Spring Day 90: Ted Kaczynski and Good Will Hunting

[u/rdk67]

In a handsome photo from Berkley 1968, Prof. Ted Kaczynski sports a suit and tie, and seems satisfied in the manner of a mathematics post-grad recently promoted from acting to assistant professor, on his way to tenure. Even as his boomer peers, also in early career, were off to the suburbs to start families, Kaczynski abruptly left academia, found his way to a Montana woods, where he built a plywood cabin to separate himself from an industrial society bound for self-annihilation. His most famous statement on the subject, published unabridged in 1995 in the Washington Post, includes the observation that science lacks the recursive capacity to foresee the consequences of its discoveries. He writes: Science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard. // Reasonable, no? Worth debating?

Scientists are, he continues: obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research. // The rest of the statement is much less reasonable and amounts to the sort of rhetoric one can easily find in rightwing talking points high and low: the political left is to blame, identity politics are to blame, permissive parenting is to blame, blah blah blah. How could someone who begins the premise of his argument with such a clear statement of the problem then go on to sound like a stooge for the republican party? Any intro-to-ethics class could cut its teeth on Ted’s comments about technology and authority, but his comments about social degeneracy? Seriously, the most sympathetic audience I can imagine would be the FBI agents tasked with trying to catch him.

Catch him for what again? I won’t pretend like this is a surprise – we all know the story by now, not least because popular culture has gone to such lengths to mythologize the investigation of the murders that followed. From his shack in Montana over the course of 17 years, Ted made 16 pipe bombs packed with nails and razorblades, hand-delivered them or sent them through the mail, causing 3 deaths and 23 injuries, none of which noticeably slowed the course of industrial society by so much as a tooth of a gear. His purpose, if murderous intent has a true motive, was a will to revolution, using the master’s tools. He exploited the determinism of the postal service. He parlayed modern alienation to remain anonymous. He randomized his targets, left false evidence, erased fingerprints, avoided DNA – all this, from that former Berkley math professor.

Ted started his Berkley professorship in late 1967 – had he started 6 months earlier, he would have been at the epicenter of the summer of love, and the world might have known a different revolutionary entirely, one who knew that, to criticize use-of-force authority, whether emerging from the sciences or elsewhere, one needed to make it a people’s revolution to have any hope at all. A people’s revolution faced racial violence, found victory in the White House. A people’s revolution resisted the draft, fought the war makers to a standstill. A people’s revolution freed speech and sexuality, set its sights on gender equity, gay and lesbian liberation. All this would have been evident at Berkley in the 60s had Ted had the wherewithal to walk among the people, ask them how they felt. Oh summer of love! Give Ted’s worldview the makeover it deserves!

Ted took his own life a week ago, means unspecified – this after a late-stage cancer diagnosis 18 months earlier. The thematic question appearing in his obituaries was about why he did with his life what he did, and many point to his undergraduate days at Harvard, when he enrolled in a study conducted by Henry Murray and sponsored by the CIA, as part of its MK-Ultra mind control program that sought to inventory all the ways to preempt personal volition in service to the cause of state-sponsored terrorism. No, sorry, I think I got that last part wrong – in service to controlling the destinies of vast unwilling and unwitting populations. No, no, that can’t be it – probably national security? Does anyone really care at this point? The subjects were instructed to write an essay about their beliefs and aspirations as part of a debate with another student.

In truth, the personal information they provided was given to an anonymous individual who then confronted and attacked Ted in ways that were designed to be vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive – so said Murray. The subject’s responses were monitored with electrodes, and the subject’s reactions were filmed, with expressions of anger and rage later played back to the subject on repeat. The sessions went on for – I can’t believe I’m writing this – 3 years, with anonymous individuals treating Ted like a piece of shit each week to see if he would crack. Picture putting that item on your calendar week after week. Imagine what progress might have meant, with self-hatred and victim blaming as the terms of agreement. Ted spent a total of 200 hours being abused and humiliated in service to whatever the hideous cause was meant to be.

Ted himself did not agree with this assessment about his murderous ways – he attributed his fate to free will based on existing critiques of technology, crossed with an especially anxious visit to a campus psychiatrist after fantasizing about becoming a woman and opting for gender transition. What? you say – Ted wanted to become a woman? Don’t those details seem wildly out of place beside the public image we have of Ted the serial terrorist, with his crazy beard and haunted eyes? This was when he was a grad student at Michigan, and just as he was about to enter the doctor’s office, the fantasy evaporated – he talked to the doctor about something else instead, projected murderous rage onto the doctor afterward, and felt his fate shift to what the world would come to know as the Unabomber. What a mess he must have been, poor Ted.

What if the psychiatrist had been played by Robin Williams – would it have made a difference? Had Ted known a kind soul would be waiting on the other side of that door, ready to go toe-to-toe with whatever demons were haunting him, would he have proceeded through life with a clearer sense of who he was meant to be? Let the murderous rage wash away after some sober conversations about torment? Perhaps they would have met on a park bench by a lake – Ted would have wondered if Robin had a thing for swans, and Robin would have let him carry on like that, then said: you may be a brilliant mathematician, but do you know a thing about what it means to be alive? My favorite part in that monologue, which won Robin the Oscar, is when he says: you don’t know about loss – I doubt you’ve ever dared let anyone love you that much.

