the unabomber essay

May 26, 1996 Text of Unabomber Manifesto Related Article Coverage of the Unabomber Trial [This text was sent last June to The New York Times and The Washington Post by the person who calls himself "FC," identified by the FBI as the Unabomber, whom authorities have implicated in three murders and 16 bombings. The author threatened to send a bomb to an unspecified destination "with intent to kill" unless one of the newspapers published this manuscript. The Attorney General and the Director of the FBI recommended publication.] INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND ITS FUTURE Introduction 1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in "advanced" countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced" countries. 2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy. 3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later. 4. We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can't predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society. 5. In this article we give attention to only some of the negative developments that have grown out of the industrial-technological system. Other such developments we mention only briefly or ignore altogether. This does not mean that we regard these other developments as unimportant. For practical reasons we have to confine our discussion to areas that have received insufficient public attention or in which we have something new to say. For example, since there are well-developed environmental and wilderness movements, we have written very little about environmental degradation or the destruction of wild nature, even though we consider these to be highly important. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MODERN LEFTISM 6. Almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply troubled society. One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism, so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern society in general. 7. But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th century leftism could have been practically identified with socialism. Today the movement is fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be called a leftist. When we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists, collectivists, "politically correct" types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like. But not everyone who is associated with one of these movements is a leftist. What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so much movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or rather a collection of related types. Thus, what we mean by "leftism" will emerge more clearly in the course of our discussion of leftist psychology. (Also, see paragraphs 227-230.) 8. Even so, our conception of leftism will remain a good deal less clear than we would wish, but there doesn't seem to be any remedy for this. All we are trying to do here is indicate in a rough and approximate way the two psychological tendencies that we believe are the main driving force of modern leftism. We by no means claim to be telling the WHOLE truth about leftist psychology. Also, our discussion is meant to apply to modern leftism only. We leave open the question of the extent to which our discussion could be applied to the leftists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. 9. The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call "feelings of inferiority" and "oversocialization." Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential. FEELINGS OF INFERIORITY 10. By "feelings of inferiority" we mean not only inferiority feelings in the strict sense but a whole spectrum of related traits; low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend to have some such feelings (possibly more or less repressed) and that these feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern leftism. 11. When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced among minority rights activists, whether or not they belong to the minority groups whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about the words used to designate minorities and about anything that is said concerning minorities. The terms "negro," "oriental," "handicapped" or "chick" for an African, an Asian, a disabled person or a woman originally had no derogatory connotation. "Broad" and "chick" were merely the feminine equivalents of "guy," "dude" or "fellow." The negative connotations have been attached to these terms by the activists themselves. Some animal rights activists have gone so far as to reject the word "pet" and insist on its replacement by "animal companion." Leftish anthropologists go to great lengths to avoid saying anything about primitive peoples that could conceivably be interpreted as negative. They want to replace the world "primitive" by "nonliterate." They seem almost paranoid about anything that might suggest that any primitive culture is inferior to our own. (We do not mean to imply that primitive cultures ARE inferior to ours. We merely point out the hypersensitivity of leftish anthropologists.) 12. Those who are most sensitive about "politically incorrect" terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any "oppressed" group but come from privileged strata of society. Political correctness has its stronghold among university professors, who have secure employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual white males from middle- to upper-middle-class families. 13. Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent (homosexuals) or otherwise inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with their problems. (We do not mean to suggest that women, Indians, etc. ARE inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology.) 14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men. 15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist's real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful. 16. Words like "self-confidence," "self-reliance," "initiative," "enterprise," "optimism," etc., play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone's problems for them, satisfy everyone's needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser. 17. Art forms that appeal to modern leftish intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment. 18. Modern leftish philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e., failed, inferior). The leftist's feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual's ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is "inferior" it is not his fault, but society's, because he has not been brought up properly. 19. The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose feelings of inferiority make him a braggart, an egotist, a bully, a self-promoter, a ruthless competitor. This kind of person has not wholly lost faith in himself. He has a deficit in his sense of power and self-worth, but he can still conceive of himself as having the capacity to be strong, and his efforts to make himself strong produce his unpleasant behavior. [1] But the leftist is too far gone for that. Hisfeelings of inferiority are so ingrained that he cannot conceive of himself as individually strong and valuable. Hence the collectivism of the leftist. He can feel strong only as a member of a large organization or a mass movement with which he identifies himself. 20. Notice the masochistic tendency of leftist tactics. Leftists protest by lying down in front of vehicles, they intentionally provoke police or racists to abuse them, etc. These tactics may often be effective, but many leftists use them not as a means to an end but because they PREFER masochistic tactics. Self-hatred is a leftist trait. 21. Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists' hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred. 22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss. 23. We emphasize that the foregoing does not pretend to be an accurate description of everyone who might be considered a leftist. It is only a rough indication of a general tendency of leftism. OVERSOCIALIZATION 24. Psychologists use the term "socialization" to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. It may seem senseless to say that many leftists are oversocialized, since the leftist is perceived as a rebel. Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such rebels as they seem. 25. The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin. We use the term "oversocialized" to describe such people. [2] 26. Oversocialization can lead to low self-esteem, a sense of powerlessness, defeatism, guilt, etc. One of the most important means by which our society socializes children is by making them feel ashamed of behavior or speech that is contrary to society's expectations. If this is overdone, or if a particular child is especially susceptible to such feelings, he ends by feeling ashamed of HIMSELF. Moreover the thought and the behavior of the oversocialized person are more restricted by society's expectations than are those of the lightly socialized person. The majority of people engage in a significant amount of naughty behavior. They lie, they commit petty thefts, they break traffic laws, they goofoff at work, they hate someone, they say spiteful things or they use some underhanded trick to get ahead of the other guy. The oversocialized person cannot do these things, or if he does do them he generates in himself a sense of shame and self-hatred. The oversocialized person cannot even experience, without guilt, thoughts or feelings that are contrary to the accepted morality; he cannot think "unclean" thoughts. And socialization is not just a matter of morality; we are socialized to conform to many norms of behavior that do not fall under the heading of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him. In many oversocialized people this results in a sense of constraint and powerlessness that can be a severe hardship. We suggest that oversocialization is among the more serious cruelties that human beings inflict on one another. 27. We argue that a very important and influential segment of the modern left is oversocialized and that their oversocialization is of great importance in determining the direction of modern leftism. Leftists of the oversocialized type tend to be intellectuals or members of the upper-middle class. Notice that university intellectuals [3] constitute the most highly socialized segment of our society and also the most left-wing segment. 28. The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today's leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. More fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society (or at least of its middle and upper classes [4] for a long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up to these principles. 29. Here is an illustration of the way in which the oversocialized leftist shows his real attachment to the conventional attitudes of our society while pretending to be in rebellion against it. Many leftists push for affirmative action, for moving black people into high-prestige jobs, for improved education in black schools and more money for such schools; the way of life of the black "underclass" they regard as a social disgrace. They want to integrate the black man into the system, make him a business executive, a lawyer, a scientist just like upper-middle-class white people. The leftists will reply that the last thing they want is to make the black man into a copy of the white man; instead, they want to preserve African American culture. But in what does this preservation of African American culture consist? It can hardly consist in anything more than eating black-style food, listening to black-style music, wearing black-style clothing and going to a black-style church or mosque. In other words, it can express itself only in superficial matters. In all ESSENTIAL respects most leftists of the oversocialized type want to make the black man conform to white, middle-class ideals. They want to make him study technical subjects, become an executive or a scientist, spend his life climbing the status ladder to prove that black people are as good as white. They want to make black fathers "responsible," they want black gangs to become nonviolent, etc. But these are exactly the values of the industrial-technological system. The system couldn't care less what kind of music a man listens to, what kind of clothes he wears or what religion he believes in as long as he studies in school, holds a respectable job, climbs the status ladder, is a "responsible" parent, is nonviolent and so forth. In effect, however much he may deny it, the oversocialized leftist wants to integrate the black man into the system and make him adopt its values. 30. We certainly do not claim that leftists, even of the oversocialized type, NEVER rebel against the fundamental values of our society. Clearly they sometimes do. Some oversocialized leftists have gone so far as to rebel against one of modern society's most important principles by engaging in physical violence. By their own account, violence is for them a form of "liberation." In other words, by committing violence they break through the psychological restraints that have been trained into them. Because they are oversocialized these restraints have been more confining for them than for others; hence their need to break free of them. But they usually justify their rebellion in terms of mainstream values. If they engage in violence they claim to be fighting against racism or the like. 31. We realize that many objections could be raised to the foregoing thumbnail sketch of leftist psychology. The real situation is complex, and anything like a complete description of it would take several volumes even if the necessary data were available. We claim only to have indicated very roughly the two most important tendencies in the psychology of modern leftism. 32. The problems of the leftist are indicative of the problems of our society as a whole. Low self-esteem, depressive tendencies and defeatism are not restricted to the left. Though they are especially noticeable in the left, they are widespread in our society. And today's society tries to socialize us to a greater extent than any previous society. We are even told by experts how to eat, how to exercise, how to make love, how to raise our kids and so forth. THE POWER PROCESS 33. Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something that we will call the "power process." This is closely related to the need for power (which is widely recognized) but is not quite the same thing. The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it autonomy and will discuss it later (paragraphs 42-44). 34. Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems. At first he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually he may become clinically depressed. History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent. This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power. But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward which to exercise one's power. 35. Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical necessities of life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are made necessary by the climate. But the leisured aristocrat obtains these things without effort. Hence his boredom and demoralization. 36. Nonattainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical necessities, and in frustration if nonattainment of the goals is compatible with survival. Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression. 37, Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals. SURROGATE ACTIVITIES 38. But not every leisured aristocrat becomes bored and demoralized. For example, the emperor Hirohito, instead of sinking into decadent hedonism, devoted himself to marine biology, a field in which he became distinguished. When people do not have to exert themselves to satisfy their physical needs they often set up artificial goals for themselves. In many cases they then pursue these goals with the same energy and emotional involvement that they otherwise would have put into the search for physical necessities. Thus the aristocrats of the Roman Empire had their literary pretensions; many European aristocrats a few centuries ago invested tremendous time and energy in hunting, though they certainly didn't need the meat; other aristocracies have competed for status through elaborate displays of wealth; and a few aristocrats, like Hirohito, have turned to science. 39. We use the term "surrogate activity" to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the "fulfillment" that they get from pursuing the goal. Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate activities. Given a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote most of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use his physical and mental faculties in a varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal X? If the answer is no, then the person's pursuit of goal X is a surrogate activity. Hirohito's studies in marine biology clearly constituted a surrogate activity, since it is pretty certain that if Hirohito had had to spend his time working at interesting non-scientific tasks in order to obtain the necessities of life, he would not have felt deprived because he didn't know all about the anatomy and life-cycles of marine animals. On the other hand the pursuit of sex and love (for example) is not a surrogate activity, because most people, even if their existence were otherwise satisfactory, would feel deprived if they passed their lives without ever having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. (But pursuit of an excessive amount of sex, more than one really needs, can be a surrogate activity.) 40. In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one's physical needs. It is enough to go through a training program to acquire some petty technical skill, then come to work on time and exert the very modest effort needed to hold a job. The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence and, most of all, simple OBEDIENCE. If one has those, society takes care of one from cradle to grave. (Yes, there is an underclass that cannot take the physical necessities for granted, but we are speaking here of mainstream society.) Thus it is not surprising that modern society is full of surrogate activities. These include scientific work, athletic achievement, humanitarian work, artistic and literary creation, climbing the corporate ladder, acquisition of money and material goods far beyond the point at which they cease to give any additional physical satisfaction, and social activism when it addresses issues that are not important for the activist personally, as in the case of white activists who work for the rights of nonwhite minorities. These are not always PURE surrogate activities, since for many people they may be motivated in part by needs other than the need to have some goal to pursue. Scientific work may be motivated in part by a drive for prestige, artistic creation by a need to express feelings, militant social activism by hostility. But for most people who pursue them, these activities are in large part surrogate activities. For example, the majority of scientists will probably agree that the "fulfillment" they get from their work is more important than the money and prestige they earn. 41. For many if not most people, surrogate activities are less satisfying than the pursuit of real goals (that is, goals that people would want to attain even if their need for the power process were already fulfilled). One indication of this is the fact that, in many or most cases, people who are deeply involved in surrogate activities are never satisfied, never at rest. Thus the money-maker constantly strives for more and more wealth. The scientist no sooner solves one problem than he moves on to the next. The long-distance runner drives himself to run always farther and faster. Many people who pursue surrogate activities will say that they get far more fulfillment from these activities than they do from the "mundane" business of satisfying their biological needs, but that is because in our society the effort needed to satisfy the biological needs has been reduced to triviality. More importantly, in our society people do not satisfy their biological needs AUTONOMOUSLY but by functioning as parts of an immense social machine. In contrast, people generally have a great deal of autonomy in pursuing their surrogate activities. AUTONOMY 42. Autonomy as a part of the power process may not be necessary for every individual. But most people need a greater or lesser degree of autonomy in working toward their goals. Their efforts must be undertaken on their own initiative and must be under their own direction and control. Yet most people do not have to exert this initiative, direction and control as single individuals. It is usually enough to act as a member of a SMALL group. Thus if half a dozen people discuss a goal among themselves and make a successful joint effort to attain that goal, their need for the power process will be served. But if they work under rigid orders handed down from above that leave them no room for autonomous decision and initiative, then their need for the power process will not be served. The same is true when decisions are made on a collective basis if the group making the collective decision is so large that the role of each individual is insignificant. [5] 43. It is true that some individuals seem to have little need for autonomy. Either their drive for power is weak or they satisfy it by identifying themselves with some powerful organization to which they belong. And then there are unthinking, animal types who seem to be satisfied with a purely physical sense of power (the good combat soldier, who gets his sense of power by developing fighting skills that he is quite content to use in blind obedience to his superiors). 44. But for most people it is through the power processshaving a goal, making an AUTONOMOUS effort and attaining the goalsthat self-esteem, self-confidence and a sense of power are acquired. When one does not have adequate opportunity to go through the power process the consequences are (depending on the individual and on the way the power process is disrupted) boredom, demoralization, low self-esteem, inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression, anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, spouse or child abuse, insatiable hedonism, abnormal sexual behavior, sleep disorders, eating disorders, etc. [6] SOURCES OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS 45. Any of the foregoing symptoms can occur in any society, but in modern industrial society they are present on a massive scale. We aren't the first to mention that the world today seems to be going crazy. This sort of thing is not normal for human societies. There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is. It is true that not all was sweetness and light in primitive societies. Abuse of women was common among the Australian aborigines, transexuality was fairly common among some of the American Indian tribes. But it does appear that GENERALLY SPEAKING the kinds of problems that we have listed in the preceding paragraph were far less common among primitive peoples than they are in modern society. 46. We attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved and to behave in ways that conflict with the patterns of behavior that the human race developed while living under the earlier conditions. It is clear from what we have already written that we consider lack of opportunity to properly experience the power process as the most important of the abnormal conditions to which modern society subjects people. But it is not the only one. Before dealing with disruption of the power process as a source of social problems we will discuss some of the other sources. 47. Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe. 48. It is well known that crowding increases stress and aggression. The degree of crowding that exists today and the isolation of man from nature are consequences of technological progress. All pre-industrial societies were predominantly rural. The Industrial Revolution vastly increased the size of cities and the proportion of the population that lives in them, and modern agricultural technology has made it possible for the Earth to support a far denser population than it ever did before. (Also, technology exacerbates the effects of crowding because it puts increased disruptive powers in people's hands. For example, a variety of noise-making devices: power mowers, radios, motorcycles, etc. If the use of these devices is unrestricted, people who want peace and quiet are frustrated by the noise. If their use is restricted, people who use the devices are frustrated by the regulations. But if these machines had never been invented there would have been no conflict and no frustration generated by them.) 49. For primitive societies the natural world (which usually changes only slowly) provided a stable framework and therefore a sense of security. In the modern world it is human society that dominates nature rather than the other way around, and modern society changes very rapidly owing to technological change. Thus there is no stable framework. 50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values. 51. The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities. Beyond that, a technological society HAS TO weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual's loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties of small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system. 52. Suppose that a public official or a corporation executive appoints his cousin, his friend or his co-religionist to a position rather than appointing the person best qualified for the job. He has permitted personal loyalty to supersede his loyalty to the system, and that is "nepotism" or "discrimination," both of which are terrible sins in modern society. Would-be industrial societies that have done a poor job of subordinating personal or local loyalties to loyalty to the system are usually very inefficient. (Look at Latin America.) Thus an advanced industrial society can tolerate only those small-scale communities that are emasculated, tamed and made into tools of the system. [7] 53. Crowding, rapid change and the breakdown of communities have been widely recognized as sources of social problems. But we do not believe they are enough to account for the extent of the problems that are seen today. 54. A few pre-industrial cities were very large and crowded, yet their inhabitants do not seem to have suffered from psychological problems to the same extent as modern man. In America today there still are uncrowded rural areas, and we find there the same problems as in urban areas, though the problems tend to be less acute in the rural areas. Thus crowding does not seem to be the decisive factor. 55. On the growing edge of the American frontier during the 19th century, the mobility of the population probably broke down extended families and small-scale social groups to at least the same extent as these are broken down today. In fact, many nuclear families lived by choice in such isolation, having no neighbors within several miles, that they belonged to no community at all, yet they do not seem to have developed problems as a result. 56. Furthermore, change in American frontier society was very rapid and deep. A man might be born and raised in a log cabin, outside the reach of law and order and fed largely on wild meat; and by the time he arrived at old age he might be working at a regular job and living in an ordered community with effective law enforcement. This was a deeper change than that which typically occurs in the life of a modern individual, yet it does not seem to have led to psychological problems. In fact, 19th century American society had an optimistic and self-confident tone, quite unlike that of today's society. [8] 57. The difference, we argue, is that modern man has the sense (largely justified) that change is IMPOSED on him, whereas the 19th century frontiersman had the sense (also largely justified) that he created change himself, by his own choice. Thus a pioneer settled on a piece of land of his own choosing and made it into a farm through his own effort. In those days an entire county might have only a couple of hundred inhabitants and was a far more isolated and autonomous entity than a modern county is. Hence the pioneer farmer participated as a member of a relatively small group in the creation of a new, ordered community. One may well question whether the creation of this community was an improvement, but at any rate it satisfied the pioneer's need for the power process. 58. It would be possible to give other examples of societies in which there has been rapid change and/or lack of close community ties without the kind of massive behavioral aberration that is seen in today's industrial society. We contend that the most important cause of social and psychological problems in modern society is the fact that people have insufficient opportunity to go through the power process in a normal way. We don't mean to say that modern society is the only one in which the power process has been disrupted. Probably most if not all civilized societies have interfered with the power process to a greater or lesser extent. But in modern industrial society the problem has become particularly acute. Leftism, at least in its recent (mid- to late-20th century) form, is in part a symptom of deprivation with respect to the power process. Continue Text of Unabomber Manifesto

