Interesting, and yet the point is made in Chase's work that Kaczynski's upbringing may have been 'dysfunctional'. But just how much so?
I came across a startling passage reading part 3 of Chase's Atlantic piece:
Lois Skillen, Kaczynski's high school counselor, is among those who believe that the Murray experiment could have been a turning point in Kaczynski's life. Ralph Meister, one of Turk Kaczynski's oldest friends and a retired psychologist who has known Ted Kaczynski since he was a small boy, also raises this possibility. So does one of Murray's own research associates. The TAT results certainly suggest that at the outset of the experiment Kaczynski was mentally healthy, but by the experiment's end, judging from Sally Johnson's comments, he was showing the first signs of emotional distress. As Kaczynski's college life continued, outwardly he seemed to be adjusting to Harvard. But inwardly he increasingly seethed. According to Sally Johnson, he began worrying about his health. He began having terrible nightmares. He started having fantasies about taking revenge against a society that he increasingly viewed as an evil force obsessed with imposing conformism through psychological controls.
These thoughts upset Kaczynski all the more because they exposed his ineffectuality. Johnson reported that he would become horribly angry with himself because he could not express this fury openly. "I never attempted to put any such fantasies into effect," she quoted from his writings, "because I was too strongly conditioned ... against any defiance of authority.... I could not have committed a crime of revenge even a relatively minor crime because ... my fear of being caught and punished was all out of proportion to the actual danger of being caught."
This raises the fascinating possibility that Kaczynski could have seen his decision to launch attacks on individuals as a kind of
development in his personality, in other words, a demonstration of his overcoming this previous personality deficiency he associated with excessive conformity. I know WAY too little about the details of his case to make strong claims about it, but his retreat into solitude can at least preliminarily be read as a kind of resolution to the tension inherent in the realization that to live a morally meaningful life, one must have the courage to confront unjust authority. Because if one learns that one lacks the resources to confront authority, withdrawal from the milieu in which this conflict will arise again and again makes sense. It's a variant of the argument concerning whether personal spiritual growth that entails detachment and withdrawal from worldly affairs is really an abdication of responsibility or not. It puts that episode with the logging road in a new light. Even in retreat, he sees he cannot avoid the conflict. If it really was that incident which precipitated his bombings, we'd seem to have reason to believe this theme remained an important one for him.
[/pop psychologizing]
I'm confident a lot of people have had feelings very similar to those expressed by Kaczynski in the bolded passage. I know I damn sure have. And I'd even hazard that many could get on board with the idea that overcoming something like that is a positive personality development. Yet the actions for which Kaczynski is most well known don't really amount to a true overcoming of it, do they? Or do they? Ruinously misdirected, for sure.
I'm trying to get to the justifications people offer themselves for not taking more drastic action in the face of what they perceive to be clear and powerful injustices. I've long suspected that the aversion to drastic action (by which I don't necessarily mean violence, but which can certainly include it) results more from a conditioned conformity to norms of obedience to authority than it does from a belief that those drastic actions are unjustifiable themselves.
"Drastic actions", of course, can be thoughtful and proportional. Putting one's own life at risk to block oil extraction in the Niger Delta, for instance, would be an example of thoughtful and proportionate drastic action, IMO, even though it might well result in personal injury or a long period of detention in bad conditions [as it has and still does]. So too would damaging the equipment used for oil extraction if it could be determined that doing so would significantly slow down or otherwise hamper the extraction effort. Kidnapping oil company employees is pretty drastic too, though you'll get more arguments about the 'thoughtful and proportional' descriptors.
