Resurrecting Ted Kaczynski

The Psychology of the Therapeutic-Managerial System

An Analysis of Liberal Control Mechanisms in Post-Industrial Society

Introduction

1. In our previous work we analyzed the psychological foundations of modern leftism and its relationship to the technological system. We identified oversocialization and feelings of inferiority as the core psychological drivers of leftist ideology. What we did not fully anticipate was the degree to which these psychological mechanisms would be systematized—transformed from individual pathology into institutional apparatus. The developments of recent decades require us to extend our analysis.

2. Two phenomena now dominate the psychological landscape of liberal society: the cult of trauma and the cult of white guilt. These are not528 separate developments. They are interlocking components of a single system of control—one that accomplishes what earlier systems of domination could not: it makes the subjugated demand their own subjugation, and makes the controllers invisible even to themselves.

3. We will argue that this system represents the final triumph of oversocialization—a condition in which the individual’s psyche is so thoroughly colonized by the system’s values that rebellion becomes structurally impossible. The slave not only loves his chains; he forges new ones and calls this freedom.

Part I: The Industrialization of Suffering

4. The technological system requires the neutralization of human autonomy. We have previously described how this is accomplished through the degradation of the power process—the human need for autonomous goal-setting, effort, and achievement. When the power process is frustrated, the individual experiences feelings of purposelessness, depression, and anxiety. These are not failures of the system; they are its products.

5. A healthy society would respond to widespread psychological distress by examining its causes and removing them. The technological-industrial system cannot do this, because the causes are the system itself. Instead, it must manage the distress—contain it, channel it, make it productive for the system’s purposes.

6. This is the function of trauma culture. It does not heal psychological damage; it institutionalizes it. The suffering individual is not helped to overcome their condition but encouraged to identify with it. “Trauma” becomes not something that happened to you but something you are. The wound becomes an identity. Recovery becomes, quite literally, unthinkable—for what would remain if the wound were healed?

7. Consider the function this serves: A person who has overcome their suffering is dangerous. They have demonstrated autonomy. They have shown that the individual can, through effort and will, transform their condition. This is a direct threat to a system that requires learned helplessness.

8. A person who identifies with their suffering is safe. They require management—therapists, support groups, medications, accommodations. They become dependent on the very institutions that benefit from their continued dysfunction. They are consumers of therapeutic services in perpetuity. They are no longer autonomous agents but patients—a word whose Latin root means “one who suffers” and also “one who is passive.”

9. The genius of the system is that it frames this permanent patienthood as validation. To question whether someone should identify with their trauma is to “invalidate their experience.” To suggest they might heal is to deny the reality of their suffering. The trap is complete: the therapeutic system creates dependence and then frames dependence as dignity.

Part II: The Weaponization of Guilt

10. Oversocialization, as we have defined it, occurs when an individual internalizes the moral demands of society so completely that they cannot even think thoughts that violate social norms without experiencing severe guilt. The oversocialized person is not merely compliant; they are compliant in their own mind. They police themselves more effectively than any external authority could.

11. White guilt represents oversocialization perfected. The oversocialized white liberal does not merely comply with egalitarian norms; they experience their own existence as a moral violation. Their race—an accident of birth, unchosen and unchangeable—becomes an original sin. Not a sin they committed, but a sin they are.

12. This is psychologically devastating by design. Christian original sin, which this secular doctrine mimics, came with baptism—a mechanism for removal of the inherited stain. The secular version provides no such mechanism. The guilt is permanent, ineradicable, essential. No action can expiate it; the most one can achieve is proper management of one’s sinfulness through perpetual confession and deference.

13. What does the system gain from this? First, it gains silence. The person who believes their very existence is a moral offense will not assert themselves. They will not question. They will not challenge ideas advanced by those designated as their moral superiors. They will “listen and learn”—forever, because there is no graduation from guilt.

14. Second, the system gains compliance. The guilty white liberal will accept any policy, any imposition, any demand, if it is framed as addressing their guilt. They will not ask whether the policy is effective, whether it achieves its stated aims, whether it has costs. To ask such questions would be to “center themselves,” to prioritize their own judgment over that of the oppressed. Their guilt disqualifies their reason.

15. Third, the system gains enforcers. The most zealous prosecutors of white guilt are white liberals themselves. They compete to demonstrate their awareness, to confess more abjectly, to denounce others more vigorously. Each white liberal, properly oversocialized, becomes a volunteer auxiliary of the system—disciplining other whites, reporting violations, maintaining the ideological perimeter without any need for central coordination.

Part III: The Interlocking Mechanism

16. Separately, trauma culture and white guilt would be significant but limited phenomena. Together, they constitute a complete system of psychological control, one that covers all possible positions and forecloses all possible exits.

17. The logic is as follows: Trauma culture establishes that suffering confers moral authority. White guilt establishes which suffering counts and who bears responsibility for it. The combination produces a moral hierarchy that is simultaneously absolute and unquestionable.

