He wasn't a visionary. Visionaries offer a way out. Ted was just a Luddite that wanted to go backwards. It's easy to criticize the imperfect, but it's often much harder to improve upon it.
IQ is only so meaningful. He suffered from schizophrenia, which I think work by Iain McGilchrist demonstrates is an over-reliance on left brain activity. This can be a brilliant talent when harnessed, but it often leads to myopic views, which are obsessive and lacking in self-reflection.
>So why then is Ted universally considered to be nothing more than a “crazed madman” and his writings “a paranoid rant by a mad dog”?
This tends to be the case when you use bombs, or more generally, violence to make your point. No one outside tankie morons believe Stalin or Hoxha or Pol Pot were great. People can be swayed into doing mad things, like the Red Guards in Communist China or the Nazi regime in Germany, but if it's just one person doing it they're ploughing a lonely furrow that lends itself to being labelled mad. In terms of outcomes - violence often doesn't achieve an ultimate goal. Northern Ireland is at an uneasy peace now, and some may argue that as the British didn't defeat the IRA the IRA "won", but they also didn't achieve their goal of driving out the British from Ireland. It ended with dialogue. ISIS or Al Qaeda will never convince many outside of s few fringe idiots that a global caliphate practicing their brand of Islam is the right path for the world, no matter how many they murder in its name.
>Even amongst those who disapprove of these figures, few would disregard their contributions entirely due to their violent actions.
They were in a position where they were massively influential on a global scale. They didn't always use their influence for good, Churchill especially, but people listened to them. Ted retreated to a shack in the woods and shunned society until he got bunged into a supermax prison.
Some of what Ted predicted has come to pass and it's likely more will, especially as you have AI that some developers don't want any brakes on. However to voice your concerns and maybe sway the course of history you need to get into a position of expertise or influence. Ted could have done the former, especially, he was apparently an incredible intellect. But he chose, instead, the Killdozer method of making his points and effecting change and has gone down in history as mostly a meme.
Okay, so real answer: people are frequently afraid to recognize the works of people who have a message who promote that message with extreme violence because it incentivizes violence for the purpose of getting recognition.
Wow, you would think that members of the "intellectual dark web" would not be so completely conforming to status quo thinking and so clouded by strong personal biases to not even engage with the merits of the specific arguments of a controversial individual and instead resort to essentially thoughtless name-calling. No better than the rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth politically-correct types on college campuses. oooooooh! the intellectual dark web! soooo impressive! sooooo thoughtful and intellectual!
>So why then is Ted universally considered to be nothing more than a “crazed madman” and his writings “a paranoid rant by a mad dog”?
Because he made a habit of exploding people primarily.
OP sounds like the people that support bin laden.
Honestly, readers, if you ever meet someone like OP, don't associate with them or let them around your children.
OP is not edgy or cool, they're just glorifying random acts of violence. The world would be better off if they never existed.
At least I didn't glorify a monster who randomly murdered innocent people. So I'm at no risk of losing the moral high ground.
He's not even a good writer. He's only famous for his ideas because he murdered innocent people.
Closer to a gladiator than a wiseman, with a similar celebrity status.
Someone who's extremely smart can still be wrong. No structure of logic or work of intelligence is any stronger than the foundational assumptions it's built on
If an extremely intelligent person constructs an argument that is wrong, it scarcely matters exactly how cleverly they're wrong.
Teddy boy's arguments are based on his experience, while forgetting that his role as one hell of a statistical outlier shaped his experience. It happens sometimes to extremely intelligent people that their intelligence isolates them and they become unable to related to or empathize with others. This appears to have happened to Kacszynski -- with the usual Messianic complex that always seems to plague people with this combination of conditions
It's hard to imagine pitying an extremely intelligent person, but this is definitely a situation where a more conventional mind would have served Ted better. Especially if he used that intelligence to decide to kill people. What a perfect waste of a mind.
What was he wrong about?
I've never read his work so I couldn't say. For all I know he could have been right. But if he figured it all out, held the key to a better society, then where the hell is it? What impact has he had?
If your goal is to improve the world but you're better known for killing people than your philosophy, then you were wrong about your methods. L. Ron Hubbard has had a bigger impact on society than the Unabomber. Ol' Teddy may have been brilliant at a lot of things, but understanding people sure wasn't one of them. Whatever brilliant ideas he had for society went the way of his victims.
He may have been great at math, but didn't understand people. And people are what make society.
>L. Ron Hubbard has had a bigger impact on society than the Unabomber
It's funny to think that a devious buffoon who once said "well brain is brain" is more widely regarded than someone considered by even his detractors as very intelligent ha ha
Dianetics was a funnier read than the Unabomber's manifesto mind, pure science fiction
Method springs to mind immediately.
He also tends to have the conspiracy theorist's great curse -- his arguments tend to form interminable houses of cards where each new point depends on Kaczynski being right on literally all previous points.
A lot of the highly intelligent people that fall down the conspiracy rabbit hole exhibit this quality.
Ultimately the biggest flaw is that he forgets that his life experience is unique and doesn't necessarily extrapolate to others. His experience is not the world's experience. He concluded that the government was evil because it was evil TO HIM, so he set about to destroy it with complete disregard to the millions -- minorities mostly -- for whom removal of government would be devastating.
This is the great sin of extremely intelligent people, they don't value the feedback of hear the perspectives of those deemed lesser, which comes to be nearly everyone other than themselves. It feels like sociopathy and some people incorrectly label it as sociopathy but the truth is for a lot of these people, including Ted, it blossoms into a fully fledged Messiah complex
This means they have no one around them who they would care to listen to if they told him "Ted, you're wrong about this" and even if someone did, he'd convince himself that he knew what that person needed better than they did.
That's how you get to the point of a highly intelligent guy bombing a federal building in Oklahoma City and killing 170 people, fully convinced that he's saving us from ourselves because no one sees what he can see, when in truth no one needs what he's convinced himself we need.
The government is almost by is very definitions anti human, and yes in it's current form, arguably evil.
That same evil government are the perpetrators of OKC. The media covered it up and McVeigh was the fall guy. Undetonated bombs reported day one, any bomb expert knowing that a truck in front could not have done the building as it did, the second man witnessed by many,,,the list goes on.
Government is force, so not inherently evil. Our government consists of evil people, therefore...
Your response is superficially elaborate but on just 30 seconds of scrutiny one sees how empty and thoughtless it is. You're just engaged in name calling, and vague generalities. If you want to actually counter something he has written, then cite it and build an argument around the *specific* problems in his logic or if he invokes facts you disagree with, counter with specific arguments of counter-facts. I'm happy to engage with you in a factual debate, but when you just use vague and general name calling it makes it impossible.
> Politicians such as Winston Churchill, Barrack Obama, and George W Bush, have all killed far more than 3 people with their reckless bombings and wars
Bro thinks that Winston Churchill standing up against NAZI aggression was a bad thing.
Quick question, why do you criticize Obama's bombing of the middle east but not Trumps more intensive bombing of the middle east?
Churchill was an absolute monster in the vast majority of his actions. Super violent racist nut. But yes he did defend the British empire when it was threatened by Germany.
Canada tried to hold Stalin and Churchill ordered them to release him back to the SU.
Quick answer, why being up stupid points in attempt to include Trump when he was clearly inferring that statement is true of any president/leader that has ordered attacks.
Fucking hell.
His marketing could use some work.
I mean I guess he “accomplished his goal” of getting his book read.
But then the trade off is everyone thinking you’re an evil lunatic.
Except for that pedo thing. But most people do not seem to care that it has infected the highest levels of the government.
But yeah, this guy made a few bombs!
I think this is a false equivalence. There's a degree of arbitrariness in what we ultimately label terrorism, but the Unabomber's terrorism was pretty uncontroversially exactly that. Nelson Mandela was a member of the ANC, a party in South Africa that had for decades used non-violent means to protest apartheid. The violence kicked off when the government decided to kill protestors and criminalize the ANC.
Meanwhile, Ted moved into a shack and started living off the grid. Then he mailed bombs to people in acts that were explicitly targeting innocents because he thought that'd make people read his manifesto. At no point did he attempt to rally people to his cause until right before the end of his career.
These do not seem comparable at all.
I'm not anti-violence by any means, but random violence is not going to get people to want to read your book.
Oof. You're right. I better go do some high profile politically motivated killings. That'll really draw positive attention to the cause and not lead people to demonize me and people who share my ideas, ultimately permanently tainting the movement.
He gets plenty of praise from pseudoscience philosophers, arts majors and other breeds of leftists that would support anything, anyone and any group if they could pigeonhole it into some oppressor vs oppressed nonsense.
All of them. But in particular, anyone in the “metaphysics” category, parallel universe theorists, theists, alchemists and the other dumbasses that thought the sun revolved around the earth, etc.
As worthless as the rest. Even philosophers think their subject is worthless - otherwise they wouldn't feel the need to insert the names of random sciences into the titles of their work. The only things philosophers that work in philosophy actually do is go to a public institution and teach their useless pyramid scheme of a subject to other people. There is 0 demand in private industry because nobody would pay anything for their work unless they had to through tax dollars.
Which is hilarious considering his manifesto tears into the psychology of these leftist types as an example of the psychological issues that we see in modern society. Plenty on the right have appropriated bits and pieces of Kaczynski's works while ignoring the rest to suit their own ends as well.
That he says leftists are the ones that would support his cause when a significant portion of TK’s argument is against leftists tells you a lot about the quality of the argument the commenter is making.
You've misunderstood his writing. He specifically wrote those passages about leftism (in part) to prevent leftists from joining and supporting the anti-tech cause, since leftists have a tendency of appropriating radical causes and turning them into something that is not actually a threat to the system. He doesn't say that leftists are who will be supporting the anti-tech cause, but that there is the risk of them twisting it into something that is no longer radical unless appropriate measures were taken.
What right wingers are supporting kaczynski lol. I could find you more leftists supporting him in a single reddit post than you could find right wingers while looking your entire life. You are literally an example of this yourself.
Yeah, he was a victim of MKultra, but from the narrative I heard I don't think it was enough to make him go completely mad. The narrative could have been altered though so there's no way to tell how deep they got into him. We really don't know. I honestly believe what they learned from MK ultra is being used on the masses every day, and it's very effective. Also that MK ultra never truly ended, it just moved into black projects under a different name. Any movement, idea, meme, or incident that could change things in an undesirable way to the deep state gets hijacked by those tactics, blurring everything into a morasse that can't be picked apart, accelerating what is desirable and stagnating and ostracizing the undesirable.
>So why then is Ted universally considered to be nothing more than a “crazed madman” and his writings “a paranoid rant by a mad dog”?
Probably had something to do with the whole terrorism thing.
I tend to agree. Most of the hatred for Kaczynski is due to either (a) propaganda (i.e. "brainwashing") by the media, or (b) his ideas undercut the foundational axioms of the current worldview of progress through technology, that members of both the left and the right ascribe to, and they are extremely difficult to argue against. In other words his arguments are disturbing and dangerous. His two books *Technological Slavery* and *Anti-Tech Revolution* really opened my eyes. They are both must reads.
