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Title: Morality and Revolution Author: Ted Kaczynski Date: 1999 Language: en Topics: revolution, violence Source: *Technological Slavery* — Kaczynski, Theodore J. Notes: Originally published in 1999 in *Green Anarchist*, published in 2008 in *Technological Slavery* in heavily revised form.
“Morality, guilt and fear of condemnation act as cops in our heads,
destroying our spontaneity, our wildness, our ability to live our lives
to the full.... I try to act on my whims, my spontaneous urges without
caring what others think of me.... I want no constraints on my life; I
want the opening of all possibilities.... This means... destroying all
morality.” — Feral Faun, “The Cops in Our Heads: Some Thoughts on
Anarchy and Morality.”[1]
It is true that the concept of morality as conventionally understood is
one of the most important tools that the system uses to control us, and
we must liberate ourselves from it.
But suppose you’re in a bad mood one day. You see an inoffensive but
ugly old lady; her appearance irritates you, and your “spontaneous
urges” impel you to knock her down and kick her. Or suppose you have a
“thing” for little girls, so your “spontaneous urges” lead you to pick
out a cute four-year-old, rip off her clothes, and rape her as she
screams in terror.
I would be willing to bet that there is not one anarchist reading this
who would not be disgusted by such actions, or who would not try to
prevent them if he saw them being carried out. Is this only a
consequence of the moral conditioning that our society imposes on us?
I argue that it is not. I propose that there is a kind of natural
“morality” (note the quotation marks), or a conception of fairness, that
runs as a common thread through all cultures and tends to appear in them
in some form or other, though it may often be submerged or modified by
forces specific to a particular culture. Perhaps this conception of
fairness is biologically predisposed. At any rate it can be summarized
in the following Six Principles:
do so.
order to forestall harm with which they threaten you, or in retaliation
for harm that they have already inflicted on you.
should be willing to do her or him a comparable favor if and when he or
she should need one.
To take a couple of examples of the ways in which the Six Principles
often are submerged by cultural forces, among the Navajo, traditionally,
it was considered “morally acceptable” to use deception when trading
with anyone who was not a member of the tribe (WA. Haviland, Cultural
Anthropology, 9^(th) ed., p. 207), though this contravenes principles 1,
5, and 6. And in our society many people will reject the principle of
retaliation: Because of industrial society’s imperative need for social
order and because of the disruptive potential of personal retaliatory
action, we are trained to suppress our retaliatory impulses and leave
any serious retaliation (called “justice”) to the legal system.
In spite of such examples, I maintain that the Six Principles tend
toward universality. But whether or not one accepts that the Six
Principles are to any extent universal, I feel safe in assuming that
almost all readers of this article will agree with the principles (with
the possible exception of the principle of retaliation) in some shape or
other. Hence the Six Principles can serve as a basis for the present
discussion.
I argue that the Six Principles should not be regarded as a moral code,
for several reasons.
First. The principles are vague and can be interpreted in such widely
ways that there will be no consistent agreement as to their application
in concrete cases. For instance, if Smith insists on playing his radio
so loud that it prevents Jones from sleeping, and if Jones smashes
Smith’s radio for him, is Jones’s action unprovoked harm inflicted on
Smith, or is it legitimate self-defense against harm that Smith is
inflicting on Jones? On this question Smith and Jones are not likely to
agree! (All the same, there are limits to the interpretation of the Six
Principles. I imagine it would be difficult to find anyone in any
culture who would interpret the principles in such a way as to justify
brutal physical abuse of unoffending old ladies or the rape of
four-year-old girls.)
Second. Most people will agree that it is sometimes “morally”
justifiable to make exceptions to the Six Principles. If your friend has
destroyed logging equipment belonging to a large timber corporation, and
if the police come around to ask you who did it, any green anarchist
will agree that it is justifiable to lie and say, “I don’t know”.
Third. The Six Principles have not generally been treated as if they
possessed the force and rigidity of true moral laws. People often
violate the Six Principles even when there is no “moral” justification
for doing so. Moreover, as already noted, the moral codes of particular
societies frequently conflict with and override the Six Principles.
Rather than laws, the principles are only a kind of guide, an expression
of our more generous impulses that reminds us not to do certain things
that we may later look back on with disgust.
