#title Every Public Recording of Ted Kaczynski #subtitle (Harvard Tapes + Prison Interviews) #date 1960s & 1999 #source <[[https://archive.org/details/every-public-recording-of-ted-kaczynski][archive.org]]>. Excerpts from [[https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/oc1-unabomber-in-his-own-words-originally-titled-the-lost-kaczynski-tapes-2020/][Unabomber in his own words documentary]] & a [[https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/stephen-j-dubner-running-to-do-evil][Time magazine interview]] #lang en #pubdate 2026-11-08T04:54:40 #authors Ted Kaczynski #topics Primary Source Documents on Ted K [[https://youtu.be/jWWlFqLyjSQ]] *** The Harvard psychological experiments Sasha: So part of what the defense team found were fragmentary records of a psychological study that Ted had participated in during his undergrad days at Harvard. The study lasted over a period of 3 years and they met on a weekly basis. It’s never been heard in public. This experiment basically was an experiment run by Henry Murray, at the Harvard psych department. But when it comes to these interviews with Ted, the files are sealed. You can’t get access to them. We have no idea what happened over the course of the 3-year period. This audio only gives us a very small glance into what really happened. Researcher #1: This is Monday evening, March 14, 1960. Dyad number 12 is about to begin, between Mr. C and Mr. Kaczynski. Mr. Kaczynski’s codename is ‘LAWFUL’, L-A-W-F-U-L. Please begin your discussion when you hear the buzzer sound, alright? Mr. C.: Just give me a second. Do you think we ought to decide how we’re going to go about it or… Ted: I suppose it’s supposed to be a spontaneous discussion. Mr. C.: I ought to warn you before I start this, that I was not… I do not have a very favorable impression of you as a result of reading your philosophy. But, let me just tick off a few preliminaries and then we’ll get into what I really didn’t like. First, I mean, in spite of the fact that you’ve explained this subjective reality, I mean I think this is essentially an asinine point of view. Ted: Yeah. Mr. C.: You made one flat statement that the individual owes nothing to society. And this is an insipid remark because I don’t think that you.... I sensed an overriding sense of I don’t know really whether I’d call it weakness or fear. It just sort of permeates your entire philosophy, and I can understand it, sitting here talking with you. Mr. C.: Go ahead. Ted: Ah well, I mean, let me get some chance for some defense here. I mean, well you say… Mr. C.: If you’re defending yourself… if able... Mr. C.: Don’t interrupt me, please. On this, avoiding of society, or of this society is a bad thing, is that why you’re trying to grow that beard? Ted: No. Mr. C.: I mean, are you conforming with the non-conformists? Ted: NO, I’m not conforming with the non-conformists. If I were conforming with the non-conformists… I mean, really, this isn’t really a beard yet… Mr. C.: You’re darn right it’s not. Ted: You haven’t really criticized my views except that you’ve applied labels. You have not analyzed them in any way and attacked them logically. Mr. C.: Sure, well there isn’t too much to analyze, Mr. Kaczynski. It’s a lot of garbage. You don’t seem to me to have the courage of your convictions. Where you do, then your convictions tend to be all wet, and I think you’ve taken your own shortcomings and attempted to compensate for them. Ted: No, you’ve just been applying labels. Researcher #1: Thank you gentlemen, thank you very much. *** The prison interviews begin Theresa: I remember the guards brought Kaczynski in and he was in shackles, and he was wearing a white jumpsuit. And he looked very small and... I was, I was nervous. Okay, so... I guess I should say something like ‘this is the interview with Dr. Theodore Kaczynski and we’re going to begin the interview now.’ [[e-p-every-public-recording-of-ted-kaczynski-1.png 90f]] Stephen: I had been writing a magazine article about his brother, David, the hero of the Unabomber story if there was such a thing. Then I learned that Ted was writing a book – a book that wound up never being published. The book spent most of its time attacking David — as intellectually dishonest and resentful of his brilliant big brother. I requested an interview with Ted, even though he didn’t do that kind of thing – and, to my surprise, he agreed. Ted: The food here, believe it or not, is pretty good. Sometimes it’s oatmeal… Stephen: We talked for several hours. He sat on a concrete bench in a concrete room, a wall of reinforced glass between us. Let’s say it’s a Thursday. Ted: I take a shower every other day, rather than every day. Because I have sensitive skin.... Stephen: Okay. Do you deny — in the context of this interview, do you deny that you committed the crimes attributed to the Unabomber? Ted: I can’t comment on that. *** Childhood Ted: So, this dumb guidance councellor in school said I should skip a grade and it was a disaster, because I was not accepted by the older kids, and