Industrial Society and Its Future
by Theodore Kaczynski
Foreword
In the late 1950s, mathematics prodigy Theodore Kaczynski entered Harvard
University at the age of 15. While there, he was subjected to mind control
experiments funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. These experiments
were part of the declassified MK Ultra program, which researched techniques
intended to fracture an individual's psyche, and rebuild their personality.
Later, after teaching mathematics, Kaczynski withdrew from civilization and
lived in a cabin he built in rural Montana. During this period, he began
mailing explosives to individuals he believed were causing harm to the earth.
In 1995, Kaczynski mailed several letters, some to his former victims, outlining
his goals and demanding that his 35,000-word paper "Industrial Society and Its
Future" (also called the "Unabomber Manifesto") be printed verbatim by a major
newspaper or journal; he stated that he would then end his terrorism campaign.
There was a great deal of controversy as to whether it should be done. A
further letter threatening to kill more people was sent, and the United States
Department of Justice recommended publication out of concern for public safety.
The pamphlet was then published by The New York Times and The Washington Post on
September 19, 1995, with the hope that someone would recognize the writing
style. Kaczynski's sister in law recognized the writing style, which eventually
led to his arrest, conviction, and imprisonment for life.
While condemning his actions, some have commented that there are a great deal
of relevant insights contained in his writing, as they relate to modern society,
leading some to speculate what he might have accomplished, had he not been
subjected to mind altering experiments at a young age.
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Industrial Society and Its Future
Introduction
1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the
human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who
live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life
unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread
psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and
have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of
technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to
greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will
probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it
may lead to increased physical suffering--even in "advanced" countries.
2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it
survives, it may eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological
suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of
adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many
other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social
machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be
inevitable: there is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to
prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.
3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But
the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown
will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than
later.
4. We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This
revolution may or may not make use of violence: it may be sudden or it may be a
relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can't predict any of
that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate
the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution
against that form of society. This is not to be a political revolution. Its
object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological
basis of the present society.
5. In this article we give attention to only some of the negative developments
that have grown out of the industrial-technological system. Other such
developments we mention only briefly or ignore altogether. This does not mean
that we regard these other developments as unimportant. For practical reasons
we have to confine our discussion to areas that have received insufficient
public attention or in which we have something new to say. For example, since
there are well-developed environmental and wilderness movements, we have written
very little about environmental degradation or the destruction of wild nature,
even though we consider these to be highly important.
The psychology of modern leftism
6. Almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply troubled society. One
of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism,
so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an introduction to the
discussion of the problems of modern society in general.
7. But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th century leftism
could have been practically identified with socialism. Today the movement is
fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be called a leftist. When we
speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists,
collectivists, "politically correct" types, feminists, gay and disability
activists, animal rights activists and the like. But not everyone who is
associated with one of these movements is a leftist. What we are trying to get
at in discussing leftism is not so much a movement or an ideology as a
psychological type, or rather a collection of related types. Thus, what we mean
by "leftism" will emerge more clearly in the course of our discussion of leftist
psychology. (Also, see paragraphs 227-230.)
8. Even so, our conception of leftism will remain a good deal less clear than
we would wish, but there doesn't seem to be any remedy for this. All we are
trying to do is indicate in a rough and approximate way the two psychological
tendencies that we believe are the main driving force of modern leftism. We by
no means claim to be telling the whole truth about leftist psychology. Also,
our discussion is meant to apply to modern leftism only. We leave open the
question of the extent to which our discussion could be applied to the leftists
of the 19th and early 20th century.
9. The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call
"feelings of inferiority" and "oversocialization." Feelings of inferiority are
characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is
characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is
highly influential.
Feelings of inferiority
10. By "feelings of inferiority" we mean not only inferiority feelings in the
strict sense but a whole spectrum of related traits; low self-esteem, feelings
of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. We
argue that modern leftists tend to have some such feelings (possibly more or
less repressed) and that these feelings are decisive in determining the
direction of modern leftism.
11. When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about
him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has
inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced among
minority rights activists, whether or not they belong to the minority groups
whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about the words used to
designate minorities and about anything that is said concerning minorities. The
terms "negro," "oriental," "handicapped" or "chick" for an African, an Asian, a
disabled person or a woman originally had no derogatory connotation. "Broad"
and "chick" were merely the feminine equivalents of "guy," "dude" or "fellow."
The negative connotations have been attached to these terms by the activists
themselves. Some animal rights activists have gone so far as to reject the word
"pet" and insist on its replacement by "animal companion." Leftish
anthropologists go to great lengths to avoid saying anything about primitive
peoples that could conceivably be interpreted as negative. They want to replace
the world "primitive" by "nonliterate." They seem almost paranoid about anything
that might suggest that any primitive culture is inferior to our own. (We do
not mean to imply that primitive cultures are inferior to ours. We merely point
out the hypersensitivity of leftish anthropologists.)
12. Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are
not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled
person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any
"oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society. Political
correctness has its stronghold among university professors, who have secure
employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual
white males from middle- to upper-middle-class families.
13. Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups
that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent
(homosexuals) or otherwise inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these
groups are inferior. They would never admit to themselves that they have such
feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that
they identify with their problems. (We do not mean to suggest that women,
Indians, etc. are inferior; we are only making a point about leftist
psychology.)
14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as
capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may not be as
strong and as capable as men.
15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and
successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white
males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the
West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They say they
hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so
forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive
cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he grudgingly admits
that they exist; whereas he enthusiastically points out (and often greatly
exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is
clear that these faults are not the leftist's real motive for hating America and
the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
16. Words like "self-confidence," "self-reliance," "initiative," "enterprise,"
"optimism," etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The
leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve
everyone's problems for them, satisfy everyone's needs for them, take care of
them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his
ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is
antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a
loser.
17. Art forms that appeal to modern leftish intellectuals tend to focus on
sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing
off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through
rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the
sensations of the moment.
18. Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective
reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that
one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and
about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it
is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians
systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved
emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts
because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an
outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the
drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality
because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and
other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist's feelings of
inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some
things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This
also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness
and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic
explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to
make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to
give society the credit or blame for an individual's ability or lack of it.
Thus if a person is "inferior" it is not his fault, but society's, because he
has not been brought up properly.
19. The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose feelings of
inferiority make him a braggart, an egotist, a bully, a self-promoter, a
ruthless competitor. This kind of person has not wholly lost faith in himself.
He has a deficit in his sense of power and self-worth, but he can still conceive
of himself as having the capacity to be strong, and his efforts to make himself
strong produce his unpleasant behavior.[1] But the leftist is too far gone for
that. His feelings of inferiority are so ingrained that he cannot conceive of
himself as individually strong and valuable. Hence the collectivism of the
leftist. He can feel strong only as a member of a large organization or a mass
movement with which he identifies himself.
20. Notice the masochistic tendency of leftist tactics. Leftists protest by
lying down in front of vehicles, they intentionally provoke police or racists to
abuse them, etc. These tactics may often be effective, but many leftists use
them not as a means to an end but because they prefer masochistic tactics.
Self-hatred is a leftist trait.
21. Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by
moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the
oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main
motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist
behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not
rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to
be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good
for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or
dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and
conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions
to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them.
But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy
their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead,
race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and
frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because
the activists' hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify
race hatred.
22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to
invent problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
23. We emphasize that the foregoing does not pretend to be an accurate
description of everyone who might be considered a leftist. It is only a rough
indication of a general tendency of leftism.
Oversocialization
24. Psychologists use the term "socialization" to designate the process by
which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is
said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his
society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. It may seem
senseless to say that many leftists are over-socialized, since the leftist is
perceived as a rebel. Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many
leftists are not such rebels as they seem.
25. The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel
and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate
anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he
admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialized that the
attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In
order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves
about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions
that in reality have a non-moral origin. We use the term "oversocialized" to
describe such people.[2]
26. Oversocialization can lead to low self-esteem, a sense of powerlessness,
defeatism, guilt, etc. One of the most important means by which our society
socializes children is by making them feel ashamed of behavior or speech that is
contrary to society's expectations. If this is overdone, or if a particular
child is especially susceptible to such feelings, he ends by feeling ashamed of
himself. Moreover the thought and the behavior of the oversocialized person are
more restricted by society's expectations than are those of the lightly
socialized person. The majority of people engage in a significant amount of
naughty behavior. They lie, they commit petty thefts, they break traffic laws,
they goof off at work, they hate someone, they say spiteful things or they use
some underhanded trick to get ahead of the other guy. The oversocialized person
cannot do these things, or if he does do them he generates in himself a sense of
shame and self-hatred. The oversocialized person cannot even experience,
without guilt, thoughts or feelings that are contrary to the accepted morality;
he cannot think "unclean" thoughts. And socialization is not just a matter of
morality; we are socialized to conform to many norms of behavior that do not
fall under the heading of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a
psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid
down for him. In many oversocialized people this results in a sense of
constraint and powerlessness that can be a severe hardship. We suggest that
oversocialization is among the more serious cruelties that human beings inflict
on one another.
27. We argue that a very important and influential segment of the modern left
is oversocialized and that their oversocialization is of great importance in
determining the direction of modern leftism. Leftists of the oversocialized
type tend to be intellectuals or members of the upper-middle class. Notice that
university intellectuals[3] constitute the most highly socialized segment of our
society and also the most left-wing segment.
28. The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological
leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough
to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the
goals of today's leftists are not in conflict with the accepted morality. On
the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own,
and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples:
racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to
war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. More
fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of
society to take care of the individual. All these have been deeply rooted
values of our society (or at least of its middle and upper classes[4]) for a
long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed
in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media
and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized
type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility
to society by claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up
to these principles.
29. Here is an illustration of the way in which the oversocialized leftist
shows his real attachment to the conventional attitudes of our society while
pretending to be in rebellion against it. Many leftists push for affirmative
action, for moving black people into high-prestige jobs, for improved education
in black schools and more money for such schools; the way of life of the black
"underclass" they regard as a social disgrace. They want to integrate the black
man into the system, make him a business executive, a lawyer, a scientist just
like upper-middle-class white people. The leftists will reply that the last
thing they want is to make the black man into a copy of the white man; instead,
they want to preserve African American culture. But in what does this
preservation of African American culture consist? It can hardly consist in
anything more than eating black-style food, listening to black-style music,
wearing black-style clothing and going to a black-style church or mosque. In
other words, it can express itself only in superficial matters. In all
essential respects leftists of the oversocialized type want to make the black
man conform to white, middle-class ideals. They want to make him study
technical subjects, become an executive or a scientist, spend his life climbing
the status ladder to prove that black people are as good as white. They want to
make black fathers "responsible." They want black gangs to become nonviolent,
etc. But these are exactly the values of the industrial-technological system.
The system couldn't care less what kind of music a man listens to, what kind of
clothes he wears or what religion he believes in as long as he studies in
school, holds a respectable job, climbs the status ladder, is a "responsible"
parent, is nonviolent and so forth. In effect, however much he may deny it, the
oversocialized leftist wants to integrate the black man into the system and make
him adopt its values.
30. We certainly do not claim that leftists, even of the oversocialized type,
never rebel against the fundamental values of our society. Clearly they
sometimes do. Some oversocialized leftists have gone so far as to rebel against
one of modern society's most important principles by engaging in physical
violence. By their own account, violence is for them a form of "liberation." In
other words, by committing violence they break through the psychological
restraints that have been trained into them. Because they are oversocialized
these restraints have been more confining for them than for others; hence their
need to break free of them. But they usually justify their rebellion in terms
of mainstream values. If they engage in violence they claim to be fighting
against racism or the like.
31. We realize that many objections could be raised to the foregoing thumb-nail
sketch of leftist psychology. The real situation is complex, and anything like
a complete description of it would take several volumes even if the necessary
data were available. We claim only to have indicated very roughly the two most
important tendencies in the psychology of modern leftism.
32. The problems of the leftist are indicative of the problems of our society
as a whole. Low self-esteem, depressive tendencies and defeatism are not
restricted to the left. Though they are especially noticeable in the left, they
are widespread in our society. And today's society tries to socialize us to a
greater extent than any previous society. We are even told by experts how to
eat, how to exercise, how to make love, how to raise our kids and so forth.
The power process
33. Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something that we
will call the "power process." This is closely related to the need for power
(which is widely recognized) but is not quite the same thing. The power process
has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and
attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires
effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The
fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for
everyone. We call it autonomy and will discuss it later (paragraphs 42-44).
34. Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just
by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious
psychological problems. At first he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he
will become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually he may become clinically
depressed. History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent.
This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain
their power. But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert
themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they
have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward
which to exercise one's power.
35. Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical necessities of
life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are made necessary by the
climate. But the leisured aristocrat obtains these things without effort.
Hence his boredom and demoralization.
36. Nonattainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical
necessities, and in frustration if nonattainment of the goals is compatible with
survival. Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in
defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.
37. Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs
goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of
success in attaining his goals.
Surrogate activities
38. But not every leisured aristocrat becomes bored and demoralized. For
example, the emperor Hirohito, instead of sinking into decadent hedonism,
devoted himself to marine biology, a field in which he became distinguished.
When people do not have to exert themselves to satisfy their physical needs they
often set up artificial goals for themselves. In many cases they then pursue
these goals with the same energy and emotional involvement that they otherwise
would have put into the search for physical necessities. Thus the aristocrats
of the Roman Empire had their literary pretensions; many European aristocrats a
few centuries ago invested tremendous time and energy in hunting, though they
certainly didn't need the meat; other aristocracies have competed for status
through elaborate displays of wealth; and a few aristocrats, like Hirohito, have
turned to science.
39. We use the term "surrogate activity" to designate an activity that is
directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in
order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of
the "fulfillment" that they get from pursuing the goal. Here is a rule of thumb
for the identification of surrogate activities. Given a person who devotes much
time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote
most of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that
effort required him to use his physical and mental facilities in a varied and
interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal
X? If the answer is no, then the person's pursuit of a goal X is a surrogate
activity. Hirohito's studies in marine biology clearly constituted a surrogate
activity, since it is pretty certain that if Hirohito had had to spend his time
working at interesting non-scientific tasks in order to obtain the necessities
of life, he would not have felt deprived because he didn't know all about the
anatomy and life-cycles of marine animals. On the other hand the pursuit of sex
and love (for example) is not a surrogate activity, because most people, even if
their existence were otherwise satisfactory, would feel deprived if they passed
their lives without ever having a relationship with a member of the opposite
sex. (But pursuit of an excessive amount of sex, more than one really needs,
can be a surrogate activity.)
40. In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy
one's physical needs. It is enough to go through a training program to acquire
some petty technical skill, then come to work on time and exert very modest
effort needed to hold a job. The only requirements are a moderate amount of
intelligence, and most of all, simple obedience. If one has those, society
takes care of one from cradle to grave. (Yes, there is an underclass that
cannot take physical necessities for granted, but we are speaking here of
mainstream society.) Thus it is not surprising that modern society is full of
surrogate activities. These include scientific work, athletic achievement,
humanitarian work, artistic and literary creation, climbing the corporate
ladder, acquisition of money and material goods far beyond the point at which
they cease to give any additional physical satisfaction, and social activism
when it addresses issues that are not important for the activist personally, as
in the case of white activists who work for the rights of nonwhite minorities.
These are not always pure surrogate activities, since for many people they may
be motivated in part by needs other than the need to have some goal to pursue.
Scientific work may be motivated in part by a drive for prestige, artistic
creation by a need to express feelings, militant social activism by hostility.
But for most people who pursue them, these activities are in large part
surrogate activities. For example, the majority of scientists will probably
agree that the "fulfillment" they get from their work is more important than the
money and prestige they earn.
41. For many if not most people, surrogate activities are less satisfying than
the pursuit of real goals (that is, goals that people would want to attain even
if their need for the power process were already fulfilled). One indication of
this is the fact that, in many or most cases, people who are deeply involved in
surrogate activities are never satisfied, never at rest. Thus the money-maker
constantly strives for more and more wealth. The scientist no sooner solves one
problem than he moves on to the next. The long-distance runner drives himself
to run always farther and faster. Many people who pursue surrogate activities
will say that they get far more fulfillment from these activities than they do
from the "mundane" business of satisfying their biological needs, but that it is
because in our society the effort needed to satisfy the biological needs has
been reduced to triviality. More importantly, in our society people do not
satisfy their biological needs autonomously but by functioning as parts of an
immense social machine. In contrast, people generally have a great deal of
autonomy in pursuing their surrogate activities.
Autonomy
42. Autonomy as a part of the power process may not be necessary for every
individual. But most people need a greater or lesser degree of autonomy in
working toward their goals. Their efforts must be undertaken on their own
initiative and must be under their own direction and control. Yet most people
do not have to exert this initiative, direction and control as single
individuals. It is usually enough to act as a member of a small group. Thus if
half a dozen people discuss a goal among themselves and make a successful joint
effort to attain that goal, their need for the power process will be served.
But if they work under rigid orders handed down from above that leave them no
room for autonomous decision and initiative, then their need for the power
process will not be served. The same is true when decisions are made on a
collective basis if the group making the collective decision is so large that
the role of each individual is insignificant.[5]
43. It is true that some individuals seem to have little need for autonomy.
Either their drive for power is weak or they satisfy it by identifying
themselves with some powerful organization to which they belong. And then there
are unthinking, animal types who seem to be satisfied with a purely physical
sense of power (the good combat soldier, who gets his sense of power by
developing fighting skills that he is quite content to use in blind obedience to
his superiors).
