Henry David Thoreau is one of the most respected authors worldwide. He wrote both Walden and Civil Disobedience, which had a profound impact on many people. Gandhi, for example, studied Thoreau and got ideas from him. So did Tolstoy, Martin Luther King and Marx.
A shameless exercise would be to compare such a big thinker to one of the most notorious terrorists we know.
So let’s do it.
Who are we talking about?
50 Million $. That’s how much money the FBI has spent on his most expensive case to date: the Unabomber. That number still seems relatively low considering that he was active for 17 years, changed the way Americans mailed packages and virtually shut down air travel on the West Coast for some time.
The FBI gave Ted Kaczynski the name Unabomber as code for University and Airline Bombing.
The Unabomber was active from 1978 to 1995. During that time he planted homemade bombs at or sent them to universities and other locations including people’s homes, killing three people and injuring 23 others.
After his last bomb, he published a Manifesto, which is a very clear anti-technology statement. It’s long, not very well written, and has some very smart observations about society and technological change. In fairness, it’s hard not to agree with some of the points that he makes, and to draw some similarities with the author of Walden – even if most of his ideas are not original.
There are some obvious parallels between the two.
The obvious
The cabin: both retreated (one for two years, one for 20 years) to live in a cabin, of basically the same dimension, in the middle of the woods.
The love for nature: both would spend hours wandering the forest, observe earths magic, and look at animals.
Handy work: both were big on building their own stuff, and be as independent as possible from other people (they both did rely on some things from their neighbors – the Unabomber without permission). They build their own cabins and planted their own food.
Education: both studied at Harvard, and both were very intelligent.
Alright, I’ll confess: except for the studying at Harvard, we can all probably relate up to this point. Who has not fantasized with the idea of a simple life in the woods?
But the main parallels are found in their ideology.
The important
Both Thoreau and Kaczynski expressed criticism of certain aspects of modern society. They questioned the effects of industrialization, consumerism, and the loss of nature. They criticized modern technology and its impact on humanity, and reflected on the relationship between the individual and society.
Both believed that modern society had led to a detachment from the natural world and an erosion of authentic human experiences.
Check for yourself:
Kaczynski writes: “Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical necessities of life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are made necessary by the climate. But the leisured aristocrat obtains these things without effort.”
Thoreau: “The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only with our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which are our night-clothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds … The poor man is wont to complain that this is a cold world … The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot…”
Unabomber: “Most workers are someone else’s employee … must spend their days doing what they are told in the way they are told to do it. Even most people who are in business for themselves have only limited autonomy.”
Thoreau: “Most men… are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them… Actually, the laboring man has not the leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relation to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be any thing but a machine…”
They both criticized government interference, questioned if all technological change has been for the better, and reflected on modern ways of living compared to a life in nature.
Main difference
For all they had in common, they also were different in some very fundamental ways. Some are obvious, some are trivial, but I believe one of those difference explains most of the others.
My personal view is that one (Thoreau) acted out of love, and the other out of hate. Approximately. It sounds wishy-washy, but let me explain.
Thoreau was very social: he was interested in the people that lived nearby, in having discussions about ideas, and in understanding others. He admired many things from townspeople (even if he didn’t like some others), and he would often have big groups of people over in his little cabin.
He had good friends, and he did not cut his family off like the Unabomber did – he worked in the family business for most of his adult life.
He had good social skills, and valued his ties with the community. His writings feel like someone who appreciates nature a lot, including humans, and wants us to reflect on our choices.
Kaczynski, on the other hand started to cut everyone off in his Harvard years. At the start, he would socialize and debate his ideas, but over time he grew more and more antisocial.
Yes, during his life, he was able to communicate with other people well enough to go by, and not raise suspicions on him.
The thing is: it looks like the interactions he had with other people were all with a particular goal in mind, and it was never to just socialize for the sake of it, or interchange ideas. He wanted to get a tool borrowed from a neighbor, find a book at the library or know the date and time.
He cut his family off completely, and wanted nothing to do with him. He even told his brother to leave his fiancé, a woman that he never met, on the basis that she will hurt him.
He often sounds like those ‘all women are…’ boys, when he writes about women.
It doesn’t look like he started to plant bombs with the intention of making a political statement.
On the contrary, it looks more like he started to use bombs out of his anger (he admits to that anger in his journals frequently), to inflict pain, get revenge for what he thought was the world’s wrong-doings on him. He just later decided to use his notoriety to make a political statement.
He even admitted to acting out of revenge, and not as an altruist who is seeking to make the world better. But, for the sake of argument, let’s play with the idea that he might have done it to get his message across.
What if?
The interesting question is to consider what Thoreau would’ve thought of the Unabomber. It seems clear that with his usual stand of ‘non-violent’ civil resistance to injustices he would’ve condemned the acts of Kaczynski, but there’s some instance where he defended the use of violence.
One of those cases was the abolition of slavery, where he defended Brown, who was named “the most violent anarchist of the era”. Slavery seemed big enough a cause to legitimize violence, and with clear perpetrators to direct that violence towards.
Given the similarities in their ideology about technology, maybe Thoreau would have thought that the cause was also important enough to spread awareness with violence?
The thing is, when it comes to social issues, morals are messy. You often can’t talk your system into the change you want to see. You need to create some impact, some people need to feel it. If nobody is affected, who will care?
So, is blocking streets justified? Is it the most we can do? Can we damage public infrastructure to make a statement? What about the private property of whom we consider wrongdoers of society? What about inflicting some pain? Are there instances where murder is justified? Are you sure there are no instances where murder is justified?
Imagine you could abolish slavery forever by killing one person who controls it. Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn’t. But there’s a lot of people who would – and you can probably see why.
So if that instance might be justified, where do you draw the line? What’s the proportion of bad and good to be considered legitimate use of force? It’s the philosophical question of ‘do you kill one person to save two?’, with all the other scenarios.
Who was right?
I don’t agree with violence.
I believe that the genius of Thoreau and his great writing will always have a bigger and better impact than a manifesto with some very smart points but stained with so much blood and terror.
I can understand certain situations in the past needing violence to create a change that we now consider right, or some situations in the future, but that doesn’t change the fact that our biggest strength as Homo Sapiens is our capability to communicate with each other.
Civil disobedience, being it striking truck drivers, not changing seats in a bus, blowing the whistle on the NSA, or occupying Wall Street, is necessary.
Violence, on the other hand, is more difficult to defend.
But sharing views and ideas with someone goes a long way in understanding his motives for violent acts. We might think we could never defend a violent act, but if we agree with the cause, it’s easier for us to accept it as a necessary evil.
And maybe, just maybe, our beloved Thoreau, who inspired the most peaceful changemaker we’ve ever had (after Jesus Christ), would’ve understood the Unabomber.
leo burghaus 
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