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Title: Reflections on Purposeful Work Author: Ted Kaczynski Date: 1978–1979 Language: en Topics: work Source: Retrieved on April 6, 2022 from https://b-ok.asia/book/18603975/54dd69
Somewhere previously in my notes I have given it as my opinion that the
reasons modern man is so prone to frustration and other emotional
problems is that in the technological society he lives a life that is
highly abnormal; as compared with the life to which evolution has
adapted him, namely, the life of a hunter-gatherer. I still hold this
opinion; but it leaves open the question of which factors in modern
society are the most important sources of psychological trouble. I have
by this time concluded that the two main problems are (A) absence of a
real purpose in life, and (B) lack of personal autonomy. I think that
for most of these people who are dissatisfied with modern society, the
most important factor by far is absence of purpose; but that for certain
individuals, including me, the lack of personal autonomy is more
important (but these two problems are not completely independent.)
What we discuss here is the problem of purpose. In what follows I will
make a number of statements that are unproved. I am not absolutely
certain that all these statements are correct, but in order to avoid
being tiresome I will generally omit phrases like “in my opinion,” “I
think that,” and so forth, which I usually use to indicate unproved
statements. Also, the following discussion is meant to apply especially
to men. I am uncertain how far it is applicable to women.
Most people (to a greater or lesser extent depending on the individual)
need to make a purposeful effort at something in order to have a
fulfilling life. Note the adjective purposeful — the person must feel
that his activity is not merely a game. Solving crossword puzzles, for
example, requires an effort but cannot form the basis for a fulfilling
life, because the activity has no purpose external to itself — one does
it only in order to have something to do. The same is true of games and
statements generally. What is needed is purposeful work requiring a
reasonable amount of effort and self-discipline.
Among the bulk of the population in modern society (that is, among
people who are more-or-less normal though not necessarily leading
satisfying lives) it is probable that many or most emotional problems
are troublesome only because of a lack of sufficient genuine purpose. A
man who has a purpose, and who feels that he is succeeding in attaining
his purpose, typically will have high morale, and when one has high
morale, hardships (whether physical or psychological) are easy to bear.
When a man’s work is going reasonably well, and he believes in the value
of that work, his guilt feelings or his sex problems or his conflict
with his wife usually will not seem overly important. He is able to
endure these feelings cheerfully along with other hardships. But a man
without purpose will have flabby morale and a vacuum in his life. He is
likely to brood on his problems, and may be made seriously uncomfortable
by problems that would seem trivial to a man with high morale.
In the hunting-gathering life, the most important purpose motivating
work is to procure the necessities of life and some minimal comforts.
Especially food. Those who are ignorant of that kind of life tend to
assume it is miserable, and for this opinion they give reasons of the
following type: (a) hunter-gatherers’ work is monotonous; (b) the work
doesn’t utilize intelligence; (c) the object of the work is purely
materialistic, therefore has no “higher values” and is unfulfilling; (d)
the yield of the work (amount of food obtained, etc.) is very low, so
that the hunter must find his work discouraging; (e) the hunter lives
from hand to mouth and has no long term purpose.
On the basis of prolonged personal experiences of living at the
subsistence level, I assert that the foregoing arguments are based on
completely misunderstanding of the psychology of the hunting life. It is
not my principal purpose here to defend hunting-gathering as a way of
life; however, I will discuss separately each of the above points ((a)
through (e)) because the discussion will involve certain instructive
comparisons between primitive work and work in modern society.
(a) “Hunter gatherers work is monotonous.” Hunting itself is not
typically monotonous (though it can be in certain circumstances), and it
involves ranging over the country, rather than working always in the
same place. On the other hand, some hunter’s work is indeed monotonous
(e.g., picking berries, digging roots, softening animal skins). Monotony
is not ideal, but (for one who is accustomed to it) monotony does not
destroy the value of work or prevent it from being satisfying.
When I first took to the woods, I found burdensome the monotonous task
of dragging poles to the cabin and cutting them up for firewood. But I
became used to the work, and I now feel that it makes a real
contribution to the fulfillment that I get from this way of life. This
does not mean that I actually feel any pleasure in doing the task. It
does mean that, though the work is monotonous, it does not bore me,
because it is purposeful. And cutting a load of firewood gives me a
sense of accomplishment — NOT pride in my ability (anyone but a cripple
can cut firewood), but simply a feeling that I have done something
worthwhile. When I say “worthwhile” I am not referring to any abstract
philosophical notions about the value of work, or any such nonsense. The
accomplishment is worthwhile solely and exclusively because it is my
only means of fulfilling the physical need for winter fuel. If I had a
lot of money and didn’t need to conserve cash, I wouldn’t cut my own
firewood. There would be no point in it. No fulfillment in cutting
firewood unnecessarily. Thus, if I were wealthy, I would be missing the
fulfillment of this kind of purposeful work.
