190. Any kind of social conflict helps to destabilize the system, but one should be careful about what kind of conflict one encourages. The line of conflict should be drawn between the mass of the people and the power-holding elite of industrial society (politicians, scientists, upper-level business executives, government officials, etc.). It should not be drawn between the revolutionaries and the mass of the people. For example, it would be bad strategy for the revolutionaries to condemn Americans for their habits of consumption. Instead, the average American should be portrayed as a victim of the advertising and marketing industry, which has suckered him into buying a lot of junk that he doesn't need and that is very poor compensation for his lost freedom. Either approach is consistent with the facts. It is merely a matter of attitude whether you blame the advertising industry for manipulating the public or blame the public for allowing itself to be manipulated. As a matter of strategy one should generally avoid blaming the

191. One should think twice before encouraging any other social conflict than that between the power-holding elite (which wields technology) and the general public (over which technology exerts its power). For one thing, other conflicts tend to distract attention from the important conflicts (between power-elite and ordinary people, between technology and nature); for another thing, other conflicts may actually tend to encourage technologization, because each side in such a conflict wants to use technological power to gain advantages over its adversary. This is clearly seen in rivalries between nations. It also appears in ethnic conflicts within nations. For example, in America many black leaders are anxious to gain power for African Americans by placing black individuals in the technological power-elite. They want there to be many black government officials, scientists, corporation executives and so forth. In this way they are helping to absorb the African American subculture into the technological system. Generally speaking, one should encourage only those social conflicts that can be fitted into the framework of the conflicts of power-elite vs. ordinary people, technology vs. nature.

145. Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. It is well known that the rate of clinical depression has been greatly increasing in recent decades. We believe that this is due to disruption of the power process. But even if we are wrong, the increasing rate of depression is certainly the result of some conditions that exist in today's society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable. (Yes, we know that depression is often of purely genetic origin. We are referring here to those cases in which environment plays the predominant role.)

146. Drugs that affect the mind are only one example of the new methods of controlling human behavior that modern society is developing. Let us look at some of the other methods.

147. To start with, there are the techniques of surveillance. Hidden video cameras are now used in most stores and in many other places, computers are used to collect and process vast amounts of information about individuals. Information so obtained greatly increases the effectiveness of physical coercion (i.e., law enforcement).2 Then there are the methods of propaganda, for which the mass communication media provide effective vehicles. Efficient techniques have been developed for winning elections, selling products, influencing public opinion. The entertainment industry serves as an important psychological tool of the system, possibly even when it is dishing out large amounts of sex and violence. Entertainment provides modern man with an essential means of escape. While absorbed in television, videos, etc., he can forget stress, anxiety, frustration, dissatisfaction. Many primitive peoples, when they don't have work to do, are quite content to sit for hours at a time doing nothing at all, because they are at peace with themselves and their world. But most modern people must be constantly occupied or entertained, otherwise they get “bored,” i.e.,
they get fidgety, uneasy, irritable.

Needless to say, we (WF) wouldn't desire a return to the USSR. Even just 141 arrests is unacceptable, because it's infinitely more than there was in the first 200,000 years of human existence: zero.

That aside, the fact the UK, a nominally 'liberal' and 'democratic' country with no dictator and no one-party system, is so adept at controlling their citizens, goes to show Ted was right about technology. It's not ideology that guides society; technology, for better or [mostly] worse, is what shapes society. An anti-tech movement must remain entirely focused on the destruction of industrial tech if it wants to achieve real change and real freedom. 🌲

"The whole texture of life is determined by society. Consider all the evils that are imposed on the individual by the system. To mention a few: air and water pollution; the threat of atomic war; overcrowding and traffic congestion; noise; bureaucratic red tape; the draft; destruction of the wilderness; the omnipresence of vulgar, intrusive, manipulative advertising; etc… Furthermore, the individual living independently can at least reasonably attempt to alleviate his hardships. If he is cold he can make a fire or build a better hut. If game gets scarce he can try, at least, to find an area where it is more plentiful. His decisions count; he is not helpless. But what can the individual do about air pollution or overpopulation?" - Ted Kaczynski

"By our standards the Sumerian cities were small, with population ranging from 7,000 to no more than a 20,000.
Nevertheless our simple tribesman had already come a long way. He had become a citizen,a super-tribesman,and the key difference was that in a super-tribe he no longer knew each member of his community. It was this change, the shift from personal to impersonal society, that was going to cause the human animal it's greatest agonies for the millennia ahead. As a species we were not biologically equipped to cope with a mass of strangers masquerading as members of our tribe." - Desmond Morris, The Human zoo

"The city is not a concrete jungle, it is a human zoo." ~ Desmond Morris,The Human zoo

THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT HUNTER-GATHERERS

Hunter-gatherers were not slaves to the clock or the market. Their "work" was gathering, hunting, preparing food, crafting tools which took a few hours a day. The rest of their time was spent resting, socializing, and creating. Civilization has convinced us that endless labor is natural, that exhaustion is noble, and that consumption is reward, yet none of this is inherent to human life. For most of our history, we "worked" less and lived more.

A persistent myth is that primitive life was brutal and short, but archeological and anthropologicak evidence tells a different story. Many huntee-gatherer groups had lower infant-mortality rates than early agricultural populations. Their diets rich in meat were also far more nutritious than the grain-heavy diet of early farmers, whose skeletons show signs of malnutrition, stunted growth, and disease. Civilization did not "save" humanity from statvation, it created dependance on unstable food systems.

@someprofessionals

We are also told that civilization rescued us from violence. Yet the archeological record shows that organized warfare, mas slaughter, conquest, and standing armies all began with civilization. Civilization institutionalized violence. Slavery, patriarchy, colonization, and police, all born from the need to protect power and surplus.

To call hunter-gatherers "backward" is to project the neurosis of a dying civilization onto people who were genuinly free. They lived without rulers, without prisons, without bosses, and without the spiritual emptiness that haunts the modern world. Civilization calls them "primitive" because it cannot imagine freedom without power, community without totalitarian control, or survival without domination.

Part 2.
@someprofessionals

“The individual is in a dilemma: either he decides to safeguard his freedom of choice, chooses to use traditional, personal, moral, or empirical means, thereby entering into competition with a power against which there is no efficacious defense and before which he must suffer defeat; or he decides to accept technical necessity, in which case he will himself be the victor, but only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect he has no freedom of choice.” - Jacques Ellul

“This important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.” - Ted Kaczynski

"Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society... Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable." ~ Theodore Kaczynski