Industrial Society and Its Future.html

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    <title>UNABOMBER MANIFESTO BY Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski</title>
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        <h1>UNABOMBER MANIFESTO BY Theodore: "Ted" Kaczynski</h1>k
        <h2>Introduction</h2>
        <p>
            <p>1.</p>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.
            <p>2.</p>The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it
            survives, it may eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological
            suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of
            adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many
            other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social
            machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be
            inevitable: there is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent
            it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.
            <p>3.</p>If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the
            bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be,
            so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.
            <p>4.</p>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.
            <p>5.</p>In this article we give attention to only some of the negative developments
            that have grown out of the industrial-technological system. Other such
            developments we mention only briefly or ignore altogether. This does not mean
            that we regard these other developments as unimportant. For practical reasons
            we have to confine our discussion to areas that have received insufficient public
            attention or in which we have something new to say. For example, since there
            are well-developed environmental and wilderness movements, we have written
            very little about environmental degradation or the destruction of wild nature,
            even though we consider these to be highly important.frustrated by the noise. If their use is restricted, people who use the devices are
            frustrated by the regulations... But if these machines had never been invented
            there would have been no conflict and no frustration generated by them.
            <h3>The psychology of modern leftism</h3>
            <p>6.</p>
            Almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply troubled society. One of
            the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism, so a
            discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an introduction to the
            discussion of the problems of modern society in general.
            <p>7.</p>But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th century leftism could
            have been practically identified with socialism. Today the movement is
            fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be called a leftist. When we
            speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists, collectivists,
            "politically correct" types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights
            activists and the like. But not everyone who is associated with one of these
            movements is a leftist. What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so
            much a movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or rather a collection
            of related types. Thus, what we mean by "leftism" will emerge more clearly in
            the course of our discussion of leftist psychology. (Also, see paragraphs 227-
            230.)
            <p>8.</p>Even so, our conception of leftism will remain a good deal less clear than we
            would wish, but there doesn't seem to be any remedy for this. All we are trying
            to do is indicate in a rough and approximate way the two psychological
            tendencies that we believe are the main driving force of modern leftism. We by
            no means claim to be telling the whole truth about leftist psychology. Also, our
            discussion is meant to apply to modern leftism only. We leave open the question
            of the extent to which our discussion could be applied to the leftists of the 19th
            and early 20th century.
            <p>9.</p>The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call
            "feelings of inferiority" and "oversocialization." Feelings of inferiority are
            characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is
            characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is
            highly influential.
            <p>Feelings of inferiority</p> 
            <p>10.</p>By "feelings of inferiority" we mean not only inferiority feelings in the strict
            sense but a whole spectrum of related traits; low self-esteem, feelings of
            powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. We argue
            that modern leftists tend to have some such feelings (possibly more or less
            repressed) and that these feelings are decisive in determining the direction of
            modern leftism.
            <p>11.</p>When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about
            him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has
            inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced among
            minority rights activists, whether or not they belong to the minority groups
            whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about the words used to
            designate minorities and about anything that is said concerning minorities. The
            terms "negro," "oriental," "handicapped" or "chick" for an African, an Asian, a
            disabled person or a woman originally had no derogatory connotation. "Broad"
            and "chick" were merely the feminine equivalents of "guy," "dude" or "fellow."
            The negative connotations have been attached to these terms by the activists
            themselves. Some animal rights activists have gone so far as to reject the word
            "pet" and insist on its replacement by "animal companion." Leftish
            anthropologists go to great lengths to avoid saying anything about primitive
            peoples that could conceivably be interpreted as negative. They want to replace
            the world "primitive" by "nonliterate." They seem almost paranoid about
            anything that might suggest that any primitive culture is inferior to our own. (We
            do not mean to imply that primitive cultures are inferior to ours. We merely
            point out the hypersensitivity of leftish anthropologists.)
            <p>12.</p>Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are
            not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or
            disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to
            any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society. Political
            correctness has its stronghold among university professors, who have secure
            employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are
            heterosexual white males from middle-to upper-middle-class families.
            <p>13.</p>Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that
            have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent
            (homosexuals) or otherwise inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these
            groups are inferior. They would never admit to themselves that they have such
            feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they
            identify with their problems. (We do not mean to suggest that women, Indians,
            etc. are inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology.)
            <p>14.</p>Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as
            capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may not be as
            strong and as capable as men.
            <p>15.</p>Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and
            successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white
            males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc.
            clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They say they hate the West
            because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where
            these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist
            finds excuses for them, or at best he grudgingly admits that they exist; whereas
            he enthusiastically points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where
            they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the
            leftist's real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the
            West because they are strong and successful.
            <p>16.</p>Words like "self-confidence," "self-reliance," "initiative," "enterprise,"
            "optimism," etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is
            anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone's
            problems for them, satisfy everyone's needs for them, take care of them. He is
            not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve
            his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the
            concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.
            <p>17.</p>Art forms that appeal to modern leftish intellectuals tend to focus on
            sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off
            rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through
            rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations
            of the moment.
            <p>18.</p>Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality
            and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask
            serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how,
            if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that
            modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically
            analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally
            in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their
            own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility,
            and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More
            importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain
            beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed,
            inferior). The leftist's feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate
            any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as
            failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept
            of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic
            explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to
            make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give
            society the credit or blame for an individual's ability or lack of it. Thus if a
            person is "inferior" it is not his fault, but society's, because he has not been
            brought up properly.
            <p>19.</p>The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose feelings of inferiority
            make him a braggart, an egotist, a bully, a self-promoter, a ruthless competitor.
            This kind of person has not wholly lost faith in himself. He has a deficit in his
            sense of power and self-worth, but he can still conceive of himself as having the
            capacity to be strong, and his efforts to make himself strong produce his
            unpleasant behavior.[1] But the leftist is too far gone for that. His feelings of
            inferiority are so ingrained that he cannot conceive of himself as individually
            strong and valuable. Hence the collectivism of the leftist. He can feel strong only
            as a member of a large organization or a mass movement with which he
            identifies himself.
            <p>20.</p>Notice the masochistic tendency of leftist tactics. Leftists protest by lying
            down in front of vehicles, they intentionally provoke police or racists to abuse
            them, etc. These tactics may often be effective, but many leftists use them not as
            a means to an end but because they prefer masochistic tactics. Self-hatred is a
            leftist trait.
            <p>21.</p>Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by
            moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the
            oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main
            motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist
            behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not
            rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be
            trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for
            black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or
            dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and
            conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions
            to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But
            leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their
            emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race
            problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and
            frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because
            the activists' hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race
            hatred.
            <p>22.</p>If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to invent
            problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
            <p>23.</p>We emphasize that the foregoing does not pretend to be an accurate
            description of everyone who might be considered a leftist. It is only a rough
            indication of a general tendency of leftism.
            <h3>Oversocialization</h3>
            <p>24.</p>Psychologists use the term "socialization" to designate the process by which
            children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be
            well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits
            in well as a functioning part of that society. It may seem senseless to say that
            many leftists are oversocialized, since the leftist is perceived as a rebel.
            Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such rebels as
            they seem.
            <p>25.</p>The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel
            and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate
            anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he
            admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt
            to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid
            feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own
            motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have
            a non-moral origin. We use the term "oversocialized" to describe such people.[2]
            <p>26.</p>Oversocialization can lead to low self-esteem, a sense of powerlessness,
            defeatism, guilt, etc. One of the most important means by which our society
            socializes children is by making them feel ashamed of behavior or speech that is
            contrary to society's expectations. If this is overdone, or if a particular child is
            especially susceptible to such feelings, he ends by feeling ashamed of himself.
            Moreover the thought and the behavior of the oversocialized person are more
            restricted by society's expectations than are those of the lightly socialized person.
            The majority of people engage in a significant amount of naughty behavior.
            They lie, they commit petty thefts, they break traffic laws, they goof off at work,
            they hate someone, they say spiteful things or they use some underhanded trick
            to get ahead of the other guy. The oversocialized person cannot do these things,
            or if he does do them he generates in himself a sense of shame and self-hatred.
            The oversocialized person cannot even experience, without guilt, thoughts or
            feelings that are contrary to the accepted morality; he cannot think "unclean"
            thoughts. And socialization is not just a matter of morality; we are socialized to
            conform to many norms of behavior that do not fall under the heading of
            morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological leash and
            spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him. In many
            oversocialized people this results in a sense of constraint and powerlessness that
            can be a severe hardship. We suggest that oversocialization is among the more
            serious cruelties that human beings inflict on one another.
            <p>27.</p>We argue that a very important and influential segment of the modern left is
            oversocialized and that their oversocialization is of great importance in
            determining the direction of modern leftism. Leftists of the oversocialized type
            tend to be intellectuals or members of the upper-middle class. Notice that
            university intellectuals[3] constitute the most highly socialized segment of our
            society and also the most left-wing segment.
            <p>28.</p>The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash
            and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to
            rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of
            today's leftists are not in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the
            left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses
            mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality
            of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence
            generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. More fundamentally, the
            duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the
            individual. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society (or at least of
            its middle and upper classes[4]) for a long time. These values are explicitly or
            implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by
            the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists,
            especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these
            principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of
            truth) that society is not living up to these principles.
            <p>29.</p>Here is an illustration of the way in which the oversocialized leftist shows
            his real attachment to the conventional attitudes of our society while pretending
            to be in rebellion against it. Many leftists push for affirmative action, for moving
            black people into high-prestige jobs, for improved education in black schools
            and more money for such schools; the way of life of the black "underclass" they
            regard as a social disgrace. They want to integrate the black man into the system,
            make him a business executive, a lawyer, a scientist just like upper-middle-class
            white people. The leftists will reply that the last thing they want is to make the
            black man into a copy of the white man; instead, they want to preserve African
            American culture. But in what does this preservation of African American
            culture consist? It can hardly consist in anything more than eating black-style
            food, listening to black-style music, wearing black-style clothing and going to a
            black-style church or mosque. In other words, it can express itself only in
            superficial matters. In all essential respects leftists of the oversocialized type
            want to make the black man conform to white, middle-class ideals. They want to
            make him study technical subjects, become an executive or a scientist, spend his
            life climbing the status ladder to prove that black people are as good as white.
            They want to make black fathers "responsible." They want black gangs to
            become nonviolent, etc. But these are exactly the values of the industrial-
            technological system. The system couldn't care less what kind of music a man
            listens to, what kind of clothes he wears or what religion he believes in as long
            as he studies in school, holds a respectable job, climbs the status ladder, is a
            "responsible" parent, is nonviolent and so forth. In effect, however much he may
            deny it, the oversocialized leftist wants to integrate the black man into the
            system and make him adopt its values.
            <p>30.</p>We certainly do not claim that leftists, even of the oversocialized type, never
            rebel against the fundamental values of our society. Clearly they sometimes do.
            Some oversocialized leftists have gone so far as to rebel against one of modern
            society's most important principles by engaging in physical violence. By their
            own account, violence is for them a form of "liberation." In other words, by
            committing violence they break through the psychological restraints that have
            been trained into them. Because they are oversocialized these restraints have
            been more confining for them than for others; hence their need to break free of
            them. But they usually justify their rebellion in terms of mainstream values. If
            they engage in violence they claim to be fighting against racism or the like.
            <p>31.</p>We realize that many objections could be raised to the foregoing thumb-nail
            sketch of leftist psychology. The real situation is complex, and anything like a
            complete description of it would take several volumes even if the necessary data
            were available. We claim only to have indicated very roughly the two most
            important tendencies in the psychology of modern leftism.
            <p>32.</p>32. The problems of the leftist are indicative of the problems of our society as a
            whole. Low self-esteem, depressive tendencies and defeatism are not restricted
            to the left. Though they are especially noticeable in the left, they are widespread
            in our society. And today's society tries to socialize us to a greater extent than
            any previous society. We are even told by experts how to eat, how to exercise,
            how to make love, how to raise our kids and so forth.
            <h3>The power process</h3>
            <p>33.</p>Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something that
            we will call the "power process." This is closely related to the need for power
            (which is widely recognized) but is not quite the same thing. The power process
            has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and
            attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires
            effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth
            element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We
            call it autonomy and will discuss it later (paragraphs 42-44).
            <p>34.</p>Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just
            by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious
            psychological problems. At first he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will
            become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually he may become clinically
            depressed. History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent.
            This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their
            power. But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves
            usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have
            power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward which
            to exercise one's power.
            <p>35.</p>Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical necessities of life:
            food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are made necessary by the climate.
            But the leisured aristocrat obtains these things without effort. Hence his boredom
            and demoralization.            
            <p>36.</p>Nonattainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical
            necessities, and in frustration if nonattainment of the goals is compatible with
            survival. Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism,
            low self-esteem or depression.            
            <p>37.</p>Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs
            goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of
            success in attaining his goals.
            <h3>Surrogate activities</h3>
            <p>38.</p>But not every leisured aristocrat becomes bored and demoralized. For
            example, the emperor Hirohito, instead of sinking into decadent hedonism,
            devoted himself to marine biology, a field in which he became distinguished.
            When people do not have to exert themselves to satisfy their physical needs they
            often set up artificial goals for themselves. In many cases they then pursue these
            goals with the same energy and emotional involvement that they otherwise
            would have put into the search for physical necessities. Thus the aristocrats of
            the Roman Empire had their literary pretensions; many European aristocrats a
            few centuries ago invested tremendous time and energy in hunting, though they
            certainly didn't need the meat; other aristocracies have competed for status
            through elaborate displays of wealth; and a few aristocrats, like Hirohito, have
            turned to science.            
            <p>39.</p>We use the term "surrogate activity" to designate an activity that is directed
            toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to
            have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the
            "fulfillment" that they get from pursuing the goal. Here is a rule of thumb for the
            identification of surrogate activities. Given a person who devotes much time and
            energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote most of his
            time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him
            to use his physical and mental facilities in a varied and interesting way, would he
            feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal X? If the answer is no, then
            the person's pursuit of a goal X is a surrogate activity. Hirohito's studies in
            marine biology clearly constituted a surrogate activity, since it is pretty certain
            that if Hirohito had had to spend his time working at interesting non-scientific
            tasks in order to obtain the necessities of life, he would not have felt deprived
            because he didn't know all about the anatomy and life-cycles of marine animals.
