Preamble: For a 17 years the Unabomber had alluded the FBI even after sending mail bombs which killed three and injured 23 others. In letters to the FBI, the Unabomber (Theodore Kaczynski) would refer to himself in the plural, using "we" instead of "you", and calling his imaginary terrorist group simply "FC." In April of 1995, the Unabomber threatened the New York Times that he would mail more bombs if a 35,000 word manifesto was not published by September 24th. September 18th issues of the New York Times and the Washington Post contained the Manifesto in its entirety. It was a large article on perceived woes of the Technological Revolution (often called the "Industrial Revolution" in the manifesto). On April 3, 1996, Kaczynski is arrested by the FBI near Lincoln, Montana.

Many who are not knowledgeable enough perceive Kaczynski as some sort of environmental prophet. I present here an anti-thesis to his manifesto.

My retort to Ted Kaczynski's manifesto is not of the usual form where you attack the person's character to vacuate their arguments i.e. "Kaczynski was a homicidal psychopath, therefore his ideas are bunk to start with."; or this example: "Kaczynski accuses social activists of being hostile axe-grinders, but who is the one sending bombs in the mail?" . It is just too easy to attack this man on a personal level. Instead I will argue against his manifesto in terms of its very content.

To really dissect what we might call Kaczynskianism, one must study his earlier writings as well. He has been writing anti-technology, anti-artificial intelligence papers since as early as 1971.

The best site on the net for text of the Manifesto is HERE. It is typo-free and the footnotes are included. Avoid those links of the text in its entirety.

Kaczynski makes valid points in several places. I found paragraphs 67 and 72 to be insightful and 145 to be absolutely brilliant. But there are places where he is just dead wrong. Take this simple example from paragraph 48: "All pre-industrial societies were predominantly rural." It takes little more than a high school education to form an antithesis to statements like this.

Kaczynski is a post-secondary intellectual who rattles off words like "industrial revolution" and "technological society" like a chef flipping flapjacks. But his manifesto lacks a summary statement. And not only that, it wanders aimlessly in its entirety and digresses into different debates that are unrelated to the main thesis and to each other. There are entire sections of the work that need to be removed. Further, the way Kaczynski states things is unclear in many places. He often sets short sentences off into thier own paragraph, leaving the reader wondering whether he is trying to summarize or give an example. You cannot tell clearly whether he is trying to define something or whether he is giving an opinionated commentary. Take paragraph 50, for example. While trying to describe the sources of social problems he suddenly butts in with the statement: "The conservatives are fools." While trying to define leftist psychology he suddenly refers to "Modern Leftist Philosophers" (para. 18) as if we are supposed to somehow know which particular philosophers given only the description of leftist psychology.

The most important aspect that I want to emphasize about Kaczynski is that he clearly has the industrial revolution confused with the post-war technological boom in America. The two are somehow collapsed togethor in his mind. At other times, he confuses the Industrial Revolution with the ancient invention of agriculture. The industrial revolution was a multi-continent shift in human life that affected diverse societies from the most socialist to the most capitalistic, to the most fascist. Conversely, the technological boom in America in the last half-century was a completely different phenomenon. The radical Industrial Revolution was a historical mountain compared to the mole-hill of any small political phenomenon that has happened in American life. Kaczynski's confusion is particularly pronounced in paragraph 63: "Modern man must satisfy his need for the power process largely through pursuit of the artificial needs created by the advertising and marketing industry." What does Kaczynski mean, then, by "Modern Man"? (American Man?) To assert that hostile Minority Rights Activists and the "advertising and marketing industry" are the product of the Industrial Revolution is nothing but baseless. These things are post-WWII American phenomena, not post-industrial facts.

Kaczynski claims that post-industrial life is awash is what he calls "surrogate activity" which not only refer to the rise of sports (everything from hunting to body-building) but he also covers science, religion, and the pursuit of wealth. Kaczynski's examples of lives which do not contain all these surrogate activities are particularly narrow. He can come up with examples only of subsistence farming and hunter-gatherer societies. The problem should be obvious already. Human beings had been engaging in science, religion, and sports for thousands of years PRIOR to the Industrial Revolution. By Kaczynski's definition, building a coloseum to watch people being mauled by lions is a surrogate activity. Greco-Roman wrestling is a surrogate activity. Kaczynski will simply have us ignore all of Ancient Chinese civilization, the whole of Greek antiquity, and all the entire history of the Roman Empire. In Kaczynski's universe, Michelangelo never painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Johann Sebastion Bach never composed music, William Shakespeare never wrote plays, and Galileo was never pursecuted by the Catholic Church. These things never happened, because, according to Kaczynski, art and religion did not exist before the Industrial Revolution. To Kaczynski, science is the sole and exclusive product of the Industrial Revolution, and it is only the "surrogate activity" of scientists seeking fullfullment in a psychological "power process."

Kaczynski claims the power process is ready-fullfilled for the individual by the post-industrial "system". Becuase it is already fullfilled, modern individuals suffer from wide-spread feelings of purposelessness and demoralisation. Kaczynski has made this claim, therefore the burden of proof is now on him to explain how being worked to death to build a pyramid for a deceased pharoah is "fullfilling" and "autonomous." After all, pre-industrial socities were all rural utopias, right? Furthermore, Kaczynski must explain the fullfillment ancient humans obtained from sacrificing each other to gods and engaging in head-hunting and cannabalism.

