Ted Kaczynski Quotes

“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.”

“A surrogate activity is an 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.”

“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.”

“Art forms that appeal to leftists tend to focus on defeat and despair as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation.”

“Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them 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 has been greatly increasing in recent decades. We believe that this is due to disruption of the power process.

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.”

“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.”

“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 the very modest effort needed to hold a job.

The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence and, most of all, simple obedience.”

“It is important not to confuse freedom with mere permissiveness.”

“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.”

“It is obvious that leftists are not cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality.”

“It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences.”

“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.”

“Leftists of the oversocialized type tend to be intellectuals or members of the upper-middle class. Notice that university intellectuals constitute the most highly socialized segment of our society and also the most leftwing segment.

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.”

“Let's stick to the practical and the concrete: Would you like it if people lived in a virtual world? If machines were smarter than people? If, in the future, people, animals and plants were products of technology?

If you don't like these ideas, then for you the computer and biological sciences clearly are dangerous.”

“Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. 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.”

“Modern man must satisfy his need for the power process largely through pursuit of the artificial needs created by the advertising and marketing industry, and through surrogate activities.”

“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 of 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 difference.

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 the 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.

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-organised 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.”