Hot young guy from a prominent Catholic family whose exterior charm hides a crippling back injury destroys a self-made striver born on a farm at America's margins who rose to power through his wits and a competitive advantage in amorality?
It confuses the people who wanted to see a morality play about the oppressed masses fighting back against elites, though. But no worries: they will find a way to enjoy it anyway. They won't give up their folk hero!
My crowd already loved it before they found out he was from a wealthy family. On Friday, my book club friends engaged in a group text conversation, the gist of which was that anybody who got mad enough to shoot a health insurance CEO was probably completely justified. I was shocked: these were middle-aged and old women who are committed Democrats. I tried to push back and say that, yes, for-profit health care in America is sometimes terrible; that Democrats have worked hard to make it better, culminating in Obamacare, which DID make things better for a lot of people, including me; but that you can't just shoot somebody because you're frustrated and angry.
During this conversation I found out how completely ignorant these women were about the history of health insurance. One woman thought that Reagan had "privatized health care." I had to explain that health care had been almost completely private, or not part of the government's social safety net, until the mid-1960s, when Medicare and Medicaid started. Nobody else knew that. Before that, there were charity hospitals, and Catholic hospitals run by nuns. My dad worked at one of those hospitals in Nashville. My grandfather owned a tiny small-town hospital in Lebanon, TN. It was his family's business. My grandmother grew the food for the patients. That's how it used to work. Sometimes that hospital took non-paying patients, or patients paid "in kind," that is, with produce from their farms. Although some of the women in my book club were born in the 1940s or 1950s, none of them remembered any of this apparently.
I tried to make the point that reforming health care is hard because Republicans push back so hard against everything Democrats manage to accomplish. I reminded them of the intense activism in our own community to prevent Obamacare from being destroyed in 2017. I was involved in that. They didn't even know it was going on at the time. Some of these people are active in the Democratic party.
Finally we got together in person on Saturday. I talked with one of the younger women about that text conversation and how surprised I was that old ladies thought assassination was a legitimate political strategy. She said something like, "Well, people are just frustrated, and it's some kind of catharsis I guess. It makes them feel better." !! Note that as far as I know, there was nobody in the group who had personally been screwed over by an insurance company. They had just read stories online or seen TikTok videos about such people. Most of their information came from TikTok. This is the really alarming thing, besides the blood-thirst.
Later, we talked about a man we know who shot at some people in our town because they were his tenants and they wouldn't vacate a house he owned quickly enough. This happened four years ago, and his case was dismissed by a judge, so he never had to go to jail or even pay a fine. Also, his friends forgave him immediately for trying to kill people: after all, those tenants were bad and they wouldn't leave! Again, I said that you can't just shoot at people because you're mad at them. They started making more excuses for him, and I finally got so upset that I slammed my fist on the table and said, "You can't just shoot at people when you get mad!" They looked at me as if I was crazy.
The fact is, the mob is not just Republican gun nuts now; it's little old liberal ladies. Everybody thinks it's ok to settle things with guns. It's going to get worse before it gets better.
"Reforming health care is hard because Republicans push back so hard against everything Democrats manage to accomplish"
Maybe it's also hard because what Democrats "manage to accomplish" are literally Republican ideas from the decade before? As concerning as you find the revelation that many of your neighbors believe assassination to be an efficacious solution to political gridlock, let's not overcorrect and start pretending that, actually, the system works just fine! America was already great!
Being too old (early 1940s) to be a Boomer, I clearly remember the claims that Obamacare (kudos to Obama for embracing that intended insult!) was just Romneycare warmed over, and the many refutations of that claim. It's pretty hard to make a list of other Republican ideas that were adopted by Democrats without going back a whole century and more. (Teddy Roosevelt the Progressive and also warmonger, anyone?)
BTW America was great in many ways (if you want to rebut this, please open with a Heil Hitler) and horrendously imperfect in many ways. (I do recall those long-gone days when the country was deeply racist -- and maybe I should put that in sarcasm font?)
Given that Nazi Germany was inspired by America's racial regime in forming their own laws regarding the Jews - though they thought that the "one-drop rule" was a bit extreme - you might want to rethink those parentheticals. And I don't have to go back a century to find the Dems adopting Republican policies: Biden famously tried to outflank the Republicans on immigration earlier this year.
He had some weird views on the evils of modern architecture which seemed to come from Tucker. Someone else unearthed a post where he discussed Japan’s low birthrate and blamed it on some whacky things and proposed banning fleshlight sec toys should help.
So I am not sure if he was a normal guy but I agree his target seems odd.
Based on what I read, his family seems fairly Trumpy in the way many petit bourgeois are
This guy is probably somewhat similar to the guy who shot at Trump. That guy had no clear ideological grievance against Republicans. He had also thought about shooting at Biden that day. The guns themselves create a desire in guys to shoot at people. It doesn't seem to matter that much whom they shoot at. The guns are driving people crazy.
