The Unabomber's Declinism Goes Mainstream

Ted Kaczynski's manifesto could have been written by any number of modern doomsayers and dystopians

People often act on their beliefs, and if you believe that civilization is in decline and that you can do something to stop it, that can be a recipe for violence. Witness the Harvard-educated mathematical prodigy turned domestic terrorist Theodore Kaczynski—aka the Unabomber—who died this week.

The widespread media coverage mostly focused on Kaczynski’s crimes for which he was sentenced to life in prison (three murdered, 23 wounded from mail bombs sent to targeted individuals between 1978 and 1995), but I thought of his dystopian view of modern society, as reflected in his 35,000-word manifesto, which if it was mentioned at all in media stories was referred to as a “screed”, the ramblings of a mad man. Indeed, although he denied it at his trial in refusing to plead insanity, Kaczynski very probably was mentally ill. (Although some have suggested that Kaczynski was brainwashed when he participated in mind control experiments run by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray, who previously worked for the OSS—the precursor to the CIA—and may have been involved in the mind-control program MKUltra, Kaczynski himself said he was "quite confident that [his] experiences with Professor Murray had no significant effect on the course of [his] life.")

Sane or insane, Kaczynski’s views were outlined in his Industrial Society and its Future, which was published in the Washington Post and The New York Times in 1995 in hopes of triggering recognition by someone who knew him (which turned out to be his own brother, who turned him in). In point of fact, the views in this document could have been penned by any number of modern doomsayers, dystopians, and progressophobes (as Steven Pinker calls them), such as Greta Thunberg, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Christopher Ryan, and John Gray (more on them below).

Here’s Kaczynski on what went wrong with civilization:

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.

Modern Americans, he griped, are “decadent leisured aristocrats” who are “bored, hedonistic, and demoralized,” nothing more than “domesticated animals.” Speaking in the first person plural “we” or occasionally “FC” (Freedom Club), like many revolutionary Marxists before him, Kaczynski advocated revolution:

We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a political revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.

Come the revolution a new ideology will emerge “that opposes technology and the industrial society…so that when and if the system collapses, the remnants will be smashed beyond repair, so that the system cannot be reconstituted.”

In a 2010 postscript to the manifesto titled The Road to Revolution, authored from his prison cell, Kaczynski reflected on the many commentaries he had read about his writings, some of which accused him of unoriginality and compared him to radical environmentalists:

If there is anything new in my approach, it is that I’ve taken revolution seriously as a practical proposition. Many radical environmentalists and “green” anarchists talk of revolution, but as far as I am aware none of them have shown any understanding of how real revolutions come about, nor do they seem to grasp the fact that the exclusive target of revolution must be technology itself, not racism, sexism, or homophobia.

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Compare these sentiments to those of environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who famously scolded the audience at the 2019 U.N. Climate Action Summit:

People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

In a speech at the UN Climate Change COP24 Conference in 2018 Thunberg admonished attendees:

Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money. Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few.

And at the UN Climate Action Summit on September 23, 2019 Thunberg warned:

You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

That sounds ominous. But what about all the poor people living in developing countries who would like to be rich, or at least well off enough to survive and flourish? What happened to the moral crisis of income inequality and wealth disparity between rich countries using fossil fuels and poor countries burning cow dung, wood, and coal for energy? It’s hard to care about the climate a century from now when you don’t know where your food is coming from a week from now.

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Then there are the prognostications of Eliezer Yudkowsky in his widely quoted Time magazine AI doomsday screed:

Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.”

How obvious is our coming collapse? Yudkowsky punctuates the point:

If somebody builds a too-powerful AI, under present conditions, I expect that every single member of the human species and all biological life on Earth dies shortly thereafter.

And:

We are not prepared. We are not on course to be prepared in any reasonable time window. There is no plan. Progress in AI capabilities is running vastly, vastly ahead of progress in AI alignment or even progress in understanding what the hell is going on inside those systems. If we actually do this, we are all going to die.

Right. So…AI is so smart that it is going to lead not only to the end of civilization, but to the extinction of all life on the planet, and yet AI (along with, presumably, AI researchers like Yudkowsky) is so dumb that it cannot figure out a way to employ its form of intelligence to enhance humanity without causing its demise?

