If ever there was an archetypal (anti)hero who recognized, precisely articulated, and spelled out the dire civilizational consequences of unbridled technology it was Ted Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber.

If ever there was an archetypal (anti)hero who lived out the philosophical/practical paradox of unbridled technology versus wild nature, again, it was Ted Kaczynski.

Born into a working family, he was a brilliant loner, accepted into Harvard when only 16 years old. Majoring in mathematics, while there he participated for three years in what has become known as an extremely abusive CIA-sanctioned MK Ultra experiment. And of course the question arises: did this experience change him? Was he transmogrified into his 1996 pre-trial official diagnosis as a “paranoid schizophrenic” via this vile experiment? Or: did the trauma originate earlier, much earlier.

It’s important to note that after graduating from Harvard, he went on to receive MA and PHD degrees from the University of Michigan, and then was hired by the University of California at Berkeley as the youngest ever Assistant Professor of Mathematics.

Then, the turn. Two years later, in 1969, he left academia, and bought, with his younger brother David, a piece of land in rural Montana on which he constructed a 10′ by 12′ foot cabin with no windows and endeavored to learn how to survive in wild nature.

(In this turn, he reminds me of Wittgenstein, another lonely figure, who, however, left academia for the natural world several times, for years, only to be persuaded by colleagues each time to return.)

Brother David, if you recall, was the one who, after reading the 35,000 word Unabomber Manifesto, published in both the NYT and WAPO, in exchange for stopping the bombings, went to the FBI seventeen years later, to say that his own brother was the probable bomber who had killed 3 people and maimed 23 others.

Here’s a decent account of his life.

https://www.history.com/topics/crime/unabomber-ted-kaczynski

The above site also details the MK Ultra experiment.

If you recall, many victims of MK Ultra were then, and still are, being used as manchurian candidates, usually loners, triggered remotely to kill in school, bar, and other false flag mass shootings.

You might say that Kaczynski was a Manchurian Candidate gone rogue, just as he detailed in his Manifesto how technology would inevitably go rogue and capture us all in its robotic clutches.

I remember reading his 1995 Manifesto shortly after it appeared, horrified, knowing that he was right, that what he claimed was true. Here it is in full.

Industrial Society and Its Future

Kaczynski – Unabomber Manifesto

Like Kaczynski, I am also highly aware of two seemingly incompatible worlds, wild nature and technology. But instead of seeing them as totally and inescapably polarized, with only one (technology) destined to “win,” I am striving for a way to combine the two so that one does not overwhelm the other. For example, our latest addition to Green Acres Permaculture Village, the already-beloved 12 foot yurt that sits in the back yard of this house on a platform, holding a indoor-outdoor circular rug that looks like a mandala, radiates serenity and inspires a hushed tone as one circles inward to one’s own center.

The back yard, and all the gardens of this three home property, embrace and enhance the natural world, and our communion with it. Our motto, in fact, is “building community from the ground up.”

Of course, technology lives here too, exemplified in those phones, the text messages we are constantly sending to one another! There’s no way to avoid technology in this increasingly disembodied culture, but we can continuously return, return, to who we really are, embodied souls inhabiting this conscious, living, nourishing planet, learning and growing from and within her.

It turns out that Ted Kaczynski was born the same year I was, 1942, and his chart features the same, extremely difficult generational conjunction between two diametrically opposed planets in the mental sign of GEMINI: critical, traditional, structural, judgmental, rule-bound SATURN and eruptive, wild, explosive, freedom-oriented URANUS.

And, in his case, this difficult conjunction just happens to coincide with his Sun, at the very same degree of Gemini as Uranus, and only one degree from Saturn. When combined with his Mercury/Jupiter/Lilith in late Gemini, all six in the 11th house of friends and associations, he was utterly obsessed with showing the whole wide world what happens when the godless, logical, Gemini left-brain takes over, copies itself into AI, and ends up running amuck.

 

Sad, and to think that this Leo ruled Moon and Ascendant and generational Pluto were so wounded (Chiron) that not only could he not recover and gift his full expression to the world, but instead, his precisely constructed bombs would cement his both his infamy and his loneliness forever.

 

Those homemade bomb packages he mailed out over 17 long yearss were little pieces of himself, designed to explode (Uranus), and he hoped, foolishly, to thereby judge society (Saturn) to the point where it would finally stop our hellish bent to technological oblivion.

Instead, Kaczynski himself was banished to oblivion in 1997, and finally died, on May 10, 2023, at 81, in his cell, a supposed suicide, after several years of advancing cancer.

May he rest in peace.