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The Unabomber Manifesto

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Unabomber manifesto published

On September 19, 1995, a manifesto by the Unabomber , an anti-technology terrorist, is published by The  New York Times and Washington Post in the hope that someone will recognize the person who, for 17 years, had been sending homemade bombs through the mail that had killed and maimed innocent people around the United States. After reading the manifesto, David Kaczynski linked the writing style to that of his older brother Ted, who was later convicted of the attacks and sentenced to life in prison without parole. All told, the Unabomber was responsible for murdering three people and injuring another 23.

Theodore John Kaczynski was born May 22, 1942, in Evergreen Park, Illinois , a Chicago suburb. As a student, he excelled at math, graduated from Harvard and received a Ph.D. in math from the University of Michigan . In 1967, he got a teaching job at the University of California at Berkeley, but quit two years later. In 1971, Kaczynski purchased some property in Lincoln, Montana , with his brother. There, the future Unabomber built a small, secluded cabin where he lived off the land as a recluse from the late 1970s until his arrest on April 3, 1996.

In May 1978, an un-mailed package was found in a University of Illinois, Chicago, parking lot; a security guard was later injured when he opened the package. The following year, another bomb exploded at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, injuring one person. In November of that same year, 12 people on an American Airlines flight from Chicago to Washington, D.C., were treated for smoke inhalation when a bomb in a mailbag aboard the plane caught fire.

Investigators eventually linked the three incidents, as the bombings continued and spread around the country. In December 1985, the owner of a computer store in Sacramento, California, was killed by a bomb filled with nail fragments. After a similar explosion in Salt Lake City two years later, investigators got their first eyewitness description of the bomber after someone reported seeing a man in aviator sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt at the scene of the crime. In April 1995, The New York Times received a letter from the Unabomber stating that the killings would stop if the paper printed a 35,000-word manifesto. In September of that year, the Times and the Post complied, and David Kaczynski eventually recognized his brother Ted’s writing as that of the Unabomber and contacted the FBI .

In January 1998, Kaczynski agreed to a plea bargain with the government and was sentenced to four life sentences plus 30 years. He died in his cell and was pronounced dead on June 10, 2023 at the age of 81.

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The Unabomber Manifesto: A Brilliant Madman's Essay on Technology, Society, and the Future of Humanity Kindle Edition

• Print length 226 pages
• Language English
• Publication date April 30, 2019
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07RBBM1JL
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Panthera Classics (April 30, 2019)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 30, 2019
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 1275 KB
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• #33 in Radical Thought
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About the author

Ted kaczynski.

