of PMOers who find it easy to stop, yet later get hooked again and find they can’t succeed the next time.</p>
+<p>Practically the last thing I say to ex-PMOers is: “Remember, you must never visit another online harem again.”</p>
+<p>One particular man said, “Have no fear, If I manage to stop, I’ll definitely never PMO again.”</p>
+<p>I could tell that the warning hadn’t really registered, I said, “I know you feel like that at the moment, but how will you feel six months on?”</p>
+<p>He said, “I will never PMO again.”</p>
+<p>A while later there was another phone call. “I had a lapse while on a business trip, and now I’m back on one a day.”</p>
+<p>I said, “Do you remember when you first phoned? You hated it so much you were going to pay your mentor $1,000 if you could stop for a week.”</p>
+<p>“I remember. Haven’t I been stupid?”</p>
+<p>“Do you remember you promised me you would never PMO again?”</p>
+<p>“I know. I’m a fool.”</p>
+<p>It’s like finding someone up to his neck in a swamp and about to go under. You help pull him out. He is grateful to you and then, six months later, dives straight back into the swamp. Ironically, when this man attended a subsequent session he said, “Can you believe it? I offered to pay a 21 yr old $1,000 if he would not PMO for a year. I paid up. I can’t believe he could be so stupid.”</p>
+<p>I said, “I don’t see how you can call him stupid. At least he doesn’t know the misery he’s in for. You knew it as well as anyone and survived only a month.” PMOers who find it easy to stop and start again pose a special problem. However, when you get free PLEASE, PLEASE, DON’T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE. They believe that such people start again because they are still hooked and are missing the dopamine. In fact, they find stopping so easy that they lose their fear of PMOing. They think: “I can have an odd PMO session. Even if I do get hooked again, I’ll find it easy to stop again.”</p>
+<p>I’m afraid it just doesn’t work that way. It’s easy to stop PMOing but It’s impossible to try to control the addiction. The one thing that is essential to becoming a non-PMOer is not to PMO.</p>
+<p>The other category of PMOers that causes me frustration is those who are just too frightened to make the attempt to stop or when they do, find it a great struggle. The main difficulties appear to be the following:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Fear of failure. There is no disgrace in failure but not to try is plain stupidity. Look at it this way - you’re hiding from nothing. The worst thing that can happen is that you fail, in which case you are no worse off than you are now. Just think how wonderful it would be to succeed. If you don’t make the attempt, you have already guaranteed failure.</li>
+<li>Fear of panic and of being miserable. Don’t worry about it. Just think: what awful thing could happen to you if you never again PMOed? Absolutely none. Terrible things will happen if you do. Re-read my notes on Pascal’s Wager. In any case, the panic is caused by dopamine and will soon be gone. The greatest gain is to be rid of that fear. Do you really believe that PMOers are prepared to have fading penetrations and unreliable erections or the pleasure of orgasms which they get from porn? If you find yourself feeling panicky, deep breathing will help. If you are with other people and they are getting you down, go away from them. Escape to the garage or an empty office or wherever.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>If you feel like crying, don’t be ashamed. Crying is nature’s way of relieving tension. No one has ever had a good cry without feeling better afterwards. One of the awful things we do to young boys is to teach them not to cry. You see them trying to fight the tears back but watch the jaw grinding away. We teach ourselves to not to show any emotions. We are meant to show emotions, not to try to bottle them up inside us. Scream or shout or have a tantrum. Kick a cardboard box or filing cabinet. Regard your struggle as a boxing match that you cannot lose. No one can stop time. Every moment that passes that little porn monster inside you is dying. Enjoy your inevitable victory.
+3. Not following the instructions. Incredibly, some PMOers say to me, “Your method just didn’t work for me.” They then describe how they ignored not only one instruction but practically all of them. (For clarification I will summarize these in the check-list at the end of this chapter).
+4. Misunderstanding instructions. The chief problems appear to be these:</p>
+<p><strong>(a)</strong> “I can’t stop thinking about porn.”</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p>Of course you can’t and if you try, you will create a phobia and be miserable. It’s like trying to get to sleep at night; the more you try, the harder it becomes. I think about porn and PMO 90 per cent of my life. It’s what you are thinking that’s important. If you are thinking, “Oh, I’d love to masturbate to PMO,” or, “When will I be free?” You’ll be miserable. If instead you are thinking, ‘YIPPEE! I am free!” You’ll be happy.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><strong>(b)</strong> “When will the little porn monster die?”</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p>The dopamine flush leaves your body very rapidly. But it is impossible to tell when your body will cease to suffer from the slight physical sensation of dopamine withdrawal. That empty, insecure feeling is identical to normal hunger, depression or stress. All the PMO does is to increase the level of it. This is why PMOers who stop by using the Willpower Method are never quite sure whether they’ve kicked it. Even after the body has ceased to suffer from dopamine surge’s withdrawal, if they suffer normal hunger or stress, their brain is still saying, “That means you must claim your entitled PMO.” The point is you don’t have to wait for the craving to go; it is so slight that we don’t even know it’s there. We know it only as feeling, “I want , I want.” When you leave the dentist after the final session, do you wait for your jaw to stop aching? Of course you don’t. You get on with your life. Even though your jaw’s still aching, you are elated.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><strong>(c)</strong> Waiting for the “moment of revelation” (MoR)<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>. If you wait for it, you are just causing another phobia, I once stopped for three weeks on the Willpower Method.</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p>I chatted with an old friend. He said, “How are you getting on?”</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>I said, “I’ve survived three weeks.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>He said, “What do you mean, you’ve survived three weeks?”</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>I said, “I’ve gone three weeks without a PMO.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>He said, “What are you going to do? Survive the rest of your life? What are you waiting for? You’ve done it. You’re a non-PMOer.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>I thought, “He’s absolutely right. What am I waiting for?” Unfortunately because I didn’t fully understand the nature of the trap at that time, I was soon back in it but the point was noted. You become a non-PMOer when you close your browser. The important thing is to be a happy non-PMOer from the start.</p>
+<p><strong>(d)</strong> “I am still craving porn.” Then you are being very stupid. How can you claim, “I want to be a non-PMOer.” And then say, “I want porn?” That’s a contradiction. If you say, “I want to PMO.” You are saying, “I want to be a PMOer.” Non-PMOers don’t want to visit the disgusting tube sites. You already know what you really want to be, so stop punishing yourself.</p>
+<p><strong>(e)</strong> “I’ve opted out of life.” Why? All you have to do is stop killing yourself and start energizing yourself. You don’t have to stop living. Look, it’s as simple as this. For the next few days you’ll have a slight trauma in your life. Your body will suffer the almost imperceptible aggravation of withdrawal from your demands and claims for a dopamine surge. Now, bear this in mind: you are no worse off than you were. This is what you have been suffering the whole of your life, every time you have been asleep or in a church, supermarket or library. It didn’t seem to bother you when you were a PMOer and if you don’t stop, you’ll go on suffering this distress for the rest of your life.</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p>PMO and orgasms don’t make meals or drinks or social occasions; they sometimes deprive you of them. Even while your body is still craving dopamine surge claims, meals and social occasions are marvellous. Life is marvellous. Go to social functions, even if there are naked dancers there. Remember that you are not being deprived; they are.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>Every one of them would love to be in your position, only if they knew. Enjoy being the prima donna and the centre of attention. Stopping PMO is a wonderful conversation point but you can take a secret pleasure that you just can’t. I am sure they will be surprised to see that you, a shying and tired looking fellow is now happy and cheerful. If you are practising no orgasms and karezza with one of the women she will think that you are incredible. Every woman wants the amative side so be sure to indulge yourself in that. The important point is that you’ll be enjoying life right from the start. There’s no need to envy PUAs at the parties. They’ll be envying you - ah, only if they knew.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><strong>(f)</strong> “I am miserable and irritable.” That is because you haven’t followed my instructions.</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p>Find out which one it is. Some people understand and believe everything I say but still start off with a feeling of doom and gloom, as if something terrible were happening. You are doing not only what you’d like to do but what every PMOer on the planet would like to do. With any method of stopping, what the ex PMOer is trying to achieve is a certain frame of mind, so that whenever he thinks about PMO he says to himself, “YIPPEE! I’M FREE!” If that’s your object, why wait? Start off in that frame of mind and never lose it. The rest of the book is designed to make you understand why there is no alternative.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2 id="the-check-list">THE CHECK LIST</h2>
+<p>If you follow these simple instructions, you cannot fail:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Make a solemn vow that you will never, ever, go online to visit your harem OR settle down for static pictures OR make peace with erotic graphics OR anything that contains supra normal stimuli, and stick to your vow.</li>
+<li>Get this clear in your mind: there is absolutely nothing to give up. By that I don’t mean simply that you will be better off as a non-PMOer (you’ve known that all this time); nor do I mean that although there is no rational reason why you PMO, you must get some form of pleasure or crutch from it or you wouldn’t do it. What I mean is, there is no genuine pleasure or crutch in PMOing. It is just an illusion, it’s an addiction like banging your head against a wall to make it pleasant when you stop.</li>
+<li>There is no such thing as a confirmed PMOer. You are just one of the millions who have fallen for this subtle trap. Like millions of other ex-PMOer who once thought they couldn’t escape, you have escaped.</li>
+<li>If at any time in your life you were to weigh up the pros and cons of PMOing, the overwhelming conclusion would always be, a dozen times over, “Stop doing it. You are a fool!” Nothing will ever change that. It always has been that way, and it always will be. Having made what you know to be the correct decision, don’t ever torture yourself by doubting it. Going through Pascal’s Wager of no chances of loss, high chances of gains, high chances of avoiding losses perfectly applies to PMO.</li>
+<li>Don’t try not to think about porn or worry that you are thinking about it constantly. But whenever you do think about it – whether it be today, tomorrow or the rest of your life think, “YIPPEE! I’M A NON-PMOer!”</li>
+<li>DO NOT use any form of substitute. DO NOT keep your laptop next to you when you go to sleep. DO NOT avoid plays or movies or magazines. DO NOT change your lifestyle in any way purely because you’ve stopped. If you follow the above instructions, you will soon experience the “moment of revelation” (MoR). But:</li>
+<li>Don’t wait for moment of revelation to come. Just get on with your life. Enjoy the highs and cope with the lows. You will find that in no time at all the moment will arrive.</li>
+</ol>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p><strong>MoR</strong> - moment of revelation. R2T resistance to temptation. MaD misery and deprived. MaS misery and sacrifice. MaG misery and guilty. DSC dopamine surge claims. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-40 A Final Warning
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 09:20:54 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-40-a-final-warning/
+ <h2 id="a-final-warning">A Final Warning</h2>
+<p>No PMOer, given the chance of going back to the time before he became hooked with the knowledge he has now, would opt to start. Many of the them who consult me are convinced that if I could only help them stop, they would never dream of PMOing again, and yet thousands of PMOers successfully kick the habit for many years and lead perfectly happy lives, only to get trapped once again. I trust that this book will help you to find it relatively easy to stop. But be warned: PMOers who find it easy to stop find it easy to start again, DO NOT FALL FOR THIS TRAP.</p>
+<p>No matter how long you have stopped or how confident you are that you will never become hooked again, make it a rule of life not to PMO for any reason. Resist the allusions and innuendoes in the media, and remember they are pushing their image of ‘openness’ by bringing porn into mainstream without realizing how porn, internet porn etc. are killers of relationships and of the personal sense of well being for a huge number of men and some women.</p>
+<p>Remember, that first peek or visit will do nothing for you. You will have no withdrawal pangs to relieve and it will make you feel awful. What it will do is to put the pleasure of dopamine rush into your mind and brain, and a little voice at the back of your mind will be saying, “you want another one.” Then you have got the choice of being miserable for a while or starting the whole filthy chain again.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-39 The Final Visit
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 09:15:27 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-39-the-final-visit/
+ <h2 id="the-final-visit">The Final Visit</h2>
+<p>Having decided on your timing, you are now ready to visit your harem one last time. Before you do so, check on the two essentials:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Do you feel certain of success?</li>
+<li>Have you a feeling of doom and gloom or a sense of excitement that you are about to achieve something marvelous?</li>
+</ol>
+<p>If you have any doubts, re-read the book first. Remember that you never decided to fall into the porn trap. But that trap is designed to enslave you for life. In order to escape you need to make the positive decision that you are about to stop and make your final visit.</p>
+<p>Remember, the only reason that you have read this book so far is because you would dearly love to escape. So make that positive decision now. Make a solemn vow that when you close your incognito browser window, whether you find it easy or difficult, you will never visit your harem again or engage in PMO. Perhaps you are worried that you have made this vow several times in the past but are still failing or that you will have to go through some awful trauma. Have no fear, the worse thing that can possibly happen is that you fail and so you have absolutely nothing to lose and so much to gain.</p>
+<p>But stop even thinking about failure. The beautiful truth is that it is not only ridiculously easy to quit but you can actually enjoy the process. This time you are going to use EASYWAY! All you need to do is to follow the simple instructions that I’m about to give you:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Make the solemn vow now and mean it.</li>
+<li>Browse the pictures and clips on your favorite tube site consciously, look at the desperate attempts by the site admins, actors and even amateurs at amplifying the shock, novelty, supra stimulation values of their wares and ask yourself where the pleasure is.</li>
+<li>When you finally close the browser, do so not with a feeling of: “I must never visit another online harem again” or “I’m not allowed to visit another,” but instead with the feeling of:</li>
+</ol>
+<blockquote>
+<p>“Isn’t it great! I’m free! I’m no longer a slave to porn! I don’t ever have to visit these filthy
+sites in my life again.”<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
+</blockquote>
+<ol start="4">
+<li>Be aware that for a few days, there will be a little porn saboteur inside your stomach. You might only know the feeling, “I want to PMO.” At times I refer to that little porn monster as the slight physical craving for dopamine. Strictly this is incorrect and it is important that you understand why. Because it takes about three weeks for that little monster to die, ex-PMOers believe that the little monster will continue to crave after the final online harem visit and that they must therefore use willpower to resist the temptation during this period. This is not so. The body doesn’t crave porn triggered dopamine. Only the brain craves dopamine.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>If you do get that feeling of “I want a peek” over the next few days, your brain has a simple choice. It can either interpret that feeling for what it actually is - an empty insecure feeling started by the first visit to an online porn site and perpetuated by every subsequent one, and say to yourself: <strong>YIPPEE I’M A NON-PMOer!</strong><sup id="fnref1:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup></p>
+<p>Or you can start craving for porn and suffer it for the rest of your life. Just think for a moment. Wouldn’t that be an incredibly stupid thing to do? To say, “I never want to PMO again,” then spend the rest of your life saying, “I’d love a visit.” That’s what PMOers who use the Willpower Method do. No wonder they feel so miserable. They spend the rest of their lives desperately moping for something that they desperately hope they will never have. No wonder so few of them succeed and the few that do never feel completely free.</p>
+<p>It is only the doubting and the waiting that make it difficult to quit. So never doubt your decision, you know it’s the correct decision. If you begin to doubt it, you will put yourself into a no-win situation. You will be miserable if you crave a PMO visit but can’t have one. You will be even more miserable if you do have one. No matter what system you are using, what is it that you are trying to achieve when you quit, PMOing? Never to PMO again? No! Many ex-PMOers do that but go through the rest of their lives feeling deprived.</p>
+<p>What is the real difference between PMOers and non-PMOers? Non-PMOers have no need or desire to PMO, they do not crave porn and PMO and do not need to exercise willpower in order not to PMO. That’s what you are trying to achieve, and it is completely within your power to achieve it. You don’t have to wait to stop craving porn or to become a non-PMOer. You do it the moment you close that final browser session, you have cut off the supply of dopamine: <em><strong>YOU ARE ALREADY A HAPPY NON-PMOer!</strong></em></p>
+<p>And you will remain a happy non-PMOer provided:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>You never doubt your decision.</li>
+<li>You don’t wait to become a non-PMOer. If you do, you will merely be waiting for nothing to happen, which will create a phobia.</li>
+<li>You don’t try not to think about PMOing or wait for the “moment of revelation” to come. Either way you will merely create a phobia.</li>
+<li>You don’t use substitutes.</li>
+<li>You see all other PMOers as they really are and pity them rather than envy them.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>Whether they be good days or bad days, you don’t change your life just because you’ve quit PMO. If you do you will be making a genuine sacrifice and there is no need to. Remember, you haven’t given up living. You haven’t given up anything.</p>
+<p>On the contrary, you’ve cured yourself from an awful disease and escaped from an insidious prison. As the days go by and your health, both physical and mental improves, the highs will appear higher and the lows less low than when you were a PMOer. Whenever you think about PMOing either during the next few days or the rest of your life, you think: <em><strong>YIPPEE. I’M A NON-PMOer!</strong></em></p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p><strong>Seeing: The mental picture of breaking away from prison and hearing: “ Yipee, I’m free. I’m a non-PMOer. Isn’t it great I’m FREE! I’m no longer a slave! I don’t HAVE TO PMO again!” Refer Maxwell’s book “The New Psycho Cybernetics” Ch 12. Get this mental picture clearly in your mind, for it can be quite helpful in overcoming the power of external stimuli to disturb you. See yourself sitting quietly, letting the phone ring, ignoring its signal, unmoved by its command. Although you are aware of it, you no longer mind or obey it. Also, get clearly in your mind the fact that the outside signal in itself has no power over you, no power to move you. In the past you have obeyed it, responded to it, purely out of habit. You can, if you wish, form a new habit of not responding. Also notice that your failure to respond does not consist in doing something, or making an effort, or resisting or fighting but in doing nothing - in relaxation from doing. You merely relax, ignore the signal, and let its summons go unheeded. The telephone ringing is a symbolic analogy to any and every other outside stimulus you might habitually give control over to and now choose to very intentionally alter that habit.</strong> <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a> <a href="#fnref1:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-38 The Moment of Revelation
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 09:13:13 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-38-the-moment-of-revelation/
+ <h2 id="the-moment-of-revelation">The Moment of Revelation</h2>
+<p>The moment of revelation usually takes place about three weeks after stopping. The sky appears to become brighter and it is the moment when the brainwashing ends completely. When instead of telling yourself you do not need to PMO, you suddenly realize that the last thread is broken and you can enjoy the rest of your life without ever needing PMO again. It is also usually from this point that you start looking at other PMOers as objects of pity.</p>
+<p>PMOers using the Willpower Method do not normally experience this moment because although they are glad to be ex-PMOers they continue through life believing they are making a sacrifice. The more you were addicted, the more marvellous this moment is and it lasts a lifetime. I consider I have been very fortunate in this life and had some wonderful moments but the most wonderful of all was that moment of revelation. With all the other highlights of my life, although I can remember they were happy times, I can never recapture the actual feeling. I can never get over the joy of not having to PMO any more. If ever I am feeling low and need a boost nowadays, I just think how lovely it is not to be hooked on that awful addiction. Half the people who contact me after they have stopped visiting the online harems say exactly the same thing: that it was the most marvellous event of their lives. Ah! What pleasure you have to come! With additional feedback, both from forums and personal interactions, I have learned that in most cases the moment of revelation occurs not after three weeks, as stated above, but within a few days.</p>
+<p>In my own case it happened before I was finished on my last harem visit. I am sure many of the readers here, before they’d even got to the end of the chapters would say something like: “You needn’t say another word. I can see it all so clearly, I know I’ll never PMO again.” From the messages I receive I’m also aware that it frequently happens.</p>
+<p>Ideally if you follow all the instructions and understand the psychology completely, it should happen to you immediately.</p>
+<p>I say to PMOers that it takes about five days for the noticeable physical withdrawal to go and about three weeks for an ex-PMOer to get completely free. In one way I dislike giving such guidelines. It can cause two problems. The first is that I put in people’s minds the suggestion that they will have to suffer for between five days and three weeks. The second is that the ex-PMOer tends to think, “if I can survive for five days or three weeks, I can expect a real boost at the end of that period.”</p>
+<p>However, he may have five pleasant days or three pleasant weeks then followed by one of those disastrous days that strike both non-PMOers and PMOers which have nothing to do with the addiction but are caused by other factors in our lives. Then our ex-PMOer is waiting for the moment of revelation but what he experiences is depression instead. It could destroy his confidence. If I don’t give any guidelines, however, the ex-PMOer can spend the rest of his life waiting for nothing to happen. I suspect that this is what happens to the vast majority of PMOers who stop when using the Willpower Method.</p>
+<p>At one time I was tempted to say that the moment of revelation should happen immediately. But if I did that and it didn’t happen immediately, the ex-PMOer would lose confidence and think it was never going to happen.</p>
+<p>People often ask me about the significance of the five days and three weeks. Are they just periods that I’ve drawn out of the blue? No. They are obviously not definite dates but they reflect an accumulation of feedback over the years. About five days after stopping is when the ex-PMOer ceases to have the addiction as the main occupation of his mind.</p>
+<p>Most ex-PMOers experience the moment of revelation around this period. What usually happens is you are in one of those stressful or social situations that once you couldn’t cope with or enjoy without a harem visit. You suddenly realize that not only are you enjoying or coping with it but the thought of PMO has never even occurred to you. From that point on it is usually plain sailing. That’s when you know you are free.</p>
+<p>I have noticed from my previous attempts using the Willpower Method and from feedback from others, that around the three-week period is when most serious attempts to stop fail. I believe that what usually happens is that after about three weeks you sense that you have lost the desire to PMO. You need to prove this to yourself and so you hop on your browser to visit your harem. It feels weird. You’ve proved you have kicked it. But you’ve also greased the DeltaFosB porn water slides thanks to the fresh dopamine rush into your brain and this dopamine rush is what your body has been craving for three weeks. As soon as you finish the deed the dopamine starts to leave your body. Now a little voice is saying, “You haven’t kicked it. You want another one.”</p>
+<p>You don’t scurry back straight away because you don’t want to get hooked again. You allow a safe period to pass. When you are next tempted you are able to say to yourself: “But I didn’t get hooked again, so there’s no harm in having another one.” You are already on your way down the slippery slope. The key to the problem is not to wait for the moment of revelation but to realize that once you close the browser it is finished. You’ve already done all you need to do. You’ve cut off the supply of oxygen to your little monster. No force on earth can prevent you from being free unless you mope about it or wait for revelation. Go and enjoy life; cope with it right from the start. That way you’ll soon experience the moment.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-37 Should I Avoid Temptation Situations?
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 09:10:40 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-37-should-i-avoid-temptation-situations/
+ <h2 id="should-i-avoid-temptation-situations">Should I Avoid Temptation Situations?</h2>
+<p>I have been direct in my advice so far and would ask you to treat this advice as instruction rather than suggestion. I am explicit and direct, first because there are sound, practical reasons for my advice and second, because those reasons have been backed up by thousands of case studies. On the question of whether or not to try to avoid temptation during the withdrawal period, I regret that I cannot be direct. Each PMOer will need to decide for himself. I can, however, make what I hope
+will be helpful suggestions, I repeat that it is fear that keeps us to PMO all our lives and this fear consists of two distinct phases:</p>
+<h3 id="phase-1-how-can-i-survive-without-pmo">Phase 1: How can I survive without PMO?</h3>
+<p>This fear is that panicky feeling the PMOer gets when they are alone in a single phase or have an asexual, uninterested or unavailable partner. The fear isn’t caused by withdrawal pangs but is the psychological fear of dependency - you cannot survive without sex and orgasm. It actually reaches its height when you are on the verge of quitting (I won’t use giving up); at that time your withdrawal pangs are at their lowest. It is the fear of the unknown, the sort of fear that people have when they are learning to dive.</p>
+<p>The diving board is 1 foot high but seems to be 6 feet high. The water is 6 feet deep but appears to be 1 foot deep. It takes courage to launch yourself. You are convinced you are going to smash your head. The launching is the hardest part. If you can find the courage to do it, the rest is easy. This explains why many otherwise strong-willed PMOers either have never attempted to stop or can survive only a few days when they do. In fact, there are some PMOers on a porn diet who when they decide to stop, actually binge and escalate to harsher clips more quickly than if they had not decided to stop. The decision causes panic, which is stressful. This is one of the occasions when the brain triggers the instruction, “take a trip to your own personal harem.” But now you can’t take one. You are being deprived - more stress.</p>
+<p>The trigger starts again quickly when the fuse blows and you fire up the browser. Don’t worry. That panic is just psychological. It is the fear that you are dependent. The beautiful truth is that you are not, even when you are still addicted. Do not panic. Just trust me and launch yourself.</p>
+<h3 id="phase-2-longer-term-fear">Phase 2: Longer Term Fear</h3>
+<p>The second phase of fear is longer-term. It involves the fear that certain situations in the future will not be enjoyable or that you will not be able to cope with a trauma without PMO. Don’t worry. If you can launch yourself you will find the opposite to be the case. The avoidance of temptation itself falls into two main categories:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>“I will subscribe to a porn-diet of once in 4 days. I will feel more confident knowing that I can go online if it gets hard. It is OK if I fail I can just add up additional days to my next cycle.”</li>
+</ol>
+<p>I find the failure rate with people who do this is far higher than for people who just quit altogether. I believe this is due mainly to the fact that if you have a bad moment during the withdrawal period, it is easy to hop on your browser and visit your harem with the above excuses. If you have the indignity of clearly breaking your own rules such as a shattered glass window, you are more likely to overcome the temptation. In any event, the pang will probably have passed if you had delayed it. However, I believe the main reason for the higher failure rate in these cases is that the PMOer does not feel completely committed to stopping in the first place. Remember the two essentials to succeed are:</p>
+<ul>
+<li>Certainty.</li>
+<li>“Isn’t it marvellous that I do not need to PMO any more?”</li>
+</ul>
+<p>In either case, why on earth do you need PMO? If you still feel the need to visit your harem, I would suggest that you re-read this book first. It means that something hasn’t quite gelled. Take the time to kill without trace the big monster in your mind.</p>
+<ol start="2">
+<li>“Should I avoid stressful or social occasions during the withdrawal period?”</li>
+</ol>
+<p>My advice is: yes, try to avoid stressful situations. There is no sense in putting undue pressure on yourself. In the case of social events - to a bar or dance floor - my advice is the reverse. No, go out and enjoy yourself straight away. You do not need sex - the propagative side of sex - even while you are still addicted to porn. Go to a party and rejoice in the fact that you do not have to have sex and propagative sex. It will quickly prove to you the beautiful truth that life is so much better without the pressure of sex. Just think how much better it will be when the little monster has left you, together with all those needy thoughts.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-36 Substitutes
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 08:46:33 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-36-substitutes/
+ <h2 id="substitutes">Substitutes</h2>
+<p>Substitutes include restricting to porn magazines, static internet images, going on a porn-diet<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> etc. <strong>DO NOT USE ANY OF THEM</strong>. They make it harder, not easier. If you do get a pang and use a substitute it will prolong the pang and make it harder. What you are really saying is, “I need to PMO to fill the void.” It will be like giving in to a hijacker or the tantrums of a child. It will just keep the pangs coming and prolong the torture. In any event the substitutes will not relieve the pangs. Your craving is for amino acids in the brain. All it will do is keep you thinking about PMOing. Remember these points:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>There is no substitute for PMO.</li>
+<li>You do not need porn or PMO. It is not food; it is poison. When the pangs come remind yourself that it is PMOers who suffer withdrawal pangs, not non-PMOers. See them as another evil of the drug. See them as the death of a monster.</li>
+<li>Internet porn create the void; they do not fill it. The quicker you teach your brain that you do not need to PMO, or do anything else in its place, the sooner you will be free. In particular avoid anything that resembles porn, men’s magazines, movies, novels, commercials. Please don’t tell me that I am being closed minded. It is OK to talk romance and sex but not porn. If you look there will be a way to find when and where to discriminate. It is true that a small proportion of PMOers who attempt to quit using “soft porn” or a porn-diet do succeed (in their own self-analyses) and attribute their success to such use. However they quit in spite of their use and not because of it. It is unfortunate that many still recommend the porn-diet.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>This is not surprising because if you don’t fully understand the porn trap, a diet or soft substitutes sound very logical. It is based on the belief that when you attempt to quit PMO, you have two powerful enemies to defeat:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>To break the habit.</li>
+<li>To survive the terrible physical withdrawal pains.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>If you have two powerful enemies to defeat it is sensible not to fight them simultaneously but one at a time. So the theory is that you first stop using porn but continue to with it only nce every week or use safe porn. Then, once you have broken the habit, you gradually reduce the supply of porn, thus tackling each enemy separately.</p>
+<p>It sounds logical but it is based on the wrong facts. PMOing is not habit but dopamine addiction and the actual physical pain from its withdrawal is almost imperceptible. What you are trying to achieve when you quit is to kill both the little porn monster in your body and the big monster inside your brain as quickly as possible.</p>
+<p>All these substituting techniques do is to prolong the life of the “little monster” which in turn will prolong the life of the “big monster.” Remember EASYPEASYWAY makes it easy to quit immediately. You can kill the big monster (brainwashing) before your final PMO session. The little monster will soon be dead and even while it is dying, will be no more of a problem than it was
+when you were a PMOer. Just think, how can you possibly cure an addict of addiction to a drug by recommending the same drug? One eminent and highly respected writer actually stated in his book that porn is here to stay and so we have to make porn better. To his credit he is not offering that as an alternative to internet porn. However, your little monster may “use” his idea to keep you in its vicious trap. He only proved the point I am making that porn is not real and depends on supranormal stimuli. But I differ from him to say that making “good porn” and making it available will help. Addicts are not created by “theme” based porn - what we are talking is supranormal stimuli with high speed novelty.</p>
+<p>I often read PMOers who have quit using internet hardcore porn but are hooked on “safe” porn. Others are hooked on the safe porn and are still PMOing. Do not be fooled by the fact that the safe porn is awful - so was that first high-speed clip. All substitutes have exactly the same effect as any porn. I’m now talking about this business of, “I can’t have a PMO, so I’ll have ordinary porn or static pictures or go on porn diet to help fill the void.” Some even start eating. Although the empty feeling of wanting a PMO is indistinguishable from hunger for food, one will not satisfy the other. In fact, if anything is designed to make you want to PMO, it’s stuffing yourself with food. As explained before - porn diet and safe porn will only put you in the middle of the tug of war and resistance to temptation is so annoying that you will feel relieved visiting your favourite online harem.</p>
+<p>The chief evil of substitutes is that they prolong the real problem which is the brainwashing. Do you need a substitute for flu when it’s over? Of course you don’t. By saying, “I need a substitute for PMOing.” What you are really saying is, “I am making a sacrifice.” The depression associated with the Willpower Method is caused by the fact that the PMOer believes he is making a sacrifice. All you will be doing is to substitute one problem for another. There is no pleasure in stuffing yourself with food or cigarettes or alcohol. You will just get fat and miserable and in no time at all you’ll be back on the “drug.”</p>
+<p>Casual PMOers find it difficult to dismiss the belief that they are being deprived of their little reward: those who aren’t allowed to go online during a period of time on travel, family event, etc. Some say, “I wouldn’t even know how to unwind if it is not for PMO.” That proves the point. Often the break is taken not because the PMOer needs it or even wants it but because the addict - that is who he or she is - desperately needs to scratch the itch.</p>
+<p>Remember the PMO sessions never were genuine rewards. They were equivalent to wearing tight shoes to get the pleasure of taking them off. So if you feel that you must have a little reward, let that be your substitute; while you are working, wear a pair of shoes or an underwear a size too small for you, don’t allow yourself to remove them until you have your break, then experience that wonderful moment of relaxation and satisfaction when you do remove them. Perhaps you feel that would be rather stupid. You are absolutely right. It’s hard to visualize while you are still in the trap, but that is what PMOers do. It’s also hard to visualize that soon you won’t need that little “reward” and you’ll regard your friends who are still in the trap with genuine pity and wonder why they cannot see the point.</p>
+<p>However, if you go on kidding yourself that the online harem visit was a genuine reward or that you need a substitute then you will feel deprived and miserable. The chances are that you’ll end up falling into the disgusting trap again. If you need a genuine break, as housewives, teachers, doctors and other workers do, you’ll soon be enjoying that break even more because you won’t have to addict yourself. Remember, you don’t need a substitute. Those pangs are a craving for dopamine and will soon be gone. Let that be your prop for the next few days. Enjoy ridding your body and your mind of slavery and dependence.</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p><strong>porn diet</strong>: orgasming using porn only once in n number of days. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-35 The Main Reasons for Failure
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 00:23:39 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-35-the-main-reasons-for-failure/
+ <p>The Main Reasons for Failure</p>
+<p>There are two main reasons for failure. The first is the influence of external stimuli - a commercial, online news articles, internet browsing etc. At a weak moment or even during a social occasion somebody will get intimate with their partner. I have already dealt with this topic at length. Use that moment to remind yourself that there is no such thing as one visit or one peek. Rejoice in the fact that you have broken the chain of mental slavery. Remember that the PMOer envies you, and feel sorry for him. Believe me, he needs your pity. The other main reason for failure is having a bad day. Get it clear in your mind before you start that, whether you are a PMOer or a non-PMOer, there are good days and bad days. It rains for both the pope and the murderer.</p>
+<p>Life is a matter of relativity and you cannot have ups without having downs. The problem with the Willpower Method of stopping is that as soon as the PMOer has a bad day he starts moping for his ‘harem’ visit and all that does is make a bad day worse. The non-PMOer is better equipped, not only physically but also mentally, to cope with the stresses and strains of life. If you have a bad day during the withdrawal period just take it on the chin. Remind yourself that you had bad days when you were addicted (otherwise you wouldn’t have decided to stop). Instead of moping about it, say to yourself something like, “OK, today’s not so good but masturbating is not going to cure it. Tomorrow will be better and at least I have got a marvellous bonus at the moment. I have kicked that awful PMO habit.”</p>
+<p>When you are a PMOer you have to block your mind to the bad side of PMO. PMOer never have brain fog just “a bit down.” When you are having life’s inevitable troubles you want to PMO but are you happy and cheerful? Of course you aren’t. Once you stop, the tendency is to blame everything that goes wrong in your life on the fact that you have stopped.</p>
+<p>Now if your work stresses you out you think, “At times like this I would have PMOed.” That’s true but the important thing you forget is that the PMO didn’t solve the problem and you are simply punishing yourself by moping for an illusory crutch. You are creating an impossible situation. You are miserable because you can’t have the porn and masturbation yet you’ll be even more miserable if you do. You know that you have made the correct decision by stopping PMO so why punish yourself by ever doubting the decision?</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<p><em><strong>Remember: A positive mental approach is essential - always.</strong></em></p>
+</div>
+
+
+ -
+
03-34 Will It Be Harder for Me?
