The Unabomber Is Dead. Or Is He?
The device still ticks.
I apologize for this brief diversion into a less than pleasant tone. Death has that effect. But perhaps we can learn something from this one.
The Unabomber is no more. He took his own life on June 10, 2023. Wait! Ted Kaczynski was still alive? I didn’t know either. The prison system is a black hole, a place where people go to be forgotten. This is disturbing. But this is the sad outcome when unstable people are fed diets of loneliness and lies at a young age, before wisdom can take root.
Ted K wasn’t raised on the internet, or on computers or smartphones for that matter. He was one of those super smart kids who skipped grades, graduated from high school early, was socially backward, and was then exposed to ideas at Harvard that he was unprepared to digest -- and, I should add, subject to debilitating psychological experiments. Just what an awkward fifteen year-old needs. And if you think that today’s internet, as digested by smart twelve year-olds with smartphones, isn’t doing much the same thing, I have a bridge to sell you… These days, we condense Ted Kaczynski’s experience into a more sanitized, ghostly efficient and easily digestible form. But it’s the same spiritual poison in the end.
Extreme intelligence isn't a "good" -- it's just a God-given ability. Ted Kaczynski was extremely intelligent. But humans can screw up anything, particularly when bathing in a sea of feel-good falsehoods and ideological nonsense on societal scales. Ah, the blessing of the internet... now supercharged by AI, which now has been trained to digest, regurgitate and calcify the party lines, for young and old, for eternity ...or until cultural meltdown, whichever comes first. Hey, do you know that it's better to let innocent people die than to utter a single racial epithet? Who knew. Guide us, oh ChatGPT! Impart your wisdom!
As an aside, a few weeks ago, I mused in a post that perhaps AI could serve the role of cultural savior and mediator, as the Data character did on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Yeah, that was fun to think about, but large language models have a long way to go before anything like that could happen. Until then, the more likely outcome is that they rev up the engines of irrational bandwagons, bestowing false credibility on bad ideas and falsehoods …and deepening the delusions of future Unabombers.
Ted K actually had a few good thoughts about the impact of industrialization on the human soul. I never read his manifesto completely, but the basics are clear enough. Certainly, humans were not prepared for what happened over the past couple centuries, philosophically, spiritually, environmentally or materially. True enough. Of course, that doesn't mean we would all be better off living in huts with smallpox; cost/benefit arguments lose a lot of credibility when you ignore the benefits. In a similar way, ChatGPT does crank out decent, readable prose with startling efficiency. It is far from worthless -- but you can’t depend on it either. And when it finally grows up, what will it be? Savior? Terrorist? Mindless Overlord? It won’t be human; it will never be wise.
I keep returning to the term "wisdom" lately. It's a scarce commodity. Many ideologues sneer at the idea. To them, wisdom is just some rationalization for allowing big bad conservatives to be closet racist homophobe bigots, or big bad progressive ideologues to secretly steal everyone's money and freedom while diddling kids in the basements of pizza joints. But wisdom is not any of those distorted caricatures. Wisdom is the real thing that prevents you from falling off the high wire into an ideological abyss of nihilism. Such restraints are not fashionable nowadays, as unfettered self-expression is misconstrued for art, unexamined ideas mistaken for philosophy, debunked data and models misinterpreted as science. We live in a culture where labels and credentials now serve as necessary and sufficient descriptors, where we no longer worry about the content of a person’s character, or the veracity of an idea, but instead judge and enable them based on crude and superficial metrics.
If you have any association with modern elementary and secondary school systems, you see this every day. Teachers are increasingly reduced to data collection scribes, so that this Holy and Transubstantial Substance can be passed on to the architects above. But what are we measuring? If “no child left behind” simply means “no child unmeasured”, what have we accomplished? What is all that data accomplishing, other than keeping certain people employed? And, tipping the hat to Heisenberg for a moment, what if all the data collection is affecting the experiment? Psst, I’ll share a secret: It is! Ask any elementary school teacher, rushing to cram the details of a bloated curriculum to meet the demands of the next assessment. Nobody is learning anything, including the folks who think that all of their precious data can be trusted.
