For the love of a brother

The Cliff Notes

Source: The Cliff Notes

…

The Letters

Source: Unabomber Letters - Selection 2

Collection Description: That desire to escape into the wild was something David had shared with his brother, Ted. Though Ted is seven years older, he and David were once as close as only brothers can be. Thirty years ago, the Kaczynskis, both Ivy League graduates, each quit their jobs and retreated into the wilderness.

Letter #1

Dave,

Of all the things you could conceivably have done to me, what you have done is by far the cruelest. You know it, and you know it before you did it, even though, with your usual talent for self-deception, you never permitted yourself to be conscious of it. You know me well enough to realize that above all I need physical freedom, silence, and solitude, and that, to me, permanent imprisonment will be a fate far worse than death. That would be the case even if I were imprisoned under the best of conditions. But you know very well that in prisons there is a high risk of homosexual rape and of abuse by other prisoners, or even by guards; and that even without that prisons are noisy and crowded; and you are certainly aware that I can’t endure noise and crowding.

The FBI assured you that conditions in federal prisons were fine and that I would be happier in prison, but it is not conceivable that you could have believed this except by a particularly egregious act of self-deception. You know me, and you know that the FBI had very strong ulterior motives for giving you such assurances. As a matter of fact, I was living rather happily prior to my arrest, and prison will be torture for me.

You tried to get the FBI to arrest me under conditions that wouldn’t involve risk of my being killed, and you urged the government not to seek the death penalty for me. But, as already noted, you knew well that permanent imprisonment would be for me far worse than death, so your effort to “save” me from death can only have been an attempt to solve your conscience by inflicting on me a punishment that in our society, is conventionally regarded as less severe than death.

It is interesting that you asked the FBI to promise not to reveal your identity as the informant, and you were very upset when that promise was broken. Evidently you were ashamed of what you were doing. Why did you do it? To stop the unabomber? Hardly. You knew that the unabomber had promised to stop bombing if his manifesto were published, and you knew that the promise would be kept if I were the unabomber, since I am strict about keeping promises. Furthermore, if I were the unabomber you could have effectively stopped the bombings by warning me that you would tip off the FBI if I didn’t desist.

The real reason why you informed on me is that you hate me. You say you love me, and you probably do. But you have deep, unresolved and uncontrolled conflicts concerning me, and your loving me does not prevent you from hating me at the same time. This hatret has repeatedly revealed itself in your behaviour toward me over the years. And what you hate me for is your own gnawing sense of inferiority. Your suspician that I was the unabomber at last gave you your opportunity to get a crushing revenge on big brother for being smarter and more capable than you are, while maintaining the illusion that your motives were “moral.”

Of course, you will not accept the truth about your own motives. I know from long experience that it is useless to reason with you where your emotions are involved, because you will resort to any sort of rationalization, no matter how far-fetched, to avoid facing up to difficult truths. You wear a kind of veil over your motives to keep yourself from being consious of them, and it is this veil that enables you to live wih yourself. But, some day the veil will fall away and you will see yourself as you really are. And on that day you will go to hell, because seeing yourself as you really are will truly be hell.

Letter #2

Dave:

If there was ever any doubt about the fact that your turning me in was motivated by your hatred of me, that doubt has been removed by your interviews that appeared in the New York Times and on 60 Minutes.

In those interviews you portrayed me as mentally ill. Did you really believe I was so? Hardly. In the past you have denied the very existence of mental illness. I have proof of this in the letters you wrote me concerning Joel Schwartz. Were you trying to “save” me from the death penalty by providing me with an insanity defense? If that had been your motive you would have emphasized the fact that I was subjected to verbal and psychological abuse, which you know is true and which would have helped my defense. Instead, you lied and denied that I had suffered such abuse, even though you are well aware (I’ve made it clear to you in various letters) that the acknowledgment of that abuse was desperately important to me, and that the denial of it tortured me with frustration and a sense of injustice.

Though you don’t admit it to yourself, you know deep inside that you were inflicting acute suffering on me by making the public statements that you did, and you were doing it because you hate me on account of your own feelings of inferiority and of inadequacy relative to me.

Letter #3

Dear Ted,

Your letters were shown to me. Afterward I spoke with one of your attorneys, Gary. Soward, who confirmed that the jail environment is terribly noisy and demeaning. I both fear and in a gut sense know the effect this must be having on you. I know that I am the immediate cause of this suffering. I’ve passed through periods of denial, in which I tried to convince myself that my actions might even have helped you. But all of that is over now. I have had to glimpse my own cruelty and it is, as you say, a kind of hell. I do love you, I’m so, so sorry for what I’ve done and for how it hurts you.

Dave