Another “Mind for Murder”?

Recalling Alston Chase’s analysis of the Unabomber, raising the question—can the United States survive the nihilism our educational system now promulgates at every level of our schooling?

We don’t have all the facts yet about Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, but early reports indicate he may be another radicalized individual who decided violence is necessary. How did he get radicalized?

The Wall Street Journal reports this morning:

A review of his reading diet suggested that, at some point, his ideas about activism had crossed into an interest in violence. In January, he wrote a chilling review on the Goodreads book-review site of Theodore Kaczynski’s “Industrial Society and Its Future,” also known as “The Unabomber Manifesto.” He gave it four stars.

In Mangione’s review, he wrote: “A take I found online that I think is interesting”:

“Had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere and at the end of the day, he’s probably right…. When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.”

It does not appear, as was originally speculated, that Mangione was someone with a direct grievance against United Healthcare for denying coverage for a medical treatment, though there are reports that his mental state spiraled down on account of chronic pain after back surgery. He seems, however, to have sought out Thompson specifically, just as the Unabomber sought out specific individuals for their role in “industrial society” as targets for his bombs.

Like the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski (who was a math prodigy with degrees from Harvard and the University of Michigan), Mangione is far from being a “marginalized” or “oppressed” person. He comes from a wealthy family, and attended fancy prep schools before matriculating at Penn.

I immediately went to my bookshelf to retrieve Alston Chase’s 2003 book about the Unabomber, A Mind for Murder: The Education of the Unabomber and the Origins of Modern Terrorism. Chase’s thesis was simple: Kaczynski was radicalized as a student at Harvard in the 1960s. Chase’s concluding chapter is bracing, and deserves an extended excerpt:

It was at Harvard that Kaczynski encountered the culture of despair and found the ideas he would put into the manifesto. It was there that he became a true believer in the scientific method and its philosophy, positivism, which allowed him to think that morality was meaningless. It was there that, by his own admission, his developing alienation bloomed into disillusionment with society. . .

Elsewhere in his chapter Chase laid out how Harvard, like all of our elite institutions, succumbed to a radical moral skepticism that curdled into nihilism. And thus:

Kaczynski’s brilliant mind proved fertile ground for these thoughts. Although clearly neurotic, the best clinical evidence suggests he is quite sane. He willingly chose to kill, and his prideful intellect provided the rationale for doing so. . . The same social and intellectual conditions that influenced him continue to flourish today.

Bright youths now are no less alienated than they were when Kazcynski was growing up. High schools still incubate alienation, particularly among brighter students, as the authoritarian and anti-intellectual atmosphere of Kaczynski’s generation continues. Colleges, high schools, even grade schools still propagate the culture of despair, scaring youth with tales of impending ecological collapse. In the universities, the crisis of reason deepens as traditional disciplines of the liberal arts—literature, philosophy, and history, are subverted by politicizing methodologies or give ground to social sciences such as psychology, sociology, and political science, all dedicated, according to their practicioners, to “prediction and control” of human behavior. . .

Call it the crisis of modernism. What began as an academic problem—a loss of confidence in ancient Western notions about reason—has transmogrified into a vast political assault on contemporary civilization.

In another striking passage, Chase sounded remarkably like Harry Jaffa:

The crisis of reason was a loss of faith in what the Declaration of Independence called the 'self-evident' truths that individual rights and the legitimacy of government derived from 'the laws of nature.' By the 1950s, this belief had been undermined in academic circles especially (as we have seen) by the success of science and its companion philosophy, positivism. And this philosophy convinced many—including Kaczynski—that as only empirically verifiable statements are meaningful, moral and political beliefs, such as those expressed in the Declaration, being untestable, are non-rational as well. Government rests, they concluded, not on 'laws of nature' as the founding fathers supposed, but on power alone. By removing ethics from the equation, positivism laid the foundation for radical ideologies—including Kaczynski's—which preached that 'the system' was illegitimate and violent overthrow acceptable.

In other words, our education system, from the high schools that assign Howard Zinn in order to make students despise America for its supposed wholesale injustice, to our universities that teach unalloyed nihilism dressed up as “postmodernism” or “critical theory,” is mass producing new generations of alienated souls who have contempt for our culture and history. To be sure, 99.99% of students do not become murderers, but as Chase rightly puts it, “Although the vast majority of educated people never turn to crime, history reveals that intellect is, indeed, a prerequisite for accomplishing mass murder.”

This is happening already. Move over Mumia and Che; you have new competition.

And far short of Kazcynski or Mangione, we see growing numbers of young people who think it is necessary and justified to deface artwork in museums, block roads, and conduct anti-Semitic pogroms in the cause of “justice.” They learn this poison from our educational system. Kacyznski himself said in a letter to Chase after he was caught and jailed: “The majority of people are pessimistic or cynical about existing institutions, there is widespread alienation and directionlessness among young people.”

And thus the key question everyone needs to confront directly: Can America survive the rot in our educational and cultural institutions? And if not, what is to be done about it?

For more, see also my article from last year, “The Ghost of the Unabomber Lives On.”