The Unabomber Will Become More Famous Than Ever in the 2020's
“One of the most dangerous features of the techno-industrial system is precisely its power to make people comfortable under circumstances in which they should NOT be comfortable, e.g., circumstances that are offensive to human dignity, or destructive of the life that evolved on Earth over hundreds of millions of years, or that may lead to disaster at some future time.”
Ted J. Kaczynski a.k.a “The Unabomber”
Decades after his arrest, Ted Kaczynski remains a fascinating figure. Why did this brilliant mathematician turn into a homicidal recluse? Did Western culture drive him insane, or was he truly a sadist at heart, fed up with pretending he was an upstanding university professor?
Photos of a disheveled, filthy Kaczynski gives one the impression he was a paranoid crackpot. But an objective read through his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, will leave one stunned at how lucid and carefully reasoned it is.
Do I agree with all of Kaczynski’s points? No. But in my opinion, the manifesto is an undeniable work of genius. Kaczynski was acutely aware that technology was a double-edged sword and could prove catastrophic if we blind ourselves to how it’s transforming society and the natural world.
Given that information technology is exponentially improving, its role in our lives will only grow larger. Kaczynski’s writings have never been more relevant.
As Peter Diamandis lays out in his book, The Future is Faster Than You Think, we will see a century’s worth of technological advancement over the next ten years. Although there are exciting breakthroughs in healthcare, 3D-printing, clean energy, etc., to come, the degree to which these innovations can be decentralized will be crucial. If they can only be distributed by tech-monopolies, or we’re forced to forfeit our data to access them, they may be extremely harmful.
We should never forgive Kaczynski for maiming innocents with his bombs. But the issues raised in his manifesto — the psychological suffering of Westerners, large institutions endlessly exploiting us and the ecosphere, the breakdown of small-scale communities — have only grown worse since its publication in ‘96.
Knowing what we know now, we would be remiss not to revisit Industrial Society and Its Future. Let’s examine what may be the best part of the manifesto, and the biggest thing Kaczynski overlooked in his assessment of the techno-industrial system.
The Power Process and The Need for Autonomy & Freedom
The Unabomber’s discussion on the “power process,” the method by which we find fulfillment in life, may be the manifesto’s standout section. We humans not only need meaningful goals (of our own choosing) to chase, but freedom in how we pursue them. Many of us are adventurous and possess an intense creative spirit. Not having the time to nurture our talents, or having soaring costs of living encumber us from being innovative, is soul-crushing.
Even if someone is working their dream job, restrictions imposed by their employer may prevent them from expressing the full range of their talents or testing their own limits. Frustration and unease will inevitably set in. If this source of anguish is never recognized, it may bleed into other areas of one’s life, causing addictions, neurotic behavior, etc.
It’s even worse for those who’ve yet to discover worthwhile aims for themselves. Because it often takes much experimentation and self-discovery to find passions that suit each person, someone pressed for time and money (i.e most Americans) likely spends most of their waking hours engaged in activities they’re indifferent about, or attempting to distract themselves from how powerless they feel.
Many religions offer a solution to this problem. They tell their followers that freer days await them if they remain diligent and faithful. But because religious practice has been plummeting in the US, we literally have millions of people hating their lives, clueless about why they’re miserable, and doubtful their circumstances will ever get better.
Is it any wonder a third of all Americans are showing signs of clinical anxiety and depression, and 2020 is poised to be a record-breaking year in terms of fatal overdoses?!
Kaczynski deserves credit for his prescience on this issue. The over-medication of people justifiably depressed over their lack of autonomy in life is a travesty. Obviously, we can’t live in a utopia and always do as we please. But our hunter-gatherer forebears, who were tightly-knit, had 10–20 hour work weeks, and leisured all day out in nature, were almost certainly not as despaired as we are.
Parallels Between the End of the Feudal Era and the End of the Nation-State Era
Most Americans, regardless of party affiliation, would agree that our Federal and State governance, despite collecting record amounts in tax-dollars, has never been more wasteful of our money, dishonest, and inept in the face of actual problems. What Americans don’t know, and what Kaczynski missed completely, is that our current predicament almost perfectly mirrors the collapse of the Feudal Era in the late 15th-century. These parallels are illustrated beautifully in The Sovereign Individual, the classic work written by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg.
Leading up to 1000 A.D, much of Europe was in total disarray. Crop failures, famines, and plagues ravaged the populace. Farmers had their lands seized by ruthless armed knights and were promptly slain. Peasants felt the apocalypse was upon them, and political authorities were helpless to reign in the chaos.
The Catholic Church assumed the role of the state and negotiated a truce: the thieving knights would be recognized as lawful landowners if they ceased their wholesale plunder of the countryside. This helped bring about feudalism, and over the next few centuries, the Church maintained peace throughout the land, improved farming practices, and undertook functions usually reserved for governments.