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 00:22:12 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-34-will-it-be-harder-for-me/
+ <h2 id="will-it-be-harder-for-me">Will It Be Harder for Me?</h2>
+<p>The combinations of factors that will determine how easily each individual PMOer will quit are infinite. To start with, each of us has his own character, type of work, personal circumstances, timing, etc. Certain professions may make it harder than others but providing the brainwashing is removed it doesn’t have to be so. A few individual examples will help.</p>
+<p>It tends to be particularly difficult for members of the medical profession. We think it should be easier for doctors because they are more aware of the effects of ill- health and are seeing daily evidence of it. Although this supplies more forceful reasons for stopping, it doesn’t make it any easier to do. The reasons are these:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>The constant awareness of the health risks creates fear which is one of the conditions under which we need to relieve our withdrawal pangs.</li>
+<li>A doctor’s work is exceedingly stressful and he is usually not able to relieve the additional stress of withdrawal pangs while he is working.</li>
+<li>He has the additional stress of guilt. He feels that he should be setting an example for the rest of the population. This puts more pressure on him and increases the feeling of deprivation.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>After his hard day at work, when the stress is momentarily relieved by PMO, that session becomes wrongly attached to the relief experienced. Because of this mis-association of ideas the porn and the PMO gets credit for the total situation. It becomes very precious when he eventually quits and goes through his withdrawal pangs. This is a form of casual PMO and applies to any situation where the PMOer is forced to abstain for lengthy-periods. Under the Willpower Method the PMOer is miserable because he is being deprived. He is not enjoying the tiredness and sleep that goes after a PMO. His sense of loss is therefore greatly increased. However, if you can first remove the brainwashing and stop moping about the PMO, the break and the sleep can still be enjoyed even while the body is craving the amine transmitters - serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine.</p>
+<p>Another difficult situation is boredom, particularly when it is combined with periods of stress. Typical examples are students and single parents. The work is stressful, yet much of the work is monotonous. During an attempt to stop on the Willpower Method the single person has long periods in which to mope about his or her “loss” which increases the feeling of depression. Again this can be easily overcome if your frame of mind is correct. Do not worry that you are continually reminded that you have stopped PMOing. Use such moments to rejoice in the fact that you are ridding yourself of the evil monster.</p>
+<p>If you have a positive frame of mind these pangs can become moments of pleasure. Remember any PMOer, regardless of age, sex, intelligence or profession, can find it easy and enjoyable to stop provided <em><strong>YOU FOLLOW ALL THE INSTRUCTIONS</strong></em>.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-33 Just One Peek
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 00:20:57 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-33-just-one-peek/
+ <h2 id="just-one-peek">Just One Peek</h2>
+<p>This is the undoing of many PMOers who try to stop on the Willpower Method. They will go through three or four days and then have the odd peek or a PMO or two to tide them over. They do not realize the devastating effect this has on their morale.</p>
+<p>For most PMOers that first peek at the tube site harem was not as good as sex with a real person. The clips that are clean are far in between. This gives their conscious minds a boost. They think, “Good. That wasn’t entirely all that enjoyable. I am losing the urge to PMO and I am not that much into the shocking stuff.” In fact, the reverse is the case. Get it clear in your mind - enjoyment of orgasm wasn’t the reason why you hit porn. If PMOers were there for orgasm alone, they’d never watch more than one clip. The only reason why you PMO was to feed that little monster. Just think: you had starved him for four days. How precious that one peek must have been to him. You are not aware of it in your conscious mind but the fix your body received will be communicated to your subconscious mind and all your sound preparation will be undermined. There will be a little voice at the back of your mind saying, “In spite of all the logic they are precious. I want another one.”</p>
+<p>That little peek has two damaging effects:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>It keeps the little monster alive in your body.</li>
+<li>What’s worse, it keeps the big monster alive in your mind. If you had the “last peek”, it will be easier to have the next one.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>Above all, remember:</p>
+<div style="font-size: 1.5em;">
+<p><strong>“Just one peek” is how people get into PMO addiction in the first place.</strong></p>
+</div>
+
+
+ -
+
03-32 The Withdrawal Period
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 00:16:57 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-32-the-withdrawal-period/
+ <h2 id="the-withdrawal-period">The Withdrawal Period</h2>
+<p>For up to three weeks after your last PMO session you may be subjected to withdrawal pangs. These consist of two quite separate factors:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>The withdrawal pangs of dopamine, that empty, insecure feeling, like a hunger, which PMOers identify as a craving or “something I must to do” feeling.</li>
+<li>The psychological trigger of certain external stimuli such as a commercial, online browsing, a telephone conversation etc.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>It is the failure to understand and to differentiate between these two distinct factors that makes it so difficult for PMOers to achieve success on the Willpower Method and it’s also the reason why many who do achieve it fall into the trap again.</p>
+<p>Although the withdrawal pangs of dopamine flush cause no physical pain, do not underestimate their power. We talk of “hunger pains” if we go without food for a day; there may be “tummy rumblings” but there is no physical pain. Even so, hunger is a powerful force and we are likely to become very irritable when deprived of food. It is similar when our body is craving it’s dopamine rush. The difference is that our body needs food but it doesn’t need poison and with the right frame of mind the withdrawal pangs are easily overcome and disappear very quickly.</p>
+<p>If PMOers can abstain for a few days on the Willpower Method the craving for dopamine flush soon disappears. It is the second factor that causes the difficulty. The PMOer has got into the habit of relieving his withdrawal pangs at certain times or occasions, which causes an association of ideas (e.g. “I got a hard on so I must PMO” or “I am on the bed with my laptop and I must PMO to feel happy”). It may be easier to understand the effect with the help of an example.</p>
+<p>You have a car for a few years and let’s say the indicator lever is on the left of the steering column. On your next car it is on the right (the law of sod). You know it is on the right but for a couple of weeks you put the windscreen wipers on whenever you want to indicate.</p>
+<p>Stopping PMO is similar. During the early days of the withdrawal period the trigger mechanism will operate at certain times. You will think, “I want to PMO.” It is essential to counter the brainwashing right from square one then these automatic cues and triggers will quickly disappear. Under the Willpower Method, because the PMOer believes he is making a sacrifice, he is moping about it and is waiting for the urge to PMO to go - far from removing these trigger mechanisms he is actually increasing them. And under the Mystic Method the PMOer starts to wonder when he is going to become a God and even demand from himself that he should not even have those ‘bad’ thoughts - this paves the way for self-loathing and failure.</p>
+<p>A common trigger is alone time - particularly one at a social event with friends. The ex-PMOer (using other methods) is already miserable because he is being deprived of his usual pleasure or crutch. His friends are with their partners and are acting intimate. He is either single or is not ‘getting’ any from his wife for whatever reasons. Now he is not enjoying the meal or what should be a pleasant social occasion. His ready made brain ‘porn water slides’ lead him to porn as it is easier than either trying to woo his wife.</p>
+<p>Because of his association of his entitlement to sex with his well being he is now suffering a triple blow and the brainwashing is actually being increased. If he is resolute and can hold out long enough he eventually accepts his lot and gets on with his life. However, part of the brainwashing remains and I think the second most pathetic thing about PMOing is the PMOer who has given up for health or money reasons, yet even after several years still craves “just one visit to the harem” on certain occasions. He is pining for an illusion that exists only in his mind and is needlessly torturing himself.</p>
+<p>Even under my method responding to triggers is the most common failing. The ex-PMOer tends to regard the internet porn as a sort of placebo or sugar pill. He thinks: “I know the porn does nothing for me but if I think it does then on certain occasions it will be a help to me.”</p>
+<p>A sugar pill, although giving no actual physical help, can be a powerful psychological aid to relieve genuine symptoms and is therefore a benefit. Internet porn, the habitual masturbation, however, are not sugar pills. Why? Porn creates the symptoms that it relieves and after a while ceases even to relieve these symptoms completely; the “pill” is causing the disease and quite apart from that it also happens to be the No. 1 killer poison in a man’s or a woman’s quest for love and relationships.</p>
+<p>You may find it easier to understand the effect when related to a non-PMOer or a successful PMOer who has quit for several years. Take the case of a PMOer who loses his partner. It is quite common at such times, with the best intentions, to say, “Have just one harem visit. It will help calm you down.” If the offer is accepted, it will not have a calming effect because the man is not addicted to dopamine and there are no withdrawal pangs to relieve. At best all it will do is to give him a momentary psychological boost.</p>
+<p>Even after the “deed” is over, the original tragedy is still there. In fact, it will be increased because the person is now suffering withdrawal pangs and his choice is now either to endure them or to relieve them by repeating the ‘porn water slide’ rides and start the chain of misery. All the porn will have done is to give a momentary psychological boost. The same effect could have been achieved by reading a book or watching a feel-good movie, even a bad one at that. Many non-PMOers and ex-PMOers have become addicted to the porn as a result of such occasions. It is essential to counter the brainwashing right from the start. Get it quite clear in your head: you don’t need the dopamine rush and you are only torturing yourself by continuing to regard it as some sort of prop or boost. There is no need to be miserable.</p>
+<p>Orgasms do not make good relations; they at most times ruin them. Remember too that it is not entirely true at all times the men and women who show public display of intimacy are enjoying it at all times. Intimacy is best enjoyed in private where both partners can respond without embarrassments. You don’t have to be an orgasm induced dopamine addict. If it happens as a natural result of a series of life events, fine- if not No Big Deal. You enjoy the occasion and life without it.</p>
+<p>Abandon the concept of the PMOing habit as pleasurable in itself, Many PMOers think, “If only there was clean internet porn.” There is clean soft porn. Any PMOer who tries it soon finds out it is a waste of time. Get it clear in your mind that the only reason you have been PMOing is to get the dopamine flush. Once you have got rid of the craving for PMO you will have no more need to visit your online harem.</p>
+<p>Whether the pangs are due to actual withdrawal symptoms (the empty feeling) or a trigger/cue mechanism, accept it. The physical pain is non-existent and with the right frame of mind it will not be a problem. Do not worry about withdrawal. The feeling itself isn’t bad. It is the association with wanting and then feeling denied that is the problem. Instead of moping about it, say to yourself, “I know what it is. It’s the withdrawal pang from PMO. That’s what PMOers suffer all their lives and that’s what keeps them PMOing. Non-PMOers do not suffer these pangs. It is another of the many evils of this lying habit. Isn’t it marvellous I am purging this evil from my brain?”</p>
+<p>In other words, for the next three weeks you will have a slight trauma inside your body but during those weeks and for the rest of your life something marvellous will be happening. You will be ridding yourself of an awful disease. That bonus will more than outweigh the slight trauma and you will actually enjoy the withdrawal pangs. They will become moments of pleasure. Think of the whole business of stopping as an exciting game. Think of the porn monster as a sort of tape worm inside your stomach. You have got to starve him for three weeks and he is going to try to trick you into getting to bed to keep him alive.</p>
+<p>At times he will try to make you miserable. At times you will be off guard. You will receive a porn URL and you may forgot that you have stopped. There is a slight feeling of deprivation when you remember. Be prepared for these traps in advance. Whatever the temptation, get it into your mind that it is only there because of the monster inside your body and every time you resist the temptation you have dealt another mortal blow in the battle.</p>
+<p>Whatever you do, don’t try to forget about PMO. This is one of the things that causes PMOers using the Willpower Method hours of depression. They try to get through each day hoping that eventually they’ll just forget about it. It is like not being able to sleep. The more you worry about it, the harder it becomes. In any event you won’t be able to forget about it. For the first few days the “little monster” will keep reminding you and you won’t be able to avoid it; while there are still laptops, smartphones and magazines etc. about, you will have constant reminders.</p>
+<p>The point is you have no need to forget. Nothing bad is happening. Something marvellous is taking place. Even if you are thinking about it a thousand times a day, SAVOR EACH MOMENT. REMIND YOURSELF HOW MARVELOUS IT IS TO BE FREE AGAIN. REMIND YOURSELF OF THE SHEER JOY OF NOT HAVING TO TORTURE YOURSELF ANYMORE. As I have said, you will find that the pangs become moments of pleasure, and you will be surprised how quickly you will then forget about internet porn.</p>
+<p>Whatever you do DO NOT DOUBT YOUR DECISION. Once you start to doubt, you will start to mope and it will get worse. Instead use the moment as a boost. CONVERT MOPE TO BOOST. If the cause is depression then remind yourself that’s what the internet porn and PMO were doing to you. If you are forwarded a URL by a friend, take pride in saying, “I’m happy to say I do not need them any more.” That will hurt him but when he sees that it isn’t bothering you he will be halfway to joining you.</p>
+<p>Remember that you had very powerful reasons for stopping in the first place. Remind yourself of the costs and ask yourself whether you really want to risk too much of those fearful ‘malfunctions’ of your ‘equipage’ which is not the greatest loss if you ask me - but the most important loss of mental happiness and well being - of not living under a ‘spell’. This is called ‘referenting’ or spotting of the minimizing efforts of the monster about the hazards. Above all, remember that the feeling is only temporary and each moment is a moment nearer to your goal.</p>
+<p>Some PMOers fear that they will have to spend the rest of their lives reversing the ‘automatic triggers’. In other words, they believe that they will have to go through life kidding themselves that they don’t really need PMO by the use of psychology. This is not so. Remember that the optimist sees the bottle as half full and the pessimist sees it as half empty. In the case of PMO, the bottle is empty and the PMOer sees it as full. There are just no advantages with internet porn and PMO. It is the PMOer who has been brainwashed. Once you start telling yourself that you don’t need to orgasm using PMO, in a very short time you won’t even need to say it because the beautiful truth is… you do not need to PMO. It’s the last thing you need to do; make sure it’s not the last thing you do.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-31 The Easy Way to Stop
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 00:07:43 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-31-the-easy-way-to-stop/
+ <h2 id="the-easy-way-to-stop">The Easy Way to Stop</h2>
+<p>This chapter contains instructions about the easy way to stop PMO. Providing you follow the instructions, you will find that stopping ranges from relatively easy to enjoyable! But remember the definition of a brunette: “a girl who didn’t read the instructions on the bottle.” It is ridiculously easy to stop PMO. All you have to do is two things:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Make the decision that you are never going to PMO again.</li>
+<li>Don’t mope about it. Rejoice.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>You are probably asking, “Why the need for the rest of the book? Why couldn’t you have said that in the first place?” The answer is that you would at some time have moped about it and consequently sooner or later, you would have changed your decision. You have probably already done that many times before.</p>
+<p>As I have already said, the whole business of PMOing is a subtle, sinister trap. The main problem of stopping isn’t the dopamine addiction (it is a problem but not the main) but the brainwashing and it is necessary first to explode all the myths and delusions. Understand your enemy. Know his tactics and you will easily defeat him. I’ve spent most of my life trying to stop PMOing and I’ve suffered weeks of black depression. When I finally stopped I went to zero without one bad moment. It was enjoyable even during the withdrawal period, and I have never had the slightest pang since. On the contrary, it is the most wonderful thing that has happened in my life.</p>
+<p>I couldn’t understand why it had been so easy and it took me a long time to find out the reason. It was this. I knew for certain that I was never going to PMO again. During previous attempts, no matter how determined I was, I was basically trying to stop PMOing, hoping that if I could survive long enough without a session of PMO the urges would eventually go. Of course they didn’t go because I was waiting for something to happen and the more I moped about it, the more I wanted to visit my internet harem, so the craving never went.</p>
+<p>My final attempt was different. Like all PMOers nowadays, I had been giving the problem serious thought. Up to then, whenever I failed, I had consoled myself with the thought that it would be easier next time. It had never occurred to me that I would have to go on PMOing the rest of my life. This latter thought filled me with horror and started me thinking very deeply about the subject.</p>
+<p>Instead of firing up my browser subconsciously, I began to analyse my feelings as I was looking at the screen. This confirmed what I already knew, I wasn’t enjoying them and they were filthy and disgusting. I started looking at non-PMOers - the ones that live in some other part of the world or the older people who never got to know the tube sites. Until then I had always regarded non-PMOers as wishy-washy, unsociable, finicky people. However, when I examined them they appeared, if anything, stronger and more relaxed. They appeared to he able to cope with the stresses and strains of life, and they seemed to enjoy social functions more than the PMOers. They certainly had more sparkle and zest than PMOers.</p>
+<p>I started talking to ex-PMOers. Up to this point I had regarded them as people who had been forced to give up PMO for health and religious reasons and who were always secretly longing for a harem visit. A few did say, “You get the odd pangs but they are so few and far between they aren’t worth bothering about.” But most said, “Miss it? You must be joking! I have never felt better in my life.” Even failures were fail forwards for them. They did not condemn themselves. It was easier for them to unconditionally accept themselves. Like a coach who will accept a mistake by a genuinely golden player. Talking to ex-PMOers exploded another myth that I had always had in my mind. I had thought that there was an inherent weakness in me and it suddenly dawned on me that all PMOers go through this private nightmare.</p>
+<p>Basically I said to myself, “Scores of people are stopping now and leading perfectly happy lives. I didn’t need to do it before I started and I can remember having to work hard to get used to this filth. So why do I need to do it now?” In any event I didn’t enjoy PMO, I hated the whole filthy ritual and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being the slave of this disgusting porn addiction.</p>
+<p>I then said to myself:</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<div style="font-size: 1.17em;">
+ <p><strong>“WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT. YOU HAVE COMPLETED YOUR LAST PMO VISIT”</strong></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>I knew, right from that point, that I would never PMO again. I wasn’t expecting it to be easy; in fact, just the reverse. I fully believed that I was in for months of black depression and that I would spend the rest of my life having the occasional pang. Instead it has been absolute bliss right from the start.</p>
+<p>It took me a long time to work out why it had been so easy and why this time I hadn’t suffered those terrifying withdrawal pangs. The reason is that they do not exist. It is the doubt and uncertainty that causes the pangs. The beautiful truth is: IT IS EASY TO STOP PMO. It is only the indecision and moping about it that makes it difficult. Even while they are addicted to porn, PMOers can go for relatively long periods at certain times in their lives without bothering about it. It is only when you want it but can’t have one that you suffer.</p>
+<p>Therefore the key to making it easy is to make stopping certain and final. Not to hope but to know you have kicked it, having made the decision. Never to doubt or question it. In fact, just the reverse - always to rejoice about it. If you can be certain from the start, it will be easy. But how can you be certain from the start unless you know it is going to be easy? This is why the rest of the book is necessary. There are certain essential points and it is necessary to get them clear in your mind before you start:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Realize that you can achieve it. There is nothing different about you and the only person who can make you PMO is you. Not that star, she would never in her dreams thought about herself being used for reducing a man’s virility.</li>
+<li>There is absolutely nothing to give up. On the contrary, there are enormous positive gains to be made. I do not only mean you will be healthier and richer. I mean you will enjoy the good times more and be less miserable during the bad times.</li>
+<li>Get it clear in your head that there is no such thing as a peek or visit. PMOing is a drug addiction and a chain reaction. By moaning about the odd PMO you will only be punishing yourself needlessly.</li>
+<li>See the whole business of PMOing not as a “boys-will-be-boys” habit that might injure you but as drug addiction. Face up to the fact that, whether you like it or not, YOU HAVE GOT THE DISEASE. It will not go away because you bury your head in the sand. Remember: like all crippling diseases, it not only lasts for life but gets worse and worse. The easiest time to cure it is now.</li>
+<li>Separate the disease (i.e. the brain chemical addiction) from the frame of mind of being a PMOer or a non-PMOer. All PMOers, if given the opportunity to go back to the time before they became hooked, would jump at that opportunity. You have that opportunity today! Don’t even think about it as ‘giving up’ PMOing.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>When you have made the final decision that you have had your last PMO you will already be a non-PMOer. A PMOer is one of those poor wretches who have to go through life destroying themselves with porn. A non-PMOer is someone who doesn’t. Once you have made that final decision, you have already achieved your object.</p>
+<p>Rejoice in the fact. Do not sit moping waiting for the chemical addiction to go. Get out and enjoy life immediately. Life is marvellous even when you are addicted and each day it will get so much better when you aren’t.</p>
+<p>The key to making it easy to quit PMOing is to be certain that you will succeed in abstaining completely during the withdrawal period (maximum three weeks). If you are in the correct frame of mind, you will find it ridiculously easy.</p>
+<p>By this stage, if you have opened your mind as I requested at the beginning, you will already have decided you are going to stop. You should now have a feeling of excitement, like a dog straining at the leash, unable to wait to break down those brain DeltaFosB porn water slides. If you have a feeling of doom and gloom, it will be for one of the following reasons:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Something has not gelled in your mind. Re-read the above five points, and ask yourself if you believe them to be true. If you doubt any point, re-read the appropriate sections in the book.</li>
+<li>You fear failure itself. Do not worry. Just read on. You will succeed. The whole business of internet porn is like a confidence trick on a gigantic scale. Intelligent people fall for confidence tricks but it is only a fool who having once found out about the trick goes on kidding himself.</li>
+<li>You agree with everything but you are still miserable. Don’t be! Open your eyes. Something marvellous is happening. You are about to escape from the prison. It is essential to start with the correct frame of mind: isn’t it marvellous that I am a non-PMOer!</li>
+</ol>
+<p>All we have to do now is to keep you in that frame of mind during the withdrawal period, and the next few chapters deal with specific points to enable you to stay in that frame of mind during that time. After the withdrawal period you won’t have to think that way. You will think that way automatically, and the only mystery in your life will be: “It is so obvious, why couldn’t I see it before?” However, two important warnings:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Delay your plan to make your last visit until you have finished the book.</li>
+<li>I have mentioned several times a withdrawal period of up to three weeks. This can cause misunderstanding. First, you may subconsciously feel that you have to suffer for three weeks. You don’t. Secondly, avoid the trap of thinking, “Somehow I have just got to abstain for three weeks and then I will be free.” Nothing magic will actually happen after three weeks. You won’t suddenly feel like a non-PMOer. Non-PMOers do not feel any different from PMOers. If you are moping about stopping during the three weeks, in all probability you will still be moping about it after the three weeks. What I am saying is, if you can start right now by saying, “I am never going to PMO again. Isn’t it marvelous?” After three weeks all temptation will go. Whereas if you say, “If only I can survive three weeks without a PMO,” you will be dying for a harem visit after the three weeks are up.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>Sexual dysfunction has a lot to do with your brain and your mind frame. Internet Porn rewires your brain’s reward circuit and gives your mind a ‘doubting’ mind frame. This self doubt will undoubtedly cause your sexual dysfunctions. Having all the desire in your upper part but putting up no arousal in your lower part is the worst thing to happen to your mind frame. Libido going hand in hand with romance is the elixir of youth that you can have until you die. You will keep the probabilities high by quitting. But that is not the only or the major gain in all this. It is your freedom from slavery.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-30 Avoid False Incentives
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 00:05:14 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-30-avoid-false-incentives/
+ <h2 id="avoid-false-incentives">Avoid False Incentives</h2>
+<p>Many PMOers, while trying to stop on the Willpower Method, attempt to increase their motivation by building up false incentives. There are many examples of this, a typical one is, “I will reward myself with a gift after no-PMO for a month.” This appears to be a logical and sensible approach but in fact it is false because any self-respecting PMOer would rather continue PMOing every day than receive a “self given gift.” In any case there is a doubt in the PMOer’s mind because not only will she have to abstain for thirty days but will she even enjoy the days without a PMO? Her only pleasure or crutch is taken away! All this does is to increase the size of the sacrifice that the PMOer feels she is making, which makes it even more precious in her mind.</p>
+<p>Other examples: “I’ll stop PMO so that I will force myself to get a social life and seek more sex in real life” OR “I’ll stop so some magical energy will help me to leap above the competitors and get this woman I pursue” OR “I commit to not waste my energy and enthusiasm in PMO, so I can grow enough hunger in myself.” These are true and can be effective and you may end up getting what you want. But think about it for a second - if you do get what you had wanted, once the novelty has gone you will feel deprived - if you didn’t then you will feel miserable and either way sooner or later you will fall for the trap again.</p>
+<p>Another typical example is online or forum pacts. These have the advantage of eliminating temptation for certain periods. However, they generally fail for the following reasons:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>The incentive is false. Why should you want to stop just because other people are doing so? All this does is to create an additional pressure, which increases the feeling of sacrifice. It is fine if all PMOers genuinely want to stop at one particular time. However, you cannot force PMOers to stop and although all PMOers secretly want to, until they are ready to do so a pact just creates additional pressure, which increases their desire to PMO. This turns them into secret PMOers, which further increases the feeling of dependency.</li>
+<li>The “Rotten Apple” theory or dependency on each other. Under the Willpower Method of stopping, the PMOer is undergoing a period of penance during which he waits for the urge to PMO to go. If he gives in, there is a sense of failure. Under the Willpower Method one of the participants is bound to give in sooner or later. The other participants now have the excuse they have been waiting for. It’s not their fault. They would have held out. It is just that ‘Fred’ has let them down. The truth is that most of them have already been cheating.</li>
+<li>“Sharing the credit” is the reverse of the “Rotten Apple” theory. Here the loss of face due to failure is not so bad when shared. There is a marvellous sense of achievement in stopping PMOing. When you are doing it alone the acclaim you receive from your friends and online buddies can be a tremendous boost to help you over the first few days. When everybody is doing it at the same time the credit has to be shared and the boost is consequently reduced.</li>
+<li>Another classic example of false incentives is the guru promise. When I was younger it would make me feel angry if you’d call me a saint. It is a cuss word. Stopping will give you happiness as you are not engaged in the tug of war and your brain is starting to re-wire and regain impulse controls and all that. However you must keep in mind that none of this will make you a sex god or win a lotto. No one, except you, cares if you stop PMO. You are not a weak person either if you are doing PMO three times a day and have PIED. And you are not a strong person if you are an addict and don’t have PIED.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>Stop kidding yourself. If the job offer that I mentioned before, of 10 months work for 12 months salary a year won’t stop him. Or if the risks of cutting down your brain’s capacity to cope with just any normal day-to-day stress and strains or if putting yourself at odds with having a reliable erection, or if the lifetime of mental and physical torture and slavery did not stop him or her - the above said few phoney incentives will not make the slightest bit of difference. They will only make the sacrifice appear worse. Instead concentrate on the other side:</p>
+<h2 id="what-am-i-getting-out-of-it-why-do-i-need-to-pmo">“What am I getting out of it? Why do I need to PMO?”</h2>
+<p>Keep looking at the other side of the tug of war. What is PMOing doing for me? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Why do I need to do it? YOU DON’T! YOU ARE ONLY PUNISHING YOURSELF. Try looking at it from the Pascal’s Wager perspective. You have almost nothing to lose (a rub-out with half arousals) for sure, chances of big profits (a full and reliable arousal, mental well being and happiness) and no chance of losing big (unreliable full arousals, premature ejaculations, fading penetrations, loss of general impulse controls, lower tolerance for frustrations and anger).</p>
+<p>Why not declare your quitting to friends and family? Well, it will make you a proud ex-addict, ex-PMOer, not an elated and happy non-PMOer. It will scare your partner a bit since they may see this as an effort to have more sex, sort of a new-age thing. They may also fear to lose you if this turns you into sex machine. It is hard to explain to them unless they are open minded.</p>
+<p>Any attempt to get others to help you in your quitting gives more power to the little monster of addiction. Pushing it from your mind and totally ignoring it has the effect of trying NOT to think of it. As soon as you spot the thoughts, when you hit the cues (home alone) or just absent minded thoughts - just say to yourself: “Great, I don’t have to do it like a slave animal. I am free. I am happy to know the differences in sex.” This will cut the life of the thought and will deny oxygen to it and will stop it from burning towards urges and cravings.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-29 Can I Compartmentalize?
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 00:03:34 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-29-can-i-compartmentalize/
+ <h2 id="can-i-compartmentalize">Can I Compartmentalize?</h2>
+<p>This is another myth about PMOing spread mainly by PMOers who, when attempting to stop on the Willpower Method, substitute mental gymnastics - they propose to act -Jekyll and Hyde: “Porn is for my alter ego side and real life romance is for my relationship side.” Nothing is further from the truth. The porn waterslides - the deltaFosBs and all the brain changes are going to overrun the real life romance and will make it less desirable. Mr Hyde is most definitely going to overrule Dr. Jekyll’s instructions.</p>
+<p>If you use internet porn, you may be training yourself for the role of voyeur or to need the option of clicking to something more arousing at the least drop in your dopamine levels, or to search and search for just the right scene for maximum effect. Also, you may be masturbating in a hunched-over position – or watching your smartphone in bed nightly. You will eventually desire those cues more than the real life action. The thing that goes against real sex is the lack of novelty, variety, ‘harem’ like 24/7 quick delivery etc. and so it stands no chance compared to your online harem. The younger you were when you started on PMO the longer to rewire and break down those ‘porn water slides’ and get back those ‘real water slides’ if there were any from the past or create new ones. Also powerful and lasting are the associated memories from when you were young.</p>
+<p>Every time you take a ride on the ‘porn water slide’ you are ‘greasing’ it - keeping the nerves fresh. When you park next to a fast food restaurant the smell of the fries floats from the pan into your nostrils and the sale was already made. Likewise, the porn water slides in your brain are there for you to get sucked in and they are open 24 hours a day. Each of these cues, or triggers, can now light up your reward circuit with the promise of sex… only it isn’t sex. Nevertheless, nerve cells may solidify these associations with sexual arousal by sprouting new branches to strengthen the connections. The more you use porn the stronger the nerve connections can become, with the result that you may ultimately need to be a voyeur, need to click to new material, need to climax to porn to get to sleep, or need to search for the perfect ending just to get the job done.</p>
+<p>As with any substance or behavioural drug, after a while the body becomes immune and the “drug” ceases to relieve the withdrawal pangs completely. As soon as we close a session, the addict wants another one very soon and he has a permanent hunger. The natural inclination is eventually to ‘escalate’ just to get the dopamine rush. However, most PMOers are prevented from doing this for one, or both, of two reasons.</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Money - they cannot afford to subscribe to paid porn sites.</li>
+<li>Health - There is only so much the body can take - either the motivator dopamine surges or the orgasms. And orgasms actually trigger anti-dopamine chemicals to cut down the dopamine flush. It has to - that is the way the body works.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>Once that little monster leaves your body the awful feeling of insecurity ends. Your confidence returns, together with a marvellous feeling of self-respect. You obtain the assurance to take control of your life, not only in your other habits but also in all other ways. This is one of the many great advantages of being free from any addiction.</p>
+<p>As I have said, the ‘compartment’ myth is due to one of many tricks that the little monster plays with your mind. In fact, these tricks do not make it easier to stop, they make it harder. The PMOer is therefore left with a permanent hunger that he can never satisfy. This is why many PMOers turn to cigarettes, heavy drinking or even harder drugs in order to satisfy the void.</p>
+<p>I had suggested watching porn with one of my partners. But eventually I noticed it did not enhance my arousal at all. The sex was not better. I realized that it actually diminished my attraction towards her. We humans are rating animals - we always self rate and other rate. I am sure she rated me against the male porn start too. Why take chances? Do you want Brad Pitt in your bedroom, even if he is in a poster? No one man or woman can match a harem where each ‘experience’ is acted, scripted and directed by professionals and at the ready 24 hours a day.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-28 Will I Miss the Fun?
+ Sat, 24 Dec 2022 00:01:03 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-28-will-i-miss-the-fun/
+ <h2 id="will-i-miss-the-fun">Will I Miss the Fun?</h2>
+<p>No! Once that little porn monster is dead and your body stops craving dopamine and the porn water slides in your brain start to fade due to lack of ‘greasing’, any remaining brainwashing will vanish and you will find yourself both physically and mentally better equipped not only to cope with the stresses and strains of life but to enjoy the good times to the full.</p>
+<p>There is only one danger and that is the influence of those who still use sex as their lying crutch and damned pleasure. “The other man’s grass is always greener,” is commonplace in many aspects of our lives and is easily understandable. Why is it in the case of PMOing, where the disadvantages are so enormous as compared with even the illusory ‘advantages,’ that the ex-PMOer tend to envy the man or woman who appears to demand sex and use porn for pleasure and a crutch?</p>
+<p>With all the brainwashing of our childhood it is quite understandable that we fall into the trap. Why is it that, once we realize what a mug’s game it is and many of us manage to kick the habit, we walk straight back into the same trap? It is the influence of society’s brainwashing of porn being conflated with sex and presented as normal. The ex-PMOer has a pang! The insecure void feelings of them being single, which in itself is not a crime anyway, causes anxiety and cues them to PMO water slide. This is indeed a curious anomaly, particularly if you consider this piece of observation: not only is every non-PMOer in the world happy to be a non-PMOer but every PMOer in the world, even with his warped, addicted, brainwashed mind suffering the delusion that he enjoys it or it relaxes him, wishes he had never become hooked in the first place. So why do some ex-PMOers envy the PMOer on these occasions? There are two reasons.</p>
+<ol>
+<li>“Just one peek.” Remember; it doesn’t exist. Stop seeing that isolated occasion and start looking at it from the point of view of the PMOer. You may be envying him but he doesn’t approve of himself: he envies you. If only you could somehow watch (clinically) another PMOer. They can be the most powerful boost of all to help you of it. Notice how quickly they open many tabs and many windows of their browsers? They fast forward to their important minutes. How quickly they get bored of some clips and how quickly they run through the gamut of genres producing novelty, shock, anxiety, worry etc. Notice particularly that not only is he/she not aware that he or she is PMOing but even the act of masturbation appears to be automatic. Remember, he is not enjoying it; it’s just that he cannot enjoy himself without it. Particularly remember that when he leaves to go to sleep after his visit he is drained of energy. The next morning, when he wakes up with a weakened will, lost energy, bleary eyes, he is going to have to carry on choking himself at the first appearance of stress and strain. The next time he has a pain in the penis, the next ED episode or a fading penetration when he is in the company of a non-PMOer, he has to continue this lifetime chain of paying through the nose just for the privilege of destroying himself physically and mentally. He is facing a lifetime of filth, bad mental health, stained confidence, a lifetime of slavery, a lifetime of destroying himself, a lifetime of black shadows at the back of his mind. And all of this is to achieve what purpose? The lying illusion if getting what you ‘deserve’ and the damned pleasure?</li>
+<li>The second reason why some ex- PMOers have pangs on these occasions is because the PMOer is doing something i.e. self pleasuring and the non-PMOer is not, so he tends to feel deprived. Get it clear in your mind before you start: it is not the non-PMOer who is being deprived. It is the poor PMOer who is being deprived of:
+<ul>
+<li>HEALTH</li>
+<li>ENERGY</li>
+<li>MONEY</li>
+<li>CONFIDENCE</li>
+<li>PEACE OF MIND</li>
+<li>COURAGE</li>
+<li>TRANQUILLITY</li>
+<li>FREEDOM</li>
+<li>SELF-RESPECT.
+Get out of the habit of envying PMOers and start seeing them as the miserable, pathetic creatures they really are. I know: I was the one of the world’s worst. That is why you are reading this book and the ones who cannot face up to it, who have to go on kidding themselves, are the most pathetic of all.</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+</ol>
+<p>You wouldn’t envy a heroin addict. Like all drug addiction, yours won’t get better. Each year it will get worse and worse. If you don’t enjoy being a PMOer today, you’ll enjoy it even less tomorrow. Don’t envy other PMOers. Pity them. Believe me: THEY NEED YOUR PITY.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-27 Timing
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 23:55:57 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-27-timing/
+ <h2 id="timing">Timing</h2>
+<p>Apart from the obvious point that as it is doing you no good, now is the right time to stop. I believe timing is important. Our society treats internet porn flippantly as a slightly distasteful habit that can not injure your health. It is not. It is drug addiction, a disease and a destroyer of relationships in society. The worst thing that happens in most PMOer’s lives is getting hooked on that awful addiction. If they stay hooked, horrendous things happen. Timing is important to give yourself the right to a proper cure.</p>
+<p>First of all, identify the times or occasions when PMO appears to be important to you. If you are a businessman and use it for the illusion of relief of stress, pick a relatively slack period; a good idea is to choose your annual holiday. If you PMO mainly during boring or relaxing periods, weekends etc. do the opposite. In any event, take the matter seriously and make the attempt the most important thing in your life.</p>
+<p>Look ahead for a period of about three weeks and try to anticipate any event that might lead to failure. Occasions like a conference trip, partner out of town etc. need not deter you, providing you anticipate them in advance and do not feel you will be deprived. Do not attempt to cut down in the meantime as this will only create the illusion that being denied is enjoyable. In fact, it helps to force yourself to watch and have as many PMO sessions as possible. While you are having the last session and that last time, be conscious of the disappointment due to satiation, unfulfilled expectations (porn can never satisfy you), any bodily pain or pain in the genitals, the withdrawal effects, the peevishness and the melancholy. Think how marvellous it will be when you allow yourself to stop doing it.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<div style="font-size: 1em;">
+ <p><strong>WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T FALL INTO THE TRAP OF JUST SAYING, “NOT NOW. LATER,” AND PUTTING IT OUT OF YOUR MIND. WORK OUT YOUR TIMETABLE NOW AND LOOK FORWARD TO IT.</strong></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>Remember you aren’t giving anything up. On the contrary: you are about to receive marvellous positive gains.</p>
+<p>For years the medical profession viewed porn is harmless without knowing the difference between the tame static porn of yesteryear and the latest VR streaming porn. The problem is this; although every PMOer uses internet porn purely to relieve the brain chemical craving for dopamine, it is not the addiction to the brain chemical itself that hooks the PMOer but the self-brainwashing that results from that addiction. An intelligent person will fall for a confidence trick. But only a fool will go on falling for it once he realizes that it’s a confidence trick. Fortunately, most PMOers aren’t fools; they only think they are. Each individual PMOer has his own private brainwashing. That is why there appears to be such a wide range of different types of PMOer, which only serves to compound the mysteries.</p>
+<p>With the benefit of the original book that used this method to stop smoking, which dealt with nicotine addiction (one of the most quickest and addictive drug known to man) and bearing in mind that the personal logs that I collected from Reddit, NoFap and YBOP blogs and forums, I was agreeably surprised to realize that the philosophy propounded in the original book was still sound. The accumulated knowledge that was acquired by the original author Alan Carr and by myself the hack-author is how to communicate that knowledge to each individual PMOer. The fact that I know every PMOer can not only find it easy to stop but can actually enjoy the process is not only pointless but exceedingly frustrating unless I can make the PMOer realize it. The original author of the quit smoking book explains some controversial advice:</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p><em>“Many people have said to me: ‘You say, “Continue to smoke until you have finished the book.’’ This tends to make the smoker take ages to read the hook or just not finish it. period. Therefore you should change that instruction.’ This sounds logical, but I know that if the instruction were: ‘Stop immediately,’ some smokers wouldn’t even start reading the book. I had a smoker consult me in the early days. He said, ‘I really resent having to seek your help, I know I’m strong-willed. In every other area of my life I’m in control. Why is it that all these other smokers are stopping by using their own willpower, yet I have to come to you?’ He continued, ‘I think I could do it on my own, if I could smoke while I was doing it.’”</em></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>This may sound like a contradiction but I know what the man meant. We think of stopping smoking as something that is very difficult to do. What do we need when we have something difficult to do? We need our little friend. So stopping smoking appears to be a double blow. Not only do we have a difficult task to perform, which is hard enough, but the crutch on which we normally rely on such occasions is no longer available. It didn’t occur to me until long after the man had left that my instruction to keep smoking is the real beauty of my method. You can continue to smoke while you go through the process of stopping. You get rid of all your doubts and fears first so when you extinguish that final cigarette you are already a non-smoker and can enjoy being one.</p>
+<p>So this book on PMO will also keep the same advice intact. No matter how much I say it will be easy there will be a vast majority who will not be able to accept it due to their personal brainwashing on how difficult it is to quit.</p>
+<p>The only chapter that has caused me to question my original advice seriously is this chapter on the matter of the right timing. Above all, I advise that if your special occasions are stress situations at the office then pick a holiday to make an attempt to give up or vice versa. In fact, that isn’t the easiest way to do it. The easiest way is to pick what you consider to be the most difficult time to do it, whether it be stress, social, concentration or boredom. Once you’ve proved that you can cope with and enjoy life in the worst possible situations every other situation becomes easy. But if I gave that as a definite instruction, would you even make the attempt to stop?</p>
+<p>Let me use an analogy. My wife and I intend to swim together. We arrive at the pool at the same time but we rarely swim together. The reason is that she immerses one toe and half an hour later she’s actually swimming. I cannot stand that slow torture. I know in advance that at some stage, no matter how cold the water is, eventually I’m going to have to brave it. So I’ve learned to do it the easy way: I dive straight in. Now, assuming that I were in a position to insist that if she didn’t dive straight in, she couldn’t swim at all. I know that she wouldn’t swim at all. Do you see the problem?</p>
+<p>From feedback I know that many PMOers have used the original advice I gave on timing to delay what they think will be the “evil day.” My next thoughts were to use the technique that I used for the chapter on the advantages of PMOing, something like: “timing is very important and in the next chapter I will advise you about the best time for you to make the attempt!” You turn the page over and there is just a huge, “NOW!” That is, in fact, the best advice but would you take it? This is the most subtle aspect of the porn trap. When we have genuine stress in our lives, it’s not the time to stop yet if we have no stress in our lives, we have no desire to stop. Ask yourself these following questions:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>When you got porn the first time, did you really decide then that you would continue to depend on it the rest of your life every day without ever being able to stop? OF COURSE YOU DIDN’T!</li>
+<li>Are you going to continue the rest of your life every day without ever being able to stop? OF COURSE YOU AREN’T!</li>
+</ol>
+<p>So when will you stop? Tomorrow? Next year? The year after? Isn’t this what you’ve been asking yourself since you first realized you were hooked? Are you hoping that one morning you will wake up and just not want to PMO any more? Stop kidding yourself. I waited many many awful years for it to happen to me. With any addiction you get progressively more hooked, not less. You think it will be easier tomorrow? You’re still kidding yourself. If you can’t do it today, what makes you think it will be easier tomorrow? Are you going to wait until you’ve actually started to feel getting out of bed is harder than just masturbating? That would be a bit pointless.</p>
+<p>The real trap is the belief that now isn’t the right time - it will always be easier tomorrow. We believe that we live stressful lives. In fact, we don’t. We’ve taken most genuine stress out of our lives. When you leave your home you don’t live in fear of being attacked by wild animals. Most of us don’t have to worry where our next meal is coming from or whether we’ll have a roof over our head tonight. But just think of the life of a wild animal. Every time a rabbit comes out of its burrow, it is facing Vietnam the whole of its life. But the rabbit can handle it. It’s got adrenalin and other hormones and so have we. The truth is, the most stressful periods for any creature are early childhood and adolescence. But 3 billion years of natural selection have equipped us to cope with stress. Many people who have had hard childhoods grew up to lead normal lives.</p>
+<p>We are all able to cope with unkind people and the unpleasant parts of life. I don’t believe any of my life adversities have left me with any permanent scars; on the contrary, I believe they have made me a stronger person. When I look back on my life there has only been one thing that I couldn’t handle and that was my slavery to that damned internet porn.</p>
+<p>A few years ago I thought I had all the worries in the world. I was suicidal - not in the sense that I would have jumped off a roof but in the sense that I knew that this mental tug of war would soon kill me. I argued that if this was life with my crutch, life just wouldn’t be worth living without it. What I didn’t realize was that when you are physically and mentally depressed everything gets you down. Now I feel like a young boy again. Only one thing made the change in my life: I’m now out of the porn pit.</p>
+<p>I know it’s a cliché to say, “if you haven’t got your health, you’ve got nothing,” but it’s absolutely true. I used to think that physical fitness fanatics like Gary Player were a pain. I used to claim there’s more to life than feeling fit; there’s sex, booze and tobacco. That’s nonsense. When you feel physically and mentally strong you can enjoy the highs and handle the lows. We confuse responsibility with stress. Responsibility becomes stressful only when you don’t feel strong enough to handle it. The Richard Burtons of this world are physically and mentally strong. What destroys them is not the stresses of life or their jobs, or old age but the lying crutches they turn to which are just illusions. Sadly in his case and for millions like him those lying crutches kill.</p>
+<p>Look at it this way. You’ve already decided that you are not going to stay in the trap the rest of your life. Therefore at some time in your life whether you find it easy or difficult, you will have to go through the process of getting free. PMOing is not a habit or pleasure. It is drug addiction and a disease. We’ve already established that far from being easier to stop tomorrow, it will get progressively harder. With a disease that’s going to get progressively worse, the time to get rid of it is NOW - or as near to now as you can manage. Just think how quickly each week of our lives comes and goes. That’s all it takes. Just think how nice it will he to enjoy the rest of your life without that ever-increasing black shadow hanging over you. And if you follow all my instructions, you won’t even have to wait five days. You won’t only find it easy after closing down your bowser: <strong>YOU’LL ENJOY IT!</strong></p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-26 A Social Habit?
