What the Unabomber got right
I have explored previously at Armageddon Prose the brilliant foresight — despite his obvious issues with morality — of Ted Kaczynski, AKA The Unabomber, in terms of technology's deleterious impacts on society and the pathologies that it generates.
While sifting through Kaczynski's manifesto on other business, I stumbled upon this passage that seems to almost literally predict the rise of multinational technocratic bodies like the World Economic Forum as the new de facto governing authority in the Brave New World.
Via Industrial Society and Its Future:
In any technologically advanced society the individual's fate MUST depend on decisions that he personally cannot influence to any great extent. A technological society cannot be broken down into small, autonomous communities, because production depends on the cooperation of very large numbers of people and machines. Such a society MUST be highly organized and decisions HAVE TO be made that affect very large numbers of people. When a decision affects, say, a million people, then each of the affected individual has, on the average, only a one-millionth share in making the decision. What usually happens in practice is that decisions are made by public officials or corporation executives, or by technical specialists, but even when the public votes on a decision the number of voters ordinarily is too large for the vote of any one individual to be significant. Thus most individuals are unable to influence measurably the major decisions that affect their lives. There is no conceivable way to remedy this in a technologically advanced society. The system tries to "solve" this problem by using propaganda to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them, but even if this "solution" were completely successful in making people feel better, it would be demeaning.
The WEF is the technocratic answer to a question no one asked. It has circumvented national sovereignty — and with it the right to self-determination — by penetrating the cabinets of industrialized governments worldwide. It offers global solutions to local problems, whether the local populations believe them to be actual problems or not. With no claim to a democratic right to govern, it issues decrees such as "you will own nothing and be happy" and "you will eat ze bugs," applicable worldwide and subject to no popular dispute.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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Image: Klaus Schwab. Credit: World Economic Forum via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.