Ted Kaczynski’s 1969 Journal
Series I, Journal #1
June 7, 1969
Among the [white] captives [of the Indians] brought in for delivery [to the English] were some [CROSSED OUT] bound fast to prevent their escape; and many others, who, amid the general tumult of joy and sorrow, sat sullen and scowling, angry that they were forced to abandon the wild license of the forest for the irksome restraints of society. Thus to look back with a fond longing to inhospitable deserts, where men, beasts, and Nature herself, seem arrayed in arms, and where ease, security, and all that civilization reckons among the goods of life, are alike cut off, may appear to argue some strange perversity or moral malformation. Yet such has been the experience of many a sound and healthful mind. To him who has once tasted the reckless independence, the haughty self-reliance, the sense of irresponsible freedom, which the forest life engenders, civilization thenceforth seems flat and stale. Its pleasures are insipid, its pursuits wearisome, its conventionalities, duties, and mutual dependence alike tedious and disgusting. The entrapped wanderer grows fierce and restless, and pants for breathing-room. His path, it is true, was choked with difficulties, but his body and soul were hardened to meet them; it was beset with dangers, but these were the very spice of his life, gladdening his heart with exulting self-confidence, and sending the blood through his veins with a livelier current. The wilderness, rough, harsh, and inexorable, has charms more potent in their seductive influence than all the lures of luxury and sloth. And often he on whom it has cast its magic finds no heart to dissolve the spell, and remains a wanderer and an Ishmaelite to the hour of his death.
— Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac, Vol II, p.237 (Boston: Litle, Brown and Co., 1917) UCB library.
Acorns ... before the use of Wheat-corn was found out) were heretofore the Food of Men, nay of Jupiter himself ... till their luxurious palats were debauched ... And men had indeed hearts of oak; I mean, not so hard, but health, and strength, and liv’d naturally, and with things easily parable and plain.
—From An “English chronicler of the 17th century” quoted by Fernaldard & Kinsey in “Edible Wild Plants of Eastern North America” page 161.
The Following from “The Fog of a Jack Tar; Or, the Life of James Choyce, Master Mariner” Edited by V.L. Cameron. Published by T. Fisher Urwin, Londin, 1897, page 201. In the Falkland Islands, Choyce reports finding 5 men “clothed in seal skins” living in a state of nature, as it were. “Indeed” (says Choyce) “they said they were comfortable enough, and wanted nothing but wives to make them happy; still” [sad mistake] “they wanted to revisit their native countries ...”.
In a dim way I appreciated how radical a change Greenland had made in me. The transition from the restrictions of life at home, where I was a gear meshing with other gears and spinning on a fixed axis, to the utter freedom of our island, where with Max I was absolute king having only our Eskimo family to consider, had been too gradual to arouse thought.... Among others again, I found that I had lost the spirit of give and take, as though I were in fact a hermit savage. It would be long before I was adjusted again to the restrictions of civilized existence. Patience, a virtue in the citizen, seemed to demand of me fantastic concessions. —William S. Carlson, Greenland Lies North, New York, MacMillan, 1940, page 286.
Following quote from Fridtjof Nansen, The First Crossing of Greenland Tranlsated by Hubert Gepp, London, Longmans, Green and Co. 1892.
p.179. Referring to the Eskimos on the East coast of Greenland — “a happy and contented race, quite as happy, perhaps, as any to which our thoughts turned across the sea.” So what have 5000 years of civilization done for us?
p.297 “However hard the day had been, however exhausted we were, and however deadly the cold, all was forgotten as we sat round our cooker, gazing at the faint rays of light which shone from the lamp, and waiting patiently for our supper. Indeed I do not know many hours in my life on which I look back with greater pleasure than on these.”
p.353. After Nansen and Svendruphad caught some sea gulls: “Language, in fact, has no words which can adequately describe the satisfaction of the two savages who sat that evening on the northern shore of Ameragdla, and dipped each his hands into the pot, fished out the body of a gull, and conveyed it, piece by piece, head, feet, and all, into the depths of his hungry stomach.”
p.360 “This was the last of these wonderful nights which we had a chance of enjoying before our re-entrance into civilisation.”
There are few things in one’s experience in the North that are so pleasant to remember as these autumn hunts, when the camp is pitched among a clump of spruce trees at the bottom of some ravine, and when at the end of a day’s hunt you can gather around a crackling fire in the enveloping darkness, for the four-months’ summer day is just over. The occasional howl of a wolf in the near shadow lends an additional romance, especially if, as not seldom happens, the wolves are so numerous and near that the dogs become frightened and gather in a close circle around the fire. Few meals can be more satisfying, either, at the end of a hard day’s work, than a caribou head that has been rotated continuously before the fire until it is roasted through, even to the base of the tongue and the center of the brain. The dreams of boyhood seldom come true, but I am not sure that there is not sometimes as much romance about the reality of such evenings as there was about the dreams of Crusoe-like adventures on desert islands.
