Originally published via American Thinker:
Having previously read and his manifesto some years ago, I have been revisiting the Unabomber’s treatise on technology and its toxic effects on society and individual psychology.
(I feel compelled — not out of moral obligation, because I believe any rational person is capable of separating the message from the messenger but because of rampant targeting by the state of so-called “domestic terrorists,” a category to which I have surely been relegated on some government list somewhere – to caution that I do not endorse mailing bombs or any variety of offensive violence in any form.)
Here he is taking a magnifying glass and a razor-sharp scalpel to leftist psychology.
Via Industrial Society and Its Future:
“The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization”…
By “feelings of inferiority” we mean not only inferiority feelings in the strict sense but a whole spectrum of related traits; low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc…
When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self- esteem. This tendency is pronounced among minority rights activists, whether or not they belong to the minority groups whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about the words used to designate minorities and about anything that is said concerning minorities. The terms “negro”, “oriental”, “handicapped” or “chick” for an African, an Asian, a disabled person or a woman originally had no derogatory connotation…
The negative connotations have been attached to these terms by the activists themselves…
Those who are most sensitive about “politically incorrect” terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any “oppressed” group but come from privileged strata of society.”
Examples of this phenomenon in practice in modern Western society are legion, but perhaps the most emblematic is the force-feeding of the term “Latin-X” – dreamed up by some neurotic Women’s and Gender studies postgraduate — as a new-age descriptor for Hispanics, despite the Hispanic population itself rejecting its use.
Via Gallup:
“One of the central threads in critiques of the use of “Latinx” is evidence measuring the opinions of rank-and-file Hispanic Americans themselves. These data show that relatively few Hispanic adults have even heard of the term, and very few indicate an interest in using it to describe their ethnicity…
Only 4% of Hispanic Americans surveyed by Gallup preferred “Latinx” as the label of choice to describe their ethnic group.”
Yet, the corporate state media, in combination with academia, relentlessly – and relentlessly is the only correct word here – push this social engineering bilge on the population as an “inclusive” alternative to “Latino,” one that purportedly subverts something called the “gender binary,” used by the Patriarchy™ to persecute the LGBTQ+++™ alphabet people.
Another example, of course, is the ever-evolving terminology used to refer to Persons of Color™. In a different time, “colored people” was used to refer to black people, which, as Kaczynski notes, was never meant in its conception or use for decades to be derogatory. Rather, liberals at some point unilaterally declared it to be offensive, and all at once the term became verboten in polite society.
Ditto, again, as Kaczynski notes, with the “handicapped,” which then became the “disabled,” which then became “persons with disability.” And with “retard.” And with “Oriental.” And so on; literally every minority group has a veritable laundry list of terms that were once considered non-offensive and standard and that suddenly, overnight, became alleged slurs.
No one voted on any of this, including the protected categories whose interests are ostensibly meant to be advanced by their forced uptake in everyday parlance.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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