I Believe In Nothing.

A Theme That Appears Repeatedly In The Writings Of The Social Critics Of The Second Half Of The 20th Century Is The Sense Of Purposelessness That Afflicts Many People In Modern Society.

In Modern Industrial Society Only Minimal Effort Is Necessary To Satisfy One's Physical Needs.

Imagine A Society That Subjects People To Conditions That Make Them Terribly Unhappy, Then Gives Them The Drugs To Take Away Their Unhappiness. Science Fiction? It Is Already Happening To Some Extent In Our Own Society... Instead Of Removing The Conditions That Make People Depressed, Modern Society Gives Them Antidepressant Drugs. In Effect, Antidepressants Are A Means Of Modifying An Individual's Internal State In Such A Way As To Enable Him To Tolerate Social Conditions That He Would Otherwise Find Intolerable.

The Industrial-technological System May Survive Or It May Break Down. If It Survives, It May Eventually Achieve A Low Level Of Physical And Psychological Suffering, But Only After Passing Through A Long And Very Painful Period Of Adjustment And Only At The Cost Of Permanently Reducing Human Beings And Many Other Living Organisms To Engineered Products And Mere Cogs In The Social Machine.

Rebellion Against Technology And Civilization Is Real Rebellion, A Real Attack On The Values Of The Existing System. But The Green Anarchists, Anarcho-primitivists, And So Forth (the "ga Movement") Have Fallen Under Such Heavy Influence From The Left That Their Rebellion Against Civilization Has To Great Extent Been Neutralized. Instead Of Rebelling Against The Values Of Civilization, They Have Adopted Many Civilized Values Themselves And Have Constructed An Imaginary Picture Of Primitive Societies That Embodies These Civilized Values.