this generated a great deal of resentment I remember and the relentless quality of these people, I wanted to revenge myself on them. *** Harvard Ted: You can’t live as a free person as a member of a large-scale system. There is another way to live and you don’t have to live the way we do in this system. I’ve been anti-technology ever since 1962. My last year at Harvard was the year when I definitely decided I was against technology. *** Mathematics & teaching Theresa: You studied math, right? Why? Ted: I just got a kick out of it. I enjoyed it. Theresa: Really? How interesting. Ted: Pure mathematics is useless from a practical point of view and that’s what I studied. I mean, a lot of people don’t understand what mathematicians really do, you know? They think they sit there adding up columns of figures or something like that. But that isn’t what it is. It’s more like puzzle solving. Ted: There was a certain point at which I reached a crisis and I just felt so desolate. I was so empty that I just got depressed and also desperate that I thought that no one cared about me. Ted: The good part about teaching was teaching the few students who were really interested in the subject and the bad part was teaching the rest. Ted: Mathematics was just a game and I wasn’t satisfied spending my life playing a game. Second place, I wanted to get out of the system and out into the wilderness. *** Move to Montana Ted: I wanted physical freedom, I wanted to get away from the cities and civilization because I just wanted to be a hermit. There’s no doubt about the actual reason that I dropped out of the technological system... I mean it reduces people to gears in a giant machine. It takes away our autonomy and our freedom. Ted: So I went up to Montana and when I went through Lincoln there was a little sign saying ‘Real Estate’ outside. I said, “What do you have around here that’s really secluded?” It was not as secluded as I would have liked, but it’s a beautiful little piece of land. It was in the mountains, and so I bought it. And so it’s been part of my life for 25 years now. *** Early hatred of ‘the system’ Theresa: Does your commitment to undermining the techno-industrial system come from a sense of duty, a sense of obligation, or is it more personal? Ted: A lot more personal. I hate the system, not because of some abstract humanitarian principle, but because I hated living in the system. And I got out of it by getting into the mountains, but the system wouldn’t let me alone. But, I had never heard of anyone who had come right out against the technological system as a whole until I read Ellul. So, I was enthusiastic about it when I read Ellul because I figured, fuck, this guy’s been saying things that I’d been wanting to say all along. Back about 1972, I wrote sort of a preliminary essay on the subject of technology, and that was one of the things that made me most hopeless because I assumed that the power of technology would just keep increasing and closing everything down. I was practically alone in the world, it’s just that I was mad. Theresa: He comes right out and says it. Ted: I was going to work at getting back at the system... Revenge. No. It was simply anger and revenge, and I was gonna strike back. Try not to get blown up. My motives are certainly not altruistic, I just don’t like living in this damn system. *** Life in the woods Ted: One thing I found when living in the woods was that you get so that you don’t worry about the future, you don’t worry about dying, if things are good right now, you think, “Well if I die next week, so what?” Things are good right now. Living in the woods, once you get adapted to that way of life, there’s almost no such thing as boredom. You can sit for a while, and just for hours, you can just sit and do nothing and be at peace. Ted: I almost always succeeded in avoiding meeting people in the woods. I would keep off the trails and keep toward the... Keep to the most isolated parts. So, I have these old dirty, ragged clothes on… and I had a… I took a baseball cap and I put a neck cloth on it, so that I could take the neckcloth and button it over to the side. So it would cover the lower part of my face. So here I was walking down this trail, I had a bedroll slung over my shoulder, and I had a canteen hanging here and a bottle of cooking oil hanging here and I had a rifle slung in the crook of my arm, you know? And I’m striding down this trail. And all of a sudden, I meet ‘em coming in the opposite direction, a couple of kids that looked like college kids, you know, out on a field trip or something like that. And there I am with a rifle over my arm, my face covered, and so these kids wouldn’t think I was a bandit or something, you know, I pulled the thing down, so it would not cover my face anymore. And I said, “hi.” And they sort of looked at me and said, “hi.” *** Sabotage Ted: You know, up above my cabin, there used to be old-growth trees, trees hundreds of years old, and there is… a guy who’s a neighbour of mine. Butch Gehring, and this guy is a… he’s a