Yeah Uncle Ted had a lot of good ideas. He was (is, I should say - he's still writing books in prison) a genius and youngest ever person to get full professorship at Harvard.

Just because he turned to terrorism that doesn't mean he stopped being intelligent or having rigorous ideas. He was a damn Harvard professor.

His basic idea is that

1. humans evolved to live in small hunter-gatherer tribes
2. the shift to agriculture, mass society and high tech happened so rapidly that humans didn't have time to adapt; evolutionary timescales are too slow
3. modern humans are maladapted to their environment
4. depression, mental illness, nihilism and the sense that higher meaning has ben lost only increase with increasing technology and material living standards
5. depression and mental illness are almost unheard of in hunter-gatherer tribes
6. leftists are prime examples of casualties of the mismatch between the ancestral environment and the modern environment. they're deranged husks of what our ancestors evolved to be.
7. technology (not only material technology but "social" technology like bureaucracy, management systems, the financial system) has it's own internal logic that makes it take on a life of it's own and steer humanity towards it's own purposes which are often opposed to the individual human's health and happiness
8. no single human or group of humans can control the complex system we built. technology was our servant but now it's our master taking us for a ride to an unknown destination and whatever that destination is, it's going to benefit technology and not humanity
9. technology will either eventually destroy humanity (classic examples are environmental destruction, nuclear war) or enslave humanity like the movies Idiocracy or the Matrix
10. the only way for humans to take back control of their destiny and avoid their eventual destruction or enslavement is to reject technology completely and return to ancestral ways of living
11. obligatory I don't endorse his methods of terrorism and I don't think his proposed solution is practical or achievable but I think his diagnoses of the problems with modern society and technology are correct and people should take them seriously and maybe try to think of other solutions (that don't involve sending bombs in the mail lol)

-as a side note there's a book called The Phenotypic Revolution by youtube "right wing extremist" neuroscientist JF Gariepy where he argues against genetic engineering designer babies because we'd be essentially giving control of our reproduction to AI and eventually over many generations AI would select for traits that benefit AI and not humanity. This could turn us into gibbering slaves and even select out sentience. Just another possible way we could be "enslaved" by technology and cease being human

-other books that support Uncle Ted's views are "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and "Technopoly" by Neil Postman where he argues that mass communication, by it's very format (think Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message") is dumbing down public discourse and that bureaucracy takes on a life of it's own, exists only to perpetuate itself and replaces transcendent meaning and higher ideals/morals with "increasing efficiency", amoral scientism, "rule by experts"

-Also here's a based philosophy podcast discussing Uncle Ted's works for anyone who's interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dKFGGrkOjw

Yeah Uncle Ted had a lot of good ideas. He was (is, I should say - he's still writing books in prison) a genius and youngest ever person to get full professorship at Harvard.

Just because he turned to terrorism that doesn't mean he stopped being intelligent or having rigorous ideas. He was a damn Harvard professor.

His basic idea is that

1. humans evolved to live in small hunter-gatherer tribes
2. the shift to agriculture, mass society and high tech happened to rapidly that humans didn't have time to adapt; evolutionary timescales are too slow
3. so modern humans are maladapted to their environment
4. depression, mental illness nihilism and the sense that higher meaning has ben lost only increase with increasing technology and material living standards
5. depression and mental illness are almost unheard of in hunter-gatherer tribes
6. leftists are prime examples of casualties of the mismatch between the ancestral environment and the modern environment. they're deranged husks of what our ancestors evolved to be.
7. technology (not only material technology but "social" technology like bureaucracy, management systems, the financial system) has it's own internal logic that makes it take on a life of it's own and steer humanity towards it's own purposes which are often opposed to the individual human's health and happiness
8. no single human or group of humans can control the complex system we built. technology was our servant but now it's our master taking us for a ride to an unknown destination and whatever that destination is, it's going to benefit technology and not humanity
9. technology will either eventually destroy humanity (classic examples are environmental destruction, nuclear war) or enslave humanity like the movies Idiocracy or the Matrix
10. the only way for humans to take back control of their destiny and avoid their eventual destruction or enslavement is to reject technology completely and return to ancestral ways of living
11. obligatory I don't endorse his methods of terrorism and I don't think his proposed solution is practical or achievable but I think his diagnoses of the problems with modern society and technology are correct and people should take them seriously and maybe try to think of other solutions (that don't involve sending bombs in the mail lol)

-as a side note there's a book called The Phenotypic Revolution by youtube "right wing extremist" neuroscientist JF Gariepy where he argues against genetic engineering designer babies because we'd be essentially giving control of our reproduction to AI and eventually over many generations AI would select for traits that benefit AI and not humanity. This could turn us into gibbering slaves and even select out sentience. Just another possible way we could be "enslaved" by technology and cease being human

-other books that support Uncle Ted's views are "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and "Technopoly" by Neil Postman where he argues that mass communication, by it's very format (think Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message") is dumbing down public discourse and that bureaucracy takes on a life of it's own, exists only to perpetuate itself and replaces transcendent meaning and higher ideals/morals with "increasing efficiency", amoral scientism, "rule by experts"

-Also here's a based philosophy podcast discussing Uncle Ted's works for anyone who's interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dKFGGrkOjw