Fourth. I suggest that the term “morality” should be used only to
designate socially imposed codes of behavior that are specific to
certain societies, cultures, or subcultures. Since the Six Principles,
in some form or other, tend to be universal and may well be biologically
predisposed, they should not be described as morality.
Assuming that most anarchists will accept the Six Principles, what the
anarchist (or, at least, the anarchist of individualistic type) does is
claim the right to interpret the principles for himself in any concrete
situation in which he is involved and decide for himself when to make
exceptions to the principles, rather than letting any authority make
such decisions for him.
However, when people interpret the Six principles for themselves,
conflicts arise because different individuals interpret the principles
differently. For this reason among others, practically all societies
have evolved rules that restrict behavior in more precise ways than the
Six Principles do. In other words, whenever a number of people are
together for an extended period of time, it is almost inevitable that
some degree of morality will develop. Only the hermit is completely
free. This is not an attempt to debunk the idea of anarchy. Even if
there is no such thing as a society perfectly free of morality, still
there is a big difference between a society in which the burden of
morality is light and one in which it is heavy. The pygmies of the
African rain forest, as described by Colin Turnbull in his books The
Forest People and Wayward Servants: The Two Worlds of the African
Pygmies, provide an example of a society that is not far from the
anarchist ideal. Their rules are few and flexible and allow a very
generous measure of personal liberty. (Yet, even though they have no
cops, courts or prisons, Turnbull mentions no case of homicide among
them.)
In contrast, in technologically advanced societies the social mechanism
is complex and rigid, and can function only when human behavior is
closely regulated. Consequently such societies require a far more
restrictive system of law and morality. (For present purposes we don’t
need to distinguish between law and morality. We will simply consider
law as a particular kind of morality, which is not unreasonable, since
in our society it is widely regarded as immoral to break the law.)
Old-fashioned people complain of moral looseness in modern society, and
it is true that in some respects our society is relatively free of
morality. But I would argue that our society’s relaxation of morality in
sex, art, literature, dress, religion, etc., is in large part a reaction
to the severe tightening of controls on human behavior in the practical
domain. Art, literature and the like provide a harmless outlet for
rebellious impulses that would be dangerous to the system if they took a
more practical direction, and hedonistic satisfactions such as
overindulgence in sex or food, or intensely stimulating forms of
entertainment, help people to forget the loss of their freedom.
At any rate, it is clear that in any society some morality serves
practical functions. One of these functions is that of forestalling
conflicts or making it possible to resolve them without recourse to
violence. (According to Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s book The Harmless
People, Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1989, pages 10, 82, 83,
the Bushmen of Southern Africa own as private property the right to
gather food in specified areas of the veldt, and they respect these
property rights strictly. It is easy to see how such rules can prevent
conflicts over the use of food resources.)
Since anarchists place a high value on personal liberty, they presumably
will want to keep morality to a minimum, even if this costs them
something in personal safety or other practical advantages. It’s not my
purpose here to try to determine where to strike the balance between
freedom and the practical advantages of morality, but I do want to call
attention to a point that is often overlooked: the practical or
materialistic benefits of morality are counterbalanced by the
psychological cost of repressing our “immoral” impulses. Common among
moralists is a concept of “progress” according to which the human race
is supposed to become ever more moral. More and more “immoral” impulses
are to be suppressed and replaced by “civilized” behavior. To these
people morality apparently is an end in itself. They never seem to ask
why human beings should become more moral. What end is to be served by
morality? If the end is anything resembling human well-being then an
ever more sweeping and intensive morality can only be counterproductive,
since it is certain that the psychological cost of suppressing “immoral”
impulses will eventually outweigh any advantages conferred by morality
(if it does not do so already). In fact, it is clear that, whatever
excuses they may invent, the real motive of the moralists is to satisfy
some psychological need of their own by imposing their morality on other
people. Their drive toward morality is not an outcome of any rational
program for improving the lot of the human race.
This aggressive morality has nothing to do with the Six Principles of
fairness. It is actually inconsistent with them. By trying to impose
their morality on other people, whether by force or through propaganda
and training, the moralists are doing them unprovoked harm in
contravention of the first of the Six Principles. One thinks of
nineteenth-century missionaries who made primitive people feel guilty
about their sexual practices, or modern leftists who try to suppress
politically incorrect speech.
