Though this is primarily a biography of Ted Kaczynski and his fascinating, troubled life, Mr. Chase, who has written extensively on animals and the environment, allows himself the freedom to roam beyond the Unabomber's dramatic actions. He devotes as much time to the man's theories and the times that created him as he does to the man himself and, as a consequence, has assembled here a sweeping and satisfying history of a man who thought he understood the future and, to say the least, liked it not at all.
Ted Kaczynski is remembered, of course, as the Unabomber, the man whose home-made bombs terrorized seemingly random businesses in the 1980s. Though his campaign actually claimed only three lives, its psychological impact was sufficient to coerce the New York Times into publishing his 35,000 word manifesto on the perniciousness of technology. Kaczynski believes that technological dependence will lead to the enslavement of the human race and it was this which motivated him to mail out his bombs to places which proliferated such technology.
Before Kaczynski was the Unabomber, however, he was a brilliant mathematician whose mind, according to one faculty advisor, was sharp enough to solve a problem that maybe ten, contemporary Americans could solve. But as clever as he may have been with numbers, he was equally anti-social, a problem helped not at all by being skipped two grades in high school which only furthered his isolation. As a consequence, the Kaczynski who arrived at Harvard at the age of 16 was ill-equipped to defend himself against the psychological attacks from Henry Murray, a famous and clearly cruel professor of psychology at Harvard who very much belonged to the right wing ethos of American universities that existed prior to the liberalization of the 1960s. Mr. Chase needed only to describe the barbarous tactics used in Dr. Murray's test to explain how this traumatizing incident could have contributed to Kaczynski's radicalization.
This is an excellent biography of a difficult subject. For while Kaczynski is clearly damaged, he's also, at times, a sympathetic figure. At one point, in the 1960s, he flees civilization for the peace of the Montana wilderness, removing himself from a world he disagrees with. But civilization follows him, invading his solitude by mining his hills, paving roads through his wilderness. It's only after these incursions into his world that he gets angry enough to lash out. Our world is an ever-changing place that is incredibly insensitive to those who do not deal well with such change.
The extent to which Mr. Chase is able to explain Kaczynski by keying on the events which turned him into the Unabomber is impressive, revealing a broken man who lacked the tools to articulate himself without the use of violence to acquire the world's attention. Yes, it's all here, from Kaczynski, to his family, to his bombs, to the FBI's effort to catch him. And it's all told with one eye always turned towards the bigger picture of the man in his time.
Kaczynski is wrong, of course. He believes that the use of technology will inevitably lead to a future day in which we invent intelligent machines to do our labor for us. Whether we master these machines and have them facilitate our lives, or whether the machines overthrow us and enslave us, either way we will be slaves to their power, dependent upon them to exist. So far, pessimistic but logical. However, when Kaczynski concludes, from this, that the only solution is to return to a world prior to the Industrial Revolution, just to escape a future that may or may not come about, he loses, well, everyone. Because, of course, we can't go back to a world prior to the Industrial Revolution! Not only would we be consigning billions of people to starvation and death, we can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. We know how electricity works, how Relativity works, how the sun works, how energy works, how fossil fuels work, all of which catalyze the ignition of civilization. We know how to make guns, cars, planes, boats, bombs... That knowledge can't be wiped out, not completely. Somewhere, somehow, someone will rebuild what was destroyed. And if, on Kaczynskian grounds, they refuse to do it, someone in the future will once Kaczynski's lesson has been forgotten. Progress is inevitable. And if this means that we are on the road to enslavement, then enslavement it will be. That doesn't mean, until then, that we sacrifice all our agency and give up. Who knows what the future will hold, but we do know this. It's impossible and foolish to go back.
A thought provoking book. (4/5 Stars)
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