[Book Review] Industrial Society and It's Future

Theodore Kaczynski's ground breaking philosophical work

I have recently completed reading the Industrial Society and its Future by the legendary author Theodore Kaczynski. While the work itself was published thirty years ago, many of the ideas are more relevant today than they were then. In the 1990’s when the book was published we were just entering the era of over-prescribed of medication that act as a coping mechanism in a broken culture. Now we rest solidly in a time where opiates, and anti-depressants are common among the general populace and where most forms of non-conformity have been pathologized by the medical industry. And that was before a global pandemic that’s been used to justify near omnipresent police surveillance states.

Ted K. makes a number of important statements and observations that help in understanding our modern world. One important note is in the structural pathology of leftism. Leftists are desperate to impose their will on the larger world but lack the will to power to act. Instead leftists take up the banner of already culturally popular causes. In doing so, the leftist is a slave to the larger society and desperately tries to “improve” society by holding it to unreasonable standards based on the moral foundation that society purports to follow. A leftist will only act in a way that’s always considered popular within the larger culture as they’re incapable of acting independently. The pathology of leftism is accurately explored in high detail by Industrial Society and its Future in a way few other pieces explore. Thus, high recommendation for properly understanding the context of the society we now live in… it also helps to understand how their pathological altruism so easily becomes pathological hedonism, violence and vice; ultimately why they’re evil.

The second important point that Ted K. makes in his thesis is that we are quickly approaching an era in which men will be molded to fit into an inhuman society rather than a society being molded to fit the needs of the men within it. This is something we’ve all observed from mask mandates to universal digital surveillance. It is a necessity of life in the modern era that we are aware of the fact that the larger post-industrial-society finds individually independent people dangerous. The larger system treats independent individuals more as rogue AI than it does treat them like people. Ted K. wrote his piece in an era where these forms of totalitarianism were only beginning to manifest in comparison to how invasive they are today. The reader is forced to consider how it is that Ted K. saw these problems so comparatively early in our history. We live in a world now where one poor choice of words can see an individual expelled from their fiscal foundation. It wasn’t that long ago it took a concerted effort by a centralized media apparatus to attack individual citizens, now all it requires as an ad-hoc lynch mob of leftists.

Given that we now exist much closer to the fundamental problems identified by Ted K. It is hoped that some of us might make observations that he could not, or did not. One of the most fundamental questions that leaps to mind in the wake of his work is this: Is it possible to use high technology to make ourselves more human? We live in a time of near instant communications and while we can all recognize the flawed societal structures resulting from mass media and social censorship, it is worth asking if there is a light at the end of this tunnel. Ted K. saw that the world must fundamentally change, and what it meant to be human may fundamentally change. From his position though, there may be ideas that he hadn’t yet recognized because they were too new, I hope there are solutions he hadn’t seen. Industrial Civilization and its Future makes up an excellent foundation, a view rendered complete, of the collapse of the human condition in the face of “progress”. As apocalyptic as the writing is, that foundation represents a place of solidity from which ships might be launched to explore new horizons of the human condition. If we are to solve these problems inherent in post-industrial anti-humanism, we must first recognize that the problems exist. We must then use our understanding of them as a launching platform to seek solutions in ways no one has ever thought of before.

As a philosophical work, Industrial Civilization and its Future basically is required reading for those who wish to survive the 21st century. It has an