IP: Unabomber -- a response from Kirkpatrick Sale, reprinted from

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

From: Hotwired


HotWired's Cate Corcoran has organized a feature which includes
the text of the Unabomber's manifesto, as well as links to other
resources related to the case. The URL for this special report is:


http://www.hotwired.com/special/unabom/


This feature is available to ALL members of the Internet community.
Subscribers to HotWired will also be able to take part in the ongoing
discussion going on in our Threads section.


There's also a version of the manifesto at Pathfinder, which includes
a response from Kirkpatrick Sale, reprinted from THE NATION. I'd be
interested in hearing other people's reactions to that piece, or any
of the material on either HotWired or Pathfinder, here in the newsgroups.


My take on the Sale piece is that he seemed to go out of his way to
insult the Unabomber, largely in order to distance his own neo-Luddite
views from the terrorists, so that he can avoid being dismissed as
readily as Kevin Kelly did in his interview in WIRED 3.06.


http://www.hotwired.com/wired/3.06/features/saleskelly.html


Oh yeah, the URL for the Pathfinder site is:


http://www.pathfinder.com/pathfinder/features/unabomber/


     Ron Hogan                               grifter () primenet com
     USENET Ambassador, HotWired          http://www.hotwired.com
     ************************************************************
     Modern history has created the eyes that know how to read us




UNABOMBER'S SECRET TREATISE


Is There Method In His Madness?


BY KIRKPATRICK SALE


The central point the Unabomber is trying to make--that "the
industrial-technological system" in which we live is a social,
psychological and environmental "disaster for the human
race"--is absolutely crucial for the American public to
understand and ought to be on the forefront of the nation's
political agenda.


I say this, of course, as a partisan. The Unabomber stands in a
long line of anti-technology critics where I myself have stood,
and his general arguments against industrial society and its
consequences are quite similar to those I have recently put
forth in a book on the people who might be said to have begun
this tradition, the Luddites. Along with a number of people
today who might be called neo-Luddites--Jerry Mander, Chellis
Glendinning, Jeremy Rifkin, Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, Dave
Foreman, Langdon Winner, Stephanie Mills and John Zerzan among
them--the Unabomber and I share a great many views about the
pernicious effect of the Industrial Revolution, the evils of
modern technologies, the stifling effect of mass society, the
vast extent of suffering in a machine-dominated world and the
inevitability of social and environmental catastrophe if the
industrial system goes on unchecked.


We disagree, to be sure, about what is to be done about all this
and the means by which to achieve it. In the course of his
career, at least as the F.B.I. has reconstructed it, the
Unabomber has carried out sixteen bombings, killing three people
and injuring twenty-three others, apparently choosing targets in
some way connected to modern technology--a technological
institute at Northwestern University, the University of Utah
business school, a Salt Lake City computer store, a University
of California geneticist, and a Yale computer scientist, among
others--to try to "propagate anti-industrial ideas and give
encouragement to those who hate the industrial system." That
strikes me as simple madness. Maiming and killing people does
not normally propagate ideas, and in this case no one knew what
ideas were in the Unabomber's mind until he started writing
letters this past year and then delivered his treatise in June.
As for getting the message across, the only message that anyone
got for sixteen years was that some nut was attacking people
associated with universities and computers (hence the F.B.I.'s
tag, Unabomber).(1)


"Industrial Society and Its Future" is the modest-enough title,
and it is labeled as "by FC," which the author describes as a
"terrorist group" though there is no sign from the writing style
here that more than one person is behind it, and the F.B.I.
believes that the Unabomber is acting alone. (The fact that he
has escaped detection for seventeen years--especially during
this past year, when he has become the target of the largest
manhunt in the agency's history--would tend to support that.)
"FC" is variously cited as the initials for "Freedom Club" or
"Freedom Collective," although it is popularly thought to stand
for a vulgar comment about computers; it is not explained in his
text.


