The Unabomber Manifesto

"Industrial society and its future", better known as the Unabomber Manifesto, is a text written anonymously by the eco-terrorist Theodore Kaczynski, also called the Unabomber.

Kaczynski more or less forced several national newspapers to publish the manifesto in 1995, promising that he would call off his bombing campaign if they did. He had already killed three people by mail bombs, and wounded many others. This campaign of terror was directed at people involved in real or perceived environmental destruction. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post published "Industrial society and its future". At the time, nobody knew the Unabomber's real identity. The manifesto was ostensibly written by a mysterious organization, known simply as FC ("Freedom Club"). Unfortunately for Kaczynski, his own brother recognized his distinctive style of writing, and the Unabomber was arrested by the FBI in 1996. He now serves a life sentence.

The Unabomber Manifesto calls for the complete destruction of industrial society and high technology. Before reading it, I assumed that the author was a violent anarcho-primitivist or in some other way "leftist". He is not. Kaczynski's political philosophy is difficult to pin down, but he sounds more right-wing than left-wing. He seems to like militia groups, romanticizes the Wild West, prefers biological to social explanations for human behaviour, and attacks "political correctness". Indeed, a large part of his pamphlet is an attack on leftism. However, he is not conservative. Kaczynski never claims that "family values" were somehow better during the dark ages. Rather, he wants to have complete freedom for the individual, or at least for small groups of individuals, to pursue whatever goals they may choose, something he believes is impossible in a society based on technology. Perhaps Kaczynski could be seen as a very odd libertarian?

"Industrial society and its future" will no doubt disappoint those who assume that it's an exciting defence of violence and terrorism, or the amusing rants of a madman. Actually, the text is rather heavy and intellectual. The author believes that industrial society is incompatible with human nature, and hampers the fulfilment of something he calls "the power process". He argues at length that industrial society cannot be reformed. It must be destroyed by a revolution (although not necessarily a violent one). Otherwise, the system will begin to modify human beings by genetic engineering, since only a changed human nature can possibly survive in a more centralized, totalitarian and robotized society. This will lead to a global dictatorship of one kind or another. The author hopes that the system will start to break down by itself long before that, and this will make it possible for revolutionaries to increase social tensions and thus hasten the system's downfall.

The Manifesto is surprisingly non-dogmatic in its approach to possible lines of future development. It doesn't even predict an imminent disaster, but says that the collapse may still take 40 to 100 years. It also describes a possible situation in which people will come to accept even more technology, ultimately becoming completely dependent on intelligent machines! One of the points of the manifesto is to argue that history and social change are unpredictable. Thus, Kaczynski never proposes some kind of utopia of his own. Rather, he rests contended with claiming that the complete destruction of modern technology is the prerequisite for genuine human freedom.

As already mentioned, Kaczynski had killed three people by sending them mail bombs when his manifesto was published. Yet, the killings are mentioned only in passing, in this short paragraph:

>>>Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers, because it's more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we've had to kill people.>>>

Thus, the pamphlet doesn't give any insights into the personal motives or psychology of its author.

Analyzing the ideas of a terrorist feels somewhat moot, but I couldn't help noticing the contradiction between Kaczynski's opposition to collectivism, and his belief that individual freedom existed in the small groups typical of pre-modern hunters and gatherers. In reality, such societies are often highly collectivist. They have to be, since lone wolves can hardly survive in a world gone wild...

"Industrial society and its future" may be of some interest to those who study extreme Green ideas, such as deep ecology, anarcho-primitivism or perhaps hardcore survivalism. The work is also available free on-line.