> Now, as to your current argument that these organizations have been more successful than Ted ever could have been. I want to believe they have been, yet reality does not reflect this.

They demonstrably have been. Organized NIMBY campaigns, including campaigns containing a part of illegal land occupation but no part of mailing package bombs to individuals, have shut down all manner of development, including both nuclear power plants and oil pipelines.

All the Unabomber accomplished was a lifelong stay in prison, the death of three people, and the injury of dozens more. By your strong metric, neither approach is successful. By a weaker metric, an organized campaign that doesn't include bombing people is partially successful.

It's not my strong metric. It's his strong metric. You only quoted the first part but I'll try to streamline the point.

The point is that their approach is only going to slow down the status quo, not permanently change it. Whether his approach was successful or not is besides my point. His approach was not successful, no.

However some of the criticisms he levies are valid. Which the one I'm trying to convey. That some alternative approach must be formulated that will have a lasting impact. Partial success is not a substitute for actual success. Neither is a failing approach.

"His approach was not successful, no."

According to what criteria do you make this determination?

He's in jail, and the course of history has basically gone unchanged. Development, both in the town he was living in and nationwide, has gone on.

This only makes sense if you place a limited and arbitrary timeframe on when "success" must be achieved, and what the "success" should be. Remember, the communist manifesto was published in 1848, and by your standard of "success" things more or less remained unchanged until the ideas in that manifesto culminated in the Russian Revolution of 1917--nearly 70 years later. Kaczynski understands this lag, and is quite sober and realistic about the long-term effect of ideas. This is adumbrated by the manifesto:

"If the system succeeds in acquiring sufficient control over human behavior quickly enough, it will probably survive. Otherwise it will break down. We think the issue will most likely be resolved within the next several decades, say forty to a hundred years." --Industrial Society and Its Future, paragraph 162.

Further, your statement implies an assumption which is not correct. The implication you're making is that because things have so far remain unchanged, Kaczynski's actions were therefore unjustified and/or his writings were not true. This does not follow. Just because an anti-tech revolutionary movement has not (yet) materialized and the industrial system is not (yet) under serious revolutionary threat does not invalidate the truth of Kaczynski's ideas or the validity of Kaczynski's actions. You would not be justified in implying this any more than you would be justified in claiming Galileo had no effect or was wrong because he was placed under house arrest and almost nobody believed him (at the time).

Now, when looking at the short-term (historically speaking), Kaczynski's actions have been a resounding success. The manifesto and his other works are read by millions--far far more than if they were published traditionally where they would have been buried or left obscure. You may disagree with this point given the new media technologies and their leverage. But even in that case this overlooks a far more important aspect relating to revolutionary dynamics: Kaczynski's works have established themselves as the most radical and oppositional ideas in our world today by virtue of their violent context. This has the (necessary) effect of preventing the ideas from being co-opted and keeping away mild, reformist types who are offended by the actions (which is exactly what you WANT to do in the formation of any revolutionary movement).

Mein Kampf has also been read by millions, but nobody claims Hitler's work was a resounding success. Is your criteria for success simply "Someone reads your manifesto?"

"..the Unabomber gets remembered as this struggle's John Brown, not this struggle's Abraham Lincoln."

You could be right about this. But then you could be wrong. Ideas still matter, and their particular expression still can have material impacts. Time will tell. Will Kaczynski's work inspire the sort of material, decisive impact that Martin Luther's works inspired during the Reformation's wars?? or Will Kaczynski as you say be more like John brown, while the real decisive impact will be made by those that actually organize and lead. (Just staying with your analogy). Only time will tell.

On this point you would do well to read the third chapter of "Anti-Tech Revolution." In it, Kaczynski argues for why an anti-tech revolution as he lays out would succeed and why its success would be more or less permanent while all other social revolutions and goals have failed and were fundamentally doomed to fail.

I've read him. I find his philosophy to be two things:

1) self-consistent

2) deeply misanthropic

As with so many seductive political philosophers (Rand and Hitler spring immediately to mind), he creates a framework that checks out against its own internal logic and that would work great if (a) humans behaved the way he needs them to behave for his system to work and (b) you ignore all the death and suffering his solution demands.

"(a) humans behaved the way he needs them to behave for his system to work."

This is flatly wrong. Humans aren't "needed" to behave in this system in any way other than they have always behaved throughout history. The revolutionary ideal is not to create a utopia, or to control society and human behavior, it is only to destroy the industrial system. the world that will remain will approximate the world prior to the industrial revolution: full bellies and hunger, sickness and health, greed and compassion, etc. etc. But it's a world where the biosphere and humanity are not threatened with existential destruction.

"(b) you ignore all the death and suffering his solution demands."