Let me compare this with my feelings about mathematics. I solved
problems in mathematics that had no practical applications; and if they
had had practical applications, it would have made no difference. Even
if some engineering firm had used my theorems for some purpose, those
theorems still would have had no use for me personally, nor for my
family or friends.
Mathematical research work was varied and interesting. It was exciting.
Some of it required me to use the very best of my intellectual powers,
and when I solved a difficult problem, I was rewarded with very intense
ego-gratification. Yet, as I grew older, I was increasingly nagged by a
sense of purposelessness in the work. Having proven a theorem, I would
sit back and think about it, and I would say, “So what? What good does
this do me? Now I’ll go work on another problem. But what for?” Thus, I
eventually became bored with mathematics.
Mathematics, music (listening, playing, composing), reading (light,
serious, fiction, non-fiction), coin-collecting, television — all these
eventually led to boredom.
Another example: I hunt the same areas for snowshoe rabbits over and
over again. It is very hard work, because the rabbits must generally be
hunted on steep slopes. The excitement connected with the first hunts
has long since disappeared. Yet I still enjoy hunting rabbits (which is
more than I can usually say for cutting firewood), and, like
firewood-cutting, rabbit-hunting still gives me solid, substantial
satisfaction. If it wasn’t for the fact that it is a real, physical
hardship to go without the meat, I would long since have grown bored
with rabbit hunting.
(b) “Hunter-gatherer’s work does not require intelligence.” Some aspects
of the hunting life require little intelligence. Other aspects do
require the full use of our intelligence (man didn’t evolve his big
brain for nothing), but a different kind of intelligence from that which
is most important in modern society. The kind of intelligence most
esteemed and most useful in organized society is the capacity for
abstract verbal or symbol-manipulating reasoning. (This is my own
strongest area of intelligence.) In the hunting life, it is intuitive
intelligence that is most important, because the required knowledge and
skills are mostly of a type that cannot be dealt with or transmitted
verbally, except in a partial way.
It seems reasonable to conjecture that the average hunter-gatherer
possesses an amount of skill and knowledge comparable to that of a
modern engineer, though of a very different kind. Be that as it may, it
seems probable that the average hunter possesses much more organized,
useful skill and knowledge than that of the average modern man, since
most people today (including petty technicians) do work that requires
only a limited amount of skill or knowledge, and few people cultivate
any learning outside of what is required for their jobs.
(c) “The object of hunters’ work is purely materialistic, has no higher
values, and therefore must be unfulfilling.” This is intellectual
snobbery. Let us distinguish between the materialism of hunter-gatherers
and the “materialism” (so-called) of modern society.
Hunters’ materialism is directed toward obtaining the physical
necessities of life, and some minimal comforts that actually contribute
to his physical well-being and his happiness. The “materialism” of
modern society is directed toward the accumulation of a surplus of
luxuries that contribute little or nothing to anyone’s physical
well-being. There are various motivations for this accumulation of
luxuries: desire for social status; a need that exists in modern society
for constant distraction and diversion (note how many of our luxuries
are toys — that is, are designed for entertainment); artificial
fulfillment of psychological needs that are otherwise stifled (e.g.,
riding a powerful motorcycle provides a spurious sense of power); and
then there is the fact that shopping in itself is a form of
entertainment. Observe that in each of these cases, material goods are
bought as a means to psychological ends, not physical ones. In some
instances, material goods are sought in order to alleviate the
few-residual physical discomforts remaining in modern society, but the
great mass of modern products are desired mostly for the psychological
effects to be obtained through them. In this sense, modern “materialism”
is not materialism at all, because its goals are not physical, but
psychological. In any case, this “materialism” is something quite
different from the materialism of primitives.
I suggest that the intellectuals’ scorn for “mere materialism” is due to
the fact that most of them have always been provided with an abundance
of material things acquired at the cost of minimal effort. Take food as
an example. The intellectual virtually has his food supply guaranteed to
him by organized society; his palate is jaded by all sorts of delicacies
that are standard fare for everyone today. He need not exert himself to
get food. Thus, he gets only a limited and superficial pleasure from
eating, so that he looks on eating as a lowly and superficial pleasure
that provides no deep fulfillment.
