The Unabomber never lived to regret his actions

[Apollo69]

Last Ted K post for a while, promise. This is just an interesting section from a FAQ post I found. I'd be curious to know if anyone feels they have any unanswered questions about him that they just haven't had the time to do the digging on? This was just one of mine until today:

------

In prison Ted felt that he had hardened and experienced even less regrets as a result of the prison situation he had ended up in:[7]

Probably the biggest reason why you find my actions incomprehensible is that you have never experienced sufficiently intense anger and frustration over a long enough period of time. You don’t know what it means to be under an immense burden of frustrated anger or how vicious it can make one.

Yet there is no inconsistency between viciousness toward those whom one feels are responsible for one’s anger, and gentleness toward other people. If anything, having enemies augments one’s kindly feelings toward those whom one regards as friends or as fellow victims.

Do I feel that my actions were justified? To that I can give you only a qualified yes. My feelings at a given time depend in part on whether I am winning or losing. When I am losing (for example now, when the system has me in jail) I have no doubts or regrets about the means that I’ve used to fight the system. But when I feel that I’m winning (for example, between the time when the manifesto was published and the time of my arrest), I start feeling sorry for my adversaries, and then I have mixed emotions about what I’ve done.

Thomas Mosser, for instance, was a practitioner of what I consider to be the slimy technique of public relations, which corporations and other large organizations use to manipulate public opinion, but it does not necessarily follow that he was ill-intentioned. He may simply have felt that the system as it exists today is inevitable, and that he could accomplish nothing by going into another line of work. And of course his death hurt his wife and children, too.

I suppose that to sympathize with my actions one has to hate the system as I hate it, or at least one has to have experienced the kind of prolonged, frustrated anger that I’ve experienced. I think you have the good fortune never to have gone through anything like that.

Later in a partially available letter, making a reasonable guess as to what the missing page contained, he wrote:[8]

[‘As for if I had the opportunity to kill Gilbert Murray again, I would have’] no more compunction than I would have in squashing a cockroach.* Yet Judy Clarke thinks the Murrays were just wonderful people. ...

* In contrast, I take very seriously the suffering that David Gelernter underwent. Gelernter is no cliche, but a highly intelligent, thoughtful, talented, and sensitive man whom no one could describe as a mere stereotype. I consider that he deserved what he got, but that is a judgement that I do not adopt lightly and it is one about which I have mixed feelings.

Reviewing his journals he shared his regrets about some of the suffering he caused to animals:[9]

Series II, #5, p.130. I now (Feb, 1996) feel very sorry about the fact that, in a few cases, I tortured small wild animals (two mice, one flying squirrel, and one red squirrel, as far as I can remember offhand) that caused me frustration by stealing my meat, damaging my belongings, or keeping me awake. There are two reasons why I tortured them. (1) I was rebelling against the moral prescriptions of organized society. (2) I got excessively angry at these animals because I had a tremendous fund of anger built up from the frustrations and humiliations imposed on me throughout life by organized society and by individual persons. (As any psychologist will tell you, when you have no means of retaliating against whomever or whatever it is that has made you angry, you are likely to vent your anger on some other object.) When I came to realize that I had taken out on these little creatures the anger that I owed to organized society and to certain people, I very much regretted having tortured them. They are part of nature, which I love, and therefore they are in a way my friends even when they cause problems for me. I ought to reserve my anger for my real enemy, which is human society, or at least the present form of society. I have not tortured an animal for many years now. However I have no hesitation about trapping and killing animals that cause problems for me, at least if they are animals of the more common kinds.

Series II, #5, p.117. Here’s something that I remember pretty clearly about catching that rabbit alive; I don’t know why I didn’t mention it in my notes. In pulling the rabbit out, I tore loose a large patch of his skin (snowshoe hares! Skins are very fragile). I had wanted to let the rabbit go, from pity, but I was afraid that I might be doing it a disservice if I let it go, because the wound probably was very painful, and with so much of its body deprived of fur the rabbit might die of cold anyway.

Ted Kaczynski's 1979 Autobiography:[10]

... One summer when I was 15 or 16, in one of the prairies that still remained then, I threw a clod of earth at a bird. (The bird was bigger than a robin but smaller than a Franklin Grouse.) ... it "froze", and I walked up to it and just picked it up. As soon as I had it in my hand it began struggling violently. I held it in my hand for some time, and I soon began to experience warm, affectionate, pitying feelings for it. When I first threw the clod at the bird, I had hoped to kill it as an act of hunting, in accord with my fantasies of primitive life. But now I was turning soft.

