What do Ted Kaczynski, Yukio Mishima and Rodion Raskolnikov have in common? Aside from the rampant egotism, acts of meaningless spectacle, it was probably that they were all revolutionary larpers. Kaczynski in his nonsensical mash of text he calls a manifesto advocates for the destruction of modern industrial society and Mishima advocates for the return of occupied Japan to an imperial age, but what do they do about it? The Unabomber, well, bombs a bunch of university professors instead of industrialists. Mishima stages a theatrical suicide 25 years after the fall of Imperial Japan. When he had the chance to die for his beloved empire, he dodged the draft. Maybe the 25 years of pseudointellectual nonsense he published in between these two events were solely to make up for that fact. And just like Mishima, Kaczynski's actions were more of that of a deranged madman than someone who actually wanted to carry out a revolution. These men did not build revolution. They were in the business of the spectacle, the theatrical. And in other words, they were both egomaniacal larpers.
Yet perhaps it would be too forgiving to call Kaczynski a lunatic. What he was was *lazy*. Lazy because he disregarded a lifetime of scholarship about his subjects, mountains of essays and books written by people far wiser and knowledgeable than he would ever be, lazy because understanding requires actual work, reading, comprehending, synthesising arguments and theses from a million different places. Kaczynski's genius proclivity for mathematics would be his downfall in political science. Because the social sciences could never be solved like an equation; history is a messy thing with too many variables and unknowns and moving parts.
Kaczynski's shocking inability to form a coherent thesis betrays his ignorance: in the famous introduction of his essay he attacks "leftism" as a manifestation of madness in the modern world, assaulting political correctness, socialism, women, et cetera. The mindboggling irony is that he spends more time attacking his imagined opponents - in real life and on paper - than industrialists and capitalists. Any attempt made in good faith to analyse his writing would surely end in failure, because this is a nonsensical piece, with points that go nowhere, unfounded and sweeping generalisations, disregard for centuries of theory by those who tackled his questions before he was a thought in his father's mind.
Ignoring the scholarship was such an egregious sin precisely because there's no such thing as a one-man revolution. Kaczynski should have known this, because his genius proofs in mathematics were built on the backs of mathematicians like Piranian, Shields and Baire. Which can only lead one to believe that his hastily made conclusions in social science are a result of egotism and laziness. The Unabomber advocates for revolution, yet he never actually says how. Judging by his actions, the Unabomber didn't even know himself. Or he was too much of a coward to do so, like his fascist Japanese counterpart.
True enough, he was as lazy in his actions as with his scholarship. In 1978, Ted Kaczynski began his infamous bombing campaign, resulting in 23 injured and 3 killed. Not a single one of these actions fought back against the technocratic society or helped to bring about his imagined revolution. At best, they were participants of the system. At worst, they were completely innocent. Academics, students and researchers. With an IQ of 167, it's hard to believe that he actually believed he was helping his cause. In reality they were acts of egoism, which makes me think of Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, who commits foul bloody murder just to prove that he can, to prove that he is the Napoleanic Great Man who is above other men. Rather than effect actual change, both actions are that of egotists seeking to show the world that they're better than the rest. Proto-incels would be a good term, I think. Because shame - not that celibacy is anything to be ashamed of, but perceived sexual inadequacy or sexual frustration - isn't serious enough to warrant creating a theory-model to justify one's superiority.
If Kaczynski was trying to create a revolution, it was utterly hopeless. Standing beside Che, Lenin and Ho, he is nothing but a larper. But an even sorrier coup exists. That is the Mishima Coup, or the Mishima Incident or the Mishima Jiken, in which a 45 year old pederast/fascist attempts to coup Japan and ends up disembowelling himself for attention. I don't know if Mishima was translated to French, but I imagine Debord rolling on the ground laughing when he found out about it.
I guess the moral of the story is that no man or woman is an island and revolution doesn't happen in a vacuum. Kaczynski was a sign of the rampant anti-intellectualism and ignorance that was to come in the twenty-first century. Men like Kaczynski are a dime a dozen, all opinions and zero evidence. What's interesting is that he appears to have pioneered the techbro archetype, someone who is so capable in one field but utterly hopeless in another. This is the danger of lack of political education: not only does the wrong side get supported, the lack of critical thinking means they accept anything that sounds remotely credible for the unequivocal capital-T Truth.
Blaming technology for all of society's ills is like saying Cortés' ships were to blame for colonisation. It's frustrating to see how close he was to achieving class consciousness, but I suppose that's too much to expect from someone belonging to the loony bin. This kind of anti-intellectualism isn't confined to loonie bins - it's particularly prevalent in young men from Central Europe, particularly Slovakian baristas in Turkish coffeeshops ranting to me about how immigrants have ruined Spain, France and Sweden beyond all recognition (they've never actually been there) while I listen bemusedly (I have). And like Kaczynski they would quicker blame the bisexual barista with a septum piercing before daring to criticise a billionaire industrialist. But what happens when the deliberately ignorant aren't misguided young men, but those who have accumulated the most capital?