real bastard. He runs a sawmill and just spews this filthy pollution into the air. Not to mention the noise pollution from his engine. And the guy’s not only a logger and a sawmill operator, but he’s a particularly irresponsible one. My intention was to put him out of business once and for all. Ted: They would ride their motorcycles on a road that was supposed to be closed, that sort of thing, and they just didn’t give a damn. And after I figured I’d had just about as much as I could take of that, I picked a nice rainy day when no one would be around and I went over and took an axe to their cabin. I did them quite a bit of damage. Ted: Normally when I did monkeywrenching, I made sure to do it far from home so that, you know, I wouldn’t be a suspect. So then about a week later, two sheriff’s deputies and a game warden came to my cabin and knocked on the door and they asked me “Ted, you cover quite a bit of the territory on foot around here, don’t you?” And I said “Yeah, I do.” And they said, “Have you ever seen anybody doing any damage to any buildings around here?” And I said “No.” Ted: If you use any kind of practical common sense at all, your chances of getting caught are practically zero. If there’s nobody there to see you. The only danger is if you talk to somebody else, and tell them what you’re doing and they don’t keep their mouth shut. *** Ted’s confidence FBI detective work wasn’t going to get him Ted: According to the witness’ description, the Unabomber had reddish blond hair, and this was massive. This description was massively publicized, according to which the Unabomber had reddish blond hair. It’s obviously inconvenient that my hair is brown instead of blond. Ted: The FBI is just incompetent. I mean you wouldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t have believed it, before I saw my case from the inside, how incompetent these people are. Ted: In my case, they had DNA results that were called the DQ alpha reading, and this was from postage stamps that were on Unabomb devices, and this supposedly would narrow it down to three percent of the population. In other words three percent of the population would have the same DQ alpha reading. You know, that doesn’t prove very much, three percent of the population, because there are millions of people who would fit into that. You know, one thing I’ve learned to my surprise is that all this stuff is a lot less effective than people think. I mean technology is useful, if it’s used intelligently, but if it’s used by people who are incompetent, then it’s not very effective. Ted: If you look at these minute traces they get at a crime scene it’s much less effective than they pretend. And add to that, the fact that the FBI lab’s incompetent. *** Elements to Ted’s terror campaign Ted: My parents had a lot of… They were frugal people and they had a lot of money accumulated in savings and loan associations, and they were getting quite a bit of money from the interest. So from about 1980 to 1991 they used to send a yearly stipend to me and my brother. Remember that I was isolated there in Lincoln. I had this little dinky little library to go to. Once, in a great while, I’d go to Missoula and visit the university library there. I would periodically leave for periods of a couple of weeks, to a few months, to get a job somewhere and earn some money to get by. The last time I had a job on just a… I spent a year, approximately a year in the Chicago area working. *** A shift towards hopefulness Ted: Up until the mid 80’s I thought the situation was hopeless, I thought there was nothing that could be done to stop the technological system from going the way it was. All my monkeywrenching activities were simply… It was simple anger and revenge, I’ll tell you frankly. To me, I felt that I was almost completely alone in this respect. I discovered Earth First! Like in the late ‘80s. I said, “hell, hey these people are saying very much the same things that I’ve been thinking all along.” So, I was not inspired by ‘Earth First!’ But I just happened to agree with them a great deal. I started to realize, hey, wait a minute, there’s some other people out there that are having a very dim view of technology too, and maybe, just maybe, it might eventually be possible to do something about this. Theresa: Did you ever think of yourself as an ‘Earth Firster’? Ted: Not really. Theresa: Really. Ted: As a sort of a satellite, sympathizer’s too weak a word, but sort of… ‘Earth Firster Satellite’? I didn’t want to subscribe to the earth first journal because I didn’t want to call attention to myself. If something happened to some logging equipment, I didn’t want them to know who to look for. But, I did pick up a copy of the journal and I saw a lot that I liked. *** Relationship with his brother Ted: My brother’s attitudes radically changed when he married. After he got married, his wife completely converted him to a conventional middle-class point of view. We used to, very often we used to go out and play catch, or one of us would hit the ball with the