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 23:54:03 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-26-a-social-habit/
+ <h2 id="a-social-habit">A Social Habit?</h2>
+<p>Health of mind and body are the main reason why we should want to stop but then they always have been. We do not actually need scientific research and knowledge in brain chemistry to tell us that internet porn is addictive and can potentially shatter our lives. These bodies of ours are the most sophisticated objects on the planet and any PMOer knows instantly, from the first session, that the stimulus can go to excess and it can turn poisonous.</p>
+<p>The only reason why we ever get involved with internet porn is the PMO’s overlap with their evolutionary brain programming. Porn is available for free and it gets streamed 24 hours a day. No risk and no traces and with very high brain rewards. Porn was once considered as harmless but that was when the images were static and involved a trip to the local store for a VHS tape.</p>
+<p>Today it is generally considered even by PMOers themselves to be a supra-stimulus and addiction forming. In the old days, the strong man did not admit he masturbated. Jerk is a derogatory term. In every pub or club bar the majority of men would be proudly wanting to take a woman home and have real sex. Today the position is completely reversed for the internet porn addicts. Today’s man realizes that he is starting to feel that he doesn’t need a woman. This scares him. He bands together online and starts discussing experiences, devise strategies and explore options. Today’s strong man does not want to depend on drugs. With the social revolution all PMOers nowadays are giving serious thought to stopping internet porn and masturbation. Today’s PMOers consider PMO as an useless and harmful activity.</p>
+<p>The most significant trend that I have noticed in forums is the increasing emphasis on the anti-social aspect of PMOing. The days when a man boasted of having sex and orgasms every day is slowly getting replaced with, “why do I need to be a slave for this porn monster when I know ‘it’ is controlling my wand (and mind)?”</p>
+<p>The only reason why people continue to PMO after getting educated is because they have failed to stop or are too frightened to try. There are even talks about no porn, no masturbation and no orgasms - with or without partners. Karezza is discussed widely and people are trying it out. Many aforementioned failures are “fail forwards” and thus somewhat benefiting the people who practice them. Once you start in the no-PMO route you will find your best fit that applies to your life. I strongly encourage devising your own plan on orgasms after understanding and practising the separation of the amative and the propagative parts of sex. I am sure whichever route you take you will see the value of preserving the “seed” by limiting the number of times you flush your brain with chemicals by orgasming. You will then never see porn, sex and orgasms as a pleasure or as a crutch for your emotional ups and downs.</p>
+<p>I was reading a Reddit forum by non-PMOers dedicated to quitting not only porn but also masturbation. As I read along I thought. “This is good, I see so many have taken to quitting masturbation and I think that is the right way to quit PMO.” However, I found most of the notes pointing to them to try with the Willpower Method. There was a lot of self-pitying as well. Except a few… almost all were not feeling elated and not having the, “yippee I am free from slavery” attitude. Eventually someone broke down - as I unfortunately expected to happen. And the result was a domino effect. All those other PMOers had been sitting there thinking, “surely I can’t be the only PMOer here.” However, they were “failing forward” albeit with a lot of self-torturing as they shut down their browsers but did not shut down the desire and the need. This method is the reverse as - we shut down the desire and the need first before shutting down the browser screen. As every day more and more PMOers leave the sinking ship, so those left on it become terrified they’ll be the last.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<div style="font-size: 1.5em;">
+ <p><strong>DON’T LET IT BE YOU!</strong></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+ -
+
03-25 The YouTube PMOer
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 23:51:35 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-25-the-youtube-pmoer/
+ <h2 id="the-youtube-pmoer">The YouTube PMOer</h2>
+<p>The YouTube PMOer should be grouped with casual PMOers but the effects of a YouTube PMOer are so insidious that it merits a separate chapter. It can lead to the breakdown of personal self control. In one case it nearly caused a split for a No-Fap forum user.</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p><em>“I was three weeks into one of my failed attempts to stop. The attempt had been triggered off by my wife’s worry about my unreliable hard-ons and lack of interest. I had told her that it was not her and it was just job pressure. She said, ‘I know you had handled the work pressure before but how would you feel if you were me and had to watch someone you love systematically destroying themselves?’ It was an argument that I found irresistible, hence the attempt to stop. She knows that I am not cheating - but this in a way is as worse as that (sic). The attempt ended after three weeks after a heated argument with an old friend. It did not register until years afterwards that my devious mind had deliberately triggered off the argument. I felt justly aggrieved at the time but I do not believe that it was coincidence, as I had never argued with this particular friend before, nor have I since. It was clearly the little monster at work. Anyway, I had my excuse. I desperately needed a release of orgasm and it doesn’t matter how. As it happens she was not in the mood right away and I was in an “entitlement” hurry. So I convinced myself that it is OK if I ‘restrict’ myself by avoiding a porn site and just stay this side of the ‘red line’ and watch only YouTube videos. But she ‘came around’ as the night unfolded and wanted to make love. But I was tired and not with all my ‘horsepower.’ I then invented a headache. I could not bear to think of the disappointment this would cause my wife. Then gradually I returned to the old ways, only YouTube became my new harem destination. I remember being quite pleased at the time. I thought, ‘well, at least it is cutting my consumption down;’ Eventually she accused me of continuing to ignore her in the bed. I had not realized it but she described the times I had caused an argument and stormed out of the house. At other times I had taken two hours to purchase some minor item and faked a sprain or something. I had made feeble excuses to cop out of the whole wooing her and etc. when I have a reliable online harem it is even more hard.”</em></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The worst thing about the YouTube PMOer is that it supports the fallacy in the PMOer’s mind that he is being deprived. At the same time, it causes a major loss of self-respect; an otherwise honest person may force himself to deceive his loved one. It has probably happened or is still happening to you in some form.</p>
+<p>It happened to me several times. Have you ever watched the TV detective series Columbo? The theme of each episode is similar. The villain, usually a wealthy and respected businessman, has committed what he is convinced is the perfect murder and his confidence in his crime remaining undetected receives a boost when he discovers that the rather shabby and unimpressive-looking Detective Columbo is in charge of the case.</p>
+<p>Columbo has this frustrating practice of closing the door after finishing his interrogation, having assured the suspect that he is in the clear and before the satisfied look has disappeared from the murderer’s face, Columbo reappears with: “just one small point, sir, which I’m sure you can explain…” The suspect stammers and from that point on we know and he knows that Columbo will gradually wear him down. No matter how heinous the crime, from that point on my sympathies were with the murderer.</p>
+<p>It was almost as if I were the criminal and that’s exactly how those bouts made me feel. The tension of not being allowed to cross the red line to get my porn fix that I “rightly deserve because I am hard working man and why shouldn’t I when every man does it?” entitlement, click, click, clicking on videos that come close to the right one. Longing for the porn tube videos. And then finishing the deed - just a limp rub out, wondering where the pleasure was. The fear of crossing the line losing control. The relief of returning to the bed, immediately followed by the fear that she would toss around and ask for sex. As the “safe” YouTube videos started not to do it for me - desensitization and lack of novelty and the certain knowledge that sooner or later I was bound to visit my favourite online harem. The final humiliation and shame when that certainty became a fact, followed by the immediate return to chain-PMOing.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<div style="font-size: 1.5em;">
+ <p><strong>OH THE JOYS OF BEING A PMO-er!</strong></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+ -
+
03-24 Casual PMOers, Teenagers, Non PMOers
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 23:40:22 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-24-casual-pmoers-teenagers-non-pmoers/
+ <h2 id="casual-pmoers-teenagers-non-pmoers">Casual PMOers, Teenagers, Non PMOers</h2>
+<p>Heavy PMOers tend to envy the casual porn user. We’ve all met these characters: “Oh, I can go all week without a PMO, it really doesn’t bother me.” We think: “I wish I were like that!” I know this is hard to believe but no PMOer enjoys being a PMOer. Never forget:</p>
+<ul>
+<li>No PMOer ever decided to become a PMOer casual or otherwise, therefore:</li>
+<li>All PMOers feel stupid, therefore:</li>
+<li>All PMOers have to lie to themselves and other people in a vain attempt to justify their stupidity.</li>
+</ul>
+<p>I used to be a golf fanatic. I would brag about how often I played and I wanted to play more. Why do PMOers brag about how little they masturbate? If that’s the true criterion then surely the true accolade is not to masturbate at all?</p>
+<p>If I said to you, “do you know, I can go all week without carrots and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest,” You would think I was some sort of nutcase. If I enjoy carrots, why would I want go all week without them? If I didn’t enjoy them, why would I make such a statement? So when a user makes a statement like: “I can go all week without a PMO session, it really doesn’t bother me.” He’s trying to convince both himself and you that he has no problem. But there would be no need to make the statement if he had no problem. What he is really saying is: “I managed to survive a whole week without PMOing.” Like every PMOer, he was probably hoping that after this he could survive the rest of his life. But he could only survive a week and can you imagine how precious that PMO session must have been afterwards, having felt deprived for a whole week?</p>
+<p>This is why casual PMOers are effectively more hooked than heavy PMOers. Not only is the illusion of pleasure greater but they have less incentive to quit because they spend less time and are less vulnerable to the health risks. They may occasionally experience PIED but they are not very sure what caused it. Remember, the only pleasure PMOers get is in search-and-seek and then to relieve the withdrawal pangs, as I have already explained but even that pleasure is an illusion. Imagine the little porn monster inside your body as a permanent itch so imperceptible that most of the time we aren’t even aware of it.</p>
+<p>Now if you have a permanent itch, the natural tendency is to scratch it. Similarly as our brain’s’ reward circuits become more and more immune to dopamine and opioids, the natural tendency is to edge, escalate, binge, novelty-seek, shock-seek etc. There are four main factors that prevent PMOers from chain-PMOing:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Time. Most cannot afford to.</li>
+<li>Health. In order to relieve our ‘itches’ we have to consume all free material that is available and then some. Capacity to cope with that kind of binging varies with each individual and at different times and situations in his or her life. This acts as an automatic restraint.</li>
+<li>Discipline. This is imposed by society or the PMOer’s job, or friends and relatives, or by the PMOer himself as a result of the natural tug of war that goes on in every PMOer’s mind.</li>
+<li>Imagination. Lack of imagination plays down the shock, novelty and other values of the same clip on a subjective basis.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>I used to think of my ‘non-casual’ PMOing as a weakness. I couldn’t understand why my friends could limit their “intake.” I knew I was a very strong-willed person. It never occurred to me that most PMOers are incapable of chain-PMOing - you need a very strong imagination and also extraordinarily strong penis stamina in order to do it. Some of these once-a-week PMOers that heavy PMOers tend to envy do it less frequently because physically their constitution cannot do more, or because they cannot afford to PMO more, or because their job, or society, or their own hatred of being hooked won’t allow them to PMO more.</p>
+<p>It may be of advantage at this stage to provide a few definitions:</p>
+<h3 id="the-non-pmoer">THE NON-PMOer</h3>
+<p>Someone who has never fallen for the trap but should not be complacent. He is a non-PMOer only by luck or the grace of goodness. All PMOers were convinced that they would never become hooked and some non-PMOers keep trying an occasional session.</p>
+<h3 id="the-casual-pmoer">THE CASUAL PMOer</h3>
+<p>There are two basic classifications of casual PMOers:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>The PMOer who has fallen for the trap but doesn’t realize it. Do not envy such PMOers. They are merely sampling the nectar at the mouth of the pitcher plant and in all probability will soon be heavy users. Remember, just as all alcoholics started off as casual drinkers, so all PMOers started off as casual PMOers.</li>
+<li>The PMOer who was previously a heavy PMOer and thinks he cannot stop. These PMOers are the saddest of all. They fall into various categories, each of which needs separate comment.</li>
+</ol>
+<h3 id="the-oncea--day-pmoer">THE ONCE–A- DAY PMOer</h3>
+<p>If he enjoys his entitlement to orgasm, why does he use internet porn to orgasm only once a day? If he can take it or leave it, why does he bother to PMO at all? Remember, the ‘habit’ is really banging your head against the brick wall only to make it relaxing when you stop. The once-a-day PMOer is relieving his withdrawal pangs for less than one hour each day. The rest of the day, although he doesn’t realize it, he is banging his head against the wall and does so for most of his life. He is PMOing only once a day because either he cannot take the risk of getting caught or screwing up his brain health. It is easy to convince the heavy PMOer that he doesn’t enjoy it but you try convincing a casual PMOer. Anybody who has gone through an attempt to cut down will know it is the worst torture of all and almost guaranteed to keep you hooked for the rest of your life.</p>
+<h3 id="the-rejected-pmoer">THE REJECTED PMOer</h3>
+<p>This PMOer demands the right to his/her orgasm(s) every day. And of course his sex partner is not always up to it. So he goes on the internet for porn initially. Once he takes “the ride” to fix “the void” he is trapped on this most exciting ‘water slide’ of novelty, shock, supranormal images etc. He is in fact dichotomously ‘happy’ with the partner’s rejection – it gives him something of an excuse. If internet porn is giving so much to you, why even bother to have a partner at all? Set him or her free. He is not even enjoying the PMO when he has to ‘carry’ his partner in his mind. At some point he is using his real life partner to hand him an excuse to go out into the valleys of the dark side of the internet.</p>
+<h3 id="the-porn-diet-pmoer">THE PORN DIET PMOer</h3>
+<p>(Or, “I can stop whenever I want to. I have done it thousands of times”). If he thinks dieting helps with his moods to ‘get out to get women,’ why is he even on the diet of once every four days? How can one predict the future, what if the happenstance of meeting occurred just an hour after your scheduled PMO session? Also, if he thinks this occasional “cleaning the plumbing” is good to relieve tension and relax why not plumb every day? It has been proven that masturbation is not required to keep the genitals healthy. Internet porn is not required at all. Even if that may be the case, any PUA guru who has read about the brain chemistry and its plasticity will never recommend watching super stimulus porn. The truth is he is still hooked. Although he gets rid of the physical addiction, he is left with the main problem - the brainwashing. He hopes each time that he will stop for good and soon falls for the same trap again.</p>
+<p>Many PMOers actually envy these stoppers and starters. They think, “how lucky to be able to control it like that, to do PMO when you want to and stop when you want to,” What they always overlook is that these stoppers and starters aren’t controlling it. When they are PMOers, they wish they weren’t. They go through the hassle of stopping, then begin to feel deprived and fall for the trap again, then wish they hadn’t. They get the worst of both worlds. If you think about it, this is true in the lives of the PMOers. When we are allowed to PMO we either take it as entitled or wish we didn’t. It’s only when we can’t have PMO that it appears to be so precious. The ‘forbidden fruit syndrome’. This is the awful dilemma of PMOers. They can never win because they are moping for a myth, an illusion. There is one way they can win and that is to stop PMOing and stop moping!</p>
+<h3 id="the-i-only-pmo-to-static--tame--home-made-porn-pmoer">THE I-ONLY-PMO-TO-STATIC / TAME / HOME-MADE-PORN PMOer</h3>
+<p>Yes, we all do it to start with but isn’t it amazing how the average shock value of these clips seems rapidly to increase and before we know it we seem to be feeling deprived (tolerance)? The novelty is lacking in with static porn and we pay the mascot for a cup of grease and take the ride down the ‘porn water slide’ towards the dark spirals of resentment and guilt. The worst thing you can do is to use your partner’s pictures (with approval, of course) for masturbation. Why? Because you are re-wiring your brain for the seeking, searching and variety induced dopamine flushes. The ‘porn water slides’ in the brain is the DeltaFosB built-up due to the dopamine surges induced by internet porn. But you will find yourself having weak and unreliable erections when you are with her in real time. Another genre in this category is ‘amateur’ or ‘home made’ porn. Most are fakes and you know it. And you are not going to settle down and finish on the very first one that hits your eyes… you are going to continue to seek and search. Remember it’s not only the orgasms but the search-and-seek, the wandering, that gives the porn slide the surge, the ‘ride’. The porn content, whether amateur or professional or whatever is not the issue, it is the ‘brain flushes of dopamine’ during the search-and-seek - the building up of brain tolerance and satiation. Porn destroys normal brain operations. Masturbation confuses the muscle-brain. Orgasms floods the brain and so it should be, better the risks involved in having one.</p>
+<h3 id="the-i-have-stopped-but-i-have-an-occasional-peek-pmoer">THE I-HAVE-STOPPED-BUT-I-HAVE-AN-OCCASIONAL-PEEK PMOer</h3>
+<p>In a way such peeking PMOers are the most pathetic of all. Either they go through their lives believing they are being deprived or, more often, the occasional peek becomes two. They remain on the slippery slope and it goes only one way - DOWNWARDS. Sooner or later they are back to being heavy PMOers. They have fallen again for the very trap that they fell into in the first place.</p>
+<p>There are two other categories of casual PMOers. The first is the type who masturbates to images or clips of the latest celebrity sex tapes that hit the news. Or something they ‘carried home’ from their ‘accidental’ viewing at school or work. These people are really non-PMOers. It’s just that they feel they are missing out. They want to be part of the action. We all start off like this. Next time watch how, after a while, the celebrity sex tape, the same star of your fantasy is not ‘doing it’ to you any more. The more ‘unattainable’ the target of your fantasy is, the more frustrating the withdrawal of the orgasm is.</p>
+<p>The second category is recently getting attention. The type can best be described by outlining a case shared online. A woman who is a professional, had been using internet porn stories for many years and had never PMOed more or less than one time every night. She was, incidentally, a very strong-willed lady. Most PMOers would wonder why she wanted to stop in the first place. They would gladly point out to her that there is no worries of PIED, or PE in her case as she is a women. She is using not even static images and the stories are far tamer than any they use on a daily basis.</p>
+<p>They make the mistake of assuming that casual PMOers are happier and more in control. In control they may be but happy they are not. In this case, she is not satisfied with her partner, not interested in real sex, highly irritable with her daily stress and strains. Her nearest-and-dearest could not find out what is bothering her. Even if she convinced herself not to be afraid of her use of internet porn by rationalizing, she still finds herself not being able to enjoy real relationships which almost invariably involve ups and downs. Her brain’s RC<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> is not able to make use of the normal de-stress brain chemicals as she is flooding dopamine into her brain on an everyday basis. The down regulation<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> of her brain receptors has rendered her melancholic most times. Like me, she had a great fear of internet porn’s dark side of the treatment of women- before her first time. Like me, she eventually fell victim to the massive social brainwash and tried that first porn site. Like me, she can remember the foul clips of violence staged as entertainment. Unlike me, who capitulated and became a chain-PMOer very quickly, she resisted the slide.</p>
+<p>All you ever enjoy in PMO is the ending of the craving that started before it, whether it be the almost imperceptible physical craving for dopamine or the mental torture caused by not being allowed to scratch the itch. Internet porn itself is a poison as far as it concerns you. This is why you only suffer the illusion of enjoying it after a period of abstinence. Just like a hunger or thirst, the longer you suffer it, the greater the pleasure when you finally relieve it. PMOers make the mistake of believing PMO is just a habit. They think, “if I can only keep it down to a certain level or do only on special occasions, my brain and body will accept it. I can then keep my PMOing at that level or cut down further should I wish to.” Get it clear in your mind: the ‘habit’ doesn’t exist. PMOing is drug addiction. The natural tendency is to relieve withdrawal pangs, not to endure them. Even to hold it at the level you are already at, you would have to exercise willpower and discipline for the rest of your life because as your brain’s RC becomes immune to dopamine and opioids, it wants more and more, not less and less. As PMO begins to destroy you physically and mentally, as it gradually breaks down your nervous system, your courage and confidence, your impulse controls, so you are increasingly unable to resist reducing the interval between each session.</p>
+<p>That is why in the early days, we can take it or leave it. If we get a sign of something amiss mentally or physically, we just stop. It also explains why someone like me, who never even suffered the illusion of enjoying them, had to go on chain-PMOing even though every time it had become a physical torture. Don’t envy that woman. When you PMO only once every twenty four hours it appears to be the most precious thing on earth. The “forbidden fruit syndrome.” For many years that poor woman had been at the centre of a tug of war.</p>
+<p>She had been unable to stop PMOing, yet was frightened to escalate to streaming clips. But for twenty-three hours and ten minutes of every one of those days she had to fight the temptation. She also had to fight her own lack of feelings towards her boyfriend. It took tremendous willpower to do what she did and, as I have said, such cases are rare. But it reduced her to tears in the end. Just look at it logically: either there is a genuine crutch or pleasure in PMOing or there isn’t. If there is, who wants to wait an hour, or a day, or a week? Why should you be denied the crutch or pleasure in the meantime? If there is no genuine crutch or pleasure, why bother paying visits to your online harem?</p>
+<p>Here is another case of a once-in-four-days man. This is how the man described his life:</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p><em>“I am forty years old. I suffered PIED with real women and even when I’d be doing PMO. Most times I am only rubbing it out. It has been a while since I had a full erection. Before going on the one-in-four days porn diet, I used to sleep soundly through the night after my PMO. Now I wake up every hour of the night and all I can think about is PMO. Even when I am sleeping. I dream about my favourite clips. On days after my scheduled PMO I feel pretty down and this diet would take up all my energy. My SO would leave me alone because I am so bad-tempered and if she can’t get out, she will not have me in the house. I go for a jog outside but my mind is obsessed with PMOing. On the schedule day I begin planning earlier in the night. I get very irritated if something happens against my plans. I’d give up on conversation and give in (only to later regret) at work and at home. I am not an argumentative guy but I don’t want the topic or conversation to hold me down. I remember occasions when I’d pick up silly fights with my SO. I then wait for 10 o’clock. When it arrives my hands are shaking uncontrollably. I do not start the deed right away. As there are new videos that has been added, I had to ‘shop’ around. As I click around, my mind tells me that since I had ‘starved’ myself for 4 days I deserve a ‘special’ clip and it has to be worth the time spent searching. Eventually I settle for one or two but then I want it to last so that I can ‘survive’ through the next 4 days. So I take more time to finish the deed.”</em></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In addition to his other troubles, this poor man has no idea that he treating himself to a poison. First he is suffering the “forbidden fruit syndrome.” Next he is forcing his brain to flush dopamine. His dopamine receptors are not as cut down comparatively either. But he is sliding and greasing the porn slides, seeking and searching for edging, novelty, variety, shock-value, anxiety-value (“I must treat myself so that I can survive the next three days”) etc. You probably have visions of a pathetic imbecile. Not so. This man was over six feet tall and an ex-sergeant in the Marines. He was a former athlete and didn’t want to become an addict to anything. However, when he returned from the war he was trained as a techie in a veterans rehab program. When he entered the civil work force he was a well paid IT professional in a bank and was given a laptop (one of the ways to ensure you take work home). It was the year that famous socialites ‘leaked’ their porn videos online. There was much talk about it. And he got hooked. He has spent the rest of his life paying through the nose and it has ruined him physically and mentally. If he were an animal, our society would have put him out of his misery, yet we still allow mentally and physically healthy young teenagers to become hooked. You may think the above case and my notes are exaggerated. It is extreme but not unique. There are literally thousands of similar stories. That man poured his heart out to me but you can be sure that many of his friends and acquaintances envied him for being a once-a-week man. If you think this couldn’t happen to you, STOP KIDDING YOURSELF.</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<div style="font-size: 1.5em;">
+ <p><strong>IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING.</strong></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>In any event, PMOers like other addicts are notorious liars, even to themselves. They have to be. Most casual PMOers indulge far more times and on far more occasions than they will admit to. I have had many conversations with so-called twice-a-week PMOers during which they have done it more than three times that week. If you read the Reddit or No-Fap forums of casual PMOers, they are either counting the days or waiting to fail. You do not need to envy casual PMOers. You do not need to PMO. Life is infinitely sweeter without PMO. One log says…</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p><em>“It started with a simple challenge to not touch my penis for a day. And being unable. I don’t think about masturbation anymore. It doesn’t cross my mind. That is possible, I promise you. And the riches that await those who are able - they’re incredible.”</em></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Teenagers are generally more difficult to cure, not because they find it difficult to stop but because either they do not believe they are hooked or they are at the primary stage of the trap and suffer from the delusion that they will automatically have stopped before the secondary stage.</p>
+<p>I would like particularly to warn parents of children who loathe internet porn not to have a false sense of security. All children loathe the dark sides of porn until they become hooked. You did too at one time. Also do not be fooled by scare campaigns. The trap is the same as it always was. Children know that internet porn is supranormal stimuli but they also know that one ‘visit’ or ‘peek’ will not do it. At some stage they may be influenced by a girlfriend or boyfriend, school friend or work colleague.</p>
+<p>You may think that all they need is an education in brain plasticity and that PMO (including even masturbation) acts like a virus in their brain programme to convince them they could never become hooked. I find society’s failure to prevent our children from becoming addicted to internet porn and other drugs to be the most disturbing of all the many disturbing facets of addiction. I beg you not to be complacent in this matter. It is necessary to protect youngsters as their brain is more plastic at that age. I strongly urge you to read the YBOP book and educate yourself of the brain science. Even if you suspect your teenager might already be hooked, the book will provide excellent guidance to assist in gaining understanding for someone to escape.</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p><strong>RC</strong> - reward circuits. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p><strong>Regulation</strong> - Up and down regulation is a natural reactionary process of the brain to adjust receptors and or their neurotransmitters based on the level that is present. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-23 Just One Peek
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 23:35:22 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-23-just-one-peek/
+ <h2 id="just-one-peek">Just One Peek</h2>
+<p>“Just one peek” is a myth you must get out of your mind:</p>
+<ul>
+<li>It is just one peek that gets us started in the first place.</li>
+<li>It is just one peek to tide us over a difficult patch or on a special occasion that defeats most of our attempts to stop.</li>
+<li>It is just one peek that, when PMOers have succeeded in breaking the addiction, sends them back into the trap. Sometimes it is just to confirm that they do not need them any more and that one harem visit does just that.</li>
+</ul>
+<p>The after effect of PMO will be horrible and convinces the PMOer he will never become hooked again but he already is. The PMOer feels that something that is making him or her so miserable and guilty should have not made him or her do it yet they did.</p>
+<p>It is the thought of that ‘one special PMO’ session that often prevents users from stopping. The one after your long conference trip or the one after your hard day at work or your fight with kids or after an incident where your partner rejects you for sex. Get it firmly in your mind there is no such thing as “just one peek.” It is a chain reaction that will last the rest of your life unless you break it. It is the myth about the odd, special occasion that keeps PMOers moping about it when they stop. Get into the habit of never seeing the “no big deal” (NBD<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>) session - it is a fantasy. Whenever you think about porn or PMO, see a whole filthy lifetime of spending a lot of time behind a screen just for the privilege of destroying yourself mentally and physically, a lifetime of slavery, a lifetime of hopelessness. It is not a crime if your erections are unreliable. But it is when you could be happier in the long term but choose to sacrifice that for a short term ‘pleasure’.</p>
+<p>It is OK that we can’t always come up with ‘something to do’ for the void and it is not realistically possible to do that every time and for our entire life. Yes, we can plan for most of them, but sometimes void happens. Good times and bad times also happen, irrespective of your PMO anyway. But get it clearly into your mind: the PMO isn’t it. You are stuck with either a lifetime of misery or none at all. You wouldn’t dream of taking cyanide because you liked the taste of almonds, so stop punishing yourself with the thought of the occasional “no big deal” PMO. Ask a PMOer with issues, “if you had the opportunity to go back to the time before you became hooked, would you have become a PMOer?” The answer is inevitably, “you have got to be joking!” Yet every PMOer has that choice every day of his life. Why doesn’t he opt for it? The answer is fear. The fear that he cannot stop or that life won’t be the same without it.</p>
+<p>Stop kidding yourself! You can do it. Anybody can. It’s ridiculously easy. In order to make it easy to stop masturbating to internet porn there are certain fundamentals to get clear in your mind. We have already dealt with three of them up to now:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>There is nothing to give up. There are actually only marvellous positive gains to achieve.</li>
+<li>Never convince yourself of the odd/NBD (no big deal) or JOP<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> (just one peak) PMO. It doesn’t exist. There is only a lifetime of filth and slavery,</li>
+<li>There is nothing different about you. Any addicted PMOer can find it easy to stop.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>Many PMOers believe that they are confirmed addicts or have addictive personalities. This usually happens if they have read the ‘shocking’<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup> part of the brain science a little bit too much. I promise you there is no such thing. No one is born with needs to masturbate to video clips before they become hooked on the drug. It is the drug that hooks you and not the nature of your character or personality. It is the effect of addictive supranormal stimuli that makes you believe that you have an addictive personality. However, it is essential that you remove this belief because if you believe that you are dependent on internet porn, you will be. Even after the little porn monster inside your body is dead. It is essential to remove all of this brainwashing.</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p><strong>NBD</strong> - no big deal. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p><strong>JOP</strong> - Just one peek. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:3">
+<p>The shocking part of brain chemistry talks about a long lasting deltaFosB stable protein that forms the ‘water slide’ cues in our brains. These cause the slip-lapse-relapse cycles in addicts. They are ‘greased’ (kept alive) every time the addicted substance is used. <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-22 Beware of Cutting Down
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 23:28:58 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-22-beware-of-cutting-down/
+ <h2 id="beware-of-cutting-down">Beware of Cutting Down</h2>
+<p>Many PMOers resort to cutting down either as a stepping-stone towards stopping or as an attempt to control the little monster. Many recommend cutting down or a ‘porn diet’<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> as a pick-me-up. Obviously, the less you PMO the better off you are but as a stepping-stone to stopping, cutting down is fatal. It is these attempts to cut down that keep us trapped all our lives.</p>
+<p>Usually cutting down follows failed attempts to stop. After a few hours or days of abstinence the PMOer says to himself something like:</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p><em>“I cannot face the thought of going to sleep without visiting my online harem, so from now on I will just PMO once in four days or I will purge my collection of ‘bad’ porn. If I can follow this ‘porn diet’, I can either hold it there or cut down further.”</em></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Certain terrible things now happen:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>He has the worst of all worlds. He is still addicted to internet porn and is keeping the monster alive not only in his body but also in his mind.</li>
+<li>He is now wishing his life away waiting for the next session.</li>
+<li>Prior to cutting down, whenever he wanted to visit his harem he would fire up his browser and at least partially relieved his withdrawal pangs. Now, in addition to the normal stresses and strains of life, he is actually causing himself to suffer the withdrawal pangs from porn most of his life. So he is causing himself to be even more miserable and bad tempered.</li>
+<li>While he was indulging himself, he didn’t enjoy most of the PMO sessions nor did he realize he was using a supranormal stimulate. It was automatic. The only harem visits that he imagined he enjoyed were after a period of abstinence (e.g. the first in the four days, the one after a business trip, etc.).</li>
+</ol>
+<p>Now that he waits an extra hour for each harem visit, he ‘enjoys’ every one. The longer he waits, the more enjoyable each PMO session appears to become because the ‘enjoyment’ in a session isn’t the session itself; it’s the ending of the agitation caused by the craving, whether it be the slight physical craving for internet porn or the mental moping. The longer you suffer, the more ‘enjoyable’ each session becomes.</p>
+<p>The main difficulty of stopping PMOing is not the brain chemical addiction. That’s easy. PMOers will all on without it anyway on various occasions - such as death of a loved one, family/work affairs keeping them away from access etc. They will go say, ten days without internet porn and it doesn’t bother them. But if they went the same ten days during which time they can have access to internet porn, they would be tearing their hair out.</p>
+<p>Many PMOers will get a chance during their work day and abstain from masturbating to orgasm. PMOers will pass through Victoria’s Secret store in the mall, swimming pools and so on without undue inconvenience. Many PMOers will abstain if they have to sleep on the couch temporarily to make space for a visitor or if they are themselves visiting . Even in the Go-Go bars or on nudist beaches there have been no riots. PMOer are almost pleased for someone to say they cannot masturbate. In fact, PMOers who want to quit get a secret pleasure out of going long periods without a harem visit. It gives them the hope that maybe one day they will never want it.</p>
+<p>The real problem when stopping is the brainwashing. That illusion of entitlement that internet porn is some sort of prop or reward and life will never be quite the same without it. Far from turning you off to internet porn, all cutting down does is to leave you feeling insecure and miserable and to convince you that the most precious thing on this earth is the missed new clip on your tube site, that there is no way that you will ever be happy again without seeing that one.</p>
+<p>There is nothing more pathetic than the PMOer who is trying to cut down. He suffers from the delusion that the less he PMOs, the less he will want to visit the online harems<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup>. In fact, the reverse is true. The less he PMOs, the longer he suffers the withdrawal pangs; the more he enjoys the PMO. However, the more he will then notice that his favourite genre or star are not hitting the spot now. But that won’t stop him. If the tube sites were to dedicate to one star only no PMOers would ever go more than once to those online harems.</p>
+<p>You find that difficult to believe? OK, let’s talk it out. Which is the worst moment of self control one feels? Waiting for four days and then having a climax. Which is one of the most precious moment for most PMOers who are in the 4 day porn diet? That’s right, the same climax after waiting for four days! Now do you really believe you are masturbating to it to enjoy the orgasm? Or do you think a more rational explanation is that you are relieving withdrawal pangs and the illusion that your are entitled to PMO?</p>
+<p>It is essential that we remove all these illusions about PMO before you extinguish that final session. Unless you’ve removed the illusion that you enjoy it before you close the window on the final one, there is no way you can prove it afterwards without getting hooked again. So, unless you are already online waiting to go to your tube site, do type it now. Open up your favourites folder and PMO to your most favourites - star, genre, theme etc. Now as you are in the action ask yourself what is so glorious about this thing. Perhaps you believe that it is only certain clips that are of good taste, like the one on your habitual or favourite theme? If so, why do you bother to watch the other videos and themes?</p>
+<p>Because you got into the habit of doing it? Now why would anyone get into the habit of PMO which is screwing up their brain scripts and wasting themselves? Why should a clip of the same star that ‘hit the spot’ last month not be as exciting now? Nothing is different after a month, so why should porn clip be different after a month?</p>
+<p>Don’t just rely on me, check it out yourself. Find that hot clip from last month to prove that it is different. Now, set a reminder and watch the same clip after a week of no PMO. It will hit (almost) the same spots like it did last month. The same clip will also do a different thing to you after a social event where you are turned down or tested by some potential partner. The reason is that the addict can never be really happy if that little monster remains unsatisfied.</p>
+<p>Where does satisfaction come into it? It’s just that they are miserable if they aren’t allowed to relieve their withdrawal symptoms at those times. So the difference between PMOing and not PMOing is the difference between being happy and miserable. That’s why the internet porn appears to be better. Whereas PMOers who get on the internet first thing in the morning for porn are miserable whether they are PMOing or not.</p>
+<p>Cutting down not only doesn’t work but it is the worst form of torture. It doesn’t work because initially the PMOer hopes that by getting into the habit of using less and less, he will reduce his desire to PMO. It is not a habit. It is an addiction and the nature of any addiction is to want more and more, not less and less. Therefore in order to cut down, the PMOer has to exercise willpower and discipline for the rest of his life. So cutting down means willpower and discipline forever.</p>
+<p>The main problem of stopping is not the dopamine addiction to internet porn. That’s easy to cope with. It is the mistaken belief that the porn gives you some pleasure. This mistaken belief is brought about initially by the brainwashing we receive before we started using internet porn, which is then reinforced by the actual addiction. All cutting down does is reinforce the fallacy further to the extent that porn dominates the user’s life completely and convinces him that the most precious thing on this earth is the addiction.</p>
+<p>As I have already said, cutting down never works anyway because you have to or must exercise willpower and discipline for the rest of your life. If you did not have enough willpower to stop then you certainly have not got enough to cut down. Stopping is far easier and less painful. I have heard of literally thousands of cases in which cutting down has failed.</p>
+<p>The handful of successes I have known have been achieved after a relatively short period of cutting down, followed by the ‘cold turkey’. These PMOers really stopped in spite of cutting down, not because of it. All it did was prolong the agony. A failed attempt to cut down leaves the PMOer a nervous wreck, even more convinced that he is hooked for life. This is usually enough to keep him reverting back to is online harem for pleasure and crutch for another stretch of time before the next attempt.</p>
+<p>However, cutting down helps to illustrate the whole futility of PMO because it clearly illustrates that a visit to the harem is enjoyable only after a period of abstinence. You have to bang your head against a brick wall (i.e. suffer withdrawal pangs) to make it nice when you stop. So the choices are:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Cut down for life. This will be self-imposed torture and you will not be able to do it anyway.</li>
