Issues with the Unabomber manifesto
While it is very convincing you can spot various issues with it.
It is well known that the rate of clinical depression has been greatly increasing in recent decades
There is zero good evidence for that, what has happened is a gradual loosening of the criteria for depression.
modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.
There is no good evidence that antidepressants are any better than placebo long term.
Education is no longer a simple affair of paddling a kid's behind when he doesn't know his lessons and patting him on the head when he does know them. It is becoming a scientific technique for controlling the child's development. Sylvan Learning Centers, for example, have had great success in motivating children to study, and psychological techniques are also used with more or less success in many conventional schools.
But we have gotten ahead of our story. It is one thing to develop in the laboratory a series of psychological or biological techniques for manipulating human behavior and quite another to integrate these techniques into a functioning social system. The latter problem is the more difficult of the two. For example, while the techniques of educational psychology doubtless work quite well in the "lab schools" where they are developed, it is not necessarily easy to apply them effectively throughout our educational system. We all know what many of our schools are like. The teachers are too busy taking knives and guns away from the kids to subject them to the latest techniques for making them into computer nerds
In reality people who study very technical subjects at schools often do very poorly since technology itself tend to get rid of these jobs and replace them with automated systems (such as computers instead of humans doing calculations).
"Parenting" techniques that are taught to parents are designed to make children accept fundamental values of the system and behave in ways that the system finds desirable. "Mental health" programs, "intervention" techniques, psychotherapy and so forth are ostensibly designed to benefit individuals, but in practice they usually serve as methods for inducing individuals to think and behave as the system requires. (There is no contradiction here; an individual whose attitudes or behavior bring him into conflict with the system is up against a force that is too powerful for him to conquer or escape from, hence he is likely to suffer from stress, frustration, defeat. His path will be much easier if he thinks and behaves as the system requires. In that sense the system is acting for the benefit of the individual when it brainwashes him into conformity.)
That's not correct, political extremists tend to be happier.
https://tsminteractive.com/political-extremists-happier-moderates/
In the long run (say a few centuries from now) it is likely that neither the human race nor any other important organisms will exist as we know them today, because once you start modifying organisms through genetic engineering there is no reason to stop at any particular point, so that the modifications will probably continue until man and other organisms have been utterly transformed.
That's not a bad thing since without genetic engineering we humanity faces certain death in less than 500 000 000 years due warning from the sun eventually making earth inhabitable for humans and most animals.
With genetic engineering we have a shot at establishing ourselves on other planets and continue from there.
from
http://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/Anarchism/Unabom/manifesto.html
In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one's physical needs. It is enough to go through a training program to acquire some petty technical skill, then come to work on time and exert the very modest effort needed to hold a job. The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence and, most of all, simple OBEDIENCE. If one has those, society takes care of one from cradle to grave. (Yes, there is an underclass that cannot take the physical necessities for granted, but we are speaking here of mainstream society.) Thus it is not surprising that modern society is full of surrogate activities. These include scientific work, athletic achievement, humanitarian work, artistic and literary creation, climbing the corporate ladder, acquisition of money and material goods far beyond the point at which they cease to give any additional physical satisfaction, and social activism when it addresses issues that are not important for the activist personally, as in the case of white activists who work for the rights of nonwhite minorities. These are not always PURE surrogate activities, since for many people they may be motivated in part by needs other than the need to have some goal to pursue. Scientific work may be motivated in part by a drive for prestige, artistic creation by a need to express feelings, militant social activism by hostility. But for most people who pursue them, these activities are in large part surrogate activities. For example, the majority of scientists will probably agree that the "fulfillment" they get from their work is more important than the money and prestige they earn.
This is very much not true. It takes a lot more than minimal effort to satisfy your basic biological drives. Reproducing as a male in particular takes a lot of effort, the biggest hurdle is finding females willing to voluntarily let them impregnate you.
If it wasn't for the welfare state and things like government control over healthcare peoples health and the well-being of their children would instead be in their own hands. People would have to earn enough resources to support themselves and their children, they might have to watch one of their children needlessly die because they couldn't afford the medical treatment needed to save their child, people might starve because they cannot afford food.
He did mention population increase as a bad thing caused by technology but over time that will make it more and more challanging to survive and reproduce since there would be an increasingly brutal struggle for resources.
Thus it is not surprising that modern society is full of surrogate activities. These include scientific work, athletic achievement, humanitarian work, artistic and literary creation, climbing the corporate ladder, acquisition of money and material goods far beyond the point at which they cease to give any additional physical satisfaction
