Reply
Tue 26 Feb, 2013 05:22 am
Context:
Industrial Society and Its Future
Theodore Kaczynski
1. (fr) The Industrial Revolution and its consequences
have been a disaster for the human race. They have
greatly increased the Iife-expectancy of those of us who
live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized
society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human
beings to indignities, have led to widespread psycholo-
gical suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering
as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natu-
ral world. The continued development of technology will
worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human being
to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the
natural world, it will probably lead to greater social dis-
ruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to in-
creased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.
2. (fr) The industrial-technological system may survive
or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually
achieve a low level of physical and psychological sutfe-
ring, but only after passing through a long and very pain-
ful period of adjustment and only at the cost of perma-
nently reducing human beings and many other living or-
ganisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the
social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the
consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of re-
forming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from
depriving people of dignity and autonomy.
3. (fr) If the system breaks down the consequences will
still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the
I suspect it is an artefact left over after conversion to PDF from another text format. Possibly a formatting code not removed in conversion. It makes no sense. It appears after every paragraph number.
http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf
The manifesto of the notorious "Unabomber" terrorist and murderer Theodore Kacynski was published in a number of US newspapers as a result of threats he made to plant lethal bombs if it was not published. The version you copied from seems to be a PDF on the Hachette (French publishers) web site.
The version published in the Washington Post and New York Times does not contain those (fr) insertions after each paragraph number. Thus I conclude they are spurious.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm
http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/unabom-manifesto-1.html