KACZYNSKI

Posted by Herb7734 7 years ago to Philosophy
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An interview of Ted Kaczynski By James Patterson. The Unibomber, Kaczynski has an I.Q. of 177: "It's simple really. The more we ask technology to do for us, the more power we have to give it. Right now the world's most brilliant minds are designing artificial intelligence and robots that they think will solve all our problems but will only spell doom for the entire human race! Human beings can't handle this kind of power.Who could? Once AI and robots are in place, they will either destroy humanity outright or give one person -- the head of Google, say -- a measure of godlike power that Caligula never dreamed possible.Right now, who is really more powerful? Google or the NSA? How about tomorrow? I tried to stop all this from happening. I saw what was coming."


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  • Posted by Dobrien 7 years ago
    Hi Herb7734,
    I was compelled to read some of his manifesto because of this post. I had to quit around the 160th numbered paragraph he seemed he was going on and on. He did refer to himself as we throughout. I found much of his description of the leftist collectivists to be very well examined
    I certainly have a different view of him after reading 1/2 his diatribe.
    I do have a much different view of technology
    than he does. I agree that tech makes it easier for evil people to be more evil. It also has many upsides for good.

    I found this very interesting: " Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something that we will call the “power process.” This is closely related to the need for power (which is widely recognized) but is not quite the same thing. The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it autonomy."
    " Autonomy as a part of the power process may not be necessary for every individual. But most people need a greater or lesser degree of autonomy in working toward their goals. Their efforts must be undertaken on their own initiative and must be under their own direction and control." I think there is a great deal of truth to this idea.

    My dad would always say you can be very smart but you need common sense. Kaczynski, with his terroristic acts sadly lacked common sense.
    Had he used his brilliance to create a message and understanding of the leftists flaws and agendas , his legacy would have been far more favorable and he taken more seriously.
    Regards,DOB
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    • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 7 years ago
      Power or as you put it, autonomy to work on one's own toward a goal must include the ability to focus down line through every consequence in the achievement of that goal.

      As I have observed, not many have this ability or desire on their own therefore it should be rare indeed, that an individual be fully trusted without some sort of guidance from someone who does.

      Mankind has evolved way too fast. I fear that many have skipped over the important considerations in the attainment of our goals.
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      • Posted by 7 years ago
        It is the failure of a life-affirming philosophy that keeps up with scientific progress that's the major problem. We know how to use the stuff of the universe to destroy one another, but for 99+% of humanity, not a clue as to how to work together in hermony, peace and happiness. As an aside, Islam has taught us that harmony is possible without peace or happiness, we really need the whole package.
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        • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 7 years ago
          islamic harmony is Not much different than the ignorance of pagan bicameral consequences of the sky is falling and it's your fault the gods are angry.

