Category Archives: philosophy

literature, philosophy, politics, quotes

>Theodore Kaczynski – The Unabomber, Part Two

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Alston Chase, author of Harvard and The Unabomber, quotes Colin Wilson‘s The Outsider:

The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnameable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, to others; their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for Truth.
The Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality. He sees “too deep and too much” and what he sees is essentially chaos. […] When he asserts his sense of anarchy in the face of the bourgeois’ complacent acceptance, it is not simply the need to cock a snook at respectability that provokes him; it is a distressing sense that truth must be told at all costs, otherwise there can be no hope for an ultimate restoration of order. Even if there seems no room for hope, truth must be told. […] The Outsider is a man who has awakened to chaos.
Colin Wilson, The Outsider (1956)

Kaczynski probably considered himself “sick in a civilization that doesn’t know it is sick”, as Wilson further writes. He obviously lived in extreme isolation and poverty to escape a sick society. “Only revolution by outsiders can save civilization”, he wrote in the manifesto.

Kaczynski worked and thought like a scientist, claiming that only scientifically testable statements are meaningful. Thus moral, spiritual judgements, religion and ethics are to him just emotional attitudes produced by social context, what he called brainwashing. Hence he referred to each of his terror attacks as “experiments”…

To be continued in Part Three.

literature, philosophy, politics

>Theodore Kaczynski – The Unabomber, Part One

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Theodore Kaczynski, June 21, 1996.

The story of civilization is […] the story of engineering. […]
Civilization is a matter of power over the world and nature and skill in exploiting this world. It has nothing to do with kindness, honesty, or peacefulness.
L. Sprague De Camp, The Ancient Engineers (1987)

I just read Industrial Society & Its Future a.k.a. The Unabomber Manifesto by Theodore John Kaczynski (born 1942), the infamous Unabomber (dubbed so by the media and the FBI because his early victims were associated with universities and airlines). It’s really nothing special. It’s filled to the brim with philosophical and environmental clichés that pretty much every sane person thinks about now and then; how science and technology alienate man from nature, how to raise awareness about the ecological crisis we’re facing, and how the system is wearing us down, limiting our freedom. It’s definitely not the work of a mad man, since his thoughts and beliefs are entirely reasonable.
What’s written in the manifesto is of great importance though, since it contains a lot of ugly truths. It’s too bad the manifesto has been written off as insane. Even activist groups such as Earth First! were shocked by this man who actually took their ecological jihad ideas serious…
And that’s what’s so very special, that’s what makes him a mad man; Ted Kaczynski was so very serious about his ideas that he ended up a terrorist leading a bombing spree that lasted for seventeen years where three people were killed and twenty-three seriously injured.

Psychiatrist Robert I. Simon writes in his book Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream:
”Every twenty-two seconds an American is beaten, stabbed, shot, robbed, raped, or killed.”
During the seventeen years that Kaczynski sent out bombs, 1978-95, more than 388,000 murders occured in America. Over 22,000 bombings killed 386 people and injured 3,634 others. Forty million people were injured by criminals during this period. These numbers are insane, but they speak of something very important: The difference between murderers and the ordinary citizens is merely a matter of degree.
Simon writes: ”After 32 years of work as a treating and as a forensic psychiatrist, I am absolutey convinced that there is no great gulf between the mental life of the common criminal and that of the everyday, upright citizen. The dark side exists in all of us…”
We think pretty much the same awful thoughts about our fellow citizens, but the bad man gives in to these dark impulses more easily. Many reach that line that Kaczynski did cross, but few of us step over it. A lot of murders are motivated by money, power, jealousy, lust, anger for being rejected… The Unabomber murdered for an idea.

He’s been labelled ”the most intellectual serial killer the nation has ever produced” by criminologists. He is the genius who entered the elite university of Harvard at age sixteen where he majored in mathematics (he scored at the top of his class with a 98.9% final grade), he earned a Ph.D. specializing in geometric function theory (”I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 people in the country understood or appreciated it”, said Maxwell O. Reade, a retired math professor), and then went on to become an assistant professor at the age of 25 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for two years and then abruptly quit to move to Lincoln, Montana, where he went into the wild, built himself a cabin and began making bombs. He speaks several foreign languages, and all of his many letters (including the 35,000-word manifesto) contain no spelling or grammatical errors – even though they’re written on a shitty typewriter. Despite his case being one of the most expensive investigations in FBI history, running for seventeen years, he was never caught as a result of this investigation. Instead, his brother, who recognized his style of writing after the manifesto had been published by The New York Times and The Washington Post on September 19, 1995, tipped off the FBI, and so on April 3, 1996 agents arrested him at his remote cabin. 17 years of American terrorism had come to an end.
In short, he’s a dangerous man.
Today, 66 years old, he’s serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole.