The sixty-six pages that follow begin with two pages of trivial
typo corrections, showing the kind of fastidiousness one might
expect from a craftsman whose bombs the F.B.I. has described as
"meticulously" constructed; then come fifty-six pages of
argument divided into twenty-four subtitled sections and 232
numbered paragraphs; and it all ends with thirty-six footnotes,
mostly qualifying statements in the text. That form, plus the
leaden language and stilted diction, the fondness for
sociological jargon and psychobabble, and the repeated use of
"we argue that" and "we now discuss" and the like, make it
certain that this was written by someone whose writing style,
and probably whole intellectual development, was arrested in
college.


The F.B.I. has said that it believes he was a student of the
history of science, but on the evidence here he was a social
psychology major with a minor in sociology, and he shows all the
distressing hallmarks of the worst of that academic breed. He
spends twelve pages, for example, on a strange and somewhat
simplistic explanation of "something that we will call the power
process," consisting of four elements "we call goal, effort and
attainment of goal," plus "autonomy," all in an effort to
explain why people today are unhappy and frustrated. Only
someone trapped in the social sciences would talk that way.


Various professor types have been quoted in the papers saying
how "bright" this fellow must be, but the arguments here are
never very original and the line of reasoning is often quite
convoluted. He has read a lot in certain areas--no poetry,
though, I'll bet--and has thought a lot about the particular
things that concern him, but aside from a few flashes there is
no suggestion of anything more than a routine mind and a dutiful
allegiance to some out-of-the-ordinary critics of modern
society. I'm sure he makes good bombs, but grading him on his
intellect I wouldn't give him more than a C+. I venture to say
he didn't make it to his senior year.


The opus isn't helped by the fact that at least a third of it is
essentially irrelevant, social-psych padding and scholarly
back-and-forthing, one-hand-and-the-othering. Two long sections
attacking "modern leftism" and "leftish" academics have nothing
to do with his thesis, and I suspect they are offered because he
had a bad time with certain sectarian groups in the early
1970s--no surprise--and with certain progress-minded,
pro-technology Marxists he met in the academy. (2) Any good
editor would have cut it.


But as near as I can fathom it after three careful readings, the
Unabomber's argument would seem to be this:


"Industrial-technological society" has succeeded to the point
where, because of its size and complexity, it has constricted
human freedom, meaning one's power to "control the circumstances
of one's own life." Such freedoms as we do have are those
permitted by the system consistent with its own ends--economic
freedom to consume, press freedom to expose inefficiency and
corruption--and do not in fact give individuals or groups true
power, in the same sense that they have control over satisfying
"life-and-death issues of one's existence: food, clothing,
shelter and defense." "Today people live more by virtue of what
the system does FOR them or TO them than by virtue of what they
do for themselves.... Modern man is strapped down by a network
of rules and regulations, and his fate depends on the actions of
persons remote from him whose decisions he cannot influence."


Industrial society must perform this way in order to
succeed--"The system has to regulate human behavior closely in
order to function"--and cannot be reformed to work differently.
"Changes large enough to make a lasting difference in favor of
freedom would not be initiated because it would be realized that
they would gravely disrupt the system."


Industrial society must increasingly work to constrict freedom
and control behavior since "technology advances with great
rapidity" and on many fronts: "crowding, rules and regulations,
increasing dependence of individuals on large organizations,
propaganda and other psychological techniques, genetic
engineering, invasion of privacy through surveillance devices
and computers, etc." (3)


But the problem of "control over human behavior" continues to
bedevil this society, and right now "the system is currently
engaged in a desperate struggle to overcome certain problems
that threaten its survival," primarily social (the "growing
numbers" of "rebels," "dropouts and resisters") but also
economic and environmental. "If the system succeeds in acquiring
sufficient control over human behavior quickly enough, it will
probably survive. Otherwise it will break down. We think the
issue will most likely be resolved within the next several
decades, say 40 to 100 years."


