iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 30/08/2025

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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 30/08/2025

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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

The leftist is anti-individualistic, procollectivist. He wants society to solve every one’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, take care of them.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

Leftists 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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 20/04/2025

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...

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

They will need more and more training, more and more ability, and will have to be ever more reliable, conforming, and docile. 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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

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 problem.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

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?

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

Science and technology constitute a powerful mass movement, and many scientists gratify their need for power through identification with this mass movement.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

If a change is made that is sufficiently large to alter permanently a longterm historical trend, then it will alter the society as a whole. You can’t permanently change any important part of society without changing all other parts as well.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

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 word “primitive” by “nonliterate”

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 09/03/2025

It should not be assumed that a person has enough freedom just because he says he has enough. Freedom is restricted in part by unconscious psychological controls, and many people’s ideas of what constitutes freedom are governed more by social convention than by their real needs.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

Does the cheap electricity generated from nuclear power outweigh the accumulating waste and the risk of accidents? Edward Teller thought it did. I do not.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

Even if most people in industrial-technological society were well satisfied, I would still be opposed to that form of society,because it is demeaning to fulfill one’s need for the power process through surrogate activities and being part of an organization rather than through pursuit of real goals.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

Technical advances taken together have created a world in which the average man’s fate is no longer in his own hands but in those of politicians, corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power to influence.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

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

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 28/02/2025

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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

If the Founding Fathers had lost their nerve and declined to sign the Declaration of Independence, 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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what might be called the bourgeois conception of freedom.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 23/02/2025

Many modern people have neverput their physical powers to any practical use; they have never gone through the power process using their bodies in a serious way. If your need for the power process has been satisfied during your life will prepare you to accept the end of that life.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 20/02/2025

Freedom means having power; not the power to control other people but the power to control the circumstances of one’s own life

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Industrial-technological society cannot be reformed in such a way as to prevent it from progressively narrowing the sphere of human freedom but “freedom” is a word that can be interpreted in many ways.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Science is a surrogate activity because scientists work mainly for the fulfillment they get out of the work itself.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

Because of their need for rebellion and for membership in a movement, leftists or persons of similar psychological type often are unattracted to a rebellious or activist movement whose goals and membership are not initially leftist.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 14/02/2025

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 a long-lasting technological regression cannot be brought about.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

If the industrial system were once thoroughly broken down, refrigeration technology would quickly be lost. The same is true of other organization-dependent technology. It would take centuries to rebuild it, just as it took centuries to build it the first time around.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

We distinguish between two kinds of technology, which we will call small-scale technology and organization-dependent technology. Small-scale technology is technology that can be used by small-scale communities without outside assistance.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

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 and this may provide much of the motivation for their work.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

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? I

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

People satisfy their need for the power process through surrogate activities. A surrogate activity 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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

Some people get very serious about essentially trivial activities such as sports, or bridge, or chess, or arcane scholarly pursuits. others who are more clear-sighted never attach enough importance to them to satisfy their need for the power process in that way.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

The U.S. invaded Panama and punished Noriega. Thus the U.S. went through the power process and many Americans, because of their identification with the U.S., experienced the power process vicariously. The Panama invasion gave people a sense of power.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

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.).

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

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.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

Freedom of the press is of very little use to the average citizen as an individual. The mass media are under the control of large organizations that are integrated into the system.

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Cousin Ted Kaczynski @cousinted.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

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.

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