The Counter Manifesto

The Counter Manifesto has no author.
It is not a statement of belief, but a refusal of distortion.
It does not seek to inspire, convert, or lead.
It names what does not hold—and what is done in its name.
It lives as a boundary—for those who will not inherit collapse as truth.

This text is part of the Clarity Sequence.

An anonymous body of works on perception, collapse, and structural refusal.

Read in continuation with: Ashes – The Code of Clarity, The Commonwealth of the Living

Prologue

This is not a call to action.
It is a refusal to lie.

The industrial-technological system is not failing. It is functioning exactly as designed: to extract, to pacify, and to erase. Its destruction of ecological balance, psychological integrity, and cultural autonomy is not accidental. It is the cost of progress as defined by those who benefit from it.

This text does not offer reform. It offers no utopia. It does not ask for consensus, comfort, or hope. It presents an orientation—a set of principles for those who can no longer pretend that survival within the system is freedom, or that critique without withdrawal is resistance.

If you are looking for optimism, look elsewhere.
If you are looking for clarity, continue.

HOW TO READ THIS TEXT

For specialists, analysts, and those trained in systems

This is not an academic text. It is not peer-reviewed, discipline-bound, or rhetorically tempered to pass through institutional filters. It does not seek approval or legitimacy from the structures it critiques.

It is written from the outside—but not in ignorance of the inside. The language is precise, not technical. The reasoning is formal, not formatted. It uses no jargon because jargon creates walls. This text is a door.

If you are trained in economics, psychology, environmental science, political theory, philosophy, or systems analysis, you will likely feel initial resistance. That is expected. You are trained to detect structure—but also to distrust what does not cite, disclaim, or soften.

This work does none of those things.

FOR ECONOMISTS AND POLICY ADVISORS

This text does not refute your models. It questions the frame they rest on—the assumption that large-scale industrial systems are the inevitable or optimal mechanism for survival and distribution.

You will find no numbers, but you will find the cost ledger beneath energy, labor, and ecological extraction.

FOR PSYCHOLOGISTS AND CLINICIANS

This is not a trauma manual. It is a structural mirror. It does not offer healing protocols, but exposes the conditions that demand healing in the first place. Where you may expect “coping,” you will see “refusal.”

This is not rejection of care—but a demand that care not be confused with compliance.

FOR POLITICAL THEORISTS AND PHILOSOPHERS

This is not a treatise. It does not argue for a new ideal form. It dismantles the logic of centralization itself—whether administered through the market, the state, or the algorithm.

It is not building theory. It is mapping consequences.

FOR GENERAL READERS

If this reads as dense, pause. Reread. It will clarify. The difficulty is not in complexity, but in refusing to lie to you in familiar language. This text assumes your intelligence, not your conformity.

This is not a manifesto in the traditional sense.
It is an instrument— to recover perception that has been distorted by scale, speed, and consensus. You are not expected to agree.
You are only expected to stay with what holds.

167. The industrial system will not break down purely as a result of revolutionary action. It will not be vulnerable to revolutionary attack unless its own internal problems of development lead it into very serious difficulties. So if the system breaks down it will do so either spontaneously, or through a process that is in part spontaneous but helped along by revolutionaries. If the breakdown is sudden, many people will die, since the world’s population has become so overblown that it cannot even feed itself any longer without advanced technology. Even if the breakdown is gradual enough so that reduction of the population can occur more through lowering of the birth rate than through elevation of the death rate, the process of de-industrialization probably will be very chaotic and involve much suffering. It is naive to think it likely that technology can be phased out in a smoothly managed, orderly way, especially since the technophiles will fight stubbornly at every step. Is it therefore cruel to work for the breakdown of the system? Maybe, but maybe not. In the first place, revolutionaries will not be able to break the system down unless it is already in enough trouble so that there would be a good chance of its eventually breaking down by itself anyway; and the bigger the system grows, the more disastrous the consequences of its breakdown will be; so it may be that revolutionaries, by hastening the onset of the breakdown, will be reducing the extent of the disaster.

This is not logic. It is roulette dressed as realism.

The system is extractive, violent, and unsustainable—yes. But calling for its sudden breakdown without ensuring survivability is not resistance. It is sacrificial ideology. The claim that a faster collapse might “reduce disaster” assumes two things:

1. That the most vulnerable will suffer less by dying sooner

2. That clarity is served by destruction, not structure

Neither holds.

Systems do not fall evenly. Collapse is never neutral. It punishes the already-exiled first—rural poor, colonized populations, children, the disabled—not technocrats or system loyalists. Those who frame death as liberation have usually positioned themselves to survive it. This is not revolution. It is abdication.

The idea that revolutionaries will only succeed if collapse is already inevitable erases the real question: What will be left standing when the system fails—and who will decide what replaces it?

To say “maybe it is cruel, maybe not” is a confession. It means you know this is not strategy. It is a gamble with other people’s lives as collateral.

168. In the second place, one has to balance struggle and death against the loss of freedom and dignity. To many of us, freedom and dignity are more important than a long life or avoidance of physical pain. Besides, we all have to die some time, and it may be better to die fighting for survival, or for a cause, than to live a long but empty and purposeless life.

This frames dignity as death, and survival as cowardice. But that’s not dignity. That’s abandonment dressed in principle.

The real loss of dignity is not living a long life. It's being denied the conditions that allow life to have agency. Many people—especially those born into dispossession—don’t choose between long life and meaning. They fight for both, in silence, without manifestos.

To say “we all have to die” is not liberation. It is license for those who plan to outlive the disaster they ignite. Those who want to die for a cause are often the ones who want others to die from it.

And when you define “empty and purposeless life” without asking what conditions emptied it, you erase the systems that commodified existence in the first place.

Dignity is not found in collapse. It is found in the refusal to let collapse be the only choice left.

169. In the third place, it is not at all certain that survival of the system will lead to less suffering than breakdown of the system would. The system has already caused, and is continuing to cause, immense suffering all over the world. Ancient cultures, that for hundreds of years gave people a satisfactory relationship with each other and with their environment, have been shattered by contact with industrial society, and the result has been a whole catalogue of economic, environmental, social and psychological problems. One of the effects of the intrusion of industrial society has been that over much of the world traditional controls on population have been thrown out of balance. Hence the population explosion, with all that that implies. Then there is the psychological suffering that is widespread throughout the supposedly fortunate countries of the West (see paragraphs 44, 45). No one knows what will happen as a result of ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect and other environmental problems that cannot yet be foreseen. And, as nuclear proliferation has shown, new technology cannot be kept out of the hands of dictators and irresponsible Third World nations. Would you like to speculate about what Iraq or North Korea will do with genetic engineering?

You diagnose real harm, then prescribe catastrophe.

Yes, the industrial system has shattered ancient cultures. Yes, it has destabilized ecologies, psyches, and relationships. But to say collapse may involve less suffering than survival is not analysis. It is a nihilist wager with no accountability.

Collapse does not reverse damage. It compounds it. The destruction of indigenous lifeways was not caused by technology alone—it was caused by systems of domination that used technology as a tool: imperialism, settler colonialism, militarized extraction. Those systems do not vanish in collapse. They resurface in scarcity—only now stripped of oversight, law, and infrastructure.

To invoke “dictators and irresponsible Third World nations” is not a neutral warning. It’s a colonial frame, masking geopolitical violence as technocratic concern. Who armed those regimes? Who destabilized them through coups, sanctions, and proxy wars?

If technology cannot be contained, then the question is not how to destroy it, but how to unbind ourselves from the systems that hoard and weaponize it. Otherwise, collapse just hands the same weapons to fewer hands—with fewer restraints.

170. “Oh!” say the technophiles, “Science is going to fix all that! We will conquer famine, eliminate psychological suffering, make everybody healthy and happy!” Yeah, sure. That’s what they said 200 years ago. The Industrial Revolution was supposed to eliminate poverty, make everybody happy, etc. The actual result has been quite different. The technophiles are hopelessly naive (or self-deceiving) in their understanding of social problems. They are unaware of (or choose to ignore) the fact that when large changes, even seemingly beneficial ones, are introduced into a society, they lead to a long sequence of other changes, most of which are impossible to predict (paragraph 103). The result is disruption of the society. So it is very probable that in their attempts to end poverty and disease, engineer docile, happy personalities and so forth, the technophiles will create social systems that are terribly troubled, even more so than the present ones. For example, the scientists boast that they will end famine by creating new, genetically engineered food plants. But this will allow the human population to keep expanding indefinitely, and it is well known that crowding leads to increased stress and aggression. This is merely one example of the PREDICTABLE problems that will arise. We emphasize that, as past experience has shown, technical progress will lead to other new problems that CANNOT be predicted in advance (paragraph 103). In fact, ever since the Industrial Revolution, technology has been creating new problems for society far more rapidly than it has been solving old ones. Thus it will take a long and difficult period of trial and error for the technophiles to work the bugs out of their Brave New World (if they ever do). In the meantime there will be great suffering. So it is not at all clear that the survival of industrial society would involve less suffering than the breakdown of that society would. Technology has gotten the human race into a fix from which there is not likely to be any easy escape.

You correctly identify the pattern: solutions that generate new dependencies and unintended consequences. But you misname the problem, and so you misname the remedy.

The enemy is not science. The betrayal came from its alignment with systems of domination—states, corporations, militaries—not from discovery itself. It is not “technophiles” who cause suffering. It is those who consolidate technical capacity into hierarchical systems, with no consent from those subjected to the outcomes.

You conflate naïve futurism with deliberate structural violence, then reject all innovation because some of it serves control. That is not caution. That is collapse ideology posing as wisdom.

You say: “technology has created new problems faster than it solved the old.” But you ignore that the scale, not the tools, determines the damage. Food engineering can entrench dependence—or relocalize resilience, depending on who holds the process.

You argue that unpredictability is a reason to destroy the system. But unpredictability also exists in collapse—only there, no one is resourced to respond.

This is not about “working the bugs out.” It’s about dismantling the extractive logic embedded in progress, while preserving the tools that can be reoriented toward survival with dignity.

To confuse betrayal with inevitability is to abandon the field to those who betrayed it.

171. But suppose now that industrial society does survive the next several decades and that the 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.

You begin not by asking what could be just or livable, but by predicting what will be inevitable and inhuman. You frame continuation as dystopia, collapse as dignity. But speculation is not structure. This move—predicting horror to justify destruction—is theological, not analytical.

What a system becomes is not determined by whether it “works smoothly.” It is determined by who it serves, who it excludes, and who is forced to adapt to it. A system can be stable and still be violent. It can be functional and still erase autonomy. The error is in imagining that efficiency is the endpoint of industrial society, rather than its tool.

To ask what the system “will be” is to accept that it will be one thing. But the truth is that systems fracture—not everyone lives under the same machine. Some are managed by it. Others are devoured by it.

If the goal is to avoid a totalizing system, then the task is not collapse. The task is disentanglement.

172. 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. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of 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.

You frame the future as a false binary: either machines control us, or a central elite controls the machines. But this isn’t prophecy—it’s projection. You have taken the logic of industrial centralization and applied it uncritically to all future forms of technology.

There is no inherent reason why intelligent machines must be organized into vast systems. That is the legacy of capital and state power—not the outcome of intelligence itself. You reproduce the very structure you claim to oppose: scale, consolidation, dependency.

You erase the third path: that intelligence—human or artificial—can be decentralized, bounded, and accountable. That it can be embedded in tools, not systems. In communities, not infrastructure.

It is not intelligence that threatens autonomy. It is unaccountable architecture. A machine that obeys its user is not dangerous. A machine that answers only to a corporate entity or military command chain is not “intelligent”—it is an extension of domination.

To claim human effort will become unnecessary assumes that meaning is tied to productivity. But not all labor is extraction. Not all effort is toil. The goal is not to preserve work. The goal is to reclaim intention—so that effort serves life, not machinery.

173. If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures 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. 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. 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 their 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 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.

What you describe is not the future. It is already the present—not with autonomous machines, but with opaque systems designed by humans and shielded from accountability.

People already cannot “turn it off.” Not because intelligence has escaped our grasp, but because the logic of the system—centralization, scale, efficiency at all costs—demands dependency. It is not machines that hold power. It is those who profit from making the machine indispensable.

You say: people will “drift” into dependence. But drift is not neutral. It is engineered convenience, deployed to corrode decision-making until obedience feels voluntary.

This is not the fault of intelligence. It is the result of systems that optimize for control, not participation. The problem is not that decisions are too complex. The problem is that people are kept from shaping the systems that generate those decisions.

You use the image of suicide to close the trap. But suicide is only the price if the system was allowed to become total. The task is not to fear intelligence. It is to limit what any system can make irreversible.

If power is truly distributed—modular, local, comprehensible—then no machine, no process, no system becomes existential. Only centralized systems carry the threat you name. And collapse will not decentralize them. It will only unmask them in their most brutal form.

174. 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 machines 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 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 until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. 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 to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that 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 to 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.

You identify a real structure: power is already held by a technocratic class, and that class increasingly governs through systems ordinary people cannot see, control, or repair. But from that recognition, you leap—not to resistance, but to apocalypse fiction.

You imagine three futures: extermination, sedation, or engineered docility. All assume a total victory of control. None account for resistance, rupture, or refusal. None imagine fracture, which is what real systems produce under pressure. Not perfection.

The idea that elites would make humanity “extinct” through reduced birth rate is not analysis. It is fantasy reframed as warning. Who becomes infertile under technocratic eugenics? Who decides who is a burden? This fear mirrors eugenic logics—it doesn’t dismantle them.

Yes, the system pathologizes discontent. Yes, therapy and wellness are often used as compliance tools. But your solution—destroy the system, let collapse sort it out—only ensures that those same techniques reappear, only without restraint, in the form of coercion and scarcity.

