The Unabomber's Ideas Aren't So Marginal Now --- While Theodore Kaczynski spent the last three decades of his life in prison, many of the radical views he outlined in a published manifesto were gaining support on the right and the left.

Before the British screwed everything up, our technologies were not so ruinous.   

"On Sept. 19, 1995, readers of the Washington Post opened their newspapers to find a special section entirely devoted to a single, 35,000-word essay. Still more unusual was the way the article had found its way into print. America's most wanted terrorist, an anonymous individual then known only as the Unabomber, had offered to stop mailing bombs if the paper published his manifesto, "Industrial Society and Its Future." At the urging of the FBI, the Post agreed, with the New York Times sharing the cost of printing.

As it turned out, the publication didn't just mark the end of the Unabomber's campaign of terror, which had killed three people and wounded more than 20 over the previous 17 years. It also led directly to the arrest and conviction of Theodore Kaczynski, a math professor turned hermit, whose brother recognized the manifesto as his work. Kaczynski was sent to prison, where he died this past week at the age of 81.

At the time, the manifesto set off a debate about media ethics, but virtually no one expressed much interest in the ramblings of a mad bomber. Reading "Industrial Society and Its Future" today, however, what's striking isn't the weirdness of Kaczynski's ideas, but their familiarity. The obsessions that turned him into a killer have become mainstream, from hatred of what was not yet called "wokeness" to fear that artificial intelligence will render human beings obsolete. Even the format of the manifesto -- a relentless march through 232 numbered paragraphs, laying out the source of every problem in the modern world -- feels less crankish today, now that the Internet has turned tweetstorms and "rants" into familiar genres.

In his complete rejection of modern American society, Kaczynski cut across ideological lines. Some of his sentences could get applause from conservatives: "In the United States, a couple of decades ago when leftists were a minority in our universities, leftist professors were vigorous proponents of academic freedom, but today, in those of our universities where leftists have become dominant, they have shown themselves ready to take away from everyone else's academic freedom."

Kaczynski, who once taught at UC Berkeley, was especially incensed by "political correctness" in language: "'Broad' and 'chick' were merely the feminine equivalents of 'guy,' 'dude' or 'fellow,'" he writes. "The negative connotations have been attached to these terms by the activists themselves."

Other views, meanwhile, would get a warm reception in many faculty lounges. Kaczynski rails against "blather and obfuscation from the people who have power" on environmental issues, while "we keep on piling up environmental problems that our grandchildren will have to live with." The manifesto begins with a declaration that "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race," a view shared by Greta Thunberg, who has described the British as "climate villains" because the Industrial Revolution took off in 18th-century Britain.

Above all, "Industrial Society and Its Future" reflects the mind of a conspiracy theorist -- a type that has become increasingly common in American politics. Kaczynski's hate-list is long and eclectic, including feminists, scientists, corporations, the media and "big government." But like other conspiracy theorists, he sees all these agents of ruin as expressions of a single malevolent power that must be defeated at any cost, even violent revolution. For Kaczynski, that enemy isn't the 1%, the swamp, or "elites," but something even harder to stop: technological progress.

Part of his indictment of progress is that it has "inflicted severe damage on the natural world," and this is the element of Kaczynski's message that resonates with environmentalists today. "I've recently been reading the collected writings of Theodore Kaczynski. I'm worried that it may change my life," wrote the British thinker Paul Kingsnorth in an influential 2013 essay, "Dark Ecology." While rejecting the Unabomber's violence, Kingsnorth was "convinced by the case he makes," particularly the idea that modern society is incapable of reforming itself. Instead of mailing bombs, Kingsnorth calls on people of conscience to withdraw from the modern world and "build refuges" to protect themselves from its impending collapse.

In this way, radical environmentalism, which is ordinarily thought of as a leftist movement, converges with far-right groups that want to withdraw from society, such as survivalists and militias. Kaczynski himself lived "off the grid" in a primitive wooden shack in Montana, and in his manifesto he writes nostalgically about a time in American history when "A man might be born and raised in a log cabin, outside the reach of law and order and fed largely on wild meat."

The most important thing technology has deprived us of is this kind of autonomy -- the power to shape our lives by our own values. Kaczynski argues that human beings gain self-esteem and self-confidence by achieving their goals through personal effort. But our society is so complicated, bureaucratic and technological that it is impossible for individuals to control their destinies, or even to feed themselves. The manifesto holds this loss of autonomy responsible for just about every social and personal ailment imaginable, including "boredom, demoralization, low self-esteem, inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression, anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, spouse or child abuse, insatiable hedonism, abnormal sexual behavior, sleep disorders, eating disorders, etc."

That list is a perfect expression of Kaczynski's monomania, his belief that every problem has the same solution. But the basic idea that the only dignified life is an independent one is very much in the American grain. And his sense of crisis, his belief that technology was on the brink of making the planet unlivable, is now shared even by many of the people who create that technology.

Writing about artificial intelligence in 1995, Kaczynski warned: "If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions . . . the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines." Last month, some of the world's leading AI researchers signed a statement that said "Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority," comparing it to the danger of nuclear war.

Theodore Kaczynski became the Unabomber because he believed that only spectacular violence could gain a hearing for his ideas. "If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted . . . In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we've had to kill people," he wrote in the manifesto. Almost 30 years later, it turns out that all he needed to do was wait." [1]

1. REVIEW --- The Unabomber's Ideas Aren't So Marginal Now --- While Theodore Kaczynski spent the last three decades of his life in prison, many of the radical views he outlined in a published manifesto were gaining support on the right and the left. Kirsch, Adam. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 17 June 2023: C.4.