No need to "ignore" anything. You just have to come the the conclusion that FAR more death and destruction lays in store for humans and the biosphere if technology is allowed to continue. This is a matter of facts and logic and can be reasonably deduced. You can;t somehow shirk from your intellectual and moral responsibility to think about something simply because it's painful to think about, which is essential what your doing. Would it be wrong, for example, for the Allies to have ever considered fighting and defeating Nazi Germany because it would entail millions of people suffering, regardless of the consequences of not doing anything???

> But it's a world where the biosphere and humanity are not threatened with existential destruction.

That's unfortunately false. The technology stack needed to divert asteroids is significant; bringing humanity to a pre-industrial revolution doesn't guarantee the safety of the biosphere, it guarantees the biosphere is unmodifiable by human activity. That leaves the biosphere vulnerable to threats that humans could use technology to intervene against but will be unable to.

> No need to "ignore" anything.

If one doesn't ignore the death and suffering but instead condemns humanity to it purposefully, with the flip response "But in a technological society, people will die anyway," that's misanthropic, and that's the part where his philosophy demands humans act other than they will. Fewer humans are suffering and dying---even with the threat of climate change---in a world where we have a technology stack that can move vast resources around.

Avoiding the death of billions of people by crashing the industrial infrastructure so billions of people die is a non-solution. Practically, nobody will go for it. Philosophically, nobody should go for it; it's the solution of throwing up one's hands and saying "into Nature's good graces we should go," and Nature's graces have never been good. "Red in tooth and claw" is the moniker she tends to carry.

There's no guarantee that if we keep the industrial society, billions die to climate change. Technology gave us the power to shape the climate and (if we choose to invest the time and effort) it can give us the power to shape the climate beneficially. If we pull the technological society up by its roots and return to the pre-industrial society, billions die from starvation, disease, and natural disaster, as we are no longer able to move resources to help them.

Thank you for this discussion. Suffice it to say I think you are dead wrong here. But a debate on the points you now raise is beyond the time I have to devote now.

You're still conflating the success of a tactic in furtherance of a goal with the success of a goal.

This entire subthread has been about tactics in furtherance of an ultimate goal. From a few posts above: > They demonstrably have been. Organized NIMBY campaigns, including campaigns containing a part of illegal land occupation but no part of mailing package bombs to individuals, have shut down all manner of development, including both nuclear power plants and oil pipelines.

> All the Unabomber accomplished was a lifelong stay in prison, the death of three people, and the injury of dozens more. By your strong metric, neither approach is successful. By a weaker metric, an organized campaign that doesn't include bombing people is partially successful.

Maybe the Unabomber's ultimate goals will bear out (I sincerely doubt it for reasons I have expounded upon elsewhere in these comments), but even if they do, he didn't pull it off.

If, 300 years from now, history remembers this era as a dark time of bad technology that humanity grew out of, the Unabomber gets remembered as this struggle's John Brown, not this struggle's Abraham Lincoln.

You appear to be assuming the communist manifesto was a success due to the Russian Revolution.

The Soviet empire lasted about as much time as the time between the writing of the manifesto and its implementation by the revolutionaries (possibly less, depending on how you define the USSR's lifetime). We'll have to see how China's experiment goes (China appears to be succeeding through a combination of a culture with massive deference to authority and the fine art of mixing in enough capitalism to keep power-brokers from undermining the goals of the party in charge), but "Marx's manifesto bore successful fruit" is hardly a non-controversial statement.

But I stand by my assertion: we cannot know the future, and in the time-frame of the writing of his manifesto 'til now, the Unabomber has failed and his philosophy bore no fruit but death and a jail sentence. Perhaps he ends up a future thought-leader; I doubt it, but stranger things have happened.

"You appear to be assuming the communist manifesto was a success due to the Russian Revolution."

You've missed the point. The point is not that the communist manifesto was ultimately successful or not judging by how its ideas were implemented successfully or not. It is merely to point out that there is an expected lag between when political ideas are produced and when they have an impact and it is irrational to imply that a political idea is a failure or wrong simply because you haven't observed their implementation or impact in your lifetime. Communism ultimately failed because of the fundamental failure of the ideas in the communist manifesto. But it does not follow that therefore Kaczynski's ideas, once implemented, will also ultimately fail. They are fundamentally different sets of ideas with different potential material outcomes.

"...whether or not murder is acceptable..."

Here you're begging the question. Murder is unjustified killing, and by calling something murder before you've even fully determined the truth of the justification, your premises irrationally assume the truth of the matter.

By definition murder is not acceptable. The question is, were Kaczynski's actions "murder," and how well does this argument stand the test of reason.

This is extremely difficult, because morality is in large part determined by education and propaganda. For example, if you took someone from our time and raised him in the civil war south U.S., under that system of education and propaganda, would they see a black man's killing of his slave master because he thought it was the only way to escape as unjustified and therefore murder? This is not to say that the morality of all killing is relative! It is merely to point out that the society in which you live has a great role in determining moral justification. Was Kaczynski justified in his actions? Were the people he killed only moral from the perspective of an evil society that is destroying the earth and enslaving humanity? The answer to these questions lies in the truth value of Kaczynski's reasoning. And in this area there is very very little open and honest debate... precisely because, I think, the ideas are far too dangerous and uncomfortable.

