Last week marked the twelfth anniversary of the arrest of Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. Kaczynski, as some may recall, was a mad bomber who killed three individuals and wounded twenty-three over a period of almost twenty years in a one-man terrorist attack against society. When I say Kaczynski was "mad," I mean that he was both angry and severely mentally ill. He was, evidently, also a boy genius.
With a purported childhood IQ of 170, Ted Kaczynski entered Harvard University as a brilliant sixteen-year-old undergraduate, going on to earn a Master's and Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Michigan. He joined the mathematics faculty at U.C. Berkeley in 1967, but abruptly and inexplicably resigned just two years later. From there it was all downhill. He withdrew from the world, building himself a funky cabin in the Montana woods without running water or electricity and subsisted with no means of support other than some money from his family and occasional odd jobs. By 1978, the bombings began.
Most of Kaczynski's victims were academics or businessmen connected to the computer or technology fields. But his homemade pipe bombs also found their way to airline officials, and into the cargo hold of an American Airlines flight in 1979. Fortunately, that powerful bomb fumed but failed to explode. In 1995, after decades of terrorist activity, Kaczynski, now known publicly as the Unabomber, demanded that his "manifesto" be published verbatim--or the bombings would continue. The New York Times decided to print this lengthy, rambling, raging rant against modern technological culture, the style and content of which Kaczynski's brother recognized. On April 3, 1996, the infamous Unabomber was finally arrested, ending his extensive reign of terror.
Several (but not all) of the forensic psychiatrists and psychologists who examined Kaczynski diagnosed him as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Renowned forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz suggested Kaczynski was not psychotic but suffered instead from a schizoid or schizotypal personality disorder. Following a failed attempt to hang himself, he was found competent to stand trial and pled guilty to the charges in a deal with prosecutors to avoid the death penalty. Though his defense attorneys tried to enter a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, Kaczynski refused, perhaps in part due to denial about his illness, a very common symptom of schizophrenia; or perhaps because of his own narcissism, not wanting to be maligned as mentally ill. He is currently serving a life sentence without possibility of parole in a Colorado prison.
What can we learn from this case about madness and destructive behavior such as terrorism? I suspect that Ted Kaczynski was a frustrated, angry guy, who never fit in to "normal" society. As a graduate student, he sought treatment for symptoms of depression, anxiety, and sexual identity confusion. He had always been described as "aloof," even as a child, felt emotionally abused by his parents, and was cruelly teased by his peers for being different. He is likely an extremely introverted type who never developed the extraverted skills required to live in the world. Kaczynski sounds very much to me like John Nash, the brilliant but tortured mathematician portrayed by Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind (2001), but with one crucial difference: that person ultimately learned to live with his demons, choosing to manage and even make constructive use of his madness; Kaczynski completely succumbed to his. Like Darth Vader in the Star Wars epic, Kaczynski gave in to evil, the shadowy "dark side." He chose the anonymous but attention-grabbing power of destructiveness over the challenge of living in the world creatively. Kaczynski rejected life rather than embracing it.
Terrorism is itself a form of madness. Perpetrators of terrorism express their rage at the world destructively, in a desperate, last-ditch and sometimes suicidal attempt to gain recognition, fame or glory for themselves and their cause and, ultimately, to give some shred of meaning to their otherwise meaningless lives. Terrorism is typically an infantile and narcissistic act of violence stemming from profound feelings of impotence, frustration, and insignificance. In their own ways, the vengeful shootings at Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University, and the Omaha mall were, like the mad bombings of Ted Kaczynski, all evil acts of terrorism. Terrorists try to force the world to meet their own narcissistic demands, and, when this doesn't happen, they lash out violently. Terrorism is a failure to find a creative solution to life, to find and fulfill one's true destiny. Terrorism is, in most cases, the madness of resentment.
Reconsidering Kaczynski--ranting madman?
Dear Dr. Diamond,
I don't know if you have taken a look at Mr. Kaczynski's manifesto. Intrigued by your piece I googled it and browsed through it at leisure. (For the intersted reader the link is: http://reactor-core.org/unabomber-manifesto.html ). I have to say that I haven't found your description of it as "a lengthy, rambling, raging rant against modern technological culture" very accurate except on the first point (lengthy). Independently of one's theoretical sympathies one should be able to recognize that the piece is written in a balanced and moderate argumentative style, making as little appeal to emotion as possible given the author's convictions and even going at some length to mark the limitations of the text (repeated disclaimers as to the scope and form of the arguments and as to how the writing conditions influenced the quality of argumentation). The argument is plausible if one were to analyse it only on the basis of its logical structure (i.e. logical operation on the basis of a given set of assumptions) and many parts of it can be encountered, separately, in debates in most mainstream settings (try discussions of technology news items on big newspaper websites for easily accessible material). The outlandish bit is Mr. Kaczynski's readiness to employ certain kinds of action (i.e. his intention to act on his thought), and even these are, unfortunately, not as uncommon as one would like to see (as rhetorics of war going as far into the present as Mr. Bush & co's dythirambs prove).
Although I can't say I sympathize with Mr. Kaczynski (probably a mutual feeling, for I might well be a "leftist"--I certainly share many tendencies, even if I would dispute Mr. Kaczynski's psychological account of them), and although I am as opposed to his behaviour as most other members of the community, I have difficulties in bringing him to my mind as "a frustrated, angry guy" on the basis of the material I have studied. I am also skeptical as to the diagnoses that you report from other sources (here, because of my general suspicion of psychiatrical diagnoses, especially in the case of schizophrenia). I have the feeling that the truth is more complex then that, and that we should deal with it otherwise than hanging with all our might on explanatory constructs that promise much more than they accomplish.
I think this is an instructive illustration of the danger of making bold, post-factum generalizations about perpetrators of acts we find repelling and disturbing. I find such an approach unhelpful, dismissive of the problem rather than trying to account for it, not to mention unfair to people that are described (or describe themselves) as "mentally ill" (as I am sure you know, the link between mental illness and criminal behavior is a vigurously disputed fact even in mainstream psychological literature).
Maybe as scientists (another one of Mr. Kaczynski's favourite social groups), when we encounter such phenomena, rather than immediately building catch-it-all theoretical accounts we should start from ground zero and gather all material that we can find, very importantly--including the perpetrator's voice, views and accounts taken in all their force as human pronouncements by full-fledged human beings. We should avoid the temptation to silence the perpetrator, categorizing them away or otherwise reducing them to a speechless theoretical object. Ironically, speaking above the heads of one's subjects of study and hastily objectifying them theoretically is one of the explanatory paradigms that Mr. Kaczynski uses to great effect in his manifesto, and we see where this has led him. Interestingly, the deep theoretical foundations of his manifesto are very much akin to those underpinning the explanation of his behavior in this article and the all-too-typical implications in the press.
Only by opening the Pandora's box and dirtying our hands by opening outselves to potentially disturbing material (for we enter an encounter with the person) we might be able to tell the story of what has happened. Such a story might well prove instructive, although I may venture a prediction that it would prove so in other ways than providing the much-sought-for, magical predictive link of human behaviour (incidentally, its potential discovery troubled Mr. Kaczynski so much that it ran as a red thread through his manifesto, I even empathize). Unfortunately (?), predicting past events post-factum in such matters has proven to amount to little more than flogging a dead horse.
I apologize if my critique has sounded somewhat harsh at some points--that was not my intention and I submit it most respectfully. I also want to emphasize that it is directed against a very general trend of thought that I happen to contest and not against you personally.
Sincerely,
Dan Tcaci