But when good nutrition is not to be taken for granted, and when a good
meal is the result of real effort, then food is really soul-satisfying.
The hunter’s enjoyment of food is not only physical, but psychological,
and involves not only the meal itself but the process by which it was
acquired — the effort and self-discipline involved in hunting the meat
and picking the berries, and certain satisfactions (which might be
called aesthetic) that are connected with having contact with nature and
are probably instinctive in human beings. If intellectuals lived this
way of life (long enough to become adapted to it), perhaps they would
not scorn its materialism.
Of course, though the activities of hunting and gathering themselves are
materialistic, it is true that hunter-gatherers usually have other
activities of an artistic and spiritual order. On the other hand, it
would seem that the artistic and spiritual concerns of the hunter tend
to revolve around his materialistic concerns. For example, animals and
plants depicted in his drawings tend to be those that he uses for food.
It can be argued that, rather than lowering the value of his spiritual
life, this materialistic orientation actually enhances it. The physical,
social, spiritual, artistic, and other aspects of primitive man’s life
all tend to be bound together in a unified whole. The various aspects of
modern man’s life tend to be unconnected and separated into
compartments: His food is not experienced as a direct result of his
labor; the act to which he is exposed typically is not expressive of his
daily work; the people with whom he socializes often are not those wich
whom he works; and so forth.
Before I took to the woods, I never drew pictures except to make
humorous cartoons. But after I had been in the woods long enough so that
the country got into my blood, so to speak, I became interested in
drawing or carving representations of the animals with which I was most
familiar. My most important source of meat, and the animal that I was
most skilled at hunting, was the snowshoe rabbit, and it was this animal
that I was most interested in drawing. The snowshoe rabbit has a special
psychological significance for me, and in my desire to depict it, I felt
I somewhat understood the motivation of the ancient hunters who left
their beautiful drawings of animals on the walls of caves.
(d) “The yield of the hunter’s work is so low that he must find it
discouraging.” The yield of the hunter’s labor may seem small to us; but
usually he gets as much as he needs to live (otherwise man would not
have survived). That is all he expects and all he is accustomed to;
hence the yield does not seem small to him.
In another sense, the yield of the hunter’s labor is far greater than
that of the modern worker. Because the hunter’s work makes the
difference between survival and death by starvation, the yield of his
labor is nothing less than life itself. The yield of the modern worker’s
labor is only a lot of toys like television sets, air conditioners, and
so forth, these being the things that he purchases with his salary.
(e) “The hunter lives from hand to mouth and has no long term purpose.”
Probably this is largely true.
When I was in my teens I often indulged in daydreams of living as a
hunter-gatherer. In my imagination, the round of labor needed to feed
myself in such an existence did not seem sufficient to fill my life, and
I imagined myself setting up artificial long-term purposes for myself —
for example, building systems of primitive bridges over streams. Not
that I thought I would need the bridges, but I thought I would need a
long-term purpose.
Now, having had the experience of hunting for meat, gathering herbs and
berries, cutting firewood, and so forth, as a matter of practical
necessity, I look upon such artificial purposes as silly. I found that
when you go out to hunt knowing that you will or will not have meat to
eat according as you succeed or fail in the hunt, your need for purpose
and importance is fully satisfied — you have no need whatever to look
forward to a goal that is five or ten years in the future. When you have
to really exert yourself to procure the necessities of life, nothing
else seems as purposeful or important.
The need that exists in many civilized people for long-term large-scale
purpose probably results from a need to magnify our goals in an attempt
to make ourselves feel that we have a significant purpose. (But we work
for something over a period of years, and when we finally obtain it, the
reward somehow seems ridiculously small in proportion to the length of
time it took to get it.)
(This concludes our comparison of purposeful work in hunting-gathering
societies with that in civilization.)
I suggest that our own biological predisposition — the purpose that is
more-or-less built into us — is to pursue practical, material, physical
objectives. But practical work is almost impossible today, because The
System takes care of all practical problems. The system is so vast, that
the contribution of any one individual to the system’s practiced work,
is insignificant. Thus, no individual can do any significant practical
work. (The argument is oversimplified, but it contains a large element
of truth, and indicates one of the main themes of this essay.)
This (the suggested predisposition to pursue practical, material
objectives) may be part of the reason for the so-called materialism of
modern society. Most people pursue material wealth because material
wealth represents to them a practical, physical goal. These people don’t
think about the fact that wealth today provides only psychological
gratifications such as entertainment and social status — which are not
what we call practical objectives. (Still, there is reason to suspect
that the majority suffer from a vague sense of purposelessness that they
never analyse.)