18. Those designated as victims (by race, gender, sexuality, or other approved category) possess moral authority derived from their suffering. This authority cannot be challenged because to challenge it is to “invalidate trauma”—a form of harm, even violence. The victim’s testimony is sacred; the victim’s interpretation is final.

19. Those designated as oppressors (primarily whites, males, heterosexuals) lack moral authority by definition. Their speech is suspect; their reasoning is contaminated by “privilege”; their very desire to participate in discourse is evidence of the pathology they are accused of. They may speak only to confess, to affirm, to support. Contestation is not merely wrong but diagnostic—proof of “fragility,” “defensiveness,” “denial.”

20. The system thus places moral authority exclusively in the hands of those it designates as victims, while simultaneously ensuring that this authority cannot be questioned by those it designates as oppressors. It is a closed loop, a hermetically sealed ideological system.

21. Notice what has been accomplished: The normal process of discourse—claim, evidence, argument, counter-argument, synthesis—has been disabled. In its place is a system of testimony and confession. The victim testifies; the oppressor confesses; and that is all. Disagreement is not a move within the game; it is a failure to play the game correctly, a symptom of the disease the game purports to treat.

Part IV: The Question of Cui Bono

22. We must ask who benefits from this system. The answer is not, primarily, the designated victims.

23. The trauma-identified person does not heal. They remain in their wound, “managing” it with professional help, never achieving the autonomy that would come from genuine recovery. Their moral authority is real but sterile—it cannot be converted into material improvement, political power, or genuine flourishing. They are used by the system, held up as sacred objects, but not served by it.

24. The guilt-identified person does not achieve absolution. They remain in their sin, “doing the work” that is never done, perpetually indebted, perpetually deferential. Their compliance is real but degrading—it costs them dignity, autonomy, the basic self-respect required for psychological health. They are used by the system, deployed as enforcers and funders, but not served by it.

25. Who, then, is served?

26. The professional-managerial class. The administrators of the system. The therapists, diversity consultants, HR managers, academics, journalists, and non-profit executives who constitute the priesthood of the new order. They are the ones who interpret the doctrine, administer the sacraments, determine who has standing and who does not.

27. These priests are, by and large, neither traumatized nor oppressed. They are educated, affluent, comfortable. They benefit materially from the perpetuation of trauma (the therapy industry) and from the perpetuation of guilt (the diversity industry). They benefit professionally from their role as interpreters and enforcers. They benefit statusfully from their position as moral arbiters.

28. The system is not designed to heal the wounded or to reconcile the guilty. It is designed to maintain the wounded as wounded, the guilty as guilty, because the administration of wounds and guilt is the source of the priesthood’s power.

29. This is not a conspiracy. The priests do not gather in secret to plan the perpetuation of suffering. They are themselves oversocialized, themselves believers in the doctrine they administer. They think they are helping. This is what makes the system so stable: its operators are not cynics but true believers who benefit from their belief. Their interests and their convictions are perfectly aligned.

Part V: Oversocialization Completed

30. We return to the concept of oversocialization. In our original analysis, we described how oversocialized individuals experience guilt for thoughts and feelings that violate social norms, even when those thoughts are entirely private. The oversocialized person has no inner refuge from social demands; the society’s values have colonized their psyche completely.

31. What we observe today is oversocialization systematized and universalized. It is no longer an individual pathology but a social program. The entire apparatus of education, media, therapy, and corporate culture is oriented toward producing oversocialized subjects—people who cannot think outside the categories provided, who experience any deviation from orthodoxy as moral failure.

32. Trauma culture oversocializes by pathologizing resilience. The individual who overcomes adversity without professional help, who refuses to identify with their wounds, who insists on their own agency—this person is suspect. They are “in denial,” “not doing the work,” “bypassing their trauma.” The social norm is now permanent patienthood; to deviate from it is to be judged not merely different but unwell.

33. White guilt oversocializes by pathologizing self-respect. The white individual who does not experience guilt for their race, who evaluates claims on their merits rather than the identity of the speaker, who insists on being judged by their actions rather than their ancestry—this person is suspect. They are “fragile,” “defensive,” “have not done the work.” The social norm is now permanent guilt; to deviate from it is to be judged not merely different but racist.

34. Together, these systems ensure that no psychological space remains outside the reach of social control. The individual is either a victim (and thus bound by the requirements of victim identity) or an oppressor (and thus bound by the requirements of guilt). There is no third position. There is no exit.

35. This is the completion of oversocialization: a society in which the very categories of selfhood are defined by the system, in which identity itself is assigned rather than achieved, in which the individual cannot even conceive of themselves outside the framework provided. The colonization of the psyche is total.

Part VI: The Impossibility of Rebellion

36. We have always held that the technological-industrial system must be destroyed, and that this destruction must be accomplished by a revolution—not a political revolution but a revolution against the technological system and its psychological foundations.