The man mailed bombs to people who had never even met him. In a civil (intra-state) context, that's murder. By US law, I'm pretty sure there is no context in which it isn't murder (the weapon of choice precludes self-defense, since it's an unreliable delivery mechanism for targeted lethal force; there were thankfully no deaths in American Airlines Flight 444, but it indicates why a "justified killing" defense is nonsense in this context). He's not a nation-state so it's not an act of war. If he acted to change a nation's policy by his own volition via violence perpetrated on the unsuspecting, it's terrorism.

It's also an ineffective way to change policy. If my actions can cause random strangers to mail bombs to me? Well, hell, that's in the same risk radius as "I could walk out my front door and get hit by a truck." I can influence strangers, but I ultimately can't control the actions of strangers. And a stable society can't condone lone-wolf assassination or mass killing of unrelated individuals, so it will always interpret the Unabomber's strategy as antisocial and route around it.

Hypothetically, enough people using the same strategy could destabilize the society to the point it cannot defend its people and it loses legitimacy and cohesion. But that's just a "might makes right" argument, and is philosophically uninteresting (and, worth noting, could be used by the "technologists" against people like the Unabomber, so it sheds no light on moral correctness whatsoever).

I wonder, can a single man do war?

> He was killing in the name of protecting tranquility itself. Why is it that shrinking tranquility is seen as politically legitimate but protecting it is not?

It's specifically his idea of tranquility and his idea of protecting it, not the majority as you already established earlier.

> Not to argue that it's valid to mail bombs as a result of ideology but this part is disingenuous. >> instead of just letting them exist apart from himself > From his vantage point they weren't letting him exist apart from themselves.

I want to keep it from his vantage point of his tranquility being shrunk vs the majority who started showing up with the road and which are generally given political legitimacy.

My answer is that the majority just don't give a fuck about the minority, never have never will, they wanted to look at the nice water fall and didn't give a fuck about his opinion of it. Violence is the ultimate authority and the mob has ultimate control over it.

You'r quote comes to a similar conclusion but with a conspiracy twist.

> The scientists explain that the benefits of the technology are indisputable

Soap is indisputable along with vaccines because even tho thousands of people every year die from vaccines and soap millions of lives are saved from them. The benefits these technologies bring to the majority of peoples life expectancy and quality of life are indisputable in comparison to a world without these things.

> Everyone can see the existing technological society is violent, oppressive and destructive, but what can we do?

Here technology is used like some sort of magic, a scapegoat for the violent, oppressive and destructive nature of society and the natural world that we live in. We eat or get eaten this is not a result of society or technology but the natural world.

> The more INTERESTING argument is, is technological society acceptable?

There are issues with how people use technology, individuals often use technology to do unacceptable things like mail bomb people but that does not negate the good technology has done for society.

We don't make soap and build roads to piss of waterfall zen masters but to protect the majority from the destructive, oppressive, violence of the natural world and natural selection. Life expectancy has been increasing around the world the more technology we get and the majority are very accepting of this.

https://www.who.int/gho/mortality_burden_disease/life_tables....

Climate change is a problem that technology contributes to and the majority of people have changed their goals to technologies that do significantly less damage to the environment, we have made significant progress in this regard.

Our energy consumption for technology is only one part of our climate change problem there is also our food production and other areas, and here technology is being used to create new ways of getting this resource without putting the same strain on the environment. Instead of deforesting the amazon for cattle ranches maybe we could use technology to 3d print beef burgers?

He argued for a complete reversal of technology to undo everything the bad and the good. He presents a world view where nature cares for all if only we could learn to live under it, and the idea that its technology that creates the conflict in the world. The fact that conflict existed before technology and out side of humans is never considered. The fact that the majority of people use technology for the greater good while only a minority of people choose to use technology to mail bomb is never considered.

His arguments about technology and society don't make much sense until you recognise how he is using technology as a scapegoat and then it becomes clear his problem is not with technology at all. It's about the problem he has with society which manifests itself in is life specifically through technology, the road.

Technology just does what people want and what the majority of people want is often violent, destructive and oppressive, I think the more interesting question is

Is society acceptable?

When considering his manifesto against technological society it's important to remember how he acted out his manifesto, he did not target power plants, bridges, infrastructure, he didn't go after tech giants like IBM he blew up relatively small time people.

His actions show the true intention of his words.

To answer my own question no I don't think society is acceptable and when it treads on me I stand up for myself, but I'm not going start a fight with a stranger just because I can and others would. When I do start a fight I own it and the reason for it I don't blame technology or society for my actions. The unabombers actions ultimately show his words where meaningless to him.