Underground Knowledge — A discussion group discussion

This is my review of the book _Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of am American Terrorist_ by Alston Chase:

Ted Kaczynski (a.k.a The Unabomber), pursued over a few years a terrorist campaign to undermine modern society. The publication of his manifesto by some media outlets eventually led to his arrest and conviction.

The author of this book, Alston Chase, presents an interpretation of the Unabomber. The author, like Ted Kaczynski, was a student at Harvard, pursued an academic career, but left it and moved to the wilderness in Montana.

The author claims that there were two factors which shaped Ted Kaczynski into the Unabomber. One factor, which I did not know about until I read this book, was that Ted Kaczynski, when he was a Harvard student, was a subject in a highly unethical psychological experiment conducted by Henry A. Murray, a veteran of DoD psychology experimentation. The subjects were deceived about the nature and length of the study, and they underwent highly stressful interrogations.

A second factor, in the author view, was Harvard's curriculum at the time. Alston Chase calls it "a culture of despair." Students had to read analytic philosophers who argued that moral statements were mere expressions of feeling; anthropologists who advocated cultural relativism; and social critics of science and technology.

I'm not convinced about Chase's second factor. Intellectuals, such as Chase (who was a philosophy professor), have a tendency to overrate the influence of ideas.

Nevertheless, I found this book a fascinating study of Ted Kaczynski.

Ronald wrote: "This is my review of the book _Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of am American Terrorist_ by Alston Chase:

Ted Kaczynski (a.k.a The Unabomber), pursued over a few years a terrorist campaig..."

I agree intellectuals overrate how influential certain ideas are. Sometimes they are influential, but other times not so much.

Chase's book seems to match our own research on Kaczynski - as Lance and I wrote the following in our book The Orphan Conspiracies: "Enough evidence exists to conclude that Theodore Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber, participated in MK-Ultra experiments conducted at Harvard University from 1959 to 1962. Although these Harvard experiments appeared relatively benign, they were surreptitiously sponsored by the CIA and that seems tantamount to a smoking gun."

Sirhan Sirhan and Timothy McVeigh may potentially fall under the same umbrella, as mentioned in this discussion thread here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...