That was actually a really interesting take on "leftism" as a group, vs the usual American Democrat vs Republican dichotomy:
"Oversocialized types who try to satisfy their drive for power by imposing their morality on everyone have certainly been around for a long time. But we THINK that the decisive role played by feelings of inferiority, low self-esteem, powerlessness, identification with victims by people who are not themselves victims, is a peculiarity of modern leftism."
I wouldn’t say it’s that interesting, it’s more or less the standard way that leftists are portrayed by the right wing. Left wing political groups are usually coalitions of people without much institutional power. But in order to bring together enough people to challenge institutional power you have to get different kinds of people who have different problems together under the same roof, so you wind up with white women protesting about black peoples rights, black people protesting about tenant rights, and so on- everyone has to take on the struggles of everyone else, so from the outside it looks like people are always complaining about problems that don’t affect them.
From the point of view of people with a lot of institutional power, they need to see the people beneath them as undeserving, to justify their own position. So the explanation they will give for what they see is that leftists must just have some kind of inferiority complex about their own failings to be always so upset about things that don’t directly affect them.
It’s a peculiar mishmash of ideas, many of them self contradictory. For instance, in the first section he calls for a revolution against technology, but then he spends several pages attacking “leftists” for their need to form organizations to feel powerful. One wonders where he expects a revolution to come from without organizations. Perhaps a completely spontaneous uprising of lone wolf mail bombers?
He also seems to conflate the alienating effects of capitalism with “technology”. If you watch tv shows from the 90’s they often used the word technology in that way- they would conflate scientific research with the tangible products that were purchased on store shelves and also with the kinds of social structures present in a large corporation or factory and call it all “technology”. But the strange move that Kaczyinski makes is to propose that people are too connected together and not isolated enough, as if being connected with other people and being a cog in some large corporate machine was necessarily the same thing. In fact as David Graeber and others have pointed out, it’s the opposite- every person is born in a social context and before they can be treated as a unit of labor to be bought and sold they must be removed from that context and isolated from their natural social bonds. That’s why we have such a dramatic separation between home and work life. Part of the reason is specialization- you are going to end up working among strangers since the people in your family and your neighbors are not going to have the same skill set as you. The irony is that the breakdown of natural social bonds that the separation between home and work life entails is why capitalism was called by Karl Marx the universal solvent of social relations- and that same lack of genuine social relations is what creates psychotic reactions such as what you see in Kaczyinski.
Both left wing activists and right wing activists are responding on some level to the same social alienation, but left wingers respond by trying to build their own organizations, whereas right wingers usually respond by explaining their feelings with conspiracy theories. That’s why left wing activists have large marches and strikes and things like that whereas right wingers engage in lone wolf terrorism.
>and that same lack of genuine social relations is what creates psychotic reactions such as what you see in Kaczyinski.
Nice analysis...but that last part is false. The psychotic reactions of the Unabomber are a direct result of his torture at the tender age of 16 while at Harvard, as part of project MKUltra. I would like to see what ethics review board approved that "research" (on a minor btw) and why the freak who conducted this torture was not only never held accountable, he went on to become one of the 20th century's most respected psychologists.
"...Henry Alexander Murray (May 13, 1893 – June 23, 1988) was an American psychologist at Harvard University, where from 1959 to 1962 he conducted a series of psychologically-damaging experiments on undergraduate students, one of whom was Ted Kaczynski, later known as the Unabomber."
"...Kaczynski's lawyers later attributed his hostility towards mind control techniques to his participation in Murray's study.[26] Some sources have suggested that Murray's experiments were part of Project MKUltra, the Central Intelligence Agency's research into mind control."
"...The experiment involved psychological torment and humiliation...The Harvard study aimed at psychic deconstruction by humiliating undergraduates and thereby causing them to experience severe stress."
Part of MK-ULTRA was convincing people that it involved trying to spy with ESP, and that had been terminated. It was a PSY-OPS attack on the American public that succeeded. Most people today who know about it believe what it promoted. Nobody involved was prosecuted.
The CIA torture regime is a direct outcome of MK-ULTRA.
Yep, and in fact it was project MKUltra that came up with the concept of "learned helplessness" (another name for induced depression) as a result of the torture experiments on people like the Unabomber. The funny thing is that civilian psychiatrists continue to insist that depression can only develop in genetically susceptible individuals and cannot be due to environmental stimuli only. Yet, the military/intelligence bases a lot of its "enhanced" psyops/interrogation techniques on the idea that stress/torture is perfectly sufficient to induce depression (even suicide) in ANY individual.
Interestingly enough, when I tried to bring up the issue of "learned helplessness" as a very common state of mental health these days, I got heavily downvoted in another thread (though lately the posts seem to have recovered a bit).
"Oversocialized types who try to satisfy their drive for power by imposing their morality on everyone have certainly been around for a long time. But we THINK that the decisive role played by feelings of inferiority, low self-esteem, powerlessness, identification with victims by people who are not themselves victims, is a peculiarity of modern leftism."