Kaczynski and the other participants were subjected to degrading interrogations disguised as intellectual debates and aimed at breaking their confidence. Kaczynski later called it the worst experience he’d ever had.
I never knew this about Ted Kaczynski. I had a similar experience about fifteen years ago at a college I taught at during my twenties. Me and some other coworkers were picked to attend a five-day training session out in the middle of nowhere where we had to deconstruct ourselves (i.e. unearth our deep-seated traumas) in order to find out what was behind our social masks (not very much it turned out). Almost every female colleague had some kind of breakdown and one male colleague ended up locking himself in his room the entire time. I ‘survived’ the experience by falling back into humor and pretending not to take it all too seriously.
That Ted Kaczynski ‘fell out’ of society doesn’t surprise me now that I’ve learned about this. He underwent a form of brainwashing and it damaged him.
While I absolutely loathed my own experiences with this kind of ‘interrogative debate’, I am forever grateful for it as I’m better able to recognize the techniques. They are very similar to those performed by Critical Theory professors: the breakdown of students’ identities and then the subsequent division of them into victim or oppressor groups dependent on their skin color, gender, or sexuality in order to prime them for ‘social justice’ ends. This is now rife in American education and needs to stop. Unfortunately, those doing it gaslight others by claiming that they are merely teaching students about racial or gender injustices, while weaponizing compassion against those who speak out against it. It is psychological abuse on such a massive scale that few are willing to see it. It is only now that parents and politicians are starting to catch on.
Your experience was bad, but Ted’s was far, far worse. Henry Murray, the sadistic psychiatrist who was his mentor-turned-tormentor subjected him to 200 hours of verbal abuse and humiliation expressly designed to break down his personality. The sessions were filmed and Ted was forced to watch them repeatedly while Murray belittled him. See Alston Chase’s excellent ‘A Mind for Murder’.
FBI Created 17 False Flag Terrorist Attacks- FOX TV – Stuart Wilde
According to Judge Andrew Napolitano, in the past 10 years, there’ve been 20 Terrorist plots in the US.
17 were created by the FBI then stopped-by the FBI.
My husband is the smartest person I’ve ever met and a true independent thinker.
I was reading this article while he was in a dead sleep, I nudged him awake and said,
“honey, do you know anything about the unibomber?”
“He saw the future coming”
Zzzzz
R Wright
1 year ago
His manifesto is worth reading at least once. The part where he talks about oversocialisation on the part of leftists is eerily prescient.
Ian Stewart
1 year ago
A child maths prodigy who kept skipping grades, thus losing social contacts, and went to University early – so probably autistic to some degree. Then subjected to a psychology study detailed in the article, for3years, meeting someone every week who berated him as part of that study. Later thought he wanted to change gender too, but realised he was wrong.
His early biography reads like one of those self help guides….’How to create a psychopathic killer’.
I don’t like the trend of attempting to understand a thinker’s ideas primarily thru biography. I think that this is a good article, really better than most of the stuff being written on “Uncle Ted” rn, and I particularly like that you highlight the suffering imparted onto him at Harvard, but I think you do not adequately address his ideas.
Thinking in terms of biography, and thus attempting to understand ideas thru building a psychological profile of the author, isn’t as intellectually honest as examining his ideas. I don’t think that much is gained in understanding “cogito ergo sum” with the knowledge of Descartes’ sexual preferences (he had a fetish for cross-eyed women), or that Newton’s physics are better grasped after learning about his lifelong celibacy (he personally considered this to be his greatest achievement).
When we overemphasize the personal, we can risk forming prejudices about the author that hinder our ability to even begin to engage with their ideas. It’s highly unlikely that if you first encounter the names Sartre, Beauvoir, Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser, etc for the first time in the context of a certain petition signed in 1977, that you will want to seriously approach their work. It’s endemic on the left and the right. Think of the leftist treatment of Thomas Jefferson online (Sally Hemings). Think of the rightist treatment of Karl Marx’s personal life (lack of regular employment, serial infidelity, etc).
Biographical facts are important. Very important. But ideas should be judged by their content, not their creator.
Nope. Should be judged by both, plus past and current context.
When K was in his cabin, I was living, serially in a real Tipi (conical pole tent, plains native), boats both residential and commercial, and an operational municipal bus.
Ain’t killed nobody, but politics tempted me
Waaay retired now.
Frank Fisher
1 year ago
Well he was not wrong, was he? The manifesto still has traction because as you read it, you immediately recognize the world we live in. Like Marx’s critique, the manifesto is pointed and accurate, but like marx he then goes askew. I’m not a pacifist in any sense, violence has its place. But I cannot endorse attempting to bomb an airliner. Perhaps my rationale is too weak. We bombed Dresden and Hiroshima, there were children there and we knew it. We decided randomly killing innocents was necessary. I guess Ted thought the same. I’m not there yet, perhaps if I had encountered MK Ultra as Ted did, or if I was in the cockpit of Enola Gay, I’d think differently, but right now I do not.