I thought, "How can I ever hope to experience a cave-man style life if I am too soft-hearted to kill game? For that kind of life I will have to be hard." So I forced myself to kill the bird by crushing it in my hand. I left the place feeling sick with pity for the unfortunate creature ...

Later in a letter to his lawyers, he wrote:[11]

As for winning the sympathy of a jury, bear in mind some of the things that my early (1970's writings indicate: indiscriminate, homicidal hostility toward society in general, not just toward the corporate-governmental technological elite; I hunted game illegally and in a few cases even wasted meat; in a few cases I tortured small animals that had made me angry.

I think that word ‘even’ referring to the severity of wasting meat, rather than the almost indiscriminate homicidal hostility toward people that he felt said it all about his value system.

----

[7] Ted Kaczynski's 1979 Autobiography

[8] Kaczynski and his lawyers

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ted's Notes on his Journals (Feb. 1996)

[11] Kaczynski and his lawyers

 

[BirdUp]

his actions weren't "revolutionary" (in Anti-Tech Revolution, he outlined how killing individual people or smashing up Starbucks won't stop the inevitable) and i don't think he had developed his philosophy until Anti-Tech Revolution, let alone when he released ISAIF
ISAIF hardly explains anything and is just a school-shooter manifesto with academic language
Anti-Tech Revolution is less vague but you still have to dig through five layers of abstraction to find out its two fundamental points: typing emails, moving boxes and reaping crops are less varied than hunting animals, cooking food and finding shelter, so people create hobbies but hobbies quickly become dull; and humans cannot predict the long-term reliably so everything we do is technically reckless, which only became problematic after we discovered electricity

 

[Kiwiballs]

I wish more terrorists could analyze their actions as he does, especially before committing the act of terror they do and target the real source of their frustrations rather than the innocent or at best the bystanders.

(As any psychologist will tell you, when you have no means of retaliating against whomever or whatever it is that has made you angry, you are likely to vent your anger on some other object.)

Great quote. Glad he managed to overcome it.

his actions weren't "revolutionary" (in Anti-Tech Revolution, he outlined how killing individual people or smashing up Starbucks won't stop the inevitable) and i don't think he had developed his philosophy until Anti-Tech Revolution, let alone when he released ISAIF
ISAIF hardly explains anything and is just a school-shooter manifesto with academic language

I mean nothing is gonna stop it until it's here and people have to fight it or adapt to circumvent it as is already the case to a degree.
I can see acts of terror being committed against the first cyborgs for example and it having a limited effect in making people fearful of adopting the changes. Though in a way we already have some early cyborg technology helping people see of hear and nobody in their right mind will target those so if the introduction of the technology is soft enough and gradual enough the frog will boil no matter what.

 

[BirdUp]

I mean nothing is gonna stop it until it's here

the problem is externalizing "it" as "the Technological System" or "Civilization" when it's just fallibility
organizing a small but dedicated movement to monkeywrench electrical infrastructure everywhere will certainly disarm us as everything will become scrap metal, and there are way less oil reservoirs than the 19th century to reindustrialize
though you can't stop people from creating farms so some people will still be perpetually bored

 

[Kulee Baba]

his actions weren't "revolutionary" (in Anti-Tech Revolution, he outlined how killing individual people or smashing up Starbucks won't stop the inevitable) and i don't think he had developed his philosophy until Anti-Tech Revolution, let alone when he released ISAIF
ISAIF hardly explains anything and is just a school-shooter manifesto with academic language
Anti-Tech Revolution is less vague but you still have to dig through five layers of abstraction to find out its two fundamental points: typing emails, moving boxes and reaping crops are less varied than hunting animals, cooking food and finding shelter, so people create hobbies but hobbies quickly become dull; and humans cannot predict the long-term reliably so everything we do is technically reckless, which only became problematic after we discovered electricity

And to cap it off Teddy doomed himself to be miserable no matter what because he gave no attempt whatsoever to have a human connection with others. He thought he could achieve peace by living a "Walden" lifestyle. And I think everyone has had a moment where they were tired of all the assholes they called friends and family and dreamt of that. Yes have a quiet comfy cabin, just sit in the forests.

