This is a book I've found circa 2019 on the flea market of Inezggan (ⵉⵏⵣⴳⴳⴰⵏ) in Morocco, I finished reading it a couple months ago. It's a French translation if an American English book called "Technological man: the myth and the reality", by Victor C. Ferkiss.
This book came out in 1969, and it basically talked about everything our modern society had, has, is, and will have & be! I've never seen such ideation accuracy & delivery finesse from a book like I did with this one. It is really rare when I agree or get convinced by 90%+ of a book’s content, which is always a humbling experience that I get a kick of when it happens. This book made me for real question a lot of things, their usage, and how we can idolize them or put them on a pedestal unconsciously or without a distinction between the tools & the goals. Some of these things are Technology, and what we call these days science[1]!
But I guess it's no wonder that, just the French translation of one of his books was enough to convince me with many things, let alone the original version. Because apparently, and according to his obituary, he was also an inspiration to The Unabomber:
https://www.vesseyfuneralservice.com/obituary/Victor-Ferkiss
Which again, doesn’t surprise me at all. Unfortunately, I can't find the link to the FBI's claim that his obituary mentioned.
I've never
read The Unabomber's Manifesto (firstly
published by the Washington Post as
it was sent to them, but can now be found in many places of the internet, and for free [2]),
nor do I know if I'll get convinced by Ted Kaczynski’s views like a lot of people
claim to have been (but I certainly am against his radical actions), but for the man who inspired him did for sure convinced me that our society needs to balance itself.
His obituary was in 2020!!! Meaning that this man was
still alive when I acquired his book’s translation! Which is something I didn’t
expect, because in my mind no Man could have written what he wrote, at that
time frame if it wasn’t already a grown old man back then to get the semantics
& idiomatics of Tech’s issues. But I was wrong, if you read this guy’s obituary,
this dude was basically a polymath no one knew about!
Moreover, I didn’t search his
name right away when I started reading the book[3], I
figured I probably should wait until I finish it, so I can get a kick out of
his one-on-one interviews or conferences; it didn’t even cross my mind back
then that this dude would virtually be unknown and inexistent in the digital
world (aside from some displays of his books), but it’s –unfortunately (?)- the
case in a time where his ideas are needed more.
And speaking of his absence in the digital world, his obituary claims that he:
"taught generations of ambassadors, scholars, political scientists, futurists, and even a U.S. President".
So it seems that after all he did have a presence, a physical one, a heavy one. Thus making him someone that's known & sought after, but only amongst those important & in power. His influence is evident by the text written in Google Books under one of his books called "Communism Today: Belief and Practice":
"This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface.
We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant".
I really wish I could read the original version of the book, The Technological Man. Unfortunately, I just can't buy the copy I've found on the internet because of the high shipping fees to Morocco; so if anyone buys this book somewhere, please scan it for us, we need this more than any time before, I also hope video essays will be done about both the author and the book, because both deserve at least some recognition.
One more thing, I suspect that what led Sean Fleming in his research paper into concluding that, Ted Kaczynski's views came from many sources (Jacques Ellul, Desmond Morris, and Martin Seligman), is him actually being inspired by Victor C. Ferkiss. Because at least in Victor's book "The Technological Man", a lot of its parts weren't original ideas as much as they were synthetizations of past works. Unfortunately, my book translation has no bibliography for me to verify this claim.
UNDER ARE SOME OTHER LINKS ABOUT HIM THAT I'VE FOUND:
He
has a two lines Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Ferkiss#cite_ref-5
Which has these links:
https://www.nationalbook.org/people/victor-c-ferkiss/
https://usobit.com/obituaries-2020/09/dr-victor-ferkiss-august-02-1925-august-25-2020/
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/coloradoan/name/victor-ferkiss-obituary?pid=196698200
I tried Duckduckgo,
and apparently he is a member of the democratic party..
https://voterrecords.com/voter/482844/victor-ferkiss
… has a paper:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/106591296101400309
... and has one more bio
in a website:
https://prabook.com/web/victor_christopher.ferkiss/1697618
[1] Because what we call today science isn't the idealistic Science with a capital S (meaning the scientific method), but rather its images, with each one of them being driven by a purpose aside from that of pure curiosity & unselectivness when doing Science. In our present day, the discoveries & inventions that came
from it are being mainly driven by profit. We should always remember that science &
universities predates Capitalism & Marxism.
http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/ethics/Unabomber.pdf
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fc-industrial-society-and-its-future
[3] Which was in 2019, and
because I’m slow lazy lousy reader, I would sometimes spend a whole day on one
or two pages reading them and rereading them just to absorb it intuitively,
because this man’s book was basically like
a bible, you could write whole new books on each chapter or section of his
book.
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