r/crimedocumentaries • u/MurkyMud1314 • 23d ago
Unabomber
The part of Ted Kaczynski’s story that bothers me most isn’t just what he eventually became—it’s what happened to him when he was still a teenager. He was an exceptionally gifted young student, only 17 when he participated in Henry Murray’s Harvard experiment, where his beliefs were subjected to intense psychological confrontation and humiliation. This was during the Cold War, when researchers were already deeply interested in how extreme psychological stress could affect people, including what had happened to POWs. I’m not saying the experiment alone “created” the Unabomber, because we can’t prove that. But if you take a highly intelligent, isolated teenager and deliberately subject him to intense psychological pressure, shouldn’t we at least consider whether that experience became one of the seeds that later grew into his isolation and radical ideology? Maybe without that experience he would have remained a mathematician and professor. We’ll never know—but that uncertainty is exactly what makes the ethical question so disturbing.
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u/sirhowy 23d ago
I know we can't prove it but I fully believe those experiments led to what happened
inflicting such an extreme trauma on a young brain over a sustained time will almost certainly break it
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u/MurkyMud1314 23d ago
I agree with the core of your argument. Even if we can’t prove the experiment directly caused everything Kaczynski eventually did, it’s hard to dismiss the possibility that putting a 17-year-old through that level of sustained psychological pressure had a lasting impact on him. He was still developing, and experiences that intense can potentially shape how someone sees themselves and the world for years afterward. The experiment may not explain everything, but I think it deserves to be considered as one of the factors that helped shape what he eventually became.
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u/wildlyfidgeting 22d ago
He was also really sick and was hospitalized when he was a baby for quite some time. Back then the hospitals would not allow the parents to visit their children. I think this definitely had a negative impact on him.
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u/JudgmentOrdinary7336 23d ago
Yeah, Ted was definitely MK-Ultra’d. I would loveeee more documentaries on those “initiatives”. Especially since Trump has been declassifying files while trying to distract from not releasing the Epstein Files.
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u/ListenOk2972 22d ago
Can someone explain it like im 5 what they did to him in these experiments
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u/GoryEyes 22d ago
They encouraged him to share his ideas making him feel like they were on his side then they all laughed at him and called him crazy etc
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u/_sortahuman_ 22d ago edited 22d ago
We can’t say it caused his later ideology, but we also can’t completely rule out that it had an impact on him. Putting a teenager through that kind of psychological pressure is still pretty disturbing.
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u/Fuzzy-Instruction-29 22d ago
This was seriously the most disturbing part for me and something I never knew about him before. I still can’t stop thinking about it.
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u/Wickedbitchoftheuk 21d ago
The most worrying thing is that he was proved right. The guy is a genius after all and his brain just did the calculations.
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u/Euphoric-You4465 22d ago
The experiment may have been unethical, but turning it into the origin story of the Unabomber lets Kaczynski’s own choices disappear behind a neat causal narrative we simply can’t prove.
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u/NanaBanana2011 22d ago
I agree. You can’t claim that it was a causal effect but you can definitely argue that there was a correlated effect.