            On the other hand the pursuit of sex and love (for example) is not a surrogate
            activity, because most people, even if their existence were otherwise satisfactory,
            would feel deprived if they passed their lives without ever having a relationship
            with a member of the opposite sex. (But pursuit of an excessive amount of sex,
            more than one really needs, can be a surrogate activity.)
            <p>40.</p>In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one's
            physical needs. It is enough to go through a training program to acquire some
            petty technical skill, then come to work on time and exert very modest effort
            needed to hold a job. The only requirements are a moderate amount of
            intelligence, and most of all, simple obedience. If one has those, society takes
            care of one from cradle to grave. (Yes, there is an underclass that cannot take
            physical necessities for granted, but we are speaking here of mainstream
            society.) Thus it is not surprising that modern society is full of surrogate
            activities. These include scientific work, athletic achievement, humanitarian
            work, artistic and literary creation, climbing the corporate ladder, acquisition of
            money and material goods far beyond the point at which they cease to give any
            additional physical satisfaction, and social activism when it addresses issues that
            are not important for the activist personally, as in the case of white activists who
            work for the rights of nonwhite minorities. These are not always pure surrogate
            activities, since for many people they may be motivated in part by needs other
            than the need to have some goal to pursue. Scientific work may be motivated in
            part by a drive for prestige, artistic creation by a need to express feelings,
            militant social activism by hostility. But for most people who pursue them, these
            activities are in large part surrogate activities. For example, the majority of
            scientists will probably agree that the "fulfillment" they get from their work is
            more important than the money and prestige they earn.            
            <p>41.</p>For many if not most people, surrogate activities are less satisfying than the
            pursuit of real goals (that is, goals that people would want to attain even if their
            need for the power process were already fulfilled). One indication of this is the
            fact that, in many or most cases, people who are deeply involved in surrogate
            activities are never satisfied, never at rest. Thus the money-maker constantly
            strives for more and more wealth. The scientist no sooner solves one problem
            than he moves on to the next. The long-distance runner drives himself to run
            always farther and faster. Many people who pursue surrogate activities will say
            that they get far more fulfillment from these activities than they do from the
            "mundane" business of satisfying their biological needs, but that it is because in
            our society the effort needed to satisfy the biological needs has been reduced to
            triviality. More importantly, in our society people do not satisfy their biological
            needs autonomously but by functioning as parts of an immense social machine.
            In contrast, people generally have a great deal of autonomy in pursuing their
            surrogate activities. Autonomy 
            <p>42.</p>Autonomy as a part of the power process may not be necessary
            for every individual. But most people need a greater or lesser degree of
            autonomy in working toward their goals. Their efforts must be undertaken on
            their own initiative and must be under their own direction and control. Yet most
            people do not have to exert this initiative, direction and control as single
            individuals. It is usually enough to act as a member of a small group. Thus if half
            a dozen people discuss a goal among themselves and make a successful joint
            effort to attain that goal, their need for the power process will be served. But if
            they work under rigid orders handed down from above that leave them no room
            for autonomous decision and initiative, then their need for the power process
            will not be served. The same is true when decisions are made on a collective
            basis if the group making the collective decision is so large that the role of each
            individual is insignificant.[5]
            <p>43.</p> It is true that some individuals seem to have little need for autonomy. Either
            their drive for power is weak or they satisfy it by identifying themselves with
            some powerful organization to which they belong. And then there are
            unthinking, animal types who seem to be satisfied with a purely physical sense
            of power (the good combat soldier, who gets his sense of power by developing
            fighting skills that he is quite content to use in blind obedience to his superiors).
            <p>44.</p>But for most people it is through the power process—having a goal, making
            an autonomous effort and attaining the goal—that self-esteem, self-confidence
            and a sense of power are acquired. When one does not have adequate
            opportunity to go throughout the power process the consequences are (depending
            on the individual and on the way the power process is disrupted) boredom,
            demoralization, low self-esteem, inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression,
            anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, spouse or child abuse, insatiable hedonism,
            abnormal sexual behavior, sleep disorders, eating disorders, etc.[6]
            <h3>Source of social problems</h3>
            <p>45.</p>Any of the foregoing symptoms can occur in any society, but in modern
            industrial society they are present on a massive scale. We aren't the first to
            mention that the world today seems to be going crazy. This sort of thing is not
            normal for human societies. There is good reason to believe that primitive man
            suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of
            life than modern man is. It is true that not all was sweetness and light in
            primitive societies. Abuse of women was common among the Australian
            aborigines, transexuality was fairly common among some of the American
            Indian tribes. But it does appear that generally speaking the kinds of problems
            that we have listed in the preceding paragraph were far less common among
            primitive peoples than they are in modern society
            <p>46.</p>We attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the
            fact that that society requires people to live under conditions radically different
            from those under which the human race evolved and to behave in ways that
            conflict with the patterns of behavior that the human race developed while living
            under the earlier conditions. It is clear from what we have already written that
            we consider lack of opportunity to properly experience the power process as the
            most important of the abnormal conditions to which modern society subjects
            people. But it is not the only one. Before dealing with disruption of the power
            process as a source of social problems we will discuss some of the other sources.
            <p>47.</p>Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are
            excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity
            of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as
            the extended family, the village or the tribe.
            <p>48.</p>It is well known that crowding increases stress and aggression. The degree of
            crowding that exists today and the isolation of man from nature are
            consequences of technological progress. All pre-industrial societies were
            predominantly rural. The industrial Revolution vastly increased the size of cities
            and the proportion of the population that lives in them, and modern agricultural
            technology has made it possible for the Earth to support a far denser population
            than it ever did before. (Also, technology exacerbates the effects of crowding
            because it puts increased disruptive powers in people's hands. For example, a
            variety of noise-making devices: power mowers, radios, motorcycles, etc. If the
            use of these devices is unrestricted, people who want peace and quiet are
            frustrated by the noise. If their use is restricted, people who use the devices are
            frustrated by the regulations... But if these machines had never been invented
            there would have been no conflict and no frustration generated by them.)            
            <p>49.</p>For primitive societies the natural world (which usually changes only slowly)
            provided a stable framework and therefore a sense of security. In the modern
            world it is human society that dominates nature rather than the other way around,
            and modern society changes very rapidly owing to technological change. Thus
            there is no stable framework.            
            <p>50.</p>The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional
            values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic
            growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic
            changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid
            changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes
            inevitably break down traditional values.
            <p>51.</p>The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown
            of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups. The
            disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that
            modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations,
            separating themselves from their communities. Beyond that, a technological
            society has to weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function
            efficiently. In modern society an individual's loyalty must be first to the system
            and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties
            of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such
            communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.
            <p>52.</p> Suppose that a public official or a corporation executive appoints his cousin,
            his friend or his co-religionist to a position rather than appointing the person best
            qualified for the job. He has permitted personal loyalty to supersede his loyalty
            to the system, and that is "nepotism" or "discrimination," both of which are
            terrible sins in modern society. Would-be industrial societies that have done a
            poor job of subordinating personal or local loyalties to loyalty to the system are
            usually very inefficient. (Look at Latin America.) Thus an advanced industrial
            society can tolerate only those small-scale communities that are emasculated,
            tamed and made into tools of the system.[7]            
            <p>53.</p>Crowding, rapid change and the breakdown of communities have been
            widely recognized as sources of social problems. but we do not believe they are
            enough to account for the extent of the problems that are seen today.
            <p>54.</p>A few pre-industrial cities were very large and crowded, yet their inhabitants
            do not seem to have suffered from psychological problems to the same extent as
            modern man. In America today there still are uncrowded rural areas, and we find
            there the same problems as in urban areas, though the problems tend to be less
            acute in the rural areas. Thus crowding does not seem to be the decisive factor.
            <p>55.</p>On the growing edge of the American frontier during the 19th century, the
            mobility of the population probably broke down extended families and smallscale social groups to at least the same extent as these are broken down today. In
            fact, many nuclear families lived by choice in such isolation, having no
            neighbors within several miles, that they belonged to no community at all, yet
            they do not seem to have developed problems as a result.            
            <p>56.</p>Furthermore, change in American frontier society was very rapid and deep.
            A man might be born and raised in a log cabin, outside the reach of law and
            order and fed largely on wild meat; and by the time he arrived at old age he
            might be working at a regular job and living in an ordered community with
            effective law enforcement. This was a deeper change than that which typically
            occurs in the life of a modern individual, yet it does not seem to have led to
            psychological problems. In fact, 19th century American society had an
            optimistic and self-confident tone, quite unlike that of today's society.[8]
            <p>57.</p>. The difference, we argue, is that modern man has the sense (largely justified)
            that change is imposed on him, whereas the 19th century frontiersman had the
            sense (also largely justified) that he created change himself, by his own choice.
            Thus a pioneer settled on a piece of land of his own choosing and made it into a
            farm through his own effort. In those days an entire county might have only a
            couple of hundred inhabitants and was a far more isolated and autonomous entity
            than a modern county is. Hence the pioneer farmer participated as a member of a
            relatively small group in the creation of a new, ordered community. One may
            well question whether the creation of this community was an improvement, but
            at any rate it satisfied the pioneer's need for the power process.
            <p>58.</p>It would be possible to give other examples of societies in which there has
            been rapid change and/or lack of close community ties without the kind of
            massive behavioral aberration that is seen in today's industrial society. We
            contend that the most important cause of social and psychological problems in
            modern society is the fact that people have insufficient opportunity to go through
            the power process in a normal way. We don't mean to say that modern society is
            the only one in which the power process has been disrupted. Probably most if
            not all civilized societies have interfered with the power process to a greater or
            lesser extent. But in modern industrial society the problem has become
            particularly acute. Leftism, at least in its recent (mid-to-late -20th century) form,
            is in part a symptom of deprivation with respect to the power process.
            <h3>Disruption of the power process in modern society</h3>
            <p>59.</p>We divide human drives into three groups: (1) those drives that can be
            satisfied with minimal effort; (2) those that can be satisfied but only at the cost
            of serious effort; (3) those that cannot be adequately satisfied no matter how
            much effort one makes. The power process is the process of satisfying the drives
            of the second group. The more drives there are in the third group, the more there
            is frustration, anger, eventually defeatism, depression, etc.            
            <p>60.</p>In modern industrial society natural human drives tend to be pushed into the
            first and third groups, and the second group tends to consist increasingly of
            artificially created drives.
            <p>61.</p> In primitive societies, physical necessities generally fall into group 2: They
            can be obtained, but only at the cost of serious effort. But modern society tends
            to guaranty the physical necessities to everyone[9]
            in exchange for only minimal
            effort, hence physical needs are pushed into group 1. (There may be
            disagreement about whether the effort needed to hold a job is "minimal"; but
            usually, in lower-to middle-level jobs, whatever effort is required is merely that
            of obedience. You sit or stand where you are told to sit or stand and do what you
            are told to do in the way you are told to do it. Seldom do you have to exert
            yourself seriously, and in any case you have hardly any autonomy in work, so
            that the need for the power process is not well served.)            
            <p>62.</p>Social needs, such as sex, love and status, often remain in group 2 in modern
            society, depending on the situation of the individual.
            [10] But, except for people
            who have a particularly strong drive for status, the effort required to fulfill the
            social drives is insufficient to satisfy adequately the need for the power process.
            <p>63.</p>So certain artificial needs have been created that fall into group 2, hence
            serve the need for the power process. Advertising and marketing techniques have
            been developed that make many people feel they need things that their
            grandparents never desired or even dreamed of. It requires serious effort to earn
            enough money to satisfy these artificial needs, hence they fall into group 2. (But
            see paragraphs 80-82.) Modern man must satisfy his need for the power process
            largely through pursuit of the artificial needs created by the advertising and
            marketing industry,[11] and through surrogate activities.            
            <p>64.</p>It seems that for many people, maybe the majority, these artificial forms of
            the power process are insufficient. A theme that appears repeatedly in the
            writings of the social critics of the second half of the 20th century is the sense of
            purposelessness that afflicts many people in modern society. (This
            purposelessness is often called by other names such as "anomie" or "middleclass vacuity.") We suggest that the so-called "identity crisis" is actually a search
            for a sense of purpose, often for commitment to a suitable surrogate activity. It
            may be that existentialism is in large part a response to the purposelessness of
            modern life.
            [12] Very widespread in modern society is the search for
            "fulfillment." But we think that for the majority of people an activity whose
            main goal is fulfillment (that is, a surrogate activity) does not bring completely
            satisfactory fulfillment. In other words, it does not fully satisfy the need for the
            power process. (See paragraph 41.) That need can be fully satisfied only through
            activities that have some external goal, such as physical necessities, sex, love,
            status, revenge, etc.            
            <p>65.</p>Moreover, where goals are pursued through earning money, climbing the
            status ladder or functioning as part of the system in some other way, most people
            are not in a position to pursue their goals autonomously. Most workers are
            someone else's employee and, as we pointed out in paragraph 61, must spend
            their days doing what they are told to do in the way they are told to do it. Even
            most people who are in business for themselves have only limited autonomy. It
            is a chronic complaint of small-business persons and entrepreneurs that their
            hands are tied by excessive government regulation. Some of these regulations
            are doubtless unnecessary, but for the most part government regulations are
            essential and inevitable parts of our extremely complex society. A large portion
            of small business today operates on the franchise system. It was reported in the
            Wall Street Journal a few years ago that many of the franchise-granting
            companies require applicants for franchises to take a personality test that is
            designed to exclude those who have creativity and initiative, because such
            persons are not sufficiently docile to go along obediently with the franchise
            system. This excludes from small business many of the people who most need
            autonomy
            <p>66.</p>Today people live more by virtue of what the system does for them or to
            them than by virtue of what they do for themselves. And what they do for
            themselves is done more and more along channels laid down by the system.
            Opportunities tend to be those that the system provides, the opportunities must
            be exploited in accord with the rules and regulations,[13] and techniques
            prescribed by experts must be followed if there is to be a chance of success.
            <p>67.</p>Thus the power process is disrupted in our society through a deficiency of
            real goals and a deficiency of autonomy in pursuit of goals. But it is also
            disrupted because of those human drives that fall into group 3: the drives that
            one cannot adequately satisfy no matter how much effort one makes. One of
            these drives is the need for security. Our lives depend on decisions made by
            other people; we have no control over these decisions and usually we do not
            even know the people who make them. ("We live in a world in which relatively
            few people—maybe 500 or 1,000—make the important decisions"—Philip B.
