Curious why this was flagged. I read the posting guidelines and didn’t find anything it clearly violates
Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto [pdf]
31–40 of 45 posts
Re: Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto [pdf]
#32It is quite plausible that cruel psychological experiments, that were carried out on Ted Kaczynski, turned him into a terrorist: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard...
Alston Chase, the author of the Atlantic article, appears in this radiolab episode
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91721...
Re: Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto [pdf]
#33I remember reading this as a young person and being impressed by how intellectual it sounded. Reading it as an adult, it now sounds like a dressed-up rant from your uncle who spends far too much time watching a certain cable news network.
Ted Kaczynski offered a critique of 'leftism' that still seems to be accurate. The 'Bay Area Liberal' stereotype that prioritizes defense of victims over all other matters.. well we've definitely seen explosions in that arena. The larger picture of technology taking over society seems to be accurate as well. It was only 13 years ago when we got the iphone, it's bizarre to think that people didn't stare at their phone…
> Ted Kaczynski offered a critique of 'leftism' that still seems to be accurate.
I highly doubt that's his own analysis, rather it's Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morality" dressed up in a more modern vernacular.
Re: Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto [pdf]
#34I remember reading this as a young person and being impressed by how intellectual it sounded. Reading it as an adult, it now sounds like a dressed-up rant from your uncle who spends far too much time watching a certain cable news network.
Ted Kaczynski offered a critique of 'leftism' that still seems to be accurate. The 'Bay Area Liberal' stereotype that prioritizes defense of victims over all other matters.. well we've definitely seen explosions in that arena. The larger picture of technology taking over society seems to be accurate as well. It was only 13 years ago when we got the iphone, it's bizarre to think that people didn't stare at their phone…
> Ted Kaczynski offered a critique of 'leftism' that still seems to be accurate.
Funny, I totally disagree and it looks to me like he was constructing an elaborate strawman. People made the same sorts of generalizations about certain ethnic groups in the past, and I felt like he was doing the same thing and lazily running sed 's/jews/leftists'.
Re: Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto [pdf]
#35I remember reading this as a young person and being impressed by how intellectual it sounded. Reading it as an adult, it now sounds like a dressed-up rant from your uncle who spends far too much time watching a certain cable news network.
Yeah, have to admit that having heard Kaczynski's manifesto was actually thoughtful and insightful and not at all what you'd expect from someone most known for committing atrocities, I wasn't expecting the first part to be dedicated to a cranky subreddit level of analysis of 'leftist' thought. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. YAWN. Putting parenthical (We do not mean to suggest that women, Indians, etc. ARE inferior;
we are only making a point about leftist psychology.) comments in to show how much more open-minded he is than the libs he's owning (because, he argues there's no reason the left could display interest in helping minorities other than believing minorities are inferior). YAWN
Frankly that sort of political ranting is exactly what you'd expect to find in the 'manifesto' of somebody better known for violent crime (as well as the writings of a lot of people who aren't). There seems to be an awful lot of projection going on in there, for a start, but even that angle probably isn't particularly insightful since non-sociopaths and even people who mostly come across as pretty well-adjusted and happy also write this sort of generalization about their political adversaries.
Re: Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto [pdf]
#36To summarize, Ted's main point is that man has been alienated from our "true nature" as a result of industrialization, and this is making us sad. He argues that we should leave the harmful industrialized world, and return to nature, which is exactly what he did in a cabin in Montana. This specific style of anti-modernity (industrialization leads to alienation) is at least as old as Rilke[1], who wrote about it extens…
I’d say you can go back to Blake’s “dark satanic mills” for some of those critiques. The anti-industrialist strain of Romanticism is almost as old as industrialism itself.
Re: Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto [pdf]
#37I always appreciated Ted's insight into the bad things about technology. His manifesto is well written and makes a strong case. However, I could never understand how he gets from pointing out that technology has some harmful side-effects, to believing that his conclusion is a justifiable rationale for murdering people.
In the document he specifically says that he killed people to get attention for his manifesto.
One wonders whether that only occurred to him after the bombings had begun
Re: Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto [pdf]
#38He was smart (if unstable) but overall a huge pessimist. Technology has reduced suffering to an incredible degree. It's created some of its own suffering, sure, but overall I'd much rather live today than any time in the past. And 100 years from now we'll have created a world with incredibly low amount of suffering. It's inevitable if we don't suffer a major setback like nuclear war. He seemed depressed and pessimist…
I agree he was a chronic pessimist, world is overall a better place than it used to be.I hope the trend will keep on, especially for the weakest and poorest.op
Just one point with suffering - too little makes us 'weak' when we inevitably have to face it at some point, in some amount. I still prefer it this way, but as with everything, there are some drawbacks.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
Soon mankind will be tested due to covid pretty harshly I believe.
Re: Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto [pdf]
#39I was 6 years old when this document was released to the public. It was written by a man who mailed bombs to people, killing several. He mailed this document to many large newspapers, demanding they publish it under the threat of further acts of terrorism. Eventually, law enforcement pushed for publication by the New York Times and the Washington Post, hoping that a member of the public could help identify the author. In 1996, about half a year after its publication, Kaczynsky was arrested.
It seems to me that, given all of this, we have something of a moral obligation to ignore this document. The ideas it contains are quite widespread; you can read them elsewhere. Of course you must listen to your own conscience, but how is publicizing this not giving a murderous terrorist exactly what he wanted?
Re: Ted Kaczynski's Manifesto [pdf]
#40He was smart (if unstable) but overall a huge pessimist. Technology has reduced suffering to an incredible degree. It's created some of its own suffering, sure, but overall I'd much rather live today than any time in the past. And 100 years from now we'll have created a world with incredibly low amount of suffering. It's inevitable if we don't suffer a major setback like nuclear war. He seemed depressed and pessimist…
Suffering has a lot to do with the current psychological state of our minds and how our surroundings affect our subjective perception.
You are thinking in terms of materialistic well-being which plays only a part of the whole well-being we can achieve.
The thing is that right now, even if you are in the "comfort zone" of the society it doesn't mean you will feel happy, fulfilled and in a balanced state of mind, because we are all filled with those destructive/unbalanced parts of our "cultural DNA" that together with our subjective destructive/unbalanced behavior will make the whole life experience not that much fulfilling the way we know it can be.
Particularly, i think our societies are "culturally sick" in a lot of areas and there's a lot of evidence of our downfall in those areas.
I can bet with you that i life in a remote tribe in Africa for instance would feel much more fulfilling and happy than a life in our society surrounded with material comfort and tech gadgets that make our lives more bearable.
I wonder if we are actually inclined to invent those stuff, because we feel miserable and we think that they will remedy this problem at least a little bit (guy invent a social network because he feel lonely).
Sure, the answer is not to go back and live in tribes, but i wonder what we have lost in the way. This civilization where at the same time, we are so proud of, but is also the reason we will feel more sadness than happiness, because in the end our problem is not in how materially safe we are, but how contempt we feel with our current situation.
Also lets not forget how about making more things, we ended up in a state where we need more things to feel happiness in our current cultural status quo.
Wanting things and not being able to have them, is part of our misery, and we are always creating new things so people will have the urge to desire them.
The paradox is that the material comfort gives you with one hand, and take with the other.
On the other hand, i think we are having better lives, because we are becoming more civilized as a whole and more educated and sophisticated. The social sphere and how we relate to others is a key part to our happiness.
How much tech and progress are helping us to achieve this? (and other possible side-effects that actually contribute to our mood balance)