[DirectorKrennic]

Not really. It's a lot of disorganized nonsense with a high noise-to-signal ratio. Random excerpts:

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

[arp242]

Reading Kaczynski is a little bit like reading the Bible: you shouldn't take everything literally but instead think about what's trying to be said, and you should ignore some bits.

e.g. paragraph "15" is excessive and inflammatory, but he wasn't wrong that some people will try to find fault for anything that happens in the West while ignoring much greater crimes in other countries. See e.g. all the HN posters who trivialize China's problems while attacking the US (I'm sure this thread will have some of those types of comments, too). This point also wasn't original to Kaczynski, e.g. George Orwell also wrote about it, as did many others.

Also remember much of this was written an era when people were literally collaborating with the USSR and East-Germany out of "socialist ideals" and (rightful) anger over the shady activities of the CIA or FBI, while also ignoring that those countries were significantly worse in almost every way.

[joenot443]

Are those "random"? It seems like you chose them pretty specifically, actually. You seem like you're inching towards a point here, but not quite making one. Maybe you can expand a bit?

[happytoexplain]

No need to be ominous. Those topics are forever the high-noise, high-politics topics. It's not eyebrow-raising to find them in this kind of manifesto, or for somebody to disagree with them.

[DirectorKrennic]

> 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.

> 97. Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what might 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 right 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.

> 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.

As I said, a whole bunch of nonsense.

[drones]

For the most part the underlying observations are hard to disagree, even if you disagree with the conclusions.

14: - Yep this is quite off. I disagree.

15: (Some) Leftists do operate under a slave morality, which does lead them to morally binary modes of thinking, resulting in things like supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine (because America is an imperialist, illegitimate state and therefore NATO is too).

22: Not unique to leftists - the political machine demands conflict to justify it's own existence

35: Mazlow's hierarchy of needs. This is undisputable. Why do billionaires waste money on backyard space experiments and vacuous social media platforms? Existential boredom and ego.

[throw4548]

14 doesn’t insane

15 seems spot on to me. It’s definitely how conservatives see leftists.

22 and 35 do seem like rambling

[13of40]

I haven't read it in years, but I think 35 was part of a bigger argument that past a certain point everything in modern life is either impossible or trivially easy to achieve, so people seek outlets in hobbies, etc. Not universally true, as anyone who's ever job hunted or quit smoking knows, but not just thoughtless rambling.