—Vilhjalmur Stefansson, My Life with the Eskimos, 1951, page 338.
From the same source, p.38: “One frequently hears the remark that no people in the world have yet been found who are so low that they do not have a religion. This is absolutely true, but the inference one is likely to draw is misleading. It is not only true that no people are so low that they do not have a religion, but it is equally true that the lower you go in the scale of human culture the more religion you find ...”{1}
September 23, 1969
By my own definition I would call myself successful if I were a fix-it man in a small village ... -Actor George Sanders, quoted in Chicago Daily News, late Aug or early Sept, 1969.
From Barttetts Familiar Quotations
John Freeman: “Who may regret what was, since it has made himself himself?” ...
Karl Marx: “Constant labor of one uniform kind destroys the intensity and flow of a man’s animal spirits, which find recreation and delight in mere change of activity.”
Thoreau: “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderences to the elevation of mankind.” “The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.” [This makes the following point: the company of other people always restricts your freedom, because people have to accommodate each other to a certain extent, unless they just want to fight.]
Thoreau again: “I never found the companion that was so companiable as solitude.”
Herbert Gleason in Saturday Review, October 18, 1969: “But what of the future? Will candidates be sold more and more like packaged goods? Will [political] campaigns end up entirely in the hands of the professional image manipulators? And will the public be casting ballots in proportion to the talent of one of the other groups of image makers on the financial ability of the partisans to buy in time? Probably.
At a two-day conference ... much talk was devoted to the morality of image manipulation .. But in the end the participants — campaign managers, candidates and ...
Oct. 26, 1969
From Vance Packland’s “Naked Society” — The closing in upon the privacy of the individual comes not only from the outright scrutiny of individuals but also from multiplying rules and regulations and from ever mounting requirements for licenses. There is the new insistence that one be traceable from cradle to grave. Bess E. Dick, … complained to me: “There is a crowding in.” … Today it is increasingly assumed that the past and present of all of us—virtually every aspect of our lives—must be an open book; ... The expectation that one has a right to be let alone—the whole idea that privacy is a right worth cherishing—seems to be evaporating among large segments of our population. … Today, as we shall see, the Bill of Rights is under assault from many directions. Thomas Jefferson’s vow that he had sworn eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man has a quaint ring to many people in 1964. Aldous Huxley commented that the classic cry of Patrick Henry that he wanted either liberty or death now sounds melodramatic. Instead today, Huxley contended, we are more apt to demand, “Give me television and hamburgers but don’t bother me with the responsibilities of liberty.”
It is worth noting that Mr. Huxley’s prophetic book, Brave New World, ... has been banned from several U.S. schools. Also among the banned is George Orwell’s 1984, ... When the U.S. Commissioner of Education was asked about the banning of these two classics ... he declined to comment because he said he had never heard of either of the books! … a haunting comment made to me by Representative Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin, who has led several battles for individual rights on the floor of Congress. He said: “Basically I am not hopeful about the pressures that will in time make our country something of a police state.... I sense a losing game.”
Also many other good points made in this book, too numerous to quote.
Oct. 27, 1969
A good article: “Eco-catastrophe” by Paul Elrich, in Ramparte, Sept 1969 ...
More from Vance Parkland’s “Naked Society”: Packard quotes Justice Brennan:
“Electronic surveillance ... makes the police omniscient; and police omniscience is one of the most effective tools of tyranny.”
p.285.... many social scientists, biologists, and medical scientists have been plunging ahead to explore methods of attaining control. A few years ago, a group of sixteen distinguished scientists were called together by Dr. James G. Miller, psychiatrist and psychologist at the University of Michigan. They concluded: “We must assume the probability of a breakthrough in the control of the attitudes and beliefs of human beings through exceptionally effective educational techniques, drugs, subliminal stimulation, manipulation of motives or some as yet unrecognized medium.” They suggested that the potentialities of this science of mind control far outweigh those of the hydrogen bomb. And so what did they do? They called for funds to help develop a science of human behavior.
Parkland mentions some of the villains and the startling successes they have achieved in mind control: B.F. Skinner of Harvard; Dr. Jose M.R. Delgado of Yale; Dr. Robert G. Heath of the Department of psychiatry and neurology, Tolane University School of Medicine
p.294 of Naked Society: A start down the road to forced medication is seen by some in government decisions to fluoridate water. The earlier chlorination of water was simply to purify the water, but fluoridation involves the concept of positive medication through the drinking water available in the areas affected. As one doctor has commented: “Individuals will have no choice but to swallow what the state presents.”
[Here, it is irrelevant whether flouridation may have any undesirable physical effects. The point is that no one should be forced to take this medicine even if he only objects because he is an ornery old cuss who just damn well doesn’t like that new-fangled stuff. Perhaps the next evil is simply the fact that over-organisation force people to be dependent on the water supply provided by society.]
... An important passage, too long to quote here, is Chapt. 3 of “My Neck of the Woods” by Louise Dickinson ...
