From d34fac3b35f65f0f5c13c0b4cd9e0997fa376460 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: kurets Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2023 19:12:16 +0300 Subject: [PATCH] add more uncle ted writings --- .../forward-to-technological-slavery.md | 50 ++ .../ted-kaczynski/hit-where-it-hurts.md | 111 ++++ .../ted-kaczynski/morality-and-revolution.md | 113 ++++ .../ted-kaczynski/progress-vs-liberty.md | 98 ++++ .../ted-kaczynski/the-littering-ape.md | 14 + .../the-system's-neatest-trick.md | 157 +++++ .../ted-kaczynski/the-techie's-wet-dreams.md | 126 ++++ new-site/public/blog/index.xml | 538 +++++++++++++++++ new-site/public/categories/index.xml | 538 +++++++++++++++++ new-site/public/index.html | 74 ++- new-site/public/index.xml | 540 +++++++++++++++++- new-site/public/library/hackbook/index.xml | 538 +++++++++++++++++ new-site/public/library/index.xml | 540 +++++++++++++++++- .../index.html | 79 +++ .../hit-where-it-hurts/index.html | 109 ++++ .../public/library/ted-kaczynski/index.html | 7 + .../public/library/ted-kaczynski/index.xml | 538 +++++++++++++++++ .../morality-and-revolution/index.html | 116 ++++ .../progress-vs-liberty/index.html | 92 +++ .../the-littering-ape/index.html | 45 ++ .../the-systems-neatest-trick/index.html | 162 ++++++ .../the-techies-wet-dreams/index.html | 182 ++++++ new-site/public/sitemap.xml | 41 +- new-site/public/tags/blog/index.xml | 538 +++++++++++++++++ new-site/public/tags/hackbook/index.xml | 538 +++++++++++++++++ new-site/public/tags/index.html | 2 +- new-site/public/tags/index.xml | 540 +++++++++++++++++- new-site/public/tags/library/index.html | 7 + new-site/public/tags/library/index.xml | 538 +++++++++++++++++ new-site/public/tags/ted-kaczynski/index.html | 7 + new-site/public/tags/ted-kaczynski/index.xml | 540 +++++++++++++++++- new-site/public/tags/updates/index.xml | 538 +++++++++++++++++ new-site/public/updates/index.xml | 538 +++++++++++++++++ .../updates/updated-the-css-again/index.html | 1 + 34 files changed, 8542 insertions(+), 53 deletions(-) create mode 100644 new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/forward-to-technological-slavery.md create mode 100644 new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/hit-where-it-hurts.md create mode 100644 new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/morality-and-revolution.md create mode 100644 new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/progress-vs-liberty.md create mode 100644 new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/the-littering-ape.md create mode 100644 new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/the-system's-neatest-trick.md create mode 100644 new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techie's-wet-dreams.md create mode 100644 new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/forward-to-technological-slavery/index.html create mode 100644 new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/hit-where-it-hurts/index.html create mode 100644 new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/morality-and-revolution/index.html create mode 100644 new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/progress-vs-liberty/index.html create mode 100644 new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/the-littering-ape/index.html create mode 100644 new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/the-systems-neatest-trick/index.html create mode 100644 new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-wet-dreams/index.html diff --git a/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/forward-to-technological-slavery.md b/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/forward-to-technological-slavery.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ed442a73 --- /dev/null +++ b/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/forward-to-technological-slavery.md @@ -0,0 +1,50 @@ +--- +title: "Forward to Technological Slavery" +date: 2023-04-15T18:57:52+03:00 +draft: false +tags: ['Ted Kaczynski','library'] +--- + + + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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”[^1] is now famous, Martin Rees, author of the book Our Final Century,[^2] and Richard A. Posner, author of Catastrophe: Risk and Response.[^3] 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. + +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. + +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[^4] 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. + +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. + +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. + +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.”[^5] 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.[^6] + +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. + +[^1]: Wired magazine, April 2000. + +[^2]: Published by William Heinemann, 2003. + +[^3]: Oxford University Press, 2004. + +[^4]: El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México, Décima Edición, Espasa-Calpe Mexicana, Mexico City 1982 (originally published in 1934), pages 104—105. + +[^5]: See Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture. + +[^6]: The process is ably documented by Martha E Lee, Earth First!: Environmental Apocalypse, Syracuse University Press, 1995. diff --git a/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/hit-where-it-hurts.md b/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/hit-where-it-hurts.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..d74cc7c5 --- /dev/null +++ b/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/hit-where-it-hurts.md @@ -0,0 +1,111 @@ +--- +title: "Hit Where It Hurts" +date: 2023-04-15T18:43:18+03:00 +draft: false +tags: ['Ted Kaczynski','library'] +toc: true +--- + + +## 1. The Purpose Of This Article. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +## 2. Technology Is The Target. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +## 3. The Timber Industry Is A Side Issue. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +## 4. Why The System Is Tough. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +## 5. It Is Useless To Attack The System In Terms Of Its Own Values. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +“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. + +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. + +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. + +## 6. Radicals Must Attack The System At The Decisive Points. + +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. + +Some examples of vital organs of the system are: + +
    +
  1. The electric-power industry. The system is utterly dependent on its electric-power grid.
    2. +
  2. The communications industry. Without rapid communications, as by telephone, radio, television, e-mail, and so forth, the system could not survive.
    3. +
  3. The computer industry. We all know that without computers the system would promptly collapse.
    4. +
  4. 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.
    5. +
  5. 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.
    6. +
+ + +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. + +## 7. Biotechnology May Be The Best Target For Political Attack. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +## 8. All Biotechnology Must Be Attacked As A Matter Of Principle. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +## 9. Radicals Are Not Yet Attacking Biotech Effectively. + +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. + +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. + +## 10. Hit Where It Hurts. + +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/morality-and-revolution.md b/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/morality-and-revolution.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f02d7a31 --- /dev/null +++ b/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/morality-and-revolution.md @@ -0,0 +1,113 @@ +--- +title: "Morality and Revolution" +date: 2023-04-15T18:54:10+03:00 +draft: false +tags: ['Ted Kaczynski','library'] +--- + + + +“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.”[^1] + +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. + +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. + +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? + +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: + + +1. Do not harm anyone who has not previously harmed you, or threatened to do so. + +2. (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. + +3. 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. + +4. The strong should have consideration for the weak. + +5. Do not lie. + +6. Abide faithfully by any promises or agreements that you make. + +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. + +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. + +I argue that the Six Principles should not be regarded as a moral code, for several reasons. + +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.) + +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”. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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.) + +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. + +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.) + +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. + +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. + +Morality often is antagonistic toward the Six Principles in other ways as well. To take just a few examples: + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +I have before me a flyer sent out by a magazine called The National Interest. In it I find the following: + +“Your task at hand is to defend our nation’s interests abroad, and rally support at home for your efforts. + +“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.” + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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: + +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. + +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. + +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.[^2] + +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.) + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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? + +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. + +[^1]: 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. + +[^2]: 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. diff --git a/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/progress-vs-liberty.md b/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/progress-vs-liberty.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..d6a98570 --- /dev/null +++ b/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/progress-vs-liberty.md @@ -0,0 +1,98 @@ +--- +title: "Progress vs Liberty" +date: 2023-04-15T18:57:32+03:00 +draft: false +tags: ['Ted Kaczynski','library'] +--- + + 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. + +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. + +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. + + +1. 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. +2. 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. +3. Operant conditioning, after the manner of B.F. Skinner and friends. (Of course, this cannot be entirely separated from item (2)). +4. 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.”) +5. Biofeedback training, after the manner of Joseph Kamiya and others. +6. 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.) +7. Predicted genetic engineering, eugenics, related techniques. +8. 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. +9. 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. + + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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.” + +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.) + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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? + +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. + +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. + +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? + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/the-littering-ape.md b/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/the-littering-ape.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..0d93244e --- /dev/null +++ b/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/the-littering-ape.md @@ -0,0 +1,14 @@ +--- +title: "The Littering Ape" +date: 2023-04-15T18:57:04+03:00 +draft: false +tags: ['Ted Kaczynski','library'] +--- + +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. + +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? + +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." + +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. diff --git a/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/the-system's-neatest-trick.md b/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/the-system's-neatest-trick.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..6a1e808f --- /dev/null +++ b/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/the-system's-neatest-trick.md @@ -0,0 +1,157 @@ +--- +title: "The System's Neatest Trick" +date: 2023-04-15T18:50:50+03:00 +draft: false +tags: ['Ted Kaczynski','library'] +toc: true +--- + + + +>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[^1] + +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. + +## 1. What the System Is Not + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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.[^2] + +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. + +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.[^3] + +## 2. How the System Exploits the Impulse to Rebel + +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. + +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. + +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? + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +## 3. The System's Neatest Trick + +So, in a nutshell, the System's neatest trick is this: + +1. 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. + +2. The frustration of life under the circumstances imposed by the System leads to rebellious impulses. + +3. 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. + +4. 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. + +5. 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. + +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: + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +## 4. The Trick Is Not Perfect + +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.[^4] + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +## 5. An Example + +I have with me an anthropology textbook[^5] 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). + +Williamson states that the American Indians not only accepted intersexed persons but especially valued them.[^6] She contrasts this attitude with the Euro-American attitude, which she equates with the attitude that her own parents adopted toward her. + +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." + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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,[^7] 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;[^8] nor does Haviland discuss the habitual use of torture by the Indians of the eastern United States.[^9] 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. + +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. + +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. + +[^1]: Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, translated by John Wilkinson, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1964, page 427. + +[^2]: 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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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. + +[^3]: 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. + +[^4]: The concepts of "integration propaganda" and "agitation propaganda" are discussed by Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965. + +[^5]: William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Ninth Edition, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999. + +[^6]: 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. + +[^7]: 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. + +[^8]: Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books edition, page 147. + +[^9]: 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. diff --git a/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techie's-wet-dreams.md b/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techie's-wet-dreams.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5aa9a6e0 --- /dev/null +++ b/new-site/content/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techie's-wet-dreams.md @@ -0,0 +1,126 @@ +--- +title: "The Techie's Wet-Dreams" +date: 2023-04-15T18:58:23+03:00 +draft: false +tags: ['Ted Kaczynski','library'] +--- + +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.[^1] For convenience, let's refer to those who ride this current as "the techies."[^2] 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."[^3] 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..."[^4] "The technium" is Kelly's name for the technological world-system that humans have created here on Earth.[^5] + +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: + +- the indefinite preservation of the living human body as it exists today; [^6] +- the merging of humans with machines and the indefinite survival of the resulting man-machine hybrids;[^7] +- the "uploading" of minds from human brains into robots or computers, after which the uploaded minds are to live forever within the machines.[^8] + +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. + +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!"[^9] 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.[^10] + +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. + +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.[^11] 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. + +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.[^12] + +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.[^13] 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. + +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.[^14] 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. + +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.[^15] 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;[^16] at least in the U. S., poverty is increasing;[^17] and these facts may well indicate the general trend of the future, though there will doubtless be ups and downs. + +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"[^18]), 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. + +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.[^19] + +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.[^20] 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. + +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. + +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.[^21] 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. + +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.[^22] Technological progress constantly accelerates, and techies like Ray Kurzweil insist that it will soon become virtually explosive;[^23] 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[^24] is nothing but a pipe-dream. + +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[^25] 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. + +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,[^26] 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,[^27] 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.[^28] Thus Kurzweil states flatly: "We will be able to live as long as we want... ."[^29] 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. + +The techies' belief-system can best be explained as a religious phenomenon,[^30] 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.[^31] In this respect Technianity probably resembles the inceptive stages of many other religions.[^32] Nevertheless, Technianity already has the earmarks of an apocalyptic and millenarian cult: In most versions it anticipates a cataclysmic event, the Singularity,[^33] 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[^34] 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[^35]). The Elect of Technianity, like that of Christianity, is destined to Eternal Life; though this element is missing from Marxism.[^36] + +Historically, millenarian cults have tended to emerge at "times of great social change or crisis."[^37] 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. + + +[^1]: 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. + +[^2]: The techies of course include the transhumanists, but some techies—as we use the term—do not appear to be transhumanists. + +[^3]: Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368. + +[^4]: Kelly, p. 357. + +[^5]: Ibid., pp. 11–12. + +[^6]: Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320. + +[^7]: Grossman, p. 44, col. 3. Kurzweil, pp. 194–95, 309, 377. Vance, p. 1, col. 3; p. 6, col. 1. + +[^8]: 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. + +[^9]: 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. + +[^10]: 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. + +[^11]: Grossman, p. 48, col. 3 (“Who decides who gets to be immortal?”). Vance, p. 6, col. 1. + +[^12]: 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. + +[^13]: Also, modern societies find it advantageous to encourage people’s compassionate feelings through propaganda. See Kaczynski, “The System’s Neatest Trick,” Part 4. + +[^14]: 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. + +[^15]: 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. + +[^16]: 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. + +[^17]: 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. + +[^18]: 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. + +[^19]: Grossman, p. 44, col. 3. Vance, p. 6, col. 4. Kurzweil, pp. 24–25, 309, 377. Man-machine hybrids are also called “cyborgs.” + +[^20]: Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree. + +[^21]: “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. + +[^22]: 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. + +[^23]: 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”). + +[^24]: Vance, p. 7, col. 1 (700 years). “Mr. Immortality,” The Week, Nov. 16, 2007, pp. 52–53 (1,000 years). + +[^25]: 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. + +[^26]: 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. + +[^27]: 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. + +[^28]: “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. + +[^29]: Kurzweil, p. 9. + +[^30]: 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. + +[^31]: E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2. + +[^32]: 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. + +[^33]: Grossman, pp. 44–46. Kurzweil, p. 9. Another version of the Singularity is the “assembler breakthrough” posited by nanotechnology buffs. Keiper, pp. 23–24. + +[^34]: 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. + +[^35]: 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. + +[^36]: 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. + +[^37]: 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. diff --git a/new-site/public/blog/index.xml b/new-site/public/blog/index.xml index 6cdb4656..84d0adb7 100644 --- a/new-site/public/blog/index.xml +++ b/new-site/public/blog/index.xml @@ -10,6 +10,544 @@ + + The Techie's Wet-Dreams + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-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&rsquo;s refer to those who ride this current as &ldquo;the techies.&rdquo;<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&rsquo; fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that &ldquo;within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe.&rdquo;<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: &ldquo;The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium&hellip;&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> &ldquo;The technium&rdquo; is Kelly&rsquo;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 &ldquo;uploading&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve argued it must, then no one is going to achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we&rsquo;re wrong and that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the techies&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;upload&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t get done. Intelligent people have said again and again: &ldquo;How easily men could make things much better than they are—if they only all tried together!