The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski Quotes

“The System imposes the universal ban on violence simply because it is required to maximize the technical efficiency of the social machine: “The reason the system teaches us to be horrified at violence is that violence of any kind is dangerous to the system [because] the system requires order above all [and a population] which is docile and obedient and who don’t make trouble.”[”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“In Defense of Violence” he noted that “[m]odern middle class culture is exceptional in the degree to which it tries to suppress aggression,” despite the fact that aggression is a “normal part of the behavioural repertoire of human beings and of most other mammals.”[400] Some responsible therapists lament that among their clients, many men exhibit frighteningly low testosterone levels because the society actively deprives them of traditional opportunities to maintain high levels and shames activities which embody masculinity. This is not to suggest, of course, that acceptance of violence in pre-modern times was uniquely exhibited by men. He notes near the end of the essay that tribal warfare was common among some Native American tribes precisely because the women in the tribes tended to egg on the fighting.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“At the very end of the short essay “The Coming Revolution,” Kaczynski challenges the idea that aversion to violence can be traced back to moral virtue at all, since in many cases this is actually to be attributed to “cowardice.” It is simply one more example of oversocialization to be “horrified at physical violence,” since this reaction is not at all natural but had to be learned. It was only taught on a massive scale because a “passive and obedient” society is useful to the System. As a result, we actually have become less virtuous in the Ancient Greek sense of virtue as a trait of a good human being:[398] “the conditions of modern life are conducive to laziness, softness, and cowardice. Those who want to be revolutionaries will have to overcome these weaknesses.”[”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“One need not wait for the post-collapse future to find evidence that pacifism amounts to suicide in the absence of a just social order. Even Ward Churchill, a former college professor and self-described radical leftist, had reached the conclusion that calls for unadulterated pacifism are logically and ethically incompatible with his own stance as an indigenist Native American intellectual who seeks to seriously challenge the ongoing colonization of North America. Churchill’s essay “Pacifism as Pathology” demonstrated the naivety of thinking that every historical conflict, in retrospect, could have been solved by peaceful negotiation.[”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“In Defense of Violence,” Kacyznski noted that the System’s call to eliminate violence does not extend to itself, since it “depends on force and violence to maintain itself— that’s what the police and army are for.”[396] Of course, he clarifies that he does not advocate “indiscriminate or automatic violence” nor does he have any interest in “violence for its own sake”; in fact he acknowledges that in most situations non-violent tactics are the most effective. However, even at a purely logical level one must admit that it is just another example of Orwellian doublethink”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“His short essay “When Non-Violence is Suicide” exposed the same stupidity by portraying the following hypothetical scenario: imagine a group of small-scale farmers who had taken personal responsibility after the collapse of the System by growing their own food and trying to live peacefully. Just as they are harvesting potatoes to prepare for winter, a gang arrives at their doorstep; they seize the potatoes and eye the women for rape. The discomforting truth is that “[n]onviolence works only when you have the police to protect you. In the absence of police protection, nonviolence is very nearly the equivalent to suicide.”[395] No one really rejects all violence; rather, we have just outsourced its use to the police and the military.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“examination of Mussolini’s speeches and writings demonstrates that fascism embodied a very specific set of economic policies, political organizational principles, and even a fully-developed philosophy. Acknowledging that these exist and are worthy of examination (if nothing else, in order to see whether the term is actually being misused in almost all modern contexts) is not at all the same thing as endorsing them, yet we are prohibited by the System from investigating these matters out of the misguided belief that doing so would amount to a tacit approval of their content.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“When the Roman Empire fell apart the Romans’ small-scale technology survived because any clever village craftsman could build, for instance, a water wheel, any skilled smith could make steel by Roman methods, and so forth. But the Romans’ organization-dependent technology DID regress. Their aqueducts fell into disrepair and were never rebuilt. Their techniques of road construction were lost. The Roman system of urban sanitation was forgotten, so that not until rather recent times did the sanitation of European cities equal that of Ancient Rome.[”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“the sophisticated pottery production methodologies and facilities which thrived at the height of the Roman Empire proved utterly incapable of surviving beyond the empire’s demise, proving that “organization-dependent technology DOES regress when the social organization on which it depends breaks down.”[”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“Both of the first two chapters of Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How deal with rationally impossible objects. The first chapter exposed that the self-predicting system is impossible because such a system would have to have complete knowledge of itself in order to make a prediction, but such a prediction would in turn modify the system and shatter its claim to complete self-knowledge. The second chapter exposed that a civilization capable of intergalactic space travel is an impossible object because it would have to surpass the level of self-destruction in order to achieve the level of technological sophistication necessary to attempt such a feat. The third chapter breaks with this trend by dealing with an object which is not necessarily impossible, but whose lifespan would be so brief that action would have to be seized immediately in order to not miss the opportunity to enact lasting change before it passes away forever.