Nov. 11, 1969
From “Can Anyone run a city?” by Gus Tyler, Saturday Review, Nov. 8, 1969: “Municipalities of 100,000 to 299,000 spend $14.60 per person on police; those of 300,000 to 490,000 spend $18.33; and those of 500,000 to one mil-lion spend $21.88. New York City spends $39.83. On hospitalization, the first two categories spend $5 to $8 per person; those over 500,000 spend $12.54; New York spends $55.19. Expanding the economy of a city does not solve the problem; it makes it worse. Several scholarly studies have come up with this piece of empiric pessimism: if the gross income of a city goes up
[PAGE 38 of the photo-scan is missing]
... does not really want them.” The paper says: “Taylor cited figures showing the spiralling cost of development that forces merger after merger.”
I maintain that as modern organized societies are presently constituted, people who live in them suffer from a severe shortage of personal freedom. Further, I think it is very probable that individual liberty will gradually disappear completely and permanently.
I begin by explaining my first assertion. I am inclined to think that the kinds of freedom most commonly spoken of and taught in schools (vis, freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, the right to vote, and to have a fair trial, etc.) are more secure now than they ever were (in the English-speaking countries, at least). In fact, there seems to be in progress a renaissance of concern for these liberties. These kinds of freedom are important, but they are important primarily as means to an end; that is, we need them in order to defend our personal liberty. In themselves, they have very little direct influence on our everyday lives; for example, the average citizen in his entire lifetime never needs a fair trial, and he spends very little time discussing politics. His daily life would be changed very little if he had to refrain from criticizing the government or questioning the established religion.
In my opinion, then, it is not the possession of freedom of speech, religion, etc. which constitutes personal freedom. The important aspect of personal freedom is the ability to direct the course of one’s own life, to influence the major events of that life, and to determine the texture of one’s daily existence. This kind of freedom we don’t have. There are a limited number of slots in society into which everyone must fit. Within the limits of our individual abilities, we are more or less free to choose our own slots, but once a slot is chosen, it is extremely difficult to move to another slot. Moreover, seen from what we may call the outsider’s viewpoint, the slots present a depressingly limited variety of alternatives. Take me as an example. It took me 9 years of training to become a mathematician. Suppose I wanted to do something else for a living. If I wanted to switch to another area of science, I would need several more years of training. Moreover, I wouldn’t really be changing slots. As a chemist, for example, I would still be living the same kind of life; only the details of my work would be different. The same objections hold with regard to other fields requiring a large amount of technical training. If I wanted to go into business, there would be 2 main possibilities: a position in a corporation, or a business of my own. I would not be likely to get a position in a corporation because I don’t have the kind of past record they like (for example, no extracurricular activities in college); furthermore, I wouldn’t want such a job because a large amount of social conformity is usually required. As for starting my own business, it would take years for me to save enough capital to do so, and I would have an excellent chance of losing it all. Everybody knows that small business is on the way out nowadays. The other possibilities are unskilled work or work requiring only a limited amount of technical training. In either of these cases, one is condemned to doing extremely boring, routine work, offering no real challenges. Moreover, unskilled work is on the way out because of automation and within a few decades (at most) jobs requiring only a limited amount of technical training will begin to disappear too. In any case, I would have difficulty getting work of that kind because I would be regarded as “overqualified” (That’s a euphemism that means they think you’re too educated to get along with your comparatively ignorant fellow-workers), and my leaving a high-prestige field for a menial job would be considered highly suspicious. Not only is it difficult to change slots, but one’s original choice of a slot may not be as free as it seems at first glance. Presumably a sort of law of supply and demand governs the number of positions open in any given field; also see the selective service memo quoted on p.16 of these notes. Almost any job outside the academic field requires subservience to an eight-hour-a-day, five-day-a-week schedule. Any pre-agricultural savage would regard this as degrading slavery. In fact, I have read that some of the Indians stated this quite explicitly when the white people tried to force them to give up their nomadic ways and take up agriculture. The pygmies of Africa have expressed a similar attitude, if my memory serves me. See a book called “people of the forest” or something like that, by some anthropologist whose name I don’t remember. In any job, most of the important decisions are made by one’s superiors, and even the minor ones have to conform to the policies they set. In short, while the employee follows orders, the preagricultural savage is in business for himself. Some [TEXT UNINTELLIBLE: swent-atack(?)] anthropologist is going to pop up now and claim that the preagricultural savage is so bound by tribal taboos and customs that he really is no more free, or even less free, than a modern factory workers. For all I know, this may very possibly be true. I am certainly no upholder of “tribal customs”, and I do not necessarily advocate a return to the stone age. What I am trying to point out is that a man who makes his own living with his own hands from scratch has (if he is free from restrictions of social origin) a kind of freedom that a gear in the modern social machine never dreams of.