But many, I think, are close to that. It surprises me that at this moment in time there is not more terrorism. When we think of the 1970s and the multiple european terrorist movements in response to the political repression and and authoritarian response to, eg, Vietnam war protests and attempts at communal living, it really is strange that post-Covid we see practically nothing. Where is this era’s Red Brigade? Where is the Angry Brigade? There is a strange passivity. Perhaps that is MK Ultra’s doing too. But I wonder how long that will last.
William Foster
1 year ago
For members of the younger generations, whose development and social lives have been shaped to a degree unprecedented in human history by technology, Kaczynski represents a lost alternative. Most of them will never commit a violent act; Tedposting will have to do for now.
most
for now.
Planting the idea that some of those who see any value in Kaczynski’s ideas will at some point commit some atrocity. Not to mention serving to reinforce the abhorrent hate term ’incel’ as a matter of fact.
It’s difficult for the writer not to conclude that ‘he was right’ in terms of forewarning what was to come, not what led to his incarceration. Even admittedly proven in at least some aspects. A clearly troubled (abused) high intellect, if not genius of our times. Yet to align yourself, even slightly, with Kaczynski’s analysis means you are branded an ‘incel’ and are therefore an enemy of society, whose ideas if not person, a human, are to be instantly denigrated and dismissed.
It’s difficult to empathise with Kaczynski as a person, even if one were willing to set aside his murders to do so.
Yet the premise of the article is exactly the opposite, ascribing an entire generation. I’d also like to point out the current trend for quoting and attributing non-person usernames and what worth that provides.
Perhaps I’m wrong but this article comes across as a classic bait and switch. Here’s a dispassionate analysis, that means your conclusions should be thus.
Let’s look at who wrote this article, I thought. Previous published by Buzzfeed and The Atlantic. Well. Hmm.
I am an OLD guy. Here’s my ‘Tedpost’
I never read his manifesto before but I have now (in part and I’ll get back to it).
The world and people he talks about are now completely familiar.
His concerns are now quite mainstream.
His call for revolution is only for now unfashionable.
Most of his arguments have been rehearsed since by other writers, not least on ‘Unherd’.
Many people more warped, wrongheaded and evil with a higher body count and more destruction to their name have ‘paid their debts to society’ and walked free.
He will die in jail because the ‘leaders’ of society could not bear to be so fundamentally challenged before they had prepared their defenses.
Oliver Nicholson
1 year ago
Lewinsky and Clinton have shown
What Kaczynski must surely have known: That an intern is better Than a bomb in a letter When what you most want’s to get blown.
Brett H
1 year ago
“Cue the iconic mugshot: Kaczynski in an orange jumpsuit, bearded and grizzled, a far cry from the handsome, clean-cut young professor photographed on the Berkeley campus.” And, UnHerd, you went and did it yourself.
THAT is a seriously accurate observation.
Unherd was predicted by K and will ignore you.
Last edited 1 year ago by ormondotvos
Cisco Diaz
1 year ago
Did I miss the point or did you-all ?
The warning was about genectic altered human beings. Changing human DNA and altering it’s normal development direction.
GATTACA the movie was built on Kaczynski’s core warning. Let’s not forget his famous defining of the ‘Liberal’ causes and their dedication to other people’s problems. Justified because they were mentally confined in their peer-group hierarchy.
This is one of the better articles but still surfing along the peripheral of his ideaology. Is that your smart-phone ringing ?
Please note: we here are all subject to an FBI raid soon. It’s the tech surveillance times we live in ….
Last edited 1 year ago by Cisco Diaz
Richard Abbot
1 year ago
He identified, as many others have before and since, that the number one obstacle to a happy and fulfilled life is Leftism.
Noel Chiappa
1 year ago
A good article. A proper response would take time I don’t have, alas; he did identify some real problems, but his proposed solution was confused.
Will Cummings
1 year ago
So was he a left wing terrorist or a right wing terrorist? Or was he a victim of an MK-Ultra experiment that uses a manufactured left/right divided ideology as cover?
Mike Michaels
1 year ago
Not to condone the bombing thing but you can’t help feeling he was right about a few things.
Vince B
1 year ago
I’m struck by how personal the political always seems with radicals, maybe all of us to some degree. He could have been just as righteously angry and worried about technology and been a leader showing is its pitfalls if he hadn’t been damaged as a young man.
harry storm
1 year ago
What is going on here (regarding comments, not the article)? Let’s all jump on the TK bandwagon, shall we? Sure, he was a violent nutcase who murdered 3 people and could have killed many more, but hey, he made a not-particularly-original manifesto about modern technology’s effects on modern life, and walked the walk by living in a shack, so let’s all talk about how “right” he was (and how he hated lefties, of course), and leave out those pesky murders. It’s shameful.
