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I started reading and thinking about Theodore Kaczynski's Industrial Society And It's Future around the time that he died and everyone was talking about it. I think everyone was talking about it in rather generous terms, mining it for the most truthful and insightful things and only talking about that. I think that's excesively generous, considering it came to be known to us thanks to a homicidal terroristic bombing campaign. I think it deserves to be cut to the core of it's true arguments that he believed justified his bombing campaign. And I also think that if you actually do so, it's pretty low quality. Here is the original text of it if you care to verify or make a counter-argument.
The core of, and most important thing to remember about Industrial Society and it's Future is the Power Process argument, as written starting in paragraph 33. TK's argument is that in order to be truly happy and satisfied with life, a person must need to exert substantial effort, labor, and creativity towards satisfying the most basic physical needs of food, water, shelter, and security. Exerting their creative efforts towards other pursuits, including art, science, engineering, etc. isn't good enough, it's got to be for core survival. Exerting substantial effort in a conventional job, earning money, and using that money to purchase the elements of survival is also not good enough, it has to be direct. This is his definition of "freedom" - one is "free" in his opinion if they need to exert substantial effort directly towards basic survival. Thus, industrial society is fundamentally destructive to "freedom" in this definition in that it enables the majority of humanity to satisfy their needs of survival very easily and reliably, usually by doing things that have no direct relation to those needs. See him doubling down on this in paragraph 94.
I believe this argument is fundamentally nonsensical. Perhaps our society is lost and missing something, but I'm doubtful that large-scale hunter-gatherer societies (or at least as large scale as such societies can be) are overall substantially happier and more satisfied with life. It may be true that some individuals who are disaffected from mainstream society for various reasons are happier in such a situation, but I don't think society as a whole is. I frankly doubt it for individuals too - how many such people ever truly disconnect fully from industrial society and stay that way? I don't think TK is has any experience in anthropology, or has spent any significant amount of time with societies that currently do live in ways similar to what he advocates. Maybe he should have spent a few years living with the Amish or something before going on a bombing campaign, or visited some primitive tribes that are still around in various parts of Africa and South America.
He has some other interesting observations, but that's the core of it and why I wholly reject the philosophy.
One of his other points is around how society tends to bend people to fit it, rather than adjusting to fit people. Maybe there's a little point in how hard it sometimes tries to bend people. But there are plenty of options out there already for other ways to live, if you are willing to go looking for them and actually adopt them. In fact, it's not really "society" trying to bend people in my opinion, it's usually the people themselves or their close family members trying to fit in. Are "we" supposed to go find the guy who thinks he should try anti-depressants to fit in better and tell him he really ought to try joining a sailboat crew first instead? Maybe it's your job to realize you don't like your place in society and change it. And however you decide to deal with your disaffection with society, what gives you the right to claim you know what's best for everyone? Doesn't the fact that you are disaffected from society fundamentally mean that you don't understand it and aren't by any measure qualified to speak for it?
Speaking of people not fitting into society, what happens when it goes the other way? If we actually adopt his supposed preferred lifestyle and it goes exactly the way he hopes it does, I'd bet anything at least a few people would think that running water, grocery stores full of food, and antibiotics are actually pretty nice, can I please go back to that? Will the result of that just be, tough shit, this is all there is, starve and die if you don't like it? Has he done any sort of research or experiment at all to determine that 100% of humanity will actually be happer living like this, even when some of them starve to death because a harvest or hunt went bad for some reason and there's no such thing as long-distance trade, or they watch their loved ones die of things that are fixable in industrial society but pre-industrial hunter-gatherers are helpless against?
I think the bigger point though is - what do you want for the future of the Human Race?
If we go TK's way, we will be hunter-gatherers chasing buffalo around and picking berries forever. Your kids and their kids as far into the future as you want to go will never live any better than you. Some day, the rising output of the sun will destroy the Earth's biosphere, or maybe we get hit by an asteroid or gamma ray burst or something, and the entire human race goes extinct. We won't have a prayer of even knowing it's coming, much less doing anything about it, because being too busy working on basic survival to notice or think about such things is apparently the correct way to live. We were given this tremendous gift of intelligence, by evolution or God or whatever you believe, and we're supposed to just throw it in the trash because some guy was sad?
