“His ideas have become more prophetic as time has gone on” noted Tony Stone, director of the film Ted K (2021), which has just been released on streaming services.
The film depicts the real-life crimes of Ted Kaczynski, more commonly known as The Unabomber, as he planned and executed his bombing campaign, an orgy of violence which left three dead and twenty-three injured.
Perceptions of Kaczynski have become more blurred in recent years as a generation of young people, born after Kaczynski’s tyrannical campaign in the 1990s, have become fascinated and enthralled by his writings.
Whole online subcultures have sprung up around the “anti-civilisation” or “anti-civ” movement, where acolytes praise and dissect Kaczynski’s infamous manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future as well as his prison writings Anti-Tech Revolution and Technological Slavery.
In a time of uncertainty, alienation and environmental decimation, Kaczynski’s writings on the unavoidably destructive effects of industrialisation resonate more so now than they did during his stint as a domestic terrorist, enthralling both left-wing anarchists and alt-right activists alike.
The release of Ted K is timely, with Kaczynski recently announcing that he has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, giving him a year or possibly even mere months to live.
The Unabomber story, as a simple true crime tale, goes like this.
Kaczynski was born in 1942. An incredibly academically gifted adolescent he entered university at just 15 years old and earned a doctorate in mathematics. Kaczynski took up an academic post at the University of California-Berkeley in 1967, only to abruptly leave in 1969 to live in a tiny, isolated shack in rural Montana.
Over a period of 17 years, driven by his view that our industrial-technological society renders us “mere cogs in a social machine”, Kaczynski sent mail bombs to various targets across the United States maiming several people and killing three. Whilst still at large, he convinced the New York Times, The Washington Post and (infamously) Penthouse to publish his raving manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, to halt the violence. Kaczynski was eventually arrested in 1996 after being dobbed in by his younger brother.
The problem with the standard true crime narrative of the Unabomber, is that it privileges Kaczynski, the murderer, over Kaczynski, the thinker – struggling to explain why such a madman would gather a following.
To understand why the Unabomber fascinates, requires an analysis of his critique of our industrialised and technologically advanced society.
A key influence on Kaczynski’s thinking are the writings of French philosopher and Christian anarchist Jacques Ellul, in particular his text The Technological Society.
In it Ellul criticised what he calls “technique” or the proliferation of rationally ordered methods for making human activity more efficient:
Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence.
Technique, which includes but is not limited to technology, radically reshapes man’s relationship to himself and his environment – throwing off his bearings in unpredictable ways:
The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.
Once a new method has entered the social sphere, humans are powerless to control their enslavement to its goals of efficiency. “It is easy to boast of victory over ancient oppression” writes Ellul, “but what if victory has been gained at the price of an even greater subjection to the forces of the artificial necessity of the technical society which has come to dominate our lives?”.
Ellul’s influence is strongly evident in Kaczynski’s manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, which argues that human freedom has been disastrously suppressed since the Industrial Revolution and the creation of what he called “industrial-technological society”.
For Kaczynski, the historical rise of complex systems tied to technology as been a net negative for the human condition. Advances may provide longer lives and modern conveniences, but it also traps humanity into dependence within a system which causes personal and ecological misery in its quest to “innovate”:
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.
Key to Kaczynski’s thinking is the relationship between industrialisation, labour and power. Far from providing us with more freedom by releasing us from the tedious labour necessarily for survival, advancements in technology have stripped us of true personal autonomy.
Modern luxuries, for Kaczynski, have made us plump, sick and mentally disturbed. Likely inspired by Nietzsche’s “will to power”, he argued that the true spiritual harm of modernity is that it strips man of his ability to master and control his life – what he called “the power process”:
Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.
Under the current system, we work only on behalf of others whilst consuming products not of our own making. This results in “surrogate activities” or hobbies where we set up arbitrary goals for ourself to feel a sense self-mastery. But for Kaczynski, this is merely a band-aid solution, incapable of fulfilling our deep need for autonomy and independence.
Kaczynski had no faith in the radical movements of his day, with a large chunk of his manifesto spent rallying against “leftist psychology” which Kaczynski argues is driven by “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization.”.
Leftist environmental movements, argues Kaczynski, have become too preoccupied with political correctness, ressentiment and pacifism rendering them impotent at truly revolutionary social change. What’s needed are revolutionaries capable of inflicting violence at the global industrial-technological system.
