If you believe good boy Teddy is correct, doesn't that mean huge swathes of philosophy are based on an incorrect premise that how humans behave, feel and experience life in post industrial society is normal and not completely unnatural and fucked up? Not all of it, but huge chunks would just be invalidated by a return to nature and the subsequent improvement to mental wellbeing, social cohesion etc. that would result from that.
Like if technological advancement at an insane rate is the disease, philosophy is the doctor diagnosing this, and the return to nature is the cure.
I don't think anyone in Uncle Ted's camp thinks that we will be swinging from trees in a generation. I think it's more about breaking the technological momentum long enough to figure out how to responsibly utilize it. Added benefit if we never return to this level
Colton Nelson
I don't see how technology could ever be responsibly used.
If you progress past the point where your basic necessities (food, warmth, shelter, water) are trivial, then that's where the problems begin.
Julian Young
Well, I don't really care so long as I can burn some factories down and kill loggers. Fuck this shit. Why can't it stop already?
Xavier Hernandez
Cringe.
Nicholas Cox
Cool statement
Oliver Gonzalez
Kaczynski's analysis of non-industrial and non-agricultural societies being superior to the modern world rests on a fundamental ignorance of human history. While he rightly criticized the idealized view of primitive hunter-gatherer societies as being communal utopias of equality, cooperation, and pacifism, he simultaneously indulged in the equally fallacious view that they were libertarian utopias where freedom and rugged individualism reigned. Even if one ignores questions over standards of living, child mortality, and disease, both viewpoints fly in the face of the actual history of ancient empires, which used brutal coercion to crush the nomadic hunter-gatherers and consolidate the power of their leaders. None of these early empires came out of nowhere; rather, they grew out of hunter-gatherer tribes who discovered some good land with food in enough abundance that it was worthwhile to settle down there permanently, start cultivating the land to maximize the food they were able to hunt and gather (inventing agriculture and animal husbandry in the process), and kick off any interlopers who tried to take "their" food and land (inventing armies and war in the process). A return to primitive society would soon entail a return to primitive, tyrannical forms of governance as a result, not a new age of liberty.
Likewise, his analysis glosses over the fact that a mass die-off would be the guaranteed end result of abandoning industrial civilization. Earth's population is supported almost entirely by agriculture, even before the Green Revolution of the 20th century and its resultant population explosion. If industrial civilization were to collapse, billions of people would starve to death, but not before turning against each other for food and resources, potentially killing billions more. All this comes before the prospect of nuclear weapons, be they controlled by governments or in the hands of terrorists, enters the mix, with the potential to finish the job of humanity's self-destruction. Of course, for those of a hard green and/or Malthusian persuasion who believe that Earth is already overpopulated, the death of most of humanity would not necessarily be seen as a bad thing
Jonathan Bell
>rationalwiki Wow based and save
Josiah Phillips
>reading the meme bomber Try Paul Shepard
Logan Watson
Because the system is self correcting and operates independently of any one person. The only way it will stop is if 99% of humanity is suddenly wiped off the face of the earth.
James Sanchez
>Kaczynskitards' first reaction to this is invariably to sperg out about the website from which it was taken >completely incapable of addressing the arguments More proof that you retards are just following a meme philosopher.
Samuel Smith
That's not necessarily true. The vast majority of the population relies on the "system" to survive. For example the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa. There is no reason that continent should have 1+ billion people. But the same can be said for all the world. What I'm getting at is if the means are disrupted, then things will correct. You don't have to kill anyone directly to improve the situation. A large enough economic depression could be enough, but that coupled with directed attacks on energy extraction/production facilities and generic industrial sites (globally) would certainly help.
Leo Richardson
If humanity is reduced to 1,000,000 people worldwide, there won't be any empires.
The discovery of agriculture is what facilitated the population to boom to 7 billion. If you somehow figured out a way to permanently stop agriculture or prevent people from discovering it, then we wouldn't go down the same path obviously.