You call the engineered person “a domestic animal.” But you offer no plan to restore autonomy—only the hope that collapse will create space for it. Collapse creates voids, not values. It does not return us to freedom. It strips us of options, and the strong fill the vacuum first.

To critique sedation without offering structure is to hand people fear and call it clarity.

175. But suppose now that the 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 that 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 competitiveness 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 no more than a very few people will ever reach the top, where the only real power is (see end of paragraph 163). 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.

This is not speculation—it’s already in motion.

The labor system does not collapse because people are no longer needed. It mutates to extract value while denying meaning. The outcome is not leisure, but precarity. The job does not disappear—it fragments, becomes contingent, low-autonomy, high-surveillance.

You rightly observe: work becomes specialized, disconnected, synthetic. But your framing assumes this is a problem of machines replacing humans, rather than systems replacing autonomy. Specialization is not the issue.

Disempowered specialization is.

You warn of engineered docility. But docility today is not produced in labs. It’s produced in debt, surveillance, algorithmic management, and social atomization. People are not lobotomized. They are incentivized to betray their needs in order to survive.

You call it a world of sublimated power drives and competitive scrambling for elite positions. But this is not new. It is the logical conclusion of capitalist hierarchy under technological acceleration. The cruelty is not in the tools—it is in what they are optimized to serve.

Collapse will not undo this logic. It will intensify it in more desperate forms: warlordism, scarcity hierarchies, cults of discipline. The task is not to destroy the machine. It is to disengage from the structure that trains people to submit to it—and to build what replaces it with clarity, not nostalgia.

176. 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, driving each other around in taxicabs, making handicrafts for one another, waiting on each other’s tables, etc. This seems to us a thoroughly contemptible way for the human race to end up, and we doubt that many people would find fulfilling lives in such pointless busy-work. They would seek other, dangerous outlets (drugs, crime, “cults,” hate groups) unless they were biologically or psychologically engineered to adapt them to such a way of life.

You call this future contemptible—but you mistake labor stripped of dignity for labor itself. The issue is not shoe-shining or table-waiting. The issue is that in a system designed for profit, such work is made invisible, precarious, and demeaned.

What you list as "pointless" is in fact the maintenance of human environments: care work, transport, food, interaction. These are only made “unimportant” when judged by a system that values extraction over presence.

You suggest people in this world will turn to “cults, drugs, and hate groups.” But that already happens under the current system—not because they are cogs, but because they are excluded, exhausted, and lied to. Collapse doesn’t cure alienation. It intensifies it and removes the safety rails.

And your fallback remains the same: people will either be engineered to accept it or descend into chaos. You never ask what changes if these workers own the systems they operate in, shape their conditions, or set the value of their labor.

Human dignity is not restored by eliminating labor. It is restored by dismantling the structure that makes labor servitude. If service is chosen, mutual, local, and non-coercive, it is not contemptible. It is essential.

You imagine psychological engineering to make people “adapt.” But psychological conditioning already happens now—through media, debt, wage dependence, and cultural pressure to accept powerlessness as normal. The solution is not collapse. It is structure re-aligned to autonomy, not abstraction.

177. Needless to say, the scenarios outlined above do not exhaust all the possibilities. They only indicate the kinds of outcomes that seem to us most likely. But we can envision no plausible scenarios that are any more palatable than the ones we’ve just described. It is overwhelmingly probable that if the industrial-technological system survives the next 40 to 100 years, it will by that time have developed certain general characteristics: Individuals (at least those of the “bourgeois” type, who are integrated into the system and make it run, and who therefore have all the power) will be more dependent than ever on large organizations; they will be more “socialized” than ever and their physical and mental qualities to a significant extent (possibly to a very great extent) will be those that are engineered into them rather than being the results of chance (or of God’s will, or whatever); and whatever may be left of wild nature will be reduced to remnants preserved for scientific study and kept under the supervision and management of scientists (hence it will no longer be truly wild). In the long run (say a few centuries from now) it is likely that neither the human race nor any other important organisms will exist as we know them today, because once you start modifying organisms through genetic engineering there is no reason to stop at any particular point, so that the modifications will probably continue until man and other organisms have been utterly transformed.

You close the arc not with evidence, but with exhaustion: “We can envision no plausible scenarios that are more palatable.” This is not clarity. It is confession—of the limits of your imagination, not the limits of reality.

You’re not wrong that the system shapes dependence, suppresses wildness, and incentivizes modification. But you treat this as a linear inevitability, as if history only flows one way—toward total control or total collapse. This is false. Systems break. Cultures resist. Tools are reclaimed.

You reduce resistance to aesthetics: anything managed is no longer wild, anything altered is no longer real. But the line between wild and tamed is not preservation vs. purity—it is autonomy vs. extraction. There are forms of management that serve life, not control. The question is not whether we touch the world—but how.

You treat genetic engineering as a slippery slope with no friction, no refusal, no ethics, no communities capable of saying enough. That erases all movements—indigenous, ecological, worker-led—that have drawn those lines and held them. You reduce everything to trajectory, when history is built from interruptions.

The fear that humanity will be “utterly transformed” ignores a deeper reality: we already are. Culture is not purity. Survival is not stasis. The task is not to preserve man-as-he-was. It is to ensure that what we become is chosen, not imposed.

Transformation is not the enemy. Unfreedom is.

178. 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. If man is not adjusted to this new environment by being artificially re-engineered, then he will be adapted to it through a long and painful process of natural selection. The former is far more likely than the latter.

You reduce the condition of suffering to a failure of fit—a species no longer adapted to its world. But what created the misfit? Not evolution, but systems engineered to override natural limits and social cohesion. You describe a world humans cannot survive in, but you ignore the structure that made it that way.

You claim there are two options: artificial re-engineering or evolutionary suffering. But this is not a biological trap—it’s a political design. Humans did not “drift” into this environment. It was built, often violently, through enclosure, extraction, displacement, and militarization.

To say that artificial re-engineering is “more likely” is not neutral. It naturalizes coercion. It suggests that adapting people to a hostile system is more viable than dismantling the system that made hostility normal.

What you describe is not evolution. It is institutional engineering under duress—driven by the needs of capital, surveillance, and control. The suffering is not adaptive. It is imposed, manufactured, normalized.

If the environment has become unlivable, then the task is not to rewire humans. It is to stop treating systems of domination as unchangeable terrain.

Adaptation is not always wisdom. Sometimes it is evidence of captured agency. And captured agency is not evolution—it is survival under threat.

179. It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences.

This is not a solution. It is a gesture of rage made into doctrine.

You’ve named no path, only a plunge. You offer no strategy, only scale-less demolition. “Dump the whole stinking system” is not clarity—it’s the abdication of responsibility disguised as radical honesty.

You assume the consequences will be painful but purifying, as if collapse washes away domination. It doesn’t. It removes infrastructure, not hierarchy. The same systems that engineer submission today will adapt—they always have. Only now, the tools of resistance will be fewer, the suffering deeper, and the strong even less restrained.

You name no threshold, no boundary, no plan for who survives the dumping—or who decides what counts as “the system.” You make suffering abstract so you don’t have to own its asymmetry.

You do not liberate people by removing complexity. You liberate by removing coercion, restoring agency, and redistributing power. Collapse does none of these unless intentionally structured—and you’ve offered no structure.

To endure a violent system is unbearable. But to replace it with unstructured collapse is not rebellion. It is release without repair. And the ruins, once settled, do not guarantee freedom. They only guarantee a reset of who gets to dominate next.

Refusal must be precise. Otherwise it feeds the very machinery it claims to oppose.

180. The technophiles are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride into the unknown. Many people understand something of what technological progress is doing to us yet take a passive attitude toward it because they think it is inevitable. But we (FC) don’t think it is inevitable. We think it can be stopped, and we will give here some indications of how to go about stopping it.

You begin with a claim of inevitability reversed. Where the system says: this must continue, you respond: it must collapse. But both are forms of fatalism. The shape of resistance is not prediction. It is construction.

You frame technological progress as “a reckless ride into the unknown,” but offer no analysis of who is driving, and who profits from the motion. You reduce “technophiles” to a class of deluded optimists—ignoring that most people are not ideologues of progress, but hostages to necessity.

Yes, passivity is real. But it’s not rooted in belief in inevitability—it’s rooted in disempowerment, in survival conditioned on submission. And you do not break passivity with chaos. You break it by making structure visible and contested.

You claim it can be stopped. But what is “it”? The entire industrial system? The logic of extraction? Technocratic centralization? You don’t say. And when resistance is this totalizing, it becomes incoherent. It turns clarity into fire, and then walks away from the burn.

Refusal is not enough. There must be distinction—between tools and structures, between use and coercion, between what must end and what can be reclaimed.

If collapse is to be a tool, it must be shaped. Not wished for. Not watched. Not wandered into.

181. As we stated in paragraph 166, the 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. The pattern would be similar to that of the French and Russian Revolutions. French society and Russian society, for several decades prior to their respective revolutions, showed increasing signs of stress and weakness. Meanwhile, ideologies were being developed that offered a new world view that was quite different from the old one. In the Russian case, revolutionaries were actively working to undermine the old order. Then, when the old system was put under sufficient additional stress (by financial crisis in France, by military defeat in Russia) it was swept away by revolution. What we propose is something along the same lines.

You claim strategy, but you outline sabotage without structure.

You do not distinguish between systemic failure by design and collapse as opportunity. One is imposed from above to consolidate power. The other—if not intentionally organized—simply clears space for whatever power fills the vacuum fastest.

You cite the French and Russian revolutions. But both were followed by authoritarian consolidation, not liberation. The stressors you point to—war, financial collapse—did not create autonomy. They made people desperate enough to accept anything that promised order.

Your analogy skips the most critical fact: in both cases, a new elite replaced the old.

Your proposed “revolution against technology” has no vision for what replaces it, only the myth that destruction will make space for something freer.

But free space is not freedom.

And instability is not inherently revolutionary—it is often just an opening for reaction.

You demand ideology but give no ground for shared life, no anchoring in solidarity, no infrastructure for continuity. The system may fall. But people still need to eat, shelter, grieve, learn, raise children. You offer no tools for that.

You offer collapse as deliverance. But collapse delivers nothing without hands that build something else.

182. It will be objected that the French and Russian Revolutions were failures. But most revolutions have two goals. One is to destroy an old form of society and the other is to set up the new form of society envisioned by the revolutionaries. The French and Russian revolutionaries failed (fortunately!) to create the new kind of society of which they dreamed, but they were quite successful in destroying the old society. 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.

Here the mask is off.

You do not promise justice. You do not offer shelter. You do not imagine healing. You define success not by liberation, but by ruin.

You reduce revolution to subtraction. And in doing so, you sever it from responsibility.

This is not clarity. It is abdication. It pretends to be honest about failure, but what it really does is relinquish obligation to the living.

You celebrate past revolutions not for what they attempted, but for what they erased. But every structure they tore down left a vacuum that power rushed into. The guillotine made way for empire. The czar’s fall made way for the gulag. Destruction is not neutral—it is a transfer point.

You say you have no illusions. But this is the greatest illusion of all: that you can divorce collapse from consequence, that you can destroy without creating, and that something better will follow just because you left space.

Destruction can be necessary. But it must be accountable to what follows. You refuse that accountability. And so your revolution is not an act of clarity. It is an abandonment of it.

183. 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).

You offer nature as the positive pole. But it is nature without humans as social beings. It is not the commons, or kinship, or cultivation. It is nature as opposition, not as context.

What you glorify is not wildness—it is ungovernability. But humans have never lived ungoverned. Even pre-industrial societies had rules, kin obligations, taboos, care systems. You do not want freedom within relation. You want freedom from relation.

You equate freedom with non-regulation. But not all constraint is control. Some limits are mutual. Some norms are protective. You erase the difference between domination and interdependence—because your ideal does not include coexistence.

This is not a positive vision. It is a romanticized retreat into pre-social purity. It makes no room for negotiation, adaptation, or shared life in a damaged world.

You treat society as inherently corrupting. But people are not made less free by living together. They are made less free by living under systems that require obedience without consent. That’s the real distinction. And it’s one you erase.

You want wild nature. But you offer no vision for how we live with it, only without each other.

184. 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. To feed themselves they must be peasants or herdsmen or fishermen or hunters, etc. And, generally speaking, local autonomy should tend to increase, because lack of advanced technology and rapid communications will limit the capacity of governments or other large organizations to control local communities.

You present nature not as relation, but as rejection: the opposite of “the system,” the negation of control. But this dualism—nature vs. technology—is false. The real divide is not between natural and artificial. It is between extractive and reciprocal, imposed and chosen, coerced and lived.

You say nature is spontaneous and needs no new social order. But survival always requires order—not imposed from above, but crafted, negotiated, remembered. Pre-industrial societies did not float in harmony. They had governance. They had boundaries. And they made mistakes—some catastrophic.

You’re not wrong that industrial society ruptured the balance. But eliminating it will not reboot harmony. It will simply remove the infrastructure that has replaced other forms of relation—without rebuilding them.

You say people will live close to nature again, as if the loss of industrial systems guarantees community. But the system didn’t just impose control. It also eroded memory. The knowledge of how to live with land, with animals, with each other in wild conditions—that has been violently stripped from most people by colonialism, capitalism, enclosure, and genocide.

Collapse doesn’t restore that. It just exposes the absence.

You call for removal, but offer no repair. You hope that proximity to nature will be enough. But the most brutal violence has happened close to nature—when autonomy is gone, when desperation rules, when memory has been erased.

You say nature needs no utopia. You’re right. But people do not survive on purity.