Morality often is antagonistic toward the Six Principles in other ways
as well. To take just a few examples:
In our society private property is not what it is among the Bushmen — a
simple device for avoiding conflict over the use of resources. Instead,
it is a system whereby certain persons or organizations arrogate control
over vast quantities of resources that they use to exert power over
other people. In this they certainly violate the first and fourth
principles of fairness. By requiring us to respect property, the
morality of our society helps to perpetuate a system that is clearly in
conflict with the Six Principles.
Among many primitive peoples, deformed babies are killed at birth (see,
e.g., Paul Schebesta, Die Bambuti-Pygmäen vom Ituri, I.Band, Institut
Royal Colonial Belge, Brus- sels, 1938, page 138), and a similar
practice apparently was widespread in the United States up to about the
middle of the 20^(th) century. “Babies who were born malformed or too
small or just blue and not breathing well were listed [by doctors] as
stillborn, placed out of sight and left to die.” Autl Gawande, “The
Score,” The New Yorker, October 9, 2006, page 64. Nowadays any such
practice would be regarded as shockingly immoral. But mental-health
professionals who study the psychological problems of the disabled can
tell us how severe these problems often are. True, even among the
severely deformed — for example, those born without arms or legs — there
may be occasional individuals who achieve satisfying lives. But most
persons with such a degree of disability are condemned to lives of
inferiority and helplessness, and to rear a baby with extreme
deformities until it is old enough to be conscious of its own
helplessness is usually an act of cruelty. In any given case, of course,
it may be difficult to balance the likelihood that a deformed baby will
lead a miserable existence, if reared, against the chance that it will
achieve a worthwhile life. The point is, however, that the moral code of
modern society does not permit such balancing. It automatically requires
every baby to be reared, no matter how extreme its physical or mental
disabilities, and no matter how remote the chances that its life can be
anything but wretched. This is one of the most ruthless aspects of
modern morality.
The military is expected to kill or refrain from killing in blind
obedience to orders from the government; policemen and judges are
expected to imprison or release persons in mechanical obedience to the
law. It would be regarded as “unethical” and “irresponsible” for
soldiers, judges, or policemen to act according to their own sense of
fairness rather than in conformity with the rules of the system. A moral
and “responsible” judge will send a man to prison if the law tells him
to do so, even if the man is blameless according to the Six Principles.
A claim of morality often serves as a cloak for what would otherwise be
seen as the naked imposition of one’s own will on other people. Thus, if
a person said, “I am going to prevent you from having an abortion (or
from having sex or eating meat or something else) just because I
personally find it offensive”, his attempt to impose his will would be
considered arrogant and unreasonable. But if he claims to have a moral
basis for what he is doing, if he says, “I’m going to prevent you from
having an abortion because it’s immoral”, then his attempt to impose his
will acquires a certain legitimacy, or at least tends to be treated with
more respect than it would be if he made no moral claim.
People who are strongly attached to the morality of their own society
often are oblivious to the principles of fairness. The highly moral and
Christian businessman John D. Rockefeller used underhand methods to
achieve success, as is admitted by Allan Nevin in his admiring biography
of Rockefeller. Today, screwing people in one way or another is almost
an inevitable part of any large-scale business enterprise. Willful
distortion of the truth, serious enough so that it amounts to lying, is
in practice treated as acceptable behavior among politicians and
journalists, though most of them undoubtedly regard themselves as moral
people.
I have before me a flyer sent out by a magazine called The National
Interest. In it I find the following:
“Your task at hand is to defend our nation’s interests abroad, and rally
support at home for your efforts.
“You are not, of course, naive. You believe that, for better or worse,
international politics remains essentially power politics-- that as
Thomas Hobbes observed, when there is no agreement among states, clubs
are always trumps.”
This is a nearly naked advocacy of Machiavellianism in international
affairs, though it is safe to assume that the people responsible for the
flyer I’ve just quoted are firm adherents of conventional morality
within the United States. For such people, I suggest, conventional
morality serves as a substitute for the Six Principles. As long as these
people comply with conventional morality, they have a sense of
righteousness that enables them to disregard the principles of fairness
without discomfort.
Another way in which morality is antagonistic toward the Six Principles
is that it often serves as an excuse for mistreatment or exploitation of
persons who have violated the moral code or the laws of a given society.