44. But for most people it is through the power process--having a goal, making
an autonomous effort and attaining the goal--that self-esteem, self-confidence
and a sense of power are acquired. When one does not have adequate opportunity
to go throughout the power process the consequences are (depending on the
individual and on the way the power process is disrupted) boredom,
demoralization, low self-esteem, inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression,
anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, spouse or child abuse, insatiable
hedonism, abnormal sexual behavior, sleep disorders, eating disorders, etc.[6]
Sources of social problems
45. Any of the foregoing symptoms can occur in any society, but in modern
industrial society they are present on a massive scale. We aren't the first to
mention that the world today seems to be going crazy. This sort of thing is not
normal for human societies. There is good reason to believe that primitive man
suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way
of life than modern man is. It is true that not all was sweetness and light in
primitive societies. Abuse of women was common among the Australian aborigines,
transexuality was fairly common among some of the American Indian tribes. But
it does appear that generally speaking the kinds of problems that we have listed
in the preceding paragraph were far less common among primitive peoples than
they are in modern society.
46. We attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the
fact that that society requires people to live under conditions radically
different from those under which the human race evolved and to behave in ways
that conflict with the patterns of behavior that the human race developed while
living under the earlier conditions. It is clear from what we have already
written that we consider lack of opportunity to properly experience the power
process as the most important of the abnormal conditions to which modern society
subjects people. But it is not the only one. Before dealing with disruption of
the power process as a source of social problems we will discuss some of the
other sources.
47. Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are
excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive
rapidity of social change and the break-down of natural small-scale communities
such as the extended family, the village or the tribe.
48. It is well known that crowding increases stress and aggression. The degree
of crowding that exists today and the isolation of man from nature are
consequences of technological progress. All pre-industrial societies were
predominantly rural. The industrial Revolution vastly increased the size of
cities and the proportion of the population that lives in them, and modern
agricultural technology has made it possible for the Earth to support a far
denser population than it ever did before. (Also, technology exacerbates the
effects of crowding because it puts increased disruptive powers in people's
hands. For example, a variety of noise-making devices: power mowers, radios,
motorcycles, etc. If the use of these devices is unrestricted, people who want
peace and quiet are frustrated by the noise. If their use is restricted, people
who use the devices are frustrated by the regulations... But if these machines
had never been invented there would have been no conflict and no frustration
generated by them.)
49. For primitive societies the natural world (which usually changes only
slowly) provided a stable framework and therefore a sense of security. In the
modern world it is human society that dominates nature rather than the other way
around, and modern society changes very rapidly owing to technological change.
Thus there is no stable framework.
50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional
values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic
growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic
changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid
changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes
inevitably break down traditional values.
51. The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of
the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups. The
disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that
modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations,
separating themselves from their communities. Beyond that, a technological
society has to weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function
efficiently. In modern society an individual's loyalty must be first to the
system and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal
loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system,
such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.
52. Suppose that a public official or a corporation executive appoints his
cousin, his friend or his co-religionist to a position rather than appointing
the person best qualified for the job. He has permitted personal loyalty to
supersede his loyalty to the system, and that is "nepotism" or "discrimination,"
both of which are terrible sins in modern society. Would-be industrial
societies that have done a poor job of subordinating personal or local loyalties
to loyalty to the system are usually very inefficient. (Look at Latin America.)
Thus an advanced industrial society can tolerate only those small-scale
communities that are emasculated, tamed and made into tools of the system.[7]
53. Crowding, rapid change and the breakdown of communities have been widely
recognized as sources of social problems. but we do not believe they are enough
to account for the extent of the problems that are seen today.
54. A few pre-industrial cities were very large and crowded, yet their
inhabitants do not seem to have suffered from psychological problems to the same
extent as modern man. In America today there still are uncrowded rural areas,
and we find there the same problems as in urban areas, though the problems tend
to be less acute in the rural areas. Thus crowding does not seem to be the
decisive factor.
55. On the growing edge of the American frontier during the 19th century, the
mobility of the population probably broke down extended families and small-scale
social groups to at least the same extent as these are broken down today. In
fact, many nuclear families lived by choice in such isolation, having no
neighbors within several miles, that they belonged to no community at all, yet
they do not seem to have developed problems as a result.
56. Furthermore, change in American frontier society was very rapid and deep.
A man might be born and raised in a log cabin, outside the reach of law and
order and fed largely on wild meat; and by the time he arrived at old age he
might be working at a regular job and living in an ordered community with
effective law enforcement. This was a deeper change than that which typically
occurs in the life of a modern individual, yet it does not seem to have led to
psychological problems. In fact, 19th century American society had an
optimistic and self-confident tone, quite unlike that of today's society.[8]
57. The difference, we argue, is that modern man has the sense (largely
justified) that change is imposed on him, whereas the 19th century frontiersman
had the sense (also largely justified) that he created change himself, by his
own choice. Thus a pioneer settled on a piece of land of his own choosing and
made it into a farm through his own effort. In those days an entire county
might have only a couple of hundred inhabitants and was a far more isolated and
autonomous entity than a modern county is. Hence the pioneer farmer
participated as a member of a relatively small group in the creation of a new,
ordered community. One may well question whether the creation of this community
was an improvement, but at any rate it satisfied the pioneer's need for the
power process.
58. It would be possible to give other examples of societies in which there has
been rapid change and/or lack of close community ties without the kind of
massive behavioral aberration that is seen in today's industrial society. We
contend that the most important cause of social and psychological problems in
modern society is the fact that people have insufficient opportunity to go
through the power process in a normal way. We don't mean to say that modern
society is the only one in which the power process has been disrupted. Probably
most if not all civilized societies have interfered with the power process to a
greater or lesser extent. But in modern industrial society the problem has
become particularly acute. Leftism, at least in its recent (mid-to-late -20th
century) form, is in part a symptom of deprivation with respect to the power
process.
Disruption of the power process in modern society
59. We divide human drives into three groups: (1) those drives that can be
satisfied with minimal effort; (2) those that can be satisfied but only at the
cost of serious effort; (3) those that cannot be adequately satisfied no matter
how much effort one makes. The power process is the process of satisfying the
drives of the second group. The more drives there are in the third group, the
more there is frustration, anger, eventually defeatism, depression, etc.
60. In modern industrial society natural human drives tend to be pushed into
the first and third groups, and the second group tends to consist increasingly
of artificially created drives.
61. In primitive societies, physical necessities generally fall into group 2:
They can be obtained, but only at the cost of serious effort. But modern
society tends to guaranty the physical necessities to everyone[9] in exchange
for only minimal effort, hence physical needs are pushed into group 1. (There
may be disagreement about whether the effort needed to hold a job is "minimal";
but usually, in lower- to middle-level jobs, whatever effort is required is
merely that of obedience. You sit or stand where you are told to sit or stand
and do what you are told to do in the way you are told to do it. Seldom do you
have to exert yourself seriously, and in any case you have hardly any autonomy
in work, so that the need for the power process is not well served.)
62. Social needs, such as sex, love and status, often remain in group 2 in
modern society, depending on the situation of the individual.[10] But, except
for people who have a particularly strong drive for status, the effort required
to fulfill the social drives is insufficient to satisfy adequately the need for
the power process.
63. So certain artificial needs have been created that fall into group 2, hence
serve the need for the power process. Advertising and marketing techniques have
been developed that make many people feel they need things that their
grandparents never desired or even dreamed of. It requires serious effort to
earn enough money to satisfy these artificial needs, hence they fall into group
2. (But see paragraphs 80-82.) Modern man must satisfy his need for the power
process largely through pursuit of the artificial needs created by the
advertising and marketing industry,[11] and through surrogate activities.
64. It seems that for many people, maybe the majority, these artificial forms
of the power process are insufficient. A theme that appears repeatedly in the
writings of the social critics of the second half of the 20th century is the
sense of purposelessness that afflicts many people in modern society. (This
purposelessness is often called by other names such as "anomie" or "middle-class
vacuity.") We suggest that the so-called "identity crisis" is actually a search
for a sense of purpose, often for commitment to a suitable surrogate activity.
It may be that existentialism is in large part a response to the purposelessness
of modern life.[12] Very widespread in modern society is the search for
"fulfillment." But we think that for the majority of people an activity whose
main goal is fulfillment (that is, a surrogate activity) does not bring
completely satisfactory fulfillment. In other words, it does not fully satisfy
the need for the power process. (See paragraph 41.) That need can be fully
satisfied only through activities that have some external goal, such as physical
necessities, sex, love, status, revenge, etc.
65. Moreover, where goals are pursued through earning money, climbing the
status ladder or functioning as part of the system in some other way, most
people are not in a position to pursue their goals autonomously. Most workers
are someone else's employee and, as we pointed out in paragraph 61, must spend
their days doing what they are told to do in the way they are told to do it.
Even most people who are in business for themselves have only limited autonomy.
It is a chronic complaint of small-business persons and entrepreneurs that their
hands are tied by excessive government regulation. Some of these regulations
are doubtless unnecessary, but for the most part government regulations are
essential and inevitable parts of our extremely complex society. A large
portion of small business today operates on the franchise system. It was
reported in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago that many of the
franchise-granting companies require applicants for franchises to take a
personality test that is designed to exclude those who have creativity and
initiative, because such persons are not sufficiently docile to go along
obediently with the franchise system. This excludes from small business many of
the people who most need autonomy.
66. 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. And what they do for
themselves is done more and more along channels laid down by the system.
Opportunities tend to be those that the system provides, the opportunities must
be exploited in accord with the rules and regulations,[13] and techniques
prescribed by experts must be followed if there is to be a chance of success.
67. Thus the power process is disrupted in our society through a deficiency of
real goals and a deficiency of autonomy in pursuit of goals. But it is also
disrupted because of those human drives that fall into group 3: the drives that
one cannot adequately satisfy no matter how much effort one makes. One of these
drives is the need for security. Our lives depend on decisions made by other
people; we have no control over these decisions and usually we do not even know
the people who make them. ("We live in a world in which relatively few
people--maybe 500 or 1,000--make the important decisions"--Philip B. Heymann of
Harvard Law School, quoted by Anthony Lewis, New York Times, April 21, 1995.)
Our lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are
properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our food or
how much pollution into our air; on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is;
whether we lose or get a job may depend on decisions made by government
economists or corporation executives; and so forth. Most individuals are not in
a position to secure themselves against these threats to more than a very
limited extent. The individual's search for security is therefore frustrated,
which leads to a sense of powerlessness.
68. It may be objected that primitive man is physically less secure than modern
man, as is shown by his shorter life expectancy; hence modern man suffers from
less, not more than the amount of insecurity that is normal for human beings.
but psychological security does not closely correspond with physical security.
What makes us feel secure is not so much objective security as a sense of
confidence in our ability to take care of ourselves. Primitive man, threatened
by a fierce animal or by hunger, can fight in self-defense or travel in search
of food. He has no certainty of success in these efforts, but he is by no means
helpless against the things that threaten him. The modern individual on the
other hand is threatened by many things against which he is helpless; nuclear
accidents, carcinogens in food, environmental pollution, war, increasing taxes,
invasion of his privacy by large organizations, nation-wide social or economic
phenomena that may disrupt his way of life.
69. It is true that primitive man is powerless against some of the things that
threaten him; disease for example. But he can accept the risk of disease
stoically. It is part of the nature of things, it is no one's fault, unless it
is the fault of some imaginary, impersonal demon. But threats to the modern
individual tend to be man-made. They are not the results of chance but are
imposed on him by other persons whose decisions he, as an individual, is unable
to influence. Consequently he feels frustrated, humiliated and angry.
70. Thus primitive man for the most part has his security in his own hands
(either as an individual or as a member of a small group) whereas the security
of modern man is in the hands of persons or organizations that are too remote or
too large for him to be able personally to influence them. So modern man's
drive for security tends to fall into groups 1 and 3; in some areas (food,
shelter, etc.) his security is assured at the cost of only trivial effort,
whereas in other areas he cannot attain security. (The foregoing greatly
simplifies the real situation, but it does indicate in a rough, general way how
the condition of modern man differs from that of primitive man.)
71. People have many transitory drives or impulses that are necessarily
frustrated in modern life, hence fall into group 3. One may become angry, but
modern society cannot permit fighting. In many situations it does not even
permit verbal aggression. When going somewhere one may be in a hurry, or one
may be in a mood to travel slowly, but one generally has no choice but to move
with the flow of traffic and obey the traffic signals. One may want to do one's
work in a different way, but usually one can work only according to the rules
laid down by one's employer. In many other ways as well, modern man is strapped
down by a network of rules and regulations (explicit or implicit) that frustrate
many of his impulses and thus interfere with the power process. Most of these
regulations cannot be disposed with, because they are necessary for the
functioning of industrial society.
72. Modern society is in certain respects extremely permissive. In matters
that are irrelevant to the functioning of the system we can generally do what we
please. We can believe in any religion we like (as long as it does not
encourage behavior that is dangerous to the system). We can go to bed with
anyone we like (as long as we practice "safe sex"). 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.
73. Behavior is regulated not only through explicit rules and not only by the
government. Control is often exercised through indirect coercion or through
psychological pressure or manipulation, and by organizations other than the
government, or by the system as a whole. Most large organizations use some form
of propaganda[14] to manipulate public attitudes or behavior. Propaganda is not
limited to "commercials" and advertisements, and sometimes it is not even
consciously intended as propaganda by the people who make it. For instance, the
content of entertainment programming is a powerful form of propaganda. An
example of indirect coercion: There is no law that says we have to go to work
every day and follow our employer's orders. Legally there is nothing to prevent
us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into
business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left,
and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business
owners. Hence most of us can survive only as someone else's employee.
74. We suggest that modern man's obsession with longevity, and with maintaining
physical vigor and sexual attractiveness to an advanced age, is a symptom of
unfulfillment resulting from deprivation with respect to the power process. The
"mid-life crisis" also is such a symptom. So is the lack of interest in having
children that is fairly common in modern society but almost unheard-of in
primitive societies.
75. In primitive societies life is a succession of stages. The needs and
purposes of one stage having been fulfilled, there is no particular reluctance
about passing on to the next stage. A young man goes through the power process
by becoming a hunter, hunting not for sport or for fulfillment but to get meat
that is necessary for food. (In young women the process is more complex, with
greater emphasis on social power; we won't discuss that here.) This phase having
been successfully passed through, the young man has no reluctance about settling
down to the responsibilities of raising a family. (In contrast, some modern
people indefinitely postpone having children because they are too busy seeking
some kind of "fulfillment." We suggest that the fulfillment they need is
adequate experience of the power process--with real goals instead of the
artificial goals of surrogate activities.) Again, having successfully raised his
children, going through the power process by providing them with the physical
necessities, the primitive man feels that his work is done and he is prepared to
accept old age (if he survives that long) and death. Many modern people, on the
other hand, are disturbed by the prospect of death, as is shown by the amount of
effort they expend trying to maintain their physical condition, appearance and
health. We argue that this is due to unfulfillment resulting from the fact that
they have never put their physical powers to any use, have never gone through
the power process using their bodies in a serious way. 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. It is the man whose need for
the power process has been satisfied during his life who is best prepared to
accept the end of that life.
76. In response to the arguments of this section someone will say, "Society
must find a way to give people the opportunity to go through the power process."
For such people the value of the opportunity is destroyed by the very fact that
society gives it to them. What they need is to find or make their own
opportunities. As long as the system gives them their opportunities it still
has them on a leash. To attain autonomy they must get off that leash.
How some people adjust
77. Not everyone in industrial-technological society suffers from psychological
problems. Some people even profess to be quite satisfied with society as it is.
We now discuss some of the reasons why people differ so greatly in their
response to modern society.
78. First, there doubtless are differences in the strength of the drive for
power. Individuals with a weak drive for power may have relatively little need
to go through the power process, or at least relatively little need for autonomy
in the power process. These are docile types who would have been happy as
plantation darkies in the Old South. (We don't mean to sneer at "plantation
darkies" of the Old South. To their credit, most of the slaves were not content
with their servitude. We do sneer at people who are content with servitude.)
79. Some people may have some exceptional drive, in pursuing which they satisfy
their need for the power process. For example, those who have an unusually
strong drive for social status may spend their whole lives climbing the status
ladder without ever getting bored with that game.
80. People vary in their susceptibility to advertising and marketing
techniques. Some people are so susceptible that, even if they make a great deal
of money, they cannot satisfy their constant craving for the shiny new toys that
the marketing industry dangles before their eyes. So they always feel
hard-pressed financially even if their income is large, and their cravings are
frustrated.
81. Some people have low susceptibility to advertising and marketing
techniques. These are the people who aren't interested in money. Material
acquisition does not serve their need for the power process.
82. People who have medium susceptibility to advertising and marketing
techniques are able to earn enough money to satisfy their craving for goods and
services, but only at the cost of serious effort (putting in overtime, taking a
second job, earning promotions, etc.) Thus material acquisition serves their
need for the power process. But it does not necessarily follow that their need
is fully satisfied. They may have insufficient autonomy in the power process
(their work may consist of following orders) and some of their drives may be
frustrated (e.g., security, aggression) (We are guilty of oversimplification in
paragraphs 80-82 because we have assumed that the desire for material
acquisition is entirely a creation of the advertising and marketing industry.
Of course it's not that simple).
