>pointless rebellion.
>
>Why pointless? Not too far from here there is a self-selected elite that reacts with rage should anybody question them or their self-serving behaviors. That's what happens when nobody "rebels." The trick is to needle and question just enough to cause people to take a look in the mirror. Not enough needling leads to a Victorian society where the "elite" is complacent, hypocritical and increasingly irrelevant to their supposed principles. Too much and it becomes a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing. Combine this with the "every rebel is a closet dictator" tendency and the internet and we have a recipe for constant angst. ;-)


I think its quite necessary for an open society to question assumptions, to question the status quo, and to question leaders.

I think the Unabomber's point (and you probably couldn't gather this from my selected quotes, you'd need to read the preceding passages) is that human beings have a psychological need to struggle, to feel as their survival is threatened, and that in our industrial society those conditions are relatively non-existent compared to life just 200 years ago.

He argues (I think) that leftists satisfy those psychological needs by finding slight imperfections in society and blowing them up to a ridiculous scale.

So much so that they're obsessively emotionally involved which eventually blinds them from reality.

Accepting that the Iraq war might turn out good (or that gender and racial equality has been and is continually improving) would eliminate a psychological enemy that they've come to depend on, and even built their personal identity on.

That said, I am fully aware of the usefulness of radicals in reality.

Let's say, on any given problem, realistically there is 1 mile to go, but the radical says you have 100 miles to go.

The radical goes to fight with all his might and maybe gets an inch. But they'll be taking us 1 inch closer to the mile.

Of course, one of the draw backs of "Utopian social engineering" is that you're dealing with such complex systems that if your sights are set at 100 miles away, there's a 50%/50% chance whether your inch is closer or farther away from where you need to be.

Not sure if that answers your question.

But saying "America is evil!" is pointless compared to less emotionally charged positions such as "Let's examine what changes, if any, should be made to our foreign policy."