TIME Magazine
April 22, 1996 Volume 147, No. 17
ROBERT BLY
No one has written more vividly about today's troubled male psyche than the poet Robert Bly, author of the best-selling Iron John. In his new book, The Sibling Society, Bly argues that we have become a culture of squabbling siblings, determined to end authority. TIME asked Bly to reflect on the Unabomber suspect's behavior.
The actions of the Unabomber give evidence of a protest against technology, and possibly a serious form of mental illness. Details of his life also show a pattern of regression to younger and younger stages, a pattern we may see repeated around us in the coming years.
Henry David Thoreau went off to live in a cabin he built himself. But while he was there, he studied the classics and complicated literature; he conducted elaborate observations of classified plants, herbs and trees, completed many journals. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said of Thoreau, he knew the exact date when each plant within 30 miles of Concord would blossom. And he remained close to his family and friends. In the woods he became more adult.
Through our advertising and consumer culture, we have created a society of half-adults that invites men and women to remain immature. In the case of Theodore John Kaczynski, the retreat to Montana without the community of his peers seems to be a retreat to childhood. His withdrawal has the unresponsive quality of a boy who wants to show his parents they can't abandon him--he will abandon them.
But this type of regression contains one immense surprise: the resulting child-adult turns out to be not the radiant and innocent child Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagined but rather a hard, half-blind, furiously offended, rancorous, enraged infant capable of any atrocity. As the late Austrian child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein noted, the thwarted infant feels a desire to tear up everything, wipe out both parents.
To kill grown people at random with concealed explosives is a cunning acting-out of that secret longing. Hitting out at others from hidden places happens more and more often, especially on the Internet. There, ugly and hostile words emerge from people no one can see. The decency of the adult in community has always depended on the fact that other adults can see him or her.
Kaczynski's spiteful return to childhood included a desire to kill "high" persons. To the Oklahoma bombers, all people who work in government offices are "high"; to the Unabomber, all people who work in corporate offices are "high." Some corporate officials are corrupt, but no distinctions are made. Improving society by killing people is a naivete we are cultivating in our culture. Action movies say that every day.
What we could take away from the grievous events is a grasp not of the Unabomber's psychology but of our own, which is full of fantasies. The Unabomber had hoped to move against technology--which does need slowing down--but he did it from a hidden place. That annulled the act. Oddly enough, his isolation as he fought technology is comparable to the isolation that surrounds the people who are consumed by technology. It's possible that the men and women who give themselves to technology as the ultimate solution are living out a fantasy as deep as the Unabomber's.