Industrial Society and Its Future

This manifesto, written under the pen name "FC" (Freedom Club), argues that modern industrial-technological society is fundamentally incompatible with human freedom and psychological well-being, and that revolution, not reform, is the only solution.

The author opens with his central thesis: The Industrial Revolution has been a disaster for the human race. While it has increased life expectancy in developed countries, it has destabilized society, made life unfulfilling, caused widespread psychological suffering, and severely damaged the natural world. He presents two possible futures. If the industrial-technological system survives, it may reduce suffering but only by permanently reducing human beings to "engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine" (1). If it breaks down, the consequences will be painful, but less catastrophic the sooner the breakdown occurs. He advocates revolution aimed not at overthrowing governments but at dismantling the economic and technological basis of modern society.

Before developing this argument, the author analyzes the psychology of modern leftism, which he treats as symptomatic of broader societal dysfunction. He defines leftism not as a specific ideology but as a psychological type, identifying two underlying tendencies: "feelings of inferiority" and "oversocialization." Leftists, he argues, are driven by low self-esteem, powerlessness, guilt, and self-hatred, while their activism is motivated primarily by hostility and the drive for power rather than by compassion. He defines "oversocialization" as the condition of individuals who have internalized society's moral code so thoroughly that it becomes a severe psychological burden. The oversocialized leftist rebels against society but cannot challenge its most basic values, instead adopting mainstream moral principles and accusing society of failing to live up to them. These problems, the author argues, are indicative of modern society's dysfunction as a whole.

The essay's theoretical core is the concept of the "power process," a fundamental human need with four elements: goal, effort, attainment of goal, and autonomy. Humans require goals whose attainment demands effort and must succeed in achieving at least some of those goals. Most people also need autonomy, the ability to direct their own efforts, typically satisfied within a small group rather than under rigid orders. When the power process is disrupted, the consequences range from low self-esteem to depression, anxiety, and hostility.

Because modern industrial society requires only minimal effort to satisfy physical needs, people turn to "surrogate activities": artificial goals pursued for fulfillment rather than out of genuine necessity, including scientific work, athletic achievement, humanitarian causes, and corporate climbing. These activities, the author argues, are less satisfying than the pursuit of real goals. He contends that scientists are motivated primarily by the power process rather than by curiosity or a desire to benefit humanity, making science largely a surrogate activity that marches on blindly, guided only by the psychological needs of scientists and their funders.

The author attributes modern social problems to the fact that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which humans evolved. The most important disruption is to the power process, but others include excessive population density, isolation from nature, rapid social change, and the breakdown of small-scale communities. Industrial society must weaken family ties and local communities to function, requiring individuals' loyalty to the system. Using the 19th-century American frontier as a counterexample, the author contends that the key difference is that modern change is imposed on people, whereas the frontiersman created change through his own initiative, thereby satisfying the power process.

In modern society, natural human drives are pushed to two extremes: those satisfiable with minimal effort and those impossible to satisfy regardless of effort, such as the need for security when individuals' lives depend on decisions made by remote institutions. The middle category increasingly consists of artificial needs created by advertising, and even where people pursue goals through earning money or climbing the status ladder, most lack genuine autonomy.

Defining freedom as control over the life-and-death issues of one's existence without interference from large organizations, the author argues that personal freedom depends more on a society's economic and technological structure than on its laws. He notes that FC had to kill people to get its message before the public, since an individual's words are swamped by the mass media's output.

The author presents five principles of history to demonstrate that the system cannot be reformed: Small changes to long-term trends are transitory; changes large enough to be permanent alter the whole society unpredictably; new societies cannot be designed on paper; and people do not consciously choose the form of their society. He concludes that only revolutionaries, not reformers, could bring about permanent changes in favor of freedom.

He argues that technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom. Technologies that are initially optional become compulsory as society restructures around them. Technological progress is irreversible within a given civilization, and no social arrangements can provide permanent protection because all social arrangements are transitory while technological advances are permanent. He further contends that the "good" and "bad" parts of technology cannot be separated because modern technology is a unified, interdependent system.

A central concern of the manifesto is the development of methods for controlling human behavior. Throughout history, human nature imposed limits on how far societies could push people, but modern technology develops ways to modify human beings themselves. The author cites antidepressant drugs as an example: Rather than addressing social conditions that contribute to depression, society medicates people to tolerate those conditions. He acknowledges that depression is often of purely genetic origin but maintains that this argument applies to cases in which environment plays the predominant role. He catalogues emerging behavioral controls, from surveillance and propaganda to educational techniques, mental health interventions, and genetic engineering, arguing that these will be introduced incrementally, each step appearing as a rational response to a social problem, making the process impossible to resist.

The essay presents two possible outcomes. If the system acquires sufficient control over human behavior, it will achieve complete domination. The author envisions scenarios in which intelligent machines make all decisions while humanity drifts into dependence, or a tiny elite controls large systems while the masses become superfluous. If the system instead breaks down, there may be a chaotic "time of troubles" (76), but the human race would be given a new chance. He acknowledges that breakdown would cause great suffering but argues that the system's continuation is not necessarily less painful, declaring that "It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences" (79).

The author outlines a revolutionary strategy centered on two tasks: promoting social stress and instability, and developing an anti-technology ideology with wild nature as the positive ideal. Revolutionaries should direct conflict between ordinary people and the power-holding elite, avoid assuming political power until the system has failed, and insist that the revolution be international. The single overriding goal must be the elimination of modern technology. He distinguishes between small-scale technology, usable by small communities without outside assistance, and organization-dependent technology, which requires large-scale social organization. Since most technology since the Industrial Revolution is organization-dependent, he argues that technological regression is achievable, and that once such technology is lost for a generation, it would take centuries to rebuild.

The manifesto warns extensively against leftism's danger to an anti-technology movement. Leftism, the author argues, is fundamentally inconsistent with wild nature and human freedom because it is collectivist, requiring advanced technology and organized management of human life. Leftists oppose technology only as outsiders and promote it once in power, as illustrated by the Bolsheviks, the Russian communist faction that seized power in 1917: They reversed their positions on censorship and ethnic minority rights after gaining control. The manifesto concludes by acknowledging its own imprecision while expressing confidence that the argument's general outlines are roughly correct. The author identifies one possible weakness: His characterization of modern leftism as peculiar to the present era may be wrong, since oversocialized types who impose their morality on others have existed throughout history.