The Rebel Rule Follower

I'm not sure if it's a recent trend, but I've heard a lot of leftists citing the works of Ted Kaczynski lately. Based on what I knew about Kaczynski's beliefs, I found this trend odd and suspected many of the people citing his works never actually read them. So I decided to read his more famous work, Industrial Society and Its Future. Now I'm certain that the people now citing him haven't read his works. How he describes lefists is quite different from how leftists typically describe themselves.

Most people who describe themselves as socialists, communists, and left-leaning anarchists, at least here in the United States, believe they are opposed to the norms of our society. They view our society as capitalistic and they are against capitalism. They view our society as white and they are against whiteness. They view our society as colonial and they are against colonialism. However, our society is largely against all of those things. Both the majority of people and the government believe the economy must be regulated and controlled. The only difference between the views of right- and left-leaning individuals on this topic is the extent to which it needs to be controlled. Racists are in the minority amongst the general population. Very few would support laws that discriminated based on race. Likewise, very few people would support the idea of the United States conquering a foreign country and claiming it as a colony. If you don't believe me, just look at the push back to Trump's proposal to make Greenland and Canada part of the United States.

What modern leftists actually are according to Ted Kaczynski are extremist rule followers. From Industrial Society and Its Future:

9. 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.

First he discussed feelings of inferiority:

12. 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-class families.

13. 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.)

14. 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.

15. 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.

While this section discusses how leftists are projecting their own feelings of inferiority onto others, I think it's at least adjacent to the next section on oversocialization. Specifically on how leftists rise to the defense of any group they perceive as weak or oppressed. They typically don't do it through violence. Instead they do it through rule following to the extreme.

Leftists often take it upon themselves to be the police of language and thought. In this capacity, they take common societal beliefs, such as insults and kicking somebody when they're down being bad, to an absurd end. They're typically the first to scream at you for using the wrong word to refer to a group that they've identified as oppressed (kicking the group when they're down). This is especially evident when an adjective changes from approve to unapproved in their book. For example, the word retard. Retard was at one point a legitimate medical term to describe a child with an intellectual disability. I think it's obvious how it then morphed into an insult. When I was growing up, people threw around the word retard as an insult like people today throw around mother fucker. But then a group of leftists decided retard wasn't merely an insult. It was derogatory to an oppressed minority, namely people with intellectual disabilities. Once that happened, leftists were quick to descend on anybody who dared use the word retard even if it was in a technical context (with very early automobiles, you often had to "retard the spark" before you crank started the engine). I'm sure Kaczynski's use of the phrase "black ghetto-dweller" would cause many modern leftists to declare him a racist and demand his books be tossed into the trash bin of history (if they actually bothered to read his works).

According to Kaczynski, this tendency derives from leftists having a feeling of inferiority. Next he discussed his concept of oversocialization, which he says only covers a segment of leftists (if you're a leftist reading this, of course you're not in that segment):

28. 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.

29. 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 most 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.

I've noted this tendency not just amongst leftists, but amongst most schools of thought outside of the mainstream. Very few schools of thought venture outside of their society's morals and norms. Those that do are typically despised by the masses. For example, libertarians are advocates for freedom of speech. Some especially edgy libertarians will demonstrate this by using racist words or phrases typically shunned by mainstream society. While the words they use may be against the morals and norms of society, the principle they're upholding (freedom of speech) is supported to at least some extend by the majority of people. They're violating one norm but in the name of upholding another.

Leftists are similar but their tactics differ. For example, in our society it's typically considered good form to care for the poor (this derives from the Christian morals upon which this country was founded). Libertarians try to uphold this principle but advocating for mutual aid and voluntary giving. Leftists try to uphold this principle by making it illegal to not give to the poor. Specifically they demand tax money, the payment of which is legally enforced, be used to provide food, shelter, and clothing to the poor. Furthermore, if you express and objection with their strategy, they immediately accuse you of hating the poor. Even if you do agree with their strategy, they'll continue to express anger because you're not supportive enough. There's no winning because the rule can never be followed strictly enough.

I largely agree with Kaczynski on these points. His observations, as should be obvious from what I just wrote, mirror my own although he came at it from a different direction. I also disagree with many of his points. I'm not convinced that what he calls surrogate activities are bad. I also don't believe our problems can be fixed by reverting to pre-industrial society. I definitely believe the strategies he described to revert society to a pre-industrial one are impossible to realize. But I, unlike many lefists currently citing him, actually bothered to read his work before commenting on it. If they had bothered to read Industrial Society and Its Future, I'm sure they would've found him guilty of wrongthink in the first four sections (the excerpts cited in this post are from those sections). Not only did he criticize modern lefitism, but he also openly advocated for violating the morals and norms of society (although many leftists would've supported his bombings if he had chosen CEOs, Republicans, etc.).