bat and the other one would catch it. And I remember one time when we were throwing that ball. We were as far apart as we could get and still reach each other with the ball. We were throwing that ball as hard as we could, and as far as we could. And, of course, the ball was thrown very inaccurately, because we were trying so hard to throw it. And so we would — we were making these running, leaping catches. We made more fantastic catches that day than I think we did in all the rest of our years together. That was more fun. I don’t know that it’s exactly true that he wanted me to suffer exactly. It’s more as if he wanted to score a victory over me. Defeat me. Put himself in the victorious position and me in the position of the one who’s defeated and humiliated. Stephen: Is it fair to say that your relationship with David over the years — which obviously had a lot of peaks and valleys — is it fair to say that that was the most profound personal relationship you’d ever had? Ted: I would say it’s the most — the deepest personal relationship that I ever had between — oh, let’s say between my teens and about 1990, when I finally broke off with him. Stephen: Right. In terms of you and David, how do you think that you two are most alike? Ted: That’s a tough one. Stephen: Yeah. Ted: Over many years we shared a great many values. And it’s not clear to me to what extent this was simple imitation of me on his part. And if it was simple imitation on his part, you wouldn’t really call it a similarity. But there are some similarities apart from that. I think we’re both basically quiet, somewhat introverted types. Both a little on the shy side. Another similarity between us would be that generally speaking, I think he’s a very honest person. Stephen: You wrote that his adulation of you disgusted you at certain points over the course of your relationship. Ted: Yeah. Stephen: Did you try to communicate that to him? Did you say to him, Dave, this is not a healthy way to be? I’m glad you like me. I’m glad you respect me, but be your own person. Did you ever try to have that kind of conversation with him? Ted: No. Stephen: Why not? I mean — Ted: It would have been very painful for him to have me say that. And it probably wouldn’t have done any good. Stephen: Yeah. Ted: I mean, I could… in one way or another he would appear to be over-valuing me, but it wasn’t something that was so explicit that I could be sure that it was really that. Stephen: Right. In your dreams... literally, in your dreams and in your thinking... it sounds as if you really felt protective of David for many, many years, yes? Ted: Yes. Stephen: Do you think at some point that he ever began to feel protective of you... do you think that as he moved into adulthood — especially after you had cut off communication, do you think that he ever began to feel protective of you? Ted: No. Stephen: You don’t. In what ways, if any, do you think he was jealous of you? Ted: He was probably jealous of the fact that I got more attention from our parents. He was jealous of the fact simply that I was dominant in our relationship. Jealous of the fact that I was smarter than he was. I could do most things better than he could. Athletics are one exception. Stephen: In what ways, if any, were you jealous of Dave? Ted: I don’t... the only way I can think that I might have been somewhat jealous of him was that when he was in high school he always had lots of friends... he was socially successful. And I wasn’t. And I may have had some jealousy about that. But I don’t clearly remember that. I mean, he was certainly alienated from the mainstream system of values. He just particularly hated Reagan and that whole political bunch. And yet I wouldn’t say exactly he had sympathy for Hinckley or for radicals in general. And there was a resentment there, and yet there was never any hope or ambition on his part to actually do anything active or take radical measures. Stephen: What do you regret most in retrospect about your relationship with David? About the way the relationship devolved, I guess. Ted: Well, I would say basically that I didn’t break off with him 20 years earlier. Stephen: So you still feel that way? Ted: Yeah. I mean, I got a lot of satisfaction out of corresponding with him. I mean, it was a good relation — it was in many respects, not in all respects, but in many respects a positive relationship from my point of view. Stephen: Right. Ted: But I don’t think it was from my brother’s point of view. And in the end it turned out to be disastrous from my point of view, as you can see. Stephen: Right. What do you think would have changed in his life if you had broken off earlier? Ted: Well — I mean — let me put it this way. I think that his attempt to — his sense of rivalry with big brother, his attempt to equal big brother and to win big brother’s approval, with very limited success, I think all this was very hard on him. I think that his self esteem would have been in much better shape if he hadn’t had me to compete with or compare himself with. And I