Joshua Smith
I don't like Ted or his cancerous fans. I wholly agree with that anons statement. you're a bore and a retard XOXO, fuck yourself :>
Caleb Butler
Ok >A return to primitive society would soon entail a return to primitive, tyrannical forms of governance as a result, not a new age of liberty. Never a stated concern of mine, but also not necessarily true. Either way, I want to halt the technological phenomenon for the sake of people, not because of some political ideology i.e. Uncle Ted's anarchists leanings. >Likewise, his analysis glosses over the fact that a mass die-off would be the guaranteed end result of abandoning industrial civilization. As always, non-issue. >All this comes before the prospect of nuclear weapons, be they controlled by governments or in the hands of terrorists, enters the mix, with the potential to finish the job of humanity's self-destruction. Overstated risk + non-issue What next, my man?
Isaac Gutierrez
>If humanity is reduced to 1,000,000 people worldwide, there won't be any empires. Hands down the most retarded thing I have read all year.
Landon Garcia
>A large enough economic depression could be enough, but that coupled with directed attacks on energy extraction/production facilities and generic industrial sites (globally) would certainly help. This would just lead to billions of people dying anyway, whether you killed them or not.
Cooper Nelson
>I want to halt the technological phenomenon for the sake of people >but the vast majority of the world dying in slow and painful ways is a non-issue This is the level of cognitive dissonance Kaczynskitards are on
Parker Johnson
Yes, but you wouldn't have to kill them first, which is what I gleamed from that post. Yes, people had to die.
Ethan Hill
Struggle breeds meaning and meaning is not painful. Try again
Brandon Adams
Why?
There's 195 countries in the world, some a lot more dense population wise than others but lets say you split 1,000,000 people across 195 nations. That's 3,000ish people per nation. Now you spread those 3,000 out intro tribes of 50 and you have a nation consisting of 50 people seperated from neighbouring tribes of 50 people by dozens of miles, and even if one tribe conquered their entire nation that's still just 3,000 people.
You're gonna conquer anything more than a grassy hill with 3,000 people? When probably not even 1500 of them are fighting men? Get a grip.
Ian Ward
>been starving for weeks >know for a fact there is not enough food available in my immediate community for any more than a small fraction to survive >know for a fact that I will die soon >also, people have started killing each other over slices of bread >"this sure is better than the nightmare of industrial society! I'm so glad my life has had meaning now!"
Carson Williams
>Implying the biosphere collapsing under the global industrial society won't inevitably lead to the rapid die off most people (and non-humans) What's next? Are you going to tell me everything is fine and we shouldn't be worried about the ever accelerating mass extinction?
Chase Nguyen
>implying the natural food levels wouldn't re-coup after a few years I'm sorry you don't know how to kill a deer or pick berries I guess hunter-gatherers never existed either
Luis Taylor
No, dude, just get excited for the next season of Rorty and Mick and the new IPhone release. I'm cumming just thinking about them!
Nathan Bennett
Have you even read Kaczynski? He argues that a shorter life is better for people anyways.
This. In a nutshell. The ideas of course are not new (...well, except for those perhaps in "Anti-Tech Revolution." That truly is a groundbreaking work of social grand-theory.) But it is the power, force, logic, and clarity with which he has articulated them and combined them all.
This is ((part)) of the reason he is so vilified--he is a threat to all established social powers including academic work.
BTW, that photo is taken in front of Berkeley's library, not Harvard. That photo is from when he was a professor at Berkeley.
He explicitly says there's no reform possible and the only solution is to blow the system the fuck up
Jaxon James
What is this meant to prove?
The estimate of the start of agriculture is 9500BC, before then the population according to that link is 2m-10m. The oldest known empire started in 2300BC, that's 7200 years AFTER the discovery of agriculture.
