Found an article I thougth might be of interest to some:

http://www.theatlantic.com/cgi-bin/o/issues/2000/06/chase.htm

"In the fall of 1958 Theodore Kaczynski, a brilliant but vulnerable boy of sixteen, entered Harvard College. There he encountered a prevailing intellectual atmosphere of anti-technological despair. There, also, he was deceived into subjecting himself to a series of purposely brutalizing psychological experiments -- experiments that may have confirmed his still-forming belief in the evil of science. Was the Unabomber born at Harvard? A look inside the files..."

"During his college years he had fantasies of living a primitive life and fantasized himself as "an agitator, rousing mobs to frenzies of revolutionary violence." He claims that during that time he started to think about breaking away from normal society..."

-- flora (***@__._), June 10, 2000

Answers

Ted K. entered Harvard in 1958? I don't think he is that old. Don't blame him on my generation.

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), June 10, 2000.

Flora:

During his college years he had fantasies of living a primitive life

Don't know your experience but that sounds like a description of living in Cambridge :^)

May have changed in the last few years.

Best wishes,,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), June 10, 2000.

Maybe you should be on his defense team!

-- Observer (lots@to.observe), June 10, 2000.

Kaczynski was a nut before he got to Harvard. Me, I'm obsessed with keeping these damned ground squirrels from eating my pecans. Just can't get them to open their mail!

-- Carlos (riffraff@cybertime.net), June 10, 2000.

flora:

A lot of people have gone to Harvard and not become antisocial.

The real question becomes, how many people went to Lincoln, MT, and became antisocial. :^)

You can ask; it isn't all that far from Helena.

Best wishes,,,,

Z

-- Z1X4Y7 (Z1X4Y7@aol.com), June 10, 2000.

From: Preparations, ` la Carte (pic), near Monterey, California

It's Unibomber, after his propensity to target university professors.

-- Dancr (addy.available@my.webpage), June 11, 2000.

from the above-mentioned article:

"Dubbed "the Unabomber" by the FBI because his early victims were associated with universities or airlines, Kaczynski conducted an increasingly lethal campaign of terrorism that began on May 26, 1978,.......... "

-- Debbie (dbspence@usa.net), June 11, 2000.

Flora:

Interesting, although lengthy article there. I almost completed page 2 before I had to put it aside for a while. It seemed to me, however, that the author's basic contention is/was that Harvard "created" the personality dysfunction that resulted in the unabombings. As I read more, I could identify with many of the same experiences as Ted, and found the arguments growing more and more simplistic. We don't yet know what makes some folks "go off", while others maintain productive lives, but this author didn't seem to present anything beyond the standard excuse that Ted was a product of society's nurturing.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), June 11, 2000.

Sorry to have abandoned the thread for a bit.

*WARNING* Long, boring post follows, with too many snippets from the article. Proceed at you own peril.

Z,

I hope you can make time in your schedule to read the article. I found issues & patterns that have been combed by many forum folks.

Anita,

I know it is a L-O-N-G article, just got around to finishing it myself. I thought I'd toss it on the pile for anyone who might want to get into something meaty.

It introduced him as a gifted, vulnerable, alienated, malleable youth who was exposed to postwar general ed. and that helped solidify his ideas of just cause, and moral relativism.

"Superficially, the positivist message appeared to be an optimistic one, concerning the perfectibility of science and the inevitability of progress. It taught that reason was a liberating force and faith mere superstition; the advance of science would eventually produce a complete understanding of nature. But positivism also taught that all the accumulated nonscientific knowledge of the past, including the great religions and philosophies, had been at best merely an expression of "cultural mores" and at worst nonsense; life had no purpose and morality no justification."

"He embraced both the dualistic cognitive style of mathematics and Gen Ed's anti-technology message. And perhaps most important, he absorbed the message of positivism, which demanded value-neutral reasoning and preached that (as Kaczynski would later express it in his journal) "there was no logical justification for morality."

Another fascinating {and frightening} layer of the onion appears when you add the brutal psychological experiments conducted by Harvard's Murray:

"...was also an advocate of world government. Murray saw understanding the dyad, it seems, as a practical tool in the service of the great crusade in both its hot and cold phases. (He had long shown interest, for example, in the whole subject of brainwashing.) During the war Murray served in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, helping to develop psychological screening tests for applicants and (according to Timothy Leary) monitoring military experiments on brainwashing."

It's an interesting position to ponder, was he more of a Manchurian Candidate byproduct than a simple brilliant paranoid schizophrenic?

The article also speaks of his current sphere of influence:

"Kaczynski has attracted a large new following of admirers. Indeed, he has become an inspiration and a sort of leader in exile for the burgeoning "green anarchist" movement. In a letter to me Kaczynski made clear that he keeps in contact with other anarchists, including John Zerzan, the intellectual leader of a circle of anarchists in Eugene, Oregon, who was among the few people to visit Kaczynski while he was in jail in Sacramento, awaiting trial. According to The Boston Globe, Theresa Kintz, one of Zerzan's fellow anarchists, was the first writer to whom Kaczynski granted an interview after his arrest. Writing for the London-based Green Anarchist, Kintz quoted Kaczynski as saying, "For those who realize the need to do away with the techno- industrial system, if you work for its collapse, in effect you are killing a lot of people."

Many themes that have been touched on at The Bomb over the last couple of years+ were recycled here. I just thought some of the rest of you might enjoy peering through that dark glass again, from a different angle.

-- flora (***@__._), June 11, 2000.

Harvard didn't create him, it allowed him to express himself. No university could teach someone to write zillions of pages of crap that no one wants to read, that comes from within. Harvard may have refined his skills, but the essence of Ted was already there Before he went to school.

Living a comfortable, non-threatening to society existence,

Frank

-- Someone (ChimingIn@twocents.cam), June 12, 2000.