think he would have — and he always had an easy time making friends. He would have had close relationships with other people, so he didn’t really need that relationship with me. Stephen: Right. If the roles had been reversed... if you had suspected David of being the Unabomber... right?... after all the years that you haven’t been communicating very regularly... What would you have done? Ted: I would have kept it to myself. Stephen: Is that what you feel he should have done? Ted: Yeah. Stephen: And what was the first — what was your reaction to that when you first hear that David is involved in turning you in? What does that feel like? Ted: Well, obviously I resented it. There was another strain to my feelings there. I don’t know if I can explain it properly. But in a way I was almost glad because my own brother turning me in in a sense made me look good. Stephen: How so? Ted: Well, I mean, it’s — Stephen: That you had eluded everyone but someone who knew you close — Ted: Well, I didn’t say I eluded anyone for anything. I mean, I have not — I mean, I pled guilty, but that was because I was forced to do so. But it was that — I mean — if someone — I mean, if A screws B, then it tends to make B look good, even if otherwise he might look so great. I don’t know. Stephen: Right, right. Ted: So maybe that’s — That was perhaps an ignoble thought on my part. But that thought was present, I have to admit. Stephen: Okay. *** The arrest Ted: Here’s exactly what happened. I was in my cabin about the middle of the day on April 3rd and I heard a voice up the hillside calling “is anybody home?” There were three guys walking down the hill toward my cabin. They certainly did not look like the kind of people that I would have thought FBI agents would have been. Two of them were old guys and one of ‘em was, you know, fat with a big paunch, you know? I always thought FBI agents would be youngish men in business suits with ties, and all that stuff and these guys were dressed like people who were doing a geological survey for mining purposes. They said, “we’re from the Nordic Drilling Company,” and then as I started to back off from the door to put my shoes on, this one guy sort of stepped toward me and he sort of had a funny look on his face. And then suddenly he reached out and grabbed me and pulled me out of the cabin. One guy pulled out a gun and pointed it at me and then they put handcuffs on me. The three guys were the only three that I saw at first because there were a whole bunch of FBI agents around there that came swarming around after they took me. Ted: Well, they let me know what the investigation was about very soon after they… I mean, even before I was formally arrested, but they didn’t ask me any questions about the case. And of course, if he had asked me anything that was, you know, about the Unabomb case, I wouldn’t have answered it. Ted: I was told by the attorney who represented me in Montana that FBI agents were taking items of alleged evidence from the cabin and they were taking it and showing it to reporters, journalists and saying, “This is such and such a piece of evidence.” And this of course is a flagrant violation of the Justice Department’s own rules. *** The trial Stephen: Were you surprised when you learned that it was David who had turned you in? Were you surprised? Ted: Not terribly surprised. Ted: I didn’t want to be represented as a lunatic, which is what my attorneys were doing. If you look back to pictures that were taken when I was just being brought in by the FBI, you know, I had these old, dirty, ragged clothes… Well, that’s how I dressed in the woods, you know because there’s nobody to see me anyway. I knew they were bringing the cabin down to Sacramento, but I didn’t know what for. This was my lawyer’s idea. They did it without my knowledge. And I only found out afterwards they intended to use it to portray me as mentally ill. ‘Anybody who would live this way is nuts.’ The chief investigator on my defense team, she is said to have pioneered what is called “mitigation investigation.” In other words she goes around and interviews people who knew this person in the past and she gets all this background information on people and in some cases she’s able to use this to get people off the death penalty. The trouble was that my attorneys had put me in a position where either I had to let them go and represent me as a madman to the world, or else I had to accept a plea bargain. *** Life in prison Stephen: Just in terms of your life in prison again, I’m just wondering a little bit about your daily routine. Do you get eight hours of sleep a day? Ted: Yeah. Usually not all at once. See, I’m in a range of cells where there are eight cells. And they call this celebrity row. These people are not what you would think of as criminal types. I mean, they don’t seem to be very angry people. They’re considerate of others. Some of them are quite intelligent. What worries me is that I might, in a sense, adapt to this environment, in the sense that I’ll actually become comfortable here