For all the reporting about the 50th-anniversary reunion dustup, an odd twist to the Harvard Unabomber story has not been mentioned: During Kaczynski’s sophomore year at Harvard, in 1959, he was recruited for a psychological experiment that, unbeknownst to him, would last three years. The experiment involved psychological torment and humiliation, a story I include in my book Mind Wars: Brain Research and the Military in the 21st Century.
The Harvard study aimed at psychic deconstruction by humiliating undergraduates and thereby causing them to experience severe stress. Kaczynski’s anti-technological fixation and his critique itself had some roots in the Harvard curriculum, which emphasized the supposed objectivity of science compared with the subjectivity of ethics. Before his arrest, he demanded that The Washington Post and The New York Times publish a 35,000-word manifesto called “Industrial Society and Its Future,” a document that expressed his philosophy of science and culture.