However, towards the end of the 15th-century, the Church metastasized into a grossly repressive and corrupt institution. Those who opposed the priesthood had their tongues cut out or were burned to death. Nearly every activity was deemed a sin so the Church could sell “indulgences,” or pardons from transgressions; the proceeds of which were used by Pope Alexander VI to host raucous orgies. Medieval life was regulated so strictly that people only worked on specified days, were forced to attend endless religious festivals, etc.
Despite the Church being as deeply resented as our modern-day politicians, it was assumed their grip on Medieval Europe would never be broken. But history shows that widespread disgust with the status quo often foreshadows a massive upheaval and the dawn of a new era.
Herein lies Kaczynski’s key error: it isn’t technology that’s the critical danger, it’s how it’s being abused by central authorities with no checks on their power. And just as the invention of gunpowder and the printing press helped to dethrone the almighty Catholic Church, the ability to earn location-independent incomes and store wealth in unseizable digital assets like Bitcoin will downsize the bloated, rotten nation-state.
Technology Will Become the Great Liberator
It’s hard to overstate the revolutionary impact of gunpowder and the printing press. Prior to the advent of gunpowder, one had to be highly-skilled and own a warhorse to be forceful in battle. This fell to the wayside as commoners with little combat experience could blast highly lethal firearms.
International commerce then exploded; merchants no longer relied on double-dealing mercenaries for protection while transacting abroad. These wealthy merchants then allied with European monarchs to take power back from the Church. The printing press increased literacy all throughout Europe, which exposed the Church for distorting the word of God to line their own pockets.
Now in 2020, the nation-state has never been able to dominate civilian life as much as they currently do. Countless nations have been utterly corrupted by the unprecedented level of power they’ve had to indoctrinate the public and harvest their wealth. Before the 1700's, European rulers at the local level fielded their own armies, placing severe limits on the state to commandeer their resources. We are living during a historical anomaly.
Governments will soon lose their ability to charge more for their services than they are actually worth. They will be subject to fierce market competition. Crypto-assets like Bitcoin allow one to store enormous sums of wealth in the ether, cross borders with it undetected, and start a new life elsewhere. This is invaluable to those escaping faltering regimes overseas.
As technology continues its exponential advance, it will lower the costs to entrepreneurship and expand the opportunities to earn a living remotely. More and more people will domicile their online businesses in tax-friendly areas that permit more freedom.
This may sound like a privilege reserved for the wealthy. But technology is a deflationary force; it will become much cheaper for regular people to make this transition. And many will do so. Plenty of poorly-run American states are bankrupt and will hike taxes even further, and as their already pissed-off residents learn how compound interest works, they will be aghast at how they’re being gutted financially.
We’ll run some conservative numbers. Let’s say you are a 25-year old Illinoisan who earns the U.S median income of $35,977. Assuming you pay a 6.25% state tax ($1,649) for 30 years straight, you would have saved around $117,000 if you were in Texas or Florida, areas with no state tax. Mind you, this is if each $1,649 payment were put into investments that earned a BELOW AVERAGE market return of 5% each year. Had you earned an average return of 10% annually, you’d have an additional $300,000 for retirement or to leave your children, money they could use to freely pursue their dreams, and not be hamsters on a wheel, fretting about bills and servicing debt.
The amount to be saved is even greater in jurisdictions outside the U.S. Highly skilled professionals are literally losing millions in lifetime earnings to predatory taxation. They will be greatly enticed by well-run states and low-tax countries to relocate their businesses, as it will become profoundly easier to do so.
Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, often refers to the “long-term debt cycle,” a roughly 50–100 year economic cycle that has recurred in developed economies throughout history.
These cycles are divided into two periods: (1) nations having low debts, high productivity, and great social cohesion and (2) nations being fraught with ballooning debts, staggering wealth disparities, and civil disorder.
Countries usually differ on what stage of the cycle they’re in, but since the globe has been on a U.S dollar standard post-World War II, most of the planet is experiencing the latter stages of this long-term cycle simultaneously.
As these cycles come to a close, they usually give rise to domestic terrorists and malicious actors. Their crimes shouldn’t be excused, but every so often, the widespread social malaise makes it understandable why they became so psychotic in the first place.
Once our current cycle ends and we enter the prosperous early stages of the new one, it will feel like we recovered from a brutal hangover. We will wonder how being a debt-enslaved, exploited worker was considered normal. We might even be thankful there weren’t more Unabomber-esque figures destroying society, since our current times offer fertile ground for violent reactionaries.
The Unabomber will become more notorious as the years progress. He will always remind us of the dystopic techno-state we could live in if we aren’t careful with our increasingly powerful technologies. His bombing spree will be remembered as a crazed response to the era of the wildly dysfunctional, grasping nation-state.
