Karl Wessel has observed that, "Paranoia and highly developed simulative powers form an especially combustible mixture" ("Worlds of Chance and Counterfeit" 50). I might re-phrase this and suggest that acute paranoia and high intelligence are an extremely volatile mixture. We know from the Unabomber's admissions in his letter to the New York Times that he chose as one victim a professional in a public relations firm because such firms are institutions devoted to the "development of techniques for manipulating people's attitudes." He also declares that "the university people whom we have attacked have been specialists in technical fields . . . such as behavior modification. . . ." The key concepts here are manipulation and modification; one might have expected him to refer, for instance, to the issue of propaganda. Instead, he narrows the field to those individuals whose professions, as he sees it, are manipulation of "attitudes" and "behavior modification." The assertion of a deliberate intentionality to these professions to manipulate and modify thought and behavior thus rings of the fear of the paranoid mind. One might be tempted to assert that these isolated features of a much longer text are not evidence, beyond that of a purely incidental sort, of an acute paranoia. One would need to look further into his writings.

In order to broach a discussion of the Unabomber's thought, I will cite a passage from the document the American media named the "Unabomber manifesto," which was titled "Industrial Society and Its Future," a portion of which was published in The New York Times on Wednesday, August 2, 1995 (16):

The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and theat such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.

No doubt Poe believed the experience of paranoia to be as old as consciousness itself. In addition to Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" one must include "Ligeia"; John T. Irwin, in Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner, would add to this list Poe's Dupin stories and in particular the two stories "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter." Irwin observes that the first of these latter two stories is a "locked-room" mystery while the latter is a "hidden-object" mystery, arguing that the two sorts of mysteries are structurally related. He writes (176­177):

In the former instance (the locked room) we are certain that what we seek is not inside a given space, in the latter (the hidden object) that what we seek cannot possibly be outside it. Indeed, part of the peculiar force of the hidden-object and locked-room types of detective stories is that they seem to present us with a physical embodiment, a concrete spatial- ization, of the very mechanism of logical inclusion/exclusion on which rational analysis is based, present us with this as an apparent confounding of rational analysis.

Though Poe could not have known the precise biological mechanisms that lead to fertilization, he is presageful in characterizing the problem of subjectivity and intersubjectivity using a biological metaphor. Of the various ways in which biological organisms (or their technological or ideational analogues) interact with each other, two are profoundly loaded with hidden philosophical and political meanings: fertilization and infection, especially since they are immediately related to the binary pair of life and death. The boundaries between two cells (or subjects) can be breached in two different ways: either by the sexual recombination of genetic material (fertilization), or by the infiltration of a pathogen (infection). A spy penetrates a defensive membrane and is misidentified as friendly: the occult Other invades the Self and appears as Self, a simulacrum. In incestuous sexuality, as John T. Irwin has observed (Doubling and Incest 11) the occult Self invades itself and appears as Other, another simulacrum. The two are mirror images, but this implies chiasmus: the left hand becomes right, the right left. The ambivalence of this structural relation is expressed in the simultaneous cultural fascination and condemnation of the Unabomber. He is "the enemy within," the Self become a simulacrum of the Other, just like those militiamen who planted the bomb which demolished the Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. As Karl Wessel has observed ("Worlds of Chance and Counterfeit" 52­53):

The threat posed by the simulacrum . . . is that it may diverge from its original in its future behavior, leading to effects that the paranoid is only too willing to imagine. It engenders suspicion because of its occult, mimetic, alien origin. It may eventually revert to type: What was once different and is now the same could one day be different again.

Yet, as I have written elsewhere ("To Flee from Dionysus," in Philip K. Dick: Contemporary Critical Interpretations), the phenomenological features of the subject's vertiginous encounter with the "monstrous double" or alienated Self correspond to a remarkable degree to what Louis A. Sass, in Madness and Modernism, describes as the representative symptoms of the schizophrenic Stimmung, the onset of a schizophrenic episode. The structural features of the Stimmung consist of what he names "the Trema [analogous to stage fright, or terror] whose three aspects are Unreality, Mere Being, and Fragmentation, and the Apophany," which often occurs slightly later and precedes the psychotic break (52). Sass summarizes the phenomenological features as follows (52):

Once conventional meanings have faded away (Unreality) and new details or aspects of the world have been thrust into awareness (Fragmentation, Mere Being), there often emerges an inchoate sense of the as yet unarticulated significances of these newly emergent phenomena. In this "mood" . . . the reality of everything the patient notices can seem heightened, as if each object were, somehow, being hyperbolically itself; and this in turn can create an air of unavoidable specificity, or a feeling of inevitability that hovers about everything. Alternatively, things may take on an exemplary quality, as if they represented other objects or essences, existing not as themselves but as tokens of types lying elsewhere (in such instances visible objects can appear very precise and very unreal at the same time).

It is this sense of the objects being stripped of their usual significance, so that they are both, are rather simultaneously, familiar and unfamiliar, with the result that the familiar world seems strange and the unfamiliar seems familiar­is both the same and yet not the same­which corresponds so clearly with Girard's description of the "monstrous double." The Freudian term for this experience is unheimlich, "the uncanny." What returns to itself must have once become estranged from itself, and the movement is a restoration of a lost order (the dis-memberment) specifically a re- membering or anamnesis (Heideggerian aletheia, an un-forgetting).

Paranoia can be understood as an internal simulation of potential scripts which, despite the ever-changing, ad hoc parameters of the simulation, always end with the Frankenstein monster at the end of the tunnel: the scene of sacrifice, the moment of sparagmos, the violent dis-memberment of Dionysus - the horror of alienated thoughts become uncannily real. The horror of the re-cognition of the "enemy within" is captured by the concept of the uncanny or monstrous double: the estranged Self returning as a simulacrum of Other, structurally the horror of incest. In the resulting implosion, the Federal Building in Oklahoma City collapses like the House of Usher; Madeline Usher, with the eyes of Ligeia, gazes at us from the covers of Time and Newsweek.

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