&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> But people never do &ldquo;all try together,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Turing test&rdquo;<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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;uploaded&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo; own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it&rsquo;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 &ldquo;guide research&rdquo; and &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; so that technology would &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shaping the advances&rdquo; to &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t be able to &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve said up to this point, and in view moreover of the fact that the techies&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;We will be able to live as long as we want&hellip; .&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:29"><a href="#fn:29" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">29</a></sup> He adds no qualifiers—no &ldquo;probably,&rdquo; no &ldquo;if things turn out as expected.&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;Technianity.&rdquo; It&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;times of great social change or crisis.&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:37"><a href="#fn:37" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">37</a></sup> This suggests that the techies&rsquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>Kelly, p. 357.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>Ibid., pp. 11–12.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:6"> +<p>Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.”&#160;<a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:20"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree.&#160;<a href="#fnref:20" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:21" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:22" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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”).&#160;<a href="#fnref:23" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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).&#160;<a href="#fnref:24" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:25" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:26" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:27" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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&amp;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:28" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:29"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 9.&#160;<a href="#fnref:29" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:30" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:31"> +<p>E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2.&#160;<a href="#fnref:31" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:32" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:33" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:34" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:35" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:36" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:37" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Forward to Technological Slavery + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:2"> +<p>Published by William Heinemann, 2003.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Oxford University Press, 2004.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>See Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Progress vs Liberty + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 &ldquo;Naked Ape&rdquo; 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 [&hellip;] 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&mdash;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&rsquo;t allowed to carve them up any more. So what do we do? We strew cigarette packages and gum wrappers. It&rsquo;s our way of saying &ldquo;Kilroy was here.&rdquo;</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 &ldquo;scent posts&rdquo; 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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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&hellip;. I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without caring what others think of me&hellip;. I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all possibilities&hellip;. This means&hellip; 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&ndash; 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&ndash;for example, people convicted of possessing marijuana&ndash;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&ndash;personal liberty for example&ndash;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&ndash;via the police or the military&ndash;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&ndash;or, as I have preferred to call it, a concept of fairness&ndash;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&ndash;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + The System's Neatest Trick + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-systems-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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s work, they are only letting out their own anger and hostility. The System&rsquo;s goal is not brutality or the expression of anger. As far as police work is concerned, the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s issues, poverty, sweatshops…the whole laundry-bag of &ldquo;activist&rdquo; issues.</p> +<p>Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait. In fighting racism, sexism, etc., etc., they are only doing the System&rsquo;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&rsquo; illusion that they are rebelling.</p> +<p>Third, in order to bring themselves into conflict even with that majority of the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t act only as the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s Neatest Trick</h2> +<p>So, in a nutshell, the System&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; in ways that serve the interests of the System.</p> +<p>The university intellectuals also play an important role in carrying out the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s trick, which allows them to irritate people and enjoy the illusion of rebelling without ever having to challenge the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s rebellious impulses toward the standard, stereotyped targets: racism, colonialism, women&rsquo;s issues, etc. Young people who are not college students learn through the media, or through personal contact, of the &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s trick does not work perfectly. Not all of the positions adopted by the &ldquo;activist&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;violence&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t easily be persuaded to approve a bloody military operation.</p> +<p>Here the System&rsquo;s trick backfires to some extent. The activists, who have been &ldquo;rebelling&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;racist,&rdquo; &ldquo;colonialist,&rdquo; &ldquo;imperialist,&rdquo; etc., all of which are contrary to the soft, cuddly values taught by integration propaganda.</p> +<p>The System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s limited resources by the growth of the human population. But activists&rsquo; insistence on ending the use of animals in scientific experiments is squarely in conflict with the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;adapted&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s parents mistreated her cruelly. They held her in contempt for her intersexed condition. They told her she was &ldquo;cursed and given over to the devil,&rdquo; and they took her to charismatic churches to have the &ldquo;demon&rdquo; cast out of her. She was even given napkins into which she was supposed to &ldquo;cough out the demon.&rdquo;</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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t so pathetic. The mainstream of modern American anthropology is abjectly subservient to the values and assumptions of the System. When today&rsquo;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&rsquo;s use of Williamson&rsquo;s article illustrates this very well, and it represents the general slant of Haviland&rsquo;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&rsquo;s account to emphasize the Indians&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;Public Displays of Affection,&rdquo; U.S. News &amp; 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 &amp; World Report is a right-of-center magazine.</p> +<p>Russia: &ldquo;Putin Denounces Intolerance,&rdquo; The Denver Post, July 26, 2002, page 16A. &ldquo;MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin strongly denounced racial and religious prejudice on Thursday…&lsquo;If we let this chauvinistic bacteria of either national or religious intolerance develop, we will ruin the country&rsquo;, Putin said in remarks prominently replayed on Russian television on Thursday night.&rdquo; Etc., etc.</p> +<p>Mexico: &ldquo;Persiste racismo contra indígenas&rdquo; (&ldquo;Racism against indigenous people persists&rdquo;), El Sol de México, January 11, 2002, page 1/B. Photo caption: &ldquo;In spite of efforts to give dignity to the indigenous people of our country, they continue to suffer discrimination….&rdquo; The article reports on the efforts of the bishops of Mexico to combat discrimination, but says that the bishops want to &ldquo;purity&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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, &ldquo;Propaganda,&rdquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>In this section I&rsquo;ve said something about what the System is not, but I haven&rsquo;t said what the System is. A friend of mine has pointed out that this may leave the reader nonplussed, so I&rsquo;d better explain that for the purposes of this article it isn&rsquo;t necessary to have a precise definition of what the System is. I couldn&rsquo;t think of any way of defining the System in a single, well-rounded sentence and I didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t think my failure to answer it will seriously impair the reader&rsquo;s understanding of the point that I want to make in this article.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>The concepts of &ldquo;integration propaganda&rdquo; and &ldquo;agitation propaganda&rdquo; are discussed by Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Ninth Edition, Harcourt Brace &amp; Company, 1999.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 380.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:8"> +<p>Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books edition, page 147.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 385; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, Oxford University Press, 1985, page citation not available.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Hit Where It Hurts + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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) https://vodoraslo.xyz/updates/updated-the-css-again/ diff --git a/new-site/public/categories/index.xml b/new-site/public/categories/index.xml index 590afbf5..422ef5be 100644 --- a/new-site/public/categories/index.xml +++ b/new-site/public/categories/index.xml @@ -9,6 +9,544 @@ + + The Techie's Wet-Dreams + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-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&rsquo;s refer to those who ride this current as &ldquo;the techies.&rdquo;<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&rsquo; fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that &ldquo;within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe.&rdquo;<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: &ldquo;The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium&hellip;&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> &ldquo;The technium&rdquo; is Kelly&rsquo;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 &ldquo;uploading&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve argued it must, then no one is going to achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we&rsquo;re wrong and that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the techies&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;upload&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t get done. Intelligent people have said again and again: &ldquo;How easily men could make things much better than they are—if they only all tried together!&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> But people never do &ldquo;all try together,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Turing test&rdquo;<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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;uploaded&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo; own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it&rsquo;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 &ldquo;guide research&rdquo; and &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; so that technology would &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shaping the advances&rdquo; to &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t be able to &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve said up to this point, and in view moreover of the fact that the techies&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;We will be able to live as long as we want&hellip; .&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:29"><a href="#fn:29" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">29</a></sup> He adds no qualifiers—no &ldquo;probably,&rdquo; no &ldquo;if things turn out as expected.&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;Technianity.&rdquo; It&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;times of great social change or crisis.&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:37"><a href="#fn:37" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">37</a></sup> This suggests that the techies&rsquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>Kelly, p. 357.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>Ibid., pp. 11–12.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:6"> +<p>Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.”&#160;<a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:20"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree.&#160;<a href="#fnref:20" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:21" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:22" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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”).&#160;<a href="#fnref:23" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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).&#160;<a href="#fnref:24" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:25" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:26" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:27" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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&amp;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:28" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:29"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 9.&#160;<a href="#fnref:29" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:30" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:31"> +<p>E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2.&#160;<a href="#fnref:31" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:32" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:33" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:34" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:35" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:36" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:37" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Forward to Technological Slavery + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:2"> +<p>Published by William Heinemann, 2003.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Oxford University Press, 2004.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>See Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Progress vs Liberty + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 &ldquo;Naked Ape&rdquo; 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 [&hellip;] 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&mdash;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&rsquo;t allowed to carve them up any more. So what do we do? We strew cigarette packages and gum wrappers. It&rsquo;s our way of saying &ldquo;Kilroy was here.&rdquo;</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 &ldquo;scent posts&rdquo; 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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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&hellip;. I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without caring what others think of me&hellip;. I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all possibilities&hellip;. This means&hellip; 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&ndash; 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&ndash;for example, people convicted of possessing marijuana&ndash;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&ndash;personal liberty for example&ndash;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&ndash;via the police or the military&ndash;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&ndash;or, as I have preferred to call it, a concept of fairness&ndash;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&ndash;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + The System's Neatest Trick + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-systems-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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s work, they are only letting out their own anger and hostility. The System&rsquo;s goal is not brutality or the expression of anger. As far as police work is concerned, the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s issues, poverty, sweatshops…the whole laundry-bag of &ldquo;activist&rdquo; issues.</p> +<p>Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait. In fighting racism, sexism, etc., etc., they are only doing the System&rsquo;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&rsquo; illusion that they are rebelling.</p> +<p>Third, in order to bring themselves into conflict even with that majority of the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t act only as the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s Neatest Trick</h2> +<p>So, in a nutshell, the System&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; in ways that serve the interests of the System.</p> +<p>The university intellectuals also play an important role in carrying out the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s trick, which allows them to irritate people and enjoy the illusion of rebelling without ever having to challenge the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s rebellious impulses toward the standard, stereotyped targets: racism, colonialism, women&rsquo;s issues, etc. Young people who are not college students learn through the media, or through personal contact, of the &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s trick does not work perfectly. Not all of the positions adopted by the &ldquo;activist&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;violence&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t easily be persuaded to approve a bloody military operation.</p> +<p>Here the System&rsquo;s trick backfires to some extent. The activists, who have been &ldquo;rebelling&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;racist,&rdquo; &ldquo;colonialist,&rdquo; &ldquo;imperialist,&rdquo; etc., all of which are contrary to the soft, cuddly values taught by integration propaganda.</p> +<p>The System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s limited resources by the growth of the human population. But activists&rsquo; insistence on ending the use of animals in scientific experiments is squarely in conflict with the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;adapted&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s parents mistreated her cruelly. They held her in contempt for her intersexed condition. They told her she was &ldquo;cursed and given over to the devil,&rdquo; and they took her to charismatic churches to have the &ldquo;demon&rdquo; cast out of her. She was even given napkins into which she was supposed to &ldquo;cough out the demon.&rdquo;</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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t so pathetic. The mainstream of modern American anthropology is abjectly subservient to the values and assumptions of the System. When today&rsquo;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&rsquo;s use of Williamson&rsquo;s article illustrates this very well, and it represents the general slant of Haviland&rsquo;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&rsquo;s account to emphasize the Indians&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;Public Displays of Affection,&rdquo; U.S. News &amp; 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 &amp; World Report is a right-of-center magazine.</p> +<p>Russia: &ldquo;Putin Denounces Intolerance,&rdquo; The Denver Post, July 26, 2002, page 16A. &ldquo;MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin strongly denounced racial and religious prejudice on Thursday…&lsquo;If we let this chauvinistic bacteria of either national or religious intolerance develop, we will ruin the country&rsquo;, Putin said in remarks prominently replayed on Russian television on Thursday night.&rdquo; Etc., etc.</p> +<p>Mexico: &ldquo;Persiste racismo contra indígenas&rdquo; (&ldquo;Racism against indigenous people persists&rdquo;), El Sol de México, January 11, 2002, page 1/B. Photo caption: &ldquo;In spite of efforts to give dignity to the indigenous people of our country, they continue to suffer discrimination….&rdquo; The article reports on the efforts of the bishops of Mexico to combat discrimination, but says that the bishops want to &ldquo;purity&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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, &ldquo;Propaganda,&rdquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>In this section I&rsquo;ve said something about what the System is not, but I haven&rsquo;t said what the System is. A friend of mine has pointed out that this may leave the reader nonplussed, so I&rsquo;d better explain that for the purposes of this article it isn&rsquo;t necessary to have a precise definition of what the System is. I couldn&rsquo;t think of any way of defining the System in a single, well-rounded sentence and I didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t think my failure to answer it will seriously impair the reader&rsquo;s understanding of the point that I want to make in this article.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>The concepts of &ldquo;integration propaganda&rdquo; and &ldquo;agitation propaganda&rdquo; are discussed by Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Ninth Edition, Harcourt Brace &amp; Company, 1999.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 380.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:8"> +<p>Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books edition, page 147.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 385; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, Oxford University Press, 1985, page citation not available.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Hit Where It Hurts + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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) https://vodoraslo.xyz/updates/updated-the-css-again/ diff --git a/new-site/public/index.html b/new-site/public/index.html index a6763526..68695f14 100644 --- a/new-site/public/index.html +++ b/new-site/public/index.html @@ -34,6 +34,42 @@

