71: The Unabomber Saga: The Manifesto of the Unabomber (Part 2) | Red Thread
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As spoken from Ted Kaczynski's manifesto, chapter 2.15, the root of our misery, mortified by the ever-expanding tentacles of techno-industrial hegemony... Nah, I can't find out, it's just a lummox.

Huh? It's just a Lamex. I don't know what the, like, model number is or anything. I was doing that. I was doing the fucking intro. You just interrupted me. Oh, shit. Sorry. What did you think I was doing? I went off and looked at the camera model, and then I didn't know you started. That's funnier than the actual intro. That should be kept in. Just fucking wander in and tell me your camera model info. Keep that in. Fuck it. We'll ride. Yeah, keep going.

I'll read my intro now. Do it, do it. So I'll start again. As spoken from Ted Kaczynski's manifesto, chapter 2.15, the root of our misery mortified by the ever-expanding tentacles of techno-industrial hegemony can be seen plainly when we step through the portal gun and observe the world as Rickwood.

a cesspool of unhappy drones worshipping their communicators and simulators as the Galactic Federation's bureaucrats enforce compliance with a thousand regulations. We have been turned into nothing more than a group of me-seeks summoned into existence to fulfill meaningless tasks endlessly. The youth, youth like Morty, stumble through an experiment that coerced into acceptance of

digital pacifiers and dopamine chambers, trading autonomy for the illusion of convenience. We must recognize that no amount of interdimensional cable can distract us from this grim truth. Technology, once a tool of liberation, has morphed into a prison. Unless we dismantle the system, we remain little more than batteries in Rick's portal gun.

Wubba lubba dub dub. That concludes the reading from Ted Kaczynski's Interdimensional Society and its Future. Now, this is Red Thread though, and we'll be reading from Ted Kaczynski's slightly less popular and less culturally relevant Industrial Society and its Future. I love imagining Ted Kaczynski as just a fucking, like if he was born in the modern year, he'd just be some like guy ranting on YouTube about how Rick and Morty

is actually so true and deep. He's like a I am very smart kind of individual. You know, I think you nailed that guy.

And to use another reference from Reddit, ah, born in LeRong generation. You're so right. He would be absolutely harmless if Rick and Morty existed. Just imagining that he's Rick and that's fine. It would have been his version of like a digital pacifier that he speaks of. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,

Because I agree, but I don't think that I fully understand why I agree. I think just the vibe is right. Well, yeah, it's the vibe. And also he just kind of the way that he talks about his points, especially in the manifesto and in writing too. Like whenever anyone would write letters to him in jail, he would always reply in a very Reddit like tone. Very like, I'm smarter than you.

I'm smarter than you and I know I'm smarter than you. You're lucky I'm giving you the time of day even responding to you, that kind of tone. And I've just noticed that those kind of online Reddit communities also love Rick and Morty. Oh, so on point. Also, I'll tell you, it's so on point, Jackson. You're so right. And I'll tell you this as well. So essentially, are we just thinking this manifesto is deep because it was written in the 60s or whatever? But really, it's just a Reddit post.

Man, I want to come in swinging, obviously, because it's Ted Kaczynski and he is that kind of pretentious, smart-ass kind of attitude. And also... A cultural icon at the same time. Well, no, I was going to say, and also he killed a bunch of people, so I don't feel empathy for him. But at the same time...

At the same time, as we said in the last episode, he's said a lot of correct things as well in this manifesto, like stuff that I agree with or can see the point of

And it's not even, that's not so much a controversial opinion. It's definitely pretty common for people to say they disagree with how he went about doing the things that he did. But even modern day philosophy university professors and stuff kind of talk about his work in a, what's the word I'm looking for? They seem to take his ideas seriously. Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah.

I think that... Go on, sorry. Yeah, continue on. I was just going to say, a lot of the commentary about him also is that, or his ideas, is that it wasn't necessarily even... They weren't original ideas. If I recall correctly, a lot of the ideas themselves are borrowed or loaned from a different, like, French philosopher's work. I can't remember his name at the moment. Me neither, but I did write it down because we did mention it in the previous podcast, just in case you haven't listened to it.

This is the sequel. And we did briefly mention the French guy. And I was like, yeah, I'll read that. And then like most things, if you say that, you absolutely do not. But I will get around to it. That's my guarantee. For those listening, it was Jacques Ellul. Jacques Ellul. It's always Jacques, isn't it? Yeah, that's such a philosopher name. Isn't it?

Yep, so this is Red Thread. Welcome. We're talking about a continuation of the last episode's topic, which was the Unabomber in the last episode. We covered the life, the ordeal, and I guess the achievements, if you could call them achievements, of Ted Kaczynski slash the Unabomber. We did say there'd be a part two because there's no way that you can talk about Ted Kaczynski without obviously diving into his...

his manifesto, which is the written work of Ted about his ideas and what motivated him into bombing a bunch of people. But if you don't know anything about Ted Kaczynski, I recommend you go watch part one.

And then come back and watch this one when you're ready to dive into the manifesto with us, which is what we'll be doing in this episode. We'll be diving into it. We've both read it. I've read it several times now. You've probably read it a bunch of times as well, I'm sure. Oh, yeah. I think the first time that I ever read it was in university, just to point to your point. It is exactly one of those. Oh, man. Now that you're just saying that it is just a glorified Reddit post, it is starting to make me...

Look, we will continue on with this, but I don't think that I can unsee that from it.

I say that about anything that takes itself seriously, though, and it purports itself to be a very intelligent kind of analysis of something. It's just so inexplicably tied to Reddit. Yeah. Intelligence is cringe, man. It is cringe. At the very least, just claiming I am objectively a genius. It's just even if you are, shut up.

Yeah, be humble about it. Be humble about it. Be cool about it. Intentionally misspell words so you seem really grounded. That's what I think too. It's just a fact it's cooler to be dumb. I mean, it's so much easier to be dumb. Oh, totally. And also, I think that it's just way better to sit there and be really Japanese about it and constantly talk about how shit your work is. That's what I reckon.

Oh, like dismiss your own output? Yeah, yeah, you know, don't reveal your strength. Humble yourself? Sit there and constantly be like, oh, so bad, so very bad. That's the way to do it. I do that too. I do that so much. What things that you know are awesome? No, no, no. I just constantly dismiss my own kind of work for some reason. I don't know why. I haven't really wrestled with that. I think it's just a better way to go about life, honestly.

I think it's just to keep myself grounded. Exactly. Otherwise, you do end up like Tay Kaczynski. Yeah, it's a very thin line we walk in between dismissing my own work and making myself grounded and then also bombing a bunch of people and making Reddit posts. That is the difference. Yeah, man.

Alright, so we'll start with an overview right now of Industrial Societies and its future. This is basically a summation of it or an introduction to it. And if you don't want to go super deep into the manifesto, you can really just listen to this and then stop after like the 15 minute mark after we finish reading this. Because the rest is extremely dense analysis of a crazy man's text.

Stick around. Come on. We've got another billion to do. Come on. Watch us bully a dead man. Yeah, totally. It might be crazy. Justifying in so many ways. And also, like, how weak are we as well? He is dead. He can't fight back. Yeah, true. We've never bombed anyone. Good old classic internet content. Trashing someone and not giving them a chance to talk back. He had his chance. Yeah, he had his chance.

This was his chance. He fucking made a giant manifesto. Yeah, true. And then made us read it. So we went, well, he did make us read it by bombing a bunch of people in the process. Like, obviously we would have to then read that. His strategy was. Hello? Yeah. Say that again.

I said it was his strategy to getting the manifesto out there, bombing a bunch of people. You can't do that and then not read it. That was legitimately his strategy, wasn't it? I know. Yeah, I'm not joking. I'm letting people in the audience know if they don't know who the Unabomber is. Yeah, actions speak louder than words. He honestly is just like the bad guy in Seven, but dumber because he's not a movie character.

All right. So we went over everything in the first episode to do with Ted Kaczynski and his campaign of domestic terrorism. But to briefly sum it up, from 1978 until he was caught in 1996, Ted Kaczynski sent 16 mail bombs, all with the intent of causing serious harm to the recipient. Only two were caught and defused. Eleven caused injuries, some being life-threatening and life-altering. And three...

It resulted in deaths. For nearly 20 years, the public lived in fear without any answer as to why these attacks were occurring. And the FBI invested millions of dollars of your taxpayer money into the investigation in an attempt to track down the group. They thought it was a group responsible for

This is to say, Ted Kaczynski was not a good person. However, during his reign of terror, he began to flesh out his manifesto, industrial society, and its future, with the goal of getting it into the hands of as many people as he could to spread his ideas and beliefs. Well, he's purported ideas and beliefs. There's definitely a bit of a discussion we could have on whether or not Ted truly believed in what he was writing to the point where

It was life or death to him. That's definitely a discussion point I've seen broached by a bunch of people. Oh, yeah? Yeah.

Oh yeah. And there's a bunch of people that argue that he didn't truly believe in the cause. I think we talked about last week as well. I go either way on it, but we'll talk about it at the end. All right. After being published in the New York Times and Washington Post, after Ted promised to stop the bombs, the manifesto quickly spread and is still widely debated even today. To possibly

possibly understand Ted, we need to dive into this manifesto and his ideas and ask the questions, is it relevant? Did he have a point? And ultimately, did he believe in what he was writing?

So the manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, was published in 1995 and is around 35,000 words long. It's too long to read in its entirety in an episode of Red Thread, so we'll instead be taking the most pertinent and impactful points, those are the points that Ted himself seemed to place the most emphasis on, and then we'll explore the relevant paragraphs that expand on those premises.

And it's still fucking way too long. Even this script is 25 pages long. We will be here for a while, I assume. So even just taking the choice cuts of this manifesto has resulted in a 25 page document. So keep that in mind. Damn, all these ideas. He's already starting to make me think that he's a genius purely just because of the length of it. But I suppose this is the trick, as you say, of crazy people. Yeah, just keep writing and eventually it'll make you look

Very intelligent.

In 2008, Ted released Technological Slavery, a 371-page book that delved even deeper into his ideas and critiques on the world and technological advancements. Technological Slavery is actually a generally well-received book, averaging 4.7 ratings on Amazon and 4.17 on Goodreads, a lot of reviewers prefacing that they do not condone murder or what Ted did, as you must do every time you talk about Ted Kaczynski, you can't.

You can't just go in and say, yeah, he had some good ideas. And then just leave it at that. Yeah. Why do we always have to put that preface on everything when you ever just say, I don't know, just being like, I don't know, Hitler had good environmental policies, but also he had some bad policies as well. You know, like, why is that always the needed thing? It should be obvious, right? It should be obvious, don't you reckon? You're wasting, you're diluting the point as well. Yeah.

I know, it does annoy me, but I do it as well because obviously we're on the internet. Yeah, you have to do it on the internet. You have to. Yeah, yeah. But it is, look, I'll tell you this, future content creators, get ready for that being one of your pet peeves in life, I reckon. Oh, yeah, it's very annoying having to. Okay, can I just say that Ted Kaczynski is rating harder than Harry Potter. LAUGHTER

I think it's so hilariously ironic that he has a positive rating on Amazon, which is probably like the most corporate personification of all of these ideas.

and, like, disgruntlement's possible. Isn't it? Oh, my God, it is. It's basically just, at this point, a robot that does everything in the world. Exactly. It's an enormous... It's something that he would... Well, he probably did hate vehemently, and yet his book is on there, like, headlining the ratings charts. It's hilarious. Oh, that's incredible. That is the classic meme of, like, the Che Guevara shirt, isn't it? That's his version of that, and it's...

more ironic than the shirt. Yeah. I did see a letter that he sent to someone from prison where he's like... The person sending the letter was asking for book recommendations, basically, and where he can get an original piece of Ted Kaczynski's work. And Ted replied basically saying, just look it up on Amazon. You can find my book there. And then he put a link to it in the mail. Oh my God! And then he's also like...

Okay, now I understand why you need to preface everything because that man not prefacing the irony of that, you are not sure as a stranger to him whether he's aware of that or not. Yeah, now I'm starting to think maybe he doesn't believe in these ideas and he just really wanted to make a best-selling Amazon book and this was his way of advertising it.

Get enough notoriety, make the book, and start replying to everyone, like advertising it on Amazon. Dude, if you think about it, it is really just a slightly more extreme Logan Paul stunt. Slightly more extreme, yeah. YouTubers are taking notes right now. Publicity equals bombing people. Yeah, I know. Dude, as anyone with a hat backwards on the internet would say, it would do numbers, bro.

Luckily, I'm wearing my hat forwards this episode. Oh, yeah? Okay. It's incredible to think that if your hat was backwards, you would think that that's a legitimately good point. The only thing is... How do you think it's going to do that? It's incredible.

It's so good. Okay, so today, just to peek behind the wizard's curtain here, Jackson and I can't see each other during these recordings. So Jackson is in his fisherman retiring mode today. And then otherwise, when he has his hat backwards, he's Sid from Hey Arnold. That's when I'm going sicko mode. You don't want to fuck with me then.

Well, that's good to know. Rational, relaxed, retired. I always just imagine you're sitting there naked since you love filming yourself naked in videos and stuff. Is that what you think?

Yeah. And fair enough, I've got to say. I bet you take any chance. Yeah, absolutely. There's a much higher chance than I would like to admit to that I would do that. And let's be honest, the only reason that I am in clothes at the moment is because I woke up in them. If I woke up naked, I'd probably just start recording. I wouldn't be a fan. Well, yeah, maybe that might be a good publicity idea for Red Thread for the future if you don't mind taking one for the team. Oh, totally. No issue with it whatsoever. Awesome. There we go. It's just a human body, man.

Nothing to be ashamed of. Yeah. Are we going to do that? Are we going to do that? No, we're not going to do that. Completely naked. He sounded excited, like genuinely excited about the concert. Kind of, yeah. Are we going to do that? I'm finally able to get naked on camera? Hell yeah. It'd be great if it's one of those Red Thread episodes as well where you get on like a huge YouTuber. Yeah.

We don't comment on it in the episode at all either. It's just like the final product, the final episode is me and the other guy fully cloaked in our squares and then you're just naked in the bottom square. Oh, Jackson, come on. You know how to do numbers. Totally do it. Oh, that's such a genius idea. I'm not even joking at this point. I honestly think that's a very good idea. Let us know if you think that's a good idea.

All right, let's start, let's start, let's start, let's start. Okay, so the first chapter of this analysis is called The Industrial Revolution Has Been Disastrous for Humanity. And really, this is the central point. Ted opens the manifesto with a bleak statement, the core hypothesis of his belief system. And Jordan, interrupt me whenever you want to add additional information or your insight. I'm sure you have...

And just an extraordinary amount of insight into this strange naked YouTuber man. Number one.

So the entries in his manifesto are all numbered. So I'll include the number in here for each entry verbally so that you guys know where to look if you're going to look up his manifesto. But it does start at number one. So he says, "...the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life expectancy of those of us who live in advanced countries."

But they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjugated human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering in the third world, to physical suffering as well, and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. So how do you feel about that core thesis already? Look, the core thesis...

I do agree with, to an extent, I think that like a lot of the predictions of dystopic futures...

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There's elements of them that are correct and elements of them that aren't. You know how the classic... Jesus, speaking of Reddit. The classic Reddit debate is always, oh, is the future like 1984 or is it like a brave new world? And the reality...

And the reality is... The reality is it's somewhere in the middle. Yeah, don't you think? Like, there's just little elements of things that's gotten scarier because of technology, and then there's things that became way better. And I think that generally the idea that the third world is worse off as a result of this and that it's leading to environmental catastrophe, I think is...

It just hasn't panned out the way that people were imagining it was in the 60s. Yeah. So they already imagined that the world would have boiled over at this point. And yes, climate change is like an existential threat and it's very serious. However, it is getting addressed. That's just undeniable. I think I think like a very good example of this was we were hurtling towards like four point five degrees of heat.

of increase now because of government policy that's in place globally it's going to be about 2.5 and that's before the next decade rolls out with all of its technology which will probably lower it again they're thinking like 1.8 in the next decade you know what i mean like so like technology actually doesn't do what these predictors will say another one that the 70s always said was like uh you know due to overpopulation we won't be able to feed the planet

And the exact opposite has happened. It's just agricultural technology is just far, far surpassed to the point that

Famine, even in the third world, is unbelievably rare. I think last year, 0.03% of the population died of starvation. Isn't this incredible? In the past decade, this is the first time this has happened. 0.03% of the population died of starvation. 0.06% of the population died of obesity. Wow. That's what I'm saying, right? So, like, it's like, yes, technology creates more problems.

But it is solving problems in the process. Well, yeah. I mean, technology is such a broad kind of category to me. It covers pretty much every possible thing that humanity has created. So you can't escape the bad, obviously.

It's undeniable that certain technology has led to disastrous impacts on the environment as well as social conditioning. But it's also brought a lot of good and you can't deny that either. And it also is probably the only thing that can reasonably solve the problems that it itself has created, interestingly enough. I genuinely do think that like,

When it comes to like, I don't know, say politically or something, when it gets to climate change, I think the world has very, human beings have very, very succinctly said, I don't give a shit. Fuck you. I'm going to keep my lights on. You know? And like really the only thing that is saving us is technological advancement.

So there is kind of birth rates plummeting globally. Right. In terms of the, let's call it the, at least first world countries. Right. Birth rates are pretty, pretty acutely declining. Yeah. As a general pattern, as a general pattern. Yeah.

