He refers to himself as “we.” He has a leaden sense of humor. He fancies himself an armchair psychologist and basement revolutionary. He wants to ruin industrial civilization, and that justifies sending lethal bombs through the mail.
The 35,000-word manifesto by the serial killer known as the Unabomber paints a sprawling word-picture of the beliefs and motivations that have driven him to kill and maim for 17 years and provides the clues that have led experts to speculate about his psychological makeup.
Federal investigators hope that the manuscript, a copy of which was obtained by the Tribune, will provide them with new clues to the Unabomber’s background or identity.
The FBI has sent copies of the document to several dozen professors, including faculty members at Northwestern University-where the Unabomber’s first two bombs exploded in the late 1970s-and many other universities around the country that the agency believes he may have attended, including the University of Utah and the University of California at Berkeley.
Authorities hope some telltale phrase or concept in the document will jog a professor’s memory and bring to mind a student from that era who may be the Unabomber. Others who have seen the manifesto are experts in ferreting out psychological traits from writing samples; the agency hopes that their insights will form a portrait that will help investigators track down the serial bomber.
The manuscript is part college term paper, part political testament and part barstool philosophizing. It’s a jumble of political science, history, anthropology and psychology but is sufficiently skillful to convince some experts that the author must have had graduate-school training.
Others dismiss him as a dabbler who has simply cobbled together the trendy-Left, anti-establishment views of the late 1960s and 1970s.
In his conviction that technology is robbing human beings of their freedom and dignity, the Unabomber undoubtedly would find many sympathetic readers. But his radical solution is to foment revolution, destroy technology and take humankind back to a time when peasants scratched out a living on the land.
Several passages in the manifesto have led FBI investigators to believe that the Unabomber’s “academic origins” were in the Chicago area, specifically Northwestern University, in the late 1970s.
But for some who have read it, the detached, impersonal tone of the manuscript seems to betray little about the author.
“There is no anger. It is clear, plodding and straightforward. Personality never sticks through,” said David Lindberg, president of the History of Science Society and a history professor at the University of Wisconsin.
“Industrial Society and Its Future,” the title of the Unabomber’s manifesto, leaves a reader in no doubt, right from the start, where he stands.
“The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,” he begins. “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.”
To feel alive and fulfilled, human beings need to take part in something the Unabomber calls “the power process,” a sequence of setting goals, striving to achieve them and then feeling empowered by being successful. The only goals that really matter, in the Unabomber’s view, are matters of life and death: finding or growing one’s own food, securing shelter and defending oneself against enemies.
In modern society, getting the bare necessities of life is too easy for most people, so they set up artificial goals for themselves and indulge in pointless “surrogate” activities.
“For instance,” the Unabomber writes, “there is no practical motive for building enormous muscles, hitting a little white ball into a hole or acquiring a complete series of postage stamps. Yet many people in our society devote themselves with passion to body-building, golf or stamp-collecting.”
Such pursuits are, however, ultimately unfulfilling, and the tradeoffs involved in modern life-working at boring or demeaning jobs in return for a safe, secure existence-have led to many modern ills: crime, drug use, depression, sexual perversion.
“We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system,” he writes, using the first-person plural, despite the fact that the FBI is convinced that he acts alone. “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. . . . 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.”
Professors who have read the manuscript say the Unabomber’s ideas are not particularly original.
A tradition of anti-industrial activism reaches back to the Luddites of early 19th Century England, and, more recently, suspicions about the supposed benefits of science and technology became fairly commonplace in the 1960s as resistance to the Vietnam War grew.
“The ideas were widespread at the time,” said Tom Tyler, a Berkeley social psychology professor who taught at Northwestern from 1978 to 1990.
“When I look at the manuscript, I don’t think, `Oh, he is reading so-and-so.’ There are many places to get these ideas, that small is beautiful, how small communities are a more humane way to live than modern society. Were there any students interested in that? Hundreds, thousands. They were major areas of social commentary.”
More Top Picks Boomerangs
Although he writes that a revolution would not necessarily be violent, he has not hesitated to use violent means himself. His bombs have killed three people and injured 23 others during his 17-year span of mail bombings. Those tactics have been necessary, according to the Unabomber, to get his message out.
“If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted,” he writes. “In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.”
And yet for someone who takes such extreme measures, the Unabomber provides few details of what should happen after the breakdown of industrial society. However, the bits and pieces that emerge give some idea of the Unabomber’s vision of utopia.
“If and when industrial society breaks down, its remnants will be smashed beyond repair, so that the system cannot be reconstituted,” he writes.
“The factories should be destroyed, technical books burned, etc. . . . Whatever kind of society may exist after the demise of the industrial system, it is certain that most people will live close to nature, because in the absence of advanced technology, there is no other way that people can live. To feed themselves, they must be peasants or herdsmen or fishermen or hunters, etc.”
History professor Harold Bauman of the University of Utah believes that the Unabomber’s hatred of authority betrays a troubled childhood.
“Where does a person develop such a violent hatred of the world?” Bauman said.
Bauman added that FBI investigators have speculated that the bomber may have a physical handicap because he repeatedly writes about the dangers of genetic engineering.
“He’s smart,” said James Fox, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. “But it’s clear that if he had academic aspirations, he couldn’t cut the mustard. He may have known the terminology, but he didn’t have what it takes to excel in the academic world. The only way he can distinguish himself is as a bomber.”