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diff --git a/new-site/public/index.xml b/new-site/public/index.xml index afd2fc4e..8a2b65e1 100644 --- a/new-site/public/index.xml +++ b/new-site/public/index.xml @@ -5,11 +5,549 @@ Recent content on vodoraslo Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us - Wed, 05 Apr 2023 16:58:44 +0300 + Sat, 15 Apr 2023 18:58:23 +0300 + + The Techie's Wet-Dreams + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-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&rsquo;s refer to those who ride this current as &ldquo;the techies.&rdquo;<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&rsquo; fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that &ldquo;within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe.&rdquo;<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: &ldquo;The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium&hellip;&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> &ldquo;The technium&rdquo; is Kelly&rsquo;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 &ldquo;uploading&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve argued it must, then no one is going to achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we&rsquo;re wrong and that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the techies&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;upload&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t get done. Intelligent people have said again and again: &ldquo;How easily men could make things much better than they are—if they only all tried together!&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> But people never do &ldquo;all try together,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Turing test&rdquo;<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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;uploaded&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo; own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it&rsquo;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 &ldquo;guide research&rdquo; and &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; so that technology would &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shaping the advances&rdquo; to &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t be able to &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve said up to this point, and in view moreover of the fact that the techies&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;We will be able to live as long as we want&hellip; .&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:29"><a href="#fn:29" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">29</a></sup> He adds no qualifiers—no &ldquo;probably,&rdquo; no &ldquo;if things turn out as expected.&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;Technianity.&rdquo; It&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;times of great social change or crisis.&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:37"><a href="#fn:37" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">37</a></sup> This suggests that the techies&rsquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>Kelly, p. 357.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>Ibid., pp. 11–12.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:6"> +<p>Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.”&#160;<a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:20"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree.&#160;<a href="#fnref:20" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:21" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:22" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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”).&#160;<a href="#fnref:23" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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).&#160;<a href="#fnref:24" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:25" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:26" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:27" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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&amp;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:28" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:29"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 9.&#160;<a href="#fnref:29" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:30" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:31"> +<p>E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2.&#160;<a href="#fnref:31" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:32" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:33" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:34" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:35" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:36" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:37" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Forward to Technological Slavery + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:2"> +<p>Published by William Heinemann, 2003.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Oxford University Press, 2004.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>See Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Progress vs Liberty + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 &ldquo;Naked Ape&rdquo; 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 [&hellip;] 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&mdash;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&rsquo;t allowed to carve them up any more. So what do we do? We strew cigarette packages and gum wrappers. It&rsquo;s our way of saying &ldquo;Kilroy was here.&rdquo;</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 &ldquo;scent posts&rdquo; 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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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&hellip;. I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without caring what others think of me&hellip;. I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all possibilities&hellip;. This means&hellip; 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&ndash; 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&ndash;for example, people convicted of possessing marijuana&ndash;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&ndash;personal liberty for example&ndash;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&ndash;via the police or the military&ndash;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&ndash;or, as I have preferred to call it, a concept of fairness&ndash;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&ndash;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + The System's Neatest Trick + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-systems-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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s work, they are only letting out their own anger and hostility. The System&rsquo;s goal is not brutality or the expression of anger. As far as police work is concerned, the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s issues, poverty, sweatshops…the whole laundry-bag of &ldquo;activist&rdquo; issues.</p> +<p>Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait. In fighting racism, sexism, etc., etc., they are only doing the System&rsquo;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&rsquo; illusion that they are rebelling.</p> +<p>Third, in order to bring themselves into conflict even with that majority of the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t act only as the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s Neatest Trick</h2> +<p>So, in a nutshell, the System&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; in ways that serve the interests of the System.</p> +<p>The university intellectuals also play an important role in carrying out the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s trick, which allows them to irritate people and enjoy the illusion of rebelling without ever having to challenge the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s rebellious impulses toward the standard, stereotyped targets: racism, colonialism, women&rsquo;s issues, etc. Young people who are not college students learn through the media, or through personal contact, of the &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s trick does not work perfectly. Not all of the positions adopted by the &ldquo;activist&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;violence&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t easily be persuaded to approve a bloody military operation.</p> +<p>Here the System&rsquo;s trick backfires to some extent. The activists, who have been &ldquo;rebelling&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;racist,&rdquo; &ldquo;colonialist,&rdquo; &ldquo;imperialist,&rdquo; etc., all of which are contrary to the soft, cuddly values taught by integration propaganda.</p> +<p>The System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s limited resources by the growth of the human population. But activists&rsquo; insistence on ending the use of animals in scientific experiments is squarely in conflict with the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;adapted&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s parents mistreated her cruelly. They held her in contempt for her intersexed condition. They told her she was &ldquo;cursed and given over to the devil,&rdquo; and they took her to charismatic churches to have the &ldquo;demon&rdquo; cast out of her. She was even given napkins into which she was supposed to &ldquo;cough out the demon.&rdquo;</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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t so pathetic. The mainstream of modern American anthropology is abjectly subservient to the values and assumptions of the System. When today&rsquo;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&rsquo;s use of Williamson&rsquo;s article illustrates this very well, and it represents the general slant of Haviland&rsquo;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&rsquo;s account to emphasize the Indians&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;Public Displays of Affection,&rdquo; U.S. News &amp; 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 &amp; World Report is a right-of-center magazine.</p> +<p>Russia: &ldquo;Putin Denounces Intolerance,&rdquo; The Denver Post, July 26, 2002, page 16A. &ldquo;MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin strongly denounced racial and religious prejudice on Thursday…&lsquo;If we let this chauvinistic bacteria of either national or religious intolerance develop, we will ruin the country&rsquo;, Putin said in remarks prominently replayed on Russian television on Thursday night.&rdquo; Etc., etc.</p> +<p>Mexico: &ldquo;Persiste racismo contra indígenas&rdquo; (&ldquo;Racism against indigenous people persists&rdquo;), El Sol de México, January 11, 2002, page 1/B. Photo caption: &ldquo;In spite of efforts to give dignity to the indigenous people of our country, they continue to suffer discrimination….&rdquo; The article reports on the efforts of the bishops of Mexico to combat discrimination, but says that the bishops want to &ldquo;purity&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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, &ldquo;Propaganda,&rdquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>In this section I&rsquo;ve said something about what the System is not, but I haven&rsquo;t said what the System is. A friend of mine has pointed out that this may leave the reader nonplussed, so I&rsquo;d better explain that for the purposes of this article it isn&rsquo;t necessary to have a precise definition of what the System is. I couldn&rsquo;t think of any way of defining the System in a single, well-rounded sentence and I didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t think my failure to answer it will seriously impair the reader&rsquo;s understanding of the point that I want to make in this article.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>The concepts of &ldquo;integration propaganda&rdquo; and &ldquo;agitation propaganda&rdquo; are discussed by Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Ninth Edition, Harcourt Brace &amp; Company, 1999.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 380.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:8"> +<p>Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books edition, page 147.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 385; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, Oxford University Press, 1985, page citation not available.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Hit Where It Hurts + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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) https://vodoraslo.xyz/updates/updated-the-css-again/ diff --git a/new-site/public/library/hackbook/index.xml b/new-site/public/library/hackbook/index.xml index 979e6c29..611639b1 100644 --- a/new-site/public/library/hackbook/index.xml +++ b/new-site/public/library/hackbook/index.xml @@ -10,6 +10,544 @@ + + The Techie's Wet-Dreams + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-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&rsquo;s refer to those who ride this current as &ldquo;the techies.&rdquo;<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&rsquo; fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that &ldquo;within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe.&rdquo;<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: &ldquo;The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium&hellip;&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> &ldquo;The technium&rdquo; is Kelly&rsquo;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 &ldquo;uploading&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve argued it must, then no one is going to achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we&rsquo;re wrong and that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the techies&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;upload&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t get done. Intelligent people have said again and again: &ldquo;How easily men could make things much better than they are—if they only all tried together!&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> But people never do &ldquo;all try together,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Turing test&rdquo;<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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;uploaded&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo; own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it&rsquo;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 &ldquo;guide research&rdquo; and &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; so that technology would &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shaping the advances&rdquo; to &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t be able to &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve said up to this point, and in view moreover of the fact that the techies&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;We will be able to live as long as we want&hellip; .&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:29"><a href="#fn:29" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">29</a></sup> He adds no qualifiers—no &ldquo;probably,&rdquo; no &ldquo;if things turn out as expected.&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;Technianity.&rdquo; It&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;times of great social change or crisis.&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:37"><a href="#fn:37" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">37</a></sup> This suggests that the techies&rsquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>Kelly, p. 357.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>Ibid., pp. 11–12.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:6"> +<p>Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.”&#160;<a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:20"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree.&#160;<a href="#fnref:20" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:21" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:22" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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”).&#160;<a href="#fnref:23" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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).&#160;<a href="#fnref:24" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:25" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:26" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:27" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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&amp;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:28" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:29"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 9.&#160;<a href="#fnref:29" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:30" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:31"> +<p>E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2.&#160;<a href="#fnref:31" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:32" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:33" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:34" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:35" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:36" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:37" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Forward to Technological Slavery + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:2"> +<p>Published by William Heinemann, 2003.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Oxford University Press, 2004.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>See Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Progress vs Liberty + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 &ldquo;Naked Ape&rdquo; 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 [&hellip;] 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&mdash;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&rsquo;t allowed to carve them up any more. So what do we do? We strew cigarette packages and gum wrappers. It&rsquo;s our way of saying &ldquo;Kilroy was here.&rdquo;</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 &ldquo;scent posts&rdquo; 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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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&hellip;. I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without caring what others think of me&hellip;. I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all possibilities&hellip;. This means&hellip; 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&ndash; 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&ndash;for example, people convicted of possessing marijuana&ndash;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&ndash;personal liberty for example&ndash;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&ndash;via the police or the military&ndash;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&ndash;or, as I have preferred to call it, a concept of fairness&ndash;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&ndash;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + The System's Neatest Trick + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-systems-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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s work, they are only letting out their own anger and hostility. The System&rsquo;s goal is not brutality or the expression of anger. As far as police work is concerned, the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s issues, poverty, sweatshops…the whole laundry-bag of &ldquo;activist&rdquo; issues.</p> +<p>Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait. In fighting racism, sexism, etc., etc., they are only doing the System&rsquo;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&rsquo; illusion that they are rebelling.</p> +<p>Third, in order to bring themselves into conflict even with that majority of the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t act only as the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s Neatest Trick</h2> +<p>So, in a nutshell, the System&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; in ways that serve the interests of the System.</p> +<p>The university intellectuals also play an important role in carrying out the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s trick, which allows them to irritate people and enjoy the illusion of rebelling without ever having to challenge the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s rebellious impulses toward the standard, stereotyped targets: racism, colonialism, women&rsquo;s issues, etc. Young people who are not college students learn through the media, or through personal contact, of the &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s trick does not work perfectly. Not all of the positions adopted by the &ldquo;activist&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;violence&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t easily be persuaded to approve a bloody military operation.</p> +<p>Here the System&rsquo;s trick backfires to some extent. The activists, who have been &ldquo;rebelling&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;racist,&rdquo; &ldquo;colonialist,&rdquo; &ldquo;imperialist,&rdquo; etc., all of which are contrary to the soft, cuddly values taught by integration propaganda.</p> +<p>The System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s limited resources by the growth of the human population. But activists&rsquo; insistence on ending the use of animals in scientific experiments is squarely in conflict with the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;adapted&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s parents mistreated her cruelly. They held her in contempt for her intersexed condition. They told her she was &ldquo;cursed and given over to the devil,&rdquo; and they took her to charismatic churches to have the &ldquo;demon&rdquo; cast out of her. She was even given napkins into which she was supposed to &ldquo;cough out the demon.&rdquo;</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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t so pathetic. The mainstream of modern American anthropology is abjectly subservient to the values and assumptions of the System. When today&rsquo;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&rsquo;s use of Williamson&rsquo;s article illustrates this very well, and it represents the general slant of Haviland&rsquo;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&rsquo;s account to emphasize the Indians&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;Public Displays of Affection,&rdquo; U.S. News &amp; 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 &amp; World Report is a right-of-center magazine.</p> +<p>Russia: &ldquo;Putin Denounces Intolerance,&rdquo; The Denver Post, July 26, 2002, page 16A. &ldquo;MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin strongly denounced racial and religious prejudice on Thursday…&lsquo;If we let this chauvinistic bacteria of either national or religious intolerance develop, we will ruin the country&rsquo;, Putin said in remarks prominently replayed on Russian television on Thursday night.&rdquo; Etc., etc.</p> +<p>Mexico: &ldquo;Persiste racismo contra indígenas&rdquo; (&ldquo;Racism against indigenous people persists&rdquo;), El Sol de México, January 11, 2002, page 1/B. Photo caption: &ldquo;In spite of efforts to give dignity to the indigenous people of our country, they continue to suffer discrimination….&rdquo; The article reports on the efforts of the bishops of Mexico to combat discrimination, but says that the bishops want to &ldquo;purity&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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, &ldquo;Propaganda,&rdquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>In this section I&rsquo;ve said something about what the System is not, but I haven&rsquo;t said what the System is. A friend of mine has pointed out that this may leave the reader nonplussed, so I&rsquo;d better explain that for the purposes of this article it isn&rsquo;t necessary to have a precise definition of what the System is. I couldn&rsquo;t think of any way of defining the System in a single, well-rounded sentence and I didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t think my failure to answer it will seriously impair the reader&rsquo;s understanding of the point that I want to make in this article.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>The concepts of &ldquo;integration propaganda&rdquo; and &ldquo;agitation propaganda&rdquo; are discussed by Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Ninth Edition, Harcourt Brace &amp; Company, 1999.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 380.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:8"> +<p>Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books edition, page 147.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 385; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, Oxford University Press, 1985, page citation not available.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Hit Where It Hurts + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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) https://vodoraslo.xyz/updates/updated-the-css-again/ diff --git a/new-site/public/library/index.xml b/new-site/public/library/index.xml index f753a7a0..f6a18084 100644 --- a/new-site/public/library/index.xml +++ b/new-site/public/library/index.xml @@ -5,11 +5,549 @@ Recent content in Vodoraslo's Library on vodoraslo Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us - Sat, 01 Apr 2023 14:48:01 +0300 + Sat, 15 Apr 2023 18:58:23 +0300 + + The Techie's Wet-Dreams + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-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&rsquo;s refer to those who ride this current as &ldquo;the techies.&rdquo;<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&rsquo; fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that &ldquo;within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe.&rdquo;<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: &ldquo;The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium&hellip;&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> &ldquo;The technium&rdquo; is Kelly&rsquo;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 &ldquo;uploading&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve argued it must, then no one is going to achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we&rsquo;re wrong and that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the techies&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;upload&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t get done. Intelligent people have said again and again: &ldquo;How easily men could make things much better than they are—if they only all tried together!&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> But people never do &ldquo;all try together,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Turing test&rdquo;<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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;uploaded&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo; own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it&rsquo;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 &ldquo;guide research&rdquo; and &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; so that technology would &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shaping the advances&rdquo; to &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t be able to &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve said up to this point, and in view moreover of the fact that the techies&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;We will be able to live as long as we want&hellip; .&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:29"><a href="#fn:29" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">29</a></sup> He adds no qualifiers—no &ldquo;probably,&rdquo; no &ldquo;if things turn out as expected.&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;Technianity.&rdquo; It&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;times of great social change or crisis.&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:37"><a href="#fn:37" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">37</a></sup> This suggests that the techies&rsquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>Kelly, p. 357.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>Ibid., pp. 11–12.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:6"> +<p>Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.”&#160;<a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:20"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree.&#160;<a href="#fnref:20" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:21" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:22" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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”).&#160;<a href="#fnref:23" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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).&#160;<a href="#fnref:24" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:25" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:26" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:27" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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&amp;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:28" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:29"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 9.&#160;<a href="#fnref:29" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:30" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:31"> +<p>E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2.&#160;<a href="#fnref:31" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:32" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:33" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:34" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:35" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:36" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:37" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Forward to Technological Slavery + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:2"> +<p>Published by William Heinemann, 2003.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Oxford University Press, 2004.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>See Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Progress vs Liberty + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 &ldquo;Naked Ape&rdquo; 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 [&hellip;] 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&mdash;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&rsquo;t allowed to carve them up any more. So what do we do? We strew cigarette packages and gum wrappers. It&rsquo;s our way of saying &ldquo;Kilroy was here.&rdquo;</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 &ldquo;scent posts&rdquo; 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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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&hellip;. I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without caring what others think of me&hellip;. I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all possibilities&hellip;. This means&hellip; 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&ndash; 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&ndash;for example, people convicted of possessing marijuana&ndash;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&ndash;personal liberty for example&ndash;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&ndash;via the police or the military&ndash;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&ndash;or, as I have preferred to call it, a concept of fairness&ndash;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&ndash;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + The System's Neatest Trick + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-systems-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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s work, they are only letting out their own anger and hostility. The System&rsquo;s goal is not brutality or the expression of anger. As far as police work is concerned, the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s issues, poverty, sweatshops…the whole laundry-bag of &ldquo;activist&rdquo; issues.</p> +<p>Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait. In fighting racism, sexism, etc., etc., they are only doing the System&rsquo;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&rsquo; illusion that they are rebelling.</p> +<p>Third, in order to bring themselves into conflict even with that majority of the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t act only as the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s Neatest Trick</h2> +<p>So, in a nutshell, the System&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; in ways that serve the interests of the System.</p> +<p>The university intellectuals also play an important role in carrying out the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s trick, which allows them to irritate people and enjoy the illusion of rebelling without ever having to challenge the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s rebellious impulses toward the standard, stereotyped targets: racism, colonialism, women&rsquo;s issues, etc. Young people who are not college students learn through the media, or through personal contact, of the &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s trick does not work perfectly. Not all of the positions adopted by the &ldquo;activist&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;violence&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t easily be persuaded to approve a bloody military operation.</p> +<p>Here the System&rsquo;s trick backfires to some extent. The activists, who have been &ldquo;rebelling&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;racist,&rdquo; &ldquo;colonialist,&rdquo; &ldquo;imperialist,&rdquo; etc., all of which are contrary to the soft, cuddly values taught by integration propaganda.</p> +<p>The System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s limited resources by the growth of the human population. But activists&rsquo; insistence on ending the use of animals in scientific experiments is squarely in conflict with the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;adapted&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s parents mistreated her cruelly. They held her in contempt for her intersexed condition. They told her she was &ldquo;cursed and given over to the devil,&rdquo; and they took her to charismatic churches to have the &ldquo;demon&rdquo; cast out of her. She was even given napkins into which she was supposed to &ldquo;cough out the demon.&rdquo;</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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t so pathetic. The mainstream of modern American anthropology is abjectly subservient to the values and assumptions of the System. When today&rsquo;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&rsquo;s use of Williamson&rsquo;s article illustrates this very well, and it represents the general slant of Haviland&rsquo;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&rsquo;s account to emphasize the Indians&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;Public Displays of Affection,&rdquo; U.S. News &amp; 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 &amp; World Report is a right-of-center magazine.</p> +<p>Russia: &ldquo;Putin Denounces Intolerance,&rdquo; The Denver Post, July 26, 2002, page 16A. &ldquo;MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin strongly denounced racial and religious prejudice on Thursday…&lsquo;If we let this chauvinistic bacteria of either national or religious intolerance develop, we will ruin the country&rsquo;, Putin said in remarks prominently replayed on Russian television on Thursday night.&rdquo; Etc., etc.</p> +<p>Mexico: &ldquo;Persiste racismo contra indígenas&rdquo; (&ldquo;Racism against indigenous people persists&rdquo;), El Sol de México, January 11, 2002, page 1/B. Photo caption: &ldquo;In spite of efforts to give dignity to the indigenous people of our country, they continue to suffer discrimination….&rdquo; The article reports on the efforts of the bishops of Mexico to combat discrimination, but says that the bishops want to &ldquo;purity&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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, &ldquo;Propaganda,&rdquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>In this section I&rsquo;ve said something about what the System is not, but I haven&rsquo;t said what the System is. A friend of mine has pointed out that this may leave the reader nonplussed, so I&rsquo;d better explain that for the purposes of this article it isn&rsquo;t necessary to have a precise definition of what the System is. I couldn&rsquo;t think of any way of defining the System in a single, well-rounded sentence and I didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t think my failure to answer it will seriously impair the reader&rsquo;s understanding of the point that I want to make in this article.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>The concepts of &ldquo;integration propaganda&rdquo; and &ldquo;agitation propaganda&rdquo; are discussed by Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Ninth Edition, Harcourt Brace &amp; Company, 1999.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 380.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:8"> +<p>Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books edition, page 147.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 385; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, Oxford University Press, 1985, page citation not available.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Hit Where It Hurts + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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) https://vodoraslo.xyz/updates/updated-the-css-again/ diff --git a/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/forward-to-technological-slavery/index.html b/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/forward-to-technological-slavery/index.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..8a1e39bc --- /dev/null +++ b/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/forward-to-technological-slavery/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,79 @@ + + + + Forward to Technological Slavery | vodoraslo + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Forward to Technological Slavery

