The Unabomber never lived to regret his actions

[Clay]

Last Ted K post for a while, promise. This is just an interesting section from a FAQ post I found. I'd be curious to know if anyone feels they have any unanswered questions about him that they just haven't had the time to do the digging on? This was just one of mine until today:

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In prison Ted felt that he had hardened and experienced even less regrets as a result of the prison situation he had ended up in:[7]

Probably the biggest reason why you find my actions incomprehensible is that you have never experienced sufficiently intense anger and frustration over a long enough period of time. You don’t know what it means to be under an immense burden of frustrated anger or how vicious it can make one.

Yet there is no inconsistency between viciousness toward those whom one feels are responsible for one’s anger, and gentleness toward other people. If anything, having enemies augments one’s kindly feelings toward those whom one regards as friends or as fellow victims.

Do I feel that my actions were justified? To that I can give you only a qualified yes. My feelings at a given time depend in part on whether I am winning or losing. When I am losing (for example now, when the system has me in jail) I have no doubts or regrets about the means that I’ve used to fight the system. But when I feel that I’m winning (for example, between the time when the manifesto was published and the time of my arrest), I start feeling sorry for my adversaries, and then I have mixed emotions about what I’ve done.

Thomas Mosser, for instance, was a practitioner of what I consider to be the slimy technique of public relations, which corporations and other large organizations use to manipulate public opinion, but it does not necessarily follow that he was ill-intentioned. He may simply have felt that the system as it exists today is inevitable, and that he could accomplish nothing by going into another line of work. And of course his death hurt his wife and children, too.

I suppose that to sympathize with my actions one has to hate the system as I hate it, or at least one has to have experienced the kind of prolonged, frustrated anger that I’ve experienced. I think you have the good fortune never to have gone through anything like that.

Later in a partially available letter, making a reasonable guess as to what the missing page contained, he wrote:[8]

[‘As for if I had the opportunity to kill Gilbert Murray again, I would have’] no more compunction than I would have in squashing a cockroach.* Yet Judy Clarke thinks the Murrays were just wonderful people. ...

* In contrast, I take very seriously the suffering that David Gelernter underwent. Gelernter is no cliche, but a highly intelligent, thoughtful, talented, and sensitive man whom no one could describe as a mere stereotype. I consider that he deserved what he got, but that is a judgement that I do not adopt lightly and it is one about which I have mixed feelings.

Reviewing his journals he shared his regrets about some of the suffering he caused to animals:[9]

Series II, #5, p.130. I now (Feb, 1996) feel very sorry about the fact that, in a few cases, I tortured small wild animals (two mice, one flying squirrel, and one red squirrel, as far as I can remember offhand) that caused me frustration by stealing my meat, damaging my belongings, or keeping me awake. There are two reasons why I tortured them. (1) I was rebelling against the moral prescriptions of organized society. (2) I got excessively angry at these animals because I had a tremendous fund of anger built up from the frustrations and humiliations imposed on me throughout life by organized society and by individual persons. (As any psychologist will tell you, when you have no means of retaliating against whomever or whatever it is that has made you angry, you are likely to vent your anger on some other object.) When I came to realize that I had taken out on these little creatures the anger that I owed to organized society and to certain people, I very much regretted having tortured them. They are part of nature, which I love, and therefore they are in a way my friends even when they cause problems for me. I ought to reserve my anger for my real enemy, which is human society, or at least the present form of society. I have not tortured an animal for many years now. However I have no hesitation about trapping and killing animals that cause problems for me, at least if they are animals of the more common kinds.

Series II, #5, p.117. Here’s something that I remember pretty clearly about catching that rabbit alive; I don’t know why I didn’t mention it in my notes. In pulling the rabbit out, I tore loose a large patch of his skin (snowshoe hares! Skins are very fragile). I had wanted to let the rabbit go, from pity, but I was afraid that I might be doing it a disservice if I let it go, because the wound probably was very painful, and with so much of its body deprived of fur the rabbit might die of cold anyway.

Ted Kaczynski's 1979 Autobiography:[10]

... One summer when I was 15 or 16, in one of the prairies that still remained then, I threw a clod of earth at a bird. (The bird was bigger than a robin but smaller than a Franklin Grouse.) ... it "froze", and I walked up to it and just picked it up. As soon as I had it in my hand it began struggling violently. I held it in my hand for some time, and I soon began to experience warm, affectionate, pitying feelings for it. When I first threw the clod at the bird, I had hoped to kill it as an act of hunting, in accord with my fantasies of primitive life. But now I was turning soft.

I thought, "How can I ever hope to experience a cave-man style life if I am too soft-hearted to kill game? For that kind of life I will have to be hard." So I forced myself to kill the bird by crushing it in my hand. I left the place feeling sick with pity for the unfortunate creature ...

Later in a letter to his lawyers, he wrote:[11]

As for winning the sympathy of a jury, bear in mind some of the things that my early (1970's writings indicate: indiscriminate, homicidal hostility toward society in general, not just toward the corporate-governmental technological elite; I hunted game illegally and in a few cases even wasted meat; in a few cases I tortured small animals that had made me angry.

I think that word ‘even’ referring to the severity of wasting meat, rather than the almost indiscriminate homicidal hostility toward people that he felt said it all about his value system.

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[7] Ted Kaczynski's 1979 Autobiography

[8] Kaczynski and his lawyers

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ted's Notes on his Journals (Feb. 1996)

[11] Kaczynski and his lawyers

 

[tandoorichickencel]

Jfl he wasn’t even incel

 

[Clay]

Jfl he wasn’t even incel

How wasn't he? He literally died a virgin at age 81. Periods of intense sexual frustration arguably were the main events that pushed him over the edge into seriously planning to start killing people. Plus failing to get laid and enjoying a hermit life away from troubles with women was a constant theme of his journals.