In the United States, politicians promotetheir careers by “getting tough
on crime” and advocating harsh penalties for people who have broken the
law. Prosecutors often seek personal advancement by being as hard on
defendants as the law allows them to be. This satisfies certain sadistic
and authoritarian impulses of the public and allays the privileged
classes’ fear of social disorder. It all has little to do with the Six
Principles of fairness. Many of the “criminals” who are subjected to
harsh penalties--for example, people convicted of possessing
marijuana--have in no sense violated the Six Principles. But even where
culprits have violated the Six Principles their harsh treatment is
motivated not by a concern for fairness, or even for morality, but
politicians’ and prosecutors’ personal ambitions or by the public’s
sadistic and punitive appetites. Morality merely provides the excuse.
In sum, anyone who takes a detached look at modern society will see
that, for all its emphasis on morality, it observes the principles of
fairness very poorly indeed. Certainly less well than many primitive
societies do.
Allowing for various exceptions, the main purpose that morality serves
in modern society is to facilitate the functioning of the
technoindustrial system. Here’s how it works:
Our conception both of fairness and of morality is heavily influenced by
self-interest. For example, I feel strongly and sincerely that it is
perfectly fair for me to smash up the equipment of someone who is
cutting down the forest. Yet part of the reason why I feel this way is
that the continued existence of the forest serves my personal needs. If
I had no personal attachment to the forest I might feel differently.
Similarly, most rich people probably feel sincerely that the laws that
restrict the ways in which they use their property are unfair. There can
be no doubt that, however sincere these feelings may be, they are
motivated largely by self-interest.
People who occupy positions of power within the system have an interest
in promoting the security and the expansion of the system. When these
people perceive that certain moral ideas strengthen the system or make
it more secure, then, either from concious self-interest or because
their moral feelings are influenced by self-interest, they apply
pressure to the media and to educators to promote these moral ideas.
Thus the requirements of respect for property, and of orderly, docile,
rule-following, cooperative behavior, have become moral values in our
society (even though these requirements can conflict with the principles
of fairness) because they are necessary to the functioning of the
system. Similarly; harmony and equality between different races and
ethnic groups is a moral value of our society because iterracial and
interethnic conflict impede the functioning of the system. Equal
treatment of all races and ethnic groups may be required by the
principles of fairness, but this is not why it is a moral value of our
society. It is a moral value of our society because it is good for the
technoindustrial system. Traditional moral restraints on sexual behavior
have been relaxed becausethe people who have power see that these
restraints are not necessary to the functioning of the system and that
maintaining them produces tensions and conflicts that are harmful to the
system.
Particulary instructive is the moral prohibition of violence in our
society. (By “violence” I mean physical attacks on human beings or the
application of physical force to human beings.) Several hundred years
ago, violence per se was not considered immoral in European society. In
fact, under suitable conditions, it was admired. The most prestigious
social class was the nobility, which was then a warrior caste. Even on
the eve of the Industrial violence was not regarded as the greatest of
all evils, and certain other values--personal liberty for example--were
felt to be more important than the avoidance of violence. In America,
well into the nineteenth century, public attitudes toward the police
were negative, and police forces were kept weak and inefficient because
it was felt that they were a threat to freedom. People preferred to see
to their own defense and accept a fairly high level of violence in
society rather than risk any of their personal liberty.[2]
Since then, attitudes toward violence have changed dramatically. Today
the media, the schools, and all who are committed to the system
brainwash us to believe that violence is the one thing above all others
that we must never commit. (Of course, when the system finds it
convenient to use violence--via the police or the military--for its own
purposes, it can always find an excuse for doing so.)
It is sometimes claimed that the modern attitude toward violence is a
result of the gentling influence of Christianity, but this makes no
sense. The period during which Christianity was most powerful in Europe,
the Middle Ages, was a particularly violent epoch. It has been during
the course of the Industrial Revolution and the ensuing technological
changes that attitudes toward violence have been altered, and over the
same span of time the influence of Christianity has been markedly
weakened. Clearly it has not been Christianity that has changed
attitudes toward violence.
It is necessary for the functioning of modern industrial society that
people should cooperate in a rigid, machine-like way, obeying rules,
following orders and schedules, carrying out prescribed procedures.