Kaczynski devotes a section to the "Motives of Science" wherein he claims that scientific research is divorced from curiosity and divorced from the welfare of humanity. The following is a quote of the entire 89th and 91st paragraphs:

"89. The same is true of scientists generally. With possible rare exceptions, their motive is neither curiosity nor a desire to benefit humanity but the need to go through the power process: to have a goal (a scientific problem to solve), to make an effort (research) and to attain the goal (solution of the problem.) Science is a surrogate activity because scientists work mainly for the fulfillment they get out of the work itself. . . .
91. Also, science and technology constitute a mass power movement, and many scientists gratify their need for power through identification with this mass movement (see paragraph 83). "

The error is clear. Kaczynski obviously has inadequate knowledge of the beginnings of science. The burden of proof is now on Kaczynski to show how his claims apply to the Copernican-Galilean Revolution. Copernicus was put to death as a heretic, and Galileo was imprisoned for apposing Aristoleanism. No early scientist could have possibly associated himself with a "mass power movement." By inserting the disclaimer "with possible rare exceptions" does not validate Kaczynski's argument. The "rare exceptions" which we are expected to ignore happen to be exactly the most important ones in all of science.

Kaczynski sometimes inserts a sudden question into his work as if the reader does not know the answer. Clearly, it is Kaczynski himself who is not knowledgeable enough to know the answer. In paragraph 88 he continues: "...Consider the case of Dr. Edward Teller, who had an obvious emotional involvement in promoting nuclear power plants.Did this involvement stem from a desire to benefit humanity? If so, then why didn't Dr. Teller get emotional about other "humanitarian" causes? If he was such a humanitarian then why did he help to develop the H-bomb? "
The answer to this question is that there is a symbiotic relationship in Modern society between politics and science. The research which scientists are expected to perform is now largely determined by political decisions. Rarely anymore do scientists berry-pick their own work. Teller developed the H-bomb because he was given funding to develop the H-bomb. The same was very true of Oppenheimer and the Manhatten Project. Given the entire manifesto, it would seem that Kaczynski would be the very candidate to recognize political motivations behind modern science. But instead, he acts as if the motives of science are hidden psychological secrets that noone has ever noticed.

Kaczynski may have made a stronger argument by showing that contemporary science is driven by the will to fame and wealth. But even this one does not stand up under heavy scrutiny. Scientists can no better predict the marketability of their new technology any better than marketing specialists. And fame is always imposed onto scientists from the outside media.

Kaczynski refers to three different kinds of loss of freedom in his work. One is an oppresive element, in which technology destroys privacy and allows the regulation of behavior by "remote organizations" (whatever those are. We are somehow expected to know.) The another is the repressive element, where people become oversocialized ("politically correct") and are inwardly driven to conformity. There are sections of the manifesto devoted to the education of children. Kaczynski warns of a future in which technocratic society has totally oppressed a completely repressed population. The doomsday scenario is analagous to the movie Gattaca. Genetically engineered people will be drugged into happiness, and otherwise brainwashed into conformity with the "system." The claim is that this is the only possible future for a technological society.

The third kind of loss of freedom defined is the loss of autonomy. Technology creates co-dependence between different orginizations and between individuals and orginizations. He refers to this as "orginization-dependent technology." Kaczynski is correct for saying that this kind of technology is dominant in post-industrial society. But in the midst of this discussion he states, "It would be much easier to build an icehouse or preserve food by drying or picking, as was done before the invention of the refrigerator." (para. 209). Obviously, it is not EASIER to dry and pick food than to use a refrigerator. What Kaczynski really meant to say is that it is more AUTONOMOUS to store food this way. Throughout the manifesto, he repeats his rejection to any kind of collectivism. This is really what Kaczynski is saying. It appears that doing things like BUYING FOOD are abhorant to him. Because engaging in these things is relying on a *gasp* "technological support system."

Kaczynski's rejection of collectivism is extremely indicative. He rejects all forms of population density, mentioning city life only to demonstrate increased crowding and stress in his thesis. (We are led to beleive that cities did not exist before the Industrial Revolution) Kaczynski seems to think that man is most happy in a rural, almost anarchist society of subsistence farming and/or hunting/gathering. Anything less would constute a "loss of freedom." Kaczynski doesn't realize, or understand, that such societies require a daily battle against the threats of being killed, robbed, or raped. Ancient measures taken against these threats constitute a history of the rise of collectivism in human life.

The remainder of the manifesto is a kind of free-association rambling about some coming revolution. It is here that we see why Kaczynski is concerned with Leftists and thier psychology. He is wondering how well such "types" will help or dissuade an anti-technology revolution. He claims they will not help due to being too hungry for power. Suddenly, his definition of Leftist explodes in scope, and he throws in the leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution, and in personalities from the French Revolution into his thesis. If this is really what he meant while referring to Leftist Types, why did he postpone the mentioning of these specific historical figures until some obscure paragraph at the end of the manifesto? On a similar note, why does Kaczynski avoid mentioning names and specifics generally? These questions should be left for more in-depth dissections of the work.

The great 20th-century logician Kurt Gödel suffered from delusional paranoia at the very end of his life. Theodore Kaczynski was a post-doctorate mathematician. A great and somber truth is that paranoia is the over-application of logic. This may help in describing Kaczynski's works. But, as before, this would be reverting to personal attacks.

To summarize my retort I will admit that there have been intellectuals who have said things both similar and far more radical than what Kaczynski has compiled. There is a twinge of Marx in some of Kazsynski's thinking, and touches of Rousseau and Fourier. But his complete lack of quoting these earlier writers demonstrates that he has read and/or understood probably none of them.