“In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.”
Given that I was starting a research project on the relationship between modern society and nature, I thought there would be no better way to ease into the reading than by checking out the manifesto of America’s most notorious pre-9/11 terrorist – Ted Kaczynski, aka FC, aka the UNABOMBER. Kaczynski blew people up to protest against an increasingly industrialised and automated society, which he viewed as impeding freedom. What would make anybody want to read the manifesto of a calculating killer today? Well, unlike a lot of serial killers and terrorists, Kaczynski was an exceptionally intelligent individual, with an IQ of 167 who made it to Harvard aged 16. So, maybe his Manifesto would reflect this apparent intellectual brilliance? Unfortunately, while Industrial Society and its Future is certainly not the rambling of a madman, it is also not very good. While I’ve no doubt he was a very capable mathematician, he’s not a particularly noteworthy social theorist.
For some reason, Kaczynski decides to bookend Industrial Society with two similar sections in which he attacks the broad and nebulous world of ‘leftism’. The arguments here, particularly in the opening passages, were absolutely dreadful, and really detracted from the later content. Kaczynski attempts to describe the psychology of leftists, in an attempt to portray them all as people with inferiority complexes who, rather than having well-meaning and compassionate intent, are motivated by self-serving and conservative interests. In reality, however, Kaczynski instead simply constructs the most ridiculous of straw men and proceeds to stab wildly with a half-hearted methodology vaguely resembling a corrupted and superficial psychoanalysis. This whole section just seems ranty and stupid. To give a taste of some of the joys to be found within: “Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly, they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men”. Or, Ted, thousands of years of patriarchy has put women in a position where the default is to be considered inferior and so they have had no choice but to prove themselves. We should be able to consign the entire section to the rubbish bin of history if only so many arguments resembling Kaczynski’s weren’t still being trumpeted around by reactionaries in contemporary debates on identity politics.
Having tackled such a dreadful first section I went into the following passages, treating the individual in modern industrial society, with even more scepticism than I had at the beginning. However, Kaczynski has obviously settled down into his comfort zone by this point and the reading is a little less painful. His core argument is that the increasing role of technology in society is increasingly infringing on human freedom. I think he is accurate if unoriginal in diagnosing some of the issues that modern society faces with technology. For example, he talks about how technology has claimed to give us freedom while actually depriving us of it. Individual pieces of technology, like cars, seem liberating, but the cumulative effect is to create new forms of behaviour that actually limit us. When we think about self-driving cars, for example, they will free us from having to drive, but they may also take our lives out of our hands in a crash situation. Even when Kaczinski is making these reasonably valid points, however, his argumentation, though highly methodical, doesn’t stand up to much analytical scrutiny.
There are a lot of small holes in his arguments but there are two core flaws for me. The first is that Kaczynski places the unjustified ethical claim that individual freedom is the ultimate good at the centre of his argument. This obsession with individualism blinds him to the possibility that collective behaviours may not be considered a negative, as well as pushing him to the belief that all people are fundamentally driven by a cynical self-interest in all their behaviour. When individual freedom is placed on a pedestal above all other virtues, any kind of social activity beyond competition on a market becomes suspect. This is clearly the wrong way to look at things. Humans are social. There are a lot of valid reasons why we may deprioritise our own freedom in order to better a group. Industrial Society, then, fails to provide any justification for its fundamentally unrealistic claims about the value of individual freedom, upon which the entire argument sits.
An even bigger issue than this, however, is that Kaczynski misidentifies the source of the perceived threat to freedom and as a result, his solution is brought into question. Kaczynski believes that the core of the problem is technology, that it is in the very character of technology that it is freedom suppressing and therefore the only way to reclaim freedom is by the total undoing of industrial society. For this to be true, he would have to demonstrate that all technology, all of the time, reduced freedom. This is something that he rejects himself when he suggests that individual technologies can seem to provide increased freedom because they complete a task more efficiently than before. He suggests that it’s technology as a whole that is the issue. This betrays the fact that what we’re actually dealing with is the systemic framework in which that technology is utilised; it is manipulated at the level of power relations to suppress rather than liberate. There is nothing inherently anti-freedom about the invention of the calculator, or the computer. The increase in productivity they bring about could easily be utilised to allow people to work fewer hours and have greater freedom. It’s our economic system that ensures this increased productivity just means individuals are given more work to do and organisations make greater profits. Modern technology actually provides the potential for unprecedented levels of freedom. Rather than seeking to destroy it, we should seek to change the ideologies that command it to be destructive of nature and encroaching on freedom.
Overall, Kaczynski’s arguments were occasionally interesting, occasionally dross, and never strong enough to stand up to scrutiny. Any of the valid points he makes have been made elsewhere and better, and his solution is not only absurd but impossible. He was definitely right that nobody would have paid attention to his work if he hadn’t killed people. This isn’t because of some grand conspiracy, however. It’s simply because it’s not very good.
J D Clough 