excerpt

From Alston Chase's immaculately researched book Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist

Such was the state of the intellectual world at the end of World War II: Most scholars believed that both God and secular humanism were dead. Reason reveals life to be without purpose or meaning. Science is the only legitimate exercise of the intellect, but that leads inevitably to technology and, ultimately, to the bomb. Democracy and human rights rest, not on natural law, but on power. The chief advantages of a free soceity are economic: free markets produce more wealth than managed ones.