Theodore John Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber is a homegrown terrorist with an IQ of 167, who in an attempt to bring about a different society against an industrial revolution, conducted a campaign of bombings that killed 3 and wounded 23 for 17 years.
Throughout his childhood researchers have taken note of a couple of events that might have contributed to the worsening of his mental state and ultimately the bombings. He was extremely smart and showed that when he was younger, but then was forced into hospital isolation as a child which psychologists think impacted his emotional development, and later in life is a part of an unethical experiment at Harvard at age 17 by Henry Murray, that is often described as abusive and extremely unethical by today’s standards. Kaczynski spent 200 hours in the study, lasting a total of three years and as a result, he has said that he didn’t think Murray’s experiments had a result on his life.
However, just looking at the experiment on a superficial level we can see how future actions mirror those of the experiment. at the time 17-year-old Kaczynski was told he was to write essays of his detailed beliefs and aspirations, these were then read by another student who would confront and belittle the author about their personal beliefs, in an extremely abusive psychological attack that continued for three years, and is now rumored to have been used as a part of the CIA’s Project MKUltra.
In 1995 Kaczynski demanded the publishing of his 35,000-word essay titled “Industrial Society and Its Future”. Many psychologists have studied the work in connection to his mental state and have tried to break down the science behind human behavior and how our childhood and crucial moments of young adulthood form what we value as adults.