I never knew this about Ted Kaczynski. I had a similar experience about fifteen years ago at a college I taught at during my twenties. Me and some other coworkers were picked to attend a five-day training session out in the middle of nowhere where we had to deconstruct ourselves (i.e. unearth our deep-seated traumas) in order to find out what was behind our social masks (not very much it turned out). Almost every female colleague had some kind of breakdown and one male colleague ended up locking himself in his room the entire time. I ‘survived’ the experience by falling back into humor and pretending not to take it all too seriously.
That Ted Kaczynski ‘fell out’ of society doesn’t surprise me now that I’ve learned about this. He underwent a form of brainwashing and it damaged him.
While I absolutely loathed my own experiences with this kind of ‘interrogative debate’, I am forever grateful for it as I’m better able to recognize the techniques. They are very similar to those performed by Critical Theory professors: the breakdown of students’ identities and then the subsequent division of them into victim or oppressor groups dependent on their skin color, gender, or sexuality in order to prime them for ‘social justice’ ends. This is now rife in American education and needs to stop. Unfortunately, those doing it gaslight others by claiming that they are merely teaching students about racial or gender injustices, while weaponizing compassion against those who speak out against it. It is psychological abuse on such a massive scale that few are willing to see it. It is only now that parents and politicians are starting to catch on.
Your experience was bad, but Ted’s was far, far worse. Henry Murray, the sadistic psychiatrist who was his mentor-turned-tormentor subjected him to 200 hours of verbal abuse and humiliation expressly designed to break down his personality. The sessions were filmed and Ted was forced to watch them repeatedly while Murray belittled him. See Alston Chase’s excellent ‘A Mind for Murder’.
Good God! This is appalling and near criminal. All responsible for this kind of experiment should be severely sanctioned.
How The US Government & Other Governments Around The World Run False Flag Operations:
TerrorStorm Full length version
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vrXgLhkv21Y
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zYVjF4uS320
Judge Napolitano The FBI Creates, Then Foils Terror Plots – False Flag
https://www.stuartwilde.com › 2013 › 04 › fbi-created-17-false-flag-terrorist-attacks-fox-tv
FBI Created 17 False Flag Terrorist Attacks- FOX TV – Stuart Wilde
According to Judge Andrew Napolitano, in the past 10 years, there’ve been 20 Terrorist plots in the US.
17 were created by the FBI then stopped-by the FBI.
Hear, Hear!
My husband is the smartest person I’ve ever met and a true independent thinker.
I was reading this article while he was in a dead sleep, I nudged him awake and said,
“honey, do you know anything about the unibomber?”
“He saw the future coming”
Zzzzz
His manifesto is worth reading at least once. The part where he talks about oversocialisation on the part of leftists is eerily prescient.
A child maths prodigy who kept skipping grades, thus losing social contacts, and went to University early – so probably autistic to some degree. Then subjected to a psychology study detailed in the article, for 3 years, meeting someone every week who berated him as part of that study. Later thought he wanted to change gender too, but realised he was wrong.
His early biography reads like one of those self help guides….’How to create a psychopathic killer’.
American culture in action.
I don’t like the trend of attempting to understand a thinker’s ideas primarily thru biography. I think that this is a good article, really better than most of the stuff being written on “Uncle Ted” rn, and I particularly like that you highlight the suffering imparted onto him at Harvard, but I think you do not adequately address his ideas.
Thinking in terms of biography, and thus attempting to understand ideas thru building a psychological profile of the author, isn’t as intellectually honest as examining his ideas. I don’t think that much is gained in understanding “cogito ergo sum” with the knowledge of Descartes’ sexual preferences (he had a fetish for cross-eyed women), or that Newton’s physics are better grasped after learning about his lifelong celibacy (he personally considered this to be his greatest achievement).
When we overemphasize the personal, we can risk forming prejudices about the author that hinder our ability to even begin to engage with their ideas. It’s highly unlikely that if you first encounter the names Sartre, Beauvoir, Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser, etc for the first time in the context of a certain petition signed in 1977, that you will want to seriously approach their work. It’s endemic on the left and the right. Think of the leftist treatment of Thomas Jefferson online (Sally Hemings). Think of the rightist treatment of Karl Marx’s personal life (lack of regular employment, serial infidelity, etc).
Biographical facts are important. Very important. But ideas should be judged by their content, not their creator.
Nope. Should be judged by both, plus past and current context.
When K was in his cabin, I was living, serially in a real Tipi (conical pole tent, plains native), boats both residential and commercial, and an operational municipal bus.
