James Phillips Introduction For those of you not famil

2Theodore Kaczynski, the “Unabomber,” offers a singularly vivid and provocative casestudy in the relationship between political extremism and psychopathology. Kaczynski issingular both in the grey area he occupies between ideology and psychopathology, on the onehand, and in the extraordinarily extensive documentation that is available through his ownwritings, 22,000 pages, and the record of the legal process that ended in his conviction, on theother.Critique of TechnologyIn this presentation I begin with a brief summary of Kaczynski’s ‘Manifesto’, and I dothat for a specific purpose - to establish from the outset Kaczynski’s credentials as an articulate,thoughtful critic of contemporary industrial society. In his critique he joins the company of otheranalysts of modern technology such as Jacques Ellul, whom Kaczynski has read andincorporated into his own document. I will not attempt to compare the quality of Kaczynski’swork with that of better known critics of technology. I only want establish that his critique iscarefully reasoned, stands on its own merits, and has proved prescient in many ways. The pointof presenting his work at the outset is that, were I to begin with his biography and save hiscritique for later, you would be inclined to dismiss it out of hand as the work of a derangedcrank.While I will focus in this summary on the ‘Manifesto’ of 2005, Kaczynski had long beeninterested in the critique of technology and had written a shorter, equally articulate essay in1971, well before he began his career of political terrorism. The 1971 document begins: “In thesepages it is argued that continued scientific and technical progress will inevitably result in theextinction of individual liberty. I use the word ‘inevitably’ in the following sense: One might -possibly - imagine certain conditions of society in which liberty could coexist with technology,