Unabomber: Ted Kaczynski (Part II)

Style

Kaczynski wrote the document on a typewriter (therefore without italics); he capitalized entire words to show emphasis. He always referred to himself as either "we" or "FC" ("Freedom Club"), though there is no evidence that he worked with others. Academic Donald Wayne Foster analyzed the writing at the request of Kaczynski's defense team and he noted that it contains irregular spelling and hyphenation and other linguistic idiosyncrasies, which led him to conclude that Kaczynski was its author.

Summary

Industrial Society and Its Future begins with Kaczynski's assertion: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."  He writes that technology has had a destabilizing effect on society, has made life unfulfilling, and has caused widespread psychological suffering.  He argues that most people spend their time engaged in useless pursuits because of technological advances; he calls these "surrogate activities" wherein people strive toward artificial goals, including scientific work, consumption of entertainment, and following sports teams.  He predicts that further technological advances will lead to extensive human genetic engineering and that human beings will be adjusted to meet the needs of the social systems, rather than vice versa.  He believes that technological progress can be stopped, unlike people who understand technology's negative effects yet passively accept it as inevitable.  He calls for a return to "wild nature."

Kaczynski argues that the erosion of human freedom is a natural product of an industrial society because "the system has to regulate human behavior closely in order to function", and that reform of the system is impossible because "changes large enough to make a lasting difference in favor of freedom would not be initiated because it would be realized that they would gravely disrupt the system". However, he states that the system has not yet fully achieved "control over human behavior" and "is currently engaged in a desperate struggle to overcome certain problems that threaten its survival". He predicts that "if the system succeeds in acquiring sufficient control over human behavior quickly enough, it will probably survive. Otherwise, it will break down," and that "the issue will most likely be resolved within the next several decades, say 40 to 100 years".  He states that the task of those who oppose industrial society is to promote "social stress and instability" and to propagate "an ideology that opposes technology", one that offers the "counter-ideal" of nature "in order to gain enthusiastic support". A "revolution against technology may be possible" when industrial society is sufficiently unstable.

Throughout the document, Kaczynski addresses left-wing politics as a movement. He defines leftists as "mainly socialists, collectivists, 'politically correct' types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like", states that leftism is driven primarily by "feelings of inferiority" and "oversocialization", and derides leftism as "one of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world".  He additionally states that "a movement that exalts nature and opposes technology must take a resolutely anti-leftist stance and must avoid all collaboration with leftists", as in his view "leftism is, in the long run, inconsistent with wild nature, with human freedom and with the elimination of modern technology".  He also criticizes conservatives, describing them as "fools" who "whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth."

Reception

Alston Chase reported in The Atlantic that the text "was greeted in 1995 by many thoughtful people as a work of genius, or at least profundity, and as quite sane".  Chase argued, however, that it "is the work of neither a genius nor a maniac." "Its pessimism over the direction of civilization and its rejection of the modern world are shared especially with the country's most highly educated."  UCLA political science professor James Q. Wilson was mentioned in the manifesto; he wrote in The New Yorker that Industrial Society and Its Future was "a carefully reasoned, artfully written paper". "If it is the work of a madman, then the writings of many political philosophers… are scarcely more sane."

David Skrbina, a philosophy professor at the University of Michigan and a former Green Party candidate for governor of Michigan, has written several essays in support of Kaczynski's ideas, one which is titled "A Revolutionary for Our Times".  Paul Kingsnorth, a former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project wrote an essay for Orion Magazine in which he described Kaczynski's arguments as "worryingly convincing" and stated that they "may change my life".

Psychiatrist Keith Ablow stated on Fox News that Kaczynski was "reprehensible for murdering and maiming people" but "precisely correct in many of his ideas", and he compared Industrial Society and Its Future to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Anarcho-primitivist authors such as John Zerzan and John Moore came to Kaczynski's defense while also holding reservations about his actions and ideas.

Influences

The manifesto echoed contemporary critics of technology and industrialization such as John Zerzan, Jacques Ellul, Rachel Carson, Lewis Mumford, and E. F. Schumacher.  Its idea of the "disruption of the power process" similarly echoed social critics emphasizing the lack of meaningful work as a primary cause of social problems, including Mumford, Paul Goodman, and Eric Hoffer.  Its general theme was also addressed by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, to which Kaczynski refers to in the text.  Kaczynski's ideas of "oversocialization" and "surrogate activities" recall Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents and its theories of rationalization and sublimation (a term which Kaczynski uses three times to describe "surrogate activities").

Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems wrote that Kaczynski is "clearly a Luddite", but "simply saying this does not dismiss his argument". Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks, published a manifesto and copied large portions from Industrial Society and Its Future, with certain terms, substituted (e.g., replacing "leftists" with "cultural Marxists" and "multiculturalists").

Over twenty years after Kaczynski's imprisonment, his views have inspired online communities of primitivists and neo-Luddites. One explanation for the renewal of interest in his views is the television series Manhunt: Unabomber, which aired in 2017.  Kaczynski is also frequently referenced by ecofascists online.

Other works

University of Michigan–Dearborn philosophy professor David Skrbina helped to compile Kaczynski's work into the 2010 anthology Technological Slavery, including the original manifesto, letters between Skrbina and Kaczynski, and other essays.  Kaczynski updated his 1995 manifesto as Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How to address advances in computers and the Internet. He advocates practicing other types of protest and makes no mention of violence.

Investigation

Because of the material used to make the mail bombs, the suspect was labeled the "Junkyard Bomber" by U.S. Postal Inspectors, who initially had responsibility for the case.  FBI Inspector Terry D. Turchie was appointed to run the UNABOM investigation.  In 1979, an FBI-led task force that included 125 agents from the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), and U.S. Postal Inspection Service was formed.  The task force grew to more than 150 full-time personnel, but minute analysis of recovered components of the bombs and the investigation into the lives of the victims proved of little use in identifying the suspect, who built his bombs primarily from scrap materials available almost anywhere. The victims, investigators later learned, were chosen irregularly from library research.

In 1980, chief agent John Douglas, working with agents in the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit, issued a psychological profile of the unidentified bomber. It described the offender as a man with above-average intelligence and connections to academia. This profile was later refined to characterize the offender as a neo-Luddite holding an academic degree in the hard sciences, but this psychologically based profile was discarded in 1983. An alternative theory was developed by FBI analysts that concentrated on the physical evidence in recovered bomb fragments. In this rival profile, the suspect was characterized as a blue-collar airplane mechanic.  A 1-800 hotline was set up by the UNABOM Task Force to take calls related to the investigation, with a $1 million reward for anyone who could provide information leading to the Unabomber's capture.

Before the publication of Industrial Society and Its Future, Ted's brother, David Kaczynski, was encouraged by his wife to follow up on suspicions that Ted was the Unabomber.  David was dismissive at first, but he began to take the likelihood more seriously after reading the manifesto a week after it was published in September 1995. He searched through old family papers and found letters dating to the 1970s that Ted had sent to newspapers to protest the abuses of technology using phrasing similar to the manifesto.

Before the manifesto's publication, the FBI held many press conferences asking the public to help identify the Unabomber. They were convinced that the bomber was from the Chicago area where he began his bombings, had worked in or had some connection to Salt Lake City, and by the 1990s had some association with the San Francisco Bay Area. This geographical information, as well as the wording in excerpts from the manifesto that were released before the entire text of the manifesto, was published, persuaded David's wife to urge her husband to read the manifesto.

After publication

After the manifesto was published, the FBI received over a thousand calls a day for months in response to its offer of a $1 million reward for information leading to the identification of the Unabomber. Many letters claiming to be from the Unabomber were also sent to the UNABOM Task Force, and thousands of suspect leads were reviewed. While the FBI was occupied with new leads, Kaczynski's brother David hired private investigator Susan Swanson in Chicago to investigate Ted's activities discreetly.  David later hired Washington, D.C. attorney Tony Bisceglie to organize the evidence acquired by Swanson and make contact with the FBI, given the presumed difficulty of attracting the FBI's attention. David wanted to protect his brother from the danger of an FBI raid, such as the Ruby Ridge or the Waco Siege, since he feared a violent outcome from any attempt by the FBI to contact his brother.

In early 1996, former FBI hostage negotiator and criminal profiler Clinton R. Van Zandt was contacted by an investigator working with Bisceglie. Bisceglie asked Van Zandt to compare the manifesto to typewritten copies of handwritten letters David had received from his brother. Van Zandt's initial analysis determined that there was better than a 60 percent chance that the same person had written the manifesto, which had been in public circulation for half a year. Van Zandt's second analytical team determined an even higher likelihood. He recommended that Bisceglie's client immediately contact the FBI.

In February 1996, Bisceglie gave a copy of the 1971 essay written by Ted Kaczynski to Molly Flynn at the FBI.  She forwarded the essay to the San Francisco-based task force. FBI Profiler James R. Fitzgerald recognized similarities in the writings using linguistic analysis and determined that the author of the essays and the manifesto were almost certainly the same. Combined with facts gleaned from the bombings and Kaczynski's life, the analysis provided the basis for a search warrant signed by Terry Turchie, the head of the entire investigation.

