#244 / Was Kaczynski Right?

 

 

Who Was Ted Kaczynski?
Ted Kaczynski (pictured above) was a serial bomber who killed three people and injured 23 more between 1978 and 1995, earning him the notorious “Unabomber” nickname. A mathematics prodigy who attended Harvard University, Kaczynski taught at the University of California at Berkeley before retreating to a survivalist lifestyle in the Montana woods. Kaczynski mailed a series of bombs to universities and airlines and, in 1995, wrote a 35,000-word manifesto on what he believed were problems of modern society. FBI agents arrested Kaczynski in 1996, and two years later, he was sentenced to life in prison. Kaczynski died by apparent suicide at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina, in June 2023.

According to Adam Kirsch, who is a features editor at The Wall Street Journal, Ted Kaczynski's ideas "aren't so marginal now." Kirsch suggests, in the June 17-18, 2023, edition of the newspaper, that both the "right" and the "left" are now finding some truth in Kaczynski's manifesto, "Industrial Society And Its Future."

 

If you'd like to see what what Kirsch has to say, as he makes his argument that Kaczynski's ideas aren't really that marginal, then click right here for a link to Kirsch's article. If you'd like to tackle Kaczynski's magnum opus yourself, just click this link. I, personally, have a hard time not agreeing with Kaczynski that modern technology is "making the planet unlivable." That was one of Kaczynski's key contentions. Seems like he might well have been "right" about that.

 

Blowing up buildings and killing people, however, does not seem "right" to me. That is not how I think we can best confront the problems that Kaczynski identified. If Kaczynski was "right" about some things - if he did have some accurate insights into our problems - the conclusions he drew from his analysis were way wrong. 

 

Check out the picture below, and compare it to the one at the top of this blog posting: 

 

Those people kind of look like Kaczynski, don't you think? They have a different message, though, and I am going with The Youngbloods, not Kaczynski!

 

Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

If we could just do that - if we could even make some progress on doing that - we would be on the way to solving all those problems that Kaczynski was talking about!

 

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Image Credits:

(1) - https://www.etonline.com/theodore-ted-kaczynski-better-known-as-the-unabomber-dead-at-81-206186

(2) - https://www.wolfgangs.com/posters/the-youngbloods/poster/ZZZ006690.html