[MUSIC]
This is entitled opinions with Robert Harrison coming to you from the studios of KZSU on the Stanford campus.
It's our first show after a long summer break.
I hope you had a good one too wherever you are.
It seems that my guest today is having some delays getting to the studio.
So while we wait for him to arrive, let me take the time to thank all of you who sent emails,
either to me or to hear us find salt over the summer.
We received quite a few of them and as usual, almost all of them were exceptionally articulate, thoughtful,
and appreciative communications entitled opinions, the most intelligent listeners in the world.
So thank you all very kindly.
[MUSIC]
Let me also take this opportunity to give you a brief update about where things stand within title opinions.
First off, I should mention that during this fall season, our shows will not air on KZSU on a weekly basis.
Your host has some travel commitments and we're also in the midst of transitioning to a new production manager,
more about that in a moment.
That's why we've decided not to apply for a regular time slot on the KZSU fall quarter schedule.
But rather than putting title opinions on hold until January, we're going to record at least a few shows
and post them online and on our iTunes podcast before we broadcast them on KZSU during the winter quarter.
What this means for those of you who listen to us either online or through our iTunes podcast is that you can expect at least three or four new shows
from us between now and Christmas.
We'll make up for the rest during the winter quarter when we otherwise would have taken a break.
Let me also mention that many of you after listening to the Jimmy Hendrix show we aired at the end of last season have been lobbying me for a show on the doors.
I've heard you loud and clear and I'll do my best to bring you one sometime this fall.
In the meantime.
[MUSIC]
We might even ask what that line means when we talk about the doors.
By the way, our Dean of Humanities, Steven Hinton who is well known to our regular listeners has very generously provided some extra funds for entitled opinions.
This helps a lot so I would like to thank Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences for the contribution.
It's much appreciated.
I mentioned that we're in the process of transitioning to a new production manager.
This is no small matter for nothing is more important when it comes to this show than the production manager.
For the past two years, Harris Fine-Sud has done an outstanding job of recording, editing and posting our shows of maintaining our website,
of sending out weekly announcements and of tending to a whole host of other tasks, large and small that make a show like entitled opinions operate smoothly.
As most of you know, we're not a professional operation here and without Harris Fine-Sud, there would have been no entitled opinions for the last couple of years.
[APPLAUSE]
>> Harris, why don't you come on in here and say goodbye to our listeners.
Thanks, Robert.
Thanks, everybody.
It's been a pleasure to help reduce the show.
>> Well, a pleasure and maybe even a learning experience.
I really should tell our listeners that Harris is starting his fifth year of graduate studies in comparative literature.
And we'll be devoting most of his time this year to writing a really fascinating dissertation on,
well, Harris, why don't you tell our listeners what you're going to be writing about?
>> I'm ready to do a dissertation on a comparative study of poets in the US and Latin America from World War II to the Latin American boom in the late 1960s,
looking at the way in which the rhetoric of pan-Americanism influenced these poets as the US became a world power.
Pan-Americanism is not an airline, by the way.
That's great.
It sounds like a not just an air, not just an air, not just an air, it's a defunct one in any case.
But it sounds like a future show, Harris, so once you get done with that, maybe we'll have you on for a report on what you found.
So by the way, those of you who are all timers, remember that the first few years of entitled opinions, we had a production manager who was my ex-student David Lummis,
I'm happy to report that David is now in his second year as an assistant professor of Italian literature at Yale University.
And if nothing else, this shows that working as the producer of entitled opinions is not detrimental to your career.
So for all you English professors out there who are tuning in, if your department is looking for an outstanding young scholar of 20th century poetry,
you should grab Harris fine-sawed right now.
You can't do better than Harris, I can assure you of that.
The person who will be taking over from Harris is a graduate student from the Department of French and Italian, that's my department, by the way.
Her name is Christy Wampol, she's also working on a very interesting dissertation on essayistic fiction.
I'm sure we'll have occasion to hear more about her topic in the future, but meanwhile, let me welcome Christy on board.
In fact, she's right here, so maybe Christy would like to say hello in person to our audience.
Yes, hello to all the entitled opinions listeners.
We're very happy to have you on board.
So before turning on our tape today, the three of us were discussing the wisdom or folly of my desire to try out a new theme song this year.
Harris thinks that's a very risky thing to do, right, Harris?
Well, it really seems like it has the potential to backfire Robert, if you think about all the listeners that write in.
Same, don't change a thing.
If you think about the marketing studies, which would suggest that people always react negatively to changes in protocols or music or logos of their favorite radio and TV shows.