Carter Diaz
That's actually not what he argues. He isn't positively FOR a shorter life. He's saying that the length of hunter/gatherer life extracting child mortality was very close to modern life, and if you further adjust for all the unhappiness, boredom, and slavish time-wasting hours living in modern life vs. primitive life, primitive lives are far far longer in terms of satisfying life-time. He's also saying that lower child mortality of modern life has lead to the overpopulation of the planet which lowers the quality of life of everyone and threatens to destroy the biosphere FOR ALL TIME. In addition to causing a number of genetic problems for the species further lowering quality of life. He also argues that there is no guarantee that the "life expectancy" as it is defined by modern science will continue to increase. Since technological growth is inherently outside of rational prediction and control, it is possible we will see a reduction in this life expectancy in the future of industrial countries. We are already seeing great apathy when it comes to the elderly, and homeless etc., and life expectancy is actually starting to decrease in many modern countries. I'm oversimplifying for the sake of brevity.
Dominic Rivera
>he is a threat to all established social powers including academic work And he knew it. It's funny how one of the groups he places the most blame on is his own people, academics. Plenty of them agreed with what he said but quietly let it slip into history because they knew they'd be first on the chopping block.
Isaac Lewis
This. Kaczynski is adamant that industrial society can collapse because of it's complexity and tightly-coupled nature and other reasons, but Kaczynski also acknowledges that there is no conceivable way to get rid of civilization since civilization rests on primitive individual-dependent technology and there is no conceivable way of preventing individuals from using primitive technology without a world-wide policing that industrial society would entail.
So primitivism is an IDEAL, and it will likely be achievable post collapse in areas unsuitable to agriculture etc., but civilization will likely remain as pockets spread around much like pre-modern times.
Dominic Howard
Oh, never mind. I misread your first post as 1 billion rather than 1 million. That makes much more sense. But there is no way the world population is going to reduce by that much, and anyway there is no way to prevent people from discovering agriculture to prevent the population from growing again.
Colton Roberts
good point. and I like the way you say that. You should write for his publisher! lol
Julian Collins
Yes, and he says that he's concerned with the current iteration of the industrial system, and that if it props up again in the future (after the collapse), it will have to be dealt with by the people living then. Not that it's very likely that it will reboot since the fossil fuels and other resources needed are mostly impossible to get without industrialization.
>civilization will likely remain as pockets spread around much like pre-modern times Fine by me, agrarianism/pastoralism > primitivism tbqh
Lincoln Robinson
Unless an extinction level event happens that sets us so far back that even having the technology in living memory won't be of any use and by the time we recover enough to pursue it again, so much time would have passed the knowledge would be forgotten/so patchwork as to be useless.
Kevin Howard
>every human is in a jail >escape will kill off most humanity, survivors will likely be better off >< to escape or not to? I'd approach a competent critique by asking if survivors will in fact be better off or not, or that if technology itself is the 'jail'. /pol/ identifies the problem as jews using technology and political positions maliciously, with full intent, causing the 'jail'. /leftypol/ identifies the problem as rich class using technology and political positions maliciously or indifferently enough to cause the 'jail'.
>agrarianism/pastoralism > primitivism Get a-load of this smoothbrain
Landon Russell
Loincloths are gay, tilling the soil is based
Landon Scott
>Toiling away in fields your whole life, at the mercy of whatever roving band of cunts comes along vs >Roaming the wilds with your tribe, always having your back and hunting, eating and sleeping together Hmmmmmm
Joseph Foster
>Destroying the soil and simplifying your ecosystem to a pool of crops/pests/weeds, dying of famine(hunter gathers almost never go hungry for long), and living in a stratified economy based on production as opposed to the gift-giving based economy of hunting and gathering is based. Read Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene; and see how wrong you actually are.
Ethan Perez
It'd be interesting to know what the world looked like before farming and cities took over huge amounts of land. I live in the UK and pretty much every field within eyesight is used for farming or grazing, to see real wild land you have to go really far out of the way of civilisation.
Imagine how plentiful food was before the land was scarred like this.
Joshua Diaz
While pleasant to look at, un-cultivated land isn't an unlimited resource for food. In my experience in other, less developed countries, these places are a pain to get around in, and difficult to survive in.
