First of all, read the Wikipedia article on the Unabomber–seriously, it’s interesting. Theodore Kaczynski was a brilliant man:

One of his professors at Michigan, George Piranian, said, “It is not enough to say he was smart.” He earned his Ph.D. by solving, in less than a year, a math problem that Piranian himself had been unable to solve. Kaczynski’s specialty was a branch of complex analysis known as geometric function theory. “I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 people in the country understood or appreciated it,” said Maxwell O. Reade, a retired math professor who served on Kaczynski’s dissertation committee. In 1967, Kaczynski received a $100 prize recognizing his dissertation, entitled “Boundary Functions”, as the school’s best in math that year. At Michigan he held a National Science Foundation fellowship, taught undergraduates for three years, and published two articles related to his dissertation in mathematical journals. After he left Michigan, he published four more papers.

But in 1969, he ducked out. Atlas Shrugged.

The first mail bomb was sent in 1978. It was at that point that Kaczynskii recited his mission statement to and about society. Unfortunately, the statement was written in blood because, to him, it seemed like that was the only language his society spoke anymore. He had something to say about society, where it was, where it had been, and where it was going.

He didn’t really see it going anywhere. So, he started “communicating” with people through the mail. He used the largest communication system of his time to send death to his countrymen in order to make a statement they would be awake and alert to listen to.

But did anyone ever really hear Ted Kaczynskii? On the media, he was sold as a crackpot. His “manifesto” (which is actually titled Industrial Society and its Future) read like a PhD. Thesis with the leash off and muzzle fallen.

In college, ideas are king. I learned to use ideas as ammunition and words as weapons. I have verbally decimated quite a few unlucky individuals in the last ten years and I’ve even been smacked up a few times mmyself.

But it never went beyond the ideas to me. I just wrote a post about the Third World mind, how it’s the one that only knows lashing out. Well, the truth is that we have Third World minds in some of the most powerful positions in our country. And, examinining the case of Ted Kaczynskii and the insane atrocities he committed in order to be heard, it’s easy to understand that even the most brilliant among us are capable of being enslaved the Third World mind.

The path to enlightenment is a razor’s edge and it is so easy to fall off that it’s a wonder our species has made it this far.

That is why I believe in giving people their thirty seconds to see what they’ve got to say. If Ted Kaczynskii had his own blog today, I’d probably read it. I imagine that a good comment section, which validated yet refuted his lunatic worldview, might have kept the bombs out of the mail.

The UnaBomber Blog might have even risen to the top of Instapundit’s blogroll. After all, stranger things have happened.

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