            Heymann of Harvard Law School, quoted by Anthony Lewis, New York Times,
            April 21, 1995.) Our lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear
            power plant are properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get
            into our food or how much pollution into our air; on how skillful (or
            incompetent) our doctor is; whether we lose or get a job may depend on
            decisions made by government economists or corporation executives; and so
            forth. Most individuals are not in a position to secure themselves against these
            threats to more than a very limited extent. The individual's search for security is
            therefore frustrated, which leads to a sense of powerlessness.
            <p>68.</p>It may be objected that primitive man is physically less secure than modern
            man, as is shown by his shorter life expectancy; hence modern man suffers from
            less, not more than the amount of insecurity that is normal for human beings. but
            psychological security does not closely correspond with physical security. What
            makes us feel secure is not so much objective security as a sense of confidence
            in our ability to take care of ourselves. Primitive man, threatened by a fierce
            animal or by hunger, can fight in self-defense or travel in search of food. He has
            no certainty of success in these efforts, but he is by no means helpless against the
            things that threaten him. The modern individual on the other hand is threatened
            by many things against which he is helpless; nuclear accidents, carcinogens in
            food, environmental pollution, war, increasing taxes, invasion of his privacy by
            large organizations, nation-wide social or economic phenomena that may disrupt
            his way of life.
            <p>69.</p>It is true that primitive man is powerless against some of the things that
            threaten him; disease for example. But he can accept the risk of disease stoically.
            It is part of the nature of things, it is no one's fault, unless it is the fault of some
            imaginary, impersonal demon. But threats to the modern individual tend to be
            man-made. They are not the results of chance but are imposed on him by other
            persons whose decisions he, as an individual, is unable to influence.
            Consequently he feels frustrated, humiliated and angry.
            <p>70.</p>Thus primitive man for the most part has his security in his own hands
            (either as an individual or as a member of a small group) whereas the security of
            modern man is in the hands of persons or organizations that are too remote or too
            large for him to be able personally to influence them. So modern man's drive for
            security tends to fall into groups 1 and 3; in some areas (food, shelter, etc.) his
            security is assured at the cost of only trivial effort, whereas in other areas he
            cannot attain security. (The foregoing greatly simplifies the real situation, but it
            does indicate in a rough, general way how the condition of modern man differs
            from that of primitive man.)
            <p>71.</p>People have many transitory drives or impulses that are necessarily frustrated
            in modern life, hence fall into group 3. One may become angry, but modern
            society cannot permit fighting. In many situations it does not even permit verbal
            aggression. When going somewhere one may be in a hurry, or one may be in a
            mood to travel slowly, but one generally has no choice but to move with the flow
            of traffic and obey the traffic signals. One may want to do one's work in a
            different way, but usually one can work only according to the rules laid down by
            one's employer. In many other ways as well, modern man is strapped down by a
            network of rules and regulations (explicit or implicit) that frustrate many of his
            impulses and thus interfere with the power process. Most of these regulations
            cannot be disposed with, because they are necessary for the functioning of
            industrial society.            
            <p>72.</p>Modern society is in certain respects extremely permissive. In matters that
            are irrelevant to the functioning of the system we can generally do what we
            please. We can believe in any religion we like (as long as it does not encourage
            behavior that is dangerous to the system). We can go to bed with anyone we like
            (as long as we practice "safe sex"). We can do anything we like as long as it is
            unimportant. But in all important matters the system tends increasingly to
            regulate our behavior.            
            <p>73.</p>Behavior is regulated not only through explicit rules and not only by the
            government. Control is often exercised through indirect coercion or through
            psychological pressure or manipulation, and by organizations other than the
            government, or by the system as a whole. Most large organizations use some
            form of propaganda
            [14]
            to manipulate public attitudes or behavior. Propaganda is
            not limited to "commercials" and advertisements, and sometimes it is not even
            consciously intended as propaganda by the people who make it. For instance, the
            content of entertainment programming is a powerful form of propaganda. An example of indirect coercion: There is no law that says we have to go to work
            every day and follow our employer's orders. Legally there is nothing to prevent
            us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into
            business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left, and
            there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business
            owners. Hence most of us can survive only as someone else's employee.
            <p>74.</p> We suggest that modern man's obsession with longevity, and with
            maintaining physical vigor and sexual attractiveness to an advanced age, is a
            symptom of unfulfillment resulting from deprivation with respect to the power
            process. The "mid-life crisis" also is such a symptom. So is the lack of interest in
            having children that is fairly common in modern society but almost unheard-of
            in primitive societies.
            <p>75.</p>In primitive societies life is a succession of stages. The needs and purposes
            of one stage having been fulfilled, there is no particular reluctance about passing
            on to the next stage. A young man goes through the power process by becoming
            a hunter, hunting not for sport or for fulfillment but to get meat that is necessary
            for food. (In young women the process is more complex, with greater emphasis
            on social power; we won't discuss that here.) This phase having been
            successfully passed through, the young man has no reluctance about settling
            down to the responsibilities of raising a family. (In contrast, some modern people
            indefinitely postpone having children because they are too busy seeking some
            kind of "fulfillment." We suggest that the fulfillment they need is adequate
            experience of the power process—with real goals instead of the artificial goals of
            surrogate activities.) Again, having successfully raised his children, going
            through the power process by providing them with the physical necessities, the
            primitive man feels that his work is done and he is prepared to accept old age (if
            he survives that long) and death. Many modern people, on the other hand, are
            disturbed by the prospect of death, as is shown by the amount of effort they
            expend trying to maintain their physical condition, appearance and health. We
            argue that this is due to unfulfillment resulting from the fact that they have never
            put their physical powers to any use, have never gone through the power process
            using their bodies in a serious way. It is not the primitive man, who has used his
            body daily for practical purposes, who fears the deterioration of age, but the
            modern man, who has never had a practical use for his body beyond walking
            from his car to his house. It is the man whose need for the power process has
            been satisfied during his life who is best prepared to accept the end of that life.
            <p>76.</p>In response to the arguments of this section someone will say, "Society must
            find a way to give people the opportunity to go through the power process." For
            such people the value of the opportunity is destroyed by the very fact that society
            gives it to them. What they need is to find or make their own opportunities. As
            long as the system gives them their opportunities it still has them on a leash. To
            attain autonomy they must get off that leash.
            <h3>How some people adjust</h3>
            <p>77.</p>Not everyone in industrial-technological society suffers from psychological
            problems. Some people even profess to be quite satisfied with society as it is. We
            now discuss some of the reasons why people differ so greatly in their response to
            modern society.            
            <p>78.</p>First, there doubtless are differences in the strength of the drive for power.
            Individuals with a weak drive for power may have relatively little need to go
            through the power process, or at least relatively little need for autonomy in the
            power process. These are docile types who would have been happy as plantation
            darkies in the Old South. (We don't mean to sneer at "plantation darkies" of the
            Old South. To their credit, most of the slaves were not content with their
            servitude. We do sneer at people who are content with servitude.)
            <p>79.</p>Some people may have some exceptional drive, in pursuing which they
            satisfy their need for the power process. For example, those who have an
            unusually strong drive for social status may spend their whole lives climbing the
            status ladder without ever getting bored with that game.
            <p>80.</p>People vary in their susceptibility to advertising and marketing techniques.
            Some people are so susceptible that, even if they make a great deal of money,
            they cannot satisfy their constant craving for the shiny new toys that the
            marketing industry dangles before their eyes. So they always feel hard-pressed
            financially even if their income is large, and their cravings are frustrated.
            <p>81.</p>Some people have low susceptibility to advertising and marketing
            techniques. These are the people who aren't interested in money. Material
            acquisition does not serve their need for the power process.            
            <p>82.</p>People who have medium susceptibility to advertising and marketing
            techniques are able to earn enough money to satisfy their craving for goods and
            services, but only at the cost of serious effort (putting in overtime, taking a
            second job, earning promotions, etc.) Thus material acquisition serves their need
            for the power process. But it does not necessarily follow that their need is fully
            satisfied. They may have insufficient autonomy in the power process (their work
            may consist of following orders) and some of their drives may be frustrated (e.g.,
            security, aggression) (We are guilty of oversimplification in paragraphs 80-82
            because we have assumed that the desire for material acquisition is entirely a
            creation of the advertising and marketing industry. Of course it's not that simple).
            <p>83.</p>Some people partly satisfy their need for power by identifying themselves
            with a powerful organization or mass movement. An individual lacking goals or
            power joins a movement or an organization, adopts its goals as his own, then
            works toward these goals. When some of the goals are attained, the individual,
            even though his personal efforts have played only an insignificant part in the
            attainment of the goals, feels (through his identification with the movement or
            organization) as if he had gone through the power process. This phenomenon
            was exploited by the fascists, Nazis and communists. Our society uses it, too,
            though less crudely. Example: Manuel Noriega was an irritant to the U.S. (goal:
            punish Noriega). The U.S. invaded Panama (effort) and punished Noriega
            (attainment of goal). The U.S. went through the power process and many
            Americans, because of their identification with the U.S., experienced the power
            process vicariously. Hence the widespread public approval of the Panama
            invasion; it gave people a sense of power.
            [15] We see the same phenomenon in
            armies, corporations, political parties, humanitarian organizations, religious or
            ideological movements. In particular, leftist movements tend to attract people
            who are seeking to satisfy their need for power. But for most people
            identification with a large organization or a mass movement does not fully
            satisfy the need for power.
            <p>84.</p>Another way in which people satisfy their need for the power process is
            through surrogate activities. As we explained in paragraphs 38-40, a surrogate
            activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that the individual pursues for
            the sake of the "fulfillment" that he gets from pursuing the goal, not because he
            needs to attain the goal itself. For instance, there is no practical motive for
            building enormous muscles, hitting a little ball into a hole or acquiring a
            complete series of postage stamps. Yet many people in our society devote
            themselves with passion to bodybuilding, golf or stamp collecting. Some people
            are more "other-directed" than others, and therefore will more readily attach
            importance to a surrogate activity simply because the people around them treat it
            as important or because society tells them it is important. That is why some
            people get very serious about essentially trivial activities such as sports, or
            bridge, or chess, or arcane scholarly pursuits, whereas others who are more
            clear-sighted never see these things as anything but the surrogate activities that
            they are, and consequently never attach enough importance to them to satisfy
            their need for the power process in that way. It only remains to point out that in
            many cases a person's way of earning a living is also a surrogate activity. Not a
            pure surrogate activity, since part of the motive for the activity is to gain the
            physical necessities and (for some people) social status and the luxuries that
            advertising makes them want. But many people put into their work far more
            effort than is necessary to earn whatever money and status they require, and this
            extra effort constitutes a surrogate activity. This extra effort, together with the
            emotional investment that accompanies it, is one of the most potent forces acting
            toward the continual development and perfecting of the system, with negative
            consequences for individual freedom (see paragraph 131). Especially, for the
            most creative scientists and engineers, work tends to be largely a surrogate
            activity. This point is so important that is deserves a separate discussion, which
            we shall give in a moment (paragraphs 87-92).            
            <p>85.</p>In this section we have explained how many people in modern society do
            satisfy their need for the power process to a greater or lesser extent. But we think
            that for the majority of people the need for the power process is not fully
            satisfied. In the first place, those who have an insatiable drive for status, or who
            get firmly "hooked" on a surrogate activity, or who identify strongly enough with
            a movement or organization to satisfy their need for power in that way, are
            exceptional personalities. Others are not fully satisfied with surrogate activities
            or by identification with an organization (see paragraphs 41, 64). In the second
            place, too much control is imposed by the system through explicit regulation or
            through socialization, which results in a deficiency of autonomy, and in
            frustration due to the impossibility of attaining certain goals and the necessity of
            restraining too many impulses.            
            <p>86.</p>But even if most people in industrial-technological society were well
            satisfied, we (FC) would still be opposed to that form of society, because (among
            other reasons) we consider it demeaning to fulfill one's need for the power
            process through surrogate activities or through identification with an
            organization, rather than through pursuit of real goals.
            <h3>The motives of scientists</h3>
            <p>87.</p>Science and technology provide the most important examples of surrogate
            activities. Some scientists claim that they are motivated by "curiosity;" that
            notion is simply absurd. Most scientists work on highly specialized problems
            that are not the object of any normal curiosity. For example, is an astronomer, a
            mathematician or an entomologist curious about the properties of
            isopropyltrimethylmethane? Of course not. Only a chemist is curious about such
            a thing, and he is curious about it only because chemistry is his surrogate
            activity. Is the chemist curious about the appropriate classification of a new
            species of beetle? No. That question is of interest only to the entomologist, and
            he is interested in it only because entomology is his surrogate activity. If the
            chemist and the entomologist had to exert themselves seriously to obtain the
            physical necessities, and if that effort exercised their abilities in an interesting
            way but in some nonscientific pursuit, then they couldn't give a damn about
            isopropyltrimethylmethane or the classification of beetles. Suppose that lack of
            funds for postgraduate education had led the chemist to become an insurance
            broker instead of a chemist. In that case he would have been very interested in
            insurance matters but would have cared nothing about
            isopropyltrimethylmethane. In any case it is not normal to put into the
            satisfaction of mere curiosity the amount of time and effort that scientists put
            into their work. The "curiosity" explanation for the scientists' motive just doesn't
            stand up.            
            <p>88.</p>The "benefit of humanity" explanation doesn't work any better. Some
            scientific work has no conceivable relation to the welfare of the human race—
            most of archeology or comparative linguistics for example. Some other areas of
            science present obviously dangerous possibilities. Yet scientists in these areas
            are just as enthusiastic about their work as those who develop vaccines or study
            air pollution. Consider the case of Dr. Edward Teller, who had an obvious
            emotional involvement in promoting nuclear power plants. Did this involvement
            stem from a desire to benefit humanity? If so, then why didn't Dr. Teller get
            emotional about other "humanitarian" causes? If he was such a humanitarian
            then why did he help to develop the H-bomb? As with many other scientific
            achievements, it is very much open to question whether nuclear power plants
            actually do benefit humanity. Does the cheap electricity outweigh the
            accumulating waste and risk of accidents? Dr. Teller saw only one side of the
            question. Clearly his emotional involvement with nuclear power arose not from a
            desire to "benefit humanity" but from a personal fulfillment he got from his work
            and from seeing it put to practical use.            
            <p>89.</p>The same is true of scientists generally. With possible rare exceptions, their
            motive is neither curiosity nor a desire to benefit humanity but the need to go
            through the power process: to have a goal (a scientific problem to solve), to
            make an effort (research) and to attain the goal (solution of the problem.)
            Science is a surrogate activity because scientists work mainly for the fulfillment
            they get out of the work itself.