Theodore John Kaczynski, Ph.D. (a.k.a. Ted Kaczynski) has focused his life’s work on sounding the alarm about society’s paramount problem: the omnipresent, subjugating, and destructive force of technological progress. His extensive writings articulate a comprehensive critique of the global “techno-industrial system” and forecast its catastrophic consequences for humankind and the biosphere. His recent works focus on realistic strategies for collective action to alter the current trajectory of society, and avoid unmitigated disaster.

Dr. Kaczynski was born in 1942 in Evergreen Park, Illinois. An intellectual prodigy, he attended Harvard at age 16, earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan at 24, and became the youngest professor of mathematics in the history of UC-Berkeley at 25. After two years, Dr. Kaczynski resigned his professorship and moved to a remote wilderness area of western Montana to pursue a life-long ambition of living an autonomous and self-sufficient life off the land, which he did for twenty-five years.

Kaczynski has been incarcerated since 1998 in solitary confinement at Federal Prison ADX in Florence, Colorado, after receiving a life sentence for a long-term violent campaign he staged to call world-wide attention to the colossal dangers inherent in technological growth.

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A requiem for the Unabomber

James c. oleson.

     Tuba Mirum : hark, the trumpet

     Confutatis : from the accursed

     Lacrimosa : full of tears

     Dies Irae : day of wrath

     Lux Aeterna : eternal light

     Recordare : remember

     References

Theodore John Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, died by suicide in June 2023. One of the most best known criminals of the late twentieth century, and a former Harvard mathematics prodigy with an IQ of 167, Kaczynski is remembered for the 1995 publication of his 35,000-word anti-technology essay, Industrial Society and Its Future . This work called for the rejection of technological civilization and the embracing of wild nature. Its publication led to Kaczynski’s identification, apprehension, and a convoluted set of legal proceedings that culminated in a coerced plea arrangement and his incarceration in the US federal supermax prison. Kaczynski was not permitted to introduce a defense of necessity. Instead, he was labeled as ‘mad’ by the press and his family, and identified as a paranoid schizophrenic by a court-appointed psychiatrist. But several commentators have argued that Kaczynski’s reasoning is sound. Indeed, many of Kaczynski’s observations about technology and the environment have proven to be prescient. Accordingly, a new generation of followers have adopted his anti-technology philosophy. If Kaczynski was correct about technology and the environment, this might warrant a reevaluation of his socio-theoretical writings and reconsideration of his constructed persona as a mad genius.

Theodore John Kaczynski died on 10 June 2023. He died, at 81, in a federal prison, as part of the great, graying American carceral population (Bedard et al., 2022). And he died, if we are to believe the New York Times (Thrush, 2023), by his own hand. Yet this , his suicide, is not why Kaczynski’s name appeared in headlines across almost all major news outlets: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, AP, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times , the New York Post , the Sun , USA Today , Rolling Stone , Mother Jones , and too many more to count. No, the reason that Kaczynski saturated the news is that he was a serial killer (and one of our most beloved killers, at that). Remember, ‘evil has its heroes as well as good’ (La Rochefoucauld, 1959, p. 60).

The world heard about Kaczynski’s death because the public is obsessed with murder. ‘Our newspapers are filled with murder, and murder streams from our radios. Murder transfixes us when we go to the movies, when we read novels, and when we watch television’ (Oleson, 2013, p. 57). After all, film’s number one villain – Hannibal Lecter – is a serial killer (Oleson, 2005b), and the most successful horror franchise in the whole world— Saw —is not about space aliens, ghosts, or vampires, but a serial killer (Oleson & Mackinnon, 2015). Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ted Bundy are cultural icons. In fact, people are more likely to recognize the names of serial killers from yesteryear than to recognize the names of this year’s Nobel Prize winners (Oleson, 2005b). Our killers are celebrities (Schmid, 2005). People buy serial killer trading cards (Jones & Collier, 1993) and action figures (Spectre Studios, 2023), and they collect murderabilia (Scouller, 2010) like holy relics. Dark tourists make pilgrimages to the sites of notorious murders (Hohenhaus, 2021; Selzer, 2021; Yonover, 2000), to places of execution, and to the graves of killers. Coppins (2023) recently described the “gross spectacle of murder fandom.”

It probably says something about our society – and not something good – that we venerate serial killers in this way (Egger, 1998; Heron, 1957; Holmes & DeBurger, 1988; Norris, 1988; Seltzer, 1998). ‘[T]he serial killer constitutes a mythical, almost supernatural, embodiment of American society’s deepest darkest fears. We are compelled by the representation of this figure because he allows us to project our fears onto a clearly delineated villain’ (Beckman, 2001, p. 62).

Although Kaczynski was no Hannibal Lecter – which is to say that he was not an aristocratic cannibal psychiatrist with 11 fingers, red eyes, power over animals, and an IQ immeasurable to man (Oleson, 2006a) – he is just about the closest we get to that mark. He is iconic as a criminal genius (Lipton, 1970; Oleson, 2016; Rhodes, 1932). Indeed, Kaczynski was a child prodigy with a 167 IQ who attended Harvard University at the age of 16 (Chase, 2003), an introverted genius whose mathematical insights could be understood by perhaps 10 or 12 people in the country (Johnston & Scott, 1996), and, at just 25 years old, who landed a tenure-track assistant professorship at the University of California, Berkeley – the youngest such hire in the university’s history (Richardson, 2018) – the academic equivalent of winning the lottery.

Yet Kaczynski turned his back on all of this, and upon society itself, to live in a 10’ by 12’ cabin in the woods near Lincoln, Montana:120 square feet, with no electricity and no running water (Waits & Shors, 1999), for 25 years. And it was there, in the woods, that Kaczynski metamorphosed from recluse to serial killer. Not the kind of serial killer who kills for psychosexual gratification (Chan, 2019; Giannangelo, 1996; Ressler et al., 1988; Toates & Coschug-Toates, 2022), but a serial killer nevertheless (Douglas et al., 2013). In fact, Kaczynski was the high-IQ killer who evaded the largest, most expensive, manhunt in United States history (Douglas & Olshaker, 1996). During his 17-year reign of domestic terror, Kaczynski killed 3 people and wounded 23 more, using increasingly sophisticated letter bombs to wage a war against universities, airlines, and technology industries. And we adored him for it:

Our construction of the ‘high-IQ killer’ is a sign of our desire to figure the serial killer as being above and beyond society, as someone who attempts to assert his freedom. It makes him Byronic or, more exactly, makes him related to the hero of every Bildungsroman taught to every child, from Huck Finn to Holden Caulfield. (Tithecott, 1997; c.f.,, p. 148; Brady, 2001)

Kaczynski was beyond society. He was an outsider (Wilson, 1956), literally. But the Unabomber case involved far more than violation of the murder taboo. The Unabomber’s actions were audacious, cunning, and defiant. He, like few others, invoked the existential rebellion described so ably by Albert Camus:

What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation .... A slave who has taken orders all his life suddenly decides that he cannot obey some new command ... Up to this point he has at least remained silent and has abandoned himself to the form of despair in which a condition is accepted even though it is considered unjust .... But from the moment that the rebel finds his voice—even though he says nothing but ‘no’— he begins to desire and to judge. (Camus, 1956, pp. 13–14)

The Los Angeles Times describes Kaczynski as taunting authorities like ‘a comic book villain’ (Chawkins, 2023). Indeed, Kaczynski fed investigators false clues – a letter to the New York Times using the street address of the FBI headquarters as its return – and planted misleading DNA evidence – inserting random hairs collected from a bus station bathroom between layers of electrical tape on a bomb. Finally, a criminal mastermind who lived up to the appellation. Numerous elements of the Unabomber case captivated the public’s collective imagination:

● His iconic hoodie and aviator sunglasses (as depicted in wanted posters, such that reproduced in Figure 1)

● His cabin in the woods (Richard Barnes’ 1998 photos of the cabin are held in the San Francisco Modern Art Museum, and the actual cabin was exhibited for years in Washington DC’s Newseum, and is now part of the FBI museum: the FBI experience)

● His suspected role in the 1982 Tylenol tampering case

● His 2012 submission for his Harvard class 50-year alumni book (listing his occupation as prisoner and listing his ‘awards’ as eight life sentences, issued by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California)

But certainly one of the most captivating elements of the Unabomber case was the manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future (Kaczynski, 1995), Kaczynski’s 35,000-word essay on the corrupting influence of technology on human freedom (Barnett, 2015). What other criminal could extort the Washington Post and the New York Times into publishing a bone-dry Luddite screed the length of Animal Farm (Orwell, 1945)?

Tuba Mirum : hark, the trumpet

It is interesting, and telling, that ‘everyone wants to discuss the genius that became a serial murderer, and with few exceptions, no one wants to discuss Kaczynski as author and social revolutionary’ (Oleson, 2005a, p. 218, internal citations omitted). Books and articles about Kaczynski usually focus on the Unabomber crimes and the 17-year manhunt for America’s most wanted criminal (e.g. Douglas & Olshaker, 1996). Alternatively, they sometimes unpack his biography in a search for the underlying psychopathologies of his crimes (e.g. Chase, 2003). ‘In either case, the very name “Ted Kaczynski” is trivialized, either into narratological material for an hour-long whodunit show to kill time on a lazy Sunday evening or into advertising material for a thinly-veiled infomercial for the pharmaceutical industry’ (Haag, 2019). But Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future is usually ignored.

Sometimes mentioned but seldom read, Kaczynski’s manifesto asserted that technology is antithetical to human freedom, and that our dependence on technology exceeds our purported love of freedom. It is an exceptional work (Luke, 1996). The language of the manifesto is neither technical nor difficult: in fact, Corey suggests that Kaczynski ‘understands the complexity of the ideas and tries to compress them into language so simple it cannot carry the weight’ (2000, p. 174). The manifesto builds upon the foundations of other theorists (Fleming, 2022), notably Jacques Ellul (1964), Desmond Morris (1969), and Martin Seligman (1975). And as once lampooned in a column by Tony Snow (1995), there are striking parallels to Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance (1992). Indeed, Sale observes that the manifesto’s author is but one critic ‘in a long line of anti-technology critics where I myself have stood’ (Sale, 1995). Chase suggests that ‘except for the call to violence, its message was ordinary and unoriginal’ (2003, p. 89). Perhaps this is why its author engaged in instrumental acts of terror:

If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers, because it’s more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people. (Kaczynski, 1995, ¶ 96)

Maybe so. In Endgame , the deep green activist Derrick Jensen makes a similar observation. He notes that when activists protested against the use of the teratogenic defoliant, Agent Orange, in Oregon’s forests, transnational timber companies responded by dropping the chemical from helicopters onto the protestors. But when a group of Vietnam veterans sent messages to the timber companies, telling them that they knew the names of their helicopter pilots and that they knew their addresses, ‘the spraying stopped’ (2006, p. 4). As the Unabomber recognized, instrumental violence can produce meaningful change. As Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has noted in another context, ‘Direct action gets the goods, now and always’ (Sainato, 2023). Alan Dershowitz has suggested, ‘The real root cause of terrorism is that it is successful – terrorists have consistently benefited from their terrorist acts’ (2002, p. 2).

