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This "third position" is basically anarchy, or anarcho-primitivism. It's not really a political position, it's more like a pathological insistence that civiliz

This "third position" is basically anarchy, or anarcho-primitivism. It's not really a political position, it's more like a pathological insistence that civilization should be destroyed. Kaczynski went as far as saying we're biologically wired to live primitive lives and we're misusing ourselves in perversions that he calls 'surrogate activities', which include science and art. To him, hunting or trying to survive while being hunted in the woods is the perfect utilization of the human mind-body, and we should all abandon society and go do that instead.

spurgu 3y ago
I'd say it's more about autonomy, self-sufficiency and freedom, rather than just "living primitive lives". Technological progress tends to stifle all of the above, in the grand scheme of things. Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Compare that to a car which is manufactured somewhere far away with tons of special expertise and which basically cannot be repaired by a layman anymore (as opposed to not too many decades ago). And you rely on a huge infrastructure network for building and maintaining the roads. There are probably better examples (horses just came to mind). We tend to choose the more "advanced" option because it seems more convenient, without considering the externalities of that convenience, whether that's pollution or handing over part of our self-sufficiency in order to do so. Something like a Carrington event would cripple us and cause utter chaos. Just think of the huge amount of technology that we rely on in daily life and it's not changing direction. At all. We are not becoming more resilient, we're becoming less. We are quickly losing the skills required to adapt to a "lower" level of technology, meaning any quick disruption in the system could be catastrophical. Technology can potentially enable us to have more freedom, autonomy and self-sufficiency, but for it to be sustainable it would need to be at the top of the decision-making tree. Right now it's mostly a balancing act between convenience and affordability on behalf of consumers and profitability of producers. And well, mix in some environmental concerns (but those tend to be secondary as well as almost always reactionary). And yes I'm probably somewhat of a neo-luddite. I take pride in being self-sufficient, to the extent possible. And I'm more than willing to sacrifice convenience for freedom. Technology creates more boundaries, rules and bureaucracy, not less. Technology controls us, rather than the other way around.
- ip26 3y ago
  Living hand-to-mouth in the bush offers certain kinds of autonomy and freedom, but lacks others. Your stomach is not a lenient master.
- notjulianjaynes 3y ago
  >Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Compare that to a car which is manufactured somewhere far away with tons of special expertise and which basically cannot be repaired by a layman anymore (as opposed to not too many decades ago). And you rely on a huge infrastructure network for building and maintaining the roads. How about the externalities and technological advancements nessecary to domesticate wild horses, and also the infastructure networks which drove the need and ability to create a ship capable of transporting those horses across the Atlantic ocean to America, where they are not a native species.
  - spurgu 3y ago
    > How about the externalities and technological advancements nessecary to domesticate wild horses, and also the infastructure networks which drove the need and ability to create a ship capable of transporting those horses across the Atlantic ocean to America, where they are not a native species. Would've been easier had your example played out 10k years ago when there were still native horses in America. :) For domesticating horses, it doesn't rely on huge factories. You need basic tools (stone would suffice) to cut down some trees in order to create an enclosure where you train the horses. Then basic tech like cloth and rope making, and/or leather, for making saddles and bridles etc. Nothing a couple of people can't cobble together with basic knowledge. No reliance on huge complicated factories and supply chains or tech unobtainable by resourceful people, locally. For ships we've been building various boats for ages, with very simple tools. Building a small boat is something a single person can do in weeks to years depending on the size. And larger ones is mostly a question of adding more laborers (engineering calculations and considerations get more complicated with size so there are practical limits built in). Making iron helps in both cases. That doesn't require a ton of technology either but granted it's quite difficult to bootstrap. Still, once up and running doesn't take more than a small community to maintain. Ideally, in my mind, any "acceptable" tech should be manageable by a community of 150 people or less. I keep coming back to the Dunbar number whenever I think of human systems/societies. Your questioning bring up an interesting comparison point: Wood as building material vs. plastics. Wood being 100% recyclable plus it literally grows on trees, while plastics require immense knowledge and expertise in chemistry and raw materials include fossil fuels. The externalities for the latter are huge and will thus require an immense amount of interconnected people and technologies to create and maintain. Way more than 150. I do also realize that there are edge cases where distinctions become difficult, but that's the case with everything. The main idea here is that I think technology should be judged on a spectrum of self-reliance/freedom. Defining a hard limit in the middle can be difficult (or impossible). Although, not impossible or necessarily even hard if the community of people deciding where the limit is is small enough.
avgcorrection 3y ago
> It's not really a political position, it's more like a pathological insistence that civilization should be destroyed. Kaczynski went as far as saying we're biologically wired to live primitive lives and we're misusing ourselves in perversions that he calls 'surrogate activities', which include science and art. To him, hunting or trying to survive while being hunted in the woods is the perfect utilization of the human mind-body, and we should all abandon society and go do that instead. Which isn’t crazy if you strip it of its politics and just consider the lifestyle itself. Many people latch onto what are effectively caveman diets (especially that). And other people justify doing whatever “weird” stuff by saying that it works similar to how we used to do things, like defecating in a squat position instead of sitting on a throne. And indeed, some of the biomechanics are corroborated by findings that tell us that “sitting is the new smoking”. Then you have the deluge of news about how you literally can’t do anything, ever, in modern society (lightning, food, air quality) without giving yourself X and Y (bad stuff). That “caveman” philosophy is basically the most conservative approach to living that exists; better the evil you know than the evil you don’t (modern society changing all the time; see for example smart phones which are quite new). Of course, the caveat to the above paragraph is that we don’t truly know how to “caveman” since we didn’t grow up like that. So it’s not strictly true that it is an uber-conservative approach. Where anarcho-primitivism fails is that we’re seven billion people on this earth, way too many to go back to hunting deer and rabbits and whatever. The Unabomber figured out that he couldn’t simply make the individualistic choice (see: liberalism) of going out into the woods and start living by himself, because the found out that Civilization would encroach on him. And what’s a hermit got to say to the federal government giving him an Eminent Domain claim or whatever it’s called? And then he took it in a bad political direction.
- shrimpx 3y ago
  I kinda think that caveman life was inherently temporary, as we advanced toward organized society. You could destroy society and information, sending us back into a caveman lifestyle, but it would only be temporary as we would immediately start to climb back toward organized society. Organized society emerges out of the drive for survival. As you seek to secure food and security for your group, you build tools and you become weary of neighboring groups. You compete, you iterate on tools and strategy, you develop borders and politics, and eventually we’re back to some kind of global infrastructure, with everything standing in a complex tension where it’s no longer easy to expand quickly.

