Ted Kaczynski, the famed terrorist wrote a tract concerning industrial society. Given his stance in opposition to it, we might take him as an authority on the qualities and pitfalls of industrial civilization. In his paper, Industrial Society and its Future, he describes many issues which seem to arise from a postindustrial civilization, the causes of which happen to be rather few. The first primary cause of issue as described by Kaczynski is oversocialization.
Oversocialization takes place in societies with large populations and ever-increasing distance between man and his industry. Kaczynski's proposed solution is to remove man from industry and industry from existence. Yet industry has many more benefits than negatives, so we should seek to solve the issues without eliminating it.
Marinetti's futurism provided a solution to this first issue, which was to praise man's aggressive and reclusive nature. Spengler's nationalism did something very similar. So, Kaczynski is not the sole arbiter of solution to the problem.
In Muammar Gaddafi's Green Book he describes both the nature of man and of woman and seeks to reconcile individual and national rights amongst both sexes. Woman has a different function and therefore deserves a different treatment from man, yet both should be held as equal before the law and in social value. With this set unique yet equalistic legal perspectives we build up a system which focuses on family unity and well-being.
Uncle Ted certainly didn't have a problem with families being healthy and unified. His philosophy directly describes the breakdown of the family unit at one point. Futurism doesn't hold true to this value despite its focus on the strong and the militaristic. Spengler strangely addresses the topic but doesn't explain sufficiently his viewpoint to constitute a proof, that families are bound together by man's will alone.
Jonas Nilsson, in his book Anarcho-Fascism, posits that men should take charge of their families and instill values and principles into them. Through a system of strong families, a revolution would take place, changing the society at large towards a more traditional state. This fits well with the avoidance of totalitarianism as described by Hannah Arendt. In a more Orwellian context, keeping families together and strong in principle is antithetical to a totalitarian state.
Gaddafi provides that families should be held together by their religious values, as well as benefits from the government. Gaddafi had successfully eliminated class in Libya and improved the lives of all his people before the Arab Spring saw him overthrown, tortured, and executed. Futurism rejects religious values and Spengler is more Nietzchean than to give a singular answer.
According to William Klemm in his book Triune Brain, Triune Mind, Triune Worldview, there are a great many psychological benefits to holding religious values and practices. Among these benefits is a tendency more so towards unity and altruism than toward ego and selfishness. A family with religious values is likely to be more generous to its own and therefore more likely to hold together even under better times.
Should the family be nuclear, classic, or multi-generational? Traditionally, immediate family and extended family lived together, in a multi-generational clan of sorts. Yet, in the United States during the 1950s a new variant of lifestyle became readily available, the nuclear family, which is comprised solely of a mother, a father, and whatever children they have. It should be noted that the nuclear family is ideal but is largely just a status symbol. A multi-generational family has stronger internal support by virtue of the larger number of people involved in the tribe.
A 19th century Europoid form of Gaddafi's system might in fact be a positive goal for the West to strive for. But what about Kaczynski's other criticisms?
The removal of man from a harmonious relationship with nature is another criticism that Kaczynski brought up. Man is an animal with a capacity for higher reasoning, and this higher reasoning has lead mankind away from a natural state; thereby increasing suffering as well as furthering the destruction of nature. Kaczynski brings up the brutal element of man's animalistic self yet provides no true solution for the venting thereof.
Spengler describes his Nietzschean outlet for man, to funnel aggression into productivity. Marinetti's futurism also praises the violent aspect of man's nature, though only offers artistic expression as the relief for such. Laura Ingalls-Wilder in her books Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie describes pre-modern humanity in smaller, pre-industrial groupings. Her description of a typical family in a state of harmony with nature is useful in guiding us towards our next step in creation of systemic solutions. In her books she describes the specialized roles each sex takes on, as well as the violence her father enacted upon external threats.
Hunting and fishing are traditional masculine activities which have fallen out of favor in modernity. Reinstituting these activities as norms could easily serve as a healthy outlet for masculine aggression. The specialization that traditional gender roles bring causes stability, efficiency and peace within the home. Perhaps adding artistic outlets to traditional masculine activity would optimize the venting of aggression for men, thusly making men more capable of providing peaceful homeostasis to a home environment.
Gaddafi extols superb individualist expression as well as the beauty of the differences between the sexes. This therefore fulfills what we have already discussed. His naturalism is almost Taoist in its expression. It satisfies Kaczynski's problems without any further extrapolation or explanation. And yet, if we are to apply his ideas within a western context, we must acknowledge how they will be impacted by industry.
Firstly, it has been posited that the family unit is the first line of defense against authoritarianism, as a strongly formed family socializes man in such a way as to instill principle deeply into the being of the human creature. This is sound and holds true even within Nilsson's anarcho-fascism, and also within traditional conservatism.
The family is the basis for the tribe, and the tribe is the basis for the nation. This differs from the libertarian theory that the individual is the most basic unit of civilization and holds more weight than the libertarian argument. A strong family unit is, in fact, the first line of defense against the oversocialization brought through industrial civilization.
By acknowledging the differences between the sexes, Gaddafi achieves harmony in self-involved human nature, but this does not necessarily equate to balance with nature as a whole in itself. Yet, it is a good first step.
To live in line with our own nature is simply the first step towards living in harmony with all of nature.
The first steps to balancing nature with industry begin here. The next steps are clearly to involve ourselves with activities in which we freely associate with nature. As we have already discussed, traditionally masculine activities such as hunting and fishing vent human aggression, yet simultaneously they also take humans into a natural setting wherein interaction with nature takes place. The one issue we run into here is the feminine side of things. Female nature is not inherently aggressive but rather passive and nurturing, and thusly gardening or raising animals would be traditional activities which take females away from artifice into a natural setting. These are rather difficult to carry out within an industrial society as space is quite limited. Yet with the advent of new technologies such as hydroponics and aquaponics they become more feasible.
Aquaponics is ideal as it also maintains male nature alongside female nature. Aquaponics is one example of how technology can be blended with nature in order to outperform natural productivity. Being scalar from the homestead to industrial levels, an aquaponics system can produce enough food to feed an entire family on a regular basis with the starting point of a standard swimming pool sized grow. Such a system is almost entirely self-sufficient as well and requires at least one fish to be removed per day in order to maintain homeostasis. Thus, killing three birds with one stone, (metaphorically speaking), appeasing aggression, providing food, and connecting individuals with nature.
As we have seen, with a select few alterations, the system Gaddafi presents satiates the major issues Kaczynski brings to light in his nearly thirty-thousand-word essay. We have also taken a peek at how technological advancement itself can solve some of the problems Ted takes issue with industrial society. Ted's solution was essentially to reject industrial society altogether, which is not viable for the majority of the human population. Our investigation here is by no means extensive, but certainly shows how shallow Ted Kaczynski's problem solving truly was.
Further investigations are necessitated, but those are better left for a different time, and a different set of concepts for use as explorative tools. Any who seek out solutions to the problems of industrial society may find use in alternative naturalistic philosophies, and more creative artifices. Neo-futurism is one such place in which to look, but I shall not be exhausting this topic any longer.
