A useful prototype for the coming superempowered individual, though he never achieved or intended a systemic level of mass carnage, would be the Unabomber, Dr. Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, a brilliant but mentally disturbed mathematician turned radical environmentalist and terrorist. Kaczynski, who spent years in relative penury in a wooden shack, possessing minimal financial resources, nevertheless managed to elude the FBI for seventeen years while carrying out an intermittant bombing campaign. Ultimately, Kaczynski’s terrorism resulted in the showcasing of his weird,anti-technology, ideology ( the “Unabomber Manifesto“) in the two premier media outlets of the American Establishment, The New York Times and The Washington Post, and subsequently his message went on to permeate much of the global media. While Kaczyinski’s body count and record of mayhem were relatively modest, considered in terms of a cost-to-benefit ratio and information operations, he might be the most successful terrorist of modern times.
Kaczynski demonstrated four characteristics that are likely to be shared with superempowered individuals:
a) “Lone Wolf” actor
c) Opportunity for leveraging Complex Systems
d) Profound alienation, isolation or societal disconnection
Kaczinski’s work as a student and professional academic in higher mathematics were regarded as highly impressive by his mentor and colleagues and reputedly his IQ was rated between 160 and 170 ( 2). While there is considerable debate among psychometricians about quantifying the upper limits of human intelligence, whatever the scale used, Kaczynski’s mental capacity would safely fall within the upper 0.5 % of the population and represents an outlier of ability. Most likely, the Unabomber’s level of IQ substantially exceeds what would be required to operate as a superempowered individual and the population base for such actors would be the upper 5 %; those people capable of understanding, calculating or estimating the probable outcome of multiple interacting variables.
According to testimony from family members and associates, Kaczynski suffered from emotional and social deficits relative to his unusual intellectual gifts and has been described variously as clinically paranoiac or schizophrenic by psychiatrists and psychologists. Kaczynski’s psychological profile reports his social alienation from his peers starting even before the onset of adolescence (3). By the time of his terrorist career, Kaczynski was writing vitriolic letters to family members, accusing them of abuse and harrassment and his immediate social network was virtually non-existent. Mental or emotional disturbance, especially forms of clinical depression, coincides with unusually high levels of productive creativity, while the unusual sensitivity of profoundly gifted individuals can make them ripe for disappointment(4).
Complex systems provide the opportunity or environment for superempowered individuals to initiate system perturbations or cascading effects that ripple across multiple systems, including the political, economic and physical. Kaczynski’s manifesto (as well as his targeting of airlines and technologists) clearly indicated that he grasped, however warped his agenda, the concept of interacting systems and downstream effects. Intelligence and will are not enough; the actor must have or conspire to gain access to a “choke point” from which he can, in jujitsu fashion, leverage the connectivity of a complex system against itself.
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