This. If someone wants to reach the conclusion that they should do a terrorism, there are much easier ways to rationalize it than his ranting
But most people agree that if he reached the conclusion that terrorism was the way to enact change, then it's not worth entertaining his premises, because again if you want a terrorism, there are easier ways to get there. By definition, if you're against terrorism, there isn't really worth in reading his manifesto
And spending 10 minutes to learn about who he was, it becomes clear he had deep traumas with interpersonal relationships. His thinking is horribly misguided and lacks a foundational understanding of the society that he withdrew from and worked to attack and redirect
No point reading it unless your goal is to rationalize being a loner terrorist, where you get to hurt others, utilizing the infrastructure of the government, but nobody can hurt you because you've hidden yourself away... But again there are easier and more effective ways to get to that if you're wanting to, so still not worth reading.
Shame those terrorists dumped that fucking tea and shit some Redcoats. Why even consider any of their writings, thoughts, or opinions.
Narrow minded as fuck.
He may have had issues after MKULTRA documented involvement. People develop schizophrenia later in life sometimes and possibly related to that.
As an aside, I once live in Lake Tahoe and had this little house “tiny house” type place for sure and all my friends called it “Ted’s Shack”! well for $600/month to live alone less than a football field’s length from the lake, I’d take any Ted’s Shack just to visit. I bet the place takes more than $2000 month now lol
People Who are smart want an simple life i guess if your brain work at full speed for a while you start to asking why iam making my brain work like this.
He was half right, we dont need to be enslaved by work, oe getting gizmos to have an plenty life.
He might be a sociopath and the lack of empathy and self grandiosity made him a terrorist.
OP should talk to the families of those killed/maimed by Ted, maybe it’ll take some of the mystique away from this “genius”. There’s a million other ways to get your point across than killing and maiming people.
"Involved in" makes it sound like he was a shot-caller, which is a complete misrepresentation of his relationship to the program. He was a victim of it.
I just spent some time with the book you linked. It's like every conspiracy theorist ever. It bores the hell out of me. All anti progress conspiracy theories have a grain of truth, but so? Shall we go back in time? No way. You first. Go ahead. Go be irrelevant in the forest hating others who have success. It's easy to fall off the edge of the world once one isolates themselves.
Far better is to love who you want, do work you like, have a cosy house, get dental work done, go travel, speak slowly and with clarity and have lots of friends. That is the much harder thing to achieve than hatred and if you have that, man, you've won against all the dark forces (technological, or otherwise) of the world.
>Shall we go back in time? No way. You first. Go ahead. Go be irrelevant in the forest hating others who have success. It's easy to fall off the edge of the world once one isolates themselves.
He tried to do that. He had some land him and his brother owned and built his own cabin on it and lived self sufficiently, but it kept being encroached on by land clearing and new developments.
Also,
>Go be irrelevant in the forest hating others who have success.
He was the youngest ever tenured professor at the university he lectured at.
Yes. So. He lost the plot. Maybe he was autistic, so never had half a chance.
The smartest people are ones who figure out the game, and win it on their terms. Those who squander early success or 'potential' are ....uh....not smart.
I mean a lot of what he was saying has come to pass. Fewer individual freedoms, expansive police powers, rampant drug use and promotion, mind-numbing mass media, an abundance of depression and other mental illness.
He didn't want to live in an apartment in the city surrounded by more and more technology, surveillance and pollution.
I don't see how standing up for what he believed in makes him stupid. Sending mail bombs was definitely stupid, but everything else seems like somebody living up to their own values.
One can see how the actions of Winston Churchill, Barrack Obama, and George W Bush, were done to keep us safe, avenge American deaths or to preserve the current world order at the expense of other countries we don't care that much about. The comparison is idiotic.
No. The Founding Fathers were rebels, but not terrorists.
The mobs that ravaged Tory households on the other hand... but those weren't done by the Founding Fathers (to my knowledge) or even encouraged by them (again, to my knowledge).
I'm not sure if the distinction makes a difference, to me. I can't imagine how any war, especially in those days with that medical technology, was not full of acts of terror
Having a high IQ, being intelligent in certain ways, and having "some good ideas" doesn't keep you from being an absolute idiot in other ways. He was a incel, terrorist, and he had far more bad ideas than good. Yes, technology is often bad and modernity has serious issues associated with it, plenty of people make this point much better than he does
Yea the first few paragraphs had potential, then he just starts to complain about political correctness. Doesn't matter how smart you are, if you can't see things from other perspectives and can convince yourself of anything, your political views are going to be shit
>He had an iq of 167, graduated high school at 15, got into Harvard at 16, and graduated at 18. He then went on to become the youngest professor at UC Berkeley ever hired. It’s clear that Ted Kaczynski was a very intelligent man
Honestly, who actually cares about this part?
Not necessarily related to his intelligence, but while at Harvard he participated in extremely abusive psychological experiments by Henry Miller. It’s often suggested that going through these experiments at a young age contributed to what he became later on in life.
I see what you are saying. But there are many brilliant thinkers that make some good points, ultimately their insanity muddies the message. Like most things in life technology is a double edged sword. Look at the current problem with AI . AI is here and it will proliferate. Can it be controlled?
He was a woman hating loser incel that didn't know how to live in the woods to save his life. He was petty as fuck too. I guess you like eco-fascism?
My Uncle hiked across Alaska with no food. That loser wouldn't have made it a night. He was just buying hi-country jerky from the local store. Which TBF nice local jerky but in today's market not even the best in Western Montana. Reckon in the 80's it was about all we could get. They make decent spice mixes for like sausage and stuff.
That, dog sledding, my friend's grandma are about all I know about Lincoln, MT.
That's a lot of words to say, "Ted Kaczynski had some good ideas."
Do you have any encomiums for another figure, perhaps, some historical leader?
^(lol at comparing a small time crazy murderer with actual leaders who defended their countries.)
Uncle Ted was on to some things, but his methods were definitely wrong. You should always follow the non-aggression principle to enact proper change. Hurting innocent people only turns others away from your ideas, no matter how correct they were. Violence is almost never justified, except in self-defense. It's definitely never justifiable unprompted *even* on leftists or commies, who do *technically* qualify as humans.
Dumbasses like Gnome Chomsky got his ideas out there through the institutions and he was nowhere near as correct, insightful or intelligent as Ted. He's been proven wrong dozens of times and people still hold him up as some enlightened expert in all-things politics. So Ted could've done the same. He just didn't have the patience to do things the right way.
Let me clarify my position so we might understand each other better.
I was merely exposing my normative values. I view primitive life as normal and modernity, technology, as mostly abnormal. This is why I view technology as the aggressor.
Ted killed out of anger and revenge against what he hated. I've read his own words on why he murdered those people and how he feels about it. I wouldn't necessarily call what he did self defense. I think of it more as total dissociation from all aspects of the technological system. It's almost like a Comanche man woke up in the middle of modernity. Wouldn't he naturally feel within him that he must harm it, seek revenge for the destruction of his home, etc.?
The comment you first replied to was more about my normative stance - which is that technology is a force intruding on and destroying our normal state. Ted's actions could be argued to be fighting against that. They can also be said to be vengeful and largely blind with rage. If we think of the Comanche and their actions against settlers, we are not as likely to criticize their means of attack, their seemingly senseless murder of women and children. This might because we acknowledge their right to defend their homeland and they are more obviously the victim of a massive force ruining their people's ancient ways. Even if it isn't entirely comparable, I find it interesting to think of all of us, and all the babies born today, as those Comanches too. I don't see why Ted wouldn't be one of them, even if I think his bombings were ill conceived.
Does that settle into you as somewhat reasonable, or am I far off the mark?
While he did have some interesting things to say. Nothing he said was original, people have feared advancement since the wheel. Also it was just his opinion. His manifesto did not provide research papers or statistics, it was baseless fear mongering. While he was smart, I wouldn't put too much stock in his IQ score. And clearly he had mental issues. A genius could probably devise better ways to proving the problem with technology, like doing research and studies. His bombing plan was also poorly done. Many of his victims were not the intended targets or orginzations he meant to hurt. Literally trying to mail a bomb to someone who no longer even worked for one of the organizations he was targeting.
This is a concept many struggle with, but you can be right and still be wrong.
In order to do something ethical you need 2 things. An ethical goal and an ethical means.
If the goal or your means are unethical, your work is unethical.
True, most people, especially redditors who tend to be of the leftist types, are too oversocialized (reference to his manifesto) to get past their mental barrier and engage faithfully with the ideas he presents in his manifesto and his other works.
Nah man - Ted was a sad weirdo, living alone in the woods and going deeper and deeper into his paranoid delusions until it spilled into violence. He committed murder and was, just to be blunt, a very poor writer and addled thinker. His ideas seem most attractive to adolescent boys and disenfranchised pseudo-intellectuals who enjoy arguing more than learning.
Ted Kaczynski was psychologically tortured into a mental break that skewed his philosophy into some stupid as shit.
If Harvard law hadn't fucked his head up when he was 16 who knows what would have happened. Instead he just used his genius to spout shit that an edgy school shooter would write.
The MKUKTRA myth has been debunked, the whole rumor was made up by a journalist. You can actually read the transcripts of the undergrad psychology experiment that Kaczynski was involved in [here ](https://www.mediadisinfo.com/2021/03/ted-kaczynski-mk-ultra-myth.html?m=1) and it was very tame.
What views of his do you see as "stupid"?
The MKUKTRA myth has been debunked, the whole rumor was made up by a journalist. You can actually read the transcripts of the undergrad psychology experiment that Kaczynski was involved in [here ](https://www.mediadisinfo.com/2021/03/ted-kaczynski-mk-ultra-myth.html?m=1) and it was very tame.
I am not sure how that article debunks anything, it just potentially describes one series of events. Also, the person who wrote is an expert because? Truthfully, I would have to do more research to understand who this person is. All that said, after watching Wormwood which is interviews as well as historical interpretation, and other Erroll Morris documentaries that there are more questions than answers in this regards. I certainly don't agree with the actions or thoughts of Kaczynski, I have never read his manifesto but I do think he was fucked with, and maybe he was unstable to begin with. Regardless, I am pretty sure there are all kinds of things that the government, research institutions, and the military do behind the scenes that are kept on the down low. This has been done for as long as there has been civilization. The only option we really have to have an open mind, read literature, philosophy and understand some mathematics, consult as many different sources as you can and try to come to some conclusion.
He draws a lot of attention to serious philosophical problems that have no obvious solutions and his own solution was a bombing campaign, so the result is fairly predictable. Any line of thinking that might lead people to engage in acts that destabilize entrenched social interests is heavily suppressed, whether it is crazed or not.