Or we go our own way and take industrial society as far as it can go. Maybe we build awesome spaceships and colonize the stars. Maybe we conduct diplomacy as equals with alien civilizations. Maybe we turn ourselves into a global hive mind somehow. Or maybe we blow ourselves up with antimatter bombs or get turned into paperclips by our superintelligent AIs or get enslaved by hostile aliens. Who knows what the future holds, but it sounds a lot better than being hunter-gatherers forever.
It is clearly more likely that we get some kind of bizarre technological transformation in 20 years than that a collapse happens.
Oh no, we'll definitely get a social collapse before we can get ourselves singularityed. It will be a bullshit one like a mix of The Camp of the Saints with flavors of Idiocracy. Complex systems will collapse, and when that happens you will not have a proper functioning power distribution system, to speak of a global "internet" will be hilarious. More like a few hundred local networks.
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What's the difference? Apocalypse either way.
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There's a rule here for Make your point reasonably clear and plain. It's not clear to me what your point is, so why don't you just say it, whatever it is? Why are you making it all about me and my experiences? Exactly what is the "lie" that you are referring to at the end?
For me it is a reasonable answer. There is a bias that you are upfront with that the ideas you are critiquing are from a terrorist, thus you are not separating the ideas from the man. But the thing is that it is not TK who is the originator of the ideas. It is Ellul! The core is simple, humanity is not supposed to serve the "machine" but the "machine" is supposed to serve humanity! And you wrote several paragraphs saying that we are supposed to serve the machine because it benefits all of humanity. I'm not so sure...
The parent I responded to there had written a longer response with more detail that I was meaning to respond to now, but I guess he deleted it. (It was pretty long but reasonably charitable and clear IMO, so I thought it deserved a reasonably high-effort response). Oh well, I guess I'll say most of the same stuff here.
I was actually biased to think moderately positively of TK before I read his piece, as most of the areas I read seem at least modestly biased towards him. I wrote about it a bit on this site. I wrote in that thread what actually changed my mind. I had basically presumed that his ideas were too censored and too difficult to get out there such that it drove him to terrorism. But he actually wrote himself in that very essay in P96 that he did violence because he did have opportunities to put it out there, but not to be distributed to his satisfaction. As I wrote there, I reject the idea that you get to do violence because nobody thinks your ideas are interesting. If nobody thinks your ideas are interesting enough to pay attention to, you should work on improving them and presenting them better, not blow people up.
That Mr. Ellul wrote similar things I think more proves my point than refutes it (I believe you both that he wrote similar things, but I'm not sure to what extent he rejected or endorsed violence to spread his ideas) - it's perfectly possible to have such views and advocate for them in normal and peaceful ways. I think that, considering the public image TK has gained from his bombing campaign (since we're all talking about him), it's perfectly reasonable to point out the holes in his ideas and remind people that he did make the decision that his ideas were important enough to justify aggressive violence - not even towards specific people responsible for opposing him or rejecting his ideas, but people he felt were part of the industrial system that he wanted to tear down.
I also believe that part of the generous interpretation many have given to his work is due to the re-definition of freedom that he used. A casual reading of many of his sections with the implicit belief among the general public in the western world that "freedom" refers to basically classical liberalism, things like free speech, free press, rule of law, etc leads many of his ideas to sound significantly more insightful and reasonable. But once you know that he redefined it to mean the "right"/need of individuals to go through the "Power Process" of doing substantial work for their basic needs, it all sounds rather different. Whether Industrial Society is inherently destructive of "classical liberalism" freedom is yet to be determined - that could be a complex and interesting discussion. But Industrial Society being inherently destructive to "power process" freedom is trivially obvious. I have a feeling that this may have been done on purpose. An honest writer simply looking to promote his ideas rather than mislead people would pick a different word, rather than one so loaded with pre-existing cultural baggage in the West.
Parent post also seems to be accusing me of not knowing enough about nature, hunter-gatherer lifestyles, etc. Presumably this is meant to lead to an argument that such lifestyles are actually much better than I had presented them as. At least, that's the most charitable interpretation IMO, part of my issue there is that he didn't actually make an argument for whatever it is he believed, just implied that I was ignorant. If I am, please go ahead and let me know what facts you know that make the arguments less valid, don't just imply that they're there.
