Submitted by Ishkah in Anarchism

-

Kelley and I discuss the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, and his life. We discuss how his anti-technology beliefs and extreme outlook resonate with events and radical, anti-government movements in this current day and age. And finally we explore what lessons can be learned by looking at this case in hindsight.

See the promo video, full video and transcript below. I edited the text slightly for clarity’s sake, just to remove filler words and put anything I forgot to say in.

-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fd5FR56Lc98

-

Index

  • Intro - Who Is The Unabomber?
    • Some key life moments
    • Separation From Parents As A Baby
    • Loneliness After Being Moved Forward A Year At School
    • Psych Experiments For The CIA
    • Sex Change Plans & First Desire To Kill (A Psychiatrist)
    • First Parcel Bomb
    • Plan To Kill A Date Who Broke Off Their Romance
    • Offer to stop bombing for newspapers publishing his manifesto
    • Arrest
  • Contents of the manifesto
  • Ethical justifications for guerrilla war
  • Theory vs. Action
  • Primitivists, Conspiracists & The Fascist Creep
  • Dogmatism
  • Prison Reform
  • What lessons can we learn about how to do activism better?
  • Extra Details We Didn’t Have Time To Cover
    • More Details About The First Parcel Bomb
    • Relief At Being Able To Kill People With His Bombs
    • Court
  • Further Reading

-

Intro - Who Is The Unabomber?

Theo: The unabomber was the nickname the FBI gave to an unknown serial killer who started out by sending mail-bombs to universities and airlines, so first letter of university, the two first letters of airlines, plus bomber to get unabomber.

He’s called a homegrown terrorist because he targeted places in the country he grew up, and:

"over the course of 17 years he planted or mailed at least 16 bombs. He killed 3 people and wounded 24. He wasn’t a religious fundamentalist, but he was a fundamentalist. His enemy was, essentially, modern society. He grew up in Chicago, attended Harvard, but he wound up living alone in a remote cabin in the Montana woods. He was arrested in 1996 after one of the most notorious and longest manhunts in history, and he was sentenced to life in prison."

And I think he’s 75 now, so still alive, still pumping out letters and books, propagandizing for the primitivist revolution.

Kelley: Now, I'm really excited to kind of get into a little bit of what was going on inside of his brain, I've kind of unceremoniously titled this in my own head; ‘true crime meets political activism and how Ted got it wrong’.

So, there are some really good bones in what he has to say, but overall I dissected a few things and was really curious to get your opinion. But how did his life start out?

Theo: Well, he was privileged to be born into a middle class family in suburbia, and he had a family who really valued academic achievements and gave him lots of love and affection and put him on a path. He was very intelligent and scored really high in IQ tests and did well at school. Struggled a bit socially and we can go through different periods of his life where that gave him some trauma.

Kelley: Yeah, so let's start there, like him as a baby because I didn't know that part and I have some thoughts on that too, but I found that really fascinating.

-

Some key life moments

Separation From Parents As A Baby

Theo: Yeah, so this is a hard one because his mum tells this memory that's really important to her that the baby Ted had hives and was very sick with it, so he needed to be in the hospital to be looked after, but because the nurses were short staffed and they couldn't be looking after visitors coming in and out and making sure that the visitors were going where they need to go and stuff, they literally just did not at that period in time let visitors in to the baby ward.

So, he spent at least a week in hospital where he was getting seen to by nurses like changing and feeding him and stuff, but was not allowed to see his parents, he wasn't allowed to even hear their voices and they said that he came out of that experience very emotionally withdrawn and rejecting them in terms of the emotional connection.

We have no way of knowing for sure if this had a lasting effect and it might just be a mothers worry that they did something wrong when their son was a baby and so at their most vulnerable.

Kelley: Well, I think she does use this as a way to try in her mind to explain some of this, but I did read a Washington post article where she had been talking about how:

“She can still see the photograph [mental picture] of her baby son, pinned down on his hospital bed. It offered what she now sees as a clue into how her oldest son grew into the troubled man he would become."

He was terrified, spread-eagled so doctors could examine what they believed was a severe allergic reaction. His naked body was blotched with hives. His eyes, usually normal, were crossed in fear.”

So, you think about that time period and I think someone in the documentary series was saying that essentially “that if a baby is not able to bond with the mother” and Ted was only nine months old I think, then “there's a chance of developing the psychopathy, so as a coping mechanism,” you know ‘I don't feel anything, I don't experience trauma’, but of course we know that's not true, trauma is often the root of psychopathy forming in the first place.

So, that very well may have a small role to play here, but I mean it seems legitimate.

