In his “Nothing is Sacred. Economic Ideas for the New Millenium”– a book I very much enjoyed, although that is not to say that I agreed 100% with the views stated in it- Robert Barro, one of the pre-eminent current economists and possibly an Economics Nobel Laureate not so far in the future, also talks about Al Gore’s “outrageous book”: “Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit” and his extreme environmental positions taken there. In fact, in Barro’s view, Gore lost a lot of votes of many intellectuals who would have otherwise voted for him (now that’s for sure, how on earth could one vote for the other option of that year, and 4 years later as well, Mr. Bush?…) exactly because of his stance on environmental policies; he closes his chapter making quite clear that he does not regret Gore not being in any prominent function: “Fortunately, Gore became neither President of the United States in 2000 nor President of Harvard University in 2001“.
Without having read Gore’s book and being myself one of the “green” advocates (nothing in the extreme though), I must nonetheless state that some of Barro’s points (which I will maybe talk about with some other occasion) are well taken if indeed Gore put it that way in the book. Moreover it is not only Barro (hence, extra evidence) who calls Gore’s ideas outrageous but a bunch of other people, economists and non-economists alike, and we are not talking about declared anti-environmentalists. In fact Gore’s view on environmental policies has been even associated by some with the notorious “Industrial Society and its Future” manifesto of its even more notorious creator, Ted Kaczynsky, aka “The Unabomber”. And here we arrived where I wanted to, after a rather lengthy introduction, since I’ve been thinking of shortly reminding you today- or informing those of you that did not know- about the Unabomber and his story.
Basically the elaborate manifesto above constitutes the motto of many eco-terrorists (we even have those kind of terrorists) and Dr. Kaczynsky was (he is serving a life sentence in prison nowadays), presumably, the most famous of them all. To have a feeling for the kind of ideas Kaczynsky wants to spread out in his manifesto and in case you really think this document is too thick to go through it (it is and it is plain insane), here’s his cry for the revolution in the industrial system, paragraph 4. of the introduction:
“We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence: it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.”
I guess people might wonder how come such a highly intelligent person- essentially a genius-, Harvard undergraduate and Michigan at Ann Arbor PhD. , in Mathematics, assistant professor, until resignation without any explanation, at University of California at Berkeley, author of several complex papers published in excellent journals, could end up as the Unabomber. This is the story of Dr. Theodore Kaczynsky, probably the criminal with the highest IQ in the history of the USA, if not of the entire mankind. This guy would have probably never been caught (he wasn’t caught for 17 years although he killed several people and maimed even more, in all this time) if his brother wouldn’t have suspected him and turned him in. Let’s just hope this case was unique, for these gray eminences turned to evil- though with a noble scope in their view (here, the return to the Blue Lagoon ideal, I guess)- are far more dangerous than all the suicide terrorists put together.