Consequently the system requires, above all, human docility and social
order. Of all human behaviors, violence is the one most disruptive of
social order, hence the one most dangerous to the system. As the
Industrial Revolution progressed, the powerful classes, perceiving that
violence was increasingly contrary to their interest, changed their
attitude toward it. Because their influence was predominant in
determining what was printed by the press and taught in the schools,
they gradually transformed the attitude of the entire society, so that
today most middle-class people, and even the majority of those who think
themselves rebels against the system, believe that violence is the
ultimate sin. They imagine that their opposition to violence is the
expression of a moral decision on their part, and in a sense it is, but
it is based on a morality that is designed to serve the interest of the
system and is instilled through propaganda. In fact, these people have
simply been brainwashed.
It goes without saying that in order to bring about a revolution against
the technoindustrial system it will be necessary to discard conventional
morality. One of the two main points that I’ve tried to make in this
article is that even the most radical rejection of conventional morality
does not necessarily entail the abandonment of human decency: there is a
“natural” (and in some sense perhaps universal) morality--or, as I have
preferred to call it, a concept of fairness--that tends to keep our
conduct toward other people “decent” even when we have discarded all
formal morality.
The other main point I’ve tried to make is that the concept of morality
is used for many purposes that have nothing to do with human decency or
with what I’ve called “fairness”. Modern society in particular uses
morality as a tool in manipulating human behavior for purposes that
often are completely inconsistent with human decency.
Thus, once revolutionaries have decided that the present form of society
must be eliminated, there is no reason why they should hesitate to
reject existing morality; and their rejection of morality will by no
means be equivalent to a rejection of human decency.
There’s no denying, however, that revolution against the
technonindustrial system will violate human decency and the principles
of fairness. With the collapse of the system, whether it is spontaneous
or a result of revolution, countless innocent people will suffer and
die. Our current situation is one of those in which we have to decide
whether to commit injustice and cruelty in order to prevent a greater
evil.
For comparison, consider World War II. At that time the ambitions of
ruthless dictators could be thwarted only by making war on a large
scale, and, given the conditions of modern warfare, millions of innocent
civilians inevitably were killed or mutilated. Few people will deny that
this constituted an extreme and inexcusable injustice to the victims,
yet fewer still will argue that Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese
militarists should have been allowed to dominate the world.
If it was acceptable to fight World War II in spite of the severe
cruelty to millions of innocent people that that entailed, then a
revolution against the technoindustrial system should be acceptable too.
Had the fascists come to dominate the world, they doubtless would have
treated their subject populations with brutality, would have reduced
millions to slavery under harsh conditions, and would have exterminated
many people outright. But, however horrible that might have been, it
seems almost trivial in comparison with the disasters with which the
technoindustrial system threatens us. Hitler and his allies merely tried
to repeat on a larger scale the kinds of atrocities that have occurred
again and again throughout the history of civilization. What modern
technology threatens is absolutely without precedent. Today we have to
ask ourselves whether nuclear war, biological disaster, or ecological
collapse will produce casualties many times greater than those of World
War II; whether the human race will continue to exist or whether it will
be replaced by intelligent machines or genetically engineered freaks;
whether the last vestiges of human dignity will disappear, not merely
for the duration of a particular totalitarian regime but for all time;
whether our world will even be inhabitable a couple of hundred years
from now. Under these circumstances, who will claim that World War II
was acceptable but that a revolution against the technoindustrial system
is not?
Though revolution will necessarily involve violation of the principles
of fairness, revolutionaries should make every effort to avoid violating
those principles any more than is really necessary--not only from
respect for human decency, but also for practical reasons. By complying
with the principles of fairness to the extent that doing so is not
incompatible with revolutionary action, revolutionaries will win the
respect of nonrevolutionaries, will be able to recruit better people to
be revolutionaries, and will increase the self-respect of the
revolutionary movement, thereby strengthening its esprit de corps.
[1] The Quest for the Spiritual: A Basis for a Radical Analysis of
Religion, and Other Essays by Feral Faun, published by Green Anarchist,
BCM 1715, London WC 1N 3XX, United Kingdom.
[2] See Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (editors), Violence in
America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Bantam Books, New
York, 1970, Chapter 12, by Roger Lane; also, The New Encyclopædia
Britannica, 15^(th) Edition, 2003, Volume 25, article “Police,” pages
959–960. On medieval attitudes toward violence and the reasons why those
attitudes changed, see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Revised
Edition, Blackwell Publishing, 2000, pages 161–172.