—Inspired by the book Harvard and The Unabomber by Alston Chase.

To be continued in Part Two.


Jeanne Boylan’s famous drawing of The Unabomber.

literature, philosophy, politics, quotes

>Jim Goad – Till truth do us part

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One of these guys is Jim Goad. Guess who.

Jim Goad has been challenging the status quo of humanity and everyday stupidities for aeons. He’s probably most (in)famous for his and his late wife’s fanzine ANSWER Me!, where the fourth issue is known as “The rape issue”. The article “It’s a rape, rape, rape, rape, rape, rape world” can be read here (PDF).
As always, people judge the book by its cover. As always, people are wrong (I come to think of the awesome band Today Is The Day and the song title The cold harshness of being wrong throughout your entire life…). Most often it’s peoples’ own prejudice and ignorance that stands in their way of rational thinking and simple understanding. That’s why they’re living fake lives. There’s no time for understanding in these peoples’ lives, cuz there are TV shows to watch and shit to be bought. Exhume to consume.
Don’t let the truth anywhere near me, you crazy bastard! I ain’t got time for no truth, boy!

I’m interested in Goad’s truths, because I believe he’s got some in stock. The truth is one ugly motherfucker, but ugliness is not something we’d like to be acquainted with, so we choose the easy way out. Goad tends to choose the hard way. Always the hard way. And when you like it hard, you’ll be looked down upon with suspicion by Them -the evil minds that plot destruction, sorcerers of death’s construction…

Now check these quotes from various interviews and columns, straight out the mouth of this unholy Goat.

Many of the racial problems in America are caused by the fact that people are innately tribal, and politicians know how to exploit that biological fact. And since power is built on money, it is in politicians’ best interest to fan racial unrest—even when it’s done under the guise of anti-racist touchy-mushy let’s-all-hold-hands propaganda, because anti-racism still keeps everyone’s attention fixated on race—to divert attention away from financial inequities. They do this because they know that it works.

[…]

I tried to make it clear in The Redneck Manifesto that it’s unwise to ask a sociopath for advice about running society. I do think it’s ironic that people are more worried about words such as “nigger” than they are about the fact that most of the nation, black and white, is being squashed down into an abject, powerless peasantry whose government treats them all like prison inmates. But hey, it’s OK—even though our standard of living is shit compared to a generation ago, at least we don’t say “nigger” no mo’.

[…]

Back in ’95, when the District Attorney of Billingham, Washington, took a pair of newsstand owners to trial for selling ANSWER Me! #4, it was truly surreal to see layouts from my magazine blasted onto a white wall with an overhead projector. “Basically, it tells you how to rape everyone”, the DA told the jury. It’s always unsettling when a stranger seems certain of your intentions and motivations, when they couldn’t be further from the truth. This sense of anguish is heavily compounded when the stranger in question has the power to destroy your life.

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This whole idea of someone objectively “deserving” punishment for their actions is an antiquated, pseudo-biblical concept and almost entirely foreign to me.

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The Ebola virus and similar detergent products underpin what we’ve always said in ANSWER Me!: The best humanity can hope for is to be eventually crushed by nature.

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In my writing, I try to focus on things which seem obvious to me, but about which society is rampagingly hypocritical.

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I tend not to hold accidents of birth against people. I am much more attuned to willful decisions people make than skin color or genitalia. How do they deal with you one on one? How ethical are they?

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Any monotheistic religion is years behind any religion the East came up with. Apparently monotheism is one of the building blocks of modern society. I think the Hindus, Buddhists and Dhaoists are all light years ahead of Western religion.

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I remember when the Oklahoma City bombing happened, everyone immediately thought it was at the hands of Arabs. Wait a second. There are Americans so disgruntled that they blow things up? That was an exciting idea.

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Every black guy who was in my cell said he respected nazis and no one else because they presume everyone is tribal and everyone is a racist. They know where they stand with the nazis. They’re not going to stab them in the back. They will stab them while looking at them, which is preferable.

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I think we all know what is wrong with us. The question is – Do you have the bravery to confront it?

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You are not better because you are a black woman. You’re a human being. You are just as bad as I am. That’s egalitarian. These people who claim to be anti-sexist and anti-racist are sexist and racist. I don’t see equality in intellectual aptitude but everybody is prone to be an asshole. That’s the only equality I know of.

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Nothing that humans do surprises me but the way they tend to cover it up is what repels me.