83. Some people partly satisfy their need for power by identifying themselves
with a powerful organization or mass movement. An individual lacking goals or
power joins a movement or an organization, adopts its goals as his own, then
works toward these goals. When some of the goals are attained, the individual,
even though his personal efforts have played only an insignificant part in the
attainment of the goals, feels (through his identification with the movement or
organization) as if he had gone through the power process. This phenomenon was
exploited by the fascists, Nazis and communists. Our society uses it, too,
though less crudely. Example: Manuel Noriega was an irritant to the U.S.
(goal: punish Noriega). The U.S. invaded Panama (effort) and punished Noriega
(attainment of goal). The U.S. went through the power process and many
Americans, because of their identification with the U.S., experienced the power
process vicariously. Hence the widespread public approval of the Panama
invasion; it gave people a sense of power.[15] We see the same phenomenon in
armies, corporations, political parties, humanitarian organizations, religious
or ideological movements. In particular, leftist movements tend to attract
people who are seeking to satisfy their need for power. But for most people
identification with a large organization or a mass movement does not fully
satisfy the need for power.
84. Another way in which people satisfy their need for the power process is
through surrogate activities. As we explained in paragraphs 38-40, a surrogate
activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that the individual pursues
for the sake of the "fulfillment" that he gets from pursuing the goal, not
because he needs to attain the goal itself. For instance, there is no practical
motive for building enormous muscles, hitting a little ball into a hole or
acquiring a complete series of postage stamps. Yet many people in our society
devote themselves with passion to bodybuilding, golf or stamp collecting. Some
people are more "other-directed" than others, and therefore will more readily
attach importance to a surrogate activity simply because the people around them
treat it as important or because society tells them it is important. That is
why some people get very serious about essentially trivial activities such as
sports, or bridge, or chess, or arcane scholarly pursuits, whereas others who
are more clear-sighted never see these things as anything but the surrogate
activities that they are, and consequently never attach enough importance to
them to satisfy their need for the power process in that way. It only remains
to point out that in many cases a person's way of earning a living is also a
surrogate activity. Not a pure surrogate activity, since part of the motive for
the activity is to gain the physical necessities and (for some people) social
status and the luxuries that advertising makes them want. But many people put
into their work far more effort than is necessary to earn whatever money and
status they require, and this extra effort constitutes a surrogate activity.
This extra effort, together with the emotional investment that accompanies it,
is one of the most potent forces acting toward the continual development and
perfecting of the system, with negative consequences for individual freedom (see
paragraph 131). Especially, for the most creative scientists and engineers,
work tends to be largely a surrogate activity. This point is so important that
is deserves a separate discussion, which we shall give in a moment (paragraphs
87-92).
85. In this section we have explained how many people in modern society do
satisfy their need for the power process to a greater or lesser extent. But we
think that for the majority of people the need for the power process is not
fully satisfied. In the first place, those who have an insatiable drive for
status, or who get firmly "hooked" on a surrogate activity, or who identify
strongly enough with a movement or organization to satisfy their need for power
in that way, are exceptional personalities. Others are not fully satisfied with
surrogate activities or by identification with an organization (see paragraphs
41, 64). In the second place, too much control is imposed by the system through
explicit regulation or through socialization, which results in a deficiency of
autonomy, and in frustration due to the impossibility of attaining certain goals
and the necessity of restraining too many impulses.
86. But even if most people in industrial-technological society were well
satisfied, we (FC) would still be opposed to that form of society, because
(among other reasons) we consider it demeaning to fulfill one's need for the
power process through surrogate activities or through identification with an
organization, rather than through pursuit of real goals.
The motives of scientists
87. Science and technology provide the most important examples of surrogate
activities. Some scientists claim that they are motivated by "curiosity;" that
notion is simply absurd. Most scientists work on highly specialized problems
that are not the object of any normal curiosity. For example, is an astronomer,
a mathematician or an entomologist curious about the properties of
isopropyltrimethylmethane? Of course not. Only a chemist is curious about such
a thing, and he is curious about it only because chemistry is his surrogate
activity. Is the chemist curious about the appropriate classification of a new
species of beetle? No. That question is of interest only to the entomologist,
and he is interested in it only because entomology is his surrogate activity.
If the chemist and the entomologist had to exert themselves seriously to obtain
the physical necessities, and if that effort exercised their abilities in an
interesting way but in some nonscientific pursuit, then they couldn't give a
damn about isopropyltrimethylmethane or the classification of beetles. Suppose
that lack of funds for postgraduate education had led the chemist to become an
insurance broker instead of a chemist. In that case he would have been very
interested in insurance matters but would have cared nothing about
isopropyltrimethylmethane. In any case it is not normal to put into the
satisfaction of mere curiosity the amount of time and effort that scientists put
into their work. The "curiosity" explanation for the scientists' motive just
doesn't stand up.
88. The "benefit of humanity" explanation doesn't work any better. Some
scientific work has no conceivable relation to the welfare of the human
race--most of archeology or comparative linguistics for example. Some other
areas of science present obviously dangerous possibilities. Yet scientists in
these areas are just as enthusiastic about their work as those who develop
vaccines or study air pollution. Consider the case of Dr. Edward Teller, who
had an obvious emotional involvement in promoting nuclear power plants. Did
this involvement stem from a desire to benefit humanity? If so, then why didn't
Dr. Teller get emotional about other "humanitarian" causes? If he was such a
humanitarian then why did he help to develop the H-bomb? As with many other
scientific achievements, it is very much open to question whether nuclear power
plants actually do benefit humanity. Does the cheap electricity outweigh the
accumulating waste and risk of accidents? Dr. Teller saw only one side of the
question. Clearly his emotional involvement with nuclear power arose not from a
desire to "benefit humanity" but from a personal fulfillment he got from his
work and from seeing it put to practical use.
89. The same is true of scientists generally. With possible rare exceptions,
their motive is neither curiosity nor a desire to benefit humanity but the need
to go through the power process: to have a goal (a scientific problem to solve),
to make an effort (research) and to attain the goal (solution of the problem.)
Science is a surrogate activity because scientists work mainly for the
fulfillment they get out of the work itself.
90. Of course, it's not that simple. Other motives do play a role for many
scientists. Money and status for example. Some scientists may be persons of
the type who have an insatiable drive for status (see paragraph 79) and this may
provide much of the motivation for their work. No doubt the majority of
scientists, like the majority of the general population, are more or less
susceptible to advertising and marketing techniques and need money to satisfy
their craving for goods and services. Thus science is not a pure surrogate
activity. But it is in large part a surrogate activity.
91. Also, science and technology constitute a mass power movement, and many
scientists gratify their need for power through identification with this mass
movement (see paragraph 83).
92. Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the
human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of
the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who
provide the funds for research.
The nature of freedom
93. We are going to argue that industrial-technological society cannot be
reformed in such a way as to prevent it from progressively narrowing the sphere
of human freedom. But because "freedom" is a word that can be interpreted in
many ways, we must first make clear what kind of freedom we are concerned with.
94. By "freedom" we mean the opportunity to go through the power process, with
real goals not the artificial goals of surrogate activities, and without
interference, manipulation or supervision from anyone, especially from any large
organization. Freedom means being in control (either as an individual or as a
member of a small group) of the life-and-death issues of one's existence; food,
clothing, shelter and defense against whatever threats there may be in one's
environment. Freedom means having power; not the power to control other people
but the power to control the circumstances of one's own life. One does not have
freedom if anyone else (especially a large organization) has power over one, no
matter how benevolently, tolerantly and permissively that power may be
exercised. It is important not to confuse freedom with mere permissiveness (see
paragraph 72).
95. It is said that we live in a free society because we have a certain number
of constitutionally guaranteed rights. But these are not as important as they
seem. The degree of personal freedom that exists in a society is determined
more by the economic and technological structure of the society than by its laws
or its form of government.[16] Most of the Indian nations of New England were
monarchies, and many of the cities of the Italian Renaissance were controlled by
dictators. But in reading about these societies one gets the impression that
they allowed far more personal freedom than our society does. In part this was
because they lacked efficient mechanisms for enforcing the ruler's will: There
were no modern, well-organized police forces, no rapid long-distance
communications, no surveillance cameras, no dossiers of information about the
lives of average citizens. Hence it was relatively easy to evade control.
96. As for our constitutional rights, consider for example that of freedom of
the press. We certainly don't mean to knock that right: it is very important
tool for limiting concentration of political power and for keeping those who do
have political power in line by publicly exposing any misbehavior on their part.
But freedom of the press is of very little use to the average citizen as an
individual. The mass media are mostly under the control of large organizations
that are integrated into the system. Anyone who has a little money can have
something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but
what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the
media, hence it will have no practical effect. To make an impression on society
with words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals and small groups.
Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had
submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been
accepted. If they had been accepted and published, they probably would not have
attracted many readers, because it's more fun to watch the entertainment put out
by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many
readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as
their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them.
In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a
lasting impression, we've had to kill people.
97. Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to
guarantee much more than what could be called the bourgeois conception of
freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a "free" man is essentially an
element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and
delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social
machine more than those of the individual. Thus the bourgeois's "free" man has
economic freedom because that promotes growth and progress; he has freedom of
the press because public criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders;
he has a rights to a fair trial because imprisonment at the whim of the powerful
would be bad for the system. This was clearly the attitude of Simon Bolivar.
To him, people deserved liberty only if they used it to promote progress
(progress as conceived by the bourgeois). Other bourgeois thinkers have taken a
similar view of freedom as a mere means to collective ends. Chester C. Tan,
"Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century," page 202, explains the
philosophy of the Kuomintang leader Hu Han-min: "An individual is granted rights
because he is a member of society and his community life requires such rights.
By community Hu meant the whole society of the nation." And on page 259 Tan
states that according to Carsum Chang (Chang Chun-mai, head of the State
Socialist Party in China) freedom had to be used in the interest of the state
and of the people as a whole. But what kind of freedom does one have if one can
use it only as someone else prescribes? FC's conception of freedom is not that
of Bolivar, Hu, Chang or other bourgeois theorists. The trouble with such
theorists is that they have made the development and application of social
theories their surrogate activity. Consequently the theories are designed to
serve the needs of the theorists more than the needs of any people who may be
unlucky enough to live in a society on which the theories are imposed.
98. One more point to be made in this section: It should not be assumed that a
person has enough freedom just because he says he has enough. Freedom is
restricted in part by psychological control of which people are unconscious, and
moreover many people's ideas of what constitutes freedom are governed more by
social convention than by their real needs. For example, it's likely that many
leftists of the oversocialized type would say that most people, including
themselves are socialized too little rather than too much, yet the
oversocialized leftist pays a heavy psychological price for his high level of
socialization.
Some principles of history
99. Think of history as being the sum of two components: an erratic component
that consists of unpredictable events that follow no discernible pattern, and a
regular component that consists of long-term historical trends. Here we are
concerned with the long-term trends.
First principle
100. If a small change is made that affects a long-term historical trend, then
the effect of that change will almost always be transitory - the trend will soon
revert to its original state. (Example: A reform movement designed to clean up
political corruption in a society rarely has more than a short-term effect;
sooner or later the reformers relax and corruption creeps back in. The level of
political corruption in a given society tends to remain constant, or to change
only slowly with the evolution of the society. Normally, a political cleanup
will be permanent only if accompanied by widespread social changes; a small
change in the society won't be enough.) If a small change in a long-term
historical trend appears to be permanent, it is only because the change acts in
the direction in which the trend is already moving, so that the trend is not
altered but only pushed a step ahead.
101. The first principle is almost a tautology. If a trend were not stable
with respect to small changes, it would wander at random rather than following a
definite direction; in other words it would not be a long-term trend at all.
Second principle
102. If a change is made that is sufficiently large to alter permanently a
long-term historical trend, then it will alter the society as a whole. In other
words, a society is a system in which all parts are interrelated, and you can't
permanently change any important part without changing all the other parts as
well.
Third principle
103. If a change is made that is large enough to alter permanently a long-term
trend, then the consequences for the society as a whole cannot be predicted in
advance. (Unless various other societies have passed through the same change
and have all experienced the same consequences, in which case one can predict on
empirical grounds that another society that passes through the same change will
be likely to experience similar consequences.)
Fourth principle
104. A new kind of society cannot be designed on paper. That is, you cannot
plan out a new form of society in advance, then set it up and expect it to
function as it was designed to.
105. The third and fourth principles result from the complexity of human
societies. A change in human behavior will affect the economy of a society and
its physical environment; the economy will affect the environment and vice
versa, and the changes in the economy and the environment will affect human
behavior in complex, unpredictable ways; and so forth. The network of causes
and effects is far too complex to be untangled and understood.
Fifth principle
106. People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society.
Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under
rational human control.
107. The fifth principle is a consequence of the other four.
108. To illustrate: By the first principle, generally speaking an attempt at
social reform either acts in the direction in which the society is developing
anyway (so that it merely accelerates a change that would have occurred in any
case) or else it only has a transitory effect, so that the society soon slips
back into its old groove. To make a lasting change in the direction of
development of any important aspect of a society, reform is insufficient and
revolution is required. (A revolution does not necessarily involve an armed
uprising or the overthrow of a government.) By the second principle, a
revolution never changes only one aspect of a society; and by the third
principle changes occur that were never expected or desired by the
revolutionaries. By the fourth principle, when revolutionaries or utopians set
up a new kind of society, it never works out as planned.
109. The American Revolution does not provide a counterexample. The American
"Revolution" was not a revolution in our sense of the word, but a war of
independence followed by a rather far-reaching political reform. The Founding
Fathers did not change the direction of development of American society, nor did
they aspire to do so. They only freed the development of American society from
the retarding effect of British rule. Their political reform did not change any
basic trend, but only pushed American political culture along its natural
direction of development. British society, of which American society was an
off-shoot, had been moving for a long time in the direction of representative
democracy. And prior to the War of Independence the Americans were already
practicing a significant degree of representative democracy in the colonial
assemblies. The political system established by the Constitution was modeled on
the British system and on the colonial assemblies. With major alteration, to be
sure--there is no doubt that the Founding Fathers took a very important step.
But it was a step along the road the English-speaking world was already
traveling. The proof is that Britain and all of its colonies that were
populated predominantly by people of British descent ended up with systems of
representative democracy essentially similar to that of the United States. If
the Founding Fathers had lost their nerve and declined to sign the Declaration
of Independence, our way of life today would not have been significantly
different. Maybe we would have had somewhat closer ties to Britain, and would
have had a Parliament and Prime Minister instead of a Congress and President.
No big deal. Thus the American Revolution provides not a counterexample to our
principles but a good illustration of them.
110. Still, one has to use common sense in applying the principles. They are
expressed in imprecise language that allows latitude for interpretation, and
exceptions to them can be found. So we present these principles not as
inviolable laws but as rules of thumb, or guides to thinking, that may provide a
partial antidote to naive ideas about the future of society. The principles
should be borne constantly in mind, and whenever one reaches a conclusion that
conflicts with them one should carefully reexamine one's thinking and retain the
conclusion only if one has good, solid reasons for doing so.
Industrial-technological society cannot be reformed
111. The foregoing principles help to show how hopelessly difficult it would be
to reform the industrial system in such a way as to prevent it from
progressively narrowing our sphere of freedom. There has been a consistent
tendency, going back at least to the Industrial Revolution for technology to
strengthen the system at a high cost in individual freedom and local autonomy.
Hence any change designed to protect freedom from technology would be contrary
to a fundamental trend in the development of our society. Consequently, such a
change either would be a transitory one--soon swamped by the tide of
history--or, if large enough to be permanent would alter the nature of our whole
society. This by the first and second principles. Moreover, since society
would be altered in a way that could not be predicted in advance (third
principle) there would be great risk. 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. So any attempts at reform
would be too timid to be effective. Even if changes large enough to make a
lasting difference were initiated, they would be retracted when their disruptive
effects became apparent. Thus, permanent changes in favor of freedom could be
brought about only by persons prepared to accept radical, dangerous and
unpredictable alteration of the entire system. In other words, by
revolutionaries, not reformers.
112. People anxious to rescue freedom without sacrificing the supposed benefits
of technology will suggest naive schemes for some new form of society that would
reconcile freedom with technology. Apart from the fact that people who make
suggestions seldom propose any practical means by which the new form of society
could be set up in the first place, it follows from the fourth principle that
even if the new form of society could be once established, it either would
collapse or would give results very different from those expected.
113. So even on very general grounds it seems highly improbable that any way of
changing society could be found that would reconcile freedom with modern
technology. In the next few sections we will give more specific reasons for
concluding that freedom and technological progress are incompatible.
Restriction of freedom is unavoidable in industrial society
114. As explained in paragraph 65-67, 70-73, 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. This is not accidental or
a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and
inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system has to regulate
human behavior closely in order to function. At work, people have to do what
they are told to do, otherwise production would be thrown into chaos.
Bureaucracies have to be run according to rigid rules. To allow any substantial
personal discretion to lower-level bureaucrats would disrupt the system and lead
to charges of unfairness due to differences in the way individual bureaucrats
exercised their discretion. It is true that some restrictions on our freedom
could be eliminated, but generally speaking the regulation of our lives by large
organizations is necessary for the functioning of industrial-technological
society. The result is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the average
person. It may be, however, that formal regulations will tend increasingly to
be replaced by psychological tools that make us want to do what the system
requires of us. (Propaganda 14, educational techniques, "mental health"
programs, etc.)
115. The system has to force people to behave in ways that are increasingly
remote from the natural pattern of human behavior. For example, the system
needs scientists, mathematicians and engineers. It can't function without them.
