propaganda – Page 21

VJMP Reads: Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber Manifesto VII (fin)

This reading carries on from here.

The next chapter in Industrial Society and Its Future is ‘Two Kinds of Technology’. Here Kaczynski works to counter the argument that technological progress is so inevitable that revolutionary efforts are futile.

First, Kaczynski distinguishes between two different scales of technology. Small-scale technology is different to organised-scale technology. The former is technology that can be used by communities without outside help, such as simple crafting or metalsmithing. This kind of technology can survive a collapse of the industrial system, unlike (e.g.) refrigerator manufacturing.

Because organised-scale technology is dependent on other organised-scale technology, any collapse of the industrial system would take centuries to rebuild, if it ever happened. In any case, there’s no guarantee that a medieval society would even develop an industrial system again. It didn’t happen in India, China or the Middle East. It is therefore still worth opposing organised-scale technology, even if opposing small-scale technology is meaningless.

The final section in this manifesto is titled ‘The Danger of Leftism’. Kaczynski exhorts anti-technology revolutionaries to take a resolutely anti-left stance from the beginning, otherwise they will get co-opted. Leftism is incompatible with freedom, because it is collectivist and seeks to bind the entire world into a single whole. Because collectivism is only possible with technology, leftists will never really support it.

Some leftists claim to oppose technology, but they only do so as long as that technology and the system is in the hands of non-leftists. Much like censorship and academic freedom, whether or not leftists support it depends on whether or not they are in charge. They cannot be trusted because they will double-cross anyone they work with.

For many people, leftism fills the same psychological niche filled by religion. The leftist needs to believe in it. Kaczynski notes here that leftists are driven by a compulsion to impose their beliefs onto everyone. “Everything contrary to leftist beliefs represents Sin.”

Leftists seek power through identification with a social movement; helping that movement attain its goals helps satisfy that leftist’s power process. However, the desires of the leftist are infinite. They are not satisfied with anything; they demand total control. “…as long as anyone harbors in some corner of his mind a negative attitude toward some minority, the leftist has to re-educated him. And ethnic minorities are not enough; no one can be allowed to have a negative attitude toward homosexuals, disabled people, fat people, old people, ugly people, and on and on and on…”

The leftists will never stop until they have complete control. Even if you gave them everything they wanted, they would soon want more. Ultimately the leftist is not motivated by good, but by the desire to fulfill their will to power by imposing it on society. Most leftists are driven heavily by the desire to impose their own morality on everyone else. Individual tendencies towards liberty don’t change this general trend.

Identifying the leftist is not difficult. They inevitably identify with the victim, and with the collective. They tend to be against individualism, competition and violence, although they readily find excuses for violent leftists. “Maybe the best diagnostic trait of the leftist is his tendency to sympathize with the following movements: feminism, gay rights, ethnic rights, disability rights, animal rights, political correctness.” (a previous article here would describe them as horizontalists.

The manifesto ends with a number of footnotes; there is no conclusion or summary. The reader is left with the feeling that Kaczynski was an extremely intelligent man who saw very deeply into the nature of reality, but who was not necessarily able to pull everything he knew into a coherent worldview, perhaps on account of some psychological disturbance.

This may have been a result of Kaczynski’s apparent lack of spiritual belief. Many of the problems he attributes to the techno-industrial system could just as well be argued to be problems with materialism. Yet, the absence of spiritual knowledge and the consequences of this are not addressed by Kaczynski. It could be said that Kaczynski, despite his immense insight, was fighting his own shadow to a large extent, in the form of materialism.

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A Brief History of Modern Racism

I remember the first time I got called a racist. I was 17 years old, and was in my first year of university, involved in a philosophical discussion. Someone had claimed that the word ‘Islam’ means ‘peace’, and I had countered that it really means ‘submission’, only to be told that this was a misconception that I had to be racist to believe. In the 20 years since then, as this essay will examine, our conception of what racism is has only become more ridiculous.

Racism originally started out as a reaction to the racial supremacist sentiments that were blamed, in English-speaking popular culture, for World War II. As the story goes, the evil dictator Adolf Hitler stirred up such latent sentiments among German speakers, which lead to an attempt to invade Eastern Europe for the purposes of securing lebensraum for the overflow of Germans. This led to the deaths of some thirty million people, and all because of racism.