It's no doubt that Kaczynski clearly articulated a harmful consequence of advanced societies. He achieved, what author Michel Houellebecq described as the key goal of great writers in identifying a social “sore spot” and following his advice to “put a finger on the wound, and press down hard”.
However, Kaczynski’s critique is hardly new.
The evils of industrial society have been documented by poets, artists and philosophers since the invention of large-scale production. In particular, the antagonism between industrialisation and the human soul was a defining theme in the French, German and English literary tradition commonly classified as “Romanticism”.
One only needs to look at the words of William Cowper in his poem The Task (1785) for a critique of the trap of efficiency: “Improvement too, the idol of the age / Is fed with many a victim”.
For the Romantic era, the growth of industry was well recognised as harmful, capable of stripping men of higher pursuits and reducing them to dispassionate goals of growth and production. As 19th century poet and philosopher Friedrich Shelegal’s noted “industry and utility are the angels of death who, with fiery swords, prevent man’s return to Paradise”.
Kaczynski’s modern appeal seems to be to convince people who otherwise wouldn’t read poetry or appreciate art, that this highly rationalised, technological driven system is hurtful even for men of highly analytical and macho dispositions.
However, this is also where Kaczynski’s failings both as a thinker and as a man shine through.
Ted K doesn’t shy away from depicting Kaczynski as an incredibly socially inept individual whose irritable temperament and pathological introversion rendered him utterly unlovable.
Kaczynski’s writings demonstrate a deeply misogynistic man, stemming all the way back to his journals in college where he complained about women denying him sex. Although he has never addressed it directly, by many accounts Kaczynski appears to be a lifelong involuntary celibate who, given his prison status and terminal illness, will die a virgin.
Reducing Kaczynski’s philosophy to sexual failure would be overly simplistic, but it’s not an irrelevant factor in his decline into arbitrary violence as a solution to social harm.
For the Romantics: love, beauty and sexual passion were the remedy for a world plagued by utility, production and over-rationalisation. This doesn’t necessarily need to come from sex, but it does require a degree of emotional maturity and sensitivity that Kaczynski clearly lacked.
Whilst Kaczynski surrounded himself in wilderness, it’s not clear that he ever truly appreciated the sublime in nature. When discussing nature, Kaczynski seems to use it as a prop to demonstrate his self-sufficiency and rugged individualism:
The positive ideal that we propose is Nature. That is, WILD nature: those aspects of the functioning of the Earth and its living things that are independent of human management and free of human interference and control. And with wild nature we include human nature, by which we mean those aspects of the functioning of the human individual that are not subject to regulation by organized society but are products of chance, or free will, or God (depending on your religious or philosophical opinions).
Kaczynski, despite his anti-tech sentiments, appears to have a robotic mind – capable only of calculating the costs/benefits of industrialisation whilst incapable of truly experiencing the marvellous and sacred.
This may explain why Kaczynski’s violence was so arbitrary and vicious, having more in common with a school shooter than a political subversive.
Despite endorsing “revolutionary integrity” in Anti-Tech Revolution, Kaczynski’s bombing campaign was mostly pointless murder and vandalism. Many of his targets had only vague connections to the industrial society he so loathed.
Kaczynski sent bombs to small-scale computer store owners (one of whom he killed) and in one instance callously risked the lives of innocent civilians by placing a bomb in the cargo hold of a Boeing 727 flying from Chicago to Washington DC.
There was no point to this violence, just the empty aggression of a man vomiting his misery and despair on others he deemed lesser than himself.
It’s no wonder that his one victory, having his Manifesto published, didn’t spark the mass movement he expected.
The popular reactions at the time of publication were that it was “bizarre” and “incomprehensible” writing – the scrawlings of a mental patient. Whilst this judgement may be re-evaluated by sympathetic readers today, it doesn’t stop the truth that there is no such thing as a socially incompetent revolutionary.
Kaczynski will die in prison, as he rightly should, and the globally destructive industrial system he so loathed will continue unfazed by his crimes, or his ideas.
His writings on the harms of industrialisation and technology may be accurate, but they lack any appreciate for the human capacity to build community or to foster a movement built around sensuality and the sublime.
Because of this, Kaczynski’s ideology will only truly resonate with a small niche group of loners, incapable of building the structures or any kind of movement for meaningful social change.
That may be the real lesson of Kaczynski’s story, one that is hardly worth the label ‘legacy’: that the current industrial system will never buckle to the ravings of a single, insular man.
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