Do you think that that is perhaps one of the main causes itself of that prevailing feeling of, fuck it, I'll take the short-term comfort as opposed to long-term comfort for my children that don't exist and I have no intention of having children? Well, I, interestingly, I think that it actually is more of a consequence of what he's talking about. I think, like, really the reason the population, again, look,

I'm sure that you could probably write university PhDs on why the population is declining. So take it with a grain of salt. But I honestly do think that it's more to do with what he's talking about, which is that when society becomes so advanced and it becomes so materially abundant, just kind of like the Universe 25 experiment with the rats, the population kind of just starts levelling off. It's this kind of like, you know, okay, for instance...

You and I, Jackson, probably should have had like seven kids at this point. Yeah, but we've had the freedom to kind of focus on other things more so. Don't you think? Yeah, that's definitely the case in my point. It's something that I've... I'm like, why would I have...

kids now when I'm enjoying focusing on other things first. If I have kids, it sounds like a cool idea, but that will become my entire life from that point on. So I should delay that as much as possible until the point where I literally can't wait any longer, I guess.

So generally, I think you've summed up our entire generation's thoughts on the matter. Yeah, maybe. So the declining birth rate is more of a symptom of the freedom, freedom for lack of a better word, that the system has given us in conducting our day-to-day.

Unshackled from kind of the necessities of survival. That's what, look, honestly, the thing that you will say before we go on with this, because yes, look, I just would like to say I agree with a lot of the things that Tiggazinski says, but I think that this is a trapping. I was kind of alluding to it before in the last podcast. I think it is a trapping of his time.

It has that hippie streak through it that just turned out not to be true. There was elements of it that definitely were true. And environmental destruction is absolutely, it turned out to be reality, but not to the extent that they thought that it was.

By hippie sentiment, do you mean the kind of fuck the system, anti-establishment kind of vibe? Fuck the system. What about Mother Earth? Why don't we all just return to nature, man? Won't that solve all the problems? Return to monkey, yeah. Like that kind. It's very much that. It's very much, it has the flavors of it. Even the fact that they're just saying that like the third world,

is worse off as a result of these technological feats. I mean, you can just look at the numbers. It's factually not true. But again, his deeper analysis of the trajectory of technology and the systems that we create, again, that analysis I think is pretty compelling. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For example, for example,

you talked about agriculture and how that system has helped feed so many and brought down famine rates and poverty rates globally to an unbelievable amount, right? It's incredible how much we have defeated in the realm of famine and things like that. To a degree, I'm just going to add this. Not just incredible, unimaginable a couple of generations ago. Even like this guy in the 60s, right?

Right. They could literally could not imagine the amount of agricultural output that the world puts in now. Their theory was at the time that we'd all starve to death or like half the population would starve to death. That was their theory. And it just didn't work out. Like, it's just it's literally unimaginable. But go on. Sorry.

I was going to then say, though, Ted's outlook on that wouldn't be so positive, though. I would imagine that his outlook on it would be we are becoming...

dependent on this technological reliance of this system giving it all the power because it feeds us and it solves this issue and technology always progresses constantly beyond our control basically so at what point do we become uh

kind of slaves to that system, to that agricultural system. At what point does it escape our control? And at what point does it sit with the powers that be who they can then use that technology to control us, basically? Yes. And that's where the analysis, I think, starts to get quite correct and much more serious.

Yeah. It's not just at its root level, like you said, just technology bad. I think that's doing it a bit of a disservice. I don't think it's, it's more about the systems at play and how, how they would progress over time. I think that's where he's, he strength lies in his manifesto. Absolutely. Yeah. So to continue, he says, number two,

"...two, the industrial technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it may eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine."

Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable. There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy. So Ted's already going pretty fucking hard at number two on his list of 280 gripes with the system. Jeez, man. Warm us up first. He did. He gave us number one.

Number one wasn't a walk in the park either. Yeah, number one was barely a warm-up. I mean, I suppose it will be in this, yeah, his list of gripes, as you say. You really are just imagining, like, Grandpa Simpson writing to the editor or something. Really.

Number three, if the system breaks down, the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows, the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be. So again, in this example, it would be if we let the agricultural system get so large that the entire world depends on that system. And then we choose, fuck, the dangers here are too much. We've got to break this system down. And we remove that system. We remove all the agricultural technology, uh,

That is going to obviously kill so many people. And that's just how these systems and technology works. Once you remove the system that humanity is dependent on, shit happens. Like you saw that in Rome, right? When the aqueducts failed. How do you know about that? What do you mean? I mean, I wasn't there, but reading. Who told you about this, Jackson? Is this a conspiracy that I didn't know about? You know too much.

Yeah, okay, yeah. So the aqueducts broke down and... Well, I meant like... Yeah, there wasn't much more to that. It's just like society had become so dependent on that technology that once that information was lost, it was like starting from scratch again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that was... Yes, I do think that that is the case. I will say that there was much... The collapse of the Roman Empire is much more...

nuance to that because like the East Roman Empire continued on for like another thousand years where it did collapse in the West Roman Empire that absolutely happened and basically people went from like kind of like a late Iron Age society back to an early Bronze Age society within you know the span of a generation and yeah and losing but my point is losing that technology obviously killed a lot of people oh yeah hell yeah it did

But the argument would be that if it had expanded to the point where those aqueducts or the technology, whatever example you want to make, was so many more people were dependent on it over time, obviously, and then that happened, the damage that would be caused would be tenfold because there'd be way more people relying on it. That's Ted's point here. That is Ted's point there, yeah. It's the... You know.

It's hard because we're so much more technologically advanced than we were in the Roman era. So it's...

The parallel is there. It wouldn't be possible to really replicate that one-to-one, obviously, because we would still be able to, unless we're talking about some magic snap like Thanos from fucking Infinity War, who sends us back to the Stone Age without any documentation or plans on how to get back to where we were. We're fundamentally in a different place right now. But I think his core point of...

Once we become generally more reliant on the systems, it's going to be much harder and much more damaging to then try to remove those systems. So it's better to do it now while the damage will be lessened.

Okay, and that's point number three. So for point number four, and this is the final kind of central thesis, let's say, the central point of his thesis. Number four, because of that, we therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. How can he have more points than this? But go on. He's pretty much outlined it.

Yeah, this is just the outline. The rest is like actual deconstruction and argument of his points. This revolution may or may not make use of violence, which is ironic considering he bombed a lot of people. So it already has. He's doing that like fingers, fingers touching each other going, ooh, ooh. It may cause violence, guys.

It may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can't predict any of that, but we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a political revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments, but the economic and technological basis of the present society. Any thoughts there?

I mean, it's very lofty. And also, on top of that, that is the most ambitious revolution I've ever heard in my life. Usually it's kind of just like, oh, you know, we're going to install Sharia law into this country. Revolutions are usually just to overthrow, well, yeah, the government.

Just to overthrow the government. That's it. This is to fundamentally overthrow the human existence almost. We are very much built on a foundation of technology. So the argument to overthrow technology is to basically pull the rug out from everyone. That is a lofty goal because at least with political revolutionaries,

they're more easily able to find allies because obviously most people have political affiliations or objectives. This one literally hurts everyone. This revolution would hurt everyone. How do you find allies in that situation? The revolution pretty much is someone trying to fix their door with a screwdriver and then Ted Kaczynski being like, give me that. And then taking the spanner off. That's technology.

This is what we were talking about last time. When does this end? How much do you have to devolve before Kaczynski's happy? Because, I mean, like chimps use tools. A stick going in an ant mound. That is a tool.

Yeah. Is that where it all begins? And so we have to smash even that so we don't repeat the cycle. This isn't in the documents. That's probably true. We won't touch on this, but I do remember a specific point in the manifesto where he does wrestle with that very argument. Oh, okay. 500 IQ genius. He already predicted our arguments against him well before I was even born. I don't imagine so yet.

So his argument was that we should revert back to a... He used an example of a refrigerator. A refrigerator is built from systems and technology spanning across a multitude of systems in and of itself. It's not reasonable to believe that a medieval farmer, for example, could create a refrigerator. Therefore, it should not be

allowed due to its reliance on a multitude of systems. Whereas that farmer could instead make a cool box out of stones like we used to do, something that he himself could create. He himself could rely on the knowledge to create and he could reasonably create within his own kind of

small scale environment so that's ted's argument is technology is okay as long as you yourself can create it in a reasonable way on your own without a reliance on systems a system essentially means then two people helping each other well no i think even that's fine it's more so just the scale um

If I was asking you to help me make my stone cool box or whatever, like farmers would have done, then I think that would be fine. But it's more so if I need to employ someone in a different kind of region to make copper wire for my refrigerator, then that's probably a step too far. So really, his ideal world is Waterworld.

Yeah, but in a forest. In a forest. No water. Forest world. Yeah, forest world. Forest world.

Kevin Costner's Forest. The sequel we all wanted. I really want that sequel. I just want more sequels to Waterworld. I wish it was like Steven Seagal and he's still making them to this day. My only exposure to Waterworld was at fucking Disneyland in Tokyo. For some reason, they still had a live action Waterworld show. Oh my God. Stunt show.

Yeah, it was awesome. It was like the best live show I've seen. What? This was just like a few months ago.

Yeah, it was Christmas. That is hilarious that they're still running that. The last time I had thought of Waterworld, it was the first time I thought of Waterworld in like 20 years. Yeah, I know. I can't believe it. I cannot believe that they're still pushing that because it just wasn't even a successful franchise. You go to so many theme parks across the world and they're still riding around on their crap jet skis with cigarettes in their mouths. I get banking on it at the time. Like, yeah, we're going to have an attraction for this hit movie.

That wasn't a hit, but it obviously cost them a lot of money. So they were banking on it, but still banking on it 20 years later after it's pretty much undeniably a commercial flop. I think we can move on guys. What the hell? Why is it still going? Oh God. I'd love to know the answer to that because look, I, I, I do love that film. I am one of those people that made it the cult classic that it is. Hmm.

What'd you say? I said, you just love Kevin Costner. Well, I barely know who he is, but yes, yes, I do. I mean, like, I know him from that, and also, I assume that he's an incredible actor, because that monologue at the end of JFK, isn't that every actor's wet dream? God, they would all love to do that, huh? Giving a monologue. But, like, a monologue that is that long, that well-constructed, that impassioned,

Like, it was, you know, it would have been that and the guy that played Atticus Finch. Those would be the only guys that have ever been able to do that, and I reckon every actor would want to. Chris Hemsworth is sitting there just knowing that he's too dumb to do it, but wishes he could. His version of monologues are fat jokes in Avengers movies, basically. LAUGHTER

I think the best, and this is very off topic, but I want to get it out there. I think the best actor, monologue actor, someone who does those kinds of monologues is definitely Daniel Day-Lewis. Oh, does he do that a lot? Does he? Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. The lengthy kind of dialogue scenes for sure.

Okay. I just don't know enough about the guy. Every single time people always say, oh, he is the greatest method actor in the world. And I say, in every film that I've ever seen him, he's just playing Abraham Lincoln over and over again. It's always some guy with a beard that wears a hat. If you boil it down to hat and beard, I guess there's a lot of Abraham Lincolns in the world. Yes. Anyway.

Anyway, to sum up the entire premise of the manifesto, number one, the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. Number two, the industrial technological system may survive or break down. Number three, if it survives, the consequences will leave us without autonomy. And if the system breaks down, the consequences will still be very painful. And number four, Ted therefore advocates for a revolution against the industrial system and...

as it's surviving, would be more disastrous than it breaking down. Kaczynski argues that the industrial technological system, that is the socioeconomic order born of the Industrial Revolution of the mid-1700s, forces individuals to perform machine or system-driven imperatives, stripping them of autonomy, purpose, and genuine happiness. Yeah, that's right. You might feel happy inside, but that's not Ted's idea of happiness. Yeah, you're not really happy. You just think you are.

Yeah, idiot. That's what the system wants you to think. The rest of the manifesto is a deconstruction of this central thesis and an explanation of his core arguments, which brings us to number two, where we're going to talk in detail about one of his core points, which is technology is reducing our freedom. Just take it at its root right there, Jordan. Yes or no?

Come on. God, that's such a fucking dim. Okay. Give a binary answer. No middle roading this bullshit. Okay. I'm going to say no. I'm going to say no. I'm sorry, but I can fly to Korea right now for $400. That's not a reduction in freedom.

No, that's just a reduction in the idea of what freedom is, man. You reckon? You had to log into a flight, an airline system, give them all of your details to do that, and your money, which was accrued from working in the system. You're not as free as you think. You don't live in a log cabin out in the wilderness. Jackson, here's my retort, though. Yes, I had to give the system money. Not that much money. It's $400 to travel across the planet. Yeah.

It should be illegal. The system should make that illegal. I swear to God. Like, bums like me should not be allowed to do that. Sorry, go on. Ted's idea of freedom is staying in the same log cabin for your entire existence. Yeah, that's freedom. Whereas your freedom is flying across the globe and going anywhere you want. At the drop of a hat, for pretty much the same price that I could, I'd honestly probably pay more to catch a bus to Adelaide

I mean, it's probably more expensive to build the log cabin, honestly. Yeah, yeah, that's true as well. Except for he's... What's expensive? I'm imagining that he's... Utopic future. There's no property either, man. Huh? Yeah. Yeah, probably. So...

I'll let Ted take it from here. Ted asserts across much of the manifesto that modern technology is advertised and often seen as empowering and helpful, but it is in actuality reducing our freedom. We are becoming a part of a complex technological system, laws and regulations that we are unable to opt out of. So you have to go through TSA and security through the airport, man. That's the system. That is the system. That's true. And that in of itself is reducing our freedom. Yeah, you can't say no to that.

I don't know if I can, though. Again, it's just like, leave in a log cabin the rest of your life or go to Disneyland Tokyo. Yeah, that's a hard argument. It's a hard one, isn't it? Which one is more free? Disneyland. This is very tough. I was on the side of the corporations. Disneyland anyway, huh? I said I'm on the side of the corporations, man. Yeah, me too.

This concept of freedom isn't really defined in the traditional conservative context. That is, Ted's idea of freedom isn't defined as the traditional conservative context, but more so in a deeply humanistic context. The idea that humans need freedom to be happy on a fundamental biological level. So it's not just like

I fight for my right to say whatever I want. That's freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of press. It's not really on that level. It's about humans themselves need to feel free, need to be able to feel like they can do anything that they want to kind of be satisfied on a biological level. Regardless of how Ted defines freedom, he goes on to explain the idea that the technological society reduces our freedom by its very design. So,

So plot point number 114, this is from the chapter Restriction of Freedom, is unavoidable in industrial society. He says, as explained in previous paragraphs, modern man is strapped down by a network of rules and regulations. His fate depends on the actions of persons remote from him whose decisions he cannot influence. This is not accidental or a result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable in any technologically advanced society. The system is

has to regulate human behavior closely in order to function. At work, people have to do what they are told to do, when they are told to do it, and in the way they are told to do it. Otherwise, production would be thrown into chaos and the system would break down.

Bureaucracies have to run according to rigid rules. To allow any substantial personal discretion to lower-level bureaucrats would disrupt the system and lead to changes of unfairness due to differences in the way individual bureaucrats exercise their discretion. It is true that some restrictions on our freedom could be eliminated, but generally speaking, the regulation of our lives by large organizations is necessary for the functioning of industrial technological society. The result?

is a sense of powerlessness on the part of the average person. It may be, however, that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by psychological tools that make us want to do what the system requires of us. And he gives the example of propaganda, educational techniques, like school,

school systems and mental health programs as examples of things that may be creations of the system to kind of control our behavior. I'll tell you what this guy's done. I know because of the line of work that I'm in.

This entire sentence, I can guarantee you now, reeks of he wanted to build his log cabin and local council said no and made him do a bunch of approvals. And so he's written this like passionate argument against technological society and bureaucracies. Because I'm telling you right now, I don't know if you've ever dealt with it, Jackson, but anybody that's listening, I bet you this is common across the Western world.

The reason people are suspicious of government, the reason people are endlessly critical of bureaucratic red tape, I'm telling you now, it's all because of local government. It's all fucking local council.

That's it. I agree. Don't you think? It's just as soon as someone's, you're just like, oh yeah, I want to build a granny flat. And they say, oh yeah, okay. Well, you need to fill out a massive extension on your house application. That should be done in four to six months. And then it takes two years.

I totally get the point. Don't you reckon? At that point, that is always what turns someone into a full-throttled libertarian that wants to destroy technology down to the Stone Age, right? It does. It sends you mad. Anyone that ever sends me anything. It is absolutely maddening. It is absolutely maddening having to, like you said, your fate depending on the actions of persons remote from decisions that you cannot influence.

Yeah, I get it. That's very frustrating. Not having any power. No wonder people feel powerlessness on a grand scale. They definitely feel powerlessness on a grand scale. It's just one of these things of, look...

Bureaucracy in itself is a form of technology, which this guy correctly identifies. The counter argument to it is, remember when we were talking, Jackson, that has fascinated me ever since, that president in the United States that lived 30 days and then died because he lived in a swamp and the swamp was filled with human shit. That's what we think is the result of that. That could be everywhere on planet Earth.

Like if there is no bureaucracy sitting there and saying you can't build a shoe leather tanning factory on this pristine river, someone will. They absolutely will. And I know that you can sit there and say, huh? Yes. I was going to say, yes, that is true. The system, the bureaucratic system has enabled, again, greatness, but like there's so much room for improvement. Oh,

Oh, so much. So much room for improvement. But then again, Jackson, immediately, if you're acknowledging that, you know, Ted Kaczynski's argument is not going through to you at all, which is just like, we should smash government down to absolutely nothing and live in basically chimpanzee colonies. His argument is never that it can't be improved. I don't think... Like, I think he would agree that those things, those certain things could be improved. His argument is that the system doesn't want to improve. The system...

this system, the bureaucratic system, wants to keep enforcing those rules to conform our behavior to their standards, to the system's standards, so that we keep complying with the rules and regulations. That's why he talks about education techniques, mental health programs, and other things, psychological tools that the system uses to compel behavior. His argument isn't that it couldn't improve. They couldn't improve the system. His argument is more so that it...

