ENDNOTES

1 Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th Ed., 2003, Vol. 28, article “Technology,” p. 451.
2 Or something to that effect. This is probably from Ellul’s Autopsy of Revolution. Here, and in any letter I may write you, please bear in mind the caveat about the unreliability of memory that I mentioned in an earlier letter. Whenever I fail to cite a source, down to the page number, for any fact I state, you can assume that I’m relying for that fact on my (possibly wrong) memory of something I’ve read (possibly many years ago), unless the fact is common knowledge or can be looked up in readily available sources such as encyclopedias or standard textbooks.
3 Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, trans. by Max Eastman, 1980 ed., Vol. One, pp. xviii-xix.
4 E.g., Elizabeth Cashdan, “Hunters and Gatherers: Economic Behavior in Bands,” in S. Plattner (editor), Economic Anthropology, 1989, pp. 22-23.
5 “In every well-documented instance, cases of hardship =starvation may be traced to the intervention of modern intruders.” Carleton S. Coon, The Hunting Peoples, 1971, pp. 388-89.
6 I take this to be “common knowledge” among anthropologists. However, I have little specific information on this subject.
7 Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed., 1997, Vol. 10, article “Slave,” p. 873.
8 Ibid., Vol. 26, article “Propaganda,” pp. 175-76 (“The propagandist must realize that neither rational arguments nor catchy slogans can, by themselves, do much to influence human behavior. ”)
9 Ibid., p. 176.
10 Ibid., p. 174.
11 Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed., 2003, Vol. 16, article “Christianity,” p. 261.
12 Trotsky, op. cit., Vol. One, p. 223.
13 Ibid., p. 324. On this subject generally, see Ibid., pp. 223-331.
14 Trotsky, op. cit., Vol. One, Chapter VIII, pp. 136-152.
15 See Trotsky, op. cit., or any history of Russia during the relevant period.
16 Admittedly, one would have to stretch a point to say that (II) here is identical with the second objective for a revolutionary movement that I listed in my letter of 8/29/04: “to increase the tensions within the social order until those tensions reach the breaking point.” But one thing I’ve learned about expository writing is that too much precision is counterproductive. In order to be understood one has to simplify as much as possible, even at the cost of precision. For the purposes of my letter of 8/29/04, the point I needed to emphasize was that a revolutionary movement has to increase social tensions rather than relieving them through reform. If I had given a more detailed and precise account of the task of a revolutionary movement, as in the present letter, it would only have distracted attention from the point that I needed to make in my letter of 8/29/04. So I beg your indulgence for my failure to be perfectly consistent in this instance.
17 The suggestion that a biotechnological accident could provide a trigger for revolution is in tension with my earlier suggestion (letter of 8/29/04, page 12) that it might be desirable to slow the progress of biotechnology in order to postpone any biotechnological catastrophe. On the one hand, such a catastrophe might be so severe that afterward there would be nothing left to save; on the other hand, a lesser catastrophe might provide the occasion for revolution. It’s arguable which consideration should be given more weight. But on the whole I think it would be best to try to slow the progress of biotechnology.
18 The New Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed., 2003, Vol. 28, article “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” p. 1000.
19 Ibid., Vol. 26, article “Propaganda,” p. 176 (“the most effective media as a rule… are not the impersonal mass media but rather those few associations or organizations reference groups with which the individual feels identified…. Quite often the ordinary man not only avoids but actively distrusts the mass media…but in the warmth of his reference group he feels at home….”).
20 Here, the usual caveat about the unreliability of memory.
21 Martin E. P. Seligman, Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death, W. H. Freeman and Company, New York, 1975, p. 55.
22 Nathan Keyfitz, reviewing Gerard Piel’s Only One World: Our Own to Make and to Keep, in Scientific American, February, 1993, p. 116.
23 See, e.g., Tacitus, Germania 46 (hunter-gatherers present in the Baltic area < 2,000 years ago); Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed., 2003, Vol. 28, article “Spain,” p. 18 (hunter-gatherers present in Spain up to 5,500 years ago).
24 “Ten thousand years ago all men were hunters, including the ancestors of everyone reading this book. The span of ten millennia encompasses about four hundred generations, too few to allow for any notable genetic changes.” Carleton S. Coon, The Hunting Peoples, 1971, p. xvii. Admittedly, it may be open to argument whether 400 generations allow for any “notable genetic changes.”
25 Robert Wright, “The Evolution of Despair,” Time magazine, August 28, 1995.
26 There is no claim here that this is an exhaustive list of the ways in which human intentions for a society can be realized on a historical scale. If you can identify any additional ways that are relevant for the purposes of the present discussion, I’ll be interested to hear of them.