Theo: Yeah, definitely and I mean what's interesting to think about is that that could have been traumatic for the parents as well, to have a baby rejecting you and it would take a skilled parent to not show that fear in their emotions with the baby and not have it create a lasting effect in your relationship with your child, every time the child rejects them as they get older, to not read into it that they’re withdrawing from them, and so there could be a shutting down there.

So, when you’re young it’s really important to form a secure attachment and if it's not formed then it can be an insecure attachment in the form of avoidance or it can be insecure in the form of too clingy to their parents and rejecting the world, so there's all kinds of ways that it could have manifested.

For example, there’s a really heart-wrenching psychological experiment researchers will do with parents and babies to in part to see to what degree the baby can form this emotionally secure attachment, and it’s that the parent will pull a completely blank straight face showing no emotion, and the baby will usually do everything it can to get the parents attention again, until it starts to look away because it can’t bare seeing the blank face anymore, to then trying to comfort themself by sucking their thumb, to finally when the parent re-engages emotionally, the baby usually crying out of stress relief and being reminded of the secure attachment available again.

So bringing that back to Ted, it must have been stressful for that week at least, having a rotation of nurses faces you don’t recognize just briefly engaging with him to feed and change him as a baby.

Kelley: Yeah and I do think that him growing up and from what I was learning about even just in primary school is that this was a super smart kid where there already feels like there’s the possibility of abandonment issues and a lack of trust, so I feel like what you're gonna walk us through next is kind of Ted's feeling of not belonging, not being like everyone else, it seems to be something that it can be traced back to that time in the hospital, the feeling of abandonment, not trusting you know he kind of already feels like an outsider and that's also another kind of textbook description of how psychopathy forms.

Theo: Yeah or even just that it was a strained relationship with the parent, that the parent really wants to be attached, so as to never - in their mind - betray the baby again and to be able to have this really secure attachment, so being clingy and then if they ever saw any signs of Ted being problematic to people that they would play it down because they just really wanted to make sure that he was safe and developing okay, so in their mind they would justify some of the things they’d see as he just needs protection.

Kelley: I do think that it was the form of her making excuses for him, you know I think there was clear anger, there are certain stories that the brother David tells about you know some really jarring incidents that happened and I think there is that denial by at least the mother that it doesn't have a deeper meaning and that she somehow is responsible for making him feel safe or I don't know that could just be my opinion.

Theo: Yeah for sure and it's just about teaching parents to know how to be open with their children, it's problematic that she felt like she wasn't a good parent, and it’s problematic that the kid maybe was picking up on that in a way, and so maybe he wasn't developing a secure attachment, so I don't know, it's complicated.

-

Loneliness After Being Moved Forward A Year At School

So his parents were teaching him a lot, making sure that he was doing well at school and this was a source of pride for him to just focus all his mind on studying.

Then at some point the school just said we should put him forward a year because he's obviously a lot further ahead than the pther kids and so he was skipped one year ahead and just went straight into another year above.

And, in his diaries or in interviews he always says that was really difficult for him, like an already socially awkward kid just not fitting into a year above him and so some alienation from society and the institutions that he was part of as a kid.

-

Psych Experiments For The CIA

So, moved forward a year in secondary school and then before he even finished school, he got accepted a year early into Harvard, the most prestigious school in the country, so he was arriving two years younger than most students in Harvard.

He was like having picnics on the grass on his own and just not really knowing how to make friends with people there. So, then he entered this psychological experiment with the most impressive psychology professor there, which wasn't advertised as a psychology experiment, it was advertised as a place where you could debate professors and have your ideas received and reviewed. So he thought he was going to get a chance to have his ideas genuinely evaluated.

So he didn't have many friends or any really strong friends at all at Harvard, but for the whole three years he was at Harvard he had these really intense sessions with professors which through his dedication to study, he really admired and valued them.

And they were testing to see how to play mind games with people in order to do advanced interrogations, it would later get used in Guantanimo Bay, they were studying how to break someone down and make them say what you want them to say, or make them say things you think they want to say deep down, but just madness. Basically the professors' objective was to humiliate the student for the philosophy they held as most important to them.

Kelley: So, basically the intent is to make them question themselves on things that they feel they believe strongly.

And I mean part of me wants to know if his intention for you know being involved in the experiment in the first place was to maybe learn a little bit more about himself and his own social issues. And this ended up just compounding that and making it worse and adding to his feelings of humiliation or ineptitude which also then to me I found like a pattern that through his writing too that made me think of that.

But, do you think that this… well, I mean I don't see how this could make a positive impact on a person, but I mean we have to study these things somehow, but he wrote a lot, he was super smart, he was so mathematically intelligent that it makes me feel a little nervous because I have a bad relationship with mathematics...

