You may wonder why I’m bothering with this, given that the Unabomber was caught and put away ten years ago. Evidence from Ted Kaczynski’s trial has come out, including pictures of the Montana cabin where he lived and some of the evidence from the many bombings he perpetrated. A San Francisco TV station has the pictures and stories.
Since he was identified and arrested, and as more details about Ted Kaczynski came out, I became interested in his case. For one, he’s a mathematician. Kaczynski has an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Harvard (after being admitted at 15), a Ph.D. in mathematics from Michigan, and he was an instructor at UC-Berkeley. Two of the people he injured with bombs were UC-Berkeley faculty.
A few years after he was arrested, another Harvard grad, Alston Chase, wrote this article for the Atlantic Monthly. I used to get the Atlantic (and maybe I need to start again), and I remember reading this article when it ran in the magazine.
Kaczynski ran into Prof. Henry Murray at Harvard — he of the LSD experiments — and participated in some psychological experiments based on work Murray did with the OSS, the WWII precursor to the CIA. There is no evidence that Kaczynski was given LSD at any time, but some of the experiments were pretty heavy and would probably have had a profound effect on someone who was probably very immature at the time. You can read about the experiments in the article; I’m sure that most of them as they were executed then would fly today.
The over-riding theme of Kaczynski’s young life, including his time at Harvard, was, according to Chase:
According to Perry (Wm. G. Perry Jr., director of the university’s Bureau of Study Counsel), intellectual development for Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates typically encompassed a progression from a simplistic, “dualistic” view of reality to an increasingly relativistic and “contingent” once. Entering freshmen tend to favor simple over complex solution and to divide the world into truth and falsehood, good and bad, friend and foe. Yet in most of the college course, especially in the social sciences and the humanities, they are taught that truth is relative. Most accept this, but a number cannot. They react against relativism by clinging more fiercely to an absolute view of the world. To some of these students, in Perry’s words, “science and mathematics still seem to offer hope.”
Nevertheless, Perry wrote, “regression into dualism” is not a happy development, for it “calls for any enemy.” Dualists in a relativistic environment then to see themselves as surrounded; they become increasingly lonely and alienated. This attitude “requires an equally absolutistic rejection of any `establishment” and “can call forth in its defenses hate, projection and denial of all distinctions but one,” Perry wrote. “The tendency…is toward paranoia.”
As is evident in his writings Kaczynski rejected the complexity and relativism he found in the humanities and the social sciences. He embraced both the dualistic cognitive style of mathematics and Gen Ed’s anti-technology message. And perhaps most important, he absorbed the message of positivism, which demanded value-neutral reasoning and preached that (as Kaczynski would later express it in his journal) “there is no logical justification for morality.”
And:
The Murray experiment may not have been as intensely traumatic as these other experiments. And its ethics were definitely acceptable in their day. But the ethics of the day were wrong. And they framed Kaczynski’s first encounter with a reckless scientific value system that elevated the pursuit of scientific truth above human rights.
When, soon after, Kaczynski began to worry about the possibility of mind control, he was not giving vent to paranoid delusions. In view of Murray’s experiments, he was not only rational but right. The university and the psychiatric establishment had been willing accomplices in n experiment that had treated human beings as unwitting guinea pigs, and had treated them brutally. Here is a powerful logical foundation for Kaczynski’s latterly expressed conviction that academics, in particular scientists, were thoroughly compromised servants of “the system,” employed in the development of techniques for the behavioral control of populations.
These beliefs are evident in his “Manifesto”, which ran in the New York Times:
1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.
Read both the article and Kaczynski’s “manifesto”. Both of them are long, I know, but worth your time. That should be enough to convince you that he wasn’t “crazy”. Anti-social? Sure. Nihilist? Yep. Amoral? Well — he killed people, didn’t he? Kaczynski wasn’t crazy.
None of this is to say that I endorse Kaczynski’s beliefs — in fact, I reject utterly his notion that technology and freedom are incompatible. He says technology must necessarily restrict freedom. I say that technology is a tool and can be used to enable or restrict freedom depending on the ethics and morals of the wielder of that technology. Read some of his other statements, however, and see if some of them aren’t in line with those of someone you may know or care about.
On the psychology of leftism:
12. Those who are most sensitive about “politically incorrect” terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any “oppressed” group but come from privileged strata of society. Political correctness has its stronghold among university professors, who have secure employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual, white males from middle-class families.
And:
15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
On conservatives:
50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.
On school:
115. The system HAS TO force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior. For example, the system needs scientists, mathematicians and engineers. It can’t function without them. So heavy pressure is put on children to excel in these fields. [As was done to Kaczynski at a very young age. -ed] It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the real world. Among primitive peoples the things that children are trained to do are in natural harmony with natural human impulses. Among the American Indians, for example, boys were trained in active outdoor pursuits — just the sort of things that boys like. But in our society children are pushed into studying technical subjects, which most do grudgingly.
None of that is far afield from what you have heard coming from reasonable people, right? Perhaps you even share some of these beliefs. I do.
As Chase notes, that’s what makes Kaczynski truly frightening. Ted Kaczynski was led by his beliefs — many of which were reasonable and are shared by you, me, and millions of Americans — to kill and maim. That’s why we’re so ready to accept a diagnosis of mental illness. We need to accept it. Because, if he isn’t mentally ill — what does that make us?
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