Comment by LatteLazy
3 years ago
I feel very sympathetic to his complaints about society. But he offers no solutions that would not embarrass a 4 year old. He wanted people, all people everywhere to give up tech. And he never bothered to address either of the obvious issues with this: (a) that whoever didn't would have a huge military advantage over those that did and would soon be in charge and (b) that we can only stay alive in the numbers we currently have because of modern agriculture so we'd need to starve a lot of people to death.
It's sad that he could so well summarise the problem AND offer no, even remotely workable, solution.
<Replies to own comment as it is too late to edit>
There was a reply here correcting me and saying Kaczynski DID in fact have a plan: to target weak points of the modern industrial economy, disable them in a co-ordinated attack, and then rely on the fact we would then lack the tech to do high tech work and have already used the resources available with low tech tools (eg we have mostly exhausted the easy-to-access mineral deposits, so removing our ability to access deeper ones would force humanity back to pre-industrial life.
I have only come across this idea in Atwood's Oryx and Crake (fiction). I wondered if it (a) true as an idea (the examples I've seen are very unconvincing) and (b) what he was actually proposing...
A bit like Marx in that regard.
Or anarchists or whatever other ideology you have.
Great problem descriptions, unworkable solutions. So far, no one has created a well working social order from first principles.
... and is unlikely to ever create one, either. First principles assume ability to understand. I'm not sure humans understand (or have the ability to understand in the future) emerging behavior in groups of humans. And the hubris to believe we can often results in violence because it's one of the simpler AND effective ways to make someone do what you think they should do.
I would have said Libertarians