Ain’t killed nobody, but politics tempted me
Waaay retired now.
Well he was not wrong, was he? The manifesto still has traction because as you read it, you immediately recognize the world we live in. Like Marx’s critique, the manifesto is pointed and accurate, but like marx he then goes askew. I’m not a pacifist in any sense, violence has its place. But I cannot endorse attempting to bomb an airliner. Perhaps my rationale is too weak. We bombed Dresden and Hiroshima, there were children there and we knew it. We decided randomly killing innocents was necessary. I guess Ted thought the same. I’m not there yet, perhaps if I had encountered MK Ultra as Ted did, or if I was in the cockpit of Enola Gay, I’d think differently, but right now I do not.
But many, I think, are close to that. It surprises me that at this moment in time there is not more terrorism. When we think of the 1970s and the multiple european terrorist movements in response to the political repression and and authoritarian response to, eg, Vietnam war protests and attempts at communal living, it really is strange that post-Covid we see practically nothing. Where is this era’s Red Brigade? Where is the Angry Brigade? There is a strange passivity. Perhaps that is MK Ultra’s doing too. But I wonder how long that will last.
Planting the idea that some of those who see any value in Kaczynski’s ideas will at some point commit some atrocity. Not to mention serving to reinforce the abhorrent hate term ’incel’ as a matter of fact.
It’s difficult for the writer not to conclude that ‘he was right’ in terms of forewarning what was to come, not what led to his incarceration. Even admittedly proven in at least some aspects. A clearly troubled (abused) high intellect, if not genius of our times. Yet to align yourself, even slightly, with Kaczynski’s analysis means you are branded an ‘incel’ and are therefore an enemy of society, whose ideas if not person, a human, are to be instantly denigrated and dismissed.
Yet the premise of the article is exactly the opposite, ascribing an entire generation. I’d also like to point out the current trend for quoting and attributing non-person usernames and what worth that provides.
Perhaps I’m wrong but this article comes across as a classic bait and switch. Here’s a dispassionate analysis, that means your conclusions should be thus.
Let’s look at who wrote this article, I thought. Previous published by Buzzfeed and The Atlantic. Well. Hmm.
I am an OLD guy. Here’s my ‘Tedpost’
I never read his manifesto before but I have now (in part and I’ll get back to it).
The world and people he talks about are now completely familiar.
His concerns are now quite mainstream.
His call for revolution is only for now unfashionable.
Most of his arguments have been rehearsed since by other writers, not least on ‘Unherd’.
Many people more warped, wrongheaded and evil with a higher body count and more destruction to their name have ‘paid their debts to society’ and walked free.
He will die in jail because the ‘leaders’ of society could not bear to be so fundamentally challenged before they had prepared their defenses.
Lewinsky and Clinton have shown
What Kaczynski must surely have known:
That an intern is better
Than a bomb in a letter
When what you most want’s to get blown.
“Cue the iconic mugshot: Kaczynski in an orange jumpsuit, bearded and grizzled, a far cry from the handsome, clean-cut young professor photographed on the Berkeley campus.”
And, UnHerd, you went and did it yourself.
THAT is a seriously accurate observation.
Unherd was predicted by K and will ignore you.
Did I miss the point or did you-all ?
The warning was about genectic altered human beings. Changing human DNA and altering it’s normal development direction.
GATTACA the movie was built on Kaczynski’s core warning. Let’s not forget his famous defining of the ‘Liberal’ causes and their dedication to other people’s problems. Justified because they were mentally confined in their peer-group hierarchy.
This is one of the better articles but still surfing along the peripheral of his ideaology. Is that your smart-phone ringing ?
Please note: we here are all subject to an FBI raid soon. It’s the tech surveillance times we live in ….
He identified, as many others have before and since, that the number one obstacle to a happy and fulfilled life is Leftism.
A good article. A proper response would take time I don’t have, alas; he did identify some real problems, but his proposed solution was confused.
So was he a left wing terrorist or a right wing terrorist? Or was he a victim of an MK-Ultra experiment that uses a manufactured left/right divided ideology as cover?
Not to condone the bombing thing but you can’t help feeling he was right about a few things.
I’m struck by how personal the political always seems with radicals, maybe all of us to some degree. He could have been just as righteously angry and worried about technology and been a leader showing is its pitfalls if he hadn’t been damaged as a young man.
What is going on here (regarding comments, not the article)? Let’s all jump on the TK bandwagon, shall we? Sure, he was a violent nutcase who murdered 3 people and could have killed many more, but hey, he made a not-particularly-original manifesto about modern technology’s effects on modern life, and walked the walk by living in a shack, so let’s all talk about how “right” he was (and how he hated lefties, of course), and leave out those pesky murders. It’s shameful.