I’ve had some conversations with a couple young Kaczynski fans and it’s dark. They say they respect him as an intellectual. But if you gently point them to the many better thinkers he got most of his ideas from (who were typically better people too), they’re not interested at all. So I have to conclude they like him primarily because of the killing.
I think that's right. Guys, and even women now, enjoy the spectacle of killing. This is truly terrifying. People pretend to "abhor the violence" (sometimes) but secretly they are getting off on it. You could see this a little more clearly in this assassination of the CEO guy. The glee was more out in the open. But sadly, I think people enjoy the entertainment factor of mass violence a lot. Maybe they voted for Trump because they knew he would create more entertaining violent and abusive spectacles for them.
There seem to be a fair number of people on the left and the right or most commonly in an ideological muddle that have convinced themselves reform is a combination of undesirable and/or impossible. The only option is to rip it all down and start again.*
The big issue here is that people want to rip it all down and start again for a variety of largely incompatible reasons. So Democrats, including very progressive ones like AOC and Warren, are left arguing for reform and improvement with an electorate where enough of the voting population considers reform/improvement undesirable to impossible.
*People never seem to think the replacement after burning it all down could be much worse than the previous structure. There is a weird optimism in nihilism sometimes.
After all, everyone knew that when the proletariat had seized power and established their dictatorship, the predictions of Marx-Engels would come true, with the withering away of the State and all.
Funny, how Russia didn't wither away, but that's life.
I read the social media post that cited Tucker. Though interestingly, hating modern architecture seems to transcend political class. I'm not the hugest fan of Brutalism but there is a lot of 20th and 21st century art and architecture I do like. I also know plenty of liberals and lefties who hate modern architecture and sometimes art as the right-wing cranks especially modern architecture.
As a retired clinical social worker I see a young man who has either had a psychotic break or is at the beginning of schizophrenia. 26 is about the time schizophrenia starts to become apparent. He was smart, social and high functioning. Then he isolated himself, had odd/distorted thoughts.
To me the issue of guns should not be the first focus. I think we will have more luck fixing the healthcare system, then getting keeping guns out of the hands of people like Luigi. Also, I believe in this case he turned to guns because the healthcare system is inadequate. And certainly the message i our society is, "guns can solve your problems". Be that as it may, getting guns off the street may solve some problems, but it won't solve his. We should be looking at his problem as well as ours.
Yup. The back injury was the final straw. He ran out of coping mechanisms. A life of chronic pain can disorder the thoughts of many people even the mentally healthy.
Kind of a trivial matter, but I’m really curious to learn why the guy hung on to the homemade gun. Along with the fake IDs and clothes, he kept virtually all the physical evidence that ties him to the crime. My suspicion is the gun is pure, even banal engineering pride. Any normal assassin buys a stolen untraceable gun and dumps it. This guy is like, “I made this thing, no way I’m chucking it.”
I agree with much of the spirit and conclusion of this piece. But to say that 'our' social problems resist "normal" political solutions seems to put the focus, wrongly, on the problems, when it seems to me that the focus really should be on the "normal" political solutions.
It has been decades since our "normal" politics have been able to solve social problems of long standing and increasing severity: race discrimination, stagnation of working class wages, job security, immigration, affordable housing, social security, health care affordability and access, education affordability and effectiveness at all levels, climate change, infrastructure deterioration, etc. The "crisis of institutions" is, I think, better and more specifically described as a "crisis of legitimacy" which affects virtually all institutions: state institutions, social institutions, economic institutions, cultural institutions, civic institutions (including the so-called 'fourth estate'). And one of the institutions that has lost the most legitimacy is 'the meritocracy'.
In many ways the celebration of the "information revolution" has promoted a belief that it is possible to do away entirely with institutions. The trouble with attempting to abolish institutions is that they aren't abolished — they are just concealed and continue to do the work of the elites who run them hidden from public view. And what remains is mass of isolated and increasingly discontented anomic individuals.
I recall a profile of most (all?) of the 2001.09.11 hijackers that noted that they were upper-middle-class guys, largely engineers, acting, they thought, in the name of their poor notional brethren too beaten-down to act. See also: the Weathermen, the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhofen.
I dunno; we'll learn a lot more when he goes to trial. The political thinking sounds like a lot of techies', but Mangione himself sounds like a lot of other bright young men who cut ties in their twenties and become drifters as they devolve into mental illness and eventually kill someone or try to.
What's interesting to me is the schadenfreude. Gutting Medicaid and veterans' benefits is pretty core for the incoming administration, certainly the DOGE and Heritage people. But it's potentially toxic for Trump's populist persona. It will be interesting to see if he cares.