27 Rafiq Zakaria, The Struggle Within Islam, Penguin Books, 1989, p. 59.
28 Encycl. Britannica, 15th ed., 2003, Vol. 27, article “Social Structure and Change,” p. 369.
29 “Each territorial clan had its own headman and council, and there was also a paramount chief for the entire tribe. The council members of each clan were elected in a meeting between the middle-aged and elderly men, and a few of the outstanding younger ones as well.” Coon, op. cit., p. 253.
30 Encycl. Britannica, 15th ed., 2003; Vol. 28, article “Ukraine,” p. 985.
31 Buccaneers elected their own captains: Encycl. Britannica, Vol. 2, article “buccaneers,” p. 592. For deposition of captains I’m relying on my memory of books read 40 years ago.
32 Encycl. Britannica, 15th ed., 2003, Vol. 19, article “Geneva,” p. 743.
33 Ibid., Vol. 20, article “Greek and Roman Civilizations,” p. 294.
34 The Russian armies played a much greater role in the defeat of Germany in World War II than the Western armies did, but the Russians received massive quantities of military aid—trucks, for example—that were produced by American industry. Moreover, British and American factories produced the thousands of bombers—not to mention bombs—that shattered German cities, though admittedly the military utility of World War ii strategic bombing is a matter of controversy. see Encycl. Britannica, 15th ed., 2003, Vol. 29, article “World Wars,” pp. 997, 999, 1019; John Keegan, The Second World War, Penguin Books, 1990, pp. 44 (photo caption), 215, 218, 219, 416, 430, 432; Freeman Dyson, “The Bitter End,” The New York Review, April 28, 2005, p. 4 (“German soldiers consistently fought better than Britons or Americans. Whenever they were fighting against equal numbers, the Germans always won….”).
35 Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right, Rutgers University Press, 1998, Chapter II. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940, Harper & Row, New York, 1963, pages 26, 27, 30 & footnote 43, 102 & footnote 22, 182-83, 221 & footnote 78, 224, 275-77, 279, 288.
36 Warren Angus Ferris, Life in the Rocky Mountains, edited by Paul C. Phillips, pp. 40-41.
Concerning Notes 36, 41, and 43: These citations are from notes that I made many years ago, at a time when I was often careless about the completeness (though not about the accuracy) of bibliographical information that I recorded. I neglected to write down the dates of publication of the books cited here. So if you should consult different editions of these books than the ones I used, you may not find the words I’ve quoted on the pages that I’ve cited.
37 Ibid., p. 289.
38 Gontran de Poncins, Kabloona, Time-Life Books, 1980, p. 78.
39 Ibid., p. 111.
40 Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Civilización y Barbarie. Regrettably, I can’t give the page number. But the quotation should be accurate, since I copied it (i.e., I copied the Spanish original of it) years ago out of a book that quoted Sarmiento. However, I neglected to record the author or the title of the latter book.
41 Osborne Russell, Journal of a Trapper, Bison Books, p. 26.
42 Colin M. Turnbull, The Forest People and Wayward Servants, passim.
43 Colin M. Turnbull, The Mountain People, p. 21.
44 Colin M. Turnbull, The Forest People, Simon & Schuster, 1962, p. 26.
45 Paul Schebesta, Die Bambuti-Pygmäen vom Ituri, Vol. I, Institut Royal Colonial Belge, 1938, p. 73. I have not had an opportunity to examine Vols. II and III of this work, which contain most of the ethnographic information.
46 Ibid., p. 205.
47 Gontran de Poncins, op. cit., pp. 212-213.
48 Ibid., p. 292.
49 Ibid., p. 273.
50 James Axtell, The Invasion Within, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 326-27.
51 Ibid. also at various other places in the same book.
52 E.g., Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac, Little, Brown and Company, 1917, Vol. II, p. 237; The Old Regime in Canada, same publisher, 1882, pp. 375-76.
53 Robert Wright, “The Evolution of Despair,” Time magazine, August 18, 1995.
54 Paul Schebesta, op. cit., p. 228.
55 Ibid., p. 213.
56 Catherine Edwards, “Look Back at Anger” (book review), Times Literary Supplement, August 23, 2002, p. 25. However, it seems to me that I recall stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses that could be understood as portraying depression.