+<li>Increasingly torture yourself for life. What is the point?</li>
+<li>Be nice to yourself. Stop doing it.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>The other important point that cutting down demonstrates is that there is no such thing as the odd or occasional harem visit. Internet porn is a chain reaction that will last the rest of your life unless you make a positive effort to break it:</p>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<div style="font-size: 1.5em;">
+ <p><strong>REMEMBER: CUTTING DOWN WILL DRAG YOU DOWN.</strong></p>
+</div>
+</div><div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p><strong>Porn Diet</strong> - Intentionally cutting down or attempting to control etc. Frequency: Restricting PMO to once in four days. Time: Setting a timer for the session. Shock: Safe porn only. Novelty: Only one clip. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p><strong>Harems</strong> - Internet porn sites that cater for streaming videos, webcams and pictures. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-21 The Willpower Method of Stopping
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 23:20:42 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-21-the-willpower-method-of-stopping/
+ <h2 id="the-willpower-method-of-stopping">The Willpower Method of Stopping</h2>
+<p>It is an accepted fact in our society that it is very difficult to stop PMO. Even books and forums advising you how to do so usually start off by telling you how difficult it is. The truth is that it is ridiculously easy. Yes, I can understand you questioning that statement but just consider it. If your aim is to run a mile in under four minutes, that’s difficult. You may have to undergo years of hard training and even then you may be physically incapable of doing it. (Much of our achievement lies in the mind. Isn’t it strange how difficult it was until Roger Bannister actually did it but nowadays it is commonplace?).</p>
+<p>However, in order to stop PMOing all you have to do is not watch internet porn and or masturbate any more. No one forces you to masturbate (apart from yourself) and unlike food or drink, you don’t need it to survive. So if you want to stop doing it, why should it be difficult? In fact, it isn’t. It is PMOers who make it difficult by using the Willpower Method. I define the Willpower Method as any method that forces the PMOer to feel he is making some sort of sacrifice. Let us just consider the Willpower Method.</p>
+<p>We do not decide to become PMOers. We merely experiment with porn magazines or websites and because they are awful, yes that is right – awful - except for our desired clip, we are convinced that we can stop whenever we want to. In the main, we watch those first few clips only when we want to and that is usually on special occasions. Before we realize it, we are not only visiting those sites regularly and masturbating when we want to, we are masturbating to them every day. PMO has become a part of our lives. We then ensure that we always have an internet connection wherever we go. We believe that we are entitled to love, sex and orgasms - and also that porn helps to relieve stress. It doesn’t seem to occur to us that the same clip and actors do not provide us the same degree of arousal and that we are either escalating or fighting against the ‘red line’ we have put around ourselves to avoid harmful “bad porn.” In fact, masturbation and internet porn neither improves our sex life nor does it relieve stress, it’s just that PMOers believe they can’t enjoy life or handle stress without an orgasm - even mind induced porn orgasms. Because that is what many times we are doing.</p>
+<p>It usually takes us a long time to realize that we are hooked because we suffer from the illusion that PMOers masturbate because they enjoy porn - not because they have to have porn - a need. While we are not “enjoying” porn (which we can never do unless novelty, shock or escalation is added), we suffer from the illusion that we can stop whenever we want to. This is a confidence trap. I don’t enjoy porn, so I am sure I can stop when I want to. Only that you never seem to ‘want’ to stop though.</p>
+<p>Usually it is not until we actually try to stop that we realize a problem exists. The first attempts to stop are more often than not in the early days and are usually triggered off by boy-meets-girl and boy notices the girl is not ‘quite enough’ after the initial dates or health (the teenager is still active in sport and finds he is short of breath).</p>
+<p>Whatever the reason, the PMOer always waits for a stressful situation, whether it be health or sex. As soon as he stops, the little monster needs feeding. The PMOer then wants something to pump that dopamine - a cigarette or alcohol or of course internet porn where your favourites are just a click and log in away. The porn cache is no longer down in the basement, it’s now virtual in the cloud. If the girl is around or if he is with his friends he cannot have access to his virtual harem and this makes him more distressed.</p>
+<p>Now by this time if he had already come across YBOP or Reddit material he is going to be having a tiresome “tug of war” (TOW<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>), resisting his temptations and feeling deprived. The thing he usually takes to relieve stress is now not available, so he suffers a triple blow. The probable result after a period of torture is the compromise, “I’ll cut down,” or, “I’ve picked the wrong time,” or, “I’ll wait until the stress has gone from my life.” However, once the stress has gone, he has no need to stop and doesn’t decide to do so again until the next stressful time. Of course, the time is never right because life for most people doesn’t become less stressful; it becomes more so. We leave the protection of our parents and enter the world of setting up home, taking on mortgages, having children, more responsible jobs, etc. Of course, the PMOer’s life can never become less stressful because it is the porn that actually causes stress. The quicker the PMOer passes on to the escalation stage, the more distressed he becomes and the greater the illusion of his dependency grows.</p>
+<p>In fact, it is an illusion that life becomes more stressful and it’s the porn itself, or a similar crutch, that creates the illusion. This will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 28. After these initial failures the PMOer usually relies on the possibility that one day he will wake up and just not want to masturbate, use porn etc. any more. This hope is usually kindled by the stories that he has heard about other ex-PMOers (e.g. “I was not serious until I had a ‘fading penetration’ then I didn’t want to use porn any more and stopped masturbating”).</p>
+<p>Don’t kid yourself. I have probed all of these rumours and they are never quite as simple as they appear. Usually the user has already been preparing himself to stop and merely used the incident as a springboard. I spent many years waiting to wake up one morning wanting never to PMO again. Whenever I had a PIED incident or even lack of energy - I would look forward to my energy dip to end because it was interfering with my entitled porn orgasms.</p>
+<p>More often in the case of people who stop “just like that” they have suffered a shock. Perhaps a ‘discovery’ by their girlfriend or wife, a self spotting incident of accessing porn that is not of your normal sexual orientation, or they have had a scare themselves. It is so much easier to say, “I just decided to stop one day. That’s the sort of guy I am.” Stop kidding yourself! It won’t happen unless you make it happen.</p>
+<p>Let’s consider in greater detail why the Willpower Method is so difficult. For most of our lives we adopt the head-in-the-sand, “I’ll stop tomorrow” approach. At odd times something will trigger off an attempt to stop. It may be concerns about health, virility or we may have been going through a particularly heavy bout of self analyses and realize that we don’t actually enjoy it.</p>
+<p>Whatever the reason, we take our head out of the sand and start weighing up the pros and cons of PMO. It is time to define what PMO is - the internet porn IP, any porn, masturbation with or without porn and orgasms. Sex is split into amative and propagative. This distinction is one of our major keys in opening up our mind’s doors. Without which there will be confusion and failure will be the result. We then find out what we have known all our lives: on a rational assessment the conclusion is, a dozen times over, STOP PMOing.</p>
+<p>If you were to sit down and give points out often to all the advantages of stopping and do a similar exercise with the advantages of PMOing, the total point count for stopping would far outweigh the disadvantages. If you employ Pascal’s Wager - by quitting, you will see that you are losing almost nothing with higher chances of gaining a lot and also higher chances of NOT losing a lot. However, although the PMOer knows that he will be better off as a non-PMOer, he does believe that he is making a sacrifice. Although it is an illusion, it is a powerful illusion. The PMOer doesn’t know why, but he believes that during the good times and the bad times of life the PMO sessions does appear to help. Before he starts the attempt he has the brainwashing of our society, reinforced by the brainwashing of his own addiction. To these must be added the even more powerful brainwashing of how difficult it is to “give up.”</p>
+<p>He has heard stories of PMOers who have stopped for many months and are still desperately craving. There are all the disgruntled stoppers (people who stop and then spend the rest of their lives bemoaning the fact that they’d love to PMO). He has heard of the PMOers who had stopped for many months or even years, apparently leading happy lives but then have one ‘look’ or PMO and are suddenly hooked again. Probably he also knows several PMOers in the advanced stages of the disease who are visibly destroying themselves and are clearly not enjoying life yet they continue to PMO. Added to all this, he has perhaps already suffered one or more of these experiences himself.</p>
+<p>So, instead of starting with the feeling, “Great! Have you heard the news? I don’t need to PMO any more!” He starts with a feeling of doom and gloom, as if he were trying to climb Everest and he firmly believes that once the little monster has got his hooks into you, you are hooked for life. Many PMOers even start the attempt by apologizing to their girlfriends and wives: “Look. I am trying to give up PMO. I will probably be irritable during the next few weeks. Try to bear with me.” Most attempts are doomed before they start.</p>
+<p>Let’s assume that the PMOer survives a few days without a PMO session. He is getting back his arousal and morning wood is starting to rear its head. He hasn’t opened the “favourites” on his tube sites and consequently getting turned on and a tent appears for incidences where he would have zoned out before. So the reasons why he decided to stop in the first place are rapidly disappearing from his thoughts. It is like seeing a bad road accident when you are driving. It slows you down for a while but the next time you are late for an appointment you have forgotten all about it and your foot stamps on the throttle.</p>
+<p>On the other side of the tug of war, that little monster inside you hasn’t had his fix. There is no physical pain. If you had the same feeling because of a cold, you wouldn’t stop working or get depressed. You would laugh it off. All the PMOer knows is that he wants to visit his harem. Quite why it is so important to him he doesn’t know. The little monster in the stomach then starts off the big monster in the mind and now the person who a few hours or days earlier was listing all the reasons to stop is desperately searching for any excuse to start again. Now he is saying things like:</p>
+<ul>
+<li>“Life is too short. A bomb could go off. I could step under a bus tomorrow. I have left it too late. They tell you everything gives you addiction these days.”</li>
+<li>“I have picked the wrong time. I should have waited until after Christmas, after my holidays/tests, after this stressful event in my life. I cannot concentrate, I am getting irritable and bad tempered. I cannot do my job properly. My family and friends won’t love me. Let’s face it, for everybody’s sake I have got to start again. I am a confirmed sex addict and there is no way I will ever be happy again without an orgasm inducing masturbation.”</li>
+<li>“No man can survive without sex (brainwashed by well meaning people who did not think about the amative and propagative distinction of sex).”</li>
+<li>“I know this will happen - my brain is ‘sensitized’ by the deltaFosB due to changes effected by dopamine surges because of my past excessive porn use. Sensitization can ‘never’ be removed from the brain.”</li>
+</ul>
+<p>At this stage the PMOer usually gives in. He fires up his browser and the schizophrenia increases. On the one hand there is the tremendous relief of ending the craving, when the little monster finally gets his fix; on the other hand, the orgasm is awful and the PMOer cannot understand why he is doing it. This is why the PMOer thinks he lacks willpower. In fact, it is not lack of willpower; all he has done is to change his mind and make a perfectly-rational decision in the light of the latest information.</p>
+<ul>
+<li>“What’s the point of being healthy if you are miserable?”</li>
+<li>“What is the point of being rich if you are miserable?”</li>
+</ul>
+<p>Absolutely none. Far better to have a shorter enjoyable life than a lengthy miserable life. Fortunately, that is not true - just the reverse. Life as a non-PMOer is infinitely more enjoyable but it was this delusion that kept me masturbating for twenty five years. I must confess, if that were the true situation, I would still be PMOing. The misery that the PMOer is suffering has nothing to do with withdrawal pangs. True, they trigger them off, but the actual agony is in the mind and it is caused by doubt and uncertainty. Because the PMOer starts by feeling he is making a sacrifice, he begins to feel deprived - this is a form of stress. One of the times when his brain tells him, “have a peek,” will be a time of stress. Therefore as soon as he stops, he wants to go back. But now he can’t because he has stopped. This makes him more depressed, which sets the trigger off again. Another thing that makes it so difficult is the waiting for something to happen. If your object is to pass a driving test, as soon as you have passed the test it is certain you have achieved your object. Under the Willpower Method you say, “if I can go long enough without internet porn then the urge to PMO will eventually go.” You can see this in the forum where addicts talk about their number of days of abstinences.</p>
+<p>How do you know when you have achieved it? The answer is that you never do because you are waiting for something to happen and nothing else is going to happen. You stopped when you had that last session and what you are really doing now is waiting to see how long it will be before you give in. Especially if you have read and subscribed the brain chemistry and DeltaFosB or any other similar sciences. You say, “if only I wait it out - like kidney stones - it will dissolve and go away.”</p>
+<p>As I said above, the agony that the PMOer undergoes is mental and caused by uncertainty. Although there is no physical pain, it still has a powerful effect. The PMoer is miserable and feeling insecure. Far from forgetting about PMO, his mind instead becomes obsessed with it. There can be days or even weeks of black depression. His mind is obsessed with doubts and fears.</p>
+<ul>
+<li>“How long will the craving last?”</li>
+<li>“Will I ever be happy again?”</li>
+<li>“Will I ever want to get up in the morning?”</li>
+<li>“How will I ever cope with stress in future?”</li>
+</ul>
+<p>The PMOer is waiting for things to improve but of course while he is still moping, the ‘harem’ is becoming more precious. In fact, something does happen but the user isn’t conscious of it. If he can survive three weeks without opening up his browser at all, the physical craving for porn and orgasm (the little monster) disappears. However, as stated before, the pangs of withdrawal from dopamine and opioids are so mild that the user isn’t aware of them.</p>
+<p>But after about three weeks many PMOers sense that they have “kicked it.” So they then take a peek to prove it and it does just that. The ex-PMOer has now supplied dopamine to the body and as soon as he is done it starts to leave the body. There is now a little voice at the back of his mind saying, “you want another one.” In fact, he had kicked it but now he has hooked himself again.</p>
+<p>When you were a child you watched Mickey Mouse on TV and as per the brain science you formed DeltaFosB for the cartoon. If I were to discourage you at that time from watching this program - I’d study why adults don’t like to watch their favourite childhood cartoon anymore - whether they still hold this DeltaFosB or not. For one, they have better entertainment and for the other the old cartoon does not hold the magic anymore. With the Willpower Method you are denying the child the cartoon - but with my method you are also making sure that he sees no value in the cartoon. Which one is better?</p>
+<p>The PMOer will not usually get into another session immediately. He thinks, “I don’t want to get hooked again!” So he allows a safe period to pass. It might be hours, days, even weeks. The ex-PMOer can now say, “well, I didn’t get hooked, so I can safely have another session.” He has fallen back into the same trap as he did in the first place and is already on the slippery slope.</p>
+<p>PMOers who succeed under the Willpower Method tend to find it long and difficult because the main problem is the brainwashing - long after the physical addiction has died, the PMOer is still moping around all miserable. Eventually - if he can survive this long-term torture - it begins to dawn on him that he is not going to give in. He stops moping and accepts that life goes on and is enjoyable without PMO.</p>
+<p>Many PMOers are succeeding with this Willpower Method but it is difficult and arduous. There are many more failures than successes. Even those who do succeed can go through the rest of their lives in a vulnerable state. They are left with a certain amount of the brainwashing and believe that during good and bad times the PMOs can give you a boost. (Most non-PMOers also suffer from that illusion. They are subjected to the brainwashing also but either find they cannot learn to “enjoy” internet porn or are too religious and don’t want the bad side, thank you very much). This explains why many PMOers who have stopped for long periods end up starting again later on.</p>
+<p>Many ex-PMOers will have the occasional session as a “special treat” or to convince themselves how strong their self-control is. It does exactly that but as soon as their session ends, dopamine starts to leave and a little voice at the back of their mind is saying, “you want another one.” If they get on with another one, it still seems to be under control - no shocks, no escalation, no novelty seek and they say, “marvellous! While I am not really enjoying it, I won’t get hooked. After Christmas/the holiday/this trauma, I will stop,” Little do they know the ‘water slides’ of their brain. The action greased the slides even more.</p>
+<p>Too late. They are already hooked. The trap that they fell into in the first place has claimed its victim again.</p>
+<p>As I keep saying, enjoyment doesn’t come into it. It never did! If we PMOed because we enjoyed it, nobody would stay on the tube sites more than the average time it takes to finish the deed. Anyway, a better way to orgasm is to masturbate out of your memories. We assume we enjoy internet porn only because we cannot believe we would be so stupid as to get addicted if we didn’t enjoy them. I had no idea about supranormal stimulus or novelty-seeking or shock-seeking, and even after I read about them, I did not believe that so much of my “fun” seeking was to do with simple evolutionary reward circuit wiring. I am some lab rat? I have free will! This is why so much of our PMOing is subconscious. If, while using, you were aware of the brain changes (the dopamine/opioid squirts, diluting of those fluids, the closing up of their receptors, the satiation levels going up ruining our future encounters and experiences with the opposite sex and you had to say to yourself, “this is going to cost $$$ in my lifetime, and this session with an unknown two dimensional actor might just be the one to trigger off PIED, PE, hypofrontality by greasing those ‘water slides’” - even the illusion of enjoyment would go.</p>
+<p>When we try to block our minds to the bad side, we feel stupid. If we had to face up to it, that would be intolerable! If you get to watch a PMOer in action, you will see that they are happy only when they are not aware that they are PMOing. Once they become aware of it, they tend to be uncomfortable and apologetic. We PMO to feed that little monster… and once you have purged the little monster from your body and the big monster from your brain, you will have neither need nor desire to PMO.</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p><strong>TOW</strong>- tug of war, dichotomous thinking, double thinking. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-20 Those Sinister Black Shadows
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 23:18:55 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-20-those-sinister-black-shadows/
+ <h2 id="those-sinister-black-shadows">Those Sinister Black Shadows</h2>
+<p>Another of the great joys of quitting porn is to be free of those sinister black shadows at the back of our minds. All PMOers know they are fools to close their minds on the ill-effects of PMO. For most of our lives PMO is automatic but the black shadows are always lurking in our subconscious minds, just beneath the surface. There are several marvellous advantages to achieve from quitting PMO. Some of them I was consciously aware of throughout my life, such as the health risks, the waste of time and the sheer stupidity of making love to a two dimensional image. However, such was my fear of quitting, so obsessed was I in resisting all the attempts of do-gooders and anyone else who tried to persuade me to quit, that all my imagination and energy was directed to finding any flimsy excuse that would allow me to continue to PMO.</p>
+<p>Amazingly, my most ingenious thoughts occurred when I was actually trying to quit. They were of course inspired by the fear and misery I suffered when attempting to quit by using willpower. No way could I block my mind from the health and sexual aspects. But now that I am free it amazes me how I successfully blocked my mind from even more important advantages to be gained from quitting. I’ve already mentioned the sheer slavery - spending half of our lives being allowed to PMO, doing it automatically and wishing we had never started, the other half feeling miserable and deprived because the knowledge of the destructive effects of internet porn won’t allow us to PMO. In the last chapter I’ve referred to the incredible joy of having energy again. But for me the greatest joy of being free was not the health, the time, the energy, or the ending of the slavery, it was the removal of those sinister black shadows, the removal of feeling despised by and feeling apologetic to myself and to other quitters, and most of all to be able to respect yourself.</p>
+<p>Most PMOers aren’t the weak-willed, spineless jellyfish that both society and themselves tend to believe. In every other aspect of my life I was in control. I loathed myself for being dependent on an evil crutch that I knew was ruining my life. I cannot tell you of the utter joy of being free of those sinister black shadows, the dependency and the self-despising. I can’t tell you how nice it is to be able to look at all other users, whether they be young, old, casual or heavy, not with a feeling of envy, but with a feeling of pity for them and elation for yourself that you are no longer the slave of that insidious trap. The other day I felt pity for the guy on a TV show who was so excited to get to watch porn - another case of society slipping one in your drink under the pretence of comedy.</p>
+<p>The last two chapters have dealt with the considerable advantages of being a non-PMOer. I feel it necessary to give a balanced account, so the next chapter lists the advantages of being a PMOer.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-19 It Relaxes Me and Gives Me Confidence
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 23:16:17 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-19-it-relaxes-me-and-gives-me-confidence/
+ <h2 id="it-relaxes-me-and-gives-me-confidence">It Relaxes Me and Gives Me Confidence</h2>
+<p>This is the worst fallacy of all about PMOing and for me it ranks with the ending of the slavery, the greatest benefit from quitting - is not to have to go through life with the permanent feelings of insecurity that PMOers suffer from.</p>
+<p>PMOers find it very difficult to believe that masturbation to internet porn actually causes those insecure feelings you get when you are out late at night after a contentious day at home or work. Non-PMOers do not suffer from that feeling. It is the porn that causes it. I only became aware of many of the advantages of stopping months afterwards, as a result of my consultations with other PMOers.</p>
+<p>I refused to see my PMO as causing so much of the mental tug of war in my mind that I am foolishly working hard to have nominal levels of confidence in my day to day life. Forget about getting an erection, I am talking about focusing, taking challenges, fighting, choosing, deciding - actions that define our lives. Especially when we are often forced to act when the facts are not clear. Come to think of it, facts were and will never be clear and hence it is to our great advantage anyway to act.</p>
+<p>Also of note is in dating area as well, the fire to go forward is being misappropriated to this ‘high reward zero pain’ porn. If you have read some top PUA books and forums, what do they say? Go on a ‘diet<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>’? Yes of course when you have the good hunger your internal juices and your brain will do the rest. Copping out is not an option at all. Playing the numbers is not tiresome by no means. All PUA advice in a nut-shell is this - try more numbers. Even if your approach is wrong you will be right twice a day like a broken clock. But if your mind is fighting a tug of war with effortless easy access to a harem of online women, how would you get back on your feet when that girl ignores you? Oh, if it was a public outright rejection I am running, not walking, to my porn girlfriend.</p>
+<p>For a long time, before YBOP and Gary’s articles, none of these things did I relate to my PMOing ‘habit’ but getting off it has been like awakening from a bad dream. Nowadays I look forward to each day. Of course, bad things still happen in my life, and I am subject to normal stresses and strains but it is wonderful to have the confidence to cope with them, and extra health, energy and confidence make the good times more enjoyable too.</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p><strong>porn diet</strong> - n number of days off before PMO. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-18 Energy
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 23:12:56 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-18-energy/
+ <h2 id="energy">Energy</h2>
+<p>Most PMOers are aware of the effect that this progressive process of PMO, leading to novelty and escalation seeking, has on their brain’s reward circuits and their sexual system. However, they are not so aware of the effect it has on their energy level.</p>
+<p>One of the subtleties of the PMO trap is that the effects it has on us, both physical and mental, happen so gradually and imperceptibly that we are not aware of them and regard them as normal. It is very similar to the effects of bad eating habits. The pot-belly appears so gradually that it causes us no alarm. We look at people who are grossly overweight and wonder how they could possibly have allowed themselves to reach that state.</p>
+<p>But supposing it happened overnight. You went to bed weighing 140 lbs, trim, rippling with muscles and not an ounce of fat on your body. You awoke weighing 180 lbs, fat, bloated and pot-bellied. Instead of waking up feeling fully rested and full of energy, you wake up feeling miserable, lethargic and you can hardly open your eyes. You would be panic-stricken, wondering what awful disease you had contracted overnight. Yet the disease is exactly the same.</p>
+<p>The fact that it took you twenty years to reach that state is irrelevant. So it is with PMOing. If I could immediately transfer you into your mind and body to give you a direct comparison on how you would feel having stopped internet porn for just three weeks, that is all I would need to do to persuade you to quit. You would think: “Will I really feel this good?” Or what it really amounts to: “Had I really sunk that low?” I emphasize that I don’t just mean that you would feel healthier and have more energy but how you would also feel more confident and relaxed and better able to concentrate.</p>
+<p>As a teenager, I can remember rushing around just for the hell of it. I was interested in reading, I had set up a chemical lab, tried fixing (old CRT) TVs, dabbled with cooking etc. I was fascinated by scientists. Then I got attracted to makers and doers of the rag-to-riches lives of real people. I had the inner push and I knew I had it.</p>
+<p>I then was introduced to print porn, then came music TV channels, followed by static computer images. By this time I was permanently tired and lethargic. Then came internet porn of images and downloadable movies. I used to struggle to wake up at nine o’clock in the morning. After my evening meal I would already be thinking about porn before going to bed, even when I had a girlfriend. Sex with her was a ‘chore’. But PMO with internet porn had all the novelty, shock, etc. No one can match that lure. And then the internet upped its game with tube sites, catalogued porn genres, ‘hearting’ favorites and all in lightning speed, high quality, no traces of downloads. Even the browsers went incognito, thoroughly helping me to cover my tracks. Reward with no pains.</p>
+<p>By this time, the lack of energy, tiredness and everything related to it is nicely swept under the rug of ‘getting’ older. My friends and colleagues by this time are all living sedentary lifestyles. I thought this behaviour was normal. I believed that energy was the exclusive prerogative of children and teenagers, and that old age began in the early twenties. I did not notice that I was paying attention to my health in general by eating right - which they did not. But I did not notice that anomaly.</p>
+<p>Shortly after I stopped PMO, I was relieved that this foggy and muggy feeling left me. For example, I can keep a steady gaze with my eyes on just about anything for a longer time. If I am looking into someone’s eyes it is even longer. However something truly marvellous and unexpected also happened. I started waking at seven o’clock in the morning feeling completely rested and full of energy, actually wanting to exercise, jog and swim. I have read about a forty-eight year old who couldn’t run a step or swim a stroke. The only sporting activities were confined to such dynamic pursuits as green bowling, affectionately referred to as “the old man’s game,” and golf, for which he had to use a motorized cart. But after quitting PMO he started going to gym - not that it is necessary that everyone would - but still. Almost all us know that it’s great to have energy and when you feel physically and mentally strong, it feels great to be alive.</p>
+<p>That is the point with PMOing - you are always debiting your energy. And in that process tampering with your brain codes of the reward circuit. Which again is going to make you miserable and vulnerable to stress and strain attacks. Unfortunately when you feel down with all of this you will seek a cigarette or alcohol or again porn. Unlike quitting smoking, where the return of your physical and mental health is only gradual, quitting PMO gives you excellent results from day one. Starting with energy. Then your mental programming to close the ‘water slides’ takes a bit of time. You need to kill the Little Monster - which will be explained in later chapters. Recovering your RC is nothing like as slow as the slide into the pit and if you are going through the trauma of the willpower method of quitting, any health or energy gains will be obliterated by the depression you will be going through. Unfortunately, I cannot immediately transfer you into your mind and body in three weeks’ time. But you can! You know instinctively that what I am telling you is correct. All you need to do is: USE YOUR IMAGINATION!</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-17 Health
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 12:12:31 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-17-health/
+ <h2 id="health">Health</h2>
+<p>This is the area where the brainwashing is the greatest. PMOers, especially the young and single, think they are aware of the health risks. They are not. Even in my case, when I was expecting my head to explode any moment and honestly believed I was prepared to accept the consequences, I was still kidding myself. I didn’t in those days have an app that started a red beeper to flash and sound every time my internet router hits a porn site, followed by a warning voice saying, “OK, this is the one!” Fortunately you do get a warning, and this is it. That warning would say, “Up to now you have got away with it but if you stay another minute your head will explode,” do you think I would have PMOed?</p>
+<p>If you are in doubt about the answer just try walking up to a cliff, stand on the edge with your eyes closed and imagine you then have the choice of either quitting PMO or walking up blindfolded before your next PMO.</p>
+<p>There is no doubt what your choice would be. I had been doing what every internet porn PMOer does all his life: closing my mind and keeping my head in the sand, hoping that I would wake up one morning and just not want to PMO any more. PMOers cannot allow themselves to think of the health risks. If they do, even the illusion of enjoying the ‘habit’ goes.</p>
+<p>This explains why a shock treatment is so ineffective in the first stages of quitting. It is only non-users who can bring themselves to read the destructive brain changes. It also explains why PMOers, influenced by their little monster, wrongly recall that filthy room mate who PMOed everyday and was still remaining ‘horny’ 24 hours a day – they will ignore the thousands of people who are brought “down” in their prime because of this poisonous ‘habit’.</p>
+<p>About six times a week I have the following conversation with PMOers (usually the younger ones):</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p>ME: Why do you want to stop?</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>PMOer: I read in a PUA guru’s blog that it is good to stop for 4 days to amp myself up.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>ME: Aren’t you worried about the health risks?</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>PMOer:No, I could step under a bus tomorrow.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>ME: But would you deliberately step under a bus?</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>PMOer:Of course not.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>ME: Do you not bother to look left and right when you cross the road?</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>PMOer: Of course I do.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Exactly. He/she goes through a lot of trouble not to step under a bus and the odds are hundreds of thousands to one against it happening. Yet the PMOer risks the near certainty of being crippled by this ‘habit’ and appears to be completely oblivious to the risks. Such is the power of the brainwashing. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. Especially when you are younger or single. So is internet porn - it is the wolf in sheep’s clothing.</p>
+<p>I remember a friend of mine who would not drink or smoke. Yet he would argue with me that internet porn is not different than older safe porn and that it is fun. Isn’t it strange that if, for example, we felt there was the slightest fault in an airplane, we wouldn’t go up in it, even though the risks are millions to one against death. Yet we take more than a one-in-four certainty with internet porn with its PMO addiction and are apparently oblivious to it. And what does the PMOer get out of it? <em><strong>ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!</strong></em></p>
+<p>Another common myth about PMO is the depression or peevishness. Many of the younger people are not worried about their health because they do not suffer any of the depression or melancholy. The depression or stress itself is not a disease; it is just a symptom. Younger people in general don’t feel the irritability or depression created because of their body’s natural capability to produce more dopamine and also the vigour and cheerfulness of their youthful activities masks those depleting reservoirs. As they age or if their lives experience serious setbacks the depleted resources are overworked and then they will experience full blown symptoms.</p>
+<p>When non-younger PMOers feel stressed, depressed or irritated it is because of the normal dopamine levels are not being effective and or due to excessive ‘flooding’ and its reactionary cutting down of the receptors. It is a reactionary step brain takes to protect its nervous systems from excessive dopamine ‘flooding’ as the dopamine receptors close up. It is one of nature’s fail-safe methods. They also develop other neural changes that will keep them in the rut.</p>
+<p>Just think of it this way. If you had a nice car and allowed it to rust without doing anything about it that would be pretty stupid, as it would soon become a heap of rust and not be able to carry you anywhere. However, that would not be the end of the world; it is only a question of money and you could always buy a new car. But your body is the vehicle that carries you through life. We all say that our health is our most valued asset. How true that is, as sick millionaires will tell you. Most of us can look back at some illness or accident in our lives when we prayed to get better. (HOW SOON WE FORGET). By being a PMOer, you are not only letting the rust get in and doing nothing about it; you are systematically destroying the vehicle you need to go through life and you only get one.</p>
+<p>Wise up. You don’t have to do it and remember: it is doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING FOR YOU. Just for a moment take your head out of the sand and ask yourself; if you knew for certain that the next PMO session would be the one to trigger off a process in your body that will make your penis fall away like a hair strand, would you then actually go ahead and do it? Forget the ‘disease’ idea (it is difficult to imagine it) but just imagine you are on your bed, with your partner and your penis is not responding. Or if you are a woman, you are not feeling in any way responsive with someone you deeply love? Now you are not in the beginning of a happy endeavour but instead a tug of war in your mind and in your partner’s mind too. “Is it my PMO or is it just stress? Can I spot who the culprit is 100%? Or for her, is it me? Am I not sexy enough for him? Or worse, am I losing my ‘appetite’ too soon due to ageing?” What do you think is going to happen?</p>
+<p>I often speak to the people that it happens to. They didn’t think it would happen to them either and the worst thing about it isn’t the disease itself but the knowledge they have brought it on themselves. For a very long time as PMOers and abusers we are saying, “I’ll stop tomorrow.” Try to imagine how those people feel who “hit the button.” For them the brainwashing is ended. They then see the ‘habit’ as it really is and spend the remainder of their lives thinking, “Why did I kid myself I needed to masturbate to internet porn? If only I had the chance to go back!”</p>
+<p>Stop kidding yourself. You have the chance. It’s a chain reaction. If you engage in the next PMO session, it will lead you to the next one and the next. It’s already happening to you. At the beginning of the book I promised you no shock treatment. If you have already decided you are going to stop, this isn’t shock treatment for you. If you are still in doubt, skip the remainder of this chapter and come back to it when you have read the rest of the book.</p>
+<p>Volumes of researches and studies have already been written about the damage that internet porn causes to our sex lives and to our mental well-being. The trouble is that until the PMOer decides to stop he doesn’t want to know. Even the forums and mentor groups are a waste of time because the PMOer puts the blinkers on. If he inadvertently reads it, the first thing he does is to open an incognito tab and visit his favourite tube site. PMOers tend to think of the happiness, stress and sex hazards as a hit-and-miss affair, like stepping on a land mine.</p>
+<p>Get it into your head: it is already happening. Every single time you browse to your tube site you are triggering dopamine flooding and the opioids get to work - the neural pathway water slides get greased and the ride takes you smoothly through the next steps that you have already given to the script. The nervous system is now flooded by dopamine and since it is its umpteenth time, it is going to let some of your dopamine receptors to close up. The ‘little monster’ in you is using this slight dip in the pleasure compared to the last time to encourage you to “cross the red line” towards more shocking porn or behaviour in order to release more dopamine. In the process just hit on the ‘novelty’ button that triggers dopamine again. “Let’s keep going,” says the little monster, because you deserve it and you are entitled to this. Now the streaming of so many pictures and videos on a single tab… that triggers another button called ‘supernormal’ stimulus, injecting more amines.</p>
+<p>All this time your receptors are receiving infomation to shut down inversely proportional to the flooding. Then you get to the orgasm stage. More dopamine, more shutting down of receptors. After this comes the withdrawal, Oh and since you are an ex-PMOer go get one. And why not pour a glass from the fridge of that leftover whiskey? Internet porn kills your sex life and thus it kills your private and public lives as well. If you are not aware of the addiction process or even if you are, you are in denial since the “little monster” craves for its fix because there was no real pain and you could handle the discomfort.</p>
+<p>I confess that the thought of having ED terrified me, which is probably why I just blocked it from my mind. It’s amazing how the fear of the horrendous health risks attached to PMOing are overshadowed by the fear of stopping. It’s not so much that the latter is a greater fear, but that if we quit today the fear is immediate, whereas the fear of getting ED, PE and OCD related mental illnesses are a fear of the future. Why look on the black side? Perhaps it won’t happen. I’m bound to have quit by then anyway.</p>
+<p>We tend to think of PMOing as a tug-of-war. On one side is fear: it’s unhealthy, filthy and enslaving. On the other side the pluses: it’s my pleasure, my friend, my crutch. It never seems to occur to us that this side is also fear. It’s not so much that we enjoy them but that we tend to be miserable without them.</p>
+<p>Think of heroin addicts deprived of their heroin: the abject misery they go through. Now picture their utter joy when they are allowed to plunge a needle into their veins and end that terrible craving. Try to imagine how anyone could actually believe they get pleasure from sticking a hypodermic syringe into a vein. Non-heroin addicts don’t suffer that panic feeling. Heroin doesn’t relieve the feeling, on the contrary, it causes it.</p>
+<p>Non-PMOers (those who don’t ‘need’ or have access to internet porn) don’t feel miserable if they are not allowed to PMO. It’s only PMOers that suffer that feeling. Internet porn doesn’t relieve it, on the contrary it causes it. The fear of ED or PE didn’t make me quit because I believed it was rather like walking through a minefield. If you got away with it - fine. If you were unlucky you stepped on a mine.</p>
+<p>You knew the risks you were taking and if you were prepared to take the risk, what had it to do with anyone else? So if a non-PMOer ever tried to make me aware of those risks, I would use the typical evasive tactics that all addicts invariably adopt. They are….</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p><em>“You will eventually get old and lose your sexual prowess anyway…”</em></p>
+</blockquote>
+<ul>
+<li>Of course you do but sexual prowess is not even the point, we are talking slavery here. Even if that is the case, is that a logical reason for deliberately cutting yourself short?</li>
+</ul>
+<blockquote>
+<p><em>“Quality of life is more important than just living.”</em></p>
+</blockquote>
+<ul>
+<li>Exactly but you are surely not suggesting that the quality of life of an addict is greater than that of someone that isn’t addicted? Do you really believe that the quality of a PMOer’s life is better than a non-PMOer? Surely the PMOer loses on both counts his life is spent in trying to cover his head in the sand and being miserable.</li>