David Kaczynski had tried to remain anonymous, but he was soon identified and within a few days an FBI agent team was dispatched to interview David and his wife with their attorney in Washington, D.C. At this and subsequent meetings, David provided letters written by his brother in their original envelopes, allowing the FBI task force to use the postmark dates to add more detail to their timeline of Ted's activities. David developed a respectful relationship with behavioral analysis Special Agent Kathleen M. Puckett, whom he met many times in Washington, D.C., Texas, Chicago, and Schenectady, New York, over the nearly two months before the federal search warrant was served on Kaczynski's cabin.

David had once admired and emulated his older brother but later decided to leave the survivalist lifestyle behind.  He had received assurances from the FBI that he would remain anonymous and that his brother would not learn who had turned him in, but his identity was leaked to CBS News in early April 1996. CBS anchorman Dan Rather called FBI director Louis Freeh, who requested 24 hours before CBS broke the story on the evening news. The FBI scrambled to finish the search warrant and have it issued by a federal judge in Montana; afterward, an internal leak investigation was conducted by the FBI, but the source of the leak was never identified.

FBI officials were not unanimous in identifying Ted as the author of the manifesto. The search warrant noted that numerous experts believed the manifesto had been written by another individual.

Arrest

FBI agents arrested Kaczynski on April 3, 1996, at his cabin, where he was found in an unkempt state. A search of his cabin revealed a cache of bomb components, 40,000 hand-written journal pages that included bomb-making experiments, descriptions of the Unabomber crimes and one live bomb, ready for mailing. They also found what appeared to be the original typed manuscript of Industrial Society and Its Future.  By this point, the Unabomber had been the target of the most expensive investigation in FBI history.

After his capture, theories emerged naming Kaczynski as the Zodiac Killer. Among the links that raised suspicion was the fact that Kaczynski lived in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1967 to 1969 (the same period that most of the Zodiac's confirmed killings occurred in California), that both individuals were highly intelligent with an interest in bombs and codes, and that both wrote letters to newspapers demanding the publication of their works with the threat of continued violence if the demand was not met. However, Kaczynski's whereabouts could not be verified for all of the killings, and the gun and knife murders committed by the Zodiac Killer differ from Kaczynski's bombings, so he was not further pursued as a suspect. Robert Graysmith, author of the 1986 book Zodiac, said the similarities are "fascinating" but purely coincidental.

The early hunt for the Unabomber portrayed a perpetrator far different from the eventual suspect. Industrial Society and Its Future consistently uses "we" and "our" throughout, and at one point in 1993 investigators sought an individual whose first name was "Nathan" because the name was imprinted on the envelope of a letter sent to the media.  When the case was presented to the public, authorities denied that there was ever anyone other than Kaczynski involved in the crimes.

Guilty plea

A federal grand jury indicted Kaczynski in April 1996 on ten counts of illegally transporting, mailing, and using bombs, and three counts of murder.

Kaczynski's lawyers, headed by Montana federal public defenders Michael Donahoe and Judy Clarke, attempted to enter an insanity defense to avoid the death penalty, but Kaczynski rejected this strategy. On January 8, 1998, he requested to dismiss his lawyers and hire Tony Serra as his counsel; Serra had agreed not to use an insanity defense and instead base a defense on Kaczynski's anti-technology views.  This request was unsuccessful and Kaczynski subsequently tried to commit suicide by hanging on January 9.  Several, though not all, forensic psychiatrists and psychologists who examined Kaczynski diagnosed him as having paranoid schizophrenia. Forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz said Kaczynski was not psychotic but had a schizoid or schizotypal personality disorder.  In his 2010 book Technological Slavery, Kaczynski said that two prison psychologists who visited him frequently for four years told him they saw no indication that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and the diagnosis was "ridiculous" and a "political diagnosis".

On January 21, 1998, Kaczynski was declared competent to stand trial "despite the psychiatric diagnoses".  As he was fit to stand trial, prosecutors sought the death penalty but Kaczynski avoided that by pleading guilty to all charges on January 22, 1998, and accepting life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. He later tried to withdraw this plea, arguing it was involuntary. Judge Garland Ellis Burrell Jr. denied his request, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld that decision.

