Romanced by Gaia

Following the outbreak of COVID19 and its political consequences, nursing homes and hospice centers are struggling to battle loneliness among their patients. Many are forbidden from seeing their families and in an environment more stressed than ever, the need for connection with others is dire. In many cases these individuals do not even have to be human in order fulfill their intended purpose. For example, it is not completely uncommon to see household cats roaming the halls of these locations. Their relatively timid temperaments are fitting for those in the autumn of age. However, due to the restrictions brought on by quarantine, some centers have now turned to using animatronic stuffed animals to help lessen the impact of isolation. Robotic cats and dogs that are to offer a form of companionship to patients that are preparing to leave this life. How exactly is this supposed to make you feel? Does it bring warmth to your chest? Feelings of happiness and pride in human innovation. Or is there something fundamentally wrong with it? An evil that is hard to express.

If you feel inclined to agree with the latter, you are not alone. As of late it seems that a growing amount of people are expressing similar worries about the physical and moral problems that technological progress poses to humanity. The original and most influential of the thinkers within the movement of tech- skepticism is Professor Ted Kaczynski, more commonly known as the Unabomber. Those of you who more or less know his story already, for there have been many attempts to tell it, have most likely already made up your mind about this man and his strange ideology. As you know, he is also no stranger to loneliness. For those of you who have not or who have heard only parts, what follows is an exploration of his life, from his birth and education, to his crimes and ultimately his incarceration. Here you will not find a deep dive into his philosophy. Rather, I wish to show you a fair image of the individual himself, something that is often lost in his mythology.

Born Theodore John Kaczynski on May 22 1942 to working class Polish American parents in Chicago, Illinois, Ted seemed to have had a relatively happy early life. As a child he had a breakout of hives which forced him into isolation at a hospital, something his mother believes had a great effect on him. Ted attended an elementary school in Chicago where he was described as well-adjusted and healthy. In 1949 his brother David was born and three years later the family moved to Evergreen Park, a suburban area of Chicago. Here Ted continued his schooling and proved an IQ of 167 or highly gifted. This allowed him to skip sixth grade which he later described as a pivotal event in his life. Whereas he was highly sociable with his peers and often assumed a leadership role, he had a hard time to fit in with the older children who tended to bully him. At this point of his life he was described as highly intelligent but lonely, something that would go on to define most of his adult life. As a child he was shy and would become unresponsive when pressured into social situations, something that caused his mother to consider entering him into a study for autistic children. Ted went on to attend the local high school where he excelled academically, joined the marching band and became a member of several clubs. As often becomes the case with exceptionally intelligent children, his fellow classmates began to identify him with that specific trait rather than seeing him as a complete individual. It was at this time that Ted’s interest in mathematics was ignited and he was placed in increasingly advanced classes, sailing past his peers. He skipped eleventh grade and after attending summer school he was allowed to graduate early at 15 years. A clear math prodigy, he was encouraged to apply to Harvard College, where he entered on a scholarship in 1958 at an astonishing 16 years old.

A high school classmate of his later told the New York Times that Ted was emotionally unprepared for college at such a young age, barely holding a driver’s license. Much like earlier in his life, he was described as a quiet and reserved yet furiously intelligent individual. In 1962 he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics with a GPA of 3.12. During his sophomore year at Harvard he participated in a study that later became a subject of great controversy. Some sources suggest connections to the clandestine CIA mind-control project MKUltra. Those already familiar with this story, either through the numerous documentaries or series that can be found on Netflix or through personal research, are well aware of how this has become a defining element of Kaczynski’s mythology. The experiments led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray were purposefully psychologically painful. Subjects were belittled and verbally abused, often on account of their most deeply held personal beliefs while their reactions were monitored and recorded. The experiment lasted three years with Ted participating weekly for a total of 200 hours. Some have also suggested that this was a catalyst for Ted’s criminal activities later in life despite Kaczynski’s rejection of this theory. Ted admitted that he resented Murray and his co-workers for their immoral methods but also that he was quite confident that these experiences had no significant effect on the course of his life.

In 1962 Ted enrolled at the University of Michigan and earned a master’s and doctoral degree in mathematics in 1964 and 1967. Here he specialized in complex analysis and was once again described as a highly intelligent yet peculiar character by his professors. In 1966 during a period of several weeks, Ted experienced intense sexual fantasies in which he pictured himself as a woman. This compelled him to seek out a psychiatrist in order to undergo gender transition. However, as he sat in the waiting-room he had a change of heart. He later expressed his anger and malice towards the doctor, expressing a desire to kill him and others that he hated. His dissertation won prizes after its publication in 1967 and Kaczynski would go on to publish five more works during and after his time at Michigan. Later the same year he became the youngest assistant professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley at 25 years old. Here he taught undergraduate courses in geometry and calculus. He was not well liked among his students, being described as seeming uncomfortable with teaching, he taught straight from the book and often refused to answer questions. In June of 1969 Kaczynski unexpectedly resigned from his position.