            <p>90.</p>Of course, it's not that simple. Other motives do play a role for many
            scientists. Money and status for example. Some scientists may be persons of the
            type who have an insatiable drive for status (see paragraph 79) and this may
            provide much of the motivation for their work. No doubt the majority of
            scientists, like the majority of the general population, are more or less
            susceptible to advertising and marketing techniques and need money to satisfy
            their craving for goods and services. Thus science is not a pure surrogate
            activity. But it is in large part a surrogate activity
            <p>91.</p>Also, science and technology constitute a mass power movement, and many
            scientists gratify their need for power through identification with this mass
            movement (see paragraph 83).
            <p>92.</p>Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the
            human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of
            the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who
            provide the funds for research.
           <h3>The nature of freedom</h3>
            <p>93.</p>We are going to argue that industrial-technological society cannot be
            reformed in such a way as to prevent it from progressively narrowing the sphere
            of human freedom. But because "freedom" is a word that can be interpreted in
            many ways, we must first make clear what kind of freedom we are concerned
            with.
            <p>94.</p>By "freedom" we mean the opportunity to go through the power process,
            with real goals not the artificial goals of surrogate activities, and without
            interference, manipulation or supervision from anyone, especially from any large
            organization. Freedom means being in control (either as an individual or as a
            member of a small group) of the life-and-death issues of one's existence; food,
            clothing, shelter and defense against whatever threats there may be in one's
            environment. Freedom means having power; not the power to control other
            people but the power to control the circumstances of one's own life. One does
            not have freedom if anyone else (especially a large organization) has power over
            one, no matter how benevolently, tolerantly and permissively that power may be
            exercised. It is important not to confuse freedom with mere permissiveness (see
            paragraph 72).            
            <p>95.</p>It is said that we live in a free society because we have a certain number of
            constitutionally guaranteed rights. But these are not as important as they seem.
            The degree of personal freedom that exists in a society is determined more by
            the economic and technological structure of the society than by its laws or its
            form of government.
            [16] Most of the Indian nations of New England were
            monarchies, and many of the cities of the Italian Renaissance were controlled by
            dictators. But in reading about these societies one gets the impression that they
            allowed far more personal freedom than our society does. In part this was
            because they lacked efficient mechanisms for enforcing the ruler's will: There
            were no modern, well-organized police forces, no rapid long-distance
            communications, no surveillance cameras, no dossiers of information about the
            lives of average citizens. Hence it was relatively easy to evade control.
            <p>96.</p>As for our constitutional rights, consider for example that of freedom of the
            press. We certainly don't mean to knock that right: it is very important tool for
            limiting concentration of political power and for keeping those who do have
            political power in line by publicly exposing any misbehavior on their part. But
            freedom of the press is of very little use to the average citizen as an individual.
            The mass media are mostly under the control of large organizations that are
            integrated into the system. Anyone who has a little money can have something
            printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has
            to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media,
            hence it will have no practical effect. To make an impression on society with
            words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals and small groups.
            Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had
            submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been
            accepted. If they had been accepted and published, they probably would not have
            attracted many readers, because it's more fun to watch the entertainment put out
            by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many
            readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as
            their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose
            them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making
            a lasting impression, we've had to kill people.
            <p>97.</p>Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to
            guarantee much more than what could be called the bourgeois conception of
            freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a "free" man is essentially an
            element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and
            delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social
            machine more than those of the individual. Thus the bourgeois's "free" man has
            economic freedom because that promotes growth and progress; he has freedom
            of the press because public criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders;
            he has a rights to a fair trial because imprisonment at the whim of the powerful
            would be bad for the system. This was clearly the attitude of Simon Bolivar. To
            him, people deserved liberty only if they used it to promote progress (progress as
            conceived by the bourgeois). Other bourgeois thinkers have taken a similar view
            of freedom as a mere means to collective ends. Chester C. Tan, "Chinese
            Political Thought in the Twentieth Century," page 202, explains the philosophy
            of the Kuomintang leader Hu Han-min: "An individual is granted rights because
            he is a member of society and his community life requires such rights. By
            community Hu meant the whole society of the nation." And on page 259 Tan
            states that according to Carsum Chang (Chang Chun-mai, head of the State
            Socialist Party in China) freedom had to be used in the interest of the state and of
            the people as a whole. But what kind of freedom does one have if one can use it
            only as someone else prescribes? FC's conception of freedom is not that of
            Bolivar, Hu, Chang or other bourgeois theorists. The trouble with such theorists
            is that they have made the development and application of social theories their
            surrogate activity. Consequently the theories are designed to serve the needs of
            the theorists more than the needs of any people who may be unlucky enough to
            live in a society on which the theories are imposed.            
            <p>98.</p>One more point to be made in this section: It should not be assumed that a
            person has enough freedom just because he says he has enough. Freedom is
            restricted in part by psychological control of which people are unconscious, and
            moreover many people's ideas of what constitutes freedom are governed more by
            social convention than by their real needs. For example, it's likely that many
            leftists of the oversocialized type would say that most people, including
            themselves are socialized too little rather than too much, yet the oversocialized
            leftist pays a heavy psychological price for his high level of socialization.
            <h3>Some principles of history</h3>
            <p>99.</p>Think of history as being the sum of two components: an erratic component
            that consists of unpredictable events that follow no discernible pattern, and a
            regular component that consists of long-term historical trends. Here we are
            concerned with the long-term trends.
            <h2>First principle</h2>
            <p>100. If a small change is made that affects a long-term historical trend, then the
                effect of that change will almost always be transitory - the trend will soon revert
                to its original state. (Example: A reform movement designed to clean up political
                corruption in a society rarely has more than a short-term effect; sooner or later
                the reformers relax and corruption creeps back in. The level of political
                corruption in a given society tends to remain constant, or to change only slowly
                with the evolution of the society. Normally, a political cleanup will be permanent
                only if accompanied by widespread social changes; a small change in the society
                won't be enough.) If a small change in a long-term historical trend appears to be
                permanent, it is only because the change acts in the direction in which the trend
                is already moving, so that the trend is not altered but only pushed a step ahead.
            <p>101.</p>The first principle is almost a tautology. If a trend were not stable with
                respect to small changes, it would wander at random rather than following a
                definite direction; in other words it would not be a long-term trend at all.</p>
            <h2>Second principle</h2>
                <p>102.</p> If a change is made that is sufficiently large to alter permanently a long-
                term historical trend, then it will alter the society as a whole. In other words, a
                society is a system in which all parts are interrelated, and you can't permanently
                change any important part without changing all the other parts as well.</p>        
            <h2>Third principle</h2>
            <p>103.</p>If a change is made that is large enough to alter permanently a long-term
            trend, then the consequences for the society as a whole cannot be predicted in
            advance. (Unless various other societies have passed through the same change
            and have all experienced the same consequences, in which case one can predict
            on empirical grounds that another society that passes through the same change
            will be likely to experience similar consequences.)
            <h2>Fourth principle</h2>
            <p>104.</p>A new kind of society cannot be designed on paper. That is, you cannot plan
            out a new form of society in advance, then set it up and expect it to function as it
            was designed to.            
            <p>105.</p>The third and fourth principles result from the complexity of human
            societies. A change in human behavior will affect the economy of a society and
            its physical environment; the economy will affect the environment and vice
            versa, and the changes in the economy and the environment will affect human
            behavior in complex, unpredictable ways; and so forth. The network of causes
            and effects is far too complex to be untangled and understood.
            <h2>Fifth principle</h2>
            <p>106.</p>People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society.
            Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under
            rational human control.            
            <p>107.</p>The fifth principle is a consequence of the other four.
            <p>108.</p>To illustrate: By the first principle, generally speaking an attempt at social
            reform either acts in the direction in which the society is developing anyway (so
            that it merely accelerates a change that would have occurred in any case) or else
            it only has a transitory effect, so that the society soon slips back into its old
            groove. To make a lasting change in the direction of development of any
            important aspect of a society, reform is insufficient and revolution is required. (A
            revolution does not necessarily involve an armed uprising or the overthrow of a
            government.) By the second principle, a revolution never changes only one
            aspect of a society; and by the third principle changes occur that were never
            expected or desired by the revolutionaries. By the fourth principle, when
            revolutionaries or utopians set up a new kind of society, it never works out as
            planned.            
            <p>109.</p>The American Revolution does not provide a counterexample. The
            American "Revolution" was not a revolution in our sense of the word, but a war
            of independence followed by a rather far-reaching political reform. The
            Founding Fathers did not change the direction of development of American
            society, nor did they aspire to do so. They only freed the development of
            American society from the retarding effect of British rule. Their political reform
            did not change any basic trend, but only pushed American political culture along
            its natural direction of development. British society, of which American society
            was an off-shoot, had been moving for a long time in the direction of
            representative democracy. And prior to the War of Independence the Americans
            were already practicing a significant degree of representative democracy in the
            colonial assemblies. The political system established by the Constitution was
            modeled on the British system and on the colonial assemblies. With major
            alteration, to be sure—there is no doubt that the Founding Fathers took a very
            important step. But it was a step along the road the English-speaking world was
            already traveling. The proof is that Britain and all of its colonies that were
            populated predominantly by people of British descent ended up with systems of
            representative democracy essentially similar to that of the United States. If the
            Founding Fathers had lost their nerve and declined to sign the Declaration of
            Independence, our way of life today would not have been significantly different.
            Maybe we would have had somewhat closer ties to Britain, and would have had
            a Parliament and Prime Minister instead of a Congress and President. No big
            deal. Thus the American Revolution provides not a counterexample to our
            principles but a good illustration of them.
            <p>110.</p>Still, one has to use common sense in applying the principles. They are
            expressed in imprecise language that allows latitude for interpretation, and
            exceptions to them can be found. So we present these principles not as inviolable
            laws but as rules of thumb, or guides to thinking, that may provide a partial
            antidote to naive ideas about the future of society. The principles should be
            borne constantly in mind, and whenever one reaches a conclusion that conflicts
            with them one should carefully reexamine one's thinking and retain the
            conclusion only if one has good, solid reasons for doing so.
            <h3>Industrial-technological society cannot be reformed</h3>
            <p>111.</p>The foregoing principles help to show how hopelessly difficult it would be
            to reform the industrial system in such a way as to prevent it from progressively
            narrowing our sphere of freedom. There has been a consistent tendency, going
            back at least to the Industrial Revolution for technology to strengthen the system
            at a high cost in individual freedom and local autonomy. Hence any change
            designed to protect freedom from technology would be contrary to a
            fundamental trend in the development of our society. Consequently, such a
            change either would be a transitory one—soon swamped by the tide of history—
            or, if large enough to be permanent would alter the nature of our whole society.
            This by the first and second principles. Moreover, since society would be altered
            in a way that could not be predicted in advance (third principle) there would be
            great risk. Changes large enough to make a lasting difference in favor of freedom
            would not be initiated because it would be realized that they would gravely
            disrupt the system. So any attempts at reform would be too timid to be effective.
            Even if changes large enough to make a lasting difference were initiated, they
            would be retracted when their disruptive effects became apparent. Thus,
            permanent changes in favor of freedom could be brought about only by persons
            prepared to accept radical, dangerous and unpredictable alteration of the entire
            system. In other words, by revolutionaries, not reformers.
            <p>112.</p>People anxious to rescue freedom without sacrificing the supposed benefits
            of technology will suggest naive schemes for some new form of society that
            would reconcile freedom with technology. Apart from the fact that people who
            make suggestions seldom propose any practical means by which the new form of
            society could be set up in the first place, it follows from the fourth principle that
            even if the new form of society could be once established, it either would
            collapse or would give results very different from those expected.            
            <p>113.</p>So even on very general grounds it seems highly improbable that any way
            of changing society could be found that would reconcile freedom with modern
            technology. In the next few sections we will give more specific reasons for
            concluding that freedom and technological progress are incompatible.
            <h3>Restriction of freedom is unavoidable in industrial society</h3>
            <p>114.</p>As explained in paragraph 65-67, 70-73, modern man is strapped down by a
            network of rules and regulations, and his fate depends on the actions of persons
            remote from him whose decisions he cannot influence. This is not accidental or a
            result of the arbitrariness of arrogant bureaucrats. It is necessary and inevitable
            in any technologically advanced society. The system has to regulate human
            behavior closely in order to function. At work, people have to do what they are
            told to do, otherwise production would be thrown into chaos. Bureaucracies have
            to be run according to rigid rules. To allow any substantial personal discretion to
            lower-level bureaucrats would disrupt the system and lead to charges of
            unfairness due to differences in the way individual bureaucrats exercised their
            discretion. It is true that some restrictions on our freedom could be eliminated,
            but generally speaking the regulation of our lives by large organizations is
            necessary for the functioning of industrial-technological society. The result is a
            sense of powerlessness on the part of the average person. It may be, however,
            that formal regulations will tend increasingly to be replaced by psychological
            tools that make us want to do what the system requires of us. (Propaganda 14,
            educational techniques, "mental health" programs, etc.)            
            <p>115.</p>The system has to force people to behave in ways that are increasingly
            remote from the natural pattern of human behavior. For example, the system
            needs scientists, mathematicians and engineers. It can't function without them.
            So heavy pressure is put on children to excel in these fields. It isn't natural for an
            adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed
            in study. A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the
            real world. Among primitive peoples the things that children are trained to do are
            in natural harmony with natural human impulses. Among the American Indians,
            for example, boys were trained in active outdoor pursuits—just the sort of things
            that boys like. But in our society children are pushed into studying technical
            subjects, which most do grudgingly
            <p>116.</p>Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human
            behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will
            not adjust to society's requirements: welfare leeches, youth-gang members,
            cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and
            resisters of various kinds.            
            <p>117.</p>In any technologically advanced society the individual's fate must depend
            on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A
            technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous
            communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large
            numbers of people and machines. Such a society must be highly organized and
            decisions have to be made that affect very large numbers of people. When a
            decision affects, say, a million people, then each of the affected individuals has,
            on the average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision. What usually
            happens in practice is that decisions are made by public officials or corporation
            executives, or by technical specialists, but even when the public votes on a
            decision the number of voters ordinarily is too large for the vote of any one
            individual to be significant.
            [17] Thus most individuals are unable to influence
            measurably the major decisions that affect their lives. There is no conceivable
            way to remedy this in a technologically advanced society. The system tries to
            "solve" this problem by using propaganda to make people want the decisions
            that have been made for them, but even if this "solution" were completely
            successful in making people feel better, it would be demeaning.