It certainly annoys me when that happens.
Yeah, I know what that's all about.
I mean, you won't find anyone more fond of ritualized repetition than me.
And in fact, one day I'm going to do a show on repetition as the very essence of biological and cultural life.
So I know what those research studies are saying, but I still think I'd like to try out our new song.
What do you say, Christy?
Well, Robert, it can't hurt to shake things up a bit.
I mean, as many people might like it, as don't like it, you can't know if you don't try.
The listeners are bound to groove to the new song if they give it a chance.
If it sparks a popular revolt, you can always go back to Enigma.
That's true.
In title, opinions brigade rises up and revolt.
That would be great.
I'm not encouraging, by the way.
Okay, why don't we give it a shot?
So look who just walked into the studio.
Jean-Marie, I posted it this.
Salut Jean-Marie.
It's used more than the concerto, Robert.
It's used for the traditional composers.
[speaking in foreign language]
Okay, Saba, are you guys ready to go?
Because we have the studio B reserved only until 4 o'clock.
That's just over an hour for now.
So let's just start up right away.
Jean-Marie, are you ready to go?
Yes, I am.
Okay, we're going to go.
[music]
This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you
from the Stanford campus.
[music]
Every now and then, but only infrequently,
sociologists come across something quite interesting in their research.
I read somewhere that there are three main types of human conversation.
The overwhelming majority of conversations around the world consists of gossip.
In other words, of people talking about other people, mostly about people they know.
This applies across the board, regardless of race, gender, class, or culture.
Then there's a comparatively tiny proportion of conversations that deals with politics.
And then there's that rarest and most beautiful flower of human intercourse,
namely conversation about ideas.
It seems that this third category is so uncommon that it barely even registers on the sociological data radar,
just like the audience size of entitled opinions.
On this show, we almost never gossip.
Every now and then, but only in passing, do we talk about politics?
We simply don't shout loud enough for politics.
That's for ideas.
Well, that's what our garden is full of.
[MUSIC]
The flowers that blossom in this garden of ideas are of diverse species, diverse forms, and diverse origins.
We're not afraid to plant anything in the soil of entitled opinions as long as it thinks.
That's why our show today is about the ideas of a man who is not only a hater of university professors,
but also a convicted serial killer.
I mean Ted Kuzinski, otherwise known as the Unabommer.
You know, that stands for university airlines because Kuzinski had a habit of targeting the airline companies as well as university academics.
No, don't open that package.
Don't open that package.
[MUSIC]
Kuzinski, you didn't get me.
And I know you hate computers and computer scientists.
But as I say in Italian, he desprét saccom para, who despises buys.
I'll bet you're using a computer in the Federal Administrative Maximum Facility Supermax.
In Florence, Colorado, where you're serving out a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
So if you happen to be listening to this podcast on your supermax computer,
I want to tell you that although I believe you're a pathetic human being,
with all the instincts of a tyrant and the emotional disposition of an adolescent,
we're going to take seriously your ideas today, some of which I guess deny fine cogent, persuasive,
and worthy enough to discuss on a radio show.
This, despite the fact that you're a criminal of the most cowardly sort,
blowing up innocent victims at a safe distance from the crime scene.
I'm not sure how my guess sees it, but you can be sure that one of the first questions I will ask him is why we should be discussing the ideas of our murderer and mentally unstable, if not insane individual.
His name is Jean-Marie, I post-tullied this, Professor of French Literature here at Stanford.
Many of you out there will remember him from a show we did a few years back on Arbét Camus,
which remains one of my all time favorite shows.
Jean-Marie has devoted some significant time to Ted Kazinski.
In 1996, he published a French translation of Kazinski's Manifesto Industrial Society and its future,
with a 60 page introduction. Later on, in July 1996, after Kazinski had been arrested,
he published a book about him called La Faire Una Bonbeir. Is that how you would say it in French, Jean-Marie?
Yes. La Faire Una Bonbeir.
This next month, I think in October, he'll be coming out with a new book including his French translation of industrial society and his future as well as an anti-industrial manifesto,
that doesn't have a title that Kazinski wrote it back in 1971. Jean-Marie is also finishing a study tentatively called Theodore Kazinski,
"Ekrivat et terro diest," which considers him above all as a writer. Jean-Marie, welcome to the program.
Thank you, Robert, for inviting me to your program.
I think it's fair to say that you would not be spending so much time translating and writing about the Una Bonbeir,
were you not in some sense fascinated by him.
What exactly is it that fascinates you about Ted Kazinski, if anything?
I don't know if the term fascinates is the most appropriate one.
