2022-05-05

This article is a follow up to my article on "The Unabomber manifesto", It will mostly include the second part of my personal highlights, which I had not completed at the time of my first article on the topic.

I have completed the reading of the book the day of this article writing, and I can highly suggest you take the time to read it for your self.

Disclaimer: This time, I allowed myself to edit some small part of it (mainly punctuation), to improve it's readability. I forgot to specified in the last article that since I copied the text by hand, their is always risk for typos.

1. 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.



2. Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the break-down of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe.



3. For primitive societies the natural world (which usually changes only slowly) provided a stable framework and therefore a sens of security. In the modern world, it is human society that dominates nature rather than the other way around, and modern society changes very rapidly owing to technological change. Thus their is no stable framework.



4. A technological society has to weaken family ties, and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual's loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a 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 expenses of the system.


Since all technological society are fundamentally based around efficiency, this process is unavoidable


5. 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. What they do for themselves, is done along channels laid down by the system.



6. Behavior is regulated not only trough explicit rules and not only by the government. Control is often exercised through indirect coercion or through psychological pressure or manipulation, and by organizations other than the government, or by the system as a whole. Most large organizations use some form of propaganda to manipulate public attitudes or behavior. Propaganda is not limited to "commercials" and advertisements, and sometimes it is not even consciously intended as propaganda by the people who make it.


I have seen this exact process being efficiently employed by the Canadian government during the "Covid crisis" to forcefully coerce people into taking the so called "Covid vaccines" and accept the (excessive, irrational and unjustifiable) "health measures".


7. An example of indirect coercion: There is no law that says we have to go to work every day and follow our employer's orders. Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners. Hence most of us can survive only as someone else employee.



8. To their credit, most of the slaves were not content with their servitude. We do sneer at people who are content with servitude.



9. People vary in their susceptibility to advertising and marketing techniques. Some people are so susceptible that, even if they make a great deal of money, they cannot satisfy their constant craving for the shiny new toys that the marketing industry dangles before their eyes. So they always fell hard-pressed financially even if their income is large and their craving are frustrated.


People are so focus on getting the money to fuel their addictions, that they basically live for their work. This is not how one can achieve a fulfilling life.


10. Some people partly satisfy their need for power by identifying themselves with a powerful organization or mass movement. An individual lacking goals or power joins a movement or an organization, adopts it's goals as his own, then works toward these goals. When some of the goals are attained the individual, even though his personal efforts have played only an insignificant part in the attainment of the goals, feels (through his identification with the movement or organizations) as if he had gone trough the power process. This phenomenon was exploited by the fascists, Nazis and communists.



11. Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research.


I doubt this refer to "science" as in a the scientific method, but as a field of work, where the credibility of experts and study are often being exploited and biased to promote a desired idea or perception. Even if the study it self is not corrupt or bias, the process in which this study can be brought to the public attentions, leaves ample opportunity to mislead.


12. Freedom means having power; not the power to control other people but the power to control the circumstances of one's own life. One does not have freedom if anyone else (especially a large organization) has power over one, no matter how benevolently, tolerantly and permissively that power may be exercised. It is important not to confuse freedom with mere permissiveness.



13. The degree of personal freedom that exists in a society is determined more by the economic and technological structure of the society than by its laws or its form of government.



14. The mass media are mostly under the control of large organizations that are integrated into the system. Anyone who has a little money can have something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect.
    
    ...
    
    Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them.



15. Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what could be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a "free" man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual.



16. Freedom is restricted in part by psychological control of which people are unconscious, and moreover many people's ideas of what constitutes freedom are governed more by social convention than by their real needs.



17. 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.



18. The system has to force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior.
    
    ...
    
    It isn't natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the real world.

I figured that this article was starting to get long enough as it is, so I decided that it would be better to stop it here, and add the rest of my Highlight's in a third, and (probably) final article on the topic.

By Amos Nimos