            <p>118.</p>Conservatives and some others advocate more "local autonomy." Local
            communities once did have autonomy, but such autonomy becomes less and less
            possible as local communities become more enmeshed with and dependent on
            large-scale systems like public utilities, computer networks, highway systems,
            the mass communications media, the modern health care system. Also operating
            against autonomy is the fact that technology applied in one location often affects
            people at other locations far away. Thus pesticide or chemical use near a creek
            may contaminate the water supply hundreds of miles downstream, and the
            greenhouse effect affects the whole world.            
            <p>119.</p>The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is
            human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has
            nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the
            technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided
            not by ideology but by technical necessity.
            [18] Of course the system does satisfy
            many human needs, but generally speaking it does this only to the extent that it
            is to the advantage of the system to do it. It is the needs of the system that are
            paramount, not those of the human being. For example, the system provides
            people with food because the system couldn't function if everyone starved; it
            attends to people's psychological needs whenever it can conveniently do so,
            because it couldn't function if too many people became depressed or rebellious.
            But the system, for good, solid, practical reasons, must exert constant pressure
            on people to mold their behavior to the needs of the system. Too much waste
            accumulating? The government, the media, the educational system,
            environmentalists, everyone inundates us with a mass of propaganda about
            recycling. Need more technical personnel? A chorus of voices exhorts kids to
            study science. No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to
            spend the bulk of their time studying subjects most of them hate. When skilled
            workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo
            "retraining," no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around
            in this way. It is simply taken for granted that everyone must bow to technical
            necessity and for good reason: If human needs were put before technical
            necessity there would be economic problems, unemployment, shortages or
            worse. The concept of "mental health" in our society is defined largely by the
            extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and
            does so without showing signs of stress.            
            <p>120.</p>Efforts to make room for a sense of purpose and for autonomy within the
            system are no better than a joke. For example, one company, instead of having
            each of its employees assemble only one section of a catalogue, had each
            assemble a whole catalogue, and this was supposed to give them a sense of
            purpose and achievement. Some companies have tried to give their employees
            more autonomy in their work, but for practical reasons this usually can be done
            only to a very limited extent, and in any case employees are never given
            autonomy as to ultimate goals—their "autonomous" efforts can never be directed
            toward goals that they select personally, but only toward their employer's goals,
            such as the survival and growth of the company. Any company would soon go
            out of business if it permitted its employees to act otherwise. Similarly, in any
            enterprise within a socialist system, workers must direct their efforts toward the
            goals of the enterprise, otherwise the enterprise will not serve its purpose as part
            of the system. Once again, for purely technical reasons it is not possible for most
            individuals or small groups to have much autonomy in industrial society. Even
            the small-business owner commonly has only limited autonomy. Apart from the
            necessity of government regulation, he is restricted by the fact that he must fit
            into the economic system and conform to its requirements. For instance, when
            someone develops a new technology, the small-business person often has to use
            that technology whether he wants to or not, in order to remain competitive.
            <h3>The 'bad' parts of technology cannot be separated from the 'good' parts</h3>
            <p>121.</p>A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed in favor of
            freedom is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are
            dependent on one another. You can't get rid of the "bad" parts of technology and
            retain only the "good" parts. Take modern medicine, for example. Progress in
            medical science depends on progress in chemistry, physics, biology, computer
            science and other fields. Advanced medical treatments require expensive, hightech equipment that can be made available only by a technologically progressive,
            economically rich society. Clearly you can't have much progress in medicine
            without the whole technological system and everything that goes with it.            
            <p>122.</p>Even if medical progress could be maintained without the rest of the
            technological system, it would by itself bring certain evils. Suppose for example
            that a cure for diabetes is discovered. People with a genetic tendency to diabetes
            will then be able to survive and reproduce as well as anyone else. Natural
            selection against genes for diabetes will cease and such genes will spread
            throughout the population. (This may be occurring to some extent already, since
            diabetes, while not curable, can be controlled through the use of insulin.) The
            same thing will happen with many other diseases susceptibility to which is
            affected by genetic degradation of the population. The only solution will be
            some sort of eugenics program or extensive genetic engineering of human
            beings, so that man in the future will no longer be a creation of nature, or of
            chance, or of God (depending on your religious or philosophical opinions), but a
            manufactured product.            
            <p>123.</p>If you think that big government interferes in your life too much now, just
            wait till the government starts regulating the genetic constitution of your
            children. Such regulation will inevitably follow the introduction of genetic
            engineering of human beings, because the consequences of unregulated genetic
            engineering would be disastrous.[19]
            <p>124.</p>The usual response to such concerns is to talk about "medical ethics." But a
            code of ethics would not serve to protect freedom in the face of medical
            progress; it would only make matters worse. A code of ethics applicable to
            genetic engineering would be in effect a means of regulating the genetic
            constitution of human beings. Somebody (probably the upper-middle class,
            mostly) would decide that such and such applications of genetic engineering
            were "ethical" and others were not, so that in effect they would be imposing their
            own values on the genetic constitution of the population at large.
            [20] Even if a
            code of ethics were chosen on a completely democratic basis, the majority would
            be imposing their own values on any minorities who might have a different idea
            of what constituted an "ethical" use of genetic engineering. The only code of
            ethics that would truly protect freedom would be one that prohibited any genetic
            engineering of human beings, and you can be sure that no such code will ever be
            applied in a technological society. No code that reduced genetic engineering to a
            minor role could stand up for long, because the temptation presented by the
            immense power of biotechnology would be irresistible, especially since to the
            majority of people many of its applications will seem obviously and
            unequivocally good (eliminating physical and mental diseases, giving people the
            abilities they need to get along in today's world). Inevitably, genetic engineering
            will be used extensively, but only in ways consistent with the needs of the
            industrial-technological system.
            <h3>Technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom</h3>
            <p>125.</p>t is not possible to make a lasting compromise between technology and
            freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and
            continually encroaches on freedom through repeated compromises. Imagine the
            case of two neighbors, each of whom at the outset owns the same amount of
            land, but one of whom is more powerful than the other. The powerful one
            demands a piece of the other's land. The weak one refuses. The powerful one
            says, "OK, let's compromise. Give me half of what I asked." The weak one has
            little choice but to give in. Some time later the powerful neighbor demands
            another piece of land, again there is a compromise, and so forth. By forcing a
            long series of compromises on the weaker man, the powerful one eventually gets
            all of his land. So it goes in the conflict between technology and freedom.
            <p>126.</p>Let us explain why technology is a more powerful social force than the
            aspiration for freedom.
            <p>127.</p>A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns
            out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized
            transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own
            pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of
            technological support-systems. When motor vehicles were introduced they
            appeared to increase man's freedom. They took no freedom away from the
            walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn't want one, and
            anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster than the
            walking man. But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society
            in such a way as to restrict greatly man's freedom of locomotion. When
            automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use
            extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go
            where one likes at one's own pace—one's movement is governed by the flow of
            traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations:
            license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance
            required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover, the use of
            motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the introduction of motorized
            transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the
            majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of
            employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they have to
            depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public
            transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own
            movement than when driving a car. Even the walker's freedom is now greatly
            restricted. In the city he continually has to stop and wait for traffic lights that are
            designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it
            dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note the important point
            we have illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of
            technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he
            chooses, it does not necessarily remain optional. In many cases the new
            technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves
            forced to use it.)            
            <p>128.</p>. While technological progress as a whole continually narrows our sphere of
            freedom, each new technical advance considered by itself appears to be
            desirable. Electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid long-distance communications . . .
            how could one argue against any of these things, or against any other of the
            innumerable technical advances that have made modern society? It would have
            been absurd to resist the introduction of the telephone, for example. It offered
            many advantages and no disadvantages. Yet as we explained in paragraphs 59-
            76, all these technical advances taken together have created a world in which the
            average man's fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of his neighbors
            and friends, but in those of politicians, corporation executives and remote,
            anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power
            to influence.
            [21] The same process will continue in the future. Take genetic
            engineering, for example. Few people will resist the introduction of a genetic
            technique that eliminates a hereditary disease. It does no apparent harm and
            prevents much suffering. Yet a large number of genetic improvements taken
            together will make the human being into an engineered product rather than a free
            creation of chance (or of God, or whatever, depending on your religious beliefs).
            <p>129.</p>Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that,
            within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one
            direction; it can never be reversed. Once a technical innovation has been
            introduced, people usually become dependent on it, unless it is replaced by some
            still more advanced innovation. Not only do people become dependent as
            individuals on a new item of technology, but, even more, the system as a whole
            becomes dependent on it. (Imagine what would happen to the system today if
            computers, for example, were eliminated.) Thus the system can move in only
            one direction, toward greater technologization. Technology repeatedly forces
            freedom to take a step back—short of the overthrow of the whole technological
            system.
            <p>130.</p>Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at many
            different points at the same time (crowding, rules and regulations, increasing
            dependence of individuals on large organizations, propaganda and other
            psychological techniques, genetic engineering, invasion of privacy through
            surveillance devices and computers, etc.) To hold back any one of the threats to
            freedom would require a long and difficult social struggle. Those who want to
            protect freedom are overwhelmed by the sheer number of new attacks and the
            rapidity with which they develop, hence they become pathetic and no longer
            resist. To fight each of the threats separately would be futile. Success can be
            hoped for only by fighting the technological system as a whole; but that is
            revolution not reform.            
            <p>131.</p>Technicians (we use this term in its broad sense to describe all those who
            perform a specialized task that requires training) tend to be so involved in their
            work (their surrogate activity) that when a conflict arises between their technical
            work and freedom, they almost always decide in favor of their technical work.
            This is obvious in the case of scientists, but it also appears elsewhere: Educators,
            humanitarian groups, conservation organizations do not hesitate to use
            propaganda or other psychological techniques to help them achieve their
            laudable ends. Corporations and government agencies, when they find it useful,
            do not hesitate to collect information about individuals without regard to their
            privacy. Law enforcement agencies are frequently inconvenienced by the
            constitutional rights of suspects and often of completely innocent persons, and
            they do whatever they can do legally (or sometimes illegally) to restrict or
            circumvent those rights. Most of these educators, government officials and law
            officers believe in freedom, privacy and constitutional rights, but when these
            conflict with their work, they usually feel that their work is more important.
            <p>132.</p>It is well known that people generally work better and more persistently
            when striving for a reward than when attempting to avoid a punishment or
            negative outcome. Scientists and other technicians are motivated mainly by the
            rewards they get through their work. But those who oppose technological
            invasions of freedom are working to avoid a negative outcome, consequently
            there are a few who work persistently and well at this discouraging task. If
            reformers ever achieved a signal victory that seemed to set up a solid barrier
            against further erosion of freedom through technological progress, most would
            tend to relax and turn their attention to more agreeable pursuits. But the
            scientists would remain busy in their laboratories, and technology as it
            progresses would find ways, in spite of any barriers, to exert more and 
            more control over individuals and make them always more dependent on the system.
            <p>133.</p>No social arrangements, whether laws, institutions, customs or ethical
            codes, can provide permanent protection against technology. History shows that
            all social arrangements are transitory; they all change or break down eventually.
            But technological advances are permanent within the context of a given
            civilization. Suppose for example that it were possible to arrive at some social
            arrangements that would prevent genetic engineering from being applied to
            human beings, or prevent it from being applied in such a ways as to threaten
            freedom and dignity. Still, the technology would remain waiting. Sooner or later
            the social arrangement would break down. Probably sooner, given that pace of
            change in our society. Then genetic engineering would begin to invade our
            sphere of freedom, and this invasion would be irreversible (short of a breakdown
            of technological civilization itself). Any illusions about achieving anything
            permanent through social arrangements should be dispelled by what is currently
            happening with environmental legislation. A few years ago it seemed that there
            were secure legal barriers preventing at least some of the worst forms of
            environmental degradation. A change in the political wind, and those barriers
            begin to crumble.            
            <p>134.</p>For all of the foregoing reasons, technology is a more powerful social force
            than the aspiration for freedom. But this statement requires an important
            qualification. It appears that during the next several decades the industrialtechnological system will be undergoing severe stresses due to economic and
            environmental problems, and especially due to problems of human behavior
            (alienation, rebellion, hostility, a variety of social and psychological difficulties).
            We hope that the stresses through which the system is likely to pass will cause it
            to break down, or at least weaken it sufficiently so that a revolution occurs and is
            successful, then at that particular moment the aspiration for freedom will have
            proved more powerful than technology.            
            <p>135.</p>In paragraph 125 we used an analogy of a weak neighbor who is left
            destitute by a strong neighbor who takes all his land by forcing on him a series
            of compromises. But suppose now that the strong neighbor gets sick, so that he
            is unable to defend himself. The weak neighbor can force the strong one to give
            him his land back, or he can kill him. If he lets the strong man survive and only
            forces him to give his land back, he is a fool, because when the strong man gets
            well he will again take all the land for himself. The only sensible alternative for
            the weaker man is to kill the strong one while he has the chance. In the same
            way, while the industrial system is sick we must destroy it. If we compromise
            with it and let it recover from its sickness, it will eventually wipe out all of our
            freedom.
           <h3>Simpler social problems have proved intractable</h3>
           <p>136.</p>If anyone still imagines
            that it would be possible to reform the system in such a way as to protect
            freedom from technology, let him consider how clumsily and for the most part
            unsuccessfully our society has dealt with other social problems that are far more
            simple and straightforward. Among other things, the system has failed to stop
            environmental degradation, political corruption, drug trafficking or domestic
            abuse.
            <p>137.</p>Take our environmental problems, for example. Here the conflict of values
            is straightforward: economic expedience now versus saving some of our natural
            resources for our grandchildren.
            [22] But on this subject we get only a lot of
            blather and obfuscation from the people who have power, and nothing like a
            clear, consistent line of action, and we keep on piling up environmental problems
            that our grandchildren will have to live with. Attempts to resolve the
            environmental issue consist of struggles and compromises between different
            factions, some of which are ascendant at one moment, others at another moment.
            The line of struggle changes with the shifting currents of public opinion. This is
            not a rational process, nor is it one that is likely to lead to a timely and successful
            solution to the problem. Major social problems, if they get "solved" at all, are
            rarely or never solved through any rational, comprehensive plan. They just work
            themselves out through a process in which various competing groups pursuing
            their own (usually short-term) self-interest
            [23] arrive (mainly by luck) at some
            more or less stable modus vivendi. In fact, the principles we formulated in
            paragraphs 100-106 make it seem doubtful that rational, long-term social
            planning can ever be successful.