[A digression: (I want to make it clear that, whether I am right or wrong in this digression, the point is in no way essential to my argument.) It is open to dispute whether the tribal customs of primitives restrict freedom as much as may be claimed: Did the Indians, for example, really have as many taboos to obey as we do? If some of their taboos seem unreasonable to us, probably many more of our taboos would have seemed unreasonable to them. Another point: My limited knowledge of anthropology suggests to me that among many pre-agricultured savages, the only punishment for deviation from tribal customs was expulsion from the tribe for a certain period of time. If my memory serves me, this was the only punishment inflicted by the tribe for even murder among some (or all?) of the plains Indians. (Personal revenge by the relatives of the deceased might be something else again.) Since pre-agricultural savages are capable of living off the country alone (though they have less security that way) the individual who had a strong dislike for some custom or social restriction could simply separate himself from the tribe. In practice, I gather, this seldom happened. But I cite the case of John D. Hunter, as recorded in his extraordinary book “Manners and Customs of Several Indian Tribes” (... originally published about 1828.) Hunter was a white who was captured by Indians at a very early age, was raised as an Indian, regarded himself as an Indian, and apparently remembered little or nothing preceding his capture by the Indians. At the age of 19 or 20, Hunter had a falling-out with the Indians and went to live all alone. I quote
“the time and labor necessary to procure food for myself was very inconsiderable … Not withstanding this solitude, many sources of amusement presented themselves to me, especially after I had become somewhat familiarized to it … I … took great pleasure in regarding the dispositions and habits of such animals, as were presented to my observations … the conflicts of the male buffalos and deer, the attack of the latter on the rattlesnake, the industry and ingenuity of the beaver in constructing its dam, etc., and the attacks of the panther on its prey, afforded much interest and engrossed much time. Indeed, I have lain for half a day at a time in the shade to witness the management of the ants … the manoeveres of the spider … I became satisfied with the loneliness of my situation, could like down to sleep among the rocks, … and almost feel the venomous reptiles seeking shelter and repose under my robe, with sensations bordering on indifference.”
Let this also serve as an answer to those who will claim that the preagricultural savage is a slave to the vagaries of nature and that his life is always one of unremitting toil and terrific hardship — though perhaps it would seem so to us, because we have been brought up to be abnormally soft and flabby. Remember also in this connection that the preagricultural savages who survived long enough to be studied by anthropologists were the ones who occupied the most inhospitable regions — because all the land that was half-way good was taken by more advanced peoples. So the preagricultural savages that we hear about are mostly those who had the hardest lives. End of digression.]
To get back to my subject, in this society, whether one lives or dies is not one’s own responsibility. The important things in life are all taken care of by society. You wont go hungry even if you don’t work, because some welfare agency will feed you. If you get sick, you’re in the doctor’s hands. The risks and rewards of life are all dealt with by society and cannot be combatted by the individual except insofar as he does so by simply following orders. All you can do to prolong your life is: obey traffic laws; eat what the doctors say is good for you; obey orders on the job; etc. None of the decisions you make that require any initiative or intelligence have much chance of preserving your life. They may affect, for example, your financial status, but that is primarily a matter of prestige rather than of physical safety or even comfort.
The whole texture of life is determined by society. Consider all the evils that are imposed on the individual by the system. To mention a few: air and water pollution; the threat of atomic war; overcrowding and traffic congestion; noise; bureaucratic red tape; the draft; destruction of the wilderness; the omnipresence of vulgar, intrusive, manipulative advertising; etc...Furthermore, the individual living independently can at least reasonably attempt to alleviate his hardships. If he is cold he can make a fire or build a better hut. If game gets scarce he can try, at least, to find an area where it is more plentiful. His decisions count; he is not helpless. But what can the individual do about air pollution or overpopulation? Sure, we can complain about it, because we have freedom of speech. We can yak about it all we want, but looking at it realistically, we have to admit that it is a very rare individual who manages through his own personal efforts to even create a significant change in a public matter of this kind.... The point I am trying to make here is that the important things in an individual’s life are mainly under the control of large organizations; the individual is helpless to influence them.
