Mind for Murder

A Mind for Murder: The Education of the Unabomber and the Origins of Modern Terrorism by Alston Chase, 372 pages

In 1969, Harvard-educated mathematics professor Ted Kaczynski left his job at the University of California at Berkeley and moved into a one room cabin in the backwoods of Montana without running water or electricity.  In 1996, FBI agents arrived at the same cabin to arrest him for a series of bombings spanning twenty years, bombings which killed three and injured two dozen more.  These victims were the casualties of Kaczynski's personal war against technological civilization, as explained in his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future.  

To many in the media in the aftermath of Kaczynski's arrest, he was simply insane, despite his rationale for terror being far more lucid than those of his future prison mates Ramzi Yusef and Timothy McVeigh.  This was compounded by Kaczynski's lawyers, who - over his public protests - pursued an insanity plea as his best hope of avoiding the death penalty.  According to Alston Chase, however, this was a fundamental misunderstanding of both Kaczynski and his worldview, which was rooted in the modernist angst cultivated at Harvard in the '50s.  In contrast to the popular image of the quixotic romantic, the Ted Kaczynski that Chase reveals was a rational ideologue, and therefore not a passionate enthusiast but a cold-blooded, calculating killer.

Chase's greatest strength is potentially his greatest weakness.  He also attended Harvard in the '50s, also experienced profound alienation there, also took up a teaching position (as a professor of philosophy), and also eventually withdrew to live a quiet, simple life in Montana (albeit, in his case, with his family).  As a result, he has the advantage of a unique sympathetic understanding of Kaczynski, but this comes with the temptation to overwrite Kaczynski's story with his own.  Chase treats Kaczynski's life as representative of their generation, finding the "origins of modern terrorism" in the postmodern disenchantment with Enlightenment.  For this reason, he spends a remarkable amount of time considering the life and career of Henry Murray, a Harvard psychology professor whom he positions as the avatar of the sadistic, technocratic system and the rival of Kaczynski's ruthless anarchist in the battle for the spirit of the age.  Whether or not this is entirely convincing, it certainly is compelling.