            <p>138.</p>Thus it is clear that the human race has at best a very limited capacity for
            solving even relatively straightforward social problems. How then is it going to
            solve the far more difficult and subtle problem of reconciling freedom with
            technology? Technology presents clear-cut material advantages, whereas
            freedom is an abstraction that means different things to different people, and its
            loss is easily obscured by propaganda and fancy talk.            
            <p>139.</p>And note this important difference: It is conceivable that our environmental
            problems (for example) may some day be settled through a rational,
            comprehensive plan, but if this happens it will be only because it is in the longterm interest of the system to solve these problems. But it is not in the interest of
            the system to preserve freedom or small-group autonomy. On the contrary, it is
            in the interest of the system to bring human behavior under control to the
            greatest possible extent.
            [24] Thus, while practical considerations may eventually
            force the system to take a rational, prudent approach to environmental problems,
            equally practical considerations will force the system to regulate human behavior
            ever more closely (preferably by indirect means that will disguise the
            encroachment on freedom.) This isn't just our opinion. Eminent social scientists
            (e.g. James Q. Wilson) have stressed the importance of "socializing" people
            more effectively.
            <h3>Revolution is easier than reform</h3>
            <p>140.</p>We hope we have convinced the reader that the system cannot be reformed
            in such a way as to reconcile freedom with technology. The only way out is to
            dispense with the industrial-technological system altogether. This implies
            revolution, not necessarily an armed uprising, but certainly a radical and
            fundamental change in the nature of society.
            <p>141.</p>People tend to assume that because a revolution involves a much greater
            change than reform does, it is more difficult to bring about than reform is.
            Actually, under certain circumstances revolution is much easier than reform. The
            reason is that a revolutionary movement can inspire an intensity of commitment
            that a reform movement cannot inspire. A reform movement merely offers to
            solve a particular social problem. A revolutionary movement offers to solve all
            problems at one stroke and create a whole new world; it provides the kind of
            ideal for which people will take great risks and make great sacrifices. For this
            reason it would be much easier to overthrow the whole technological system
            than to put effective, permanent restraints on the development or application of
            any one segment of technology, such as genetic engineering, for example. Not
            many people will devote themselves with single-minded passion to imposing and
            maintaining restraints on genetic engineering, but under suitable conditions large
            numbers of people may devote themselves passionately to a revolution against
            the industrial-technological system. As we noted in paragraph 132, reformers
            seeking to limit certain aspects of technology would be working to avoid a
            negative outcome. But revolutionaries work to gain a powerful reward—
            fulfillment of their revolutionary vision—and therefore work harder and more
            persistently than reformers do.            
            <p>142.</p>Reform is always restrained by the fear of painful consequences if changes
            go too far. But once a revolutionary fever has taken hold of a society, people are
            willing to undergo unlimited hardships for the sake of their revolution. This was
            clearly shown in the French and Russian Revolutions. It may be that in such
            cases only a minority of the population is really committed to the revolution, but
            this minority is sufficiently large and active so that it becomes the dominant
            force in society. We will have more to say about revolution in paragraphs 180-
            205.
	    <h3>Control of human behavior</h3>
	    <p>143.</p>Since the beginning of civilization, organized societies have had to put
	    pressures on human beings for the sake of the functioning of the social organism.
	    The kinds of pressures vary greatly from one society to another. Some of the
	    pressures are physical (poor diet, excessive labor, environmental pollution),
	    some are psychological (noise, crowding, forcing humans behavior into the mold
	    that society requires). In the past, human nature has been approximately
	    constant, or at any rate has varied only within certain bounds. Consequently,
	    societies have been able to push people only up to certain limits. When the limit
	    of human endurance has been passed, things start going wrong: rebellion, or
	    crime, or corruption, or evasion of work, or depression and other mental
	    problems, or an elevated death rate, or a declining birth rate or something else,
	    so that either the society breaks down, or its functioning becomes too inefficient
	    and it is (quickly or gradually, through conquest, attrition or evolution) replaced
	    by some more efficient form of society.[25]
            <p>144.</p>Thus human nature has in the past put certain limits on the development of
	    societies. People could be pushed only so far and no farther. But today this may
	    be changing, because modern technology is developing ways of modifying
	    human beings.
            <p>145.</p>Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly
	    unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science
	    fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. It is well
	    known that the rate of clinical depression had been greatly increasing in recent
	    decades. We believe that this is due to disruption of the power process, as
	    explained in paragraphs 59-76. But even if we are wrong, the increasing rate of
	    depression is certainly the result of some conditions that exist in today's society.
	    Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society
	    gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of
	    modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate
	    social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable. (Yes, we know that
	    depression is often of purely genetic origin. We are referring here to those cases
	    in which environment plays the predominant role.)
            <p>146.</p>Drugs that affect the mind are only one example of the methods of
	    controlling human behavior that modern society is developing. Let us look at
	    some of the other methods.
            <p>147.</p>To start with, there are the techniques of surveillance. Hidden video
	    cameras are now used in most stores and in many other places, and computers
	    are used to collect and process vast amounts of information about individuals.
	    Information so obtained greatly increases the effectiveness of physical coercion
	    (i.e., law enforcement).
	    [26] Then there are the methods of propaganda, for which
	    the mass communication media provide effective vehicles. Efficient techniques
	    have been developed for winning elections, selling products, influencing public
	    opinion. The entertainment industry serves as an important psychological tool of
	    the system, possibly even when it is dishing out large amounts of sex and
	    violence. Entertainment provides modern man with an essential means of escape.
	    While absorbed in television, videos, etc., he can forget stress, anxiety,
	    frustration, dissatisfaction. Many primitive peoples, when they don't have work
	    to do, are quite content to sit for hours at a time doing nothing at all, because
	    they are at peace with themselves and their world. But most modern people must
	    be constantly occupied or entertained, otherwise they get "bored," i.e., they get
	    fidgety, uneasy, irritable.
            <p>148.</p> Other techniques strike deeper than the foregoing. Education is no longer a
	    simple affair of paddling a kid's behind when he doesn't know his lessons and
	    patting him on the head when he does know them. It is becoming a scientific
	    technique for controlling the child's development. Sylvan Learning Centers, for
	    example, have had great success in motivating children to study, and
	    psychological techniques are also used with more or less success in many
	    conventional schools. "Parenting" techniques that are taught to parents are
	    designed to make children accept fundamental values of the system and behave
	    in ways that the system finds desirable. "Mental health" programs, "intervention"
	    techniques, psychotherapy and so forth are ostensibly designed to benefit
	    individuals, but in practice they usually serve as methods for inducing
	    individuals to think and behave as the system requires. (There is no contradiction
	    here; an individual whose attitudes or behavior bring him into conflict with the
	    system is up against a force that is too powerful for him to conquer or escape
	    from, hence he is likely to suffer from stress, frustration, defeat. His path will be
	    much easier if he thinks and behaves as the system requires. In that sense the
	    system is acting for the benefit of the individual when it brainwashes him into
	    conformity.) Child abuse in its gross and obvious forms is disapproved in most if
	    not all cultures. Tormenting a child for a trivial reason or no reason at all is
	    something that appalls almost everyone. But many psychologists interpret the
	    concept of abuse much more broadly. Is spanking, when used as part of a
	    rational and consistent system of discipline, a form of abuse? The question will
	    ultimately be decided by whether or not spanking tends to produce behavior that
	    makes a person fit in well with the existing system of society. In practice, the
	    word "abuse" tends to be interpreted to include any method of child-rearing that
	    produces behavior inconvenient for the system. Thus, when they go beyond the
	    prevention of obvious, senseless cruelty, programs for preventing "child abuse"
	    are directed toward the control of human behavior of the system.
            <p>149.</p>Presumably, research will continue to increase the effectiveness of
	    psychological techniques for controlling human behavior. But we think it is
	    unlikely that psychological techniques alone will be sufficient to adjust human
	    beings to the kind of society that technology is creating. Biological methods
	    probably will have to be used. We have already mentioned the use of drugs in
	    this connection. Neurology may provide other avenues of modifying the human
	    mind. Genetic engineering of human beings is already beginning to occur in the
	    form of "gene therapy," and there is no reason to assume the such methods will
	    not eventually be used to modify those aspects of the body that affect mental
	    functioning.
            <p>150.</p>As we mentioned in paragraph 134, industrial society seems likely to be
	    entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and
	    in part to economic and environmental problems. And a considerable proportion
	    of the system's economic and environmental problems result from the way
	    human beings behave. Alienation, low self-esteem, depression, hostility,
	    rebellion; children who won't study, youth gangs, illegal drug use, rape, child
	    abuse, other crimes, unsafe sex, teen pregnancy, population growth, political
	    corruption, race hatred, ethnic rivalry, bitter ideological conflict (e.g., pro-choice
	    vs. pro-life), political extremism, terrorism, sabotage, anti-government groups,
	    hate groups. All these threaten the very survival of the system. The system will
	    be forced to use every practical means of controlling human behavior.
            <p>151.</p>The social disruption that we see today is certainly not the result of mere
	    chance. It can only be a result of the conditions of life that the system imposes
	    on people. (We have argued that the most important of these conditions is
	    disruption of the power process.) If the system succeeds in imposing sufficient
	    control over human behavior to assure its own survival, a new watershed in
	    human history will have passed. Whereas formerly the limits of human
	    endurance have imposed limits on the development of societies (as we explained
	    in paragraphs 143, 144), industrial-technological society will be able to pass
	    those limits by modifying human beings, whether by psychological methods or
	    biological methods or both. In the future, social systems will not be adjusted to
	    suit the needs of human beieings. Instead, human beings will be adjusted to suit
	    the needs of the system.[27]
            <p>152.</p>Generally speaking, technological control over human behavior will
	    probably not be introduced with a totalitarian intention or even through a
	    conscious desire to restrict human freedom.[28] Each new step in the assertion of
	    control over the human mind will be taken as a rational response to a problem
	    that faces society, such as curing alcoholism, reducing the crime rate or inducing
	    young people to study science and engineering. In many cases, there will be
	    humanitarian justification. For example, when a psychiatrist prescribes an
	    antidepressant for a depressed patient, he is clearly doing that individual a favor.
	    It would be inhumane to withhold the drug from someone who needs it. When
	    parents send their children to Sylvan Learning Centers to have them manipulated
	    into becoming enthusiastic about their studies, they do so from concern for their
	    children's welfare. It may be that some of these parents wish that one didn't have
	    to have specialized training to get a job and that their kid didn't have to be
	    brainwashed into becoming a computer nerd. But what can they do? They can't
	    change society, and their child may be unemployable if he doesn't have certain
	    skills. So they send him to Sylvan.
            <p>153.</p> Thus control over human behavior will be introduced not by a calculated
	    decision of the authorities but through a process of social evolution (rapid
	    evolution, however). The process will be impossible to resist, because each
	    advance, considered by itself, will appear to be beneficial, or at least the evil
	    involved in making the advance will seem to be less than that which would result
	    from not making it (see paragraph 127). Propaganda for example is used for
	    many good purposes, such as discouraging child abuse or race hatred. Sex
	    education is obviously useful, yet the effect of sex education (to the extent that it
	    is successful) is to take the shaping of sexual attitudes away from the family and
	    put it into the hands of the state as represented by the public school system.
            <p>154.</p>Suppose a biological trait is discovered that increases the likelihood that a
	    child will grow up to be a criminal and suppose some sort of gene therapy can
	    remove this trait.[29] Of course most parents whose children possess the trait will
	    have them undergo the therapy. It would be inhumane to do otherwise, since the
	    child would probably have a miserable life if he grew up to be a criminal. But
	    many or most primitive societies have a low crime rate in comparison with that
	    of our society, even though they have neither high-tech methods of child-rearing
	    nor harsh systems of punishment. Since there is no reason to suppose that more
	    modern men than primitive men have innate predatory tendencies, the high
	    crime rate of our society must be due to the pressures that modern conditions put
	    on people, to which many cannot or will not adjust. Thus a treatment designed to
	    remove potential criminal tendencies is at least in part a way of re-engineering
	    people so that they suit the requirements of the system.
            <p>155.</p>Our society tends to regard as a "sickness" any mode of thought or behavior
            that is inconvenient for the system, and this is plausible because when an
            individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as
            problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to
            the system is seen as a "cure" for a "sickness" and therefore as good.            
            <p>156.</p>In paragraph 127 we pointed out that if the use of a new item of technology
            is initially optional, it does not necessarily remain optional, because the new
            technology tends to change society in such a way that it becomes difficult or
            impossible for an individual to function without using that technology. This
            applies also to the technology of human behavior. In a world in which most
            children are put through a program to make them enthusiastic about studying, a
            parent will almost be forced to put his kid through such a program, because if he
            does not, then the kid will grow up to be, comparatively speaking, an ignoramus
            and therefore unemployable. Or suppose a biological treatment is discovered
            that, without undesirable side-effects, will greatly reduce the psychological stress
            from which so many people suffer in our society. If large numbers of people
            choose to undergo the treatment, then the general level of stress in society will
            be reduced, so that it will be possible for the system to increase the stressproducing pressures. In fact, something like this seems to have happened already
            with one of our society's most important psychological tools for enabling people
            to reduce (or at least temporarily escape from) stress, namely, mass
            entertainment (see paragraph 147). Our use of mass entertainment is "optional":
            No law requires us to watch television, listen to the radio, read magazines. Yet
            mass entertainment is a means of escape and stress-reduction on which most of
            us have become dependent. Everyone complains about the trashiness of
            television, but almost everyone watches it. A few have kicked the TV habit, but
            it would be a rare person who could get along today without using any form of
            mass entertainment. (Yet until quite recently in human history most people got
            along very nicely with no other entertainment than that which each local
            community created for itself.) Without the entertainment industry the system
            probably would not have been able to get away with putting as much stress-
            producing pressure on us as it does.
            <p>157.</p>Assuming that industrial society survives, it is likely that technology will
            eventually acquire something approaching complete control over human
            behavior. It has been established beyond any rational doubt that human thought
            and behavior have a largely biological basis. As experimenters have
            demonstrated, feelings such as hunger, pleasure, anger and fear can be turned on
            and off by electrical stimulation of appropriate parts of the brain. Memories can
            be destroyed by damaging parts of the brain or they can be brought to the surface
            by electrical stimulation. Hallucinations can be induced or moods changed by
            drugs. There may or may not be an immaterial human soul, but if there is one it
            clearly is less powerful than the biological mechanisms of human behavior. For
            if that were not the case then researchers would not be able so easily to
            manipulate human feelings and behavior with drugs and electrical currents.
