Ted Kaczynksi is usually classified as one of America’s most notorious serial killers – yet unlike other infamous psychopaths he was also a brilliant mathematician, a real-life survivalist, and an original thinker about human technology and its threat to humanity and the planet. Now he’s gone, it’s worth reconsidering his philosophical legacy, because much of it is uncannily prescient in a “deep ecology” way.
As a teenager Kaczynski was a shy, gauche schoolboy with a loathing for school – where he was regularly bullied – and a love of maths and science. In fifth grade he sat an IQ test and scored 167. Such an outlier high intelligence would prove more of a curse than a blessing, making it harder than ever for him to fit in.
He cruised into Harvard at the age of sixteen but remained isolated. At seventeen, he had what he called “the worst experience of my life.” To earn a few extra dollars he volunteered for some psychological testing, overseen by Professor Henry Murray, and behind him, the US Government’s Office of Strategic Studies. Subjects were asked to write down their personal philosophy and life aims, which would then be discussed. This was a lie. In practice, their writings were read aloud and savagely ridiculed for hours on end. Such ruthless belittlement was filmed and later played back to the subject to torment them further. Other details remain shadowy, but Kaczynski was also fitted with electrodes, may have been constrained in a device like an electric chair, and drugged with LSD. The whole ordeal was described by Murray himself, perhaps with a note of professional pride, as “vehement, sweeping and personally abusive.” Yet Kaczynski continued in these tests for three years.
He later completed his maths PhD – it was said only about ten people in the US could even understand it – and worked in academia for the bare minimum of time, less than two years, before abruptly quitting in 1969. He lived with his parents for two more years before finally realising his misanthrope’s dream: moving into the 10ft x 12ft cabin he’d built himself in a remote corner of Montana, with two chairs, a bed, no running water and no electricity.
His survival there, growing vegetables and shooting rabbits, is testament to his extreme toughness. As well as providing for himself, he wrote compulsively. But of course, no one paid any attention. So he reached a quintessentially psychopathic conclusion: if he started killing people in terrorist style, with letter bombs, he could draw public attention to his writings. It was the start of his twenty-year career of terror as The Unabomber.
Kaczynski later admitted that he also wanted revenge on the kind of people he felt had ruined his life, or were ruining the world around him: academic scientists, computer shop owners, lumber companies… It was quite a broad spectrum. He killed three, injured a further 23, nearly succeeded in blowing up an aeroplane with more than 70 passengers on board, and, after his arrest in 1996, expressed not a shred of remorse.
He moved into a 10ft x 12ft cabin he’d built himself in a remote corner of Montana, with two chairs, a bed, no running water and no electricity
It’s a chilling litany. Yet to me it doesn’t invalidate the astute and unsettling foresight of his writings about the way we live now and the potential climate catastrophe to come. Perversely, the frigid and unempathetic hyper-intelligence of this damaged outcast enabled him to see things above and beyond the chattering hubbub of his tribe. He shone a cold arc light on our world – and once you’ve seen things his way, it’s not easy to unsee them.
His fierce self-sufficiency, for instance, led to Kaczynski’s notion of what he called the Power Process, by which he meant our freedom to pursue the essentials in life: food and water, clothing and shelter for ourselves and our families. He believed this agency gave purpose to daily existence. Anyone with an allotment would agree: while it’s easier to buy fruit and veg in a store, it’s unsatisfying by comparison. Modern, technologised existence takes away that independence and excludes us from the Power Process; in some cases, we are no longer even allowed to provide or source the essentials.
An example: at the bottom of our field in Wiltshire is a small river. It’s illegal for me to take water out of it with a bucket, to water my cabbages, say, since the water legally belongs to Wessex Water, which in turn is owned by the YTL Corporation, based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Instead, I must turn on the tap, and pay Wessex Water for what comes out. This in turn obliges me to work and earn money in the wider economy.
Nor am I legally allowed to stalk around the fields with a home-made bow and arrow to hunt rabbit or pheasant for my highly nutritious and cost-free supper. It’s illegal under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. But I am allowed, encouraged, to drive to Tesco and buy whey-coloured chicken pieces, from birds raised in conditions of horrendous cruelty. This, again, requires money.
Kaczynski’s obsessive focus on tech itself offers another way of understanding a widespread, ineradicable anxiety
Once you start to see modern life in terms of the lost Power Process, you understand why Kaczinski’s thought gets its hooks into people who read his key manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future (1995), or later, more extensive editions of his work, like Technological Slavery (Fitch & Madison, 2019) and Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (Fitch & Madison, 2020). There’s far more here than the mere ramblings of a developmentally arrested and unhappy sophomore.
Instead of the Power Process, he argues, we are distracted and sedated by “surrogate activities” that include 24/7 media and entertainment, permanent internet-connectedness (euphemistically known as a “smartphone”), and our largely non-essential careers: working in imaginary money (pointless but highly lucrative), or in tech-related joke jobs like Digital Media Profile Management, all the time knowing that we are insultingly fungible at any moment, easily replaced by another employee who could do exactly what we do – or more likely, AI.
There are many ways of reading our late, sclerotic, increasingly unreal society: Jared Diamond’s Collapse remains my favourite. But Kaczynski’s obsessive focus on tech itself offers another way of understanding this widespread, ineradicable anxiety – especially among the young – that we are jittering and juddering to some kind of abrupt and unpleasant end.
His solution was simple: industrial society must be abolished immediately. This is on a par with saying Just Stop Oil. Both would lead to a total collapse of the human population, though you feel Kaczynski would have been just fine with this.
Still, if his solution is unworkable, his analysis of the problem remains needle-sharp. Technology, he warned, is a self-propagating system par excellence. We can’t turn it off, or we’ll die – and yes, we’re already at that stage. And such self-prop systems as this, which “least allow respect for the environment to interfere with their pursuit of power here and now, tend to acquire more power than those that limit their pursuit of power from concern about what will happen to our environment 50 years from now, or even ten years. Thus, through a process of natural selection, the world comes to be dominated by organisations that make maximum possible use of all available resources to augment their own power without regard to long-term consequences.”
The results are visible all around us. There are marches and protests and placards, but whose interests do they really serve? One of Kaczynski’s most startling short pieces is his update of the medieval myth of the Ship of Fools. In his version, the captain and crew of a ship are “so full of hubris and impressed with themselves” that they sail ever further north, amid dangerous icebergs and floes. The troubled passengers begin to complain – but about all the wrong things. A sailor complains about his wages. A lady passenger complains about gender inequality. A Mexican sailor complains he’s given orders in English, not Spanish. The bosun proclaims, “I have the right to suck cock without being called names for it!”
Then the cabin boy pipes up: “Ahem. You all have good reasons to complain. But it seems to me that what we really have to do is get this ship turned around and headed back south, because if we keep going north we’re sure to be wrecked sooner or later, and then your wages, your blankets, and your right to suck cocks won’t do you any good, because we’ll all drown.” But no one paid attention because he was only the cabin boy.
His solution was simple: industrial society must be abolished immediately
The story doesn’t end well. And there’s surely a joke here: a warning from a cabin boy, written by a man who lived in a cabin. And died this month of suicide, we are told, in a prison hospital in North Carolina.
Professor Henry Murray, incidentally, died peacefully at home in Cambridge, Mass., at the age of 95. In life he was made an emeritus professor, given the Gold Medal Award for lifetime achievement from the American Psychological Foundation, and the Legion of Merit from the US Army Medical Corps. Unlike Kaczynski, Murray was a most obedient servant of the System.
Christopher Hart is an English novelist, journalist and critic