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“Self-propagating systems all have a hardwired tendency to pursue short-term advantage in order to outcompete other systems’ in a context of Natural Selection, even if doing so destroys the superset of which it was a smaller part. The real paradox is that just as a civilization achieves sufficient technological sophistication to be able to attempt intergalactic space travel, it would have already advanced far enough along the trajectory of competitive behaviour to have destroyed itself or its environment. The crucial window of time between the two is therefore more like a vanishing mediator or an impossible object than something which could be achieved in reality, since achieving the ultimate technological feat requires the system to advance beyond the point of self-destruction.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“[I]n the field of complex systems, cause-to-effect relationships are very difficult to analyse: hardly ever does one given parameter depend on just one other factor. What happens is that all factors and parameters are interrelated by multiple feedback loops, the structure of which is far from obvious.[339]”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“Ellul had similarly noticed that one of the necessary effects of Technique upon human behaviour was uniform collectivization: Human activity in the technical milieu must correspond to this milieu and also must be collective. It must belong to the order of the conditioned reflex. Complete human discipline must respond to technical necessity. And as the technical milieu concerns all men, no mere handful of them but the totality of society is to be conditioned in this way. The reflex must be a collective one.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“the essence of Leftism certainly does include feelings of inferiority and oversocialization, yet these are themselves just structural features of an all-too-familiar essence: Modern Technology. Leftism cannot rebel against Modern Technology, because Leftism quite literally is Modern Technology. The powerlessness of submitting to oversocialization generates feelings of inferiority that must be projected into the hopes for a massive movement which everyone is forced to join (i.e., the universal adoption of Socialism, the universal rejection of Religion, the universal acceptance of 68 genders etc.) Yet this collectivization is simply a structural description of living under Modern Technology.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“The main reason why these values have become . . . the official values of our society is that they are useful to the industrial system. Violence is discouraged because it disrupts the functioning of the system. Racism is discouraged because ethnic conflicts also disrupt the system, and discrimination wastes the talents of minority-group members who could be useful to the system. Poverty must be ‘cured’ because the underclass causes problems for the system and contact with the underclass lowers the morale of the other classes. Women are encouraged to have careers because their talents are useful to the system and, more importantly, because by having regular jobs women become integrated into the system and tied directly to it rather than to their families. This helps to weaken family solidarity [which is also useful to the system.][285] Obviously, this is not at all to say that arguing for the opposite of these values should be preferred. The entire point is, rather, that obsessions over the currently-accepted linguistic labels by which to formulate racial, gender, and “queer” definitions (or, what amounts to the same thing, to use these terms to argue against the existence of their essences) is simply an abstract game that leaves the underlying essence of the System untouched.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“Kaczynski’s dismissal of Relativist Philosophy in the Manifesto, however, also exposes the extent to which all of this anti-essentialist relativist posturing occurs against the backdrop of one absolute standard: the need to go through the Power Process. The grand irony is that relativism is only possible in the context of one non-relativized exception, the drive for power:     Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analysing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs . . . [T]heir attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“he acknowledges that “man is a social animal, meant to live in groups” but the ideal size of these units is about 100 people. It is therefore intellectually dishonest to claim that the massive impersonal organizations which now literally span the entire globe are legitimate examples of the kind of social groups man had evolved over millions of years to live under. In the fragment, he explicitly contrasts this natural social form with the present condition to which man has been reduced: an atom in a vast social organization.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“It’s important to understand that in order to make people superfluous, machines will not have to surpass them in general intelligence but only in certain specialized kinds of intelligence. For example, the machines will not have to create or understand art, music, or literature, they will not need the ability to carry on intelligent, non-technical conversation (the “Turing Test”), they will not have to exercise tact or understand human nature, because these skills will have no application if humans are to be eliminated anyway.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“It is not a question of finding just the right level of technological intermediation which some previous civilization achieved before the balance was tipped to the clearly unacceptable level which modern industrialism exhibits today. Rather, civilization itself logically implies technology. A civilization of any kind requires a physical apparatus of tools or machines. It also requires an epistemological orientation towards discovering rationalized means to manipulate natural matter (even including human bodies) and repurpose it to artificial ends. Finally, it requires a compulsory means of social organization by which people might be retrofitted into cogs in a social machine that blots out individual identity in favour of achieving some schematic image of a massive artificial super-organism; this techno-organism will of course act in the interest of promoting its own survival and expansion with no regard for its members, each of whom would have been devalued to subordinate parts of this great monstrous whole.