Note: David Skrbina joins at the 29 minute mark.
In the wake of CEO-slayer Luigi Mangione becoming a folk hero, an anti-genocide fighter getting arrested for targeting genocide perpetrators, and less-defensible non-state-sponsored violence reaching epidemic proportions in the USA, it’s a good time to talk about the minuscule fraction of human violence that isn’t perpetrated by governments.
Philosophy professor and technology critic David Skrbina returns to the Truth Jihad podcast to discuss the hoopla around Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s influence on American young people in general, and CEO-slayer Luigi Mangione in particular. While teaching at the University of Michigan, Skrbina corresponded extensively with the imprisoned Kaczynski and served as his editor. He writes: “This whole issue extends beyond technology to that of any corrupt social system (like health care) and how people might respond.”
Excerpt from the interview:
David Skrbina: Again, that's, again, an interesting parallel between Luigi and Ted, right? They were both combating a larger system, of which they are a very small part. And so there's this perennial dilemma of a large organizational structure which is unjust or illegal or needs to be reformed or changed or overthrown. How does an individual or a small group of individuals have any effect on this process? With an organizational structure that contains hundreds or thousands of people, (violence) doesn't really do any good. Even if you kill one or two of them, the system will just work around it and will replace them and it will move on. So so all you can do is gain attention, gain the notoriety, maybe use that to get a message out, maybe to send a message right to others that that extreme action is being taken by by individual people out there.
So, in Ted's case, he was willing to take extreme action and he was willing to send a detailed message in terms of the manifesto. We can only guess in Mangione's case that he's maybe willing trying to send a message like like these CEOs cannot act with impunity and that they will somehow pay a price for extremely unjust action. I guess we can assume that that's really what Luigi had in mind. It's hard to know unless we hear from him directly.
Read the full transcript at my Substack by clicking on the “transcript” button above the image to the right.
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