So heavy pressure is put on children to excel in these fields. It isn't natural
for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk
absorbed in study. A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active
contact with the real world. Among primitive peoples the things that children
are trained to do are in natural harmony with natural human impulses. Among the
American Indians, for example, boys were trained in active outdoor
pursuits--just the sort of things that boys like. But in our society children
are pushed into studying technical subjects, which most do grudgingly.
116. Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human
behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will
not adjust to society's requirements: welfare leeches, youth-gang members,
cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts
and resisters of various kinds.
117. In any technologically advanced society the individual's fate must depend
on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A
technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities,
because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people
and machines. Such a society must be highly organized and decisions have to be
made that affect very large numbers of people. When a decision affects, say, a
million people, then each of the affected individuals has, on the average, only
a one-millionth share in making the decision. What usually happens in practice
is that decisions are made by public officials or corporation executives, or by
technical specialists, but even when the public votes on a decision the number
of voters ordinarily is too large for the vote of any one individual to be
significant.[17] Thus most individuals are unable to influence measurably the
major decisions that affect their lives. There is no conceivable way to remedy
this in a technologically advanced society. The system tries to "solve" this
problem by using propaganda to make people want the decisions that have been
made for them, but even if this "solution" were completely successful in making
people feel better, it would be demeaning.
118. Conservatives and some others advocate more "local autonomy." Local
communities once did have autonomy, but such autonomy becomes less and less
possible as local communities become more enmeshed with and dependent on
large-scale systems like public utilities, computer networks, highway systems,
the mass communications media, the modern health care system. Also operating
against autonomy is the fact that technology applied in one location often
affects people at other locations far away. Thus pesticide or chemical use near
a creek may contaminate the water supply hundreds of miles downstream, and the
greenhouse effect affects the whole world.
119. 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 the fault of technology, because the
system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.[18] Of course the
system does satisfy many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only
to the extent that it is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the
needs of the system that are paramount, not those of the human being. For
example, the system provides people with food because the system couldn't
function if everyone starved; it attends to people's psychological needs
whenever it can conveniently do so, because it couldn't function if too many
people became depressed or rebellious. But the system, for good, solid,
practical reasons, must exert constant pressure on people to mold their behavior
to the needs of the system. Too much waste accumulating? The government, the
media, the educational system, environmentalists, everyone inundates us with a
mass of propaganda about recycling. Need more technical personnel? A chorus of
voices exhorts kids to study science. No one stops to ask whether it is
inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects
most of them hate. When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical
advances and have to undergo "retraining," no one asks whether it is humiliating
for them to be pushed around in this way. It is simply taken for granted that
everyone must bow to technical necessity and for good reason: If human needs
were put before technical necessity there would be economic problems,
unemployment, shortages or worse. The concept of "mental health" in our society
is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with
the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.
120. Efforts to make room for a sense of purpose and for autonomy within the
system are no better than a joke. For example, one company, instead of having
each of its employees assemble only one section of a catalogue, had each
assemble a whole catalogue, and this was supposed to give them a sense of
purpose and achievement. Some companies have tried to give their employees more
autonomy in their work, but for practical reasons this usually can be done only
to a very limited extent, and in any case employees are never given autonomy as
to ultimate goals--their "autonomous" efforts can never be directed toward goals
that they select personally, but only toward their employer's goals, such as the
survival and growth of the company. Any company would soon go out of business
if it permitted its employees to act otherwise. Similarly, in any enterprise
within a socialist system, workers must direct their efforts toward the goals of
the enterprise, otherwise the enterprise will not serve its purpose as part of
the system. Once again, for purely technical reasons it is not possible for
most individuals or small groups to have much autonomy in industrial society.
Even the small-business owner commonly has only limited autonomy. Apart from
the necessity of government regulation, he is restricted by the fact that he
must fit into the economic system and conform to its requirements. For
instance, when someone develops a new technology, the small-business person
often has to use that technology whether he wants to or not, in order to remain
competitive.
The 'bad' parts of technology cannot be separated from the 'good' parts
121. A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed in favor of
freedom is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are
dependent on one another. You can't get rid of the "bad" parts of technology
and retain only the "good" parts. Take modern medicine, for example. Progress
in medical science depends on progress in chemistry, physics, biology, computer
science and other fields. Advanced medical treatments require expensive,
high-tech equipment that can be made available only by a technologically
progressive, economically rich society. Clearly you can't have much progress in
medicine without the whole technological system and everything that goes with
it.
122. Even if medical progress could be maintained without the rest of the
technological system, it would by itself bring certain evils. Suppose for
example that a cure for diabetes is discovered. People with a genetic tendency
to diabetes will then be able to survive and reproduce as well as anyone else.
Natural selection against genes for diabetes will cease and such genes will
spread throughout the population. (This may be occurring to some extent
already, since diabetes, while not curable, can be controlled through the use of
insulin.) The same thing will happen with many other diseases susceptibility to
which is affected by genetic degradation of the population. The only solution
will be some sort of eugenics program or extensive genetic engineering of human
beings, so that man in the future will no longer be a creation of nature, or of
chance, or of God (depending on your religious or philosophical opinions), but a
manufactured product.
123. If you think that big government interferes in your life too much now,
just wait till the government starts regulating the genetic constitution of your
children. Such regulation will inevitably follow the introduction of genetic
engineering of human beings, because the consequences of unregulated genetic
engineering would be disastrous.[19]
124. The usual response to such concerns is to talk about "medical ethics." But
a code of ethics would not serve to protect freedom in the face of medical
progress; it would only make matters worse. A code of ethics applicable to
genetic engineering would be in effect a means of regulating the genetic
constitution of human beings. Somebody (probably the upper-middle class,
mostly) would decide that such and such applications of genetic engineering were
"ethical" and others were not, so that in effect they would be imposing their
own values on the genetic constitution of the population at large.[20] Even if a
code of ethics were chosen on a completely democratic basis, the majority would
be imposing their own values on any minorities who might have a different idea
of what constituted an "ethical" use of genetic engineering. The only code of
ethics that would truly protect freedom would be one that prohibited any genetic
engineering of human beings, and you can be sure that no such code will ever be
applied in a technological society. No code that reduced genetic engineering to
a minor role could stand up for long, because the temptation presented by the
immense power of biotechnology would be irresistible, especially since to the
majority of people many of its applications will seem obviously and
unequivocally good (eliminating physical and mental diseases, giving people the
abilities they need to get along in today's world). Inevitably, genetic
engineering will be used extensively, but only in ways consistent with the needs
of the industrial-technological system.
Technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom
125. It is not possible to make a lasting compromise between technology and
freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and
continually encroaches on freedom through repeated compromises. Imagine the
case of two neighbors, each of whom at the outset owns the same amount of land,
but one of whom is more powerful than the other. The powerful one demands a
piece of the other's land. The weak one refuses. The powerful one says, "OK,
let's compromise. Give me half of what I asked." The weak one has little choice
but to give in. Some time later the powerful neighbor demands another piece of
land, again there is a compromise, and so forth. By forcing a long series of
compromises on the weaker man, the powerful one eventually gets all of his land.
So it goes in the conflict between technology and freedom.
126. Let us explain why technology is a more powerful social force than the
aspiration for freedom.
127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns
out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized
transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace
without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological
support-systems. When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase
man's freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to
have an automobile if he didn't want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an
automobile could travel much faster than the walking man. But the introduction
of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly
man's freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became
necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely
populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one's own pace--one's
movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is
tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing
registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on
purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional.
Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has
changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking
distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational
opportunities, so that they have to depend on the automobile for transportation.
Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less
control over their own movement than when driving a car. Even the walker's
freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop and
wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the
country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the
highway. (Note the important point we have illustrated with the case of
motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option
that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily
remain optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way
that people eventually find themselves forced to use it.)
128. While technological progress as a whole continually narrows our sphere of
freedom, each new technical advance considered by itself appears to be
desirable. Electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid long-distance communications . .
. how could one argue against any of these things, or against any other of the
innumerable technical advances that have made modern society? It would have
been absurd to resist the introduction of the telephone, for example. It
offered many advantages and no disadvantages. Yet as we explained in paragraphs
59-76, all these technical advances taken together have created a world in which
the average man's fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of his
neighbors and friends, but in those of politicians, corporation executives and
remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no
power to influence.[21] The same process will continue in the future. Take
genetic engineering, for example. Few people will resist the introduction of a
genetic technique that eliminates a hereditary disease. It does no apparent
harm and prevents much suffering. Yet a large number of genetic improvements
taken together will make the human being into an engineered product rather than
a free creation of chance (or of God, or whatever, depending on your religious
beliefs).
129. Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that,
within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only
one direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been
introduced, people usually become dependent on it, unless it is replaced by some
still more advanced innovation. Not only do people become dependent as
individuals on a new item of technology, but, even more, the system as a whole
becomes dependent on it. (Imagine what would happen to the system today if
computers, for example, were eliminated.) Thus the system can move in only one
direction, toward greater technologization. Technology repeatedly forces
freedom to take a step back--short of the overthrow of the whole technological
system.
130. Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at many
different points at the same time (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.) To hold back any one of the threats to
freedom would require a long and difficult social struggle. Those who want to
protect freedom are overwhelmed by the sheer number of new attacks and the
rapidity with which they develop, hence they become pathetic and no longer
resist. To fight each of the threats separately would be futile. Success can
be hoped for only by fighting the technological system as a whole; but that is
revolution not reform.
131. Technicians (we use this term in its broad sense to describe all those who
perform a specialized task that requires training) tend to be so involved in
their work (their surrogate activity) that when a conflict arises between their
technical work and freedom, they almost always decide in favor of their
technical work. This is obvious in the case of scientists, but it also appears
elsewhere: Educators, humanitarian groups, conservation organizations do not
hesitate to use propaganda or other psychological techniques to help them
achieve their laudable ends. Corporations and government agencies, when they
find it useful, do not hesitate to collect information about individuals without
regard to their privacy. Law enforcement agencies are frequently inconvenienced
by the constitutional rights of suspects and often of completely innocent
persons, and they do whatever they can do legally (or sometimes illegally) to
restrict or circumvent those rights. Most of these educators, government
officials and law officers believe in freedom, privacy and constitutional
rights, but when these conflict with their work, they usually feel that their
work is more important.
132. It is well known that people generally work better and more persistently
when striving for a reward than when attempting to avoid a punishment or
negative outcome. Scientists and other technicians are motivated mainly by the
rewards they get through their work. But those who oppose technological
invasions of freedom are working to avoid a negative outcome, consequently there
are a few who work persistently and well at this discouraging task. If
reformers ever achieved a signal victory that seemed to set up a solid barrier
against further erosion of freedom through technological progress, most would
tend to relax and turn their attention to more agreeable pursuits. But the
scientists would remain busy in their laboratories, and technology as it
progresses would find ways, in spite of any barriers, to exert more and more
control over individuals and make them always more dependent on the system.
133. No social arrangements, whether laws, institutions, customs or ethical
codes, can provide permanent protection against technology. History shows that
all social arrangements are transitory; they all change or break down
eventually. But technological advances are permanent within the context of a
given civilization. Suppose for example that it were possible to arrive at some
social arrangements that would prevent genetic engineering from being applied to
human beings, or prevent it from being applied in such a ways as to threaten
freedom and dignity. Still, the technology would remain waiting. Sooner or
later the social arrangement would break down. Probably sooner, given that pace
of change in our society. Then genetic engineering would begin to invade our
sphere of freedom, and this invasion would be irreversible (short of a breakdown
of technological civilization itself). Any illusions about achieving anything
permanent through social arrangements should be dispelled by what is currently
happening with environmental legislation. A few years ago it seemed that there
were secure legal barriers preventing at least some of the worst forms of
environmental degradation. A change in the political wind, and those barriers
begin to crumble.
134. For all of the foregoing reasons, technology is a more powerful social
force than the aspiration for freedom. But this statement requires an important
qualification. It appears that during the next several decades the
industrial-technological system will be undergoing severe stresses due to
economic and environmental problems, and especially due to problems of human
behavior (alienation, rebellion, hostility, a variety of social and
psychological difficulties). We hope that the stresses through which the system
is likely to pass will cause it to break down, or at least weaken it
sufficiently so that a revolution occurs and is successful, then at that
particular moment the aspiration for freedom will have proved more powerful than
technology.
135. In paragraph 125 we used an analogy of a weak neighbor who is left
destitute by a strong neighbor who takes all his land by forcing on him a series
of compromises. But suppose now that the strong neighbor gets sick, so that he
is unable to defend himself. The weak neighbor can force the strong one to give
him his land back, or he can kill him. If he lets the strong man survive and
only forces him to give his land back, he is a fool, because when the strong man
gets well he will again take all the land for himself. The only sensible
alternative for the weaker man is to kill the strong one while he has the
chance. In the same way, while the industrial system is sick we must destroy
it. If we compromise with it and let it recover from its sickness, it will
eventually wipe out all of our freedom.
Simpler social problems have proved intractable
136. If anyone still imagines that it would be possible to reform the system in
such a way as to protect freedom from technology, let him consider how clumsily
and for the most part unsuccessfully our society has dealt with other social
problems that are far more simple and straightforward. Among other things, the
system has failed to stop environmental degradation, political corruption, drug
trafficking or domestic abuse.
137. Take our environmental problems, for example. Here the conflict of values
is straightforward: economic expedience now versus saving some of our natural
resources for our grandchildren. [22] But on this subject we get only a lot of
blather and obfuscation from the people who have power, and nothing like a
clear, consistent line of action, and we keep on piling up environmental
problems that our grandchildren will have to live with. Attempts to resolve the
environmental issue consist of struggles and compromises between different
factions, some of which are ascendant at one moment, others at another moment.
The line of struggle changes with the shifting currents of public opinion. This
is not a rational process, nor is it one that is likely to lead to a timely and
successful solution to the problem. Major social problems, if they get "solved"
at all, are rarely or never solved through any rational, comprehensive plan.
They just work themselves out through a process in which various competing
groups pursuing their own (usually short-term) self-interest [23] arrive (mainly
by luck) at some more or less stable modus vivendi. In fact, the principles we
formulated in paragraphs 100-106 make it seem doubtful that rational, long-term
social planning can ever be successful.
138. Thus it is clear that the human race has at best a very limited capacity
for solving even relatively straightforward social problems. How then is it
going to solve the far more difficult and subtle problem of reconciling freedom
with technology? Technology presents clear-cut material advantages, whereas
freedom is an abstraction that means different things to different people, and
its loss is easily obscured by propaganda and fancy talk.
139. And note this important difference: It is conceivable that our
environmental problems (for example) may some day be settled through a rational,
comprehensive plan, but if this happens it will be only because it is in the
long-term interest of the system to solve these problems. But it is not in the
interest of the system to preserve freedom or small-group autonomy. On the
contrary, it is in the interest of the system to bring human behavior under
control to the greatest possible extent. [24] Thus, while practical
considerations may eventually force the system to take a rational, prudent
approach to environmental problems, equally practical considerations will force
the system to regulate human behavior ever more closely (preferably by indirect
means that will disguise the encroachment on freedom.) This isn't just our
opinion. Eminent social scientists (e.g. James Q. Wilson) have stressed the
importance of "socializing" people more effectively.
Revolution is easier than reform
140. We hope we have convinced the reader that the system cannot be reformed in
such a way as to reconcile freedom with technology. The only way out is to
dispense with the industrial-technological system altogether. This implies
revolution, not necessarily an armed uprising, but certainly a radical and
fundamental change in the nature of society.
141. People tend to assume that because a revolution involves a much greater
change than reform does, it is more difficult to bring about than reform is.
Actually, under certain circumstances revolution is much easier than reform.
The reason is that a revolutionary movement can inspire an intensity of
commitment that a reform movement cannot inspire. A reform movement merely
offers to solve a particular social problem. A revolutionary movement offers to
solve all problems at one stroke and create a whole new world; it provides the
kind of ideal for which people will take great risks and make great sacrifices.
For this reason it would be much easier to overthrow the whole technological
system than to put effective, permanent restraints on the development or
application of any one segment of technology, such as genetic engineering, for
example. Not many people will devote themselves with single-minded passion to
imposing and maintaining restraints on genetic engineering, but under suitable
conditions large numbers of people may devote themselves passionately to a
revolution against the industrial-technological system. As we noted in
paragraph 132, reformers seeking to limit certain aspects of technology would be
working to avoid a negative outcome. But revolutionaries work to gain a
powerful reward--fulfillment of their revolutionary vision--and therefore work
harder and more persistently than reformers do.
142. Reform is always restrained by the fear of painful consequences if changes
go too far. But once a revolutionary fever has taken hold of a society, people
are willing to undergo unlimited hardships for the sake of their revolution.
This was clearly shown in the French and Russian Revolutions. It may be that in
such cases only a minority of the population is really committed to the
revolution, but this minority is sufficiently large and active so that it
becomes the dominant force in society. We will have more to say about
revolution in paragraphs 180-205.
Control of human behavior
143. Since the beginning of civilization, organized societies have had to put
pressures on human beings for the sake of the functioning of the social
organism. The kinds of pressures vary greatly from one society to another.
Some of the pressures are physical (poor diet, excessive labor, environmental
pollution), some are psychological (noise, crowding, forcing humans behavior
into the mold that society requires). In the past, human nature has been
approximately constant, or at any rate has varied only within certain bounds.
Consequently, societies have been able to push people only up to certain limits.
