Ted Kaczynski
Name: | Ted Kaczynski |
Date of Birth: | 1942 |
Occupation: | Professor of mathematics (formerly), prisoner |
Ethnicity: | Polish American |
IQ: | 136 (+?) |
Theodore John Kaczynski (* 22. Mai 1942; † 10. Juni 2023), also known as the Unabomber, was a U.S. environmentalist activist, wizard, prisoncel, and former mathematics professor. He was the author of Industrial Society and its Future, a neo-luddite manifesto that warns about the dangers of the centralization of power in the hands of a looming technocracy.
As a child, he was considered intellectually gifted, with him advancing several classes throughout elementary and high school, an advancement which Kaczynski, like many gifted children, later asserted had a negative effect on his social development. It was claimed by his father's best friend (a child psychologist) that Kaczynski scored an IQ of '160-170' on a version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test when he was six years old.[1][2] Later in his life, as an adult awaiting trial, his IQ was measured at 136 on the WAIS-R according to his psych report.[3]
After entering the university at the age of 16 and quickly rising to a tenure-track position as a mathematics lecturer,[4] he abruptly abandoned his prestigious academic career at the age of age 27 to pursue a primitive lifestyle by living in a log cabin in rural Montana.[5] During this period in his life, he experienced social isolation and increasingly antagonistic relationships with his neighbours and his loathing of society increased, feeding his ideas of violent revenge against technologists that had first emerged during his university days.[6] Between 1978 and 1995, he committed a mail-bomb campaign against people he believed responsible for destroying the environment, and ultimately society through advancing technology, injuring 23 people and killing three.
Though it has been commonly asserted that he never had a girlfriend prior to being jailed,[7] one of his aunts claimed in an interview with the Washington Post in 1996 that he'd had a girlfriend in high school for a short period.[8] Regardless of the validity of this claim, during his trial, criminal investigators theorized that his issues with social interaction and lifelong struggles with obtaining romantic relationships were factors that contributed to his rejection of society and his subsequent terroristic activities.[9] After entering prison, he received romantic letters from female admirers,[10] which is an example of hybristophilia.
He was found dead in his prison cell on the 10th of June 2023.[11]
Inceldom[edit | edit source]
Kaczynski was an incel. He initially appears to have attributed his social isolation and difficulties with women to the deleterious effect advancing several grades in high school had on his social skills, a common complaint among early intellectual overachievers. Around the time most people hit puberty, he claimed he sensed an "increasing amount of I had to face from other kids". He further stated: "by the time I left high school, I was definitely regarded as a freak by a major portion of the student body." According to the psychiatrist who evaluated him before his trial, he was fixated on a passing comment made by a female family friend when he was a teenager, stating he was "quite attractive". Later, he asked a woman how physically attractive she found him, and she replied by saying he was "run of the mill". The psychiatrist concluded that he thereafter didn't wonder why he was unattractive to women.[3]
Later in his life, the report noted that Kaczynski recounted feeling intense anger when he was lodging in a rental home for college students. He could frequently hear other students having sex through the walls, even attempting to get the other students evicted for this, hinting at substantial sexual envy on Kaczynski's behalf.[3]
There are several anecdotal reports of Kaczynski's awkward/failed attempts at picking up women.
In 1978, Kaczynski courted a female supervisor at the factory where he worked, though after having been rejected, he wrote "crude limericks" about her, which got him fired. Curiously, Kaczynski withdrew from society and committed the first bombing following this incident in the same year.[12]
In 1996, five months before he was captured, Kaczynski wrote to a girl known as Tess. He simped her, saying he's been a "devout practitioner of celibacy", but was ready to "relinquish this mode of self-denial" with her. "I'm through with depriving myself, […] I don't care if it is in the land of the Mormons, who frown on sex—except for procreation, of course." he wrote on Dec. 10, 1995. "You are a very precious person. I never want to lose you or blemish our friendship in any way." However, before ever meeting Tess, he was busted in 1996 at his isolated Montana cabin. In prison, he kept writing to Tess, denying he was the Unabomber. "Don't lose your faith in me. You are all I have to keep my spirits up," he wrote her.[12]
Transsexualism[edit | edit source]
According to Kaczynski's psychiatric examination during his federal trial in January 1998 in Sacramento, Kaczynski had reported suffering during several weeks from autogynephilic fetishes and intense sexual frustration, during the start of his fifth year of study at the University of Michigan. It appears these sexual fetishes may have contributed to a fleeting desire he had to become a woman, with Kaczynski going so far as to book an appointment with a psychiatrist to be approved to undergo a sex-change operation.[13][3]
During the 1998 examination, Kaczynski said he remembered "setting up an appointment at the University of Michigan's health center after weeks of fantasizing about becoming a female. However, by the time of his consultation, he lost his nerve. During the consultation, he lied to the psychiatrist, instead stating the reason for the consult was that he was anxious about the possibility of being drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. Leaving the building in shame, Kaczynski said, he developed a violent hatred for the psychiatrist in question. 'Just then there came a major turning point in my life,' Kaczynski said. He said he felt "disgusted as to what my constant sexual cravings had driven me to do", a sense of self-hatred he transferred onto the psychiatrist. 'Like a Phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope. I thought I wanted to kill that psychiatrist because the future looked utterly empty to me.' 'What was entirely new,' Kaczynski concluded, 'was the fact that I really felt I could kill someone.' "[13]
Quotes[edit | edit source]
[…] control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consist of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone's physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes "treatment" to cure his "problem." Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or to make them "sublimate" their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they most certainly will not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.[14]
See also[edit | edit source]
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/04/07/the-profile-of-a-loner/82b4e96d-4fc1-4b69-82c8-9d95293a2be3/
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20170817162052/http://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-ted_add009t20080226125454-photo.html
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 https://paulcooijmans.com/psychology/unabombreport1.html
- ↑ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard-and-the-making-of-the-unabomber/378239/
- ↑ https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-unabombers-cabin-washington-dc
- ↑ https://www.thenation.com/article/society/ted-kaczynski-unabomber-technology/
- ↑ https://news.yahoo.com/falling-in-love-with-the-unabomber-210740275.html?
- ↑ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/06/16/a-stranger-in-the-family-picture/faa11dd5-6d68-40b1-81cb-60308a541628/
- ↑ https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1996-04-12-9604120309-story.html
- ↑ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3418476/The-love-story-Unabomber-Ted-Kacynzski-teacher-Joy-Richards.html
- ↑ https://abcnews.go.com/US/unabomber-ted-kaczynski-found-dead-jail-cell/story?id=99984583
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 https://radaronline.com/exclusives/2017/08/ted-kaczynski-writes-love-letters-sex-celibate/
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 UNABOMBER'S PSYCHIATRIC PROFILE REVEALS GENDER-IDENTITY STRUGGLE
- ↑ Theodore John Kaczynski. The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future