However, there is certainly something which at the beginning was very amazing for me.
In our academic profession, one of the most aspect of our work is to publish each other,
as an encounter, difficulties to publish.
But nobody, as far as I know, has ever killed in order to have his or her book published.
And I think at the beginning it was the fact that Kazinski would kill in order to have his book published,
and that it was written in his manifesto that he had purposely killed people in order to have his ideas known by many people,
which probably quote unquote "fesinated me."
I give a new twist to the term "publish or perish."
Also, on our previous show on Albert Camus, you said that Gally Ma, the son of Gally Ma,
who was in the car with Albert Camus, fulfilled the secret subconscious fantasy of every publisher,
which is to kill the author.
Yes.
This is a different kind of public.
Yes, yes.
But beyond your joke, we change like a lot, it means that there is probably somewhere
a link between writing and death and the problem of death.
I don't know what it is exactly, but I suspect there is a link between the two.
I remember when the industrial society in this future was first published in the New York Times and Washington Post in 96, I believe it was.
Yes.
You and I were both 95.
95, right.
He was arrested in 96 a few months later, but you were both very taken with the content of this manifesto.
It is a strident critique of technology.
And of course, while it probably never would have met the kind of academic standards for publication because of the stylistic idiosyncrasies,
he was expressing ideas about our technological society that seemed to have a freshness,
and so far as they were completely direct, they were not qualified, and they seemed to go to the heart of a certain malaise in our civilization.
And you certainly had found some resonance in that manifesto with some of your own sociological critiques of our technological civilization.
Is that correct?
Yes.
I have been always interested in extremist and avant-garde ideas, which does not mean that I share these ideas, but I admit that I find interest in extremist ideas,
such as, for example, the ideas expressed by the situationist during the 60s and the 70s.
When the Ted Kajinsky's manifesto appeared in the Washington Post, it had many connections with the way of writing that the situationist had used for years and years.
And it has no direct claim between the two because I doubt that Kajinsky has ever heard of the situationist movement.
But the reciprocity is not true because now the pro-situationist people have a lot of knowledge of Kajinsky's work and they have retranslate his manifesto.
Well, to make a long story short, the connection between these two extremist groups, I found it very interesting, except that the situationist even gives the proclaims themselves to be the same.
The same thing that he has been saying to himself to be revolutionary, stayed within the Vietnam society, where Kajinsky put himself outside the Vietnam society, and in a certain way was more faithful to his own ideas and kept them or maintained at the level of consistency, which is almost unbelievable in our society.
Would you agree that Kajinsky not revealed himself to have been someone who was embodied incarnated in his own existential choices of living in the wilderness in a little shack, and who had not adopted a lifestyle consistent with its ideas that these ideas would not have nearly the same sort of swagent that they have.
As a result of his choice in favor of living this kind of quasi-wild life.
In other words, many theorists have had ideas similar and more sophisticated than Kajinsky's, but perhaps don't have the same sort of immediate claim to authenticity because they are not lived out.
If a university professor will have a very hard time getting similar ideas as Kajinsky read and disseminated because of the existential choice.
If we can take an example, for example, Jacques Elul was worked at an enormous influence on Kajinsky, remained within our society, so he holds several books against technocracy and technology in our society.
But his book never adds the same impact that Kajinsky's book, "Industrial Society and its Fittier," and that is definitely due to the fact that Kajinsky lived in a wild and veron man for so many years.
And as basically what he has done, he has created the link between his writing and his social practice. Whether we like it or not, it is a fact that we have to discuss probably.
And I would imagine that the writings we can talk about this later, but the writings that he might deliver in prison will be of less interest just because of the fact that he is not any longer in this wild environment as an outlaw.
He doesn't speak with the authority of an outlaw if I can use an oxymoron.
Exactly now he is more of a erud
a lot of the exchanges that he has been doing, and what I can say about his current writing is that it is more likely something more academic, he discuss academic books and academics ideas.
Well certainly when he was arrested there were those dramatic photos of him being taken away by policemen all in their uniforms and he looked with his long hair, his long beard and his bandana.
He had the look of a hermit, he had the look of a saint, he had the look of a almost holy man vis-a-vis these other people who representing the law.
And there was a certain charisma in the persona that I think lent a shade of authority to that manifesto that we read.
But nevertheless let me just state some of the facts of what he was accused of and then later indicted of in all 16 bombs that he sent which injured 23 people and killed three people.
They were at least attributed to Kizinski and he ended up pleading guilty in order to spare himself the death sentence and I know that maybe he wants to revisit that plea bargain.
