[D66] Industrial society and its Future

[R.O.]

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/unabom-manifesto-1.html?mcubz=3

  INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND ITS FUTURE

Introduction

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

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