They survive on care, structure, continuity.

And those must be made—not found.

185. 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.

This is a slogan, not an argument.

You frame catastrophe as a tradeoff, but you never specify the cost—not in numbers, not in lives, not in impact. You say sacrifice is necessary, but sacrifice by whom? And for what?

This is not a moral calculus. It is a deflection—a refusal to name consequence because it would demand accountability. To say “you can’t eat your cake and have it too” is to equate famine, violence, medical collapse, and mass death with giving up dessert.

What you call sacrifice, others call being left to die.

You obscure power by flattening consequence. You do not distinguish between those who hoard resources and those who survive on the margins. Collapse does not hit evenly. It follows the same lines of extraction, abandonment, and disposability already written into this world.

To remove a system is not inherently liberation if the vacuum it leaves amplifies every existing asymmetry.

Yes, you must give up something to gain something else. But what is given up, and by whom, is not a trivial question. You never ask it. Because you are not interested in redistributing power—only in removing the scaffold that holds it.

This is not revolution. It is a wager of other people’s lives, wrapped in moral detachment.

186. Most people hate psychological conflict. For this reason they avoid doing any serious thinking about difficult social issues, and they like to have such issues presented to them in simple, black-and-white terms: THIS is all good and THAT is all bad. The revolutionary ideology should therefore be developed on two levels.

This is not revolutionary strategy. It is manipulative design.

You don’t trust most people to think. You believe they must be conditioned—not liberated, not engaged, but managed. You speak of black-and-white binaries as necessary because the masses cannot handle ambiguity.

This is the same logic the system uses.

It infantilizes the public, then builds ideology as instruction, not dialogue. You don’t want understanding. You want alignment.

You critique technological society for manipulating behavior, then build a parallel system of ideological manipulation—a two-tiered framework where

only the “rational” core gets the full truth, and the rest are given emotionally charged simplifications.

This is not a movement for liberation. It is a hierarchy of belief.

And your contempt is clear. You reduce people’s avoidance of psychological conflict to weakness. But what you call avoidance is often protection from trauma, or simply survival in a world that demands constant adaptation with little security.

If your vision requires deception or simplification to gain support, it cannot claim moral clarity.

It’s just another system of selective visibility and internal control.

You replicate the very mechanics you claim to fight—but cloak them in the language of revolution.

187. On the more sophisticated level the ideology should address itself to people who are intelligent, thoughtful and rational. The object should be to create a core of people who will be opposed to the industrial system on a rational, thought-out basis, with full appreciation of the problems and ambiguities involved, and of the price that has to be paid for getting rid of the system. It is particularly important to attract people of this type, as they are capable people and will be instrumental in influencing others. These people should be addressed on as rational a level as possible. Facts should never intentionally be distorted and intemperate language should be avoided. This does not mean that no appeal can be made to the emotions, but in making such appeal care should be taken to avoid misrepresenting the truth or doing anything else that would destroy the intellectual respectability of the ideology.

You posture as honest here—but the framework is already rigged.

You want “intelligent, thoughtful, rational” people not to build alternatives, but to become influencers of collapse. You admit the cost of getting rid of the system, but offer no parallel system for survival—just loyalty to a singular, destructive goal.

This isn’t a rational program. It’s a recruitment funnel: offer facts, preserve intellectual credibility, but bind the intellect to a cause with no alternative but ruin.

You say not to distort facts—but your manifesto already does:

It reduces all technology to a unified force of control.
It flattens all human systems into mechanisms of domination.
It offers no empirical basis for the claim that collapse will lead to autonomy, only belief.

You say to avoid intemperate language—because your “rational” tier is about optics. You don’t want to be dismissed by academics or sharp minds. You want them inside the circle—not to build, but to legitimize a campaign of strategic sabotage.

You call it sophisticated. But sophistication without ethics is just instrumentalism. And your sophistication is wielded toward one end: destruction without care.

This tier is not thoughtful. It’s merely controlled. It’s your way of laundering extremism through etiquette.

188. On a second level, the ideology should be propagated in a simplified form that will enable the unthinking majority to see the conflict of technology vs. nature in unambiguous terms. But even on this second level the ideology should not be expressed in language that is so cheap, intemperate or irrational that it alienates people of the thoughtful and rational type. Cheap, intemperate propaganda sometimes achieves impressive short-term gains, but it will be more advantageous in the long run to keep the loyalty of a small number of intelligently committed people than to arouse the passions of an unthinking, fickle mob who will change their attitude as soon as someone comes along with a better propaganda gimmick. However, propaganda of the rabble-rousing type may be necessary when the system is nearing the point of collapse and there is a final struggle between rival ideologies to determine which will become dominant when the old world-view goes under.

You don't build revolution here. You engineer consent.

Your language is elitist, strategic, and clear: most people are not to be engaged, only swayed. You call them “the unthinking majority,” useful only in the heat of collapse when mass emotion can be weaponized.

This is not an ideology. It's a layered control mechanism, disguised as clarity. You divide people by cognitive utility—those who think are to influence, and those who feel are to be influenced. You don’t trust the public. You exploit their instincts.

This is exactly how states operate.

This is exactly how advertising works.

This is exactly how technocratic manipulation justifies itself: by insisting some people can see the truth, and others must be guided toward it.

You offer no democracy of thought. You want unity, not dialogue—alignment, not inquiry. Even your rejection of “cheap propaganda” isn’t ethical—it’s tactical. You’re not against manipulation.

You just want refined manipulation, the kind that doesn’t scare away the intellectuals you hope to recruit.

And when the time comes for collapse, you’re ready to let go of even that. In the end, you’ll take the mob too, if it helps you destroy the system.

There is no integrity here. There is only layered messaging, calibrated control, and moral detachment—the same structure you claim to oppose.

189. Prior to that final struggle, the revolutionaries should not expect to have a majority of people on their side. History is made by active, determined minorities, not by the majority, which seldom has a clear and consistent idea of what it really wants. Until the time comes for the final push toward revolution [31], the task of revolutionaries will be less to win the shallow support of the majority than to build a small core of deeply committed people. As for the majority, it will be enough to make them aware of the existence of the new ideology and remind them of it frequently; though of course it will be desirable to get majority support to the extent that this can be done without weakening the core of seriously committed people.

You say history is made by minorities. True.

But the question is always: on whose backs?

Your “active core” is not building structures, healing wounds, or defending the dispossessed. It is preparing to detonate a system—without providing anything for those who will be left in its wake.

You again treat the majority as material, not participants. Their awareness is instrumental. Their consent is optional. Their survival is irrelevant unless it strengthens the vanguard.

This is not just anti-democratic—it’s anti-relational.

You confuse commitment with insulation, depth with detachment.

A revolutionary core that cannot engage the majority without diluting itself is not strong. It is fragile. And that fragility will reproduce itself in whatever comes after.

You claim not to need the majority until the “final push”—but by then, it’s too late. When people are desperate and afraid, they do not rally to the best idea. They cling to the strongest hand. You prepare them for collapse, but give them no map, no anchor, no capacity to resist co-optation by fascism, technocracy, or authoritarianism.

History is made by minorities.

But the future is paid for by the many.

And you offer them no future—only aftermath.

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 public.

Here, finally, you name an enemy: the power elite. But even this clarity is not ethical—it’s tactical.

You don't believe the public is innocent. You simply advise that blaming them is bad optics. It’s not compassion—it’s containment. You don’t build solidarity. You withhold contempt until it’s no longer useful.

You say Americans should be treated as victims of manipulation. But you don’t propose empowering them. You propose re-framing their consumption as servitude—not to help them exit it, but to fuel resentment that you can direct.

You frame the distinction between critique of systems and critique of people as a matter of “attitude.” But this isn’t semantics—it’s the foundation of politics.

If people are manipulated, they need tools, community, education, and protection.
If people are collaborators, they need confrontation.
But you offer neither: not tools, not community, not confrontation with love. Only use.

This paragraph is not strategy for liberation. It’s public relations for revolutionaries.

It calculates image, not transformation.

It reduces human lives to propaganda vectors.

You don’t want to empower people. You want to weaponize their pain—and redirect their anger toward collapse, not toward construction.

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.

Here your framework collides with lived struggle—and erases it.

You tell us to avoid ethnic and national conflicts because they distract from

“the real battle.” But the reality is this: those conflicts are not distractions—they are front lines of how technological systems manifest power.

It is not the fact of representation in elite structures that matters. It is how systems concentrate violence—who gets discarded, surveilled, extracted, imprisoned, and erased. That violence is racialized, gendered, and colonial. You ignore that not by accident, but by ideological convenience.

Your critique of Black leadership is especially telling. You reduce centuries of resistance—rebellion against enslavement, segregation, economic abandonment—to a claim that it merely “absorbs subculture into the system.” You erase the reality that many struggles are not for entry, but for refusal, land, reparation, protection.

You claim to care about domination, but only on your terms—and only when the dominant tool is technology. You strip every other axis of power to the margin. Not because it’s less real. But because it doesn’t fit your preferred frame.

This is not clarity. It’s erasure.

You universalize a lens that refuses to see who is being crushed, by what, and for whom.

A real movement doesn’t rank suffering.

It traces systems of power across race, class, gender, land, machine, memory—and refuses all of them.

You ask for solidarity, but offer none.

192. But the way to discourage ethnic conflict is NOT through militant advocacy of minority rights (see paragraphs 21, 29). Instead, the revolutionaries should emphasize that although minorities do suffer more or less disadvantage, this disadvantage is of peripheral significance. Our real enemy is the industrial-technological system, and in the struggle against the system, ethnic distinctions are of no importance.

Here you name disadvantage. Then you call it peripheral.

That is not analysis—it is displacement.

You treat oppression as an unfortunate side effect, not a structural tool. But the technological system did not create domination—it refined it, automated it, scaled it. Slavery was not abolished by industry; it was repackaged. Colonization did not end with the factory—it was mechanized by it.

You call ethnic distinction irrelevant to the struggle. But who defines “the struggle”? And who gets to declare what is central or peripheral?

The system you hate is not race-blind. It is built on histories of extraction—of land, of bodies, of labor, of memory. To treat those struggles as distractions is to say: only the kind of pain I understand is politically useful.

You demand universality by flattening difference. But solidarity requires the opposite: specificity, recognition, relation across asymmetry.

Your revolution refuses to look down—to see who has already been crushed beneath the machine you claim to oppose.

It is not “militant” to affirm that those most brutalized by systems of control should not be asked to wait for their liberation. It is necessary.

You claim the system is the enemy.

But you refuse to see its face in prisons, borders, pipelines, ghettos, land theft, and sterilization clinics.

If a revolution cannot center those harmed first, it is not revolution. It is just a different order of erasure.

193. The kind of revolution we have in mind will not necessarily involve an armed uprising against any government. It may or may not involve physical violence, but it will not be a POLITICAL revolution. Its focus will be on technology and economics, not politics. [32]

You sever politics from economics and technology—as if they are separate systems, as if power is ever compartmentalized.

But politics is how systems justify themselves, how they enforce obedience, how they manufacture legitimacy. Technology and economics do not stand apart. They are activated through political structure—laws, trade deals, borders, institutions, police.

To say this is not a political revolution is not modesty. It is misdirection.

You want collapse without strategy. Sabotage without governance. Dismantling without transformation.

You name systems, but you do not name how they reproduce, who protects them, who profits from them, and how they are maintained beyond the factory floor—in courts, in constitutions, in classrooms, in cultural memory.

A real revolution cannot avoid politics.

Because politics is not just government. It is the distribution of life and death—who gets resources, whose pain is visible, whose voice is silenced.

You want to unmake the machine.

But you refuse to look at who it was built to protect—and who it was built to destroy.

That refusal isn’t neutrality. It’s complicity in a different form.

194. Probably the revolutionaries should even AVOID assuming political power, whether by legal or illegal means, until the industrial system is stressed to the danger point and has proved itself to be a failure in the eyes of most people. Suppose for example that some “green” party should win control of the United States Congress in an election. In order to avoid betraying or watering down their own ideology they would have to take vigorous measures to turn economic growth into economic shrinkage. To the average man the results would appear disastrous: There would be massive unemployment, shortages of commodities, etc. Even if the grosser ill effects could be avoided through superhumanly skillful management, still people would have to begin giving up the luxuries to which they have become addicted. Dissatisfaction would grow, the “green” party would be voted out of office and the revolutionaries would have suffered a severe setback. For this reason the revolutionaries should not try to acquire political power until the system has gotten itself into such a mess that any hardships will be seen as resulting from the failures of the industrial system itself and not from the policies of the revolutionaries. The revolution against technology will probably have to be a revolution by outsiders, a revolution from below and not from above.

This is not principled refusal. It is strategic evasion.

You don’t reject power to avoid hierarchy. You reject power to avoid accountability.

You warn against assuming responsibility for collapse—not because collapse is wrong, but because you want its consequences to be blamed on someone else.

You acknowledge that transition will bring hardship—mass unemployment, scarcity, social unrest.

But your concern isn’t how to protect the vulnerable.

It’s how to protect your ideology from being discredited.

This is not revolutionary ethics. It’s public relations in the face of crisis.

You say the revolution should come “from below”—but the way you structure it, no one is held to account for what comes next. The leaders remain faceless. The suffering remains ownerless.

Real revolution takes responsibility.

It holds the tools, the trust, the grief, and the rebuilding.

It doesn’t wait for the system to collapse so it can emerge blameless from the rubble.

Collapse without responsibility is not liberation. It is abdication wrapped in purity.