I could counter-argue that while I am no expert on such lifestyles, he in turn may not know much about just how complex the logistical chain is that makes available all of the modern goods that we take for granted and exactly what life may be like when they are completely impossible to obtain. I specifically mean the "safety net" concept that I mention elsewhere in this thread. It may not be terribly hard to live a lifestyle superficially similar to what is described by TK, presumably Ellul, and others - I wouldn't be surprised if the number of people in the continental US voluntarily living like that is in the hundreds of thousands. But it's only superficial if you still have the grocery store to solve any food production problems that come up, the hospital to solve any medical problems, the hardware store for any tools you can't fabricate, etc. Even if you never actually go to any of those, the mere fact that it's possible tends to change peoples' behavior. How many people volunteer to put all of those perpetually out of reach for their entire extended family for all eternity?
Ellul is the originator of the ideas and he also rejected violence to spread them. Last time I checked the wikipedia article wasn't that bad. And to quote wikipedia... 'Ellul explained his view in this way: "By anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence."'
This is the main reason I think you got caught in such a critical response. It is that there is no separation of the ideas that Kaczynski based on Elluls work and Kaczynskis campaign of violence. It is not clear what are Kaczynskis contributions that you are criticizing here or if you are criticizing Ellul.
The Amish reject modernity but when their children come of age they get to decide through 'Rumschpringe' if they want to join the community or get access to all of modernity has to offer. Also the Amish are not hunter-gatherers so there is that.
I'm not here to accuse you of being ignorant but I could claim that there is not enough imagination what it could mean to resist industrialized society. The ideas resisting it has continued with people of like Paul Kingsnorth. But because someone decided to mail out bombs you are rejecting the ideas around resisting "the machine" even if there are people that have ideas that predate and supersede it without violence.
The new top-level post has better in-depth discussion on the relative merits of TK vs Ellul and their ideas, so I'll leave further discussion of that point there.
I do think a necessary point here is that TK explicitly advocated for the violent overthrow of technological society worldwide. I'm not an expert on Ellul, I've only skimmed his Wikipedia article, but he doesn't seem to go that way. He makes some of the same arguments, but he seems to push for broader awareness and acceptance of his viewpoint and possibly setting up some independent communities that implement them as much as possible on a voluntary basis. I think that's a critical distinction, and a good reason why Ellul deserves tolerant consideration and discussion while TK deserves much harsher criticism.
I'm perfectly fine with the Amish and other such societies because 1. They walk the walk, actually setting up long-lasting communities to practice their lifestyle that are about as non-dependent on mainstream society as you can reasonably be while living in a first-world industrialized nation, and 2. They don't seek to impose anything on anyone - they just want to live their way, and don't care at all how anybody outside their community lives. Rumspringa is proof that even their own children are encouraged to get a real and fair view of the world outside so that they can make a legitimate, free, and fully-informed choice on whether to stay within the community or leave it. TK did the opposite - he advocated for and actively tried to force everyone else to live in the way he thought was best while not doing so himself.
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The lie of the social contract, whig history, and man's capability to set himself aside from the constraints of nature -- he seems (to me) to be saying reasonably clearly.
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An important missing element in your description is that you need to be doing things that are hard but that you can actually succeed in. The "work hard" --> "achieve something you couldn't have without the hard work" cycle is important. Whether it's for literal basic survival or for some "surrogate" activity as he calls them seems a little bit less important to me.
A lot of the ennui plaguing people in modern society seems like it stems from everything either being trivially easy to get or completely unobtainable regardless of effort, so there's not much left that can fit into the power process. Technology has moved a lot of the "you have to work hard for it" things like food and shelter into the "trivially easy" category. We're left with "become a celebrity," "become a billionaire," etc., which require a ton of luck and grinding will only get you so far.
Interesting thesis. Perhaps this is part of why some people find things like kids, homeownership, getting degrees, getting promoted at work as meaningful, since those all fit in between "easy" and "almost impossible".
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Yeah, you can nod along with TK on the alienation of modernity until he arrives at mass murder. Starvation is certainly one way to bring focus to life!
Estimates of the maximum extent of hunter gatherer populations are 1-20 million people total. Even if everyone were down with starving/freezing/baking to death 99.999% of the population in one year, we would have a prisoners dilemma in getting there. Any hunter gatherer society would be trivially conquered/genocided/colonized by any defecting society, of which there would surely be one because I’ll be in it.