In 232 numbered paragraphs, the manifesto argues that we are slaves, and that technology has enslaved us. It claims that the Industrial Revolution accelerated the pace of life, subordinated people to technology, and thereby fomented anomie and apathy. Human beings, asserts the manifesto, have a biological need for a ‘power process.’ To satisfy this need, people must have goals, must exert effort to attain them, and must have a reasonable chance of attaining them. In modern society, almost no effort is required to satisfy biological needs, and people are left psychologically hungry, focused on wealth or status, or immersing themselves in work. Surrogate activities, however, cannot satisfy the need for the power process. The manifesto compares American surveillance to Orwell’s 1984 (Orwell, 1949) and compares our growing reliance on mood-altering drugs to a ‘brave new world’ of soma (Huxley, 1932).

He even envisions a dystopian Matrix-like existence in which people have electrodes planted directly into their brains, allowing society to directly manipulate their thoughts and feelings with electrical impulses, and describes a Terminator -like future, in which humans exist as the slaves of intelligent machines. Aware that many of Industrial Society ’s readers will dismiss his idea as science fiction, Kaczynski scolds his skeptics, reminding them that ‘yesterday’s science fiction is today’s fact’ (Oleson, 2005a, p. 220, internal citations omitted).

Indeed, some of Kaczynski’s outlandish ‘science fiction’ is already coming true: Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink, has recently started recruiting subjects for human trials for brain implants that ‘will make the paralyzed walk, the blind see and eventually turn people into cyborgs’ (Levy & Taylor, 2023).

Kaczynski believes that our single greatest obstacle to freedom is technology. Indeed, in a technological society, Kaczynski dourly concludes that the restriction of freedom (as he defines it) is ‘unavoidable.’ Although people prize both fulfillment of the power process and the comforts of modern technology, our appetite for technology is a more powerful social force than our need for freedom. The ‘human race with technology is just like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine.’ We are addicted to technological society. ‘Therefore, we subtly coerce people to conform and obey, and we use a host of subtle psychological techniques to socialize behaviors that support rather than undermine – the sustainability of technological society’ (Oleson, 2005a, p. 220, internal citations omitted).

Our society fetishizes technology (Harvey, 2003). That is, it understands technology as possessing mysterious, even magical, properties. It understands technology as exogenous to society, molding society from without, relentless and inevitable, rather than emerging within the available confines of social arrangements. It even understands technology as possessing moral qualities – thus the polio vaccine is ‘good’ while ransomware is ‘evil.’ Attributions of this kind are useful in enforcing existing power asymmetries. ‘Technology is agentic. This faith in technology – the belief that it creates our social arrangements and not that social relations create technology – absolves people from the consequences of their decisions’ (Kramer & Oleson, 2022, p. 140). Kaczynski uses the example of depression: ‘Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs’ (1995, ¶ 145).

Industrial Society and Its Future calls for the revolutionary overthrow of technology, through violent means if necessary (¶ 193; also Kaczynski, 2016), but it also embraces wild nature, which it understands as the opposite of technology: ‘[A]n ideology ... must be FOR something as well as AGAINST something. The positive ideal that we propose is Nature. That is, WILD nature’ (¶ 183).

However, as noted during his sentencing, Kaczynski mocked this very approach in his diaries: ‘I believe in nothing ... I don’t even believe in the cult of nature-worshipers or wilderness worshipers’ (quoted in Oleson, 2005a, p. 218). Thus, Corey (2000) might well be correct in thinking that Kaczynski tied his anti-technology philosophy to environmentalism for strategic reasons. Yet we should take Kaczynski’s assertion of nature seriously. After all, if Kaczynski was correct about nature being antithetical to technology (¶ 184), the affirmation of nature is implicit in the rejection of technology. That is simple math. Thus, contemporary concerns about climate change (e.g. McGuire, 2022; Thunberg, 2023; Wallace-Wells, 2019) are embedded within Kaczynski’s logic.

The Manifesto blasphemed everything that knits together the worldview of not only the mainstream, but also that of many reformers and radical critics. Many are able to say that Orwell’s vision threatens. But they think that to become alert to this danger is to solve the problem. They remain caught up in what Jacques Ellul has called ‘the illusion of politics’—the belief that in a democracy we actually shape our future through the political process. Many of the Unabomber’s anti-mythical ideas are unthinkable to us, more so than the use of violence. Given the right rationale, our society is willing to kill not only guilty people, but innocent ones as well, and then call it collateral damage. The Unabomber questioned our faith in politics itself, and challenges concepts of self, freedom and happiness. He is a heretic at the deepest level . (Eccles, in Mello, 1999, p. 41, italics added)

The publication of Industrial Society and Its Future was a triumph for Kaczynski, but it also served as the catalyst of his downfall. After Kaczynski’s brother, David, and his wife, Linda Patrik, recognized familiar turns of phrase in the manifesto that had also appeared in Ted’s angry letters (e.g. ‘cool-headed logicians’), they were confronted with an agonizing choice. Like something out of Greek tragedy, something ‘more like literature than life’ (Kaczynski, 2016, p. 24), David Kaczynski was forced to choose:

We found ourselves in a place where anything we did or didn’t do could result in somebody’s death. Any choice we made could be fatal to someone. The realization that if we did nothing, there was some chance if this person — if Ted was the Unabomber, he might attack someone else again .... If that were to happen, we’d go through the rest of our lives with the knowledge that we could have stopped it. And instead, we had decided to do nothing .... On the other hand, ... there was a chance, maybe even a possibility that—you know, a probability that he would be executed. It was in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. Polls had come [along] significantly but, at that point, lots of people in America thinking the death penalty’s the answer to these kinds of crimes. And I had to ask myself what would it be like to go through the rest of my life with my brother’s blood on my hands (Kaczynski, 2006)?

Ultimately, David Kaczynski alerted the FBI, hoping to spare the lives of future victims by identifying his brother. On 3 April 1996, a swarm of FBI agents arrested Ted Kaczynski and seized his cabin as well as physical evidence (e.g. the typewriter that had produced all known Unabomber correspondence, the hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses from the FBI’s most wanted poster, a hit list of potential victims, and an explosive device ready for mailing) (Graysmith, 2021). After authorities finally persuaded Ted that it was his brother who had turned him in, Kaczynski denounced David as a ‘Judas’ (Kaczynski, 1999) and vowed to never speak with him again. He never did.

Although David Kaczynski’s decision might have saved the lives of those on Kaczynski’s list of targets, the Unabomber continued to kill – long after his arrest and conviction – through indirect means. That is, the 1995 publication of Kaczynski’s manifesto, combining a radical, anti-technology ideology with a call to revolution, mobilized others to violence. In 2011, Anders Breivik detonated a car-bomb in an Oslo government complex, killing eight and injuring hundreds more; before killing 77 more – victims as young as 12—on nearby Utøya Island (Borchgrevink, 2013). The massacre was intended to draw attention to Breivik’s manifesto – it was, in his words, his ‘marketing method’ (undefined). His 1,500- page manifesto, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence (as Berwick, 2011), plagiarized heavily from Industrial Society and Its Future and adapted Kaczynski’s anti-technology rhetoric to advance his own alt-right, misogynist, anti-Muslim ideology. In turn, Breivik’s manifesto inspired other attacks, including but not limited to the 2019 New Zealand mosque attacks (Oleson, 2023). Thus, in the pantheon of revolutionaries who employ terror and violence in their bids to overthrow the existing social order, the Unabomber, paragon of criminal genius, occupies a place of particular prominence.

Confutatis : from the accursed

Serial murder itself is a social construction (Jenkins, 1994). But rather than cast Kaczynski in the die of the serial killer (e.g. Hickey, 1991; Norris, 1988), or even in the mold of the ecoterrorist (Scarce, 2016), he was constructed by almost everyone in the trope of the mad genius (Becker, 1978; Oleson, 2009). The FBI labeled him a ‘twisted genius’ (FBI, 2023); Deputy Attorney General James Comey called the manifesto ‘wacko’ (2006, p. 406); the New York Times ran a long profile on the ‘tortured genius’ (Johnston & Scott, 1996); the editorial staff of Time published a book entitled Mad Genius (Gibbs et al., 1996); and Kaczynski’s face appeared on the covers of both Time and U.S. News and World Report , underneath headlines that read ‘twisted genius’ and ‘Odyssey of a Mad Genius’ (Oleson, 2016). He was denounced as a ‘wild-eyed hermit’ and a ‘pathetic loner’ who lived in a ‘dingy shack’ (e.g. Balsamo & Whitehurst, 2023). Psychologists and the court-appointed psychiatrist diagnosed Kaczynski as mentally ill, his brother identified him as mentally ill (‘illness rather than evil’ [D. Kaczynski, in Mello, 1999, p. 60]), and even his own lawyers excused his crimes as the product of mental illness.

But Kaczynski rejected, vehemently, the allegation that he was ‘mad’ or in any way mentally ill. ‘In his diary, Kaczynski wrote of his fear that his bombing campaign against technology would be dismissed as the work of a “sickie”’ (Mello, 1999, p. 452). In the manifesto, Kaczynski recognized that any opposition to existing social structures would be pathologized:

Our society tends to regard as a ‘sickness’ any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system, and this is plausible because when an individual doesn’t fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a ‘cure’ for a ‘sickness’ and therefore as good. (Kaczynski, 1995, ¶155; c.f.; Cohen, 2016)

Kaczynski was not particularly afraid of death or martyrdom – after all, ‘we all have to die sometime, and it may be better to die fighting for survival, or for a cause, than to live a long but empty and purposeless life’ (Kaczynski, 1995, ¶168) – but he did fear being dismissed as crazy.

And this proved to be a well-founded fear. For, after reviewing the evidence collected from the cabin, Kaczynski’s team of experienced federal defenders concluded that their best chance of saving their client’s life was a mental defense. Mello (1999) speculates that Kaczynski’s lawyers first considered an insanity plea, but – after seeing the lucidity of his writing and the meticulousness of his bombing campaign – they realized that no jury would deem Kaczynski insane. Therefore, they decided to use a claim of mental illness in the penalty phase. Specifically, they sought to bring Kaczynski’s cabin into the courtroom. One AP article explained:

‘You cannot really understand this guy’s life unless you can get in that cabin,’ said Defense Attorney Quin Denvir. ‘The cabin is 10-by-12 feet and 13 feet tall. It had no running water, no electricity, no toilet—not even an outhouse. And the irony was that a quarter-mile away was electricity and water that he could have hooked into.’ Government lawyers oppose the demonstration and want to substitute a scale model of the structure ... but Denvir and co- counsel Judy Clarke indicated they will fight to use the actual building—because if Theodore Kaczynski has a defense, it is somewhere in that shack . (in Mello, 1999, p. 61, italics added)

But Kaczynski wanted no part of a mental defense. He did not even want to talk to a psychologist. As Time magazine explained, ‘Everyone has a point of pride, a trait held paramount in defining oneself. Some might have looks or will; Ted Kaczynski prized his brilliance. So it was in a sort of self defense that he refused to allow his mind to be called into question’ (Edwards, 1998). Some of the psychologists who diagnosed Kaczynski as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia never even met him, basing their assessments upon his refusal to undergo psychological evaluation, upon his unawareness of his disease (Treatment Advocacy Center, 2016), and his ‘delusional’ anti-technology philosophy (Mello, 1999, p. 56). But the anti-technology thesis of Industrial Society and Its Future is not delusional. Indeed, in the words of James Q. Wilson, ‘If it is the work of a madman, then the writings of many political philosophers – Jean Jacques Rousseau, Tom Paine, Karl Marx – are scarcely more sane’ (in Finnegan, 1998, p. 61).