I apologize if I sound like a rambling, but there’s a point. Bear with me.
Wisdom is deep. It is substantive. It must emerge slowly within a person’s soul. You can’t measure it, but it is more a part of a person’s true character than any 1600 on the SAT could ever be. Ted Kaczynski was extremely intelligent, but he had virtually no wisdom. He never learned to control or appreciate his gift. He was raised without spiritual or social context, then forced to don the trappings of maturity at far too young an age. He was then manipulated by a higher education system that viewed him, in part literally, as a data point. A skewed ideology emerged from that rubble, a Frankestein monster of thoughts and concepts, assembled without the benefit of moral understanding or context. And multiple people paid the ultimate price for this creation.
We can continue to build such monsters, deluding ourselves into thinking that kids can handle the onslaught both from the internet and from the bloated educational establishment. And when kids begin to unravel psychologically, we can continue to construct fantasy remedies that most humans through the ages with any common sense (let alone wisdom) would recognize as distorted at best and spiritual poison at worst. Blood letting and lobotomies had rationales too, lest we forget.
My astute readers will sense some discomfiting irony here. Do I not sound a little like, well, Ted Kaczynski, pontificating about a social ill borne of the modern technocracy …a voice crying from the wilderness? I suppose I do, strangely enough — not that anyone would confuse my sweet crib in the Philly suburbs for wilderness; my “hut”, while well-worn and soon to reach the half-century mark, has a pool and decent, dual-zone air conditioning. And bombs are clearly not my thing.
But the irony is real: Kaczynski railed against technology, and against the dystopian, anti-human causes of the left and right. I do too, in my own way. It’s not just the internet and smartphone experiment of the early twenty-first century, and its effect on children, although that is certainly a big part of it. Technology virtualizes life for so many of us. With due respect to Meta and its ill-advised plans to virtualize our lives, most of us already live in a kind of virtual reality. Vast tracts of our existence depend on things we will never understand, let alone be able to build or even repair. The reality of everything around us is encased in plastic or aluminum, hidden forever — from the planes, trains, and automobiles to the refrigerators, oil burners and smartphones, to the pixels on our television screens, to the GPS that tells us how to get to places, to the functions we call in our spreadsheets. Few people have the first clue about how such things work, or what confluence of people, materials, civilizations and technology made them possible. We are fully disconnected from the gears that make our lives go. We are alienated from both reality and, increasingly, from each other.
So it is true: We do live atop mountains of technology, which few understand, and without which our lives crumble, enabling us to focus most of our time on things that Kaczynski viewed as trivial or destructive. And I can understand why someone would find that disturbing. I find it disturbing. I imagine that Ted Kaczynski did too. But he was unable to cope with that knowledge. On one hand, he knew too much; on the other, he was hopelessly unprepared for life. He never appreciated the basic power of love and cooperation, the necessity of relationship, the beauty of human interaction and interdependence, the joy of creative giving. He never realized that all societies — primitive or industrialized — are more than groups of individuals. Kaczynski wanted to tear it all down, believing that removing the technology would force us to be true to ourselves and the activities that he deemed valuable, presumably as individuals.
He was wrong of course, even without the bombs. Humans are social creatures. This is true whether we are sitting around a fire with an animal carcass roasting above the flames, or sitting in front of our computers writing a post for substack. Kaczynski seemed to prefer to withdraw, and we deem it destructive — which it was. But we delude ourselves when we believe that the virtual lives we lead are substantially more “social”.
Ted Kaczynski is dead. But the system that created him is very much alive. It was just getting started when it built him, but the mad scientists have improved their methods considerably since then. We can recognize this system for what it is, or we can let it destroy us. There is a Unabomber within all of us these days. Perhaps not one that constructs physical bombs that kill and injure the flesh. But it is there, ticking away, tearing down, pretending to be real, writing its meandering manifestos. We all need to silence that person, walk out the door, and re-tune the eyes of our minds to the bright light of human reality.