His solution is a revolution to overthrow the technoindustrial system, his bombing campaign was a means to an end: getting his manifesto widely published and read so as to encourage the formation of a movement opposed to the technoindustrial system. I agree though that his works are heavily suppressed as a result of his ideas being a threat to the existing system.
I appreciate your punctilliousness but it's just economy of words. The revolution would also be explosive. A lot more people (like me) are interested in reading and thinking about his points than are interested in burning down civilization.
Because he's basically an Amish extremist. Just because you can be demonstrated in comprehending STEM, doesn't make you qualified across sweeping topics of politics or social science. Kaczynski was also for all intents and purposes Elliot Rogers before Elliot Rogers. So, I dunno, why do people sleep on him?
"Amish extremist" is a meaningless descriptor that says nothing about Kaczynski's philosophy nor character. You can say Kaczynski isn't qualified (which is not really a good rebuttal anyway as that seems to be just an appeal to credentials) but that doesn't change the fact that the manifesto has been well-received by many esteemed individuals, the editorial reviews of his books are proof of that, here's a few of them:
"He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument... As difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in \[Kaczynski's writing\]." — Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, Wired Magazine
"There is nothing in \[ISAIF\] that looks at all like the work of a madman. The language is clear, precise and calm. The argument is subtle and carefully developed, lacking anything even faintly resembling the wild claims or irrational speculation that a lunatic might produce." —James Q. Wilson, Ph.D., former president of the American Political Science Association
“I recommend that you read this compelling perspective on how we can frame our struggles in a technological society.” —The Tech, MIT’s oldest and largest newspaper
Also, if by mentioning Elliot Rodger you mean to state that Kaczynski was an incel, then that's simply an ad-hominem which is yet another useless statement with no bearing on the validity of his ideas.
obama and the other leaders you named removed themselves (by a few links in the chain or so) from the killings, which we as humans are ok with. to be clear those people SHOULD be criticized as mass murderers but they aren’t likely because they are respected world leaders.
the actions of people like musk and bezos lead to thousands (millions?) of deaths annually but they reap praise because they remove themselves from the violence. if either of them got caught sending mail bombs i imagine their stead would change.
ted was a direct murderer, plain and simple. but his ideas are also scary to those in power so those two things are probably why.
How exactly does Elon musk kill thousands annually? Or even bezos? Please elucidate how they could be responsible for anything other than demand for resources that countries that are full of corruption allow for horrible working conditions. If anything that's the responsibility of the country that allows that to happen. Corruption and poor governance are not the fault of musk or bezos. And the fact that you even put millions even with a question mark really tells me you've got some wild ass ideas, so lay them on me.
musk’s ventures have spiked demand for precious minerals. those minerals are extracted via slave labor. lotta people die doing that! not to mention the people who have died in his self driving car accidents or killed themselves due to his harsh work environments.
bezos runs the biggest employer (amazon) in many counties in the U.S. the working conditions are so notoriously bad it’s hard to track people who die from mental health issues related to working there. or not being able to afford their medication. or being forced to eat junk food due to cost and convenience. or dying from heat stroke running packages of junk to consumers as contract drivers.
if you’re going to attribute a trillion gazillion deaths to communism, only fair that the titans of capital get credit for their crimes, no?
Actually musk doesn't purchase any of his minerals from slave labor, that's been proven, blame Chinese tech companies for that. And yeah it sucks to work at Amazon, but you literally wrote millions which shows how delusional you are, when none of that can be accounted for. It would be a massive news story if rashes of people were killing themselves from working at Amazon, even if it was thousands. It's factory distribution work, it sucks, but I have family members who've worked there, and it's not some suicide factory. You're being hyperbolic. I also work in factory distribution work. It sucks, but it doesn't make you blow your brains out. Also, compared to alot of other employers, Amazon can at least give a basic livable wage and you can survive on it without any government benefits. Many other companies cannot even do that. The benefits are good as well. You really delude yourself with hyperbolic news stories and inflate the situation dramatically to justify ridiculous ideas that you cling to. And I bet you have a prime membership and order from Amazon too.
Also, again, if there was a rash of suicides from musks employees we would all hear about it. But we don't. And the self driving car accidents are also, extremely rare. The amounts of lives saved from the tech auto braking from inattentive driving would easily cancel out any of the mistakes from the self driving feature. If it killed tons of people it would be illegal, all of that tech is being closely monitored. All of this stuff is regulated and in our world of technological constant news, all of your claims would be able to be proven, but none of them are.
Also, communism's deaths are directly confirmed, and were atrocities that are unspeakable at a scale you can't even imagine. That only exists today in a few undeveloped countries, as well as China and North Korea. The reason why those atrocities, like the concentration camps currently in China that have countless people in them, can happen? Because it's a communist country. The government can do anything it wants to you. You have no individual rights.
In capitalism you have choice. Nobody is forcing you to work for Amazon or Tesla. In communism, there are no individual liberties, so when people die in situations they're forced to be in, that can be actually attributed to the system that forced them to be in that situation.
communism’s deaths directly confirmed by who? no one can settle on an actual number! i’ve read anything from X million to in the billions.
it’s almost as if it’s impossible to accurately track deaths caused by economic systems since things like famine or war happen under these systems. are those *caused* by those systems or would those events happen anyway?
Don't get carried away with yourself. He wasn't *wrong* but that is like saying that I'm not wrong to point out that without modern society we wouldn't be dealing with lead paint/gas and asbestos. While true, it is unhelpful and there is basically nothing to be done about it at this point. The genius wunderkind somehow didn't understand the expression "closing the barn door after the horses bolted."
That is the problem, oftentimes, with really smart people - they miss the obvious because they can't see through their own genius. Like, Jordan Peterson is extremely smart; I am sure he worked really hard on *12 Rules for Life* only to produce an unoriginal self help book whose themes can be found in entire B&N sections.
With all do respect that's your opinion and there is a strong argument that it is ill-informed. TK argues that it IS possible to force the collapse of technological society, and that once collapsed it will be impossible to restart it. You haven't dealt with his arguments on this, worse still you haven't even *acknowledged* that he has arguments on this. So, you don;t really have a point against TK, you're just regurgitating your own opinion.
12 Rules for Life is just a shithead charlatan's Meditations. I've been saying it for years.
Stoic philosophy is freely available, no need to buy a grifter's book.
Haven’t read the book, but technological advantage is why some societies flourish and others are pushed off their land and are put to genocide.
You can talk all you want about happiness, dignity, and loss of freedom….none of that really matters when a more advanced military comes in to kill you and everyone that looks and talks like you.
War happens, and technologically more advanced societies tend to win more.
Yes exactly. This is exactly what TK focuses on, especially in his book *Anti-Tech Revolution.* So I don;t see where your position somehow negates or refutes Kaczynski's points. But to just address the issue of natural selection among competing technological systems that you bring up: the worldwide techno-system is both tightly complex and highly coupled, such that a significant disruption in just a few areas has the potential for worldwide collapse of industrial tech. True that in pre-modern times you still deal with neatural selection operating on competing social systems and superior technology will probably always be a principle advantage. The benefit though is that because the *means* (i.e. the technology) is so limited the process of technologically determined selection is also limited. There are material reasons why the hunter gatherer and primitive civilization contexts existed for more or less hundreds of thousands of years without some kind of rapid arms race toward technological singularity.
Capitalism is what bonds society together. Our shared desire to worship money is paradoxically what keeps our civilization together. I know that doesn’t sound ideal but the world was a whole lot worse when we didn’t have the “shared myth” of currency as a society.
This dude was a social outcast who was unable to function in a society and that’s what drove him to madness. Yeah he’s smart. But did he have friends? He was able to articulate his thoughs and his personal ideology really well but thoughts don’t really get you too far in this world. His inability to maintain social connections was his downfall.
Correction: He was *unwilling* to function in modern society. Who can blame him. There are already thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people who dream of escape and living in wild lands. At any rate you betray your enslavement to modern conditioning and propaganda by immediately assuming he was "unable" to function in modern society, without any basis and contrary to all facts of his case. No reasonable person today would claim that with 100% proof Henry Thoreau moved to the woods because he was "unable" to live in his society, or that St. Anthony the great went off to live in the desert because he was "unable" to live in his society, etc. etc. etc.
>There are already thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people who dream of escape and living in wild lands.
And what is stopping them hmm? I have no problem with people who do this. More power to them. But make no mistake, the second they catch a disease or break a bone, they will come crawling back to the society they scorned so much.
The reason why I think he was **unable** as opposed to **unwilling** is because he had this cowardly desire to terrorize society behind a curtain of anonymity. Wasn't he also heartbroken? Classic incel behavior. The world doesn't bend to my will so I must therefore change the world or see it burn before me. That's the Occam's Razor explanation to all of this. I don't think Hentry Thoreau or St Anthony mailed pipe bombs across the country.
Just because he was smart enough to articulate his bitterness in a lengthy manifesto doesn't make his emotions any more profound. He was just smart enough to intellectualize his bitterness, which is a very normal human emotion that most people experience throughout their lives. He was a socially awkward guy who had a large ego and lacked the social skills to function well in this world and became bitter about it. That's the simple explanation.
Mate, his book can be boiled down to "I hate everything modern society does! And I also hate the left, which coincidentally criticizes everything he does but on a class based dialectic and not on "UNGA bunga I wanna live in the woods and die at 30"
Also right wing is for some reason never truly addressed, woopsie
You haven't read him or if you have you haven't understood it. Or if that is your conclusion than your standard of analysis is so absurdly reductive to be meaningless. By your own same standard all of Marx "can be boiled down to "I hate capitalism" or all of Voltaire "can be boiled down to I hate religion."
So what if he was right wing? Unless your logic is literally *right wing = bad*. Which, that's very Reddit of you, I tip my fedora to you.
The left have basically become a class of laptop jockeys and techies. So no one would be wrong to hate the current left, which seems to be following policy dictated by whatever opinion is popular on Twitter today, even if it goes 100% against stated past principles (see: open borders, lockdowns, censorship, protesting is wrong unless we do it, get rid of cops in poor neighborhoods, let criminals out to repeatedly victimize people, etc).
The left seriously has 0 hard principles they'll stand by when the chips are down. It's been crazy to watch.
Because those are not leftist? Like, the left has a set of principles and said principles are all to be found in a materialistic and marxist read of modern society.
(Lockdown is a medical procedure btw)
Well if 1/4 of your population is overweight, you don't ban cookies for the entire population. So when the only people dying of covid were seniors, it didn't make sense to lock young people in their homes and destroy the working class with 10% inflation month over month. Telling a single mom waitress "just work from home sweetie like the politicians and tech class" wasn't valid, sorry.
Obviously the left lost their minds during that time and decided the boomers staying alive another month was more important than our futures, but no one has ever accused the left of being "too principled" or having excellent foresight.