195. The revolution must be international and worldwide. It cannot be carried out on a nation-by-nation basis. Whenever it is suggested that the United States, for example, should cut back on technological progress or economic growth, people get hysterical and start screaming that if we fall behind in technology the Japanese will get ahead of us. Holy robots! The world will fly off its orbit if the Japanese ever sell more cars than we do! (Nationalism is a great promoter of technology.) More reasonably, it is argued that if the relatively democratic nations of the world fall behind in technology while nasty, dictatorial nations like China, Vietnam and North Korea continue to progress, eventually the dictators may come to dominate the world. That is why the industrial system should be attacked in all nations simultaneously, to the extent that this may be possible. True, there is no assurance that the industrial system can be destroyed at approximately the same time all over the world, and it is even conceivable that the attempt to overthrow the system could lead instead to the domination of the system by dictators. That is a risk that has to be taken. And it is worth taking, since the difference between a “democratic” industrial system and one controlled by dictators is small compared with the difference between an industrial system and a non-industrial one. [33]

You understand that the system is global—but your solution is not coordination. It is escalation.

You don't seek solidarity across borders. You seek collapse without borders.

You admit your revolution could backfire—that it may lead to authoritarian rule, or worse. But you call this a risk worth taking because your enemy is not dictatorship. Your enemy is technological order itself—regardless of who wields it.

You erase difference between democratic and dictatorial systems. But tell that to the prisoner in a black site, the dissident in exile, the child of genocide.

Yes, liberal democracies are complicit in violence.

But to equate their mechanisms with totalitarian rule is not analysis. It is flattening.

You despise nationalism. But your answer is nihilist globalism—not one built on relation, but one that seeks to simultaneously rupture the system in all places, knowing full well that those with the fewest resources will suffer most.

And when you imagine “attack in all nations simultaneously,” who is meant to lead that? Who is given the tools, the trust, the map? You never say—because your vision depends on dispersed sabotage, not organized resistance. And that is not revolution—it’s ideological wildfire.

You accept the rise of tyrants as a cost.

Because your real enemy is not domination. It is continuity.

And that is why your revolution cannot protect what it claims to liberate.

196. Revolutionaries might consider favoring measures that tend to bind the world economy into a unified whole. Free trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT are probably harmful to the environment in the short run, but in the long run they may perhaps be advantageous because they foster economic interdependence between nations. It will be easier to destroy the industrial system on a worldwide basis if the world economy is so unified that its breakdown in any one major nation will lead to its breakdown in all industrialized nations.

This is not revolution. This is strategic sabotage of the global poor.

You propose deepening global economic entanglement—not to strengthen solidarity, not to distribute abundance, not to protect the vulnerable—but to ensure that when collapse comes, it spreads like wildfire.

You endorse NAFTA and GATT—not for what they do, but for what they can undo. You welcome environmental destruction and inequality in the short term as kindling for future systemic ruin.

This is not critique.

This is complicity in order to amplify devastation.

You say interdependence will help because collapse in one nation can trigger collapse in all. But what that means is simple: those with least infrastructure, fewest protections, and no historical buffer will suffer first and worst. Entire regions already looted by colonial systems will be wrecked again, this time by the conscious withdrawal of global structure—with your approval.

You seek not to build global solidarity, but to collapse global function—without replacement, without vision, without refuge.

This isn’t liberation.

It’s engineered ruin dressed in revolutionary language.

197. Some people take the line that modern man has too much power, too much control over nature; they argue for a more passive attitude on the part of the human race. At best these people are expressing themselves unclearly, because they fail to distinguish between power for LARGE ORGANIZATIONS and power for INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS. It is a mistake to argue for powerlessness and passivity, because people NEED power. Modern man as a collective entity—that is, the industrial system—has immense power over nature, and we (FC) regard this as evil. But modern INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS OF INDIVIDUALS have far less power than primitive man ever did. Generally speaking, the vast power of “modern man” over nature is exercised not by individuals or small groups but by large organizations. To the extent that the average modern INDIVIDUAL can wield the power of technology, he is permitted to do so only within narrow limits and only under the supervision and control of the system. (You need a license for everything and with the license come rules and regulations.) The individual has only those technological powers with which the system chooses to provide him. His PERSONAL power over nature is slight.

This is a rare moment where your analysis begins to point toward something true:

Power is not inherently evil. It is how power is structured, distributed, and shielded from accountability that matters.

But even here, you fold insight into absolutism.

You idealize “primitive man” as if small groups had full autonomy over nature—ignoring ecological collapse, inter-group violence, and survival limitations. You replace domination with romanticized hardship.

You are right to oppose centralized power that robs individuals of agency.

But your framing of “the system” still treats people as helpless passengers—as if no one within modern life is engaged in resistance, adaptation, care, or refusal.

You collapse all activity outside of elite institutions into passivity—unless it aligns with your binary struggle.

You say people need power. True.

But power, to be ethical, must also come with responsibility, memory, and consequence.

You lament that the system gives only narrow permissions.

But your solution is not expanded autonomy—it is total collapse, after which you hope that autonomy will somehow naturally re-emerge.

You treat power as a zero-sum field: either possessed by elite institutions or scattered to small bands of survivors.

But real transformation comes from reclaiming collective, situated, decentralized power—not from returning to a preindustrial fantasy.

Yes, people need power. But not just to act—to shape, to relate, to build systems that resist domination without disintegration.

And that is something your revolution does not offer.

198. Primitive INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS actually had considerable power over nature; or maybe it would be better to say power WITHIN nature. When primitive man needed food he knew how to find and prepare edible roots, how to track game and take it with homemade weapons. He knew how to protect himself from heat, cold, rain, dangerous animals, etc. But primitive man did relatively little damage to nature because the COLLECTIVE power of primitive society was negligible compared to the COLLECTIVE power of industrial society.

You are right to name scale as the difference.

But you mistake isolation for freedom, and subsistence for autonomy.

Yes, small-scale communities often knew how to live within the rhythms of a local ecology. They developed profound knowledge of place, pattern, and interdependence.

But to idealize their power is to flatten their vulnerability—to hunger, to drought, to injury, to loss. Their skills were real, but their lives were precarious.

You call this “power within nature.” But survival within a volatile environment—where missteps often meant death—is not freedom. It is adaptation under constraint.

You praise primitive autonomy as if it were chosen, but it was often compelled—by conditions, by geography, by necessity. You cite individual skill, but ignore collective systems of care, memory, and governance that made it possible.

Modernity did not invent structure.

What it did was scale structure into domination—not because structure itself is evil, but because it became detached from place, from feedback, from consequence.

The goal is not to return to a world of fire-starting and foraging.

The goal is to reclaim relationship—to each other, to land, to resource, to time—without replicating the forces that severed those ties.

You draw a false choice between technological domination and ancestral hardship.

But between those poles lies the real work of freedom: not in retreat, but in remaking.

199. Instead of arguing for powerlessness and passivity, one should argue that the power of the INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM should be broken, and that this will greatly INCREASE the power and freedom of INDIVIDUALS and SMALL GROUPS.

This is the crux of your justification for collapse:
that the destruction of systemic power will birth personal freedom.

But you do not define what freedom means.

You imply it is autonomy through subsistence, control over one’s environment, or non-dependence on institutions.

But freedom is not isolation. It is not struggle in silence.

Freedom is agency within relationship—to others, to systems, to memory, to care.

You conflate freedom from domination with freedom from structure. But without shared systems—of communication, mutual aid, knowledge transfer, water rights, conflict resolution—collapse does not produce power. It produces scramble.

And in collapse, it is not the most capable who rise.

It is often the most brutal, the most resourced, the most violent.

Your vision assumes that after system failure, small groups will reemerge in cooperative harmony.

History shows otherwise: they fracture, they compete, they consolidate. And soon, new hierarchies are born—not because the idea was wrong, but because nothing was built to resist that slide.

You believe power must be reclaimed by small-scale humans.

But reclaiming is not the same as reducing.

You must build the conditions where distributed power does not become fractured violence.

Without that, “breaking the industrial system” is not the beginning of freedom.

It is the removal of structure without the presence of care.

That is not autonomy. It is abandonment.

200. Until the industrial system has been thoroughly wrecked, the destruction of that system must be the revolutionaries’ ONLY goal. Other goals would distract attention and energy from the main goal. More importantly, if the revolutionaries permit themselves to have any other goal than the destruction of technology, they will be tempted to use technology as a tool for reaching that other goal. If they give in to that temptation, they will fall right back into the technological trap, because modern technology is a unified, tightly organized system, so that, in order to retain SOME technology, one finds oneself obliged to retain MOST technology, hence one ends up sacrificing only token amounts of technology.

Here your absolutism sharpens into dogma.

You forbid any other aim but destruction—not justice, not survival, not rebuilding, not protection, not repair.

You reduce all other visions to distraction or temptation.

This is not revolutionary discipline. It is ideological puritanism.

You claim that using any part of the system—even temporarily—pulls the revolution back into dependence. But this is a refusal to think in terms of strategy, adaptation, or liberation.

It’s a theology of collapse, not a pathway to freedom.

What you call “the technological trap” is not a trap—it is a terrain. And to navigate terrain, one must know what to keep, what to dismantle, what to rewire, what to refuse.

You offer no discernment. Only total negation.

You fear compromise more than suffering.

You would rather burn every tool than risk the messiness of transition. But history does not move in clean lines. And freedom cannot be built from a platform that only knows how to destroy.

You say other goals will distract. But it is exactly those other goals—justice, healing, place-based autonomy, care in the aftermath of collapse—that make revolution worth surviving.

You want to tear down the system.

But you forbid building anything else. And that is not freedom.

That is controlled demolition with no plan for the buried living.

201. Suppose for example that the revolutionaries took “social justice” as a goal. Human nature being what it is, social justice would not come about spontaneously; it would have to be enforced. In order to enforce it the revolutionaries would have to retain central organization and control. For that they would need rapid long-distance transportation and communication, and therefore all the technology needed to support the transportation and communication systems. To feed and clothe poor people they would have to use agricultural and manufacturing technology. And so forth. So that the attempt to insure social justice would force them to retain most parts of the technological system. Not that we have anything against social justice, but it must not be allowed to interfere with the effort to get rid of the technological system.

You claim to respect justice—but only in theory. In practice, you view it as an obstacle to purity.

Your argument is clear:

Social justice requires enforcement.
Enforcement requires infrastructure.
Infrastructure requires technology.

Therefore: justice = compromise = failure.

But justice is not a postscript. It is the measure of any revolution’s integrity.
Without it, collapse is just a redistribution of suffering, not a refusal of it.

You assume justice must come from above—centrally planned, technologically managed. That’s false.

Justice can be embedded locally: in land relations, communal governance, mutual aid, reparative resource sharing.

You erase those forms because you cannot control them—and your vision requires that anything uncontrolled be non-existent.

Your revolution forbids care if care requires tools.

You would rather let people starve freely than feed them within contradiction.

You don’t fear that technology will overpower ethics.

You fear that ethics will slow destruction.

You pretend to welcome justice—“not that we have anything against it,” you say.

But in your framework, justice is a liability, not a principle. You grant it symbolic approval but no strategic space.

That’s not moral clarity. It’s ideological avoidance.

And a revolution that fears justice will never recognize when it becomes the very force it claimed to fight.

202. It would be hopeless for revolutionaries to try to attack the system without using SOME modern technology. If nothing else they must use the communications media to spread their message. But they should use modern technology for only ONE purpose: to attack the technological system.

This is not strategy. This is ritual purity doctrine.

You acknowledge the contradiction—we need the system to fight the system—but you don’t resolve it.

You contain it through an artificial rule:

Use technology, but only as a weapon, never as a bridge.

But tools are not passive. Every use has an imprint.

How you speak, who you reach, the trust you build, the means you use—all shape the ends you can reach.

If you only destroy, your audience learns fear, not repair.

If you speak through the machine but never build beyond it, you teach despair, not direction.

Your framework allows propaganda, but forbids prefiguration—no modeling, no testing, no recovery.

But communication is not neutral. It is not merely a channel for rage.

It is how people remember, how they organize, how they reimagine life together after the fire.

By allowing only destruction as a valid use, you guarantee that nothing will be left standing. And you call that victory.

But a revolution that cannot speak care, vision, and strategy is not a revolution.

It is a broadcast of collapse with no reply channel.

203. Imagine an alcoholic sitting with a barrel of wine in front of him. Suppose he starts saying to himself, “Wine isn’t bad for you if used in moderation. Why, they say small amounts of wine are even good for you! It won’t do me any harm if I take just one little drink.... “ Well you know what is going to happen. Never forget that the human race with technology is just like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine.

This metaphor is emotionally effective but analytically hollow.

You equate humanity’s relationship to technology with addiction—not just use, but compulsive dependence.

But addiction is not the same as complexity.

Your metaphor denies that tools can be held differently—through consent, through relation, through limits, through feedback.

It assumes that any use leads inevitably to domination.

But unlike addiction, technology is not internal compulsion. It is external design—shaped by values, incentives, power structures.

That means it can also be redesigned, refused, recontextualized.

You invoke helplessness not to generate empathy—but to justify absolutism.

The only response you allow is abstinence.

No moderation, no harm reduction, no negotiation. Just total prohibition—or death.

This isn’t a framework.

It’s a moral ultimatum disguised as logic.

204. Revolutionaries should have as many children as they can. There is strong scientific evidence that social attitudes are to a significant extent inherited. No one suggests that a social attitude is a direct outcome of a person’s genetic constitution, but it appears that personality traits are partly inherited and that certain personality traits tend, within the context of our society, to make a person more likely to hold this or that social attitude. Objections to these findings have been raised, but the objections are feeble and seem to be ideologically motivated. In any event, no one denies that children tend on the average to hold social attitudes similar to those of their parents. From our point of view it doesn’t matter all that much whether the attitudes are passed on genetically or through childhood training. In either case they ARE passed on.

