Thoughts About The Unabomber’s Manifesto - Industrial Society and its Future

I spent a lot of my time in college in the computer science and electrical engineering buildings of UC Berkeley -  Soda Hall and Cory Hall.  I preferred Cory Hall because the computer room actually had windows and it was just slightly less depressing than the dungeon in Soda Hall.  I also had a locker in Cory where I kept the textbooks I borrowed from the library.  Anyway, one day I overheard someone saying that Cory is where the Unabomber AKA Ted Kaczynski sent one of his bombs and once upon a time he was a mathematics professor at UC Berkeley.  It happened before I was  born, so I didn’t think much of it.  Recently while surfing Wikipedia I somehow landed on the page about the Unabomber, and I ended up reading his manifesto titled Industrial Society and Its Future.  I am not totally done reading it, but I find myself agreeing with many of his points.  It is tragic that he felt that he had to promote his work through cold blooded murder, but I really think that he said a lot of things people are afraid to admit. So today I shall highlight a few points  in his manifesto that really stuck in my mind.

The power process - Kaczynski lays down something he calls “the power process”, which has four elements: goal, effort, attainment of goal, and autonomy.  The problem he sees is that many people do not need to exert a lot of effort to attain their goals of physical needs these days, and that brings boredom, depression, and a variety of other problems.  Another point is that many people do not have autonomy to achieve their own goals so they align with a larger organization.  One passage that really hit me was this section of paragraph 73, “An example of indirect coercion: There is no law that says we have to go to work every day and follow our employer’s orders. Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners. Hence most of us can survive only as someone else’s employee.”  I think this lack of autonomy or freedom is a big reason why so many people hate their jobs.  I don’t believe that my calling in life is to work for someone else for 40+ years, but many people think that is the correct and right path to take because they are indirectly forced to do so. Kaczynski goes on to explain how people attempt to go through the power process and why some people seem perfectly content, but I won’t discuss those details here.

We are always manipulated to want more than what we actually need - Kaczynski talks about “indirect coercion” by the media fairly early on.  He says that the advertising and marketing industries “make many people feel they need things that their grandparents never desired or even dreamed of.”  In the footnote he writes, “Is the drive for endless material acquisition really an artificial creation of the advertising and marketing industry? Certainly there is no innate human drive for material acquisition. There have been many cultures in which people have desired little material wealth beyond what was necessary to satisfy their basic physical needs (Australian aborigines, traditional Mexican peasant culture, some African cultures). On the other hand there have also been many pre-industrial cultures in which material acquisition has played an important role. So we can’t claim that today’s acquisition-oriented culture is exclusively a creation of the advertising and marketing industry. But it is clear that the advertising and marketing industry has had an important part in creating that culture. The big corporations that spend millions on advertising wouldn’t be spending that kind of money without solid proof that they were getting it back in increased sales. One member of FC met a sales manager a couple of years ago who was frank enough to tell him, ‘Our job is to make people buy things they don’t want and don’t need.’ He then described how an untrained novice could present people with the facts about a product, and make no sales at all, while a trained and experienced professional salesman would make lots of sales to the same people. This shows that people are manipulated into buying things they don’t really want.”  I think this is a point most personal finance bloggers try to preach, but I think the Unabomber is more eloquent than me in stating this observation.

The evils of technology - In a previous article about selling eggs, I expressed my fear of bioengineering, and Kazyncski shares that same concern.  He wrote in paragraph 123, “If you think that big government interferes in your life too much now, just wait till the government starts regulating the genetic constitution of your children. Such regulation will inevitably follow the introduction of genetic engineering of human beings, because the consequences of unregulated genetic engineering would be disastrous.[19]”  This is just one detail in the many ways technology could potentially limit our freedom.  Kaczynski also made the point that in the past when people lived within a natural environment the environment did not change very much and thus it provided security, but our modern society is changing rapidly because of technology.  Older workers have to be retrained and this constant change brings more stress and despair to people.  Ultimately his conclusion is that we have to absorb all the good and bad things technology brings, and it is impossible to separate the benefits and detriments.  I agree with this hypothesis because I feel that technology is changing our lives so rapidly that sometimes it is hard to keep up. I also work in a software security firm and through the training/propaganda of my own employer I have a good idea of how technology can be misused to harm others.  It is much easier for an entity like the government or a ruthless criminal to control your life through technology in present times.  So in that aspect, technology does limit freedom.

Overall, it is a pretty depressing document because I can just feel helplessness and frustration ooze out of it, but its observations about our modern society  are not without merit.  I think anyone who works in science and technology should read it and truly examine why they are doing their work. Also, anyone who is confused about their direction in life should also read it to see if their problems are simply stemming from a lack of autonomy. Kaczynski’s choice to  bomb  his fellow scientists is definitely criminally insane, but he is also brilliant in his observations.  If he didn’t kill people, perhaps he could have been a respected philosopher and mathematician akin to a modern Henry Thoreau. Then again, we are in a society where people are more interested in  the breakdowns of Britney Spears than the presidential election and Kaczynski knew this as he wrote, “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.” It is chilling to read these words, but I find it hard to argue with his logic. Would I be reading his essay if he weren’t the Unabomber?  Probably not.

Have you read the manifesto? What are your thoughts?

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