one of the few good fictionalized treatments of the unabomber is ted
k (2021), which depicts him not as a tortured genius but an off-put-
ting loner. it's an appropriately sympathetic portrait of a man who
feels the world has no place for him, and has attempted to retreat
from it but found the retreat increasingly impossible. the sounds of
atvs and chainsaws are not symbols of environmental destruction so
much as encroachments of the social, threatening to reintegrate him
back into the world. by dealing with ted not as a set of ideas but a
human being, the film offers something much more incisive and truth-
ful than procedural dreck like /manhunt: unabomber/. ted kaczynski's
ideas are not particularly interesting (as the manhunt series points
out in one of its better moments, he mostly just apes jacques ellul)
nor was the investigation to find him (the fbi sat around with their
thumbs up their asses until his brother ratted on him).
the romantic phobia of technology is not new, nor is its connection
to a disavowal of the social. ernesto de martino gets into this with
heidegger---heidegger insists on breaking free of rationalization by
finding an authentic life outside the tyranny of 'das Man' (the one,
the rhetorical 'they'). most people are unthinkingly blinkered by
received wisdom about 'what one does,' says heidegger, and to live
authentically is to break out of it---by joining the nazi party, in
heidegger's case). many existentialists have some variation on this,
e.g. sartre's 'bad faith' (living unreflectively by social scripts).
de martino is impatient with this, being an anthropologist. social
custom /is/ the basis of authenticity, it is the foundation of our
being in the world with others---and being with others is the only
thing we can reasonably call 'the world.' the 'bad faith' maneuver
is to pretend one can live outside of it. de martino makes a gesture
at the 'world-ending experience' (weltuntergangserlebnis) of schizo-
phrenic patients. a common delusion of clinical psychotics is that
the world has ended or is ending, and that the patient is responsi-
ble either as a singular culprit or savior. while this apocalypse is
a delusion in a literal sense, it does signify an 'end of the world'
in the sense of the patient's exit from the social interchange that
constitutes 'the world.'
