Unabomber thoughts
I explore a deeper story about the "Unabomber," Theodore Kaczynski, a former mathematics professor turned domestic terrorist, and have read many articles and papers about him. I forgot how I ended up on university program websites and unintentionally discovered this person. He was highly intelligent and wrote academic papers while working as Assistant Professor. But after two years, he dropped out and started living in a self-made cabin in rural Montana, USA, which lacked water, electricity, and heat. There, he made bombs and sent them to various people, including engineering professors and computer shop owners. Many were injured, though I don't remember the exact number, which might need a citation.
Ted was a gifted child who entered Harvard at 15 and was extremely talented, naturally, but isolated from others since his early days there. What’s interesting is I found that Ted was one of the subjects involved in the MK Ultra mind control experiment, where he and others were unaware of it. The experiment involved subjects having their views ridiculed and mocked by examiners to study stress. Talking about MK Ultra, it sounds like the conspiracy theories you sometimes see on social media. I was skeptical about it until CIA employees published a book about it and I read psychology books on the subject in college.
Okay, back to the main topic: Ted, still a teenager, was developing an identity, which led him to feel alienated and develop a hatred toward the professors who ridiculed his views. This is where his anti-technology stance began. Over time, Ted slowly began to believe it was his responsibility to make people "realize" what he saw. Just after leave academic world, he started his terrorist activities on small cabin. At the time, no one knew who was sending the bombs, but the FBI was puzzled—maybe it was a scientist or an engineer. That was until Ted asked a newspaper to publish his manifesto, "Industrial Society and Its Future," which ultimately led to his capture.
This genius wrote in an academic style, mostly directing his ideology: society is trapped by technology, and he must free them. Many of his points seem to make sense. Take pIndustrial Society and Its Future, for example—Ted explained why he did what he did. To simplify, there are many arguments in this work, but I’ll focus on one:
Technology forces everyone to work harder and not be free. Ted uses the car as an example, where we put in a lot of effort—sitting in traffic and filling up with petrol—when we could simply walk. Ted’s critique of modern society seems almost true; well, he's an intellectual, after all.
Now, here's why monsters like Ted are produced:
He isolated himself by his own will because society didn’t align with his views, and as a result, he had trouble communicating with many people. However, things became even more complicated in his teenage years when researchers, whom he believed to be adults, directly interfered with his search for identity (I mentioned the experiments earlier). It was at this moment that Ted developed extreme thoughts after enduring high-level stress to defend his views. Many intellectuals share Ted’s views on technology, but his experience was different. Teenagers rebel for many reasons, like developmental psychology. This might seem like an irrelevant analogy, but did you know why ISIS attracts many youths? Government pressure and killing its own citizens produce similar forces. Extremism on one side often leads to extremism on the other. Remember Newton's third law of motion.
Ted was finally arrested after nearly 20 years, and two decades later, he ended his life in prison.
I became interested in indoctrination after learning about Ron Jones’ Third Wave experiment. If we take a closer look, some claim Ted was "programmed" to do what he did. Not literally, but the key word is communication. Ted’s communication with others was limited. He developed a sense of being lost in a world of abstraction and words. Most dictators are intellectual but psychopaths, in a respectful way—something’s wrong with that pun(?). If you observe most of his works, you can see that they touch on aspects of life, but we can also feel just how "lonely" it is. The Puppet Master in Ghost in the Shell was believed to be the smartest, most philosophical AI, but soulless, which reflects a signature of the postmodern world (unfortunately, postmodernism has reached its end, and both ugly and beautiful coexist now in something called 'metamodernism').
Ted didn’t realize how disconnected his statements were from reality. His combination of abstract concepts with an academic way of describing reality contributed to this. Well, in Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, it’s noted how dangerous conclusions can be without enough information. His thoughts became more extreme (militant) and were finally corrupted by his own intellectualism.