Quite reasonably, there developed a movement within postwar popular culture to reject racist sentiments, so that the causes of World War II would not cause another great conflagration. The problem, as with so much of popular culture, is that things went too far. Far, far too far.

Once upon a time, in order to be called a racist you had to display racial prejudice that harmed someone. A racist would be someone who called a black man a “nigger” in public, or someone who refused to hire the best-qualified applicant on the grounds that he was Asian. An example of something that was racist would be going around your neighbourhood beating up Aborigines. Choosing to hold an unfashionable political opinion was not racist, as this was just a thought, and thoughts weren’t crimes once.

Now, if a person doesn’t actively hate the white race and wish for its destruction, that person is considered some kind of white supremacist. The ‘It’s Okay To Be White’ campaign revealed that, in the minds of many people, a refusal to feel guilt on account of being white is tantamount to support for white supremacy. You can now be racist merely for a refusal to be ashamed for being white.

In modern times, our conception of racism has evolved, and well beyond any directive to treat different races on equal terms. The white man is perfectly evil – if you think that there’s a semblance of good in him, you’re a racist. All men of other races are perfectly innocent – if you think there’s a semblance of malice in them that did not arise as a result of their oppression at the hands of white people, you’re a racist. This is the new dogma – question it at your peril.

All economic and social advantages that the white man possesses can be attributed to his ruthless oppression of coloured people and the theft of their natural birthright, but curiously this does not apply to Jews. Despite being much wealthier than the average white person (at least in America), Jews did not achieve their position by any immoral means, but only by diligent and intelligent application of effort.

It is never explained why the white man can not have become rich by the same application of effort as the Jew, it’s just assumed that the white man became rich through crime, while the Jew – who is far wealthier – did so through honest hard work.

Similarly, an attempt has been made to redefine racism as “prejudice + power”, implying that black people cannot be racist against white people on account of that black people do not possess institutional power with which to oppress white people. But, as above, white people do not possess institutional power with which to oppress Jews, yet white people are accused of anti-Jewish racism all the time.

Believing in science is now racist if science suggests facts that are in any way unflattering to a coloured person. It’s not even okay to suggest that different groups of people evolved to meet the survival challenges of different environments, unless of course all non-white people evolved to be superior to whites (there is no way in which white people could have evolved to be superior over anyone else). The idea that the different challenges of different environments led to different intelligences is right out.

It can be seen from the examples above that much of what passes for modern racism is really an anti-white sentiment, either self-hatred projected outwards (as in the case of the social justice warrior) or simple hatred born of envy and fear (as in the case of most coloured people). This explains why accusations of racism are often made in situations where they make no logical sense, the most common example today being getting called racist for expressing a dislike of Islam.

The truth, of course, is that most of this racism hysteria is part of what is known as “call-out culture” – in other words, it’s mostly a way for bourgeois white people to one-up each other, gaining social capital at the expense of their fellows. The modern concept of racism has, therefore, lost all contact with its roots as a way of reducing suffering from racial prejudice. It’s now just a fashion, displayed as shamelessly as any other.

VJMP Reads: Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber Manifesto V

This reading carries on from here.

The next chapter in Industrial Society and Its Future is ‘Control of Human Behaviour’. Having established that invasive control of human behaviour was inevitable given a high enough level of technology within a society, Kaczynski now turns to the question of how that behaviour is controlled.

Pressures to control human behaviour have arisen from the beginning of civilisation. When civilisations try to control people so tightly that those people go beyond the limits of their endurance and collapse, then that society will also collapse. Human nature therefore limited the development of human society, but technology threatens to change this by making it possible to change humans.

The passage “Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction?” reads as extremely prescient for 1995. Kaczynski was writing at the start of the Prozac wave, but the trend has worsened severely, with as many as a quarter of some populations on a psychiatric drug at any one point in time. It can be said, therefore, that he predicted the current state of widespread dismay and despair.

Psychiatric drugs are not so much medicines as they are ways of postponing the collapse of society. “In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.” With a strong sense of irony, Kaczynski notes that the system is often doing the individual a favour when it brainwashes him into submission, because the alternative is destruction. Likewise, the definition of “child abuse” changes depending on which childrearing techniques produce results the system wants, and which do not.

The social disruption we see today is the result of what the system has done to people. This can lead to a totalitarianism that arrives after a number of steps, each one an apparently necessary reaction to a social problem, often with a humanitarian justification. We will probably have to contend with widespread genetic engineering for this reason. The system tends to regard as a “sickness” any mode of behaviour that is inconvenient for it, and therefore that manipulating people to fit in is a “cure”.

