“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
Last week, I covered the manifesto of Ted Kaczynski — aka the Unabomber — titled “Industrial Society and Its Future” as it pertains to the author’s tragically accurate forecasting of technology’s destructive influence on society.
(Once again, I feel compelled to offer the caveat that I do not endorse mailing bombs to political opponents under any circumstances. This is an analysis of the writing, not the man.)
Related: Did the Unabomber Get Technology’s Destructive Influence Right?
Kaczynski also devoted a significant amount of ink to the various psychological pathologies of the modern left, which I would like to explore here. He opens the section on leftism with a provocative claim, but one I believe he goes on to prove, that “one of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism.”
First, as some semantical housekeeping, the reason that I used the term “modern left” rather than just “left” is that Kaczynski rightly separates classical socialist ideology, which dominated until the last seventy years or so and was largely economic in its orientation, to the modern left, which has taken on more of a cultural/social identity. I agree with him on this score.
“Today the [leftist] movement is fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be called a leftist,” he writes. “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… leftism is not so much [a] movement or an ideology as a psychological type.”
Anyway, without further ado, here are some of the highlights I excerpted from his manifesto related to leftism, which I would encourage everyone to read in its entirety.
Via Industrial Society and Its Future (emphasis added):
The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization”…
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…
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…
The negative connotations have been attached to these terms by the activists themselves…
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.
As I emphasized in my previous article about the manifesto, which is worth noting again, Kaczynski was writing these things in the ’90s, long before the apex of woke insanity that we have either yet to reach or that we reached sometime in the past five years.
What Kaczynski may have not foreseen, for all of his foresight, was that the members of this privileged strata of society would one day be able to fashion themselves into members of an oppressed class by transing themselves and their children.
More to come on Kaczynski’s manifesto.