When the limit of human endurance has been passed, things start going wrong:
rebellion, or crime, or corruption, or evasion of work, or depression and other
mental problems, or an elevated death rate, or a declining birth rate or
something else, so that either the society breaks down, or its functioning
becomes too inefficient and it is (quickly or gradually, through conquest,
attrition or evolution) replaced by some more efficient form of society.[25]
144. Thus human nature has in the past put certain limits on the development of
societies. People could be pushed only so far and no farther. But today this
may be changing, because modern technology is developing ways of modifying human
beings.
145. Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them
terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness.
Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. It
is well known that the rate of clinical depression had been greatly increasing
in recent decades. We believe that this is due to disruption of the power
process, as explained in paragraphs 59-76. But even if we are wrong, the
increasing rate of depression is certainly the result of some conditions that
exist in today's society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people
depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect,
antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such
a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise
find intolerable. (Yes, we know that depression is often of purely genetic
origin. We are referring here to those cases in which environment plays the
predominant role.)
146. Drugs that affect the mind are only one example of the methods of
controlling human behavior that modern society is developing. Let us look at
some of the other methods.
147. To start with, there are the techniques of surveillance. Hidden video
cameras are now used in most stores and in many other places, and computers are
used to collect and process vast amounts of information about individuals.
Information so obtained greatly increases the effectiveness of physical coercion
(i.e., law enforcement).[26] Then there are the methods of propaganda, for which
the mass communication media provide effective vehicles. Efficient techniques
have been developed for winning elections, selling products, influencing public
opinion. The entertainment industry serves as an important psychological tool
of the system, possibly even when it is dishing out large amounts of sex and
violence. Entertainment provides modern man with an essential means of escape.
While absorbed in television, videos, etc., he can forget stress, anxiety,
frustration, dissatisfaction. Many primitive peoples, when they don't have work
to do, are quite content to sit for hours at a time doing nothing at all,
because they are at peace with themselves and their world. But most modern
people must be constantly occupied or entertained, otherwise they get "bored,"
i.e., they get fidgety, uneasy, irritable.
148. Other techniques strike deeper than the foregoing. Education is no longer
a simple affair of paddling a kid's behind when he doesn't know his lessons and
patting him on the head when he does know them. It is becoming a scientific
technique for controlling the child's development. Sylvan Learning Centers, for
example, have had great success in motivating children to study, and
psychological techniques are also used with more or less success in many
conventional schools. "Parenting" techniques that are taught to parents are
designed to make children accept fundamental values of the system and behave in
ways that the system finds desirable. "Mental health" programs, "intervention"
techniques, psychotherapy and so forth are ostensibly designed to benefit
individuals, but in practice they usually serve as methods for inducing
individuals to think and behave as the system requires. (There is no
contradiction here; an individual whose attitudes or behavior bring him into
conflict with the system is up against a force that is too powerful for him to
conquer or escape from, hence he is likely to suffer from stress, frustration,
defeat. His path will be much easier if he thinks and behaves as the system
requires. In that sense the system is acting for the benefit of the individual
when it brainwashes him into conformity.) Child abuse in its gross and obvious
forms is disapproved in most if not all cultures. Tormenting a child for a
trivial reason or no reason at all is something that appalls almost everyone.
But many psychologists interpret the concept of abuse much more broadly. Is
spanking, when used as part of a rational and consistent system of discipline, a
form of abuse? The question will ultimately be decided by whether or not
spanking tends to produce behavior that makes a person fit in well with the
existing system of society. In practice, the word "abuse" tends to be
interpreted to include any method of child-rearing that produces behavior
inconvenient for the system. Thus, when they go beyond the prevention of
obvious, senseless cruelty, programs for preventing "child abuse" are directed
toward the control of human behavior of the system.
149. Presumably, research will continue to increase the effectiveness of
psychological techniques for controlling human behavior. But we think it is
unlikely that psychological techniques alone will be sufficient to adjust human
beings to the kind of society that technology is creating. Biological methods
probably will have to be used. We have already mentioned the use of drugs in
this connection. Neurology may provide other avenues of modifying the human
mind. Genetic engineering of human beings is already beginning to occur in the
form of "gene therapy," and there is no reason to assume the such methods will
not eventually be used to modify those aspects of the body that affect mental
functioning.
150. As we mentioned in paragraph 134, industrial society seems likely to be
entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior
and in part to economic and environmental problems. And a considerable
proportion of the system's economic and environmental problems result from the
way human beings behave. Alienation, low self-esteem, depression, hostility,
rebellion; children who won't study, youth gangs, illegal drug use, rape, child
abuse, other crimes, unsafe sex, teen pregnancy, population growth, political
corruption, race hatred, ethnic rivalry, bitter ideological conflict (e.g.,
pro-choice vs. pro-life), political extremism, terrorism, sabotage,
anti-government groups, hate groups. All these threaten the very survival of
the system. The system will be forced to use every practical means of
controlling human behavior.
151. The social disruption that we see today is certainly not the result of
mere chance. It can only be a result of the conditions of life that the system
imposes on people. (We have argued that the most important of these conditions
is disruption of the power process.) If the system succeeds in imposing
sufficient control over human behavior to assure its own survival, a new
watershed in human history will have passed. Whereas formerly the limits of
human endurance have imposed limits on the development of societies (as we
explained in paragraphs 143, 144), industrial-technological society will be able
to pass those limits by modifying human beings, whether by psychological methods
or biological methods or both. In the future, social systems will not be
adjusted to suit the needs of human beings. Instead, human beings will be
adjusted to suit the needs of the system.[27]
152. Generally speaking, technological control over human behavior will
probably not be introduced with a totalitarian intention or even through a
conscious desire to restrict human freedom.[28] Each new step in the assertion
of control over the human mind will be taken as a rational response to a problem
that faces society, such as curing alcoholism, reducing the crime rate or
inducing young people to study science and engineering. In many cases, there
will be humanitarian justification. For example, when a psychiatrist prescribes
an anti-depressant for a depressed patient, he is clearly doing that individual
a favor. It would be inhumane to withhold the drug from someone who needs it.
When parents send their children to Sylvan Learning Centers to have them
manipulated into becoming enthusiastic about their studies, they do so from
concern for their children's welfare. It may be that some of these parents wish
that one didn't have to have specialized training to get a job and that their
kid didn't have to be brainwashed into becoming a computer nerd. But what can
they do? They can't change society, and their child may be unemployable if he
doesn't have certain skills. So they send him to Sylvan.
153. Thus control over human behavior will be introduced not by a calculated
decision of the authorities but through a process of social evolution (rapid
evolution, however). The process will be impossible to resist, because each
advance, considered by itself, will appear to be beneficial, or at least the
evil involved in making the advance will seem to be less than that which would
result from not making it (see paragraph 127). Propaganda for example is used
for many good purposes, such as discouraging child abuse or race hatred. Sex
education is obviously useful, yet the effect of sex education (to the extent
that it is successful) is to take the shaping of sexual attitudes away from the
family and put it into the hands of the state as represented by the public
school system.
154. Suppose a biological trait is discovered that increases the likelihood
that a child will grow up to be a criminal and suppose some sort of gene therapy
can remove this trait.[29] Of course most parents whose children possess the
trait will have them undergo the therapy. It would be inhumane to do otherwise,
since the child would probably have a miserable life if he grew up to be a
criminal. But many or most primitive societies have a low crime rate in
comparison with that of our society, even though they have neither high-tech
methods of child-rearing nor harsh systems of punishment. Since there is no
reason to suppose that more modern men than primitive men have innate predatory
tendencies, the high crime rate of our society must be due to the pressures that
modern conditions put on people, to which many cannot or will not adjust. Thus
a treatment designed to remove potential criminal tendencies is at least in part
a way of re-engineering people so that they suit the requirements of the system.
155. Our society tends to regard as a "sickness" any mode of thought or
behavior that is inconvenient for the system, and this is plausible because when
an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as
well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to
adjust him to the system is seen as a "cure" for a "sickness" and therefore as
good.
156. In paragraph 127 we pointed out that if the use of a new item of
technology is initially optional, it does not necessarily remain optional,
because the 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. This applies also to the technology of human behavior. In a world
in which most children are put through a program to make them enthusiastic about
studying, a parent will almost be forced to put his kid through such a program,
because if he does not, then the kid will grow up to be, comparatively speaking,
an ignoramus and therefore unemployable. Or suppose a biological treatment is
discovered that, without undesirable side-effects, will greatly reduce the
psychological stress from which so many people suffer in our society. If large
numbers of people choose to undergo the treatment, then the general level of
stress in society will be reduced, so that it will be possible for the system to
increase the stress-producing pressures. In fact, 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 (see paragraph 147). Our use of mass
entertainment is "optional": No law requires us to watch television, listen to
the radio, read magazines. Yet mass entertainment is a means of escape and
stress-reduction on which most of us have become dependent. Everyone complains
about the trashiness of television, but almost everyone watches it. A few have
kicked the TV habit, but it would be a rare person who could get along today
without using any form of mass entertainment. (Yet until quite recently in
human history most people got along very nicely with no other entertainment than
that which each local community created for itself.) Without the entertainment
industry the system probably would not have been able to get away with putting
as much stress-producing pressure on us as it does.
157. Assuming that industrial society survives, it is likely that technology
will eventually acquire something approaching complete control over human
behavior. It has been established beyond any rational doubt that human thought
and behavior have a largely biological basis. As experimenters have
demonstrated, feelings such as hunger, pleasure, anger and fear can be turned on
and off by electrical stimulation of appropriate parts of the brain. Memories
can be destroyed by damaging parts of the brain or they can be brought to the
surface by electrical stimulation. Hallucinations can be induced or moods
changed by drugs. There may or may not be an immaterial human soul, but if
there is one it clearly is less powerful than the biological mechanisms of human
behavior. For if that were not the case then researchers would not be able so
easily to manipulate human feelings and behavior with drugs and electrical
currents.
158. It presumably would be impractical for all people to have electrodes
inserted in their heads so that they could be controlled by the authorities.
But the fact that human thoughts and feelings are so open to biological
intervention shows that the problem of controlling human behavior is mainly a
technical problem; a problem of neurons, hormones and complex molecules; the
kind of problem that is accessible to scientific attack. Given the outstanding
record of our society in solving technical problems, it is overwhelmingly
probable that great advances will be made in the control of human behavior.
159. Will public resistance prevent the introduction of technological control
of human behavior? It certainly would if an attempt were made to introduce such
control all at once. But since technological control will be introduced through
a long sequence of small advances, there will be no rational and effective
public resistance. (See paragraphs 127,132, 153.)
160. To those who think that all this sounds like science fiction, we point out
that yesterday's science fiction is today's fact. The Industrial Revolution has
radically altered man's environment and way of life, and it is only to be
expected that as technology is increasingly applied to the human body and mind,
man himself will be altered as radically as his environment and way of life have
been.
Human race at a crossroads
161. But we have gotten ahead of our story. It is one thing to develop in the
laboratory a series of psychological or biological techniques for manipulating
human behavior and quite another to integrate these techniques into a
functioning social system. The latter problem is the more difficult of the two.
For example, while the techniques of educational psychology doubtless work quite
well in the "lab schools" where they are developed, it is not necessarily easy
to apply them effectively throughout our educational system. We all know what
many of our schools are like. The teachers are too busy taking knives and guns
away from the kids to subject them to the latest techniques for making them into
computer nerds. Thus, in spite of all its technical advances relating to human
behavior the system to date has not been impressively successful in controlling
human beings. The people whose behavior is fairly well under the control of the
system are those of the type that might be called "bourgeois." But there are
growing numbers of people who in one way or another are rebels against the
system: welfare leaches, youth gangs, cultists, nazis, satanists, radical
environmentalists, militiaman, etc..
162. The system is currently engaged in a desperate struggle to overcome
certain problems that threaten its survival, among which the problems of human
behavior are the most important. 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.
163. Suppose the system survives the crisis of the next several decades. By
that time it will have to have solved, or at least brought under control, the
principal problems that confront it, in particular that of "socializing" human
beings; that is, making people sufficiently docile so that their behavior no
longer threatens the system. That being accomplished, it does not appear that
there would be any further obstacle to the development of technology, and it
would presumably advance toward its logical conclusion, which is complete
control over everything on Earth, including human beings and all other important
organisms. The system may become a unitary, monolithic organization, or it may
be more or less fragmented and consist of a number of organizations coexisting
in a relationship that includes elements of both cooperation and competition,
just as today the government, the corporations and other large organizations
both cooperate and compete with one another. Human freedom mostly will have
vanished, because individuals and small groups will be impotent vis-a-vis large
organizations armed with super technology and an arsenal of advanced
psychological and biological tools for manipulating human beings, besides
instruments of surveillance and physical coercion. Only a small number of
people will have any real power, and even these probably will have only very
limited freedom, because their behavior too will be regulated; just as today our
politicians and corporation executives can retain their positions of power only
as long as their behavior remains within certain fairly narrow limits.
164. Don't imagine that the systems will stop developing further techniques for
controlling human beings and nature once the crisis of the next few decades is
over and increasing control is no longer necessary for the system's survival.
On the contrary, once the hard times are over the system will increase its
control over people and nature more rapidly, because it will no longer be
hampered by difficulties of the kind that it is currently experiencing.
Survival is not the principal motive for extending control. As we explained in
paragraphs 87-90, technicians and scientists carry on their work largely as a
surrogate activity; that is, they satisfy their need for power by solving
technical problems. They will continue to do this with unabated enthusiasm, and
among the most interesting and challenging problems for them to solve will be
those of understanding the human body and mind and intervening in their
development. For the "good of humanity," of course.
165. But suppose on the other hand that the stresses of the coming decades
prove to be too much for the system. If the system breaks down there may be a
period of chaos, a "time of troubles" such as those that history has recorded at
various epochs in the past. It is impossible to predict what would emerge from
such a time of troubles, but at any rate the human race would be given a new
chance. The greatest danger is that industrial society may begin to
reconstitute itself within the first few years after the breakdown. Certainly
there will be many people (power-hungry types especially) who will be anxious to
get the factories running again.
166. Therefore two tasks confront those who hate the servitude to which the
industrial system is reducing the human race. First, we must work to heighten
the social stresses within the system so as to increase the likelihood that it
will break down or be weakened sufficiently so that a revolution against it
becomes possible. Second, it is necessary to develop and propagate an ideology
that opposes technology and the industrial society if and when the system
becomes sufficiently weakened. And such an ideology will help to assure that,
if and when industrial society breaks down, its remnants will be smashed beyond
repair, so that the system cannot be reconstituted. The factories should be
destroyed, technical books burned, etc.
Human suffering
167. The industrial system will not break down purely as a result of
revolutionary action. It will not be vulnerable to revolutionary attack unless
its own internal problems of development lead it into very serious difficulties.
So if the system breaks down it will do so either spontaneously, or through a
process that is in part spontaneous but helped along by revolutionaries. If the
breakdown is sudden, many people will die, since the world's population has
become so overblown that it cannot even feed itself any longer without advanced
technology. Even if the breakdown is gradual enough so that reduction of the
population can occur more through lowering of the birth rate than through
elevation of the death rate, the process of de-industrialization probably will
be very chaotic and involve much suffering. It is naive to think it likely that
technology can be phased out in a smoothly managed orderly way, especially since
the technophiles will fight stubbornly at every step. Is it therefore cruel to
work for the breakdown of the system? Maybe, but maybe not. In the first
place, revolutionaries will not be able to break the system down unless it is
already in deep trouble so that there would be a good chance of its eventually
breaking down by itself anyway; and the bigger the system grows, the more
disastrous the consequences of its breakdown will be; so it may be that
revolutionaries, by hastening the onset of the breakdown will be reducing the
extent of the disaster.
168. In the second place, one has to balance the struggle and death against the
loss of freedom and dignity. To many of us, freedom and dignity are more
important than a long life or avoidance of physical pain. Besides, we all have
to die some time, and it may be better to die fighting for survival, or for a
cause, than to live a long but empty and purposeless life.
169. In the third place, it is not all certain that the survival of the system
will lead to less suffering than the breakdown of the system would. The system
has already caused, and is continuing to cause, immense suffering all over the
world. Ancient cultures, that for hundreds of years gave people a satisfactory
relationship with each other and their environment, have been shattered by
contact with industrial society, and the result has been a whole catalogue of
economic, environmental, social and psychological problems. One of the effects
of the intrusion of industrial society has been that over much of the world
traditional controls on population have been thrown out of balance. Hence the
population explosion, with all that it implies. Then there is the psychological
suffering that is widespread throughout the supposedly fortunate countries of
the West (see paragraphs 44, 45). No one knows what will happen as a result of
ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect and other environmental problems that
cannot yet be foreseen. And, as nuclear proliferation has shown, new technology
cannot be kept out of the hands of dictators and irresponsible Third World
nations. Would you like to speculate about what Iraq or North Korea will do
with genetic engineering?
170. "Oh!" say the technophiles, "Science is going to fix all that! We will
conquer famine, eliminate psychological suffering, make everybody healthy and
happy!" Yeah, sure. That's what they said 200 years ago. The Industrial
Revolution was supposed to eliminate poverty, make everybody happy, etc. The
actual result has been quite different. 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 impossible to predict (paragraph 103). The
result is disruption of the society. So it is very probable that in their
attempt to end poverty and disease, engineer docile, happy personalities and so
forth, the technophiles will create social systems that are terribly troubled,
even more so than the present one. For example, the scientists boast that they
will end famine by creating new, genetically engineered food plants. But this
will allow the human population to keep expanding indefinitely, and it is well
known that crowding leads to increased stress and aggression. This is merely
one example of the predictable problems that will arise. We emphasize that, as
past experience has shown, technical progress will lead to other new problems
for society far more rapidly that it has been solving old ones. Thus it will
take a long difficult period of trial and error for the technophiles to work the
bugs out of their Brave New World (if they ever do). In the meantime there will
be great suffering. So it is not all clear that the survival of industrial
society would involve less suffering than the breakdown of that society would.