          Kinda sounds like our very own demoncraps of the left and progressives now doesn't it.
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          • Posted by 7 years ago
            The lack of introspection among the Dems is astonishing. If it sounds good, it must be good, say the usefull idiots, who in reality are otherwise fairly intelligent persons. They are seduced by the sufferings of humanity and think that altruism is the solution. At the same time, they'll all agree to the give them a fish versus teaching them how to fish is the best way to go.So many screwed up premises, I'd have to write a book. Oh wait, she already has.
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            • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 7 years ago
              Not to mention that they have caused these problems with their own faux and demented altruism...meaning "we the people" have been sacrificed, not them...I say, their faux so called intelligence makes them "Useless" idiots...either way we look at it, it spells, compartmentalized bull crap...no matter how high the IQ number.
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          • Posted by lrshultis 7 years ago
            I doubt that, since the human brain is bicameral, except for an extremely large amount of discovered knowledge about reality, humans are any more advanced toward living than were the pagans. Billions of humans still believe in gods and goddesses controlling Nature. They still depend upon evolutionary built emotion systems to determine quickly whether others and the rest of nature are for them or against them. Your pejorative 'demoncraps' is a small indication that your bicameral brain is working well in the 'demon haunted world' of bicameralism.
            Are split brained or single hemisphere humans any more free of evilness and irrationality than the normal brained human? I would guess not.
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            • Posted by $ Olduglycarl 7 years ago
              The history of demoncraps is well documented and their brains are still split, otherwise they would be self inspecting...just cause we call them out doesn't mean that they made the sky fall...it just means they have been a constant pain in the butt and we are tired of it.
              Once man, (some men), became self aware and introspective, that rudimentary physical split was bridged and integration or wisdom was made possible...but that too, doesn't mean we engage in that process...sadly.
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        • Posted by Maritimus 7 years ago
          Hello, Herb,
          I did not understand your concept of harmony without peace. Cen you help me?
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          • Posted by 7 years ago
            By harmony I mean working together for the same ends. The Jihadists have that in abundance, but because that end is evil and therefore that harmony is evil, it cannot truly lead to peace or happiness in a sane world. The end result can only be just about everything negative one can imagine.
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            • Posted by Maritimus 7 years ago
              Well, I think that there are several brands of jihadists in bitter conflict among themselves. To point to them as an example of harmony makes no sense to me.
              Homo sapiens is a form of life on this planet. As all living things, it is driven by the three most basic drives: to survive, to adapt and to procreate and multiply. Built into that is competition for space and for supporting resources.
              With sizeable portion of the population illiterate and having no idea what the word philosophy means, how do you expect to conquer those basic drives? It would take a utopia to make it happen - with the reality left behind.
              From bands of kin, to tribes, to related tribal groups, ethnic identities in empires, to nation states, we arrived to United States as the first experiment in nationhood ignoring ethnicities and races: the melting pot. Well, you can see how well that is working even two and a half centuries later.
              We must accept the reality of slow evolution.
              EDIT: Missing words and spelling.
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    • Posted by $ Abaco 7 years ago
      He taught at UC Berkeley. I can't help but think that being in that environment really influenced him.
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      • Posted by 7 years ago
        Berkeley, the university designed like granola. Once you get past the fruits and nuts, all that is left are the flakes. He is truly intelligent and much of what he has to say is brilliant. Sadly, he is also a maniacal nutcase.
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        • Posted by Dobrien 7 years ago
          The fact that that much of what he said was spot on about the leftists was a surprise to me. I had also considered him a murderer, a freak who thought it ok to be judge, jury and executioner with little regard to collateral damage or personal hygiene.
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    • Posted by ewv 7 years ago
      Unabomber Kaczynski wasn't interested in criticizing the left; he was part of the viro anti-industrial revolution and was influenced by radicals like Earth First in selecting his targets to kill. When he was finally caught, a copy of Al Gore's book was found in his primitive wilderness cabin.

      Excellent sources on the Unabomber's background, goals and actions are:

      Ron Arnold's EcoTerror: The Violent Agenda to Save Nature -- The World of the Unabomber, Chapters 1-3 "The Bomb", "Manifesto", and "The Bomber" pp 1-101.

      Alston Chase's Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist.
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      • Posted by 7 years ago
        I think he was not as much of an eco-freak as he was fearing the possibility of some sort of technical singularity.
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        • Posted by ewv 7 years ago
          "[T]he two main tasks for the present are to promote social stress and instability in industrial society and to develop and propagate an ideology that opposes technology and the industrial system. When the system becomes sufficiently stressed and unstable, a revolution against technology may be possible...

          "We have no illusions about the feasibility of creating a new, ideal form of society. Our goal is only to destroy the existing form of society.

          "But an ideology, in order to gain enthusiastic support, must have a positive ideal as well as a negative one; it must be FOR something as well as AGAINST something. The positive ideal that we propose is Nature. That is, WILD nature: those aspects of the functioning of the Earth and its living things that are independent of human management and free of human interference and control. And with wild nature we include human nature, by which we mean those aspects of the functioning of the human individual that are not subject to regulation by organized society but are products of chance, or free will, or God (depending on your religious or philosophical opinions).