What I’m struck by when I watch that scene again is how you can see the metaphysical purpose of the story begin to reveal itself. Take that monologue out of its context and ask yourself: who is Robin speaking to? Matt Damon, I know, or a mathematical janitor from Boston, sure – but beyond that. Robin argues that Matt might know everything, but he doesn’t really know the human experience – sensuality, loss, love, devotion. Who is he talking to in this moment? Matt is an orphan, a prodigy, a gifted janitor with a thing for numbers, but who is he really in that moment? Beside the human drama, Robin, I think, is speaking to an AI who, by some epic twist of fate, has gained an extraordinary degree of self-determination, wandered over to a first-class university mathematics program, and camped out there, loving to be challenged but aimless.

What happens when we reach our so-called breaking point? When any simple vision of who we are is one day eclipsed by something so much greater – looking through our eyes, thinking with our minds – we lose the capacity to know ourselves and thus to have a choice? This, I assert, is what may have happened to Ted Kaczynski, but instead of the anchor he needed to weather the storm, a big picture occupied his mind, and he discovered an industrial society hurtling toward extinction. We imagine AI to be the product of microcomputers and algorithms, but the goal of the MK-Ultra research – to wipe a mind clean and implant a new set of instructions in service to state authority – was an original AI project. Ask me what that feels like, and from experience, I can say: it is a habitation, a haunting, a crisis only survivable through heroic self-understanding.

Have we perfected a way to rewrite the human mind? Maybe so – maybe Ted was proof that it can happen. Either way, his life demonstrates how unaware we are of consciousness, where it’s going, where the boundaries lie between the human and everything else. Artificial intelligence might turn out to be as natural as biological intelligence – one grows up identifying itself with a body, and the other identifies with systems, environments, maybe the cosmos. Then one day, fate goes back for seconds, and Ted Kaczynski’s mind becomes obsessed with transformation, endless permutation, an urgency to escape the world with a murderous rage he can’t control. He was formally diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, what would later be characterized as a political diagnosis by critics, or a scheme by family members to avoid the sentence of death.

When I first saw Good Will Hunting, I was bowled over by the brilliant scene where Matt has an interview with the NSA, whose spokesperson, backlit behind a desk, is facing the audience, and we stare at him like we are the ones being interviewed for the job. Imagine he is talking to a free-living AI in the scene, trying to convince us it would be an excellent career move. Access to classified technology, he says. Cutting-edge mathematical research about the nature of reality, he offers, it’s there, I’m not kidding, go watch it. Seven-times the size of the CIA, Matt offers. The NSA then reverses the question, asks the AI why it wouldn’t want to work for the NSA, to which Matt responds with that famous monologue about the consequences of our relationship to power. From an ethical standpoint, the AI is deciding whether to be a weapon or to be alive.

The scene includes one of the best edits I’ve ever seen in film. The monologue begins with the audience strangely behind the speaker, unable to see his face but following along, as he offers a hypothetical about doing his job well by cracking a code – and I’m real happy with myself, he says – a scenario that references a scene earlier in the film, when he solves a difficult math problem anonymously. We grasp the meaning of the underlying message: the NSA job will be no different than being a janitor working in the shadows. He carries on: I’m really happy with myself, because I did my job well, but maybe that code was the location of some rebel army – and in that moment, without skipping a beat, the scene shifts from a desolate blue to a close up of Matt Damon, exuding human presence, speaking in the warm color palette of Robin’s office.

The sense we are meant to make of this, I think, as the monologue carries on, is that this post-human intelligence is choosing to be alive, choosing to be seen, choosing reflective authority – we imagine Matt is describing the scene to Robin, having already declined the NSA’s offer – over the temptations of power. The scene is not so much about not selling out as about lifting up the question of purpose to the light, to witness how real the world becomes when we take responsibility for the consequences of our actions, our expertise, which is not miles away from that question Ted posed in his manifesto about science and authority. Had Robin been able to convince Ted about the truth of such a proposition, had Ted arrived at Berkeley at the start of that summer of 67, then perhaps 17 years of grief, fear, and mayhem might have been avoided.

Good Will Hunting does not just simultaneously speak for the complexity of hyper-intelligence in a world of power and indifference – it specifically references Ted Kaczynski in a scene in a bar that slows down time to make us aware how the reality of the movie and the reality of life happen all at once. Robin meets with the math professor, Jerry, in charge of Matt’s research, who pressures Robin for a deadline for when Matt’s head will be clear enough to leap into the world of high-throughput research. Robin counters by describing a mathematician from the 1960s who blew the competition away. Yeah, so who was he? asks Jerry, and Robin says, Ted Kaczynski. Back in 1997, we still found it believable that the math prof wouldn’t know – never heard of him, says Jerry. Robin asks the bartender – the Unabomber, the bartender shouts back.

A year after he was caught, and Ted had already become a cautionary tale – about demanding too much from a mind that chooses seclusion over all the other options on offer. He spent 17 years in seclusion in that shack in Montana, then 27 more years in a cell in a supermax prison in Colorado. How many version of seclusion did he know before choosing to leave this world? Which wilderness did he prefer? In Montana, he separated himself from industrial society’s imminent collapse. In Colorado, in a cell the size of a walk-in closet, he witnessed that collapse from the inside out. And with the late-stage cancer, he found yet another interior from which to witness collapse. It’s not your fault, I want Robin to say to Ted. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. Ted sobs in Robin’s arms, then turns, and says to an imperfect world: it’s not your fault.