            <p>158.</p>It presumably would be impractical for all people to have electrodes
            inserted in their heads so that they could be controlled by the authorities. But the
            fact that human thoughts and feelings are so open to biological intervention
            shows that the problem of controlling human behavior is mainly a technical
            problem; a problem of neurons, hormones and complex molecules; the kind of
            problem that is accessible to scientific attack. Given the outstanding record of
            our society in solving technical problems, it is overwhelmingly probable that
            great advances will be made in the control of human behavior.            
            <p>159.</p>Will public resistance prevent the introduction of technological control of
            human behavior? It certainly would if an attempt were made to introduce such
            control all at once. But since technological control will be introduced through a
            long sequence of small advances, there will be no rational and effective public
            resistance. (See paragraphs 127,132, 153.)
            <p>160.</p>To those who think that all this sounds like science fiction, we point out that
            yesterday's science fiction is today's fact. The Industrial Revolution has radically
            altered man's environment and way of life, and it is only to be expected that as
            technology is increasingly applied to the human body and mind, man himself
            will be altered as radically as his environment and way of life have been.
            <h3>Human race at a crossroads</h3>
            <p>161.</p>But we have gotten ahead of our story. It is one thing to develop in the
            laboratory a series of psychological or biological techniques for manipulating
            human behavior and quite another to integrate these techniques into a
            functioning social system. The latter problem is the more difficult of the two. For
            example, while the techniques of educational psychology doubtless work quite
            well in the "lab schools" where they are developed, it is not necessarily easy to
            apply them effectively throughout our educational system. We all know what
            many of our schools are like. The teachers are too busy taking knives and guns
            away from the kids to subject them to the latest techniques for making them into
            computer nerds. Thus, in spite of all its technical advances relating to human
            behavior the system to date has not been impressively successful in controlling
            human beings. The people whose behavior is fairly well under the control of the
            system are those of the type that might be called "bourgeois." But there are
            growing numbers of people who in one way or another are rebels against the
            system: welfare leaches, youth gangs, cultists, nazis, satanists, radical
            environmentalists, militiaman, etc..            
            <p>162.</p>The system is currently engaged in a desperate struggle to overcome certain
            problems that threaten its survival, among which the problems of human
            behavior are the most important. If the system succeeds in acquiring sufficient
            control over human behavior quickly enough, it will probably survive. Otherwise
            it will break down. We think the issue will most likely be resolved within the
            next several decades, say 40 to 100 years.
            <p>163.</p>Suppose the system survives the crisis of the next several decades. By that
            time it will have to have solved, or at least brought under control, the principal
            problems that confront it, in particular that of "socializing" human beings; that
            is, making people sufficiently docile so that their behavior no longer threatens
            the system. That being accomplished, it does not appear that there would be any
            further obstacle to the development of technology, and it would presumably
            advance toward its logical conclusion, which is complete control over everything
            on Earth, including human beings and all other important organisms. The system
            may become a unitary, monolithic organization, or it may be more or less
            fragmented and consist of a number of organizations coexisting in a relationship
            that includes elements of both cooperation and competition, just as today the
            government, the corporations and other large organizations both cooperate and
            compete with one another. Human freedom mostly will have vanished, because
            individuals and small groups will be impotent vis-a-vis large organizations
            armed with super technology and an arsenal of advanced psychological and
            biological tools for manipulating human beings, besides instruments of
            surveillance and physical coercion. Only a small number of people will have any
            real power, and even these probably will have only very limited freedom,
            because their behavior too will be regulated; just as today our politicians and
            corporation executives can retain their positions of power only as long as their
            behavior remains within certain fairly narrow limits.            
            <p>164.</p>Don't imagine that the systems will stop developing further techniques for
            controlling human beings and nature once the crisis of the next few decades is
            over and increasing control is no longer necessary for the system's survival. On
            the contrary, once the hard times are over the system will increase its control
            over people and nature more rapidly, because it will no longer be hampered by
            difficulties of the kind that it is currently experiencing. Survival is not the
            principal motive for extending control. As we explained in paragraphs 87-90,
            technicians and scientists carry on their work largely as a surrogate activity; that
            is, they satisfy their need for power by solving technical problems. They will
            continue to do this with unabated enthusiasm, and among the most interesting
            and challenging problems for them to solve will be those of understanding the
            human body and mind and intervening in their development. For the "good of
            humanity," of course.
            <p>165.</p>But suppose on the other hand that the stresses of the coming decades prove
            to be too much for the system. If the system breaks down there may be a period
            of chaos, a "time of troubles" such as those that history has recorded at various
            epochs in the past. It is impossible to predict what would emerge from such a
            time of troubles, but at any rate the human race would be given a new chance.
            The greatest danger is that industrial society may begin to reconstitute itself
            within the first few years after the breakdown. Certainly there will be many
            people (power-hungry types especially) who will be anxious to get the factories
            running again.
            <p>166.</p>herefore two tasks confront those who hate the servitude to which the
            industrial system is reducing the human race. First, we must work to heighten
            the social stresses within the system so as to increase the likelihood that it will
            break down or be weakened sufficiently so that a revolution against it becomes
            possible. Second, it is necessary to develop and propagate an ideology that
            opposes technology and the industrial society if and when the system becomes
            sufficiently weakened. And such an ideology will help to assure that, if and
            when industrial society breaks down, its remnants will be smashed beyond
            repair, so that the system cannot be reconstituted. The factories should be
            destroyed, technical books burned, etc.
            <h3>Human suffering</h3>
            <p>167.</p>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
            deep 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.
            <p>168.</p>In the second place, one has to balance the 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.
            <p>169.</p>In the third place, it is not all certain that the survival of the system will
            lead to less suffering than the 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 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 it 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?            
            <p>170.</p>. "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 attempt 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
            one. 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 for society far more rapidly
            that it has been solving old ones. Thus it will take a long 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 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.
            <h3>The future</h3>
            <p>171.</p>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
            <p>172.</p>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.            
            <p>173.</p>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 the 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 machines become more and more
            intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them,
            simply because machine-made decisions will bring better result 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.            
            <p>174.</p> 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 consist 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.            
            <p>175.</p> 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 that 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 needs for power only by pushing large
            numbers of other people out of the way and depriving them of their opportunity
            for power.            
            <p>176.</p>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 will spend their
            time shining each others 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 to such a way of life.            
            <p>177.</p>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.            
            <p>178.</p>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.
            <p>179.</p>It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the
            consequences.
            <h3>Strategy</h3>
            <p>180.</p>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.
            <p>181.</p>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.            
            <p>182.</p>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 existing form of society.
            <p>183.</p>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).            
            <p>184.</p>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.
            <p>185.</p>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.            
            <p>186.</p>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.            
            <p>187.</p>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
            <p>188.</p>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.            
            <p>189.</p>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.
            <p>190.</p>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.            
            <p>191.</p>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.            
            <p>192.</p>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 industrialtechnological system, and in the struggle against the system, ethnic distinctions
            are of no importance.
            <p>193.</p>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]
            <p>194.</p>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.            
            <p>195.</p> 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] It might even be argued that an industrial system
            controlled by dictators would be preferable, because dictator-controlled systems
            usually have proved inefficient, hence they are presumably more likely to break
            down. Look at Cuba.
            <p>196.</p>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.            
            <p>197.</p>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.            
            <p>198.</p>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.
            <p>199.</p>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.
            <p>200.</p>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.            
            <p>201.</p>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.            
            <p>202.</p>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.            
            <p>203.</p>. 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.
            <p>204.</p>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 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 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.
            <p>205.</p>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 must reproduce itself abundantly. In doing so they will be worsening
            the population problem only slightly. And the most 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.            
            <p>206.</p>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.
            <h3>Two kinds of technology</h3>
            <p>207.</p>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.
            <p>208.</p>We distinguish between two kinds of technology, which we will call smallscale 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 only until rather recent times did the sanitation of European
            cities equal that of Ancient Rome.
            <p>209.</p>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 ice house or preserve food by drying or pickling, as was done before the
            invention of the refrigerator.            
            <p>210.</p>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
            particular to the modern form of society, and it seems not to have existed prior to
            the 17th century or thereabouts.            
            <p>211.</p> 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 longlasting technological regression cannot be brought about.
            <p>212.</p>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.   
            <h3>The danger of leftism</h3>
            <p>213.</p>Because of their need for rebellion and for membership in a movement,
            leftists or persons of similar psychological type are often attracted 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.
            <p>214.</p>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.
            <p>215.</p>The anarchist[34] too seeks power, but he seeks it on an individual or smallgroup 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.            
            <p>216.</p>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 nonleftists. 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 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.            
            <p>217.</p>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.            
            <p>218.</p>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.)            
            <p>219.</p>Leftism is 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 leftists 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. It's not enough that the
            public should be informed about the hazards of smoking; a warning has to be
            stamped on every package of cigarettes. Then cigarette advertising has to be
            restricted if not banned. The activists will never be satisfied until tobacco is
            outlawed, and after that it will be alcohol then junk food, etc. Activists have
            fought gross child abuse, which is reasonable. But now they want to stop all
            spanking. When they have done that they will want to ban something else they
            consider unwholesome, then another thing and then another. They will never be
            satisfied until they have complete control over all child rearing practices. And
            then they will move on to another cause.            
            <p>220.</p>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.            
            <p>221.</p>Because of the restrictions placed on their thoughts and behavior by their
            high level of socialization, many leftists of the oversocialized 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
            <p>222.</p>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).            
            <p>223.</p>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.            
            <p>224.</p>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.            
            <p>225.</p>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
            <p>226.</p>Thus the fact that many individual leftists are personally mild and fairly
            tolerant people by no means prevents leftism as a whole form having a
            totalitarian tendency.            
            <p>227.</p>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 hardpressed 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.            
            <p>228.</p>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
            <p>229.</p>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 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]
            <p>230.</p>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 collectivist 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 (wellsublimated) drive for power is stronger than that of the average bourgeois.
            <h3>Final note</h3>
            <p>231.</p>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.            
            <p>232.</p>All the same we are reasonably confident that the general outlines of the
            picture we have painted here are roughly correct. We have portrayed leftism in
            its modern form as a phenomenon peculiar to our time and as a symptom of the
            disruption of the power process. But we might possibly be wrong about this.
            Oversocialized types who try to satisfy their drive for power by imposing their
            morality on everyone have certainly been around for a long time. But we think
            that the decisive role played by feelings of inferiority, low self-esteem,
            powerlessness, identification with victims by people who are not themselves
            victims, is a peculiarity of modern leftism. Identification with victims by people
            not themselves victims can be seen to some extent in 19th century leftism and
            early Christianity but as far as we can make out, symptoms of low self-esteem,
            etc., were not nearly so evident in these movements, or in any other movements,
            as they are in modern leftism. But we are not in a position to assert confidently
            that no such movements have existed prior to modern leftism. This is a
            significant question to which historians ought to give their attention.
    <h2>Notes</h2>
    <p>
        <p>1.</p>We are not asserting that all, or even most, bullies and ruthless
        competitors suffer from feelings of inferiority.        
        <p>2.</p>During the Victorian period many oversocialized people suffered from
        serious psychological problems as a result of repressing or trying to repress
        their sexual feelings. Freud apparently based his theories on people of this
        type. Today the focus of socialization has shifted from sex to aggression.
        <p>3.</p>Not necessarily including specialists in engineering "hard" sciences.
        <p>4.</p>There are many individuals of the middle and upper classes who resist
        some of these values, but usually their resistance is more or less covert.
        Such resistance appears in the mass media only to a very limited extent.
        The main thrust of propaganda in our society is in favor of the stated
        values.
        <p>The main reasons why these values have become, so to speak, the official
            values of our society is that they are useful to the industrial system.
            Violence is discouraged because it disrupts the functioning of the system.
            Racism is discouraged because ethnic conflicts also disrupt the system, and
            discrimination wastes the talent of minority-group members who could be
            useful to the system. Poverty must be "cured" because the underclass causes
            problems for the system and contact with the underclass lowers the morale
            of the other classes. Women are encouraged to have careers because their
            talents are useful to the system and, more importantly, because by having
            regular jobs women become better integrated into the system and tied
            directly to it rather than to their families. This helps to weaken family
            solidarity. (The leaders of the system say they want to strengthen the family,
            but they really mean is that they want the family to serve as an effective
            tool for socializing children in accord with the needs of the system. We
            argue in paragraphs 51,52 that the system cannot afford to let the family or
            other small-scale social groups be strong or autonomous.)
            </p>    
        <p>5.</p>It may be argued that the majority of people don't want to make their own
        decisions but want leaders to do their thinking for them. 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, and most people hate psychological conflict.
        Hence they tend to lean on others in making difficult decisions. The
        majority of people are natural followers, not leaders, but they like to have
        direct personal access to their leaders and participate to some extent in
        making difficult decisions. At least to that degree they need autonomy.        
        <p>6.</p>Some of the symptoms listed are similar to those shown by caged
        animals. To explain how these symptoms arise from deprivation with
        respect to the power process: Common-sense understanding of human
        nature tells one that lack of goals whose attainment requires effort leads to
        boredom and that boredom, long continued, often leads eventually to
        depression. Failure to obtain goals leads to frustration and lowering of selfesteem. Frustration leads to anger, anger to aggression, often in the form of
        spouse or child abuse. It has been shown that long-continued frustration
        commonly leads to depression and that depression tends to cause guilt,
        sleep disorders, eating disorders and bad feelings about oneself. Those who
        are tending toward depression seek pleasure as an antidote; hence insatiable
        hedonism and excessive sex, with perversions as a means of getting new
        kicks. Boredom too tends to cause excessive pleasure-seeking since,
        lacking other goals, people often use pleasure as a goal. See accompanying
        diagram. The foregoing is a simplification. Reality is more complex, and of
        course deprivation with respect to the power process is not the only cause of
        the symptoms described. By the way, when we mention depression we do
        not necessarily mean depression that is severe enough to be treated by a
        psychiatrist. Often only mild forms of depression are involved. And when
        we speak of goals we do not necessarily mean long-term, thought out goals.
        For many or most people through much of human history, the goals of a
        hand-to-mouth existence (merely providing oneself and one's family with
        food from day to day) have been quite sufficient.
        <p>7.</p>A partial exception may be made for a few passive, inward looking
        groups, such as the Amish, which have little effect on the wider society.
