Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

June 27, 2023

The Unabomber, Technology, Nihilism, and a World without Moral Order

Contrasting Ted Kaczynski with a deeply religious, and ethically heroic, thinker who influenced him.

Earlier this month, Ted Kaczyznski—the mathematician-turned-terrorist who murdered three people and left several others with lifelong injuries—died, apparently of suicide, in a federal prison. Stephen Hayward re-examines both Kaczynski’s 1995 “manifesto” and Alston Chase’s 2003 biography. To Hayward, Kaczynski’s “views on technology are neither original nor wholly ill-founded,” and owe much to such philosophers as Jacques Ellul, who was honored by Yad Vashem for helping to save French Jews during the Holocaust:

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