The Unabomber
A Canny and Driven Insanity
Part 2 of 3: A Study Of Manifestos
In this section of my three-part series, I explore the Unabomber manifesto as a hotly contested piece of writing whose diagnosis of our common ills continues to ambiguously unsettle readers even after over three decades.
I want to clarify that I am neither condoning nor condemning his actions, but am instead interested in gathering intelligence from the details of what breaks down people’s minds and spirits in ways that cause them to lash out. I am continuing to investigate the manifesto as a form of expressive writing that can diagnose social ills even when the actions they inspire do not properly “solve” or even adequately diagnose the dynamics they so strongly oppose.
In William Finnegan’s 1998 New Yorker article “Defending the Unabomber,” they delve into a specific question that came up during the trial of Ted Kaczynski, which is whether or not he should be considered insane. His lawyers “believed that his best, if not his only, hope of escaping a death sentence was to claim that he was mentally ill.” In the piece, they grapple with the fact of his apparent reasonableness, the cogent assertions made in his manifesto, and the machinations that he believed justified his specific use of targeted violence. In my previous piece, I discussed epistemic inflammation as occurring when what is known is blocked from being communicated. When what is felt continues, lasts, gains pressure, and cannot be metabolized, these kinds of effects gain a life of their own, seeking out any available outlet to root and so force itself into expression.
As a form of aggrieved expression, the writing of manifestos seeks relief from a form of rumination that cannot be escaped. The kind of relief they provide does not necessarily provide a lasting peace, but rather seeks to manage the effects of a building pressure by constructing an outlet. The nuance of what is relieving about this reminds me of an interaction I had a couple of years ago when I was discussing conspiratorial studies with a group of social scientists. I mentioned that I thought that being racist was probably relaxing to those who practiced it. Attributing our suffering to a scapegoat provides a channel for inner tensions, creating a target for aggrievement that would allow the mind to temporarily rest. I thought that expressions of hate could be relaxing because they allow us to move. They enable the expression of something that has hardened, producing the kind of frozen immersion that comes about at the edge of something that cannot be explained. By contrast, hate is hot, passionate, mobilizing. It feels powerful to hate something. It moves collectives into action. It is a force inside of our bodies that, for good or ill, allows people to act in the world.
Love on the other hand can also be hot, forceful, explosive, and even sometimes destructive. Yet, the motivating force of love is not destruction but union, connection. When we become frozen, the heat that demands release can take us over and so the relief that I theorize people get from hating, is what unbinds their own inertia. The unbinding that comes from a furious love, on the other hand, is much more unsettling.
Others at the table fought me, saying that expressions of hate could not be relaxing because they riled people up. I honestly think that both statements are true, but the thing about being riled up is that sometimes it feels better than being frozen, incapacitated, trapped. Hate can be a tempting outlet when there is nowhere else to go. It allows the self to remain whole when it would otherwise shatter. The thing about love as a force in the world is that overwhelming connection also has this quality of destroying the self, obliterating the ego in a way that propels us into direct confrontation of something much larger and less manageable than we are used to. The wildness of love is itself terrifying. It moves us, but not in the focused way that hate moves us. Both are wild forces but where hate is directed out at the world and so preserves the self, love causes our boundaries to fall apart.
Hate is a drug. It is a feeling that can bring about feelings of power and efficacy. Yet, just like taking too many drugs, an escalating practice of hate can also cause disaster. Yet, small titrations of hate are also not wholly destructive. Should I not hate the destruction of the natural world, the suffering of migrants, the genocide(s) of those who cannot defend themselves? Hating things, just like feeling angry, brings about a reckoning, and whether this is helpful or harmful depends on the circumstances. Expressions of hate are essentially creative efforts that can further aggrieve and unsettle us even as they offer temporary relief from whatever underlying condition is causing our upset. In some ways, hate is a kind of self-harm that allows us access to our bodies when they are becoming dissociated with overwhelm. By intentionally inflicting pain, we can return to ourselves but in relying on pain to return us to ourselves, we can also lose a sense of proportionality. In normalizing the pain, we can lose sense of the path back into connection.
Mad studies scholar Sarah Smith says in a recent publication studying madness in higher-education that acts of self-harm are not only destructive. In centring researchers who have experienced this behaviour in their lives, the pain caused by self-harm and suicidal ideation can also be understood as relieving anxiety. Even suicidal rumination can itself become a form of comfort when the underlying conditions of existence are unbearable.
The issue is that these are not solutions. They are merely outlets.
Despite the apparent randomness of ideologically driven attacks, a logical through-line can exist whether or not we consider particular acts of violence as legitimate. Kaczynski himself was enraged with the “technocrats” who he believed were responsible for overarching industrial systems destroying the natural order. According to this logic, the sanity of this argument seems to rest on whether his diagnosis justified his response.
While he undoubtedly committed acts of devastating violence, killing three people and maiming dozens of others, by his own account these acts had to do with a philosophical rationale which paradoxically becomes dual evidence for both his sanity and insanity. Psychiatrists labeled his anti-technology stance a “systematized paranoid delusion,” and so dismissed it as a pathology because they did not agree with his particular diagnosis. While I feel uncomfortable with the idea of mass murder, I must admit that given the state of current affairs I don’t actually think it is a paranoid delusion to believe that the rise of a technocratic elite was and is endangering global life, or that liberal progressives are largely incapable of standing against their rise.
