As the “Unabomber”, Ted Kaczynski, who died in a federal prison medical facility on Saturday, killed three people and injured 23 others in a series of bombings from 1978 to 1995.
Kaczynski was unquestionably a terrorist, using violence in an attempt to bring about political change. His manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future”, is a not entirely wrong criticism of industrialization and the tendency of reform movements to be taken over by authoritarians; but which suggests an entirely wrong and stupid response of violent revolution. It reminded me in some ways of Marxism: insightful criticism, bad proposed solutions. I am not here to glorify or justify him.
But Kaczynski was not just any violent revolutionary, overconfident in the rightness of his solutions to the world’s problems. He was a victim of the CIA’s MKULTRA mind control experiments.
If you’ve never read up on it, MKULTRA may sound like the ravings of the sort of paranoid conspiracy theorist who believes that covid vaccinations implant mind control chips. But it’s well-documented history: in the 1950s and 60s, in response to alleged Communist use of brainwashing on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea, the CIA started experimenting with “chemical, biological, and radiological material capable of employment in clandestine operations to control human behavior”, as a CIA memo put it.
MKULTRA may be most famous for its LSD and drug experiments, dosing unsuspecting subjects. That does not seem to have been the case here, but over a three year period Kaczynski was involved in a series of experiments which included brutal interrogation sessions in which researchers would attack the subjects’ deepest beliefs and ideals.
The lead experimenter, Henry A. Murray, described these interrogations as intended to be “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” — and he should know. During WWII he worked for the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. He was not an innocent researcher led astray by nefarious Three Letter Agencies, but a willing participant in the “national security” apparatus.
Evolutionary psychologist Nigel Barber points out that the interrogation methods in question “were designed to ‘break’ enemy agents and render them so damaged that they would be operationally useless,” and so it is likely that “they would have the same consequences for vulnerable young people who did not have specialized training to resist interrogation.”
It may be that Kaczynski had latent schizophrenia which these experiments exacerbated, though that diagnosis was contested. Others have suggested that it’s merely a coincidence that someone badly abused by the intersection of science and politics went on to advocate the destruction of technology and the overthrow of the political system.
But I’d like to look at the matter from a Discordian perspective, as an example of an important law of human activity:
Imposition of Order = Escalation of Disorder
If you’re reading this you may already be familiar with Discordianism, a satirical religion created in the 1950s by a few teenaged boys who liked to hang out at bowling alleys drinking beer. It holds that God is a crazy woman named Eris, the ancient Greek goddess of chaos — after all, someone had to put all of this chaos here. By accepting the role of chaos in the universe, in just a few decades it has proven itself to be the most true of all of the One True Religions.
Its primary holy text is the Principia Discordia, which spread through the 1960s counterculture via one of the first experiments in “copyleft” or “creative commons” — it bears the instructions “ALL RIGHTS REVERSED – Reprint what you like”. Discordian Society co-founder Kerry Thornley was credited by Margot Adler as being one of the first to use the word “Pagan” in the Neopagan sense, though Thornley downplayed the connection.
And among its marginalia, the Principia bears the following entry:
“And, behold, thusly was the Law formulated: Imposition of Order = Escalation of Disorder”
Thornley later dubbed this the “Law of Eristic Escalation”, and added, “Fenderson’s Amendment adds that the tighter the order in question is maintained, the longer the consequent chaos takes to escalate, BUT the more it does when it does! Armed with the Law of Eristic Escalation and Fenderson’s Amendment any imbecile – not just a sociologist – can understand politics.”
I don’t know if George Lucas had ever heard of it, but the Law may be more familiar in the form that Princess Leia spoke it to Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars: “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”
MKULTRA, and the Cold War of which it was a part, were part of the US’s attempt to impose its order, tighten its grip upon the world. Instead, we know for sure that it led to the popularization of psychedelics and the discrediting of the US government.
More speculatively, it has been suggested that MKULTRA experiments may have been conducted at Atsugi Naval Air Station in Japan — where both Kerry Thornley and Lee Harvey Oswald were stationed.
So we might say the lesson here is, “the more you try to engineer mind control of the masses, the more you’re going to crack people and turn them into raving terrorist bombers, assassins, or founders of chaos religions.”
Oswald displayed psychological problems as a youth, and if he were an experimental subject it’s possible that these were exacerbated and led to him fire one of the 20th century’s most notable rifle shots.
Thornley, despite his holy work on behalf of Our Lady Eris, suffered from mental health issues that made his life difficult. As the only person to have written a book about Oswald before the JFK assassination (he was fascinated by this weird guy in his unit and his defection to the USSR), he got caught up in the assassination conspiracy theory weirdness vortex. That in itself might have been enough to lead him to genuine paranoia; or he may have been helped along the way by the security state. (Either way, in some ways it only added to his allure as a chaos cult leader who just wanted to be left alone.)
The CIA tried to cover its tracks and many records about MKULTRA were destroyed, and paranoid conspiracy theorists have muddied the waters. (If I were a little bit more paranoid I might suggest that some of those paranoid conspiracy theorists were working on behalf of the CIA to lay down false trails…) So just as it’s impossible to directly attribute any one incident of severe weather to fossil carbon dioxide, so we can’t directly attribute anything from Kaczynski, Oswald, or Thornley’s lives to MKULTRA.
But we can see the pattern.
Imposition of Order = Escalation of Disorder.
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