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The overall tone of the Unabomber Manifesto is pretty crazy, but substantial parts are rather profound, or at least concise and effective restatements of import

The overall tone of the Unabomber Manifesto is pretty crazy, but substantial parts are rather profound, or at least concise and effective restatements of important ideas. In particular, Kaczynski's discussion of the Power Process, Autonomy, and Surrogate Activities rings true and explains a lot. I get the impression a lot of this stuff has only been further confirmed in recent years: people without autonomous, difficult, and meaningful tasks are unhappy. http://xahlee.org/p/um/um.html http://xahlee.org/p/um/um.html I also thought his discussion of the psychological character of the Left has some value.

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balsam 14y ago
It reads like Nietzsche (all that Will to Power & slave morality stuff) updated for century XXI. (I skimmed the text by highlighting the word "goal".) Frustratingly, the Unabomber doesn't give any examples of "real goals". Does helping startups succeed count?
- philwelch 14y ago
  That's not a very helpful comment; if you're going to discuss the text, you'd better read it, and carefully. If you did, you'd know the answer to your questions. It's extremely straightforward.
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- defen 14y ago
  Nietzsche's "will to power" is Darwin's theory of "natural selection" writ large, applied to the whole universe instead of just life forms, presented in Nietzsche's traditional non-scientific metaphorical format. Kaczynski's "power process" has to do with the satisfaction of drives, not the achievement of goals. It's only similar in the sense that you could possibly make the argument that the "power process" is a very small part of the more general "will to power". But this would be about as meaningful as arguing that anger is an emotion. Furthermore, the achievement of most (societally sanctioned) goals is part of the problem, because they are merely surrogate goals! So it sounds like by attempting to skim the text you got precisely the wrong meaning out of it!

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balsam 14y ago

It reads like Nietzsche (all that Will to Power & slave morality stuff) updated for century XXI. (I skimmed the text by highlighting the word "goal".) Frustratingly, the Unabomber doesn't give any examples of "real goals". Does helping startups succeed count?

philwelch 14y ago
That's not a very helpful comment; if you're going to discuss the text, you'd better read it, and carefully. If you did, you'd know the answer to your questions. It's extremely straightforward.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
defen 14y ago
Nietzsche's "will to power" is Darwin's theory of "natural selection" writ large, applied to the whole universe instead of just life forms, presented in Nietzsche's traditional non-scientific metaphorical format. Kaczynski's "power process" has to do with the satisfaction of drives, not the achievement of goals. It's only similar in the sense that you could possibly make the argument that the "power process" is a very small part of the more general "will to power". But this would be about as meaningful as arguing that anger is an emotion. Furthermore, the achievement of most (societally sanctioned) goals is part of the problem, because they are merely surrogate goals! So it sounds like by attempting to skim the text you got precisely the wrong meaning out of it!