There are certain other people to whom the purposelessness of wealth
today is quite obvious; these people accept certain artificial goals
that society has set up — goals like Art, Science, Humanitarianism, etc.
But, again, one suspects that to the majority of these people too, their
artificial goals are not fully satisfactory, and they are vaguely
troubled. Being essentially bored, they brood on their psychological
problems and often lead frustrated, unhappy lives.
We shall now develop in detail the thesis sketched in the foregoing 3
paragraphs. We begin by discussing a certain psychological trait.
Some people have more than other people of a psychological trait that I
shall call close organization. If a person has a closely organized mind,
then each item of information that he possesses is closely integrated
into his thoughts, feelings, and behavior. If a person has a loosely
organized mind, then many items of information that he possesses are not
well integrated into his thoughts, feelings, and behavior. In a closely
organized mind, verbally formulated beliefs or values very readily
affect feelings and behavior. A man with a loosely organized mind may
verbally profess certain beliefs or values, but may fail to make the
connection between these verbal formulations and his feelings or
behavior.
We illustrate with examples:
careful to obey the law himself. If his mind is loosely organized, he
may commit a petty theft without ever worrying about the contradiction
between his belief and his action.
mind, he feels no pride in his grade, because he knows it does not
represent his real level of achievement. If X has a loosely organized
mind, he may feel pride in his A even though he realizes it does not
represent his real level of achievement.
show of enjoying the intercourse, but X knows very well that she is only
doing it for the money. If X has a closely organized mind, his pleasure
with the prostitute is likely to be dampened by his knowledge that she
is only putting on an act. If X has a loosely organized mind, his
knowledge that the prostitute is only putting on an act may not affect
his feelings in having intercourse with her.
known as the “criterion of verifiability” — or suppose that, if he does
not entirely accept it, he at least agrees that in order to fully
understand a statement we must examine to what extent the statement is
“verifiable.”At the same time, this scholar may profess certain
political principles or ideologies without ever having examined these
principles in light of the criterion of verifiability.If his mind were
very closely organized, he would not have omitted such examination.
strongly that “serious” music was very superior to the “popular” forms
of music. He attempted to justify this by asserting that the pleasure
obtained by the “common man” from popular music is of a smaller order of
magnitude than that obtained by intellectuals from “serious” music. Yet
he had no evidence to support this assertion. He was only guessing. In
the scientific realm he never would have accepted such an
unsubstantiated statement. Yet he did not seem to question such a
statement in his personal ideology.
If he had had a very closely organized mind, he would have been aware of
the sloppiness of his thinking here.
We trust that these examples make it fairly clear what we mean by the
distinction between “closely” and “loosely” organized minds.
We make two points:
organized minds, common experience would seem to indicate that there are
quite a few individual exceptions. Intelligence, apparently, is not at
all rigidly related to closeness of organization.
introspection, and a tendency to re-examine one’s own thought-processes;
but I am not convinced that close organization always accompanies these
other characteristics. In any case, close organization is not identical
with these other characteristics. For instance, the closely-organized
response in Example 3 is not the same thing as being thoughtful or
introspective, or examining one’s own thought-processes.
Now let us study the way in which closeness of organization is related
to the problem of purpose.
(alpha) Consider first a person having subnormal intelligence and a very
loosely organized mind. Suppose this fellow is given each day the task
of stacking up wooden blocks in a certain configuration. At the end of
the day, his keeper comes and knocks down all the stacks of blocks, and
next day our moron has to stack them up all over again. Let us suppose
that this fellow is not too stupid to realize that his work accomplishes
nothing, Nevertheless, it is possible that he may get fulfillment from
his work: Each day he simply absorbs himself happily in his task and
doesn’t bother to think about whether it has any purpose.
(beta) Next take the case of a fellow I once knew who discussed his
ambitions with me and said that his hope was simply to keep on
increasing his income indefinitely. When I asked his motive for this, he
answered to this effect: “I have studied economics! I know that man’s
economic wants are never satisfied. No matter how much I have, I will
always want more.” He made no claim that the indefinite increase of
wealth would bring happiness or any other particular benefit. He seemed
to realize in a way that the indefinite increase of wealth was simply a
kind of game people play, having no definite external purpose. Yet this
did not prevent him from absorbing himself in the game and feeling
purpose.