spurgu 3y ago

I'd say it's more about autonomy, self-sufficiency and freedom, rather than just "living primitive lives". Technological progress tends to stifle all of the above, in the grand scheme of things. Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Compare that to a car which is manufactured somewhere far away with tons of special expertise and which basically cannot be repaired by a layman anymore (as opposed to not too many decades ago). And you rely on a huge infrastructure network for building and maintaining the roads. There are probably better examples (horses just came to mind). We tend to choose the more "advanced" option because it seems more convenient, without considering the externalities of that convenience, whether that's pollution or handing over part of our self-sufficiency in order to do so. Something like a Carrington event would cripple us and cause utter chaos. Just think of the huge amount of technology that we rely on in daily life and it's not changing direction. At all. We are not becoming more resilient, we're becoming less. We are quickly losing the skills required to adapt to a "lower" level of technology, meaning any quick disruption in the system could be catastrophical. Technology can potentially enable us to have more freedom, autonomy and self-sufficiency, but for it to be sustainable it would need to be at the top of the decision-making tree. Right now it's mostly a balancing act between convenience and affordability on behalf of consumers and profitability of producers. And well, mix in some environmental concerns (but those tend to be secondary as well as almost always reactionary). And yes I'm probably somewhat of a neo-luddite. I take pride in being self-sufficient, to the extent possible. And I'm more than willing to sacrifice convenience for freedom. Technology creates more boundaries, rules and bureaucracy, not less. Technology controls us, rather than the other way around.

