Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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I read Kaczynski long ago and saw a huge hole immediately.

So surrogate activities replace the authentic struggle for survival. I can get that. But why is the struggle for survival better? Isn’t it just another game?

Kaczynski like many other romantics rails against the system, but isn’t nature just another system? It’s an older one that we didn’t design, but didn’t we learn in the end that the matrix was inside an even older matrix which was inside an even older one…?

What would it even mean to escape the “system?” How can you do that except death? If you are breathing you are playing some kind of game.

Instead the question is: can we exercise some choice over what systems we give our energy to and can we influence these systems? I do think we give our energy to a lot of dumb pointless or even evil systems today, so how do we turn our attention elsewhere?

For the natural system of subsistence hunting and gathering or farming the answers to these questions are “no” (little choice, play or die) and “no” (the system is billions of years old and isn’t even ours). We have more choice today in our complicated mesh of systems, or at least we have the potential of choice.

This is ultimately a big part of why I am not a primitivist, reactionary, or traditionalist. Sure what we have sucks sometimes. Are we sure it was better back then? Or was it just different? I always want to ask “trads” of various types if they are sure they would be happy in the traditional state they imagine.

Maybe the people who railed against nature and sought to command it with science to escape its constraints were malcontents not entirely different from Kaczynski in their emotional and personality structure. Send Ted back to 1400 and you might have an enlightenment radical materialist.

It's been many years since I last read it, but I seem to recall Kaczynski defined surrogate activities as those beyond what one would feel substantively deprived should they be without. He gives the example of pursuit of social fulfillment like romantic affection to be not a surrogate activity, since we're programmed to feel deprived without any at all, but being a sex addict to be one.

If you combine this with his notion of the power process, surrogate activities ultimately unsatisfying in the context of that. Modern man lacks the ability to fulfill the power process, and surrogate activities is the result. Kaczynski draws arrows from the fact that that man lacks autonomy and fulfillment of the power process, to surrogate activities, then to various societal problems (of which he enumerates many).

So, the point isn't that surrogate activities is the terrible end state to be avoided at all costs, it's what results when they're load-bearing at a societal level.

But the power process is just a game, or perhaps more accurately a built in biological addiction to games that caused us to pass on our genes in the past. Why is it truly metaphysically better than, say, racking up Reddit karma?

What I really think is that most humans have never had meaning. They’ve just been too busy surviving to stop and think about it. When societies get rich enough to afford time to think and universal literacy to discuss then we start noticing that life is “meaningless” and discussing the metaphysical emptiness that was always there below the surface.

Huxley’s brave new world is accurate but is neither brave nor new.

You always get a faction that thinks the absence of such discourse in the past meant we had meaning back then. They’re wrong.

Going back in time to when we were still deeply embedded in the “power process” or whatever you call it is no different from drowning yourself in TikTok or MMORPGs. It’s just another way to stop thinking about big deep questions that in fact have never been solved.

We do not truly know what we are, where we came from, if we truly have any “purpose” beyond just catalyzing the dissipation of energy, whether consciousness ends at death or has some eternal component, etc. We can have various religious and spiritual faiths but these do not come with proof. The honest ones tell you that up front.

Becoming too busy to care, whether in the old traditional way or some new way, does not change this.

"But the power process is just a game, or perhaps more accurately a built in biological addiction to games that caused us to pass on our genes in the past. Why is it truly metaphysically better than, say, racking up Reddit karma?" Because it gives us psychological fulfilment. We are conditioned through millions of years of evolution to find it psychologically fulfilling. That's the point. His argument is that living a life that may be less physically secure, but psychologically fulfilling is a better life to live. That's why it's better.

"But why is the struggle for survival better? Isn’t it just another game?" The reason why the struggle for survival is better is because that is what we are psychologically predisposed to be fulfilled by. Millions of years of evolution have created reward pathways and we get deep fulfillment from these goals, and community. Not all games are the same when it comes to how it affects us psychologically.

>> What would it even mean to escape the “system?” How can you do that except death? If you are breathing you are playing some kind of game.

I think yogic/buddhist enlightenment or nirvana is freedom from constraints due to nature.. the solution (as far as I understand) is essentially a state like death or physical non-existence but somehow still fully conscious and absolutely blissful

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