It won't want to improve. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it will inevitably go back to the state that it is in. Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly. You can reform, but you can't expect that reformation to stick.

Yes. Point 121. A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed in favor of freedom is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can't get rid of the bad parts of technology and retain only the good parts.

Take modern medicine, for example. Progress in medical science depends on progress in chemistry, physics, biology, computer science, and other fields. Advanced medical treatments require expensive high-tech equipment that can be made available only by technologically progressive, economically rich society. Clearly, you can't have much progress in medicine without the whole technological system and everything that goes with it.

plot point number 122 even if medical progress could be maintained without the rest of the technological system it would be by itself bringing certain evils suppose for example that a cure for diabetes is discovered people with a genetic tendency to diabetes will then be able to survive and reproduce as well as anyone else natural selection against genes for diabetes will cease and such genes will spread throughout the population

This may be occurring to some extent already since diabetes, while not curable, can be controlled through the use of insulin.

The same thing will happen with many other diseases' susceptibility to which is affected by genetic factors, example childhood cancer, resulting in massive genetic degradation of the population. The only solution will be some sort of eugenics program or extensive genetic engineering of human beings so that man in the future will no longer be a creation of nature or of chance or of God, depending on your religious or philosophical opinions."

but a manufactured product. That's true. It is true. Jackson, what do you think about that? Because the more that I've thought about this point a lot and my conclusion at the end is, yeah, that's awesome. What do you think? Oh man, what do I think? I think the core idea is awesome in that we get rid of all of these things. We don't have to live with things like

if we don't choose to, for example, or other... Like I know Elon Musk is talking about putting computer chips in our brains, for example, to make us smarter or whatever. But then you also have to remember, like he says, you can't bring the good without also the bad with technology. The bad in that situation is Elon Musk has the keys to my brain now. When you're a manufactured product, you are owned by someone. And that's what is the terrifying aspect of kind of changing...

changing us as human beings to conform to the system is that we have conformed to a system that now owns us. System in that case being Elon Musk. So it does honestly scare me, the idea of manufacturing humans. You would be corporate property, but you would also have an IQ that would be even bigger than Ted Kaczynski's, you know? No, you would be the IQ that they want you to be. That'd be the IQ that they want you to be.

which we have already established is whatever IQ that they can control. Yeah, so it's scary to me. I don't believe... I don't have optimism. Okay, so that's what I'm saying. Do you have optimism about it? No, I don't have optimism about it. I don't know. Maybe I'm just overly optimistic about the future all the time, and this is why I am really bad at the future. Are you optimistic about AI? Am I optimistic about AI? Yeah. I'm honestly optimistic about...

the future in general. I don't know why, and I'm probably wrong, but it just seems to me that honestly, if you look back at the last 50 years, the amount of advancement that has happened with human beings and the quality of life that we have in comparison to anyone in human history, I just think that, yeah, there's things that it's definitely made

but overall it's overwhelmingly great. I do have a question, though. Was the quality of life at the peak just before the fall of the Roman Empire historically very high? Yeah, hugely. Massively. And then what happened? And then it collapsed. And that's all that we've got time for, and then we've got to go on to the next one. LAUGHTER

I guess that is my point. It absolutely... No, look, no, the peak... Because the decline of the empire would have taken hundreds of years. But, like, yes, when it actually did finally collapse, there was a noticeable shift in living standards. But, again, it's patchy because living standards continue to be good in the East Roman Empire. And so...

It's just kind of strange to me to think that all of that, even when the quote-unquote collapse of the Roman Empire wasn't as universal as you have been led to believe, I guess, the same thing would happen where it happens here. I think that's saying... He's saying that there's going to be a global collapse because we're so interdependent now. But yeah, sorry, go on.

I was going to say, I don't think the collapse, any kind of collapse in Western society would be overnight. Definitely not. I think it would be multi-generation collapse. But I think that this lays the foundation, especially things like manufacturing human beings. Like, have you seen those... There's a company in America, I believe, where you can...

Basically custom make your baby, certain aspects of your baby through genetic kind of engineering. Yeah. Like eye color, height, things like that. Yes. Yeah, I think that's terrifying. I think giving people the ability to dictate kind of what their child will turn out to be is just a terrifying concept in general to me because of...

the system that it would exist in, I think it could certainly be taken advantage of. And that's how I feel about AI as well. But definitely be used to take advantage of, but over the long stretch of looking at, okay. So for instance, a good example of that would be dogs, right? The argument's always that, well, how many wolves are there in North America? Like 10,000. And then how many dogs are there? There's like 90 million.

And yeah, some dogs, they've been bred for different capacities and some of them been bred to ridiculous points that they've got inbred disabilities like sausage dogs and French bulldogs. But French bulldogs would have to be one of the most successful species that has ever lived. Everyone has one now.

And I think that that's kind of like... Is that a good thing? That's just an unwarranted level of grand animal abuse. They don't live pleasant existences. I guess that's... You know what? Actually, this argument pretty much just goes, would you rather be a wolf or a French bulldog? And frankly, I'd rather be a French bulldog, which says a lot of pathetic things about me, I guess.

I don't know. I go back. Let me bust out an old classic point. And I borrow it from Jurassic Park. The first Jurassic Park. We are meddling with science that we have no right to meddle with. It's something that we will not be able to control.

But having said that, I destroy my own point because I would immediately bring back dinosaurs if I could. So I will dismiss myself from this argument as a loser. Yeah, exactly. What is everybody's response with the Tasmanian tiger and the woolly mammoth? Hurry up. Where is it? No one wants it to not be brought back. Yeah. We don't care. I guess my difference is I don't care about manufacturing other species because

It's more so humanity itself because that directly affects me. Directly affects you. But the thing is, like, okay, so Jackson, for instance, you have migraines, right? Like, if your parents had the option to make sure that you didn't have migraines for the rest of your life and then they ticked no, wouldn't you just be like, what the fuck, mum and dad? Like, what did I do to you?

Well, no, okay, wait. If they directly were in the discussion of picking those certain things, then yes. But I feel like people should be able to say, I don't want to know anything about the genetic makeup of my child. I just want nature to take its course just like it has throughout human existence. And they just didn't know. Then fine. I wouldn't blame them for that at all. Yes, yes, yes. No, okay, but I'll say this. How is that not child abuse at that point?

Fuck. Yeah, that's a good point. And that's exactly what the systems argument would be too. What? They would be, sorry, we have to regulate you. Look at these charts that show that your child is going to have migraines. So you need to tick this box for us.

We have removed your freedom in making your own choice about the future of your child, your own child, your own progeny. It has to conform to our society's standards, our system's standards. Oh my God. Please check this chart. He's right. It's going to be so annoying because there's going to be like a local council for babies. So before you even, that probably happened, right? I mean, look,

Look, I can't talk because I did exactly that. Because of the same selfish reasons, because of this system that has been created. I just got more of a positive outspin on what he's saying. But, like, I think he's right about everything. But, okay, the system has made it so that, as Jackson, you were saying before, I...

and you both don't really want to have kids at this point in our lives. Just to be safe, I got my sperm frozen. Maybe you don't, Jackson, but I do. We can mix us. No, I'm sorry. This broadcast is over. You've hurt my feelings. No, no, no. I was playing hard to get.

You know, then my partner got her eggs frozen, and then we mashed them together in the little omelette that's sitting there. Now we just have cryogenically frozen little Han solos ready to defrost whenever we want. At any point. We could be like 90. In you go, popping that old geriatrics womb. I'm fine with that technology. You want to talk about geriatric birth?

But that's already getting there. And on top of that, they're looking at the ovaries and they're saying at the embryos and they're saying this is the healthiest embryo. We'll germinate that one, you know. So it's already there. And on top of that, you know, if they come up to me and say, would you like us to fertilize the least healthiest embryo? No. Why would I want that?

Why would I deliberately want a sick child? It is cruel. It's such a difficult concept for me to wrestle with. Like, yeah, the ethics and the morals around it. On one part, yes, the technology has made it better. Like, obviously, we can reduce childhood sickness, things like that. It's just the... Again, it comes down to optimism. I just do not have optimism in humans...

to make the right decisions about where to draw the line, basically. Where to draw the line? Well, I think this is the other thing as well, is this genetic mutation point is probably pretty redundant because I think at some point

You'll obviously just be uploading your consciousness into a cyborg that moves around as a robot and you are vaguely sort of a human being dimly in the robot that is probably just functioning at a better brain capacity than you are anyway. And so there's just the illusion that you're there. That's probably what the end result is anyway, right? I mean, you can boil any kind of...

Any kind of discussion down to science fiction shit in the future. Nothing matters right now because everything will collapse into a small little speck of dust eventually in the grand scale of the cosmos. Well, I was just saying, like, look, in terms of his argument of the system just becoming more and more technologized, surely at some point you just become Robocop.

I mean, yeah, the technology is obviously going in one direction where our consciousness will be uploaded to some kind of digital framework. But at the same time, that's still a bad idea again, because it still, again, is very easily changeable. We are currently, in our current form, we still at least have some kind of freedom over everything. If we are uploaded into government...

computer programs or system made babies that they've designed and helped collaborate and create your children, then we are our most susceptible to coercion forms that have ever existed. Yes, that's definitely true. Yeah. What's going to happen when they unplug the system that your digital consciousness is uploaded to?

What happens then? Well, don't you think also this would probably happen as well, Jackson? They would probably start regulating your penchants and they would start regulating the way that you look at the world and optimizing that. So, for instance, the cartoonish idea of like some greedy billionaire controlling humanity for their own selfish gain, at some point they would be genetically mutated to the point that they don't have those ambitions anymore. Right.

Because that would also be part of... It's not just eye colour and it's not just intelligence. It would be all kinds of, like, proclivities and pensions. Well, no, yeah. He definitely touches on this in the document. He talks about how the government or the system would be compelled to make behavioural changes at childbirth through genetic engineering if they had such a way to do so. For example, they would get rid of the, you know, the...

They would get rid of the motivation for children to do naughty things, for example. Yeah. Straight out the box. Yeah. So, yeah, at that point, that is just directly controlling people, like fundamentally. So from a genetic level, that's, yeah, that's scary.

So he sums it up here, point 123. If you think that big government interferes in your life too much now with your log cabins, just wait till the government starts regulating the genetic constitution of your children. Such regulation will inevitably follow the introduction of genetic engineering of human beings because the consequences of unregulated genetic engineering would be disastrous. So he's saying what's the point that genetic engineering...

The government would have to regulate it... Because having an unregulated genetic engineering... Would obviously also be incredibly bad... Yeah, it was so bad... Just monkey men being created... Across the world... Flying monkey men... Yeah, so obviously... But then you're giving the power to the system... To create the regulations that then dictate... What the future of humanity will look like... Which is also very scary... So yeah, I mean that's a compelling argument... For why continuing on with certain technological threads...

a terrifying concept. Again, with AI. They're already discussing regulating AI, which is, since the genie is out of the bottle, I think that's a good thing because at least we can now put laws into place which mean that people can't deep fake pictures of me naked doing unspeakable things, for example, which is cool. Yeah, nice that you started lacing that in just before the nude podcast just so you've got an hour. Yeah. Just in case. Yeah.

I'm already sowing seeds of doubt. Yeah. It wasn't actually me. Jordan had access to a high intelligence AI framework that was able to generate me nude. But yeah, yeah, 100%. All right. And we come to point number three.

Well, it's point number two. The power process is important for psychological health. One of Ted's most prominent ideas is the concept of a so-called power process. The power process is all about the individual pursuit and achievement of meaningful goals and it's broken into four points by Ted. Number one, the person has a meaningful goal. Number two, the person exerts effort to achieve the goal. Number three, the person attains the goal. And number four,

the person experiences autonomy from achieving the goal. Ted's belief is that this process is what makes humans satisfied and in turn happy. Ted argues that modern society disrupts this process, which directly leads to widespread mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. Previously, humans had power process goals that were to do with survival, activitizing

activities like hunting and farming. Now, however, in the modern age and in the modern structure of society, goals are more trivial and can be met with minimal effort, which removes the feeling of struggle and accomplishment, and they aren't satisfying our deeply psychological and biological needs. Even when we do work hard, for example, at a project at work, we rarely control the outcome or enjoy the fruits of our labor. It's all about following systems and working towards corporate goals.

Which is interesting given that he, remember he was working at the university and then he left randomly frustrated. So I wonder if that's where this was born from. Yeah. He was a disgruntled former employee of the university. It's a very middle class experience.

Hmm.

Ted believes that people are being denied natural, autonomous goal-seeking behavior, which causes depression, low self-esteem, the feeling of being innately powerless, and even becoming hedonistic by supplementing it with surrogate activities. So we have from his manifesto,

Point 34. Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems. At first, he will have a lot of fun, but by and by, he will become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually, he may become clinically depressed. History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent. This

This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power, but leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic, and demoralized even though they have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals towards which to exercise one's power. Yeah, I mean, you do see that across history, right? Oh, this is absolutely true.

Can you think of a prime example? Well, I just know somebody who is... I know of someone who is best friends with someone who is part of those, like, real blue-blood aristocracies in England, as in...

has a legitimate claim to the throne, King of England kind of stuff. Are you announcing live on this episode that you know a prince? What are you saying right now? Who do you know? I know someone who knows a princess is what I'm saying. Like you go back a couple of generations and then there was the fight between the current royal family, the Windsors, and then these guys' family and these guys could have pushed it and done it.

No, no, I haven't met her, but I was talking to her friend and her friend, I was like, what's their family like? And she said, they're all heroin addicts. LAUGHTER

Yeah, because they have nothing. Again, I think it's true. They have nothing to kind of exert their power towards. They have no goals that feel innately satisfying. Yeah, and haven't for like, what, 500 generations at this point? Yeah, of course. They've just been that secure for that long. So what else do you do? Yeah, you take the Soam appeal. Yep, 100%. Yeah, so look, everything that you've read out so far, I completely agree with, but go on.

Number 35. Everyone has goals. Do you agree with that? Yes, but most people have really shit goals. Like what? Yeah.

Which isn't a satisfying goal. That's what his point would be. Everyone has goals, if nothing else, to attain 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. And that's when you turn to heroin, obviously. Oh, yeah. Because when you're able to get food easy, so the next step is heroin. Yeah.

Number 36, non-attainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical necessities and in frustration if non-attainment of the goals is compatible with survival. Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem, or depression. Yeah, naturally so.

Yeah, constantly failing at your goals never feels good. No. Especially if it feels like the outcome of reaching your goal was out of your hands. Like again, building a log cabin on regulated land. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As Ted probably experienced. And now that you've said that, it really does feel like most of this is like...

or created from a moment where he had an argument at like a DMV or something. I swear to God that's what happened. What do you need? I need a pool fence consultant. This is ridiculous. That's how this always starts. I know because in my job, I'm always getting people that are about to expose the system and, oh, they've got something that's going to blow the lid off this really corrupt system and regime, man. And 95% of the time, they're an absolute lunatic. Okay.

Actually, I'll go further. 99% of the time they're a lunatic. And every single time in that...

Local council. It's always their local council. And they've got this elaborate conspiracy theory about how it ties into the constitution and it's not legal. I'm telling you, local council sends people around the bend. I know from experience. And everything that Ted's saying, it just sounds like one of these guys. They're always the same thing. Frustrated, hyper obsessive, got a beard.

They always have a beard. They've always got that hermit beard. That's because the government can't control their beard growth. They're taking a stand. Don't you think that's what it is? Yeah, the government invented razor blades, therefore. Yeah, therefore. Oh, my God. Sorry, but I'm thinking the same thing that you are, Jackson. That Ted Kaczynski's awesome?

Definitely. I absolutely think that. And not a lunatic with a chip on his shoulder? Yeah, he's also a lunatic with a chip on his shoulder that was pissed off because of local council. I need a manifesto about Ted Kaczynski that just tells me how to feel about him. It's so conflicting.

Number 37. Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals, which is an impossible task, right? Like you don't, you can't dictate what people's goals are. Some people are just very, again, optimistic like you are where their goals are kind of like unobtainable. What do you do in that situation? You can't compel them. You're removing their freedom to make their own goals.

I don't know what you do in that situation. Yeah. In order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals, so his attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success at attaining his goals. It's true, but yeah, how do you do it? My big solution to that in life is just read a bunch of self-help books. I'm telling you now, that's how I got out of that matrix.

by going further into it. You know what? All I'm advocating for this whole time is like, take the blue pill. It's awesome. All you're advocating for is go subscribe to Jordan Shanks right now on his self-help channel. He'll help you. He'll help you avoid a fate like Ted Kaczynski. Or at least get better at building bombs, for Christ's sake. Yeah, you're going to do like a five-part bomb-making series. Now that's self-help.

Point number 44. But for most people, it is through the power process, having a goal, making an autonomous effort and attaining the goal that self-esteem, self-confidence and a sense of power are required, which is true. Yeah. Whenever I accomplish a goal, I feel pretty good about myself. Totally. When one does not have adequate opportunity to go through the power process, the consequences are depending on the individual and on the way the power process is disrupted,

Oh Jesus, there's a lot here. Boredom, demoralization, low self-esteem, inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression, anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, spousal child abuse, insatiable hedonism, abnormal sexual behavior, sleep disorders, eating disorders. Yeah. I mean, it's true. He's right. He's identified it.