Therefore, the task of those who oppose the industrial system is
to advance that breakdown by promoting "social stress and
instability in industrial society," which presumably includes
bombing, and by developing and propagating "an ideology that
opposes technology," one that puts forth the "counter-ideal" of
nature "in order to gain enthusiastic support." Thus, when the
system becomes sufficiently stressed and unstable, a "revolution
against technology may be possible."


Now, this is a reasonable enough argument--the Unabomber is not
irrational, whatever else you can say about him--and I think it
is even to some extent persuasive. There is nothing wild-eyed or
rabble-rousing about it (it could actually use a lot more
Paine-ist fomentation and furor) and the points are most often
buttressed with careful arguments and examples--though nowhere,
interestingly, a single statistic. It is too slow, too plodding,
too repetitive; but you have to say its case is made in a
competent, if labored, fashion.


His critique of industrial society today is most telling, I
think, and reads as if he'd spent a lot of time defending it in
the back rooms of bars. (Excerpts presented in the Times and the
Post for some reason concentrate on the treatise's weaker and
tangential early parts and give only limited attention to this
central message.) Just picking at random, I find these examples:


The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs.
Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the
needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political
or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological
system. It is not the fault of capitalism and it is not the
fault of socialism. It is the fault of technology, because the
system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.


If the use of a new item of technology is INITIALLY optional, it
does not necessarily REMAIN optional, because new technology
tends to change society in such a way that it becomes difficult
or impossible for an individual to function without using that
technology.... Something like this seems to have happened
already with one of our society's most important psychological
tools for enabling people to reduce (or at least temporarily
escape from) stress, namely, mass entertainment. Our use of mass
entertainment is "optional"...yet mass entertainment is a means
of escape and stress-reduction on which most of us have become
dependent.


The technophiles are hopelessly naive (or self-deceiving) in
their understanding of social problems. They 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
difficult to predict.... In fact, ever since the industrial
revolution technology has been creating new problems for society
far more rapidly than it has been solving old ones. Not
inspired, but thoughtful, perceptive enough, when abstracted
from its labored context.


What's surprising about all this, though, is that it reads as if
the Unabomber thinks he's the first person who ever worked out
such ideas. It is hard to believe, but he seems woefully
ignorant of the long Luddistic strain in Western thought going
back at least to William Blake and Mary Shelley, and he does not
once cite any of the great modern critics of technology such as
Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Paul Goodman, Max Weber, E.F.
Schumacher or Rachel Carson, nor any of the contemporary
laborers in this vineyard. In one of his letters to the Times he
does say that "anyone who will read the anarchist and radical
environmentalist journals will see that opposition to the
industrial-technological system is widespread and growing," so
he must know something about the current critics, although he
does not mention specific articles or authors or particular
periodicals. (If I had to guess which has been most influential
on him, I'd say the Fifth Estate, a feisty anti-technology paper
published out of Detroit for the past thirty years, but he does
not name it anywhere.)


That failure to ground himself in the Luddistic tradition, where
both utopian and dystopian models proliferate, may be the reason
that the Unabomber is so weak on envisioning the future,
particularly the kind of revolution he seems to want.


I would agree with the Unabomber's general position that "to
make a lasting change in the direction of development of any
important aspect of a society, reform is insufficient," and I
might even agree that in certain circumstances therefore
"revolution is necessary." But I can't figure out at all what
kind of revolution this is to be. He says that "a revolution
does not necessarily involve an armed uprising or the overthrow
of a government," a conviction he is so certain of he repeats it
twice more, adding that "it may or may not involve physical
violence," and in two footnotes he suggests that it might be
"somewhat gradual or piecemeal" and might "consist only of a
massive change of attitudes toward technology resulting in a
relatively gradual and painless disintegration of the industrial
system."