And consider all the innumerable restrictions that are necessitated by the complex structure of civilization — restrictions that people are so accustomed to that they don’t even think of them as limitations on their freedom. Some examples: I like to take long walks. On these walks I can’t take a piss when I want to. I can’t sit down if I get tired, lest people think I’m a bum. I am restricted to walking in certain permitted areas, viz, the sidewalks; most of the land area is taken up by private property or by streets filled with cars. In the woods, if you see a little glade that attracts you, you can turn aside and explore it, but in the city you can’t stray from the sidewalks. I often have to stop for traffic lights, which gets irksome if there are a lot of them. I have on several occasions been stopped by cops and questioned as a suspicious character, apparently for being out too early or for walking where there is no sidewalk or in the rain. Busy thoroughfares are so numerous that it is difficult to avoid these [CROSSED OUT: messy] [ADDED later: noisy], smelly places. If I want to go to the woods to walk, I have to drive, and the traffic congestion often makes the drive more troublesome than it’s worth. Perhaps these restrictions don’t worry most people, because most people are too lazy to walk anyway. But here are some more popular activities that are subject to restrictions: For city dwellers — hunting is at best a once-a-year vacation activity; fishing is usually hopeless because there are so many fisherman and so few fish; shooting can only be done at a shooting range — and that just isn’t any fun compared to shooting at tin cans in the field; because of the restrictive traffic laws that congestion makes necessary, car-driving cannot be considered as a recreational activity; horseback riding is out; so are people who like to keep, say, chickens; sailing is out for most people in Chicago because its extremely difficult to get a place to moor your boat. “O.K.” you say, “so you can’t keep a house in the city. Why be so upset about such a little thing?” But it’s not any one restriction that bothers me — it’s the whole pattern of restriction that makes life sterile. About the only activities available, recreational or otherwise, one of the packaged variety — movies, TV, bowling alleys, golf courses, concerts, etc. The individual has little opportunity to determine the structure of his own activities — he has to just choose one of the packages that’s offered. Almost every aspect of our lives is hemmed in by restrictions — what clothes we wear on what occasions, what time of day we have to work, etc. See Vance Packard’s Naked Society. In some passages he describes the problem much more eloquently than I could, though in my opinion his stand is not sufficiently uncompromising.
I have now finished my case for the thesis that liberty in this society today is severely curtailed. I will proceed to explain my assertion that the situation will get worse and that individual liberty eventually will completely disappear forever.
In the first place, of course, there is “progress”, as it is commonly called. The more highly organized society becomes, the more necessary it is that individuals fit smoothly into their assigned places in order to keep the machine working. It is commonly said that scientific and technological progress increases man’s power over his environment. This is true enough, but the power in most cases can only be exercised by large organizations, because the sophisticated equipment required is usually too expensive to be owned by any ordinary individual; and even in cases where individuals can own the equipment (e.g. automobiles, radio transmitters) its use is generally subject to many restrictions and is dependent on facilities provided by society. thus this power over the environment is kept under the control of society and can be used only in the ways that society provides for and under the surveillance of society. Technological advances have the effect of increasing the power that large organizations exercise over individuals, of making individuals more dependent on society, and thus of decreasing the power of the individual. Have computers, for example, increased John P. Doe’s power over his environment? No, but they do help the government to keep a dossier of information about him. How about say, airplanes? Sure, John Doe can fly from New York to Los Angeles (once or twice a year, if he has the money) in a few hours; but his environment in Los Angeles will in its essential aspects be very similar to his environment in New York. It is probably safe to say that an 18th century person could find more adventure and variety through travel on foot or horseback than a modern man of average financial resources can find through air travel.
Still more dangerous are scientific advances which make it possible to control people’s minds. Scientists have already had great success in controlling animals by means of electrodes inserted in their brains, and these techniques have even been successfully applied to human mental patients. No-one who views the matter objectively can doubt that scientific capabilities in this direction will increase faster and faster, as they do in all other directions. Psychological techniques for manipulating people also are meeting with increasing success. In short, it is obvious that within a few decades, at most, society will have in its hands the capacity to control everybodies minds at will. The question remaining is: will this capacity be used, and, if so, how will it be used?
It seems virtually certain that it will be used, and, if it is used, it doesn’t matter how it is used, because people will be nothing but robots and not humans at all, so who cares what happens to them? The danger that occurs to most people first is that mind-control techniques might be used by cynical, power-hungry, authoritarian personalities to seize control of the country and establish a totalitarian dictatorship along the lines of fascist or communist governments. This kind of thing is probably fairly likely to happen in certain unsophisticated Asian, African, or Latin American countries, and there may be some possibility of its happening in the U.S., but I think it is quite unlikely here. In this country, I think that liberty will be destroyed by ordinary honest or half-honest people, and that the change will come gradually and smoothly without any disruption of the structure of society. Bureaucrats, psychologists, educators, etc. will want to begin manipulating people’s minds “for their own good” or “for the good of society”, and no doubt they will honestly believe that these are their true motivations. In part these will be their true motivations, but there will be other factors as well; e.g. it will gratify their egos to control people, and it will also make their jobs easier. Quite likely the invasion of liberty will proceed most quickly in the “education” of children and the “rehabilitation of criminals and insane people”, and, in fact, the invasion has already been begun by those who attempt to apply psychology in these areas. Mind you, these manipulators don’t usually start with some cynical idea that people’s minds should be controlled or manipulated; they merely start from the premise that children should be brought up to have “good” values, that they should abhor violence, that they should “relate” to other people, etc.”, that criminals should be “cured” and made into “useful members of society”, etc. Of course, people have always wanted to educate their children to have such and such values, but as long as the techniques used to direct children into certain channels are naïve and of low effectiveness, there is no loss of liberty. But when psychological and/or physiological techniques become so effective (as they will in the future) that it is possible to reliably endow each child with a specified set of values, then people will no longer be human — they will just be man-made artifacts. Of course, the majority of educators today, including those who presume to concern themselves with the psychology of their words, would probably be repelled by the idea of having children’s personalities engineered in detail. But this behavioural engineering will be introduced by little bitty stages, so that nobody will think of objecting to it.