But we don't want to get into the legal issues at least not now.
What we would like to do is probe what are the central ideas particularly of the industrial future and its future.
So, as we mentioned is a critique of technology but very important frame for his critique of technology is his critique of the over social socialization that people in our society are subjected to.
And he interprets contemporary, especially academic leftism as a symptom of this over socialization.
What does he mean by that?
Probably the intellectual background of Kizinski's idea is a conception of human beings going back to 18 and 19th century European thinking.
For him the ideal is the individual who is in control of his or her own fate.
And who is capable of surviving in a state of nature which is hostile to human beings.
And he has been himself living like that for more than 18 years.
Whereas he considered that contemporary society in which we are connected to everyone through technology.
As we can our capacity to survive and to achieve what he calls the power process.
That means a human accomplishment of our different potentialities both physical and intellectual.
And it targets the left or the so called left in academic milieu to show that instead of developing a sort of niche and conception of humanity.
They are more attracted by the victimization side of our life.
They are always on the side of the victim because they project themself on the victim.
So his acquisition are twofold.
On one side, he argues that far from being rebel these people are a billion citizens of the men on society.
And second, far from creating liberation for human beings.
Their discourse, their way of behaving force people to be even more dependent of the big technological machine.
And on Z suspect, at least his idea is deserved to be discussed.
Well, would you say that his criticism that leftists are always taking the side of victims is part of the fact that they as leftists are trying to, as he argues, compensate for their lack of personal power, of their disempowerment by the technological society through over socialization.
And therefore, they themselves feel victimized but are not expressing it directly.
And if I can quote from the manifesto there, he's talking about leftism as a movement of people who are over socialized.
He says the moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel, and act in a completely moral way.
Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel, and act morally imposes a severe burden on them.
In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanation for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin.
We use the term over socialized to describe such people.
I think that when people like you and I read that, we think of Frederick Nietzsche, we think of Freud, we think of all the great tradition of the hermeneutics of suspicion,
that is suspicious of people's avowed motives and goals and tries to penetrate to a different, unconfessed, unavowed source of motivations.
And he seems to fall into this genealogy of suspicious thinkers now.
Absolutely, absolutely, I agree with you. He has certainly a point, a finger on something very important in the unconscious of our own civilization if I may use the term unconscious.
But at the same time, it seems to me that this particular point is something which concerned him also, because given the education he has received, given the moral values which have been transmitted by his family to him and to his younger brother David.
It was probably what he described in the paragraph you have just read is probably the sort of model that he was induced to follow by his milieu and he rebelled violently against this family.
And in order to distance himself from this model, but he would not make such a generalization if this model of averse of scallised people would not be somewhere something he has been induced himself to follow.
I agree with that. So do you think he is or was ultimately a creature of Arisanti Mo? Yes, in the meaning you are using the term. Yes.
So let me ask you this question about his victims, because one thing I've never understood about Kazinski's motivation is the choice and selection of his victims.
And you look at who he sent bombs to. It doesn't seem to me like he targeted the great villains of our society.
And the people that some of us might actually secretly cheer if they were to get a hand blown off because they are not the lisalo.
People like a campus police officer, a graduate student at Northwestern University, some passengers on an American Airlines. There's a secretary, a university secretary, a professor, another graduate student.
There's a computer store owner, two computer store owners actually, and then there's geneticists and so forth. The victim seem not to be these great villains that we would automatically suspect. Why did he choose this bizarre set of characters to send bombs to him?
Before I answer your question, permit me to say something on the microphone. The fact that I neither share the ideas of the Kazinski, nor is method. And I totally disagree with his method. And that has to be said from the beginning.
Otherwise, I will listen to Rans Rieskov associating me as an individual to this guy, and I don't want it to be the case.
It seemed to me that I agree with you, these were not the target when true revolutionary should have chosen. But bear in mind that he was alone, he had more access to these people.
Because he knew their address, he knew how to reach them, and for them, for him, they were a sort of target. But he's very intelligent, I am sure, he thought that they were not real target.
And they would not change anything. It seems to me that in this respect, he had more in mind to be notified as a criminal, and maybe to prove himself that he was capable of becoming a criminal, rather than being someone really useful in the revolutionary dimension.
Because the words, I am sure he probably knew that his crimes would not change anything dramatically in our society, but that they would permit his ideas to be known by many people.
He obviously believed that the dissemination of his ideas would make a difference.
And this is where he's profoundly self-deceived, I would argue, because his ideas have made very little difference in the political realm of things.