Theo: Yeah, he was excelling at maths and sciences because it was something you could do on your own and just really dedicate all your mind to. And he probably wasn't reading political theory books, so he had some funny beliefs about, well to me, funny beliefs about primitivism and about how less less technology is good.

And he hadn't yet decided that like we needed an anti-tech revolution or anything, maybe at this point he was against big cities and very systematized, atomized society, he liked the suburbia life that he came from and he didn't like big metropolises.

Kelley: Something just sprung into my head and this is extremely personal, but I came from a home-schooling background and it was extremely oppressive, and then I got into college, I somehow was able to make the right score to get into college and that's totally due to my older sister, but once I was there I cannot tell you...

I'm not going to draw a parallel between myself and Ted, but coming from somewhere where I had so much isolation, once I got to college, it was the most traumatic experience I think of my adult life because I had to suddenly have a roommate that I didn't know who this person was, I didn't know how to study for tests, I had only taken one test in my whole life, all of these things compounded around entering university for the first time that I think has exacerbated all of my personal anxieties.

And I feel like that is possibly a huge catalyst when you know you're told that everybody's social, you need to go out, you need to put yourself out there and let me tell you that's one of the worst things I ever did for myself because I was like maybe you just don't know what fun is, maybe you just need to put yourself in these uncomfortable situations because that's what everybody else is doing.

And as somebody who's an introvert it was not a fun period of life and it was constantly feeling inadequate in social situations, so I can sort of see a glimpse into the mind of someone who kind of wanted some normalcy but just couldn't quite get there, I don't know that just jumped in my head.

Theo: No, for sure, like he didn't know whether he fitted in and he probably had the same feeling of wearing feeling like he was wearing different people's clothing, like trying out different identities. So, with the professors, he would have been asking questions that maybe come from a naive place, like we’ve all just lived through 4 years of Trump where he would do things like suggest injecting bleach into your body at a news conference, so people have these weird ideas where they haven't fully thought through the consequences. And he was probably connecting that to psychology and why he didn't fit in, and why he felt alienated.

So, he would have been using these arguments to test them out with the professors and see what they thought and all that time he was just on a highly regimented program, where they’d pretend we agree with you for a bit and then we're gonna tear you down, so yeah just not nice to say the least.

Kelley: I mean the whole idea of a university setting, it’s also jarring when you know I think a lot of his early ideas could have been formed in that moment, probably more strongly than others as far as everybody kind of looking like sheep, you know everybody does the same things, everybody's a part of this system and one that he didn't feel a part of and one that he maybe felt alienated from and started to resent. I think those ideas probably started to really solidify during this period.

Theo: Yeah and what friends he did have in university would say that during different periods of the experiment he would just never eat dinner with them or if they would try to sit down with him he would just be so angry with himself and the people around him that he’d just take himself off back to the room and spend as little time as around people as possible.

-

Sex Change Plans & First Desire To Kill (A Psychiatrist)

Theo: Ok, so next we can talk about dates and romance, and how that affected his emotional development.

To start with there's one example of him chatting to a woman in the university library and her giving him her number, but then he’d write in his diary that he couldn’t get up the nerve to call, so his defense mechanism for being so anxious, trying to call and not feeling like he was able to, was to chastise himself for spending so much time worrying about connecting ‘with some dumb woman’, so his feelings of inadequacy projected onto an identity class of less powerful people like women and later gay people.

Then he started to have sexual fantasies of becoming a woman, I think because he didn’t know how to have relationships with women, so he wanted to explore desires for women which he hadn't had the space to learn to understand. I definitely don’t think it was out of any felt emergence that he was a woman. They’re called autoerotic fantasies, where you get turned on imaging how other people will view you in different situations, and it can be as common as when you’re imagining yourself in a situation where someone is admiring a specific item of clothing you’re wearing that make you feel confident.

So anyway, he made an appointment to go see the university psychologist and at the last minute decided he didn’t want to talk about having a sex change or his sexual fantasies.

And he writes in his diary that this is when the first desire to kill happened;

“I felt disgusted about what my uncontrolled sexual cravings had almost led me to do. And I felt humiliated, and I violently hated the psychiatrist. Just then there came a major turning point in my life. Like a Phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope. . . . So, I said to myself, why not really kill that psychiatrist and anyone else whom I hate. . . I will kill, but I will make at least some effort to avoid detection, so that I can kill again.”

So the psychology experiments for the CIA and this humiliating experience with the psychologist, turned into hateful resentment for a society that he felt had made him confused and depressed.