57 Gontran de Poncins, op. cit., pp. 169-175, 237.
58 Coon, op. cit., pp. 72, 184.
59 Ibid., pp. 372-373.
60 The Denver Post, December 30, 2003, p. 5A, reporting on a paper by Daniel Hamermesh and Jungmin Lee published during December 2003 by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
61 Time magazine, June 10, 2002, p. 48.
62 U.S. News & World Report, March 6, 2000, p. 45.
63 Ibid., February 18, 2002, p. 56.
64 Elliot S. Gershon and Ronald O. Rieder, “Major Disorders of Mind and Brain,” Scientific American, September 1992, p. 129.
65 Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia, 1996, Vol. 24, article “Suicide,” p. 423.
66 Los Angeles Times, September 15, 1998, p. A1. The study was reported at about that date in the Archives of General Psychiatry, according to the L.A. Times article.
67 The New Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed., 2003, Vol. 29, article “United Kingdom,” p. 38.
68 Ibid., pp. 61-66.
69 Ibid., Vol. 27, article “Southern Africa,” section “South Africa,” p. 920.
70 Ibid., p. 925.
71 Ibid., pp. 928-929.
72 Ibid., p. 929.
73 Ibid., p. 925.
74 Newsweek, September 27, 2004, p. 36.
75 The Denver Post, October 19, 2004, p. 15A.
76 Ibid., October 18, 2004, p. 15A.
77 As of 2008.
78 Here I am not including Finland among the Scandinavian countries.
79 Encycl. Britannica, 15th ed., 2003, Vol. 24, article “Netherlands,” pp. 891-94.
80 Ibid., p. 894 (“When the crisis of the 1848 revolutions broke… a new constitution was written…”).
81 Ibid., Vol. 28, article “Sweden,” pp. 335-38.
82 Ibid., Vol. 24, article “Norway,” pp. 1092-94.
83 Ibid., Vol. 17, article “Denmark,” pp. 240-41.
84 Ibid., Vol. 28, article “Switzerland,” pp. 352-56.
85 Ibid., p. 354 (“a new constitution, modeled after that of the United States, was established in 1848…”).
86 Sometimes a country can be intentionally and calculatedly assimilated to the technoindustrial system and the culture thereof. This falls under one of the exceptions (exception iii, my letter of 10/12/04) that I noted, in which human intentions for the future of a society can be successfully realized.
87 “Antislavery groups estimated that 27 million people were enslaved at the beginning of the 21st century, more than in any previous historical period,” Encycl. Britannica, 15th ed., 2003, Vol. 27, article “Slavery,” p. 293. I assume, however, that the percentage of the world’s population that lives in slavery today is smaller than in earlier times, and that the elimination of slavery from fully modernized countries is very nearly complete.
88 “The fate of slavery in most of the world outside the British Isles depended on the British abolition movement…,” Encycl. Britannica, 15th edition, 2003, Vol. 27, article “Slavery,” p. 293.
89 Ibid., p. 299.
90 Ibid., pp. 298-99.
91 G. A. Zimmermann, Das Neunzehnte Jahrhundert, Zweite Hälfte, Zweiter Teil, Milwaukee, 1902, pp. 30-31.
92 Encycl. Britannica, 15th ed., 2003, Vol. 20, article “Greek and Roman Civilizations,” p. 277.
93 Simón Bolívar, letter to the editor of the Gaceta Real de Jamaica, September 1815; in Graciela Soriano (ed.), Simón Bolívar: Escritos políticos, Madrid, 1975, p. 86.
94 Ibid., p. 87.
95 Encycl. Britannica, 15th ed., 2003, Vol. 27, article “Slavery,” p. 288.
96 Theodore H. von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin?, J. B. Lippencott Co., New York, 1971, p. 202.
97 I don’t mean to suggest that discipline as such is necessarily bad. I suspect that any successful revolutionary movement directed against the technoindustrial system will have to be well disciplined.
98 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Antichrist, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 1990, p. 103.
99 U.S. News & World Report, May 8, 2000, pp. 47-49. National Geographic, May, 2006, pp. 127, 129.
100 Encycl. Britannica, 15th ed., 2003, Vol. 20, article “Hitler,” p. 628.
101 See, e.g., Encycl. Britannica, 15th ed., 1997, Vol. 26, article “Propaganda,” p. 175 (“The rank and file of any group, especially a big one, have been shown to be remarkably passive until aroused by quasi-parental leaders whom they admire and trust.”); Trotsky, op. cit., Vol. Two, p. vii (“The mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection….It is necessary that…new conditions and new ideas should open the prospect of a revolutionary way out.”).
102 Vegetarian Times, May, 2004, p. 13 (quoting Los Angeles Times of January 13, 2004).
103 Science News, February 1, 2003, Vol. 163, p. 72.
104 “Kids Need more Protection From chemicals,” Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1999, page number not available.
