Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) has
terminal skin cancer, so may die any day now, which means there will likely be a brief flurry of interest in his story again, which we can harness by using his life as an analogy to talk about other important issues.
I've decided to focus on writing the biography of his life, and one of the resources I'll cite in my book is
this wiki page on Ted Kaczynski on this website because I've created a sortable table of what books he was reading at the time he was arrested, which many people are curious about. As well, I'll include a critique of his political philosophy on the wiki page and I'll promote it in other essays I do, so if you like the idea of contributing to it, feel free.
Here's a preview below:
Ted Kaczynski
Obviously Kaczynski is in no way a philosophical vegan, as well he has more supporters among primitivist anti-vegans.
The main reason for the creation of this page was simply to harness the sortable tables function to create the most comprehensive sortable list of books found in his cabin.
This page will also be used as an unironic attempt to try and call him out, for the few people who need to hear it, so that fewer otherwise productive activists fall down the eco-purist rabbit hole. However, that doesn't mean we're completely against platforming his writing alongside critiques.
Key Events
To begin with, here’s a timeline of key events that I think led to Ted Kaczynski becoming violent & events in which he could have been stopped with either a compassionate ear or a better police investigation:
- Separated from parents as a baby or his parents inability to cope when their child misbehaved, so to blame his behavior on this experience.
- Moved forward a year at school whilst failing to make sure he maintained friendships, rather than taking a year off to travel with family.
- Parents/teachers/counselors failing to talk through his desire for escape in primitive life as a desire to escape bullying, earlier education in politics.
- Attending Harvard a year early without taking the time to travel and explore the world.
- Unwittingly joining psych experiments that would be used by the CIA for developing torture techniques, where ideally people would have voted in parties outlawing these practices before they ever happened.
- Projected his feelings of inadequacy onto women for not knowing how to start a relationship with them.
- Inability to discuss his sexual fantasies of becoming a woman in order to get to be intimate with a woman to a councilor. Coming away with stronger suicidal ideation, as well as now the first desire to kill through a murder suicide, due to his shame at not being able to find a relationship turning into hatred at society for regimenting his life and making him this way.
- Kaczynski showed a letter to his brother, parents and romantic interest that he planned ‘violence of a serious nature’ against this romantic interest who had broken off their romance, but no steps were taken to either get him help or report him. And journal entries later revealed that he brought with him a knife in a paper bag to mutilate her face.
- Kaczynski proposed founding an organization dedicated to stopping federal aid to scientific research, thereby preventing the “ceaseless extension of society’s powers. He sent this essay, similar to the manifesto he’d later write to a few politicians and would often write anti-technology essays to newspapers and favorite authors. If the FBI had put more focused callouts for information, then one of these people may have tipped off the FBI sooner.
- Felt shame later about his sadism towards animals.
- Briefly felt shame about having crippled the arm of a man who was an airline pilot.
- Felt shame about the innocent people he would have killed on an airliner he attempted to blow up.
The Manifesto - Industrial Society and its Future
The contents of the manifesto are surprisingly cogent to many:
At 35,000 words, Industrial Society and Its Future lays very detailed blame on technology for destroying human-scale communities. Kaczynski contends that the Industrial Revolution harmed the human race by developing into a sociopolitical order that subjugates human needs beneath its own. This system, he wrote, destroys nature and suppresses individual freedom. In short, humans adapt to machines rather than vice versa, resulting in a society hostile to human potential.
Kaczynski indicts technological progress for its destruction of small human communities and the rise of uninhabitable cities controlled by an unaccountable state. He contends that this relentless technological progress will not dissipate on its own, because individual technological advancements are seen as good despite the sum effects of this progress. Kaczynski describes modern society as defending against dissent an order in which individuals are "adjusted" to fit the system and those outside the system are seen as "bad".
This tendency, he says, gives rise to expansive police powers, mind-numbing mass media, and indiscriminate promotion of drugs. He criticizes both big government and big business as the inevitable result of industrialization, and holds scientists and "technophiles" responsible for recklessly pursuing power through technological advancements.