First, perhaps, children’s minds will be adjusted so that every single one of them will abhor violence — and how can you argue against that? After all, people who commit crimes of violence kill and maim people! How can you let this continue to happen just for the sake of some silly sentimental idea that children’s personalities should be allowed to grow like Topsy? Next, perhaps, kids will be fixed so as to have a strong motivation to study hard in school. And you can’t argue with that, either. How can you allow a child’s whole life to be blighted by school failure, just because of some irrational, puritanical idea that educators shouldn’t influence his personality? How can you allow those precious intellectual resources to be wasted? Later, kids will be brought up to be more docile, more willing to fit into the place that society assigns to them — and you can’t argue with that either, because it will present all kinds of tragic maladjustments and psychological problems. And so it will go. More and more aspects of the child’s personality will be engineered.
Of course, if they started off fixing kids by some disgusting cold-blooded means like sticking electrodes in their heads or injecting hypnotic drugs into them, people would object. But the means that will be used will simply be highly sophisticated psychological educational techniques, and it will all be done in the name of giving kids “proper values”, improving their “mental health”, and “helping them relate to other people”. Eventually, once this kind of thing has been accepted and has made people docile enough so that they will accept quite a lot, then the electrodes and chemicals will come into use as being more efficient and effective. Most intellectuals won’t object to the gradual introduction of behavioural engineering in education. They would object if the kids were engineered into a type they don’t like; but if the kids are engineered to be more like them (the intellectuals), then they (the intellectuals) won’t object. If the kids are fixed so as to have a greater appreciation of arts and sciences, to be more nonviolent, and all that stuff, the intellectuals won’t think of it as brainwashing, they’ll think of it as progress in education. But once you start manipulating the kids, where will it stop? It won’t stop, because somebody will always find a really compelling reason to start engineering just one more little aspect of the kids personalities; just as lawmakers always find a compelling reason to pass one more law. And the reason really are compelling, because as society gets more and more complicated, more laws become necessary; and for the same reason, more manipulation of people’s personalities will become necessary. It seems people are always willing to give up one more little piece of their freedom in exchange for one more little piece of physical security. [CROSSED OUT: then extinct(?)] Gun control laws are a case in point. Proposals for stricter requirements for drivers licences are another.)
With “rehabilitation” of criminals it will be the same story. No doubt it will start with “rehabilitation” of people convicted of crimes of violence. who, after all, can object to “curing” a murderer of his violent propensities? Then the class of criminals subject to “rehabilitation” will be gradually widened. Eventually, all people will be screened for violent propensities, and those who have them will be subject to compulsory treatment to prevent violent crimes from happening in the first place. And who will object? Would you actually let people be killed just because of your irrational reluctance to have your mind investigated? And besides (they will say) only potential criminals will be subject to treatment, and they are “sick” anyhow. But next, perhaps, anyone with erratic propencities of any kind will be treated, because erratic or irresponsible behaviour of any kind can physically endanger people, even if only accidentally. And so forth. Eventually people will be just biochemical machines.
Once this situation has come about it will last forever,{2} because social turmoil and uncontrolled change will have become impossible. All desire for autonomy will simply be programmed out of people’s minds.
One myth that certain wishfully-thinking intellectuals like to believe in is that people of very high intelligence would be necessary to keep society going and that such people would always be rebellious and hard to control. Actually, there is no reason to believe that individualistic tendencies are an unavoidable concomitant of high intelligence, even though they may tend on the average to accompany high intelligence in our still relatively uncontrolled society. Undoubtedly there exist today many highly intelligent other-directed people. [CROSSED OUT: One point worth noting is that high intelligence and a high degree of hypnotic suggestibility tend to accompany each other.]
Despite the fact that the youthful social and political rebels of today are constantly demanding “freedom”, I don’t think they provide us with much hope. They have always appeared to me to be intolerant and unwilling to look at things from the other person’s point of view. In the unlikely event that they ever gained control of this society, I think they would permit us less freedom than we have now. They too would use mind-control techniques, though they would no doubt use them in a somewhat different way than the present establishment would.
Note: In this little essay I have occasionally made comparisons between modern society and various societies of the past. This is not to be taken to imply that I regard past societies better than the present one. I am not very interested in the past, except in so far as it may be useful for purposes of illustration. My main concern is with the present and future.
Nov. 20, 1969
Lest the gloomy prognostications above be regarded as merely the ravings of a fevered imagination, I call attention to the fact that a number of highly respectable people share my worries. For example, see Aldous Huxley’s important book “Brave New World Revisited”.
J. Herbert Hollomon in Saturday Review, July 1, 1967: “Today you and I can buy a house, but we cannot buy an attractive city; you and I can buy a car but we cannot buy an efficient highway; you and I can pay tuition for a son to go to college but we cannot buy an educational system. The public—in the small or large—buys these public goods: school systems, cities, suburbs, road systems, air pollution control systems, airways systems. Today an increasing share of your and my money is being spent for public goods as contrasted with private goods. This is because we live closer together, have become more interacting and interdependent than we ever were before.”