And if in it less since he wrote his manifesto, the power of technology has totally increased to the point where it is so embedded in human life now that we can speak of ourselves as a new generation of human beings in which the technological aspect is inscribed in our own body.
And for years on this show, I've been decrying the fact that we're becoming the Borg and a prosthetic species between the synthetic and the organic.
And this is where Kazinski, if I have sympathy with some of his ideas, I have sympathy when he says, and I quote him where he predicts that if the system succeeds in acquiring sufficient control over human behavior quickly enough, it will probably survive.
Otherwise, it will break down.
Now, he thought that by publishing his ideas, he was going to contribute to the breakdown of the system.
But the reality, I think I agree with you, is that since his arrest, the system has succeeded in acquiring such control over human behavior that not only will it survive, it is actually thriving.
And that we are no longer even barely conscious of the fact that technology is our war master, that it's insinuated itself into our human relations, into our relations with our bodies, with the earth, with other species, with knowledge.
In every possible sphere of human activity and reflection, technology has already colonized the frame, or has given the frame within which we're allowed to operate.
I think Kazinski is right about that.
I don't see any danger of that system collapsing anytime soon.
Me neither, I think that when you wrote in 1995 and published his manifesto, it was already too late.
But what this manifesto has done in the intellectual milieu is to make us aware of the sense where our civilization is going.
And for us, we are in a certain way, the children of Marx, we thought that economy was a driving force in our society.
It seems to me that with people like Jacqueline Ortez Kavinski, we understand now that economy is not any longer the driving force in the development of our society.
This is definitely technology, and as such, the existence of Kazinski is kind on one side, but is reflection and analysis on the other side are very important for us to understand where we are going and to force the kind of future that we already have, which is already here, and that we did not want to lucidly.
In that respect, he is manifest to help us to be more aware of the direction our society is taking currently.
The difference I have of opinion, if you want to call opinion or analysis with Kazinski, is that for him it was either their survival and complete hegemony of the system, or its collapse.
And therefore, one had to be a revolutionary in order to precipitate the total collapse of the system.
Whereas, I don't think that that is either likely or do I consider it desirable a total collapse.
Namely, I kind of return to a state of nature of the war of all against all, but rather finding ways to keep open alternatives within the reality of modern technology,
and to create little spaces that I continue to refer to as little gardens in the midst of the wasteland, because they can go a long way in terms of a different kind of survival, psychological survival rather than material survival that he was so interested in.
I thought one am also very suspicious about any extreme solutions such as revolution, so I did not think either it was something desirable.
Let's say that if you permit me to speak a little bit about my own ideas, I understand that technology to a certain extent is governing more and more aspect in our life.
But it seems also to me that each new civilization and definitely we are in a new civilization creates on one side its own negativity, but also its own condition of freedom.
That means in a totally technological society such as the one we are creating currently, we have to invent to create our new condition of freedom, which are very different from the 18th or 19th century situation of our founding father living in the frontier and so on.
But that does not mean we are totally the slave of this technological situation, we are not totally passive in front of technology, which is a human creation, and we have to be aware of the danger in order to create new condition for liberty and freedom, except that it won't be the same freedom situation as it was even at the time of my birth in 1945.
Well that's where I think your ideas are much more interesting than Kazinski's on this issue, because for Kazinski it was dichotomously black or white, it was either total enslavement in the system or it was this wilderness child outside of society living in a shack and learning materials, survival skills in a complete wilderness, trying to invent the new spheres of freedom within the context of a given historical reality.
It's a much more difficult challenge than to try to bring about impossible and feckless revolutions that can only happen in someone's mind and not actually translate into reality.
So thank you for saying that.
I would like to raise this issue of his division of human, but what interests me about Kazinski is also his notion that human beings that there's certain formula for human happiness, and that most people do not
formulate, or they do not actually take full cognizance of what will make them happy, and that oftentimes the technology we're creating, as you said, the society we're making, or the scientific research that we're pursuing, we're not in control of the goals that they're heading towards.
And so for example, he divides human drives into three groups, you remember that, where he says that there are those drives that can be satisfied with minimal effort.
I'm hungry, I go to the supermarket, I buy my food, minimal effort to satisfy that drive.
Then there are those that can be satisfied, but only at the cost of serious effort, becoming a professor, getting your PhD, whatever kind of truly earned achievement.
And then there are those drives that cannot be adequately satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes.
And he says that the power process, what gives people a sense of freedom and empowerment, is the process of satisfying the drives of the second group.
And I believe he's correct.
But then he goes on to claim that in our modern industrial society, natural human drives tend to be pushed into the first and third groups, and the second group tends to consist increasingly of artificially created drives.