He argues that this industrialized system's collapse will be devastating and that quickening the collapse—before industrialization further progresses—will mitigate the devastation's impact. He justifies the trade-offs that come with losing industrial society as being worth the cost. Kaczynski's ideal revolution seeks not to overthrow government, but rather, the economic and technological foundation of modern society. He seeks to destroy existing society and protect the wilderness, the antithesis of technology.
Zerzan also explained…
By the way he told me he got his ideas from Elull, it’s an American vernacular version of the technological society, that’s his great gift, that’s his great plus, he made it very readable, … the original translation in English is hard to read, it has that abstract classical mode of the way French are taught to write and it’s very off-putting I think in the rest of the world.
I think almost everyone can agree that it’s good to get more variation in digestible versions of philosophy books and essays.
However, Kaczynski didn’t include some central elements of Ellul’s politics which are wholly sensible. Ellul valued using more minimal viable use technologies where practicable for one’s own mental health and the environment, but he wasn’t for destroying all industrial level technology:
If we see technique as nothing but objects that can be useful (and we need to check whether they are indeed useful); and if we stop believing in technique for its own sake or that of society; and if we stop fearing technique, and treat it as one thing among many others, then we destroy the basis for the power technique has over humanity.
Ellul is a very admirable person for having played a very active role in the French Resistance.
Similarly to how George Orwell talks about getting to experience a glimpse of a more ideal world in anarchist Catalonia, Ellul writes fondly of the communalist caring society the bravest in society were able to build together under the noses of the fascist regime:
In 1944, at the Liberation, I was part of the Movement of National Liberation, I even held certain positions in it, and had begun to believe the dream we had been dreaming during the last few years of the Resistance, often expressed by the saying that we were going to move from Resistance to Revolution. But when we said that-and I would like to point out that Camus first used it in 1943 in combat groups-we did not mean a Communist, Stalinist, Soviet revolution. We meant a fundamental revolution of society, and we made great plans for transforming the press, the media, and the economic structures. They all had elements of socialism, to be sure; but I would say it was more of a Proudhonian socialism, going back to grassroots by means of a federative and cooperative approach.
The main problem with Ellul is simply that he infused many of his sensible arguments against technological overconsumption with fundamentally irrational Christian premises that were entirely unnecessary and make the argument fail for anyone who isn't a believing Christian. For example, he often posits that only Christian culture has been able to help with this problem in the past, and that only through more dedication to a peaceful Christian culture can we be saved from the problems we exist with today.
These weak arguments then inevitably lead to someone like Kaczynski to come along who buys the religiously apocalyptic vision, but not the proposed solution.
So, I wish Kaczynski had picked up a book that had a more secular critique of technological overconsumption that was harder to dismiss in its reformist prescriptions, but it may have just been a case of finding almost any book to justify his desires.
Ellul did in fact predict someone might try to twist his tech minimalist philosophy to justify violence and dedicated many books to arguing how we simply need a peaceful avoidance of engaging with high tech society in situations where we can use the minimum viable technology for the task we want to get done. But obviously Kaczynski dismissed these arguments:
There are several ideas that Kaczynski takes from Ellul. One is that human beings are maladapted to life in a technological society I discussed that at the beginning the basic idea is that human beings evolved in a primitive Stone Age environment we're still genetically hunter-gatherers but now we've been thrust into this world of concrete and steel and we're psychologically ill-equipped to deal with that. ...
Now it's notable though that for Ellul the mismatch between human beings and the technological society was more social than biological and Elull thought that the problem was that our norms and morals and social structures and communities can't evolve fast enough to keep up with technology, whereas Kaczynski wasn't concerned so much about those things he was concerned about our biology, so already there they diverge but the basic idea that we're maladapted or maladjusted to technology comes from Ellul ...
The problem with technology is that it has outstripped the evolution of our social structures and communities and norms ... and I think judging by the first part of the technological society Ellul thinks that in the past we were perfectly capable of resisting the pull of technique. So, he talks about several different societies that resisted the urge to prioritize means over ends. First he says look at the ancient Greeks, the ancient Greeks were incredibly sophisticated philosophically and scientifically, but he claims they had contempt for practical application, they could have used their knowledge to manipulate the world, but they didn't, they wanted to understand it, so he says for the Greeks there was a stark division between science/understanding of the world and technique/application.