Technology has gotten the human race into a fix from which there is not likely
to be any easy escape.
The future
171. But suppose now that industrial society does survive the next several
decades and that the bugs do eventually get worked out of the system, so that it
functions smoothly. What kind of system will it be? We will consider several
possibilities.
172. First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing
intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do
them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized
systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases
might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions
without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be
retained.
173. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't
make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how
such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race
would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race
would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But
we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over
to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do
suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a
position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical
choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the
problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and
more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for
them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better result than
man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions
necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will
be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be
in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off,
because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to
suicide.
174. On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may
be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private
machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over
large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite--just as it is
today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have
greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be
necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If
the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of
humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or
biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity
becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consist of
soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the
rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are
satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic
conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that
anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his "problem."
Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically
or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process
or to make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby.
These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most
certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of
domestic animals.
175. But suppose now that the computer scientists do not succeed in developing
artificial intelligence, so that human work remains necessary. Even so,
machines will take care of more and more of the simpler tasks so that there will
be an increasing surplus of human workers at the lower levels of ability. (We
see this happening already. There are many people who find it difficult or
impossible to get work, because for intellectual or psychological reasons they
cannot acquire the level of training necessary to make themselves useful in the
present system.) On those who are employed, ever-increasing demands will be
placed; They will need more and more training, more and more ability, and will
have to be ever more reliable, conforming and docile, because they will be more
and more like cells of a giant organism. Their tasks will be increasingly
specialized so that their work will be, in a sense, out of touch with the real
world, being concentrated on one tiny slice of reality. The system will have to
use any means that it can, whether psychological or biological, to engineer
people to be docile, to have the abilities that the system requires and to
"sublimate" their drive for power into some specialized task. But the statement
that the people of such a society will have to be docile may require
qualification. The society may find competitiveness useful, provided that ways
are found of directing competitiveness into channels that serve that needs of
the system. We can imagine a future society in which there is endless
competition for positions of prestige and power. But no more than a very few
people will ever reach the top, where the only real power is (see end of
paragraph 163). Very repellent is a society in which a person can satisfy his
needs for power only by pushing large numbers of other people out of the way and
depriving them of their opportunity for power.
176. One can envision scenarios that incorporate aspects of more than one of
the possibilities that we have just discussed. For instance, it may be that
machines will take over most of the work that is of real, practical importance,
but that human beings will be kept busy by being given relatively unimportant
work. It has been suggested, for example, that a great development of the
service industries might provide work for human beings. Thus people will spend
their time shining each others shoes, driving each other around in taxicabs,
making handicrafts for one another, waiting on each other's tables, etc. This
seems to us a thoroughly contemptible way for the human race to end up, and we
doubt that many people would find fulfilling lives in such pointless busy-work.
They would seek other, dangerous outlets (drugs, crime, "cults," hate groups)
unless they were biologically or psychologically engineered to adapt to such a
way of life.
177. Needless to say, the scenarios outlined above do not exhaust all the
possibilities. They only indicate the kinds of outcomes that seem to us most
likely. But we can envision no plausible scenarios that are any more palatable
than the ones we've just described. It is overwhelmingly probable that if the
industrial-technological system survives the next 40 to 100 years, it will by
that time have developed certain general characteristics: Individuals (at least
those of the "bourgeois" type, who are integrated into the system and make it
run, and who therefore have all the power) will be more dependent than ever on
large organizations; they will be more "socialized" than ever and their physical
and mental qualities to a significant extent (possibly to a very great extent)
will be those that are engineered into them rather than being the results of
chance (or of God's will, or whatever); and whatever may be left of wild nature
will be reduced to remnants preserved for scientific study and kept under the
supervision and management of scientists (hence it will no longer be truly
wild). In the long run (say a few centuries from now) it is likely that neither
the human race nor any other important organisms will exist as we know them
today, because once you start modifying organisms through genetic engineering
there is no reason to stop at any particular point, so that the modifications
will probably continue until man and other organisms have been utterly
transformed.
178. Whatever else may be the case, it is certain that technology is creating
for human beings a new physical and social environment radically different from
the spectrum of environments to which natural selection has adapted the human
race physically and psychologically. If man is not adjusted to this new
environment by being artificially re-engineered, then he will be adapted to it
through a long and painful process of natural selection. The former is far more
likely than the latter.
179. It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the
consequences.
Strategy
180. The technophiles are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride into the
unknown. Many people understand something of what technological progress is
doing to us yet take a passive attitude toward it because they think it is
inevitable. But we (FC) don't think it is inevitable. We think it can be
stopped, and we will give here some indications of how to go about stopping it.
181. As we stated in paragraph 166, the two main tasks for the present are to
promote social stress and instability in industrial society and to develop and
propagate an ideology that opposes technology and the industrial system. When
the system becomes sufficiently stressed and unstable, a revolution against
technology may be possible. The pattern would be similar to that of the French
and Russian Revolutions. French society and Russian society, for several
decades prior to their respective revolutions, showed increasing signs of stress
and weakness. Meanwhile, ideologies were being developed that offered a new
world view that was quite different from the old one. In the Russian case,
revolutionaries were actively working to undermine the old order. Then, when
the old system was put under sufficient additional stress (by financial crisis
in France, by military defeat in Russia) it was swept away by revolution. What
we propose is something along the same lines.
182. It will be objected that the French and Russian Revolutions were failures.
But most revolutions have two goals. One is to destroy an old form of society
and the other is to set up the new form of society envisioned by the
revolutionaries. The French and Russian revolutionaries failed (fortunately!)
to create the new kind of society of which they dreamed, but they were quite
successful in destroying the existing form of society.
183. But an ideology, in order to gain enthusiastic support, must have a
positive ideal as well as a negative one; it must be for something as well as
against something. The positive ideal that we propose is Nature. That is, wild
nature; those aspects of the functioning of the Earth and its living things that
are independent of human management and free of human interference and control.
And with wild nature we include human nature, by which we mean those aspects of
the functioning of the human individual that are not subject to regulation by
organized society but are products of chance, or free will, or God (depending on
your religious or philosophical opinions).
184. Nature makes a perfect counter-ideal to technology for several reasons.
Nature (that which is outside the power of the system) is the opposite of
technology (which seeks to expand indefinitely the power of the system). Most
people will agree that nature is beautiful; certainly it has tremendous popular
appeal. The radical environmentalists already hold an ideology that exalts
nature and opposes technology.[30] It is not necessary for the sake of nature to
set up some chimerical utopia or any new kind of social order. Nature takes
care of itself: It was a spontaneous creation that existed long before any human
society, and for countless centuries many different kinds of human societies
coexisted with nature without doing it an excessive amount of damage. Only with
the Industrial Revolution did the effect of human society on nature become
really devastating. To relieve the pressure on nature it is not necessary to
create a special kind of social system, it is only necessary to get rid of
industrial society. Granted, this will not solve all problems. Industrial
society has already done tremendous damage to nature and it will take a very
long time for the scars to heal. Besides, even pre-industrial societies can do
significant damage to nature. Nevertheless, getting rid of industrial society
will accomplish a great deal. It will relieve the worst of the pressure on
nature so that the scars can begin to heal. It will remove the capacity of
organized society to keep increasing its control over nature (including human
nature). Whatever kind of society may exist after the demise of the industrial
system, it is certain that most people will live close to nature, because in the
absence of advanced technology there is no other way that people can live. To
feed themselves they must be peasants or herdsmen or fishermen or hunters, etc..
And, generally speaking, local autonomy should tend to increase, because lack of
advanced technology and rapid communications will limit the capacity of
governments or other large organizations to control local communities.
185. As for the negative consequences of eliminating industrial society--well,
you can't eat your cake and have it too. To gain one thing you have to
sacrifice another.
186. Most people hate psychological conflict. For this reason they avoid doing
any serious thinking about difficult social issues, and they like to have such
issues presented to them in simple, black-and-white terms: this is all good and
that is all bad. The revolutionary ideology should therefore be developed on
two levels.
187. On the more sophisticated level the ideology should address itself to
people who are intelligent, thoughtful and rational. The object should be to
create a core of people who will be opposed to the industrial system on a
rational, thought-out basis, with full appreciation of the problems and
ambiguities involved, and of the price that has to be paid for getting rid of
the system. It is particularly important to attract people of this type, as
they are capable people and will be instrumental in influencing others. These
people should be addressed on as rational a level as possible. Facts should
never intentionally be distorted and intemperate language should be avoided.
This does not mean that no appeal can be made to the emotions, but in making
such appeal care should be taken to avoid misrepresenting the truth or doing
anything else that would destroy the intellectual respectability of the
ideology.
188. On a second level, the ideology should be propagated in a simplified form
that will enable the unthinking majority to see the conflict of technology vs.
nature in unambiguous terms. But even on this second level the ideology should
not be expressed in language that is so cheap, intemperate or irrational that it
alienates people of the thoughtful and rational type. Cheap, intemperate
propaganda sometimes achieves impressive short-term gains, but it will be more
advantageous in the long run to keep the loyalty of a small number of
intelligently committed people than to arouse the passions of an unthinking,
fickle mob who will change their attitude as soon as someone comes along with a
better propaganda gimmick. However, propaganda of the rabble-rousing type may
be necessary when the system is nearing the point of collapse and there is a
final struggle between rival ideologies to determine which will become dominant
when the old world-view goes under.
189. Prior to that final struggle, the revolutionaries should not expect to
have a majority of people on their side. History is made by active, determined
minorities, not by the majority, which seldom has a clear and consistent idea of
what it really wants. Until the time comes for the final push toward
revolution[31], the task of revolutionaries will be less to win the shallow
support of the majority than to build a small core of deeply committed people.
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; though of course it will be
desirable to get majority support to the extent that this can be done without
weakening the core of seriously committed people.
190. Any kind of social conflict helps to destabilize the system, but one
should be careful about what kind of conflict one encourages. The line of
conflict should be drawn between the mass of the people and the power-holding
elite of industrial society (politicians, scientists, upper-level business
executives, government officials, etc..). It should not be drawn between the
revolutionaries and the mass of the people. For example, it would be bad
strategy for the revolutionaries to condemn Americans for their habits of
consumption. Instead, the average American should be portrayed as a victim of
the advertising and marketing industry, which has suckered him into buying a lot
of junk that he doesn't need and that is very poor compensation for his lost
freedom. Either approach is consistent with the facts. It is merely a matter
of attitude whether you blame the advertising industry for manipulating the
public or blame the public for allowing itself to be manipulated. As a matter
of strategy one should generally avoid blaming the public.
191. One should think twice before encouraging any other social conflict than
that between the power-holding elite (which wields technology) and the general
public (over which technology exerts its power). For one thing, other conflicts
tend to distract attention from the important conflicts (between power-elite and
ordinary people, between technology and nature); for another thing, other
conflicts may actually tend to encourage technologization, because each side in
such a conflict wants to use technological power to gain advantages over its
adversary. This is clearly seen in rivalries between nations. It also appears
in ethnic conflicts within nations. For example, in America many black leaders
are anxious to gain power for African Americans by placing black individuals in
the technological power-elite. They want there to be many black government
officials, scientists, corporation executives and so forth. In this way they
are helping to absorb the African American subculture into the technological
system. Generally speaking, one should encourage only those social conflicts
that can be fitted into the framework of the conflicts of power-elite vs.
ordinary people, technology vs nature.
192. But the way to discourage ethnic conflict is not through militant advocacy
of minority rights (see paragraphs 21, 29). Instead, the revolutionaries should
emphasize that although minorities do suffer more or less disadvantage, this
disadvantage is of peripheral significance. Our real enemy is the
industrial-technological system, and in the struggle against the system, ethnic
distinctions are of no importance.
193. The kind of revolution we have in mind will not necessarily involve an
armed uprising against any government. It may or may not involve physical
violence, but it will not be a political revolution. Its focus will be on
technology and economics, not politics.[32]
194. Probably the revolutionaries should even avoid assuming political power,
whether by legal or illegal means, until the industrial system is stressed to
the danger point and has proved itself to be a failure in the eyes of most
people. Suppose for example that some "green" party should win control of the
United States Congress in an election. In order to avoid betraying or watering
down their own ideology they would have to take vigorous measures to turn
economic growth into economic shrinkage. To the average man the results would
appear disastrous: There would be massive unemployment, shortages of
commodities, etc. Even if the grosser ill effects could be avoided through
superhumanly skillful management, still people would have to begin giving up the
luxuries to which they have become addicted. Dissatisfaction would grow, the
"green" party would be voted out of office and the revolutionaries would have
suffered a severe setback. For this reason the revolutionaries should not try
to acquire political power until the system has gotten itself into such a mess
that any hardships will be seen as resulting from the failures of the industrial
system itself and not from the policies of the revolutionaries. The revolution
against technology will probably have to be a revolution by outsiders, a
revolution from below and not from above.
195. The revolution must be international and worldwide. It cannot be carried
out on a nation-by-nation basis. Whenever it is suggested that the United
States, for example, should cut back on technological progress or economic
growth, people get hysterical and start screaming that if we fall behind in
technology the Japanese will get ahead of us. Holy robots! The world will fly
off its orbit if the Japanese ever sell more cars than we do! (Nationalism is a
great promoter of technology.) More reasonably, it is argued that if the
relatively democratic nations of the world fall behind in technology while
nasty, dictatorial nations like China, Vietnam and North Korea continue to
progress, eventually the dictators may come to dominate the world. That is why
the industrial system should be attacked in all nations simultaneously, to the
extent that this may be possible. True, there is no assurance that the
industrial system can be destroyed at approximately the same time all over the
world, and it is even conceivable that the attempt to overthrow the system could
lead instead to the domination of the system by dictators. That is a risk that
has to be taken. And it is worth taking, since the difference between a
"democratic" industrial system and one controlled by dictators is small compared
with the difference between an industrial system and a non-industrial one.[33]
It might even be argued that an industrial system controlled by dictators would
be preferable, because dictator-controlled systems usually have proved
inefficient, hence they are presumably more likely to break down. Look at Cuba.
196. Revolutionaries might consider favoring measures that tend to bind the
world economy into a unified whole. Free trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT
are probably harmful to the environment in the short run, but in the long run
they may perhaps be advantageous because they foster economic interdependence
between nations. It will be easier to destroy the industrial system on a
worldwide basis if the world economy is so unified that its breakdown in any one
major nation will lead to its breakdown in all industrialized nations.
197. Some people take the line that modern man has too much power, too much
control over nature; they argue for a more passive attitude on the part of the
human race. At best these people are expressing themselves unclearly, because
they fail to distinguish between power for large organizations and power for
individuals and small groups. It is a mistake to argue for powerlessness and
passivity, because people need power. Modern man as a collective entity--that
is, the industrial system--has immense power over nature, and we (FC) regard
this as evil. But modern individuals and small groups of individuals have far
less power than primitive man ever did. Generally speaking, the vast power of
"modern man" over nature is exercised not by individuals or small groups but by
large organizations. To the extent that the average modern individual can wield
the power of technology, he is permitted to do so only within narrow limits and
only under the supervision and control of the system. (You need a license for
everything and with the license come rules and regulations). The individual has
only those technological powers with which the system chooses to provide him.
His personal power over nature is slight.
198. Primitive individuals and small groups actually had considerable power
over nature; or maybe it would be better to say power within nature. When
primitive man needed food he knew how to find and prepare edible roots, how to
track game and take it with homemade weapons. He knew how to protect himself
from heat, cold, rain, dangerous animals, etc. But primitive man did relatively
little damage to nature because the collective power of primitive society was
negligible compared to the collective power of industrial society.
199. Instead of arguing for powerlessness and passivity, one should argue that
the power of the industrial system should be broken, and that this will greatly
increase the power and freedom of individuals and small groups.
200. Until the industrial system has been thoroughly wrecked, the destruction
of that system must be the revolutionaries' only goal. Other goals would
distract attention and energy from the main goal. More importantly, if the
revolutionaries permit themselves to have any other goal than the destruction of
technology, they will be tempted to use technology as a tool for reaching that
other goal. If they give in to that temptation, they will fall right back into
the technological trap, because modern technology is a unified, tightly
organized system, so that, in order to retain some technology, one finds oneself
obliged to retain most technology, hence one ends up sacrificing only token
amounts of technology.
201. Suppose for example that the revolutionaries took "social justice" as a
goal. Human nature being what it is, social justice would not come about
spontaneously; it would have to be enforced. In order to enforce it the
revolutionaries would have to retain central organization and control. For that
they would need rapid long-distance transportation and communication, and
therefore all the technology needed to support the transportation and
communication systems. To feed and clothe poor people they would have to use
agricultural and manufacturing technology. And so forth. So that the attempt
to insure social justice would force them to retain most parts of the
technological system. Not that we have anything against social justice, but it
must not be allowed to interfere with the effort to get rid of the technological
system.
202. It would be hopeless for revolutionaries to try to attack the system
without using some modern technology. If nothing else they must use the
communications media to spread their message. But they should use modern
technology for only one purpose: to attack the technological system.
