A review by kazimir_kharza
Industrial Society and Its Future by Theodore John Kaczynski

hopeful informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

4.5

 

Industrial society and its future (ISAIF), colloquially known as “the Unabomber manifesto”, is not what one might initially expect from a man who was wanted by the FBI for nearly 20 years for his mail bombing campaign. Far from being a delusional rant, ISAIF is a serious intellectual work and has been acknowledged as such not just by Ted Kaczynski’s supporters, but also by his opponents (and potential targets) like Bill Joy. Almost 30 years after Kaczynski’s capture, his manifesto remains relevant and has proven itself to be highly prescient. 

While many good points are raised throughout the text, what stood out to me most were the ideas about the power process and surrogate activities. Drawing heavily from evolutionary psychology, Kaczynski points out that each human individual possesses the need to go through the power process, a process consisting of three key elements: having a goal, investing effort towards it, and achievement of the goal. 

Kaczynski divides all human drives into three categories: drives that can be satisfied with minimal effort, drives that can only be satisfied with serious effort, and drives that can’t ever be properly satisfied. Because most physical needs are satisfied with extreme ease in industrial society, they have been moved from the second category to the first. The need for the power process thus remains unsatisfied, so people take up surrogate activities – processes that attempt to fill the void through completing artificial goals the only real purpose of which is to bring fulfillment – but the fact that these activities do no deal directly with survival goals causes people to remain feeling unfulfilled. 

Additionally, the fact that most meaningful goals can not be pursued with a sufficient degree of autonomy – another important element of the power process – leaves people feeling disempowered and helpless, especially when combined with countless external factors that determine our lives, but that people personally have no control and power over (economic crises, competency of specialists they have to rely on for survival, invasion of privacy by large organizations, etc.). 

Being unable to go through the power process properly is very likely the main cause of many psychological issues, bad attitudes, and the all-prevailing crisis of meaning. This analysis is a much needed alternative explanation to the common leftist notion that alienation can be overcome by worker’s collective ownership of the means of production, and is part of why ISAIF resonates with so many people living in industrial settings. 

In contrast to the members of industrial society, people living in primitive conditions get more opportunities to go through the power process with a high enough degree of autonomy, and reach fulfillment and a sense of self-reliance. It certainly offends modern sensibilities to suggest that technological progress can only bring about more suffering and degradation, but that is exactly what ISAIF argues with great eloquence. “The Industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,” and the wisest thing to do, according to Kaczynski, is to bring down the techno-industrial system. 

ISAIF is a work I can’t recommend enough; it’s extremely readable, clear, concise, eye opening, and has many more interesting things to say than what I’ve summed up in this review.