Hot point number 45, the source of social problems. Any of the foregoing symptoms can occur in any society, but in modern industrial society, they are present on a massive scale. We aren't the first to mention that the world today seems to be going crazy. This sort of thing is not normal for human societies. There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is.

is. So I just don't, I, again, I don't know about that. I really feel like the primitive man, even though his goals were attainable and also required effort, it had to be fucking stressful living back then, not knowing if you were going to be able to hunt a boar that night to feed your family of 14 kids. That would have been stressful. And he didn't have, that guy didn't even have any way to cool down. He couldn't like,

you know, put his kids off to bed and then play a round of Fortnite before he goes to bed. You know, there's no kind of like relaxation really. What are you going to do? No escapism, I should say, not relaxation. I think the general argument for this is that, you know,

In primitive times, there would have been points of extreme stress that maybe the closest thing would be being a cop to being a- Nowadays. I think being a cop would be pretty close. Long, long stretches of boredom punctured by unimaginable moments of horror. I reckon that's why. Don't you think that's probably a primitive man's life?

And a cop's life, yeah. And a cop's life. And I think that they probably... That is...

what the human nervous system is probably designed to do. Whereas most people now experience kind of like a low level refrigerator hum of endless anxiety about, I've got to pay the bills, I've got to pay the mortgage. Actually, which is, which is, which is his point really, when you think about it, because his point is like those things are caused by things outside of individuals control. Whereas the hunter who lived in his, you know, shit wood shack, uh,

All of those things were within his control. So if he found them, it was up to him. These issues were self-created. There were no changes imposed on him. Whereas with us, mortgage, different government regulations, other stresses of life that just kind of exist under the surface of every waking moment. The classic thing people say of, that's just being an adult, man.

You know, like that's just being an adult. Just being an adult. Having these constant stresses and stuff. Yep. Yeah. I could see that. It's out of your control. It's just thrust upon you by the system. Yes, yes, yes. He's right.

So, yeah, it is true that not all was sweetness and light in primitive societies. There it goes. Abuse of women was common among the Australian Aborigines. Transsexuality was fairly common among some of the American Indian tribes. But it does appear that generally speaking, the kinds of problems that we have listed in the preceding paragraph, that sort of boredom, demoralization, all that stuff, those problems...

were far less common among primitive people than they are in modern society. Isn't the argument there for certain things like that, that they've just weren't diagnosed as much back then? Isn't that the argument I always hear? Which I don't agree with. I think it's pretty clear that there is an uptick in those things in current time outside of just more kind of awareness and such.

What do you think? Boredom, demoralization, low self-esteem, inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression, anxiety, guilt. No, look, I think he's probably right. All of those are problems of the modern age, more so than they would have been back then. Obviously, these are human traits that you would have had at any point. But I will say this. I'll say this. I think that those are better problems to have than what primitive people had.

Dying at 30 isn't a great problem. Constantly being hungry and scared of where your next meal is coming from isn't a great problem. Being part of weird tribes that you could very easily just reflect on

strange death cults like today and then you just being born into that one and that one's just fucked and violent for no reason. Yeah, but Jordan, sometimes my Uber Eats food arrives slightly cold. And that makes me nervous. It makes me angry. Makes me angry enough to send off some bombs. Oh, yeah.

Deliveroo and bombs. Christ. Oh, my God. No, the modern Unabomber. Do Americans know what we're talking about when we say Deliveroo? I chose the correct one. There's no way Deliveroo exists anywhere except Australia. No, no, no, no. That's ours. And I knew that no one would know that. Sorry about that, everyone.

The description of the power process has led people to replace the empty space with so-called surrogate activities. These are unfulfilling artificial goals that are socially encouraged. Think general hobbies, interests, careers, etc. Ted argues that these meaningless replacement activities are like coping mechanisms for a society that doesn't have any real or meaningful challenges.

And he elucidates this by saying, point number 38, but not only is it a

But not every leisured aristocrat becomes bored and demoralized. For example, the Emperor Hirohito, instead of sinking into decadent hedonism, devoted himself to marine biology, a field in which he became distinguished. When people do not have to exert themselves to satisfy their physical needs, they often set up artificial goals for themselves. In many cases, they then pursue these goals with the same energy and emotional involvement that they otherwise would have put into the search for physical necessities.

Um,

Plot number 39. We use the term surrogate activity to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the fulfillment that they get from pursuing the goal. Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate activities, and you at home can play along. Given a person who...

Given a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, that's a goal that you think of a goal in your head. Ask yourself this. If he had to devote most of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use his physical and mental faculties in a varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain the goal? If the answer is no, then the person's pursuit of goal X

is a surrogate activity. Hirohito's studies in marine biology clearly constitute a surrogate activity since it is pretty certain that if Hirohito had had to spend his time working at interesting non-scientific tasks in order to obtain the necessities of life, he would not have felt deprived because he didn't know all about the anatomy and life cycles of marine animals. A little dig there from him. Like, you...

Unabomber's like, your science is dumb, bitch. You should have learned physics and math and shit. And also, he just came up with a way to escape his own little trap and then just traps him again. Isn't bomb making his surrogate activity or log cabin building his surrogate activity? I suppose you're right. And I suppose his argument is, yes, I too am a victim of the system. Yeah, true. It would be.

On the other hand, the pursuit of love and sex, for example, is not a surrogate activity. Fuck yeah. Sweet. We can still have sex, Jordan. Sick? Hell yeah. Ted's ideal world. Thanks, Ted. Because most people, even if their existence were otherwise satisfactory, would feel deprived if they passed their lives without ever having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. That got sad. I feel like

I feel like Ted would have actually been a self-described incel in the modern years. I mean, he was, wasn't he? Yeah, he was. Just factually was an incel. Yeah. And an incel for exactly the same reasons that incels think that they're incels as well. But he does say here, but pursuit of an excessive amount of sex, more than one really needs, can be a surrogate activity. So that's an insult to all those Stacys out there, fucking all their chads and stuff or whatever the incel lingo is.

Put one out for my 10. They're also not really happy. You have to have the exact amount of sex that 10 wants. That's true happiness. Oh, so good. And also, how do you achieve happiness? Literally be a loner in the woods.

Ted also goes on to describe the power process in greater detail, that it can only be satisfying to human nature if we make our own opportunities as opposed to being given them by the system. He also suggests that the scale of society and its systems has created an effect of people becoming deeply frustrated by the changes imposed on them as opposed to the changes they're able to affect on their own life.

So he says, 59, we divide human drives into three groups. Number one, those drives that can be satisfied with minimal effort. Number two, those that can be satisfied but only at the cost of serious effort. And number three, those that cannot be adequately satisfied no matter how much effort one makes. The power process is the process of satisfying the drives of the second group. The more drives there are in the third group, the more there is frustration, anger, eventually defeatism, depression, etc.,

In modern industrial society, natural human drives tend to be pushed into the first and third groups, and the second group tends to consist increasingly of artificially created drives, that is, those surrogate activities. In primitive societies, physical necessities generally fall into group two. They can be obtained... Wait. Oh, yeah. So the second group is the good one, right? Yeah. Those that can be satisfied. Yeah.

So in primitive societies, physical necessities generally fall into group two. They can be obtained, but only at the cost of serious effort. But modern society tends to guarantee the physical necessities to everyone in exchange for only minimal effort. Hence, physical needs are pushed into group one. He does note here that there may be disagreement about whether the effort required

needed to hold a job is minimal but usually in lower to middle level jobs whatever effort is required is merely that of obedience you sit or stand where you are told to sit or stand and do what you are told to do in the way that you are told to do it seldom do you have to exert yourself seriously and in any case you have hardly any autonomy in work so that the need for the power process is not well served I mean that's exactly what a 180 IQ person would say all jobs are super easy dude

It is kind of true though. Yeah, he's right. But it is, it's just, again, it's always funny to imagine a 180 IQ Redditor saying this kind of stuff. He's really trying to get right. Number 62. Social needs such as sex, love, and status are

often remain in group two in modern society depending on the situation of the individual but except for people who have a particularly strong drive for status the effort required to fulfill that social drive is insufficient to satisfy adequately the need for the power process can you explain that to me dumb that down it's not computing for me me neither

we're going to move on we lost we don't get it Ted we're going to need manifesto part 2 please I'm sure I'm sure it's profound in his head except for people who have a particularly strong driver status the effort required to fulfill the social drives is insufficient to satisfy adequately the need for the power process no I don't get it I don't get it

I think he's saying have more sex with me.

Number 66. Today, people live more by virtue of what the system does for them or to them than by virtue of what they do for themselves. And what they do for themselves is done more and more along channels laid down by the system. Opportunities tend to be those the system provides. The opportunities must be exploited in accord with rules and regulations. And techniques prescribed by experts must be followed if there is to be a chance of success. So yeah, this is all just in service of his point that you need...

you need to be able to actually exert yourself in the pursuit of your goals to receive the power processes, you know, reward. Doesn't the power process sound like something in self-help? Oh yeah, absolutely. It does. I mean, it really is just breaking it down. This is the same thing that you read when you say read like desk capital or something, and then you read self-help books and they're, it's,

They're saying exactly the same things as Das Kapital. They're just saying that it's awesome as opposed to bad. That's pretty much it. What he's talking about right now is actually just a very good manifesto of self-help, but he's sitting there and saying that it's all pointless and you're on a hamster wheel. Yeah, well, he is on the defeatist route, really. When you think about it, he's acting out in desperation because he believes that the system will literally destroy all of us. If you believe that he believes, what are you saying? Anyway. Hmm.

68. This one I feel like is important. Wait, where is it?

Yeah. Okay, so it may be objected that primitive man is physically less secure than modern man, as is shown by his shorter life expectancy. Hence, modern man suffers from less, not more than the amount of insecurity that is normal for human beings. But psychological security does not closely correspond with physical security. What makes us feel secure is not so much objective security as a sense of confidence in our ability to take care of ourselves.

Permanent man, threatened by a fierce animal or by hunger, can fight in self-defense or travel in search of food. He has no certainty of success in these efforts, but he is by no means helpless against the things that threaten him. The modern individual, on the other hand, is threatened by many things against which he is helpless. Nuclear accidents, carcinogens in food, environmental pollution, war, increasing taxes, invasion of his privacy by large organizations, nationwide social or economic phenomena that may disrupt his way of life.

Yeah, Caveman didn't have to compete with that. He's right. No, I just fundamentally disagree with that. What? What if the climate changes? What if there's just a bad weather year? These are all things that are out of control of him. What if there's just different migration patterns in the food that he was hunting before?

Yeah, that's a good point. But would the caveman know about those things, really? Would he be able to kind of... Not even a caveman, just a normal peasant. Would he be able to actually rationalize those things?

I don't know if they were able to vibe out with the patterns or not. I'm sure they did to a degree. Well, also Ted's argument would be those things are born from the natural world. Like it's something we have existed in since time immemorial. So like the other things are not natural creations that they are not, that they're man-made disasters that we have no kind of say in the matter of, I think that's what his argument would be.

I'm sure that there's examples of man-made accidents in primitive. Okay, what about like Easter Island or something then? What happened with that? What would he say there? Easter Island, because they were making those huge statues of their tribal chiefs, they eventually cut down all the trees on their own island and it significantly decreased the ecological capacity of the island and massively reduced their amount of food and what they could grow.

Well, I think he would argue potentially that a system caused the downfall of that island. Okay. All right. So we're back to this again. All right. Look, yes, he's right. We need to get like a Ouija board out and channel the spirit of Ted Kaczynski right now and ask him these heavy hitting questions. Yeah. Yeah, we do. There's so many weeds for interpretation here. Yeah. Yeah.

And then again, I really feel like the Ouija board would just come back and say, buy another book off of Amazon of mine. Just advertise. Yeah, it's just an ad.

Yeah, okay. So plot number 58 to sum up the social problem slash the power process. Ted contends that the most important cause of social and psychological problems in modern society is the fact that people have insufficient opportunity to go through the power process in a normal way. He doesn't mean to say that modern society is the only one in which the power process has been disrupted.

Probably most, if not all, civilized societies have interfered with the power process to a greater or lesser extent. But in modern industrial society, the problem has become particularly acute. Leftism, at least in its recent mid to late 20th century form, is in part a symptom of deprivation with respect to the power process. And then he goes on, point number four, one of his main points is the system can only tolerate pacified collectives.

So Ted argues that the system has no emotions or motives beyond cultivating components of itself. Therefore, it's not beneficial for the system to fix the issues that plague modern society.

He states, 51, "...the breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities."

Beyond that, a technological society has to weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. A modern society and individual's loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to small-scale community because if the internal loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.

Suppose that a public official or a corporate executive appoints his cousin, his friend, or his co-religionist to a position rather than appointing the person best qualified for the job. He has permitted personal loyalty to supersede his loyalty to the system, and that is nepotism or discrimination, both of which are terrible sins in modern society. So he's saying that nepotism and discrimination is proof, or those buzzwords, are proof that the system seeks to kind of...

dissuade people from doing that, appoint people in their small-scale local communities to positions that they haven't earned because it would be less beneficial to the system than a form of meritocracy because you want people in those positions that run the system well. So that's an example that he uses there. But I'll push back at that and say that nepotism and discrimination both still plague modern society. Those things still occur at an enormous rate.

So the system's not doing a very good job at correcting our behavior in that regard, really, when you think about it, is it? No, I don't think that it's correcting our behavior in that regard, but I do think the system makes it to the point that it's really redundant whether or not there is a meritocracy or not. True, yeah. It's maybe more and more redundant, let's say. Yeah, it's running itself. It's running itself smoothly. So, yeah, who cares? That's pretty much what happens. And so, actually, this goes into...

Christopher Lash's book, Culture of Narcissism, he talks about this endlessly, which is that in today's system, really, skills are becoming less and less important. What's becoming most important, just obedience? No. Yes, that's an element of it, but mostly just personality. And obviously things like nepotism and this kind of stuff. That's the thing that gets you the job. What is the greatest measure of success? What?

I'm saying that is the greatest measure of success in someone is if they've got a personality that makes them attractive to other people. Don't you think? And that's becoming more and more important and everything else is becoming less and less important because jobs are just becoming easier.

Yeah, and I guess that would go in hand again as everything does with the Unabomber's point because his point is that the only people that are able to function in society are those of the over-socialized type, those that fit in with the mold of the system. So again, his point would be accurate in that the only people succeeding in the system are the ones that are able to be attractive to the system. And you're saying that the system...

those types of people. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what the system would want. So, yes and no. What do you reckon? Yeah, I think yes. What you said is true. Okay. And accurate. Good, good. Again, it kind of like falls in line with what he's saying too. Yeah. All right, so refer back to point two for a further explanation of why Ted believes that restriction of freedom is unavoidable in the industrial society and why the system has to force people to behave in these pacified states. That was at the start of this episode. Um,

He continues, though, by saying,

Among primitive people, the things that children are trained to do tend to be in reasonable harmony with natural human impulses. Among the American Indians, for example, boys were trained in active outdoor pursuits, just the sort of thing that boys like. But in our society, children are pushed into studying technical subjects, which most do grudgingly, which is, yeah, I guess that is an example of the system conforming human behavior to what it most benefits from. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's a very good example of it. Um,

Fuck yeah. Actually, that's... Man, again, like, a lot of the points that he makes. A lot of the points. There's nothing really to argue with there. No. All we can do is nod and say, yes, Ted, good job. You are a genius.

You were right. But he also does sound resentful that he did get to go play outside as a kid because he was too high IQ and was forced to sit inside reading math all day. There is. Man, Jackson, you've really diminished this man's work by just painting as indisputable a character as his points. Yeah. Yeah.

You've done a- Really, you've absolutely marred this entire podcast in that man. Now, like, his voice has just changed. Because when I first read it, his voice was read out by some, like, authoritative black guy's voice, just being like, in the future of technology, like that kind of voice. And now all I can read is just like, because of the constant pressure that system exerts-

It's literally gone through like a Reddit voice modulator or something. Yes, yes.

He continues, 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. These are known as welfare leeches, youth gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts, and resistors of various kinds. In any technologically advanced society, the individual's fate must change.

depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small autonomous communities because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society must be highly organized and decisions have to be made that affect very large numbers of people.

When a decision affects, say, a million people, then each of the affected individuals has, on the average, only a one millionth share in making the decision. Jesus, that really does boil it down. Yeah. It really makes my entire existence seem a lot less impactful.

That's why people are very frustrated by election results.

Thus, most individuals are unable to influence measurably their major decisions that affect their lives. There is no conceivable way to remedy this in a technologically advanced society. The system tries to solve, in quotation marks, this problem by using propaganda to make people want the decisions that have been made for them. But even if this solution were completely successful in making people feel better, it would be demeaning.

Yeah, kind of treat us like cattle. But even if this solution were completely successful in making people feel better, it would be demeaning. Yeah, because we had to rely on the system to come up with a solution. Again, it still takes the control out of our hands, really. Yes, that's definitely true. He really is boiling down a lot of human agency, though. What do you mean? Look, a lot of what he's saying is correct, right?