Don't mistake the pleasures of having solo time with being a natural loner. That's a complete illusion! We are social creatures. At the very least a human being needs a friend, a shoulder to cry on and talk to. Without that Ted lost his mind because of a ROAD. If my friend got mad that a road was built in his favorite nature preserve I'd remind him that there's still plenty of unmolested land in the USA.

Now was Ted a dumbass? No he factually was genius. And I think he was right that mind altering drugs are being used to quell a miserable populace. There's one popular drug that I will never remotely consider accepting a prescription for and that's Xanax (and Benzos as a whole). I did it once in my young stupid days and it was the easiest drug experience I ever had. I just became happy, even trying to make myself mad wound up with me just giggling. And I was functional too, could do it during work or school! I'm certain if I got into Benzos hardcore I would wind up dead or in a similar boat as Jordan Peterson did a few years back.

But did Ted come up with that dystopian concept of humanity being emotionally sedated? I'm pretty sure he just read Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and Huxley's depiction of the drug Soma. ISAIF has always appeared to be non-fiction ripoff of BNW. It has the same villain after all Technology. Even if I'm wrong on that the fact of the matter is Ted wasn't the first luddite.

But there's one thing Ted was right about and it's what scares me the most concerning the future. No one would have read his manifesto had he not been the Unabomber. And that's why we do need to defend Free Speech online just to make that justification harder to justify.

 

[Apollo69]

his actions weren't "revolutionary" (in Anti-Tech Revolution, he outlined how killing individual people or smashing up Starbucks won't stop the inevitable) and i don't think he had developed his philosophy until Anti-Tech Revolution, let alone when he released ISAIF

Yeah to be fair, I did get that sense from reading ATR and also his unsent letter to the Manhunt Unabomber assistant. It feels like towards the end of his life he hardly related to the person who had killed those individual people. I don't know whether that amounts to regret, but maybe it's something close? What do you think?

One of his correspondents I think explained it well:

Lindsey: In all these years, did you get any feeling that his time in incarceration has changed his views; about his manifesto, his mission or his crimes?

John: I mean, he's not the kind of person who would reveal that necessarily, if he has any remorse about his killings, I don't think he would say so because it would be like an unseemly reach or sympathy or something like that. I don't think he would want to play that card.

 

[BirdUp]

It feels like towards the end of his life he hardly related to the person who had killed those individual people. I don't know whether that amounts to regret, but maybe it's something close? What do you think?

i think he lost it when he saw the logging company or whatever so he murdered people and cobbled together a manifesto, then only got into philosophy in prison

 

[Fastest Hand In The East]

If we kill people because we hate the system it's no better than what the system does.
Is there really a moral difference between killing people you think are wrong and what the system does in it's dark corners of government "cladestine work"?
And yet I fully share the sentiment that it's because of these people we are where we are.
It's an ancient conundrum- how do we fight the system without becoming it. I don't see any way, to be honest.

 

[Kiwiballs]

@Homer J. Fong
I've been reading the Anti Technology Revolution now for the first time and he seems to have some good points.
He's suggesing just like Sahra Wagenknecht in her book "The Self-Righteous" of the German Die Linke or Yanis Varoufakis that the left today (and the latter are two leftists) has become some kind of tool for the system, in cooperation with the politicians and elites.

His particular version of this is that what they deem as rebellion is only rebellion out of tradition but that the system now depends on compliance and docility and thus that their "struggles" against various forms of social vices is a struggle with the system.
Anyway it takes too long to explain since it's a pretty long and a bit disjointed.

But the point being that what we need today is a spirit of rebellion. Of any rebellion.
And he suggests that a rebellion against technology is a rebellion against the system because the system integrates technology into everything.
AS such the new values of opposition for those that seek to bring down the system should be found in the opposition to technology. That this can be the unifying factor.

He claims that if we do not rebell, the system will become hegemonic, something no other system, nation, culture etc has become before.
He escaped into the woods because back when he felt like this almost nobody felt like this. So there was almost nobody to feel companionship with. Things are slowly changing, but too slowly.