(gamma) For another example we can take any one of a number of young
researchers in pure mathematics whom I knew of in the 1960’s. These
fellows would grind out papers one after another, each being of interest
only to a tiny group of specialists in a narrow area of mathematics, and
none having any practical applications. For the most part they never
thought about the purpose of all this. If pressed, they might claim that
mathematics has “aesthetic” value. Of course, the supposed aesthetic
value in most of the papers they published was accessible only to the
tiny group of specialists who had the knowledge to read these papers.
The obvious question is, why should society pay these fellows
comfortable salaries to gratify each other’s supposed aesthetic
sensibilities in a way that was of no benefit whatever to the public?
Nevertheless, like the moron building his piles of blocks, these guys
would happily absorb themselves in their work and churn out papers
without worrying about what, if anything, they were accomplishing.
Presumably, if their minds had been sufficiently closely organized, they
would not have been able to feel a sense of purpose in their work
without first specifying to themselves some definite goal that they were
pursuing.
(delta) Now we take a more complex example: a research scientist whose
work has clearcut practical applications. Suppose that he describes his
purpose as this: to benefit humanity by contributing to technological
progress. (For the sake of argument, we shall assume for the present
that technological progress does benefit humanity.)
Human beings have an instinct that leads them to want to do good for
their own family and immediate circle of friends. But we feel safe in
asserting that human beings do not have any innate instinct to do good
for humanity at large, which consists of vast masses of unknown, unseen
strangers. (This assertion is confined by the fact that, until very
recently on the historical time-scale, nearly all people hold the
attitude: “My family comes first, then my clan, then my nation, and to
hell with the rest of the human race.” I am not criticizing this
attitude, which is natural and instinctive for human beings.)
So, what is the scientist’s motive for wanting to benefit humanity? He
needs to have work to do, and he needs to feel that work is purposeful.
He decides to benefit humanity only in order to fulfill his need for
purposeful work. But this means that benefiting humanity is not his real
purpose — his real purpose is simply to fulfill his need for work. In
other words, he is working merely for the sake of working — his work has
no purpose external to itself. “Benefiting humanity” is only an
artificial purpose that he has set up in order to make himself feel that
his work is purposeful.
Now, it may be that our scientist is a thoughtful man and is aware of
everything that we have just said. But (perhaps) he is able to absorb
himself contentedly in his work and push the question of purpose out of
his mind. (Here again we have the moron piling up the blocks.) On the
other hand, if our scientist has a very closely organized mind, it may
be that the problem of purpose will always be too much present in his
consciousness for him to feel content in his work.
The foregoing discussion is oversimplified and incomplete. We will now
try to analyze the problem of purpose in more detail.
Let us roughly divide the modern man into two types.
Type I. Those who have routine jobs, who work only because they have to,
who make no effort to excel in their work, and who have no job-related
ambitions.
Type II. Career workers. Those who have ambitions, put a real effort
into their work, and try to excel in it. In Type II we also include
those people who try to satisfy their need for purposeful work through
non-money-earning activities, whether hobbies, or community service, or
whatever.
(Of course, some people may be hybrids between Type I and Type II, but
that does not invalidate our argument.)
First, we consider Type I. These people do work that is purposeful for
them only to the extent that they must work in order to avoid the
humiliation of going on welfare. They feel that they are working to
avoid a punishment, not that they are exerting themselves to gain a
reward. To judge from my own personal observation, morale among type I
workers often is extremely low. This is not always the case — in some
companies I thought morale was pretty good. But it does not seem to me
that Type I work provides an adequate sense of purpose in life for any
but the most placid and unambitious personalities.
Various manipulative tricks are being tried on Type I workers to make
them have a more positive attitude toward their work. For example, one
company, whose employees would formerly each assemble one section of a
telephone book, is now having each employee assemble a whole telephone
book, and this is supposed to give them a sense of accomplishment in
their work. It’s almost a sick-joke. If cheap devices like this actually
succeed, then so much the worse. It would be better for people to be
miserable at their work than to have the company manipulate them in this
way.
In any case, if any employee begins to take pride in his work, to try to
excel in it, or to have job-related ambitions, then this will put him
into Type II, which we are about to discuss.
Type II: Career workers. We shall begin by discussing these career
workers whose work is what is generally called “practical.” This type of
worker we shall call, for brevity, a PCW (Practical Career Worker). In
order to be definite, we will take, say, an aeronautical engineer. Let
us suppose he is improving the design of an aircraft. What is his
purpose in doing this work? Ostensibly it is to make a more efficient
plane. A practical (there are no more pages)