and not resent it anymore and I’m afraid that as the years go by, I might lose my memories of the mountains and the woods, and that’s what really worries me. I’ll tell you a good story, I was camping in my favorite spot. It was the best place there was in that country. While I was picking huckleberry’s I could hear ravens kicking up a big fuss and I was wondering what these ravens were making such a big fuss about. And all of a sudden, I heard this tremendous whooshing sound. I thought, my god, am I being buzzed by an airplane? And I looked up and there’s a golden eagle that goes diving past me, within like ten feet or so of my head with the four ravens chasing it. And the golden eagle, it landed next to some bushes further up the gulch, and it sort of put it’s back to the bushes, so it could face off the ravens that were harassing it. And I kept walking up the gulch, closer to the eagle, and finally it took off and it flew past me, it must’ve been within six feet of my head, it flew so close and these four ravens are still after it. I don’t get to see outside at all. My window just looks down on this concrete and steel recreation area. Theresa: Don’t you think that’s going to drive you crazy? Ted: No, it won’t drive me crazy.... I’m not worried that they’re going to break my spirit and I don’t think they’ll ever convert me as far as attitudes and opinions are concerned. I’m not depressed or downcast. It’s — let me see. Let’s see if I can explain this. There’s sort of — different levels of how you feel about your life. Let me try to explain it this way. When I was living in the woods, there was sort of an undertone, an underlying feeling that things were basically right with my life. That is, something might go wrong, I might have a bad day, I might screw something up, I might break my axe handle and do something else, and everything would go wrong. But still somehow underneath the superficial unhappiness or bad feelings there was an underlying feeling that my life was right. I was able to fall back on the fact that here I was a free man in the mountains surrounded by forests and wild animals and so forth. And that this made my life right even if things were for the time being going badly. Here it’s the other way around. I’m not depressed or downcast, and I have things to do that I can do that I consider productive, like working on getting this book out. And yet the knowledge that I’m locked up here and likely to remain so for the rest of my life is — it ruins it. The undertone in this case is an extremely bad one. And I don’t want to live long. I would rather get the death penalty than spend the rest of my life in prison. Stephen: Would you take your own life given the opportunity? Ted: I will not comment on that. I mean, on a superficial level it isn’t really that bad. But just the knowledge that I’m locked up and I’m not free sort — to me it’s just not a life worth living. Stephen: Right. What do you say — if you have a re-trial and are acquitted, and have your life back, what do you say to society to relax them, to not let them worry about the Unabomber is at large? Ted: Well, I don’t know that I would have to relax them. Just let them worry. Stephen: Ok. If David were to come visit you, if David’s in the room now, what do you want to say to him? Ted: Nothing. I just wouldn’t talk to him. I would just turn my back and wouldn’t talk to him. Stephen: Yeah. Do you still love him? Ted: No. *** Fan mail and the cult figure Ted: There are women who write to me just because they.. There are women who just think that high profile prisoners are attractive and they want a personal relationship with them. And they send me pictures of themselves and tell me about their, you know, personal feelings and things like that. Ted: This is being recorded alright? Theresa: Yup. Ted: Alright. I don’t think… Theresa: Do you want to talk off the record? Ted: No, no, this is fine. This can be on the record. I get letters from kooks who think that I’m in cahoots with space aliens… really… I’ve had a few letters from people… who do regard me as some kind of cult figure. And my personal preference is to be depicted truthfully. If I could be used as a symbol for promoting revolutionary activity, that’s fine with me, because the main thing in my opinion, to me, the main thing is to get rid of the industrial system by whatever means may be necessary. *** Revolution Ted: People today are excessively afraid of pain and death. If the system does break down, with or without the help of revolutionaries, there’s going to be a lot of violence and what sort of dilemma does this pose for nonviolent radicals? Ted: I think especially useful targets would be things like computer centers, or let’s say, for example, genetic engineering laboratories because these are sort of the cutting edge of the system’s progress. Because I think a lot of people are threatened by things like genetic engineering or super-intelligent computers. Ted: People don’t believe a revolution is possible and one of the most important things you