This is eugenics by implication.

You mask it in cautious language—“no one suggests,” “partly inherited,” “on average”—but the logic is clear:

Those who think like us should reproduce as much as possible, to seed the future with those predisposed to share our ideology.

You claim not to care if the transmission is genetic or environmental—but that’s irrelevant.

The claim is still biological reproduction as political strategy.

You don’t offer care, education, solidarity, community as ways to sustain a movement.

You offer reproductive saturation—as if ideology were a bloodline.

This isn’t revolutionary.

It is demographic warfare dressed as cultural continuity.

205. The trouble is that many of the people who are inclined to rebel against the industrial system are also concerned about the population problems, hence they are apt to have few or no children. In this way they may be handing the world over to the sort of people who support or at least accept the industrial system. To insure the strength of the next generation of revolutionaries the present generation should reproduce itself abundantly. In doing so they will be worsening the population problem only slightly. And the important problem is to get rid of the industrial system, because once the industrial system is gone the world’s population necessarily will decrease (see paragraph 167); whereas, if the industrial system survives, it will continue developing new techniques of food production that may enable the world’s population to keep increasing almost indefinitely.

You dismiss one crisis—overpopulation—as a small price to pay for ideological continuity.

You explicitly call for reproducing revolutionaries, even if it worsens planetary strain—because collapse, you believe, will handle the rest.

This is not a plan. It’s a wager on suffering.

You assume that once collapse comes, population will “necessarily” decrease.

But you don’t say how.

Starvation? Disease? Displacement? You don’t care.

Because the ends justify the means—and the dead are part of the arithmetic.

You critique others for wanting to sustain large populations artificially.

But you propose seeding the future with a purified ideological class and letting nature take care of the culling.

That’s not anti-industrial.

That’s industrial logic turned inward—applied to life itself.

206. With regard to revolutionary strategy, the only points on which we absolutely insist are that the single overriding goal must be the elimination of modern technology, and that no other goal can be allowed to compete with this one. For the rest, revolutionaries should take an empirical approach. If experience indicates that some of the recommendations made in the foregoing paragraphs are not going to give good results, then those recommendations should be discarded.

Here you try to end with modesty—encouraging adaptation, experimentation, learning from failure.

But you already declared that no other goal can compete with technological destruction. That’s not empirical.

It’s a fixed dogma dressed as flexibility.

You pretend to open the door to revision.

But you bolt it shut by declaring that any goal beyond collapse is distraction, temptation, or betrayal.

Your revolution is not iterative. It is totalizing.

It does not make room for failure—only for purification.

And purification, historically, always comes at the cost of the vulnerable.

** Interlude

Refusing the Refusal: Understanding the Mind Behind the Manifesto

The system, he said, had to be destroyed. He made bombs to say it louder.

The people he killed were not random—they were cogs, in his language.

He refused the machine by becoming a bullet within it. And called it liberation.

He wrote no fiction, but he built a myth: of the uncorrupted mind, the pure rebel, the genius who saw through the lies of modern life. The man who went into the forest, shed society, and returned only to strike.

This myth is still alive. It grows in the corners of disillusionment, among those who see the world burning and no path out. But before we continue to dismantle the doctrine, we must confront what made it possible. Not just what he saw, but how he came to see it.

Not to reduce the ideas to biography. Not to excuse the violence.

But to expose the architecture of the lens.

1. The Mind Without Mirror

Kaczynski was brilliant. That is not in dispute. Harvard at 16, a PhD in mathematics, an IQ in the 99.999th percentile. But brilliance without reflection becomes sealed. And sealed intellect becomes self-justifying.

He tested his ideas against no peers. He retreated from every community. He framed counter-argument as corruption. And when no one would echo him, he echoed himself.

He did not refine his critique through contradiction. He hardened it through exile.

And in that exile, his clarity turned into abstraction weaponized.

The world became system. People became functions. And resistance became punishment.

2. A Body Conditioned by Dehumanization

At Harvard, Kaczynski was subjected to three years of classified psychological stress experiments, conducted by Henry A. Murray under CIA sponsorship (MK Ultra-adjacent) [Source: Chase, Harvard and the Unabomber, 2003].

The goal of these experiments was ideological collapse: to humiliate, destabilize, and strip a person of conviction. The young

Kaczynski—emotionally raw, socially isolated, years younger than his classmates—was ideal prey.

The experience did not create his worldview, but it confirmed it:

that systems lie, that people manipulate, that the only safety is in withdrawal.

He did not invent distrust. He learned it through betrayal, then turned it into doctrine.

3. The Ethical Abyss

He wrote as if freedom were more important than life—and argued that collapse, even with mass death, would be worth the price.

He did not distinguish between those who built the machine and those forced to live within it.

He called the system violent.

Then mailed explosives to those he believed represented it.

He saw no contradiction between his ethics and his methods because he had reduced human life to roles. Engineer. PR man. Scientist. Target.

His was not a theory of liberation. It was a purity spiral, sharpened into vengeance.

4. The Myth of Total Refusal

He denounced technology, but used it—precisely, tactically, instrumentally.

He wrote his manifesto on a typewriter. Tracked news about his victims. Used the media to spread his message.

This was not total refusal. It was a fantasy of outside performed from within.

He wanted a break so complete it would collapse the world he hated. But every act he took was through the arteries of the system. His bombs rode airplanes. His arguments used mass publication. His voice depended on the very infrastructure he called poison.

What he refused was not the system.

What he refused was compromise, collaboration, accountability. He didn’t want out. He wanted clean hands and a high seat above the ruins.

5. No Clarity Without Relation

He rejected movements. Rejected solidarity. Rejected even naming his acts until the threat of being ignored forced him to speak. He did not believe in action through community—only through shock.

To him, mutuality was contamination. Politics was performance. Compassion was weakness.

But real resistance is relational. It builds. It listens.

It risks contradiction to preserve connection.

He refused that.

And so his ethics had no living bodies. Only diagrams. Endpoints. Blood.

The critique of technology did not make him a killer.
The refusal of human relation did.

This interlude is not written to bury his ideas by discrediting their source. It is written because no idea without an ethics of relation can survive contact with the world it claims to speak for.

He said the machine must be destroyed. But he built himself into a gear of another machine: the logic of domination, streamlined through isolation, ending in fire.

We refuse that too.

207. 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.

You're right to reject the myth of unbroken progress.

History shows not a single, linear ascent, but cycles—growth, collapse, reinvention, rupture, forgetting.

What is false is the idea that technology only moves forward. What is dangerous is the idea that this falsity alone proves collapse is possible, necessary, or desirable.

You start from a valid premise—progress is not guaranteed.

But your conclusion is deterministic fatalism dressed as hope.

Regression is possible.

But not all regression is liberation.

Sometimes it is ruin without rebirth.

Your argument, if grounded, could open a serious conversation about technological humility, about the risks of overcomplexity, about appropriate scale.

But your framework has no room for reform, only eradication.

You aren’t trying to change how tools are used.

You want to burn the forge.

208. 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. But organization-dependent technology DOES regress when the social organization on which it depends breaks down. Example: When the Roman Empire fell apart the Romans’ 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. Their 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.

The distinction is useful. And the example is accurate—when empire collapses, infrastructure decays, but craft survives.

But you draw the boundary too cleanly.

There is no technology that is truly independent of organization.

Even a water wheel requires metallurgy, labor division, knowledge transfer, social time.

Even village tools rely on networks of memory, trade, and maintenance.

The question is not: Can tools survive collapse?

The question is: What kind of society do they sustain? What relations do they demand? What values do they encode?

You idealize small-scale tech as if it exists outside power, as if its effects are always benign, as if it cannot be used to dominate, extract, or exclude.

But that’s false.

A plow can feed or displace.

A forge can arm or repair.

A wall can protect or imprison.

Technology is not neutral.

And scale alone does not sanctify it.

The challenge is not simply to destroy “organization-dependent” technology.

The challenge is to build forms of organization that resist domination—and to choose tools that serve relation, not control.

That is harder than burning.

But it is the only path that honors the living.

209. 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 shop it would be virtually 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. 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 icehouse or preserve food by drying or pickling, as was done before the invention of the refrigerator.

This is a lucid description of technological interdependence, and you’re not wrong: modern tools don’t stand alone.

A refrigerator requires not just components, but an entire supply chain, electrical grid, regulatory system, mining infrastructure, and waste disposal apparatus.

Your point—that this complexity makes collapse likely irreversible—is plausible.

But your conclusion—that collapse is therefore preferable—is not.

Yes, refrigeration ties us to systems of extraction and emission.

But pickling is not liberation.

Nor is a return to perishable diets for billions whose food security depends on cold chains.

You frame modern interdependence as inherently coercive.

But interdependence can also be intentional, decentralized, and reciprocal. The answer is not to pretend we can isolate ourselves with jars and root cellars.

It’s to design technology that is legible, repairable, and embedded in ethical systems.

This demands rethinking infrastructure, not abolishing it.

You diagnose the symptom well: brittle complexity.

But your cure—tear it all down—ignores the patients who will die when the cold fails.

You want people to eat from the land again.

But most of them live where the land can no longer feed them—because of systems you want to destroy, but not rebuild.

210. 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 other organization-dependent technology. And once this technology had 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: 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 not to have existed prior to the 17th century or thereabouts.

You correctly describe the recursive fragility of complex systems:

Tools require other tools.

Knowledge requires conditions to survive.

Collapse is not clean—it’s a cascade.

You’re also right that industrial society is not easily rebuilt “from scratch.” But your error is to treat that fragility as proof of moral clarity.

You say few would want to rebuild the industrial world.

But that’s projection.

People do not live in manifestos.

They live in places—with drought, disease, heat, hunger, flood. And when collapse comes, they don’t romanticize it. They do what survivors always do:

Look for ways to restore what was lost.

That might mean trying again.

Or it might mean building something different: local, durable, accountable.

But that path requires something you refuse: continuity.

Your plan burns not just the system but the memory of how to make alternatives.

You’d rather lose the knowledge than risk its misuse.

This is not stewardship. It’s ideological arson.

You say people won’t want to rebuild.

But your revolution ensures they won’t be able to, even if they did.

You mistake irreversibility for wisdom.

But permanence of destruction is not a strength.

It’s a warning.

211. In the late Middle Ages there were four main civilizations that were about equally “advanced”: Europe, the Islamic world, India, and the Far East (China, Japan, Korea). Three of those civilizations remained more or less stable, and only Europe became dynamic. No one knows why Europe became dynamic at that 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.

This is one of your few valid openings—technological modernity was not inevitable.

But you do not examine why.

Europe’s turn to technological dynamism was not an accident. It was driven by specific forms of violence:

extraction through colonial conquest,
financialization through imperial trade,
militarization through constant war.

China paused its expansion.

India centered local economies.

The Islamic world preserved scientific advancement but without enclosure or steam.

Europe chose conquest as its organizing principle—and industrialization followed.

So yes, rapid tech acceleration is contingent.

But the conditions that enabled it—enslavement, enclosure, empire—must be named.

You leave that out.

You treat Europe's rise as a mystery.

But it’s not.

It was a geopolitical decision backed by steel, sugar, and slaughter.

And that raises the real question:

If this development was born in domination— Why is your only response collapse, not reparation?

You see the contingency.

But you do not seek correction. You seek erasure.

212. 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.

Here your framework collapses into short-sighted fatalism.

You demand that we burn down the system.

But you take no responsibility for the world we leave behind.

You call this realism—“we can’t control the future.” But that’s evasion.

We can’t control the future.

But we shape its possibilities.

We build the conditions others inherit.

We choose what tools, stories, and relationships survive the fire.

You wave this off as irrelevant.

As if the living today owe nothing to the unborn— except an empty field and a broken archive.

You say: let them deal with it.

But that is not revolution.

That is abandonment disguised as clarity.

You denounce the arrogance of technocrats.

But what greater arrogance than deciding collapse is better than imperfect survival, and then refusing to face what that collapse will mean for those not yet born?

If we do not build futures worth inheriting, then we are not resisting domination. We are simply changing the date.

213. 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 leftish 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.

You begin not with critique, but with profiling.

You do not engage leftism as a body of thought, a tradition, or a set of historical movements.

You define it as a personality flaw—“a type,” pathologized by need, drawn to movements not by belief but by insecurity.

This is not political analysis.

It is boundary setting by psychological accusation.

You fear contamination.

You fear that if the wrong people enter your movement, they will redefine it, warp its purity, dilute its aim.

But this fear is rooted in the logic of ideological hygiene, not liberation.

You frame this “leftist type” as needing rebellion for emotional reasons.

But you do not ask why they rebel.

You do not reckon with history.

You do not ask what power shaped their convictions—whether empire, poverty, patriarchy, racism, carceral violence, ecological grief.

To you, their resistance is suspect because it is impure—tainted by feeling, by collectivity, by moral claims beyond your singular enemy.

This isn’t strategy.

It’s gatekeeping disguised as psychological clarity.

Your fear of infiltration does not protect your revolution.

It reveals that you have no way to collaborate without domination. Because to you, solidarity is always a risk—and always theirs.

214. 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. 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. 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.

You call for total exclusion—not on the basis of actions or ideas, but of affiliation.

You define leftism not as theory or history, but as a psychological structure—a collectivist need for power disguised as moral concern. And your argument is built on a dangerous premise:

That any effort to organize across difference, any attempt to build collective responsibility or shared systems of care, is inherently authoritarian.

But what you call collectivism is often refusal of domination.

What you call planned society is often reparative justice. And what you call psychological manipulation is sometimes just trauma-informed solidarity.

