All that done, no group of citizens driven to resist centralized technocratic totalitarianism would have the resource base to be successful. Abbey's pessimism in Desert Solitaire with regard to the survivability of an autonomous life world in enclaves of wilderness appears warranted given the widespread evidence from numerous scientific and non-scientific sources. It has become increasingly apparent that human kind has not as yet found a means by which to use its science and technology discriminately. Rather, the opposite appears to be true. Scientific discovery and technological application are driven by a system or organization and application which finds its values grounded in an absolute anthropocentric utilitarianism.
Technocratic ideology appears deterministic.
If indeed Abbey does take all of this as a given, one would expect to find him skeptical of any eighteenth century Kantian claim of moral autonomy. The Monkey Wrench Gang which centers on the defense of nature through active resistance as its plot device. For Abbey human beings are both a natural phenomena like rain or hydrogen, as well as willful beings capable of arriving at independent consciousness and moral acts within the social life world. Even in a post-Nietzscheian world, it is upon this acknowledgment that the major premises or moral philosophy still rest and encourages hopefulness, ironically, or course, within the tradition or the Enlightenment. It is for this reason that The Monkey Wrench Gang is comedic.