+</ul>
+<blockquote>
+<p><em>“I am single and am not planning to ‘settle down’ in the near future so why not?”</em></p>
+</blockquote>
+<ul>
+<li>Even if that were true, is that a logical reason for playing with the brain structure dealing with impulse control that is needed in other areas of life? Can you possibly conceive of anyone being stupid enough to strip naked wherever one is going to be alone? No matter how sure you are that you are not expecting anyone in your life? THAT’S WHAT PMOers EFFECTIVELY DO!</li>
+</ul>
+<p>I can understand why the ED and the risks of ruining one’s mental health didn’t help me to quit. I could cope with the former and block my mind to the latter. As you are already aware, my method is not to frighten you into quitting but the complete opposite - to make you realize just how more enjoyable your life will be when you have escaped.</p>
+<p>However, I do believe that if I could have seen what was happening inside my brain, this would have helped me to quit. Now I’m not referring to the shock technique of showing a PMOer the effect of the hidden attribute of internet porn on the reward circuit of the brain. It was obvious to me from my unreliable arousals, fading penetrations, lack of energy, unemotional sex (as in just a muscle twitch), hit-seek escalations of porn search for novelty and shock that something is not going right. None of these are catastrophic for me as I have trained myself in cognitive behavioural techniques as discussed before but I did experience them quite often enough. Practising CBT/REBT gave me enough grounding and stability to look at my addiction in a different and better way than I’d have if I were not aware of the cognitive biases. Provided I kept functioning, even at a mediocre level, they were less of an embarrassment than a lost tooth - at least nobody could see my mind.</p>
+<p>What I am referring to is the progressive gunging-up of our reward circuits with excessive stimulation, making them incapable of handling the normal stresses of life. Closing up of dopamine and opioids receptors does not help me in enjoying my life with enough vigour. Porn and masturbation has replaced the natural sexual appetite, like a candy bar replacing real food. The brain has no idea to differentiate one from the other. I don’t like the thought of a virus in my smart phone or my laptop. Could you imagine buying the latest one of these gadgets and letting a virus to run every line of the software code but repeat it thrice? That’s what we effectively do to our bodies when we become PMOers.</p>
+<p>Many researchers and doctors are now relating various mental health problems in addition to the physiological ones caused by internet porn and PMO in general. This is no surprise to me. The mainstream medical world has laboured that PMO has never been scientifically proven to be the direct cause of the issues reported by self-confessing individuals. Admitting one’s sexual inability in public is such a shame triggering event, why would anyone do that unless they are really concerned? And probably many have found the cause and have eliminated it. This book is going to help you to get rid of it and also become a happy ex PMOer. No porn whatsoever, no porn aided masturbation. And of course no unnecessary orgasms. The only aid will be the touch, smell and voice of your partner. Like whole wheat bread after a well developed appetite, you will produce enough juices to break down the hard bread and it comes as a beautiful refreshment. No high fructose corn syrup injected fake food. The evidence is so overwhelming as not to need proof. No one ever scientifically proved to me exactly why, when I bang my thumb with a hammer, it hurts. I soon got the message.</p>
+<p>I must emphasize that I am not a doctor but just like the hammer and the thumb, it soon became obvious to me that the periods of my life outside of sex that were marked by low levels of irritation tolerance, lack of energy, temper, moody thoughts, zoning out of social scenes etc. were directly related to my masturbation and especially the supernormal stimulus of IP<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>. However, I truly believe that the greatest hazard that IP causes to our health is the gradual and progressive deterioration of our sex life caused by super-substitutes. The novelty, shock, variety in size and nature of internet porn can slowly take away the magic of the real sex. Worse, the RC<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> reward circuits are flooding unnaturally and at high abnormal levels so that they close up the receptors and also diminish any potency and effectiveness of normal de-stressors that work in the RC. This predisposes one to be depressed and become needy to lot more other ‘crutches’ of life such as cigarettes and alcohol or even causing the host to think of committing suicide. Even the real vagina will not be a match for the death grip of masturbation - and the little monster is kept alive.</p>
+<p>Our lives are ‘blessed’ with challenges – yes, ‘blessed’- they are needed to keep us strong and make us better. If our nervous systems is pre-disposed to making a molehill out of a mountain it will seek a ‘fix. When it seeks a hit or a mountain out of a molehill when it interfaces with reality then is it worth it? Our body and our brain is designed to make use of optimal levels of these brain chemicals. I don’t think a man who fails in satisfying a woman should consider himself worthless.</p>
+<p>You will do well accepting yourself unconditionally and as an extension others and of life in general as well. It needs practice - but you won’t practice unless your brain rewards you. External rewards are iffy and most of the time are not forthcoming. If your internal brain chemicals and the reward circuits are humming even a little external reward will go a long way and the lack of external approvals won’t even matter at all. If you want to you can be the king of your life. Think about this as one of your greatest benefits.</p>
+<p>Several of the adverse effects that PMO had on my health, some of which I had been suffering from for years, did not become apparent to me until many years after I had stopped. The good news I have for you is this - all of this is reversible. You are the jailer and you are also going to set yourself - the prisoner - free!</p>
+<p>It didn’t even occur to me that I was already suffering from ED and PE<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup> myself. Upon my first observation of the damage I quickly attributed it, with the help of my little monster, to (a) the occasional opposition to foreplay by my partner, (b) to the ‘less-than-ideal’ partner (my brain ‘tolerance’ is so high that even if I were with the most sexy one imaginable it’d still be not enough), (c) some silly grudge about my past stopping me to ‘prepare’ us to mood setting or (d) my boss, customer etc. etc.</p>
+<p>When it happened again my little monster brain gave me a BS mix of the above combo which I don’t even want to waste your time with. It never occurred to me that none of these would have stopped me before? So, I decided that I need ‘stamina practice’ since I figured that a toy which comes close to real vagina will ‘train’ me in getting hard and to avoid PE. I later came to read about PE being the result of poor training of the reward circuits. If one’s goal is orgasm then getting hard is not a requirement with masturbation. That being avoided enough times sets up waterslides in your brain and you grease it real nice every time to ride the slide. You can dispute this but I am going to take the Pascal’s Wager and quit - I lose very little, gain big and avoid losing big.</p>
+<p>When you don’t get hard or have unreliable erections, it’s a signal that your mind wants it more than your body - most times. Also of note is my peevishness and melancholy (anger/irritability and moodiness/depression). I told myself that I am a negatively oriented Virgo. While many Virgos are predisposed to think and act ‘negatively’ I failed to notice that actually I am a pretty optimistic guy.</p>
+<p>In fact, the many times I had not gone along for the porn water slide ride, due to external events, even though I had wanted to, I noticed that I did not get affected big time - remember again Pascal’s Wager. But looking back at my life, I have to say that I have been an achiever, in spite of the self-sabotage of PMO and its constant drag. That must be due to the training of tempering my pre-disposition and keeping the negatives to toned down healthy negatives of disappointment, sorrow, concern, annoyance, sadness, regret, frustration, caution, vigilance, irritation etc. I am sure that I am an optimistic and positive guy, how else could I explain that I kept going in spite of my tripping myself with PMO?</p>
+<p>I have been in the stock market and have advised my friends and colleagues. I would show my hands - in real investments and trades. Most of the macho guys would not bring themselves to pull the trigger at those times when I did with no fears but of course with due vigilance and caution.</p>
+<p>I know a person close to me who would masturbate every day at least once. He had no access to porn and was using static magazines and his own imagination. Now, looking back I wonder if this person lost his life’s joy to PMO. He would always be quick to anger and his irritation trigger levels are always very low. Any day-to-day stress will tick him off. He had a secure government job that demanded little from him and so he was lucky to survive until his retirement. Lucky? Maybe not. Anyway, I am sure his RC* had long sent shutdown signals to his receptors and his dopamine and opioids have much diminished effectiveness.</p>
+<p>You might conclude that I am something of a hypochondriac. I believe that I was when I was a PMOer. One of the great evils about addictions such as these is that it fools us into believing that the cigarettes, alcohol, PMO etc. give us courage, when in fact it gradually and imperceptibly dissipates it. I was shocked when I read about a confessor who felt suicidal at 19 due to PMO. Little did I realize that twenty years later I would have exactly the same lack of joie de vivre. You might conclude that this chapter has been one of necessary, or unnecessary, doom and gloom. I promise you it is the complete opposite. I used to fear death when I was a child. A bit later I used to believe that smoking, drinking and porn removed that fear. Perhaps it did. If so, it replaced it with something infinitely worse: <strong>A FEAR OF LIVING!</strong></p>
+<p>Now my fear of dying has returned. Yet it does not bother me. I realize that it only exists because I now enjoy life so much. I don’t brood over my fear of dying any more than I did when I was a child. I’m far too busy living my life to the full. The odds are against my living to a hundred, but I’ll try to. I’ll also try to enjoy every precious moment!</p>
+<p>There were two other advantages on the health side that never occurred to me until I had stopped PMOing. One was that I now wake up refreshed in the morning. The subtle well-rested feeling is something sort of what you’d experience after a fever had left you. I get that almost every day but of course some nights are not going to be perfect. I had accepted that there is nothing outside of us that we need to enjoy or cope in our lives.</p>
+<p>The other was the acceptance of the Void in our lives. Those insecure feelings. The emptiness. From what I learned - that is after removing PMO from my life, I could see that these three are present in everyone’s lives. Yes, that includes the playboys and the PUA macs as well. I think they are like the nights that serve to enhance our days. Yes, it is a well known ‘insight’. But then I know of many insights which have never translated to any value to my life. After I quit, it all fell into place. Look, I am not a saint or a guru. But I am not panicking and seeking substitutes when I feel the void, or insecurity or emptiness. There are no outside things that will be a pleasure or crutch.</p>
+<p>Here is a thought experiment for you… let’s say a woman comes to you and says she doesn’t necessarily want an orgasm but however, she very much wants to make love. Even penetrative. And she wants to do it for as long and as far as you can go without an orgasm but if it happens then its fine. I assure you of a great new experience, far better than anything in your life if you even get that offer. Try it.</p>
+<p>PMOers also suffer the illusion that the ill-effects of internet porn and PMO are overstated. The reverse is the case. There is no doubt that internet porn is the major cause of PIED and other problems. The trouble is that in many cases where PMO causes the ED or is a contributory factor, it is not blamed on PMO in the statistics. It has been estimated that more than 25 per cent of men experience ED or PE and yet I wonder how many divorces have been caused by PMO? There are no reliable ways to know the number of Internet Porn users within the study group. The studies usually mix up traditional and internet porn users and has no way to account for the starting age of the participants, years of use, duration and frequency of usage. There is no way to conduct blind or double blind methods either.</p>
+<p>I was a ‘safe’ user of internet porn - if there is anything ‘safe’ about it. However I noticed that I invariably projected porn fantasies on real life women. Like the episode in Friends where the guys, who were receiving continuous free porn on TV, started to wonder to each other why the pizza delivery girl didn’t ask to check out their ‘big bedroom’. Imagine what ‘careless’ or even ‘accidental’ porn exposure on the darker sides the internet would do to someone who is already at a tipping point in his or her life? Fighting against these ‘porn induce thoughts’, PIT<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup>, is going to be a major drain on his or her mental health.</p>
+<p>The effect of the brainwashing is that we tend to think like the man who, having fallen off a 100-storey building, is heard to say, as he passes the fiftieth floor, “So far, so good!” We think that as we have got away with it so far, one more PMO session won’t make the difference. Try to see it another way, the ‘habit’ is a continuous chain for life, each session creating the need for the next. When you start the habit you light a fuse. The trouble is, YOU DON’T KNOW HOW LONG THE FUSE IS. Every time that you give up to a PMO session you are one step nearer to the bomb exploding. HOW WILL YOU KNOW IF IT’S THE NEXT ONE?</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p><strong>IP</strong> - internet porn <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p><strong>RC</strong> - reward circuits in the brain that involves dopamine/ opioids, receptors, proteins etc. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:3">
+<p><strong>PE</strong> - premature ejaculation <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:4">
+<p><strong>PIT</strong> - porn induced thoughts, porn themes crossing over to normal interactions <a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-16 I Will Save X Hours a Week
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 12:08:55 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-16-i-will-save-x-hours-a-week/
+ <h2 id="i-will-save-x-hours-a-week">I Will Save X Hours a Week</h2>
+<p>I cannot repeat too often that it is brainwashing that makes it difficult to stop PMOing. So, the
+more brainwashing we can dispel before we start, the easier you will find it to achieve your goal.
+Occasionally I get into arguments with people whom I call “confirmed PMOers.” By my definition
+a confirmed PMOer is somebody who doesn’t believe PMO has any negative effect on his health
+(PME, PIED and hypofrontality etc.) and is not having a mental tug of war. Most times he’d be a
+younger guy or a single but with an occasional sex partner. Thus the internal feedback is lost due to
+the nature of their youth and or it is too infrequent to be observed and registered.</p>
+<p>If he is a young man, I’d rather say to him, “I cannot believe you are not worried about the
+time you are spending.” Usually his eyes light up. If I had attacked him instead on health grounds or
+on the social stigma, he would feel at a disadvantage which will trigger resistance from him. But on
+time…</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p><em>“Oh, I can afford it. It is only x hours per week and I think it is worth it. It is my only vice or
+pleasure.”</em></p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p><em>“I still cannot believe you are not worried about the time spent. Say at a minimum half an hour a day on an average including the physical ‘drain’ time of dopamine withdrawals, you are spending approximately one full working day of 8 hours every fortnight. Half an hour a day is a very conservative estimate you would agree. And in a year that will add up to a working month. Have you thought about how much time you are going to spend in your lifetime? What are you doing with that time? You are not even developing real relationships? No, your favourite porn star does not have sympathy for you just because you spent that much time on her site - you are throwing it away! Not only that, you are actually using that time to ruin your physical health, to destroy your nerves and confidence, to suffer a lifetime of slavery, pain, stress, melancholy and peevishness. Surely that must worry you?”</em></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It is apparent at this point, particularly with younger PMOers, that they have never considered it a lifetime habit. Occasionally they work out the time they waste in a week and that is alarming. Very occasionally (and only when they think about stopping) they estimate what they spend in a year and that is frightening but over a lifetime it is unthinkable. However, because now we are in an argument, the confirmed PMOer will impulsively say, “I can afford it. It is only so much a week.” He pulls an “encyclopedia salesman” routine on himself.</p>
+<p>Will you refuse a job offer which pays you your current annual salary and also gives you a month off every year? Any PMOer would sign up for this job offer in a heartbeat and would get busy finding vacation deals to exotic places. Figuring out how to spend one full month with no work would be the biggest problem that he now has to solve.</p>
+<p>In every discussion with a confirmed PMOer - and please bear in mind I am not now talking to someone like yourself who plans to stop, I am talking to someone who has no intention of stopping - nobody has ever taken me up on that offer. Why not?</p>
+<p>Often at this point in my consultation, a confirmed PMOer will say, “look, I am not really worried about the money aspect.” If you are thinking along these lines, ask yourself why you are not worried. Why in other aspects of your life will you go to a great deal of trouble to save a few dollars here and there but yet spend thousands of dollars killing your happiness and hang the expense?</p>
+<p>The answer to these questions is this: every other decision that you make in your life will be the result of an analytical process of weighing up the pros and cons and arriving at a rational answer. It may be the wrong answer but at least it will be the result of rational deduction. Whenever any PMOer weighs up the pros and cons of using internet porn, the answer is a dozen times over: “STOP PMOing! YOU ARE A MUG!” Therefore all PMOers are using not because they want to or because they decided to but because they think they cannot stop. They have to and need to brainwash themselves. They have to and need to keep their heads in the sand.</p>
+<p>The strange thing is many men would pay good money for gym and personal trainers to build their muscles and look sculpted. Other treatments such as boosting testosterone with dubious and sometimes dangerous effects are tried out by many men in their real (and imaginary) desperation. Yet, there are many men in that group who would save money and risks by stopping a practice that systematically not only destroys their manhood but also affects their brain’s natural relaxation system.</p>
+<p>This is because they are still thinking with the brainwashed mind of the PMOer. Just take the sand out of your eyes for a moment. Internet porn is a chain reaction and a chain for life. If you do not break that chain, you will remain a user for the rest of your life. Now estimate how much time you think you will spend on PMOing for the rest of your life. The amount will obviously vary with each individual but for the purpose of this exercise let us assume it is a year and half of work hours. You will shortly be making the decision to use your final session (not yet, please - remember the initial instructions). All you have to do to remain a non-PMOer is NOT to fall for the trap again. That is, do not PMO and consciously avoid having “just a peek.” If you do, that one peek will cost you a year and half of your work life. If you think this is a trick way of looking at it, you are still kidding yourself. Just work out how much time you would have saved if you had not taken your very first ‘peek’ right at the start.</p>
+<p>If you see the argument as factual, ask yourself how you would feel if there were a cheque from your state’s lotto for a year and half worth of your current salary lying on your carpet tomorrow? You’d be dancing with delight! So start dancing! You are about to start receiving that bonus and that’s just one of the several fantastic gains you are about to receive.</p>
+<p>During the withdrawal period you may be tempted to have just one final ‘look’. It will help you to resist the temptation if you remind yourself it will cost you one year’s worth of your peak annual salary (or whatever your estimate is)! I could be making that offer on television and radio programmes yet I bet no-one will take it.</p>
+<p>If you are mentoring someone online for his PMO addiction tell him that he knows someone who has refused a job offer that pays his current annual salary and also gives him a full month’s of PTO. When he ask who that idiot is, tell him, “you!” I know it’s rude but you may sometimes need to get your point across in a less-than-polite way.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-15 Self-Imposed Slavery
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 12:06:39 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-15-self-imposed-slavery/
+ <h2 id="self-imposed-slavery">Self-Imposed Slavery</h2>
+<p>Usually when PMOers try to stop the main reasons given are health, religion and partner stigma. Part of the brainwashing of this awful drug is the sheer slavery. Man fought hard in the last century to abolish slavery and yet the PMOer spends his life suffering self-imposed slavery. He seems to be oblivious to the fact that when he is allowed to PMO he wishes that he were a non-PMOer. With most of the masturbation we do in our lives, not only do we not enjoy them but we aren’t even aware that we are masturbating. It is only after a period of abstinence that we actually suffer the delusion of enjoying PMO (e.g. the first day after a 4 day abstinence with the intent of rebooting etc.). The only time that the porn becomes precious is when we are ’trying’ to cut down or abstain or when abstinence is forced on us (e.g. when on a business trips, holiday trips to locations where the Internet is not available and so on).</p>
+<p>The confirmed PMOer should bear in mind that more studies and even more people are coming out and talking about the ill effects of internet porn. This trend will get “worse and worse.” Today, it is non-medical people talking. Tomorrow, it will be in your doctor’s list of diagnostic tests to perform. Gone are the days when the PMOer can hide behind “just a bit of downtime due to work stress” in his or her sex life. Your partner is going to ask you why you are on your laptop at this time too late into the night. The poor PMOer, who was already feeling wretched, wants the ground to open up and swallow him.</p>
+<p>I remember every time my partner stayed up late it was an ordeal waiting to open up my laptop. When on business trips the dinner with the clients and colleagues dragged on or was I just going through the natural ups and downs in human interactions? What was I doing? I was thinking, “let’s get on with it, so that I can get over with this and go to my room for some porn.” I have thought many times, “am I not lucky? I have got my little reward. The poor non-PMOer with no internet access somewhere in an Amish village hasn’t got a reward.” The ‘poor’ non-PMOer doesn’t need a reward. We were not designed to go through life systematically flooding our brains with dopamine and opioids. The pathetic thing is that even when masturbating with internet porn the PMOer doesn’t achieve those feelings of peace, confidence and tranquillity that the non-PMOer has experienced for the whole of his non-PMO life. The non-PMOer isn’t sitting in the family room, feeling agitated and wishing his life away. He can enjoy the whole of his life.</p>
+<p>No, this wasn’t a fourteen-year-old schoolboy but a forty-year-old professional. How pathetic. I wouldn’t admit to myself that I wasn’t enjoying it. I was looking for the right clip and/or pictures to reach orgasm or better, edge forever. I don’t know what I am supposed to be ‘watching’ sometimes. That is the confusing part. The ’edging’ and then the orgasm floods my brain. Yet this was supposed to be my way of relaxing and enjoying my “favourite hobby.”</p>
+<p>To me, one of the tremendous joys of being a non-PMOer is to be freed from that slavery. To be able to enjoy the whole of my life and not spend half of it craving for more and more internet porn and then, when I get to fire up my browser, wishing I didn’t have to do it. PMOers should bear in mind that when they see or meet non-PMOers, it is not the self-righteous non-PMOer who is depriving them but their very own “little monster.”</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-14 What Am I Giving Up?
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 11:49:35 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-14-what-am-i-giving-up/
+ <h2 id="what-am-i-giving-up">What Am I Giving Up?</h2>
+<p>ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! The thing that makes it difficult for us to give up is fear. The fear that we are being deprived of our pleasure or prop. The fear that certain pleasant situations will never be quite the same again. The fear of being unable to cope with stressful situations. In other words, the effect of brainwashing is to delude us into believing that sex and by extension orgasm, is a must for all human beings. Or that there is something inherent in Internet porn that we need and that when we stop PMOing we will be self-denying ourselves and there will be a void.</p>
+<div style="font-size: 1.5em;">
+<p><strong>Get it clear in your mind:</strong></p>
+<p><strong>Internet porn</strong></p>
+<p><strong>DOES NOT FILL A VOID.</strong></p>
+<p><strong>IT CREATES ONE!</strong></p>
+</div>
+<p>These bodies of ours are the most sophisticated objects on this planet. Whether you believe in a creator, a process of natural selection or a combination of both, whatever being or system devised these bodies of ours, it is a thousand times more effective than man! Man cannot create the smallest living cell, let alone the miracle of eyesight, reproduction, our circulatory system or our brains. We don’t have our systems upgraded yet to properly assess the supranormal stimulus such as rich high density food or high speed internet novelty porn with multiple active windows.</p>
+<p>If the creator or process had intended us to handle novelty triggering stimuli, we would have been provided with some other brain reward circuits. Our bodies are, in fact, provided with fail-safe warning devices and we ignore these at our peril. Excessive edging results in body pain, irritation, and inflammation. In women, excessive flooding of dopamine and stress enzymes such as prostaglandin-E2 can cause difficulty to orgasm and PME.</p>
+<h2 id="there-is-nothing-to-give-up">There Is Nothing To Give Up</h2>
+<p>The beautiful truth is - there is nothing to give up. Once you purge that little monster from your body and the brainwashing (the big monster) from your mind, you will neither want to masturbate often nor need internet porn for it. PMO destroys your sense of self-control. I don’t think PMOers are self-destructive to continue even after knowing the ill-effects of internet porn. They clearly don’t have suicidal tendencies. They don’t enjoy this slavery themselves. Many of them do it in spite of the fact that they know it causes self-sabotage. You see there must be many unknowns and the medical community has no idea of even questioning and determining someone as an internet porn addict yet. So a lot of reported symptoms are wrongly tagged under other causes. It is not that PMOers are generally stupid people; it is just that they are miserable without the PMO. They are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. They either have to abstain and be miserable because they cannot PMO or be miserable because they are destroying themselves through PMO and feel guilty and despise themselves for it. When they feel that lower back pain or get PIED, their minds are torn between accepting responsibility and looking the other way.</p>
+<p>The problem I have is to make a convincing point as I’d have done for, let us say… smokers? All of us have seen smokers who develop excuses to sneak off for a crafty puff. It is easy to see the true addiction in action. Addicts do not do it because they enjoy it. They do it because they are miserable without it.</p>
+<p>Because many of us started out our first sexual experience that ended in an orgasm and we acquired the belief that we cannot enjoy sex without an orgasm. And for men, porn is sold as an aid towards sex, sometimes even as an education to be confident during the act of sex. It used to be static, but now we have supranormal internet porn. But this is nonsense. Internet porn takes away your confidence.</p>
+<h2 id="women-and-porn">Women And Porn</h2>
+<p>The greatest evidence of the fear that porn instils is in its effect on women. Practically all women are fastidious about their personal appearance. They wouldn’t dream of appearing at a social function not immaculately turned out and smelling beautiful. So why would they fall for internet porn? The traps were set as either a control trap (I can give up when I want) or an educational trap, or a freedom trap (I am entitled). Feminism has freed women from all the bad patriarchal rules of the past but they still need to be aware of supranormal stimulus such as internet porn.</p>
+<p>Porn and internet porn does not help your sex life; it destroys it totally. Having to hide your internet footprints, trying to delete your history, fearing accidental exposure to your boyfriend or kids, body pains, doubtful symptoms, fighting self doubts, arguing with yourself about your responsibilities in the ill effects of your addiction… well, why do you want to put yourself in such a bad situation?</p>
+<p>Not only is there nothing to give up but there are marvellous positive gains to be had. When PMOers contemplate quitting they tend to concentrate on health and virility. These are obviously valid and important issues but I personally believe the greatest gains from stopping are psychological:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>The return of your confidence and courage.</li>
+<li>Freedom from the slavery.</li>
+<li>Not to have to go through life suffering the awful black shadows at the back of your mind, knowing you are being despised by half of the population and, worst of all, despising yourself.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>Not only is life better as a non-PMOer but it is infinitely more enjoyable. I do not only mean you will be healthier. I mean you will be happier and enjoy life far more. The marvellous gains from being a non-PMOer are discussed in the next few chapters. Some PMOers find it difficult to appreciate the concept of the ‘void’ and the following analogy may assist you.</p>
+<h2 id="void-the-void-the-beautiful-void">Void, the Void, the Beautiful Void!</h2>
+<p>Imagine having a cold sore on your face. I’ve got this marvellous ointment. I say to you, “try this stuff.” You rub the ointment on and the sore disappears immediately. A week later it reappears. You ask, “do you have any more of that ointment?” I say, “sure, keep the tube. You might need it again.” You apply the ointment once again. Hey presto, the sore disappears again. But every time the sore returns, it gets larger and more painful and the interval gets shorter and shorter. Eventually the sore covers your whole face and is excruciatingly painful. It is now returning every half hour. You know that the ointment will remove it temporarily, but you are very worried. Will the sore eventually spread over your whole body? Will the interval disappear completely? You go to your doctor. He can’t cure it. You try other things but nothing helps except this magical ointment.</p>
+<p>By now you are completely dependent on the ointment. You never go out without ensuring that you have a tube of the ointment with you. If you go abroad, you make sure that you take several tubes with you. Now, in addition to your worries about your health, I’m charging you $100 per tube. You have no choice but to pay.</p>
+<p>You then read in the medical column of your newspaper that this isn’t happening just to you; many other people have been suffering from the same problem. In fact, pharmacists have discovered that the ointment doesn’t actually cure the sore. All that it does is to take the sore beneath the surface of the skin. It is the ointment that has caused the sore to grow. All you have to do to get rid of the sore is to stop using the ointment. The sore will eventually disappear in due course.</p>
+<p>Would you continue to use the ointment? Would it take willpower not to use the ointment? If you didn’t believe the medical article, there might be a few days of apprehension, but once you realized that the sore was beginning to get better, the need or desire to use the ointment would go, Would you be miserable? Of course you wouldn’t. You had an awful problem which you thought was insoluble. Now you’ve found the solution. Even if it took a year for that sore to disappear completely, each day, as it improved, you’d think. “isn’t it marvellous? I’m not going to die!” This was the magic that happened to me on my final PMO day. Let me make one point quite clear in the analogy of the sore and the ointment.</p>
+<p>The sore isn’t lung cancer, or arterial sclerosis, or emphysema, or angina, or chronic asthma, or bronchitis, or coronary heart disease. They are all in addition to the sore. It isn’t the body pains, lack of normal lust, flagging arousal, fading penetration, the wasted time spent on lifeless two dimensional images, the times when we felt infringed of our entitlement because we are not allowed to PMO. It isn’t the lifetime of being despised by other people who caught you or, worst of all, despising yourself. These are all in addition to the sore.</p>
+<p>The sore is what makes us close our minds to all these things. It’s that panic feeling of, “I want a fix.” Non-PMOers don’t suffer from that feeling. The worst thing we ever suffer from is fear, and the greatest gain you will receive is to be rid of that fear. It was as if a great mist had suddenly lifted from my mind. I could see so clearly that that panic feeling of wanting a porn fix wasn’t some sort of weakness in me or some magic quality of internet porn. It was caused by the first PMO session; and each subsequent one - far from relieving the feeling, it was actually causing it.</p>
+<p>At the same time I could see all these other “happy” PMOers - the ones who are blinded by their cunning little porn monsters - were going through the same nightmare that I was. Not as bad as mine yet all putting up phony arguments to try to justify their stupidity.</p>
+<p><strong>IT’S SO NICE TO BE FREE!</strong></p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-13 Social Night PMOing
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 11:47:03 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-13-social-night-pmoing/
+ <h2 id="social-night-pmoing">Social Night PMOing</h2>
+<p>This is a misinformation that seems to make sense but then it does not. In order to have control of eating, will you eat at home before leaving to go to a restaurant or a party? This is what you are doing when you PMO before your social night. You will look tired and will not be up to your best. If you have dating jitters then work on it beforehand and then go with the flow even with some butterflies in your stomach. I like a bit of the anxiety in me to keep me going. Tiring yourself mentally and physically with an orgasm is not going to help you, unless of course you are going to see a prostitute. The goal is entirely different in that angle.</p>
+<p>The widespread adoption of pick-up techniques has put pressure on guys to perform, to attract and to ‘score’. You can get knowledge but you should know how to use it. I can guarantee that 100% of the other guys hanging at that bar know exactly what you know. It comes down to the ‘how’ of how you use it when you get the chance. Even before that, there is one very critical thing about any knowledge pertaining to human interactions, that ‘knowledge’ should never force your actions. This is important.</p>
+<p>I once masturbated and then poured wine to quiet the butterflies in my stomach before a date. I looked tired after just one hour into the date, the loud noise of the bar, dehydration, excessive self-consciousness (PUA teachings) etc. made my time unenjoyable. Somehow the girl and her friend liked it all. However, I do think it would have been better if I had gone without any props. I ended up being successful by claiming my ‘goal(s)’ - which I consider unfortunate and as random luck.</p>
+<p>The PMO session I had before the date triggered a dopamine flooding and its withdrawal hit around the time I was with the date. I had to over-do my conversation to compensate the ineffective dopamine effects after that earlier orgasm. I am also sure that I was suffering from hypofrontality - where my impulses were failing my controls. That gushing moment, an extra decibel in the tone etc. would easily have given my nervousness to the girls - only if I was not protected by the loud noise in the bar. Why do you want to take chances?</p>
+<p>PMO ceases to relieve the withdrawal pangs that it causes in the first place. That is also why heavy PMOers turn to alcohol or other drugs. But I digress. Social night PMOing is occasioned by two or more of our usual reasons for pleasure/prop seeking, e.g. social functions, parties, weddings, school exams, game night, even business meetings. These are examples of occasions that are both stressful and relaxing. This might at first appear to be a contradiction but it isn’t. Any form of socializing can be stressful, even with friends, and at the same time you want to be enjoying yourself and be completely relaxed.</p>
+<p>There are situations where multiple reasons are present at one and the same time. To illustrate I will quote driving as one of these. But driving always involves an element of stress. Your life is at stake. You are also having to concentrate. You may not be aware of the last two factors but the fact that they are subconscious doesn’t mean they aren’t there. And if you are stuck in a traffic jam or have a long motorway drive, you may also be bored and may have ‘promised’ yourself to a PMO after you reach home.</p>
+<p>Another classic example is going on a first date. Especially when you know something about the date before hand like their profile from an online dating site. Your mind is throwing questions back and forth. If she is a 10 and in that vicinity or if the date is from another race which is socially ‘perceived’ as a couple of levels above your race then it gets even noisier in your head. Then the surprise to meet the person in flesh, first the looks, then the voice, then the mannerisms. Expectations determine the level of interest you have for her from there on. If your enthusiasm starts to flag you will start to feel too relaxed but then you feel guilty for feeling too relaxed. The tug of war has started. I want sex or get me out of here ASAP - I know where to get it. That will lead you to the next stage of post-date PMOing.</p>
+<p>Even if the date went fine and hours later you are at her door and which ever way it goes, you will not be satisfied if your goal is fully on the orgasm-seek. At other times, you drive home alone and all you want to do is to go to your online harem instead of patting yourself on the back for your efforts and enjoying yourself.</p>
+<p>You can bet that this unfortunate guy is going to PMO after he reaches home. It is often after nights like these, when we wake to feel the uneasy emptiness, are often the special ones, the ones that we think we’ll miss the most when we are contemplating stopping PMOing. We think that life will never be quite as enjoyable again. In fact, it is the same principle at work: these PMO sessions simply provide relief from withdrawal pangs and at certain times we have greater need to relieve them than at others. You had ended up ‘greasing’ the neural ‘waterslides’ in your brain and made it ready to slide again on the next cue.</p>
+<p>Let us make it quite clear. It is not the internet porn and the harem dwellers that are special; it is the occasion. Once we have removed the need for the PMO, such occasions will become more enjoyable and the stressful situations less stressful. This will be explained in greater detail in the next chapter.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-12 Relaxation
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 11:44:10 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-12-relaxation/
+ <h2 id="relaxation">Relaxation</h2>
+<p>Most PMOers think that PMO helps to relax them. The truth is that internet porn used in PMO acts like a chemical stimulant. The frantic search to get the fix in those “dark alleys of the internet” and the internal struggle to reign in the dog straining at its leash for more shocking clips does not sound much like an activity of relaxation to me.</p>
+<p>One of the favourite PMO sessions for most is the one after a trip to a new place or after along day. As the night rolls in we stop working; we sit down and relax, relieve our hunger and thirst and are then completely satisfied. However, the poor PMOer cannot relax, as he has another hunger to satisfy. He thinks of the PMO as the icing on the cake but it is the ’little monster’ that needs feeding.</p>
+<p>The truth is that the addict can never be completely relaxed and as you go through life it gets worse. The most stressed people on this planet aren’t non-PMOers but those young men and women who have a need to hunt (with the misunderstood goal of orgasm) and their ignorance of and/or low opinion of amative sex. Women who have subscribed to “I must orgasm” teachings are not even aware of the victim they have made of themselves. At this point any sex that leads to climax and orgasm cease to relieve even partially the symptoms that they have created.</p>
+<p>I can remember when I was bringing up a family. If my child would do something wrong I would quickly lose my temper to an extent that was out of all proportion to what he had done.</p>
+<p>My partner was “always frigid and not interested in sex.” Now I realize that if I had only tried the amative side of things then maybe I could have relieved myself of a great measure of stress at least - if not at me, I am sure she would have. One online comment…</p>
+<p>“I really believed that I had an evil demon in my make-up. I now know that I had, however it wasn’t some inherent flaw in my character but the little internet porn monster that was creating the problem. During those times I thought I had all the problems in the world but when I look back on my life I wonder where all the great stress was. In everything else in my life I was in control. The one thing that controlled me was this porn slavery. The sad thing is that even today I can’t convince my children that it was the slavery that caused me to be so irritable.”</p>
+<p>Every time I hear a porn addict trying to justify his addiction the message is, “Oh, it calms me. It helps me to relax.”</p>
+<p>On the Internet I read about a single dad whose 6 year old son would want to share his bed sometimes in the night after a scary movie yet the dad would refuse under some pretence so he can have his PMO session and edge for hours.</p>
+<p>Let me try a smoking analogy here… a couple of years ago, the adoption authorities threatened to prevent smokers from adopting children. A man rang up, irate. He said, “you are completely wrong. I can remember when I was a child, if I had a contentious matter to raise with my mother, I would wait until she lit a cigarette because she was more relaxed then.” Why couldn’t he talk to his mother when she wasn’t smoking a cigarette?</p>
+<p>Why are PMOers so stressed when they are not getting their fix, even after a real sex with a real woman? I read about a guy who has 9’s and 10’s open for dating with him as he was in the advertising field. I am talking about dinner and stuff only - but he lost interest in those dinners as his Internet porn is far more ‘easy’ for him - no restaurant spending and no hearing a ‘no’ from his date at the end of an evening. Why would he bother when his little monster tells him about the low-risk high-reward scheme called PMO that is at his fingertips when he reaches home? Those real girls sure have competition.</p>