          "Nature makes a perfect counter-ideal to technology for several reasons. Nature (that which is outside the power of the system) is the opposite of technology (which seeks to expand indefinitely the power of the system). Most people will agree that nature is beautiful; certainly it has tremendous popular appeal. The radical environmentalists ALREADY hold an ideology that exalts nature and opposes technology. [30] It is not necessary for the sake of nature to set up some chimerical utopia or any new kind of social order. Nature takes care of itself: It was a spontaneous creation that existed long before any human society, and for countless centuries many different kinds of human societies coexisted with nature without doing it an excessive amount of damage. Only with the Industrial Revolution did the effect of human society on nature become really devastating. To relieve the pressure on nature it is not necessary to create a special kind of social system, it is only necessary to get rid of industrial society. Granted, this will not solve all problems. Industrial society has already done tremendous damage to nature and it will take a very long time for the scars to heal. Besides, even pre-industrial societies can do significant damage to nature. Nevertheless, getting rid of industrial society will accomplish a great deal. It will relieve the worst of the pressure on nature so that the scars can begin to heal. It will remove the capacity of organized society to keep increasing its control over nature (including human nature). Whatever kind of society may exist after the demise of the industrial system, it is certain that most people will live close to nature, because in the absence of advanced technology there is no other way that people CAN live...

          "As for the negative consequences of eliminating industrial society—well, you can’t eat your cake and have it too. To gain one thing you have to sacrifice another."

          Compare that with Ayn Rand's The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. And compare it to Earth First's Live Wild or Die journal in the 1980s and 90s that Kaczynski was reading -- including their issue in 1990 proclaiming in a quote by International Workers of the World leader Bill Haywood, "Sabotage means to push pack, pull out or break off the fangs of capitalism", accompanied by what they called the "Eco-Fucker Hit List" with names and addresses of their enemies, including the California Forestry Association where Gil Murray was murdered by Kaczynski.
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          • Posted by 7 years ago
            This all started when Cro-Magnon realized that he was different from other animals. All animals except men are forcibly compliant with their environment. They live or die depending on how well they deal with their environment. Man, on the other hand found that when his environment became too hostile, he could do something to change that environment. That was the first thing that man did that completely set him apart from animals
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      • Posted by Dobrien 7 years ago
        As well as this: From Kaczynski's Manifesto
        15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.

        16. Words like “self-confidence,” “self-reliance,” “initiative,” “enterprise,” “optimism,” etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.

        17. Art forms that appeal to modern leftish intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment.

        18. Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been brought up properly.
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      • Posted by Dobrien 7 years ago
        This sounds critical to me. From his Manifesto:
        THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MODERN LEFTISM

        6. Almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply troubled society. One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism, so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern society in general.
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        • Posted by ewv 7 years ago
          He certainly rants at them -- much of it psychologizing and superficial rambling to the point where most of them wouldn't recognize themselves -- while holding the same core beliefs himself. "The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend" -- especially philosophically.

          He ranted at both the left and the right establishments. Kaczynski was a loaner paranoid over any kind of establishment. He didn't join viro organizations either, staying by himself as a hermit in the wilderness. The viros didn't know who he was, but he hated industrial civilization, read their radical publications, and acted on them to target his last victims.

          The last one was Gil Murray of the California Forestry Association, which had been fingered by the radical viros and which is certainly not the left. You can read the gory description of that and Kaczynski's motjves Ron Arnold's Ecoterror. The list of Kaczynski's bombings is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kac...

          He was in no way even remotely intellectually allied with us against the left or anything else, quite aside from his murders that almost everyone opposes.
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          • Posted by 6 years, 12 months ago
            My purpose was to illustrate that truth is true no matter who says it.
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            • Posted by ewv 6 years, 12 months ago
              A rambling lunatic steeped in viro left misanthropic nihilism who happens to stumble onto an occasional out of context truth is not worth listening to let alone citing for whatever he says that happens to be true regardless of whether he understands it himself. You have to know what is true on other grounds before you can even go out of your way to recognize the coincidence coming from Kaczynski. A stopped clock is 'right' twice a day, too, but you don't know when unless you already know what time it is. The clock doesn't know and neither do you by watching it.
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              • Posted by 6 years, 12 months ago
                It is a bad practice to automatically discount a truth because it happens to be mouthed by a maniac. Keep in mind also, that all truths are not beneficent, so that understanding an evil truth makes it easier to cope with it.
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