Was Unabomber right? Will civilization collapse?

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Ever since I first read Industrial Society and its Future. By Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski I haven't been able to get it out of my mind. I've always had the feeling that all the time that all the other political peope were telling me too-good-to-be-true "just be optimistic" stories. When I read Industrial Society and its Future I felt like I was finally reading an honest description of the world, without any excessive optimism. I don't see anything factually wrong with it either. My family and friends don't like to talk about it so I've been forced to discuss it here.

In Industrial Society and its Future, Unabomber points out that we humans are rapidly using up our natural resources. He also points out that as tecnology advances, humans are being put in environments further and further from what man evolved to live in and that the mental stress this puts on people is creating larger and larger numbers of people on welfare and youth gangs. From this he predicts that our society will come close to total collapse sometime in this century.

He predicts that once society nears collapse, one of two things will happen. The first option is that socitey will collapse entirely - sending humanity into a primitive state. The second is that the state and the medical industry will prevent the collapse in the only way possible - by genetically engineering the populus in a herd of neurologically homogenous, mindless sheeple. He makes no secret thoughout the whole thing of his belief that whenever technology advances, the government and the rich use it to take away freedom a bit more.

Near the end of the essay, Unabomber gives tips on how to make sure the collapse happens once it is close to happening as he prefers the idea of a primitive world to a dystopian one.

The entire text of Unabombers essay can be read here
http://cyber.eserver.org/unabom.txt

So here are two questions that I can't get out of my head.
Are we really on the verge of collapse?
Are we really headed for dystopia if the system does not collapse?

Personally I must say I'd rather live in a primitive world than a dystopia.

Last edited by DarthMetaKnight on 10 Aug 2010, 10:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

No, to both. The present is, by any measurement we can make, the best time in human history, and all the trends indicate that the future is just going to continue to be better than the past.

Or not as the case may be. In any case, our society is going to change. Perhaps for the better (in some ways) perhaps for the worse. If you could visit the future of 100 years from now it would be considerably different from our present now. Eventually all hegemons grow old and perforce give way to stronger forces. Look what happened to the British Empire, for example. Because of the wars Britain had to fight to stay alive the Empire was bankrupted.

ruveyn

Makes sense to me. It drives me nuts how people like the Unabomber (and other less violent theorists) see collapse as the only alternative to things continuing exactly the way they are now. It's as though change isn't an option. The only choices are stasis and destruction. I'm not a technotopia dreamer who thinks it's all going to be rainbows and unicorns (once we figure out how to splice rhinocerous genes non-fatally into horse genes). But I do think that change is pretty likely. There is an awful lot of historical precedent.

Empires inevitably fall apart but that's not the same thing at all as civilization collapsing. It's as though the dystopians look at an empire in progress and really can't conceive of civilization contuing on without that empire. So they predict (accurately) that the empire will collapse but assume (innacurately, I think) that civilization will collapse along with it. But historically that's not what has happened, as you describe.

Well, I'm not sure what will happen. I'm not sure what the Unibomber was hoping to accomplish with his acts.

Human society collapse? Well, yes and no. I have no doubts those in power will have plans to maintain their power base and quality of life at the expense of the masses, so for some society will collapse. Others will retreat to their bunkers, vast estates in third world nations, etc. and watch as cities burn far away.

If society totally collapses, vast swatches of humanity will perish because we have generations of people who do not have a clue of how to live off the land and probably could not adapt to going to the standard if it came upon them. Others are preparing now, at least learning how, and are going to fight to survive and force themselves to adapt. They will endure.

It is also fact that the state and medical industry is trying to lobotomize common people so that they offer no resistance and can be easily controlled. Examine stuff put into vaccines, food products, etc. and see the effects they have listed. You could take 500,000 people, put them into a city and force vaccinate them, provide pre-crafted food stuffs for them to consume, and before you know it, people exist in a drugged stupor that keeps them from posing a threat. Easy enough to do in a crisis.

Not to argue with you here, but just to say I cannot imagine how anyone could believe that unless things like ever-increasing prison populations and continual war on the globe are somehow viewed as promising trends.

Full article : http://www.paulcooijmans.com/psychology/unabomber.html

Civilizations come and go, but human society remains. With the collapse of each system, some new system will come forward to replace it. While the unabomber may be correct that our society is due for a collapse, I do not agree that we will regress to a more primitive state.

It depends which "we" and whose civilization you are talking about.
The West, if it continues on its current path, will increasingly come to resemble the Third World. But that is because the West, if it continues on its current path, will come to be populated by more and more Third-World-derived people.
This, as I understand it, was not something the Unabomber wrote about, although the explanations for why it is being allowed to happen perhaps include some of the things he did write about (such as materialism and distance from nature) as well as some of the things other jeremiahs have warned about in recent decades, and even centuries (complacency, extreme individualism, egalitarianism, the rise of mercantile elites etc).