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Ted Kaczynski always struck me as the smart guy who was pissed off that the world wasn't being run in a way he approved of. He also struck me someone who suffered from profound social isolation, no matter where he was. I remember an interview with his brother David describing a failed hiking trip where they tried to live off the land. They couldn't forage enough food and David turned to some store-bought granola bars he'd brought. Ted had a massive temper tantrum about it which caused David to pack up and head back to the trail head. It's not like David was some citified yuppie either, he spent some time living off the grid in the Texas desert. He just wasn't the same as Ted and Ted was angry about it.
I also really don't think we can discount the effect his mental illness had on him. Without it he probably would have ended up just another North Pond Hermit.
One can blame this on the MK-ultra study or autism, but what Ted had is very simple: he's a uniquely principled man.
Reasoning oneself into violence from rational application of first principles isn't uncommon. And such a strong conviction is not only useful, I think it's admirable, and admired. Richard Stallman has a similar virtue if for principles that did not require violence.
Discounting Ted as mentally ill is something he was extremely keen for people not to do, and I think he has a point because it's a cop out for people to refuse to contemplate the disturbing: that maybe some of the failings of our world are worth killing for and that we do not do so more out of cowardice than practicality.
I simply believe it is in my interest to smear, discount and erase the ideas of those who try to spread them through terrorism. What they have to say is not valuable enough to warrant even one death.
Then you must erase all of humanity's patrimony. For it all has been spread at the point of the sword.
This is a childish notion. All ideas, including the want to prevent terrorism, require death. You just like your tribute to be paid behind your back.
It would take a rather broad standard of "requiring death" to encompass all ideas. I've heard all that jazz before. "If you don't take the jab they will Literally Kill You [if you care to escalate to that point]!".
What did TK offer in exchange for his oh so principled will to murder? Security? Prosperity? Stability? Justice? No, he killed for publicity to try and get people to read words he wasn't the first or the last to write, and those other ideologues have a clear advantage of not being terrorists.
Conviction is a dime a dozen. I could find thousands of convicted schizos on the Internet. Men with unshakable beliefs who are sadly only correct twice a day.
Making it subjective won't let you easily escape from this. All morality up and including some devotion to truth itself requires violence to be enacted in the world. Yes, all laws are mandates to kill and that's not speaking broadly, it's just how it is.
The State is by nature a terrorist organization insofar as terrorism is political violence. It exists for that sole purpose. And saying unsanctioned political violence is evil is only saying that one prefers an instantiated order over another one. Which is fine, but rests solely on moral evaluation and no other criteria.
You've decided this isn't an advantage and are just begging the question. It is an advantage. Ellul was never as popular as Ted.
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Crazy person claims he's totally sane
, everyone else is nuts. Film at 11.I never see this kind of lionization of ISIS or the Weathermen ETA in The Motte /ETA, so you'll forgive me if I'm skeptical of the hagiography.
Edit: missing a few words
How many such people convince the jury and expert witnesses that they are?
Ted wasn't crazy. He was evil. His judgement was not impaired. He had full knowledge of the consequences of his actions and he still decided that killing was okay to achieve his political goals.
You and many others really enjoy the luxury of thinking nobody sane can just decide to start making people explode. But it is a delusion. There are endless perfectly sane justifications to kill one's fellow man and the reason it doesn't happen all the time is the one guy with the biggest stick renting it for money and nothing else.
I have a simple explanation for this and it's that you haven't looked for it. I've seen plenty of it. For those groups and all others. For the IRA, for the Confederacy, for Hezbollah, for Zapatistas, for CJNG, for all manners of people with guns and an idea.
And I must say I appreciate the core of every single instance of it. People of great evil still possess this one rare and venerable virtue: they are great.
Romanticizing armed revolt and crime is a universal cultural touchstone. And wherever you live you are most likely heir to such a hagiography, for the people who founded your own society and its righteous promise of peace and order had to be knaves of this same kind to make it happen.
His actions didn't achieve his political goals. Considering the backlash too, the net consequences of his actions might have been a negative for his political goals.
Undertaking actions contrary to your goals (even for sociopaths whose goals don't include "fewer bombing victims") is only rational if there was reason to expect the exact opposite result instead and failure is just bad luck. And yet "murdering people is bad PR" should have been an easily foreseen consequence; it was not an unpredictable outcome.
