It cannot be denied that the modern world brings more psychological stress to an individual, much more than ever before. It may be because of the growth of our society, they are too fast. One could feel these changes rapidly in a developing country, and it couldn’t be avoided that the one that feels the impact of these changes consciously is us, the people. One day you wake up knowing there’s a calculator, the next day fruit is now can be used as a phone, very absurd.
One could argue that these changes are pretty important and that they are necessary for us to keep going and whatnot. Do we really need these changes, do we really need these improvements? What has led us into this spiral of technological advancement, and why do people praise the industrial revolution? Well, I’m here to partly, briefly answer those questions, with a help from the book Industrial Society and Its Future by Theodore Kaczynski, or Uncle Ted.
First of all, humans have been through many evolution and revolutions. One of the crucial one that started it all was the usage of fire, who would’ve thought? From then and on, we started to make pieces of machinery to replace, or threaten to replace our bodily functions:
- Motor
- sensory,
- and auditory
How many times have we decided to use our feet to do what they are intended to instead of carrying us to a car or motorcycle? How many times did we use our hands to chop down a tree or do hefty work? People are panicking about the A.I. taking over jobs and the world, while the billionaires and the system already replaced some of our bodily functions with technologies.
Why does it bring stress? Why would we want to go back to primitive, isn’t it dangerous? First, we have too many to catch, we lived in a society that demanded so much of our capabilities to operate machinery and adapt to it. We’ve been overloaded, or rather, fucked by so much information, and it’s not going to slow down at any rate. Second, modern man might live a longer life than primitive man sure, but they’ve got so much psychological stress that they would die a life full of unsatisfactory. Differing from modern man, the primitive man lived a life full of work that actually fulfilled their physical necessities (e.g. hunting for food), the job or the work that they did was for a necessary goal, directly. The primitive man had provided a lot for their family, work their assess off with their body, and then died happily as a fucking stoic because they don’t have to keep up with someone else’s bullshit. Talking about someone else’s bullshit. Another reason that we are in such stress is because we rely on other people to live.
We live in a world in which relatively few people-maybe 500 or 1.000-make the important decisions
- on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained;
- on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our food or how much pollution into our air;
- on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is;
- whether we lose or get a job may depend on decisions made by government economists or corporation executives;
- and so forth.
Consequently, this would yield someone to just touch grass and actually live off of it. Planting their own food, building their own homes, tending their own cattle, and such. Because heck, we have a lot of freedom if we do that. Those activities are literally necessary for humans to learn. You can’t always rely on people to do important activities such as:
- Cooking
- Farming
- Building
I might be a little bit biased, or projecting my dissatisfaction, but it’s true. We need to really go back to our prime lives, don’t be stuck on our chairs or our phone, and scroll endlessly.
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
- Theodore Kaczynski
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