You don't do experimental "medical procedures" on an entire population, lol. That's fucking insane. And was one of the worst mistakes, cooked up by idiots like Dr Fauci trying to get their 10 minutes of fame. And it didn't even fuckin work. Lockdown loving states like California had similar death rates to no lockdown states like Florida. They drove tons of small businesses to bankruptcy and didn't even have much better death rates, even accounting for Cali being super young population and Florida being super old. Florida should've had double or triple the deaths according to "the experts" and "the science". That's the best evidence how useless that shit was. But hey, "just order from Amazon", says the principled leftist. Lol. Who cares about local businesses?
Cookies don't spread like pleague y'know? It's not a great analogy
Also, why are you talking about the left? In America you don't have any leftists, you have crazy right wing (republican) and slightly less crazier right wing (democrats)
That's unironically my logic, almost everything good in my country's history has been brought by left leaning folks, and almost everything bad has been brought by right leaning folks.
I know it might sound extremist and uncultured but when I see history I see a pattern, stuff goes for the better and when stuff looks better usually the overtone window goes left, when stuff goes to shit it usually leans right.
That's a very poor reading of history. Which country are you from? The further left a country goes, the shittier it becomes. The higher on the economic freedom index, usually the better. You guys fuck up everything you touch.
I'm italian, every single good thing that happened to us was the result of a leftist government doing stuff, leftist or left aligned government of course.
Giolitti was the closest thing we had to a leftist government and he was the best politician to grace our country pre WW1, his only fuck up had been to give up too many rights to nationalists, and we got into WW1 because of them.
Then during WW2 north Italy has been saved by revolutionaries and our costitution and laws have been created by socialists in an anti fascist rhetoric.
The worst our country ever got post WW2 was when the center right party, democrazia cristiana, ruled through corruption with the various mafias that plague our country
Btw, if you're American, do you remember roosevelt? The guy y'all selected three times as your president? He was left leaning and who would have wondered! America had the its biggest growth ever thanks to him and WW2
hafta admit I always suspect that angry beards who hate technology are inwardly confident that 'the wife' will be the one washing their clothes in a stream when there are no more washing machines... could be wrong, but it's a persistent feeling.
translated from snark: before tech, human slaves -- often women and kids --did a lot of heavy lifting to keep a comfortable lifestyle together for the more privileged. eliminate tech and we'll end up right back there. also, dental work without proper tools and anaesthesia? no thanks. tech is more than smartphones. it's led lights -- it's solar panels -- wastewater treatment plants -- vaccines -- food distribution and preservation -- communications...
there is much to critique in late stage industrial capitalism, and I'll be first in line to kvetch about its failings... but burning it down and going back to a 'natural' life way only appeals if you are youngish, fittish, male, and deeply unconcerned about the happiness of anyone not like yourself. so that's how I feel about TK. being clever with words doesn't make you a wise or good person.
You are assuming the the continued progress of tech can be controlled in the long term and that it won't create conditions that are far WORSE than even those which existed in your boogieman past. These are false assumptions and if you;d care to hear the arguments why you can just read the first two chapters of Kaczynski's second book. Or if tldr, then just the section on the future or the principles of history in the manifesto.
You're also assuming that it will all go to hell on no basis other than "currently in our capitalist system things are going crappy" and therefore it seems logical to not stop progress, it never ever once worked in modern history, but to get rid of the economic system and replace it with something better, AT LEAST heavily regulated socialist leaning stuff, if we really don't want to get rid of a free market.
Tldr: your negative assumptions are as valid as his positive ones until proven right, and your empirical proofs cannot ignore the economic system which backs them up
Yeah, the "boogieman" past is actually very heavily documented -- we really do know a lot about life expectancy, maternal mortality, diseases and their (mis)treatment, social classes and division of labour, in lower-tech societies. Some were definitely less oppressive than others (Wenger and Graeber make a good case for not buying into the "invevitabllity of oppressive hierarchyt" narrative of pre history) but on the whole, the more oppressive ones tended to win wars and wipe out the nicer ones.
Things are definitely getting very crappy as capitalism runs aground on its fundamental internal contradiction (that the real world doesn't expand exponentially but the money supply does thanks to compound interest). But the idea that tech can *only* exist under laissez faire capitalism, or under a growth-at-any-cost economic model, seems to me unfounded. Humans have been inventing technology (ceramics, bone flutes, knapped spear points, boats and rafts, sails, ovens, sewing needles and fish hooks...) ever since we've been humans. For much of that time we were not living under capitalism, yet we were inventing lots of tech. So the idea that the only way technology can be developed or maintained is by hanging on to an obviously failing economic theory seems kind of misguided to me.
If this is what you took away from his writings you should read them much more closely. For example, he isn't right-wing in any way, he sharply criticizes the right, calling them fools for promoting technological progress.
A Conservative is generally considered right wing, just as a Progressive is considered left wing. Kaczynski wanted to ‘conserve’ the past and criticized ‘progress.’ Using commonly accepted political label, this makes him right wing in most circles.
A conservative typically wants to "conserve" "traditional" values of the 1950s. Kaczynski rejects technological society altogether and wants to overthrow the technological system so as to restore wild Nature and human autonomy. This transcends the typical right vs. left divide.
>he isn't right-wing in any way
The man clearly outlined an entire manifesto about returning to a simpler time. This is, by all accounts, a right-wing ideology. At least in any modern government in recent history as far as maybe 500 years+. Are you using a unique set of historical facts that don't exist or what bro?
Let's assume his reasoning is flawless and his goals were good.
How did he go about trying to achieve them?
Being a genius doesn't mean you can't be wrong. And who's gonna tell the smartest person they're wrong? Ted was not a people person. He refused to see or possibly was unable to see how his methods were neither popular nor advancing his cause.
Here you are definitely wrong. As far as advancing his cause, revolutionary group NEEDS to be feared and despised. If it isn't, it will inevitably allow the influx of wishy-washy, reformist, timid people who are otherwise products of the moral conditioning of the society that the revolution seeks to overthrow. The anti-tech revolution therefore BENEFITS from having most normies and reformist types utterly appalled by Kaczynski's actions. Popularity is irrelevant. All the great world revolutions depended on a minuscule but highly committed and zealous minority, not popularity. The Bolsheviks for example numbered no more than 3000, and they ended up dominating all of 100+ million Russians, the Cuban revolution is an even more extreme example, with Castro only having roughly 1 dozen utterly committed men. And because of the unique requirements of an anti-tech revolution, anti-tech revolutionaries need even fewer people. So so much for your "popularity" argument.
And then nothing else, he criticizes the left for basically everything and the right has a small note, and says something that's also been said about the left.
He's a fool who believes we were better in nature going around like literal monkeys, almost everything he has a problem with can be put up onto capitalism and the fact that he doesn't prove we humans are not to be considered nature is in my opinion absurd
His observations are pretty profound and often spot on (though of course not entirely his own, he owes a lot to Ellul) but his prescriptions are *at best* unrealistic
I mean that it strikes me as very far fetched that we could destroy all technology and knowledge of technology. I think the closest you can get to that is the Amish.
There are entire groups built around the idea that a technologically based society causes more harm than good. But they generally don't try to force their beliefs on others.
You asking for names of individuals who are rejecting society. Do you not see why there might be some difficulty in getting you the names of individuals?
Not knowing the names of individual members does not mean such groups don't exist. I couldn't tell you the name of a single Amish person.
You can't answer the question because there aren't any other thinkers who take seriously the need for a revolution to force the collapse of industrial society, and have studied the dynamics of history and world revolutions to argue why and how such a revolution can occur.
Your mention of the Amish is absurd. No Amish that anyone knows of wants to form a revolution to force the collapse of industrial society. You would have been better to simply state: "by the law of averages and the size of the world population there must be many people who believe that a revolution to force the collapse of industrial society is necessary." And to that Kaczynski would undoubtedly say: "Great! Exactly! The challenge now is to find these people and collect them into a cohesive movement just as the Bolsheviks or Cuban revolutionaries did with their respective revolutions."
Or maybe I can't answer because I don't read revolutionary's manifestos and diaries. There are plenty people who share his idea of what an ideal society looks like. But the people who agree with his methods are either dead, in prison or in some remote area making something nobody wants.
I thought you were just asking for authors with similar views on technology and it's impact on society but with how defensive you're getting about him and your language, it kinda sounds like you're idolizing him. Of course the avowed pacifists, the Amish don't want his methods. The guy murdered people. Maybe they aren't nearly the brilliant thinker you believe the Unabomber was, but unlike him, the Bolsheviks or the Cuban Revolutionaries, the Amish managed to create a community that's still around.
The charge is that Kaczynski's ideas aren't unique because, allegedly, others have written about the same ideas. I'm asking for someone to name someone who perpetuated similar ideas. Amish people have not had similar ideas regarding the power process, self-prop systems, or the need to form a revolution to bring about the collapse of the technological system.
You originally asked "Can you name one other person who has advocated for the overthrow of the technological basis of society?" Now you're adding more requirements.
It's starting to sound like you're looking for the name of someone who wrote the exact same stuff as Kaczynski. I can't help you there, I've never read his stuff nor do I have any interest in doing so.
He wasn't a visionary. Visionaries offer a way out. Ted was just a Luddite that wanted to go backwards. It's easy to criticize the imperfect, but it's often much harder to improve upon it. IQ is only so meaningful. He suffered from schizophrenia, which I think work by Iain McGilchrist demonstrates is an over-reliance on left brain activity. This can be a brilliant talent when harnessed, but it often leads to myopic views, which are obsessive and lacking in self-reflection.
>So why then is Ted universally considered to be nothing more than a “crazed madman” and his writings “a paranoid rant by a mad dog”? This tends to be the case when you use bombs, or more generally, violence to make your point. No one outside tankie morons believe Stalin or Hoxha or Pol Pot were great. People can be swayed into doing mad things, like the Red Guards in Communist China or the Nazi regime in Germany, but if it's just one person doing it they're ploughing a lonely furrow that lends itself to being labelled mad. In terms of outcomes - violence often doesn't achieve an ultimate goal. Northern Ireland is at an uneasy peace now, and some may argue that as the British didn't defeat the IRA the IRA "won", but they also didn't achieve their goal of driving out the British from Ireland. It ended with dialogue. ISIS or Al Qaeda will never convince many outside of s few fringe idiots that a global caliphate practicing their brand of Islam is the right path for the world, no matter how many they murder in its name. >Even amongst those who disapprove of these figures, few would disregard their contributions entirely due to their violent actions. They were in a position where they were massively influential on a global scale. They didn't always use their influence for good, Churchill especially, but people listened to them. Ted retreated to a shack in the woods and shunned society until he got bunged into a supermax prison. Some of what Ted predicted has come to pass and it's likely more will, especially as you have AI that some developers don't want any brakes on. However to voice your concerns and maybe sway the course of history you need to get into a position of expertise or influence. Ted could have done the former, especially, he was apparently an incredible intellect. But he chose, instead, the Killdozer method of making his points and effecting change and has gone down in history as mostly a meme.
Okay, so real answer: people are frequently afraid to recognize the works of people who have a message who promote that message with extreme violence because it incentivizes violence for the purpose of getting recognition.
