Photo by Will Moss

Ten years after the capture of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, his Manifesto remains as one of the few testaments to his philosophy.

Manifesto still read, still controversial

By Paul Brohaugh

In a cabin 75 miles from the nation’s fourth smallest state capital, a man sought to live in the arms of wild nature. He ate game from the forest, bicycled occasionally to the Lincoln, Mont., library, wrote in a journal, hiked in the woods, mailed out bombs and wrote a Manifesto – 67 pages on a manual typewriter – that said technology is strangling human freedom.

“The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,” he typed on a fresh sheet of paper. While increasing life expectancy, these consequences “have made life unfulfilling … have led to widespread psychological suffering … and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world.”

About 35,000 words later, he sent his work to the New York Times and The Washington Post. He wrote the Manifesto as if it were the work of a movement called the “F.C.”  (Read full Manifesto)

University of Montana journalism professor Dennis McAuliffe was a night editor at the Post's foreign desk at the time, in the spring of 1995. The Manifesto didn't create any buzz in the newsroom, other than when it went missing for a few days, he said. It turned up on the desk next to McAuliffe's, addressed to an editor who was on vacation. Everyone was glad not to copy edit the thing, he said.

“Industrial Society and Its Future,” the proper name of the Manifesto, made some waves when The Post printed it word for word in an eight-page supplement on Sept. 19, 1995. Most of the commotion was about printing, on terms of blackmail, the treatise of an unidentified terrorist. The author claimed to be the one who mailed bombs that killed three and injured 23 over the previous 17 years. The Unabomber. Print the whole thing and I’ll stop killing people, he told the Times and the Post.

Photo illustration by Will Moss

The Missoula Public Library carries a bound version of the Unabomber's Manifesto.

Why not? said the FBI. It might help us find him. So 816,474 copies of his message hit the streets, coffee shops and living rooms of America, including David Kaczynski’s, who eventually told the FBI that it sounded like his brother in Montana. The Oakland Tribune printed another 80,000 copies. The full text showed up on several Web sites, and a Berkeley publisher put it out in a $10 paperback. The Missoula Public Library shelves a computer print-out version under 303.483 UNABOM (missing paragraph no. 116, as did the version in The Washington Post).

Today, a Google search of “Industrial Society and its Future” along with “syllabus” yields about 50 “edu” Web sites, college courses that include the Manifesto in their reading lists, from environmental studies to philosophy to political science to English.

The author turned out to be Theodore John Kaczynski, Ph.D. in math, whose previous work included “The Set of Curvilinear Convergence of a Continuous Function Defined in the Interior of a Cube.” He was arrested April 3, 1996, at his cabin near Lincoln.

The Manifesto reads with the tone of a one-man club, in the particular lingo (sometimes bizarre) of someone who spends too much time alone, with cool, prophetic confidence in his own authority.

“The FBI has tried to portray these bombings as the work of an isolated nut,” he wrote in an April 1995 letter to the New York Times. “We won’t waste our time arguing about whether we are nuts, but we certainly are not isolated.”

Isolation is a relative term. In inventing the F.C. – some say it meant Freedom Club – Kaczynski may have hoped for members to spring from the woodwork. Today, not many people remember anything about his Manifesto, other than it being a long rant against technology. Yet some people agreed with his message, mostly minus the bombings, and say its truth becomes more apparent as time marches on.

Others, such as University of Montana philosophy professor Albert Borgmann, say the Manifesto wouldn’t stand alone – its appeal stems from Kaczynski’s notoriety. “I don’t think anyone should read it carefully,” he said. Borgmann’s field is the philosophy of technology. There are much better arguments about what’s going wrong, he said, and Kaczynski’s Manifesto has “fallen into its richly deserved obscurity.”

Kaczynski never appeared to repent for bombing people he called “technophiles,” though his treatise allowed that he might be wrong on some points. Rather than explain his violent tactics, “Industrial Society and its Future” was a separate prong in a no-holds-barred attack on technology. What did it say?

*****

Photo illustration by Will Moss

“It appears that during the next several decades the industrial-technological system will be undergoing severe stresses due to economic and environmental problems, and especially due to problems of human behavior,” Kaczynski wrote. “If we compromise with it and let it recover from its sickness, it will eventually wipe out all of our freedom….It would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences.”

Boredom, excessive pleasure-seeking, insatiable hedonism, sexual perversion, overeating, tendency to depression, eating disorders, sleep disorders, guilt, anxiety, low self-esteem, frustration, anger and abuse are products of technology, Kaczynski wrote. They are “symptoms resulting from disruption of the power process.” The “power process” was his term for our need to set goals and attain them. In primitive societies, or perhaps back in the good old days, personal goals corresponded to real life. Collecting food, protecting yourself and building shelter were difficult but attainable goals.