After his resignation, Ted moved back to his parent’s home in Illinois. Only two years later he moved out into a remote cabin which he built together with his brother in rural Montana, here he set a goal to live a simple and fully autonomous life. Not an uncommon lifestyle for this area. Teaching himself survival skills, Ted would live on money made off of odd jobs and financial support from his family. According to witnesses he would use an old bike to get to and from the local town where he would often visit the library. During this time, Kaczynski came to the realization

that it would be impossible to live in peace in nature. This was based on the destruction of the wildland that he witnessed in the area around his cabin by real estate and industrial development projects. It may be argued that it was around this time that he became truly radicalized as he began performing acts of sabotage against the developments in the area. He also dedicated himself to the study of sociology and political philosophy. For Kaczynski there was no longer an option for peaceful reform. The human tendency for taking the path of least resistance meant that the only solution was to violently collapse the industrial-technological system.

For the next 17 years Kaczynski would be involved in a campaign of terror spanning the whole country while also managing to constantly elude the FBI. He would go on to build and mail or hand-deliver a series of increasingly sophisticated improvised bombs that ultimately took the life of three people and injured another 23. The first mail bomb was directed towards one Professor Buckley Crist at Northwestern University. When Crist became suspicious of the package it was given to campus police officer Terry Marker who opened it. The explosion caused minor injuries. Kaczynski would lay low for the rest of the year, working in a foam factory together with his brother and father over the summer, he was later discharged from his position by his brother. The following year a bomb was placed in the cargo hold of a domestic Boeing 727 flying from Chicago to Washington D.C. Due to an internal mechanic error, the bomb failed to go off, releasing only smoke. This was enough for the airplane to be grounded and it was later remarked that had it detonated properly, the plane would have been obliterated. It was at this time that the FBI became involved, designating the case UNABOM for University and Airline bomber and also giving Ted his now infamous nickname.

For the next decade and a half the FBI led a nationwide manhunt, creating a special task force and employing the help of an experimental Behavioral Sciences Unit and the public, setting up a reward of $1 million for anyone who could provide information leading to the capture of the Unabomber. Kaczynski would go on to send 14 more explosive devices, 12 of which would actually detonate. The bombs often came as boxes and could be identified by the letters “FC”, short for “Freedom Club”, hidden somewhere in the mechanism. They would also contain several false clues, obscured in order to feign legitimacy. As the casualties became more severe, the desire to catch the enigmatic perpetrator grew. The Behavioral Sciences Unit issued a psychological profile of the Unabomber, describing him as a man of above-average intelligence with connections to academia, however this was later discarded. In 1995 Kaczynski sent a letter to the New York Times, vowing to desist from terrorism if the Times or the Washington Post published his now famous essay Industrial Society and Its Future. In this essay, he also referred to himself as “FC” or as a “we”.

There was great controversy as to whether the essay was to be published or not. However, based on a concern for public safety as well as the hope that a reader may be able to identify the author, the attorney general as well as the FBI director recommended that it was released. In September of 1995, the essay was published in The Washington Post. Prior to its publication, Ted’s brother David had begun to grow suspicious. The Unabomber was practically a media celebrity at this point and much of the evidence pointed towards someone from the Chicago area. Furthermore, the excerpts of the manifesto released by the FBI during press conferences seemed to match Ted’s own ideas and prose. Despite this, David was dismissive of the idea of his brother being a domestic terrorist. However, a week after the publication of the full manifesto, David decided to become involved in the investigation, contacting the FBI.

An essay written by Kaczynski was compared to the manifesto using linguistic analysis, finding that the author was most likely the same person. In April of 1996, an unkempt Ted was arrested and taken away from his cabin in Montana. A search revealed an abundance of incriminating evidence, including one fully armed bomb, ready for mailing, as well as several pages of documented experimentation. An original copy of Industrial Society was also found, further confirming suspicions. At this point, Kaczynski had been the target of the most expensive FBI investigation in history. His cabin was lifted from the forest floor by helicopter and taken to an FBI facility in California. There it remained intact until it was moved to the Newseum in Washington D.C. several years later.

Kaczynski was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and schizotypal personality disorder. Despite this he was declared competent to stand trial by federal prison. Prosecutors sought the death penalty, however Kaczynski pleaded guilty and on January 22 1998 he was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. To this day, Theodore John Kaczynski sits in the supermax prison ADX Florence in Colorado. There he will serve his eight life sentences, to die in prison. When, in 1999, he was asked to comment on his fate he had the following to say:

“(...)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.”