This is a somewhat peculiar position for a man who has been
killing and injuring people in service to his dream of a new
society, and I'm not sure what he thinks revolutions are or how
they are achieved. If he has in mind something more like the
Industrial Revolution or the Copernican revolution, he doesn't
suggest how that might come about, and the sorts of strategies
he ends up advocating--promoting social instability, destroying
and wrecking "the system," seeing "its remnants...smashed beyond
repair"--sound an awful lot like a revolution with a good deal
of violence. He even suggests at one point that the models are
the French and Russian revolutions, both pretty bloody affairs.


The whole question of violence indeed is confused in the
Unabomber's mind, oddly enough after seventeen years during
which he must have been thinking about it a little. He never
once addresses the reasons for his own string of bombings or
explains what he thinks he has been accomplishing, other than to
say that this was the way to have "some chance of making a
lasting impression." He is critical of "leftists" who commit
violence, because it is only "a form of `liberation'<FU10>" they
justify "in terms of mainstream values...fighting against racism
or the like," and later is critical of leftists because they are
"against competition and against violence." His revolution is
not necessarily to be violent, yet he never confronts the idea
of a nonviolent revolution or how it would be strategically
carried out.


The one task of revolutionaries the Unabomber is clear about is
the business of producing an anti-technology "ideology,"
although he doesn't anywhere concern himself with the hard
business of saying what that would consist of. But it doesn't
much matter to him, since the primary purpose of this ideology
is "to create a core of people who will be opposed to the
industrial system on a rational, thought-out basis," an
intellectual cadre who can then dish it out "in a simplified
form" for the "unthinking majority" who "like to have such
issues presented in simple, black-and-white terms." "History is
made by active, determined minorities," you see, and "as for the
majority, it will be enough to make them aware of the existence
of the new ideology and remind them of it frequently." Lenin
couldn't have put it better.


The Unabomber's idea of a systemic breakdown is, I think, more
plausible than his concept of revolution; one could see how, as
the system was breaking down of its own weight and incompetence,
unable to manage the problems its technology creates, this might
be "helped along by revolutionaries." Just how the breakdown
would come about is not spelled out. The Unabomber gives only a
passing glance to the multiple environmental disasters the
system is producing for itself and never mentions the
likelihood, as chaos theory predicts, that the complex
industrial house of cards will not hold. At least he does posit
a "time of troubles" after which the human race would be "given
a new chance."


I should note that the Unabomber, on the evidence here, does not
have any special vision of an ecologically based future, as the
newspapers have suggested. Indeed, he is no environmentalist,
and I'd say he has only the faintest grasp of the principles of
ecology. It's true that he refers to nature at one point--"That
is, WILD nature!"--as a "positive ideal," but this is almost
entirely cynical, nature as a concept that he figures will be
useful in propaganda terms because it is "the opposite of
technology," because "most people will agree that nature is
beautiful" and because "in many people, nature inspires the kind
of reverence that is associated with religion." He shows no real
understanding of the role of technology in enabling industrial
society not only to exploit nature but to pass that off as
legitimate, and not one individual environmental problem is
addressed here, except overpopulation. (And on that one the
Unabomber, though acknowledging that it produces overcrowding
and stress, indicates no awareness of its awful consequences for
all the other species of the world, whose endangerment and
extinctions we are causing by our exploding numbers, or for the
natural systems of the world, whose degradation we are causing
by our exploding consumption.)


It's clear enough that the Unabomber counts "radical
environmentalists" as among those rightly opposing technology,
and his use of wood in some of his bombs and his killing of a
timber lobbyist in California suggests a further affinity. But
he indicates no sympathy for the kind of biocentric "deep
ecology" and bioregionalism espoused by most of them, and his
concerns are exclusively anthropocentric, his appreciation of
other species and natural systems nil. He also mocks those who
believe in the "Gaia theory" of a living earth, common in many
environmental groups: "Do its adherents REALLY believe in it or
are they just play-acting?"


In short, it feels to me that his appeal to nature is entirely
utilitarian (like adding another little mechanism to your bomb
to make sure it works) rather than a heartfelt passion, of which
he seems to have very few in any case.