So the paradox, as his case neared trial, could not have been lost on Kaczynski. His own lawyers, talented idealists intent on saving his life, were striving mightily to label him mentally ill. The prosecutors, meanwhile, intent on having him executed, were ready to accept him as the dead-serious dissident and violent anarchist that his writings said he was. (Finnegan, 1998, p. 55)

When Kaczynski did talk with psychologists, it was because his lawyers assured him that these findings were covered by attorney-client privilege and would be used only with his permission. But, as David Luban writes, ‘His lawyers ... double-crossed him. At the last minute, they announced that at the guilt phase they would undertake the mental defense – the only one that might save his life’ (2005, p. 828). From their perspective, Kaczynski’s lawyers surely believed that they were serving their client’s interests – saving his life – and that his opposition to mental defense was a product of his social isolation and ideology. Given their ethical obligations as lawyers, they could not acquiesce to a trial strategy that was tantamount to suicide (c.f. Oleson, 2006b).

So Kaczynski attempted to fire his lawyers and to replace them with another lawyer – J. Tony Serra – who had offered to mount, pro bono, an imperfect necessity defense based on Kaczynski’s ideology – not upon a claim of insanity, not upon mental illness. This would have been a very different defense:

An imperfect necessity defense would have provided Kaczynski with a forum in which to expound the ideas articulated in Industrial Society and Its Future . He had disfigured and killed in order to draw attention to his claims, but a high-profile media trial would provide him with a vastly superior vehicle for communicating his views. Would the media have come? You bet. Kaczynski had made the cover of both U.S. News and World Report and Time , and prompted an in-depth series of articles in the Sacramento Bee and the New York Times . ‘Cold as a lizard and ambitious as Lucifer,’ Kaczynski was precisely the kind of defendant that, if unleashed, could have driven the media absolutely wild: a criminal genius, a mountain man who eluded the largest manhunt in American history for seventeen years until his own brother turned him in, a former Berkeley math professor who, acting as a serial killer, targeted other scientists and academics. And he did it all because he believed that he had to—because he was trying to save the world. The Unabomber trial would have been media catnip. The entire world would have lent an ear as a brilliant bomber explained, with the exacting detail of a mathematical proof, how the scientific developments that were supposed to liberate society had in fact made slaves of us all. While many television viewers would focus only on the celebrity of Kaczynski’s infamy, no more interested in the eccentric former professor’s diatribe than in Industrial Society and Its Future , some people would have attended to his arguments. They would have found his premises uncontroversial, and would have found themselves agreeing with many of his conclusions. (Oleson, 2007b, pp. 59–60)

In the epilogue to Unabomber: A Desire to Kill , Robert Graysmith speculates that this is exactly what Kaczynski intended to do: ‘His strategy, I long suspected, was to take the stand and deliver his antitechnology message to America .... This self-proclaimed political messiah might be in the process of fashioning himself into a political martyr’ (2021). In Manhunt: Unabomber , Paul Bettany’s Kaczynski says:

The outcome of the trial Is nothing. The trial itself is everything. It’s gonna give me the biggest microphone in the world. Before, I had to threaten violence to get one Manifesto published in the Post. Now I’m gonna be piped directly into every living room in the country. And if you put me in a jail cell, I will spend the rest of my life appealing. But if it’s the worst case, the very worst case a person like you can possibly imagine, the death penalty, I promise you, I won’t even blink. (Yaitanes, 2017)

But the trial never materialized. The judge rejected Kaczynski’s request to replace his counsel as ‘untimely.’ Judge Burrell also told Kaczynski that his attorneys – not he – controlled ‘major strategic decisions’ such as putting on mental health testimony (Mello, 1999, p. 89). That night, in response, Kaczynski attempted suicide, asphyxiating himself with the elastic from his underwear. In the eyes of many, this was further proof of the mad genius’ mental illness, but Mello disagrees:

Under the circumstances, suicide was the only rational option open to him. He was utterly alone. He felt betrayed by his lawyers who kept him in the dark until it was too late for him to replace them or to defend himself at trial without a lawyer. The judge was poised to refuse his constitutional right to fire those lawyers and represent himself. For the next few months, he would have to sit in court and listen to his own lawyers build the case that he was mentally ill —and there was absolutely no way he could stop it. Except for suicide. (1999, pp. 89–90)

Boxed into a corner, Kaczynski asked to represent himself at trial. Judge Burrell appointed a forensic psychiatrist, Sally Johnson, to ascertain his competence. And after 22 hours of psychiatric examination, Dr. Johnson determined that Kaczynski was legally competent, although she also entered a provisional diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and paranoid personality disorder (Mello, 1999). In doing so, she, too, interpreted Kaczynski’s politics as a delusional architecture. However, in ‘The Non-Trial of the Century: Representations of the Unabomber,’ Michael Mello challenges this characterization:

If you think Kaczynski is a paranoid schizophrenic, I have a question for you: What are his delusions? The hallmark of paranoid schizophrenia is a delusional architecture: What are Kaczynski’s delusions? That the Industrial Revolution has been a mixed blessing? Hardly a delusion. That technology is chipping away at our freedoms and privacy? Hardly a delusion. That committing murder—and threatening to commit more—was the only way to force the New York Times and Washington Post into publishing, in full and unedited, the 35,000-word Unabomber Manifesto? Hardly a delusion. That the powers that be in our culture would define the Unabomber as a pathetic lunatic? Hardly a delusion. That a simple, self- sufficient life, in one of the most physically beautiful places in America, is preferable to the rat- race of academia? Hardly a delusion. (Mello, 2000, p. 472)

Despite Dr. Johnson’s conclusion that Kaczynski was competent to represent himself, Judge Burrell – the same judge that had ordered the competency assessment (Finnegan, 1998)–- ruled that Kaczynski could not represent himself at trial. For this, too, was untimely. Therefore, confronted with the Hobson’s choice of (1) a mental defense that was anathema to him and (2) pleading guilty to all prosecution charges in exchange for their not seeking the death penalty, Kaczynski opted for the plea deal. Yet it was not a fear of death that motivated this decision; rather, it was a fear of being characterized as crazy. Kaczynski explained:

They put me in such a position that I had only one way left to prevent my attorneys from using false information to represent me to the world as insane: I agreed to plead guilty to the charges in exchange for withdrawal of the prosecution’s request for the death penalty ... I am not afraid of the death penalty, and I agreed to this bargain only to end the trial and thus prevent my attorneys from representing me as insane. (in Mello, 1999, p. 117)

At his sentencing in May 1998, Theodore John Kaczynski was sentenced to life imprisonment. For more than 20 years, he was confined in solitary confinement in ADX Florence, the federal supermax prison once called ‘the last worst place’ (Taylor, 1998). The conditions in Florence are austere:

The conditions in supermax prisons are even more dehumanizing and damaging than those of the warehouse prisons. In supermax facilities, inmates are entombed within solitary cells of about seven by twelve feet (slightly larger than a king-sized bed) bound by seven layers of steel and cement. The spartan furniture (for example, a stool, a writing desk, and a mattress pedestal) is made of poured concrete in order to prevent prisoners from fashioning weapons out of metal parts. Inmates are often confined within their tiny one-man cells for twenty-three hours per day; they only get one hour of exercise (in an even-smaller outdoor cage that is attached to the rear of their cell). This hour is also spent in solitude. The silence and the lack of human contact are dehumanizing. Indeed, the Madrid v. Gomez court concluded that the conditions in supermax facilities ‘may press the outer bounds of what most humans can psychologically tolerate’. (Oleson, 2002, pp. 859–860, fn. 161)

Indeed, even early research indicated that sensory deprivation produces cognitive impairment, visual and auditory hallucinations, and measurable changes in brain function after just 96 hours (Heron, 1957). And ‘within several days of isolation spent in a deprived setting, there is a risk of physical deteriorations in the brain’ (Coppola, 2019, p. 187). After months or years in segregation, many prisoners suffer from lethargy, depression, and despair; they lose the ability to initiate behavior – in extreme cases, they can literally stop behaving, becoming effectively catatonic (Gawande, 2009). Theodore Kaczynski was confined in his ADX cell – entombed (Amnesty International, 2014)— for 23 years . In his non-trial and his confinement, there are curious echoes of the trial of Joan of Arc:

You promised me my life; but you lied [ indignant exclamations ]. You think that life is nothing but not being stone dead. It is not the bread and water I fear: I can live on bread: when have I asked for more? It is no hardship to drink water if the water be clean. Bread has no sorrow for me, and water no affliction. But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers ... without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God. (Shaw, 1930, p. 145)

After more than two decades in federal supermax, and after being transferred to the federal prison medical center in Butner, North Carolina, in December 2021, Theodore John Kaczynski died by suicide on 10 June 2023 (Thrush, 2023).

Lacrimosa : full of tears

Of course, in the end, it was the manifesto that was truly dangerous, not the bombs. Lydia Eccles explains, ‘The Medieval martyrs did not seek execution. They were executed because they refused to recant. It was worth sparing Ted Kaczynski to burn the manifesto at the stake – and there was community interest in doing so’ (in Mello, 1999, p. 128).

The manifesto was not dangerous because it was ‘wacko’ (Comey, 2006, p. 406), or because it would be plagiarized by a ethno-nationalist terrorist (Oleson, 2023), but because it was lucid. Because, as Elon Musk (CEO of Twitter and creator of the advanced technology companies Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and A.AI) recently tweeted, ‘He might not have been wrong’ (Novak, 2023). Indeed, building upon the Center for AI Safety’s recent open letter (which reads, ‘Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war’), the 12 June 2023 cover of Time magazine features the headline: THE END OF HUM A N I TY. Yeah: he might not have been wrong.

That is why there could be no spectacular trial (Graysmith, 2021; Mello, 2000) and why Kaczynski had to be denounced as a ‘sickie.’ By pathologizing Kaczynski instead of martyring him, attention was diverted from Industrial Society and Its Future .

Haag (2019) identifies Kaczynski as the ‘single most underappreciated thinker of our era.’ However, by discounting his manifesto as the ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic and – contradictorily—as simultaneously indistinguishable from the vanilla environmentalism of Bill McKibben (1989), Al Gore (1992), and Greta Thunberg (2023)—all good exemplars of the leftism so roundly rejected in the manifesto – the threat of Kaczynski’s message was attenuated. Who would want to read a 35,000-word numbered proof if, instead, you could just watch the academy award winning film, An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006)?

