Theodore Kaczynski

Theodore John Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber (May 22, 1942 – June 10, 2023) was an American terrorist and former mathematics professor. After leaving modern society in 1971, between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski killed three people and injured 23 others in a nationwide mail bombing campaign against people he believed to be advancing modern technology and the destruction of the environment. He authored Industrial Society and Its Future, a 35,000-word manifesto and social critique opposing industrialization, rejecting leftism, and advocating for a nature-centered form of anarchism. After promising to desist from terrorism in a letter sent to The New York Times if his manifesto was published by the Times or The Washington Post, it appeared in the latter in September 1995, leading to his identification and capture. Following the FBI's most expensive manhunt in its history, he pleaded guilty to all charges in 1998 and was sentenced to eight consecutive life terms in prison without the possibility of parole.

The ultimate goal of a revolutionary movement today must be the total collapse of the worldwide technological system.

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness.

Quotes

• My motive for what I am going to do is simply personal revenge. I do not expect to accomplish anything by it.… I certainly don't claim to be an altruist or acting for the "good" (whatever that is) of the human race. I act merely from a desire for revenge. Of course, I would like to get revenge on the whole scientific and bureaucratic establishment, not to mention the communists and others who threaten freedom, but that being impossible, I have to content myself with just a little revenge.
  • Journal (April 6, 1971)

• After I had skipped 6th grade and begun feeling a great deal of hostility toward many of my schoolmates, I developed a habit of trying to find ways of justifying my hatred in terms of my moral system. By and by I got bored with this game. One day when I was 13 years old, I was walking down the street and saw a girl. Something about her appearance antagonized me and, from habit, I began looking for a way to justify hating her, within my logical system. But then I stopped and said to myself, "This is getting ridiculous. I'll just chuck all this silly morality business and hate anybody I please." Since then I have never had any interest in or respect for morality, ethics, or anything of the sort.
  • Memoir

• Just then came a major turning point in my life. Like a Phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope. I thought I wanted to kill that psychiatrist because the future looked utterly empty to me. I felt I wouldn't care if I died. And so I said to myself why not really kill the psychiatrist and anyone else whom I hate.… I will kill, but I will make at least some effort to avoid detection so that I can kill again.
  • Memoir, describing his decision in 1966 to become a serial killer

• This guy is clearly typical member of the technician class. Might even be one of the guys that has flown those fucking jets over my home. This gives great relief to my choking, frustrated anger and sense of impotence against the system. At the same time, must admit I feel badly about having crippled this man’s arm. It has been bothering me a good deal. This is embarrassing because while my feelings are partly from pity, I am sure they come largely from the training, propaganda, brainwashing we all get, conditioning us to be scared by the idea of doing certain things. It is shameful to be under the sway of this brainwashing. But do not get the idea that I regret what I did. Relief of frustrated anger outweighs uncomfortable conscience.
  • Journal (May 1985) in reference to the bombing of engineering student John Hauser

• Recently I camped in a paradise like glacial cirque. At evening, beautiful singing of birds was ruined by the obscene roar of jet planes. Then I laughed at the idea of having any compunction about crippling an airplane pilot.
  • Journal (May 1985)

Interviews

• But what first motivated me wasn’t anything I read. I just got mad seeing the machines ripping up the woods.
  • Interview with Earth First! in Administrative Maximum Facility Prison, Florence, Colorado, USA, (June 1999)

• The big problem is that people don't believe a revolution is possible, and it is not possible precisely because they do not believe it is possible.
  • Interview from primitivism.com

• Many years ago I used to read books like, for example, Ernest Thompson Seton's Lives of Game Animals to learn about animal behavior. But after a certain point, after living in the woods for a while, I developed an aversion to reading any scientific accounts. In some sense reading what the professional biologists said about wildlife ruined or contaminated it for me. What began to matter to me was the knowledge I acquired about wildlife through personal experience.
  • in Defining Danger: American Assassins and the New Domestic Terrorists

• No, 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. But I am not afraid they are going to break my spirit.
  • Answer given when he was asked if he was afraid of losing his mind in prison. Interview with Ted Kaczynski

• Never lose hope, be persistent and stubborn and never give up. There are many instances in history where apparent losers suddenly turn out to be winners unexpectedly, so you should never conclude all hope is lost.
  • Interview with Ted Kaczynski

• I must tell you that mathematicians are not scientists, they are artists. ... Apart from the most elementary mathematics, like arithmetic or high school algebra, the symbols, formulas and words of mathematics have no meaning at all. The entire structure of pure mathematics is a monstrous swindle, simply a game, a reckless prank. You may well ask: "Are there no renegades to reveal the truth?" Yes, of course. But the facts are so incredible that no one takes them seriously. So the secret is in no danger.
  • The Net: The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet

Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)

It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force.

Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.

• The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
  • "Introduction", paragraph 1

• The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine.
  • "Introduction", paragraph 2

• If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.
  • "Introduction", paragraph 3

• The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call feelings of inferiority and oversocialization. Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential
  • "The Psychology of Modern Leftism", paragraph 9

• Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society.
  • "Feelings of Inferiority", paragraph 12

• We are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not.
  • "Oversocialization", paragraph 25

• Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.
  • "The Power Process", paragraph 36

• In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one's physical needs.
  • "Surrogate Activities", paragraph 40

• And then there are unthinking, animal types who seem to be satisfied with a purely physical sense of power (the good combat soldier, who gets his sense of power by developing fighting skills that he is quite content to use in blind obedience to his superiors).
  • "Autonomy", paragraph 43

• Crowding, rapid change and the breakdown of communities have been widely recognized as sources of social problems. But we do not believe they are enough to account for the extent of the problems that are seen today.
  • "Sources Of Social Problems", paragraph 53

• A theme that appears repeatedly in the writings of the social critics of the second half of the 20th century is the sense of purposelessness that afflicts many people in modern society.
  • "Disruption Of The Power Process In Modern Society", paragraph 64

• Some people have low susceptibility to advertising and marketing techniques. These are the people who aren't interested in money. Material acquisition does not serve their need for the power process.
  • "How Some People Adjust", paragraph 81

• In any case it is not normal to put into the satisfaction of mere curiosity the amount of time and effort that scientists put into their work.
  • "The Motives of Scientists", paragraph 87

• Also, science and technology constitute a power mass movement, and many scientists gratify their need for power through identification with this mass movement. Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research.
  • "The Motives of Scientists", paragraphs 91-92

• One does not have freedom if anyone else (especially a large organization) has power over one, no matter how benevolently, tolerantly and permissively that power may be exercised. It is important not to confuse freedom with mere permissiveness.
  • "The Nature of Freedom", paragraph 94

• In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we've had to kill people.
  • "The Nature of Freedom", paragraph 96

• A new kind of society cannot be designed on paper. That is, you cannot plan out a new form of society in advance, then set it up and expect it to function as it was designed to do.
  • "Some Principles of History", paragraph 104

• People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under rational human control.
  • "Some Principles of History", paragraph 106

• The system HAS TO force people to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior.
  • "Restriction on Freedom is Unavoidable in Industrial Society", paragraph 118

• The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system.
  • "Restriction on Freedom is Unavoidable in Industrial Society", paragraph 119

• The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.
  • "Restriction on Freedom is Unavoidable in Industrial Society", paragraph 119

• A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed in favor of freedom is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the "bad" parts of technology and retain only the "good" parts.
  • The ‘Bad’ Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated From the ‘Good’ Parts, paragraph 121

• It is not possible to make a LASTING compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through REPEATED compromises.
  • "Technology Is A More Powerful Social Force Than The Aspiration For Freedom", paragraph 125

• Thus it is clear that the human race has at best a very limited capacity for solving even relatively straightforward social problems. How then is it going to solve the far more difficult and subtle problem of reconciling freedom with technology?
  • "Simpler Social Problems Have Proved Intractable", paragraph 138

• We hope we have convinced the reader that the system cannot be reformed in such a way as to reconcile freedom with technology. The only way out is to dispense with the industrial-technological system altogether. This implies revolution, not necessarily an armed uprising, but certainly a radical and fundamental change in the nature of society.
  • "Revolution is Easier Than Reform", paragraph 140

• Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. It is well known that the rate of clinical depression had been greatly increasing in recent decades. We believe that this is due to disruption of the power process, as explained in paragraphs 59-76. But even if we are wrong, the increasing rate of depression is certainly the result of SOME conditions that exist in today's society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable. (Yes, we know that depression is often of purely genetic origin. We are referring here to those cases in which environment plays the predominant role.)
  • "Control of Human Behavior", paragraph 145

• 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.
  • "Control of Human Behavior", paragraph 160

• The technophiles are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride into the unknown. Many people understand something of what technological progress is doing to us yet take a passive attitude toward it because they think it is inevitable. But we (FC) don't think it is inevitable. We think it can be stopped, and we will give here some indications of how to go about stopping it.
  • "Strategy", paragraph 180

Hit Where It Hurts (2002)

Green Anarchy #8, (Spring 2002)

• Smashing up McDonald's or Starbuck's is pointless. Not that I give a damn about McDonald's or Starbuck's. I don't care whether anyone smashes them up or not. But that is not a revolutionary activity. Even if every fast-food chain in the world were wiped out the techno-industrial system would suffer only minimal harm as a result, since it could easily survive without fast-food chains. When you attack McDonald's or Starbuck's, you are not hitting where it hurts.
  • "Technology Is The Target", point 2

• The techno-industrial system is exceptionally tough due to its so-called "democratic" structure and its resulting flexibility. Because dictatorial systems tend to be rigid, social tensions and resistance can be built up in them to the point where they damage and weaken the system and may lead to revolution. But in a "democratic" system, when social tension and resistance build up dangerously the system backs off enough, it compromises enough, to bring the tensions down to a safe level.
  • "Why The System Is Tough", point 4

The Road to Revolution (2008)

I have noticed that the people who try hardest to impose moral code on others (not in self-defense) are often the least careful to abide by that moral code themselves.

Writings later included in Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, aka "The Unabomber" (2010)

• There are two kinds of morality—the kind of morality that one imposes on oneself and the kind of morality that one imposes on others. For the first kind of morality, that is, for self-restraint, I have the greatest respect. The second kind of morality I do not respect except when it constitutes self-defense. (For example, when women say that rape and wife-beating are immoral, that is self-defense.) I have noticed that the people who try hardest to impose moral code on others (not in self-defense) are often the least careful to abide by that moral code themselves.
  • "Morality and Revolution"

• To judge from the Internet postings that people have sent me, probably most of what you learned [about me] was nonsense.
  • Letter to J. N.

• A mistake that most people make is to assume that the more followers you can recruit, the better. That's true if you are trying to win an election. A vote is a vote regardless of whether the voter is deeply committed or just barely interested enough to get to the polls. But when you're building a revolutionary movement, the number of people you have is far less important than the quality of your people and the depth of their commitment. Too many lukewarm or otherwise unsuitable people will ruin the movement.
  • Letters to David Skrbina

• Rebellion against technology and civilization is real rebellion, a real attack on the values of the existing system. But the green anarchists, anarcho-primitivists, and so forth (The "GA Movement") have fallen under such heavy influence from the left that their rebellion against civilization has to great extent been neutralized. Instead of rebelling against the values of civilization, they have adopted many civilized values themselves and have constructed an imaginary picture of primitive societies that embodies these civilized values.
  • Letter to M. K.

• Its is important, too, to realize that deadly violence among primitives is not even remotely comparable to modern warfare. When primitives fight, two little bands of men shoot arrows or swing war-clubs at one another because they want to fight; or because they are defending themselves, their families, or their territory. In the modern world soldiers fight because they have been brainwashed into believing in some kook ideology such as that of Nazism, socialism, or what American politicians choose to call "freedom". In any case the modern soldier is merely a pawn, a dupe who dies not for his family or his tribe but for the politicians who exploit him. If he's unlucky, maybe he does not die but comes home horribly crippled in a way that would never result from an arrow- or a spear-wound. Meanwhile, thousands of non-combatants are killed or mutilated. The environment is ravaged, not only in the war zone, but also back home, due to the accelerated consumption of natural resources needed to feed the war machine. In comparison, the violence of primitive man is relatively innocuous.
  • "The Truth about Primitive Life"

Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (2015)

We will argue that if the development of the technological world-system is allowed to proceed to its logical conclusion, then in all probability the Earth will be left a dead planet – a planet on which nothing will remain alive except, maybe, some of the simplest organisms – certain bacteria, algae, etc. – that are capable of surviving under extreme conditions.

