After a while of not having any assigned readings, our FSEM professor assigned us to read Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, entitled Industrial Society and its Future. I had heard of this text before, but I was unaware of how long it was, so that came as a surprise to me.
Ted Kaczynski is very interesting to me. He stands out as one of those genius figures who was simply plagued illness, similar to Valerie Solanas. I also found it interesting that both of these people were diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenics. Upon reading the first bit of the text, I was struck by how extreme his ideas were. Granted, it is evident that he strongly believed in his point-of-view, but it is also evident that he didn’t really know when to say when in terms of extremes. He interested me greatly in terms of his mind, as he was such a genius. He seems genuinely self aware, and just aware in general, and his isolation wasn’t unlike that of so many artists in history, or even the people who lived in his same town. After doing some extra research and finding out about the experiments performed on him during his time at University, I wondered if he might have turned out different if that hadn’t happened.
This text didn’t interest me as much as some others have, but it was interesting to have a chance to look more into the Unabomber and put some facts to the name.