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In his 2019 book Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress, Christopher Ryan asks rhetorically if all the pre-civilized dangers he admits were real—“Many babies died in infancy. A broken bone, infected wound, snakebite, or difficult pregnancy could be life-threatening”—were worse than modern scourges like cardiovascular disease, cancer, car accidents, and “a technologically prolonged dying process”? As Ryan told me when he was a guest on my podcast to discuss his book, “civilization is ultimately a tragic mistake.”

Why? “It’s heartbreaking to think about all the suffering that’s been caused over the millennia, and just how misguided a pursuit this has been.” The decline began with agriculture, Ryan avers, because it brought with it hierarchy, oppression, violence, pollution, overpopulation, communicable diseases and pandemics, and ultimately depression, suicide, and deaths of despair.

O-kay. But we might also ask, echoing Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, what has civilization ever done for us? Well, for starters, there are the aqueducts, sanitation, roads, irrigation, medicine, education, public baths, public order, wine and, of course, peace. Oh peace, puh-leeze!

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John Gray is a perpetual pessimist about progress, which he calls a myth. Specifically, Gray is skeptical that “the progress achieved in science and technology can occur in ethics, politics, or, more simply, civilization.” While acknowledging advances in society, “like the emancipation of women and homosexuals and the abolition of torture,” Gray worries “all that can be easily swept away again.” Although torture was outlawed centuries ago, including in the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights amendment against cruel and unusual punishment, Gray points to the “enhanced interrogation” practiced by the American military at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib which shows that, in his words, “Something like torture, which is completely beyond the boundaries of civilization, can become renormalized at any time.”

While the prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib was inexcusable, it is worth noting the widespread media coverage and condemnation of the practice, including and notably in the U.S. by the vast majority of Americans. As for slavery, does anyone seriously think it could be reintroduced as a legal institution in the US or in any of the UN or EU member nations? Or that the franchise for women would ever be reversed in any of the nearly 200 countries in which it is legally guaranteed? As for same-sex marriage, it is now the law of the land, codified by no less an authority than the US Supreme Court.

Such examples do nothing to lighten Gray’s dark view of history. “The proponents of the Enlightenment and the idea of progress like to think that they are an important chapter in this vast historical narrative,” Gray continues, calling it all “a rather silly fiction.”

Oh yeah? Ask the billions of people emancipated from the yoke of autocratic governments centuries past who now find themselves free and prosperous just how fictional the progress narrative is.

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The point of this comparison is that academics, activists, and public intellectuals are just as susceptible to the pull of a paradisiacal past followed by a declinist history as was Ted Kaczynski, albeit without the violence. Indeed, in a 2000 essay in The Atlantic the Harvard philosopher Alston Chase observed that "the truly disturbing aspect of Kaczynski and his ideas is not that they are so foreign but that they are so familiar." And in a 1998 New York Times OpEd the renowned political scientist James Q. Wilson noted:

If it is the work of a madman, then the writings of many political philosophers—Jean Jacques Rosseau, Thomas Paine, Karl Marx—are scarcely more sane. Apart from his call for an (unspecified) revolution, his paper resembles something that a very good graduate student might have written.

In fact, for at least a century and a half public intellectuals and academic scholars have been predicting the imminent collapse of Western civilization, even as the ideals and institutions that insure its success have grown: science and technology, reason and Enlightenment humanism, democracy and universal franchise, property rights and the rule of law, free enterprise and free trade, and the rights of individuals expanded to include all humans and even members of other sentient species. You would think academics and intellectuals—the very people who promote such values—would be singing their own praises for such progress, but no, they’re gloomier than ever.

An Amazon book scan of the word string “The Coming Crisis” produces titles like The Coming Financial Crisis (2015), The Global Water Crisis (2008), The Coming Bond Market Collapse (2013), Get Prepared Now!: Why a Great Crisis is Coming and How You Can Survive It (2015), ISIS, Iran and Israel: What You Need to Know about the Current Mideast Crisis and the Coming Mideast War (2016), Code Red: How to Protect Your Savings from the Coming Crisis (2013), The Coming Oil Crisis (2012), The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System (2014), Coming Climate Crisis? (2012), The Coming Economic Armageddon (2010), The Coming Inflation Crisis (2014), The Coming Famine (2011), Rising Sea Level and the Coming Coastal Crisis (2012), and 55 more pages of titles in a similar vein.