But the manifesto is not the same as An Inconvenient Truth . It is not the same as 350.org (n.d.), as Earth First! (Davis, 2001), as the Earth Liberation Front (Rosebraugh, 2004), as Extinction Rebellion (2019) or even as James Hansen’s Juliana litigation (2015). Remember, although the manifesto affirmatively asserts wild nature (Kaczynski, 1995, ¶ 183), it is not a piece of environmental writing. It is not ecoterrorism (c.f., Arnold, 1997). Thus, the manifesto is not even the same as the anarcho- primitivism of John Zerzan (1994) or the deep green resistance of Derrick Jensen (2006). Indeed, there is ‘no indication that Kaczynski shared the sense, so prevalent in radical environmental subcultures, that life is worthy of reverence and the earth is sacred’ (Taylor, 1998, p. 15). Fundamentally, Industrial Society and Its Future is an anti- tech declaration of war – a theme developed in full in Kaczynski’s later writing (Kaczynski, 2010, 2016). Although Kaczynski and environmental radicals agree upon many roots of the problem (i.e. the alienating, unsustainable, and destructive nature of modern technology), Kaczynski sees the technology as defining the problem of civilization, while Zerzan and Jensen (and their followers) understand technology as just one part of it. Moreover, these thinkers fundamentally disagree about viable solutions (Fleming, 2022): Jensen muses about blowing up a dam (2006, p. 172), Malm contemplates blowing up a pipeline (2021), but Kaczynski killed people. For revenge (Richardson, 2018). Deliberately, with bombs, over and over, for years.

It echoes the crimes of John Doe in David Fincher’s Se7en : they would have required a kind of superhuman fortitude. ‘Imagine the will it takes to keep a man bound for a full year. To sever his hand and use it to plant fingerprints’ (Fincher, 1995). It is also analogous to the character of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979). Remember, too, that Kurtz, like Kaczynski, was dismissed as ‘totally insane.’ In the denouement of the film, Marlon Brando’s Kurtz muses:

I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We’d left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio. And this old man came running after us, and he was crying. He couldn’t say. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were, in a pile. A pile of little arms. And, I remember, I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget it. And then I realized, like I was shot, like I was shot with a diamond bullet through my forehead. And I thought, My God, the genius of that! The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized, they were stronger than we. Because they could stand it. These were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who have families, who have children, who are filled with love. That they had the strength, the strength to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly.

Kurtz’s lament comes very close to what Kaczynski called in the manifesto when he wrote,”Until the time comes for the final push toward revolution, the task of revolutionaries will be less to win the shallow support of the majority than to build a small core of deeply committed people” (1995, ¶ 189). It is close to what Kaczynski envisioned in his Technological Slavery essay, ‘Hit Where It Hurts’ (2010, pp. 248–253; see also Jensen, 2006, pp. 808–833).

Today, there is a loosely-connected movement—consisting of both ‘acolytes’ and ‘heretics’ (Jacobi, 2016)—that has taken up Kaczynski’s anti-tech ideology (see also Hanrahan, 2018). Surveying the landscape of indominista anti-tech scholars, divergent anti-civilization wildists, and violent eco-terrorists like the Mexican ITS (Individualidades Tendiendo a lo Salvaje: Individuals Tending toward the Wild), John Jacobi, dubbed the ‘Zelig of ecoextremism’ by journalist John Richardson (2018) writes: This new eco-radicalism is not the stale ecological politic of mainstream environmentalism, nor is it like the weak and compromising ‘radical’ ideologies like primitivism or eco-socialism. No, this is anti-civilization politic taken seriously: a full rejection of not just the material basis of civilized society, but the moral and philosophical basis too. Of course, at the moment these new eco-radicals look like lone prophets in the wilderness, or worse, lost lepers there. But this is only because of how fundamentally contrary the new values run to the values of civility— an accomplishment, not a failure. And as climate change, antimicrobial resistance, mass surveillance, species extinctions, etc.—the problems central to the ideology—continue to dominate the politics of th e 21 st century, we can only expect the values to spread further. The only question that remains is which approach will take on. Will it be the traditional revolutionary approach of Kaczynski? The coalition building approach of the wildists? Or will it be the savagery and terror of the eco-extremists?. (2016, p. 32)

Time, it seems, shall tell.

Dies Irae : day of wrath

Kaczynski published Industrial Society and Its Future on 19 September 1995: 28 years ago. When his essay appeared in the Washington Post , the public internet – launched in 1993— was still in its infancy. Only 14% of American adults had internet access; three times as many (42%) had never even heard of the internet (Fox & Rainie, 2014, p. 10). Amazon.com was only a few months old and sold only books. Facebook wouldn’t be created for another 9 years; smartphones were still 12 years away. And although McKibben (1989) and Gore (1992) had sounded the alarm on climate change – the decimation of wild nature – the Kyoto Protocol would not be signed for another two years, the infamous hockey stick graph would not be published for another three (Mann et al., 1998), and the 2105 Paris Agreement, limiting warming to + 2°C over pre-industrial baseline, was 20 years off. Climate activist Greta Thunberg wasn’t even born.

Since then, much has changed, prompting former psychiatrist and Fox News contributor Keith Ablow to ask, ‘Was the Unabomber correct?’:

Kaczynski, while reprehensible for murdering and maiming people, was precisely correct in many of his ideas. Watching the development of Facebook heighten the narcissism of tens of millions of people, turning them into mini-reality TV versions of themselves, I would bet he knows, with even more certainty, that he was onto something. Witnessing average Americans ‘tweeting’ about their daily activities as though they were celebrities, with fans clamoring to know their whereabouts, he must marvel at the ease with which technology taps the ego and drains the soul. (2015)

The technology that Kaczynski despised has thoroughly infiltrated our lives. It comes, not in disguise like a terminator (Cameron, 1984), but welcomed in as a friend, since it is technology that allows so many modern humans to live like gods:

Although our jaded eyes no longer see the miracles in our everyday activities, we live in homes that are heated and cooled with central air, that are wired for electricity and natural gas and cable TV, and that have running hot and cold water and garbage disposals and toilets; we prepare our meals in microwave ovens; we watch DVD (or HD-DVD or Bluray) movies on high-definition televisions. We call our friends on cell phones, and check our email on Blackberries, and use the Internet to make instantaneous purchases from halfway around the world. We take photos on digital cameras and edit home movies on laptop computers. In vast cities with populations in the millions, we drive to work in automobiles that are capable of 100+ mph speeds, and when we arrive at our offices, we use desktop computers that possess five to ten times more computational power than the system that put man on the moon. We pick up food from drive-up windows, pick up our children from public schools, and shop in malls that contain dozens or even hundreds of stores. We get annual flu shots, take Viagra for sexual dysfunction, Prozac for depression, get LASIK for perfect vision, and get liposuction for perfect swimsuit bodies. We work out in gyms, each of us wrapped in the cocoon of an iPod, and grumble about being treated like cattle when we fly coach class between the United States and Europe. (Oleson, 2007b, p. 71)

However, as Kaczynski observed in Industrial Society and Its Future (1995), all of this consumption does not make us happy. It tethers us. It enslaves us. It makes us anxious and miserable (James, 2007). Tyler Durden, it seems, was right: ‘ The things you own wind up owning you ’ (Fincher, 1999). Despite all of the material prosperity, just living in America increases the likelihood of suffering from depression and other psychological disorders (Vega et al., 1998). And it is getting worse: ‘Youth depression rates rose from 2% in the sixties to almost 25% today, according to Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School. Suicide among kids has soared 400% since 1950’ (Shenk, 1999, p. 23). Understandably, people lose themselves in sex, gambling, and drugs. US rates of drug overdose are rising, especially for opioid analgesics; more than 100,000 people in the US died of overdose during a single one-year period (CDC, 2021): this (famously) exceeds the death toll of a 737 crashing and killing everyone on board, every day, for an entire year. Today, more people die in the US from overdose than from car accidents (Bach, 2019). People are tired of ‘the shit job, fucking condo world, watching sitcoms’ (Fincher, 1999). Even our rich are angry and envious:

Lower uppers are professionals who by dint of schooling, hard work and luck are living better than 99 percent of the humans who have ever walked the planet. They’re also people who can’t help but notice how many folks with credentials like theirs are living in Gatsbyesque splendor they’ll never enjoy. This stings. If people no smarter or better than you are making ten or 50 or 100 million dollars in a single year while you’re working yourself ragged to earn a million or two—or, God forbid, $400,000—then something must be wrong. (Miller, 2006)

Something is indeed wrong with this picture. The cost of this ... distraction ... is everything.

Americans comprise five percent of the world population, but they consume a quarter of its resources (Reece, 2004). Comparing the average citizens of the US and India, ‘the American uses fifty times more steel, fifty-six times more energy, one hundred and seventy times more synthetic rubber, two hundred and fifty times more motor fuel, and three hundred times more plastic’ (Jensen, 2006, p. 115). In fact, Edmund O. Wilson has suggested that for everyone in the world to live like modern Americans, it would require the resources of four additional earths (in Feldman, 2002). But William Catton (1982) argues that it would take not four earths, but ten. This demand for resources leads to overreliance on fossil fuels.

Let us use the letter ‘Q’ to stand for the energy derived from burning some 33,000 million tons of coal. In the eighteen and one half centuries after Christ, the total energy consumed averaged less than one half Q per century. But by 1850, the rate had risen to one Q per century. Today, the rate is about ten Q per century. (Toffler, 1970, p. 23)

This consumption of fossil fuels drives anthropogenic climate change:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that the Earth’s surface temperatures will almost certainly exceed the 1.5°C threshold target of the 2015 Paris Agreement during either the late 2020s or early 2030s, increasing between + 1.6°and +2.4°C over baseline levels by 2050. This means that ‘a hotter future ... is now essentially locked in’. (Oleson, in press, internal citations omitted)

The physical consequences of technological expansion and its resulting climate change will be profound. It already is: ‘The era of global warming has ended and “the era of global boiling has arrived”, the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, has declared ... “Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning”’ (Niranjan, 2023). Pope Francis agrees: ‘Our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point’ (Harvey, 2023). Ice melt and sea level rise will further change the face of the earth. Even if temperatures track according to conservative IPCC models – rising ‘only’ between + 1.6° and + 2.4°C by 2050—it will still result to sea level rise of approximately half a meter over pre-industrial levels. At ‘only’ +1.5°C, storms will be more violent, floods more intense, and wildfires more frequent. The New York Times explains:

At 1.5 degrees of warming, ... nearly 1 billion people worldwide could swelter in more frequent life-threatening heat waves. Hundreds of millions more would struggle for water because of severe droughts. Some animal and plant species alive today will be gone. Coral reefs, which sustain fisheries for large swaths of the globe, will suffer more frequent mass die- offs. (Plumer & Fountain, 2021)

Kaczynski’s ideal of wild nature (1995, ¶ 183) is at great risk. Already, many scientists believe that anthropogenic climate change has started a mass extinction – the sixth in the historic record Kolbert (2014)—making it likely that approximately one-in-six species will go extinct (Urban, 2015). A great deal of writing about climate change is bland, bloodless, and banal – Greta Thunberg has condemned the ‘blah blah blah’ of empty government platitudes (Carrington, 2021) for example – but one writer recently described the situation in unequivocal terms:

We have pushed ourselves beyond the point in the human narrative when we can worry only about ourselves. We have fucked ourselves into a massive die-off, killing half the world’s species. California is on fire, Australia is on fire; we are already suffering, with displaced populations and major failures to the electrical grid. Doomsday is here now . We need to act collectively, we need to act fast, if all humans—libertarian or progressive or the hapless masses of the unprepared—are going to have a chance to survive this warming world. (Groff, 2023, italics added)

But humans are unlikely to act collectively. ‘Climate change isn’t just about things getting hotter and wetter ... it’s about things getting meaner and uglier’ (Naomi Klein, in Winship, 2016). Specifically, as temperatures increase, so does interpersonal and intergroup violence (Hsiang et al., 2013; Ranson, 2014): assault, rape, murder, coups, wars. At ‘only’ +1.5°C, there will be an estimated + 5.9% median increase in interpersonal violence and an estimated 21% median increase in intergroup violence (Hsiang et al., 2013). There will almost certainly be climate wars (Dyer, 2010). It is all too easy to envision the geopolitical climate-change conflicts modeled by the U.S. Department of Defense (2015).