As soon as some energy is freed up by conservation, the technological world-system gobbles it up and demands more. No matter how much energy is provided, the system always expands rapidly until it is using all available energy, and then it demands still more.

• There are many people today who see that modern society is heading toward disaster in one form or another, and who moreover recognize technology as the common thread linking the principal dangers that hang over us.
  • p. 1

• People ... can think of nothing better to do than to continue attacking particular evils while vaguely hoping that their work will somehow help to solve the overall problem of technology. In reality their work is counterproductive, because it distracts attention from the technological system itself as the underlying source of the evils and leads people to focus instead on problems of limited significance that moreover cannot be permanently solved while the technological system continues to exist.
  • p. 1

• The development of a society can never be subject to rational human control.
  • p. 7

• In the short term, natural selection favors self-propagating systems that pursue their own short-term advantage with little or no regard for long-term consequences.
  • p. 44

• Where (as today) problems of transportation and communication do not constitute effective limitations on the size of the geographical regions over which self-propagating systems operate, natural selection tends to create a world in which power is mostly concentrated in the possession of a relatively small number of global self-propagating systems.
  • p. 47

• As technology progresses and globalization grows more pervasive, the world-system becomes ever more complex and more tightly coupled, so that a catastrophic breakdown has to be expected sooner or later.
  • p. 49

• Meanwhile, fierce competition among global self-prop systems will have led to such drastic and rapid alterations in the Earth's climate, the composition of its atmosphere, the chemistry of its oceans, and so forth, that the effect on the biosphere will be devastating. ... We will argue that if the development of the technological world-system is allowed to proceed to its logical conclusion, then in all probability the Earth will be left a dead planet-a planet on which nothing will remain alive except, maybe, some of the simplest organisms-certain bacteria, algae, etc.-that are capable of surviving under extreme conditions.
  • p. 55

• It seems amazing that those who advocate energy conservation haven't noticed what happens: As soon as some energy is freed up by conservation, the technological world-system gobbles it up and demands more. No matter how much energy is provided, the system always expands rapidly until it is using all available energy, and then it demands still more.
  • p. 56

• The ultimate goal of a revolutionary movement today must be the total collapse of the worldwide technological system.
  • p. 138

• An antitechnological movement that focused on the elimination of capitalism would gain little in return for an enormous expenditure of energy. What is worse, by focusing on capitalism the movement would distract its own and other people's attention from the far more important objective of bringing down the technological system itself.
  • p. 211

Quotes about Kaczynski

Listed in alphabetical order by individual or source.

• Once a man is a murderer, I don't give a damn what his opinions are. His opinions are of no interest to me. What I know about him is that he's a murderer, a creator of pain and suffering, and his opinions are disqualified from being of interest to any civilized human being.
  • David Gelernter, Kaczynski bomb victim, in The Net (2003)

• It was a feeling of being trapped – trapped in this brother relationship, trapped in this dilemma in which people's lives were at stake either way. One way, if we did nothing, another bomb might go off and more people might die. The other way, I turned Ted in and he would be executed.
  • David Kaczynski interviewed for "My brother, the Unabomber" The Guardian (September 15, 2009)
  • The possibility of an execution was dropped after Ted Kaczynski was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia and pleaded guilty to the charges.

• [The first time Kaczynski's sister-in-law thought he might be the unabomber] I'd thought about the families that were bombed. There was one in which the package arrived to the man's home and his little 2-year-old daughter was there. She was almost in the room when he opened the package. Luckily she left, and his wife left. [...] And then he died.
  And there were others. And so I spent those days thinking about those people.
  • Linda Patrik (David Kaczynski's wife), interviewed for 20/20 on ID Presents: Homicide, as cited in "Unabomber Ted Kaczynski found dead in prison cell" ABC News (June 10, 2023).

• In the 1960s there was a young man who had just graduated from the University of Michigan who was doing brilliant work in mathematics, specifically bounded harmonic functions. Then he went to Berkeley, where he was an assistant professor and showed amazing potential. Then he moved to Montana and blew the competition away.
  • Robin Williams and Stellan Skarsgård, in Good Will Hunting (1997)

See also

• Technology critique

External links

• The Writings of Ted Kaczynski