016.txt

1000 HOWTOs for various needs [WINDOWS]

[[The Washington Post, September 19, 1995, Separate
Pullout. Note: single brackets [ ] are in the Post
document.]]


*This text was sent last June to The New York Times and
The Washington Post by the person who calls himself "FC,"
identified by the FBI as the Unabomber, whom authorities
have implicated in three murders and 16 bombings. The
author threatened to send a bomb to an unspecified
destination "with intent to kill " unless one of the
newspapers published this manuscript. The Attorney
General and the Director of the FBI recommended
publication. An article about the decision to publish the
document appears on the front page of today's paper.*


INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND ITS FUTURE

INTRODUCTION

1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have
been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly
increased the Iffe-expectancy of those of us who live in
"advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society,
have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings
to indignities, have led to widespread psychological
suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as
well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural
world. The continued development of technology will
worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human
being to greater indignities and inflict greater damage
on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater
social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may
lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced"
countries.

2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it
may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve
a low level of physical and psychological sutfering, but
only after passing through a long and very painful period
of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently
reducing human beings and many other living organisms to
engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine.
Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences
will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or
modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving
people of dignity and autonomy.

3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still
be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more
disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it
is to break down it had best break down sooner rather
than later.

4. We therefore advocate a revolution against the
industrial system. This revolution may or may not make
use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a
relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We
can't predict any of that. But we do outline in a very
general way the measures that those who hate the
industrial system should take in order to prepare the way
for a revolution against that form of society. This is
not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to
overthrow not governments but the economic and
technological basis of the present society.

5. In this article we give attention to only some of the
negative developments that have grown out of the
industrial-technological system. Other such developments
we mention only briefly or ignore altogether. This does
not mean that we regard these other developments as
unimportant. For practical reasons we have to confine our
discussion to areas that have received insufficient
public attention or in which we have something new to
say. For example, since there are well-developed
environmental and wilderness movements, we have written
very little about environmental degradation or the
destruction of wild nature, even though we consider these
to be highly important.


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MODERN LEFTISM

6. Almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply
troubled society. One of the most widespread
manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism,
so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as
an introduction to the discussion of the problems of
modern society in general.

7. But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th
century leftism could have been practically identified
with socialism. Today the movement is fragmented and it
is not clear who can properly be called a leftist. When
we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind
mainly socialists, collectivists, "politically correct"
types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal
rights activists and the like. But not everyone who is
associated with one of these movements is a leftist. What
we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so
much movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or
rather a collection of related types. Thus, what we mean
by "leftism" will emerge more clearly in the course of
our discussion of leftist psychology. (Also, see
paragraphs 227-230.)

8. Even so, our conception of leftism will remain a good
deal less clear than we would wish, but there doesn't
seem to be any remedy for this. All we are trying to do
here is indicate in a rough and approximate way the two
psychological tendencies that we believe are the main
driving force of modern leftism. We by no means claim to
be telling the WHOLE truth about leftist psychology.
Also, our discussion is meant to apply to modern leftism
only. We leave open the question of the extent to which
our discussion could be applied to the leftists of the
19th and early 20th centuries.

9. The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern
leftism we call "feelings of inferiority" and
"oversocialization." Feelings of inferiority are
characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while
oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain
segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly
influential.


FEELINGS OF INFERIORITY

10. By "feelings of inferiority" we mean not only
inferiority feelings in the strict sense but a whole
spectrum of related traits; low self-esteem, feelings of
powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt,
self-hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend to
have some such feelings (possibly more or less repressed)
and that these feelings are decisive in determining the
direction of modern leftism.

11. When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything
that is said about him (or about groups with whom he
identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings
or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced among
minority rights activists, whether or not they belong to
the minority groups whose rights they defend. They are
hypersensitive about the words used to designate
minorities and about anything that is said concerning
minorities. The terms "negro," "oriental," "handicapped"
or "chick" for an African, an Asian, a disabled person or
a woman originally had no derogatory connotation. "Broad"
and "chick" were merely the feminine equivalents of
"guy," "dude" or "fellow." The negative connotations have
been attached to these terms by the activists themselves.
Some animal rights activists have gone so far as to
reject the word "pet" and insist on its replacement by
"animal companion." Leftish anthropologists go to great
lengths to avoid saying anything about primitive peoples
that could conceivably be interpreted as negative. They
want to replace the word "primitive" by "nonliterate."
They may seem almost paranoid about anything that might
suggest that any primitive culture is inferior to ours. 
(We do not mean to imply that primitive cultures ARE
inferior to ours. We merely point out the hyper
sensitivity of leftish anthropologists.)

12. Those who are most sensitive about "politically
incorrect" terminology are not the average black
ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled
person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not
even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from
privileged strata of society. Political correctness has
its stronghold among university professors, who have
secure employment with comfortable salaries, and the
majority of whom are heterosexual white males from
middle- to upper-middle-class families.

13. Many leftists have an intense identification with the
problems of groups that have an image of being weak
(women), defeated (American Indians), repellent
(homosexuals) or otherwise inferior. The leftists
themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They
would never admit to themselves that they have such
feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these
groups as inferior that they identify with their
problems. (We do not mean to suggest that women, Indians,
etc. ARE inferior; we are only making a point about
leftist psychology.)

14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women
are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are
nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as
capable as men.

15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of
being strong, good and successful. They hate America,
they hate Western civilization, they hate white males,
they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for
hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with
their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because
it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so
forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist
countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds
excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that
they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and
often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear
in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these
faults are not the leftist's real motive for hating
America and the West. He hates America and the West
because they are strong and successful.

16. Words like "self-confidence," "self-reliance,"
"initiative," "enterprise," "optimism," etc., play little
role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist
is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants
society to solve every one's problems for them, satisfy
everyone's needs for them, take care of them. He is not
the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence
in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his
own needs. The leftist is antagohistic to the concept of
competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.

17. Art forms that appeal to modern leftish intellectuals
tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else
they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational
control as if there were no hope of accomplishing
anything through rational calculation and all that was
left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the
moment.

18. Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason,
science, objective reality and to insist that everything
is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask
serious questions about the foundations of scientific
knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of
objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that
modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed
logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of
knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their
attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts
because of their own psychological needs. For one thing,
their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the
extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for
power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and
rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true
(i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false
(i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist's feelings of
inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any
classification of some things as successful or superior
and other things as failed or inferior. This also
underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept
of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests.
Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of
human abilities or behavior because such explanations
tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to
others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or
blame for an individual's ability or lack of it. Thus if
a person is "inferior" it is not his fault, but
society's, because he has not been brought up properly.

19. The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose
feelings of inferiority make him a braggart, an egotist,
a bully, a self-promoter, a ruthless competitor. This
kind of person has not wholly lost faith in himself. He
has a deficit in his sense of power and self-worth, but
he can still conceive of himself as having the capacity
to be strong, and his efforts to make himself strong