At only + 1.5°C, we can expect to experience sea level rise of half a meter over pre-industrial levels and the potential displacement of some 200 million people (Myers, 2005, p. 1), the largest dislocation of humanity that the world has ever witnessed. As a point of comparison, the Syrian refugee crisis – claimed by many to be driven in part by climate change – has involved 5.6 million refugees. Therefore, in a New Yorker piece, Jonathan Franzen describes a not-so-distant future of climate migration. He writes: ‘The immigration pressure in the future will make the recent refugee crisis in Europe look like a Sunday picnic. I fear the outcome will be very ugly’ (2019). Temperature increases above + 2°C

will seriously threaten the stability of global society ... [yet] according to the most hopeful estimates ... , the world is on course to heat up by between 2.4C and 3C. From this perspective it is clear we can do little to avoid the coming climate breakdown”. (McKie, 2022)

Bill McGuire describes it:

As resources and habitable land diminish, nations will turn against one another in an effort to maintain or gain what they feel is their share and their right. As economies degrade, the social fabric begins to fray and mass migration becomes a global phenomenon, so the election of populist leaders promising the Earth is likely to become increasingly commonplace. (2022: 120/177)

As the risk of economic collapse becomes increasingly dangerous (Wallace-Wells, 2019) and as nations descend into lifeboat ethics (Hardin, 1974), states will flex the muscle of their police and security forces to reinforce and reproduce existing power arrangements. They will use violence to suppress domestic social movements and to manage ‘those on the losing end of economic and political arrangements’ (Vitale, 2017, p. 34). Mass surveillance technology will facilitate this (Cohen, 2010); mass incarceration will incapacitate any who constitute a recognized threat to the status quo (Hinton, 2016). A few lawyers might squawk about civil liberties and the ‘rule of law’ (c.f., Oleson, 2007a; Simon, 2014), but it is simple enough to create a ‘state of exception’ (Agamben, 2004). We have done it before (Hafetz, 2009); we have done it often (Powell, 2016).

But, and this is remarkable, though the world burns, we will not renounce technology. On the contrary, we shall cling to it all the more tightly. We shall do so because, despite the allure of beautiful rhetoric about it being ‘better to die on our feet than to live on our knees’ (Roosevelt, 1941), we value the security of technology more than we value freedom. We will do so because ‘technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom’ (Kaczynski, 1995, ¶ 126).

Lux Aeterna : eternal light

What, then, if the conventional account is wrong? What if Theodore John Kaczynski was not a ‘mad genius’ (e.g. Gibbs et al., 1996; Johnston & Scott, 1996) was not a ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ (e.g. Kaczynski, 2016), and was not mentally ill? What then?

After reviewing the evidence, Michael Mello (1999, 2000) concluded that Kaczynski was lucid and sane. What if Kaczynski’s intelligence, a four-in-a-million IQ of 167 (Oleson, 2016), simply allowed him to appreciate the fundamental incompatibility of technology and freedom in a way that most people could not (c.f., Towers, 1990)? To perceive a pattern? What if like the unnamed narrator in Barbusse’s novel, Hell , Kaczynski simply saw ‘too deep and too much’ (Barbusse, 1932, p. 72)? Writing about the criminal genius, Rhodes wrote:

The ordinary man comes to terms with society. The ... genius will not. Those who will not are, when all is said and done, actual or potential criminals. It is the aim of the genius, although it may not be more than subconscious, to overthrow society and rebuild it upon lines that would bring it into harmony with him . (p. 59, emphasis in original)

What, then, if Industrial Society and Its Future (Kaczynski, 1995) is not some ‘wacko’ screed (Comey, 2006), but a work of penetrating insight? What if its analysis, simultaneously rational and unintelligible, is fundamentally correct? What if it is was dismissed, both as unoriginal (Chase, 2003) and as ‘demented’ (Fromm, 1998, p. 417; Gavin, 2023), only because it was so disruptive to existing arrangements, so fundamentally heretical (Eccles, in Mello, 1999, p. 41), that it really did seem like madness to most people? After all, to employ violence – to kill people – in order to destroy the technology that has allowed so many to live so well: well, that would seem crazy to most people:

Because only tormented persons want truth. Man is an animal like other animals, wants food and success and women, not truth. Only if the mind Tortured by some interior tension has despaired of happiness: then it hates its life-cage and seeks further, And finds, if it is powerful enough. But instantly the private agony that made the search Muddles the finding (Jeffers, 2008, p. 613).

In the allegory of the cave, when the philosopher returns to tell other prisoners that they are chained, seeing only shadows cast upon the wall, Plato asks, ‘Would he not provoke laughter, ... and if it were possible to lay hands on and to kill the man who tried to release them and lead them up, would they not kill him’ (1961, p. 749)? This sounds exactly like what happened to Theodore Kaczynski: a reception of derision and persecution.

So, then, what if Kaczynski was not crazy but correct? What if Elon Musk was right when he said of Kaczynski, ‘He might not be wrong’ (in Novak, 2023). And what if it is the rest of us who are crazy (for living in the manner that we do)? Given that the alarms have been sounding on climate change for decades (Rich, 2018) and given that the world is sleepwalking over a cliff, increasing – not cutting – its output of CO 2 (IEA, 2023a), we might be the ones who are acting irrationally. In Manhunt Unabomber , a fictional Kaczynski says, ‘The irony is they’re gonna show this cabin as evidence that I’m crazy. But if everyone was content to live simply like this’ we’d have no more war, no poverty, no pollution’ (Yaitanes, 2017).

Henry David Thoreau once wrote:

Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.... The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. (Thoreau, 1970, p. 221)

What if, at Berkeley, Kaczynski had simply awakened, realizing that we have been sold a dystopia? What then? One option to him, of course, was suicide. As Camus famously observed, ‘There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide’ (1955, p. 3). Suicide remained a rational option for Kaczynski. He attempted suicide when his lawyers colluded with the trial judge, and he reportedly committed suicide in 2023. But the same despair that gives rise to suicide can also be liberating. Kaczynski explains:

Because I found modern life utterly unacceptable, I grew increasingly hopeless until, at the age of 24, I arrived at a kind of crisis: I felt so miserable that I didn’t care whether I lived or died. But when I reached that point a sudden change took place: I realised that if I didn’t care whether I lived or died, then I didn’t need to fear the consequences of anything I might do. Therefore, I could do anything I wanted. (in Kingsnorth, 2017, p. 123)

The idea echoes Tyler Durden: ‘It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything’ (Fincher, 1999). It echoes Hassan-i-Sabbah: ‘Nothing is true: Everything is permitted’ (Burroughs, 1964, p. 149). And thus, perhaps, instead of suicide, instead of despair, Kaczynski said no . Perhaps he rebelled (Camus, 1956), choosing not death but resistance and action. There is something principled in rebellion. Although DeValve (2017) unequivocally rejects violence as a legitimate means, he identifies rebellion as a dynamic, powerful social force: an act of love (p. 91), a sacrament (p. 98). Others, too, have urged action:

We have spent too much time in thinking, supposing that if we weigh in advance the possibilities of any action, it will happen automatically. We have learnt, rather too late, that action comes not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility. (Bonhoeffer, 1953, p. 298)

Under this formulation, Kaczynski could be ‘a hero, a man who awoke from the dreaming masses and was willing to act upon what he saw’ (Oleson, 2005a, p. 222). He was willing to act decisively, even if that meant killing innocent people. Of course, as far as Kaczynski was concerned, his victims were not innocent: advocates and architects of technology, they were the creators of society’s fundamental problem – akin to the ‘little Eichmanns’ (Churchill, 2001) murdered in the 9–11 attacks – and therefore constituted legitimate targets. Moreover, the longer Kaczynski waited to initiate the anti-tech revolution, the worse the suffering would be:

If the breakdown [of the industrial system] is sudden, many people will die, since the world’s population has become so overblown that it cannot even feed itself any longer without advanced technology. Even if the breakdown is gradual enough so that reduction of the population can occur more through lowering of the birthrate than through elevation of the death rate, the process of deindustrialization probably will be very chaotic and involve much suffering. It is naïve to think it likely that technology can be phased out in a smoothly managed, orderly way, especially since the technophiles will fight stubbornly at every step. The bigger the system grows, the more disastrous the consequences of its breakdown will be; so it may be that revolutionaries, by hastening the onset of the breakdown, will be reducing the extent of the disaster. (Kaczynski, 1995, ¶ 167)

This logic provides the foundation for the necessity defense that Kaczynski had hoped to introduce with attorney J. Tony Serra: the use of instrumental violence, ‘ultimately to save humanity from self-destruction’ (Oleson, 2007b, p. 58, fn. 220). But the world never heard this argument, since, instead, Kaczynski was identified as a schizophrenic, denied a trial, and – in a modern iteration of civil death (Chin, 2011) – sentenced to eight life terms. Reflecting on his non-trial, Kaczynski demonstrates both insight and empathy. He does not sound particularly paranoid; nor does he rave. Instead, he writes:

Perhaps I ought to hate my attorneys for what they have done to me, but I do not. Their motives were in no way malicious. They are essentially conventional people who are blind to some of the implications of this case, and they acted as they did because they subscribe to certain professional principles that they believe left them no alternative. These principles may seem rigid and even ruthless to a non-lawyer, but there is no doubt that my attorneys believe in them sincerely. Moreover, on a personal level my attorneys have treated me with great generosity and have performed many kindnesses for me. (But these can never compensate for the harm they have done me through their handling of my case.) (in Mello, 1999, p. 140)

Theodore John Kaczynski was not mad. He was merely furious.