I don't really understand how you can say that. He did get his demands met, his manifesto published, his ideas heard by the world and ultimately created a huge cult following. He went from being a crank in the woods to one of the most influential philosophers of his decade. One serious people find relevant and reference to this day and not merely to denounce him. Is that not political success?
It may be unfortunate, but killing people was a very successful way of promoting his ideas, and Ellul's brand of techno-skepticism is now infinitely more popular because of his actions that it would have been without. However many caveats people put in front of saying it, I've yet to meet someone who utterly denies the man had a point and his descriptive analysis was devoid of merit. And none of those people would have heard of him if he didn't use violence.
You may have had a point if we were talking about Timothy McVeigh, who was apparently truly surprised his revenge didn't trigger a second american revolutionary war, but I do not think for a second Ted ever thought his crusade would end in his life, by his hand. It was always about seeding his ideas. Which despite the ignominious cost, was an indeniable success.
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Fair, amended.
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Being "uniquely principled" is a similar mode of failure to many rationalists: reasoning from first principles and not sanity-checking your conclusions.
You call it failure. I call it atypical but necessary.
Sometimes it is the entire world that is insane and must be reminded of it. Which is why we need people of such unyielding moral character, if in small numbers.
This is a slogan. It isn't actually true.
I disagree to such a powerful degree that it is hard to put into words.
All I can do is gesture at the whole of Abrahamic civilization and it's namesake.
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Didn’t he literally move to a shack in the woods?
He did, and then they built roads around the place he'd retired to and destroyed it, which he claims ultimately gave him the resolve to start his bombing campaign.
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The line about living with the Amish misses the depth of the technology stack. Every-one, including the Amish, benefit from access to high carbon steels. All the chisels and saws that carpenters use in a low-tech wooden life-style depend on heat treated steels that retain their cutting edge. Making the chisels and saws depends on hardened high carbon steel being harder than normalised high carbon steel, sufficiently harder that you can use files and hacksaws to form the blanks for your chisels and saws before you harden them in their turn with more heat treatment. It is all very delicate, depending on chemistry and metallurgy to get quench hardening to work right ("Silver steel" has added chromium to improve through hardening. Metallurgists need microscopes to see what is happening with the grains in the steel). (Things have moved on. Now-a-days you heat treat steel parts before cutting them to shape using carbide tooling,...)
I wondered if the Amish use cement. Maybe just lime mortar. It is a tough question. Yes, and attention to price and efficiency seduces you, so that you end up tied to industrial cement making. No, and your building techniques are in some ways pre-Roman; who wants to go back that far?
We are mostly ignorant of the long history of our technology stack and use phrases such as "back to nature" in ways that do no withstand scrutiny
You're mostly right. My statement wasn't meant to say "TK should go live with the Amish because they're exactly like what he proposes" - I don't think they are either. What I think is more like, the Amish are 70%-ish of the way from mainstream society to what TK says he wants, but they actually exist now, are accessible, and decent odds you could find an Amish church that would let you live with them for a while. Living with them would let him learn a lot about what it's actually like to live in such a society, how to live decently well with minimal contact with the industrial world, and get an idea about what it would be like to go further.
You are spot on and thinking about it I realise that I've seen TK's the lack of incrementalism before.
I was listening to radio broadcast about the Utopia Experiment. Dylan Evans sees total collapse coming and sets up his simple living experiment to try to get ahead of it. But quite early on, his attempts to make soap come unstuck because he has already given up the internet, so he cannot watch the "How to make soap" videos on You Tube. That is when I twigged that the story was going to turn into a mental health crisis. Going all in, rather than plotting a path and taking reasonable sized steps is usually a sign of mental illness. And so it was in Dylan Evans' case.
Reminiscent of Christopher McCandless too.
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I think he’s sort of half right. I think what seems to work well for most people is a sense of accomplishment especially in doing something physical. I don’t see that it means literally going out and living in the woods. But the kinds of things that seem to be associated with well-being — physical activity, a sense of affiliation with other people, and a job in which they get a sense that their work matters — are somewhat similar to what TK is suggesting. Even time in nature is good for mental health. But even going that far, I don’t see it as following that we should go live in the woods and farm with a sharpened sticks. You can have those things without going that far. You can take up sports especially team sports. You can go hiking or fishing or rock climbing. You can found or join a group of people to do good in the world.