In 2006, Burrell ordered that items from Kaczynski's cabin be sold at a "reasonably advertised Internet auction." Items considered to be bomb-making materials, such as diagrams and "recipes" for bombs, were excluded. The net proceeds went towards the $15 million in restitution Burrell had awarded Kaczynski's victims.  Kaczynski's correspondence and other personal papers were also auctioned.  Burrell ordered the removal, before sale, of references in those documents to Kaczynski's victims; Kaczynski unsuccessfully challenged those redactions as a violation of his freedom of speech.  The auction raised $232,000.

Imprisonment

Kaczynski is serving eight life sentences without the possibility of parole at ADX Florence, a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.  When asked in 1999 if he was afraid of losing his mind in prison, Kaczynski replied:

No, what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget, I may begin to lose my memories of the mountains and the woods and that's what really worries me, that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild nature in general. But I am not afraid they are going to break my spirit.

In 2016, it was reported that early on in his imprisonment Kaczynski had befriended Ramzi Yousef and Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombing, respectively. The trio discussed religion and politics and formed a friendship which lasted until McVeigh's execution in 2001.

Kaczynski's cabin was seized by the U.S. government and was on display at the Newseum in Washington, D.C.  In October 2005, Kaczynski offered to donate two rare books to the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University's campus in Evanston, Illinois, the location of his first two attacks. Northwestern rejected the offer due to already having copies of the works.

The Labadie Collection, part of the University of Michigan's Special Collections Library houses Kaczynski's correspondence with over 400 people since his arrest, including replies, legal documents, publications, and clippings.  His writings are among the most popular selections in the University of Michigan's special collections.  The identity of most correspondents will remain sealed until 2049.  In 2012, Kaczynski responded to the Harvard Alumni Association's directory inquiry for the fiftieth reunion of the class of 1962; he listed his occupation as "prisoner" and his eight life sentences as "awards".

Published mathematical works

Kaczynski, T.J. (June–July 1964). "Another Proof of Wedderburn's Theorem". American Mathematical Monthly. 71 (6): 652–653. doi:10.2307/2312328. JSTOR 2312328. A proof of Wedderburn's little theorem in abstract algebra

—— (June–July 1964). "Advanced Problem 5210". American Mathematical Monthly. 71 (6): 689. doi:10.2307/2312349. JSTOR 2312349. A challenge problem in abstract algebra

—— (June–July 1965). "Distributivity and (−1)x = −x (Advanced Problem 5210, with Solution by Bilyeu, R.G.)". American Mathematical Monthly. 72 (6): 677–678. doi:10.2307/2313887. JSTOR 2313887. Reprint and solution to "Advanced Problem 5210"

—— (July 1965). "Boundary Functions for Functions Defined in a Disk". Journal of Mathematics and Mechanics. 14 (4): 589–612.

—— (November 1966). "On a Boundary Property of Continuous Functions". Michigan Mathematical Journal. 13 (3): 313–320. doi:10.1307/mmj/1031732782.

—— (1967). Boundary Functions (fragment) (PhD). University of Michigan. Kaczynski's doctoral dissertation. Complete dissertation available for purchase from ProQuest, with publication number 6717790.

 —— (March–April 1968). "Note on a Problem of Alan Sutcliffe". Mathematics Magazine. 41 (2): 84–86. Bibcode:1975MathM..48...12G. doi:10.2307/2689056. JSTOR 2689056. A brief paper in number theory concerning the digits of numbers

—— (March 1969). "Boundary Functions for Bounded Harmonic Functions" (PDF). Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 137: 203–209. doi:10.2307/1994796. Archived (PDF) from the original on January 16, 2017.

—— (July 1969). "Boundary Functions and Sets of Curvilinear Convergence for Continuous Functions" (PDF). Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. 141: 107–125. doi:10.2307/1995093. Archived (PDF) from the original on August 12, 2017.

—— (November 1969). "The Set of Curvilinear Convergence of a Continuous Function Defined in the Interior of a Cube" (PDF). Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society. 23 (2): 323–327. doi:10.2307/2037166. Archived (PDF) from the original on August 2, 2017.

—— (January–February 1971). "Problem 787". Mathematics Magazine. 44 (1): 41. Bibcode:1975MathM..48...12G. doi:10.2307/2688865. JSTOR 2688865. A challenge problem in geometry

—— (November–December 1971). "A Match Stick Problem (Problem 787, with Solutions by Gibbs, R.A. and Breisch, R.L.)". Mathematics Magazine. 44 (5): 294–296. Bibcode:1975MathM..48...12G. doi:10.2307/2688646. JSTOR 2688646. Reprint and solutions to "Problem 787"