But if nature does not inspire his vision of the future, it is
hard to tell what does. Presumably he would want, as a
self-described anarchist, some kind of world where "people live
and work as INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS," using "small-scale
technology...that can be used by small-scale communities without
outside assistance." But he nowhere bothers to hint at how this
future society would operate (other than to say it would burn
all technical books), nor does he refer to any in the long line
of anarcho-communal writers from Kropotkin to Bookchin who have
given a great deal of thought to the configurations of such a
society.


It's true that the Unabomber offers the defense at one point
that "a new kind of society cannot be designed on paper" and
"when revolutionaries or utopians set up a new kind of society,
it never works out as planned." That gives him leeway to avoid
discussing what kind of world he wants (even in a three-page
section called "THE FUTURE"); unfortunately, it also leaves a
gaping hole in his treatise. Even those who agree that the
industrial system should be torn down will want to get some idea
of what is supposed to replace it before they are moved to
endorse the cause, much less become the revolutionaries the
Unabomber wants.


So, in sum, what are we to make of this strange document? So
important to its author that he is prepared to kill people (even
though he has written that he is "getting tired of making
bombs") to get it published in a major newspaper. So
embarrassing to those newspapers that they don't know what to do
with it.


It is the statement of a rational and serious man, deeply
committed to his cause, who has given a great deal of thought to
his work and a great deal of time to this expression of it. He
is prescient and clear about the nature of the society we live
in, what its purposes and methods are, and how it uses its array
of technologies to serve them; he understands the misery and
anxiety and constriction this creates for the individual and the
wider dangers it poses for society and the earth. He truly
believes that a campaign of social disorder led by misfits,
rebels, dropouts and saboteurs (and presumably terrorists),
coupled with the concerted propaganda work of a dedicated
intellectual elite, has a chance to cause or hasten the
breakdown of industrial society, and this motivates him in his
grisly work.


The document is also the product of a limited and
tunnel-visioned man, with a careful and dogged but somewhat
incoherent mind, filled with a catalogue of longstanding
prejudices and hatreds, academically trained, occasionally
inventive, purposeful and humorless. He is amoral, not to say
coldblooded, about acts of terrorism, which are regarded as an
effective tactic in service to the larger cause. He is convinced
enough in his cause to have produced this long justification for
it, complete with numerous bold assertions and his own
"principles of history," but he repeatedly finds qualifications
and reservations and indeed ends up calling the article no more
"than a crude approximation to the truth," as if to suggest that
somewhere within he is not quite confident


All in all, I think despite its flaws it is a document worth
publishing, and not only because that could presumably help stop
the killing. There is a crucial message at the core of it for
those with fortitude enough to get through it, and unless that
message is somehow heeded and acted on we are truly a doomed
society hurtling toward a catastrophic breakdown.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------


Kirkpatrick Sale, a Nation contributing editor, is the author,
most recently, of Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and
Their War on the Industrial Revolution (Addison-Wesley).
Excerpted with permission from The Nation, September 25, 1995.
Copyright 1995, The Nation Co., L.P. All rights reserved.


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----------------------------------------------------------------
Footnotes


(1) The "a" stands for "airline" because one early target was an
airline executive, but I remain unconvinced that this was a
genuine Unabomber victim. I'd render him "Unibomber,"
considering nine of the sixteen bombs were aimed at university
targets or professors.


(2) The F.B.I. has leaked the idea that the Unabomber is really
Leo Frederick Burt, one of the "New Year's Gang" that bombed the
Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin in
August 1970 and who has been a fugitive ever since. If so, he
probably was steeped beyond human endurance in the kind of
fractious sectarian stews aboiling in those days and comes by
his dislike of what he thinks is leftism legitimately.


(3) Oddly, the Unabomber's antipathy toward technology is more
in the abstract than the particular. He actually likes certain
technologies--"electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid long-distance
communications...how could one argue against any of these
things?"-- and argues that revolutionaries should use "some
modern technology."