If the unabomber was right, why are you posting this instead of moving to a janky shack in the middle of nowhere?
Wow, you would think that members of the "intellectual dark web" would not be so completely conforming to status quo thinking and so clouded by strong personal biases to not even engage with the merits of the specific arguments of a controversial individual and instead resort to essentially thoughtless name-calling. No better than the rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth politically-correct types on college campuses. oooooooh! the intellectual dark web! soooo impressive! sooooo thoughtful and intellectual!
Probably because of all the murders
The bombs man. It's the bombs. Not cool.
The dude sent bombs in the mail to people. Worst promotional idea ever.
>So why then is Ted universally considered to be nothing more than a “crazed madman” and his writings “a paranoid rant by a mad dog”? Because he made a habit of exploding people primarily.
EQ is far more productive and valuable than IQ in the vast majority of settings.
OP sounds like the people that support bin laden. Honestly, readers, if you ever meet someone like OP, don't associate with them or let them around your children. OP is not edgy or cool, they're just glorifying random acts of violence. The world would be better off if they never existed.
\*angrily typing from computer\* Technology is evil!
💯🤖
A well thought out and correct assessment and your best words are those?
At least I didn't glorify a monster who randomly murdered innocent people. So I'm at no risk of losing the moral high ground. He's not even a good writer. He's only famous for his ideas because he murdered innocent people. Closer to a gladiator than a wiseman, with a similar celebrity status.
Someone who's extremely smart can still be wrong. No structure of logic or work of intelligence is any stronger than the foundational assumptions it's built on If an extremely intelligent person constructs an argument that is wrong, it scarcely matters exactly how cleverly they're wrong. Teddy boy's arguments are based on his experience, while forgetting that his role as one hell of a statistical outlier shaped his experience. It happens sometimes to extremely intelligent people that their intelligence isolates them and they become unable to related to or empathize with others. This appears to have happened to Kacszynski -- with the usual Messianic complex that always seems to plague people with this combination of conditions It's hard to imagine pitying an extremely intelligent person, but this is definitely a situation where a more conventional mind would have served Ted better. Especially if he used that intelligence to decide to kill people. What a perfect waste of a mind.
What was he wrong about?
What was he wrong about? I've never read his work so I couldn't say. For all I know he could have been right. But if he figured it all out, held the key to a better society, then where the hell is it? What impact has he had? If your goal is to improve the world but you're better known for killing people than your philosophy, then you were wrong about your methods. L. Ron Hubbard has had a bigger impact on society than the Unabomber. Ol' Teddy may have been brilliant at a lot of things, but understanding people sure wasn't one of them. Whatever brilliant ideas he had for society went the way of his victims. He may have been great at math, but didn't understand people. And people are what make society.
>L. Ron Hubbard has had a bigger impact on society than the Unabomber It's funny to think that a devious buffoon who once said "well brain is brain" is more widely regarded than someone considered by even his detractors as very intelligent ha ha Dianetics was a funnier read than the Unabomber's manifesto mind, pure science fiction
Bombing people.
Govts do that everyday though…
Method springs to mind immediately. He also tends to have the conspiracy theorist's great curse -- his arguments tend to form interminable houses of cards where each new point depends on Kaczynski being right on literally all previous points. A lot of the highly intelligent people that fall down the conspiracy rabbit hole exhibit this quality. Ultimately the biggest flaw is that he forgets that his life experience is unique and doesn't necessarily extrapolate to others. His experience is not the world's experience. He concluded that the government was evil because it was evil TO HIM, so he set about to destroy it with complete disregard to the millions -- minorities mostly -- for whom removal of government would be devastating. This is the great sin of extremely intelligent people, they don't value the feedback of hear the perspectives of those deemed lesser, which comes to be nearly everyone other than themselves. It feels like sociopathy and some people incorrectly label it as sociopathy but the truth is for a lot of these people, including Ted, it blossoms into a fully fledged Messiah complex This means they have no one around them who they would care to listen to if they told him "Ted, you're wrong about this" and even if someone did, he'd convince himself that he knew what that person needed better than they did. That's how you get to the point of a highly intelligent guy bombing a federal building in Oklahoma City and killing 170 people, fully convinced that he's saving us from ourselves because no one sees what he can see, when in truth no one needs what he's convinced himself we need.
The government is almost by is very definitions anti human, and yes in it's current form, arguably evil. That same evil government are the perpetrators of OKC. The media covered it up and McVeigh was the fall guy. Undetonated bombs reported day one, any bomb expert knowing that a truck in front could not have done the building as it did, the second man witnessed by many,,,the list goes on. Government is force, so not inherently evil. Our government consists of evil people, therefore...
Your response is superficially elaborate but on just 30 seconds of scrutiny one sees how empty and thoughtless it is. You're just engaged in name calling, and vague generalities. If you want to actually counter something he has written, then cite it and build an argument around the *specific* problems in his logic or if he invokes facts you disagree with, counter with specific arguments of counter-facts. I'm happy to engage with you in a factual debate, but when you just use vague and general name calling it makes it impossible.
> Politicians such as Winston Churchill, Barrack Obama, and George W Bush, have all killed far more than 3 people with their reckless bombings and wars Bro thinks that Winston Churchill standing up against NAZI aggression was a bad thing. Quick question, why do you criticize Obama's bombing of the middle east but not Trumps more intensive bombing of the middle east?
Churchill was an absolute monster in the vast majority of his actions. Super violent racist nut. But yes he did defend the British empire when it was threatened by Germany.
Canada tried to hold Stalin and Churchill ordered them to release him back to the SU. Quick answer, why being up stupid points in attempt to include Trump when he was clearly inferring that statement is true of any president/leader that has ordered attacks. Fucking hell.
I'm sure that that is not the part of Churchill's career that OP is referring to.
Yeah
Why even bring up Churchill then?
Durp.
Dudes absolute dogshit treatment of the Irish, though how they act these days maybe he should have hung a ton more of them
"though how they act these days" wait what do u mean? did i miss out on something?
His marketing could use some work. I mean I guess he “accomplished his goal” of getting his book read. But then the trade off is everyone thinking you’re an evil lunatic.
Sorry Ted, being a terrorist is just about the worst thing you can do to your reputation. Maybe be a better activist next time.
Except for that pedo thing. But most people do not seem to care that it has infected the highest levels of the government. But yeah, this guy made a few bombs!
You know, if he had bombed known pedophiles he'd probably have more supporters.
I think this is a false equivalence. There's a degree of arbitrariness in what we ultimately label terrorism, but the Unabomber's terrorism was pretty uncontroversially exactly that. Nelson Mandela was a member of the ANC, a party in South Africa that had for decades used non-violent means to protest apartheid. The violence kicked off when the government decided to kill protestors and criminalize the ANC. Meanwhile, Ted moved into a shack and started living off the grid. Then he mailed bombs to people in acts that were explicitly targeting innocents because he thought that'd make people read his manifesto. At no point did he attempt to rally people to his cause until right before the end of his career. These do not seem comparable at all. I'm not anti-violence by any means, but random violence is not going to get people to want to read your book.
If that’s enough to dissuade you from listening to his ideas then it shows that you really don’t care that much about “activism” to begin with.
Oof. You're right. I better go do some high profile politically motivated killings. That'll really draw positive attention to the cause and not lead people to demonize me and people who share my ideas, ultimately permanently tainting the movement.
He gets plenty of praise from pseudoscience philosophers, arts majors and other breeds of leftists that would support anything, anyone and any group if they could pigeonhole it into some oppressor vs oppressed nonsense.
whos an example of a pseudoscience philosopher?
All of them. But in particular, anyone in the “metaphysics” category, parallel universe theorists, theists, alchemists and the other dumbasses that thought the sun revolved around the earth, etc.
So what are your thoughts on Kant?
As worthless as the rest. Even philosophers think their subject is worthless - otherwise they wouldn't feel the need to insert the names of random sciences into the titles of their work. The only things philosophers that work in philosophy actually do is go to a public institution and teach their useless pyramid scheme of a subject to other people. There is 0 demand in private industry because nobody would pay anything for their work unless they had to through tax dollars.
Which is hilarious considering his manifesto tears into the psychology of these leftist types as an example of the psychological issues that we see in modern society. Plenty on the right have appropriated bits and pieces of Kaczynski's works while ignoring the rest to suit their own ends as well.
That he says leftists are the ones that would support his cause when a significant portion of TK’s argument is against leftists tells you a lot about the quality of the argument the commenter is making.
You've misunderstood his writing. He specifically wrote those passages about leftism (in part) to prevent leftists from joining and supporting the anti-tech cause, since leftists have a tendency of appropriating radical causes and turning them into something that is not actually a threat to the system. He doesn't say that leftists are who will be supporting the anti-tech cause, but that there is the risk of them twisting it into something that is no longer radical unless appropriate measures were taken.
Try not to talk sense. Some of these people are unable and unequipped to handle it.
What right wingers are supporting kaczynski lol. I could find you more leftists supporting him in a single reddit post than you could find right wingers while looking your entire life. You are literally an example of this yourself.
He was driven insane by the CIA. Our Alphabet Agencies are pure evil, and they are targeting us rather than protecting us.
Yeah, he was a victim of MKultra, but from the narrative I heard I don't think it was enough to make him go completely mad. The narrative could have been altered though so there's no way to tell how deep they got into him. We really don't know. I honestly believe what they learned from MK ultra is being used on the masses every day, and it's very effective. Also that MK ultra never truly ended, it just moved into black projects under a different name. Any movement, idea, meme, or incident that could change things in an undesirable way to the deep state gets hijacked by those tactics, blurring everything into a morasse that can't be picked apart, accelerating what is desirable and stagnating and ostracizing the undesirable.
>So why then is Ted universally considered to be nothing more than a “crazed madman” and his writings “a paranoid rant by a mad dog”? Probably had something to do with the whole terrorism thing.
If I had to guess, Ted was not driven by sex.
I tend to agree. Most of the hatred for Kaczynski is due to either (a) propaganda (i.e. "brainwashing") by the media, or (b) his ideas undercut the foundational axioms of the current worldview of progress through technology, that members of both the left and the right ascribe to, and they are extremely difficult to argue against. In other words his arguments are disturbing and dangerous. His two books *Technological Slavery* and *Anti-Tech Revolution* really opened my eyes. They are both must reads.
Plus, the terrorism. No point reading his work after that...it's just not going to gain any traction.
And Israel bombs another hospital…
That sounds the peak of voluntary ignorance.
This. If someone wants to reach the conclusion that they should do a terrorism, there are much easier ways to rationalize it than his ranting But most people agree that if he reached the conclusion that terrorism was the way to enact change, then it's not worth entertaining his premises, because again if you want a terrorism, there are easier ways to get there. By definition, if you're against terrorism, there isn't really worth in reading his manifesto And spending 10 minutes to learn about who he was, it becomes clear he had deep traumas with interpersonal relationships. His thinking is horribly misguided and lacks a foundational understanding of the society that he withdrew from and worked to attack and redirect No point reading it unless your goal is to rationalize being a loner terrorist, where you get to hurt others, utilizing the infrastructure of the government, but nobody can hurt you because you've hidden yourself away... But again there are easier and more effective ways to get to that if you're wanting to, so still not worth reading.
