James Phillips Introduction For those of you not famil

22extreme retaliation. And as was noted above, he was appropriately aggrieved that the judgedeprived him of the personal autonomy to represent himself, even after he had been found by thegovernment psychiatrist to be competent. In this situation his worst nightmare had come true -the machinery of government depriving him of what, legally, should have been his legal right todefend himself.In this discussion of how the theme of personal freedom is interwoven in the personaland ideological life of Kaczynski, we should note that it is quite commonplace in any kind ofintellectual, artistic, or political enterprise that the creative individual will engage the largeractivity to work through personal issues. Indeed, we expect that; it is what provides much of theenergy for the larger project. Freud termed this process sublimation, and his word has becomepart of public language.In trying to understand Kaczynski’s attitude toward freedom, what is striking is the wayin which he has turned everything on its head. This is not sublimation as we ordinarilyunderstand it. For Freud it represented the effort to contain primitive impulse by channeling itinto creative, intellectual activity. For Kaczynski, however, the primitive impulse to hate and killis not converted into creative activity - as it might well have been if he had been satisfied withpublishing his critique of modern technology. Rather, the critique takes on another role. Ratherthan functioning merely as a sublimation of the primitive drive, it becomes the rationale foracting out the drive.We can move the discussion onto a philosophical plain and find the same upending ofexpected relationships. The philosopher who most strongly argued for personal autonomy wasKant. But for Kant such autonomy was associated with our ability to act as moral agents, both inthe sense of determining on our own our moral obligations and in the sense of being able to