And he says that among those are surrogate activities directed towards an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work towards.
And I believe that this is a very intelligent analysis of what maybe Jean-Paul Satt would call the movis fua of projecting goals which are not coming for myself, which even if I were to attain would not bring me happiness.
But they just keep the illusion that I have purpose in my life, whereas my life might not have any purpose whatsoever. It's just a veneer of purpose.
But it is his own vision, because for example, he defined as surrogate activities, so desire for knowledge.
It is probably his case. This is an academic. He got the PhD in Mathematica, as we know. He has been an assistant professor in one of the best American University Berkeley.
And he did not like this sort of life. He did not want to have this sort of academic life.
I for one do not consider that I would drive for understanding the universe in which we live today is a surrogate activity.
For me, it is linked to our body. We need to understand the sort of universe in which we are.
One says to try to understand our universe starting with Earth, our relationship to the Sun. Today with technology, we have a totally different view of what the universe is.
In my view, it is not a surrogate activity. It is a strong, inscribed in human body, desire, drive to understand the life we have.
So in a certain way, Kajin's key is not always aware of the impact of his own education on his ideas. Project onto everybody is own personal view, so that everything which appears to him to be a surrogate activity, we are not forced to share this perspective.
I agree with you that a lot of activities in the realm of knowledge are not surrogate activities in the way he understands them.
For example, our desire to know the origins of the cosmos or desire to know ourselves through probing us.
However, I have claimed several times on the show that there is a great deal of scientific research, which does not fall under the category of this wonder and natural curiosity,
to know the world we live in, it is a no ourselves better, but that when he says, and I quote, that science marches on blindly without regard to the real welfare of the human race, or to any other standard,
obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporate executives who provide the funds for their research, a great deal of scientific research takes place right here in our own academic home and in universities around the world is of this sort, I think.
I agree with you, but it's very difficult within the academic environment to seem to criticize most of our colleagues and to place ourselves outside the circle.
So this is why I am facilitating publicly to agree with you, but basically you know that I share your opinions.
Well, you know, it reminds me of what Hegel said in the phenomenology of spirit, which is that the one of the deepest drives or motivations of human behavior and human achievement is a desire for recognition.
And he said that men of knowledge, for loss of a scientist, that they are not motivated by a disinterested search for knowledge, they are motivated primarily for the desire for recognition.
How many of our colleagues here at Stanford just wait for that phone call from the Nobel Prize committee that is going to crown, you know, their work of years and years, I mean, it's probably a noble goal, but the desire for recognition is a very different motivation than maximizing the welfare of the human race.
Now oftentimes, you know, scientific research is conducted for the former, not the latter.
Okay, but these desire for recognition belongs to the human nature, or even animal nature, animals do need to recognize one another and it's the same for us.
We need the sort of recognition.
That's fine.
As long as animals can remain animals, but when scientists now are starting to change a mouse into a rat or a cat into a dog through genetic manipulation of their genome, then I figure that one has to tell the scientists, are you doing this?
Because you really want to save the life of that innocent baby that weren't once always invoking, or are you doing this because it's that thing which will get you the next piece of recognition.
This is true. This is a negative aspect of science and this is a price to pay to evolve so in knowledge of what the genome is.
Right.
Definitely.
Well, in any case, that's that you cannot have over there.
The negative side without having it at the same time, the negative side.
I agree with that, but if I accept that as a foregone conclusion, then I say, I have to accept the technological society with all its virtues and all its vices and therefore I have to get out of the business of trying to point out what are its vices as opposed to its virtues and to address the question of its vices.
People sometimes misunderstand on this show that I'm anti-scientific, not at all. I mean, science is one of the most noble enterprises, but that doesn't mean that one has to just be on either your with us or against us, you're either for science or you're against science. No.
There are certain things in scientific activity and research that one can also look at with the certain suspicion.
I think Kazinski can help.
Absolutely.
Show us this.
Absolutely.
And on that respect, whatever we may think of the man, we need to read and to pass to our students, he's manifesto because it's an important text.
So what are other ideas for Lugeo Maty are the most important in his corpus that we should address?
Beyond the idea on technology and his sociological description of contemporary society, where all of victimization ultimately weakens not only the victim, but all human beings, the other aspect of Kazinski's work which interested me was personal aspects of psychological aspects.
So the education that he has received is frustration during his life.
And above all, is conception of writing.
You mentioned in your introduction that John Clare, I am working on him as a writer and it seems to me after I read many texts, many interviews,
as well as even I even read his autobiography which has not been published.
