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by adamrezich
1096 days ago
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> but if he had just held on, resisted the urge and played the long game I don't think everyone having wireless devices that connect to a global information network in their pockets at all times is something one could've really foreseen in 1978. and, even so, it's not as though it's really feasible to make any sort of shock-to-the-system sentiment widely and broadly heard, today, while abstaining from violence—even our modern societies are still trying to grapple with the question of, how much violence and destruction is justified in order to make a point about something, as seen in the last few years. had Kaczynski chosen peaceful decades-later contemporary Internet discourse as his means of promoting his ideas, he'd simply be tarred and feathered as an "alt-right" nutjob, just like everyone else with views that contradict the present Western civilization status quo. The System has gotten extremely efficient in perpetuating itself, and silencing anything resembling Actual Dissent. |
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So what? Anyone with an ounce of spirituality knows that living your life to be admired in your lifetime is not the real goal. Ivan Illich spent his life being as lefty and now he's trendy on the right (making similar critiques, btw). Truth is beautiful when it's spoken for its own sake -- insecurity makes it ugly. It can't be forced into the world by terror.
Kaczynski killed because he was unbalanced and insecure, not because he held (partial) truth. Better thinkers on the issue were dime-a-dozen, even in his day (E.M. Forester, Samuel Butler, McLuhan). And it wasn't his terrorism but sophomoricly intellectual "incel" rage and religious fundamentalist movements that are finally waking people up.
edit: ... and this isn't to say that truth never justifies any form of violence, just that there is absolutely nothing to learn from Kaczynski's brand -- which was ignoble and totally futile to his intended ends.