105 U.S. News & World Report, January 24, 2000, pp. 30-31.
106 Time magazine, October 18, 2004, p. 29.
107 E.g., Bill McKibben, “Acquaintance of the Earth” (book review), New York Review, May 25, 2000, p. 49. U.S. News & World Report, February 5, 2001, p. 44.
108 Time magazine, July 1, 2002, p. 57. U.S News & World Report, February 5, 2001, pp. 46, 48, 50.
109 U.S. News & World Report, February 5, 2001, pp. 44-46.
110 Time magazine, November 22, 2004, pp. 72-73.
111 Ibid., October 4, 2004, pp. 68-70.
112 U.S. News & World Report, February 5, 2001, pp. 48, 50.
113 Ibid., p. 50.
114 The Denver Post, June 16, 2004, p. 2A.
115 Ibid.
116 Christian Science Monitor, March 8, 2001, p. 20. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Ice Memory,” The New Yorker, January 7, 2002, pp. 30-37.
117 Poncins, op. cit., pp. 164-65.
118 Paul Schebesta, Die Bambuti-Pygmäen vom Ituri, II. Band, I. Teil, Institut Royal Colonial Belge, Brussels, 1941, pp. 8, 18. I received Schebesta’s Vol. II as a Christmas gift this year from my beloved lady, the schoolteacher whom I mentioned to you in an earlier letter. Two years ago I received Schebesta’s Vol. I from her as a Christmas gift.
119 Colin Turnbull, Wayward Servants, Natural History Press, 1965, pages 27, 28, 42, 178-181, 183, 187, 228, 256, 274, 294, 300; The Forest People, pages 110, 125. Nancy Bonvillain, Women and Men, Prentice-Hall, 1998, pages 20-21.
120 Obviously, there may be disagreement as to what constitutes an “acceptable” solution. I suspect that you and I may not be too far apart as to what we would consider acceptable, but I have no idea where your colleague stands in that respect.
121 Admittedly there is a gray area: Sometimes a reform is in the interest of the system only because conditions are so hard on human beings that they will rebel if there is no alleviation. E.g., the government acted to solve the labor problems of the early 20th century only after violence by workers made clear that it was in the interest of the system to solve the problems. I think there is a chapter on these labor problems in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (editors), Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives.
122 See my letter of 10/12/04; ISAIF §§44, 58, 145.
123 Mel Greaves, Cancer: The Evolutionary Legacy, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 16. Greaves actually writes, “overall age-related mortality from the major types of cancer in Western society at the end of the twentieth century was probably more than ten times that at the end of the nineteenth century.” I assume this means that cancer mortality in any given age group has increased by a factor of more than ten. For balance: “overall rates of new cancer cases and deaths from cancer in the U.S. have been declining gradually since 1991… .,” University of California, Berkeley, Wellness Letter, September 2004, p. 8.
124 From speech attributed to Gaius Memmius by Sallust, Jugurthine War, Book 31, somewhere around Chapt. 16. Roman historians commonly invented the speeches that they put into the mouths of their protagonists, but the quotation reflects Roman attitudes even if it was invented by Sallust rather than spoken by Memmius.
125 Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La vida es sueño, Jornada primera, Escena cuarta (Edilux Ediciones, Medellin, Colombia, 1989, p. 25): “hombre que está agraviado es infame…,” etc. Mark Danner, “Torture and Truth,” The New York Review, 6/10/04, p. 45.
126 Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, op. cit.; Chapter 12, by Roger Lane. The New Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed., 2003, Vol. 25, article “Police,” pp. 959-960.
127 Bill Moyers, “Welcome to Doomsday,” New York Review, 3/24/05, pp. 8, 10.
128 Some of us would add: biological engineering of other organisms (an insult to the dignity of all life).
129 National Geographic, November 2003, pp. 4-29, had a surprisingly vigorous article on surveillance technology (e.g., p. 9: “Cameras are becoming so omnipresent that all Britons should assume that their behavior outside the home is monitored.… Machines will recognize our faces and our fingerprints. They will watch out for… red-light runners and highway speeders.”). For other scary stuff on surveillance, see, e.g., Denver Post, 7/13/04, p. 2A (“Mexico has required some prosecutors to have tiny computer chips implanted in their skin as a security measure….”); Time Bonus Section, Oct. 2003, pp. A8-A16; Time, 1/12/04, “Beyond the Sixth Sense.”