+<p>Why are non-PMOers completely relaxed then? Why are PMOers not able to relax without a fix for a day or two? If you read about the experience of a PMOer taking the abstinence oath and quitting and you notice his struggle with the temptations. You can clearly see that they are not relaxed at all when they are not allowed to have the ‘only pleasure’ they are “entitled to enjoy.” They’ve forgotten what it feels like to be completely relaxed. That’s one of the many joys you have to come. The whole business of PMOing can be likened to a fly being caught in a pitcher plant. To begin with, the fly is eating the nectar. At some imperceptible stage the plant begins to eat the fly.</p>
+<p>Isn’t it time you climbed out of that plant?</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-11 Concentration
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 11:42:13 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-11-concentration/
+ <h2 id="concentration">Concentration</h2>
+<p>Sex and masturbation do not help concentration. That is just another illusion. When you are trying to concentrate, you automatically try to avoid distractions. So when a PMOer wants to concentrate he doesn’t even have to think about it. He automatically PMOs, partially ending the craving, gets on with the matter in hand and has already forgotten that he just PMOed. Sex in general do not help concentration. After years of masturbation your brain changes affect abilities such as assessing, planning and impulse control. The PMOer is already suffering: that little monster wants his fix.</p>
+<p>You are also stressed to provide novelty for the next PMO session as the same stuff will not generate enough dopamine and opioids. You have to “roam the internet streets” for novelty - all the while fighting the pull to cross the line towards shock. This creates more stress. After you orgasm, you feel unfulfilled as well.</p>
+<p>Concentration is also affected adversely for another reason. Your dopamine receptors have already started to get reduced by building up natural tolerance to these large surges, reducing the benefit of the smaller dopamine boosts from natural de-stressors.</p>
+<p>In fact, your concentration and inspiration will be greatly improved as this process is reversed. For some it will be the concentration aspect that prevents them from succeeding when using the willpower method. They could put up with the irritability and bad temper but when they really needed to concentrate on something difficult they have to have that porn fix. I can well remember the panic I felt when I discovered that the hotel has no internet connection and I had this huge presentation the day after.</p>
+<p>The loss of concentration that PMOers suffer when they try to escape is not, in fact, due to your abstinence from sex, let alone PMO. When you are addicted to something, you have mental blocks. When you have such a block, what do you do? You fire up the browser. That doesn’t cure the mental block, so then what do you do? You do what you have to do: you get on with it, just as non-PMOers do.</p>
+<p>When you are a PMOer nothing gets blamed on the cause. PMOers never have EDs; they just have an occasional down time. The moment you stop using, everything that goes wrong in your life is blamed on the fact that you’ve stopped. Now when you have a mental block, instead of just getting on with it, you start to say, “if only I could check out my favourites now, it would solve my problem.” You then start to question your decision to quit and escape from this slavery.</p>
+<p>If you believe that PMOing is a genuine aid to concentration, worrying about it will guarantee that you won’t be able to concentrate. It’s the doubting, not the physical withdrawal pangs, that causes the problem. Always remember: it is PMOer who suffers pangs and not non-PMOers. When I quit I went overnight from using everyday to zero without any apparent loss of concentration.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-10 Boredom
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 11:40:46 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-10-boredom/
+ <h2 id="boredom">Boredom</h2>
+<p>As soon as you get into your bed - and if you are like many people you are already on your favorite tube site - you will probably have already forgotten about it until I reminded you. It has become second nature. Another fallacy about PMOing is that it relieves boredom. Boredom is a frame of mind. The only time that happens is when you have been deprived for a long time or are trying to cut down, or during those first few PMO sessions after a failed attempt to stop.</p>
+<p>The true situation is this: when you are addicted to internet porn’s supranormal novelty and then you decide to abstain from internet porn, there is something missing. If you have something to occupy your mind that isn’t stressful, you can go for long periods without being bothered by the absence of the drug. However, when you are bored there’s nothing to take your mind off it, so you feed the monster. When you are indulging yourself (i.e. not trying to stop or cut down), even firing up your incognito browser becomes subconscious. The PMOer can perform this ritual automatically. If any PMOer tries to remember the session during the last week, he can only remember a small proportion of them - e.g. the very last one or after a long abstinence.</p>
+<p>The truth is that PMOing tend to increase boredom indirectly because orgasms make you feel lethargic and instead of undertaking some energetic activity, PMOers tend to prefer lounge around, bored, relieving their withdrawal pangs. This is why countering the brainwashing is so important. Because it’s a fact that PMOers tend to masturbate when they are bored and that we’re wired to interpret PMO as interesting. It doesn’t occur to us to question the fact how a two dimensional supranormal stimulus relieves boredom.</p>
+<p>We’ve also been brainwashed into believing that sex - even a bad sex - aids relaxation. It is a fact that when under stress or sad, couples want to have sex. In the absence of discrimination between amative and propagative sex, the goal is set to achieve orgasms by hook or by crook. Next time you do this watch how you both want to get away from each other as soon as it’s over. It is obvious that if they had just decided to cuddle, speak, hug and touch each other and go to sleep without the mandatory orgasms, the couple would have felt relieved. Well, if in the process, they wanted to have the propagative part then by all means they can but that is a topic not meant to be discussed in this book.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-09 Stress
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 11:38:59 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-09-stress/
+ <h2 id="stress">Stress</h2>
+<p>I am referring not only to the great tragedies of life but also to the minor stresses, the socializing, the telephone call, the anxieties of the housewife with noisy young children and so on. Let us use the telephone conversation as an example. For most people the telephone is slightly stressful, particularly for the businessman. Most calls aren’t from satisfied customers or your boss congratulating you. There’s usually some sort of aggravation - something going wrong or somebody making demands. Then he or she comes home to the mundane family life of kids screaming and wife’s emotional demands on you. His already PMO weakened de-stressors are in no way ready to take the aggravation. At that time the PMOer, if he isn’t already doing so, will fantasize the relief of internet porn that he promised himself that night. He will even allow himself to “take one step more” into the ‘forbidden’ area that he had previously self-excluded. He doesn’t know why he does this but he does know that for some reason it appears to help.</p>
+<p>What has actually happened is this: without being conscious of it, he has already been suffering aggravation (i.e. the withdrawal pangs). By partially relieving that aggravation at the same time as normal stress, the total stress is reduced and the PMOer gets a boost. At this point the boost is not, in fact, an illusion. The Internet porn user will feel better than before. However, even when using porn to masturbate he or she is more tense than if he were a non-PMOer because the more you go into the drug, the more it knocks you down and the less it restores you when you masturbate. I promised no shock treatment. In the example I am about to give, I am not trying to shock you, I am merely emphasizing that PMO destroy your nerves rather than relax them.</p>
+<p>Try to imagine getting to the stage where you cannot get aroused even with a very sexy and attractive partner. Just for a moment pause and try to visualize life where one very lovely and charming woman has to compete and fail with all the virtual porn stars who are in your ‘harem’ to get your attention! Try to imagine the frame of mind of a man who, issued with that warning, actually continues PMOing and then dies without ever having had real sex with this charming and willing real woman. I had read real life stories like that from men and dismissed them as weirdos. In fact, I used to wish a doctor would tell me that this weird condition would happen if I continue PMO; then I would have stopped. Yet I was already fully expecting that PIED and hypofrontality where I am guaranteed to lose in a brain war. I didn’t think of myself as an impotent, just a heavy PMOer. Now, let’s talk about the stress that this is putting on me.</p>
+<p>Such weird stories as the above are not fakes. That is what this awful ‘novelty’ porn drug does to you. As you go through life, it systematically takes away your nerve and courage. The more it takes your courage away, the more you are deluded into believing the porn is doing the opposite.</p>
+<p>Have you ever been overtaken by panic when you are out on business travel and the hotel WiFi is down or too slow? Non-PMOers do not suffer from it. The internet porn drug causes that feeling. At the same time, as you go through life, PMO not only destroys your nerves but keeps building a powerful neural ‘water slide’, DeltaFosB, progressively destroying your ability to say no.</p>
+<p>By the time the PMOer reaches the stage at which it has killed his virility, he believes the PMO is his new girlfriend and cannot face life without it. Get it clear in your head that Internet porn is not relieving your nerves; it is slowly but steadily destroying them. One of the great gains of breaking the ‘habit’ is the return of your natural confidence and self-assurance.</p>
+<p>There is no need to self-rate based on your ability to get hard or to satisfy a woman. However, you do ‘know’ deep inside that this is slavery. It is not freedom. And that freedom cannot be achieved by continuing to ‘grease’ - repeating the same behaviour and energizing the ‘water slide’ neural pathways of your brain in ways that undercut your happiness in general and not to mention your libido.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-08 Relieving Withdrawal Pangs
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 11:36:16 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-08-relieving-withdrawal-pangs/
+ <h2 id="relieving-withdrawal-pangs">Relieving Withdrawal Pangs</h2>
+<p>As I explained earlier, PMOers think they do it for enjoyment, relaxation or some sort of education. In fact, this an illusion. The actual reason is the relief of withdrawal pangs. In the early days we use the porn as a curious and novel thing or even educational or as a rebel. We can take it or leave it. However, the subtle chain has started. Our subconscious mind begins to learn that internet porn and masturbation taken at certain times tends to be pleasurable. The more we become hooked on the drug, the greater the need to relieve the withdrawal pangs and the further the PMO drags you down and the more you are fooled into believing it is doing the opposite. It all happens so slowly, so gradually, you are not even aware of it. Each day you feel no different from the day before. Most young PMOers don’t even realize they are hooked until they actually try to stop and even then many won’t admit to it. A few stalwarts just keep their heads in the sand all their lives,trying to convince themselves and other people that they enjoy it.</p>
+<p>Listen to this conversation a therapist had with hundreds of teenagers.</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p>TH: “You realize that internet porn is a drug and that the only reason why you are using is that you cannot stop.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>PA: “Nonsense! I enjoy it. If I didn’t, I would stop.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>TH: “Just stop for a week to prove to me you can if you want to.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>PA: “No need. I enjoy it. If I wanted to stop, I would.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>TH: “Just stop for a week to prove to yourself you are not hooked.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>
+<p>PA: “What’s the point? I enjoy it.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>As already stated, PMOers tend to relieve their withdrawal pangs at times of stress, boredom, concentration, relaxation or a combination of these. This point is explained in greater detail in the next few chapters.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-07 Brainwashing and the Primitive Mechanism
+ Fri, 23 Dec 2022 08:39:02 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-07-brainwashing-and-the-primitive-mechanism/
+ <h2 id="brainwashing-and-the-primitive-mechanism">Brainwashing and the Primitive Mechanism</h2>
+<p>How or why do we start PMOing in the first place? To understand this fully you need to examine the powerful effect of the supernormal stimulus. We all tend to think we are intelligent, dominant human beings determining our paths through life. We act and act frequently when our brain reward circuit are rewarded. Nobel laureate Nikolaas Tinbergen coined the term “supranormal stimulus.” He said mammals could be tricked into preferring fake eggs and mates. Female birds, for example, struggled to sit on larger-than life, vividly spotted plaster eggs while their own pale, dappled eggs perished untended.</p>
+<p>The stimulation here in internet porn is not it brings stimulating actors and themes to your home - it is a genie at your bidding to create a harem in your mind. You can switch between genres and theme, home-made and viewer rated, commented and discussed, so rapid and so easy. We absolutely are not ready for the high speed internet porn and our brains are not designed to handle this supranormal stimuli.</p>
+<p>We can have an ‘information overload’ from the same internet but our reward circuits are not going to squirt dopamine at the levels when ‘porn overload’ is involved. We are evolutionarily programmed to seek and access sex related stuff. And we wrongly appraise the stimulus mostly based on this reward circuit action. If all you wanted is to masturbate why can’t you just use one clip and get the business done?</p>
+<p>Here is another question - next time after a long day or some stressful incident can you consciously embellish your self-talk with “Do you know what I would really enjoy today? The marvellous warm glow of dopamine rush going to my online harem.” You will find that even people who dislike PMO will join you.</p>
+<h2 id="past-misguided-advice">Past Misguided Advice</h2>
+<p>There was much misguided advice given in the past and one is that masturbating will lead to blindness. And there are some other scare tactics that clearly over-did it. It is right that those notions were overthrown by science. But now the mainstream threw the baby out with the bath water. TV programs, pop music, literature and movies all subtly show shambolic characters using porn or masturbation. They knowingly or unknowingly mix porn, sex, internet porn, masturbation and orgasm.</p>
+<p>From our earliest years our subconscious minds are bombarded daily with information telling us that sex is good and that the most precious thing on this earth is to ‘achieve’ orgasm. Girls are taught to achieve it and claim it’s because they were wrongly suppressed of their sexual side for a very long time and still are. You think I exaggerate? Watch any TV or movie plot and you will see the mix-up of the amative (touch, smell, voice etc.) and the propagative (orgasmic) sides of sex. The impact of this does not register on our conscious minds but the sleeping partner, the subconscious mind, has time to absorb it. What the message is really saying is, “The most precious thing on this earth, my last thought and action, will be the goal of orgasm.” If you don’t have an orgasm then you are an old man with zero libido.</p>
+<p>Our children are being bombarded by sex and porn clips and many don’t even know how to protect them from it all. Large hoardings and magazine adverts are loaded with sexual innuendo. Some of the pop videos are extremely suggestive - again they hide behind free speech. Don’t be vexed and feel powerless about it. Make it a game and find you which of the components they are using - is it novelty, shock value, color, size, taboo etc. If the kids are pre-teen some of these can be disclosed to them and it would make an excellent show-and-tell game.</p>
+<p>A while back there was a wave of ‘leaked’ private videos of celebrities on the internet. If the youngster is too smitten by their favourite star, even if the conscious mind blames the ‘leak’ on the blood thirsty internet paparazzi, the ‘sleeping partner’ is patiently digesting the notion that, “yes, even my shambolic hero does it and if I don’t, I won’t look the part.”</p>
+<h2 id="the-scientific-reasoning">The Scientific Reasoning</h2>
+<p>True, there is publicity the other way - the PIED scares, the loss of motivation, preferring virtual porn to real girls, YBOP<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>, Reboot<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> forums, underground PUA<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup>, the no FAP movement - but these do not actually stop people PMOing. Logically they should, but the fact is they do not. They would not even prevent youngsters from starting no matter how much the YBOP guys try. All the years that I remained a PMOer, I can honestly say, even if I had read all of them before, I would never have become a quitter. The truth is that it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference. The trap is the same today as when you fell into it.</p>
+<p>Ironically, the most powerful force in this melee of confusion is the PMOer himself. It is a fallacy that they are weak-willed or are physically weak specimens. You have to be physically strong in order to cope with an addiction after you know it is. This is one of the reasons why PMOers refuse to accept the overwhelming statistics that prove that internet porn with its ‘novelty’ cripples your brain. Add to that the sexologists who are doing half-baked studies and declare PMO is not an issue - they just help to add to the confusion.</p>
+<p>Everyone knows a friend who PMOed every day - he started with the ‘static’ to internet porn, always horny in real life, chasing girls and you never doubted him to have sex problems of course. You want to believe him. He never complained about any ED right? Guys and girls like them refuse even to consider the hundreds of ex-addicts and non-PMOers who painfully recount their difficulties. It is the “little monster” brain chemical addiction and the “big monster” - illusions and delusions. In this hackbook, I’ve put together almost all the sorts of brainwashing a PMOer can suffer from. There will always be a few out there that I haven’t touched upon.</p>
+<p>Even more painful is they think of themselves as unsuccessful losers and insufferable introverts. A possible fact is that a PMO friend could have been more interesting in person if he hadn’t put himself down for seeking self-pleasure.</p>
+<p>If you do a small survey among your online forum members, friends and colleagues, you will find that most PMOers are, in fact, strong-willed people. They tend to be self-employed, business executives or in certain specialized professions, such as doctors<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup>, lawyers, policemen, teachers, salesmen, nurses, secretaries, housewives with children, etc. In other words, anybody leading a stressful existence. Yes, I did include women and mothers. It’s the brain and it’s the same for them too. The main delusion of the PMOer is that porn helps to masturbate to orgasm and that relieves stress. This tends to be associated with the dominant type, the type that takes on responsibility and stress and, of course, that is the type that we admire and therefore tend to copy. Another group that tends to get hooked are people in monotonous jobs because the other main reason for PMOing is boredom. However, the idea that internet porn relieves boredom is also an illusion, I am afraid.</p>
+<p>As a society we get all uptight about glue-sniffing, heroin addiction, etc. Actual deaths from glue-sniffing do not amount to ten per annum, and deaths from heroin are less than a hundred a year in this country. There is another drug, internet porn, on which over 45 per cent of us become hooked at some time in our lives and the majority spend the rest of their lives regretting it. Some even don’t know that their ED is due to this.</p>
+<h2 id="the-willpower-method">The Willpower Method</h2>
+<p>PMOers who quit using the Willpower method blame their own lack of willpower and ruin their peace and happiness. It is one thing to fail in self-discipline and another to self-loathe. There is no law that requires you to get fully hard all the time before sex, and to be properly aroused, and that you must be able to satisfy a woman. We are working on an addiction and not a habit. Habit is something you like to do- for example, golf - at no point you are arguing with yourself to stop golfing? But you do so with your porn addiction. The real question is: why?</p>
+<p>Constant exposure to internet porn re-wires your brain. You need to start building resistance to this brainwashing, just as if you were buying a car from a second-hand car dealer. You would be nodding politely but you would not believe a word the man was saying. So don’t believe everything they say either - that you must have sex as much as you can and you must have it exceptional good. And that in the absence of real sex you claim it by the substitute called internet porn - which is only a component of the good old porn.</p>
+<p>And don’t play ‘safe’ porn game either - because your “little porn monster” invented that scheme to lure you. Even the content - ‘amateur’? Really? Is there a certification authority that certifies it? Tube sites and porn producers gather site visitor profiles and cater to their needs. If they see a trend in crowd sourced collection of a particular genre they will focus on that and get content out ASAP. The statistics of what genre users like is collected to the level of how long and which portion the users were preferring. Do not be fooled by their educational intent or the safe female oriented clips (for you ladies). Start asking yourself:</p>
+<ul>
+<li>Why am I doing it?</li>
+<li>Do I really need to?</li>
+</ul>
+<p><strong>NO, OF COURSE YOU DON’T.</strong></p>
+<p>I find this brainwashing aspect the most difficult of all to explain. Why is it that an otherwise rational, intelligent human being becomes a complete imbecile about his own addiction? It pains me to confess that out of the thousands of people that I have assisted in kicking the habit, I (not Allen Carr) was the biggest idiot of all.</p>
+<p>At the age of thirteen, although I was doing well at school and games, I was still an insufferable introvert. I read books from the library that were not within my main study list. However, I can see that I was attracted to erotica. I started masturbating to TV programs, song and dance sequences etc. I must have to have it every day. The tired feeling I felt was misappropriated by my ‘little porn monster’ as work stress. I didn’t know my “I-must-masturbate-as-I-am-entitled” attitude was the one that created the ‘stress’ in the first place. Then I got pictures and GIFs via email on my laptop - the first step towards electronic porn. The colour and texture of the images were amazing for me at that time - won’t be now for sure. Then came dial-up but still they were predominantly static pictures. Then came downloadable videos. It’s a pain to download and watch now - but it was heaven sent then as we were coming out of the static porn era! Oh, the streaming tube sites haven’t arrived yet.</p>
+<h2 id="when-real-sex-is-not-enough-anymore">When Real Sex Is Not Enough Anymore</h2>
+<p>I even remember opening up my laptop after having real sex (an activity I did due to stress induced by my own irrational rigid self demands to make her orgasm) and I was wanting more. Obviously the prospect of orgasm providing fulfilment rarely happens after prolonged porn use. So, my mind was reaching out to porn.</p>
+<p>At the age of forty, I was visiting my online harem daily, drinking ‘socially’ (whatever that means) and smoking ‘sometimes’ but not so often. I had wrongly subscribed to misguided ideas of ‘moderation’ and ‘entitlement’. I had reached the stage where I couldn’t get through a single day without reaching out to porn in the night. With most PMOers, the triggers are the normal stresses of life, like answering the telephone or socializing.</p>
+<p>When I experienced PIED - I knew it was killing my virility. There was no way I could kid myself otherwise. I am smart enough not to ‘project’ the porn fantasies on to real life. But it was like pacifying a dog straining at its leash. But why I couldn’t see what it was doing to me mentally, I could not understand. It was almost jumping up and biting me on the nose. The ridiculous thing is that most PMOers suffer the delusion at some time in their life that they enjoy internet porn because it is ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’. I never suffered that delusion, I PMOed because I thought enjoying sex is a ‘birthright’ and I am only doing a normal thing.</p>
+<p>Since it was easier at most times for me to get internet porn than a partner I thought I am doing the normal thing. Now I am a non-PMOer, the most difficult part is trying to believe that those days actually happened. It’s like awakening from a nightmare and that is about the size of it. Internet porn is a supranormal drug. It is weakening your de-stressing mechanisms, your virility and your energy. The worst aspect of PMO isn’t the injury to your health or manliness, it is the warping of the mind. You search for any plausible excuse to go on.</p>
+<p>I remember at one stage switching to static images, a failed attempt to cut down on internet porn, in the belief that it was less harmful and I could reign in my ‘habit’. I failed to see the ‘novelty’ and the ‘shock’ demands from my ‘little monster’ to just get more dopamine. Did I ‘stay’ within my boundaries? I ‘favorited’ 2 dimensional photos and my harem collection saw pictures and videos of ‘mild’ type porn rotating in and out like musical chair. When their ‘music’ stopped they ‘exited’. I didn’t understand the novelty-seeking, shock-seeking nature of my brain.</p>
+<h2 id="pied-and-my-excuses">PIED And My Excuses</h2>
+<p>Once I figured I had PIED, as it had occurred multiple times with two different partners, I switched to more and more sophisticated masturbation. I practised with different artificial vaginas. They are sold as strength training. However, the combo of internet porn and toys needs deft hands, which is off-putting. Besides, by this time I was at the stage of orgasming with a limp member. All I wanted is an orgasm so I did not care about arousal, getting hard and all that. I had a long distance married girlfriend - who likes to share and talk about her sex life in very explicit manner. It turned me on so much that I’d masturbate to orgasm when I am on the phone with her. She knew it and would play with me by cutting off abruptly - to keep me hanging there - making me wanting more when she calls the next time. She had no trouble because I was fully willing to be the subject of playing such games, as long as it led to orgasm. A girl knows when a guy is seeking orgasm and it is his only goal. The only redeeming factor about me was my intelligence and empathy which kept her and my other partners coming back to me.</p>
+<p>Most PMOers swear that they only watch static and soft porn and so they are OK. They are actually straining at the leash and thus fighting with their willpower to resist temptations. If they do this too often and for too long they will debit their willpower considerably and fail in other life projects where willpower is of much great value, like in daily exercise, dieting etc. Continuous failure in those areas will make them feel miserable and guilty and very soon they will find themselves back to their entitled relief. If not, they will vent their anger and depression onto their loved ones.</p>
+<p>The answer is that once you have become addicted to internet porn, the brainwashing is increased. Your subconscious mind knows that the little monster has to be fed and you block everything else from your mind. As I have already stated, it is fear that keeps people quitting, the fear of that empty, insecure feeling that you get when you stop supplying the brain with dopamine flooding. Just because you are not aware of it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. You don’t have to understand it any more than a cat needs to understand where the under-floor hot-water pipes are. It just knows that if it sits in a certain place it gets the feeling of warmth.</p>
+<h2 id="the-passivity-of-our-mind">The Passivity Of Our Mind</h2>
+<p>It is the passivity of our minds and dependency on authority leading to brainwashing that is the main difficulty in giving up PMO. The brainwashing of our upbringing in society reinforced with the brainwashing from our own addiction and, most powerful of all, the brainwashing of our friends, relatives and colleagues. Did you notice that up to now I’ve frequently referred to ‘giving up’ PMO, I used the expression at the beginning of the previous paragraph. This is a classic example of the brainwashing. The expression implies a genuine sacrifice. The beautiful truth is that there is absolutely nothing to give up. On the contrary, you will be freeing yourself from a terrible disease and achieving marvellous positive gains. We are going to start removing this brainwashing now. From this point on, no longer will we refer to ‘giving up’, but to stopping, quitting or the true position: <strong>ESCAPING!</strong></p>
+<p>The only thing that persuades us to PMO in the first place is all the other people doing it. We feel we are missing out. We work so hard to become hooked, yet nobody ever finds out what they have been missing. But every time we see another new video clip it reassures us that there must be something in it, otherwise people wouldn’t be doing it - and it wouldn’t be such big business all over the world. Even when he has kicked the habit, the ex-PMOer feels he is being deprived when a discussion on a sexy entertainer, singer or even a porn star comes up at a party or other social function. She or he must be good to have all my friends talk about them, no? Do they have ‘hot’ pictures of her in my tube site? He feels safe. He can have just one ‘peek’ that night. And, before he knows it, he is hooked again.</p>
+<p>This brainwashing is extremely powerful and you need to be aware of its effects. I have heard scare stories about wicked men giving heroin mixed candies to kids at schoolyards. The concept of addiction and being compelled to go on taking the drug, filled me with horror. Even to this day, in spite of the fact that I am fairly convinced that ‘pot’ is not addictive, I would not dare take one puff of marijuana. How ironic that I should have ended up a porn junky. Technology will continue to grow and we will have even faster tube sites and more faster access methods. The industry is investing millions in Virtual Reality so it will become the next best thing. The point is, do we know where we are going? Are we equipped with an under armour of defence so we can enjoy the benefits of technology yet at the same time protect ourselves from its bad effects?</p>
+<p>We are about to remove the brainwashing. It is not the non-PMOer who is being deprived but the poor user who is forfeiting a lifetime of:</p>
+<ul>
+<li><strong>HEALTH</strong></li>
+<li><strong>ENERGY</strong></li>
+<li><strong>WEALTH</strong></li>
+<li><strong>PEACE OF MIND</strong></li>
+<li><strong>CONFIDENCE</strong></li>
+<li><strong>COURAGE</strong></li>
+<li><strong>SELF-RESPECT</strong></li>
+<li><strong>HAPPINESS</strong></li>
+<li><strong>FREEDOM</strong></li>
+</ul>
+<p>And what does he gain from these considerable sacrifices? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Except the illusion of trying to get back to the state of peace, tranquillity and confidence that the non-PMOer enjoys all the time.</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p><strong>YBOP</strong> - yourbrainonporn.com, the leading internet porn addiction awareness site. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p><strong>PUA</strong> - pickup artist. Someone who teaches men to pick up mates. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:3">
+<p><strong>Reboot forum</strong> - online resource for those who try temporary abstinence. <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:4">
+<p><strong>Doctors</strong> - there is a reddit online forum for medical doctors who are quitting. <a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-06 Internet Porn
+ Tue, 20 Dec 2022 20:44:00 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-06-internet-porn/
+ <h2 id="internet-porn">Internet Porn</h2>
+<p>Erotic novelty of the internet porn is a mental ‘drug’ and internet porn beats anything that is known to mankind and its streaming straight to your home for free ! We are not even talking VR virtual reality here. Porn triggers the ‘flooding’ of dopamine in our brain. Dopamine amps up the brain reward circuitry to produce experiences and feels of cravings and pleasure by locking themselves into ‘receptors’. More dopamine more wanting. Less dopamine no wanting. New experiences, tasty food - more dopamine - more wanting. Sex and sex related stuff gives the biggest injection of dopamine in the reward circuits. Dopamine is not the final pleasure stuff, if it were you would feel happy when you are done with it, but it is only a brain chemical that encourages seeking and action in you. The real pleasure is produced by opioids. More dopamine more opioids more
+action more happy feelings.</p>
+<p>So the first time you see porn - dopamine injects itself - you act - you orgasm. All of which will now be stored as a script in your brain for easy access next time. I call this a ‘water slide’. Next time at the cue - a sexy commercial or alone time or stress or feeling a little down - you are ready to take a ride on the ‘water slide’. One more thing is that every time to repeat this you are ‘greasing’ it as well - so it is active, alive and more easier to slide the next time.</p>
+<p>As time passes you are most probably not excited as before of the same clip - the reason will be explained shortly - but of similar type, genre, shock-level, our dopamine seeps into the brain but this time lesser than before. Now you feel less arousal, lesser motivation. This low motivation feeling in itself will trigger a feeling of lower satisfaction as our minds engage in constant rating. Then you seek more motivation. Then you ask for more novelty. Then you click on that amateurish, ugly looking, low quality, but high shock valued clip thumbnail which you had confidently said you won’t on your first time.</p>
+<h2 id="my-own-online-harem">My Own Online Harem!</h2>
+<p>This cycle of novelty, escalation, satiation, desensitization etc. is not the same as the old porn magazine? Neither can you do that in real life with your partner. Maybe if you own a harem? One of the pros of owning a harem is novelty and the cons are desensitization, escalation and of course the cost.</p>
+<p>Going back to the earlier discussion - in this cycle as you crossed the ‘red line’ you also trigger emotions such as guilt, disgust, embarrassment, anxiety and fear - which in turn raise dopamine levels as well. Now the brain may mistakenly associate feelings of anxiety and fear as sexual arousal. This perpetual cycle is only broken by natural causes - fortunately sooner or later. With its free access and privacy it provides boundless harem-like novelty. The dopamine can be theoretically kept very high for a very very long time. I can be satisfied with one lobster once in awhile. But Internet porn is different. It is even worse than drugs. Don’t let me make you nervous. I will shortly show you how to be free from this slavery.</p>
+<p>Now our human body has a self-correcting system by which the number of dopamine and opioid receptors are cut short when frequent and daily ‘flooding’ of dopamine is detected. Unfortunately - these receptors are also needed for receiving dopamine and to keep us even and balanced to handle the inevitable and normal day-to-day stresses. But this natural nominal amount of dopamine will not be absorbed efficiently with decreased receptors and you will feel mores tressed and irritated than normal.</p>
+<blockquote>
+<p>“For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed” – Kahlil Gibran.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>A fleeting feeling of security is all that is needed to get through a rough spot in life - but will your brain be able to catch that drop of de-stressor that a non-PMOers’ brain is able to catch and
+use?</p>
+<p>This dopamine flooding, like a quick-acting drug, falls quickly to induce withdrawal pangs. I must at this point dispel a common illusion that PMOers have about withdrawal pangs. They think that withdrawal pangs are the terrible trauma they suffer when they try or are forced to stop PMOing. These are, in fact, mainly mental; the user is feeling deprived of his pleasure or prop. I will explain more about this later.</p>
+<h2 id="the-little-monster">The Little Monster</h2>
+<p>The actual pangs of withdrawal from PMO are so subtle that most users have lived and died without even realizing they are like drug addicts. When we use the term ‘porn addict’ we think we just ‘got into the habit’. Most PMOers have a horror of drugs, yet that’s exactly what they are - drug addicts. Fortunately it is an easy drug to kick, but you need first to accept that you are addicted. There is no physical pain in the withdrawal from PMO. It is merely an empty, restless feeling, the feeling of something missing, which is why many think it is something to do with their hands. If it is prolonged, the user becomes nervous, insecure, agitated, lacking in confidence and irritable. It is like hunger - for a poison, INTERNET PORN.</p>
+<p>Within seconds of engaging in PMO the dopamine is supplied and the craving ends, resulting in the feeling of fulfilment and pleasure that the action gives to the PMOer. In the early days, when we first start PMOing, the withdrawal pangs and their relief are so slight that we are not even aware that they exist. When we begin to masturbate regularly to internet porn we think it is because we’ve either come to enjoy them or got into the ‘habit’. The truth is we’re already hooked; we do not realize it, but that little monster is already inside our stomach and every now and again we have to feed it.</p>
+<p>All PMOers start seeking porn for stupid reasons. Nobody has to. The only reason why anybody continues PMOing, whether they be a casual or a heavy user, is to feed that little monster. The whole business of porn and PMO is a series of confusing conundrums. All sufferers of PMO know at heart that they are fools and have been trapped by something evil. However, I think the most pathetic aspect about this is that the enjoyment that the PMOer gets from a session is the pleasure of trying to get back to the state of peace, tranquillity and confidence that his body had before he became hooked in the first place.</p>
+<h2 id="the-annoying-burglar-alarm">The Annoying Burglar Alarm</h2>
+<p>You know that feeling when a neighbour’s burglar alarm has been ringing all day, or there has been some other minor, persistent aggravation. Then the noise suddenly stops - that marvellous feeling of peace and tranquillity is experienced. It is not really peace but the ending of the aggravation. Before we start the next PMO session, our bodies are complete. We then force our brains to pump dopamine into the body using PMO, and when we are done orgasming and the dopamine starts to leave, we suffer withdrawal pangs - not physical pain, just an empty feeling. We are not even aware that it exists, but it is like a dripping tap inside our bodies. Our rational minds do not understand it. They do not need to. All we know is that we want porn and when we masturbate the craving goes, and for the moment we are content and confident again just as we were before we
+became addicted. However, the satisfaction is only temporary because in order to relieve the craving you have to get more porn. As soon as you orgasm the craving starts again and so the chain goes on. It is a chain for life - <strong>UNLESS YOU BREAK IT</strong>.</p>
+<p>The whole business of PMO is like wearing tight shoes just to obtain the pleasure you feel when you take them off. There are three main reasons why PMOers cannot see things that way:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>From birth we have been subjected to massive brainwashing telling us that internet porn is simply just another modern development that replaced the print version of porn. Why should we not believe them when it hides behind the truth that masturbation is not bad? (However, I won’t recommend you take up masturbation). Why else would they waste all that time and energy and take such horrendous risks?</li>
+<li>Because the physical withdrawal from dopamine injection involves no actual pain but is merely an empty, insecure feeling, inseparable from hunger or normal stress and because those are the very times that we tend to seek internet porn. We tend to regard the feeling as normal.</li>
+<li>However the main reason that PMOers fail to see internet porn in its true light is because it works back to front. It’s when you are not masturbating to it that you suffer that empty feeling. Because the process of getting hooked is very subtle and gradual in the early days, we regard that empty feeling as normal and don’t blame it on the previous PMO session. The moment you fire up the browser and reach a tube site, you get an almost immediate boost or buzz and do actually feel less nervous or more relaxed and internet porn gets the credit.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>It is this ‘back to front’ reverse process that makes all drugs difficult to kick. Picture the panic state of a heroin addict who has no heroin. Now picture the utter joy when that addict can finally plunge a needle into his vein. Can you visualize someone actually getting pleasure by injecting themselves, or does the mere thought fill you with horror? Non-heroin addicts don’t suffer that panic feeling.</p>
+<p>The heroin doesn’t relieve it. On the contrary, it causes it. Non-PMOers - say a 14 year old in 2008 - didn’t suffer the empty feeling of needing internet porn or start to panic when they are off- line. Non-PMOers cannot understand how PMOers can possibly obtain pleasure from two dimensional videos with muted sounds and abnormal body proportions. And do you know something? PMOers themselves cannot understand why they do it after some time either.</p>
+<p>We talk about internet porn being relaxing or giving satisfaction. But how can you be satisfied unless you were dissatisfied in the first place? Why don’t non-PMOer suffer from this dissatisfied state and why, after a no-sex date, when the non-PMOers are completely relaxed, are PMOers completely unrelaxed until they have satisfied their ’little monster’?</p>
+<h2 id="a-pleasure-or-crutch">A Pleasure or Crutch?</h2>
+<p>Forgive me if I dwell on this subject for a moment. The main reason that PMOers find it difficult to quit is that they believe that they are giving up a genuine pleasure or crutch. It is absolutely essential to understand that you are giving up nothing whatsoever. The best way to understand the subtleties of the PMO trap is to compare it with eating. If we are in the habit of eating regular meals, we are not aware of being hungry between meals. Only if the meal is delayed are we aware of being hungry, and even then, there is no physical pain, just an empty, insecure feeling which we know as: ‘I need to eat.’ And the process of satisfying our hunger is a very pleasant pastime.</p>
+<p>PMOing appears to be almost identical. The empty, insecure feeling which we know as: ‘wanting or needing an PMO orgasm’ is identical to a hunger for food, although one will not satisfy the other. Like hunger, there is no physical pain and the feeling is so imperceptible that we are not even aware of it between PMO sessions. It’s only if we want to masturbate and aren’t able to reach internet for porn that we become aware of any discomfort. But when we do PMO we feel satisfied.</p>
+<p>It is this similarity to eating which helps to fool PMOers into believing that they receive some genuine pleasure. Some PMOers find it very difficult to grasp that there is no pleasure or crutch, whatsoever to PMO. Some argue: “How can you say there is no crutch? When I orgasm up then I’ll feel less nervous than before.”</p>
+<p>Although eating and PMOing appear to be very similar. In fact they are exact opposites:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>You eat to survive and to energize your life, whereas PMOing dims your mojo and cuts down your energy.</li>
+<li>Food does genuinely taste good, and eating is a genuinely pleasant experience that we can enjoy throughout our lives, whereas PMOing involves self-sabotaging the happiness receptors and thus destroying your chances to cope and to feel happy.</li>
