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Theodore Kaczynski Quotes

phattonez

phattonez

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It's an old subject, but have you ever read Industrial Society and Its Future? It's no justification for the bombings, but they're certainly subjects worth thinking about:

In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one's physical needs.

A theme that appears repeatedly in the writings of the social critics of the second half of the 20th century is the sense of purposelessness that afflicts many people in modern society.

Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. It is well known that the rate of clinical depression had been greatly increasing in recent decades. We believe that this is due to disruption of the power process, as explained in paragraphs 59-76. But even if we are wrong, the increasing rate of depression is certainly the result of SOME conditions that exist in today's society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.
 
Not knocking your thread per se, but there are plenty of other non-homicidal nut job scholars/authors with somewhat similar views to read. Kaczynski’s theories about post industrial America aren’t unique.
 
I think the increased rates of depression has more to do with how isolated individuals are in modern society. There was more community in the past. You'll find less depression in poor communities where people live closely with their neighbors. In wealthy developed countries people don't know their neighbors. They don't go to church so they don't have spiritual support either.
 
We're the richest most powerful country in the world, hell of all time. Our Unemployment is under 4%, The economy has been humming along for 10+ years.

BUT we are a pitiful 19th on the happiness index.. Canada, our very close neighbor who shares a huge border with us, and a language.. Ranks 10 full points ahead of us, 9th..

Weekly someone picks up a gun and goes to a school, or mall, or work place and kills a bunch of people.. But then we point at countries like the Dominican Republic and call them 3rd world?

Something is very wrong with our society. I'm sure it's more than 1 reason. We work too hard, we can't make ends meet no matter how hard we work, political divide, college cost, health care cost, and on and on..

No wonder we have an serious drug crisis.
 
RaleBulgarian said:
Not knocking your thread per se, but there are plenty of other non-homicidal nut job scholars/authors with somewhat similar views to read. Kaczynski’s theories about post industrial America aren’t unique.
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That is true, but he certainly gets more attention because of that.
 
SonOfDaedalus said:
I think the increased rates of depression has more to do with how isolated individuals are in modern society. There was more community in the past. You'll find less depression in poor communities where people live closely with their neighbors. In wealthy developed countries people don't know their neighbors. They don't go to church so they don't have spiritual support either.
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Being part of a community is, I believe, the single biggest contributor to any person’s happiness. Your comment on poor communities reminded me of people I saw when traveling to some really poor countries.

I’m not suggesting their conditions didn’t have any effect on their satisfaction/happiness, but to an outsider looking in, it seemed that many were pretty happy overall. Maybe it was because they didn’t know how tough they had it compared to us, or maybe they didn’t much care about living like us.
 
RaleBulgarian said:
I’m not suggesting their conditions didn’t have any effect on their satisfaction/happiness, but to an outsider looking in, it seemed that many were pretty happy overall. Maybe it was because they didn’t know how tough they had it compared to us, or maybe they didn’t much care about living like us.
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Sebastian Junger in his book Tribe briefly touched on this. Although his main focus was on military veterans, he was inclined to suggest that industrial and post-industrial societies inevitably lead to higher rates of depression and such simply because people have more time to ponder existential questions like what they're doing with their lives, instead of spending their time trying to secure their next meal or shelter. Of course, it's only through the advancement of industry and technology that we have such comforts and amnesties such as modern medicine, but clearly there is a drawback.
 
Jredbaron96 said:
Sebastian Junger in his book Tribe briefly touched on this. Although his main focus was on military veterans, he was inclined to suggest that industrial and post-industrial societies inevitably lead to higher rates of depression and such simply because people have more time to ponder existential questions like what they're doing with their lives, instead of spending their time trying to secure their next meal or shelter. Of course, it's only through the advancement of industry and technology that we have such comforts and amnesties such as modern medicine, but clearly there is a drawback.
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Our conditioned minds.
 
RaleBulgarian said:
Our conditioned minds.
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It's funny how often assumptions we make turn out to be wrong because we've been led to believe them. Most adults today would tell you that kids these days are ruder, more violent, and more disrespectful than in the past.

In reality, kids today take less risks, start less fights, get in trouble less, smoke less, drink less, and teen pregnancy and teen abortion rates are low. They're doing less drugs (though vaping more), and aren't drinking and driving as much. Of course there are drawbacks too; they're fatter and have less friends. It's a mixed bag.
 
RaleBulgarian said:
Being part of a community is, I believe, the single biggest contributor to any person’s happiness. Your comment on poor communities reminded me of people I saw when traveling to some really poor countries.

I’m not suggesting their conditions didn’t have any effect on their satisfaction/happiness, but to an outsider looking in, it seemed that many were pretty happy overall. Maybe it was because they didn’t know how tough they had it compared to us, or maybe they didn’t much care about living like us.
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I've been to very poor countries too. What I noticed is that they didn't have nice things and lived in small homes. But they were a community. They laughed and danced. They seemed happier than most Americans. The "vibe" is completely different.

You don't know your neighbors. Your wife divorced you and took the kids. You're getting older. You become depressed and start sending mail bombs and writing manifestos.
 
phattonez said:
It's an old subject, but have you ever read Industrial Society and Its Future? It's no justification for the bombings, but they're certainly subjects worth thinking about:

In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one's physical needs.

A theme that appears repeatedly in the writings of the social critics of the second half of the 20th century is the sense of purposelessness that afflicts many people in modern society.

Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. It is well known that the rate of clinical depression had been greatly increasing in recent decades. We believe that this is due to disruption of the power process, as explained in paragraphs 59-76. But even if we are wrong, the increasing rate of depression is certainly the result of SOME conditions that exist in today's society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.
Click to expand...
Not too different from Herbert Marcuse, who believed Psychiatry was just an extension of Capitalist production and consumption cycles.
 
Jredbaron96 said:
Sebastian Junger in his book Tribe briefly touched on this. Although his main focus was on military veterans, he was inclined to suggest that industrial and post-industrial societies inevitably lead to higher rates of depression and such simply because people have more time to ponder existential questions like what they're doing with their lives, instead of spending their time trying to secure their next meal or shelter. Of course, it's only through the advancement of industry and technology that we have such comforts and amnesties such as modern medicine, but clearly there is a drawback.
Click to expand...

Maybe compared to the typical worker at the advent of Industrialization, but certainly not before then. The Medieval peasant had far more free time than today's workers.
 
phattonez said:
Maybe compared to the typical worker at the advent of Industrialization, but certainly not before then. The Medieval peasant had far more free time than today's workers.
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And hunter-gatherers had more leisure time than peasants.
 
Jredbaron96 said:
And hunter-gatherers had more leisure time than peasants.
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They sure did. But do we have any evidence that these generations were more depressed than this one?
 
phattonez said:
They sure did. But do we have any evidence that these generations were more depressed than this one?
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We'll never know since the means of gathering that information simply don't exist.

Of course, people throughout all of history have had depression. How much of it would've varied depending on the time and place; Europe in the 5th Century probably had a lot more depression than say the Islamic world in the 9th Century.
 
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