The Unabomber and the tyranny of a good idea
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race . . . There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.
This quote is from the introduction of the text Industrial Society and Its Future. It is a manifesto written by Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, who terrorized America for 17 years with mailbombs, killing three and injuring many more. He died recently while serving his life sentence in prison.
Kaczynski wasn’t what many might imagine as the archetypical terrorist. He had a doctorate in mathematics from Harvard and an IQ of 167. These things supposedly bring with them a certain expectation of ‘civility’. So what possessed such a man to commit such heinous crimes?
The great man theory suggests that history moves forward through the merits and efforts of excellent individuals. Galileo changed history by making it known that the world orbits around the sun, and not the other way around. Einstein did the same by discovering the theory of relativity. Columbus did so by having a boat, a gun, and white supremacy.
But what if history is not made by great men, but rather by great ideas? What if ideas have a life of their own, like wayward spirits, relying on people to fling them into the world and find their home in the fabric of history? What if we are merely temporary vessels for great ideas? This is what Nadia Asparouhova suggests in her essay The tyranny of ideas:
Rather than viewing people as agents of change, I think of them as intermediaries, voice boxes for some persistent idea-virus that’s seized upon them and is speaking through their corporeal form . . . Ideas ride us into battle like warhorses. We can witness, participate in, and even lead these battles, but their true meaning eludes us. We don’t really know where ideas come from, nor how to control them.
Some of the ideas that possessed Kaczynski and drove him to violence were demented.1 But some of them, particularly his critique of technology, seem to hold some weight.
It is difficult to deny how some of Kaczynski's claims about technology overlap with my own. We have become possessed by similar ideas, namely that “technology” describes more than physical machines. Often, we think about technology as stuff: it's my phone, my computer, my car, and so on. But it’s important to see the distinction between the solidification of technology and the lifestyle it creates.
Technology shapes the way we attend the world. It dictates what we pay attention to. When we become fixated on making machines more efficient, more scalable, and more optimal, we adopt a machinelike way of being in the world—devoid of everything that makes us human.
Ideas stoke a sense of urgency in us; their epiphanies inebriate. We become so enchanted by their clarity that not sharing them feels almost sinful. Then there is our inherent social nature; whatever we find to be valuable and useful, we want to share with others. But we are not always successful in our ways of communicating.
Despite my commonality with the Unabomber, our paths forward diverge quite sharply. Comparing myself with him, it is clear that a single idea can manifest itself in very different ways (substack essays, murder). I believe this difference reveals that a good idea on its own is not enough.
Ideas can make you see something that the people around you don’t. At its best, this makes you a visionary agent of innovative change for the better. At its worst, it alienates, banishing you to a different reality with only your insular clarity to comfort you.
Kaczynski spent his life all alone. First out in the woods in Lincoln, Montana, and then in solitary confinement after he was caught.
In the words of Nicklaus Suino, a victim of one of his bombs: I felt sorry for Kaczynski because the bomber had become the thing he most feared: an empty machine, devoid of conscience . . . Imagine being so isolated from the human race as he is. He has nobody and nothing now, except for his writing.
A closer look at great men
One does a little hand-jive, a little mechanical magic, produces an illusion and looks for uncritical acceptance and obedience from the audience. Scientific thought does not resolve mysteries so much as it defines them out of existence.
CEDRIC ROBINSON, “ON THE LIBERAL THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE CONCEPT OF RACE”
According to Sylvia Wynter, before the Enlightenment, rationality was first and foremost seen as a gift from God, bestowed to Man2, making him uniquely aware of His presence and creations. Those who taught God's word were seen as furthering His will; logic was seen as a tool to pick language apart and reveal eternal holy truths.
As students utilized their new reasoning to question the God they once worshiped, they believed that reason itself was the source of all knowledge. After all, rationality is what broke them from the shackles of the church. Man climbed to the top of the hierarchy of all living beings through his own merits—by having intellectual breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and creating powerful technologies.
Yet the sense of being a chosen people was never really abandoned, it was merely secularized. Instead of divine servants of an all-knowing God, these men fashioned themselves as the arbiters of truth and morality.
Here, a problem arose. The previous justification for colonialist violence against minoritized peoples was rooted in the supposed divinity of white men and manifest destiny. Savages required subjugation under the will of God. But now that God was out of the picture, they needed another reason to uphold their ways of living.
In the name of progress, scientists deprived indigenous societies of their natural resources, ways of life, and labor. Pillaging became a necessary step in the scientific process. Because of the way they conducted their studies, they necessarily reached certain results that, circularly, allowed them to continue the inhuman methods that ultimately served them.
The means of colonial imperialist rule and the ends symbiotically fed each other and provided each other with justifications for violence.
I don’t believe the Unabomber was any different than any of these supposed great men of history. Even in his anti-tech crusade, he replicated their methodology: hyperindividualism, a disregard for the sanctity of human life, and an obsession with power.
We can try to engage with the intellectual arguments Kaczynski made, but their lack of value quickly becomes evident when his methodology was so irrevocably cruel. There is no way to cleanly siphon his idea away from the methods that brought them to fruition. The rot of the violent actions contaminated the idea, no matter how true some of his claims about technology might feel.
In a recent interview, Gary Wright, owner of a computer shop and victim to one of the bombs, cut to the core of the Unabomber’s failure: Look, I love myself enough that I’m not going to let others see me as less than what I could be or what I am.
Internalizing the superiority complex of a great man implies that everyone else is smaller, insignificant, less capable. They need saving from themselves, or they are necessary collateral to a divine and cosmic end. As Wright aptly pointed out, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
The great man complex isn’t something unique to terrorists or colonial tyrants of the past. This hubris and entitlement can be found in anyone, and I believe those in higher education and in the tech industry are especially susceptible to it.
Humility as methodology
Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities . . . And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms.
SYLVIA WYNTER, “THE POPE MUST HAVE BEEN DRUNK, THE KING OF CASTILE A MADMAN”
The education system makes a great man out of you. It makes you feel special for knowing things and excuses your poor behavior, making you a bad companion to the people around you. This particular brand of intellectualism completely deadens the world, making everyone else seem like unaware zombies, trodding along, letting themselves be manipulated and exploited, maybe even finding enjoyment in it. It encourages us to imagine everyday people’s inner lives not as rich and interesting as ours, the educated elite.
It is the biggest mistake of our education: the false assumption that the world is dull and uninteresting, unlike the great ideas in the heads of great men; that we inject the world with value and abundance. In his famous commencement speech for the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College, “This Is Water,” David Foster Wallace talks about the harm of looking inwards for value:
Going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out . . . To be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation.
I am sympathetic to the brutality of learning the specific mechanics that mess up the world, and the subsequent hopelessness that ensues when you realize that you are unable to do anything about it—at least if you do not wish to adopt means as extreme as Kaczynski’s. But this reveals a misguided sense of responsibility that is not proportionate to your capabilities. Who told you the world was on your shoulders—that you don’t get to live in it along with everyone else?
This is where humility comes in: the ability to know when you ought to act, and when you are required to simply sit and listen.
I find Asparouhova’s suggestion to be immensely useful in nurturing a sense of humility. If ideas aren’t ours, if they are things that came to be outside of our human minds, then we must recognize how their existence differs from our own. Ideas get to behave unabashedly and arrogantly because they have nothing and no one to answer to. But we do.
Humility as a methodology is a way of attending the world that grabs everyone in close vicinity and asks them to join in, not allowing ourselves to become alienated by the ideas that possess us. It protects from this loneliness by assuming that others can contribute meaningfully in a way that you yourself cannot. That they are required for the idea to be the best it can be.
Humility is the space that we should find ourselves in when the next idea inevitably comes around and possesses us. It is deeply liberating to operate from such a place. It necessitates collaboration, or at least having other people and their wellness at the forefront of your mind as you act. The inevitable result of fully realizing the rich interiority of other people is a sense of humility.
All things become so much richer when we assume they are more than we initially perceive them to be. Wallace says:
If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down… This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
The Unabomber may have been possessed by an idea, but his actions were his own. The tragic irony is that he disregarded the how in favor of the what, exactly like the technocrats he opposed so vehemently.
I don’t care if you have a good idea. I care about what you do with it. These ideas find a vessel where they can survive, but once they take residence in our minds, we are still at liberty to choose how we bring them to fruition.
The how is all there is. If ideas aren’t ours, if they originate from a place outside of ourselves, then all we have is the how. If our sole responsibility is how we choose to act on ideas, then we ought to choose to act in a humble fashion.
I’m being very generous when I say that Kaczynski had a good idea. His prestigious background, along with alluding to a valid point about technology makes him seem more interesting than he really is. If the general idea about technology piqued your interest, you’re much better off reading Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society. I find this Reddit comment to be an accurate summation of this point:
the first half of [the manifesto] sounds like a typical Petersonian screed against "the woke snowflake libs". Keep in mind the manifesto was written in the 90s during the culture wars, which, for someone ostensibly living as a recluse in the woods, Kaczynski seemed to be very clued into. . . He then engages for a while in some armchair psychology that roots all leftism in various kinds of inferiority complexes (not me, though!). The anti-technology stuff doesn't really come up until later in the manifesto, and the properly "philosophical" content of that portion is basically little more than a haphazard reconstruction of Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society. If Kaczynski hadn't blown a bunch of people up there would be no more reason to pay attention to his manifesto than to some neckbeard denouncing "postmodern neomarxism" on a WordPress.
Wynter’s description of “man” is very complex and I frankly do not have the range to summarize it succinctly. Still, its important for me to acknowledge how my take on the great man theory is immensely shaped by her work. In Black Metamorphosis, she says:
The psychological subjugation of the conquered peoples would be ensured by the pen and the printing press as their physical subjugation had been assured by the gun. The coercive power of the one could be made to imply the coercive power of the other: power came out of the barrel of a gun, humanity resided in writing. The oral culture of the indigenous civilization was therefore a non-culture, was ‘barbarous.’ By a process of repetition, ‘humanity’ came to be synonymous with European culture. To be non-European was to be non-human. This myth of the cultural void was to be central to the ideology which the West would use in its rise to world domination.