ip26 3y ago
Living hand-to-mouth in the bush offers certain kinds of autonomy and freedom, but lacks others. Your stomach is not a lenient master.
notjulianjaynes 3y ago
>Think about owning horses back in the day, which you could simply breed to get more of. You could travel freely pretty much anywhere, no roads required. Compare that to a car which is manufactured somewhere far away with tons of special expertise and which basically cannot be repaired by a layman anymore (as opposed to not too many decades ago). And you rely on a huge infrastructure network for building and maintaining the roads. How about the externalities and technological advancements nessecary to domesticate wild horses, and also the infastructure networks which drove the need and ability to create a ship capable of transporting those horses across the Atlantic ocean to America, where they are not a native species.
- spurgu 3y ago
  > How about the externalities and technological advancements nessecary to domesticate wild horses, and also the infastructure networks which drove the need and ability to create a ship capable of transporting those horses across the Atlantic ocean to America, where they are not a native species. Would've been easier had your example played out 10k years ago when there were still native horses in America. :) For domesticating horses, it doesn't rely on huge factories. You need basic tools (stone would suffice) to cut down some trees in order to create an enclosure where you train the horses. Then basic tech like cloth and rope making, and/or leather, for making saddles and bridles etc. Nothing a couple of people can't cobble together with basic knowledge. No reliance on huge complicated factories and supply chains or tech unobtainable by resourceful people, locally. For ships we've been building various boats for ages, with very simple tools. Building a small boat is something a single person can do in weeks to years depending on the size. And larger ones is mostly a question of adding more laborers (engineering calculations and considerations get more complicated with size so there are practical limits built in). Making iron helps in both cases. That doesn't require a ton of technology either but granted it's quite difficult to bootstrap. Still, once up and running doesn't take more than a small community to maintain. Ideally, in my mind, any "acceptable" tech should be manageable by a community of 150 people or less. I keep coming back to the Dunbar number whenever I think of human systems/societies. Your questioning bring up an interesting comparison point: Wood as building material vs. plastics. Wood being 100% recyclable plus it literally grows on trees, while plastics require immense knowledge and expertise in chemistry and raw materials include fossil fuels. The externalities for the latter are huge and will thus require an immense amount of interconnected people and technologies to create and maintain. Way more than 150. I do also realize that there are edge cases where distinctions become difficult, but that's the case with everything. The main idea here is that I think technology should be judged on a spectrum of self-reliance/freedom. Defining a hard limit in the middle can be difficult (or impossible). Although, not impossible or necessarily even hard if the community of people deciding where the limit is is small enough.

avgcorrection 3y ago

> It's not really a political position, it's more like a pathological insistence that civilization should be destroyed. Kaczynski went as far as saying we're biologically wired to live primitive lives and we're misusing ourselves in perversions that he calls 'surrogate activities', which include science and art. To him, hunting or trying to survive while being hunted in the woods is the perfect utilization of the human mind-body, and we should all abandon society and go do that instead. Which isn’t crazy if you strip it of its politics and just consider the lifestyle itself. Many people latch onto what are effectively caveman diets (especially that). And other people justify doing whatever “weird” stuff by saying that it works similar to how we used to do things, like defecating in a squat position instead of sitting on a throne. And indeed, some of the biomechanics are corroborated by findings that tell us that “sitting is the new smoking”. Then you have the deluge of news about how you literally can’t do anything, ever, in modern society (lightning, food, air quality) without giving yourself X and Y (bad stuff). That “caveman” philosophy is basically the most conservative approach to living that exists; better the evil you know than the evil you don’t (modern society changing all the time; see for example smart phones which are quite new). Of course, the caveat to the above paragraph is that we don’t truly know how to “caveman” since we didn’t grow up like that. So it’s not strictly true that it is an uber-conservative approach. Where anarcho-primitivism fails is that we’re seven billion people on this earth, way too many to go back to hunting deer and rabbits and whatever. The Unabomber figured out that he couldn’t simply make the individualistic choice (see: liberalism) of going out into the woods and start living by himself, because the found out that Civilization would encroach on him. And what’s a hermit got to say to the federal government giving him an Eminent Domain claim or whatever it’s called? And then he took it in a bad political direction.

shrimpx 3y ago
I kinda think that caveman life was inherently temporary, as we advanced toward organized society. You could destroy society and information, sending us back into a caveman lifestyle, but it would only be temporary as we would immediately start to climb back toward organized society. Organized society emerges out of the drive for survival. As you seek to secure food and security for your group, you build tools and you become weary of neighboring groups. You compete, you iterate on tools and strategy, you develop borders and politics, and eventually we’re back to some kind of global infrastructure, with everything standing in a complex tension where it’s no longer easy to expand quickly.