+<li>Eating doesn’t create hunger and genuinely relieves it, whereas the first PMO starts the craving for dopamine and each subsequent one, far from relieving it, ensures that you suffer it for the rest of life.</li>
+</ol>
+<h2 id="pmo-is-a-habit">PMO is a Habit?</h2>
+<p>This is an opportune moment to dispel another common myth about PMO - that it is a habit. Is eating a habit? If you think so, try breaking it completely. No, to describe eating as a habit would be the same as describing breathing as a habit. Both are essential for survival. It is true that different people are in the habit of satisfying their hunger at different times and with varying types of food. But eating itself is not a habit. Neither is PMO. The only reason any PMOer fires up the browser is to try to end the empty, insecure feeling that the previous orgasm and the PMO session created. It is true that different PMOers are in the habit of trying to relieve their withdrawal pangs at different times, but PMO itself is not a habit.</p>
+<p>On the internet they frequently refer to PMO as a habit and in this hackbook, for convenience, I also refer to the ‘habit’. However, be constantly aware that it is not habit, on the contrary it is no more nor less than DRUG ADDICTION! When we start to PMO we have to force ourselves to learn to cope with it. Before we know it, we are ‘escalating’<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> - we have to then have more bizarre and more shocking porn. The thrill is in the hunting… not in the killing. If we don’t then panic sets in and as we go through life we tend to novelty-seek more and more. Worse is when this seeking of higher shock level get into our real life. Have you heard about people suffering from PIED, that too in solo? How about wet dreams and fantasies where you are not even there but only involving others? There is no performance stress but I am not even getting hard. Great!</p>
+<h2 id="crossing-the-red-line">Crossing The Red Line</h2>
+<p>This is because, as with any other drug, the body tends to develop immunity to the effects of the same old porn clips and our brain wants more or something else. After quite a short period of watching the same clip it ceases to relieve completely the withdrawal pangs that the previous PMO session had created. You want to stay on the safe side of your own ‘red line’ but your brain is asking you to click on that ‘forbidden fruit’ clip. There is a tug of war occurring in this supposed porn paradise.</p>
+<p>You feel better than you did before starting this PMO session but you are in fact more nervous and less relaxed than you would be as a non-PMOer, like someone who is living in Loma Linda or in an Amish village, even though you are actually PMOing and living in your supposed “porn paradise.” This position is even more ridiculous than wearing tight shoes because as you go through life an increasing amount of the discomfort remains even when the shoes are removed.</p>
+<p>Once the orgasm is achieved, the dopamine rapidly begins to leave the brain, causing a mood dip. Which explains why the PMOer wants to ‘edge’<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> and switch through multiple browser windows as they seek and search. As I said, the ‘habit’ doesn’t exist. The real reason why every user goes on using internet porn is because of that little porn monster inside his stomach. Every now and again he has to feed it. The PMOer himself will decide when he does that and it tends to be on four types of occasion or a combination of them.</p>
+<p>These occasions are:</p>
+<ul>
+<li><strong>BOREDOM / CONCENTRATION</strong> - two complete opposites!</li>
+<li><strong>STRESS / RELAXATION</strong> - two complete opposites!</li>
+</ul>
+<p>What magic drug can suddenly reverse the very effect it had minutes before? If you think about it, what other types of occasion are there in our lives; apart from sleep? The truth is that PMO neither relieves boredom and stress nor promotes concentration and relaxation. It is all just illusion. Apart from being a drug, PMO is also a destroyer of happiness and virility.</p>
+<p>In case you have ideas of toning down to other more ‘realistic’ or ‘soft’ genres of porn and such, I should make it quite clear that the content of this book applies to all porn, yes, that includes, print, webcams, pay-per-views, chat, live shows etc. that is on high speed internet where ‘novelty’ and ‘shock’ is the nature of the game. Imagination goes farther than reality. The human body is the most sophisticated object on our planet. No species, even the lowest amoeba or worm, can survive without knowing the difference between food and poison.</p>
+<h2 id="brain-reward-circuit-mechanics">Brain Reward Circuit Mechanics</h2>
+<p>Through a process of natural selection over thousand of years, our minds and bodies have developed techniques for rewarding actions that multiply and sustain humanity. Yet our minds and bodies are not ready for the supernormal stimulus that is bigger, brighter, colourful, edgier and more shocking than the one we have now. We are attracted proportional to the degree of how far the outlier is from our individual normal. It can be two dimensional clip - and a muted one at that - we will get aroused. Look at the same clip again and again and you won’t be. You just moved your red line close to the outlier and in no time you will enclose it in your normal consciousness. It is natural and it is so that you can multiply and grow this human race. In real life there are checks and balances in place so you take a break and go away do something else. With internet porn there are no such checks and balances and you are living in a virtual harem!</p>
+<p>When we took a ‘peep’ at internet porn the first time, a few images were titillating but most were disgusting, causing you to avert your eyes away. Like you would if had accidentally glanced a feeding mother’s breast. And some of us are even revolted with what they saw when the star reminded them of someone dear to their heart or a scene which recalled their own instance of being the victim. Some don’t feel like it to browse and masturbate at the same time. It may be hard to believe for you but the non-PMOs, who don’t PMO after their first time, are the lucky ones. They actually decided that it was not their cup of tea. It must be hard for you to believe but stay with me.</p>
+<p>How many of us don’t visit brothels - even when you are far from home? Why not? It’s not the social stigma? How many of us did not bring home a bottle on your way back from work - even after a hard day? Why not? You ‘deserve’ it after that big deal you made? You just decided, after your first instance, that it’s not your cup of tea. That’s all.</p>
+<h2 id="are-pmoers-mentally-weak">Are PMOers Mentally Weak?</h2>
+<p>It is a fallacy that physically weak and mentally weak-willed people become PMOers. The lucky ones are those who find that first instance repulsive and they are cured for life. Or, alternatively, they are not mentally prepared to go through the severe learning process of fighting the obstructions of self-talking themselves to get hooked, fear of ‘getting caught’, not technical enough to create an online cache, operate privacy settings in the browser etc.</p>
+<p>To me this is the most tragic part of this whole business. How hard we worked to become hooked, and this is why it is difficult to stop teenagers. Because they are skilled in seeking and finding material, they know online privacy options and can clean their tracks - if they still feel some stigma and they (wrongfully) believe they can stop whenever they want to. Why do they not learn from us? Then again, why did we not learn from other PMOers and addicts?</p>
+<p>Many PMOers believe they enjoy online internet porn. It is an illusion. What we are actually doing when we jump from genre to genre is to keep our ‘novelty’ monkey within the ‘red line’ of ‘safe’ porn genres to get our dopamine fix, like heroin addicts who think that they enjoy injecting themselves. The withdrawal pangs from heroin are relatively severe and all they are really enjoying is the ritual of relieving those pangs.</p>
+<h2 id="the-high-from-the-dance-around-the-red-line">The High From The Dance Around The Red Line</h2>
+<p>Even with that one clip on which he lingers longer - the PMOer constantly teaches himself to filter out the bad and ugly portions of a porn clip. Even if it is solo, you still do the ‘filtering’ on the body parts that appeal to you the most. In fact some even take pleasure in this game to find an excuse to declare that they like ‘soft’ stuff and are not addicted to supranormal stimuli. Sometimes even this constant dance around the red line in itself produces a sort of high as well.</p>
+<p>Ask a user who believes that he sticks to a certain actor or genre - only because he likes something about the star or the theme (if any) of the clip: “If you cannot get your normal brand of porn and can only obtain a poor or unsafe brand, do you stop masturbating?” No way. A PMOer will masturbate to anything rather than abstain and it doesn’t matter if he has to switch to escalating themes, different sex-orientation-themes, look-alike actresses, dangerous settings shocking relationships etc. To begin with they taste awful but if you persevere you will learn to like them. Most PMOers will also try to seek masturbation even after having real sex (unfulfilment, porn-induced unrealistic expectations etc.), or after a long, stressful work day, fever, colds, flu, sore throats and even when admitted in hospitals.</p>
+<p>Enjoyment has nothing to do with it after the initial few minutes. If sex is wanted then it makes no sense to be with your laptop. During my conversation some PMOers find it alarming to realize they are drug addicts and think it will make it even more difficult to stop. In fact, it is all good news for two important reasons:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>The reason why most of us carry on masturbating to internet porn is because, although we know the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, we believe that there is something in the porn that we actually enjoy or that it is some sort of prop. We feel that after we stop PMOing there will be a void, that certain situations in our life will never be quite the same. This is an illusion. The fact is the masturbation and especially PMO gives nothing; it only takes away and then partially restores to create the illusion. I will explain this in more detail in a later chapter.</li>
+<li>Although internet porn is the most powerful trigger for ‘novelty’ and ‘sex’ based dopamine ‘flooding’ - because of the speed with which you become hooked, you are never badly hooked. The actual withdrawal pangs are so mild that most PMOers have lived and died without ever realizing that they have suffered them.</li>
+</ol>
+<p>You will quite rightly ask why it is that many PMOers find it so difficult to stop, go through months of torture and spend the rest of their lives pining for it at odd times. The answer is the second reason why we use Internet porn - the brainwashing. The brain-chemical addiction is easy to cope with. Most PMOers go days without online porn - when they are on business trips or travel etc. The withdrawal pangs don’t affect them. Their little porn monster knows that you will open your laptop as soon as you return to your hotel room or your den. Ah, you can even survive this obnoxious client and your megalomaniac manager - just ‘knowing’ that the fix is there for your take. It doesn’t bother the PMOers.</p>
+<h2 id="the-smokers-analogy">The Smokers Analogy</h2>
+<p>A good analogy is the situation of smokers - if they went ten hours during the day without a cigarette they’d be tearing their hair out. Many smokers will buy a new car nowadays and refrain from smoking in it. Many will visit theatres, supermarkets, churches, etc. and not being able to smoke doesn’t bother them. Even on the trains there have been no riots. Smokers are almost pleased for someone or something to force them to stop smoking.</p>
+<p>PMOers will automatically refrain from using internet porn in the home of their parents while visiting for family get togethers etc. with little discomfort to themselves. In fact, most PMOers have extended periods during which they abstain without effort. Even in my case I would quite happily go a week or so without a PMO incident. In the later years as a PMOer I actually used to look forward to these days when I could stop choking my penis (what a ridiculous ‘habit’).</p>
+<p>The brain chemical addiction (little monster) is easy to cope with, even when you are still addicted, and there are thousands of PMOers who remain casual users all their lives. They are just as heavily addicted as the heavy PMOer. There are even heavy PMOers who have kicked the ‘habit’ but will have an occasional ‘peek’, and that keeps them addicted. You are ‘greasing’ the ‘water slide’ of the brain only to see you slide down at the next dip in your mood.</p>
+<h2 id="the-big-monster---the-brainwashing">The Big Monster - The Brainwashing</h2>
+<p>You are smart enough to know (aside, I will explain shortly why PMOers are in fact a strong willed and hard working bunch) that not all porn workers get a W-2 with 401k and stock options. Only a very rare actor and that too for a very short period of time of their career may be.</p>
+<p>Not all the amateurs are ‘amateurs’ on these tube sites, oversized body parts and overcharged scenarios are the norm, aided by a bit of the ‘viagran’ help.</p>
+<p>As I say, the actual porn addiction is not the main problem. It just acts as a catalyst to keep our minds confused over the real problem: the brainwashing. It may be of consolation to lifelong and heavy PMOers to know that it is just as easy for them to stop as casual PMOers. In a peculiar way. it is easier. The further you go along with the ‘habit’, the more it drags you down and the greater the gain when you stop.</p>
+<p>It may be of further consolation for you to know that the rumours that occasionally circulate that the neural pathways created are there for life, and so at the right (or wrong) time and with strong stimuli you will be sliding again down the ‘water slide’ of internet porn and masturbation to permanently destroy your real life sex are untrue.</p>
+<p>Do not think the bad effects of internet porn are exaggerated. If anything, they are sadly understated but the truth is there are different levels of dependency on PMO and masturbation in general. However, these bodies of ours are incredible machines and have enormous powers of recovery. If you stop now, your body and brain will recover within a matter of a few weeks.</p>
+<p>As I have said, it is never too late to stop. You can see many who have stopped not only porn but masturbation as well. Naturally with any obstacles that humans face some have even taken this addiction recovery to the next level in learning about differentiating amative and propagative sides of sex. They have not only rebooted their sex lives but have made their partner happier than before as well.</p>
+<p>The further it drags you down, the greater the relief. When I finally stopped I went straight to ZERO, and didn’t have one bad pang. In fact, it was actually enjoyable, even during the withdrawal period. But we must remove the brainwashing about internet porn regardless of your status as single or partnered and also of masturbation.</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p><strong>Escalation</strong> - a practice that is the result of our brain’s novelty and curiosity seeking to get more dopamine in our reward circuitry. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p><strong>Edge</strong> - to stay longer in pre-orgasm stage. To delay orgasm. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-05 Why Do We Carry on With PMO
+ Tue, 20 Dec 2022 20:42:16 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-05-why-do-we-carry-on-with-pmo/
+ <h2 id="why-do-we-carry-on-with-pmo">Why Do We Carry on With PMO</h2>
+<p>We all start PMOing for many reasons, usually social pressures or our biological curiosity, but once we feel we are becoming hooked, why do we carry on using porn? No regular PMOer knows why he or she looks at porn. If PMOers knew the true reason, they would stop doing it. The true answer is the same for all PMOers but the variety of replies is infinite, I find this part of the consultation the most amusing and at the same time the most pathetic.</p>
+<p>All PMOers know in their heart of hearts that they are fools. They know that they had no need to use porn or internet porn before they became hooked. Most of them can remember that their first ‘peek’ was a mix of revulsion and novel curiosity. They then filter out and get “skilled” at “locating” and “bookmarking” the right porn sites. They know that they had to work hard in order to become hooked.</p>
+<p>The most annoying part is that they sense that non-addicts - most women, older guys, people living in countries where hi-speed internet porn is not available “on tap” - are not missing anything and that they are laughing at them.</p>
+<p>However, PMOers are intelligent, rational human beings. They know that they are taking enormous future risks and so they spend a lot of time rationalizing their ‘habit’. The actual reason why PMOers continue is a subtle combination of the factors that I will elaborate in the next two chapters. They are:</p>
+<ol>
+<li><strong>INTERNET PORN</strong></li>
+<li><strong>BRAINWASHING</strong></li>
+</ol>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-04 The Sinister Trap
+ Tue, 20 Dec 2022 20:38:28 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-04-the-sinister-trap/
+ <h2 id="the-sinister-trap">The Sinister Trap</h2>
+<p>Internet porn is the most subtle, sinister trap that man and nature have combined to devise. What gets us into it in the first place? The free samples from the professionals and the amateurs (celebrities and commons) who like to share. Some of us are even warned earlier that it’s an awful and disgusting habit with short term pleasures and long term costs but we cannot believe that they are not enjoying it. One of the many pathetic aspects of PMO (after knowing its dangers) is how hard we have to work in order to become hooked.</p>
+<p>It is the only trap in nature which has does not require a lot of hard work to set up. The thing that springs the trap is not that all porn clips feature young, high quality, sexy models; it’s that most of the thumbnails on any porn web page are ugly looking, unattractive, amateurish, home-made clips of unknown models. If the first timer’s first look at a tube page was only filled with angelic beauties, professional models and high quality then the alarm bells would ring. And as intelligent human beings, we could then understand why half the adult population was systematically addicted to watching something that is cutting down their very same potential to do what they are viewing. In many known and yet unknown ways porn cuts down sexual performance and the feeling of satisfaction.</p>
+<p>But because that first “peek” has “stains and holes,” a mishmash of low quality clips of not-so-hot models, our young minds are reassured that we will never become hooked, and we think that because we are not enjoying them we can stop whenever we want to. It is the only drug in nature that prevents you from achieving your aim. Our curiosity brings us to its door steps. You dare not even click on all of the thumbnails because some of them will make you feel sick and throw up! If you were to accidentally click on an “I-did-not-see-that” clip - all you want to do is get away from the site and close your laptop.</p>
+<p>With women, the aim is to be the sophisticated modern young lady. We have all seen them acting up and looking absolutely ridiculous. By the time the boys have learnt to look tough and the girls have learnt to look sophisticated, they wish they had never started in the first place. I wonder whether women ever look sophisticated when they discuss the top 10 porn sites, or whether this is a figment of our imaginations created by internet porn companies.</p>
+<p>We then spend the rest of our lives trying to explain to ourselves why we do it, telling our children not to get caught and, at odd times, trying to escape ourselves. The trap is so designed that we try to stop only when we have an “incident” that touch us to the quick of the flesh, whether it be in the bed, loss of a career or relationship, shortage of drive or just plain being made to feel like a leper. As soon as we stop, we have more stress (the fearful withdrawal pangs of brain chemicals) and the thing that we rely on to relieve stress (our old prop, porn and PMO) we now must do without. Internet porn is powerful imagery at high speed making it a high fructose corn syrup… sorry, high density supernormal stimulant.</p>
+<p>After a few days of torture we decide that we have picked the wrong time to quit. We must wait for a period without stress, and as soon as that arrives the reason for stopping vanishes. Of course, that period will never arrive because, in the first place, we think that our lives tend to become more and more stressful. As we leave the protection of our parents the natural process is jobs, setting up home, mortgages, babies, more responsible jobs, a bigger house, more babies etc. etc. This is also an illusion.</p>
+<p>The truth is that the most stressful periods for any creature are early childhood and adolescence. We tend to confuse responsibility with stress. A PMOer’s life - like a drug addict - automatically becomes more stressful because PMO does not relax you or relieve stress, as some try to make you believe. Just the reverse: it actually causes you to become more nervous and stressed. Internet porn is as fake in its promises for pleasure and crutch as its actors are. If you had never learned any life skills to cope the stress and strains of day to day life you are not going to get any better with this fake and disgusting crutch. Worse you are going to add more bales of straw on the old camel’s back.</p>
+<p>Even those users who kick the habit (most do, one or more times during their lives) can lead perfectly happy lives yet suddenly become hooked again. The whole business of PMO is like wandering into a giant maze. As soon as we enter the maze our minds become misted and clouded, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to escape. Many of us eventually do, only to find that we get trapped again at a later date. I spent thirty-three years trying to escape from that maze. Like all PMOers, I couldn’t understand it. However, due to a combination of unusual circumstances, none of which reflect any credit on me, I wanted to know why previously it had been so desperately difficult to stop and yet, when I finally did, it was not only easy but enjoyable.</p>
+<p>Since stopping PMO my hobby has been to resolve the many conundrums associated with porn. It is a complex and fascinating puzzle and - like a Rubik’s Cube - practically impossible to solve. However, like all complicated puzzles, if you know the solution, it is easy! I have the solution to stopping porn easily. I will lead you out of the maze and ensure that you never wander into it again. All you have to do is follow the instructions. If you take a wrong turn, the rest of the instructions will be pointless. Let me emphasize that anybody can find it easy to stop but first we need to establish the facts. No, I do not mean the scare facts. I know you are already aware of them. There is already enough information on the evils of PMO. If that was going to stop you, you would already have stopped. I mean, why do we find it difficult to stop? In order to answer this question we need to know the real reason why we are still doing PMO.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-03 Why Is It Difficult to Stop?
+ Tue, 20 Dec 2022 20:31:45 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-03-why-is-it-difficult-to-stop/
+ <h2 id="why-is-it-difficult-to-stop">Why Is It Difficult to Stop?</h2>
+<p>As I explained earlier, I got interested in this subject because of my own addiction. When I finally stopped it was like magic. When I had previously tried to stop there were weeks of black depression. There would be odd days when I was comparatively cheerful but the next day back with the depression. It was like clawing your way out of a slippery pit, you feel you are near the top, you see the sunshine and then find yourself sliding down again. Eventually you open your browser and as you masturbate you feel awful and you try to work out why you have to do it.</p>
+<p>One of the questions I always ask online is: “do you want to stop PMO?” In a way it is a stupid question. All users (including members who dispute total abstinence) would love to stop PMO. If you ask to the most confirmed PMOer: “if you could go back to the time before you became hooked, with the knowledge you have now, would you have started PMO?”</p>
+<p>“NO WAY,” would be the reply.</p>
+<p>Say to the confirmed PMOer - someone who defends internet porn and who doesn’t think that it cause injury to the brain (PIED, hypofrontality or the decreases in the dopamine receptors and etc.) - “do you encourage your children to use PMO?”</p>
+<p>“NO WAY,” is again the reply.</p>
+<p>All PMOers feel that something evil has got possession of them. In the early days it is a question of, “I am going to stop, not today but tomorrow.” Eventually we get to the stage where we think either that we haven’t got the willpower or that there is something inherent in the whole PMO that we must have in order to enjoy life.</p>
+<p>As I said previously, the problem is not explaining why it is easy to stop; it is explaining why it is difficult. In fact, the real problem is explaining scientifically why anybody does it even after getting the insights on the neurological damages of addictions not limited to porn.</p>
+<p>The whole business of porn is an extraordinary enigma. One of the reasons we get on to it is because of the thousands of people are already into it, about 35% of the population approximately. Yet every one of them wishes he or she had not started in the first place, telling us that life is like driving in second gear. We cannot quite believe they are not enjoying it. We associate it with freedom or being “sex-educated” and work hard to become hooked ourselves. We then spend the rest of our lives telling others not to do it and trying to kick the habit ourselves.</p>
+<p>We also spend the rest of our lives feeling hopeless and miserable. Time spent on porn can accumulate to a large percentage of our life in this planet! What do we do with that amount of time spent? We ‘educate’ ourselves with supranormal<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> ‘material’ that makes us stupidly prefer and childishly long for these cold images - even when warm real ones are available. By the constant surge and drop of dopamine induced by PMO, we sentence ourselves to a lifetime of irritability, anger, frustration, stress, fatigue<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup>, PIED, hypofrontality etc. In short, it is a lifetime of slavery. It is logically and intuitively clear that amative sex (physical touch, feel, voice etc.) is the best part of sex and is even better (if Karezza<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">3</a></sup> is practiced, although not necessary for the current purposes) than the propagative (orgasm) part, except when children are desired. So, when we use porn in the absence of the best part of sex we feel miserable and guilty.</p>
+<p>In fact, all the reading about internet pornography’s addictive capabilities and it’s destructive effects here and in other online sites makes us even more nervous and hopeless. When we are trying to cut down or stop, we end up feeling deprived. We wish we didn’t have to. What sort of hobby is it that when you are doing it you wish you weren’t, and when you are not doing it you crave for it? A lifetime of an otherwise intelligent, rational human being going through life in contempt.</p>
+<p>The PMOer despises himself, every time he has an unreliable erection, a fading penetration, reading about PIED and other stuff on the YBOP forum, every time he could not pull himself up to exercise after a daytime PMO, every PMO behind his or her trustfully asleep partner’s back, every time he sees his tired face and lifeless eyes in the restroom mirror.</p>
+<p>Having to go through life with these awful black shadows at the back of his mind, what does he get out of it? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Pleasure? Enjoyment? Relaxation? A prop? A boost? All illusions, unless you consider the wearing of tight shoes to enjoy the removal of them as some sort of pleasure!</p>
+<p>The real problem is trying to explain not only why PMOers find it difficult to stop but why anybody does it at all after knowing about brain neuroplasticity. You are probably thinking: “That’s all very well. I know this, but once you are hooked on these things it is very difficult to stop.” But why is it so difficult, and why do we have to do it? Addicts of PMO search for the answer to these questions all of their lives. Some say it is because of the powerful withdrawal symptoms. In fact, the actual withdrawal symptoms from porn are so mild (see Chapter 6) that PMOers should know about smokers who have lived and died without ever realizing they are drug addicts.</p>
+<p>Some say internet porn is free and hence humankind should claim this biological bonanza. It is NOT. It is addictive and acts like any other drug. Ask a PMOer who swears that he only enjoys safe playboy type erotica and that he could always restrict himself only to this soft genre? If he is absolutely honest - he would tell you about the many times when he had unwittingly crossed the line. Otherwise good PMOers would rather use ‘unsafe’ hardcore stuff, rationalizing it, than left with nothing at all.</p>
+<p>Enjoyment has nothing to do with it. I enjoy lobster but I never got to the stage where I had to have lobsters everyday and multiple times like they are hanging round my neck. With other things in life we enjoy them whilst we are doing them but we don’t sit feeling deprived when we are not. Some search for deep psychological reasons, the “Freudian Syndrome,” or “the child at the mother’s breast.” Really it is just the reverse.</p>
+<p>The ‘usual’ reason why we start PMO is to show we are grown up and mature. Some think it is the reverse, the macho effect of “doing what boys do” or in some cases, “let me show I am a tomboy girl,” to rattle my conservative family. Again, this argument has no substance. Internet porn provides easy escalation (outrageous and shocking clips just a click away), desensitization (same clips don’t do it any more) and all this within the high reward no risk settings. The science fiction story lines, the fake “amateurs,” the “real life” clips etc. should make any average PMOer discover pretty soon that it is all an illusion. What a PMOer should also understand is that after eating at restaurants every day the home food will never appeal your taste buds at all. Yes, the food is free and is tasty - but does it nourish you?</p>
+<p>Some say:</p>
+<ul>
+<li>“It is educational!” So, when is your graduation?</li>
+<li>“It is a sexual satisfaction.” So, why do it alone? Find a partner and save it for her or him?</li>
+<li>“It is the feeling of release.” A release from the stresses of real life? Porn is going to remove the cause of the stress? OK, good luck. You just added more to it.</li>
+</ul>
+<p>Many believe PMO relieves boredom. This is also a fallacy. Boredom is a frame of mind. Porn will induce you to “novelty” seeking in no time. Causing you to be eventually more bored unless and until you participate in the “wild goose chase” all night long for the “right hit” producing clip. There is nothing interesting about supranormal stimulus such as internet porn, it fires up dopamine whose only job is to seek clips that evoke strong emotions, interesting novelty and outrageous shock value.</p>
+<p>For thirty years my reason was that it relaxed me, gave me confidence and courage. I also knew it was draining me and costing me virility. Why didn’t I go to a therapist or find an another way to relax me and give me courage and confidence? I didn’t go because I knew he would suggest an alternative. It wasn’t my reason; it was my excuse.</p>
+<p>Some say they only do it because their friends and every one they know do it. Are you really that stupid? If so, just pray that your friends do not start cutting their heads off to cure a headache! Most users who think about it eventually come to the conclusion that it is just a habit. This is not really an explanation but having discounted all the usual rational explanations, it appears to be the only remaining excuse. Unfortunately, this explanation is equally illogical. Every day of our lives we change habits and some of them are very enjoyable. We have been brainwashed to believe that PMO is a habit and that habits are difficult to break. Are habits really difficult to break?</p>
+<p>In the US we are in the habit of driving on the right side of the road. Yet when we drive in the UK we immediately break that habit with hardly any aggravation whatsoever. It is clearly a fallacy that habits are hard to break. The fact is that we make and break habits every day of our lives. So why do we find it difficult to break a habit that makes us deprived when we don’t have it yet guilty when we do and that we would love to break anyway, when all we have to do is to stop doing it?</p>
+<p>The answer is that PMO is not habit: IT IS ADDICTION! That is why it appears to be so difficult to “give up.” Perhaps you feel this explanation explains why it is difficult to “give up?” It does explain why most PMOers find it difficult to “give up.” That is because they do not understand addiction. The main reason is that PMOers are convinced that they get some genuine pleasure and/or crutch from porn and believe that they are making a genuine sacrifice if they quit.</p>
+<p>The beautiful truth is that once you understand porn addiction and the true reasons why you PMO, you will stop doing it just like that - and within three weeks the only mystery will be why you found it necessary to PMO as long as you have, and why you cannot persuade other PMOers <strong>HOW NICE IT IS TO BE A NON-PMOer</strong>!</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p><strong>Supranormal</strong> - a phrase coined by Nikolaas Tinbergen. Studies show that our brains prefer brighter, larger, colourful
+etc. versions of what we like. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p>When dopamine receptors are de-activated in response to frequent and extended dopamine surges even normal de-
+stressing chemicals are not absorbed by our brains. <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:3">
+<p><strong>Karezza</strong> - is the practice of amative sex that puts no pressure on orgasms as occurs in propagative sex. It relieves the
+man and woman from performance based anxieties. <a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-02 The Easy Method
+ Tue, 20 Dec 2022 20:26:34 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-02-the-easy-method/
+ <h2 id="the-easy-method">The Easy Method</h2>
+<p>The object of this book is to get you into the frame of mind in which, instead of the normal method of stopping whereby you start off with the feeling that you are climbing Mount Everest and spend the next few weeks craving and feeling deprived, you start right away with a feeling of elation, as if you had been cured of a terrible disease. From then on, the further you go through life the more you will look at this period of time and wonder how you ever had to use any porn in the first place. You will look at your dorm mate PMOer with pity as opposed to envy.</p>
+<p>Provided that you are not a non-PMOer (who had never got addicted) or an ex-PMOer (who had quit or is in the fasting days of the porn-diet), it is essential to not quit until you have finished the book completely. This may appear to be a contradiction. Later I shall be explaining that porn do absolutely nothing for you at all. In fact, one of the many conundrums about internet porn is that when we are actually masturbating to a porn clip, we look at it and wonder why we are doing it. It is only when we have been deprived that the craving for PMO becomes precious.</p>
+<p>However, let us accept that, whether you like it or not, you believe you are hooked. When you believe you are hooked, you can never be completely relaxed or concentrate properly unless you are using PMO. So do not attempt to stop PMO before you have finished the whole book. This instruction to continue to masturbate using porn until you have completed the book has caused me more frustration than any other. As you read further your desire to masturbate to porn will gradually be reduced. Do not go off half-cocked; this could be fatal. Remember, all you have to do is to follow the instructions in the right order. When I first started writing on forums many of the readers also stopped purely because I had done it. They thought, “if he can do it, anybody can.”</p>
+<p>Over the years, I managed to persuade the ones that hadn’t stopped to realize just how nice it is to be free! I gave my hackbook for free upon request. I worked on the basis that, even if it were the most boring book ever written, they would still read it, if only because it had been written by an ex-PMOer. I was surprised and hurt to learn that,they hadn’t bothered to finish the book.</p>
+<p>I was hurt at the time but I had overlooked the dreadful fear that this slavery to the “dopamine surge” instils in the addict. I now realize that many PMOers don’t finish the book because they feel they have got to give up something that is their pleasure and crutch when they quit. Some deliberately read only one line a day in order to postpone the evil day. Look at it this way: what have you got to lose? If you don’t stop at the end of the book, you are no worse off than you are now. YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO LOSE AND SO MUCH TO GAIN! AND SO MUCH MORE TO AVOID !!! A Pascal’s Wage<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup>?</p>
+<p>Incidentally, if you have not PMOed for a few days or weeks but are not sure whether you are a PMOer, an ex-PMOer or a non-PMOer, then don’t use porn to masturbate while you read. In fact, you are already a non-PMOer. All we’ve now got to do is to let your brain catch up with your body. By the end of the book you’ll be a happy non-PMOer.</p>
+<p>Basically this method is the complete opposite of the normal method of trying to stop. The normal method is to list the considerable disadvantages of PMO and say, “if only I can go long enough without porn, eventually the desire to masturbate to porn will go. I can then enjoy life again, free of slavery to the tube.” This is the logical way to go about it, and thousands of PMOer are stopping every day using variations of this method. However, it is very difficult to succeed using this method for the following reasons:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>Stopping PMO is not the real problem. Every time you finish your ‘deed’ you stop using it. You may have powerful reasons on day one of your once-in-four porn diet to say, “I do not want to PMO or even masturbate any more” - all PMOers have, every day of their lives, and the reasons are more powerful than you can possibly imagine. The real problem is day two, day ten or day ten thousand, when in a weak moment, an inebriated moment or even a strong moment you have one ‘peek’ and because it is partly akin to drug addiction you then want another, and suddenly you are a masturbator again.</li>
+<li>The health scares should stop us. Our rational minds say: “Stop doing it. You are a fool,” but in fact they make it harder. We masturbate, for example, when we are nervous. Tell PMOers that it is destroying their virility, and the first thing they will do is to find something to rush their dopamine - a cigarette, alcohol or even fire up the browser and search for porn.</li>
+<li>All reasons for stopping actually make it harder for two other reasons. First, they create a SOS sense of sacrifice. We are always being forced to give up our little friend or prop or vice or pleasure, whichever way the PMOer sees it. Secondly, they create a ‘blind’. We do not masturbate for the reasons we should stop. The real question is: why do we want or need to do it?</li>
+</ol>
+<p>The EasyPeasy Method is basically this: initially to forget the reasons we’d like to stop, to face the problem and to ask ourselves the following questions:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>What is it doing for me?</li>
+<li>Do I actually enjoy it?</li>
+<li>Do I really need to go through life using free internet porn or even paying through the nose just to sabotage my mind and body?</li>
+</ol>
+<p>The beautiful truth is that porn – streaming, static or whatever - does absolutely nothing for you at all. Let me make it quite clear; I do not mean that the disadvantages of being a PMOer outweigh the advantages. All PMOers know from the many published studies about high speed internet porn addiction, forum messages, blog articles in YBOP and similar sites. I mean there are not any advantages from internet porn. The only advantage it ever had was the ‘educational’ aspect and guess what, nowadays the kind of education that it is offering is highly disputable for their contribution to real life intimacy. Most PMOers find it necessary to rationalize why they PMO but the reasons they come up are all fallacies and illusions.</p>
+<p>The first thing we are going to do is to remove these fallacies and illusions. In fact, you will realize that there is nothing to give up. Not only is there nothing to give up but there are marvellous, positive gains from being a non-PMOer and well being and happiness are only two of these gains. Once the illusion that life will never be quite as enjoyable without porn is removed, once you realize that not only is life just as enjoyable without it but infinitely more so, once the feeling of being deprived or of missing out are eradicated, then we can go back to reconsider the health and happiness - and the dozens of other reasons for stopping. These realizations will become positive additional aids to help you achieve what you really desire to enjoy the whole of your life free from the slavery of the porn habit.</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p>Pascal’s Wager is a bet you take when you have nothing or less to lose for a higher chances of large gains and avoiding losses in the future <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
03-01 The Worst PMO Addict I Have Yet to Meet
+ Tue, 20 Dec 2022 17:10:39 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/03-01-the-worst-pmo-addict-i-have-yet-to-meet/
+ <h2 id="the-worst-pmo-addict-i-have-yet-to-meet">The Worst PMO Addict I Have Yet to Meet</h2>
+<p>Perhaps I should begin by describing my competence for writing this book. No, I am not a doctor or a psychiatrist; my qualifications are far more appropriate. I spent thirty years of my life as a confirmed fapper. In the later years I used porn on a daily bases to get orgasm(s).During my life I had made a great number of attempts to stop. I never got past a full week of abstinence, and I was still climbing up the wall, with an “annoying alarm clock beeping” in my head called craving. With most PMOers, on the health side, it’s a question of “ I’ll stop before it happens to me.” I had reached the stage where I knew it has caused PIED, hypofrontality (inability to control and execute action towards a goal), irritability, lack of energy, soulless eyes, mental dryness, stress and pain in the lower back, genital irritations. It bothered me, but it still didn’t stop me.</p>
+<p>I felt lack of enthusiasm to go to gym or just a walk even if it’s sunny outside or simple weight lifting at home either. I had reached the stage where I gave up even trying to stop. I found excuses in substitute methods (controlled use, safe porn, porn-diet and etc. discussed later) as advocated by sexologists, forum users and medical pros - who have no idea of its effect on brain chemistry and who are themselves fooled by their ’little monster’ (not devil or satan - we will talk about monsters later) . The novelty trap and shock value provided by internet porn delivered at home with a low risk high reward deal is something that they can’t even think of. They are still in the static playboy era. And the younger ones have buried their heads under the sand so they can still continue to PMO.</p>
+<p>The worst part is it was not so much that I enjoyed the PMO. It was just doing it routinely, a chore - like slipping down the water slides, in fact there are brain water slides greased well by the neurochemicals (DeltaFosB proteins made by dopamine which store emotion scripts for easy recall, will be discussing later). A simple cue such as a commercial, or a day to day stress that got ‘relieved’ temporarily by PMO is all it takes to complete the ride down the ‘waterslide’. Some time in their lives most PMOers have suffered from the illusion that they enjoy the ride, the novelty, the rush and of course the orgasm, but I never had that illusion.</p>
+<p>I have most times detested the porn, even when I liked the orgasm. But at all times I thought a release from PMO helped me to relax. It gave me courage and confidence, and I was always miserable when I tried to stop, never being able to visualize an enjoyable life without PMO. And so my PMO habit which had started before my marriage stayed with me during and after my marriage was over. I had experienced PIED but I blocked it out and found excuses , “it happens to every man”. Well it does of course - but ‘it’ happened to me again and again. My penis, I found it difficult to get hard - when I am with real woman. Could it be because I had habituated it to work in limp mode? Later I found that it was hard for me to get hard even with porn.</p>
