The Harvard Experiment That Turned A Mathematician Into A Murderer

They say of Ted Kaczynski that he has one of the brightest minds today. However, between 1976 and 1995 it sent 16 homemade bombs to protest against technological progress. It was the Unabomber, someone who was part of a CIA-sponsored Harvard experiment in psychological control, known in turn as the MK Ultra.

Ted Kaczynski has served a sentence since 1996 in a maximum security prison in Colorado. From here, he carries out an intense epistolary work that helps him spread his ideas, the same ones that he collected in his “Manifesto on industrial progress and its future” . This work was published by the New York Times a year before his capture in a desperate attempt by the FBI to get someone to identify him, to get someone to recognize his peculiar and radical ideas about our society.

The strategy was a success, and after more than 20 years of investigations, 3 dead and 11 wounded, Kaczynski was tried and convicted. However, his determination does not waver, and this Harvard mathematician and philosopher continues to transmit his sophisticated ideology to the world. It should be said that all his letters are kept and analyzed at the University of Michigan, as well as his famous manifesto, which has been translated into several languages ​​and remains a more than fascinating material for the psychological, economic and sociological community.

Now, it was in 2003 that a hitherto unknown aspect about Kaczynski came to light. The historian Alston Chase published a revealing investigation which explained that this terrorist and brilliant mathematician was part of a Harvard experiment that lasted almost 3 years.  The MK Ultra.

The Harvard Experiment and the Unabomber

It took the FBI more than 20 years to find that terrorist who patiently planted 16 bombs throughout all that time at very specific points, as well as being studied. They called him the  Unabomber for his methodology, for his precise objectives : “University and Airline Bomber” (Terrorist of Universities and Airlines).

The story goes that that investigation was one of the most expensive in the United States, and that it was not until the arrival of a brilliant criminalist, agent James R. Fitzgerald, that Kaczynski himself saw his own nemesis closing in on his footsteps, until he gave finally with him. Now, when the general public learned the name behind all those acts, they were perplexed. Nobody understood why a Harvard mathematics professor who had several awards and recognitions for his work, had crossed the line of academic distinction to the border of the criminal.

Schizophrenia, paranoia, antisocial personality disorder … For several years Kaczynski had these diagnoses, those ideas with which to reassure the population and offer a “why” to something that could not be understood. However, in 2003 various reports began to be published that once again shocked all those who were still interested in the Unabomber case .

Theodore Kaczynski came to Harvard University in his early 15s. He was a gifted child, but emotionally vulnerable and still too young to face what was about to happen to him. The CIA carried out its mind control program at this university, using for this purpose the most varied techniques: administration of substances, hypnosis, electric shocks and the most sophisticated psychological techniques.

This Harvard experiment lasted almost 3 years, Kaczynski being one of those experimental subjects because he was easily manipulated, given his youth and because of his high IQ.

Did the Harvard experiment influence your subsequent criminal conduct?

To the question of whether the Harvard experiment formed in him that antisocial and reactive seed that culminated in the manufacture of several bombs to attack progress and technology, it must be said that we cannot speak of a cause-effect. In fact, there are many causes that shaped this behavior in him.

Kaczynski was a gifted child who never fit into any scenario. He was always the youngest student in every classroom, that boy who came to university as a teenager and who had to face abuse, contempt, ridicule and that government program, which far from bringing him any academic benefit, left traumatized.

The theory that this philosopher and mathematician ended up developing as a result of that Harvard experiment and his subsequent experiences is that technology, far from being an enabler, threatens humanity itself. According to him, people are slaves to all these technological advances, entities manipulated by a consumer society where we have all lost our ability to choose.

After leaving the university where he worked as a teacher, Kaczynski built himself a cabin in the woods on the outskirts of Lincoln to live as a hermit. It was there where he carried out his ideals, where he wrote his manifesto with an old typewriter and where he manufactured those sophisticated bombs with which he murdered 3 people.

To this day, his figure continues to inspire books and television series. He is now 75 years old, but they say that his mind is more active than ever and that he persists in his endeavor, in his personal revolution: to end techno-industrial society.