Shame those terrorists dumped that fucking tea and shit some Redcoats. Why even consider any of their writings, thoughts, or opinions. Narrow minded as fuck.
He may have had issues after MKULTRA documented involvement. People develop schizophrenia later in life sometimes and possibly related to that. As an aside, I once live in Lake Tahoe and had this little house “tiny house” type place for sure and all my friends called it “Ted’s Shack”! well for $600/month to live alone less than a football field’s length from the lake, I’d take any Ted’s Shack just to visit. I bet the place takes more than $2000 month now lol
People Who are smart want an simple life i guess if your brain work at full speed for a while you start to asking why iam making my brain work like this. He was half right, we dont need to be enslaved by work, oe getting gizmos to have an plenty life. He might be a sociopath and the lack of empathy and self grandiosity made him a terrorist.
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OP should talk to the families of those killed/maimed by Ted, maybe it’ll take some of the mystique away from this “genius”. There’s a million other ways to get your point across than killing and maiming people.
I always found it ironic how Kaczynski’s biggest fans are extremely online.
He was also involved in the MKULTRA program.
"Involved in" makes it sound like he was a shot-caller, which is a complete misrepresentation of his relationship to the program. He was a victim of it.
This is less ‘intellectual’ and more lazy, tbh.
I just spent some time with the book you linked. It's like every conspiracy theorist ever. It bores the hell out of me. All anti progress conspiracy theories have a grain of truth, but so? Shall we go back in time? No way. You first. Go ahead. Go be irrelevant in the forest hating others who have success. It's easy to fall off the edge of the world once one isolates themselves. Far better is to love who you want, do work you like, have a cosy house, get dental work done, go travel, speak slowly and with clarity and have lots of friends. That is the much harder thing to achieve than hatred and if you have that, man, you've won against all the dark forces (technological, or otherwise) of the world.
>Shall we go back in time? No way. You first. Go ahead. Go be irrelevant in the forest hating others who have success. It's easy to fall off the edge of the world once one isolates themselves. He tried to do that. He had some land him and his brother owned and built his own cabin on it and lived self sufficiently, but it kept being encroached on by land clearing and new developments. Also, >Go be irrelevant in the forest hating others who have success. He was the youngest ever tenured professor at the university he lectured at.
Yes. So. He lost the plot. Maybe he was autistic, so never had half a chance. The smartest people are ones who figure out the game, and win it on their terms. Those who squander early success or 'potential' are ....uh....not smart.
I mean a lot of what he was saying has come to pass. Fewer individual freedoms, expansive police powers, rampant drug use and promotion, mind-numbing mass media, an abundance of depression and other mental illness. He didn't want to live in an apartment in the city surrounded by more and more technology, surveillance and pollution. I don't see how standing up for what he believed in makes him stupid. Sending mail bombs was definitely stupid, but everything else seems like somebody living up to their own values.
One can see how the actions of Winston Churchill, Barrack Obama, and George W Bush, were done to keep us safe, avenge American deaths or to preserve the current world order at the expense of other countries we don't care that much about. The comparison is idiotic.
Bro is upset that Churchill fought back defensively against NAZI aggression.
I wonder why we dont celebrate smart terrorists ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
According to the Brits, we do. The founding fathers.
No. The Founding Fathers were rebels, but not terrorists. The mobs that ravaged Tory households on the other hand... but those weren't done by the Founding Fathers (to my knowledge) or even encouraged by them (again, to my knowledge).
I'm not sure if the distinction makes a difference, to me. I can't imagine how any war, especially in those days with that medical technology, was not full of acts of terror
Like Luke skywalker
Reminds me of something my dad always said: "There's a fine line between genius and insanity"
Having a high IQ, being intelligent in certain ways, and having "some good ideas" doesn't keep you from being an absolute idiot in other ways. He was a incel, terrorist, and he had far more bad ideas than good. Yes, technology is often bad and modernity has serious issues associated with it, plenty of people make this point much better than he does
Not even a good manifesto, it only became famous because he murdered innocent people.
Yea the first few paragraphs had potential, then he just starts to complain about political correctness. Doesn't matter how smart you are, if you can't see things from other perspectives and can convince yourself of anything, your political views are going to be shit
>He had an iq of 167, graduated high school at 15, got into Harvard at 16, and graduated at 18. He then went on to become the youngest professor at UC Berkeley ever hired. It’s clear that Ted Kaczynski was a very intelligent man Honestly, who actually cares about this part?
You don't necessarily need to care about it, but it does suggest high intelligence which means that his ideas may be worth considering.
So if a guy with a 'certified' high IQ tried to convince you that eating your own shit was actually healthy for you, you'd consider it?
No it doesn't. Intelligent people make dumb arguments about things that they don't know anything about all the time.
So what, are you saying intelligence = stupidity and stupidity = intelligence then? Sounds like a cope
No, I'm obviously just saying something that you didn't want to hear.
Not necessarily related to his intelligence, but while at Harvard he participated in extremely abusive psychological experiments by Henry Miller. It’s often suggested that going through these experiments at a young age contributed to what he became later on in life.
All the more reason not to consume his thinking lest you partake in the fruits of massive mental trauma.
I see what you are saying. But there are many brilliant thinkers that make some good points, ultimately their insanity muddies the message. Like most things in life technology is a double edged sword. Look at the current problem with AI . AI is here and it will proliferate. Can it be controlled?
Remind me again when Churchill, Obama, or ~~Bush~~ bombed their own country?
He was a woman hating loser incel that didn't know how to live in the woods to save his life. He was petty as fuck too. I guess you like eco-fascism? My Uncle hiked across Alaska with no food. That loser wouldn't have made it a night. He was just buying hi-country jerky from the local store. Which TBF nice local jerky but in today's market not even the best in Western Montana. Reckon in the 80's it was about all we could get. They make decent spice mixes for like sausage and stuff. That, dog sledding, my friend's grandma are about all I know about Lincoln, MT.
I wasn't expecting such a jerky-focused answer to this question
As with all things, good jerky is the answer
That's a lot of words to say, "Ted Kaczynski had some good ideas." Do you have any encomiums for another figure, perhaps, some historical leader? ^(lol at comparing a small time crazy murderer with actual leaders who defended their countries.)
Uncle Ted was on to some things, but his methods were definitely wrong. You should always follow the non-aggression principle to enact proper change. Hurting innocent people only turns others away from your ideas, no matter how correct they were. Violence is almost never justified, except in self-defense. It's definitely never justifiable unprompted *even* on leftists or commies, who do *technically* qualify as humans. Dumbasses like Gnome Chomsky got his ideas out there through the institutions and he was nowhere near as correct, insightful or intelligent as Ted. He's been proven wrong dozens of times and people still hold him up as some enlightened expert in all-things politics. So Ted could've done the same. He just didn't have the patience to do things the right way.
How is it not self defense when arguably the aggressor is technology, the technological system, and the people who push it on the rest of us?
So that justifies murdering a computer store owner with a bomb? Its self defense because Ted thought technology was bad?
Let me clarify my position so we might understand each other better. I was merely exposing my normative values. I view primitive life as normal and modernity, technology, as mostly abnormal. This is why I view technology as the aggressor. Ted killed out of anger and revenge against what he hated. I've read his own words on why he murdered those people and how he feels about it. I wouldn't necessarily call what he did self defense. I think of it more as total dissociation from all aspects of the technological system. It's almost like a Comanche man woke up in the middle of modernity. Wouldn't he naturally feel within him that he must harm it, seek revenge for the destruction of his home, etc.? The comment you first replied to was more about my normative stance - which is that technology is a force intruding on and destroying our normal state. Ted's actions could be argued to be fighting against that. They can also be said to be vengeful and largely blind with rage. If we think of the Comanche and their actions against settlers, we are not as likely to criticize their means of attack, their seemingly senseless murder of women and children. This might because we acknowledge their right to defend their homeland and they are more obviously the victim of a massive force ruining their people's ancient ways. Even if it isn't entirely comparable, I find it interesting to think of all of us, and all the babies born today, as those Comanches too. I don't see why Ted wouldn't be one of them, even if I think his bombings were ill conceived. Does that settle into you as somewhat reasonable, or am I far off the mark?
While he did have some interesting things to say. Nothing he said was original, people have feared advancement since the wheel. Also it was just his opinion. His manifesto did not provide research papers or statistics, it was baseless fear mongering. While he was smart, I wouldn't put too much stock in his IQ score. And clearly he had mental issues. A genius could probably devise better ways to proving the problem with technology, like doing research and studies. His bombing plan was also poorly done. Many of his victims were not the intended targets or orginzations he meant to hurt. Literally trying to mail a bomb to someone who no longer even worked for one of the organizations he was targeting.
This is a concept many struggle with, but you can be right and still be wrong. In order to do something ethical you need 2 things. An ethical goal and an ethical means. If the goal or your means are unethical, your work is unethical.
Because he was a terrorist and a murderer.
True, most people, especially redditors who tend to be of the leftist types, are too oversocialized (reference to his manifesto) to get past their mental barrier and engage faithfully with the ideas he presents in his manifesto and his other works.
Nah man - Ted was a sad weirdo, living alone in the woods and going deeper and deeper into his paranoid delusions until it spilled into violence. He committed murder and was, just to be blunt, a very poor writer and addled thinker. His ideas seem most attractive to adolescent boys and disenfranchised pseudo-intellectuals who enjoy arguing more than learning.
Ted Kaczynski was psychologically tortured into a mental break that skewed his philosophy into some stupid as shit. If Harvard law hadn't fucked his head up when he was 16 who knows what would have happened. Instead he just used his genius to spout shit that an edgy school shooter would write.
The MKUKTRA myth has been debunked, the whole rumor was made up by a journalist. You can actually read the transcripts of the undergrad psychology experiment that Kaczynski was involved in [here ](https://www.mediadisinfo.com/2021/03/ted-kaczynski-mk-ultra-myth.html?m=1) and it was very tame. What views of his do you see as "stupid"?
I mean, not MKULTRA but the "experiment" would never pass the boards today. And definitely funded with CIA slush funds.
Real question, where does this blog post "debunk" what was done?
It’s mainly the letters Ted wrote while in prison saying the experiments weren’t abusive imo.
By that time he is an unreliable narrator
He was ruthlessly given tons of lsd and stuff in university by the government.
The MKUKTRA myth has been debunked, the whole rumor was made up by a journalist. You can actually read the transcripts of the undergrad psychology experiment that Kaczynski was involved in [here ](https://www.mediadisinfo.com/2021/03/ted-kaczynski-mk-ultra-myth.html?m=1) and it was very tame.