+<p>My girlfriend gave a book by Dr David Burns - which I liked very much. I also practiced the exercises and got interested in it. Through the book I came to know of Dr. Abraham Low and his books on rational therapy - it is now known as Recovery International. At the same time - my soon to be ex-wife also sent me to a therapist. I completed therapy - and was getting out of my mental rut and started a new beginning in my life. I continued my reading and self education from the above two authors and started to read about REBT and Dr. Albert Ellis. I poured into all of his books and got myself well trained in REBT. I still practice it on a daily bases. I do ABC write ups (and DE and F as well)<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> and actively journal my daily endorsements. I keep my DML (daily mood logs) and Endorse documents in an online spreadsheet.</p>
+<p>I was able to spot my rigid beliefs, exaggerations, self-rating and low frustration tolerance and immediately self-talk myself to have healthy negative emotions when needed. I was able to get my alcohol intake under control, cigarettes were on and off, and I rode through divorces. The point is that I was able to go through them all with the lowest disturbance in any random test set of divorced 40 yr old guys. However, I was still struggling with the occasional excesses that are inevitable with alcohol. I absolutely hated the cigarettes. I was aware of my (and the little monster’s) efforts to dig a hole and hide my head in sand about my daily PMO affecting my sex life. I had two incidences of PIED, and found substitutes in getting a fleshlight to simulate a female vagina and also as a form of stamina training.</p>
+<p>I then somehow landed on the Amazon page of Allen Carr’s best seller book on how to stop smoking. I used it to quit my smoking by the time I completed the reading. I felt so light and happy about quitting, how can I not be, I don’t have the feelings of misery and self-sacrifice. I don’t even feel the ‘resistance to temptations’ that most feel which taxes their will power. I know I found something that will work for me. Now, cigarettes are not the society’s favourite anyway and it carried a social stigma so that would be easy, right? I then challenged myself to my next problem, alcohol - where my frequent excesses were starting to bother me. I realized that I am finding excuses and minimizing my nasty and shameful drunken behaviours many times. I can also see I am using it as a crutch and also as pleasure - but more of the former. I guess that it has to do my nature
+of being melancholic. And yes, I was able to kick that habit as well.</p>
+<p>I then naturally applied the same techniques on PMO as well. With a little bit of doubt I have to agree. But as I started to relate his Method to PMO I found a lot of the ‘big monster’ (not devil or Satan, we will talk about it later) brainwash and social conditioning were pretty much the same. I later read on YBOP that the brain reacts the same in all these above cases as well thus confirming my deduction. The important discovery that I made during this time is there is nothing called controlled use. Cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, porn, masturbation etc. I came to know about Karezza from YBOP and Reunited site and I thank them for that. Karezza’s separation of the ‘amative’ and the ‘propagative’ nature of sex is one of the keys to this method. You are welcome to read about Karezza method, though you may not accept the idea of not having orgasms as your goal in sex - you will see that there is a high degree of logic in their assertion that sex has two sides the amative and the propagative. Efforts on self-holding can turn out be deeply seductive on your partner too.</p>
+<p>During those awful years as a PMO user I thought that my life depended on this pleasure that I allowed myself in the nights, and I was prepared to die rather than be without them. Today when someone asks me whether I ever have the odd pang, the answer is, ‘Never, never, never’ - just the reverse. I’ve had a marvellous life. I have been a very lucky man, but the most marvellous thing that has ever happened to me is being freed from that nightmare, that slavery of having to go through life systematically destroying my self-worth, handicapping my ability to experience natural full arousals, seeking immediate pleasures at the cost long term gains, and torturing myself with physical fatigue for a momentary surge.</p>
+<p>Let me make it quite clear from the beginning: I am not trying to become a mystic. I do not believe in magicians or fairies. I have a scientific brain, and I couldn’t understand what appeared to me like magic. I started reading up on hypnosis and on PMO. Nothing I read seemed to explain the miracle that had happened. Why had it been so ridiculously easy to stop, whereas previously it had been weeks of black depression?</p>
+<p>It took me a long time to work it all out, basically because I was going about it back to front. I was trying to work out why it had been so easy to stop, whereas the real problem is trying to explain why PMOers find it difficult to stop. PMOers talk about the terrible withdrawal pangs. but when I looked back and tried to remember those awful pangs, they didn’t exist for me. There was no physical pain. It was all in the mind.</p>
+<p>I am very happy in helping other people to kick the habit. I’m very, very successful. Let me emphasize from the start: there is no such thing as a confirmed PMOer addict. Anybody can not only stop but find it easy to stop. It is basically fear that keeps us in the porn trap: the fear that life will never be quite as enjoyable without PMO and the fear of feeling deprived. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Not only is life just as enjoyable without them but it is infinitely more so in many ways and extra health, energy and well-being are the least of the advantages.</p>
+<p>All PMOers can find it easy to stop porn - even you! All you have to do is read the rest of the book with an open mind. The more you can understand, the easier you will find it. Even if you do not understand a word, provided you follow the instructions, you will find it easy. Most important of all, you will not go through life moping for PMO or feeling deprived. The only mystery will be why you did it for so long.</p>
+<p>Let me issue a warning. There are only two reasons for failure with my method:</p>
+<ol>
+<li>FAILURE TO CARRY OUT INSTRUCTIONS
+Some people find it annoying that I am so dogmatic about certain recommendations. For example, I will tell you not to try cutting down or using substitutes (porn diet, safe porn etc.). The reason why I am so dogmatic is because I know my subject. I do not deny that there are many people who have succeeded in stopping using such ruses, but they have succeeded in spite of, not because of them. There are people who can make love standing on a hammock, but it is not the easiest way. Everything I tell you has a purpose: to make it easy to stop and thereby ensure success. The numbers for opening the lock is in this book, however there is the right order, that is to go from one chapter to the next and to avoid jumping.</li>
+<li>FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND
+Do not take anything for granted. Question not only what I tell you but also your own views and what society has taught you about amative-propagative sex, internet porn, karezza. For example, those of you who think it is just a habit, ask yourselves why other habits, some of them enjoyable ones, are easy to break, yet a habit that feels awful, costs us energy and time and kills our virility is so difficult to break. Those of you who think you enjoy PMO, ask yourselves why other things in life, which are infinitely more enjoyable, you can take or leave. Why do you have to have the PMO and panic sets in if you don’t?</li>
+</ol>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p>A stands for activating events, B for beliefs, C for consequences, D for dispute, E for effective new philosophy and F for going forward <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
02-02 Sister Kenny
+ Tue, 20 Dec 2022 16:58:54 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/02-02-sister-kenny/
+ <h2 id="sister-kenny">Sister Kenny</h2>
+<p>You’ve probably seen the film Sister Kenny. In case you haven’t, it was about the time when infantile paralysis or polio was the scourge of our children. I vividly remember that the words engendered the same fear in me as the word cancer does today. The effect of polio was not only to paralyze the legs and arms but to distort the limbs. The established medical treatment was to put those limbs in irons and thus prevent the distortion. The result was paralysis for life.</p>
+<p>Sister Kenny believed the irons inhibited recovery and proved a thousand times over that the muscles could be re-educated so that the child could walk again. However, Sister Kenny wasn’t a doctor, she was merely a nurse. How dare she dabble in a province that was confined to qualified doctors? It didn’t seem to matter that Sister Kenny had found the solution to the problem and had proved her solution to be effective. The children that were treated by Sister Kenny knew she was right, so did their parents, yet the established medical profession not only refused to adopt her methods but actually prevented her from practicing. It took Sister Kenny twenty years before the medical profession would accept the obvious.</p>
+<p>I (Allen Carr) first saw that film years before I (Allen Carr) discovered EASYWAY, The film was very interesting and no doubt there was an element of truth. However, it was equally obvious that Hollywood had used a large portion of poetic license. Sister Kenny couldn’t possibly have discovered something that the combined knowledge of medical science had failed to discover. Surely the established medical specialists weren’t the dinosaurs they were being portrayed as? How could it possibly have taken them twenty years to accept the facts that were staring them in the face?</p>
+<p>They say that fact is stranger than fiction, I apologize for accusing the makers of Sister Kenny for using poetic license. Even in this so-called enlightened age of modern communications, even having access to modern communications, I’ve failed to get my message across.</p>
+<p>Oh, I’ve proved my point, the only reason that you are reading this hook is because another ex-PMOer has recommended it to you. Remember, I don’t have the massive financial power of popular and big institutions. Like Sister Kenny, I’m a lone individual. Like her. I’m (Allen Carr) only famous because my system works. This Method is already regarded as the number-one Method on helping people to quit. Like Sister Kenny, I’ve proved my point. But Sister Kenny proved her point. What good did that do if the rest of the world was still adopting procedures which were the direct opposite to what they should be?</p>
+<p>The last sentence of this book is identical to that in the original manuscript: ‘There is a wind of change in society, A snowball has started that I hope this book will help turn into an avalanche’. From my remarks above, you might have drawn the conclusion that I am no respecter of the medical profession. Nothing could be further from the truth. One of Allen Carr’s sons is a doctor and I know of no finer profession. Indeed Allen’s clinics receive more recommendations from doctors than from any other source, and surprisingly, more of our clients come from the medical profession than any other single profession.</p>
+<p>In the early years, I (Allen Carr) was generally regarded by the doctors as being somewhere between a charlatan and a quack. Allen is no more and his clinics don’t provide services for PMO sufferers, probably due to non coverage by insurance companies. I would not know. But I can tell you that this Method works. If you have doubts please do keep them but give this hackbook a try. This hackbook will give you all the numbers of the combination lock. But it is important that you use the numbers in the right order. You must follow the flow by going chapter to chapter and must not jump for any reasons. And you don’t need to cut down or stop PMO while you are reading this book.</p>
+<p>Since many mix sex and eroticism with internet porn they haven’t a clue about helping PMOers to quit. They concentrate on telling what PMOers already know: PMO is unhealthy and self-defeating. It never seems to occur to them that PMOers do not use for the reasons that they shouldn’t use. The real problem is to remove the reasons they have to use porn.</p>
+<p>However, I might just as well have been lecturing to a brick wall since - substituting- such as porn diets<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> ( PMO once in n number of days) or cutting down have failed to cure the problem. PMOers themselves appear to have accepted that you don’t get cured from addiction to a drug by turning it into a ‘forbidden fruit’.</p>
+<p>Some PUA<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup> experts say something like: PMO only once in four days “ Every PMOer knows that it is the one day that most PMOers will do twice as many as they usually do and sometimes they ‘close the shop’ to run home knowing that it is their final day of ‘fasting’ and because no one like being told what to do, particularly by people who dismiss PMOers as mere idiots and don’t understand their problem.</p>
+<p>Because they don’t completely understand PMOers themselves or how to make it easy for them to quit, their attitude is ‘Try this method. If it doesn’t work try another: Can you imagine if there were ten different ways of treating appendicitis? Nine of them cured 10 per cent of the patients, which means they killed 90 per cent of them and the tenth way cured 95 per cent. Imagine that knowledge of the tenth method had been available for free, but the vast majority of the medical profession was still recommending the other nine.</p>
+<p>Someone pointed out that doctors might well find themselves liable to a legal action for malpractice, by not advising their patients of the best way to quit. Ironically he was a great advocate of substituting methods (soft porn, solo, nude only, porn-diet etc), I try hard not to be vindictive, but I hope he becomes the first victim of his suggestion.</p>
+<p>There are many websites that talk about the harms of PMO. You can find content that explains scientifically the harms of high speed internet porn on the brain. There is much literature and studies of neurochemicals and the neuroplasticity of the brain and how it is affected by PMO. I read many comments on forums and blogs of how some were able to overcome the addiction. They might just as well have wasted it on trying to persuade their readers that motorbikes can kill you. Do they not realize that youngsters know that one ‘look’ at a tube site won’t kill them and that no youngster ever expects to get hooked? The link between porn and PIED porn induced ED, has been established for some time now. Yet more youngsters are becoming hooked nowadays than ever before.</p>
+<p>Youngsters don’t need to be preached on the harms of PIED, hypofrontality, dopamine surge and the resulting cutting down of the associated dopamine receptors. Young and old PMOers tend to avoid such materials anyway. Practically every subscriber and reader of sites such as YBOP knows the brain science and the self-sabotage nature of PMO. I myself has seen the damages in my personal life. On a more serious note, two men in my own family had MO addiction ( porn was not prevalent 20 yrs ago) and I can see how they were peevish and melancholic when they felt deprived or guilty related to their MO. But that didn’t prevent me from falling into the trap.</p>
+<p>However, the snowball won’t become an avalanche until the medical profession and the media stop recommending methods that make it harder to quit and accept that EASYPEASYWAY is not just another method: BUT THE ONLY SENSIBLE METHOD TO USE! I don’t expect you to believe me at this stage, but by the time you have finished the book, you will understand.</p>
+<p>Even the comparatively few failures that we have say something like: ‘I haven’t succeeded yet, but your way is better than any I know.’ If when you finish the book, you feel that you owe me a debt of gratitude, you can more than repay that debt. Not just by recommending EASYPEASYWAY to your friends, but whenever you see or read an article advocating some other method, email to them asking why they aren’t advocating EASYWAY.</p>
+<p>This edition of EASYPEASYWAY is to give you the state of the art technology on just how easy and enjoyable it is to quit PMOing. Do you have a feeling of doom and gloom? Forget it. I’ve achieved some marvelous things in my life. By far the greatest was to escape from the slavery of orgasm addiction. I escaped a long time ago and still cannot get over the joy of being free. There is no need to feel depressed, nothing bad is happening, on the contrary, you are about to achieve something that every PMOer on the planet would love to achieve : TO BE FREE!</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p><strong>PUA</strong> - pickup artist. Someone who teaches men to pick up mates <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p><strong>Porn diet</strong> - To restrict PMO once in n number of days <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
02-01 Introduction
+ Mon, 19 Dec 2022 22:27:57 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/02-01-introduction/
+ <h2 id="introduction">Introduction</h2>
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<div style="font-size: 1.5em;">
+ <p><strong>‘I’M GOING TO CURE THE WORLD OF PMO’</strong></p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>I was talking to my mentor. He thought that I had flipped. Understandable if you consider that he had watched me fail on numerous attempts to quit. The most recent had been two years previously. I’d actually survived six months of sheer purgatory before I finally succumbed and found myself clicking on stacked up tabs of porn sites. I’m not ashamed to admit that I cried like a baby. I was crying because I knew that I was condemned to be an addict for life. I’d put so much effort into that attempt and suffered so much misery that I knew I would never have the strength to go through that ordeal again. I’m not a violent man, but if some patronizing non-PMO’er had been stupid enough at that moment to suggest to me that all users can find it easy to quit, immediately and permanently, I would not have been responsible for my actions. However, I’m convinced that any jury in the world, comprised of PMOers only, would have pardoned me on the grounds of justifiable homicide.</p>
+<p>Perhaps you too find it impossible to believe that any PMOer can find it easy to quit. If so, I beg you not to cast this book into the rubbish bin. Please trust me. I assure you that you can find it
+easy to quit.</p>
+<p>Anyway, there I was two years later, having just completed what I knew would be my final session, not only telling my mentor that I was already a non-PMOer, but that I was going to cure the rest of the world. I must admit that at the time I found his scepticism somewhat irritating. However, in no way did it diminish my feeling of exaltation, I suppose that my exhilaration in knowing that I was already a happy non-PMOer distorted my perspective somewhat. With the benefit of hindsight, I can sympathize with his attitude, I now understand why he thought I was a candidate for the funny farm.</p>
+<p>As I look back on my life, it seems that my whole existence has been a preparation for solving the problem. Even those hateful years of training and practising as a professional were invaluable in helping me to unravel the mysteries of the PMO trap. They say you can’t fool all the people all of the time, but I believe the internet porn producers have done just that for years. I also believe that I am the first to really understand the PMO trap. If I appear to be arrogant, let me hasten to add that it was no credit to me, just the circumstances of my life.</p>
+<p>The momentous day was when I made my final online harem visit, I felt a sense of relief and exhilaration as I closed out my browser in incognito mode. I realized I had discovered something that every PMOer was praying for: an easy way to stop. One of my failures, the man I describe in chapter 25, was the inspiration. We were both reduced to tears on every meeting. He was so agitated that I couldn’t get him to relax enough to absorb what I was saying. I hoped that if I wrote it all down, he could read it in his own good time, as many times as he wanted to, and this would help him to absorb the message.</p>
+<p>I was in no doubt that EASYWAY would work just as effectively for other PMOers as it had for me. However, when I contemplated putting the method into book form, I was apprehensive. The comments were not very encouraging:</p>
+<ul>
+<li><em>“How can a book help me to quit? What I need is willpower!”</em></li>
+<li><em>“How can a book avoid the terrible withdrawal pangs?”</em></li>
+</ul>
+<p>In addition to these pessimistic comments, I had my own doubts. Often it became obvious that someone had misunderstood an important point that I was making. I was able to correct the situation when I am in person or chatting. But how would a book be able to do that?</p>
+<p>I remembered well the times when I studied to qualify as a (professional), when I didn’t understand or agree with a particular point in a book, the frustration because you couldn’t ask the book to explain. Added to all these factors, I had one doubt that overrode all the rest. I wasn’t a writer and was very conscious of my limitations in this respect. I was confident that I could sit down face to face with a PMOer and convince him or her how much more enjoyable social occasions are without PMO.</p>
+<p>When a PMOer fail in quitting it is a mistake to regard it as their failure. In Allen’s smoker’s clinic when a smoker fails they regard it as the clinic’s failure, we failed to convince those smokers just how easy and enjoyable it is to quit. That failure rate was based on the money-back guarantee at the clinics. The average current failure rate of the clinics world-wide is under 5 per cent. That means a success rate of over 95 per cent. That was beyond the wildest dreams. Coming back to the present…You might well argue that if I genuinely believed that I would cure the world of all addictions, I must have expected to achieve 100 per cent. No, I never ever expected to achieve 100 per cent.</p>
+<p>Snuff-taking was the previous most popular form of nicotine addiction until it became antisocial and died . However, there are still a few weirdoes that continue to take snuff and probably, there always will be. So there will always be a few weirdoes that will continue to use.</p>
+<p>I certainly never expected to have to cure every PMOer personally. What I thought would happen was that once I had explained the mysteries of the porn trap and dispelled such illusions as:</p>
+<ul>
+<li>Users enjoy PMO</li>
+<li>Users choose to use PMO</li>
+<li>PMO relieves boredom & stress</li>
+<li>PMO aids concentration and performance</li>
+<li>PMO is a habit</li>
+<li>It takes willpower to quit</li>
+<li>Once an addict always an addict</li>
+<li>Telling PMOers that it will turn them into robots will make them to quit</li>
+<li>Substitutes, particularly soft porn, reality porn, solo naked only porn etc.. and training toys such as fleshlight, helps PMOers to regain their full unfading erections.</li>
+<li>All porn is same in their rate of addictiveness</li>
+<li>In particular, when I had dispelled the illusion that it is difficult to quit and that you have to
+go through a transitional period of misery in order to do so, I naively thought that the rest of
+the world would also see the light and adopt my method.</li>
+</ul>
+<p>I thought my chief antagonist would be the porn industry. Amazingly, my chief stumbling blocks were the very institutions that I thought would be my greatest allies: the control/regulated safe sex advocates in the noFap forum,the media and the established medical profession.</p>
+
+
+
+ -
+
01-03 Fear
+ Mon, 19 Dec 2022 22:23:44 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/01-03-fear/
+ <h2 id="fear">Fear</h2>
+<p>Fear that we will have to survive an indeterminate period of misery, deprivation and unsatisfied craving in order to be free. Fear that a night all by yourself or the eve of a test or exam will be miserable fighting uncontrollable impulses. Fear that we’ll never be able to concentrate, handle stress or be as confident without our little crutch. Fear that our personality and character will change.</p>
+<p>But most of all, the fear of ‘once an addict always an addict,’ that we will never be completely free and spend the rest of our lives at odd times craving the occasional porn induced orgasm. If, as I did, you have already tried all the conventional ways to quit and been through the misery of what I describe as the willpower method of stopping, you will not only be affected by that fear, but convinced you can never quit.</p>
+<p>If you are apprehensive, panic-stricken or feel that the time is not right for you to give up, then let me assure you that your apprehension or panic is caused by fear. That fear is not relieved by PMO but was indeed created by PMO. You didn’t decide to fall into the porn trap. But like all traps, it is designed to ensure that you remain trapped. Ask yourself, when you viewed those first porn pictures and videos, did you decide to come back to view them as long as you have? So when are you going to quit? Tomorrow? Next year? Stop kidding yourself! The trap is designed to hold you for life. Why else do you think all these other PMO addicts don’t quit before it kills their lives?</p>
+<p>As you will soon be reading, the feedbacks I got has revealed information that has exceeded my wildest aspirations of the effectiveness of my method. It has also revealed two aspects of the method that have caused me concern. The second I will be covering later.</p>
+<p>The first arose from the letters that I have received. I give three typical examples:</p>
+<ul>
+<li><em>“I didn’t believe the claims you made and I apologize for doubting you. It was just as easy and enjoyable as you said it would be. I’ve shared the link to your hackbook to some of my PMOer friends but I can’t understand why they don’t read it.”</em></li>
+<li><em>“I was forwarded your hackbook eight months ago by an ex-PMO friend, I’ve just got around to reading it. My only regret is that I wasted eight months.”</em></li>
+<li><em>“I’ve just finished reading your EasyPeasy. I know it has only been four days, but I feel so great, I know I’ll never need to PMO again. I first started to read your book five months ago, got half-way through and panicked. I knew that if I went on reading I would have to stop. Wasn’t I silly?”</em></li>
+</ul>
+<p>I’ve referred to a magic button. EASYWAY<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> works just like that magic button. Let me make it quite clear, EASYWAY isn’t magic, but for me and the hundreds of thousands of quitters who have found it so easy and enjoyable to quit. it seems like magic!</p>
+<p>This is the warning. We have a chicken and egg situation. Every PMO addict wants to quit and every user can find it easy and enjoyable to quit. It’s only fear that prevents users from trying to quit. The greatest gain is to be rid of that fear. But you won’t be free of that fear until you complete the book. On the contrary, like the lady in the third example, that fear might increase as you read the book and this might prevent you from finishing it.</p>
+<p>You didn’t decide to fall into the trap, but be clear in your mind, you won’t escape from it unless you make a positive decision to do so. You might already be straining at the leash to quit. On the other hand you might be apprehensive, Either way please bear in mind: <strong>YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO LOSE!</strong></p>
+<p>If at the end of the book you decide that you wish to continue to PMO, there is nothing to prevent you from doing so. You don’t even have to cut down or stop using porn while you are reading the book, and remember, there is no shock treatment. On the contrary, I have only good news for you. Can you imagine how the Count of Monte Cristo felt when he finally escaped from that prison? That’s how I felt when I escaped from the porn PMO trap. That’s how the millions of ex-users who have used my method feel. By the end of the book: <strong>THAT’S HOW YOU WILL FEEL! GO FOR IT!</strong></p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p>EASYWAY and EASYPEASY will be used interchangeably when describing the method <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
01-02 Warning
+ Mon, 19 Dec 2022 22:19:35 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/01-02-warning/
+ <h2 id="warning">Warning</h2>
+<p>Perhaps you are somewhat apprehensive about reading this book. Perhaps, like the majority of PMO addicts, the mere thought of stopping fills you with panic and although you have every intention of stopping one day, it is not today.</p>
+<p>If you are expecting me to inform you of the terrible health issues that PMO addicts risk, that they are susceptible to be affected by PIED (porn induced erectile disfunction), unreliable arousals, fading penetration, loss of interest in real partners,loss of control over themselves, loss of relationships, that it is a filthy, disgusting habit and that <em>YOU</em> are a stupid, spineless, weak-willed jellyfish, then I must disappoint you. Those tactics never helped me to quit and if they were going to help you, you would already have quit.</p>
+<p>Our Method, which I shall refer to as EASYPEASY doesn’t work that way. Some of the things that I am about to say, you might find difficult to believe. However by the time you’ve finished reading the book, you’ll not only believe them, but wonder how you could ever have been brainwashed into believing otherwise.</p>
+<p>There is a common misapprehension that we choose to watch porn. PMO addicts ( yes addicts) no more choose to do that than alcoholics choose to become alcoholics, or heroin addicts choose to become heroin addicts. It is true that we choose to boot up the laptop, fire up the browser and visit our favourite online harem<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> tube sites. I occasionally choose to go to the cinema, but I certainly didn’t choose to spend my whole life in the cinema theatre. The curiosity and my nature took me there but I would not have done that if I had known it would addict me and cause me my health, happiness and relationships. Only if I had heard about PIED on my first visit to that porn site?</p>
+<p>Please reflect on your life. Did you ever make the ‘positive’ decision that at certain times in your life, you couldn’t enjoy a good night sleep or pass a night after a hard day at work without surfing for porn, or that you couldn’t concentrate or handle stress without masturbating to orgasm at the end of the day? At what stage did you decide that you needed PMO, not just for lonely nights, but that you needed to have them permanently in your life, and felt insecure, even panic-stricken without online porn which I will call your online harem?</p>
+<p>Like every other PMOer, you have been lured into the most sinister subtle trap that man and nature have combined to devise. There is not a parent, brother, sister on this planet, whether they be PMOer themselves or not, that likes the thought of their children using porn and PMO to cope and for pleasure. This means that all PMOers wish they had never started. Not surprising really, no one needs porn to enjoy life or cope with stress before they get hooked.</p>
+<p>At the same time all PMOers wish to continue to PMO. After all, no one forces us to turn on the incognito mode of the browser, whether we understand the reason or not, it is only PMOers themselves that decide to knock on the doors of the online harems.</p>
+<p>If there were a magic button that the PMOers could press to wake up the following morning as if they never accessed their very first tube site…. the only PMO addicts there would be tomorrow morning would be the youngsters who are still at the experimental stage. The only thing that prevents us from quitting is: FEAR!</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p><strong>Online harem</strong> - Tube sites hosting high speed streaming porn <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
01-01 Preface
+ Mon, 19 Dec 2022 22:14:52 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/01-01-preface/
+ <h2 id="preface">Preface</h2>
+<p>This hackbook will enable you to stop PMO, immediately, painlessly, and permanently, without the need for Willpower or feeling any sense of deprivation or sacrifice. It will not judge you. It will not embarrass you. It will not put pressure on you to undergo painful measures.</p>
+<p>That goes against everything you’ve ever been told about PMO. But ask yourself what you’ve been told before worked for you? If it had, you wouldn’t be reading this site.</p>
+<ul>
+<li>Instantaneous</li>
+<li>Equally effective for the heavy PMOer* <sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">1</a></sup> <sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">2</a></sup></li>
+<li>No bad withdrawal pangs</li>
+<li>Needs no willpower</li>
+<li>No shock treatment</li>
+<li>No aids or gimmicks</li>
+<li>You will not replace this addiction with other addictions such as overeating or smoking or drinking. You may use this to combat them if unfortunately you are addicted to all or some of them.</li>
+<li>Permanent</li>
+</ul>
+<p>If you are an addict to PMO all you have to do is read on.</p>
+<p>If you are a non-addict who came here for a loved one all you have to do is persuade them to read the book.</p>
+<p>If you cannot persuade them, then read the book yourself, and the last chapter will advise you how to get the message across - also how to prevent your children from starting.</p>
+<p>Do not be fooled by the fact that they hate it now. All children do before they become hooked.</p>
+<div class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes">
+<hr>
+<ol>
+<li id="fn:1">
+<p><strong>PMO</strong> - Porn, masturbation and orgasm. <a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+<li id="fn:2">
+<p><strong>PMOer</strong> - Anyone who excessively and obsessively seeks to achieve orgasms relying exclusively and only using internet
+porn and or masturbation <a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p>
+</li>
+</ol>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
00-00 HackBook EasyPeasy
+ Mon, 19 Dec 2022 22:01:36 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/hackbook/00-00-hackbookeasypeasy/
+ <div style="text-align: center;">
+<div style="font-size: 1.5em;">
+ <p><strong><a href="https://vodoraslo.xyz/hackbook/hackbook.pdf">Click to download HackBookEasyPeasy (original pdf)</a></strong></p>
+</div>
+<div style="font-size: 1.17em;">
+ <strong>EasyPeasyWay</strong>
+</div>
+<p><strong><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201014165025/https://sites.google.com/site/hackbookeasypeasy/">https://sites.google.com/site/hackbookeasypeasy/home</a></strong></p>
+<p>HackBookEasyPeasy EasyPeasyWay <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/hackbookeasypeasy/home">https://sites.google.com/site/hackbookeasypeasy/home</a> I am Allen Carr. I am also not Allen Carr. So yes I am not the author. I am the hack-author.</p>
+<p>I hacked Allen Carr’s book and his method of de-addiction to adapt it for PMO. Why? Because his method helped me in getting rid of cigarettes, alcohol and then PMO. Why did I hack his work? Because he is dead now. And the institution that he had
+formed does not list Internet pornography as one of the addictions that it provides services for. I don’t gain monetarily or otherwise. Above all - you won’t ‘find’ me in this book. Myself and Allen will appear and disappear in this book to provide you with an unique and effective method to get your mind de-addicted.</p>
+<div style="font-size: 1.17em;">
+ <p><strong>IMPORTANT ADVICE FOR YOU!</strong></p>
+<p><strong>DO NOT JUMP CHAPTERS!</strong></p>
+<p><strong>THE NUMBERS TO UNLOCK THE COMBO LOCK SHOULD BE USED IN THE GIVEN SEQUENCE!</strong></p>
+</div>
+<p>The common thread running through Allen Carr’s work is the removal of fear. Indeed, his genius lies in eliminating the phobias and anxieties which prevent people from being able to enjoy life to the full, as his best-selling books vividly demonstrate. His method is solid and has high success rates. It helped cure me of not one but three addictions. There is a network of clinics that uses his methods that span the globe and has a phenomenal reputation for success in helping people to quit addictions (except PMO). Their success rate is over 95% with money-back guarantees.</p>
+<p>Hackbook : A book based and hacked from another book. The original author is credited fully.</p>
+<div style="font-size: 1.17em;">
+ <p><strong>IMPORTANT ADVICE FOR YOU!</strong></p>
+<p><strong>DO NOT JUMP CHAPTERS!</strong></p>
+<p><strong>THE NUMBERS TO UNLOCK THE COMBO LOCK SHOULD BE USED IN THE GIVEN SEQUENCE!</strong></p>
+</div>
+<p>Dr. Albert Ellis’ autobiography - “All Out!”</p>
+<p>“I used to wrongly think that most of them (addicts) were aided by self-help groups like AA, by therapy, or some other real support. But no. The facts show that more people surrender their addictions on their own-without any notable help from others. How? Mainly by seeing, acknowledging, and emphasizing how hard it is not to stop and how much easier it is-in the long run- to suffer through the withdrawal process.”</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+ -
+
Pluralization issues (Blogs instead of Blog)
+ Sat, 17 Dec 2022 22:33:25 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/blog/pluralization-issues/
+ <h3 id="this-is-my-first-entry-and-im-already-having-issues-lol">this is my first entry and i’m already having issues lol</h3>
+<p>So I wanted to make a quick entry, see how it looks like and I stumbled upon this issue of hugo pluralzing Blog into Blogs</p>
+<p>You can fix this in config.toml with the following line</p>
+<div class="highlight"><pre tabindex="0" style="color:#b0c4de;background-color:#282c34;-moz-tab-size:4;-o-tab-size:4;tab-size:4;"><code class="language-toml" data-lang="toml"><span style="display:flex;"><span><span style="color:#c1abea">pluralizelisttitles</span> = <span style="color:#b756ff;font-weight:bold">false</span>
+</span></span></code></pre></div>
+
+
+ -
+
Hello world / About me
+ Sat, 17 Dec 2022 17:20:18 +0200
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/updates/helloworld/
+ <h2 id="obligatory-hello-world">Obligatory Hello World!</h2>
+<p>trying to see which hugo theme i like best</p>
+<p>had some issues with papermod and their css not working so for now i’ll use lugo</p>
+<p>i think the css looks pretty alright</p>
+<p>im adding this bit in just to check if the scuffed shell script i made actually works (it’s supposed to cd into the .git where hugo is, rsync the /public/ folder into var/www [where my site is])</p>
+<h2 id="about-me">About me</h2>
+<ul>
+<li>touching grass and nature in general (wannabe farmer)</li>
+<li>にっぽんese
+<ul>
+<li>‘ate manga</li>
+<li>‘ate anime</li>
+<li>luv vinnies and jp youtube simple as</li>
+</ul>
+</li>
+<li>currently reading the <a href="https://friendsoftherainbow.net/node/1976">Tsarigrad translation of the bible</a> (bulgarian orthodox bible)</li>
+</ul>
+<div class="index-links">
+<div style="text-align: center;">
+<figure ><img src="https://vodoraslo.xyz/img/ab67706c0000da8432f03af2b48b93d104186742.jpg" title="Gigachad Orthodox priest" alt="Gigachad Orthodox priest"><figcaption>he's literally me</figcaption></figure>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
diff --git a/public/lainring/lainring.html b/public/lainring/lainring.html
new file mode 100644
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+++ b/public/lainring/lainring.html
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diff --git a/public/library/hackbook/index.xml b/public/library/hackbook/index.xml
index 1e9ffd6d..40bf038a 100644
--- a/public/library/hackbook/index.xml
+++ b/public/library/hackbook/index.xml
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
-
-
How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation
+ How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation
Thu, 04 May 2023 10:12:26 +0300
diff --git a/public/library/index.xml b/public/library/index.xml
index b0202a4b..41b96268 100644
--- a/public/library/index.xml
+++ b/public/library/index.xml
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
-
-
How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation
+ How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation
Thu, 04 May 2023 10:12:26 +0300
diff --git a/public/library/ted-kaczynski/index.xml b/public/library/ted-kaczynski/index.xml
index 530673c3..53e49a14 100644
--- a/public/library/ted-kaczynski/index.xml
+++ b/public/library/ted-kaczynski/index.xml
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
-
-
How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation
+ How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation
Thu, 04 May 2023 10:12:26 +0300
diff --git a/public/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-wet-dreams/index.html b/public/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-wet-dreams/index.html
index 5adaea6a..626fb3e3 100644
--- a/public/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-wet-dreams/index.html
+++ b/public/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-wet-dreams/index.html
@@ -165,7 +165,7 @@ Like Kurzweil, many techies stand to profit financially from Technianity, but it
diff --git a/public/sitemap.xml b/public/sitemap.xml
index d00be1ce..d20d3214 100644
--- a/public/sitemap.xml
+++ b/public/sitemap.xml
@@ -2,6 +2,12 @@
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/lainring/
+ 2023-05-06T10:12:26+03:00
+
+ https://vodoraslo.xyz/
+ 2023-05-06T10:12:26+03:00
+
https://vodoraslo.xyz/blog/
2023-05-04T10:12:26+03:00
@@ -10,9 +16,6 @@
https://vodoraslo.xyz/tags/
2023-05-04T10:12:26+03:00
-
- https://vodoraslo.xyz/
- 2023-05-04T10:12:26+03:00
https://vodoraslo.xyz/tags/ted-kaczynski/
2023-04-15T18:58:23+03:00
diff --git a/public/tags/blog/index.html b/public/tags/blog/index.html
index 5079d1b1..b3d026a4 100644
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+++ b/public/tags/blog/index.html
@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@
- 2023 May 04 – How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation 2023 May 04 – How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation 2023 Jan 12 – Recover Lost Anki Streak 2023 Jan 04 – Meta Description in Hugo 2023 Jan 03 – Multiple Index Pages in Hugo -
-
How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation
+ How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation
Thu, 04 May 2023 10:12:26 +0300
diff --git a/public/tags/hackbook/index.xml b/public/tags/hackbook/index.xml
index 6fdb890e..ffe0243b 100644
--- a/public/tags/hackbook/index.xml
+++ b/public/tags/hackbook/index.xml
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
-
-
How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation
+ How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation
Thu, 04 May 2023 10:12:26 +0300
diff --git a/public/tags/index.xml b/public/tags/index.xml
index ccaf53e1..474dbec9 100644
--- a/public/tags/index.xml
+++ b/public/tags/index.xml
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
-
-
How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation
+ How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation
Thu, 04 May 2023 10:12:26 +0300
diff --git a/public/tags/library/index.xml b/public/tags/library/index.xml
index 32ab0ba5..25cfbf09 100644
--- a/public/tags/library/index.xml
+++ b/public/tags/library/index.xml
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
-
-
How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation
+ How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation
Thu, 04 May 2023 10:12:26 +0300
diff --git a/public/tags/ted-kaczynski/index.xml b/public/tags/ted-kaczynski/index.xml
index 53a2d7d0..3529e6c9 100644
--- a/public/tags/ted-kaczynski/index.xml
+++ b/public/tags/ted-kaczynski/index.xml
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
-
-
How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation
+ How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation
Thu, 04 May 2023 10:12:26 +0300
diff --git a/public/tags/updates/index.xml b/public/tags/updates/index.xml
index 7e5d5523..eefebe0d 100644
--- a/public/tags/updates/index.xml
+++ b/public/tags/updates/index.xml
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
-
-
How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation
+ How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation
Thu, 04 May 2023 10:12:26 +0300
diff --git a/public/updates/index.xml b/public/updates/index.xml
index 06044135..3b15ca4d 100644
--- a/public/updates/index.xml
+++ b/public/updates/index.xml
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@
-
-
How I Fixed My Synapse Matrix Federation
+ How I Fixed My Synapse's Matrix Federation
Thu, 04 May 2023 10:12:26 +0300
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/static/img/banner/x.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+meow
+
+I THINK you can just download this folder as a zip and place it into wherever you put your images
diff --git a/あ_retired_stuff/content/lainring/underscoreindex.md b/あ_retired_stuff/content/lainring/underscoreindex.md
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index 00000000..a5b9c27e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/あ_retired_stuff/content/lainring/underscoreindex.md
@@ -0,0 +1,274 @@
+
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+ Lain.la Webring
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