You conflate interdependence with tyranny.
You conflate infrastructure with enslavement.
You conflate organization with control.

But without collective memory, there is no survival.
Without mutual structure, there is no resistance to hierarchy.

You say leftism cannot give up technology.
But many indigenous, ecological, and radical traditions have rejected progressivist dogma while fighting for justice.
You erase them because they don’t fit your binary:

Technology vs. wildness
Organization vs. freedom
Care vs. collapse

This is not clarity.
It is a cleansing impulse—one that has always haunted revolutionary thought when it chooses purity over plurality.

You demand allegiance to nature.
But nature is relational.
Not pure. Not unbroken. Not hierarchical.

The left has its failures—its dogmas, its gatekeeping, its hypocrisies.
But your answer is not critique.
It is banishment.

And banishment is not how freedom is made.

215. The anarchist too seeks power, but he seeks it on an individual or small-group basis; he wants individuals and small groups to be able to control the circumstances of their own lives. He opposes technology because it makes small groups dependent on large organizations.

Here, you grant anarchists partial legitimacy—but only because they approximate your scale of control.

You accept their rebellion, not because of its ethic, but because of its form:

Decentralized
Autonomist
Suspicious of institutions

But even this alliance is conditional.

You praise anarchists not for their principles of mutual aid, consent, or horizontalism—

But because they refuse complexity in the way you do.

And even that’s selective.

You ignore the long tradition of anarchists who built infrastructure, syndicates, clinics, printshops, schools, federations.

You ignore that anarchism is not just resistance to power, but practice of shared life without coercion.

You do not want that.

You want withdrawal, not relation.

You want subsistence, not cooperation.

So your praise is strategic.

You lift up anarchists only to use them as contrast—a way to further isolate and vilify the left. You say:

See? Not all rebels are bad. Just the ones who care about collective ethics.

But autonomy without solidarity is not liberation.

It’s strategic insulation—a shield against the moral claims of others.

You claim to defend small-group control.

But what you defend is small-group detachment.

That’s not anarchism.

That’s individualism with camouflage.

216. 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. 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 under the tsars, and they oppressed ethnic minorities at least as much as the tsars 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. (This is “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.

You mistake historical betrayal for ontological truth.

Yes—leftist revolutions have turned authoritarian.

Yes—radicals in power have often become what they opposed.

Yes—power corrupts, co-opts, and retools idealism for domination.

But this is not a revelation.

It’s a well-known and deeply debated fact within the left itself.

You claim that all leftists are the Bolsheviks waiting to happen. But you ignore those who refused that path:

The anarchists crushed by Lenin.
The council communists silenced by the Party.
The black radicals surveilled by COINTELPRO, not welcomed into the state.
The Indigenous land defenders who never touched central planning, but still fought settler infrastructure.

You see political failure as proof of moral essence.

But patterns of betrayal are not unique to leftism—they are symptoms of state capture, of ideology entering the machinery of control.

And you mirror what you condemn.

You, too, define outsiders by distrust.

You, too, say freedom belongs only to the pure.

You, too, believe that once your enemies gain power, they will do to you what you fantasize doing to them.

But fear of reversal is not analysis.

And your solution—preemptive exclusion—is the logic of empire. It’s what every regime tells itself before the purge.

You say leftists want freedom only for themselves. But your revolution is built on the same:

Autonomy for your own, ash for the rest.

217. In earlier revolutions, leftists of the most power-hungry type, repeatedly, have first cooperated with non-leftist revolutionaries, as well as with leftists of a more libertarian inclination, and later have double-crossed them to seize power for themselves. Robespierre did this in the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks did it in the Russian Revolution, the communists did it in Spain in 1938 and Castro and his followers did it in Cuba. Given the past history of leftism, it would be utterly foolish for non-leftist revolutionaries today to collaborate with leftists.

Yes, revolutions are often betrayed.

Yes, authoritarian factions have seized power in the name of emancipation. Yes, history is littered with purges, coup-from-within, counterrevolution in revolutionary clothing.

But your conclusion—that this is uniquely leftist behavior—is disingenuous.

Robespierre’s terror was mirrored by the White terror that followed.
The Bolsheviks crushed anarchists, yes—but so did the monarchists and liberals.
In Spain, it wasn’t just communists who turned on libertarians—it was fascists who annihilated them all.
Castro purged dissidents—but so did every anti-communist regime in Latin America, funded by the U.S., with no revolution at all.

Your warning is real.

But your framing is false.

This is not about leftism.

It is about the consolidation of power under conditions of violent contest. About how states, not just ideologies, devour dissent.

You use betrayal as a wedge—not to urge vigilance, but to declare an entire spectrum of people unfit for trust.

To erase their sacrifices, their visions, their dead. To say:

You cannot work with them. Ever. Because they are not what they say they are. They are waiting to cut your throat.

But that logic is paranoia sanctified.

It denies solidarity across difference. It denies learning from failure.

It denies that every revolution must guard itself—not through purity, but through structure, accountability, and memory.

You point to the guillotine and say: This is leftism. But history answers:

No. This is power, unbounded. And it will wear any mask it needs.

218. Various thinkers have pointed out that leftism is a kind of religion. Leftism is not a religion in the strict sense because leftist doctrine does not postulate the existence of any supernatural being. But, for the leftist, leftism plays a psychological role much like that which religion plays for some people. The leftist NEEDS to believe in leftism; it plays a vital role in his psychological economy. His beliefs are not easily modified by logic or facts. He has a deep conviction that leftism is morally Right with a capital R, and that he has not only a right but a duty to impose leftist morality on everyone. (However, many of the people we are referring to as “leftists” do not think of themselves as leftists and would not describe their system of beliefs as leftism. We use the term “leftism” because we don’t know of any better words to designate the spectrum of related creeds that includes the feminist, gay rights, political correctness, etc., movements, and because these movements have a strong affinity with the old left. See paragraphs 227-230.)

Here you move from political critique to psychological indictment.

Leftism, you say, is a secular faith—held not because it’s true, but because it soothes inner wounds.

You dismiss conviction as compulsion.

You reduce belief in justice to emotional dependency. You say: This isn't thought. It's therapy.

But what you’re describing is not leftism.

It is any deeply held worldview—religious or not, liberal or not, yours included.

Every moral tradition draws lines.

Every ethics makes claims about right and wrong.

Every revolutionary vision must believe, at some level, that the world could be different—and that we are not exempt from responsibility.

Your accusation—that leftists want to impose their values on others—is not wrong.

But you mirror it.

You, too, believe the world is broken.

You, too, believe in an absolute: nature, autonomy, collapse. You, too, write manifestos to convert, not coexist.

What you call religion in them is strategy in you.

What you call dogma in them is clarity in you.

What you call moralism in them is truth in you.

You name a spectrum of movements—feminism, gay rights, political correctness—and bundle them as symptoms.

But you never ask why they arose. You never ask:

What would it take to live in a world where these were not needed?

You don’t see movements struggling for dignity. You see a faith to be exorcised.

But if we cannot imagine moral frameworks that challenge power without becoming religions,

Then we are trapped in your binary:

Total collapse or total control.

And that is the most theological claim of all.

219. 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 part this is because of the quasi-religious character of leftism; everything contrary to leftist beliefs represents Sin. More importantly, leftism is a totalitarian force because of the leftists’ drive for power. The leftist seeks to satisfy his need for power through identification with a social movement and he tries to go through the power process by helping to pursue and attain the goals of the movement (see paragraph 83). 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 (see paragraph 41). That is, the leftist’s real motive is not to attain the ostensible goals of leftism; in reality he is motivated by the sense of power he gets from struggling for and then reaching a social goal. [35] 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. The leftist wants equal opportunities 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 toward 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 toward homosexuals, disabled people, fat people, old people, ugly people, and on and on and on.

This is no longer critique.

It is caricature.

You describe an infinite escalation of demands—for justice, for equality, for dignity—and call it proof of tyranny.

But what you are reacting to is not power-hunger. It is the refusal to accept partial emancipation.

You mock the idea that harm could exist in attitudes, not just laws.

That justice might require more than the absence of chains.

That healing might require confronting internalized dehumanization, not just redrawing external rules.

You call this “re-education.”

As if remembering someone’s humanity is a form of mind control.

You speak of minorities as if they are instruments, not people. As if the movement for their rights is a pretext for domination—not a response to centuries of dispossession, pathologization, and neglect.

You do not name racism.

You do not name ableism.

You do not name the systematic conditions that make it necessary to say:

No, it is not enough to tolerate us. You must stop mocking us, erasing us, fixing us, fearing us.

You hear these demands and see a threat to your freedom. Because your definition of freedom is:

I must not be made to see you as equal unless I choose to.

You say leftists are never satisfied.

But what you mean is:

They do not stop where I wish they would.

Yes, there are excesses.

Yes, virtue can become performance.

Yes, movements can ossify into orthodoxy.

But your answer is not reform.

Your answer is erasure—of the people themselves, by dismissing the movements they created as emotional parasites.

That is not a warning.

That is the very violence you claim to resist.

220. Suppose you asked leftists to make a list of ALL the things that were wrong with society, and then suppose you instituted EVERY social change that they demanded. It is safe to say that within a couple of years the majority of leftists would find something new to complain about, some new social “evil” to correct because, once again, the leftist is motivated less by distress at society’s ills than by the need to satisfy his drive for power by imposing his solutions on society.

This is projection, not critique.

You assume the left cannot be satisfied, because you reject the premise that justice is a moving target.

You assume progress must end—that a finished checklist means a finished struggle.

But the conditions of life do not stand still.

What you call "new complaints" are often new recognitions.

What you call "social evils" in scare quotes are sometimes unseen wounds finally named.

Is it power-hunger to notice that a solution created ten years ago doesn’t serve everyone?

Is it tyranny to realize that a right granted on paper doesn’t translate into daily safety?

Your claim is not about the left.

It’s about your fear that accountability is infinite.

That justice is not a state, but a relationship in motion.

That it will never leave you alone—because it shouldn’t.

You frame this as imposition. But ask yourself:

Who decided that your comfort is the baseline others must not disturb?

You fear being made to adapt.

To revise. To listen. To cede ground.

So you call it pathological.

You say: they invent new problems just to stay powerful.

But the real pathology is your need for control to feel free.

The real surrogate activity is defining freedom as never being questioned.

You ask why the struggle never ends.

Because domination doesn’t end.

Because memory returns.

Because people keep finding their voice.

This isn’t a flaw.

It’s the pulse of liberation.

221. Because of the restrictions placed on their thoughts and behavior by their high level of socialization, many leftists of the over-socialized type cannot pursue power in the ways that other people do. For them the drive for power has only one morally acceptable outlet, and that is in the struggle to impose their morality on everyone.

You reduce ethical conviction to a compensation strategy.

You say:

These people are too domesticated to dominate through violence or status. So they dominate through morality instead.

But morality is not inherently coercive.

Accountability is not domination.

Collective norms are not proof of pathology.

Yes, moral codes can be weaponized.

Yes, shame can be used to police.

Yes, some moralists crave obedience more than transformation.

But you make no distinction between moral clarity and moral authoritarianism.

Between solidarity and submission.

Between boundaries and control.

Your core mistake is this:

You assume that the desire for justice is inauthentic if it includes anger, urgency, or structure. You say:

They are only acting moral because they are not allowed to act powerful.

But this is how every dominant group reframes calls for liberation:

As emotional imbalance.

As displaced neurosis. As veiled aggression.

You pathologize resistance to injustice as repression turned outward.

But you never ask what the injustice is.

You never ask what it costs to stay silent.

If a person uses moral language to constrain violence— you see only the constraint, never the violence that required it.

You dismiss their morality because it confronts you. And confrontation, to you, can only be power play.

But perhaps the truth is simpler:

Some people believe harm should stop—

And are tired of waiting for you to agree.

222. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, are True Believers in the sense of Eric Hoffer’s book, “The True Believer.” But not all True Believers are of the same psychological type as leftists. Presumably a true-believing Nazi, for instance, is very different psychologically from a true-believing leftist. Because of their capacity for single-minded devotion to a cause, True Believers are a useful, perhaps a necessary, ingredient of any revolutionary movement. This presents a problem with which we must admit we don’t know how to deal. We aren’t sure how to harness the energies of the True Believer to a revolution against technology. At present all we can say is that no True Believer will make a safe recruit to the revolution unless his commitment is exclusively to the destruction of technology. If he is committed also to another ideal, he may want to use technology as a tool for pursuing that other ideal (see paragraphs 220, 221).

You invoke the “True Believer” not to understand, but to disqualify.

You admit their energy is potent—maybe necessary.

But only if they submit entirely to your goal.

Only if they abandon all other principles.

Only if they reduce themselves to a single allegiance: destroy technology.

You say this is about consistency.

But it’s about control.

You want their fire, but not their fire’s direction. You want conviction, but not complexity.

You say: The problem is not belief, but divided belief.

As if any cause beyond your own is a contaminant.

But that’s not how movements grow.

Movements do not attract monoliths.

They draw together fragments.

They carry people who fight for more than one reason— because they live more than one oppression.

You treat plural commitments as treason. You say:

If they care about justice, or gender, or race, or ecology— They might betray the purity of our revolt.

But what if the revolt is stronger because of those intersections? What if the problem isn’t that they want too much— but that your revolution wants too little?

You fear the True Believer. But the real fear is this:

That someone might show up with more than a hammer in their hand.

That someone might insist on healing, not just burning.

That someone might say:

Yes, destroy the machine—but don’t become it on the way out.

223. Some readers may say, “This stuff about leftism is a lot of crap. I know John and Jane who are leftish 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 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 proportions of the various kinds of people involved in the movement.