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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”1 is now famous, Martin Rees, author of the book Our Final Century,2 and Richard A. Posner, author of Catastrophe: Risk and Response.3 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.

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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.

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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 Ramos4 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”5 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.6

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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.

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    Wired magazine, April 2000. ↩︎

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    Published by William Heinemann, 2003. ↩︎

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    Oxford University Press, 2004. ↩︎

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    El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México, Décima Edición, Espasa-Calpe Mexicana, Mexico City 1982 (originally published in 1934), pages 104—105. ↩︎

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    See Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture. ↩︎

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    The process is ably documented by Martha E Lee, Earth First!: Environmental Apocalypse, Syracuse University Press, 1995. ↩︎

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+ + + + + diff --git a/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/hit-where-it-hurts/index.html b/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/hit-where-it-hurts/index.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..1b8213cb --- /dev/null +++ b/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/hit-where-it-hurts/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,109 @@ + + + + Hit Where It Hurts | vodoraslo + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Hit Where It Hurts

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1. The Purpose Of This Article.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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2. Technology Is The Target.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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3. The Timber Industry Is A Side Issue.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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4. Why The System Is Tough.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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5. It Is Useless To Attack The System In Terms Of Its Own Values.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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6. Radicals Must Attack The System At The Decisive Points.

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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.

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Some examples of vital organs of the system are:

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  1. The electric-power industry. The system is utterly dependent on its electric-power grid.
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  2. The communications industry. Without rapid communications, as by telephone, radio, television, e-mail, and so forth, the system could not survive.
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  3. The computer industry. We all know that without computers the system would promptly collapse.
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  4. 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.
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  5. 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.
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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.

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7. Biotechnology May Be The Best Target For Political Attack.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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8. All Biotechnology Must Be Attacked As A Matter Of Principle.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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9. Radicals Are Not Yet Attacking Biotech Effectively.

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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.

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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.

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10. Hit Where It Hurts.

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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.

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+ Tags: [Ted Kaczynski · Library] +
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+ + + + + diff --git a/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/index.html b/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/index.html index b28cec28..135868d9 100644 --- a/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/index.html +++ b/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/index.html @@ -17,6 +17,13 @@
    +
  • – The Techie's Wet-Dreams
    • +
  • – Forward to Technological Slavery
    • +
  • – Progress vs Liberty
    • +
  • – The Littering Ape
    • +
  • – Morality and Revolution
    • +
  • – The System's Neatest Trick
    • +
  • – Hit Where It Hurts
  • – Ship of Fools
  • – The Long Term Outcome of Geo Engineering
  • – Ecofascism an Aberrant Branch of Leftism
    • diff --git a/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/index.xml b/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/index.xml index f15ce37a..a2541a53 100644 --- a/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/index.xml +++ b/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/index.xml @@ -10,6 +10,544 @@ + + The Techie's Wet-Dreams + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-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&rsquo;s refer to those who ride this current as &ldquo;the techies.&rdquo;<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&rsquo; fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that &ldquo;within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe.&rdquo;<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: &ldquo;The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium&hellip;&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> &ldquo;The technium&rdquo; is Kelly&rsquo;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 &ldquo;uploading&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve argued it must, then no one is going to achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we&rsquo;re wrong and that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the techies&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;upload&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t get done. Intelligent people have said again and again: &ldquo;How easily men could make things much better than they are—if they only all tried together!&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> But people never do &ldquo;all try together,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Turing test&rdquo;<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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;uploaded&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo; own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it&rsquo;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 &ldquo;guide research&rdquo; and &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; so that technology would &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shaping the advances&rdquo; to &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t be able to &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve said up to this point, and in view moreover of the fact that the techies&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;We will be able to live as long as we want&hellip; .&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:29"><a href="#fn:29" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">29</a></sup> He adds no qualifiers—no &ldquo;probably,&rdquo; no &ldquo;if things turn out as expected.&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;Technianity.&rdquo; It&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;times of great social change or crisis.&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:37"><a href="#fn:37" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">37</a></sup> This suggests that the techies&rsquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>Kelly, p. 357.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>Ibid., pp. 11–12.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:6"> +<p>Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.”&#160;<a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:20"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree.&#160;<a href="#fnref:20" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:21" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:22" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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”).&#160;<a href="#fnref:23" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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).&#160;<a href="#fnref:24" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:25" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:26" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:27" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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&amp;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:28" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:29"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 9.&#160;<a href="#fnref:29" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:30" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:31"> +<p>E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2.&#160;<a href="#fnref:31" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:32" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:33" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:34" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:35" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:36" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:37" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Forward to Technological Slavery + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:2"> +<p>Published by William Heinemann, 2003.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Oxford University Press, 2004.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>See Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Progress vs Liberty + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 &ldquo;Naked Ape&rdquo; 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 [&hellip;] 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&mdash;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&rsquo;t allowed to carve them up any more. So what do we do? We strew cigarette packages and gum wrappers. It&rsquo;s our way of saying &ldquo;Kilroy was here.&rdquo;</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 &ldquo;scent posts&rdquo; 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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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&hellip;. I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without caring what others think of me&hellip;. I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all possibilities&hellip;. This means&hellip; 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&ndash; 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&ndash;for example, people convicted of possessing marijuana&ndash;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&ndash;personal liberty for example&ndash;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&ndash;via the police or the military&ndash;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&ndash;or, as I have preferred to call it, a concept of fairness&ndash;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&ndash;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + The System's Neatest Trick + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-systems-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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s work, they are only letting out their own anger and hostility. The System&rsquo;s goal is not brutality or the expression of anger. As far as police work is concerned, the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s issues, poverty, sweatshops…the whole laundry-bag of &ldquo;activist&rdquo; issues.</p> +<p>Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait. In fighting racism, sexism, etc., etc., they are only doing the System&rsquo;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&rsquo; illusion that they are rebelling.</p> +<p>Third, in order to bring themselves into conflict even with that majority of the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t act only as the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s Neatest Trick</h2> +<p>So, in a nutshell, the System&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; in ways that serve the interests of the System.</p> +<p>The university intellectuals also play an important role in carrying out the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s trick, which allows them to irritate people and enjoy the illusion of rebelling without ever having to challenge the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s rebellious impulses toward the standard, stereotyped targets: racism, colonialism, women&rsquo;s issues, etc. Young people who are not college students learn through the media, or through personal contact, of the &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s trick does not work perfectly. Not all of the positions adopted by the &ldquo;activist&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;violence&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t easily be persuaded to approve a bloody military operation.</p> +<p>Here the System&rsquo;s trick backfires to some extent. The activists, who have been &ldquo;rebelling&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;racist,&rdquo; &ldquo;colonialist,&rdquo; &ldquo;imperialist,&rdquo; etc., all of which are contrary to the soft, cuddly values taught by integration propaganda.</p> +<p>The System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s limited resources by the growth of the human population. But activists&rsquo; insistence on ending the use of animals in scientific experiments is squarely in conflict with the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;adapted&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s parents mistreated her cruelly. They held her in contempt for her intersexed condition. They told her she was &ldquo;cursed and given over to the devil,&rdquo; and they took her to charismatic churches to have the &ldquo;demon&rdquo; cast out of her. She was even given napkins into which she was supposed to &ldquo;cough out the demon.&rdquo;</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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t so pathetic. The mainstream of modern American anthropology is abjectly subservient to the values and assumptions of the System. When today&rsquo;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&rsquo;s use of Williamson&rsquo;s article illustrates this very well, and it represents the general slant of Haviland&rsquo;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&rsquo;s account to emphasize the Indians&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;Public Displays of Affection,&rdquo; U.S. News &amp; 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 &amp; World Report is a right-of-center magazine.</p> +<p>Russia: &ldquo;Putin Denounces Intolerance,&rdquo; The Denver Post, July 26, 2002, page 16A. &ldquo;MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin strongly denounced racial and religious prejudice on Thursday…&lsquo;If we let this chauvinistic bacteria of either national or religious intolerance develop, we will ruin the country&rsquo;, Putin said in remarks prominently replayed on Russian television on Thursday night.&rdquo; Etc., etc.</p> +<p>Mexico: &ldquo;Persiste racismo contra indígenas&rdquo; (&ldquo;Racism against indigenous people persists&rdquo;), El Sol de México, January 11, 2002, page 1/B. Photo caption: &ldquo;In spite of efforts to give dignity to the indigenous people of our country, they continue to suffer discrimination….&rdquo; The article reports on the efforts of the bishops of Mexico to combat discrimination, but says that the bishops want to &ldquo;purity&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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, &ldquo;Propaganda,&rdquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>In this section I&rsquo;ve said something about what the System is not, but I haven&rsquo;t said what the System is. A friend of mine has pointed out that this may leave the reader nonplussed, so I&rsquo;d better explain that for the purposes of this article it isn&rsquo;t necessary to have a precise definition of what the System is. I couldn&rsquo;t think of any way of defining the System in a single, well-rounded sentence and I didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t think my failure to answer it will seriously impair the reader&rsquo;s understanding of the point that I want to make in this article.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>The concepts of &ldquo;integration propaganda&rdquo; and &ldquo;agitation propaganda&rdquo; are discussed by Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Ninth Edition, Harcourt Brace &amp; Company, 1999.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 380.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:8"> +<p>Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books edition, page 147.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 385; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, Oxford University Press, 1985, page citation not available.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Hit Where It Hurts + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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) https://vodoraslo.xyz/updates/updated-the-css-again/ diff --git a/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/morality-and-revolution/index.html b/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/morality-and-revolution/index.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f80353f1 --- /dev/null +++ b/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/morality-and-revolution/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,116 @@ + + + + Morality and Revolution | vodoraslo + + + + + + + + + + + +
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    Morality and Revolution

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    “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.”1

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    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.

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    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.

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    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?

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    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:

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      Do not harm anyone who has not previously harmed you, or threatened to do so.

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      (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.

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      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.

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      The strong should have consideration for the weak.

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      Do not lie.

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      Abide faithfully by any promises or agreements that you make.

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    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.

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    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.

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    I argue that the Six Principles should not be regarded as a moral code, for several reasons.

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    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.)

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    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”.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.)

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    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.

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    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.)

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    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.

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    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.