I am reminded of an argument I made in a chapter in The Capitol Riots: Digital Media, Disinformation, and Democracy Under Attack, where I explored the conditions under the pandemic leading up to the pizza-gate shooter. I described his actions in reference to Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty where he would subject audiences to unrelenting sensory stimulation until the stupor of their passivity was broken and they were forced to take some action, if only to protect themselves against attack. It is the same ethos demonstrated by the infamous punk rock legend G. G. Allin, whose shows involved antics like “grabbing lewdly at people in his audience, punching anyone in the front row, defecating heartily on stage, and pelting his scat into the crowd.” The theatre of cruelty offers a technique that would enable audiences to give up their acquiescence to the spectacle, forcing them to act in the world.
When taken in the light of a population confined to their homes during the global pandemic, as we were participating in endless algorithmic feeds, mine were filled with allegations of a global ring of pedophilic elite corroborated by the Epstein Files, the killing of the journalist who brought us the Panama Papers, and documented abuses from the CIA (both domestically and internationally). In my chapter, I asked the question: is it more insane to bring a machine gun to a pizza restaurant than it is to do absolutely nothing? Of course, these are two very wide poles with a lot of ground in-between, but the point of the question is to ask us why it makes more sense to be totally shut down than it is to act, even if those actions themselves seem insane.
I have noticed how those most likely to take action are being sidelined into the kind of conspiracy mentation that inspires people to become a Prepper “someone who makes deliberate, advance preparations—supplies, skills, and plans—to protect household health, safety, and livelihood when everyday systems break down” or else maybe to start a right-wing militia (or in Kaczynski’s case to start building bombs). Affective outpourings during times of crisis, whether personal or collective, often do little more than temporarily alleviate our grievances. It may feel good to stockpile gold, build a bunker, or engage in self-harm, but it is also reactive rather than proactive. Acts of self-harm tend to occur in situations where there is ongoing trauma without the possibility of escape. In such situations, it may feel better to feel something than nothing at all, yet, the act itself is coping with the implosion rather than doing something about it. This might happen when we are held from getting to the root of what is wrong. When we cannot name what is harming us, we have little choice but to displace our anxiety into activities that seek to manage the ongoing stress.
Ted Kaczynski refused to plead mental illness at his trial, not just rejecting the label but also standing by his ideals and the actions that he believed supported them. He claimed that he was ready to explain his rationale to a jury and to the world at large but was not allowed to do so, never actually having his day in court. He plead guilty to his crimes to avoid being given the death penalty.
Getting deeper inside of what might have brought him to the tipping point, Alston Chase details another angle of this story in an Atlantic investigation called “Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber.” The article explores Kaczynski’s involvement in a set of disturbing experiments set in motion by Henry A. Murray, wherein undergrads (including minors) were subjected to “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” attacks on their egos, cherished ideas, and beliefs in an experiment that would later go on to gain the researcher traction in advanced interrogation techniques (i.e. torture).
Participants in these experiments would repeatedly view replayed footage of their own interrogations, having lights shone in their eyes while being systematically broken down from the inside out. At the time, the study was tied to the “Ivy-League” Harvard University, where the foundation overseeing this research continues to withhold the specific details of Kaczynski’s file under the guise of “anonymity.” This move, they say, is to protect him, but the article reads it as evading accountability for the project’s brutality and further protecting the institutions involved from any subsequent accountability that might require them to pay reparations for Kaczynski’s actions.
Why I read manifestos is not to excuse them, but to situate them as artifacts of a particular zeitgeist. They reveal secrets about our common malaise that I can understand even when I do not share the direction of their hate, nor their solutions to what they are diagnosing. My interests in these texts us not actually in the solutions they pose, because these can often be harmful and distorted. Instead, I am interested in what I find familiar about their pain. I am curious to understand where I find myself reflected in them. This is how I am able to study the far-right without losing my mind, by identifying the roots of the pain that I share with them, even and especially in their hate.
In understanding why people hate, I do not need to feel the same way that they do. I can, however, recognize in myself what is hurting in the same way. In this, I can build a bridge between myself and those who have lost their minds because this same world is also driving me insane. When we identify a system of irritants that points to what is being seized inside of us through over-coding and repression, I can understand how people might be driven off the deep end and into the abyss.
I wonder: how else could they have released what was trapped inside of them when it has no outlet, no words to hold up against what is destroying their sanity?
The real question, is why there is not an easier route to prove our theories about what ails us? Why does it have to get to the point where a person feels the need to make a bomb or pick up a machine gun? Is there something else we could be doing to allow an outlet for their fury?
I ask: why it is easier to inscribe it in blood than to find commonality and support in one another?
References
Chase, Alston. (2000). “Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber.” The Atlantic, June.
Damiani, J. (2025) What Is a Prepper? Meaning, Mindset & Myths Debunked Reality Studies
Finnegan, William. (1998). “Defending the Unabomber.” The New Yorker, March 16.
Shalina, M. (2013) GG Allin Gets Trapped in America, Sends Word to the Empire The Brooklyn Rail
Smith, S. (2026). Maddening Research Ethics: Challenging Sanism and Biomedicalism in Institutional Ethics Discourses and Policies. International Mad Studies Journal, 4(1), e1-20. https://doi.org/10.58544/imsj.v4i1.10311