PERSPECTIVE ON THE UNABOMBER : Heed the Message, Not the Messenger : Living in a complex world without control can seed hatred so deep that violence may seem the only recourse.

Now that the hefty manifesto of the man whom the FBI calls the Unabomber has finally been published, we should be able to get some rare insights into the mind of a self-described terrorist. And perhaps into terrorism itself.

It isn’t easy. The Unabomber’s prose style was apparently fashioned when he was a college sophomore, where he read nothing but academic texts on social psychology and Chinese politics. His language is wooden, his logic murky and his argument confused.

But after three close readings of it, I think it is possible to discern a number of core characteristics that define this man.

The first is a savvy if not very sophisticated understanding of the on-rushing dangers of “the industrial-technological society.” On the one hand, he appreciates that it has become so vast in scope and so pervasive in effect that it threatens to bring on social disarray, economic collapse and environmental disaster--a belief now shared by many, including me. But on the other hand, he thinks it is potentially so fragile that it can be brought down by acts of killing by himself and other “rebels,” “dropouts” and “resisters”--a belief he shares with very few indeed. This is not an insane perception, really, but it is not very sensible, either.

The second characteristic is his abnormal concern for the power held by this technological society and the lack of power in ordinary individuals who have become constructed and regimented by it. What he calls “the power process” has taken away people’s ability to “control the circumstances of one’s own life” so that “today people live more by virtue of what the system does FOR them or TO them than by virtue of what they do for themselves.”

Another characteristic we glean from his treatise is a deep-seated antipathy to that industrial system. One of the chief goals of his bombings, he says, is to encourage “those who hate the industrial system.” He brooks no compromise, argues against reform and feels the only fit task is to promote “social stress and instability” that will cause “the whole stinking system” to come crashing down and to see “its remnants . . . smashed beyond repair.”

The last is an obsession with the industrial society’s ability to mold the minds and shape the behaviors of its members. He repeatedly refers to how the system uses propaganda “to make people WANT the decisions that have been made for them” and pressures people “to mold their behavior to the needs of the system.” All of which will be perfected in the future through “psychological techniques for controlling human behavior” and “genetic engineering” capable of “modifying human beings” so they “will be adjusted to suit” the system.

There are other Unabomber characteristics as well, some quite odd, but they strike me as less defining. For example, he has a passionate dislike of “leftists” and “leftish” academics, arguing that they have feelings of inferiority, identify with the weak and powerless, and believe in collective rather than individual solutions. For another, he seems to have a true faith that some sort of ill-defined revolution will bring about his ends, led by a cadre of intellectuals who will propound an anti-technological “ideology” so powerful it will win over the “unthinking majority.” Hard to know what to make of it.

But add up the core features of the man, and I think what emerges is a profile not just of one specific terrorist but in some ways of many such people. If you live in a complex, ever-changing world where you are denied control over your life, as you see it, by a massive forceful regime that uses subtle and artful means of manipulation as well as outright power and regimentation, you might well hate it so deeply that the only sensible way you could see of hurting it, of trying to end it, would be violence, even murder. That sounds to me as much like some of the fanatics of the Middle East, Ireland, Somalia or Oklahoma City as like the Unabomber.

They may seem like madmen, but for the most part, I bet, they are not. A reasoning is operating there, misguided and errant as it may be, and with a thought-out purpose as its result. It would behoove us, I think, to pay less attention to the means by which that reasoning is expressed and more to the conditions that give rise to it.

It is not impossible that there is something in those conditions that should give us all cause to reflect.