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    Morality often is antagonistic toward the Six Principles in other ways as well. To take just a few examples:

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    I have before me a flyer sent out by a magazine called The National Interest. In it I find the following:

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    “Your task at hand is to defend our nation’s interests abroad, and rally support at home for your efforts.

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    “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.”

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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:

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.2

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    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.)

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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?

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    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.

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      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. ↩︎

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      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. ↩︎

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    Progress vs Liberty

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    1. 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.
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    2. 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.
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    3. Operant conditioning, after the manner of B.F. Skinner and friends. (Of course, this cannot be entirely separated from item (2)).
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    4. 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.”)
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    5. Biofeedback training, after the manner of Joseph Kamiya and others.
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    6. 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.)
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    7. Predicted genetic engineering, eugenics, related techniques.
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    8. 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.
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    9. 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.
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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.”

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    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.)

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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?

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    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.

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    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.

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    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?

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    The Littering Ape

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    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.

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    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?

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    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.”

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    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.

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    The System's Neatest Trick

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    The supreme luxury of the society of technical necessity will be to grant the bonus of useless revolt and of an acquiescent smile. —Jacques Ellul1

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    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.

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    1. What the System Is Not

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.2

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    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.

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    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.3

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    2. How the System Exploits the Impulse to Rebel

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    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.

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    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.

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    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?

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    3. The System’s Neatest Trick

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    So, in a nutshell, the System’s neatest trick is this:

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      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.

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      The frustration of life under the circumstances imposed by the System leads to rebellious impulses.

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      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.

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      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.

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      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.

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    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:

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    4. The Trick Is Not Perfect

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    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.4

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    5. An Example

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    I have with me an anthropology textbook5 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).

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    Williamson states that the American Indians not only accepted intersexed persons but especially valued them.6 She contrasts this attitude with the Euro-American attitude, which she equates with the attitude that her own parents adopted toward her.

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    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.”

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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,7 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;8 nor does Haviland discuss the habitual use of torture by the Indians of the eastern United States.9 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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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      Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, translated by John Wilkinson, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1964, page 427. ↩︎

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      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. ↩︎

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      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. ↩︎

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      The concepts of “integration propaganda” and “agitation propaganda” are discussed by Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965. ↩︎

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    5. +

      William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Ninth Edition, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999. ↩︎

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      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. ↩︎

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      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. ↩︎

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    8. +

      Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books edition, page 147. ↩︎

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      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. ↩︎

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    + + + + + diff --git a/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-wet-dreams/index.html b/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-wet-dreams/index.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..03d6353d --- /dev/null +++ b/new-site/public/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-wet-dreams/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,182 @@ + + + + The Techie's Wet-Dreams | vodoraslo + + + + + + + + + + + +
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    The Techie's Wet-Dreams

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    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.1 For convenience, let’s refer to those who ride this current as “the techies.”2 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.”3 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…”4 “The technium” is Kelly’s name for the technological world-system that humans have created here on Earth.5

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    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:

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    • the indefinite preservation of the living human body as it exists today; 6
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    • the merging of humans with machines and the indefinite survival of the resulting man-machine hybrids;7
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    • the “uploading” of minds from human brains into robots or computers, after which the uploaded minds are to live forever within the machines.8
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    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.

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    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!”9 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.10

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    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.

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    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.11 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.

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    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.12

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    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.13 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.

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    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.14 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.

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    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.15 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;16 at least in the U. S., poverty is increasing;17 and these facts may well indicate the general trend of the future, though there will doubtless be ups and downs.

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    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”18), 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.

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    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.19

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    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.20 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.

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    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.

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    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.21 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.

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    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.22 Technological progress constantly accelerates, and techies like Ray Kurzweil insist that it will soon become virtually explosive;23 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 aspire24 is nothing but a pipe-dream.

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    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 University25 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.

    +

    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,26 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,27 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.28 Thus Kurzweil states flatly: “We will be able to live as long as we want… .”29 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.

    +

    The techies’ belief-system can best be explained as a religious phenomenon,30 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.31 In this respect Technianity probably resembles the inceptive stages of many other religions.32 Nevertheless, Technianity already has the earmarks of an apocalyptic and millenarian cult: In most versions it anticipates a cataclysmic event, the Singularity,33 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 Day34 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 Marxists35). The Elect of Technianity, like that of Christianity, is destined to Eternal Life; though this element is missing from Marxism.36

    +

    Historically, millenarian cults have tended to emerge at “times of great social change or crisis.”37 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.

    +
    +
    +
      +
    1. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      2. +
    2. +

      The techies of course include the transhumanists, but some techies—as we use the term—do not appear to be transhumanists. ↩︎

      +
      3. +
    3. +

      Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368. ↩︎

      +
      4. +
    4. +

      Kelly, p. 357. ↩︎

      +
      5. +
    5. +

      Ibid., pp. 11–12. ↩︎

      +
      6. +
    6. +

      Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320. ↩︎

      +
      7. +
    7. +

      Grossman, p. 44, col. 3. Kurzweil, pp. 194–95, 309, 377. Vance, p. 1, col. 3; p. 6, col. 1. ↩︎

      +
      8. +
    8. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      9. +
    9. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      10. +
    10. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      11. +
    11. +

      Grossman, p. 48, col. 3 (“Who decides who gets to be immortal?”). Vance, p. 6, col. 1. ↩︎

      +
      12. +
    12. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      13. +
    13. +

      Also, modern societies find it advantageous to encourage people’s compassionate feelings through propaganda. See Kaczynski, “The System’s Neatest Trick,” Part 4. ↩︎

      +
      14. +
    14. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      15. +
    15. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      16. +
    16. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      17. +
    17. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      18. +
    18. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      19. +
    19. +

      Grossman, p. 44, col. 3. Vance, p. 6, col. 4. Kurzweil, pp. 24–25, 309, 377. Man-machine hybrids are also called “cyborgs.” ↩︎

      +
      20. +
    20. +

      Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree. ↩︎

      +
      21. +
    21. +

      “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. ↩︎

      +
      22. +
    22. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      23. +
    23. +

      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”). ↩︎

      +
      24. +
    24. +

      Vance, p. 7, col. 1 (700 years). “Mr. Immortality,” The Week, Nov. 16, 2007, pp. 52–53 (1,000 years). ↩︎

      +
      25. +
    25. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      26. +
    26. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      27. +
    27. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      28. +
    28. +

      “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. ↩︎

      +
      29. +
    29. +

      Kurzweil, p. 9. ↩︎

      +
      30. +
    30. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      31. +
    31. +

      E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2. ↩︎

      +
      32. +
    32. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      33. +
    33. +

      Grossman, pp. 44–46. Kurzweil, p. 9. Another version of the Singularity is the “assembler breakthrough” posited by nanotechnology buffs. Keiper, pp. 23–24. ↩︎

      +
      34. +
    34. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      35. +
    35. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      36. +
    36. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
      37. +
    37. +