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“Regardless of its ultimate origin, the natural morality differs from the conventional morality in that it does not consist of explicit statements which dictate behaviour in specific contexts. Instead, the natural morality is really just a set of six principles which provide a foundation for the subject to judge given situations individually. The first principle, for example, forbids harming anyone who has not harmed or threatened to harm you. The second principle justifies self-defence.[220] The third principle encourages returning favours to those who have helped you before.[221] The fourth principle encourages the strong to have consideration for the weak. The fifth principle discourages lying. Finally, the sixth principle encourages one to keep one’s word and honour agreements to which one had committed oneself.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“In former times, for those who were willing to take serious risks, it was often possible to escape the bonds of the family, of the village, or of the feudal structures. In Medieval Western Europe, serfs ran away to become peddlers, robbers, or town-dwellers. Later, Russian peasants ran away to become Cossacks, black slaves ran away to live in the wilderness as ‘Maroons,’ and indentured servants in the West Indies ran away to become buccaneers. But in the modern world there is nowhere left to run. Wherever you go, you can be traced by your credit card, your social-security number, [and] your fingerprints. You, Mr. N., live in California. Can you get a hotel or motel room without showing your picture I.D.? You can’t survive unless you fit into a slot in the system, otherwise known as a ‘job.’ And it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a job without making your whole past history accessible to prospective employers.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“Even within many full-fledged civilizations in the past, the subject was, at the very least, theoretically free to flee from a given social context and reinvent himself in some new context.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“The family or the village was small enough so that individuals within it were not powerless. Even where all authority was theoretically vested in the paterfamilias, in practice he could not retain his power unless he listened and responded to the grievances and problems of the individual members of his family. Today, however, we are at the mercy of organizations, such as corporations, governments, and political parties, that are too large to be responsive to single individuals. These organizations leave us a great deal of latitude where harmless recreational activities are concerned, but they keep under their own control the life-and-death issues on which our existence depends. With respect to these issues, individuals are powerless.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“In the letter, he acknowledges that “anarchist” is an inherently “vague word” which must be supplemented by some explicit definition in order to distinguish his own understanding of the term from its many other unrelated applications. Fortunately, in this letter he provides just such an explicit definition of what the word meant to him. Above all, in this fragment he understands Anarchism to mean the goal of breaking society up into “very small, completely autonomous units.” Perhaps his reason for choosing the term “Anarchism” was that these units, which would seem to reflect the average size of prehistoric hunter gatherer bands, would obviously be intrinsically too small to be compatible with any of the artificial constraints and bureaucracy associated with the industrial system.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“One might argue that technical deficiency is the sole condition which would allow genuine choice to exist. It is only in a world where crude tools are not good enough to accomplish tasks without the aid of a skilled human labourer that a free subject can shoulder the burden of making real choices rather than just submit to a fate already decided in advance by an autonomous technical apparatus. Only if a minimal gap holds between an imperfect tool and a completed task (in which a skilled labourer must intervene) can the subject exist, since the subject’s realm of existence is in this space between. A machine running fully on auto-pilot destroys subjectivity by collapsing this space between tool and task into nothingness. Being qua Being transforms according to a new standard which bears no room for a thinking subject to achieve real existence.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“We use the term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the ‘fulfillment’ that they get from pursuing the goal. Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate activities. Given a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote most of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use his physical and mental faculties in a varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal X?”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“In a certain sense, the Power Process is a neutral term to describe what can only ever be actualized in one of these two modes of construal; there is no such thing as “Power Process” in itself, except as an abstraction from some instantiation taken from either the natural mode or the technological mode. In the natural mode of construal, the Power Process is actualized as freedom,”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“[O]ne learns that boredom is a disease of civilization. It seems to me that what boredom mostly is is that people have to keep themselves entertained or occupied, because if they aren’t, then certain anxieties, frustrations, discontents, and so forth, start coming to the surface, and it makes them uncomfortable. Boredom is almost non-existent once you’ve adapted to life in the woods. If you don’t have any work that needs to be done, you can sit for hours at a time just doing nothing, just listening to the birds or the wind or the silence, watching the shadows move as the sun travels, or simply looking at familiar objects. And you don’t get bored. You’re just at peace.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology

“Our society is so fatally dependent today on computers that Kaczynski’s doomsday scenario in the Manifesto is now simply taken for granted as everyday reality. He warned that someday outsourcing decision making from human minds to electronic brains would force humans into a state of constantly maintaining the machines, since turning them off even for one day would amount to suicide:”
― Chad A. Haag, The Philosophy of Ted Kaczynski: Why the Unabomber was Right about Modern Technology