I think that from the beginning, he should be considered as a writer, very special writer, but a writer.
Bear in mind that over the years, he has written a diary which is almost 20,000 pages.
A diary which is basically written in English, but some parts are written in Spanish.
And some as a part are coded in such a secret code that it was extremely difficult for the FBI to understand what he had written.
And they found the key in his shock otherwise they probably would not have understood what he meant.
He has written even literary texts, he has written one important philosophical book which is the industrial society and his future.
He has written at least two if not three different autobiographies.
So basically his real vocation is to be a writer.
And one of our problems in our society is that when we write, we want our book for which we have worked so many years to have a certain impact.
And basically in most of the cases except few people, our words have no meaning.
They bear no power, they will change nothing, they will be seen at best as the diversity, as the pleasure, even the pleasure of intelligence, but nothing more than that.
Our words do not have any longer the power to change society.
The Kajinsky was obsessed by this former of almost a religious writing by which a book can change human life.
And in my view this is probably the main reason why it killed someone.
So this is a word that is invented, a word that is invented to be associated not with ink like your pen or my pen, but with blood.
In order to have words which were so strong, so powerful that they would change the real.
So I said it's almost a religious attitude because bearing minds that even if it is the Natist and has been raised in a at least family.
His family was from a Catholic origin.
And he still maintain even if he does not know it, a certain Catholic conception of the words.
When the priest takes the oath and says, "Pronon's the sacred words," "okest in imporpos," these words have the power to transform the oath into the body of Christ.
So it is an extremely powerful capacity with some special words to transform the universe into something different.
And this is what he wanted to have, and this is the revolution he wanted.
In you he was alone, he knew basically that nobody would follow him, but he expected that associating words with blood.
These words would be strong enough to transform reality, to change the course of our society in order to make something different.
Of course, it's totally crazy, and it is totally irrelevant if you think about it.
And at the same time, my question to you and to Neil, so is this one? Is this secret dream of Kajinsky? Is it not a part of our own dream as writer?
Don't we want to have the greatest intellectual figurines of 20th century think of Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre, many other words.
Also some of the art French.
Yes, exactly, I'm sorry, I'm a very firm for this nationalism. Please, people will listen to me, excuse me for being so French.
But I mean, the great intellectuals have always wanted their words to create something new.
So, funding further in America, this is what they've done, and it is in this dimension that we have to evaluate Kajinsky's crazy enterprise.
Well, I have two questions for you then. One is, if his true vocation was not to be a murderer, not to be a wild man in the force, but to be a writer.
First question, do you think he was a good writer? Second question, with this radical proto or post-Catholic desire to transubstantiate the word into action,
or into history, do you think that the belief of a sane man?
So, is he a good writer? What's he saying? From a clinical point of view.
I use him in the past tense, I should use the present tense, but...
Yeah, in both cases, and of course, he's my personal judgment, the answer is no.
He's not a good writer, because today we are not anymore in a society where we have an impact through a religious method, but rather through aesthetics.
And as far as aesthetics is concerned, no, he does not try very well.
He is writing his very often schematically, and by no means he could be compared to Mark Twain, for example, with a master of the American language.
Second, is he sane? It's extremely difficult to have a final judgment, but in my view now.
In my view now, he had many problems from the beginning, an extremely difficult relationship to his parents, particularly to his mother.
Very bizarre relationship to his brother, David, difficulty to be in touch and in contact with other human beings with male on one side, having difficulty to be friends with colleagues.
And with female, this is a man who was and still is to the very uncertain, very intelligent.
He has been unable to find a girlfriend for himself when he had everything he could, a good job at Berkeley.
Very uncertain and attractive body, and a guy who was well read and very intelligent, and yet he was alone.
One of his great failures, and he knows it, is the fact that he has been incapable of sharing his life with a sweet girlfriend, having a family, and having babies which was one of his dream.
So all that refers to an extremely complex, difficult psychological relationship with other people.
It's very difficult to draw a line between someone who is sane and totally insane, but I would lean in the case of the other kashinsky on the side of the unsan, if not in sane.
And in my view, if he had been more sane, he probably would not have killed, and he would have spent his time improving his writing.
And hanging out with girls.
Probably not.
Yes.
So this loneliness, his profound loneliness and estrangement from others that characterizes his entire adult life, even as a Berkeley professor apparently, he was pathologically shy, even in front of students who got terrible student evaluations.
Maybe it was a question of compensation, but he was very, very close with his brother, David, for a while in his life, no?
And his younger brother idolized him and loved him and looked up to him.