More Jim Goad:
The redneck speaks
Prayin’ hard
Humanism without humans

literature, philosophy, politics, quotes

>Francis Parker Yockey

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In this century it is of scant importance what language a European speaks and in what geographic area he was brought up. Of importance only is the spirituality that permeates his inner life.
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In this century the idea of vertical race is dead. We can now view race only in horizontal terms – the race one feels in oneself is everything. The anatomic-geographic group to which one belongs means nothing.
[…]
Our touchstone of comradeship and belonging is spiritual-ethical, not the old one of birth-place, cephalic-index, eye-colour. In the 20th century, the century of elective affinities, materialistic tests are pure stupidity.
The Enemy of Europe (1953)

These are the words of Francis Parker Yockey, American born philosopher (who highly praised European high culture), most often labelled fascist, Nazi revivalist, anti-Semite, anti-American and far right mystery man.
I tend to enjoy reading about these guys and their ideas. I’m fascinated by their explicit ways of looking at the world, I find it dedicated and to the point (even though often narrow-mindedly romantic), whereas the mainstream equivalent philosophers and historians are extremely limited when it comes to sensitive subjects due to their political correctness. They often end up straight hypocritical or plain lame and grovelling, and I find that a waste of time.
I do not necessarily agree with everything I read, be it Spengler, Nietzsche, Pound, Yockey or whatever politically incorrect dude you might find in here. However, when I find something of importance to me, I treat it as I treat all kinds of knowledge. I don’t care if it’s right, left, wrong… As long as it means something to me it is of relevance. Simple as that.
And I think the above quote proves just that; even though you’re a dick in the public eye, you still might have some interesting stuff to communicate.

Here’s a review of the Yockey biography Dreamer of The Day (1999).

literature, philosophy, quotes

>Thoreau – Walden

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“The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”

Like most people ever interested in politics, independence and philosophy I’ve come to check out H.D. Thoreau every once in a while. I first read Thoreau back in 1989, when I was 14. I read Civil Disobedience, or Resistance to Civil Government as was its original publishing name in 1849, and it completely seduced my mind. Some of the first words are there forever: ”That government is best that governs not at all”, as well as ”I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government”. I believe that’s what started my political awareness/interest, reading a 140 year old lecture and finding so much modern truth. When I started reading about Holocaust revisionism some ten years ago and the way these revisionists are put in prison for asking questions I immediately remembered this quote as well: ”Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison”.

Walden or Life In The Woods (1854), appeared to me some years later, and I remember being quite disappointed since it lacked the immediate “instructions” and guidance I was hoping to find back then. Sure, I got the message, but I was looking for action, not contemplation.
Now, having recently seen the stunning movie Into The Wild, I picked up Walden and studied it again, this time with so much joy. It was as inspirational as when I first read Civil Disobedience, but on a completely different level. I found it quite cool to realize that a lot of the stuff he’s writing about in Walden is where my ideas are right now. It took me another 14 years to arrive there, and now I really appreciate Thoreau’s great piece of art.
I wonder where I’ll be in another 14 years… I’ve got so much more reading to do. Must prevail!

Check this page for thorough information about the man and his works.

Some excerpts from Walden:

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me — some of its virus mingled with my blood. No — in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way. A man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as much. Philanthropy is not love for one’s fellow-man in the broadest sense.
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Some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they employed themselves there? You boast of spending a tenth part of your income in charity; maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with it. Society recovers only a tenth part of the property then. Is this owing to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found, or to the remissness of the officers of justice?
Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it.
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I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man’s uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious. This is a charity that hides a multitude of sins. The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own castoff griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.
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I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology. My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it, that is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have chewed which I could lecture against. If you should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing. Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings. Take your time, and set about some free labor.
Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the saints. Our hymn-books resound with a melodious cursing of God and enduring Him forever. One would say that even the prophets and redeemers had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of man. There is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable praise of God. All health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure helps to make me sad and does me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it. If, then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly Indian, botanic, magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.
I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of Shiraz, that “they asked a wise man, saying: Of the many celebrated trees which the Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in this? He replied, Each has its appropriate produce, and appointed season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious independents. — Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.”

movies, philosophy, politics, religion

>Zeitgeist – The movie / Remastered Final Edition

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>I stumbled upon a guy this afternoon who had not seen Zeitgeist (go here for sources, subtitles and additional info). You may download it here (yes, it’s legal!). It’s a must see for everyone. Below is the remastered final edition, two hours of the most interesting conspiracy theories ever put on tape. Watch, digest and explore.

“It is my hope that people will not take what is said in the film as the truth, but find out for themselves, for truth is not told, it is realized.”

In my opinion this movie is about making a choice: Do you want to live your life through the eyes of someone else, or do you want to think for yourself? Question everything (Zeitgeist included, of course).

This YouTube channel has a bunch of interviews with the producer of Zeitgeist, Peter Joseph.