Industrial Society And It's Future was very clearly written by an angry, lonely
man.

The book itself was interesting. I think the foundations on which it rests are
flawed, but there was a lot of thought provoking content inside of the pages. I
think that some of the ideals proposed are great, and are worth thinking about
and considering (especially the sections on artificial intelligence and the
incremental reduction of freedom)

> pre-industrial people were happier

If there is one lynchpin behind the whole philosophy of the book, it's that
people in industrialized societies are more unhappy than people in
pre-industrialized societies because they do not have the freedom to persue
their own whims autonomously and thus satisfy "the power pyramid" or whatever
Ted calls it. Ted implies that people who satisfy their own personal "power
pyramids" are happy.

Ted refers to the ability of satisfying ones own power pyramid as "freedom."

> define freedom

"Our freedom is being taken from us" is pretty classic rhetoric in any political
circle. I think that for it to bear weight, one must define freedom. I think
that the book does a decent job of that. To summarize:

"Freedom means being in control of the life-and-death issues of one's existence."

aka:
"Freedom is when I can do whatever the fuck I want with the extent of my life
and time with no oversight whatsoever. Also, it involves making decisions with
complete _autonomy_"

Opposition to elite forces & government are key to the arguments being laid out.
Ted brings up things like spanking, affirmitive action, soul-less corporate
jobs, etc as arguments that our lives are mostly pre-defined. He argues that a
banker in moscow and a banker in the USA have more similar lives than two random
people from pre-industrial times. And he would be correct.

> surrogate activities

A surrogate activity is any activity that satisfies the power pyramid (so
basically, any activity) that does not involve life or death determination.
Additionally, they're normally not completely autonomous.

The book argues that surrogate activities (activities that satisfy the power
pyramid but are not life or death / fully autonous) are unfulfilling because
humans want full control (or at least actual influence) over their own destinies.

I think that broadly speaking, he's right - at a micro scale, humans care about
their destinies, or influencing people defining their destinies. I do not buy
the argument that fulfilling this "power pyramid" naturally brings any greater
level of happiness or satisfaction than fulfilling most surrogate activities.

> writing this book itself was a "surrogate activity"

The most clear-cut case of hypocrisy I can see between the pages of this book is
that Ted was driven from life til death by a philosophy - one that he deeply
identified with. I highlighted a portion of the book that stated:

"It may be better to die fighting for for a cause [sic], than to live a long but
empty and purposeless life"

In this sentence, Ted implies that fighting for a cause (a surrogate activity)
may be more fulfilling than living a "long but empty and purposeless life",
which is hugely hypocritical since following a philosophy & writing a book are
both surrogate activities.

The most hypocritical thing about this is that Ted spent his life doing exactly
this - fighting for something that he believed in. He tried to live a primitive
life, but could not be satisfied by his attempts, and so committed himself to an
idea.

I would argue that it is no accident that humanity has progressed forwards as
time has gone on. It is an innate characteristic of our race. We like to strive,
struggle, and make progress. We find much satisfaction in that, even if it's not
fully self determined.

I think that the separation of "surrogate activities" from "activities that
satisfy the power pyramid" is complete bullshit. I think that a person may be
completely satisfied by surrogate activities (athletics, marriage, programming),
in exactly the same way a pre-industrialist would be satisfied by chopping wood,
or hunting animals for their group of people.

Another innate characteristic of our race is suffering. I would argue that there
is no escaping it.

> suffering is bad, and being happy is good

It is ironic to me that Ted is in favor of destroying the industrial system
that our species has been building throughout our history. Doing so would cause
untold suffering, and much death - he admits as much.

Ted is in favor of de-industrialization for many reasons. One reason is because
we would be happier without industrialization (with absolute freedom!).

It's very clear to me that Ted does not aim to make people happy. He voids
his own arguments - he wants to make people happy... by killing people. What
his actions would actually do is bring about the greatest amount of human
suffering the world has ever known.

If Ted's goal is really to escape from suffering and return to monke, he needs
to adopt a philosophy that doesn't kill people by necessity.

Ted heavily implies throughout the book that suffering is bad, and being happy is
good. These are two things that I don't necessarily believe in.

> the banker argument

Ted argues that two people with the same job who live in different areas
probably have very similar lives, and implies that that's bad because two random
people (from some undefined time period) would have much different lives. Having
different lives in this context is good, because their lives would be
self-determined.

I think that this rhetoric is mostly bullshit. There's no way to quantify what
Ted is claiming, and I don't buy that having different lives is an indication of
any sort.

Also, Ted compares random people to two people performing a similar trade. What
if he instead compared the bankers to two prehistoric wood-gatherers? I would
imagine their lives wouldn't differ significantly either.

Argument bad. Rip.

> revolution must be intentional and worldwide, must come from outsiders and not
> from within

The argument here is that the average citizen will be so against
de-industrialization that they will vote against any party that tries to
implement it as a policy. this implies that the same group of people would be
actively opposed to the implementation of de-industrialization as a matter of
revolution. The problem is the same either way - you cannot claim to need common
consent but admit that the process would be so destructive that common consent
would be destroyed.

The de-industrialize-everything revolution is doomed to fail, because the
results would be disastrously harmful to the way common people live their lives.

> people can sit for hours with nothing to do

Ted argues that in pre-industrial societies, people might sit for hours with
nothing to do. He argues that we would find this insane because we see boredom
as an issue, and I think that Ted is correct in his line of thinking here. Our
desire to be constructive and conform to society, and to drive boredom from our
lives is absolutely shaped by the system we grew up inside of.

I think there's some romanticism in this. But if people really did just sit idly
for hours after their dumb power pyramid meters filled up, we wouldn't be where
we are in history. This argument invalidates itself.

People don't sit idle when they satisfy themselves - they look for ways to improve
life for other humans. It's in our blood.

> the revolution will kill people, and that's fine

because nature will be happy, and we will be happy. ok.

"It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences"

yea okay Ted "the joker" Kaczynski

> some select quotes

"so it may be that revolutionaries, by hastening the onset of the breakdown, will be reducing the extent of
the disaster"

ok so he's a primitive accelerationist lmao

"It (suffering [sic]) is not the result of capitalism and it is not the fault of
socialism. It is the fault of tecehnology, because the system is guided not by
ideology but by technical necessity."

I think that Ted misses the mark here - the system isn't guided by technology. The
technology is built in accordance with the desires of the system.

"We sneer at people are ARE content with servitude"

I found this quote to be a great illustration of Ted's condescending & angry attitude.

"It is not the primitive man who has used his body daily for practical purposes,
who fears the deterioration of age, but the modern man who has never had a
practical use for his body beyond walking from his car to his house."

lmaooooo okay. so no modern men use their bodies beyond walking ten feet? got it.

Show this quote to electricians who fuck up their knees and lungs kneeling in shitty
attics for 40 hours a week. Ask them not to fear the deterioration of age.

"Self-hatred is a leftist trait"

agreed tbh

"We can do anything we like as long as it is UNIMPORTANT. But in all IMPORTANT
matters the system tends increasingly to regulate our behavior"

idk, too smooth brained to comment on this. I just thought it was a powerful quote.

"[Feminists] are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and capable as men"

This quote assumes a lot about feminists and is soaked in hateful undertones.




TLDR:

ted was a damaged man who based his life on a romanticized and impossible philosophy.

ted could have tried to be realistic and come up with something workable. instead, he
nurtered obvious resentment in isolation.

he killed and injured men and women, and changed nothing.

the book was very interesting and fun, but not convincing. i was hoping for more.


3/10