Ted Kaczynski Wasn’t Completely Nuts
Okay, he was pretty bad, but not all bad. If you were one of the people killed or maimed by him, he was very bad. However, with his death there will be stories about his philosophy. I’ve read some, and the best and most concise is by Isiah McCall, which I will summarize below (McCall's excerpted analyses are in italics). To a certain extent Kaczynski is talking about unnecessarily accumulating “stuff,” which George Carlin spoke about and I wrote about in a previous post.
1. Modern society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved.
The modern civilization we’ve created is unnatural and we behave unnaturally within it almost like animals in a zoo.
2. The existential dangers of "over socialization"
Political correctness isn’t an outright bad thing, but at what point do we have too much of it? Do we have too much right now?
3. The reason why we have a meaning crisis
People have a need to take part in the "power process" Kaczynski says — which is putting serious effort to attain a goal they know is important. For our ancestors, this would be finding food and satisfying biological needs.
In the modern Western world, it’s a bit more complicated. Modern industrial-technological society makes the fulfillment of biological needs trivial, requiring only obedience to survive.
4. Mass production makes all products the same, and global homogenization makes all places the same
According to Teddy — can I call him Teddy? I’m going to call him Teddy — our society traps us in a rat race where we work to earn money and are then encouraged to spend it on meaningless products.
It’s an endless cycle of 9 to 5, 5 days a week, and it prevents us from pursuing our ‘real’ passions and interests.
We’ve become completely dependent on the system to survive, and because of this, we are losing our sense of individuality and uniqueness.
Everything and everyone are at risk of becoming a boring grey.
5. College is a useless scam
I’m not sure when it happened, but college is pretty much run by adult babies, who are comfortable equipping their students with useless degrees, unmarketable skills, and thousands in debt.
Final Thoughts
At our current pace, Ted argues jobs will become more and more specialized — placing greater burdens on people required to maintain the system (i.e., most of us who make a decent living) — while the roles of these people will slowly become completely out of touch with natural reality.
Scientists are unaware of (or choose to ignore) the fact that when large changes, even seemingly beneficial ones, are introduced into a society, they lead to a long sequence of other changes, most of which are impossible to predict. The result is disruption of society." — Teddy K.
Here is a link to McCall’s full piece: https://medium.com/yardcouch-com/were-the-unabombers-predictions-about-technology-correct-8ef3239172f4