203. Imagine an alcoholic sitting with a barrel of wine in front of him.
Suppose he starts saying to himself, "Wine isn't bad for you if used in
moderation. Why, they say small amounts of wine are even good for you! It
won't do me any harm if I take just one little drink..." Well you know what is
going to happen. Never forget that the human race with technology is just like
an alcoholic with a barrel of wine.
204. Revolutionaries should have as many children as they can. There is strong
scientific evidence that social attitudes are to a significant extent inherited.
No one suggests that a social attitude is a direct outcome of a person's genetic
constitution, but it appears that personality traits tend, within the context of
our society, to make a person more likely to hold this or that social attitude.
Objections to these findings have been raised, but objections are feeble and
seem to be ideologically motivated. In any event, no one denies that children
tend on the average to hold social attitudes similar to those of their parents.
From our point of view it doesn't matter all that much whether the attitudes are
passed on genetically or through childhood training. In either case they are
passed on.
205. The trouble is that many of the people who are inclined to rebel against
the industrial system are also concerned about the population problems, hence
they are apt to have few or no children. In this way they may be handing the
world over to the sort of people who support or at least accept the industrial
system. To insure the strength of the next generation of revolutionaries the
present generation must reproduce itself abundantly. In doing so they will be
worsening the population problem only slightly. And the most important problem
is to get rid of the industrial system, because once the industrial system is
gone the world's population necessarily will decrease (see paragraph 167);
whereas, if the industrial system survives, it will continue developing new
techniques of food production that may enable the world's population to keep
increasing almost indefinitely.
206. With regard to revolutionary strategy, the only points on which we
absolutely insist are that the single overriding goal must be the elimination of
modern technology, and that no other goal can be allowed to compete with this
one. For the rest, revolutionaries should take an empirical approach. If
experience indicates that some of the recommendations made in the foregoing
paragraphs are not going to give good results, then those recommendations should
be discarded.
Two kinds of technology
207. An argument likely to be raised against our proposed revolution is that it
is bound to fail, because (it is claimed) throughout history technology has
always progressed, never regressed, hence technological regression is
impossible. But this claim is false.
208. We distinguish between two kinds of technology, which we will call
small-scale technology and organization-dependent technology. Small-scale
technology is technology that can be used by small-scale communities without
outside assistance. Organization-dependent technology is technology that
depends on large-scale social organization. We are aware of no significant
cases of regression in small-scale technology. But organization-dependent
technology does regress when the social organization on which it depends breaks
down. Example: When the Roman Empire fell apart the Romans' small-scale
technology survived because any clever village craftsman could build, for
instance, a water wheel, any skilled smith could make steel by Roman methods,
and so forth. But the Romans' organization-dependent technology did regress.
Their aqueducts fell into disrepair and were never rebuilt. Their techniques of
road construction were lost. The Roman system of urban sanitation was
forgotten, so that only until rather recent times did the sanitation of European
cities equal that of Ancient Rome.
209. The reason why technology has seemed always to progress is that, until
perhaps a century or two before the Industrial Revolution, most technology was
small-scale technology. But most of the technology developed since the
Industrial Revolution is organization-dependent technology. Take the
refrigerator for example. Without factory-made parts or the facilities of a
post-industrial machine shop it would be virtually impossible for a handful of
local craftsmen to build a refrigerator. If by some miracle they did succeed in
building one it would be useless to them without a reliable source of electric
power. So they would have to dam a stream and build a generator. Generators
require large amounts of copper wire. Imagine trying to make that wire without
modern machinery. And where would they get a gas suitable for refrigeration?
It would be much easier to build an ice house or preserve food by drying or
pickling, as was done before the invention of the refrigerator.
210. So it is clear that if the industrial system were once thoroughly broken
down, refrigeration technology would quickly be lost. The same is true of other
organization-dependent technology. And once this technology had been lost for a
generation or so it would take centuries to rebuild it, just as it took
centuries to build it the first time around. Surviving technical books would be
few and scattered. An industrial society, if built from scratch without outside
help, can only be built in a series of stages: You need tools to make tools to
make tools to make tools ... . A long process of economic development and
progress in social organization is required. And, even in the absence of an
ideology opposed to technology, there is no reason to believe that anyone would
be interested in rebuilding industrial society. The enthusiasm for "progress"
is a phenomenon particular to the modern form of society, and it seems not to
have existed prior to the 17th century or thereabouts.
211. In the late Middle Ages there were four main civilizations that were about
equally "advanced": Europe, the Islamic world, India, and the Far East (China,
Japan, Korea). Three of those civilizations remained more or less stable, and
only Europe became dynamic. No one knows why Europe became dynamic at that
time; historians have their theories but these are only speculation. At any
rate, it is clear that rapid development toward a technological form of society
occurs only under special conditions. So there is no reason to assume that
long-lasting technological regression cannot be brought about.
212. Would society eventually develop again toward an industrial-technological
form? Maybe, but there is no use in worrying about it, since we can't predict
or control events 500 or 1,000 years in the future. Those problems must be
dealt with by the people who will live at that time.
The danger of leftism
213. Because of their need for rebellion and for membership in a movement,
leftists or persons of similar psychological type are often attracted to a
rebellious or activist movement whose goals and membership are not initially
leftist. The resulting influx of leftish types can easily turn a non-leftist
movement into a leftist one, so that leftist goals replace or distort the
original goals of the movement.
214. To avoid this, a movement that exalts nature and opposes technology must
take a resolutely anti-leftist stance and must avoid all collaboration with
leftists. Leftism is in the long run inconsistent with wild nature, with human
freedom and with the elimination of modern technology. Leftism is collectivist;
it seeks to bind together the entire world (both nature and the human race) into
a unified whole. But this implies management of nature and of human life by
organized society, and it requires advanced technology. You can't have a united
world without rapid transportation and communication, you can't make all people
love one another without sophisticated psychological techniques, you can't have
a "planned society" without the necessary technological base. Above all,
leftism is driven by the need for power, and the leftist seeks power on a
collective basis, through identification with a mass movement or an
organization. Leftism is unlikely ever to give up technology, because
technology is too valuable a source of collective power.
215. The anarchist[34] too seeks power, but he seeks it on an individual or
small-group basis; he wants individuals and small groups to be able to control
the circumstances of their own lives. He opposes technology because it makes
small groups dependent on large organizations.
216. Some leftists may seem to oppose technology, but they will oppose it only
so long as they are outsiders and the technological system is controlled by
non-leftists. If leftism ever becomes dominant in society, so that the
technological system becomes a tool in the hands of leftists, they will
enthusiastically use it and promote its growth. In doing this they will be
repeating a pattern that leftism has shown again and again in the past. When
the Bolsheviks in Russia were outsiders, they vigorously opposed censorship and
the secret police, they advocated self-determination for ethnic minorities, and
so forth; but as soon as they came into power themselves, they imposed a tighter
censorship and created a more ruthless secret police than any that had existed
under the Tsars, and they oppressed ethnic minorities at least as much as the
Tsars had done. In the United States, a couple of decades ago when leftists
were a minority in our universities, leftist professors were vigorous proponents
of academic freedom, but today, in those universities where leftists have become
dominant, they have shown themselves ready to take away from everyone else's
academic freedom. (This is "political correctness.") The same will happen with
leftists and technology: They will use it to oppress everyone else if they ever
get it under their own control.
217. In earlier revolutions, leftists of the most power-hungry type,
repeatedly, have first cooperated with non-leftist revolutionaries, as well as
with leftists of a more libertarian inclination, and later have double-crossed
them to seize power for themselves. Robespierre did this in the French
Revolution, the Bolsheviks did it in the Russian Revolution, the communists did
it in Spain in 1938 and Castro and his followers did it in Cuba. Given the past
history of leftism, it would be utterly foolish for non-leftist revolutionaries
today to collaborate with leftists.
218. Various thinkers have pointed out that leftism is a kind of religion.
Leftism is not a religion in the strict sense because leftist doctrine does not
postulate the existence of any supernatural being. But for the leftist, leftism
plays a psychological role much like that which religion plays for some people.
The leftist needs to believe in leftism; it plays a vital role in his
psychological economy. His beliefs are not easily modified by logic or facts.
He has a deep conviction that leftism is morally Right with a capital R, and
that he has not only a right but a duty to impose leftist morality on everyone.
(However, many of the people we are referring to as "leftists" do not think of
themselves as leftists and would not describe their system of beliefs as
leftism. We use the term "leftism" because we don't know of any better words to
designate the spectrum of related creeds that includes the feminist, gay rights,
political correctness, etc., movements, and because these movements have a
strong affinity with the old left. See paragraphs 227-230.)
219. Leftism is totalitarian force. Wherever leftism is in a position of power
it tends to invade every private corner and force every thought into a leftist
mold. In part this is because of the quasi-religious character of leftism;
everything contrary to leftists beliefs represents Sin. More importantly,
leftism is a totalitarian force because of the leftists' drive for power. The
leftist seeks to satisfy his need for power through identification with a social
movement and he tries to go through the power process by helping to pursue and
attain the goals of the movement (see paragraph 83). But no matter how far the
movement has gone in attaining its goals the leftist is never satisfied, because
his activism is a surrogate activity (see paragraph 41). That is, the leftist's
real motive is not to attain the ostensible goals of leftism; in reality he is
motivated by the sense of power he gets from struggling for and then reaching a
social goal.[35] Consequently the leftist is never satisfied with the goals he
has already attained; his need for the power process leads him always to pursue
some new goal. The leftist wants equal opportunities for minorities. When that
is attained he insists on statistical equality of achievement by minorities.
And as long as anyone harbors in some corner of his mind a negative attitude
toward some minority, the leftist has to re-educate him. And ethnic minorities
are not enough; no one can be allowed to have a negative attitude toward
homosexuals, disabled people, fat people, old people, ugly people, and on and on
and on. It's not enough that the public should be informed about the hazards of
smoking; a warning has to be stamped on every package of cigarettes. Then
cigarette advertising has to be restricted if not banned. The activists will
never be satisfied until tobacco is outlawed, and after that it will be alcohol
then junk food, etc. Activists have fought gross child abuse, which is
reasonable. But now they want to stop all spanking. When they have done that
they will want to ban something else they consider unwholesome, then another
thing and then another. They will never be satisfied until they have complete
control over all child rearing practices. And then they will move on to another
cause.
220. Suppose you asked leftists to make a list of all the things that were
wrong with society, and then suppose you instituted every social change that
they demanded. It is safe to say that within a couple of years the majority of
leftists would find something new to complain about, some new social "evil" to
correct because, once again, the leftist is motivated less by distress at
society's ills than by the need to satisfy his drive for power by imposing his
solutions on society.
221. Because of the restrictions placed on their thoughts and behavior by their
high level of socialization, many leftists of the over-socialized type cannot
pursue power in the ways that other people do. For them the drive for power has
only one morally acceptable outlet, and that is in the struggle to impose their
morality on everyone.
222. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, are True Believers
in the sense of Eric Hoffer's book, "The True Believer." But not all True
Believers are of the same psychological type as leftists. Presumably a true
believing Nazi, for instance, is very different psychologically from a true
believing leftist. Because of their capacity for single-minded devotion to a
cause, True Believers are a useful, perhaps a necessary, ingredient of any
revolutionary movement. This presents a problem with which we must admit we
don't know how to deal. We aren't sure how to harness the energies of the True
Believer to a revolution against technology. At present all we can say is that
no True Believer will make a safe recruit to the revolution unless his
commitment is exclusively to the destruction of technology. If he is committed
also to another ideal, he may want to use technology as a tool for pursuing that
other ideal (see paragraphs 220, 221).
223. Some readers may say, "This stuff about leftism is a lot of crap. I know
John and Jane who are leftish types and they don't have all these totalitarian
tendencies." It's quite true that many leftists, possibly even a numerical
majority, are decent people who sincerely believe in tolerating others' values
(up to a point) and wouldn't want to use high-handed methods to reach their
social goals. Our remarks about leftism are not meant to apply to every
individual leftist but to describe the general character of leftism as a
movement. And the general character of a movement is not necessarily determined
by the numerical proportions of the various kinds of people involved in the
movement.
224. The people who rise to positions of power in leftist movements tend to be
leftists of the most power-hungry type because power-hungry people are those who
strive hardest to get into positions of power. Once the power-hungry types have
captured control of the movement, there are many leftists of a gentler breed who
inwardly disapprove of many of the actions of the leaders, but cannot bring
themselves to oppose them. They need their faith in the movement, and because
they cannot give up this faith they go along with the leaders. True, some
leftists do have the guts to oppose the totalitarian tendencies that emerge, but
they generally lose, because the power-hungry types are better organized, are
more ruthless and Machiavellian and have taken care to build themselves a strong
power base.
225. These phenomena appeared clearly in Russia and other countries that were
taken over by leftists. Similarly, before the breakdown of communism in the
USSR, leftish types in the West would seldom criticize that country. If prodded
they would admit that the USSR did many wrong things, but then they would try to
find excuses for the communists and begin talking about the faults of the West.
They always opposed Western military resistance to communist aggression.
Leftish types all over the world vigorously protested the U.S. military action
in Vietnam, but when the USSR invaded Afghanistan they did nothing. Not that
they approved of the Soviet actions; but because of their leftist faith, they
just couldn't bear to put themselves in opposition to communism. Today, in
those of our universities where "political correctness" has become dominant,
there are probably many leftish types who privately disapprove of the
suppression of academic freedom, but they go along with it anyway.
226. Thus the fact that many individual leftists are personally mild and fairly
tolerant people by no means prevents leftism as a whole form having a
totalitarian tendency.
227. Our discussion of leftism has a serious weakness. It is still far from
clear what we mean by the word "leftist." There doesn't seem to be much we can
do about this. Today leftism is fragmented into a whole spectrum of activist
movements. Yet not all activist movements are leftist, and some activist
movements (e.g., radical environmentalism) seem to include both personalities of
the leftist type and personalities of thoroughly un-leftist types who ought to
know better than to collaborate with leftists. Varieties of leftists fade out
gradually into varieties of non-leftists and we ourselves would often be
hard-pressed to decide whether a given individual is or is not a leftist. To
the extent that it is defined at all, our conception of leftism is defined by
the discussion of it that we have given in this article, and we can only advise
the reader to use his own judgment in deciding who is a leftist.
228. But it will be helpful to list some criteria for diagnosing leftism.
These criteria cannot be applied in a cut and dried manner. Some individuals
may meet some of the criteria without being leftists, some leftists may not meet
any of the criteria. Again, you just have to use your judgment.
229. The leftist is oriented toward large scale collectivism. He emphasizes
the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care
of the individual. He has a negative attitude toward individualism. He often
takes a moralistic tone. He tends to be for gun control, for sex education and
other psychologically "enlightened" educational methods, for planning, for
affirmative action, for multiculturalism. He tends to identify with victims.
He tends to be against competition and against violence, but he often finds
excuses for those leftists who do commit violence. He is fond of using the
common catch-phrases of the left like "racism," "sexism," "homophobia,"
"capitalism," "imperialism," "neocolonialism," "genocide," "social change,"
"social justice," "social responsibility." Maybe the best diagnostic trait of
the leftist is his tendency to sympathize with the following movements:
feminism, gay rights, ethnic rights, disability rights, animal rights, political
correctness. Anyone who strongly sympathizes with all of these movements is
almost certainly a leftist.[36]
230. The more dangerous leftists, that is, those who are most power-hungry, are
often characterized by arrogance or by a dogmatic approach to ideology.
However, the most dangerous leftists of all may be certain oversocialized types
who avoid irritating displays of aggressiveness and refrain from advertising
their leftism, but work quietly and unobtrusively to promote collectivist
values, "enlightened" psychological techniques for socializing children,
dependence of the individual on the system, and so forth. These crypto-leftists
(as we may call them) approximate certain bourgeois types as far as practical
action is concerned, but differ from them in psychology, ideology and
motivation. The ordinary bourgeois tries to bring people under control of the
system in order to protect his way of life, or he does so simply because his
attitudes are conventional. The crypto-leftist tries to bring people under
control of the system because he is a True Believer in a collectivist ideology.
The crypto-leftist is differentiated from the average leftist of the
oversocialized type by the fact that his rebellious impulse is weaker and he is
more securely socialized. He is differentiated from the ordinary
well-socialized bourgeois by the fact that there is some deep lack within him
that makes it necessary for him to devote himself to a cause and immerse himself
in a collectivity. And maybe his (well-sublimated) drive for power is stronger
than that of the average bourgeois.
Final note
231. Throughout this article we've made imprecise statements and statements
that ought to have had all sorts of qualifications and reservations attached to
them; and some of our statements may be flatly false. Lack of sufficient
information and the need for brevity made it impossible for us to formulate our
assertions more precisely or add all the necessary qualifications. And of
course in a discussion of this kind one must rely heavily on intuitive judgment,
and that can sometimes be wrong. So we don't claim that this article expresses
more than a crude approximation to the truth.
232. All the same we are reasonably confident that the general outlines of the
picture we have painted here are roughly correct. We have portrayed leftism in
its modern form as a phenomenon peculiar to our time and as a symptom of the
disruption of the power process. But we might possibly be wrong about this.
Oversocialized types who try to satisfy their drive for power by imposing their
morality on everyone have certainly been around for a long time. But we think
that the decisive role played by feelings of inferiority, low self-esteem,
powerlessness, identification with victims by people who are not themselves
victims, is a peculiarity of modern leftism. Identification with victims by
people not themselves victims can be seen to some extent in 19th century leftism
and early Christianity but as far as we can make out, symptoms of low
self-esteem, etc., were not nearly so evident in these movements, or in any
other movements, as they are in modern leftism. But we are not in a position to
assert confidently that no such movements have existed prior to modern leftism.
