The Tinkerer

Thinking about the UnitedHealth Killer

The first thing that struck me upon learning a little bit about the identity and background of the suspected UnitedHealth killer Luigi Mangione was that he seemed so normal. He comes from a prominent, well-to-do family in Baltimore that by all indications cared for him, he went to elite schools, was a bit nerdy but seems to have had a solid social life and friendships, and was physically fit and good-looking. He suffered from a terrible back injury and now there is much speculation that either the direct pain or the frustration with the medical establishment may have contributed to his fatal decision. But ideologically there’s not much to suggest that this person would take a turn towards political violence, except—and this is admittedly a big except—a sudden interest in the Unabomber. His politics, as far as I can sus them out from posts online, seem like a melange of center-right views that are pretty typical for a young male software engineer. Certainly not my politics, but not someone I’d identify as particularly aggrieved or hateful. There were dystopian fantasies at the edges: his Goodreads—now locked—had fiction like 1984 and Brave New World and his Twitter posts—now also locked—showed some concern about what AI future would be. But again, this is not that strange at all. Everyone reads those books in high school and everyone is thinking about that stuff, too. He seeemed to believe in tech-futurist solutions, in applying rational, systemic methods to overcome social problems. His posts sound like thought experiments. Then he took the steps of an old-school anarchist: direct action, propaganda of the deed.

So, was there a break, or was this on a continuum? From the perspective of an engineer, directly intervening and altering the system makes a lot of sense: You don’t bother with all the mediating institutions that don’t seem to function anyway, you simply reach down into the machine and start making changes. In a strange and disturbing way, Mangione was tinkering, that activity beloved by American inventors from Alexander Graham Bell to Henry Ford to Elon Musk. And, of course, Mangione participates in another hallowed American tradition: that of the vigilante gunman.

It’s too early to say if this marks the descent of the country into a new phase of political and para-political violence, a new Years of Lead. It’s important to remember here how incredibly violent America’s past has been. Just a few relevant examples: the American public feared (or celebrated) the revolver and bomb of the anarchist in the late 1900s and early 20th century, the 1960s witnessed mass civil unrest and assassinations, and for some reason, the waves of bombings in the 1970s are now almost entirely forgotten. From the 1980s to the 1990s, right-wing extremists carried on a campaign of terror that culminated in the Oklahoma City Bombing, the worst terrorist attack on American soil until 9/11. But these were by and large the work of ideologues. What we are facing in the United States today is an overlapping crisis of institutions: social problems that stubbornly resist normal political solutions and a sense that the old system of meritocratic recognition is either broken or, at least, deeply unsatisfying for the young. Like many well-off young people, he comes from a bourgeois family that owns property but decided instead of business to pursue a high-status profession that’s supposed to be about rationally improving the world, only to find that idealistic path blocked in various frustrating ways. Even for the “normal” and relatively successful something feels terribly broken and alienating. When you combine these things you will get tragic and desperate attempts at heroism. The crowd already loves it.