this book is 100x better than his more well known one, the turner diaries.
Yeah, Cathy O'Brien was one of the all-stars in the '90s pre-internet era of conspiracy whackjobs. She was heavily promoted by David Icke in his heyday.
I read TRANCEFormation in my late teens and it made me a lifelong enthusiast of that kind of insanity. "Someone carved a baphomet on my vaginal wall!" Good times.
And I get what Stephen King was going for there, the metaphor for the end of childhood and all that, but, uh, maybe not the best choice of metaphor.
Stephen King was going for porn, because he's a nonce.
I find Kaczynski to be an utterly fascinating figure because, quite frankly, he's right in a lot of ways. His stance on technology, while extreme, has a kernel of truth to it. We are basically enslaved to our machines, and while technology makes our lives easier it's also allowed for others to control our existence. If you showed someone his manifesto without telling them who wrote it, I don't think there'd be a lot they would disagree with, at least if they weren't the kind of ultra-consoomer Kaczynski rails against.
It's fucked up that a domestic terrorist was the person to articulate these thoughts so well. It almost amused me when journalists described the book as "rambling," when it really isn't. It quite clearly states its thesis up front, then goes on to support it, and again, coherently sums up and concludes at the end.
I think the fucked up part is how he got his message out. I don't think the targets actually mattered but it was how he did it and the attention it got. If he was a guy who just shot and killed someone then no one would care. He killed to spread the message. By the same logic, you could say Manson killed out of a lack of attention and he got it. Look At Your Game Girl is a good song.
There's a point in the manifesto where he laments that it was only through violence that he would have been able to spread his message at all, that if he hadn't done any sort of extreme action the newspapers wouldn't be printing it (and he was right about that; if he hadn't done anything, the newspapers would never have printed his manifesto). I believe he wanted to motivate others to follow in his wake, hence the use of plural pronouns ("we" and "us" rather than "I"). Kaczynski wanted to outright dismantle the way modern society works, and by presenting his operation as bigger than it was (multiple people vs one guy in a tiny cabin in the middle of nowhere), I think his hope was that if he kept going at it then eventually other like-minded individuals would follow suit and make that aspect of the manifesto a reality.
It's odd reasoning. I used to think it was something akin to "propaganda of the deed" as originated by anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin. However, at least in its currently understood form, probably most associated with ancoms, the deed was itself supposed to be the propaganda that inspired action by others. In Kaczynski's case, the deed was to extort the publication of his manifesto, an odd and rather autistic way of going about it.