Recordare : remember

The Unabomber case has loomed in the background of my entire academic career. Industrial Society and Its Future was published in September of 1995, just as I was commencing my doctoral research on IQ and crime. Although I never interviewed or corresponded with Kaczynski, his case figured prominently in my thinking on the topic. And although my interest in jurisprudential ethics (e.g. Oleson, 2006b) was not sparked by Kaczynski’s ‘non-trial of the century’ (Mello, 1999), there are obvious connections between that subject and the way that Kaczynski’s defenders and the presiding judge managed the legal proceedings. Similarly, my interest in the linkages between genius and insanity was not about the Unabomber, but, in a sense, it was. Kaczynski is frequently named in my academic work, but even when he is not, he is often present. It is a little like Prince Andrei, thinking, in War and Peace : ‘Yes, that man is somehow closely and painfully connected with me ... What is the connection of that man with my childhood and my life?’ (Tolstoy, 2010, p. 874).

These intellectual connections to Kaczynski’s case became ontological ones when I spent one dark winter reading IPCC reports on climate change, the climate work of Lovelock (2006) and of Hansen and his colleagues (2007), and the green anarchism of Jensen (2006). For me, Jensen’s virulent Endgame was like the red pill in The Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999), cracking open a vista that I sometimes wish I had never seen. ‘We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling’ (Kingsnorth, 2017, p. 283). Lovecraft expressed it beautifully in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (1963, p. 124)

In that dark winter, the dawning realization that anthropogenic climate change will almost certainly drown cities and nations, displace millions of people, and precipitate intergroup conflicts and war left me despairing, depressed, and despondent. We will not fix this with long-life lightbulbs (Dyer, 2010), for every international flight we take, every shiny new cell phone we buy (Chan, Seldon, & Chan et al., 2020), every steak we consume – these will indirectly kill someone (c.f., Matheson, 1970), possibly someone who has not yet been born. We know this vaguely, dimly, but the anonymity of our actions allows us to sustain a willful ignorance. Moreover, our arrangements of technological capitalism make this kind of consumption normative: to reject them is deviant, and requires herculean, deliberate effort. Similarly, the realization that legislators and industry leaders have known about this problem for decades and have done nothing (Rich, 2018) left me outraged. As I re-read Industrial Society and Its Future (Kaczynski, 1995), I was struck by the synthetic prescience of Kaczynski’s argument. He was right about so much. But that is the crux of the dilemma: if you believe in the near-unanimity of the scientific evidence, and if you do not ‘believe that our culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living’ (Jensen, 2006, p. 3), then what are you doing to change things?

Theodore Kaczynski died fighting for a cause, which he believed to be better than living ‘a long but empty and purposeless life’ (Kaczynski, 1995, ¶168). In reality, Kaczynski was neither the ‘diabolical’ (Rick Smith, in Gavin, 2023) and ‘tortured’ (Johnston & Scott, 1996) ‘mad genius’ (Gibbs et al., 1996) that the media needed him to be, nor the anti-tech messiah that he probably aspired to be (Balsamo & Whitehurst, 2023). Motivated not by altruism, but by revenge (Balsamo & Whitehurst, 2023), Kaczynski was responsible for 16 bombings, ultimately killing three people and injuring another 23. His victims suffered: the description of Thomas Mosser’s death was horrific . This must neither be forgotten nor trivialized. But the casualties associated with technology (and with the climate change it has wrought) are infinitely greater. Even if we do not call it poisoning when we bear the costs (human and financial) from generations of deliberate lead contamination (Nevin, 2000). Even if we do not call it murder when corporations allow defective products to go to market when the cost of a recall exceeds the cost of litigation (e.g. Cullen et al., 2014). Yet violence wears a thousand faces. It is collective as well as interpersonal; it can be insidious, structural (Galtung, 1969), cultural (Galtung, 2016), and slow (Nixon, 2011).

I teach the trolley car problem originally introduced by Philippa Foot (1967) and subsequently developed by Judith Jarvis Thomson (1985). In this context, to explore the utilitarianism of Beccaria (1963) and Bentham (1879), I ask my undergraduate students whether it is justice to redirect a racing train from a track that will kill five people onto a side-track that will kill one (most say yes); then I ask them about whether or not to push the fat man in front of a train (most say no) (Edmonds, 2014). In these exercises, I pit ruthless utilitarian arithmetic (1 < 5) against human squeamishness and deontological principle. These, however, are not idle games. These are real questions, questions of life and death, as I think about whether murder – the ugliest of normal crimes – can be justified by necessity.

Murder (and other, lesser forms of illegitimate violence) frequently offend our intuitions about justice – indeed, the core aims and scope of this journal, Contemporary Justice Review , include, inter alia: ‘peacemaking criminology ... peaceful methods of conflict resolution ... utopian visions of a just society ... and non-violent, needs-meeting solutions to needs-denying, power-based social arrangements’ ( Contemporary Justice Review , n.d.). But even those who are committed unequivocally to peacemaking (e.g. DeValve, 2014; Pepinksy, 2006; Pepinsky & Quinney, 1991; Quinney & Wildeman, 1991) must reckon with the questions of whether (and when, and how) to employ violence – in any form – in the struggle against injustice. After all, even a nonviolent occupation will disrupt traffic, costing time (and therefore money, and – in the case of a delayed ambulance and its less- obvious analogues – human suffering and death).

If one billion people will drown in climate-change-related disasters in the next century, and if Kaczynski’s actions had, let’s say, even a 1% chance of reducing that number by just 1% (i.e. by 10,000,000), would it be justified for him to kill three people? The utilitarian economist says yes : 1% of 10,000,000 (which is, in turn, 1% of 1 billion) is 100,000. Kill three to save 100,000? Given those numbers, under an act utilitarian framework, Kaczynski’s crimes can be justified. ‘Some people say something stronger than that it is morally permissible for you to turn the trolley: They say that morally speaking, you must turn it – that morality requires you to do so’ (Thomson, 1985, p. 1395, italics in original). And given the enormous scale of the potential casualties associated with our reliance upon technology and climate change, even a very remote chance to effect a very modest reduction in suffering might pass utilitarian scrutiny. Violence might be ugly, but ‘direct action gets the goods’ (Sainato, 2023). And at least under some models, violence can even be just (c.f., Kant, 1887).

Ultimately, if Kaczynski’s rejection of technology was not the delusional architecture of paranoid schizophrenia (Mello, 1999), but, rather, a lucid formulation of political philosophy (Finnegan, 1998), then it might be prudent to consider – seriously—Kaczynski’s assertion that technology imposes grave costs on society as well as conferring advantages. Obviously, society will not renounce the technologies upon which it depends (e.g. Catton, 1982; Toffler, 1970). In fact, amid climate change (McGuire, 2022; McKibben, 1989; Thunberg, 2023; Vince, 2022), on the back of the hottest September in human history (Hausfather, 2023), the oil and gas industry remains unapologetic about its pursuit of prosperity: ‘Our mission is not to please them [anti-oil-and-gas activists]. Our mission is to deliver to the society the energy we need today and tomorrow’ (Pouyanne, in Boyle, 2023). Another puts the matter more bluntly: ‘I’m reminded of an old saying: “If you want to keep everyone happy, sell ice cream.” We are not in the business of ice cream ’ (Taufik, in Boyle, 2023, italics added).

Under this kind of business as usual, things are going to get hotter; wild weather will wreak global havoc in ‘natural’ disasters; many species will go extinct, stripping the world of biodiversity (Urban, 2015). And as nature suffers, so too will the human world. As the world boils (Niranjan, 2023), things will get meaner and uglier (Winship, 2016). As seas, metaphoric and real, rise, many people will drown – the marginal, the poor, the unlucky – while others will stand by and allow it to happen (Hardin, 1974; Levi, 1989; Rosenthal, 1964; c.f.; Chokshi, 2017). The rich will consume the future. Temperatures will rise, and domestic crime rates will increase (Ranson, 2014); intergroup conflicts – climate wars – will spread and intensify at an even faster rate (Dyer, 2010; Hsiang et al., 2013). And although it has been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (Fisher, 2009, p. 1), capitalism, itself, could collapse (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Schweickart, 2011; Streek, 2016). When these terrible things begin to happen, corporations and nation states alike, acting to preserve existing power arrangements, will turn to technology for their salvation. To survive today, they will extract gas and oil and rare earth – tomorrow be damned. They will build great walls, both to stem rising seas and to repel desperate migrants, the barbarians at their gates. Behind veils of state secrets (Fisher, 2006) they will declare legal states of exception (Agamben, 2004). They will exercise force. And they will surrender decision making to superior, post-human AI (Bostrom, 2014; Kurzweil, 2005), even though computers, like corporations (Bakan, 2004), are psychopathic and lack human empathy.

Computers often solve real-world problems better than humans: when Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, it was a watershed moment; but the 2017 defeat of Stockfish 8 (the world’s top-ranked chess program) by Google’s AlphaZero (after AlphaZero taught itself chess in just four hours ) hints that the ‘singularity’—the moment in which technology begins to advance itself at a rate incomprehensible to humans—is not so far away. Accordingly, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking both identified AI as one of humanity’s great existential threats. (Oleson, 2021)

As all of this happens, the feelings of despair and resentment experienced by people deprived of the power process (Kaczynski, 1995) will intensify, punctuated by occasional pockets of active resistance (e.g. Taylor, 1998), at least until feelings of helplessness and hopelessness are eclipsed by something worse: an authentic struggle for survival, or real enslavement, or the horrors of actual war. ‘Big darkness soon come,’ as Hunter S. Thompson (2003) warned in one of his final essays. More and more, our world might resemble the hells of Christianity (Alighieri, 2009 and Buddhism (Gardiner, 2012). Already, recently declared the Secretary-General of the United Nations, ‘humanity has opened the gates to hell’ (UN News, 2023).

Who knows if we can avoid this dystopia? ‘Long is the way and hard, that out of hell leads up to light’ (Milton, 2003, bk. 2, ln. 432–433). Some insist that it is still possible to hold climate change to a ceiling of + 1.5°C, although even they acknowledge that the window to do so is closing rapidly (IEA, 2023b); others, arguing that ‘optimism is cowardice’ (Spengler, 1932, p. 104) and believing that clutching at false hope is harmful, argue that we must prepare, now, for the world beyond + 1.5°C (e.g. Franzen, 2019). We will almost certainly cross + 1.5°C (Plumer & Fountain, 2021) and it is very possible that we were never going to limit warming to + 1.5°C (Cointe & Guillemot, 2023). So, instead of sacrificing everything to deliver the political target of <+1.5°C, it might be prudent to adopt a harm reduction framework (e.g. Marlatt, 1996) in managing our dependence upon fossil fuels and our addiction to technology. Which policies will allow us to address climate change with the smallest number of human deaths (and the least damage to the non- human world)?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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