"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.