In ‘Human Race At A Crossroads’, Kaczynski points out that the system is not in control over everyone. Although it has total control over those who could be termed ‘bourgeois’, there are still many different kinds of disaffected rebel groups. The main concern of the system is to make these people docile so that they can no longer threaten. With this achieved, technology can then expand to take over everything on Earth. Human resistance will be impotent.

A total collapse of the technological system would give humanity the chance to start again. Kaczynski concludes that those who hate the industrial-technological system have two major duties: the first to increase the stresses within the technological system so as to hasten its collapse, the second to develop an alternative ideology that can serve to order a new world when it does.

The last chapter in this section is ‘Human Suffering’. Kaczynski was able to note, even in 1995, that the world’s population has become overblown on account of the technological system, and a collapse of the system would shortly be followed by a collapse in that population. This might entail much suffering in the short term, but this is less than the suffering that would arise if the system was allowed to grow even bigger. In any case, some consider dignity and freedom more important than merely avoiding suffering.

It is far from clear that the collapse of the industrial system would lead to less suffering anyway. Technology has meant that natural controls on population have been removed, which has resulted in a population explosion and all the suffering ensuing from that. Our relationship to Nature has been destroyed, and this is before we account for the effects of future problems like climate change.

Technophiles are unwilling to admit that when a technology comes and makes great changes to a society, this results in many other changes further down the line. For instance, agricultural advances that solve the problem of poverty merely lead to overpopulation, which leads to new problems of stress and aggression. This is an easily predictable problem, and there are many, many others that are not as predictable.

VJMP Reads: Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber Manifesto IV

This reading carries on from here.

The next chapter in Industrial Society and Its Future is ‘Restriction of Freedom is Unavoidable in Industrial Society’. Here Kaczynski expounds at length what appears to be the central thesis of the manifesto.

Modern man is strapped down by a number of rules and regulations that have been laid down on him by faceless people far away and who he cannot hope to influence. Kaczynski contends that this is not because bureaucrats are malicious or because the system is yet to be perfected – this is the nature of technological society. Generally speaking, our lives have to be closely regulated by large organisations in order for society to function. Human lives have to be modified to fit the system.

This close regulation happens even to children. The system needs people educated in a particular manner in order to run its machines, and so children have to be forced to study things that they don’t really care about. This social pressure creates a lot of dysfunction in the form of dropouts and mentally ill people. The system uses propaganda to try to induce people to want what the system is doing to them. This is a complicated and dishonest process.

In ‘The Bad Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated From the Good Parts’ Kaczynski argues that technology is a double-edged sword. Not only does advanced medical treatment require an entire industrial society to maintain, but it also removes the natural selection pressure that is, in many ways, keeping the human race healthy. The only solution to this is either eugenics or massive genetic engineering. Kaczynski contends that this genetic engineering is inevitable owing to the good things it promises.

The next chapter is ‘Technology is a More Powerful Social Force Than the Aspiration For Freedom’. Freedom is continually forced to compromise to technology, and after many repeated instances of this, all freedom is gone. The motor vehicle is a great example: when first introduced, they took no freedom away from the walking man, but society has been forced to adapt to accommodate them, and now walking in many places is impossible. Moreover, regulations such as driver’s licences and insurance have tied people down.

New technology changes society in a way that people are forced to use it. Each new advance, taken by itself, is desirable, but the cumulative effect is to lose freedom to people far away. Technology always advances, but can never be rolled back without a collapse of the system. This means that reform is impossible, which in turn means that any resisters effectively have to be revolutionaries. History shows that social arrangements are temporary, but technological advances are more or less permanent.

The last two chapters in this section are ‘Simpler Social Problems Have Proved Intractable’ and ‘Revolution is Easier than Reform’. These contain a summary of the main statements made so far. Humans have proven themselves incapable of dealing with much easier problems than resisting technology, and therefore cannot succeed without a revolution that destroys the entire industrial system. Kaczynski points out here that we have already left massive environmental problems to our grandchildren merely for the sake of convenience now.

Revolution will not be as difficult as it seems, because the prospect of revolution is capable of inspiring powerful emotions in people. By contrast, the prospect of reform can only inspire lukewarm emotions at best. It is not necessary for a majority of people to become revolutionaries, just enough so that the system is incapacitated.