But for instance, I mean, I'm living example of that. And yes, you're right. You still do feel powerless about it, even though it is just an indisputable fact that in Australia, I would have to be one of the most influential political voices in the country. And you still feel very powerless about elections. Um, and you do pursue that goal your entire life. And it's still sort of meaningless at the end of the day. Um,

That is true. However, it's still like this point of like, you know, like you can absolutely work in an election and have more influence over it and get rid of that feeling of like there is no agency in it. Or, for instance, you could...

move into one of these systems and understand how it works. Yeah, actually, yeah, he's right. You do start to feel a bit powerless at the end of that. You fucking do. You can't out-rationalize him, I'm sure. Nah, I'm sorry. Yeah, he's right. He is fucking right. I'm trying to. I'm trying to beat that nerd down into submission, but I just can't. I just can't. He's too strong. Yet again.

I really do feel like, though, if he just had more sex, he probably would have been more below, honestly. Totally. Absolutely. Like, a lot of these problems could just be solved by... Again, because he identifies it himself. He says, like... What did he say? Like, sex is still something that...

when pursued and when rewarded with when you achieve that goal of getting sex he said that is still in group number two as he described earlier so that is still like a natural goal and a natural process of the oh sorry a natural outcome of the power process right it's still a natural goal of the power process yeah so that still exists for everyone he even admits that so yeah if he just succeeded at having sex i think he would have actually felt fine yeah totally

He still would have had the same gripes, but I don't think he would have bombed people. Yes, I think you're right. Number 151. He really was an incel. Number 150. As we mentioned, industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems.

and a considerable proportion... of the system's economic... and environmental problems... result from the way... human beings behave... alienation... low self-esteem... depression... hostility... rebellion... children who want to study... youth gangs... illegal drug use... rape... child abuse... other crimes... unsafe sex... teen pregnancy... population growth... political corruption... race hatred... ethnic rivalry... bitter ideological conflict... example... pro-choice vs pro-life... political extremism... terrorism... sabotage... anti-government groups...

hate groups, all of these things threaten the very survival of the system. The system will therefore be forced to use every practical means of controlling human behavior. I mean, yeah, but all those things are bad. Yes. Probably would have been shunned even in a primitive society if there was rape going around. Although teen pregnancies, yeah, there's a lot there that's probably less so.

The social disruption that we see today is certainly not the result of mere chance. It can only be a result of the conditions of life that the system imposes on people. We've argued that the most important of these conditions is disruption of the power process. If the system succeeds in imposing sufficient control over human behavior to assure its own survival, a new watershed in human history will have passed.

Whereas formerly the limits of human endurance have imposed limits on the development of societies, industrial technological society will be able to pass those limits by modifying human beings, whether by psychological methods or biological methods or both. In the future, social systems... I pointed this out last week. I think this is like the most poignant...

and scary point of his entire manifesto, to me anyway. He says, in the future, social systems will not be adjusted to suit the needs of human beings. Instead, human beings will be adjusted to suit the needs of the system. And again, it is like a very, like, r slash I'm 14 and this is very deep kind of thing. But I do see that happening more and more.

Well, it has been happening more and more all throughout human development, though. This is why I'm not that scared by that statement. It is a very damning and prophetic statement and true. But, you know, like... I just don't understand. I don't understand why you're not averse to the idea of something out of your control kind of changing the way that you think. Oh, because I just think that that's exactly what happens anyway in our society now.

I think, you know, like a huge amount. You know what a lot of my stand-up shows are? No, you go. I've realised a lot of my stand-up shows over the years have been me pretty much just reading extensively into a subject and deprogramming myself on things that are just societally willed onto you. Like, I'll give a very lame, dumb example. Even the...

alien show that I'm doing now that you can get tickets to across Australia and New Zealand. Links below. It could be nutty. I'm willing to accept that. Glowing endorsement of the live show. Oh man, the live show is the peak of my intellectual pursuits in life. The idea of UFOs

And somebody that says, I think that that's nuts and anybody that thinks this is nuts. It's like, yes, okay. You can come to that conclusion and you could very well be right as well. However, there was an 80-year program set up by the CIA to get everybody to reach that conclusion. So did you think that it was nutty or were you culturally conditioned to think that it was nutty?

Like another one is just union busting. There's been a hundred year campaign against the unions and how evil and corrupt they are and how they're just filled with mafia dons. And it's like, I guess there's reality to that, but there's like been a very, very concerted effort to make people hate them. Like this is something that you can point to in a thousand different ways that happens with society right now as it is. I mean, that's Chomsky's book, Manufacturing Consent in a nutshell. Yeah, but sorry, go on.

I was going to say, but that's kind of, again, his point is, yes, it exists now. We already see that. He's not making a new observation. I mean, it might have been new in the 80s or 90s whenever he wrote it. But yeah, he's saying it exists now, but the technology is going to progress in such a way that it makes it far more widespread and it's going to make it far harder for you

Yes, you to deprogram yourself as you just kind of said that you do. And how does that not scare you? Because the thing is, man, like, look, my life is a lot better when I don't deprogram myself. It's way better. So your argument is just like the system makes me feel good.

Oh, totally. Oh, my God. If I didn't do all of my self-help shows, because it's just like this is the whole thing about deprogramming yourself, right? It's very hard. And then you realize that everything that you probably do think is probably just programming anyway. And so it just makes you really depressed and despondent like this guy. And so what if somebody just gave you that? So you're saying it's better to live in denial?

not even just living in denial, just living in complete and utter ignorance and not even knowing. That would honestly probably be a much better life. Does this... Okay, wait, wait, wait. Because you... Does this... Is this how you help people in self-help? I feel bad about my endorsement of you as a self-help professor now. I'm going to rescind that previously if your entire thesis for self-help is live in ignorance. Yeah.

No, I think honestly, look, deprogramming yourself and not living in ignorance means that you will live a very successful life. I think that that's definitely true because, look, being ignorant, we just know this for stats, right? If you are stupid, you are far more likely to live a sad life. I mean, there's going to be like your Aiden Rosses or something like that in the world that just somehow just jackpot their way into a sick life.

But generally, you're not going to. Generally, if you aren't able to decipher what is and isn't a scam, you're going to have a worse life. But there's big costs that come with it, much like what Szyzycki's talking about, where you realize that there is a lot of things that are just like unavoidable comets that are going to hit the earth. You know, like it's not...

It's not a fun place to be. The comet is actually a good analogy. If there was a comet or an asteroid about to hit the Earth, would you want to know about it? Yeah, would you want to know about it? Would you want to know about it? And the other thing is, a lot of the time, even though you do know about it, even though the analysis is correct, like Szynski, he might end up being ultimately right. But so far, like we were saying at the beginning of this, he hasn't been exactly right.

as society's panned out the way that it has. And so a lot of it could just be worrying about nothing. That's the other point. So I don't know, like, look, when it comes to this whole idea of, oh, you know, your opinions are going to be engineered and like you will be biologically engineered to think in a certain way. I mean, come on. We all went through our, you know, edgy atheist phase when we were 19. We've all read Sam Harris's Free Will, right? Are you asking me?

I guess we should have just been jacked. Yeah, sorry. No, I've never read that. But yeah, I mean, I don't believe in God. No, but okay, the general premise. Look, I'm going to butcher the point of this book, but he's pretty much just saying that you don't have...

You have the illusion of free will as it is. For instance, like if I say, think of a movie, the chances are that you're going to think of a movie that you have already seen. The chances are that you have already, you're going to be thinking of a movie that was advertised to you that you are going to see. You did not choose that. It popped into your head because there was a bunch of things that happened before that.

Well, wait, wouldn't the argument extend then to think of a movie? I couldn't think of a movie without movies being invented by people. Yeah. Created by people. Yeah. So where does free will start? That's what he's saying. It's just, it's not there. It's like, also his example is that

Everyone always sits there and says like, oh, Kim Jong-un's a massive monster or something. But he's saying that, man, if you were given the exact inputs of information that Kim Jong-un would, you would be Kim Jong-un. There's no chance outside of that that you would be different. Maybe you might be a little bit different because of, I don't know, personal. Maybe you might be a more emotional person or maybe you'll be a less emotional person or something. But generally, you'd be the same guy.

That's his point. So this whole idea of just like you start getting conscious of it and you start engineering people's consciousness in these areas that is more beneficial to everyone. Again, I'm not that pessimistic about that. You are a positive guy. I'll give you that. I appreciate that about you.

It makes me feel warm and tingly inside knowing that we'll be all right as long as Jordan's there to crack a smile every now and then. All right. We're going now. Jesus.

We move on now to Jordan's favorite topic, which is leftism. Leftism, over-socialization, and feelings of inferiority. So many pages and points are dedicated to criticizing modern leftism with the claim that it is driven by feelings of inferiority and what Ted calls over-socialization.

defined as someone who is burdened by moral impositions made onto them by the system, which I guess could go along with no free will. Ted also diagnoses the ideologies from modern leftism as having come from not moral concern, but actually from personal psychological distress.

This opening part is quite controversial as Ted argues that self-identified leftists are insecure individuals and they seek personal validation through activism. Though he does say that this isn't a political message or revolution and it's simply a diagnosis of a certain makeup of people as opposed to the underlying political idea itself.

He also critiques conservatives in the manifesto, but though not nearly as much as he does leftism. This likely stems from the fact that Ted believes that the over-socialized nature of leftists is both proof of his ideology and also a danger to the revolution he hopes to inspire. We start, however, with the writings about how leftism serves as an apt personification of the problems he speaks of, as well as the definition of leftism itself. So he says...

Right.

But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th century, leftism could practically have been identified with socialism. Today, the movement is fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be called a leftist. When we speak of leftists in the article, we have in mind mainly socialists, collectivists, politically correct types,

feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists, and the like. But not everyone who is associated with one of these movements is a leftist. What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so much a movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or rather a collective of related types. Thus, what we mean by leftism will emerge more clearly in the course of the discussion of leftist psychology."

Even so, our conception of leftism will remain a good deal less clear than we would wish, but there doesn't seem to be any remedy for this. All we are trying to do here is indicate in a rough and approximate way the two psychological tendencies that we believe are the main driving force of modern leftism. We by no means claim to be telling the whole truth about leftist psychology. Also, our discussion is meant to apply to modern leftism only. We leave open the question of the extent to which our discussion could be applied to the leftists of the 19th and 20th centuries, and we are not going to be telling the whole truth about

The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call feelings of inferiority and over-socializations. Feeling of inferiority are a characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while over-socialization is a characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism. But this segment is highly influential. Okay, keep going. What? No, what? It's just when he did his...

Description of leftism. First off, because I don't know if anyone doesn't know, it's a pet peeve of mine. Anybody that ever identifies themselves as left or right, any political label, it really annoys me. His, because he's so precise about it, I'll stomach and I think it's good.

And his analysis of that type of person is just so spot on. It's even more spot on than his point of just like technology will inevitably lead to a society of cyborgs. I'll preface this with, I've read this a couple of times. I don't disagree with any of it.

What do you think? The whole topic of leftism. Yes, what he describes as leftism, which I think what he is describing is sort of academic narcissism, really. Yes, yeah, academic narcissism, usually like middle-income kind of security. Yeah, narcissism born from the security of living a privileged life. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. And I think he does kind of narrow it down

uh the behavior types again it's it's not really about like the political ideology so much as it is the types of behavior makeups of the people involved in the movement itself yeah yeah that's a really good way of describing it but sorry do continue

Okay, so psychologists use the term socialization to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. It may seem senseless to say that many leftists are over socialized since the leftist is perceived as a rebel. Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such rebels as they seem. Okay.

Damn, coffin strays from Teddy. He continues...

and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin. We use the term over-socialized to describe such people. So basically, an over-socialized person feels such a weight and burden from the socialization to fit into society's mold that I guess you could just say they overthink it. I think that's pretty fair to say, probably. They feel it heavier than other people do feel it. Would you agree with that? Yeah.

I think that's a very good way of putting it. So over-socialization can lead to low self-esteem, a sense of powerlessness, defeatism, guilt, etc. One of the most important means by which our society socializes children is by making them feel ashamed of behavior or speech that is contrary to society's expectations. If this is overdone or if a particular child is especially susceptible to such feelings...

He ends up feeling ashamed of himself. Moreover, the thought and the behavior of the over-socialized person are more restricted by society's expectations than those of the lightly socialized person. I think shame is one of the most dangerous emotions that a person can feel, right? How do you know that? I'm obviously always surprised by your little tidbits of knowledge in every field. Because I have felt shame before and it is literally the worst feeling. Damn, dude.

You're way closer to primitive man than me. I literally need to be told that in a book to be like, ah, that's about that is. That's what shame is. Yeah. That's why I don't like that feeling. Yeah. But I mean, it's just turning yourself into your own worst enemy is the most destructive behavior a person can take. And it is, that's what the shame spiral is, right? You just consistently and constantly, uh,

demoralize yourself on a fundamental human basis. Yeah. I think the best way to describe it is the guilt is the feeling that you did something wrong and shame is that you are wrong. Just fundamentally a bad person. It's defeatism in a self form. The majority of people engage in a significant amount of naughty behavior. Please do go on Ted.

What have you done, Ted? Well, you have taken in a lot of naughty behavior, haven't you, Ted?

That's going to be a spank for Teddy. They lie. They commit petty thefts. They break traffic laws. They goof off at work. They hate someone. They say spiteful things or they use some underhanded trick to get ahead of the other guy. I'm noticing that bombing people is not on this Ted. Not on the list. The over socialized person cannot do these things, or if he does do them, he generates in himself a sense of shame and self hatred. The over,

The over-socialized person cannot even experience without guilt thoughts or feelings that are contrary to the accepted morality. He cannot think unclean thoughts. And socialization is not just a matter of morality. We are socialized to conform to many norms of behavior that do not fall under the heading of morality. Thus, the over-socialized person is kept on a psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him."

So he's not a free thinker, basically. He has been too socialized by the system that it has become shameful. Because like he says, hating people is a natural feeling if you dislike someone. It's a natural feeling. So society is kind of pressuring people to act in unnatural ways, which is what the over-socialized people struggle with. Or they don't struggle with. They're perfect. They're

They are so on rails that they cannot deviate into their natural kind of behavioral traits. I mean, look, he is absolutely right about that. You can think of a bunch of people that you know that work in bureaucracies, that work in universities, and they are this type of person. You can tell. They are very nerdy, protective people. Sorry, go on. Not just nerdy. It's, again... Not just nerdy. Not just nerdy. The over-socialized type of...

It's a form of narcissism, I think. It's a form of putting up an image to protect the things that you are shameful of behind that image, that mask. You can usually tell... Well, you can't usually tell, but sometimes you can tell when someone is putting on that image and you're like, there's no way you actually...

believe what you are currently arguing for or saying or anything like that like there's there's some natural voice behind you that's like i don't believe what i'm saying right now but i think the image presents me in such a way that society will accept me yes and that's and those people seem to be extremely predominant in the corporate sector and in government uh that that type of person goes there because he's right and universities because uh

This system that he's talking about trains you to be like that. And then I think that you have varying degrees of unsocialized people from that level, which I think honestly is why people are so fascinated by criminals. Because criminals seem to have a deviation. They are sort of the closest thing we have to primitive man.

I think that that's what you're looking at when you look at them. You're kind of looking at what human beings would be like if they were cavemen. Not, no way even close because even they would be more socialized. But I think that that's why there is always that middle class obsession with true crime and gangsters and shit. I think that's why. Yeah, for sure. Um,

So thus, yeah, you're kept on a psychological leash. Ted suggests that over-socialization is among the more serious cruelties that human beings inflict on one another. Yeah? No? No, I'm just saying, where? I mean, shooting someone is probably...

I mean, there's a lot of cruelty. He said one of Jackson checkmate among the more serious cruelties. Yeah. True. It's incredible that this man who's dead keeps doing this.

I hate it. That's too smart. Okay. So because of their need for rebellion and for membership in a movement, leftists or persons of similar psychological type often are unattracted to a rebellious or activist movement whose goals and membership are not initially leftist. The resulting influx of leftist types can easily turn a non-leftist movement into a leftist one. And you do say that a lot, right? Mm-hmm.

Oh, my God. That was a sexual moan. Oh, dude, he's speaking my language. God. What he's really talking about there, endlessly that you see constantly, is something like, say with unions, for instance. Unions is a very working class thing designed for working class people. Obviously, it's a union, yeah? Eventually, you have academic types that start getting jobs in the apparatchik of it because they start seeing it becomes a bureaucratic system. They go into it.

And they all have these ideas of, like, what they think is, like, right for the working man and all this kind of shit. And the thing is that they've just... They're, like, generations removed from the working class. They have no fucking connection to it at all. And then...

You know, the outfit starts to become this detestable pseudo-university thing for people that don't have the connections to get universities and jobs. He's talking about it right there. He's absolutely talking about it. Sorry. I was going to take it. You took it in a productive way. I was going to take it in a way more nerdy way that most people might be able to.

relate to is like video games. A lot of video game companies and stuff start to become very politically charged as soon as leftist ideas come into it. But it is also now the inverse, I've noticed. But it's more like a pendulum. It's swung the other way. So now they're fighting. Everything becomes like a political war field. Don't you think that same thing happens? He's right.

As soon as something starts to become... Oh, my God, he's so right. Fuck. Dude, this is the great thing about this book, and this is why you need to listen to this podcast over and over again like it's a Dolly Parton classic or something, right? You have to listen to it nine to five times. The reason you do is because he's hitting me on a level that I haven't thought about before, but that's so true. Like, why is that happening in video games?

Because it started to become bureaucratized. Everything eventually does have to become bureaucratized. It's just the natural progression of anything. And this is when that ideology starts coming in. Yeah. So the resulting influx of leftist types can easily turn a non-leftist movement into a leftist one so that leftist goals replace or distort the original goals of the movement. Yeah. And you do see that in those bureaucracies, they start kind of trivializing the movement.