        Apart from these, some genuine small-scale communities do exist in
        America today. For instance, youth gangs and "cults." Everyone regards
        them as dangerous, and so they are, because the members of these groups
        are loyal primarily to one another rather than to the system, hence the
        system cannot control them. Or take the gypsies. The gypsies commonly
        get away with theft and fraud because their loyalties are such that they can
        always get other gypsies to give testimony that "proves" their innocence.
        Obviously the system would be in serious trouble if too many people
        belonged to such groups. Some of the early-20th century Chinese thinkers
        who were concerned with modernizing China recognized the necessity of
        breaking down small-scale social groups such as the family: "(According to
        Sun Yat-sen) The Chinese people needed a new surge of patriotism, which
        would lead to a transfer of loyalty from the family to the state. . .(According
        to Li Huang) traditional attachments, particularly to the family had to be
        abandoned if nationalism were to develop to China." (Chester C. Tan,
        Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century," page 125, page 297.)        
        <p>8.</p>Yes, we know that 19th century America had its problems, and serious
        ones, but for the sake of brevity we have to express ourselves in simplified
        terms.
        <p>9.</p>We leave aside the underclass. We are speaking of the mainstream.
        <p>10.</p>Some social scientists, educators, "mental health" professionals and the
        like are doing their best to push the social drives into group 1 by trying to
        see to it that everyone has a satisfactory social life.        
        <p>11.</p>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. There have been many cultures in which
        people have desired little material wealth beyond what was necessary to
        satisfy their basic physical needs (Australian aborigines, traditional
        Mexican peasant culture, some African cultures). On the other hand there
        have also been many preindustrial cultures in which material acquisition
        has played an important role. So we can't claim that today's acquisitionoriented culture is exclusively a creation of the advertising and marketing
        industry. But it is clear that the advertising and marketing industry has had
        an important part in creating that culture. The big corporations that spend
        millions on advertising wouldn't be spending that kind of money without
        solid proof that they were getting it back in increased sales. One member of
        FC met a sales manager a couple of years ago who was frank enough to tell
        him, "Our job is to make people buy things they don't want and don't need."
        He then described how an untrained novice could present people with the
        facts about a product, and make no sales at all, while a trained and
        experienced professional salesman would make lots of sales to the same
        people. This shows that people are manipulated into buying things they
        don't really want.        
        <p>12.</p> The problem of purposelessness seems to have become less serious
        during the last 15 years or so, because people now feel less secure
        physically and economically than they did earlier, and the need for security
        provides them with a goal. But purposelessness has been replaced by
        frustration over the difficulty of attaining security. We emphasize the
        problem of purposelessness because the liberals and leftists would wish to
        solve our social problems by having society guarantee everyone's security;
        but if that could be done it would only bring back the problem of
        purposelessness. The real issue is not whether society provides well or
        poorly for people's security; the trouble is that people are dependent on the
        system for their security rather than having it in their own hands. This, by
        the way, is part of the reason why some people get worked up about the
        right to bear arms; possession of a gun puts that aspect of their security in
        their own hands.
        <p>13.</p>Conservatives' efforts to decrease the amount of government regulation
        are of little benefit to the average man. For one thing, only a fraction of the
        regulations can be eliminated because most regulations are necessary. For
        another thing, most of the deregulation affects business rather than the
        average individual, so that its main effect is to take power from the
        government and give it to private corporations. What this means for the
        average man is that government interference in his life is replaced by
        interference from big corporations, which may be permitted, for example,
        to dump more chemicals that get into his water supply and give him cancer.
        The conservatives are just taking the average man for a sucker, exploiting
        his resentment of Big Government to promote the power of Big Business.        
        <p>14.</p> When someone approves of the purpose for which propaganda is being
        used in a given case, he generally calls it "education" or applies to it some
        similar euphemism. But propaganda is propaganda regardless of the
        purpose for which it is used.        
        <p>15.</p>We are not expressing approval or disapproval of the Panama invasion.
        We only use it to illustrate a point.        
        <p>16.</p>When the American colonies were under British rule there were fewer
        and less effective legal guarantees of freedom than there were after the
        American Constitution went into effect, yet there was more personal
        freedom in preindustrial America, both before and after the War of
        Independence, than there was after the Industrial Revolution took hold in
        this country. We quote from Violence in America: Historical and
        Comparative Perspectives, edited by Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert
        Gurr, Chapter 12 by Roger Lane, pages 476-478:
        <p>"The progressive heightening of standards of property, and with it
        the increasing reliance on official law enforcement (in 19th
        century America)were common to the whole society. . .[T]he
        change in social behavior is so long term and so widespread as to
        suggest a connection with the most fundamental of contemporary
        social processes; that of industrial urbanization itself. . .
        "Massachusetts in 1835 had a population of some 660,940, 81
        percent rural, overwhelmingly preindustrial and native born. Its
        citizens were used to considerable personal freedom. Whether
        teamsters, farmers or artisans, they were all accustomed to setting
        their own schedules, and the nature of their work made them
        physically dependent on each other. . .Individual problems, sins
        or even crimes, were not generally cause for wider social concern.
        "But the impact of the twin movements to the city and to the
        factory, both just gathering force in 1835, had a progressive effect
        on personal behavior throughout the 19th century and into the
        20th. The factory demanded regularity of behavior, a life
        governed by obedience to the rhythms of clock and calendar, the
        demands of foreman and supervisor. In the city or town, the needs
        of living in closely packed neighborhoods inhibited many actions
        previously unobjectionable. Both blue-and white-collar
        employees in larger establishments were mutually dependent on
        their fellows. As one man's work fit into another's, so one man's
        business was no longer his own.
        "The results of the new organization of life and work were
        apparent by 1900, when some 76 percent of the 2,805,346
        inhabitants of Massachusetts were classified as urbanites. Much
        violent or irregular behavior which had been tolerable in a casual,
        independent society was no longer acceptable in the more
        formalized, cooperative atmosphere of the later period. . .The
        move to the cities had, in short, produced a more tractable, more
        socialized, more 'civilized' generation than its predecessors."
        —Roger Lane, Violence in America </p>
        [If copyright problems make it impossible for this long quotation to be
        printed, then please change Note 16 to read as follows:
        16. When the American colonies were under British rule there were fewer
        and less effective legal guarantees of freedom than there were after the
        American Constitution went into effect, yet there was more personal
        freedom in preindustrial America, both before and after the War of
        Independence, than there was after the Industrial Revolution took hold in
        this country. In "Violence in America: Historical and Comparative
        Perspectives," edited by Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, Chapter
        12 by Roger Lane, it is explained how in preindustrial America the average
        person had greater independence and autonomy than he does today, and
        how the process of industrialization necessarily led to the restriction of
        personal freedom.]
        <p>17.</p>Apologists for the system are fond of citing cases in which elections have
        been decided by one or two votes, but such cases are rare.        
        <p>18.</p>"Today, in technologically advanced lands, men live very similar
        lives in spite of geographical, religious and political differences.
        The daily lives of a Christian bank clerk in Chicago, a Buddhist
        bank clerk in Tokyo, a Communist bank clerk in Moscow are far
        more alike than the life any one of them is like that of any single
        man who lived a thousand years ago. These similarities are the
        result of a common technology. . ."
        —L. Sprague de Camp, The Ancient Engineers, Ballentine
        edition, page 17.
        The lives of the three bank clerks are not identical. Ideology does have
        some effect. But all technological societies, in order to survive, must evolve
        along approximately the same trajectory.        
        <p>19.</p>Just think—an irresponsible genetic engineer might create a lot of
        terrorists.        
        <p>20.</p>For a further example of undesirable consequences of medical progress,
        suppose a reliable cure for cancer is discovered. Even if the treatment is too
        expensive to be available to any but the elite, it will greatly reduce their
        incentive to stop the escape of carcinogens into the environment.        
        <p>21.</p>Since many people may find paradoxical the notion that a large number of
        good things can add up to a bad thing, we will illustrate with an analogy.
        Suppose Mr. A is playing chess with Mr. B. Mr. C, a Grand Master, is
        looking over Mr. A's shoulder. Mr. A of course wants to win his game, so if
        Mr. C points out a good move for him to make, he is doing Mr. A a favor.
        But suppose now that Mr. C tells Mr. A how to make all of his moves. In
        each particular instance he does Mr. A a favor by showing him his best
        move, but by making all of his moves for him he spoils the game, since
        there is no point in Mr. A's playing the game at all if someone else makes
        all his moves.
        The situation of modern man is analogous to that of Mr. A. The system
        makes an individual's life easier for him in innumerable ways, but in doing
        so it deprives him of control over his own fate.
        <p>22.</p>Here we are considering only the conflict of values within the
        mainstream. For the sake of simplicity we leave out of the picture
        "outsider" values like the idea that wild nature is more important than
        human economic welfare.
        <p>23.</p>Self-interest is not necessarily material self-interest. It can consist in
        fulfillment of some psychological need, for example, by promoting one's
        own ideology or religion.        
        <p>24.</p>A qualification: It is in the interest of the system to permit a certain
        prescribed degree of freedom in some areas. For example, economic
        freedom (with suitable limitations and restraints) has proved effective in
        promoting economic growth. But only planned, circumscribed, limited
        freedom is in the interest of the system. The individual must always be kept
        on a leash, even if the leash is sometimes long (see paragraphs 94, 97).        
        <p>25.</p>We don't mean to suggest that the efficiency or the potential for survival
        of a society has always been inversely proportional to the amount of
        pressure or discomfort to which the society subjects people. That is
        certainly not the case. There is good reason to believe that many primitive
        societies subjected people to less pressure than the European society did,
        but European society proved far more efficient than any primitive society
        and always won out in conflicts with such societies because of the
        advantages conferred by technology.        
        <p>26.</p>If you think that more effective law enforcement is unequivocally good
        because it suppresses crime, then remember that crime as defined by the
        system is not necessarily what you would call crime. Today, smoking
        marijuana is a "crime," and in some places in the U.S., possession of any
        firearm, registered or not, may be made a crime; the same thing may
        happen with disapproved methods of child-rearing, such as spanking. In
        some countries, expression of dissident political opinions is a crime, and
        there is no certainty that this will never happen in the U.S., since no
        constitution or political system lasts forever. If a society needs a large,
        powerful law enforcement establishment, then there is something gravely
        wrong with that society; it must be subjecting people to severe pressures if
        so many refuse to follow the rules, or follow them only because forced.
        Many societies in the past have gotten by with little or no formal lawenforcement.
        <p>27.</p>To be sure, past societies have had means of influencing behavior, but
        these have been primitive and of low effectiveness compared with the
        technological means that are now being developed.
        <p>28.</p> However, some psychologists have publicly expressed opinions indicating
        their contempt for human freedom. And the mathematician Claude Shannon
        was quoted in Omni (August 1987) as saying, "I visualize a time when we
        will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I'm rooting for the
        machines."    
        <p>29.</p>This is no science fiction! After writing paragraph 154 we came across an
        article in Scientific American according to which scientists are actively
        developing techniques for identifying possible future criminals and for
        treating them by a combination of biological and psychological means.
        Some scientists advocate compulsory application of the treatment, which
        may be available in the near future. (See "Seeking the Criminal Element",
        by W. Wayt Gibbs, Scientific American, March 1995.) Maybe you think
        this is OK because the treatment would be applied to those who might
        become drunk drivers (they endanger human life too), then perhaps to
        people who spank their children, then to environmentalists who sabotage
        logging equipment, eventually to anyone whose behavior is inconvenient
        for the system.      
        <p>30.</p>A further advantage of nature as a counter-ideal to technology is that, in
        many people, nature inspires the kind of reverence that is associated with
        religion, so that nature could perhaps be idealized on a religious basis. It is
        true that in many societies religion has served as a support and justification
        for the established order, but it is also true that religion has often provided a
        basis for rebellion. Thus it may be useful to introduce a religious element
        into the rebellion against technology, the more so because Western society
        today has no strong religious foundation.
        Religion nowadays either is used as cheap and transparent support for
        narrow, short-sighted selfishness (some conservatives use it this way), or
        even is cynically exploited to make easy money (by many evangelists), or
        has degenerated into crude irrationalism (fundamentalist Protestant sects,
        "cults"), or is simply stagnant (Catholicism, main-line Protestantism). The
        nearest thing to a strong, widespread, dynamic religion that the West has
        seen in recent times has been the quasi-religion of leftism, but leftism today
        is fragmented and has no clear, unified inspiring goal.
        Thus there is a religious vacuum in our society that could perhaps be filled
        by a religion focused on nature in opposition to technology. But it would be
        a mistake to try to concoct artificially a religion to fill this role. Such an
        invented religion would probably be a failure. Take the "Gaia" religion for
        example. Do its adherents really believe in it or are they just play-acting? If
        they are just play-acting their religion will be a flop in the end.
        It is probably best not to try to introduce religion into the conflict of nature
        vs. technology unless you really believe in that religion yourself and find
        that it arouses a deep, strong, genuine response in many other people.
        <p>31.</p>Assuming that such a final push occurs. Conceivably the industrial system
        might be eliminated in a somewhat gradual or piecemeal fashion (see
        paragraphs 4, 167 and Note 4).        
        <p>32.</p>It is even conceivable (remotely) that the revolution might consist only of
        a massive change of attitudes toward technology resulting in a relatively
        gradual and painless disintegration of the industrial system. But if this
        happens we'll be very lucky. It's far more probably that the transition to a
        nontechnological society will be very difficult and full of conflicts and
        disasters.        
        <p>33.</p>The economic and technological structure of a society are far more
        important than its political structure in determining the way the average
        man lives (see paragraphs 95, 119 and Notes 16, 18).        
        <p>34.</p>This statement refers to our particular brand of anarchism. A wide variety
        of social attitudes have been called "anarchist," and it may be that many
        who consider themselves anarchists would not accept our statement of
        paragraph 215. It should be noted, by the way, that there is a nonviolent
        anarchist movement whose members probably would not accept FC as
        anarchist and certainly would not approve of FC's violent methods.
        <p>35.</p>Many leftists are motivated also by hostility, but the hostility probably
        results in part from a frustrated need for power.
        <p>36.</p>It is important to understand that we mean someone who sympathizes
        with these movements as they exist today in our society. 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, and if one
        believes, for example, that women should have equal rights it does not
        necessarily follow that one must sympathize with the feminist movement as
        it exists today.
    </p>

<h1>This was: Industrial & Its Future by Theodore Kaczynski</h1>
<p><a href="https://youtu.be/T0nR2U4msHQ">The Audio Book Version</a></p>  
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