Freud v. the Unabomber

With so many of our fellow citizens losing their shit over “death panels” (which are looking increasingly appealing, I must say) and cable news seemingly determined to will an incident of domestic terrorism into being by continuing to reward the senile, demented, and psychotic with exposure on the TV box, the time seems right to resurrect a rather incredible document unearthed by The Smoking Gun a few years back.  Below you can read a book report on Freudian psychology written by none other than Ted “Unabomber” Kaczynski.  The Unabomber, as many will recall, killed three and injured twenty-three in a sporadic series of bombings between 1978 (at Northwestern!) and 1995 (in Sacramento). He pled guilty in 1998 and is now serving a life sentence without possibility of parole in Colorado. 

 A former professor of mathematics at UC-Berkeley, Kaczynski has often been described as a “neo-Luddite,” based primarily on his manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future” (which appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post on September 19, 1995), and his decision to live in an off-the-grid cabin in the Montana wilderness.  His bombing campaign was apparently designed to draw attention to prominent players responsible for the evils of technocracy, a social order that he believed increasingly limited individual freedom.

 If you’ve read the Unabomber manifesto, you might recall that it is strange brew of political theory, philosophy, techno-history, and tightly argued ranting—extremely erudite, and in that intellectual precision, all the more unnerving in its association with psycho/sociopathology.  In other words, TK actually makes a few good points here and there, so much so that a number of prominent techno-critics have come to his defense over the past few years (while, of course, NOT endorsing his terrorist tactics).  

One of the oddest aspects of the manifesto, however, is Kaczynski’s extended critique of “Leftism” as a political/social movement, a critique that TK bases—with apparently no sense of irony—on the theoretical foundations of several prominent thinkers typically associated with the Left itself.  The manifesto begins with a simple declaration that the industrial revolution has proven a disaster for humanity (cue Freud and Marx, stage LEFT).  But TK’s anger is not directed at the forces of alienation—psychic or economic—but centers instead on the Left’s ambitions for mass structural reforms (like universal healthcare, no doubt) that threaten that Fountainheady fantasy of absolute individual freedom.  Leftists, Kaczynski argues, are oversocialized: 

The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. [...] 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.

Later he goes on to indict the creation of “false needs” and “unattainable desires,” even proposing a taxonomy of basic human “drives” and how they cohere in different socio-political orders.  

If this all sounds familiar, it should, as it is an almost uncanny parroting of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man.  The advent of “civilization” has demanded a certain amount of repression for society to function, and at times this contract can become so extreme as to make individuals and perhaps entire societies “sick” through “surplus repression.” 

All of which makes Kaczynski’s analysis of Freud in the following document all the more amazing.  Go ahead and read it—I’ll wait (click here for link). 

While the entire document is ghoulishly fascinating, the real goldmine begins on page four.  Kaczynski, who apparently believed that scientists often pursue science with no thought as to its larger social consequences, and do so only to satisfy their own unexamined structure of desire, here criticizes psychoanalysis as a “pseudoscience,” noting that it is interested in “emotionally loaded statements that are logically immune to empirical testing!” (“holy shit” exclamation point mine, not TK’s).  Kaczynski then observes that Freud’s famous line, “Reason is not master in its own house,” is “virtually meaningless” as a scientific statement.  

This seems a rather stunning instance of intellectual disassociation.  Collating the manifesto with this book report, Kaczynski appears to believe the following: I think that science and industrialism, born of Enlightenment rationality, have destroyed human freedom by creating a repressive regime of guilt, shame, and misplaced reformism from the Left, and yet I think Freud is a “mystic” and “charlatan” because none of his theories can be subjected to rational, empirical, scientific testing!  And I write this in jail because I believed blowing up certain random people was the best rational (irrational?) strategy to effect revolutionary socio-political change.  The mind reels.  Either TK is the walking epitome of Enlightenment contradiction, or he’s a pataphysical genius. 

Last night I heard a Republican congressman cite Kaczynski as an example of “Left-wing” extremism (because that of course makes “Obama + Hitler moustache” a fair and balanced retort)—but truly, TK really belongs much more to the pre-social contract reactionaries who would address social conflicts by somehow dissolving society itself—that strange world of wild west conservatism where everything would be resolved by self-interested greed, well-placed fences, and superior firepower.  And he lived this ideology as well as anyone could—the decision to live alone in a cabin without electricity or running water is as close as one can come to primal pre-history, that moment just before our humanoid ancestors first crawled out of caves and realized cooperating on growing a few crops together might not be such a bad idea. 

Just goes to show you people believe what they believe without necessarily knowing why they believe anything.  But it also suggests a useful historical/philosophical project.  Just how did U.S. history produce a populace so allergic to the idea of the social, so determined to base a vision of American identity on a community bound together by the idea of non-communal self-reliance? 

What makes Americans true Americans, it would appear, is their inability to imagine social bonds beyond a four-mile radius from their house.  Thus do Town-Hall “deathers” drive on Federal highways, having been organized on the Federally created technology of the Internet, so that they might yell at their Senator not to let the government destroy Medicare with a government-run health-plan (because the latter, as opposed to my own Medicare plan, will be accessed by people I don’t know—which is code for lazy sons-a-bitches signing up for simultaneous abortion/cosmetic surgery procedures: “Rip this one outta me and give me bigger boobs so I can go fornicate a couple more!”).  

Even the argument that a public option will SAVE YOU MONEY by increasing preventive care and unburdening the ER will not work with these people, because Reason truly is not the master in their own house—they are guided by some much more complex and, yes, irrational neurosis about the social as a sinister pathogen constantly looking to infect them with social-ism (remember dipshit Tom DeLay’s vow to stay on a boat during the Republican convention in NYC a few years back?  The very act of being among Other people, “technically” but really only nominally Americans, was just that terrifying in its possibilities for contamination).

 This ideology is so profound, it seems, that even someone as educated as Kaczynski can actually use the Left’s critiques of alienation under industrial capitalism (and beyond) to indict the Left as the source of the same said alienation!  But perhaps this is just the level of insanity it takes to maintain the fiction of a truly autonomous ego, a self deluded into believing it is wholly self-sufficient and thus beyond any form of collective investment: blame our miserable “society” as the product of oversocialization, or side with profit-driven insurance as an ally for maintaining precious “freedom” and “autonomy” against the horrifying maw of a socialist beast. 

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For bonus amusement, be sure not to miss the final paragraph of TK’s report (pp. 5-6) in which, having just trashed Freud, Kaczynski happens to fixate on a particular psychologist’s purported use of “the black whip that hurts,” employed with a mistress for “sexual gratification.” It is offered in the book report, apparently, for no other reason than TK found it interesting to think about and discuss a psychologist with a whip fetish  (It’s in there, I’m not kidding, take a look).