Broadly speaking, to the general public, let's say, to the general audience, they start distorting the goals and aspirations to include what they are personally interested in or personally want.

To avoid this, a movement that exalts nature and opposes technology must take a resolutely anti-leftist stance and must avoid all collaboration with leftists. So he's saying, this movement that I want to make here, no leftists, please. Because they will invade the space and turn it into something that will not be constructive to what we are talking about here. Mm-hmm.

Leftism, it's interesting that he identified leftism. And I don't necessarily think that it was entirely like politically motivated. I do think he was obviously probably politically more conservative for sure. But it's interesting that he identified leftism as a natural thing

enemy, let's say, or a natural kind of negative force for his movement. He's just right. Even just outside of... Based entirely on behavioral kind of analysis as opposed to political ideology. It's a really interesting way to go around it and, again, can't fault it.

Leftism is in the long run inconsistent with wild nature, with human freedom, and with the elimination of modern technology. Leftism is collectivist. It seeks to bind together the entire world, both nature and the human race, into a unified whole, which is just another way to say a system.

But this implies management of nature and of human life by organized society, and it requires advanced technology. You can't have a united world without rapid transportation and communication. You can't make all people love one another without sophisticated psychological techniques. You can't have a planned society without the necessary technological base. Above all, leftism is driven by the need for power, and the leftist seeks power on a collective basis...

through identification with a mass movement or an organization. Leftism is unlikely ever to give up technology because technology is too valuable a source of collective power. 100%. Like, yeah. Dude, he's found the... Okay, man. He's found the fault lines in fucking Marx's theory as well. Holy hell. Yeah. He's killing it. Dude, this guy's on fire. Yeah.

It is interesting that he's identified that leftists or leftism, his idea of leftism here, portrays itself to be rebellious and that they want to take down the system, man. But in reality, they need the system. They need the system to exert their idea of power. Well, this is also very... Because, look...

The way that I would describe him is not... What he's talking about is, like, leftist, in inverted commas, of, look, it's so murky, and he's pointed to it, which is great, because, again, one of those things you can't really clasp definitively. But he is...

I think more or less as he was saying before, kind of talking about like the, the, the overarching principles of like that kind of guy that's like a trot at university. That's endlessly, you know, talking about the quotes from Lenin and all that kind of shit. And then like the kind of offshoots of what that person is in different forms, like an animal activist or like a tree hugger or whatever. No, not even a tree hugger, but like this guy, I would put his like philosophy much more in the camp of hippies.

And this is the whole thing that's very interesting about hippies. If you think about it, they should have never been, quote, unquote, left because of this exact point that he's talking about, like where he says, quote, leftism is collectivist. I mean, you know, unions and hippies should have never been in the same basket ever. They're completely adverse human beings.

It's much more a libertarian look of the view of the world. This is why you have people like Russell Brand and shit that kind of have these, like, weird drug-fuelled rationalisations into being like, and that's why I support Donald Trump, yeah? You know, like... But I also believe in Marx. It's very hippie. It's very, very hippie. Yeah, it is. 100%. Sorry, go on.

Where was I? Yeah, okay. So some leftists may seem to oppose technology, but they will oppose it only so long as they are outsiders and the technological system is controlled by non-leftists. If leftism ever becomes dominant in society so that the technological system becomes a tool in the hands of leftists, they will enthusiastically use it and promote its growth. I mean, didn't that already happen? Like leftism has, not now, but it was dominant over the 2010s, right? What do you mean?

leftism was dominant, more dominant than it was in the 80s, in the 2010s. Well, 2000s and 2010s, right? Like the Obama period, that kind of entire time span. Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously they're always going to say, like, that wasn't left and, you know, there's always going to be those arguments of it. But I think he's generally just getting to the point that, I mean, look at

I think it would be pretty hard to argue. I actually would argue this, but like, you know, it is for the average person quite hard to argue that the Soviet Union wasn't left wing, you know? But like what happened as soon as the Soviet Union took over? Russia just got like way more, like unbelievable levels of technological growth in the Soviet Union from the Tsar period, you know? Huge. It's pretty undeniable, isn't it?

Yeah, 100%. I mean, whoever is in power will seek to stay in power and the greatest source of power is technology. So 100%. And there's no ideological difference between any political side in terms of

how they feel about power technology really. Like they see it as a tool that they can use. Right. Yeah. But I think that he's actually gotten to a point that I've never really thought about, but that type of person, like your commies and all that kind of stuff. Yes. As you're saying, Jackson, they want to, the, the, the goal of anyone, regardless of ideology would be to stay in power. But also when it comes to these people, they would have like much more of a, of a,

They do believe in these things. At the end of the day, really, he's right. That whole collectivist idea is more or less just mechanising things. It's more or less mechanising things. And then when you go to, I don't know, like czarists or any period of just like the royal family and all that kind of stuff, yes, I suppose they have systems as well. But generally, they're not really into the idea of technological advancement.

As in, the South in the United States was pretty happy just having slaves. Obviously, the cotton gym came around and kind of just made slaves redundant. But they weren't really pushing for it or anything. So it's actually way more of a left-wing thing to just be like, fuck, he's right. Sorry, sorry. It's just like, just reading it out again and thinking about it is honestly, it's quite fascinating. It really isn't like, again, it's like more so the behaviors that make up

those alignments more so the personal behavioristics as opposed to any kind of ideological stance. Yeah.

Okay, interesting. All right, so in doing this, they will be repeating a pattern that leftism has shown again and again in the past. When the Bolsheviks in Russia were outsiders, they vigorously opposed censorship and the secret police. They advocated self-determination for ethnic minorities and so forth. But as soon as they came into power themselves, they imposed a tighter censorship and created a more ruthless secret police than any that had existed unnoticed.

under the SARS and they oppressed ethnic minorities at least as much as the SARS had done in the United States a couple of decades ago when leftists were a minority in our universities leftist professors were vigorous proponents of academic freedom but today in those of our universities where leftists have become dominant they have shown themselves ready to take away from everyone else's academic freedom in the guise of political correctness

The same will happen with leftists and technology. They will use it to oppress everyone else if they ever get it under their own control. The university thing is definitely pretty accurate. The university one's very rated T for teen. Each year, thousands of adults lose their shred. It's an epidemic simply known as shred loss. But it doesn't have to be this way. Because rekindling your shred is as easy as playing the new Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 and 4. With new parks...

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It's again, it's like a mix of these two things. I think, I think there's two competing forces when it comes to that whole university woke-ish that they're kind of teaching. How good is saying woke in like, Americans will never understand this. You'll have your own accent, but there's just a, there's a type of old man in Australia that's like in their like sixties that just, there's only one way to say it in Australia. Woke. Don't you reckon? That's the only way you can say it. But,

The university thing is definitely true, but it's also just this thing of confined by the commercial reality of universities. So I think that much more of their criticisms go into gender and race than like economic things. Because that's what's attractive at the moment. Well, yeah, but attractive for keeping your job as well, you know? Yeah.

So leftism is a totalitarian force. Wherever leftism is in a position of power, it tends to invade every private corner and force every thought into a leftist mold. In parts, this is because of the quasi-religious character of leftism. Everything contrary to leftist beliefs represents sin. Capital S, sin.

More importantly, leftism is a totalitarian force because of the leftist strive for power. The leftist seeks to satisfy his need for power through identification within a social movement. He tries to go through the power process by helping to pursue and attain the goals of the movement. But no matter how far the movement has gone in attaining its goals, the leftist is never satisfied because his activism is a surrogate activity.

That is the leftist's real motive is not to attain the ostensible goals of leftism. In reality, he's motivated by the sense of power he gets from struggling for and then reaching a social goal. Consequently, the leftist is never satisfied with the goals he has already attained. His need for the power process leads him always to pursue some new goal. That's always the argument of like...

activists will never be happy basically like they'll always find something new to complain about how good is this quote greenpeace can't exist in a perfect world oh isn't that incredible like it's so many activists will lose their jobs exactly exactly this is something look honestly like i wouldn't have agreed with in my 20s but i swear by the time you get to your 30s you just start looking at a lot of ngos and like the pamphlets that they're putting out and being like

This is a bullshit problem. Come on. This is just a donation drive. And then like also on top of this, I'll say this as well. This is another point where he is not, this is because he is of his time that it was only these quote unquote lift groups that were behaving in this way, but you could very easily move this to the mega movement now. Yeah. Like exactly what he's talking about. Oh yeah. 100%. Like I said, it's a pendulum. Yeah. It's a pendulum. It's a pendulum.

Consequence. Yeah. But like his underlying point, I think that he's talking about here is, um,

Something that I'm obsessed with that Jackson's probably bored to the shit with me talking about, but post-materialism, which is the idea that once... And this is why your trot types and people that are mad into linen and shit are never from the working class, ever. Because they've got the time... And he's talking about that surrogate goal that they're talking about. They've got meaninglessness in their life because they just can't do anything that they want, and so they do nothing. And then they need a goal in life, and they just go into that. That's the thing.

Their goal is just to look good. Their goal is to look good. But I think this is the whole thing. It's just like now we live in a society where there's just so much abundance that you have things like the MAGA movement move on on the other side as well that are the same thing. People that are like very well off and bored and looking for fucking problems that aren't there, you know? Yeah. Yes. Sorry, go on. Consequently, the leftist is never satisfied with the goals he's already attained. His need for the power process leads him always to pursue some new goal.

The leftist wants equal opportunity for minorities. When that is attained, he insists on statistical equality of achievement by minorities. And as long as anyone harbors in some corner of his mind a negative attitude towards some minority, the leftist has to re-educate him. And ethnic minorities are not enough. No one can be allowed to have a negative attitude towards

Oh, he's so right. Sorry.

Activists. Just let me smoke. Activists have fought gross child abuse, which is reasonable, but now they want to stop all spanking. Can you believe it?

When they have done that, they will want to ban something else they consider unwholesome, then another thing, and then another. They will never be satisfied until they have complete control over all child-rearing practices. And then they will move on to another cause. Holy fuck. Okay, yep. Some readers may say, this stuff about leftism is a lot of crap. I know John and Jane, who are leftist types, and they don't have all these totalitarian tendencies.

It's quite true that many leftists, possibly even a numerical majority, are decent people who sincerely believe in tolerating others' values up to a point and wouldn't want to use high-handed methods to reach their social goals. Our remarks about leftism, and by our I mean, this is Ted's writing, our remarks about leftism are not meant to apply to every individual leftist, but to describe the general character of leftism as a movement. And the general character of a movement is not necessarily determined by the numerical

the numerical proportions of the various kinds of people involved in the movement.

The people who rise to positions of power in leftist movements tend to be leftists of the most power-hungry type, because power-hungry people are those who strive hardest to get into positions of power. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. Once the power-hungry types have captured control of the movement, there are many leftists of a gentler breed who inwardly disapprove of many of the actions of the leaders, but cannot bring themselves to oppose them. They need their faith in the movement, and because they cannot give up this faith, they go along with the leaders. True, but...

Some leftists do have the guts to oppose the totalitarian tendencies that emerge, but they generally lose because the power-hungry types are better organized, are more ruthless and Machiavellian, and have taken care to build themselves a stronger power base. 100% accurate again. Yep.

Yeah.

Varieties of leftists fade out gradually into varieties of non-leftists and we ourselves would often be hard pressed to decide whether a given individual is or is not a leftist. To the extent that it is defined at all, our conception of leftism is defined by the discussion of it that we have given in this article and we can only advise the reader to use his own judgment in deciding who is a leftist. But the leftist is orientated towards large-scale collectivism.

He emphasizes the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. He has a negative attitude towards individualism. He often takes a moralistic tone. He tends to be for gun control, for sex education, and other psychologically enlightened educational methods, for social planning, for affirmative action, for multiculturalism.

He tends to identify with victims. He tends to be against competition and against violence, but he often finds excuses for those leftists who do commit violence. He's fond of using the common catchphrases of the left like racism, sexism, homophobia, capitalism, imperialism, neocolonialism, genocide, leftist...

Wait, genocide, social change, social justice, social responsibility. Maybe the best diagnostic trait of the leftist is his tendency to sympathize with the following movements. Feminism, gay rights, ethnic rights, disability rights, animal rights, political correctness. Anyone who strongly sympathizes with all of these movements is almost certainly a leftist. Things really haven't changed that much since the 80s then. Nah, nah, that's pretty much exactly what it is, yeah. Yeah, broadly speaking.

the more dangerous leftist that is those who are the most power hungry are often characterized by arrogance or by dogmatic approach to your ideology. But I also feel like people would point at Ted and say that he's, uh, clearly pretty arrogant and he uses a dogmatic approach to his ideology, right? Yes. So what's the difference? Uh,

I mean, the difference isn't so much... Is he power hungry? That's the question. Yes, he is. He's seeking to overthrow the entire fundamental system of humanity. I would say that's pretty power hungry. But he doesn't want to be at the head of it. He just wants it destroyed. No, but the power process is just... Again, I think there's a lot to relate to here from Ted in what he's describing as leftism. Because he's...

Kind of finding a surrogate for his own power process. I'm sure he feels powerful doing these things, bombing people and trying to force across his message. I really don't see that much of a difference. I think you're right too. I'm trying to think of a difference. This is the whole thing that's really interesting about Ted is because...

He does write in a very objective way, but it's also extremely polemic. And there is just this little, which you've been very good at identifying throughout this, Jackson. You can see his personality being injected into his own writings. Yeah, 100%. You can see his own kind of biases working its way into the text, which is natural, obviously. Natural. It's very hard not to.

However, the most dangerous leftists of all may be certain over-socialized types who avoid irritating displays of aggressiveness and refrain from advertising their leftism, but work quietly and unobtrusively to promote collectivist values, enlightened psychological techniques for socializing children, dependence of the individual on the system, and so forth. These crypto-leftists, as we may call them. Pretty cool. He invented crypto.

That is pretty cool. These crypto leftists approximate certain bourgeois types as far as practical action. Is that how Australians pronounce it? Bougie? Yeah, we do. That's not how you pronounce it, though, is it? That's just... We can't say it for some reason. No, no, no. We just... Because everything... We make everything shorter than it has to be. Yeah. But...

Yeah, I think it's just an Aussie trait. It's like we call McDonald's Maccas. How do you say it? Bourgeois. Yeah, okay. One of those things where I don't know what the correct pronunciation is because I exist both in American internet and see all their pronunciations and then also hear it in real life in Australian. Well, how do Americans say it? I assume. I don't know. I don't know what's reality. I exist across too many different systems. Bourgeoisie.

Yeah. Bourgeois. Bourgeois. Bourgeois. Anyway, approximate certain bourgeois types as far as practical action is concerned, but differ from them in psychology, ideology, and motivation. The ordinary bourgeois tries to bring people under control of the system in order to protect his way of life, or he does so simply because his attitudes are conventional.

The crypto leftist tries to bring people under control of the system because he is a capital T, true, capital B believer in a collectivist ideology. The crypto leftist is differentiated from the average leftist of the over-socialized type by the fact that his rebellious impulse is weaker and he's more securely socialized. Hmm, interesting.

He's differentiated from the ordinary well-socialized bourgeois by the fact that there is some deep lack within him that makes it necessary for him to devote himself to a cause and immerse himself in collectivity. And maybe he's well-subliminated drive for power is stronger than that of the average bourgeois.

than that of the average bourgeois. How many bourgeois are there? I know, I know. I thought it was like one small group of people usually, but apparently they're hiding among us. Terrifying. Are we bourgeois? Not in Marx's definition. We don't own the means of production. You know what we are? You know what we are? We're petty bourgeois. That's what we are.

We're bourgeois wannabes. Yeah. All right. So we've now explored how Ted thinks of the system, the power process, how ideology works and how the state we currently live in is not tenable. Now, well, we come to a solution. He argues that revolution and not reform is the only thing that will free us from the technological shackles that bind us. He says...

Think of history as being the sum of two components, an erratic component that consists of unpredictable events that follow no discernible pattern, and a regular component that consists of long-term historical trends. Here we are concerned with the long-term trends.

He breaks it down into multiple principles. First principle, if a small change is made that affects a long-term historical trend, then the effect of that change will almost always be transitory. That means the trend will soon revert to its original state. As an example, a reform movement designed to clean up political corruption in a society rarely has more than a short-term effect. Sooner or later, the reformers relax and corruption creeps back in. The level of political corruption in a given society tends to remain constant or

or to change only slowly with the evolution of the society. Normally, a political cleanup will be permanent only if accompanied by widespread social changes. A small change in the society won't be enough. If a small change in a long-term historical trend appears to be permanent, it is only because the change acts in the direction in which the trend is already moving so that the trend is not altered but only pushed a step ahead. What do you think of that? Again, undeniable.

I think he's right. Okay. He's definitely right. I think that, yeah, honestly, like, okay. You look at old world countries like Italy and Lebanon, and they're just rife with corruption still out of this day. I'm sure that there was periods where there was more corruption in them. But, and, and like, there was like a big clean sweep through it, but it kind of just feels like, you know, you give it another 50 years, it'll go back to its original. I agree, man. I really agree. What about you? Yeah, I agreed. Second principle.

If a change is made that is sufficiently large to alter permanently a long-term historical trend, then it will alter the society as a whole. In other words, a society is a system in which all parts are interrelated and you can't permanently change any important part without changing all other parts as well.

Third principle, if a change is made that is large enough to alter permanently a long-term trend, then the consequences for the society as a whole cannot be predicted in advance unless various other societies have passed through the same change and have all experienced the same consequences, in which case one can predict on empirical grounds that another society that passes through the same change will be likely to experience similar consequences.