“The Decline and Fall of” string returns, naturally, Gibbon’s the Roman Empire, but also Byzantium, the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, the British Aristocracy, the Japanese Empire, the Soviet Empire, the Roman Church, Radical Catholicism, the American Republic, Democracy in 21^st Century America, American Growth, Truth in Bush’s America, and the West, to site just a few from the first 10 pages of 100 pages of such doom.

The word string “Rise and Fall of” generates 11,857 titles, starting with William L. Shire’s classic Third Reich, but continues with the rise and fall of Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece, Alexandria, Carthage, the Roman Empire, the House of Caesar, the House of Medici, the British Empire, Communism, the Cherokee Nation, American Growth, American Business, the Constitution, the Confederate Government, Society, Nations, Empires, and the Great Powers. The only two positive titles I found were on the rise and fall of Violent Crime and Slavery (take that John Gray!)

In the late 1980s I devoured Paul Kennedy’s 1987 The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and assigned it for a class I taught at Glendale College on the history of war. I completely bought into Kennedy’s thesis that America had reached “imperial overstretch” and was soon to go the way of the British Empire and its Pax Brittanica. “The task facing American statesmen over the next decades,” Kennedy warned, would be “to ‘manage’ affairs so that the relative erosion of the United States’ position takes place slowly and smoothly.” This was just three years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was not even on Kennedy’s radar, in keeping with nearly everyone else in the West, including Soviet experts.

Not that democracy was spared the doomsayers’ prognostications. The Twilight of Democracy, The Democracy Trap, Democracy on Trial, Giving Up on Democracy, The Frozen Republic, The Selling of America, The Bankrupting of America, The Endangered American Dream, and Who Will Tell the People were just a few titles from the 1990s, all during the exceptionally prosperous administration of the democratic centrist Bill Clinton.

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What is it about human nature that leads both rational and irrational people to think we are in the end of days? There are at least four factors at work:

1. The Availability Bias, or the tendency to assign probabilities of potential outcomes based on examples that are immediately available to us, especially those that are vivid, unusual, or emotionally salient. Thus, our initial assessment of what is most likely to kill us—AI, global warming, terrorist bombings, shark attacks, lightning strikes, police brutality, killer bees—is whatever happens to be on the evening news at the time we’re thinking about it.

2. The Pull of the Past. Today’s declinism is often accompanied by a longing to return to a mythical time and paradisiacal place, before modernity (whenever that was or is). The Greeks and Romans had their “golden age” myths, of course, but the most famous and persistent paradisiacal fantasy is the mythical Garden of Eden, where humans lived in primordial love and concord with God and nature until “The Fall,” when the first woman, that audacious autodidact Eve, dared to educate herself by partaking of the fruit of that tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and then instead of being a subservient helpmate to Adam, the first man, she cajoled him to also choose knowledge over ignorance.

3. The Negativity Bias. Psychologists Paul Rozin, Edward Royzman, Roy Baumeister and their colleagues have catalogued numerous examples of why bad is stronger than good, for example, that memory recall is better for bad behaviors, events and information than it is for good; losing money and friends has a greater impact on people than gaining money and friends; bad information is processed more thoroughly than is good information; and negative stimuli command more attention than positive stimuli.

4. The Evolutionary Logic of Pessimism. There are many more ways for things to turn bad than to get good. In the world in which our ancestors evolved, it paid to focus more on the negative than the positive, and that is why emotionally bad is stronger than good and pessimism trumps optimism. Our minds evolved in that world, not the far safer modern world, so our pessimism can seem misplaced when confronted with the deluge of data showing that optimism—or at least gratitude—would be a more appropriate response.

All of these explanations help explain not only our longing for the Good Old Days and the idea of decline in our own days, but also the yearning for a Golden Age to come, which if channeled rationally—a pathway I outlined in a recent article for The Progress Network and more fully in my 2015 book The Moral Arc—can be a road to real progress.

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Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of The Michael Shermer Show, and the author of many bestselling books, including Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc, and Heavens on Earth. His new book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational.