/lit/ - Literature

>Kaczynski's analysis of non-industrial and non-agricultural societies being superior to the modern world rests on a fundamental ignorance of human history. While he rightly criticized the idealized view of primitive hunter-gatherer societies as being communal utopias of equality, cooperation, and pacifism, he simultaneously indulged in the equally fallacious view that they were libertarian utopias where freedom and rugged individualism reigned. Even if one ignores questions over standards of living, child mortality, and disease, both viewpoints fly in the face of the actual history of ancient empires, which used brutal coercion to crush the nomadic hunter-gatherers and consolidate the power of their leaders. None of these early empires came out of nowhere; rather, they grew out of hunter-gatherer tribes who discovered some good land with food in enough abundance that it was worthwhile to settle down there permanently, start cultivating the land to maximize the food they were able to hunt and gather (inventing agriculture and animal husbandry in the process), and kick off any interlopers who tried to take "their" food and land (inventing armies and war in the process). A return to primitive society would soon entail a return to primitive, tyrannical forms of governance as a result, not a new age of liberty.

>Likewise, his analysis glosses over the fact that a mass die-off would be the guaranteed end result of abandoning industrial civilization. Earth's population is supported almost entirely by agriculture, even before the Green Revolution of the 20th century and its resultant population explosion. If industrial civilization were to collapse, billions of people would starve to death, but not before turning against each other for food and resources, potentially killing billions more. All this comes before the prospect of nuclear weapons, be they controlled by governments or in the hands of terrorists, enters the mix, with the potential to finish the job of humanity's self-destruction. Of course, for those of a hard green and/or Malthusian persuasion who believe that Earth is already overpopulated, the death of most of humanity would not necessarily be seen as a bad thing
Taken from: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Unabomber#Ignorance_of_history