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He did, but it's not clear to what extent he was actually living the kind of life he advertised, which would include getting all of his own food, water, and other supplies from nature by himself and never from stores or other things sourced from the "industrial economy". At the very least, the materials required for the bombing campaign most likely couldn't have been built without outside supplies. I rather doubt he did considering how little knowledge of living off the land he started with and how much time he must have devoted to the bombing campaign.
There's also the point of safety nets. In TK's advocated world, if you fail to hunt and gather or farm enough food, then you starve and possibly die, tough shit. Living in a shack in the woods in the United States, even if you mostly get your own food, you still have the option of going to a store if you fall short, or to a hospital if you get injured or sick. Maybe he would voluntarily refrain from those options, but I don't think we know.
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Yes, but that would only let him know how he enjoyed the survival lifestyle, not how everyone else would respond.
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Marx spoke of alienation (Entfremdung), proletariat losing its will to live; it exerting significant effort during the course of performing its job. Renumeration was for him insufficent, labouring masses still required an intermediary between it and his goals. This lack of directness deforms its minds, as now it must burden itself with knowledge of temporary and society dependent constructs and interests not his own, in order to achieve his true desires. As efficiency demands greater and greater specialization, its minds grow distant from eachother and fill up with ever minuter tricks to gain producitivity.
Marx also took the same research approach as Kaczynski, which was to sit in a room and imagine how other people felt. The fact that two basement dwellers came up with the same idea is not an endorsement of that idea.
I have a great deal of disdain for both sets of ideas, so I am perhaps not being maximally charitable. However, there are certain lines of argumentation where the only real counter to the ideas is to say "have you bothered asking anyone else?" This feels like a consistent problem among certain types of thinkers. They go off into isolation and use their own brain as a model for how everyone else might think and feel, and to a large extent they really nail how they themselves feel, and describe it in such a logical way that other people can imitate that line of reasoning and come to feel the same way.
They have not come upon a universal way of thinking about their topic, but they and their followers believe it to be universal. When they start trying to implement it and get predictable pushback they come up with all sorts of pet theories about how those who disagree with them have somehow been subverted by evil elements. These ideas can be very effective mind viruses. But their implementation in the real world will always leave a great deal to be desired, because there was never any strong connection between the author and the real world.
Should be noted that much of Marx-ISM was the handiwork of Friedrich Engels, who based his theories on his experiences of working-class life in Manchester, which he both observed personally to a great degree and also encountered through his working-class paramour Mary Burns.
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I just randomly read TK’s manifesto this week and I thought of the alienation of labor. They both struck a chord with me that they are obviously correct about a problem in a society.
I also think they are wrong about the solution. That is, they’ve done half the work.
I'm not entirely convinced they are even correct about the problem.
We don't know for certain that people in hunter-gatherer societies also don't feel some sort of alienation with the labor they do. Our translations of current hunter-gatherer societies aren't great, we aren't even sure if they can count most of the time. And by definition they usually don't write anything down.
It reminds me more of the common complaint by marxists that the workers are forced to either work or starve. As if this is somehow a valid criticism of capitalism. Its a criticism of life and the universe in general. Sorry we can't just subsist on mana falling from heaven.
In my model there are more steps, and they've barely done any of the work:
IIRC when they tried explaining depression to hunter-gatherers, the hunter-gatherers straight-up thought the idea was absurd.
I don't think all the West's problems come from this, but this is very definitely a big part of depression.
Most people have that reaction to depression. Unless they themselves are depressed. And even then if you are the one weird person with an affliction you are better off hiding it.
Scott has an article (book review?) about mental illness and social contagion. He talks about the inuit a hunter gatherer society. I didn't get the sense you could ever get an inuit to admit to depression, they'd basically be signing up for a lifetime of being made fun of for it.
Well, I know I managed to somehow generate the same hypothesis as Kaczynski despite never actually getting around to reading his manifesto. Don't remember the details of how I came to the conclusion, though.
(Of course, physical activity and social contact per se are also relevant.)
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I know he reviewed Crazy Like Us, but the Inuit weren't mentioned.
Found it: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-arctic-hysterias
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Modern Marxists, but not historic ones. Lenin and Stalin were, for a couple of atheists, rather fond of "He who does not work, neither shall he eat."
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