ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604290083
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID GARLAND
IF THEODORE Kaczynski turns out to be the Unabomber, we should celebrate the capture of one of the vilest men ever to walk this Earth. To understand just how evil he is, compare him with the character of John Galt from author Ayn Rand's best selling (and still popular) 1957 novel, "Atlas Shrugged."
Throughout her writings, Rand argued that man is "a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." Politically, she argued that this required the rule of law and a free market based on property rights, that any other system inevitably leads to rule by "second-handers" and "parasites" who produce nothing but who use the force of government to ultimately enslave people.
Rand conveyed these ideas in "Atlas Shrugged," which is set in a future America slowly declining into totalitarianism as a result of socialist intellectuals and the steady growth of government. John Galt, the hero of the novel, epitomizes Rand's philosophy in action.
He does not honor others' claims to his freedom or property. But he goes further. When he hears the voices of society decrying the rich and famous as the source of oppression, he decides to take away the source of their grief.
He secretly approaches and convinces the most creative and productive individuals in society to leave and join him in an idyllic, hidden canyon out West and out of reach of the bureaucrats, clerics and unprincipled electorate who are forever condemning them for their achievements while using the state to seize their work product. Galt leads away not only industrial leaders, scientists and inventors, but also thinkers and artists.
Meanwhile, a society and government unable to understand why their socialist ideals and state controls are not saving the country from imminent collapse is asking, "Who is John Gait?" Eventually he comes forward in a radio address.
Here, in 1996, we confront the very real Unabomber, who instead of rescuing individuals from a society that would chain them for their virtues, murdered the very individuals who are society's true saviors - the thinkers and doers - precisely because of their virtues. His intended victims were leading businessmen, scientists and engineers. He also seized the pages of leading newspapers through threats of deadly force, by conditioning his respect for innocent life on publication of his "manifesto."
If Galt represents virtue, the Unabomber represents abject evil. In this manifesto, he calls for "destruction of the worldwide industrial system." Technology is to be replaced by "wild nature," where humans live free from the influences of the products of others' minds. Everything from refrigeration to health care must go because man "can accept the risk of disease stoically," but cannot cope with technology that is "imposed" on him. Technology, he claims, brings people together, making them "oversocialized," while simultaneously alleviating the "challenges" of bare day-to-day survival.
"It is enough to go through a training program to acquire some petty technical skill," he writes, "then come to work on time and exert the very modest effort needed to hold a job." People are merely cogs in the machine, not the gods of it.
To fill leisure time resulting from technology, he says, people pursue artificial goals through "surrogate activities," including not only hobbies but also scientific research and political activism. Unable to adjust to life outside "wild nature," he says, people inevitably develop psychological problems stretching from depression to anger to boredom.
The Unabomber's romantic view of a paradise lost lacks even a shade of plausibility. Nevertheless, he says he came to save our souls and give us life abundantly, like every despot before him who claimed good intentions and superior knowledge of good and evil as the basis for taking an innocent person's life. Thus, though it is only consumers who create a market for technology, it is the businessman, scientist, inventor - the innocent man - that he says must die for our sins. It is out of his altruistic concern for society, he says, that we must burn all technical books.
The Unabomber's ideas are nothing new. Nor are they rare.
While a student at the University of Virginia five years ago, I knew members of Earth First! who spoke of "deep ecology," of man as a cancer on Earth, of the evils of technology and the necessity for revolution. One can find such criticisms of technology going back to the mythical Zeus, who condemned Prometheus to eternal torture for showing humans the technology of creating fire.
Recall that even in Christianity, man's sin begins with gaining knowledge. One need only briefly survey history to see that time and time again, there are those whose view man's mind and its creative products as evil. Socrates was made to drink poison. The pope excommunicated Galileo.
In more recent times, the Luddites of 19th-century Britain smashed labor-saving textile machinery that they claimed threatened their jobs and humanity. Modern-day "neo-Luddites" such as John Zerzan and Jeremy Rifkin perpetuate the same technophobia. In a column for The Nation magazine, Kirkpatrick Sale called the Unabomber "amoral", but found the manifesto "the statement of a rational and serious man" and concluded that "unless that message is somehow heeded and acted on, we are truly a doomed society hurtling toward a catastrophic breakdown."
The Unabomber is not amoral. It is precisely the Unabomber's moral code that led him to murder in cold blood - a morality that says those who most skillfully use their minds to promote modern existence are evil. Is that a moral view worthy of debate? No. However, the Unabomber's killings should spark reflection on the results that follow from his views.
Those who have good-heartedly given anti-industrialists and radical environmentalists the benefit of the doubt, refusing to believe that the implications of their ideas are very serious, should beware of taking technology and its labor, time and life-saving effects for granted. Keep in mind that language itself is a technology, and that plagues have been far deadlier than nuclear plants.
It is also time for people to stop asking forgiveness for the sin that makes human life possible. Take away the products of man's mind, and all that will remain is the chaos, helplessness and random death found in "wild nature" and in the wake of the Unabomber and other more successful totalitarians around the world. I'll take John Galt over the Unabomber any day.
David Garland, a George Mason University Law School student involved in Libertarian politics, is from Roanoke.
LENGTH: Long : 114 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: RICHARD MILLHOLLAND/Los Angeles Timesby CNB