      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. ↩︎

      +
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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&rsquo; fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that &ldquo;within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe.&rdquo;<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: &ldquo;The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium&hellip;&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> &ldquo;The technium&rdquo; is Kelly&rsquo;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 &ldquo;uploading&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve argued it must, then no one is going to achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we&rsquo;re wrong and that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the techies&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;upload&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t get done. Intelligent people have said again and again: &ldquo;How easily men could make things much better than they are—if they only all tried together!&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> But people never do &ldquo;all try together,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Turing test&rdquo;<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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;uploaded&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo; own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it&rsquo;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 &ldquo;guide research&rdquo; and &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; so that technology would &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shaping the advances&rdquo; to &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t be able to &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve said up to this point, and in view moreover of the fact that the techies&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;We will be able to live as long as we want&hellip; .&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:29"><a href="#fn:29" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">29</a></sup> He adds no qualifiers—no &ldquo;probably,&rdquo; no &ldquo;if things turn out as expected.&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;Technianity.&rdquo; It&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;times of great social change or crisis.&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:37"><a href="#fn:37" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">37</a></sup> This suggests that the techies&rsquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>Kelly, p. 357.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>Ibid., pp. 11–12.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:6"> +<p>Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.”&#160;<a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:20"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree.&#160;<a href="#fnref:20" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:21" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:22" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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”).&#160;<a href="#fnref:23" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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).&#160;<a href="#fnref:24" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:25" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:26" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:27" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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&amp;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:28" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:29"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 9.&#160;<a href="#fnref:29" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:30" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:31"> +<p>E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2.&#160;<a href="#fnref:31" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:32" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:33" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:34" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:35" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:36" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:37" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Forward to Technological Slavery + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:2"> +<p>Published by William Heinemann, 2003.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Oxford University Press, 2004.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>See Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Progress vs Liberty + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 &ldquo;Naked Ape&rdquo; 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 [&hellip;] 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&mdash;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&rsquo;t allowed to carve them up any more. So what do we do? We strew cigarette packages and gum wrappers. It&rsquo;s our way of saying &ldquo;Kilroy was here.&rdquo;</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 &ldquo;scent posts&rdquo; 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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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&hellip;. I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without caring what others think of me&hellip;. I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all possibilities&hellip;. This means&hellip; 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&ndash; 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&ndash;for example, people convicted of possessing marijuana&ndash;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&ndash;personal liberty for example&ndash;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&ndash;via the police or the military&ndash;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&ndash;or, as I have preferred to call it, a concept of fairness&ndash;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&ndash;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + The System's Neatest Trick + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-systems-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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s work, they are only letting out their own anger and hostility. The System&rsquo;s goal is not brutality or the expression of anger. As far as police work is concerned, the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s issues, poverty, sweatshops…the whole laundry-bag of &ldquo;activist&rdquo; issues.</p> +<p>Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait. In fighting racism, sexism, etc., etc., they are only doing the System&rsquo;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&rsquo; illusion that they are rebelling.</p> +<p>Third, in order to bring themselves into conflict even with that majority of the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t act only as the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s Neatest Trick</h2> +<p>So, in a nutshell, the System&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; in ways that serve the interests of the System.</p> +<p>The university intellectuals also play an important role in carrying out the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s trick, which allows them to irritate people and enjoy the illusion of rebelling without ever having to challenge the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s rebellious impulses toward the standard, stereotyped targets: racism, colonialism, women&rsquo;s issues, etc. Young people who are not college students learn through the media, or through personal contact, of the &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s trick does not work perfectly. Not all of the positions adopted by the &ldquo;activist&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;violence&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t easily be persuaded to approve a bloody military operation.</p> +<p>Here the System&rsquo;s trick backfires to some extent. The activists, who have been &ldquo;rebelling&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;racist,&rdquo; &ldquo;colonialist,&rdquo; &ldquo;imperialist,&rdquo; etc., all of which are contrary to the soft, cuddly values taught by integration propaganda.</p> +<p>The System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s limited resources by the growth of the human population. But activists&rsquo; insistence on ending the use of animals in scientific experiments is squarely in conflict with the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;adapted&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s parents mistreated her cruelly. They held her in contempt for her intersexed condition. They told her she was &ldquo;cursed and given over to the devil,&rdquo; and they took her to charismatic churches to have the &ldquo;demon&rdquo; cast out of her. She was even given napkins into which she was supposed to &ldquo;cough out the demon.&rdquo;</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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t so pathetic. The mainstream of modern American anthropology is abjectly subservient to the values and assumptions of the System. When today&rsquo;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&rsquo;s use of Williamson&rsquo;s article illustrates this very well, and it represents the general slant of Haviland&rsquo;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&rsquo;s account to emphasize the Indians&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;Public Displays of Affection,&rdquo; U.S. News &amp; 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 &amp; World Report is a right-of-center magazine.</p> +<p>Russia: &ldquo;Putin Denounces Intolerance,&rdquo; The Denver Post, July 26, 2002, page 16A. &ldquo;MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin strongly denounced racial and religious prejudice on Thursday…&lsquo;If we let this chauvinistic bacteria of either national or religious intolerance develop, we will ruin the country&rsquo;, Putin said in remarks prominently replayed on Russian television on Thursday night.&rdquo; Etc., etc.</p> +<p>Mexico: &ldquo;Persiste racismo contra indígenas&rdquo; (&ldquo;Racism against indigenous people persists&rdquo;), El Sol de México, January 11, 2002, page 1/B. Photo caption: &ldquo;In spite of efforts to give dignity to the indigenous people of our country, they continue to suffer discrimination….&rdquo; The article reports on the efforts of the bishops of Mexico to combat discrimination, but says that the bishops want to &ldquo;purity&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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, &ldquo;Propaganda,&rdquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>In this section I&rsquo;ve said something about what the System is not, but I haven&rsquo;t said what the System is. A friend of mine has pointed out that this may leave the reader nonplussed, so I&rsquo;d better explain that for the purposes of this article it isn&rsquo;t necessary to have a precise definition of what the System is. I couldn&rsquo;t think of any way of defining the System in a single, well-rounded sentence and I didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t think my failure to answer it will seriously impair the reader&rsquo;s understanding of the point that I want to make in this article.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>The concepts of &ldquo;integration propaganda&rdquo; and &ldquo;agitation propaganda&rdquo; are discussed by Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Ninth Edition, Harcourt Brace &amp; Company, 1999.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 380.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:8"> +<p>Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books edition, page 147.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 385; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, Oxford University Press, 1985, page citation not available.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Hit Where It Hurts + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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) https://vodoraslo.xyz/updates/updated-the-css-again/ diff --git a/new-site/public/tags/hackbook/index.xml b/new-site/public/tags/hackbook/index.xml index 6c2a5e81..2b6e6358 100644 --- a/new-site/public/tags/hackbook/index.xml +++ b/new-site/public/tags/hackbook/index.xml @@ -10,6 +10,544 @@ + + The Techie's Wet-Dreams + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-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&rsquo;s refer to those who ride this current as &ldquo;the techies.&rdquo;<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&rsquo; fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that &ldquo;within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe.&rdquo;<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: &ldquo;The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium&hellip;&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> &ldquo;The technium&rdquo; is Kelly&rsquo;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 &ldquo;uploading&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve argued it must, then no one is going to achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we&rsquo;re wrong and that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the techies&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;upload&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t get done. Intelligent people have said again and again: &ldquo;How easily men could make things much better than they are—if they only all tried together!&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> But people never do &ldquo;all try together,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Turing test&rdquo;<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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;uploaded&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo; own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it&rsquo;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 &ldquo;guide research&rdquo; and &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; so that technology would &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shaping the advances&rdquo; to &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t be able to &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve said up to this point, and in view moreover of the fact that the techies&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;We will be able to live as long as we want&hellip; .&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:29"><a href="#fn:29" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">29</a></sup> He adds no qualifiers—no &ldquo;probably,&rdquo; no &ldquo;if things turn out as expected.&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;Technianity.&rdquo; It&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;times of great social change or crisis.&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:37"><a href="#fn:37" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">37</a></sup> This suggests that the techies&rsquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>Kelly, p. 357.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>Ibid., pp. 11–12.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:6"> +<p>Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.”&#160;<a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:20"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree.&#160;<a href="#fnref:20" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:21" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:22" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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”).&#160;<a href="#fnref:23" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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).&#160;<a href="#fnref:24" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:25" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:26" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:27" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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&amp;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:28" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:29"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 9.&#160;<a href="#fnref:29" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:30" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:31"> +<p>E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2.&#160;<a href="#fnref:31" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:32" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:33" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:34" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:35" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:36" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:37" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Forward to Technological Slavery + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:2"> +<p>Published by William Heinemann, 2003.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Oxford University Press, 2004.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>See Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Progress vs Liberty + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 &ldquo;Naked Ape&rdquo; 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 [&hellip;] 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&mdash;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&rsquo;t allowed to carve them up any more. So what do we do? We strew cigarette packages and gum wrappers. It&rsquo;s our way of saying &ldquo;Kilroy was here.&rdquo;</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 &ldquo;scent posts&rdquo; 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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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&hellip;. I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without caring what others think of me&hellip;. I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all possibilities&hellip;. This means&hellip; 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&ndash; 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&ndash;for example, people convicted of possessing marijuana&ndash;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&ndash;personal liberty for example&ndash;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&ndash;via the police or the military&ndash;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&ndash;or, as I have preferred to call it, a concept of fairness&ndash;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&ndash;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + The System's Neatest Trick + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-systems-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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s work, they are only letting out their own anger and hostility. The System&rsquo;s goal is not brutality or the expression of anger. As far as police work is concerned, the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s issues, poverty, sweatshops…the whole laundry-bag of &ldquo;activist&rdquo; issues.</p> +<p>Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait. In fighting racism, sexism, etc., etc., they are only doing the System&rsquo;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&rsquo; illusion that they are rebelling.</p> +<p>Third, in order to bring themselves into conflict even with that majority of the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t act only as the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s Neatest Trick</h2> +<p>So, in a nutshell, the System&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; in ways that serve the interests of the System.</p> +<p>The university intellectuals also play an important role in carrying out the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s trick, which allows them to irritate people and enjoy the illusion of rebelling without ever having to challenge the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s rebellious impulses toward the standard, stereotyped targets: racism, colonialism, women&rsquo;s issues, etc. Young people who are not college students learn through the media, or through personal contact, of the &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s trick does not work perfectly. Not all of the positions adopted by the &ldquo;activist&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;violence&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t easily be persuaded to approve a bloody military operation.</p> +<p>Here the System&rsquo;s trick backfires to some extent. The activists, who have been &ldquo;rebelling&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;racist,&rdquo; &ldquo;colonialist,&rdquo; &ldquo;imperialist,&rdquo; etc., all of which are contrary to the soft, cuddly values taught by integration propaganda.</p> +<p>The System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s limited resources by the growth of the human population. But activists&rsquo; insistence on ending the use of animals in scientific experiments is squarely in conflict with the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;adapted&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s parents mistreated her cruelly. They held her in contempt for her intersexed condition. They told her she was &ldquo;cursed and given over to the devil,&rdquo; and they took her to charismatic churches to have the &ldquo;demon&rdquo; cast out of her. She was even given napkins into which she was supposed to &ldquo;cough out the demon.&rdquo;</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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t so pathetic. The mainstream of modern American anthropology is abjectly subservient to the values and assumptions of the System. When today&rsquo;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&rsquo;s use of Williamson&rsquo;s article illustrates this very well, and it represents the general slant of Haviland&rsquo;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&rsquo;s account to emphasize the Indians&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;Public Displays of Affection,&rdquo; U.S. News &amp; 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 &amp; World Report is a right-of-center magazine.</p> +<p>Russia: &ldquo;Putin Denounces Intolerance,&rdquo; The Denver Post, July 26, 2002, page 16A. &ldquo;MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin strongly denounced racial and religious prejudice on Thursday…&lsquo;If we let this chauvinistic bacteria of either national or religious intolerance develop, we will ruin the country&rsquo;, Putin said in remarks prominently replayed on Russian television on Thursday night.&rdquo; Etc., etc.</p> +<p>Mexico: &ldquo;Persiste racismo contra indígenas&rdquo; (&ldquo;Racism against indigenous people persists&rdquo;), El Sol de México, January 11, 2002, page 1/B. Photo caption: &ldquo;In spite of efforts to give dignity to the indigenous people of our country, they continue to suffer discrimination….&rdquo; The article reports on the efforts of the bishops of Mexico to combat discrimination, but says that the bishops want to &ldquo;purity&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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, &ldquo;Propaganda,&rdquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>In this section I&rsquo;ve said something about what the System is not, but I haven&rsquo;t said what the System is. A friend of mine has pointed out that this may leave the reader nonplussed, so I&rsquo;d better explain that for the purposes of this article it isn&rsquo;t necessary to have a precise definition of what the System is. I couldn&rsquo;t think of any way of defining the System in a single, well-rounded sentence and I didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t think my failure to answer it will seriously impair the reader&rsquo;s understanding of the point that I want to make in this article.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>The concepts of &ldquo;integration propaganda&rdquo; and &ldquo;agitation propaganda&rdquo; are discussed by Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Ninth Edition, Harcourt Brace &amp; Company, 1999.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 380.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:8"> +<p>Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books edition, page 147.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 385; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, Oxford University Press, 1985, page citation not available.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Hit Where It Hurts + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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) https://vodoraslo.xyz/updates/updated-the-css-again/ diff --git a/new-site/public/tags/index.html b/new-site/public/tags/index.html index 8e2cb047..b3cd553d 100644 --- a/new-site/public/tags/index.html +++ b/new-site/public/tags/index.html @@ -17,8 +17,8 @@
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      • diff --git a/new-site/public/tags/index.xml b/new-site/public/tags/index.xml index d6a2f912..8bb80ba8 100644 --- a/new-site/public/tags/index.xml +++ b/new-site/public/tags/index.xml @@ -5,11 +5,549 @@ Recent content in Tags on vodoraslo Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us - Wed, 05 Apr 2023 16:58:44 +0300 + Sat, 15 Apr 2023 18:58:23 +0300 + + The Techie's Wet-Dreams + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-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&rsquo;s refer to those who ride this current as &ldquo;the techies.&rdquo;<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&rsquo; fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that &ldquo;within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe.&rdquo;<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: &ldquo;The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium&hellip;&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> &ldquo;The technium&rdquo; is Kelly&rsquo;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 &ldquo;uploading&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve argued it must, then no one is going to achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we&rsquo;re wrong and that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the techies&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;upload&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t get done. Intelligent people have said again and again: &ldquo;How easily men could make things much better than they are—if they only all tried together!&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> But people never do &ldquo;all try together,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Turing test&rdquo;<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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;uploaded&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo; own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it&rsquo;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 &ldquo;guide research&rdquo; and &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; so that technology would &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shaping the advances&rdquo; to &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t be able to &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve said up to this point, and in view moreover of the fact that the techies&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;We will be able to live as long as we want&hellip; .&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:29"><a href="#fn:29" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">29</a></sup> He adds no qualifiers—no &ldquo;probably,&rdquo; no &ldquo;if things turn out as expected.&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;Technianity.&rdquo; It&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;times of great social change or crisis.&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:37"><a href="#fn:37" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">37</a></sup> This suggests that the techies&rsquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>Kelly, p. 357.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>Ibid., pp. 11–12.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:6"> +<p>Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.”&#160;<a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:20"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree.&#160;<a href="#fnref:20" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:21" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:22" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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”).&#160;<a href="#fnref:23" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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).&#160;<a href="#fnref:24" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:25" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:26" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:27" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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&amp;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:28" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:29"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 9.&#160;<a href="#fnref:29" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:30" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:31"> +<p>E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2.&#160;<a href="#fnref:31" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:32" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:33" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:34" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:35" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:36" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:37" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Forward to Technological Slavery + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:2"> +<p>Published by William Heinemann, 2003.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Oxford University Press, 2004.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>See Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Progress vs Liberty + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 &ldquo;Naked Ape&rdquo; 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 [&hellip;] 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&mdash;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&rsquo;t allowed to carve them up any more. So what do we do? We strew cigarette packages and gum wrappers. It&rsquo;s our way of saying &ldquo;Kilroy was here.