Today marks the birthday of environmentalist/philosopher/mathematician/Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. While not exactly a day for celebration, it is a day to look back at a time before the internet, before Katrina, before Wikileaks, when a new digital environment was being created even as the actual, natural environment continued to become even more embattled. People argued about what was happening back then. People raised their voices and formed organizations. Kaczynski wrote books and mailed bombs. The Wiki does a great job of breaking down Kaczynski’s path from math prodigy to victim of psychological abuse to anarcho-environmentalist bomber…

Kaczynski was born and raised in Evergreen Park, Illinois. While growing up in Evergreen Park he was a child prodigy, excelling academically from an early age. Kaczynski was accepted into Harvard University at the age of 16, where he earned an undergraduate degree. He subsequently earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan. He became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967 at age 25. He resigned two years later.

While at Harvard, Kaczynski was among the twenty-two Harvard undergraduates used as guinea pigs in ethically questionable experiments conducted by Henry Murray.[6] In the experiment each student received a code name. Kaczynski was given the code name “Lawful”. Among other purposes, Murray’s experiments were focused on measuring people’s reactions under extreme stress. The unwitting undergraduates were submitted to what Murray himself called “vehement, sweeping and personally abusive” attacks. Assaults to their egos, cherished ideas and beliefs were the tools used to cause high levels of stress and distress. These experiments were conducted at Harvard University from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962[7] and were part of the CIA-sponsored Project MKUltra experiments.[8]

In 1971, he moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water, in Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient.[9] From 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski sent 16 bombs to targets including universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23. Kaczynski sent a letter to The New York Times on April 24, 1995 and promised “to desist from terrorism” if the Times or the Washington Post published his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future (also called the “Unabomber Manifesto”), in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization.

Kaczynski’s manifesto is the first place you should look to find out more about the man and his message. Lesser known is his short story “Ship of Fools,” which is an allegory about a ship heading for a disaster while the passengers and crew continually squabble, intractably distracted by their greedy and selfish demands of one another. Here is a charming stop-motion-animation of the tale, enacted by Lego figures…

Stay Awake!

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One of the weirdest cult music movies of all time, Space is the Place (1974) is a fictional film written by Joshua Smith and composer, poet, keyboardist and cosmic philosopher Sun Ra.

Born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914, Ra’s music ultimately found him following his muse all over the country from Chicago to Florida to Philadelphia, New York and beyond. In 1937, in a deep state of prayer, Ra claimed that he even took a trip to Saturn. According to the Wiki:

… my whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up … I wasn’t in human form … I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn … they teleported me and I was down on [a] stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop [attending college] because there was going to be great trouble in schools … the world was going into complete chaos … I would speak [through music], and the world would listen. That’s what they told me.

Following his vision, Ra took to his music with a fanatical devotion. It was a commitment he shared with the various incarnations of his band the Arkestra. The group often lived together communally and grew to include as many as 30 musicians, singers and dancers.

In 1973, Ra was appointed Artist in Residence at the University of California, Berkeley where he taught a course entitled “The Black Man in the Cosmos.” The reading list for the class included the works of Madame Blavatsky and Henry Dumas, the Tibetan Book of the Dead and assorted titles exploring Egyptian hieroglyphs, African-American folklore, and other topics. It was during his time at Berkeley that Ra met film producer Jim Newman who approached Ra about making a film based on his lectures at the university.

Space is the Place is a musical of sorts that mixes sci-fi time travel tropes with a Seventh Seal-esque struggle for the fate of the black race, pitting Ra against the evil Overseer in a winner-take-all card game. Of course, Ra is also chased by hapless, white government agents who try to kill him.

Featuring vintage performances of Ra and band in their heyday, the film’s Afro-Utopian themes provide an entertaining primer to both Ra’s cosmic poetry and his intergalactic world view.

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