| HN Mirror

Mein Kampf has also been read by millions, but nobody claims Hitler's work was a resounding success. Is your criteria for success simply "Someone reads your manifesto?"

"..the Unabomber gets remembered as this struggle's John Brown, not this struggle's Abraham Lincoln."

You could be right about this. But then you could be wrong. Ideas still matter, and their particular expression still can have material impacts. Time will tell. Will Kaczynski's work inspire the sort of material, decisive impact that Martin Luther's works inspired during the Reformation's wars?? or Will Kaczynski as you say be more like John brown, while the real decisive impact will be made by those that actually organize and lead. (Just staying with your analogy). Only time will tell.

On this point you would do well to read the third chapter of "Anti-Tech Revolution." In it, Kaczynski argues for why an anti-tech revolution as he lays out would succeed and why its success would be more or less permanent while all other social revolutions and goals have failed and were fundamentally doomed to fail.

I've read him. I find his philosophy to be two things:

1) self-consistent

2) deeply misanthropic

As with so many seductive political philosophers (Rand and Hitler spring immediately to mind), he creates a framework that checks out against its own internal logic and that would work great if (a) humans behaved the way he needs them to behave for his system to work and (b) you ignore all the death and suffering his solution demands.

"(a) humans behaved the way he needs them to behave for his system to work."

This is flatly wrong. Humans aren't "needed" to behave in this system in any way other than they have always behaved throughout history. The revolutionary ideal is not to create a utopia, or to control society and human behavior, it is only to destroy the industrial system. the world that will remain will approximate the world prior to the industrial revolution: full bellies and hunger, sickness and health, greed and compassion, etc. etc. But it's a world where the biosphere and humanity are not threatened with existential destruction.

"(b) you ignore all the death and suffering his solution demands."

No need to "ignore" anything. You just have to come the the conclusion that FAR more death and destruction lays in store for humans and the biosphere if technology is allowed to continue. This is a matter of facts and logic and can be reasonably deduced. You can;t somehow shirk from your intellectual and moral responsibility to think about something simply because it's painful to think about, which is essential what your doing. Would it be wrong, for example, for the Allies to have ever considered fighting and defeating Nazi Germany because it would entail millions of people suffering, regardless of the consequences of not doing anything???

> But it's a world where the biosphere and humanity are not threatened with existential destruction.

That's unfortunately false. The technology stack needed to divert asteroids is significant; bringing humanity to a pre-industrial revolution doesn't guarantee the safety of the biosphere, it guarantees the biosphere is unmodifiable by human activity. That leaves the biosphere vulnerable to threats that humans could use technology to intervene against but will be unable to.

> No need to "ignore" anything.

If one doesn't ignore the death and suffering but instead condemns humanity to it purposefully, with the flip response "But in a technological society, people will die anyway," that's misanthropic, and that's the part where his philosophy demands humans act other than they will. Fewer humans are suffering and dying---even with the threat of climate change---in a world where we have a technology stack that can move vast resources around.

Avoiding the death of billions of people by crashing the industrial infrastructure so billions of people die is a non-solution. Practically, nobody will go for it. Philosophically, nobody should go for it; it's the solution of throwing up one's hands and saying "into Nature's good graces we should go," and Nature's graces have never been good. "Red in tooth and claw" is the moniker she tends to carry.

There's no guarantee that if we keep the industrial society, billions die to climate change. Technology gave us the power to shape the climate and (if we choose to invest the time and effort) it can give us the power to shape the climate beneficially. If we pull the technological society up by its roots and return to the pre-industrial society, billions die from starvation, disease, and natural disaster, as we are no longer able to move resources to help them.

Thank you for this discussion. Suffice it to say I think you are dead wrong here. But a debate on the points you now raise is beyond the time I have to devote now.

You're still conflating the success of a tactic in furtherance of a goal with the success of a goal.

This entire subthread has been about tactics in furtherance of an ultimate goal. From a few posts above: > They demonstrably have been. Organized NIMBY campaigns, including campaigns containing a part of illegal land occupation but no part of mailing package bombs to individuals, have shut down all manner of development, including both nuclear power plants and oil pipelines.

> All the Unabomber accomplished was a lifelong stay in prison, the death of three people, and the injury of dozens more. By your strong metric, neither approach is successful. By a weaker metric, an organized campaign that doesn't include bombing people is partially successful.

Maybe the Unabomber's ultimate goals will bear out (I sincerely doubt it for reasons I have expounded upon elsewhere in these comments), but even if they do, he didn't pull it off.

If, 300 years from now, history remembers this era as a dark time of bad technology that humanity grew out of, the Unabomber gets remembered as this struggle's John Brown, not this struggle's Abraham Lincoln.