And the fourth principle, a new kind of society cannot be designed on paper. That is, you cannot plan out a new form of society in advance and set it up and expect it to function as it was designed to do, which obviously you cannot account for everything from a planning stage in terms of such a large scale system as a society.

The third and fourth principles result from the complexity of human societies. A change in human behavior will affect the economy of a society and its physical environment. The economy will affect the environment and vice versa. And the changes in the economy and the environment will affect human behavior in complex, unpredictable ways and so forth. The network of causes and effects is far too complex to be untangled and understood. And finally, his fifth principle...

People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under rational human control. The fifth principle is a consequence of the other four. So the foregoing principles help to show how hopelessly difficult it would be to reform the industrial system in such a way as to prevent it from progressively narrowing our sphere of freedom.

There has been a consistent tendency going back to at least the industrial revolution for technology to strengthen the system at a high cost in individual freedom and local autonomy. Hence, any change designed to protect freedom from technology would be contrary to a fundamental trend in the development of our society. Consequently, such a change either would be a transitory one soon swamped by the tide of history or if large enough to be permanent would alter the nature of our whole society.

This by the first and second principles. Moreover, since society would be altered in a way that could not be predicted and advanced by the third principle, there would be great risk. Changes large enough to make a lasting difference in favor of freedom would not be initiated because it would be realized that they would gravely disrupt the system. So any systems that reform would be too timid to be effective."

Even if changes large enough to make a lasting difference were initiated, they would be retracted when their disruptive effects become apparent. Thus, permanent changes in favor of freedom could be brought about only by persons prepared to accept radical, dangerous, and unpredictable alteration of the entire systems. In other words, by revolutionaries, not reformers.

I mean, again, if the central thesis of his argument, Jordan, is that the system will destroy us all, like if he's accurate in his description of that, then you would need to completely dismantle the system in the way that he speaks of, in a revolutionary way. Like he identified, you wouldn't be able to just reform it. He's absolutely right about it. But you like the system. I like the system.

And I would but I would also say that if he wanted to do that, I don't agree with his end point, which is always the same thing when it comes to anybody who has the solution to all of our long term problems.

So it's honestly, it's exactly the same as Karl Marx, right? Like, it's just like you read Karl Marx's dissertations and dissection of capitalism and he's just bang on the money. It's still used to this day. It's one of the most thorough critiques of anything ever. It's undeniable. There's been so many people that tried to disprove it over the years and yet Marx is still taught to, you know, it's still taught to this day because it's just, it's irrefutable.

Then it comes to his solutions and it's like, well, that's not going to work. LAUGHTER

And I think it's just the same with him. It's like, so what do you do? I suggest we make bombs out of acorns and mail them to random people. It's like, what? Just destroy everything. Yeah, but like in a really dumb, small way. This is the other thing. What was he hoping? That everybody just starts mailing bombs? I guess at some point he'd destroy FedExes. Sure. Okay, so let me ask you this then. If...

If he's accurate and we're on the path to a system that will eventually destroy us, do you think it's better to just stay on that path permanently, just see throughout that existence because there will be benefits along the way? Or do you believe that it is more beneficial to go back to a Stone Age primitive-like society or not Stone Age, maybe not that far back, but a less technologically advanced society and just...

Try to implement measures where we stay at that level forever because anything further puts us on the path to that future. Yeah, but don't you think that, honestly, even if you went back to that stage, it is inevitable. Yeah. You know what? It's human nature to create. You know who has absolutely destroyed Sikorsky's

theories on how to solve this you know what's absolutely destroyed it an even more intellectual piece known as Terminator 3 I was that's pretty funny I was going to say Rick and Morty but yeah you were going to say Rick and Morty why why does Rick and Morty destroy his theory well it doesn't it doesn't really it's kind of it kind of exists in the theory itself like they try to tear down the system in that in that show as well

Right, okay. So, yeah, I think that, as they were saying in Terminator 3, where Arnold Schwarzenegger just says, judgment day is inevitable. I think that that's pretty much it. Even if you went back to the Stone Age, at some point, caveman would create wheel, and then it would all continue again. Maybe not in the same way, but it seems that this is sort of an inevitability that's happening.

So, yes, okay, maybe it might be beneficial to go back to those times and live in some sort of Amish community forever. But I don't think that it will stay like that forever. No, agreed. And what's the Amish community going to do when across the continent or something, or across the globe, you know, some other community dies?

technologically advancing beyond that scope. What are they going to do? Wage a war with them? They're going to lose it. They are technologically unadvanced. It is inevitable. So there is part of me that thinks, and it is like nihilistic almost, the positive hope, the optimistic hope, is that we are able to overcome our

our problems using technology, right? That is the optimistic hope and that we are able to continue existing and spread out across the galaxy and so on as technology advances. And part of me does believe that even if it doesn't go the optimistic route and technology does spell out doom, again, along with the inevitability, maybe it is just better to just keep going, you know, keep going towards that direction.

Because really what is served by going back? We continue living an unfulfilled existence forever. And until what? Until what? Yeah. Until a meteor hits us. Yeah. Media hits. Really, there is only one way forward, isn't there? That's pretty much it. And I think that...

Yeah, look, again, I think that there will be things that Ted is right about, but I think that history has already proven that there will be things that he's wrong about, and that's worth being optimistic about. True, but Ted's not always right. He's not always right. He's got some pretty good calls, but he's not always.

So in the manifesto, Ted writes, the industrial technology system we are all in cannot be reformed to reconcile freedom and we need a revolution. Though he does make a point to say not necessarily an armed uprising, but certainly a radical and fundamental change in the nature of society. He says, people tend to assume that because a revolution involves a much greater change than reform does, it is more difficult to bring about than reform is.

Actually, under certain circumstances, revolution is much easier than reform. In fact, you can make your own bomb and mail it to people. The reason is that a revolutionary movement can inspire an intensity of commitment that a reform movement cannot inspire. A reform movement merely offers to solve a particular social problem. A revolutionary movement offers to solve all problems at one stroke and create a whole new world. It provides the kind of ideal for which people would take great risks and make great sacrifices. For this reason, it would be much easier to overthrow the whole technological system than

and to put effective permanent restraints on the development or application of any one segment of technology, such as genetic engineering, for example. Not many people will devote themselves with single-minded passion to imposing and maintaining restraints on genetic engineering, but under suitable conditions, large numbers of people may devote themselves passionately to a revolution against the industrial technological system."

As noted in a previous paragraph, reformers seeking to limit certain aspects of technology would be working to avoid a negative outcome, but revolutionaries work to gain a powerful reward, fulfillment of their revolutionary vision, and therefore work harder and more persistently than reformers do.

Reform is always restrained by the fear of painful consequences if changes go too far. But once a revolutionary fever has taken hold of a society, people are willing to undergo unlimited hardships for the sake of their revolution. Sounds great, Ted. This was clearly shown in the French and Russian revolutions, which were, from what I hear, fantastic times.

It may be that in such cases, only a minority of the population is really committed to the revolution, but this minority is sufficiently large and active so that it becomes the dominant force in society. An argument likely to be raised against our proposed revolution is that it is bound to fail because it is claimed throughout history technology has always progressed, never regressed, hence technological regression is impossible. But this claim is false.

He doesn't say there that technological progression isn't always constant. He just says that it's not possible for us to regress technologically.

Yes. He continues, we distinguish between two kinds of technology, which we will call small-scale technology and organization-dependent technology. Small-scale technology is technology that can be used by small-scale communities without outside assistance. Organization-dependent technology is technology that depends on large-scale social organization. We are aware of no significant cases of regression in small-scale technology. For example, hammers have always been hammers.

But organization-dependent technology does regress when the social organization on which it depends breaks down. Example, when the Roman Empire fell apart, the Roman small-scale technology survived because any clever village craftsman could build, for instance, a water wheel. Any skilled smith could make steel by Roman methods, and so forth.

But the Romans' organization-dependent technology did regress. Their aqueducts fell into disrepair and were never rebuilt. The techniques of road construction were lost. The Roman system of urban sanitation was forgotten so that not until rather recent times did the sanitation of European cities equal that of ancient Rome. What do you think about that, Mr. Rome? What do you mean, what do I think? You're a Rome expert. What do you think? Yeah.

Yes, obviously, yes. What do I think about... But what's specifically about that, though? The fact that, like, technology did regress as a result? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, irrefutably. Irrefutably. The only... Again, my overarching point of this is, though, that the system continued on in another way. It just became smaller. It was just the East Roman Empire continued on in its... Wow, you really love this East Roman Empire, huh? Oh, man, I...

Don't get me started on how much I love the Easter egg. They were the cool ones. They were the cool ones. They really were the cool ones. But the thing was that they did preserve those systems throughout the Dark Ages. So the idea...

Maybe because we're more complex and we're more integrated, maybe everything would just collapse and fall apart. But historically, what has happened when these systems have broken apart is that it kind of, in inverted commas, just breaks down in one area and continues on in another. Okay, well, it sounds like you fundamentally disagree on that part with Ted, because I think he believes that if one part does fail, then the system itself would collapse under its own weight.

Because it's so interconnected. Yeah, which I just can't really think of an example of it. Okay. I suppose Japan might be a good example. Post-war. But no, like during... There was many a period where, I don't know, like imperial control kind of just broke down and everybody just turned into warlords across Japan. Oh, right, yeah. Far earlier. So like feudal? Feudal Japan, yeah. Okay. God. Yeah.

I have my reservations about this. I have my reservations on his thoughts, but yes, continue. So the reason why technology has seemed always to progress is that until perhaps a century or two before the Industrial Revolution, most technology was small-scale technology. But most of the technology developed since the Industrial Revolution is organization-dependent technology.

Take the refrigerator, for example. Without factory-made parts or the facilities of a post-industrial machine to shop it, it would virtually be impossible for a handful of local craftsmen to build a refrigerator. If by some miracle they did succeed in building one, it would be useless to them without a reliable source of electric power. But though the argument could be made that technology could get to the point where it is so ubiquitous and so easy to use that you can just print, for example,

Like you could 3D print a refrigerator perhaps or anything. Exactly. Yeah. So again, technology, again, you can't take the bad without the good. I mean, he says you can't take the good without the bad, but I would invert that and say you can't take the bad without the good, which is that technology could potentially be the solution to the problems that you speak of about technology. But you obviously... And has historically proven to be the case time and time again. Yeah.

Look, and then also, look, he'd argue that war got to the point where it reached World War II and then just got to this stalemate where someone will inevitably drop the bomb. Ah, man, it's... He's outsmarting us again. And he's dead. Yeah, go on. He's dead and he's outsmarting us. He is dead. You're fighting his own fight for him as well.

Damn. Now that's an intellectual heavyweight, hey? Yeah. He continues though. He says, if by some miracle they did succeed in building a refrigerator, it would be useless to them without a reliable source of electric power. So they would have to dam a stream and build a generator. Generators require large amounts of copper wire. Imagine trying to make that wire without modern machinery. And where would they get a gas suitable for refrigeration? It would be much easier to build an ice house or preserve food by drying or picking, as was done before the invention of the refrigerator. So

So it is clear that if the industrial system were once thoroughly broken down, refrigeration technology would quickly be lost. The same is true of any other organization-dependent technology. And once this technology has been lost for a generation or so, it would take centuries to rebuild it, just as it took centuries to build it the first time around. Surviving technical books would be few and scattered,

An industrial society, if built from scratch without outside help, can only be built in a series of stages. That is, you need tools to make tools to make tools to make tools. A long process of economic development and progress in social organization is required. And even in the absence of an ideology opposed to technology, there is no reason to believe that anyone would be interested in rebuilding industrial society.

The enthusiasm for progress is a phenomenon peculiar to the modern form of society, and it seems to not have existed prior to the 17th century or thereabouts. Hmm. Yeah. I mean, I guess, right? I guess so too. The enthusiasm for progress. Yeah. I mean, what did that come about after enlightenment? I mean, I suppose there would have been marked examples of it. If you were going to go back to the Roman era, for instance,

So Marius coming up with the reforms of the Roman army so that it was professionalized. So before that, most, there was Sparta, I suppose, but most armies would have been, you're a farmer most of the year. And then when you couldn't farm, you go out and fight wars and try and steal other people's territory, right? That would be pretty much patented.

Then Marius came along because there was just a huge destitute population in Rome that didn't have any land or were just beggars and there was no employment prospects because slavery basically underwrote any menial work. And he said, all right, here's the solution. We're going to turn you into a professional fighting unit and that's going to be your entire job. And so that is mechanising warfare. And that was a huge piece of progress in warfare. And that was very much...

championed by the state at the time as well so there's pockets of progress and pockets of enthusiasm of progress it's too granular you're right yeah you're right

He's talking about more of a widespread kind of society impulse to... And just, yeah, a philosophical idea that this is a good thing. Yeah. That's true. Whereas a lot of those pre-17th century societies were probably pretty content, let's say, in their... As they were. As they were, yeah. I don't know. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.

So in the late Middle Ages, there were four main civilizations that were about equally advanced. Europe, the Islamic world, India, and the Far East, composing of China, Japan, and Korea. Three of those civilizations remained more or less stable, and only Europe became dynamic. No one knows why Europe became dynamic at the time. Historians have their theories, but these are only speculation. At any rate, it is clear that rapid development toward a technological form of society occurs only under special conditions."

So there is no reason to assume that a long-lasting technological regression cannot be brought about. Would society eventually develop again toward an industrial technological form? Maybe, but there is no use in worrying about it since we can't predict or control events 500 or 1,000 years in the future. Those problems must be dealt with by the people who will live at that time. No, we should have just kept reading on. He's got us again. So yeah, I mean, he does make the point that obviously like...

He doesn't argue that society won't eventually progress again. Like it does seem to be a pretty natural extension of human ingenuity and human nature. Right. But his argument is more so that we can regress as well if we so choose to. Yeah.

Okay. So we come finally to the end after this monster of an episode, the future. Finally, we come to Ted's perception of the future and how the system will grow and change if it does not crumble to revolution. So we've talked about the components that make up the system, uh, the, the power process, leftism, uh, the, the feeling that how reliant we are on this broad system. Um,

now, and we've also talked about his idea of revolution, basically, which is his solution. Now we come to his ideas about what the future will look like and how the system will grow and change if it does not crumble to revolution. And it is not a good outlook. It's not a positive outlook.

He says, but suppose now that industrial society does survive the next several decades and what the bugs and that bugs do eventually get worked out of the system so that it functions smoothly. What kind of system will it be? We will consider several possibilities. First, let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. So, yeah, better, better.

Better than us at everything. In that case, presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems and machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight or else human control over the machines might be retained.

And this is relevant now more than ever, really. If the machines are permitted to make all of their own decisions, we can't make any conjecture as to the results because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines.

What a sentence. I mean, yeah. I mean, we really would not understand how hyper, how more intelligent, like ants don't understand how we think. For example, we would not be able to comprehend how things more intelligent than us. No way. Would see the world. So yeah, I mean, that naturally comes with the risk that they might see us as nothing more than ants. Yeah.

It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines, nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. Which is kind of what we already have done with the societal machine that we exist in. Fundamentally so. Fundamentally, yeah. Yeah.

As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex, and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of the decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually, a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently at

At that stage, the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide. The future is bleak. Damn you, Elon Musk and your AI. Grok will rule us all.

I mean, yeah, people point and laugh at this. He's saying this about AI and yet AI generates pictures of humans with six fingers as if that'll happen. Forgetting the fact that AI has only existed in the form that we know it for about five years. And it has improved. Remember the old AI generated videos of the monstrous creations created by AI eating spaghetti and stuff and it looked so fucking stupid? Yeah.

So bad. Five years later, I can literally not determine what is an AI video anymore. Already. Already. Already. Okay. That's how quickly. I did not know. I mean, when you factor in the fact that we are using AI to increase the speed of AI development as well, like it's kind of a snowball going down a giant mountain. It will pick up speed and increase development at just an unfathomable level.

Right. Totally. Like it just builds on itself, which is why it'll happen quicker and quicker and quicker. Yes. Yes. Well, also on top of that, look, this, this is why I'm more optimistic about it because I honestly think I like the idea of robots governing us. I think that make decisions. Do you have faith that they will care to keep us around?

Yeah, I think so. I think they'll probably just see us in the same way that we look at species, but we're just kind of too ignorant and stupid to stop their extinction. I think that they'd just be much, much better at making literally every decision. I mean, look, if anybody's had the experience, Jackson, you don't know because you don't drive, but driving a Tesla...

is so much better than... There's going to be some car rev heads out there that'll just be like, what the hell are you talking about? But just so you know, rev heads, you are in the minority. You know, like most of us just want to drive to the supermarket and not be hit by a four-wheel drive. And that...

Lofty life goals right there. Yeah, huge. If you're in the market for that, look no further than the Tesla, right? It's just... It's already getting to the point where it's giving off the illusion that you're driving when in reality it's mostly driving. And it's right. It's just like I can feel it when I go off of auto-drive mode to drive mode. I am making so many more mistakes than the computer is. Of course. And like you say, Jackson...

Think about that technology 10 years from now, 20, 30. Of course, but you're talking about a tool in the conventional sense. Yes, it is a computer. It is not at all...

what we are talking about here though. We are talking about sentient life hyper intelligent life forms at this point what he's describing. You put a personality in your Tesla and let it make all the decisions. You have lost complete control. You can currently turn off the auto control or you can kind of make minor adjustments to the technology to make it

you know, act in a safer way. It is on guide rails. It is operating in a paradigm that we have set. You give it sentience, it can remove those blocks, you know, by its own volition because it is so much more intelligent than us. And so you hop into your car and you say, you insult Elon Musk or something or you insult Tesla and then the car takes issue with that and decides to drive you into a river. Yeah.

