UNABOMBER: FROM HIS TINY CABIN TO THE LACK OF ELECTRICTY AND WATER, KACZYNSKI’S SIMPLE LIFESTYLE IN MONTANA MOUNTAINS COINCIDED WELL WITH HIS ANTI-TECHNOLOGY VIEWS. HE CALLED FOR ‘REVOLUTION AGAINST THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM’ THAT ‘MAY’ INVOLVE USE OF VIOLENCE. The simple life Theodore J. Kaczynski led in a one-room cabin in rural Montana meshes neatly with the anti-technology stance taken by the Unabomber in his famous 35,000-word manifesto.
Kaczynski has lived in the wooden shack on Stemple Pass Road outside Lincoln, Mont., for at least the past seven years. The home has no running water or electricity. Kaczynski grew what he ate in his garden, competing with deer and rabbits for what it produced. He relied on a bicycle donated by an acquaintance in town for transportation. He kept to himself, his trips into Lincoln spent only at the post office, the library and the grocery store.
It’s the sort of lifestyle the Unabomber embraced in his manifesto.
Publication of the Unabomber Manifesto in September by the New York Times and Washington Post ultimately led the FBI to Kaczynski. His family members came across similar writings while cleaning out a home in Lombard, Ill., they had sold. They also recognized similar ideas in letters they’d received from Kaczynski over the years.
Family members shared their suspicions with the FBI. Agents took the former Berkeley mathematics professor into custody on April 3. Nearly every day since, they’ve uncovered more evidence that seems to support their beliefs that Kaczynski and the Unabomber are one and the same.
In the manifesto, the Unabomber wrote that the Industrial Revolution and technological advances in society have been “a disaster” for the human race. He blamed technology for destabilizing society, making life unfulfilling and causing widespread psychological suffering. Because of technological advances, most people spend their time engaged in useless, “surrogate activities” pursuing artificial goals, such as scientific and technological work, consuming mass entertainment, following sports teams, etc.
Technological progress will eventually result in “extensive genetic engineering of human beings, so that man in the future will no longer be a creation of nature, or of chance or of God.” Then, technology will have “complete control over everything on Earth.”
So freedom and technological progress are incompatible, he said.
The Unabomber called for a “revolution against the industrial system” that “may or may not make use of violence” and a return to “wild nature” unfettered by human management, interference and control.
The Unabomber outlined some steps people who “hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society.” He also describes the negative effects of technological advances.
The Unabomber, often speaking in the plural “we” or as “FC” (Freedom Club; the initials “FC” were found on some bombs), said:
Problems of our troubled society are particularly manifest in modern leftism. Modern leftists include “socialists, collectivists, politically correct types (particularly university professors), feminists, gays, disability activists and animal rights activists and the like.”
Modern leftism is mainly driven by two psychological tendencies: “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization.” “Notice that university intellectuals constitute the most highly socialized segment of society and also the most left-wing segment.”
“One of the most important means by which society socializes children is by making them feel ashamed of behavior or speech that is contrary to society’s expectations. If this is overdone, or if a particular child is especially susceptible to such feelings, he ends by feeling ashamed of himself.”
“The system needs scientists, mathematicians and engineers. It can’t function without them. So heavy pressure is put on children to excel in these fields. It isn’t natural for an adolescent human being to spend the bulk of his time sitting at a desk absorbed in study. A normal adolescent wants to spend his time in active contact with the real world.”
“No one stops to ask whether it is inhumane to force adolescents to spend the bulk of their time studying subjects most of them hate. When skilled workers are put out of a job by technical advances and have to undergo ‘retraining,’ no one asks whether it is humiliating for them to be pushed around in this way.”
The “lack of opportunity to properly experience the power process (having a goal, making efforts toward that goal, achieving it and acting autonomously) is the most important of the abnormal conditions to which modern society subjects people.”
“If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted.... In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.”
“A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support systems. When motor vehicles were introduced, they appeared to increase man’s freedom.... But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion” (through regulations, licensing, traffic jams, etc.).
“Electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid long-distance communications — how could anyone argue against any of these things, or against any other of the innumerable technical advances that have made modern society?” “Yet ... all these technical advances taken together have created a world in which the average man’s fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of his neighbors and friends, but in those of politicians, corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power to influence.”
“The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.”
“In the future, social systems will not be adjusted to suit the needs of human beings. Instead, human beings will be adjusted to suit the needs of the system.”
“To those who think that all this sounds like science fiction, we point out that yesterday’s science fiction is today’s fact. The Industrial Revolution has radically altered man’s environment and way of life, and it is only to be expected that as technology is increasingly applied to the human body and mind, man himself will be altered as radically as his environment and way of life have been.”
“While the industrial system is sick, we must destroy it. If we compromise with it and let it recover from its sickness, it will eventually wipe out all of our freedom.”
Destroying the industrial-technological system requires “revolution, not necessarily an armed uprising, but certainly a radical and fundamental change in the nature of society.”
“The technopiles are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride into the unknown. Many people understand something of what tech-no-log-ical progress is doing to us yet take a passive attitude toward it because they think it is inevitable. But we don’t think it is inevitable.”
“Until the industrial system has been thoroughly wrecked, the destruction of that system must be the revolutionaries’ only goal.”