can do is convince people that it is possible. If you work for the collapse of industrial civilization, you don’t really have to convince the majority of the population that you’re right. What you have to do is get a very large and very strongly committed minority. Ted: There are computer experts now that are quite seriously, in all seriousness, thinking of getting rid of the human race and replacing us with computers. They think that in 50 years from now we can download our brains into computers. And in this way attain immortality as machines. And I think a lot of people, other than activists, will be upset by that kind of thing. Ted: I mean, if you’re going to choose an enemy, the head of a corporation is a much bigger enemy than scientists who are developing genetic engineering and that sort of thing. And I think it’s important not to forget that it’s really the core of the system that we have to worry about most. Ted: I think what has to be done is not try to persuade the majority of people that we’re right, so much as to increase tensions in society to the point where things start to break down, when people get uncomfortable enough so that they’re going to rebel. Now the question is, how do you increase those tensions? Well, the problem of the revolutionary should be, it seems to me, is unequivocally, simply to get rid of the industrial system, and that’s the key point. That’s my take on the situation. Ted: I think we have to build a strong and cohesive revolutionary movement so that when the right moment comes we will be prepared to do what we have to do. One reason why I think actions like the Vail arson are useful: An action like that tends to increase the sense that something is going on, the sense that there is a tension in society, and it gives the activists themselves a sense of purpose. It’s important. It seems to me that there are discontented groups that could be very useful if we could, so to speak, recruit them. Then when the right moment comes, they will be in a position to strike. The thing is that people will tend to be attracted to a movement not only on the basis of agreeing with its ideas, but if they see it as effective, having a clear-cut agenda, cohesive, purposeful and active. Ted: In certain quarters, there is a rejection of modernity, among Muslim militants, and I’m wondering what extent it might be useful to our movement to carry on discussions with the Muslim militants and see whether there is sufficient common ground there for any sort of alliance. *** Appendix **** Stephen’s afterthoughts Stephen: We asked David Kaczynski to talk about his brother for this show; he understandably chose not to. Ever since Ted’s arrest, David has worked hard to try to repair some of the damage done by his brother. While Ted has never expressed regret or apologized to the victims, David did. He donated money; he toured the country speaking against violence. It is bizarre, to me at least, listening back to this tape of Ted. He makes it sound as if he is the aggrieved party. Can you imagine having an older brother like that – who tells you that up is down and down is up? Soon you might start believing him. And if he has bad intentions, violent intentions, well, you might start believing that those are your intentions too. **** Ellul was done dirty by Ted Sean: I think what’s interesting about the relationship between Kaczynski and Ellul is not just that Ellul influenced Kaczynski, but also that Ellul anticipated a lot of Kaczynski’s arguments, and tried to preempt them. He anticipated that someone much like Kaczynski would eventually come along and try to use his arguments to justify a violent revolution against technology. He tried to head that off in advance. **** Ted was done dirty by the CIA Glenn: I was a career operations officer in the CIA, who became involved, for a time, in the interrogation of one of the top members, we believed, of Al-Qaeda. And thereby was involved for that time, in the enhanced interrogation program, which is torture and is mind-altering procedures. My experiences, tragically, are directly relevant to the experience Kaczynski went through because the methods used by the CIA were directly derived from — not just inspired by — what Murray was trying to do in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. And that is that you can break somebody down and you can alter their mind. The theory was, you will be psychologically broken down and dislocated so that you can then be reformed as a cooperative source. It’s perverse. It’s sick. It doesn’t work. And it’s wrong in every conceivable way. But that’s what Kaczynski was subjected to. David: Ted had told his attorneys and they relayed it to me, they asked him, “Ted, why did you put up with this for three years? I mean, these people were just humiliating you, why did you put up with this?” And he basically said, well, I wanted to show that I could take it, that I couldn’t be broken. And the thought that occurred to me was, well, maybe sometimes it’s better to be broken than to be hardened.