He forced his way into the conversation through terrorism. It seems reasonable enough to reject his ideas out of hand rather than give them respectful hearing.
With respect this is not correct. What you are describing is Ad Hominem driven by some kind of moralist knee-jerk reaction. The absurd extreme of this line of reasoning would be to refuse to acknowledge the existence of snow because Hitler mentioned in passing in a letter or a speech at some point.
Not correct? Ad hominem? Moralist knee-jerk reaction? Absurd? Extreme? There is probably a more reasonable version of this disagreement, to put it lightly.
Unlike Hitler's opinions on snow, Ted Kaczynski's murders are inextricably linked to his ideology.
And how would you know what, exactly? Have you actually taken the time to read any of the man's writing? Because I've been picking my way through his manifesto off and on this evening and so far what I'm encountering is calm, lucid, internally consistent, and a fairly accurate critique. Something about this exchange is reminding me of all of the decades of inarticulate hyperventilating about "communism" by individuals who hadn't bothered to so much as read the manifesto, much less examine Marx's writings.
Fascinating how good writing and surface intelligence can make absolutely insane ideas seem sensible. Deductive reasoning is, unfortunately, not absolutely reliable for people who have pattern loving brains and good enough memory to make long chains of deductions; evaluating the entire chain as a gestalt and with an eye towards the great amount of data we lack, about the present and past and true material causes, is a necessary step. Like the German electorate that voted for a madman without seeing thru him, or TK in the woods, we are all equipped with he neural machinery to go down this path.
Can you point at something in his manifesto that you'd classify as an "absolutely insane idea" ? I have the vague impression that people either don't engage at all with TK philosophy -but are happy to pass verdict nonetheless- or if they do, simply can't handle the cognitive dissonance that arises and immediately reach for quick relief ("madman", "insane ideas", "MKUltra" etc)
Few if any called Ellul a madman or characterized his ides as absolutely insane, but as far as I know he didn't kill anyone.
“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” First sentence. Does he object to the diminution of child hood death or violent death, or in his mind does being alienated from nature (fixable in principal by personal choices) outweigh the death of ones children? Totally insane.
On a more personal note, I am always getting panicked by emails from virus vendors about some grand new threat till I walk around for fifteen minutes. I bought toed shoes believing it would transform my experience of walking and hiking. I worried about Congress canceling NPR back in the 90s. When I try to remove some plastic toxic stuff from my diet,mit is extremely hard to avoid a big slide into “purity eating” where a choice to make a slight alteration to the effects on my world i to a matter of moral virtue. From “less antibiotics for the chickens slowing the spread of anti-biopics” to “why do you ask me to consume this swill of the devil?!” Is a small delta in my mind.
For a year or so I listened to all kinds of crypto podcasts or YouTubes / twitter spaces, and it was never long till people brought up anti-vax or global finance conspiracy ideas. I have watched flat earth / scientist debates, and the words of the flat earthers don’t parse as insane.
A) the hitler metaphor isn’t quite right - the parent isn’t saying that all of his ideas are inherently 100% false, but rather that reading his work is wasteful and disrespectful and dangerous. (Ok well some of that’s me but I’m guessing they’d agree) In my eyes, a better metaphor would be “refuse to read mein kampf even though it has some true paragraphs about the harms of monetary inflation”. Which, by god, I hope we can all agree is the right choice!
B) seeing “moralist” in this context seems a little absurd. He didn’t swear a lot or start an OnlyFans, he tried to kill dozens of people…
I disagree with this characterization. It’s not that reading Mein Kampf would brainwash you, it’s that reading it for it’s “nuggets of wisdom” is an insane, dangerous thing to do. I sorta thought that part would be uncontroversial but who knows
Considering his lack of success and the fact that he had better military thinkers as subordinates, looking for "military wisdom" from Hitler sounds like the kind of thing you'd do because you had an ulterior motive.
A more accurate Hitler analogy would probably be to reject his racial theories out of hand since they led to the world's first industrial-scale genocide.
Rejection out of hand is bankrupt regardless of what motivation one cares to use as a hood ornament. If one can't be assed to even examine the claims in question, one certainly isn't qualified to field a critique thereof. At minimum, one should know one's enemy.
Your accusations are dramatic. It's OK to not consider this particular person's writings on the topic as required reading, or even particularly valuable, without rejecting the topic as a whole. And more subjectively, you shouldn't try to bully people into giving credence to murderers.
I've done neither. I simply point out that no meaningful conclusions can be drawn about a body of work without first examining it. Not sure why y'all think that's controversial.
If I linked you to a 35,000 word essay on why you're wrong about this, would you read it? What if I told you it was generated by GPT-2? How much of it would you have to read before you could decide the rest wasn't worthwhile?
I think you're falling prey to the trap many engineers and scientists do, by assuming that they are ultimately capable of pure logical discussion and analysis, and that their biases are known and minimal - and that others can be seen in that light, too. In such a world, perhaps it would make sense to give Hitler a fair shake.
In our current world, I see us all as flawed little monkeys who can be pulled this way and that by provocative rhetoric and incomplete information. Dismissing someone's ideology completely because it was a central part of their campaign to kill millions is by far the logical and ethical choice. To do otherwise is intellectual hubris, IMO.
All this is, of course, in addition to the "there's a billion books out there, why does Hitler get to the top of the list? What about his life, ideas, or the summaries of his books makes you think that his ideas are any better than a million political blogs you have yet to read?"
My time and attention is limited and I'd rather not spend it on the scribblings of someone whose intellectual work is only read because of its association with his more famous work sending letter bombs.
This gets messy quick. If for example you lived under a dictator and that dictator didn't like your conversation then you wouldn't expect to have a venue unless you took extreme measures.
Now let's say that you think AI was an existential threat to humanity and we were all going to die because of it. In your mind would it matter if you blew up 10 people? 100 people? 1000000 people? I mean in your mind they are all dead anyway and if this is the price to pay to stop it, it will have been worth it.
First, I'm not sure you're using "quick" properly here. There is no trajectory - only individual cases. We can easily consider his actions unjustifiable and yet consider similar actions against a brutal dictator justifiable without straying into hypocrisy.
Second, the "imagine you truly believed X" defense is a good argument for sympathy, but not a good argument for justification or credence.
Yes, it should matter, because sane people admit there is a chance they could be wrong. You can walk back ideas, you can’t walk back deaths.
Also unless you’re a government you probably shouldn’t be applying utilitarian ideas of ethics to your actions, you do not have a right to decide on behalf of anyone but yourself as an individual, so even by utilitarian standards you are likely being unethical.
Anyway, if we want to apply utilitarian reasoning, taking someone’s ideas seriously simply because he garnered attention through random killings would seem to encourage more people to do violence for various different causes.