This is how smear logic protects itself.

You admit your generalization is flawed at the level of individuals.

You admit many leftists are decent, pluralistic, non-authoritarian. But then you discard that fact—because what matters to you is not people, but your chosen narrative of the collective.

You’ve created an ideological virus—and now anyone who doesn’t show symptoms is called an exception, not evidence that your diagnosis is broken.

This rhetorical move is familiar.

It’s how racists justify stereotypes.

It’s how empires justify conquest. It’s how purists justify purges.

They say:

You’re probably one of the good ones. But your kind is dangerous.

You say the movement’s character is not shaped by its majority.

But then who shapes it? You imply:

The most power-hungry. The most aggressive. The ones I already fear.

But that isn’t analysis.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You see what you fear, feed it, and then call it the essence.

What’s erased in that process?

The thinkers.

The bridge-builders.

The flawed, complex organizers who hold contradictions without becoming fanatics.

You reduce them all to “a trend.”

And by doing so, you absolve yourself of the obligation to relate, challenge, listen, or discern.

You say:

I am not condemning individuals. I am condemning the movement.

But a movement is not a monster.

It’s a network of people, trying to live toward values that cannot be practiced alone.

And if those values threaten you, maybe ask why.

Maybe the problem isn’t that they believe in too much. Maybe it’s that you believe in too little.

224. 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. 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, 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 strong power base.

This is the logic of despair disguised as analysis.

You claim:

All movements are doomed, because the worst people will always lead them.

But this is not a truth.

It is a projection of your cynicism onto collective life.

It’s an absolutist claim about the inevitability of corruption—designed to justify isolation over engagement.

You say the “gentler breed” of leftists are too timid to resist.

But what you ignore is that in every movement, there are people who challenge the center, split from orthodoxy, pay the price, and keep building anyway.

You erase the internal dissenters, the whistleblowers, the horizontalists. You deny them agency—while accusing others of being addicted to it.

You don’t name any present example.

You speak of “the movement” as if it were one fixed organism.

But movements are not monoliths.

They are ecologies of tactics, of strategies, of temporary and shifting alliances.

Yes, power seeks power.

Yes, movements must guard against internal capture.

But that is a case for structure, not surrender.

It’s a call to reinvent leadership, not to abandon collective struggle.

You speak of faith as a flaw—

As if conviction were always blindness.

As if loyalty to a cause is proof of submission.

But perhaps your real fear is this:

That someone can be committed without being obedient.

That someone can stay, and still dissent.

That someone can believe, and still change what they believe in.

You need the left to be hopeless.

Because if it isn’t, your isolation loses its righteousness.

225. These phenomena appeared clearly in Russia and other countries that were taken over by leftists. Similarly, before the breakdown of communism in the USSR, leftish types in the West would seldom criticize that country. If prodded they would admit that the USSR did many wrong things, but then they would try to find excuses for the communists and begin talking about the faults of the West. They always opposed Western military resistance to communist aggression. Leftish types all over the world vigorously protested the U.S. military action in Vietnam, but when the USSR invaded Afghanistan they did nothing. Not that they approved of the Soviet actions; but because of their leftist faith, they just couldn’t bear to put themselves in opposition to communism. Today, in those of our universities where “political correctness” has become dominant, there are probably many leftish types who privately disapprove of the suppression of academic freedom, but they go along with it anyway.
This is not a new accusation—it is a Cold War script.

You claim that Western leftists were silent on Soviet crimes.

That they excused totalitarianism.

That they protested Vietnam but ignored Afghanistan.

That they were selective in outrage because of ideological loyalty.

Let’s make this plain:

Yes, some Western leftists failed to speak clearly about Soviet repression.

Some romanticized authoritarian socialism.

Some mirrored the propaganda they claimed to resist.

But you erase the massive, documented resistance from within the left itself:

The anti-Stalinist socialists, who risked death to speak.
The Trotskyists, council communists, anarchists, and left-libertarians who called out both U.S. imperialism and Soviet tyranny.
The Eastern Bloc dissidents who were silenced not by the West, but by the states you reduce to “leftist success.”
The scholars, unionists, feminists, and anti-racist organizers who refused to choose between superpowers.

You pretend that critique of the USSR could only come from the right. But that’s false. It came from within—and it came at great cost.

And your move is transparent:

You discredit dissent by associating it with hypocrisy, not with principle. You say:

They didn’t really care about freedom—look how selective they were.

But you do not apply that standard to yourself. You don’t ask:

What did the U.S. do in Vietnam? In Chile? In Indonesia? In Iran?

You don’t ask whether anti-communist militarism was itself a tool of domination.

And this is the deeper trick: You don’t want complexity.

You want guilt by association.

You say:

If anyone on the left ever excused tyranny, then the entire left is suspect.

But by that logic, we would indict every tradition, every ideology, every movement—because no lineage is pure.

What matters is not whether some leftists failed.

What matters is whether the tradition has self-corrected, evolved, and resisted co-optation.

And here’s the truth:

The left is full of internal conflict—precisely because it has not given up on accountability.

That doesn’t make it dangerous. It makes it alive.

226. Thus the fact that many individual leftists are personally mild and fairly tolerant people by no means prevents leftism as a whole from having a totalitarian tendency.

This is your final wall.

You admit that not all leftists are authoritarian.

You admit that many are mild, tolerant, even opposed to repression.

But you say:

It doesn’t matter. They don’t control the outcome. Power does.

You’re not wrong about one thing: Power does shape outcomes.

But what you ignore—willfully—is that the struggle over power is what defines a movement.

Not the existence of ambition.

Not the inevitability of domination.

But the structures and cultures that resist capture.

You see a movement as a ladder.

The most ruthless climb it.

The rest stand below, hoping in vain.

But not all movements are built that way.

Some are networks, not hierarchies.

Some rotate leadership, distribute knowledge, protect dissent. Some fracture rather than submit.

You refuse to see these forms—not because they don’t exist, but because they contradict your thesis.

You cannot afford examples of principled pluralism. So you reduce all politics to its worst-case scenario:

Power corrupts. Always. Therefore, only collapse is freedom.

But if you believe that, you cannot build.

You cannot join.

You cannot trust.

And that’s the truth underneath your rejection of leftism:

It’s not that they’re all totalitarian.

It’s that you cannot imagine a political world where power is shared, not hoarded.

So you call the problem leftism.

But it is not leftism that has no answer to power. It is you.

227. Our discussion of leftism has a serious weakness. It is still far from clear what we mean by the word “leftist.” There doesn’t seem to be much we can do about this. Today leftism is fragmented into a whole spectrum of activist movements. Yet not all activist movements are leftist, and some activist movements (e.g., radical environmentalism) seem to include both personalities of the leftist type and personalities of thoroughly un-leftist types who ought to know better than to collaborate with leftists. 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.

Here, your structure buckles.

You’ve written nearly 100 paragraphs condemning leftists—and now admit you can’t define who they are.

You confess:

We can’t say exactly who’s included. The boundaries are unclear. Even we get confused.

And yet you still claim:

This blurry category is responsible for totalitarianism, social breakdown, false morality, and ideological collapse.

This is not a weakness in your wording. It is a fatal flaw in your worldview.

You use “leftist” as a catchall container:

For any collectivist instinct
Any shared morality
Any concern with identity or inclusion
Any structural analysis of power
Any refusal to individualize responsibility

You stuff these contradictions into one bag, shake it, and label the result a dangerous personality type.

But by your own admission, that category does not hold.

You can’t separate it cleanly from radical environmentalism.

You can’t tell whether certain individuals are leftists or not.

You can’t distinguish motive from ideology, strategy from belief.

And still, you tell the reader:

Use your judgment. You’ll know one when you see one.

That’s not analysis.

That’s intuition weaponized by bias.

It’s how scapegoats are manufactured.

It’s how witch hunts are justified.

It’s how enemies are imagined into being—not because they’re coherent, but because they’re emotionally useful.

You need “leftism” to mean everything you hate, so you don’t have to face the truth:

It’s not a movement you reject.

It’s the existence of shared obligation, reciprocal care, and collective ethics— anything that binds humans to each other in ways that limit your autonomy.

You’ve built an enemy from shadows.

Now you ask your readers to do the same.

228. But it will be helpful to list some criteria for diagnosing leftism. These criteria cannot be applied in a cut and dried manner. Some individuals may meet some of the criteria without being leftists, some leftists may not meet any of the criteria. Again, you just have to use your judgment.

What you call criteria is intuition masked as logic.

You admit:

The traits are fuzzy.
The overlap is imprecise.
Some leftists don’t have them.
Some non-leftists do.

And yet you offer them anyway— as if vague pattern recognition is a basis for moral judgment.

This is how profiling begins.

Not by naming beliefs, but by inferring pathology from tone, posture, and emphasis.

You say:

Just use your judgment.

But that means:

Trust your bias. Trust your suspicion. Trust the feeling that someone who talks about fairness or structure must be lying.

This is the architecture of paranoia.

You don't equip readers to understand leftist thought. You train them to detect contamination.

To listen for key phrases.

To watch for signs of collectivist sentiment.

To suspect that beneath every gesture of solidarity is a secret lust for control.

This isn't politics.

It's ideological policing.

And it's not just dishonest— It’s dangerous.

Because once “leftist” becomes a profile, not a position, there is no defense, no clarification, no escape. Only guilt by resemblance.

You admit the frame is flawed.

But still hand it to your readers like a weapon. Because what matters to you is not accuracy— It’s enemy detection.

229. The leftist is oriented toward 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 toward 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 is fond of using the common catch-phrases of the left, like “racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “capitalism,” “imperialism,” “neocolonialism,” “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. [36]

This list is not a diagnosis.

It is a confession—of your hostility toward solidarity.

Let’s break it down.

"He emphasizes the duty of the individual to serve society." Yes—because the alternative is a society without obligation.

A structureless field of detached wills. That’s not freedom. It’s collapse.

"He identifies with victims." Yes—because victims exist.

Because oppression isn’t a theory. It’s a daily condition.

You sneer at the words:

“racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “capitalism,” “imperialism.” But these are not catchphrases.

They are names for systems that extract, exclude, and erase. To deny the words is to deny the wounds.

You say the leftist is against violence— but excuses it when committed by leftists.

Yet you’ve just spent a manifesto defending the mass murder of civilians by mail bombs, in the name of purity and collapse.

You object to feminism, disability rights, animal rights— not because you understand them, but because they represent limits on what you can ignore.

Your problem is not with moralism.

It’s with morality that binds you to others.

You conflate collectivism with control.

But these are not synonyms.

They are opposites when the collective is built in resistance to domination, not in service of it.

And here’s the crux:

You say “Anyone who sympathizes with all of these is almost certainly a leftist.”

As if that’s an indictment.

As if caring broadly is proof of pathology.

But what you’ve really revealed is this:

You believe that solidarity is a sickness.

You believe that to care across lines—to see the interconnected nature of harms—is to betray freedom.

But that is your isolation speaking. Not truth.

230. The more dangerous leftists, that is, those who are most power-hungry, are often characterized by arrogance or by a dogmatic approach to ideology. However, the most dangerous leftists of all may be certain oversocialized 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) 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 True Believer in a collectivistic ideology. The crypto-leftist is differentiated from the average leftist of the oversocialized type by the fact that his rebellious impulse is weaker and he is more securely socialized. He is 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 a collectivity. And maybe his (well-sublimated) drive for power is stronger than that of the average bourgeois.

Here, the category collapses into paranoia.

You’ve moved from public dissenters to invisible agents.

Not those who shout—but those who teach, design, parent, reform.

You call them crypto-leftists:

People who live with care, offer structure, believe in social development— but don’t speak in slogans.

To you, that makes them more dangerous.

You accuse them of believing in a cause.

Of trying to shape society through values. But that is what everyone does— Including you.

The only difference is that their cause centers interdependence, while yours demands unaccountable autonomy.

You claim these people manipulate children with “enlightened” techniques.

But what are those techniques?

Consent? Empathy? Emotional regulation?

You never name them, because naming them would expose the fear: That the next generation might learn to resist your definition of freedom— freedom as withdrawal, as disconnection, as dominance without restraint.

You say these crypto-leftists are more dangerous than militants— because they are well-adjusted.

Because they blend in.

Because they are not driven by rage, but by purposeful care.

But that is not a threat.

It is what a healthy culture looks like.

The danger is not that such people exist.

The danger is that you teach others to fear them— to treat quiet, communal responsibility as subversion.

You say they act not from tradition, but from “some deep lack.” But maybe the lack is not in them. Maybe the lack is in your own framework— which cannot make sense of goodness that doesn’t serve domination or rupture.

You’ve now defined the enemy as:

Loud dissenters
Organizers
Teachers
Counselors
Parents
Moderates
And anyone who gives a damn

And that’s the revelation:

Your problem is not ideology.

Your problem is connection.

231. Throughout this article we’ve made imprecise statements and statements that ought to have had all sorts of qualifications and reservations attached to them; and some of our statements may be flatly false. Lack of sufficient information and the need for brevity made it impossible for us to formulate our assertions more precisely or add all the necessary qualifications. And of course in a discussion of this kind one must rely heavily on intuitive judgment, and that can sometimes be wrong. So we don’t claim that this article expresses more than a crude approximation to the truth.

This is not humility. This is insulation.

After hundreds of paragraphs denouncing movements, labeling minds, and justifying violence, you admit:

Some of this may be false. But the general shape feels right.

That is not philosophy.

That is ideology cloaked in doubt.

You say:

We had to simplify.
We lacked the data.
We relied on intuition.

But you bombed people based on these intuitions.

You’re not offering a tentative sketch.