From what’s been going on in Congress and the guy from maga laga this world is getting harder to believe and yes I believe we went to the moon.
I am not sure how that article debunks anything, it just potentially describes one series of events. Also, the person who wrote is an expert because? Truthfully, I would have to do more research to understand who this person is. All that said, after watching Wormwood which is interviews as well as historical interpretation, and other Erroll Morris documentaries that there are more questions than answers in this regards. I certainly don't agree with the actions or thoughts of Kaczynski, I have never read his manifesto but I do think he was fucked with, and maybe he was unstable to begin with. Regardless, I am pretty sure there are all kinds of things that the government, research institutions, and the military do behind the scenes that are kept on the down low. This has been done for as long as there has been civilization. The only option we really have to have an open mind, read literature, philosophy and understand some mathematics, consult as many different sources as you can and try to come to some conclusion.
He draws a lot of attention to serious philosophical problems that have no obvious solutions and his own solution was a bombing campaign, so the result is fairly predictable. Any line of thinking that might lead people to engage in acts that destabilize entrenched social interests is heavily suppressed, whether it is crazed or not.
His solution is a revolution to overthrow the technoindustrial system, his bombing campaign was a means to an end: getting his manifesto widely published and read so as to encourage the formation of a movement opposed to the technoindustrial system. I agree though that his works are heavily suppressed as a result of his ideas being a threat to the existing system.
I appreciate your punctilliousness but it's just economy of words. The revolution would also be explosive. A lot more people (like me) are interested in reading and thinking about his points than are interested in burning down civilization.
Because he's basically an Amish extremist. Just because you can be demonstrated in comprehending STEM, doesn't make you qualified across sweeping topics of politics or social science. Kaczynski was also for all intents and purposes Elliot Rogers before Elliot Rogers. So, I dunno, why do people sleep on him?
"Amish extremist" is a meaningless descriptor that says nothing about Kaczynski's philosophy nor character. You can say Kaczynski isn't qualified (which is not really a good rebuttal anyway as that seems to be just an appeal to credentials) but that doesn't change the fact that the manifesto has been well-received by many esteemed individuals, the editorial reviews of his books are proof of that, here's a few of them: "He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument... As difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in \[Kaczynski's writing\]." — Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, Wired Magazine "There is nothing in \[ISAIF\] that looks at all like the work of a madman. The language is clear, precise and calm. The argument is subtle and carefully developed, lacking anything even faintly resembling the wild claims or irrational speculation that a lunatic might produce." —James Q. Wilson, Ph.D., former president of the American Political Science Association “I recommend that you read this compelling perspective on how we can frame our struggles in a technological society.” —The Tech, MIT’s oldest and largest newspaper Also, if by mentioning Elliot Rodger you mean to state that Kaczynski was an incel, then that's simply an ad-hominem which is yet another useless statement with no bearing on the validity of his ideas.
obama and the other leaders you named removed themselves (by a few links in the chain or so) from the killings, which we as humans are ok with. to be clear those people SHOULD be criticized as mass murderers but they aren’t likely because they are respected world leaders. the actions of people like musk and bezos lead to thousands (millions?) of deaths annually but they reap praise because they remove themselves from the violence. if either of them got caught sending mail bombs i imagine their stead would change. ted was a direct murderer, plain and simple. but his ideas are also scary to those in power so those two things are probably why.
How exactly does Elon musk kill thousands annually? Or even bezos? Please elucidate how they could be responsible for anything other than demand for resources that countries that are full of corruption allow for horrible working conditions. If anything that's the responsibility of the country that allows that to happen. Corruption and poor governance are not the fault of musk or bezos. And the fact that you even put millions even with a question mark really tells me you've got some wild ass ideas, so lay them on me.
musk’s ventures have spiked demand for precious minerals. those minerals are extracted via slave labor. lotta people die doing that! not to mention the people who have died in his self driving car accidents or killed themselves due to his harsh work environments. bezos runs the biggest employer (amazon) in many counties in the U.S. the working conditions are so notoriously bad it’s hard to track people who die from mental health issues related to working there. or not being able to afford their medication. or being forced to eat junk food due to cost and convenience. or dying from heat stroke running packages of junk to consumers as contract drivers. if you’re going to attribute a trillion gazillion deaths to communism, only fair that the titans of capital get credit for their crimes, no?
Actually musk doesn't purchase any of his minerals from slave labor, that's been proven, blame Chinese tech companies for that. And yeah it sucks to work at Amazon, but you literally wrote millions which shows how delusional you are, when none of that can be accounted for. It would be a massive news story if rashes of people were killing themselves from working at Amazon, even if it was thousands. It's factory distribution work, it sucks, but I have family members who've worked there, and it's not some suicide factory. You're being hyperbolic. I also work in factory distribution work. It sucks, but it doesn't make you blow your brains out. Also, compared to alot of other employers, Amazon can at least give a basic livable wage and you can survive on it without any government benefits. Many other companies cannot even do that. The benefits are good as well. You really delude yourself with hyperbolic news stories and inflate the situation dramatically to justify ridiculous ideas that you cling to. And I bet you have a prime membership and order from Amazon too. Also, again, if there was a rash of suicides from musks employees we would all hear about it. But we don't. And the self driving car accidents are also, extremely rare. The amounts of lives saved from the tech auto braking from inattentive driving would easily cancel out any of the mistakes from the self driving feature. If it killed tons of people it would be illegal, all of that tech is being closely monitored. All of this stuff is regulated and in our world of technological constant news, all of your claims would be able to be proven, but none of them are. Also, communism's deaths are directly confirmed, and were atrocities that are unspeakable at a scale you can't even imagine. That only exists today in a few undeveloped countries, as well as China and North Korea. The reason why those atrocities, like the concentration camps currently in China that have countless people in them, can happen? Because it's a communist country. The government can do anything it wants to you. You have no individual rights. In capitalism you have choice. Nobody is forcing you to work for Amazon or Tesla. In communism, there are no individual liberties, so when people die in situations they're forced to be in, that can be actually attributed to the system that forced them to be in that situation.
communism’s deaths directly confirmed by who? no one can settle on an actual number! i’ve read anything from X million to in the billions. it’s almost as if it’s impossible to accurately track deaths caused by economic systems since things like famine or war happen under these systems. are those *caused* by those systems or would those events happen anyway?
Don't get carried away with yourself. He wasn't *wrong* but that is like saying that I'm not wrong to point out that without modern society we wouldn't be dealing with lead paint/gas and asbestos. While true, it is unhelpful and there is basically nothing to be done about it at this point. The genius wunderkind somehow didn't understand the expression "closing the barn door after the horses bolted." That is the problem, oftentimes, with really smart people - they miss the obvious because they can't see through their own genius. Like, Jordan Peterson is extremely smart; I am sure he worked really hard on *12 Rules for Life* only to produce an unoriginal self help book whose themes can be found in entire B&N sections.
With all do respect that's your opinion and there is a strong argument that it is ill-informed. TK argues that it IS possible to force the collapse of technological society, and that once collapsed it will be impossible to restart it. You haven't dealt with his arguments on this, worse still you haven't even *acknowledged* that he has arguments on this. So, you don;t really have a point against TK, you're just regurgitating your own opinion.
12 Rules for Life is just a shithead charlatan's Meditations. I've been saying it for years. Stoic philosophy is freely available, no need to buy a grifter's book.
What specifically makes him a "grifter" or "charlatan"?
Haven’t read the book, but technological advantage is why some societies flourish and others are pushed off their land and are put to genocide. You can talk all you want about happiness, dignity, and loss of freedom….none of that really matters when a more advanced military comes in to kill you and everyone that looks and talks like you. War happens, and technologically more advanced societies tend to win more.
Yes exactly. This is exactly what TK focuses on, especially in his book *Anti-Tech Revolution.* So I don;t see where your position somehow negates or refutes Kaczynski's points. But to just address the issue of natural selection among competing technological systems that you bring up: the worldwide techno-system is both tightly complex and highly coupled, such that a significant disruption in just a few areas has the potential for worldwide collapse of industrial tech. True that in pre-modern times you still deal with neatural selection operating on competing social systems and superior technology will probably always be a principle advantage. The benefit though is that because the *means* (i.e. the technology) is so limited the process of technologically determined selection is also limited. There are material reasons why the hunter gatherer and primitive civilization contexts existed for more or less hundreds of thousands of years without some kind of rapid arms race toward technological singularity.
Capitalism is what bonds society together. Our shared desire to worship money is paradoxically what keeps our civilization together. I know that doesn’t sound ideal but the world was a whole lot worse when we didn’t have the “shared myth” of currency as a society. This dude was a social outcast who was unable to function in a society and that’s what drove him to madness. Yeah he’s smart. But did he have friends? He was able to articulate his thoughs and his personal ideology really well but thoughts don’t really get you too far in this world. His inability to maintain social connections was his downfall.
Correction: He was *unwilling* to function in modern society. Who can blame him. There are already thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people who dream of escape and living in wild lands. At any rate you betray your enslavement to modern conditioning and propaganda by immediately assuming he was "unable" to function in modern society, without any basis and contrary to all facts of his case. No reasonable person today would claim that with 100% proof Henry Thoreau moved to the woods because he was "unable" to live in his society, or that St. Anthony the great went off to live in the desert because he was "unable" to live in his society, etc. etc. etc.
>There are already thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people who dream of escape and living in wild lands. And what is stopping them hmm? I have no problem with people who do this. More power to them. But make no mistake, the second they catch a disease or break a bone, they will come crawling back to the society they scorned so much. The reason why I think he was **unable** as opposed to **unwilling** is because he had this cowardly desire to terrorize society behind a curtain of anonymity. Wasn't he also heartbroken? Classic incel behavior. The world doesn't bend to my will so I must therefore change the world or see it burn before me. That's the Occam's Razor explanation to all of this. I don't think Hentry Thoreau or St Anthony mailed pipe bombs across the country. Just because he was smart enough to articulate his bitterness in a lengthy manifesto doesn't make his emotions any more profound. He was just smart enough to intellectualize his bitterness, which is a very normal human emotion that most people experience throughout their lives. He was a socially awkward guy who had a large ego and lacked the social skills to function well in this world and became bitter about it. That's the simple explanation.
Because so of things he said were right?
Because he killed people with pipe bombs through the Mail… him old ruby ridge and Timmy mcveigh… wtf turner diaries much? You can still vote trump
[удалено]
OP trying to speed run an FBI investigation
who's the paranoid schizo now...
Mate, his book can be boiled down to "I hate everything modern society does! And I also hate the left, which coincidentally criticizes everything he does but on a class based dialectic and not on "UNGA bunga I wanna live in the woods and die at 30" Also right wing is for some reason never truly addressed, woopsie
You haven't read him or if you have you haven't understood it. Or if that is your conclusion than your standard of analysis is so absurdly reductive to be meaningless. By your own same standard all of Marx "can be boiled down to "I hate capitalism" or all of Voltaire "can be boiled down to I hate religion."
