Horror, Sleaze and Trash.

h4le-bopp:

We know the basic fact, that Adam Lanza was interested in Ted Kaczynski by his own statement: “I’m normally not interested in non-Kaczynski bombers”.

If we look at occasions where Adam revealed his world-view we indeed see many similarities between his philosophy and those of Ted Kaczynski. We do not know, if Adam adopted these views because he was influenced by Kaczynski or if his attraction to Kaczynski was born out of his world-view. I think a mixture of both might be most likely.

Adam repeatedly mentioned that he believed socialisation and modern society in general to be the root cause of mental illnesses, especially depression:

 “What is “chemical imbalance” even supposed to mean? Why don’t hunter-gatherers need antidepressants? I swear, a psychiatrist could take a perfectly fine chimpanzee away from its jungle, confine it in captivity, and when the chimp gets depressed, they would say, “This chimpanzee has a chemical imbalance. What? A correlation between enculturation and depression? But culture brings us meaning and beauty. Get out of my way, cavemanwannabe. I need to prescribe this chimp some Xanax”.” (Adam Lanza in a post on the Shocked Beyond Belief Forum)

Ted Kaczynski also stated this several times and based it on his theory of Power Process, which indicates that modern civilisation lacks several of the most important requirements that humans need to have a purposeful life, which causes severe psychological problems in modern society. The theory is too complex, to lay it out in detail here. However, Kaczynski combined this theory with those of “learned helplessness” and I think his explanations towards this theory are a very good summary of his opinion towards a link between modern civilisation and depression:

 „Take an animal, subject it repeatedly to a painful stimulus, and each time block its efforts to escape from the stimulus. The animal becomes frustrated. Repeat the process enough times, and the state of frustration gives way to one of depression. The animal just gives up. The animal has now acquired “learned helplnessness”. If, at a later time, you subject the animal to the same painful stimulus, it will not try to escape from the stimulus even if it could easily do so. (…) An animal can be partly “immunized” to learned helplessness: If an animal is given prior experience in overcoming obstacles through effort, it will be much more resistant to learned helplessness (hence also to depression) than an animal that has not had such experience. For example, if caged pigeons are able to get food only by pushing a lever on an apparatus that gives them one grain of wheat or the like for each push of the lever, then they will later acquire learned helplessness much less easily than pigeons that have not had to work for their food. (…) the theory of learned helplessness squares very neatly with my own personal experience and my impressions of human nature gained from observation of others. The need for purposeful, successful effort implies a need for competence, or a need to be able to exercise control, because one’s goals can’t be attained if one does not have the competence, or the power to exercise control, that is necessary to reach the goals.”

(Ted Kaczynski in a letter to David Skrbina)

Adam mentioned, that people in so-called “primitive” societies don’t have the same psychological problems, that are found in modern people:

“(…) but that’s even more of an indication why they should be needing antidepressants, not the opposite. And yet somehow, it’s we domesticated humans that need antidepressants while hunter-gatherers are the happy ones.“

(Adam Lanza in a post on the Shocked Beyond Belief Forum)

Although Ted Kaczynski admits, that there is little information about the psychological status of Hunter-Gatherer societies, he still can provide us with many examples that indicate, that life in primitive societies may have caused a lot less psychological stress than life in modern society. I think the most powerful might be this:

“Robert Wright, without citing his source, states that “when a Western anthropologist tried to study depression among the Kaluli of New Guinea, he couldn’t find any.””

(Ted Kaczynski in a letter to David Skrbina)

In his phone call to John Zerzan, Adam described socialisation (in form of child raising) as a form of unnatural cruelty:

“Civilization isn’t something which just happens to gently exist without us having

to do anything, because every newborn child — human child — is born in a chimp-like state, and civilization is only sustained by conditioning them for years on end so that they’ll accept it for what it is. And since we’ve gone through this conditioning, we can observe a human family raising a human child, and I’m sure that even you have trouble intuitively seeing it as something unnatural, but when we see a chimp in that position, we [visually?] know that there’s something profoundly wrong with the situation.“
(Adam Lanza in his phone call to AnarchyRadio)

