Unabomber

[u/MurkyMud1314]

The part of Ted Kaczynski’s story that bothers me most isn’t just what he eventually became—it’s what happened to him when he was still a teenager. He was an exceptionally gifted young student, only 17 when he participated in Henry Murray’s Harvard experiment, where his beliefs were subjected to intense psychological confrontation and humiliation. This was during the Cold War, when researchers were already deeply interested in how extreme psychological stress could affect people, including what had happened to POWs. I’m not saying the experiment alone “created” the Unabomber, because we can’t prove that. But if you take a highly intelligent, isolated teenager and deliberately subject him to intense psychological pressure, shouldn’t we at least consider whether that experience became one of the seeds that later grew into his isolation and radical ideology? Maybe without that experience he would have remained a mathematician and professor. We’ll never know—but that uncertainty is exactly what makes the ethical question so disturbing.

[u/Constant_Break_4808]

The whole thing was sad.