Ted Kaczynski: Counterpunch vs Jamie Gehrig, and others

At Counterpunch, Bruce Levine says Ted Kaczynski wasn't really mentally ill and Jeff St. Clair excerpts from an old book to paint somewhat the same picture. A day earlier, St. Clair revives an old piece written with Alexander Cockburn about Kaczynski participating (voluntarily) in CIA-derived mind control work while at Harvard, also referenced by Levine.

Especially versus Levine, I contrast Gehrig's "A Madman in the Woods." Ted may not have been criminally insane, but he was nuts, and while an undergrad psych class may have intensified pre-existing issues, he did have pre-existing issues.

And, just because he was not the only escapist near Lincoln, Montana, doesn't mean that he still wasn't off his rocker. (And, maybe that some others aren't, or actually, are, either.)

Also, none of this makes Kaczynski into an environmentalist, hunters' or non-hunters' version. Per Gehrig, he wasn't really that, either.

Having blogged about "Anarchists and Twitter bullshit" earlier today, let's be honest about what Ted was: an anarchist. Anarchists aren't environmentalists, or leftists, or many other things. Like it or not, we can't go back to a Roussellian "state of nature" that, contra Rousseau, never really existed any way. Environmentalism today requires management in some way, shape and form. And, even in relatively non-hierarchical American Indian tribes here in the US before Columbus, that management, whether prescribed burns or whatever, required organization, decision-making, and group cooperation.

Now, the issue of Kaczynski, his family, and his "criminal insanity" legal defense to dodge the death penalty? First, I put "criminal insanity" that way as both reference quotes and scare quotes. In reference quote terms, he did not have such a defense literally, unlike John Hinckley Jr., sent to a psychiatric unit, and later released. I put "insanity defense" in scare quotes because, per Wiki, its definition varies, a bit, at least, from state to state, and much more so, the idea of criminal insanity legally doesn't square with psychological ideas of "insanity," where in fact the word is rarely used today. As for whether Kaczynski had mental health problems, and if so, what they were, per his Wiki bio, while being a genius or near-genius mathematician is not a guarantor of schizophrenia, there are ties to mental health issues on that psychological axis.

As for raising the issue of his mental health to save him from execution? Wiki says that "some authors" suggest his mother and brother did this. It notes that his original public defenders did this, and Ted thereupon fired them. 

Trying to make him a martyr for the cause he espoused with less than full sanity, or for other causes, also doesn't treat Ted Kaczynski on his own terms, or rather, on "neutral" terms, to the degree that, pace Husserl, we can talk about "neutral" terms. 

Update: Leah Sottile, a former reporter for High Country News, offers thoughts about both Kaczynski's and James Watt's deaths at her Substack, Watt first. THIS about his Unabomber manifesto:

The manifesto is about many things; quite honestly, I think any extremist can find something to excite them in the document — from the leftest of lefties, to the rightest of the right.

Is exactly what I'm getting at, and which the gang at Counterpunch took a pass on, to extract "their" point of view.

None of this is to excuse Harvard prof Henry Murray. But, Ted himself said that this did NOT influence him, a flat statement flatly ignored by both Levine and St. Clair/Cockburn. But, it's always easy to turn a dead person into a martyr for something (even if the latter pair actually did it while Kaczynski was still alive.) Wiki also notes (which I don't think I knew) that, while in grad school in Michigan, he had fantasies of sexually transitioning. (It says "gender" but "sex" is clearly what's meant.)

Update 2: Per Oliver Bateman, here's another good angle on Kaczynski that ties directly with his troubled older childhood years: He never grew up. Bateman ties that with the fact that most extremists are similar and "can't accept life's disappointments." (Bateman's piece has its own issues, like claiming history is cyclical and Ted couldn't accept that, either.)