And this intimacy that he had with David was one that then he became a strange from his brother.
He cut off all relations with his family. But I'm very intrigued by the figure of David, the brother, because it was finally David who recognized after the manifesto was published in the Washington Post, who recognized that this was the work of his brother.
He recognized the style and the ideas from previous things, letters that he had written to David and so forth.
And from everything we know, David agonized over what to do. But of course, he did.
He tried before turning in his brother to make sure that he would get the FBI not to pursue a death penalty that he himself would remain anonymous as the source and so forth.
And while everyone was talking about Ted Kazinski as the Saint figure in this whole drama, for me, you know, there's something saintly about David Kazinski and his behavior, not only
in the question of the arrest, but afterwards, how he's still going around with some of the victims of Ted Kazinski, talking about reconciliation, giving all the money makes, you know, two, the families of the victims and so forth.
He seems like a truly decent, if not profoundly moral individual. But do you have any view on that?
Yes, it is true that it was probably an agonizing decision for David to denounce his brother, recognize the ideas that was expressed in the manifesto written in 1971.
And under the guidance of David's wife, Linda, David went to the indirectly to the FBI and to say that he suspected his brother to be the unabomber.
That is true, but David certainly does incarnate our own moral values today.
At the origin, David was totally in admiration with his brother and wanted to be like his brother, and he went out in the solitude for years and years like his brother.
But at the moment or immediately after he denounced his brother to the police, that permitted him to reinstate himself.
In the Vietnam society, so he changed the move from loneliness to civilization, imma read his girlfriend. Today is very much involved in community work. He gives the lecture on his brother or on different topics.
And in a certain way, he has taken the place of Theodore. Theodore now is in the shadow. Whereas at the origin, Theodore was constantly in the light. He was a bright guy. He was a guy who had succeeded in his studies. He was a very intelligent guy. And David was nothing.
Today, curiously enough, David is something that becomes important for us. He is seen as generous as someone who has done something exceptional. Whereas Theodore is a villain, he is in jail, in the shadow.
And I would like to add something. As I said in 1998, Cajun's Quito d'Orcajun's Quirot is owned autobiography. And he speaks a lot about his relationship to his brother and his autobiography.
And he says that he will never forgive his brother David for betraying him when he thought that his brother was always on his side. But he also says, "I will forgive him under one condition that he divorce his spouse. He leaves civilization. He goes back to the shark in Texas where he lived. And he leaves in loneliness for the rest of the world.
For the rest of his life." So in a certain way, Theodore Cajun's Quito describes his brother as a Judas, who has betrayed the Christ. And he sees himself as a Christ figure.
That says a lot about his unconscious cultural conception of his work. I know what I may say here is shocking because for us, Theodore Cajun's Quito is a criminal if not a serial killer. But I wanted to report what I read in his autobiography. And that also should be taken into consideration.
For me, that's another confirmation that he had all the instincts of a tyrant, as I mentioned in my introduction, because this idea that he would only forgive his brother on this one condition that he go and be the duplicate.
The inferior duplicate of himself is an act of arrogance and a presumption and of a lack of generosity in terms of the relation to his brother. And this inability to forgive shows that he's not a true Catholic at my heart.
He might have been obsessed with transubstantiation, but...
I don't know what he's a term for. They know not what they do. And of course, David asked for forgiveness for his brother Ted not only legally, but probably also morally.
And from the public, because the spirit of forgiveness he knew that his brother was probably not responsible for his actions and that he should be spared the death penalty and so forth. I mean, talking about forgiveness, it's on the side, I think, of David, none on Ted.
One last question before we close a program, Jean-Marie, we've been speaking here, by the way, with Professor Jean-Marie up with this on KZSU Stanford, about Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unobama.
All the work you've done, most of the work you've done on the Unobama has been in French and translating him into French. There seems to be a huge interest in this figure in France.
It seems to me that he has been a whole model for the extreme left. He's in a certain way, a whole model for this revolutionary left, who has no more figure and ideal to present.
Also, Ted Kaczynski is much closer to the anarchist of the end of 19th century in Chicago or in Paris.
Yet, the post-68 revolution removement in France, which is at the same time so important and so weak because it has no realistic program, found in Kaczynski, its whole model, and this is why very likely is someone extremely popular in France.
Well, that's good. I'm sure you're a new book that's going to come out shortly. We'll do very well in France. Thanks for coming on again, Jean-Marie. It's been a pleasure as usual. There are plenty of other topics that we're going to get you back on to discuss.
Thank you all for having me once more. Thank you all for listening to entitled opinions. We'll be with you shortly.
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