(Note: The individual — because one vote is insignificant — has no control over what “public goods” will be provided, and thus an “increasing share of your and my money” is being spent in a way over which we have no control.) Hollomon expresses no dissatisfaction with this situation — and why should he? After all, he is a comparative big shot. He can get his views published in influential journals like the Saturday Review. He isn’t just a helpless pawn; he’s one of the elite that helps to move the pawns.
November 25, 1969
Chicago Daily News reports recommendations of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence: “Among the commission’s recommendations were ... identification of specific violence-prone persons ...”. This, of course, implies [CROSSED OUT: surveillance of persons] some form of surveillance of “violence-prone persons”, as identification alone would be useless as a preventive measure. The next step, no doubt, will be compulsory psychiatric treatment for individuals considered to be “violence-prone”.
Dec. 21, 1969
From Chicago-Sun times, p.2: “In 10 to 15 years from now every man, woman and child in the [Northern] hemisphere will have to wear a breathing helmet to survive outdoors. Streets, for the most part, will be deserted.... In 20 years, man will live in domal cities. Even now ... there is no more clean air left in the United States .... ‘We have no solution’ ... ‘The people will be inside and all living things outside will be dead. Technology will have taken over completely’ ... for the near future ‘we can see no improvement’” [If everything outside is dead, what do we eat?]{3}
P.8 of Sun-times, Dec 21: Apparently, office of the Hammond Corporation are required to undergo “sensitivity training.” “You get all these people wanting to make personal contributions to corporate objectives and that is much different than a dedication to personal objectives”.
Jan 7, 1970: From Driftwood Valley by Thedore C Stamwell-Fletcher, Who lived for a couple of years in wilderness amongst Indians: “Of all people whom we’ve known, I. and I have decided that we envy these Indians most. For they are free as very few left on this earth are free. They can be independent in mallens of medival wealth, for the country in which they live supplies their needs if they choose to make it do so....
Jun. 20, 1970
From “Indians of the United States” by Clark Wissler, Doubleday, 1966.
p. 126: “The traditions of Indian life had always been for absolute freedom of action, and each community was jealous of this might. Aboriginal United States was a kind of ultrademocracy, every small group functions for itself.”
p.290: the following is quoted from a politician by a group of Mohegans: “The Times are Exceedingly Alter’d, Yea the Times have turn’d everything Upside down, or rather we have Chang’d the good Times, Chiefly by the help of the White People, For in Times past our Fore-Fathers lived in Peace, Love and great harmony ...
From Norbert Wiemen’s “I am a Mathematician.” p.271: “... a general breakdown of the decencies in science which continues to the present day. In most previous times, the personnel of science had been seeded by the austerity of the work and the scantiness of the pickings. … Thus, an ambitious man with slightly anti-social tendencies or, to put it more politely, indifferent to spending other people’s money, would formerly have avoided a scientific career as if it were the plague itself. From the time of the war on, these adventurers, who would have started out as stock promoters or lights of the insurance business, have been invading science. The old assumption which we used to make must be discarded. … in the normal course of events we did not expect to meet in our world men who lied or men who intrigued. When I began to emerge from my sheltered life into the scientific confusion of wartime, I found that among those I was trusting were some who could not be held to any trust.”
I contend that liberty is inconsistent with the nonexistence of evil. Unless men’s minds are engineered or controlled so that everyone wants only what is “good”, there will be some people who will be disposed to evil[1]; and unless people are so closely regulated and watched that it is possible to prevent any unauthorized act before it is committed, then some of these evilly-disposed people will actually commit evil. And if people are so closely regulated and watched, then there is no freedom. Furthermore, there is the problem of deciding what is to be considered “good”. There is no such thing as absolute good. Ask any logician. The word “good” is meaningless until you define it in oppositional terms and your definition of “good” determines your system of values or goals. (In practice it would probably be impossible for anyone to explicitly and completely define his whole system of values.) Different people have different systems of values and different definitions of the word “good”. No system of values is “better” than any other, because when you say that system A is “better” (i.e., “more good”) then system B, you are presupposing some prior definition of the word “good”, i.e. a prior system of values. Unless some uniform system of values is imposed on all people by means of behavioural engineering, there will always be as many different systems of value as there are people. Thus it will be impossible for everything to be “good” from everybody’s point of view. No one group of people can have everything “good” according to its own values, in an organized society, unless it directly or indirectly imposes its will on all other people — and then you have no liberty. It therefore seems clear that you can’t eliminate all “evil” and still have liberty. Some may contend, however, that there are some things we can all agree on as being “evil” and that these things can be completely eliminated without loss of liberty. But there is nothing at all that everyone will agree is “evil.” There are, no doubt, even some people who regard such things as pain and danger as desirable in and of themselves. So you say, if only a tiny minority fails to agree that something is evil, why should that prevent us from completely eliminating that evil? Well, to be absolutely because from evil, you would either have to brainwash the opposing minority into regarding it as evil, or you would have to establish such close surveillance and restraint of the minority that they could inextricably be prevented from perpetrating the evil under consideration. Well, maybe you are willing to do this to a tiny minority; say by brainwashing them this sets a precedent for brainwashing the next “evil” minority. And the process continues. There is always another “evil” that someone regards as intolerable and insists must be brainwashed out of people.