 

[Kulee Baba]

@Homer J. Fong
I've been reading the Anti Technology Revolution now for the first time and he seems to have some good points.
He's suggesing just like Sahra Wagenknecht in her book "The Self-Righteous" of the German Die Linke or Yanis Varoufakis that the left today (and the latter are two leftists) has become some kind of tool for the system, in cooperation with the politicians and elites.

His particular version of this is that what they deem as rebellion is only rebellion out of tradition but that the system now depends on compliance and docility and thus that their "struggles" against various forms of social vices is a struggle with the system.
Anyway it takes too long to explain since it's a pretty long and a bit disjointed.

But the point being that what we need today is a spirit of rebellion. Of any rebellion.
And he suggests that a rebellion against technology is a rebellion against the system because the system integrates technology into everything.
AS such the new values of opposition for those that seek to bring down the system should be found in the opposition to technology. That this can be the unifying factor.

He claims that if we do not rebell, the system will become hegemonic, something no other system, nation, culture etc has become before.
He escaped into the woods because back when he felt like this almost nobody felt like this. So there was almost nobody to feel companionship with. Things are slowly changing, but too slowly.

The problem with this is that we've already enjoy the "forbidden fruits" of a Post-Industrial Revolution, and Ted's dream was we'd return to tradition to families living on farms & depending purely on the sweat of their direct brow. In some fantasy world where we had Emperor Unabomber we'd experience a psychological shock that would utterly devastate the mass population.

In the last hundred years life expectancy went from 55 years to 80. A full 25 years! Just think it used to be you were 60 years old well you were an old fart and you'd likely be the grave soon. With regular tests to detect cancer & keeping one's body vitals in good shape you can live long joyous life. It wasn't until the late 70s a heart bypass became a common thing.

These things, they require technology, they require medical advancement. You need to be able to have immediate access to specialized doctors. You need at the very least cities with decently sized population to run these clinics.

And for one last thing, Ted rallies hard against the left (and also disliked conservatives but not so much). But the closest thing in the modern era (I know of) that's been shown to somewhat live up to Ted's desire of "anarcho-primitivism" is the Kibbutz system in Israel. Which is an inherently left-wing system. You cannot run a farm today with a family, you need people who can operate complex machinery. And that's the specialization that Ted hated.

 

[BirdUp]

The problem with this is that we've already enjoy the "forbidden fruits" of a Post-Industrial Revolution, and Ted's dream was we'd return to tradition to families living on farms & depending purely on the sweat of their direct brow. In some fantasy world where we had Emperor Unabomber we'd experience a psychological shock that would utterly devastate the mass population.

it isn't a matter of choosing to retvrn
he was hoping for people who are poor at nomadism or agriculture to be weeded out in the aftermath of the revolution

 

[Stan]

I'd be curious to know if anyone feels they have any unanswered questions about him that they just haven't had the time to do the digging on?

Why is the Unabomber so appealing to you?

 

[Absurdist Laughter]

Why is the Unabomber so appealing to you?

Why does it matter? Why is a website around documenting and archiving the fringe, esoteric, and retarded tech/Internet milestones so touchy on the subject of historical figures and learning?

 

[Stan]

Why does it matter? Why is a website around documenting and archiving the fringe, esoteric, and retarded tech/Internet milestones so touchy on the subject of historical figures and learning?

You're not 1000 monkeys sitting in front of typewriters. There's something you find super interesting about Ted, which is why there are lots of posts about him on the Farms, and I just want to know what that is. Really.

 

[BirdUp]

You're not 1000 monkeys sitting in front of typewriters. There's something you find super interesting about Ted, which is why there are lots of posts about him on the Farms, and I just want to know what that is. Really.

i'm going to club you on the head

 

[Stan]

i'm going to club you on the head

See Kiwis, this is why you can't get positive press coverage.

 

[ARIMASPOI]

I enjoyed his writings back in the day

and then I became the type of person he would blow up. I'm a filthy technology advancer

 

[BirdUp]

See Kiwis, this is why you can't get positive press coverage.

yeah because nobody here likes stupid bints

 

[Nancy]

He made a few good points but his entire "philosophy" can be summed up in one word: cope

 

[Absurdist Laughter]

You're not 1000 monkeys sitting in front of typewriters. There's something you find super interesting about Ted, which is why there are lots of posts about him on the Farms, and I just want to know what that is. Really.

Sometimes, like fetishes, an explanation just isn't needed.