Why would people give up a plentiful food supply and replace it with farming?
Nolan Edwards
>Why would people give up a plentiful food supply and replace it with farming? Because farming yielded way more food, so much so you had a surplus. When I say "plentiful" I mean you could just exist comfortably off plants and animals just out there in the wild if you knew where to look. Try doing that today in a developed country, you'll starve to death.
Jose Lopez
I will.
Jace Russell
People who say things like: >I found his manifesto very interesting, and it makes a lot of sense >He raises many good points >Ted was right about everything Etc. Then proceed to do nothing, are no better than those who know nothing about him.
Ted threads are never anything more than circlejerking.
PSA: this poster is an FBI agent attempting to entrap you to bragging about your activism so they can lock you away for 40 years on "terrorism" charges. Ignore this COINTELPRO glowie.
Carson Long
>Why would people give up a plentiful food supply and replace it with farming?
Hunting and Gathering is constant work all year to eat and survive. Its sometimes depends how much but because you cant store a surplus or are limited in carrying/preserving food you are required to hunt and gather constantly even if its relative to how much you gotta work. Wich mostly depends on your luck of encountering animals/stuff to eat as you always change location.
When you farm you work hard for a half a year where you ("usually) gain a shitton of food to relax in the rest of your year. Aka your surplus wich you store and live on untill you will do it again. Or if you make more you could let people not be farmers but instead specialise in roles to make better stuff like better equipment. But while you have a comfy surplus and the primitive lads got no luck getting food in the wild you perhaps can get folk who raid you and steal your shit. Then you take revenge with those neatly improved tools and beat the primitive lads and suddenly have a bunce of prisoners of war wich you could use to do your farming. And suddenly you can chill all year.
Untill some other king wants your land and surplus.
Daniel Wright
you're right. But the truth is I am so socially inept that I don't know how to help. The closest organization I know of Deep green resistance, but it naturally is suspect and doesn't seem to do anything. Lone wolf action is stupid. What is the best step? Recruiting university kids? I honestly don't know what to do
Blake Miller
>Then proceed to do nothing Because some people agree with him but disagree that things can be fixed, some people agree and are too scared of rotting in prison for 50+ years if they fail, some people agree but just don't care enough to do anything.
If you do what Ted did and commit acts of intense violence to stir up revolution, you're commiting to throwing away whatever scraps of comfort you have, whatever people you care about, whatever plans you had for you future if you follow in his footsteps you're commiting to a suicide mission. Not many people have the right mix of crazy, drive, suffering and intelligence to do it.
Look what it took to bring Ted to that point, decades of social rejection and isolation, decades of suffering, decades of mulling it all over in his head until he came up with his manifesto. Everything that happened in his life all leading to that one decision.
Are you implying you're not just as much of a coward as the rest of us?
There are actually a bunce of us around and there has been some attempts at active organising wich all have turned out to be failures. Generally cause there are lots of idiots (always right/left wingers!!!), paranoia with legality, incompetence, lack of commitment and people having no time. Actual suitable "revolutionaries" who know their shit are extremely rare or non existant.
Christopher Murphy
The only way it would ever work is independent agents all united under one banner who never interact with each other but act in sync to spark revolution.
A man like that comes along once in a generation, you'd need at least 10 acting at the same time to have any progress at all.
Oliver Edwards
Thats Horizontal Informal Organisation, its how ELF, ALF, CCF, FAI, ITS operate. Its a safest way to organise but its not what Ted suggests (i believe) in anti tech revolution wich is a bit of a platformist/vangaurd type hierarchal organisation that DGR uses.
The best awnsers honestly are in Teds previouse work commenting on praxis like the texts. "Suggestions for Earth First!ers from FC", "Ted Kaczynski on Individualists Tending Toward Savagery (ITS)" and the essays on revolution and "hit it where it hurts" in technological slavery. Study this deeply with a pragmatic mindset and avoid interacting with political minded people who like Ted. (left/right wingers)