For one thing, many of the sacrifices of liberty are made for the sake of security against calamitous events like violent crimes, dangerous accidents, etc. John Doe reads about Charles Whitman, who killed 13 people or so, and he finds it very frightening. So he favors gun-control laws, because they seem to involve such a minor sacrifice of liberty when set up against frightening things like murders. Actually, John Doe’s fear at reading about Charles Whitman is largely irrational, because, in comparison to the entire population of the country, the number of people killed by mad assassins is infinitesimal. If J. Doe viewed the matter in rational terms, he would set that little sacrifice of liberty on the one hand against, say, an increase of one hundredth of one percent in each person’s chances of living to the age of 60, on the other hand. Viewed in these terms it doesn’t seem quite so obvious that the sacrifice of liberty should be made. Other proposed sacrifices of liberty that fall into this same category are proposals for stricter requirements for driver’s licenses, proposals for requiring governor on all cars to prevent anyone from driving over 60 m.p.h., etc.
Another reason people are willing to sacrifice pieces of liberty for pieces of security or material comfort may be that it is easy to give a rational or seemingly rational reason for measures that provide security or material goods. One can talk about 100,000 more TV sets or 2 years of longer life-expectancy. But liberty is an intangible thing. If you try to argue that liberty actually leads to materialistic benefits, you are usually wrong. Furthermore, it is often easy to give facile but naïve arguments to “prove” that such and such a freedom is useless or foolish. Examples: Against the 5th Amendment (or in favour of wiretapping) you hear people say: “If he has nothing to hide why should he object to answering the question (or having his phone tapped?) And if we repealed the 5th Amendment …
… few kinds of liberty that everyone has at least some stake in …
… Once sufficiently effective mind control techniques become established in Communist countries these countries would stay that way.
[Bibliography]
Archivists note: This list is not included at the end of original handwritten journal. It’s the only alteration made to the text.
Anthropology
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My Life with the Eskimos — Vilhjalmur Stefansson
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Indians of the United States — Clark Wissler
Biography
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I am a Mathematician — Norbert Wiener
History
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The Conspiracy of Pontiac — Francis Parkman
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Sylva, Vol. 1; Or A Discourse of Forest Trees — John Evelyn
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The Fog of a Jack Tar; Or, the Life of James Choyce, Master Mariner — V.L. Cameron (ed.)
Politics
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Can Anyone run a city? — Gus Tyler
Nature Writing
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My Neck of the Woods — Louise Dickinson
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Driftwood Valley — Thedora C. Stamwell-Fletcher
Travel
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Greenland Lies North — William S. Carlson
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The First Crossing of Greenland — Fridtjof Nansen
Technology
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Literate Engineering — J. Herbert Hollomon
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Eco-catastrophe — Paul Elrich
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Naked Society — Vance Packard
Misc.
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Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations — John Bartlett
[1] Some thoughtless individuals will object that perhaps if people are properly social and educated, they will be “good” automatically, and their minds won’t have to be manipulated. But if educational techniques are so effective that they make everyone “good” without exception, then the techniques are merely a variety of behavioural engineering. Sticking electrodes into people’s heads makes us feel squeamish, but what is the difference whether we manipulate a person by sticking electrodes in his head or by educational techniques if both methods are equally effective in engineering his personality? …
{1} Actually, Stefansson’s remark is not accurate. The Kalahari Bushmen are said to have little religion. The Siriono of Eastern Bolivia have no religion at all (see Allan R. Holmberg, Nomads of the Long Bow). The Ituri Pygmies studied by Colin Turnbull (The Forest People*) certainly had less religion than the highly-developed civilization of medieval Europe, and their religion contained surprisingly little irrationality. (See also Turnbull’s Wayward Servants.)
{2} That the situation would last “forever” was certainly too hasty a conclusion. To engineer such a system of society so that it would have a high degree of stability is probably a far more difficult task than I imagined when I wrote those lines.
{3} It is doubtful that the scientists who made these predictions actually believed them. Very likely they were just trying to frighten people into being concerned about air pollution. But, whether they believed them or not, the predictions were irresponsible, and probably did more harm than good, because these scientists were “crying wolf”, and the fact that such predictions have proved so grossly inaccurate has made many people scoff at all predicitons of environmental damage.
Back in 1969, I had a much higher opinion of the competence and honesty of scientists than I do now, so I was then much more concerned about these predictions than I would be today.