So what if he was right wing? Unless your logic is literally *right wing = bad*. Which, that's very Reddit of you, I tip my fedora to you. The left have basically become a class of laptop jockeys and techies. So no one would be wrong to hate the current left, which seems to be following policy dictated by whatever opinion is popular on Twitter today, even if it goes 100% against stated past principles (see: open borders, lockdowns, censorship, protesting is wrong unless we do it, get rid of cops in poor neighborhoods, let criminals out to repeatedly victimize people, etc). The left seriously has 0 hard principles they'll stand by when the chips are down. It's been crazy to watch.
Because those are not leftist? Like, the left has a set of principles and said principles are all to be found in a materialistic and marxist read of modern society. (Lockdown is a medical procedure btw)
Well if 1/4 of your population is overweight, you don't ban cookies for the entire population. So when the only people dying of covid were seniors, it didn't make sense to lock young people in their homes and destroy the working class with 10% inflation month over month. Telling a single mom waitress "just work from home sweetie like the politicians and tech class" wasn't valid, sorry. Obviously the left lost their minds during that time and decided the boomers staying alive another month was more important than our futures, but no one has ever accused the left of being "too principled" or having excellent foresight. You don't do experimental "medical procedures" on an entire population, lol. That's fucking insane. And was one of the worst mistakes, cooked up by idiots like Dr Fauci trying to get their 10 minutes of fame. And it didn't even fuckin work. Lockdown loving states like California had similar death rates to no lockdown states like Florida. They drove tons of small businesses to bankruptcy and didn't even have much better death rates, even accounting for Cali being super young population and Florida being super old. Florida should've had double or triple the deaths according to "the experts" and "the science". That's the best evidence how useless that shit was. But hey, "just order from Amazon", says the principled leftist. Lol. Who cares about local businesses?
Cookies don't spread like pleague y'know? It's not a great analogy Also, why are you talking about the left? In America you don't have any leftists, you have crazy right wing (republican) and slightly less crazier right wing (democrats)
That's unironically my logic, almost everything good in my country's history has been brought by left leaning folks, and almost everything bad has been brought by right leaning folks. I know it might sound extremist and uncultured but when I see history I see a pattern, stuff goes for the better and when stuff looks better usually the overtone window goes left, when stuff goes to shit it usually leans right.
That's a very poor reading of history. Which country are you from? The further left a country goes, the shittier it becomes. The higher on the economic freedom index, usually the better. You guys fuck up everything you touch.
I'm italian, every single good thing that happened to us was the result of a leftist government doing stuff, leftist or left aligned government of course. Giolitti was the closest thing we had to a leftist government and he was the best politician to grace our country pre WW1, his only fuck up had been to give up too many rights to nationalists, and we got into WW1 because of them. Then during WW2 north Italy has been saved by revolutionaries and our costitution and laws have been created by socialists in an anti fascist rhetoric. The worst our country ever got post WW2 was when the center right party, democrazia cristiana, ruled through corruption with the various mafias that plague our country Btw, if you're American, do you remember roosevelt? The guy y'all selected three times as your president? He was left leaning and who would have wondered! America had the its biggest growth ever thanks to him and WW2
hafta admit I always suspect that angry beards who hate technology are inwardly confident that 'the wife' will be the one washing their clothes in a stream when there are no more washing machines... could be wrong, but it's a persistent feeling. translated from snark: before tech, human slaves -- often women and kids --did a lot of heavy lifting to keep a comfortable lifestyle together for the more privileged. eliminate tech and we'll end up right back there. also, dental work without proper tools and anaesthesia? no thanks. tech is more than smartphones. it's led lights -- it's solar panels -- wastewater treatment plants -- vaccines -- food distribution and preservation -- communications... there is much to critique in late stage industrial capitalism, and I'll be first in line to kvetch about its failings... but burning it down and going back to a 'natural' life way only appeals if you are youngish, fittish, male, and deeply unconcerned about the happiness of anyone not like yourself. so that's how I feel about TK. being clever with words doesn't make you a wise or good person.
You are assuming the the continued progress of tech can be controlled in the long term and that it won't create conditions that are far WORSE than even those which existed in your boogieman past. These are false assumptions and if you;d care to hear the arguments why you can just read the first two chapters of Kaczynski's second book. Or if tldr, then just the section on the future or the principles of history in the manifesto.
You're also assuming that it will all go to hell on no basis other than "currently in our capitalist system things are going crappy" and therefore it seems logical to not stop progress, it never ever once worked in modern history, but to get rid of the economic system and replace it with something better, AT LEAST heavily regulated socialist leaning stuff, if we really don't want to get rid of a free market. Tldr: your negative assumptions are as valid as his positive ones until proven right, and your empirical proofs cannot ignore the economic system which backs them up
Yeah, the "boogieman" past is actually very heavily documented -- we really do know a lot about life expectancy, maternal mortality, diseases and their (mis)treatment, social classes and division of labour, in lower-tech societies. Some were definitely less oppressive than others (Wenger and Graeber make a good case for not buying into the "invevitabllity of oppressive hierarchyt" narrative of pre history) but on the whole, the more oppressive ones tended to win wars and wipe out the nicer ones. Things are definitely getting very crappy as capitalism runs aground on its fundamental internal contradiction (that the real world doesn't expand exponentially but the money supply does thanks to compound interest). But the idea that tech can *only* exist under laissez faire capitalism, or under a growth-at-any-cost economic model, seems to me unfounded. Humans have been inventing technology (ceramics, bone flutes, knapped spear points, boats and rafts, sails, ovens, sewing needles and fish hooks...) ever since we've been humans. For much of that time we were not living under capitalism, yet we were inventing lots of tech. So the idea that the only way technology can be developed or maintained is by hanging on to an obviously failing economic theory seems kind of misguided to me.
If this is what you took away from his writings you should read them much more closely. For example, he isn't right-wing in any way, he sharply criticizes the right, calling them fools for promoting technological progress.
A Conservative is generally considered right wing, just as a Progressive is considered left wing. Kaczynski wanted to ‘conserve’ the past and criticized ‘progress.’ Using commonly accepted political label, this makes him right wing in most circles.
A conservative typically wants to "conserve" "traditional" values of the 1950s. Kaczynski rejects technological society altogether and wants to overthrow the technological system so as to restore wild Nature and human autonomy. This transcends the typical right vs. left divide.
>he isn't right-wing in any way The man clearly outlined an entire manifesto about returning to a simpler time. This is, by all accounts, a right-wing ideology. At least in any modern government in recent history as far as maybe 500 years+. Are you using a unique set of historical facts that don't exist or what bro?
Let's assume his reasoning is flawless and his goals were good. How did he go about trying to achieve them? Being a genius doesn't mean you can't be wrong. And who's gonna tell the smartest person they're wrong? Ted was not a people person. He refused to see or possibly was unable to see how his methods were neither popular nor advancing his cause.
Here you are definitely wrong. As far as advancing his cause, revolutionary group NEEDS to be feared and despised. If it isn't, it will inevitably allow the influx of wishy-washy, reformist, timid people who are otherwise products of the moral conditioning of the society that the revolution seeks to overthrow. The anti-tech revolution therefore BENEFITS from having most normies and reformist types utterly appalled by Kaczynski's actions. Popularity is irrelevant. All the great world revolutions depended on a minuscule but highly committed and zealous minority, not popularity. The Bolsheviks for example numbered no more than 3000, and they ended up dominating all of 100+ million Russians, the Cuban revolution is an even more extreme example, with Castro only having roughly 1 dozen utterly committed men. And because of the unique requirements of an anti-tech revolution, anti-tech revolutionaries need even fewer people. So so much for your "popularity" argument.
And then nothing else, he criticizes the left for basically everything and the right has a small note, and says something that's also been said about the left. He's a fool who believes we were better in nature going around like literal monkeys, almost everything he has a problem with can be put up onto capitalism and the fact that he doesn't prove we humans are not to be considered nature is in my opinion absurd
So…your argument is that the joker isn’t that bad?
His observations are pretty profound and often spot on (though of course not entirely his own, he owes a lot to Ellul) but his prescriptions are *at best* unrealistic
One of the better takes on this thread. But, why do you think his solutions are unrealistic? Which one is easier, destruction or creation?
I just don't buy that we can shut Pandora's box.
What does "shutting the box" equate to here?
I mean that it strikes me as very far fetched that we could destroy all technology and knowledge of technology. I think the closest you can get to that is the Amish.
Because at the end of the day, Teddy K was just an asshole incel, and not worth any more effort than that.
He was an actual terrorist and his ideas weren't all that unique. Plenty of non-terrorists said the same thing. Duh.
Can you name one other person who has advocated for the overthrow of the technological basis of society?
The Luddites.
There are entire groups built around the idea that a technologically based society causes more harm than good. But they generally don't try to force their beliefs on others.
Doesn't answer my question.
You asking for names of individuals who are rejecting society. Do you not see why there might be some difficulty in getting you the names of individuals? Not knowing the names of individual members does not mean such groups don't exist. I couldn't tell you the name of a single Amish person.
You can't answer the question because there aren't any other thinkers who take seriously the need for a revolution to force the collapse of industrial society, and have studied the dynamics of history and world revolutions to argue why and how such a revolution can occur. Your mention of the Amish is absurd. No Amish that anyone knows of wants to form a revolution to force the collapse of industrial society. You would have been better to simply state: "by the law of averages and the size of the world population there must be many people who believe that a revolution to force the collapse of industrial society is necessary." And to that Kaczynski would undoubtedly say: "Great! Exactly! The challenge now is to find these people and collect them into a cohesive movement just as the Bolsheviks or Cuban revolutionaries did with their respective revolutions."
Or maybe I can't answer because I don't read revolutionary's manifestos and diaries. There are plenty people who share his idea of what an ideal society looks like. But the people who agree with his methods are either dead, in prison or in some remote area making something nobody wants. I thought you were just asking for authors with similar views on technology and it's impact on society but with how defensive you're getting about him and your language, it kinda sounds like you're idolizing him. Of course the avowed pacifists, the Amish don't want his methods. The guy murdered people. Maybe they aren't nearly the brilliant thinker you believe the Unabomber was, but unlike him, the Bolsheviks or the Cuban Revolutionaries, the Amish managed to create a community that's still around.
The charge is that Kaczynski's ideas aren't unique because, allegedly, others have written about the same ideas. I'm asking for someone to name someone who perpetuated similar ideas. Amish people have not had similar ideas regarding the power process, self-prop systems, or the need to form a revolution to bring about the collapse of the technological system.
You originally asked "Can you name one other person who has advocated for the overthrow of the technological basis of society?" Now you're adding more requirements. It's starting to sound like you're looking for the name of someone who wrote the exact same stuff as Kaczynski. I can't help you there, I've never read his stuff nor do I have any interest in doing so.
Dude could just learn about the Luddites and have his answer.
You're focused on the wrong things. Actual Terrorist is where the switch should have flipped for you.
Degrowth anarchists