Last edited by codarac on 13 Aug 2010, 3:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think world leaders over the last century have learned a lot about how to keep society in a stable state. To prevent revolution. We learned a lot from the french revolution - 'Keep the people content or otherwise occupied and they will not rebel". There is also a lot to be said for divide and conquer. In Britain the masses are so divided (culturally and politcally) that the chance of us uniting to overthrow our governments is very slim.

Of course a disaster or exhaustion of resources would cause mass chaos. So I think the world is holding its breath at the moment because we know our current economic system could collapse when the oil runs out. But we are searching for new ways of providing energy for our societies.

It would be very interesting to see what happens to our societies when and if we harness nuclear power in a safe and clean way. If we were able to provide ourselves with limitless energy surely that would call into question the whole idea of ownership of the production of energy.

However, I am sure the current ruling class of the world would fight tooth and nail to own it and carry on our slavish societies.

But I reckon on the whole humanity is searching for utopia.

Given what the Unabomber faced in life, I tend to think he was right about a lot of things. Living a life of simplicity, being left alone. It's not far removed in principle with what I've done with my family (long story, but I'm ok!). His issue arose mainly from the encroachment of the rest of human civilization and technology upon those things that meant a lot to him. I'm sure we all know what that's like and can relate to it.

To give you an example from my own life: I live very close to the Mississippi River, and they just finished building a cable-stayed bridge to replace an older conventional design. It's a beautiful work of engineering, aesthetically as well as functionally. It's more accommodating to daily traffic across the bridge between Greenville, Mississippi and Lake Village, Arkansas, not to mention commercial traffic passing through this area. But in the process of building this bridge, contracts have also gone out to build a US82 bypass that will cut through all the cotton fields surrounding the city and connect directly with the new bridge. This means the destruction of farmland which impacts the local economy. As if imminent domain isn't bad enough to build a bridge and some new roads, the idea is that the increased traffic flow will bring more people to the outlying areas, further boosting the Greenville economy. This means building more hotels, more restaurants, and other services catering to travelers. If the farmers don't want to give up their farmland, selling out to Red Lobster and the Olive Garden, then imminent domain CAN be invoked to forcibly co-opt that land (with compensation of current market value, of course) for the purpose of establishing businesses.

This defies common sense. People tend to want to move as quickly as possible out of the Delta while they're traveling. These businesses might have a productive run for a few short years, but its hardly likely they can maintain viability long term. The farmers lose their land for the benefit of Greenville and Washington County. But for what? So those restaurant and hotel chains can just go out of business and move on just like they did on the other side of town? Have the Greenville mayor or county officials
actually LOOKED at downtown Greenville recently?

Meanwhile, the farmers have to figure out how to adjust to stay afloat with less land to farm. It doesn't take a genius to figure out how this might be cause for some resentment.

And when it becomes apparent that the world around us is controlled by a bunch of greedy, delusional idiots, why be tolerant of it? Burn it all down and start over, this time with those who have hearts and brains running the show and extending true equitable justice for all people. If this really were the case, I'd actually look forward to the crumbling of civilization. I'd welcome it with bottle rockets and cherry bombs. I'd invite everyone to a party on the levee where we'd celebrate with barbecue and beer. It might even do us some good to find out for ourselves that the Native Americans were right all along.

Don't worry, I'm not going to mail bombs to people to launch the end of the world as we know it. But it does make you stop and think...

... in killing anyone who ever lied to them or tried to own real estate?!

If so: Agreed.

Ha!! ! NOT what I meant!! !!

But yeah, that too!

Yesterday I watched a Geronimo movie and got all wound up again.

My wife says she remembers many years ago seeing the rut in the concrete floor where Geronimo had dragged his chain-and-ball hobble around for many years, but that part of the floor was covered with displays when my wife and I more recently visited there together. I am one who believes the face of Mount Rushmore should be blasted away and all land West of the rockies returned to Native Americans, but now the buffalo are all gone.

I'd be more worried about overpopulation and the depletion of resources (especially cheap energy, like oil) more than anything.

It will probably start to hit the fan sometime in my lifetime, since as of now we are remarkably shortsighted to do anything about it.

AngelRho, try reading Into the Wild. Chris McCandless was concerned with many of the same issues that concerned the Unabomber-destruction of nature, an unhealthy attachment to material things and artificial environments. McCandless was probably aspie, and he was less smart than the Unabomber, going off into the wilderness without much planning and starving to death. The Unabomber was diagnosed with schizophrenia, which is related to autism. It seems that it's easier for people to see the problems with modern society if they're not wired to cope with it.

Human society has become so desirous of immediate gratification that we willingly destroy the future to have an easier today. Even worse, nobody seems to care except a few "crazies". Everybody knows that the oil is running out, but any attempt to build an alternative energy infrastructure is called communist and deemed impossible. So we should just wait until the oil DOES run out and people are cannibalizing each other to do anything? The NTs prefer to think that Jesus will come back by then. But what if he doesn't? What then? Shouldn't we try to live simpler lives NOW, growing and raising most of our own food, living off the grid, so that when stuff starts to go bad it's not a big shock?