&rdquo;</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 &ldquo;scent posts&rdquo; 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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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&hellip;. I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without caring what others think of me&hellip;. I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all possibilities&hellip;. This means&hellip; 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&ndash; 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&ndash;for example, people convicted of possessing marijuana&ndash;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&ndash;personal liberty for example&ndash;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&ndash;via the police or the military&ndash;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&ndash;or, as I have preferred to call it, a concept of fairness&ndash;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&ndash;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + The System's Neatest Trick + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-systems-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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s work, they are only letting out their own anger and hostility. The System&rsquo;s goal is not brutality or the expression of anger. As far as police work is concerned, the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s issues, poverty, sweatshops…the whole laundry-bag of &ldquo;activist&rdquo; issues.</p> +<p>Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait. In fighting racism, sexism, etc., etc., they are only doing the System&rsquo;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&rsquo; illusion that they are rebelling.</p> +<p>Third, in order to bring themselves into conflict even with that majority of the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t act only as the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s Neatest Trick</h2> +<p>So, in a nutshell, the System&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; in ways that serve the interests of the System.</p> +<p>The university intellectuals also play an important role in carrying out the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s trick, which allows them to irritate people and enjoy the illusion of rebelling without ever having to challenge the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s rebellious impulses toward the standard, stereotyped targets: racism, colonialism, women&rsquo;s issues, etc. Young people who are not college students learn through the media, or through personal contact, of the &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s trick does not work perfectly. Not all of the positions adopted by the &ldquo;activist&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;violence&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t easily be persuaded to approve a bloody military operation.</p> +<p>Here the System&rsquo;s trick backfires to some extent. The activists, who have been &ldquo;rebelling&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;racist,&rdquo; &ldquo;colonialist,&rdquo; &ldquo;imperialist,&rdquo; etc., all of which are contrary to the soft, cuddly values taught by integration propaganda.</p> +<p>The System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s limited resources by the growth of the human population. But activists&rsquo; insistence on ending the use of animals in scientific experiments is squarely in conflict with the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;adapted&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s parents mistreated her cruelly. They held her in contempt for her intersexed condition. They told her she was &ldquo;cursed and given over to the devil,&rdquo; and they took her to charismatic churches to have the &ldquo;demon&rdquo; cast out of her. She was even given napkins into which she was supposed to &ldquo;cough out the demon.&rdquo;</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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t so pathetic. The mainstream of modern American anthropology is abjectly subservient to the values and assumptions of the System. When today&rsquo;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&rsquo;s use of Williamson&rsquo;s article illustrates this very well, and it represents the general slant of Haviland&rsquo;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&rsquo;s account to emphasize the Indians&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;Public Displays of Affection,&rdquo; U.S. News &amp; 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 &amp; World Report is a right-of-center magazine.</p> +<p>Russia: &ldquo;Putin Denounces Intolerance,&rdquo; The Denver Post, July 26, 2002, page 16A. &ldquo;MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin strongly denounced racial and religious prejudice on Thursday…&lsquo;If we let this chauvinistic bacteria of either national or religious intolerance develop, we will ruin the country&rsquo;, Putin said in remarks prominently replayed on Russian television on Thursday night.&rdquo; Etc., etc.</p> +<p>Mexico: &ldquo;Persiste racismo contra indígenas&rdquo; (&ldquo;Racism against indigenous people persists&rdquo;), El Sol de México, January 11, 2002, page 1/B. Photo caption: &ldquo;In spite of efforts to give dignity to the indigenous people of our country, they continue to suffer discrimination….&rdquo; The article reports on the efforts of the bishops of Mexico to combat discrimination, but says that the bishops want to &ldquo;purity&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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, &ldquo;Propaganda,&rdquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>In this section I&rsquo;ve said something about what the System is not, but I haven&rsquo;t said what the System is. A friend of mine has pointed out that this may leave the reader nonplussed, so I&rsquo;d better explain that for the purposes of this article it isn&rsquo;t necessary to have a precise definition of what the System is. I couldn&rsquo;t think of any way of defining the System in a single, well-rounded sentence and I didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t think my failure to answer it will seriously impair the reader&rsquo;s understanding of the point that I want to make in this article.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>The concepts of &ldquo;integration propaganda&rdquo; and &ldquo;agitation propaganda&rdquo; are discussed by Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Ninth Edition, Harcourt Brace &amp; Company, 1999.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 380.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:8"> +<p>Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books edition, page 147.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 385; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, Oxford University Press, 1985, page citation not available.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Hit Where It Hurts + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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) https://vodoraslo.xyz/updates/updated-the-css-again/ diff --git a/new-site/public/tags/library/index.html b/new-site/public/tags/library/index.html index bb6656a5..06f0d912 100644 --- a/new-site/public/tags/library/index.html +++ b/new-site/public/tags/library/index.html @@ -17,6 +17,13 @@
        +
      • – The Techie's Wet-Dreams
        • +
      • – Forward to Technological Slavery
        • +
      • – Progress vs Liberty
        • +
      • – The Littering Ape
        • +
      • – Morality and Revolution
        • +
      • – The System's Neatest Trick
        • +
      • – Hit Where It Hurts
      • – Ship of Fools
      • – The Long Term Outcome of Geo Engineering
      • – Ecofascism an Aberrant Branch of Leftism
        • diff --git a/new-site/public/tags/library/index.xml b/new-site/public/tags/library/index.xml index 0147ea89..21c4e2da 100644 --- a/new-site/public/tags/library/index.xml +++ b/new-site/public/tags/library/index.xml @@ -10,6 +10,544 @@ + + The Techie's Wet-Dreams + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-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&rsquo;s refer to those who ride this current as &ldquo;the techies.&rdquo;<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&rsquo; fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that &ldquo;within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe.&rdquo;<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: &ldquo;The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium&hellip;&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> &ldquo;The technium&rdquo; is Kelly&rsquo;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 &ldquo;uploading&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve argued it must, then no one is going to achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we&rsquo;re wrong and that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the techies&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;upload&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t get done. Intelligent people have said again and again: &ldquo;How easily men could make things much better than they are—if they only all tried together!&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> But people never do &ldquo;all try together,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Turing test&rdquo;<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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;uploaded&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo; own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it&rsquo;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 &ldquo;guide research&rdquo; and &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; so that technology would &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shaping the advances&rdquo; to &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t be able to &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve said up to this point, and in view moreover of the fact that the techies&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;We will be able to live as long as we want&hellip; .&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:29"><a href="#fn:29" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">29</a></sup> He adds no qualifiers—no &ldquo;probably,&rdquo; no &ldquo;if things turn out as expected.&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;Technianity.&rdquo; It&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;times of great social change or crisis.&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:37"><a href="#fn:37" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">37</a></sup> This suggests that the techies&rsquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>Kelly, p. 357.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>Ibid., pp. 11–12.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:6"> +<p>Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.”&#160;<a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:20"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree.&#160;<a href="#fnref:20" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:21" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:22" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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”).&#160;<a href="#fnref:23" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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).&#160;<a href="#fnref:24" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:25" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:26" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:27" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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&amp;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:28" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:29"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 9.&#160;<a href="#fnref:29" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:30" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:31"> +<p>E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2.&#160;<a href="#fnref:31" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:32" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:33" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:34" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:35" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:36" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:37" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Forward to Technological Slavery + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:2"> +<p>Published by William Heinemann, 2003.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Oxford University Press, 2004.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>See Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Progress vs Liberty + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 &ldquo;Naked Ape&rdquo; 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 [&hellip;] 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&mdash;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&rsquo;t allowed to carve them up any more. So what do we do? We strew cigarette packages and gum wrappers. It&rsquo;s our way of saying &ldquo;Kilroy was here.&rdquo;</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 &ldquo;scent posts&rdquo; 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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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&hellip;. I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without caring what others think of me&hellip;. I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all possibilities&hellip;. This means&hellip; 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&ndash; 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&ndash;for example, people convicted of possessing marijuana&ndash;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&ndash;personal liberty for example&ndash;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&ndash;via the police or the military&ndash;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&ndash;or, as I have preferred to call it, a concept of fairness&ndash;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&ndash;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + The System's Neatest Trick + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-systems-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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s work, they are only letting out their own anger and hostility. The System&rsquo;s goal is not brutality or the expression of anger. As far as police work is concerned, the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s issues, poverty, sweatshops…the whole laundry-bag of &ldquo;activist&rdquo; issues.</p> +<p>Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait. In fighting racism, sexism, etc., etc., they are only doing the System&rsquo;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&rsquo; illusion that they are rebelling.</p> +<p>Third, in order to bring themselves into conflict even with that majority of the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t act only as the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s Neatest Trick</h2> +<p>So, in a nutshell, the System&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; in ways that serve the interests of the System.</p> +<p>The university intellectuals also play an important role in carrying out the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s trick, which allows them to irritate people and enjoy the illusion of rebelling without ever having to challenge the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s rebellious impulses toward the standard, stereotyped targets: racism, colonialism, women&rsquo;s issues, etc. Young people who are not college students learn through the media, or through personal contact, of the &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s trick does not work perfectly. Not all of the positions adopted by the &ldquo;activist&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;violence&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t easily be persuaded to approve a bloody military operation.</p> +<p>Here the System&rsquo;s trick backfires to some extent. The activists, who have been &ldquo;rebelling&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;racist,&rdquo; &ldquo;colonialist,&rdquo; &ldquo;imperialist,&rdquo; etc., all of which are contrary to the soft, cuddly values taught by integration propaganda.</p> +<p>The System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s limited resources by the growth of the human population. But activists&rsquo; insistence on ending the use of animals in scientific experiments is squarely in conflict with the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;adapted&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s parents mistreated her cruelly. They held her in contempt for her intersexed condition. They told her she was &ldquo;cursed and given over to the devil,&rdquo; and they took her to charismatic churches to have the &ldquo;demon&rdquo; cast out of her. She was even given napkins into which she was supposed to &ldquo;cough out the demon.&rdquo;</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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t so pathetic. The mainstream of modern American anthropology is abjectly subservient to the values and assumptions of the System. When today&rsquo;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&rsquo;s use of Williamson&rsquo;s article illustrates this very well, and it represents the general slant of Haviland&rsquo;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&rsquo;s account to emphasize the Indians&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;Public Displays of Affection,&rdquo; U.S. News &amp; 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 &amp; World Report is a right-of-center magazine.</p> +<p>Russia: &ldquo;Putin Denounces Intolerance,&rdquo; The Denver Post, July 26, 2002, page 16A. &ldquo;MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin strongly denounced racial and religious prejudice on Thursday…&lsquo;If we let this chauvinistic bacteria of either national or religious intolerance develop, we will ruin the country&rsquo;, Putin said in remarks prominently replayed on Russian television on Thursday night.&rdquo; Etc., etc.</p> +<p>Mexico: &ldquo;Persiste racismo contra indígenas&rdquo; (&ldquo;Racism against indigenous people persists&rdquo;), El Sol de México, January 11, 2002, page 1/B. Photo caption: &ldquo;In spite of efforts to give dignity to the indigenous people of our country, they continue to suffer discrimination….&rdquo; The article reports on the efforts of the bishops of Mexico to combat discrimination, but says that the bishops want to &ldquo;purity&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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, &ldquo;Propaganda,&rdquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>In this section I&rsquo;ve said something about what the System is not, but I haven&rsquo;t said what the System is. A friend of mine has pointed out that this may leave the reader nonplussed, so I&rsquo;d better explain that for the purposes of this article it isn&rsquo;t necessary to have a precise definition of what the System is. I couldn&rsquo;t think of any way of defining the System in a single, well-rounded sentence and I didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t think my failure to answer it will seriously impair the reader&rsquo;s understanding of the point that I want to make in this article.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>The concepts of &ldquo;integration propaganda&rdquo; and &ldquo;agitation propaganda&rdquo; are discussed by Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Ninth Edition, Harcourt Brace &amp; Company, 1999.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 380.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:8"> +<p>Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books edition, page 147.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 385; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, Oxford University Press, 1985, page citation not available.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Hit Where It Hurts + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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) https://vodoraslo.xyz/updates/updated-the-css-again/ diff --git a/new-site/public/tags/ted-kaczynski/index.html b/new-site/public/tags/ted-kaczynski/index.html index b28cec28..135868d9 100644 --- a/new-site/public/tags/ted-kaczynski/index.html +++ b/new-site/public/tags/ted-kaczynski/index.html @@ -17,6 +17,13 @@
          +
        • – The Techie's Wet-Dreams
          • +
        • – Forward to Technological Slavery
          • +
        • – Progress vs Liberty
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        • – The Littering Ape
          • +
        • – Morality and Revolution
          • +
        • – The System's Neatest Trick
          • +
        • – Hit Where It Hurts
        • – Ship of Fools
        • – The Long Term Outcome of Geo Engineering
        • – Ecofascism an Aberrant Branch of Leftism
          • diff --git a/new-site/public/tags/ted-kaczynski/index.xml b/new-site/public/tags/ted-kaczynski/index.xml index 84468386..11d3285d 100644 --- a/new-site/public/tags/ted-kaczynski/index.xml +++ b/new-site/public/tags/ted-kaczynski/index.xml @@ -5,11 +5,549 @@ Recent content in Ted Kaczynski on vodoraslo Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us - Sat, 01 Apr 2023 14:48:01 +0300 + Sat, 15 Apr 2023 18:58:23 +0300 + + The Techie's Wet-Dreams + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-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&rsquo;s refer to those who ride this current as &ldquo;the techies.&rdquo;<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&rsquo; fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that &ldquo;within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe.&rdquo;<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: &ldquo;The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium&hellip;&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> &ldquo;The technium&rdquo; is Kelly&rsquo;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 &ldquo;uploading&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve argued it must, then no one is going to achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we&rsquo;re wrong and that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the techies&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;upload&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t get done. Intelligent people have said again and again: &ldquo;How easily men could make things much better than they are—if they only all tried together!&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> But people never do &ldquo;all try together,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Turing test&rdquo;<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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;uploaded&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo; own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it&rsquo;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 &ldquo;guide research&rdquo; and &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; so that technology would &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shaping the advances&rdquo; to &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t be able to &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve said up to this point, and in view moreover of the fact that the techies&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;We will be able to live as long as we want&hellip; .&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:29"><a href="#fn:29" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">29</a></sup> He adds no qualifiers—no &ldquo;probably,&rdquo; no &ldquo;if things turn out as expected.&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;Technianity.&rdquo; It&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;times of great social change or crisis.&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:37"><a href="#fn:37" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">37</a></sup> This suggests that the techies&rsquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>Kelly, p. 357.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>Ibid., pp. 11–12.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:6"> +<p>Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.”&#160;<a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:20"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree.&#160;<a href="#fnref:20" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:21" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:22" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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”).&#160;<a href="#fnref:23" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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).&#160;<a href="#fnref:24" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:25" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:26" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:27" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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&amp;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:28" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:29"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 9.&#160;<a href="#fnref:29" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:30" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:31"> +<p>E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2.&#160;<a href="#fnref:31" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:32" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:33" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:34" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:35" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:36" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:37" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Forward to Technological Slavery + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:2"> +<p>Published by William Heinemann, 2003.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Oxford University Press, 2004.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>See Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Progress vs Liberty + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 &ldquo;Naked Ape&rdquo; 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 [&hellip;] 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&mdash;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&rsquo;t allowed to carve them up any more. So what do we do? We strew cigarette packages and gum wrappers. It&rsquo;s our way of saying &ldquo;Kilroy was here.&rdquo;</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 &ldquo;scent posts&rdquo; 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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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&hellip;. I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without caring what others think of me&hellip;. I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all possibilities&hellip;. This means&hellip; 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&ndash; 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&ndash;for example, people convicted of possessing marijuana&ndash;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&ndash;personal liberty for example&ndash;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&ndash;via the police or the military&ndash;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&ndash;or, as I have preferred to call it, a concept of fairness&ndash;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&ndash;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + The System's Neatest Trick + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-systems-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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s work, they are only letting out their own anger and hostility. The System&rsquo;s goal is not brutality or the expression of anger. As far as police work is concerned, the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s issues, poverty, sweatshops…the whole laundry-bag of &ldquo;activist&rdquo; issues.</p> +<p>Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait. In fighting racism, sexism, etc., etc., they are only doing the System&rsquo;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&rsquo; illusion that they are rebelling.</p> +<p>Third, in order to bring themselves into conflict even with that majority of the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t act only as the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s Neatest Trick</h2> +<p>So, in a nutshell, the System&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; in ways that serve the interests of the System.</p> +<p>The university intellectuals also play an important role in carrying out the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s trick, which allows them to irritate people and enjoy the illusion of rebelling without ever having to challenge the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s rebellious impulses toward the standard, stereotyped targets: racism, colonialism, women&rsquo;s issues, etc. Young people who are not college students learn through the media, or through personal contact, of the &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s trick does not work perfectly. Not all of the positions adopted by the &ldquo;activist&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;violence&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t easily be persuaded to approve a bloody military operation.</p> +<p>Here the System&rsquo;s trick backfires to some extent. The activists, who have been &ldquo;rebelling&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;racist,&rdquo; &ldquo;colonialist,&rdquo; &ldquo;imperialist,&rdquo; etc., all of which are contrary to the soft, cuddly values taught by integration propaganda.</p> +<p>The System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s limited resources by the growth of the human population. But activists&rsquo; insistence on ending the use of animals in scientific experiments is squarely in conflict with the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;adapted&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s parents mistreated her cruelly. They held her in contempt for her intersexed condition. They told her she was &ldquo;cursed and given over to the devil,&rdquo; and they took her to charismatic churches to have the &ldquo;demon&rdquo; cast out of her. She was even given napkins into which she was supposed to &ldquo;cough out the demon.