130 The claim here is not that governments or corporations will directly use psychoactive medications to control people, but that people will “voluntarily” medicate themselves (e.g., for depression) or their children (e.g., for hyperactivity or attention-deficit disorder) in order to enable them to meet the system’s demands.
131 Clifford Geertz, “Very Bad News,” New York Review, 3/24/05, pp. 4-6.
132 Julio Mercader (ed.), Under the Canopy: The Archaeology of Tropical Rain Forests, Rutgers University Press, 2003, pp. 235, 238, 239, 241, 282. Carleton S. Coon, The Hunting Peoples, Little, Brown and Co., 1971, p. 6.
133 E.g., Mercader, op. cit., p. 233.
134 Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed., 2003, Vol. 14, article “Biosphere,” pp. 1190, 1202. Ibid., Vol. 19, article “Forestry and Wood Production,” p. 410.
135 E.g., Coon, op. cit., pp. 243-44.
136 Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1971, p. 273 (“The peace movement is a general social movement which has been in existence since its beginning in england during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars”).
137 J. García López, Historia de la literatura española, 5th ed., Las Americas Publishing Co., New York, 1959, p. 567.
138 Unless it is rich enough to undertake a massive, long-term propaganda campaign on a national scale—a possibility too far-fetched to be considered here.
139 See Note 121.
140 Trotsky, op. cit., Vol. One, p. 223. See my letter of 8/29/04.
141 Clifford Geertz, op. cit. (see Note 131).
142 Times Literary Supplement, 8/1/03, pp. 6-7.
143 Ibid. This danger was also discussed by Russell Ruthen in “Science and the Citizen,” Scientific American, August, 1993.
144 David Quammen, “Planet of Weeds,” Harper’s Magazine, October 1998, pp. 57-69.
145 These statements about Earth First! are based mainly on my recollection of Martha F. Lee, Earth First!: Environmental Apocalypse.
146 Colin Turnbull, The Mbuti Pygmies: Change and Adaptation, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1983, pp. 89-90, 92.
147 Ibid., p. 11.
148 Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, 1/3/05, p. 72. (reviewing Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed).
149 In terms of freedom and dignity I personally feel that the situation is already bad enough to justify revolution, but I don’t need to rely on that.
150 Denver Post, 1/25/05, p. 11A.
151 Advertisement by Honda in National Geographic, February 2005 (unnumbered page).
152 Denver Post, 2/18/05, pp. 28A-29A.
153 Chicago Daily News, November 16, 1970. I don’t have a record of the page number.
154 Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed., 2003, Vol. 16, article “Climate and Weather,” has a good section on the Greenhouse Effect, pp. 508-511.
155 Paul Schebesta, Die Bambuti-Pygmäen vom Ituri, Institut Royal Colonial Belge, Brussels, II. Band, I. Teil, 1941, p. 261.
156 See Louis Sarno, The Song from the Forest.
157 Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. 24, article “The Netherlands,” p. 891.
158 Vilhjalmur Stefansson, My Life with the Eskimo, Macmillan, 1951, p. 38.
159 Colin Turnbull, The Forest People, Simon and Schuster, 1962, pp. 92-93, 145. Wayward Servants, The Natural History Press, 1965, pp. 19, 234, 252-53, 271, 278. I have not seen the volume of Schebesta’s work that deals specifically with Mbuti religion, but in his II. Band, I. Teil, I find some incidental remarks that seem inconsistent with Turnbull’s account of Mbuti religion. The inconsistency is perhaps explained by the fact that Turnbull and Schebesta focused their main studies on different groups of Mbuti.
160 E.g., Clark Wissler, Indians of the United States, Revised Edition, Anchor Books, 1989, pp. 179-182, 304-09.
161 Bill Moyers, “Welcome to Doomsday,” New York Review, 3/24/05, pp. 8, 10.
162 William Dalrymple, “India: The War Over History,” New York Review, April 7, 2005, pp. 62-65.
163 If I remember correctly, James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, Oxford University Press, 1985, discusses the tolerant and syncretistic character of American Indian religion in the eastern U.S.
164 Fred Hoyle was quoted to this effect by Richard C. Duncan in an Internet article. The quote is probably from Hoyle’s book Of Men and Galaxies, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1964.
165 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. by Allan Bloom, Basic Books, HarperCollins, 1979, p. 47.
166 John E. Pfeiffer, The Emergence of Man, Harper & Row, 1969, p. 344. I question whether Pfeiffer is reliable, but it should be possible to check this information by consulting Pfeiffer’s sources.
167 Max Rodenbeck, “Islam Confronts its Demons,” New York Review, April 29, 2004, p. 16.