The industrial-technological system, web of life since the Industrial Revolution, makes our goals either easy or impossible. It’s easy to work a mindless job in obedience to the higher-ups, for a paycheck, for food – but nearly impossible to live off the land, independent of machines and factories.

We fill our lives with what he called “surrogate activities,” varying degrees of science, hobbies, television, work and consumption; we can’t stop ourselves and we are never fulfilled. We end up slaves to technology, in bondage to “the system” that would seemingly liberate us.

Kaczynski distinguished between “small-scale technology” and “organization-dependent technology.” Examples of the latter are the Roman aqueducts, he wrote, which were never rebuilt when that society failed.

Small-scale technology, which Kaczynski seems to embrace, is something that “any clever village craftsman could build.” Instead of refrigerators, for example, people will go back to icehouses and pickling food if the industrial-technological system collapses. Without electricity, elaborate tools, factories and technical books, people won’t attempt to build refrigerators, he wrote.

“The system” – Kaczynski’s lump-all term for modern, technological society – might improve certain conditions of life. But it does so only to fortify itself. Eventually humans will be biologically engineered, like nature is today, to fit the system. Humanity will be “an engineered product rather than a free creation of chance (or of God, or whatever, depending on your religious beliefs).”

Unless the system cracks and is destroyed. The second half of “Industrial Society and its Future” is mostly about the need for revolution and strategy to pull it off. Kaczynski insisted on one goal: destruction of technology. Not many will accept this, but a minority group of revolutionaries will be enough, he wrote, when the time is ripe. Also: “Revolutionaries should have as many children as they can.”

The attack should not be political, but against the real power, the economic and technological system. Free trade agreements and the like might help unify the world for a massive technological collapse. The positive antidote to evil technology, the image to hold up while factories are destroyed and technical books burned, is “wild nature.” It takes care of itself and, according to Kaczynski, invites us to live in its arms, making our own decisions, in freedom from technology.

*****

If it is true – if we are barreling down the road to where machines will control us and breed our children to fit the system’s needs – Kaczynski might justify blowing up technologists, lumbermen and advertising executives in the tradition of Just War (the ancient principle that says violence is OK if it stops something worse). Although violence is rarely mentioned in his treatise, he said it was the only way to get his message across.

Few of his philosophical sympathizers agree. “The only message that anyone got for sixteen years was that some nut was attacking people associated with universities and computers,” Kirkpatrick Sale wrote in a September 1995 essay for The Nation.

Yet the Manifesto, written in “leaden language and stilted diction,” filled with “sociological jargon and psychobabble,” contained a message that must be heeded, else “we are a doomed society hurtling toward a catastrophic breakdown,” Sale wrote.

Ten and a half years later, Sale has held the course. “The basic message is as true now as it was then,” he said in an interview. Things are getting worse, especially in the natural world. Global warming is creeping up faster than Kaczynski imagined, he said.

Fed up with the United States, Sale recently helped found the Middlebury Institute, a study group based in Cold Spring, N.Y., that wants certain geographic regions (e.g., his) to peacefully secede.        

Today, the message of Kaczynski doesn’t stand a chance, Sale said. People are aware of technology’s limitations, he said, but they can’t do anything. The Iraq war is an example. In spite of sophisticated military technology that would seem to make for a neat and clean operation, the war drags on. The “power people” aren’t about to change course, he said.

The industrial and technological system has “created a society that doesn’t figure to last more than a dozen years,” Sale said. This roughly fits the Manifesto’s predictions.

Another writer who agreed with the Manifesto’s main tenets was John Zerzan, now editor of Green Anarchy magazine, “an anti-civilization journal of theory and action.” Zerzan travels frequently, speaking about anarchism and returning to a more primitive way of life. He was impressed with Kaczynski’s message in 1995. The two struck up a correspondence after Kaczynski was arrested, and met four or five times during Kaczynski’s California trial. Green Anarchy lists Kaczynski among 34 “prisoners that have acted against the mega-machine.”

Kaczynski gave Zerzan a stack of papers when he was sentenced, before heading to the Colorado prison where he is today. He wanted Zerzan to find a publisher for the work he wrote in the California jails.

“It was not very interesting,” Zerzan said. Mostly about how the media mischaracterized him during his lengthy trial, “it was not what people wanted to know about the Unabomber,” he said.

Kaczynski is quite particular about seemingly small details – in a neatly handwritten letter to this reporter, he wrote, “[T]he text of ISAIF (‘Industrial Society and its Future’) published by the Washington Post was riddled with errors, including the omission of parts of sentences and even of whole sentences … whatever version of ISAIF you are reading is sure to be seriously mutilated.”

Typographically mutilated or not, the Manifesto itself is disjointed, Zerzan said. “There’s so much emotional flak” and space wasted on unrelated points, like on the futile psychology of leftism. However, Kaczynski's main argument, Zerzan said, is beautiful, logical and modest: more technology means less freedom, less personal fulfillment, less joy.

 “Who can dispute that?” he said.