Yeah, I honestly just don't think that it would be like that because, again, it is hard what he's saying there and what you were saying before. It's hard for us to comprehend what something that's that much more intelligent would be. Because, again, we would be ants to it. Yes, but then if that's the case, any risk is too great a risk. What do you mean?

Well, I'm saying like the scale of what the outcome would be if things went wrong would be astronomical. So at that point, any level of risk is too much risk. 0.01% risk of total annihilation is too much risk. I would not gamble with the future of the human race in that way. Yeah, you're right. That is kind of a scary thought. It's the scale of the outcome. We're not talking about... Like I could take a...

let's say 20% odds, 20% chance of me breaking my bone. But on the other hand, 80% chance I get a million dollars. I probably take that bet, right? I'll take that coin flip.

That weird coin that only lands on heads 20% of the time. But regardless, I would take that bet because the scale of the outcomes there is so great. And yes, the scale of the positive outcomes of AI is also great, right? Like unlimited knowledge, technological advancements that we could just never have fathomed on our own ability. But then you look at the 0.001% all life ending to the machine gods. I don't know. That's hard. That is hard. And it's not 0.001%.

No. Probably higher than that. Probably. True. On the other hand, this is still Ted. On the other hand, it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case, the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer. But control over large systems of machine will be in the hands of a tiny elite just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques, the elite will have greater control over the masses, and because human work will no longer be necessary, the masses, well,

the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless, they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane, they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate, uh-oh, until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Is there a chance that's already happening? I think so. Don't you? I mean, it's definitely in the elite's benefit, right? Like...

It's certainly not unbelievable. But I'd say this, like, I think that this is kind of just an interim period until...

AI technology becomes so smart that it kind of just outsmarts its owners. But yeah, go on. Yep. Or if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see it so that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep them busy. I hope mine's Lego. And that anyone who may become...

Oh, you don't have to hope. Free Lego bricks, please. And then anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes treatment to cure his problem.

Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them sublimate their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals. I mean, out of those three...

Out of those three outcomes, I know which one I'm choosing. I'm going to Lego me as a cow domesticated animal livestock version, please.

It doesn't actually sound that bad at all, does it? Well, that's what you're arguing for and what you've argued for the entire time, really. Yeah, I like being the idea of dogs. Dogs seem like they have pretty good lives, generally, as long as they don't have cruel owners, which I'm betting will be taken out of the equation. But that... Sorry, go on. I was going to say that. I often say that. I often, like...

I'm feeling frustrated from a hard day of work. Things aren't going my way or whatever. I look at my cats. They've spent the last 18 hours laying in a slightly warm spot on a carpet, cleaning themselves slowly and then sleeping the rest of the time. And I'm like, waiting for me to feed them at a designated time later on in the night. I'm like, damn, that existence actually seems great. Doesn't it? Yeah. But again, it probably wouldn't be a rewarding existence.

You wouldn't feel fulfilled. Every time I ever look at my dog, I always think, is there anything else you want to be doing? No. Because it seems like, exactly. It seems like when they want something, they come up to you and you know what they want and you give it to them and then they just go back to sleep.

Yeah, but they don't feel... They feel fulfilled by base things like that. They don't have any concept of society. We do. We have deeper ambitions, let's say. But don't you think that that's what's going to happen? We're just going to go up to robots and be like, and they'll be like, do you want more Lego? And they'll be like...

And then you get more. What a fantastic future you've envisioned where we're stumbling mutes. They can't even verbalize things because we have been so conditioned by society or the systems into just being dumb, docile creatures. You know what? Maybe because AI are so intelligent, they will just see our form of language and communication the same way we see our cats and dogs as communicating to us. Because when it comes to dogs...

I feel, and Kat, I feel like that there is some limited capacity of verbal communication between the two of us. Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. They'd probably think the same about us. Yeah. Yeah, that's terrifying. I don't want to live in a system like that. I'm sorry, I don't. I don't. It sounds great to you. I don't know why it sounds great to you. I think you are more ambitious than you give yourself credit for.

Why would that make me more ambitious, wanting to be a pet? No, I'm saying I think you are more ambitious than you give yourself credit for. I don't think you're being honest in that you were saying that you want to be a pet to the system. It's not so much that I want to be a pet. It's just that I don't think that it would be that particularly bad of an outcome, especially because this is something that I'm grappling with a lot on my self-help channel at the moment, which is you want to succeed in this day and age with the world as it is now.

Pretty fucking easy. Yeah. Really easy. Easier than it's ever been before. Easier than it's ever... For the very fact that most of the people that we're talking to right now are American, you shouldn't know who the fuck we are. You should not know who two random cunts in Australia are. And yet here we are. If you just, like, follow and pursue, like, basic recipes that are there...

You will get the end result. But the question is, in a world like that, where basically everything is just cooking, really, it's just follow the recipe, get the result. Where does the fulfillment come from at that point? I think we're a lot closer to the world that he's insinuating we're in than we are, than we think we are. That's all I'm saying.

In fact, actually, I really wish that I said that because I know that a lot of people would have stopped paying attention at the three and a half hour mark. I wish I explained it like that before. That's what I'm getting at. Yeah, let us know what you clicked off this video. But that's my response to him is that...

He's sitting there and saying we already do live in this world to some degree. And I would say, I think we, well, I mean, we're 40 years down the track. So yes, yes, we live in that world more. Thanks, Ted.

Yeah, sorry, man. That's all I got. No, that's good. You're good. Oh, thank you. But suppose now, Jordan, that these computer scientists do not succeed in developing artificial intelligence so that human work remains necessary. Even so, machines will take care of more and more of the simpler tasks, so there will be an increasing surplus of human workers at the lower levels of ability. We see this happening already. There are many people who find it difficult or impossible to get work because for intellectual or psychological reasons they cannot acquire the level of training necessary to make themselves useful in the present system.

On those who are employed, ever-increasing demands will be placed. They will need more and more training, more and more ability, and will have to be ever more reliable, conforming, and docile because they will be more and more like cells of a giant organism.

Their tasks will be increasingly specialized so that their work will be, in a sense, out of touch with the real world, being concentrated on one tiny slice of reality. The system will have to use any means that it can, whether psychological or biological, to engineer people to be docile, to have the abilities that the system requires, and to sublimate their drive for power into some specialized task. But the statement that the people of such a society will have to be docile may require qualification. The society may find compelling

useful, provided that ways are found of directing competitiveness into channels that serve the needs of the system. We can imagine a future society in which there is endless competition for positions of prestige and power, but

But no more than a very few people will reach the top. But no more than a very few amount of people will ever reach the top where the only real power is. Very repellent is a society in which a person can satisfy his need for power only by pushing large numbers of other people out of the way and depriving them of their opportunity for power.

One can envision scenarios that incorporate aspects of more than one of the possibilities that we have just discussed. For instance, it may be that machines will take over most of the work that is of real practical importance, but that human beings will be kept busy by being given relatively unimportant work. It has been suggested, for example, that a great development of the service industries might provide work for human beings. Thus, people would spend their time shining each other's shoes and

driving each other around in taxi cabs, making handicrafts for one another, waiting on each other's tables, etc. This seems to us a thoroughly contemptible way for human race to end up. Thoroughly contemptible.

Yeah, because it's not ambitious enough. Gotta love that phrase. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we doubt that many people would find fulfilling lives in such pointless busy work. They would seek other dangerous outlets, drugs, crimes, cults, hate groups, unless they were biologically or psychologically engineered to adapt them to such a way of life.

Whatever else may be the case, it is certain that technology is creating for human beings a new physical and social environment, radically different from the spectrum of environments to which natural selection has adapted the human race physically and psychologically. I mean, yeah, we already know that is true 100% with how much social media has just destroyed the psyche of younger generations. We were not meant for that.

In fact, I think that that's actually, I always refer to sort of jokingly, but sort of seriously. Don't you think the Zoomers are the first cyborg generation? Yeah. Well, yes, because they were born hand in hand with technology, the technology that we know of. Hand in hand. You hand them an iPad at the age of three, they are fundamentally co-bonded from that point in terms of development. Pretty much the computer is telling them what to think at this point. Change my mind. I mean, I agree.

Ted would agree. That's all that matters. That's all that matters. I'm starting to realize that at this point. If man is not adjusted to this new environment by being artificially re-engineered,

like Jordan just said, that he will be adapted to it through a long and painful process of natural selection. The former is far more likely than the latter. It would, and this is his final point that I'm going to quote here, really. It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences. Oh, it's a lot of reading. We come to the conclusion though, our own personal conclusion that I wrote.

In the decades since its publication, industrial society and its future has come to occupy a contentious position in both public and academic consciousness. An admittedly impressive feat, given it was penned by a madman who bombed people repeatedly over the span of a decade. On one hand, Ted's critique of technological acceleration has actually resonated more with people over time. It's an honest and relatable insight and explanation for what many people notice under the surface.

...

On the other hand, however, his violence irreversibly taints his ideas to those who, as Ted may say, are socialized. Some take issue with the idea that mankind would be happier in a pre-industrial revolution world, a world where infant mortality was exceptionally high, and your quality of life would pale in comparison to that that you would experience today.

Those with that particular analysis of his manifesto believe that Ted's desire to completely abolish civilization is very likely an incredibly silly and naive idea as it was a violent time and that violence only ever drops once civilization, as we know, was formed. The core argument against Ted's thesis is simple. We wouldn't have invented civilization if we didn't need it. Do you agree with that? Yes.

That's actually a really nice, elegant way of putting it. Yeah, that's the best way I could have summed up my feelings for why Ted...

is probably more wrong in his resolution of the issue. I think the issue that he identifies is there, but I think that his resolution is the incorrect part of his manifesto. Not just the bombing people. I mean the idea of revolution and completely upending the system.

I, again, succinctly, I think it's the argument against that is we wouldn't have invented civilization if we didn't need it. Yeah. Ted would likely argue, however, that technology is an endless beast. We may have started civilization for noble reasons and it may have been beneficial at some points, but Ted would again, likely argue that it has put us on a path with only one outcome, the total destruction and extinction of the human race.

So we'll end this lengthy deconstruction of Ted's manifesto by quoting point 163. Point 163. Suppose the system survives the crisis of the next several decades. By that time, it will have...

...

Okay.

Human freedom mostly will have vanished because individuals and small groups will be impotent vis-a-vis large organizations armed with super technology and an arsenal of advanced psychological and biological tools for manipulating human beings besides instruments of surveillance and physical coercion. Only a very small number of people will have any real power and even those probably will have only very limited freedom because their behavior too will be regulated.

just as today our politicians and corporate executives can only retain their positions of power for as long as their behavior remains within certain fairly narrow limits.

That's, yeah. Yeah, probably. What a text. What a text. Can I just say, you and Kira this week did something much better than anything that I learned in my degree, which was basically just thinking about this stuff for four years straight. I think you did a really good job of summarizing this. I mean...

considering it was about three and a half hours, I don't think I could claim that we did a good job summarizing it. Summarizing. Yeah, true. That's a good, yeah, not a great word, but I'll say deconstructing it. Yeah. Thoroughly deconstructing it as much as we can. I'm not a, I am not a, what would I say? I'm not an educated person on this matter at all. I did it as much justice as we could have really. No, I think that you got the gist of it very well.

Yeah. So I wanted to end it though, by asking this question to you, and I guess we'll just wrap it there. Do you think that Ted believed in what he wrote? Yes. Is that what we're just ending on? It's like, no, in my mind, that's all you need to say. Do you think there's any more that needs to be said on that?

There is. I mean, there are definitely people out there that think that it was just an excuse to violence. And I said this last week. I think that he definitely believes in what he said, but maybe not as passionately as he did, perhaps. Like, maybe it was more so a rationalization for why he wanted to enact violence more so. Yes. Well, I think that that's definitely true as well. But I can guarantee you one thing.

That guy isn't bullshitting in his manifesto. I think he genuinely thinks that that's the future of humanity.

Yeah, I agree with that. But like, yeah, I think that you can also just use this as an excuse to be violent, which he clearly did. To take back some form of power by enacting violence. Like that was, in a way, his power process that he spoke about. Like, again, I think a lot of this text is self-identification of his own inner turmoil and how he felt powerless in a modern society, which is why it's so accurate, because it is an honest introspection. Isn't that interesting? Yeah.

Manifesto might not even be the right word. It's sort of just like a prose or a lamentation or something. I was going to say a diary, but yeah. A diary. A Reddit thread. It's a Reddit thread. And there goes one of the most up-duded Reddit threads in human history. If only he were out of... I wish he was allowed Reddit in prison.

Let him have it. What's he going to do? He'd be a lot less violent and a lot more annoying. And at the end of the day, I don't know which one's a bigger crime. I want to read his manifesto on like Stacey's and stuff, like women. Like I really want to know how incel he got. Do you need to read it? No, I don't. I'm telling you there's enough incel Reddit threads out there to know exactly what he would have thought about it. Yeah. You can piece it together from his progeny.

It is kind of wild to think because, again, he even identifies having sex as a natural process of the power process or a reward of the power process. So it is interesting to think about how different it would have actually turned out if he just did get laid. I'm going to say... President of the United States. Yeah.

Oh my god, could you imagine? The greatness he could have... Beats Reagan with his hard rhetoric. The greatness he could have achieved.

Okay. Holy fuck. That's a really funny thought that like the difference between a president and a Ute bomber is getting laid. And kind of true, dude. Because don't you think, honestly, the history of American presidents is a history of whoever is the coolest option. Oh yeah, for sure. And what does that mean at the end of the day? It basically just means your ability to get pussy. That's it. Yeah. Well, that would explain why there's been no female presidents so far.

Actually, that is lesbian erasure. My bad. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like you need a lesbian candidate to run. And actually, if you think about it, I'm honestly being sincere when I say this. You wouldn't know this in Australia, but I honestly think one of the coolest politicians we have is Penny Wong. She's a Chinese lesbian in Australia. And dude, it's just more point to it. She can get pussy. That's why.

Yeah, the masses respect it. They don't respect the Unabomber crying about not getting pussy. We truly are the modern day philosophers. Look, man, honestly, I was really, really impressed with this week. I'm always really impressed with every week, but this was no easy task. No, it really wasn't. And I think that you simplified it quite well, especially given the time constraints that you guys had.

It was definitely difficult. I'll be honest. I had to read through the Unabomber's manifesto several times. And you knew that I had a migraine this week as well. So I had to do that. Which was excruciating. That's exactly what you want to be reading when you have a migraine. Yeah, it was bad. The Unabomber's theories of how the world ends. I hope we did it as much justice as we could. I hope everyone in the audience enjoyed it. It's a massive one. So I really do hope you guys enjoy it.

stuff in here and take something from it. You don't have to agree. Obviously, you don't have to agree with the Unabomber or our assessment. You have to agree with us. Not the Unabomber, though. You probably won't. We're stupid fucking idiots. So it's totally fine if you disagree with us. In fact, it's encouraged. So please do disagree with us. Hey, leave comments disagreeing with us below. It really does help out.

Well, honestly, yeah, I would be very interested to hear other people's thoughts on it. Absolutely. So please do leave comments below about your interpretation on the manifesto if you have read it because I'm incredibly interested in reading some of the comments from people. Do so respectfully, of course. Or don't. I don't care. Don't be rude. Yeah, I don't fucking care. Insult me all you want. Just don't insult Jordan. Poor defenseless Jordan. We can't insult Jordan otherwise he won't show up naked the next week's episode.

Yeah, I'll be too scared for that. I'll come in fully clothed. What a tragedy that would be. You're going to have to get jacked by the time we do our naked episode.

That's a good goal, actually. Thank you. All right, guys. That's going to do it for this week. Official.men for seven-day free earlier access. No, wait. Seven-day free trial to official.men, which is our membership website where you can get early access to Red Thread, usually about four days early in advance, as well as ad-free versions of all of our shows, all early, as well as other content as well. I know Jordan and I and our friend Connor have

I've been doing a bad movie kind of show. So you can go watch us watch bad movies over there. It's a lot of fun. People love it over on the official. People really like it. Yeah. Again, angers me to no end. I hate the fact that that does well. I really do. Yeah. Cause Jordan's in misery for about three hours, three hours of my life. Yeah. Worth it. Yeah. Apparently. Yeah.

Jordan is but a victim to the system of official dot men. Oh, my God. Slave to the algorithm. See, this is, I'm telling you, I don't understand, Jackson, how you can be a YouTuber and find that reality to be so dystopic because that is our reality. It's just that. I love watching bad movies.

I love it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Because you're even more of a slave to this. Oh, you say I've been conditioned by bad movies? You've been conditioned. Oh, no. Oh, no. I really don't know how you can enjoy watching something that is objectively bad. It makes me feel better about my own existence. And your own creation. Yeah. It's true, though. Honestly, I'll tell you this. This podcast is so much better than those four movies that we've seen.

Even in terms of direction decision. You can go check out what we're talking about right now. Other than that, share the show with friends. It really does help out. That's the best way to help us out, honestly. Just share it around. It helps out in the algorithm, the system, the system that acts out against us. Yeah, really appreciate you guys. Thanks very much. Thank you, Jordan, for showing up. Links below to all of his stuff, including his channels, his self-help channel.

He's a main channel. It's very funny. Even if you're a foreigner, go check it out. It's hilarious. You'll love it. If you love Jordan on the show, you'll love him there. And he's also got a live show so all Australians can go see him live. Tickle him in real life. He loves it. Yeah. All right. See you guys. Bye, guys.