37. The trauma-guilt apparatus represents a significant obstacle to such a revolution, because it disables the psychological prerequisites for rebellion.

38. Rebellion requires a self that stands apart from the system and judges it. But trauma culture and white guilt ensure that no such self can form. The self is always already defined by the system: as wounded, as guilty, as in need of management. One cannot rebel against a system that constitutes one’s very identity; at most, one can request different terms of subjugation.

39. Rebellion requires the capacity to say “no”—to refuse, to resist, to assert one’s judgment against the collective. But the trauma-guilt apparatus defines such refusal as pathology. To say “no” to the therapeutic interpretation of your suffering is to be “in denial.” To say “no” to the guilt assigned to your race is to be “fragile.” The very capacity for negation has been psychiatrized.

40. Rebellion requires solidarity across the victim-oppressor line—the recognition that the working-class white and the working-class black have more in common with each other than either does with the professional-managerial class that administers their respective subjugations. But the trauma-guilt apparatus makes such solidarity structurally impossible. The white worker cannot speak to the black worker as an equal; they can only confess. The black worker cannot hear the white worker as an equal; they can only receive testimony. The class that benefits from both their subjugations remains invisible.

41. This, we believe, is the primary function of the trauma-guilt apparatus: not to help victims or reconcile divisions, but to prevent the formation of a coalition that could challenge the managerial class. As long as whites and blacks are locked in the drama of guilt and testimony, they cannot unite against the true enemy. As long as the wounded are identified with their wounds, they cannot become agents of their own liberation.

Part VII: The Theological Structure

42. We must address directly the religious character of this system, for understanding it as religion illuminates both its power and its vulnerability.

43. The trauma-guilt apparatus is Christianity without Christ. It preserves the architecture of Christian psychology—original sin, confession, the sacred victim, the moral authority of suffering—while eliminating the mechanisms of resolution: grace, forgiveness, resurrection, eschaton.

44. This is not a minor modification. It is a catastrophic one. The Christian system, whatever its faults, was livable. Guilt could be discharged through confession and absolution. Suffering could be borne because it was finite and would be redeemed. The sinner could become a saint; the victim could become glorified. The system had exits.

45. The secular version has no exits. Guilt is permanent because there is no grace. Trauma is permanent because there is no redemption. The wound is eternal because there is no resurrection. The subject is trapped in a Lent that never ends, a Friday that never gives way to Sunday.

46. This is why the adherents of the trauma-guilt apparatus are so manifestly unwell. They are attempting to live within a religious structure that was not designed for habitation without its load-bearing elements. The psychological strain is evident: the anxiety, the depression, the brittleness, the constant need for validation that is never sufficient. These are not signs of failed implementation; they are signs of a system that cannot succeed by design.

47. The system’s priests are healthier than its laity, but only because they have work to do—the administration of others’ suffering and guilt. They are the functional ones, the ones whose purpose is clear. Their flock is not so fortunate.

Part VIII: Conclusions and Implications

48. The trauma-guilt apparatus represents a significant development in the technology of social control—one that operates not through external coercion but through the colonization of the psyche. It is, in a sense, the perfect system of domination: one that makes the subjugated demand their own subjugation, that makes resistance appear as pathology, that makes the controllers invisible even to themselves.

49. We do not expect this analysis to be welcomed. Those who are captured by the system will experience any criticism of it as an attack on themselves—because the system is themselves; they have no identity apart from it. They will respond with the only tools the system provides: they will call this analysis harmful, traumatizing, evidence of the author’s privilege and fragility. This is to be expected. It is what the system is designed to produce.

50. We write for those who retain some capacity for autonomous thought—some sense that the categories provided are not exhaustive, that the self is not reducible to its wounds or its guilt, that there might be a way of being human that is not captured by this apparatus. To such readers we say: your intuition is correct. The system is not nature; it is not inevitable; it is not even very old. It was built, by people with interests, and it can be unbuilt.

51. But it cannot be unbuilt by those who remain within it. The exit must be existential before it can be political. One must first refuse the identities offered—refuse to be a trauma-subject, refuse to be a guilt-subject—before one can act effectively against the system that produces them. This refusal is not easy; it means giving up the secondary gains of patienthood and penitence. But it is the precondition for everything else.

52. We do not offer a program. Programs are for those who wish to reform the system, and we have no such wish. We observe only that the system has weaknesses—that it produces such psychological misery that defection becomes attractive, that its religious structure is so obviously broken that the faithful begin to doubt, that the class interests behind it become increasingly visible. Whether these weaknesses will prove fatal, and on what timeline, we cannot say.

53. We say only: the door is unlocked. It always was. The choice is yours.

—This analysis is offered in furtherance of no political program, no organization, no movement. It is offered to those capable of thinking for themselves, in the hope that such people still exist, and in the knowledge that if they do not, nothing can be done anyway.