Although I am not aware of any remarks from Ted Kaczynski about child raising, he also wrote about autonomy as a important part of the Power Process and the fact that modern society nearly causes autonomy to cease to exist. He also conceptualized the issue of oversocialization:

“Oversocialization can lead to low self-esteem, a sense of

   powerlessness, defeatism, guilt, etc. One of the most important means

   by which our society socializes children is by making them feel

   ashamed of behavior or speech that is contrary to society’s

   expectations. If this is overdone, or if a particular child is

   especially susceptible to such feelings, he ends by feeling ashamed of

   HIMSELF. Moreover the thought and the behavior of the oversocialized

   person are more restricted by society’s expectations than are those of

   the lightly socialized person. The majority of people engage in a

   significant amount of naughty behavior. They lie, they commit petty

   thefts, they break traffic laws, they goof off at work, they hate

   someone, they say spiteful things or they use some underhanded trick

   to get ahead of the other guy. The oversocialized person cannot do

   these things, or if he does do them he generates in himself a sense of

   shame and self-hatred. The oversocialized person cannot even

   experience, without guilt, thoughts or feelings that are contrary to

   the accepted morality; he cannot think “unclean” thoughts. And

   socialization is not just a matter of morality; we are socialized to

   confirm to many norms of behavior that do not fall under the heading

   of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological

   leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down

   for him. In many oversocialized people this results in a sense of

   constraint and powerlessness that can be a severe hardship. We suggest

   that oversocialization is among the more serious cruelties that human

   beings inflict on one another.”

(Ted Kaczynski in his Manifesto “Industrial Society and its Future)

When Adam asked why people in Hunter Gatherer societies do not need antidepressants, another User answered with: “Because they died at twenty-five.”

Adam replied with: “Only if you factor in infant mortality”. Although I can’t find the part at this moment (I might add it later) I am 100% sure, that Ted Kaczynski once used exactly the same argument. He even calculated what the usual life expectancy of people in primitive societies was, if child mortality is included and came to a much higher result. Adam did not only talked about modern society as causing psychological problems, but also violence:

“(…) And when his owner’s — owner’s friend arrived, he knew that she was trying to coax him back into his life of domestication, and he couldn’t handle that, so — he attacked her, and anyone else who approached them. And dismissing his attack as simply being the senseless violence and impulsiveness of a chimp, instead of a human, is wishful thinking at best. His attack can be seen entirely parallel to the attacks and random acts of violence that you bring up on your show every week- committed by humans, which the mainstream also has no explanation for, and…actual humans — I just don’t think it would be such a stretch to say that he very well could have been a teenage mall shooter or something like that.”

(Adam Lanza in his phone call to AnarchyRadio)

Although I didn’t find anything written by Ted Kaczynski about modern civilisation causing violence per se, he always saw his own violent acts as being a response to modern civilisation. In an interview, he once talked about the point, where he started to consider violence:

“The best place, to me, was the largest remnant of this plateau that dates from the tertiary age. It’s kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was even a waterfall there. It was about a two days hike from my cabin. That was the best spot until the summer of 1983. That summer there were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I went back to the plateau and when I got there I found they had put a road right through the middle of it. You just can’t imagine how upset I was. It was from that point on I decided that, rather than trying to acquire further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the system. Revenge. That wasn’t the first time I ever did any monkeywrenching, but at that point, that sort of thing became a priority for me… I made a conscious effort to read things that were relevant to social issues, specifically the technological problem. For one thing, my concern was to understand how societies change, and for that purpose I read anthropology, history, a little bit of sociology and psychology, but mostly anthropology and history.“

(Ted Kaczynski in an Interview with Earth First! Journal)

Another remarkable point is, that Adam choose the Radio show of John Zerzan for his call and described himself towards Zerzan as “a fan of your writing”. It is well known, that John Zerzan did several visits to Ted Kaczynski in prison and also wrote letters to him. I am not sure, what their personal relationship is. The press quickly jumped to the conclusion, that Zerzan and Kaczynski are friends. However, in his article “The truth about primitive life: A critique of Anarcho-primitivism”, Kaczynski criticizes Zerzan for having left-wing-“politically correctness” influences in his interpretation of primitive societies.