I’ve read quite a few true crime books this year. It’s an interesting field, but I’m wary of including too much of it here. All the books I’ve discussed here have had satanism or cult connections. This week I’m going a bit further afield and looking at the Unabomber’s manifesto. The Unabomber was not a Satanist nor an occultist, and though not my usual fare, I imagine most of my readers will have at least mild interest in this extraordinarily intelligent, yet completely delusional, mass murderer.

Industrial Society and Its Future – FC (Ted Kaczynski)

For those of you who don’t know, Ted Kaczynski was a Harvard educated Math professor who left his job lecturing at the University of California, Berkeley, to live a life of seclusion in a cabin in the woods. While he was there, he decided that technology was the root of nearly all human unhappiness and that by killing a bunch of influential scientists, he would kickstart a revolution that would destroy all technology and end human suffering. In 1995, after spending almost 2 decades terrorising America, he sent a manifesto to the Washington Post and told them he’d stop bombing innocent people if they printed it. It was actually the wording in the manifesto that led to his arrest. His brother recognised familiar phrases in it and told the FBI.

The above paragraph probably makes this dude seem absolutely crazy, but a lot of his ideas are frighteningly prescient. We all know that technology is undoubtedly fucking people up. Ted came up with this stuff in the 70s, so he wasn’t even thinking of social media and smartphones, but he specifically foretold how advancing technology would gain a stronger and stronger hold on how people would think and act. We’ve gotten to a point now where technology has such a hold on every aspect of our lives that the idea of getting rid of it seems completely impossible.

I think that’s the thing that makes Ted crazy. His goals were noble but utterly ridiculous. He may have been a mathematical genius, a skillful craftsman and a philosopher, but he had no self awareness. He thought a hairy weirdo living in a bush was going to stop people from using electricity.

The other problem is that technology is also pretty useful. I’d love to see people spending less time looking at their screens, but I also think that cancer treatments for sick children are neat. Kaczynski was a “survival of the fittest” kind of a guy. I suppose that kind of belief is easier to accept if you’re a little frigid with no friends or family.

Reading this manifesto reminded me of 2 books. One of these was Kiss Maerth’s The Beginning Was the End. Like the manifesto, that book describes humanity falling from grace. For Ted the fall began with the industrial revolution. For Oscar it was when monkeys started to eat each others’ brains. The effect has been similar. Humanity’s accomplishments are unhealthily great, and both authors want a return to a more natural state. The other book this reminded me of was Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Kaczynski is more optimistic about the future of humanity as he believes in a hope for salvation, but that hope now seems so misplaced that his manifesto felt a lot like reading Ligotti’s thoughts on how humanity is cursed and doomed by its own intelligence. These would be 3 good books to read together if you wanted to have a really bad time.

The actual manifesto is pretty boring. It’s thorough, but quite repetitive. A sparksnotes version would probably be sufficient. I can’t be sure, but I feel like his ideas might have been influential on whoever wrote the Matrix.

Kaczynski killed himself a couple of years ago. I’m sure that living is prison is shit, but you can’t help but wonder if his decision to commit suicide was affected by seeing his prophecies coming to pass. It was a sad end to a sad life. He was a psychopathic murderer, but he clearly had severe mental health problems, and there’s stories that he was a victim of an evil science experiment when he was a teenager.