Then a desire to carefully plan his murders and pick targets he thought some people would intellectually admire him for picking, as in his eyes the evilest people deserving of fighting a guerrilla war against. Which could be seen as a way of getting the validation he didn’t get from friends as a child on his own terms, for being special and intelligent enough to have discovered all these connections and go after the worst offenders.

As well as a desire to rebel against social alienation and mediocrity, a fear of the harder task of finding meaning with others, that there’s no special meaning given to your life for just being you.

Kelley: And I think it's interesting that he did write so much because I think there would be a lot of unanswered questions if we didn't have a lot of his writing. And I think part of that confusion is... I think one of his neighbors or somebody in in the documentary had talked about how he just clearly hated women and I think it all comes back to that theme of inadequacy and self-loathing and those patterns that he seems to have turned on everybody else at this point in in his writings that I find very interesting.

Theo: Yeah, and we see that today with InCel (involuntarily celibate) terrorists driving their van into people and having this whole worldview they’ve built where they gather on places like 4chan and reddit, where there’s these ‘Chads and Stacies’ and how they're oppressed because women aren't traditional enough anymore, so yeah it's a weird phenomenon.

Kelley: And a way of deflection, as well. So, I mean I'm always talking about mental health like any time that I can and growing up with someone who's schizophrenic and extremely abusive it's one of those things where you can see the pattern and you can see it worsening at a certain period of time in life, where there's certain some traumatic event.

And just thinking about the person that I knew before and during and after it's like if only that person had gotten the help that they needed, you know he seems to be such an intelligent guy with deep feeling, but extremely damaged. So, I think we as a society are getting a little bit smarter about catching these things and being a little bit more open and embracing of handling our issues with mental health and therapy and things of that nature.

Theo: Yeah definitely, if only people had felt able to be open about their mental health problems like this would this would have been a time when people it would have been like it would have been like the worst thing in the world to come out as having depression even. You would worry about your social standing among your neighbors, that maybe you wouldn't be invited around for dinner parties.

As well, I’m jumping forwards a bit here, but he gave a letter to his brother that explained how he had thought about killing this other woman and his brother just thought it was like a psychological break, he thought it wasn't serious. So there's not enough understanding about mental health and the mental institutes and prisons I’d imagine were even worse back then, you would never want to do that to your brother, make the police aware and then put him through that system, if you don't think he's gonna be violent in the future, if you make that judgment, then it's a scary thing to think with our past or even current system that you’d have to turn someone over to exist in this horrible prison system.

Kelley: Well, not just that but I do remember his brother David saying how his mother had told him the story of Ted as baby and how she had kind of put responsibility on his shoulders as well, to always look out for and take care of and protect his brother. And he was always just like ‘well yeah, I love him, why would I not’. So there is all of this enabling being done by his family.

And of course that is a time like both of my parents grew up in, where talking about mental health was taboo, which is why my mom has still been completely adamant about not admitting to anything and not seeing someone for help. It's like this ultimate shame to have to admit that there's an issue there, so then you have all these people around you enabling you, it's kind of giving you free reign to keep going.

Theo: Yeah that's really sad. So, yeah I mean the brothers had a really interesting relationship, the connection between siblings in general is something really unique, there was a weird case of sisters running in front of traffic that went viral and it was because they had schizophrenia and were spending lots of time around each other, confirming each other's psychosis beliefs. And then there’s the case of the marathon bombers, where the older brother encouraged the younger brother into throwing his life away at a young age. So these are examples at the extreme fringes, but it just shows to me how powerful sibling relationships can be.

So Ted and his brother David would spend a lot of time with their dad out camping in the wilderness from a young age, and they'd been taught in bushcraft, so they saw survivng by their own wits as a really special experience, and would go off to camp on their own at a young age and eventually both build cabins, but at opposite ends of the country.

And then David started to settle down and not visit his cabin as much, but Ted’s idea was always to move move permanently off grid and he hoped that David would do that as well and would justify it for the same reasons of being anti-tech, but at some point their ideas split.

One interesting example of this was after he came back from Harvard David noticed this difference in Ted, where before they were bouncing ideas off each other and being very interested in what each other had to say, but that after the psych experiments maybe he was just very dismissive and very ruthless towards his ideas and putting them down.

So, I mean it's a good thing there was a split in terms of David not following his path, but it would have been more ideal if Ted had not had followed David.

-

[I've hit the character limit, so to continue reading click here]---> https://activistjourneys.wordpress.com/2021/09/01/case-revisited-unabomber-ted-kaczynskis-lingering-influence-in-2021/

3

Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

There's nothing here…