orion | I’VE RECENTLY BEEN reading the collected writings of Theodore
Kaczynski. I’m worried that it may change my life. Some books do that,
from time to time, and this is beginning to shape up as one of them.
It’s not that Kaczynski, who is a fierce, uncompromising critic of
the techno-industrial system, is saying anything I haven’t heard before.
I’ve heard it all before, many times. By his own admission, his
arguments are not new. But the clarity with which he makes them, and his
refusal to obfuscate, are refreshing. I seem to be at a point in my
life where I am open to hearing this again. I don’t know quite why.
Here are the four premises with which he begins the book:
1. Technological progress is carrying us to inevitable disaster.
2. Only the collapse of modern technological civilization can avert disaster.
3. The political left is technological society’s first line of defense against revolution.
4. What is needed is a new revolutionary movement, dedicated to the elimination of technological society.
Kaczynski’s prose is sparse, and his arguments logical and
unsentimental, as you might expect from a former mathematics professor
with a degree from Harvard. I have a tendency toward sentimentality
around these issues, so I appreciate his discipline. I’m about a third
of the way through the book at the moment, and the way that the four
arguments are being filled out is worryingly convincing.
Maybe it’s what
scientists call “confirmation bias,” but I’m finding it hard to muster
good counterarguments to any of them, even the last. I say “worryingly”
because I do not want to end up agreeing with Kaczynski. There are two
reasons for this.
Firstly, if I do end up agreeing with him—and with other such critics
I have been exploring recently, such as Jacques Ellul and D. H.
Lawrence and C. S. Lewis and Ivan Illich—I am going to have to change my
life in quite profound ways. Not just in the ways I’ve already changed
it (getting rid of my telly, not owning a credit card, avoiding
smartphones and e-readers and sat-navs, growing at least some of my own
food, learning practical skills, fleeing the city, etc.), but properly,
deeply. I am still embedded, at least partly because I can’t work out
where to jump, or what to land on, or whether you can ever get away by
jumping, or simply because I’m frightened to close my eyes and walk over
the edge. Fist tap Nakajima Kikka.