This is a significant question to which historians ought to give their
attention.
Notes
| We are not asserting that all, or even most, bullies and ruthless competitors
suffer from feelings of inferiority.
| During the Victorian period many oversocialized people suffered from serious
psychological problems as a result of repressing or trying to repress their
sexual feelings. Freud apparently based his theories on people of this type.
Today the focus of socialization has shifted from sex to aggression.
| Not necessarily including specialists in engineering "hard" sciences.
| There are many individuals of the middle and upper classes who resist some of
these values, but usually their resistance is more or less covert. Such
resistance appears in the mass media only to a very limited extent. The main
thrust of propaganda in our society is in favor of the stated values. The main
reasons why these values have become, so to speak, the official values of our
society is that they are useful to the industrial system. Violence is
discouraged because it disrupts the functioning of the system. Racism is
discouraged because ethnic conflicts also disrupt the system, and discrimination
wastes the talent of minority-group members who could be useful to the system.
Poverty must be "cured" because the underclass causes problems for the system
and contact with the underclass lowers the morale of the other classes. Women
are encouraged to have careers because their talents are useful to the system
and, more importantly, because by having regular jobs women become better
integrated into the system and tied directly to it rather than to their
families. This helps to weaken family solidarity. (The leaders of the system
say they want to strengthen the family, but they really mean is that they want
the family to serve as an effective tool for socializing children in accord with
the needs of the system. We argue in paragraphs 51,52 that the system cannot
afford to let the family or other small-scale social groups be strong or
autonomous.)
| It may be argued that the majority of people don't want to make their own
decisions but want leaders to do their thinking for them. There is an element
of truth in this. People like to make their own decisions in small matters, but
making decisions on difficult, fundamental questions requires facing up to
psychological conflict, and most people hate psychological conflict. Hence they
tend to lean on others in making difficult decisions. The majority of people
are natural followers, not leaders, but they like to have direct personal access
to their leaders and participate to some extent in making difficult decisions.
At least to that degree they need autonomy.
| Some of the symptoms listed are similar to those shown by caged animals. To
explain how these symptoms arise from deprivation with respect to the power
process: Common-sense understanding of human nature tells one that lack of goals
whose attainment requires effort leads to boredom and that boredom, long
continued, often leads eventually to depression. Failure to obtain goals leads
to frustration and lowering of self-esteem. Frustration leads to anger, anger
to aggression, often in the form of spouse or child abuse. It has been shown
that long-continued frustration commonly leads to depression and that depression
tends to cause guilt, sleep disorders, eating disorders and bad feelings about
oneself. Those who are tending toward depression seek pleasure as an antidote;
hence insatiable hedonism and excessive sex, with perversions as a means of
getting new kicks. Boredom too tends to cause excessive pleasure-seeking since,
lacking other goals, people often use pleasure as a goal. See accompanying
diagram. The foregoing is a simplification. Reality is more complex, and of
course deprivation with respect to the power process is not the only cause of
the symptoms described. By the way, when we mention depression we do not
necessarily mean depression that is severe enough to be treated by a
psychiatrist. Often only mild forms of depression are involved. And when we
speak of goals we do not necessarily mean long-term, thought out goals. For
many or most people through much of human history, the goals of a hand-to-mouth
existence (merely providing oneself and one's family with food from day to day)
have been quite sufficient.
| A partial exception may be made for a few passive, inward looking groups, such
as the Amish, which have little effect on the wider society. Apart from these,
some genuine small-scale communities do exist in America today. For instance,
youth gangs and "cults." Everyone regards them as dangerous, and so they are,
because the members of these groups are loyal primarily to one another rather
than to the system, hence the system cannot control them. Or take the gypsies.
The gypsies commonly get away with theft and fraud because their loyalties are
such that they can always get other gypsies to give testimony that "proves"
their innocence. Obviously the system would be in serious trouble if too many
people belonged to such groups. Some of the early-20th century Chinese thinkers
who were concerned with modernizing China recognized the necessity of breaking
down small-scale social groups such as the family: "(According to Sun Yat-sen)
The Chinese people needed a new surge of patriotism, which would lead to a
transfer of loyalty from the family to the state. . .(According to Li Huang)
traditional attachments, particularly to the family had to be abandoned if
nationalism were to develop to China." (Chester C. Tan, Chinese Political
Thought in the Twentieth Century," page 125, page 297.)
| Yes, we know that 19th century America had its problems, and serious ones, but
for the sake of brevity we have to express ourselves in simplified terms.
| We leave aside the underclass. We are speaking of the mainstream.
| Some social scientists, educators, "mental health" professionals and the like
are doing their best to push the social drives into group 1 by trying to see to
it that everyone has a satisfactory social life.
| Is the drive for endless material acquisition really an artificial creation of
the advertising and marketing industry? Certainly there is no innate human
drive for material acquisition. There have been many cultures in which people
have desired little material wealth beyond what was necessary to satisfy their
basic physical needs (Australian aborigines, traditional Mexican peasant
culture, some African cultures). On the other hand there have also been many
pre-industrial cultures in which material acquisition has played an important
role. So we can't claim that today's acquisition-oriented culture is
exclusively a creation of the advertising and marketing industry. But it is
clear that the advertising and marketing industry has had an important part in
creating that culture. The big corporations that spend millions on advertising
wouldn't be spending that kind of money without solid proof that they were
getting it back in increased sales. One member of FC met a sales manager a
couple of years ago who was frank enough to tell him, "Our job is to make people
buy things they don't want and don't need." He then described how an untrained
novice could present people with the facts about a product, and make no sales at
all, while a trained and experienced professional salesman would make lots of
sales to the same people. This shows that people are manipulated into buying
things they don't really want.
| The problem of purposelessness seems to have become less serious during the
last 15 years or so, because people now feel less secure physically and
economically than they did earlier, and the need for security provides them with
a goal. But purposelessness has been replaced by frustration over the
difficulty of attaining security. We emphasize the problem of purposelessness
because the liberals and leftists would wish to solve our social problems by
having society guarantee everyone's security; but if that could be done it would
only bring back the problem of purposelessness. The real issue is not whether
society provides well or poorly for people's security; the trouble is that
people are dependent on the system for their security rather than having it in
their own hands. This, by the way, is part of the reason why some people get
worked up about the right to bear arms; possession of a gun puts that aspect of
their security in their own hands.
| Conservatives' efforts to decrease the amount of government regulation are of
little benefit to the average man. For one thing, only a fraction of the
regulations can be eliminated because most regulations are necessary. For
another thing, most of the deregulation affects business rather than the average
individual, so that its main effect is to take power from the government and
give it to private corporations. What this means for the average man is that
government interference in his life is replaced by interference from big
corporations, which may be permitted, for example, to dump more chemicals that
get into his water supply and give him cancer. The conservatives are just
taking the average man for a sucker, exploiting his resentment of Big Government
to promote the power of Big Business.
| When someone approves of the purpose for which propaganda is being used in a
given case, he generally calls it "education" or applies to it some similar
euphemism. But propaganda is propaganda regardless of the purpose for which it
is used.
| We are not expressing approval or disapproval of the Panama invasion. We only
use it to illustrate a point.
| When the American colonies were under British rule there were fewer and less
effective legal guarantees of freedom than there were after the American
Constitution went into effect, yet there was more personal freedom in
pre-industrial America, both before and after the War of Independence, than
there was after the Industrial Revolution took hold in this country. We quote
from Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, edited by
Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, Chapter 12 by Roger Lane, pages 476-478:
"The progressive heightening of standards of property, and with it the
increasing reliance on official law enforcement (in 19th century America). .
.were common to the whole society. . .[T]he change in social behavior is so
long term and so widespread as to suggest a connection with the most fundamental
of contemporary social processes; that of industrial urbanization itself. . .
"Massachusetts in 1835 had a population of some 660,940, 81 percent rural,
overwhelmingly preindustrial and native born. Its citizens were used to
considerable personal freedom. Whether teamsters, farmers or artisans, they
were all accustomed to setting their own schedules, and the nature of their work
made them physically dependent on each other. . .Individual problems, sins or
even crimes, were not generally cause for wider social concern. . .
"But the impact of the twin movements to the city and to the factory, both just
gathering force in 1835, had a progressive effect on personal behavior
throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. The factory demanded regularity
of behavior, a life governed by obedience to the rhythms of clock and calendar,
the demands of foreman and supervisor. In the city or town, the needs of living
in closely packed neighborhoods inhibited many actions previously
unobjectionable. Both blue- and white-collar employees in larger establishments
were mutually dependent on their fellows. As one man's work fit into another's,
so one man's business was no longer his own.
"The results of the new organization of life and work were apparent by 1900,
when some 76 percent of the 2,805,346 inhabitants of Massachusetts were
classified as urbanites. Much violent or irregular behavior which had been
tolerable in a casual, independent society was no longer acceptable in the more
formalized, cooperative atmosphere of the later period. . .The move to the
cities had, in short, produced a more tractable, more socialized, more
'civilized' generation than its predecessors."
--Roger Lane, Violence in America
[If copyright problems make it impossible for this long quotation to be printed,
then please change Note 16 to read as follows:
16. When the American colonies were under British rule there were fewer and
less effective legal guarantees of freedom than there were after the American
Constitution went into effect, yet there was more personal freedom in
pre-industrial America, both before and after the War of Independence, than
there was after the Industrial Revolution took hold in this country. In
"Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives," edited by Hugh
Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, Chapter 12 by Roger Lane, it is explained how
in pre-industrial America the average person had greater independence and
autonomy than he does today, and how the process of industrialization
necessarily led to the restriction of personal freedom.]
| Apologists for the system are fond of citing cases in which elections have
been decided by one or two votes, but such cases are rare.
| "Today, in technologically advanced lands, men live very similar lives in
spite of geographical, religious and political differences. The daily lives of
a Christian bank clerk in Chicago, a Buddhist bank clerk in Tokyo, a Communist
bank clerk in Moscow are far more alike than the life any one of them is like
that of any single man who lived a thousand years ago. These similarities are
the result of a common technology. . ."
--L. Sprague de Camp, The Ancient Engineers, Ballentine edition, page 17.
The lives of the three bank clerks are not identical. Ideology does have some
effect. But all technological societies, in order to survive, must evolve along
approximately the same trajectory.
| Just think--an irresponsible genetic engineer might create a lot of
terrorists.
| For a further example of undesirable consequences of medical progress, suppose
a reliable cure for cancer is discovered. Even if the treatment is too
expensive to be available to any but the elite, it will greatly reduce their
incentive to stop the escape of carcinogens into the environment.
| Since many people may find paradoxical the notion that a large number of good
things can add up to a bad thing, we will illustrate with an analogy. Suppose
Mr. A is playing chess with Mr. B. Mr. C, a Grand Master, is looking over Mr.
A's shoulder. Mr. A of course wants to win his game, so if Mr. C points out a
good move for him to make, he is doing Mr. A a favor. But suppose now that Mr.
C tells Mr. A how to make all of his moves. In each particular instance he does
Mr. A a favor by showing him his best move, but by making all of his moves for
him he spoils the game, since there is no point in Mr. A's playing the game at
all if someone else makes all his moves. The situation of modern man is
analogous to that of Mr. A. The system makes an individual's life easier for him
in innumerable ways, but in doing so it deprives him of control over his own
fate.
| Here we are considering only the conflict of values within the mainstream.
For the sake of simplicity we leave out of the picture "outsider" values like
the idea that wild nature is more important than human economic welfare.
| Self-interest is not necessarily material self-interest. It can consist in
fulfillment of some psychological need, for example, by promoting one's own
ideology or religion.
| A qualification: It is in the interest of the system to permit a certain
prescribed degree of freedom in some areas. For example, economic freedom (with
suitable limitations and restraints) has proved effective in promoting economic
growth. But only planned, circumscribed, limited freedom is in the interest of
the system. The individual must always be kept on a leash, even if the leash is
sometimes long (see paragraphs 94, 97).
| We don't mean to suggest that the efficiency or the potential for survival of
a society has always been inversely proportional to the amount of pressure or
discomfort to which the society subjects people. That is certainly not the
case. There is good reason to believe that many primitive societies subjected
people to less pressure than the European society did, but European society
proved far more efficient than any primitive society and always won out in
conflicts with such societies because of the advantages conferred by technology.
| If you think that more effective law enforcement is unequivocally good because
it suppresses crime, then remember that crime as defined by the system is not
necessarily what you would call crime. Today, smoking marijuana is a "crime,"
and in some places in the U.S., possession of any firearm, registered or not,
may be made a crime; the same thing may happen with disapproved methods of
child-rearing, such as spanking. In some countries, expression of dissident
political opinions is a crime, and there is no certainty that this will never
happen in the U.S., since no constitution or political system lasts forever. If
a society needs a large, powerful law enforcement establishment, then there is
something gravely wrong with that society; it must be subjecting people to
severe pressures if so many refuse to follow the rules, or follow them only
because forced. Many societies in the past have gotten by with little or no
formal law-enforcement.
| To be sure, past societies have had means of influencing behavior, but these
have been primitive and of low effectiveness compared with the technological
means that are now being developed.
| However, some psychologists have publicly expressed opinions indicating their
contempt for human freedom. And the mathematician Claude Shannon was quoted in
Omni (August 1987) as saying, "I visualize a time when we will be to robots what
dogs are to humans, and I'm rooting for the machines."
| This is no science fiction! After writing paragraph 154 we came across an
article in Scientific American according to which scientists are actively
developing techniques for identifying possible future criminals and for treating
them by a combination of biological and psychological means. Some scientists
advocate compulsory application of the treatment, which may be available in the
near future. (See "Seeking the Criminal Element", by W. Wayt Gibbs, Scientific
American, March 1995.) Maybe you think this is OK because the treatment would be
applied to those who might become drunk drivers (they endanger human life too),
then perhaps to people who spank their children, then to environmentalists who
sabotage logging equipment, eventually to anyone whose behavior is inconvenient
for the system.
| A further advantage of nature as a counter-ideal to technology is that, in
many people, nature inspires the kind of reverence that is associated with
religion, so that nature could perhaps be idealized on a religious basis. It is
true that in many societies religion has served as a support and justification
for the established order, but it is also true that religion has often provided
a basis for rebellion. Thus it may be useful to introduce a religious element
into the rebellion against technology, the more so because Western society today
has no strong religious foundation. Religion nowadays either is used as cheap
and transparent support for narrow, short-sighted selfishness (some
conservatives use it this way), or even is cynically exploited to make easy
money (by many evangelists), or has degenerated into crude irrationalism
(fundamentalist Protestant sects, "cults"), or is simply stagnant (Catholicism,
main-line Protestantism). The nearest thing to a strong, widespread, dynamic
religion that the West has seen in recent times has been the quasi-religion of
leftism, but leftism today is fragmented and has no clear, unified inspiring
goal.
Thus there is a religious vacuum in our society that could perhaps be filled by
a religion focused on nature in opposition to technology. But it would be a
mistake to try to concoct artificially a religion to fill this role. Such an
invented religion would probably be a failure. Take the "Gaia" religion for
example. Do its adherents really believe in it or are they just play-acting?
If they are just play-acting their religion will be a flop in the end.
It is probably best not to try to introduce religion into the conflict of nature
vs. technology unless you really believe in that religion yourself and find
that it arouses a deep, strong, genuine response in many other people.
| Assuming that such a final push occurs. Conceivably the industrial system
might be eliminated in a somewhat gradual or piecemeal fashion (see paragraphs
4, 167 and Note 4).
| It is even conceivable (remotely) that the revolution might consist only of a
massive change of attitudes toward technology resulting in a relatively gradual
and painless disintegration of the industrial system. But if this happens we'll
be very lucky. It's far more probably that the transition to a nontechnological
society will be very difficult and full of conflicts and disasters.
| The economic and technological structure of a society are far more important
than its political structure in determining the way the average man lives (see
paragraphs 95, 119 and Notes 16, 18).
| This statement refers to our particular brand of anarchism. A wide variety of
social attitudes have been called "anarchist," and it may be that many who
consider themselves anarchists would not accept our statement of paragraph 215.
It should be noted, by the way, that there is a nonviolent anarchist movement
whose members probably would not accept FC as anarchist and certainly would not
approve of FC's violent methods.
| Many leftists are motivated also by hostility, but the hostility probably
results in part from a frustrated need for power.
| It is important to understand that we mean someone who sympathizes with these
movements as they exist today in our society. One who believes that women,
homosexuals, etc., should have equal rights is not necessarily a leftist. The
feminist, gay rights, etc., movements that exist in our society have the
particular ideological tone that characterizes leftism, and if one believes, for
example, that women should have equal rights it does not necessarily follow that
one must sympathize with the feminist movement as it exists today.
Diagram: disruption of the power process
Table of Contents
Industrial Society and Its Future by Theodore Kaczynski
Introduction
The psychology of modern leftism
Feelings of inferiority
Oversocialization
The power process
Surrogate activities
Autonomy
Sources of social problems
Disruption of the power process in modern society
How some people adjust
The motives of scientists
The nature of freedom
Some principles of history
Industrial-technological society cannot be reformed
Restriction of freedom is unavoidable in industrial society
The 'bad' parts of technology cannot be separated from the 'good' parts
Technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom
Simpler social problems have proved intractable
Revolution is easier than reform
Control of human behavior
Human race at a crossroads
Human suffering
The future
Strategy
Two kinds of technology
The danger of leftism
Final note
Notes
Diagram: disruption of the power process