&rdquo;</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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t so pathetic. The mainstream of modern American anthropology is abjectly subservient to the values and assumptions of the System. When today&rsquo;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&rsquo;s use of Williamson&rsquo;s article illustrates this very well, and it represents the general slant of Haviland&rsquo;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&rsquo;s account to emphasize the Indians&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;Public Displays of Affection,&rdquo; U.S. News &amp; 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 &amp; World Report is a right-of-center magazine.</p> +<p>Russia: &ldquo;Putin Denounces Intolerance,&rdquo; The Denver Post, July 26, 2002, page 16A. &ldquo;MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin strongly denounced racial and religious prejudice on Thursday…&lsquo;If we let this chauvinistic bacteria of either national or religious intolerance develop, we will ruin the country&rsquo;, Putin said in remarks prominently replayed on Russian television on Thursday night.&rdquo; Etc., etc.</p> +<p>Mexico: &ldquo;Persiste racismo contra indígenas&rdquo; (&ldquo;Racism against indigenous people persists&rdquo;), El Sol de México, January 11, 2002, page 1/B. Photo caption: &ldquo;In spite of efforts to give dignity to the indigenous people of our country, they continue to suffer discrimination….&rdquo; The article reports on the efforts of the bishops of Mexico to combat discrimination, but says that the bishops want to &ldquo;purity&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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, &ldquo;Propaganda,&rdquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>In this section I&rsquo;ve said something about what the System is not, but I haven&rsquo;t said what the System is. A friend of mine has pointed out that this may leave the reader nonplussed, so I&rsquo;d better explain that for the purposes of this article it isn&rsquo;t necessary to have a precise definition of what the System is. I couldn&rsquo;t think of any way of defining the System in a single, well-rounded sentence and I didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t think my failure to answer it will seriously impair the reader&rsquo;s understanding of the point that I want to make in this article.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>The concepts of &ldquo;integration propaganda&rdquo; and &ldquo;agitation propaganda&rdquo; are discussed by Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Ninth Edition, Harcourt Brace &amp; Company, 1999.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 380.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:8"> +<p>Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books edition, page 147.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 385; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, Oxford University Press, 1985, page citation not available.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Hit Where It Hurts + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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) https://vodoraslo.xyz/updates/updated-the-css-again/ diff --git a/new-site/public/tags/updates/index.xml b/new-site/public/tags/updates/index.xml index fa0cc55a..013d358e 100644 --- a/new-site/public/tags/updates/index.xml +++ b/new-site/public/tags/updates/index.xml @@ -10,6 +10,544 @@ + + The Techie's Wet-Dreams + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-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&rsquo;s refer to those who ride this current as &ldquo;the techies.&rdquo;<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&rsquo; fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that &ldquo;within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe.&rdquo;<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: &ldquo;The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium&hellip;&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> &ldquo;The technium&rdquo; is Kelly&rsquo;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 &ldquo;uploading&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve argued it must, then no one is going to achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we&rsquo;re wrong and that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the techies&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;upload&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t get done. Intelligent people have said again and again: &ldquo;How easily men could make things much better than they are—if they only all tried together!&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> But people never do &ldquo;all try together,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Turing test&rdquo;<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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;uploaded&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo; own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it&rsquo;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 &ldquo;guide research&rdquo; and &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; so that technology would &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shaping the advances&rdquo; to &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t be able to &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve said up to this point, and in view moreover of the fact that the techies&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;We will be able to live as long as we want&hellip; .&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:29"><a href="#fn:29" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">29</a></sup> He adds no qualifiers—no &ldquo;probably,&rdquo; no &ldquo;if things turn out as expected.&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;Technianity.&rdquo; It&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;times of great social change or crisis.&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:37"><a href="#fn:37" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">37</a></sup> This suggests that the techies&rsquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>Kelly, p. 357.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>Ibid., pp. 11–12.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:6"> +<p>Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.”&#160;<a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:20"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree.&#160;<a href="#fnref:20" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:21" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:22" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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”).&#160;<a href="#fnref:23" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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).&#160;<a href="#fnref:24" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:25" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:26" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:27" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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&amp;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:28" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:29"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 9.&#160;<a href="#fnref:29" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:30" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:31"> +<p>E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2.&#160;<a href="#fnref:31" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:32" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:33" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:34" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:35" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:36" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:37" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Forward to Technological Slavery + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:2"> +<p>Published by William Heinemann, 2003.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Oxford University Press, 2004.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>See Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Progress vs Liberty + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 &ldquo;Naked Ape&rdquo; 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 [&hellip;] 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&mdash;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&rsquo;t allowed to carve them up any more. So what do we do? We strew cigarette packages and gum wrappers. It&rsquo;s our way of saying &ldquo;Kilroy was here.&rdquo;</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 &ldquo;scent posts&rdquo; 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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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&hellip;. I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without caring what others think of me&hellip;. I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all possibilities&hellip;. This means&hellip; 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&ndash; 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&ndash;for example, people convicted of possessing marijuana&ndash;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&ndash;personal liberty for example&ndash;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&ndash;via the police or the military&ndash;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&ndash;or, as I have preferred to call it, a concept of fairness&ndash;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&ndash;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + The System's Neatest Trick + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-systems-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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s work, they are only letting out their own anger and hostility. The System&rsquo;s goal is not brutality or the expression of anger. As far as police work is concerned, the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s issues, poverty, sweatshops…the whole laundry-bag of &ldquo;activist&rdquo; issues.</p> +<p>Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait. In fighting racism, sexism, etc., etc., they are only doing the System&rsquo;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&rsquo; illusion that they are rebelling.</p> +<p>Third, in order to bring themselves into conflict even with that majority of the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t act only as the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s Neatest Trick</h2> +<p>So, in a nutshell, the System&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; in ways that serve the interests of the System.</p> +<p>The university intellectuals also play an important role in carrying out the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s trick, which allows them to irritate people and enjoy the illusion of rebelling without ever having to challenge the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s rebellious impulses toward the standard, stereotyped targets: racism, colonialism, women&rsquo;s issues, etc. Young people who are not college students learn through the media, or through personal contact, of the &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s trick does not work perfectly. Not all of the positions adopted by the &ldquo;activist&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;violence&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t easily be persuaded to approve a bloody military operation.</p> +<p>Here the System&rsquo;s trick backfires to some extent. The activists, who have been &ldquo;rebelling&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;racist,&rdquo; &ldquo;colonialist,&rdquo; &ldquo;imperialist,&rdquo; etc., all of which are contrary to the soft, cuddly values taught by integration propaganda.</p> +<p>The System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s limited resources by the growth of the human population. But activists&rsquo; insistence on ending the use of animals in scientific experiments is squarely in conflict with the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;adapted&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s parents mistreated her cruelly. They held her in contempt for her intersexed condition. They told her she was &ldquo;cursed and given over to the devil,&rdquo; and they took her to charismatic churches to have the &ldquo;demon&rdquo; cast out of her. She was even given napkins into which she was supposed to &ldquo;cough out the demon.&rdquo;</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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t so pathetic. The mainstream of modern American anthropology is abjectly subservient to the values and assumptions of the System. When today&rsquo;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&rsquo;s use of Williamson&rsquo;s article illustrates this very well, and it represents the general slant of Haviland&rsquo;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&rsquo;s account to emphasize the Indians&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;Public Displays of Affection,&rdquo; U.S. News &amp; 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 &amp; World Report is a right-of-center magazine.</p> +<p>Russia: &ldquo;Putin Denounces Intolerance,&rdquo; The Denver Post, July 26, 2002, page 16A. &ldquo;MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin strongly denounced racial and religious prejudice on Thursday…&lsquo;If we let this chauvinistic bacteria of either national or religious intolerance develop, we will ruin the country&rsquo;, Putin said in remarks prominently replayed on Russian television on Thursday night.&rdquo; Etc., etc.</p> +<p>Mexico: &ldquo;Persiste racismo contra indígenas&rdquo; (&ldquo;Racism against indigenous people persists&rdquo;), El Sol de México, January 11, 2002, page 1/B. Photo caption: &ldquo;In spite of efforts to give dignity to the indigenous people of our country, they continue to suffer discrimination….&rdquo; The article reports on the efforts of the bishops of Mexico to combat discrimination, but says that the bishops want to &ldquo;purity&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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, &ldquo;Propaganda,&rdquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>In this section I&rsquo;ve said something about what the System is not, but I haven&rsquo;t said what the System is. A friend of mine has pointed out that this may leave the reader nonplussed, so I&rsquo;d better explain that for the purposes of this article it isn&rsquo;t necessary to have a precise definition of what the System is. I couldn&rsquo;t think of any way of defining the System in a single, well-rounded sentence and I didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t think my failure to answer it will seriously impair the reader&rsquo;s understanding of the point that I want to make in this article.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>The concepts of &ldquo;integration propaganda&rdquo; and &ldquo;agitation propaganda&rdquo; are discussed by Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Ninth Edition, Harcourt Brace &amp; Company, 1999.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 380.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:8"> +<p>Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books edition, page 147.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 385; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, Oxford University Press, 1985, page citation not available.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Hit Where It Hurts + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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) https://vodoraslo.xyz/updates/updated-the-css-again/ diff --git a/new-site/public/updates/index.xml b/new-site/public/updates/index.xml index dc3143df..b151cb8b 100644 --- a/new-site/public/updates/index.xml +++ b/new-site/public/updates/index.xml @@ -10,6 +10,544 @@ + + The Techie's Wet-Dreams + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-techies-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&rsquo;s refer to those who ride this current as &ldquo;the techies.&rdquo;<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&rsquo; fantasies are astonishingly grandiose. For example, Ray Kurzweil believes that &ldquo;within a matter of centuries, human intelligence will have re-engineered and saturated all the matter in the universe.&rdquo;<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: &ldquo;The universe is mostly empty because it is waiting to be filled with the products of life and the technium&hellip;&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">4</a></sup> &ldquo;The technium&rdquo; is Kelly&rsquo;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 &ldquo;uploading&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve argued it must, then no one is going to achieve immortality in any form. But even assuming that we&rsquo;re wrong and that the technological world-system will survive indefinitely, the techies&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;upload&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t get done. Intelligent people have said again and again: &ldquo;How easily men could make things much better than they are—if they only all tried together!&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:9"><a href="#fn:9" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">9</a></sup> But people never do &ldquo;all try together,&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;Turing test&rdquo;<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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;uploaded&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo; own beliefs about the exponential acceleration of technological development, it&rsquo;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 &ldquo;guide research&rdquo; and &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; so that technology would &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shaping the advances&rdquo; to &ldquo;improve society.&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;t be able to &ldquo;shape the advances&rdquo; 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&rsquo;ve said up to this point, and in view moreover of the fact that the techies&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;We will be able to live as long as we want&hellip; .&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:29"><a href="#fn:29" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">29</a></sup> He adds no qualifiers—no &ldquo;probably,&rdquo; no &ldquo;if things turn out as expected.&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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 &ldquo;Technianity.&rdquo; It&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;times of great social change or crisis.&rdquo;<sup id="fnref:37"><a href="#fn:37" class="footnote-ref" role="doc-noteref">37</a></sup> This suggests that the techies&rsquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Grossman, p. 49, col. 2. Kurzweil, pp. 351–368.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>Kelly, p. 357.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>Ibid., pp. 11–12.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:6"> +<p>Grossman, p. 47. Kurzweil, p. 320.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:10" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:11" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:12" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:13" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:14" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:15" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:16" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:17" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:18" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.”&#160;<a href="#fnref:19" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:20"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 202, seems to agree.&#160;<a href="#fnref:20" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:21" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:22" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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”).&#160;<a href="#fnref:23" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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).&#160;<a href="#fnref:24" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:25" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:26" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:27" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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&amp;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:28" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:29"> +<p>Kurzweil, p. 9.&#160;<a href="#fnref:29" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:30" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:31"> +<p>E.g., Grossman, p. 46, col. 2.&#160;<a href="#fnref:31" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:32" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:33" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:34" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &amp; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:35" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:36" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:37" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Forward to Technological Slavery + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:2"> +<p>Published by William Heinemann, 2003.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>Oxford University Press, 2004.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>See Paul Hollander, The Survival of the Adversary Culture.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Progress vs Liberty + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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 &ldquo;Naked Ape&rdquo; 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 [&hellip;] 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&mdash;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&rsquo;t allowed to carve them up any more. So what do we do? We strew cigarette packages and gum wrappers. It&rsquo;s our way of saying &ldquo;Kilroy was here.&rdquo;</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 &ldquo;scent posts&rdquo; 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 + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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&hellip;. I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without caring what others think of me&hellip;. I want no constraints on my life; I want the opening of all possibilities&hellip;. This means&hellip; 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&ndash; 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&ndash;for example, people convicted of possessing marijuana&ndash;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&ndash;personal liberty for example&ndash;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&ndash;via the police or the military&ndash;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&ndash;or, as I have preferred to call it, a concept of fairness&ndash;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&ndash;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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + The System's Neatest Trick + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/the-systems-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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s work, they are only letting out their own anger and hostility. The System&rsquo;s goal is not brutality or the expression of anger. As far as police work is concerned, the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s issues, poverty, sweatshops…the whole laundry-bag of &ldquo;activist&rdquo; issues.</p> +<p>Huge numbers of would-be rebels take the bait. In fighting racism, sexism, etc., etc., they are only doing the System&rsquo;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&rsquo; illusion that they are rebelling.</p> +<p>Third, in order to bring themselves into conflict even with that majority of the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo; 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&rsquo;t act only as the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;s Neatest Trick</h2> +<p>So, in a nutshell, the System&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;rebel&rdquo; in ways that serve the interests of the System.</p> +<p>The university intellectuals also play an important role in carrying out the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s trick, which allows them to irritate people and enjoy the illusion of rebelling without ever having to challenge the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s rebellious impulses toward the standard, stereotyped targets: racism, colonialism, women&rsquo;s issues, etc. Young people who are not college students learn through the media, or through personal contact, of the &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s trick does not work perfectly. Not all of the positions adopted by the &ldquo;activist&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;violence&rdquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t easily be persuaded to approve a bloody military operation.</p> +<p>Here the System&rsquo;s trick backfires to some extent. The activists, who have been &ldquo;rebelling&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;racist,&rdquo; &ldquo;colonialist,&rdquo; &ldquo;imperialist,&rdquo; etc., all of which are contrary to the soft, cuddly values taught by integration propaganda.</p> +<p>The System&rsquo;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&rsquo;s limited resources by the growth of the human population. But activists&rsquo; insistence on ending the use of animals in scientific experiments is squarely in conflict with the System&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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 &ldquo;adapted&rdquo; 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&rsquo;s parents mistreated her cruelly. They held her in contempt for her intersexed condition. They told her she was &ldquo;cursed and given over to the devil,&rdquo; and they took her to charismatic churches to have the &ldquo;demon&rdquo; cast out of her. She was even given napkins into which she was supposed to &ldquo;cough out the demon.&rdquo;</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&rsquo;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&rsquo;t so pathetic. The mainstream of modern American anthropology is abjectly subservient to the values and assumptions of the System. When today&rsquo;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&rsquo;s use of Williamson&rsquo;s article illustrates this very well, and it represents the general slant of Haviland&rsquo;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&rsquo;s account to emphasize the Indians&rsquo; 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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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&rsquo;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: &ldquo;Public Displays of Affection,&rdquo; U.S. News &amp; 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 &amp; World Report is a right-of-center magazine.</p> +<p>Russia: &ldquo;Putin Denounces Intolerance,&rdquo; The Denver Post, July 26, 2002, page 16A. &ldquo;MOSCOW—President Vladimir Putin strongly denounced racial and religious prejudice on Thursday…&lsquo;If we let this chauvinistic bacteria of either national or religious intolerance develop, we will ruin the country&rsquo;, Putin said in remarks prominently replayed on Russian television on Thursday night.&rdquo; Etc., etc.</p> +<p>Mexico: &ldquo;Persiste racismo contra indígenas&rdquo; (&ldquo;Racism against indigenous people persists&rdquo;), El Sol de México, January 11, 2002, page 1/B. Photo caption: &ldquo;In spite of efforts to give dignity to the indigenous people of our country, they continue to suffer discrimination….&rdquo; The article reports on the efforts of the bishops of Mexico to combat discrimination, but says that the bishops want to &ldquo;purity&rdquo; 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&rsquo; 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, &ldquo;Propaganda,&rdquo; 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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:1" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:2" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:3"> +<p>In this section I&rsquo;ve said something about what the System is not, but I haven&rsquo;t said what the System is. A friend of mine has pointed out that this may leave the reader nonplussed, so I&rsquo;d better explain that for the purposes of this article it isn&rsquo;t necessary to have a precise definition of what the System is. I couldn&rsquo;t think of any way of defining the System in a single, well-rounded sentence and I didn&rsquo;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&rsquo;t think my failure to answer it will seriously impair the reader&rsquo;s understanding of the point that I want to make in this article.&#160;<a href="#fnref:3" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:4"> +<p>The concepts of &ldquo;integration propaganda&rdquo; and &ldquo;agitation propaganda&rdquo; are discussed by Jacques Ellul in his book Propaganda, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.&#160;<a href="#fnref:4" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:5"> +<p>William A. Haviland, Cultural Anthropology, Ninth Edition, Harcourt Brace &amp; Company, 1999.&#160;<a href="#fnref:5" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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.&#160;<a href="#fnref:6" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 380.&#160;<a href="#fnref:7" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +<li id="fn:8"> +<p>Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books edition, page 147.&#160;<a href="#fnref:8" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</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 &ldquo;American Peoples, Native,&rdquo; page 385; James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, Oxford University Press, 1985, page citation not available.&#160;<a href="#fnref:9" class="footnote-backref" role="doc-backlink">&#x21a9;&#xfe0e;</a></p> +</li> +</ol> +</div> + + + + + Hit Where It Hurts + https://vodoraslo.xyz/library/ted-kaczynski/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) https://vodoraslo.xyz/updates/updated-the-css-again/ diff --git a/new-site/public/updates/updated-the-css-again/index.html b/new-site/public/updates/updated-the-css-again/index.html index b923218d..b27b7183 100644 --- a/new-site/public/updates/updated-the-css-again/index.html +++ b/new-site/public/updates/updated-the-css-again/index.html @@ -50,6 +50,7 @@ I did this by setting the light theme to be by default for more readability: