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Purpose in a Post-Scarcity World
The Magicians, Ecclesiastes and a refutation of Industrial Society and Its Future
“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.” — Ted Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future
A couple months ago, I was persuaded to read Industrial Society and Its Future, more commonly known as the Unibomber Manifesto. What I found scared me, though not because it was crazy or sadistic, like many other documents of its type. No, the Unibomber Manifesto scared me because it made sense, and if it made sense to mail people bombs in an attempt to dismantle industrial society (something that would kill millions, if not billions of people), then I no longer knew what was really right or wrong anymore.
The basic thesis of the Unibomber is an evolutionary one. “Purpose” is a higher cognitive function that our ancestors evolved in order to help them survive. If you feel your “purpose” is to help you and your tribe survive, you will be more strongly driven to take actions that make it so: like waking up early to hunt or staying up late to keep watch. For the humans of the distant past, there was no such thing as existentialism, nihilism or a crisis of meaning. If you didn’t show up, you died, it was simple as that.
Yet since the industrial revolution, and arguably since the agriculture revolution before it, this was no longer the case. As Kaczynski says in the top quote, it is trivially easy to survive in today’s society. Almost no one starves in America, and although that is not true of the rest of the world, it is slowly becoming so. With the primal drive to survive easily satisfied, many humans turn to what Kaczynski calls surrogate activities. Some of these, like becoming an artist, scientist, or engineer, society approves of. Others, like alcohol, consumerism or Netflix-binge watching, are less sanctioned. However, Kaczynski has the same opinion of all of these so called surrogate activities: that they cannot ever be as satisfying as the real purpose of trying to survive. In his opinion, the industrial revolution has only made things worse: surrogate activities are increasingly distant from the…