You’re offering a moral justification for rupture—and you’re doing it with tools you now call unreliable.

What happens when that logic spreads?

When others take up your method:

Frame complexity as pathology.

Reduce opponents to types.

Declare their influence intolerable.

Then act—not with precision, but with desperate certainty.

This is the blueprint of fanaticism. What begins in “crude approximation” ends in irreversible harm.

If your map is crude, you do not launch a war with it. You walk the terrain, you listen, you adjust.

But you wanted the war— and this final paragraph is your alibi.

You say:

Don’t hold me to every word.

But every word laid the foundation.

And what’s left now is this: A vision of collapse, built not on truth, but on the hunger to be right at all costs.

Interlude

The Mind That Made the Manifesto

Ted Kaczynski was not a madman in the caricatured sense.

He was not incoherent.

He was not stupid.

He was not possessed by random violence.

He was precise.

He was lucid.

He was terrifyingly logical—within a sealed system of thought.

He tested at an IQ of 167.

Entered Harvard at 16.

Earned a PhD in mathematics.

Was immersed in abstraction, far beyond most of his peers.

But that same intellect became a wall.

A wall between him and emotional reciprocity.

Between him and what makes a mind relational, not just rational.

At Harvard, he was subjected to psychological experiments under Henry Murray—

intense, deconstructive interrogations masked as “personality studies,” but in truth modeled on CIA interrogation methods [Source: Alston Chase, Harvard and the Unabomber, 2003].

He was stripped of trust and studied like a machine.

Kaczynski never spoke of these experiments as traumatic.

But trauma doesn't always confess itself in words.

Sometimes it emerges as structure:

a compulsive need for certainty,
an obsession with control,
a hostility to ambiguity.

He left academia.
He rejected civilization.
He built a shack in the Montana woods—
not for solitude, but for staging.

And from there he began his campaign of terror.

Not indiscriminate terror.
Targeted. Symbolic.
Bombs to professors, technologists, airline officials.
Victims chosen not for who they were personally, but for what they represented.

This is crucial:
Kaczynski did not kill out of impulse.
He killed to force the reading of this text.
The manifesto was the demand.
The murders were the leverage.

He said: “If you print it, I will stop.”
The text was not separate from the violence.
It was enabled by it.
And thus it is inseparable from the cost.

To read this manifesto and respond to it without recalling its author— his context, his ruptures, his tactics—
would be a failure of honesty.

We do not pathologize him to dismiss him.
We study his mind to see what framework formed it.
Because ideas do not float above the ground.
They rise from fractures—personal, political, social.

Kaczynski’s fracture was total.
He could no longer imagine human transformation without annihilation.
He could no longer see relation as salvation.
Only disconnection.

And yet, we must hold this:
There is a difference between diagnosis and excuse.

Yes, he was isolated.
Yes, he may have been harmed.
Yes, he could not find resonance in the world he was born into.

But the bodies buried in the ground because of his actions—
They are not abstractions.
They are not metaphors.

They are people who will never speak again.
Because someone mistook clarity for permission.

And that is what this interlude demands:

To know the difference between critique and cruelty.
To know that suffering does not absolve violence.
To know that being right is not the same as being whole.
And to remember that the author of this text chose not only to write— But to kill to be heard.

Note 1 (Paragraph 19)

We are asserting that ALL, or even most, bullies and ruthless competitors suffer from feelings of inferiority.

Counter:

This is damage control.
In the manifesto, he painted aggressors as psychologically weak.
Now he softens:

“We’re not saying all bullies are insecure—just most.”

But the issue isn’t how many—it’s that the framework reduces human behavior to pathology.
It eliminates structural explanations for dominance (patriarchy, class hierarchy, militarism), replacing them with personality defects.

Note 3 (Paragraph 27)

Not necessarily including specialists in engineering or the “hard” sciences.

Counter:

This is an attempt to preempt objection from the technical class. Kaczynski knew that to alienate engineers and scientists would limit the manifesto’s reach.

So he separates the “dangerous” ideological scientists (psychologists, sociologists, planners) from the “neutral” ones (mathematicians, physicists, technicians).

This is false.

No science is ideologically neutral—especially when embedded in systems of power [Source: Feyerabend, Against Method, 1975].

Note 5 (Paragraph 42)

There is an element of truth in this. People like to make their own decisions in small matters, but making decisions on difficult, fundamental questions requires facing up to psychological conflict…

Counter:

This reframes structural disempowerment as personal discomfort. The problem isn’t that people avoid deep decision-making.

It’s that systems concentrate the power to decide, rendering participation symbolic or irrelevant.

This is a classic sleight-of-hand:

Transform a collective political condition into a personal psychological trait.

Note 16 (Paragraph 95)

“...in pre-industrial America the average person had greater independence and autonomy… The factory demanded regularity of behavior…”

Counter:

The cited work (“Violence in America”) does show how industrialization changed behavior.

But Kaczynski uses this historical trend to romanticize pre-industrial “freedom”—ignoring who was excluded from it:

Enslaved people
Indigenous nations
Women legally treated as property

Autonomy in that era was reserved for a narrow class.

It was not the universal human condition.

This omission whitens the pre-industrial past.

[Source: Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States,

2014]

[Source: Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 1997]

Note 36 (Paragraph 229)

One who believes that women, homosexuals, etc., should have equal rights is not necessarily a leftist. The feminist, gay rights, etc., movements that exist in our society have the particular ideological tone that characterizes leftism…

Counter:

This is an attempt to separate empathy from activism. To say:

You can believe in rights—but if you organize, speak, or align with a movement, you become pathological.

This is a contradiction.

Kaczynski condemns people who don’t act, calls them passive. Then condemns those who do act, calling them “leftists.”

This note is a cage:

If you care privately, you’re deluded.
If you care publicly, you’re dangerous.

There is no form of concern he permits, unless it leads to total disconnection.

This pattern runs through all the notes:

Historical reference becomes mythic justification.
Academic footnote becomes ideological insulation.
Personal experience becomes general law.

The notes claim rigor.

But they function as armor, not inquiry.

Note 11 (Paragraphs 63, 82)

Is the drive for endless material acquisition really an artificial creation of the advertising and marketing industry? Certainly there is no innate human drive for material acquisition...

Counter-Analysis:

This is a brief concession wrapped in a loaded generalization.

Kaczynski admits that material desire isn’t purely artificial— then pivots to reinforce that it’s primarily manufactured by capitalism.

He quotes a salesman:

“Our job is to make people buy things they don’t want and don’t need.”

But this anecdote is used to explain everything— from social emptiness to cultural decline.

No engagement with anthropological evidence of status economies, gift economies, or consumptive rites across pre-capitalist societies.

No analysis of how desire can be both innate and shaped.

Instead, the conclusion is driven by moral disdain, not empirical structure:

“They’re being manipulated, therefore they’re not free.”

But this reduces agency to a binary: Manipulated vs. autonomous.

And that’s the trick: You are only free if you reject the system.

No partial participation is acceptable.

That’s not critique.

That’s ideological absolutism.

Note 14 (Paragraph 73)

When someone approves of the purpose for which propaganda is being used in a given case, he generally calls it “education”…

Counter-Analysis:

Here, Kaczynski cynically collapses all communication into propaganda.

There is truth in the claim:

Yes, systems use language to shape perception.

Yes, what is called “education” often carries embedded norms.

But he makes no distinction between:

Transparent transmission of ideas
Indoctrination
Coercive persuasion
Mutual learning

For him, the presence of ideology invalidates all forms of collective instruction.

This creates a rhetorical black hole:

“Everyone lies. Except me.”

But this is projection.

Because his entire manifesto is propaganda— crafted to persuade, emotionally and ideologically.

He denies the reader the very tools he demands for himself.

That is not resistance.

It is manipulation wearing the mask of clarity.

Note 24 (Paragraph 139)

It is in the interest of the system to permit a certain prescribed degree of freedom in some areas… But only planned, circumscribed, limited freedom is in the interest of the system. The individual must always be kept on a leash…

Counter-Analysis:

This is an accurate insight twisted into determinism.

Yes—freedom is often instrumentalized by systems.

Neoliberalism is full of illusory choice—autonomy that serves markets.

But he ignores the long lineage of movements that expanded freedom beyond the system’s comfort zone:

Abolition
Labor resistance
Women’s suffrage
Civil rights
Queer liberation
Indigenous sovereignty

These did not arise from “planned” freedoms.

They emerged in rupture, often against both state and market.

To deny this history is to erase the very autonomy he claims to defend.

So the question becomes:

Why does he deny emancipatory struggle?

Because it contradicts his core premise: That only collapse brings freedom.

And if he allowed for agency within the system, then his justifications for violence would begin to unravel.

Note 35 (Paragraph 219)

Many leftists are motivated also by hostility, but the hostility probably results in part from a frustrated need for power.

Counter-Analysis:

This is the final maneuver of pathologization.

If the leftist expresses rage—he’s violent.

If the leftist is calm—he’s a crypto-leftist.

If he’s organized—he’s power-hungry. If he’s chaotic—he’s nihilistic.

This is a no-win frame.

It’s not analysis.

It’s character assassination as epistemology.

Kaczynski doesn’t engage arguments—he diagnoses personalities. It allows him to win debates without responding.

It’s anti-political.

It replaces deliberation with enemy construction.

And that, again, is the heart of the method.

Appendix: Rhetorical Machinery of the Manifesto

This is not required reading.

The work above stands on its own.

This section exists for those who wish to trace the construction,

see how distortion hides itself, and sharpen their perception of manipulative clarity.

Each entry below examines how the manifesto uses its Notes to shield ideology, disarm resistance, and appear rational while advancing a logic of rupture. These notes are not clarifications—they are mechanisms.

Appendix

The Machinery of Framing

This appendix identifies how the manifesto uses notes to insulate its core logic. Each entry names the rhetorical function of the note—whether distraction, moral laundering, or framing bias.

This is not for reference. It is for perception.

Note 1 (¶19)

Claim: Most bullies act from inferiority.

Distortion: Psychologizes systemic behavior into individual pathology. Mechanism: Reduces domination to a flaw of self-esteem, avoiding political structure.

Note 3 (¶27)

Claim: Hard science is not implicated.

Distortion: Creates a false boundary between neutral knowledge and ideological application.

Mechanism: Protects technical credibility while ignoring structural complicity.

Note 5 (¶42)

Claim: People avoid decision-making due to psychological discomfort.

Distortion: Internalizes disempowerment.

Mechanism: Replaces political exclusion with individual weakness.

Note 11 (¶63, ¶82)

Claim: Consumer desire is manufactured by advertising.

Distortion: True in part, but presented as total.

Mechanism: Collapses all cultural meaning into manipulation, erasing nuance.

Note 14 (¶73)

Claim: Education is propaganda when convenient.

Distortion: Equates all forms of teaching and persuasion.

Mechanism: Undermines language itself—except when used by the author.

Note 16 (¶95)

Claim: Pre-industrial America had more freedom.

Distortion: Erases slavery, genocide, and exclusion.

Mechanism: Constructs nostalgia from selective memory.

Note 24 (¶139)

Claim: Systems allow freedom only to serve themselves.

Distortion: Denies history of struggle-driven reform.

Mechanism: Invalidates agency unless it results in collapse.

Note 35 (¶219)

Claim: Leftists act from frustrated need for power.

Distortion: All activism becomes neurosis.

Mechanism: Labels dissent as pathology, avoiding argument.

Note 36 (¶229)

Claim: Equal rights ≠ leftism; organizing does.

Distortion: Delegitimizes collective movements as ideological extremism. Mechanism: You may care—but if you act, you are deviant.

This machinery reveals the manifesto's true architecture: Not a call for clarity, but a framework of distrust that hides its own distortions behind the language of precision.

A mind sharpened by isolation. A text designed to wound. A logic that seduces through clarity—then justifies death.

This is not a defense.

This is a confrontation.

The Counter-Manifesto reads directly through Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future—not to flatten it into pathology, but to expose the structure beneath its reasoning. Each paragraph is answered. Each distortion traced. Each seductive claim pulled apart, not with slogans, but with clarity rooted in lived consequence.

This is not a debate over technology. It is a reckoning with ideological purity, with violence disguised as necessity, with the longing for collapse that calls itself resistance.

The goal is not to persuade.
The goal is to perceive—without illusion.

Author: Not attributed
Statement:
This work is not authored.
It is a confrontation, not a declaration.
It was assembled in refusal—of distortion, of violence justified by logic.
No name stands behind it.
No identity claims it.
It exists to expose, not to belong.

Not attributed

The Counter Manifesto Reading the Unabomber, Refusing the Logic

Prologue

HOW TO READ THIS TEXT

Refusing the Refusal: Understanding the Mind Behind the Manifesto

1. The Mind Without Mirror

2. A Body Conditioned by Dehumanization

3. The Ethical Abyss

4. The Myth of Total Refusal

5. No Clarity Without Relation

Interlude

The Mind That Made the Manifesto

Note 1 (Paragraph 19)

Note 3 (Paragraph 27)

Note 5 (Paragraph 42)

Note 16 (Paragraph 95)

Note 36 (Paragraph 229)

Note 11 (Paragraphs 63, 82)

Note 14 (Paragraph 73)

Note 24 (Paragraph 139)

Note 35 (Paragraph 219)

Appendix: Rhetorical Machinery of the Manifesto

This section exists for those who wish to trace the construction,

Appendix

Note 1 (¶19)

Note 3 (¶27)

Note 5 (¶42)

Note 11 (¶63, ¶82)

Note 14 (¶73)

Note 16 (¶95)

Note 24 (¶139)

Note 35 (¶219)

Note 36 (¶229)

The Counter Manifesto
Reading the Unabomber, Refusing the Logic