I wondered how many of Luigi's fans and celebrators voted for Trump. Probably a lot. Do they realize that access to health care will only get worse when Republicans take over? Probably not. People are very confused about where health care "comes from." Because we have a patchwork system, with the VA, Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers, insuring different people at different times in their life, a lot of people don't understand the system. For example, in TN the state legislature turned down money to expand Medicaid to poor people without children. But when poor people without children can't get free care, they blame Obama, because "Obamacare doesn't care about me." They don't know that Obama and Democrats TRIED to get people like them covered, and Republicans undermined that effort. People who have been voting against health care for themselves for decades are still mad that they don't get free care. They think black people and immigrants get it instead. Having had conversations with these people, I know how difficult it is to explain reality to them. They just don't want to hear that their "own" Republican reps have been screwing them.
Trump absolutely depends on that ignorance. Funnily enough, when he was floating his candidacy in 1989, his ghost-written campaign book THE AMERICA WE DESERVE called for universal healthcare and a one-time supertax on the mega-wealthy to reduce the national debt. He'll say anything that gets him applause, and the beauty of it is that he can deliver a different set of applause lines to the billionaires in their living rooms, at cabinet meetings, and in the Mar a Lago dining room, where the unwashed MAGA people won't hear him. But once the cuts begin, he won't have Biden or Obama or Hillary to blame for them.
That won't stop them from blaming Obama for anything. People have no notion of history - I'm sure plenty of people would bite if the right person suggested that Obama was responsible for Pearl Harbor.
What I find interesting is that the corporate monied class solution is more bodyguards. More isolation inside their communities and concentration on security measures. As opposed to introspection of how a politically and economically divided Country might course correct to limit the disparities perceived by the majority.
They do in fact use their wealth for political outcomes to divide and suppress and that historically results in a backlash of violence. The cohort of "haters" on social media widens every hour of every day. The clock of patience is nearing the enough is enough measurement.
It's said one can't fix the stupid. One can't correct for the crazy. One never knows when the two will show up together convinced they are on the right path to salvation.
I don't think this is uncommon. A friend of mine is from Malaysia. Her family qualified as upper-middle class likely. The middle-classes and above in countries like Malaysia live in complexes that are guarded/gated even more so than American gated communities because the country is fairly lawless when it comes to the kind of crime that people said was rampant in the United States during the Biden years.
These compounds usually have everything you need to lead a hermetically sealed existence. You still need to go to work, school, potentially shopping/eating out on the outside but recreational stuff like a gym, pool, sometimes a golf course, or even a grocery store are in the compound.
I think we could live much better with as many guns—though I don't think we'd desire to have so many—if we didn't have the gun culture we do, which makes the misunderstood man who is The Only One Who Sees It and uses a gun to right wrongs a culture-hero, and his skill with a gun an exact index of his righteousness…like the Forty-Seven Ronin.
EDIT: [please! un-like if this changes your opinion of the whole]
…but with guns instead of swords, and without the check of a group to keep you something like within reasonable limits. Hell, if gun-ownership required you to drill with a sanely-regulated militia, the people around you might _notice_ your going around the bend, and would have incentive to stop you, out of both self-preservation and unit pride.
luigi appears to have had pretty plumbline "grey tribe" politics, a term coined by scott alexander siskind of slate star codex, which puts him in the ideological orbit of scott's ssc blog, the lesswrong reddit, eliezer yudkowsky, the TESCREAL zeitgeist, etc
also seems to have been a big fan of airport bookstore business grindset and pop intellectual works like the ones if books could kill podcast covers
labeling him "rightwing" or associating him too closely with silicon valley technoreaction would be an outgroup homogenous category error
the only thing out of left field is a guy like him doing propaganda of the deed
Someone described him as a "THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING" kind of bro, a guy looking for a unified and singular theory for everything. His sources for this ranged from the benign (Michael Pollan) to the dangerous/violent (the Unibomber).
None of us knows the real people, Brian the CEO or Luigi the aggrieved assassin, but we are very familiar with these characters in art and popular culture. And when we encounter them, “Brian the CEO” is almost always the villain.
FWIW, the NYT says that he suffered spinal misalignment and resulting pain so intense that he considered himself unable to date or enjoy physical intimacy. Seemingly in 2023 (the article is a little ambiguous about the timing), he underwent a spinal fusion procedure. It will be interesting to learn if United HealthCare was his insurance provider and if there was a dispute between him and United about payment. It would not be at all surprising if someone of his nature would intellectualize physical suffering and a bad relationship with his insurer. I do not mean to downplay the significance of the specific content of his intellectual statements, only that his health condition and payment situation needs to be considered (if the reporting is accurate). (Perhaps a Marxist might say that his health and insurance situation sparked in him a new "consciousness.")
You are right, I should have noted that. But, having thought further, I guess what I honestly mean to say is I think the injury and any possible resulting payment dispute with his insurer needs to be considered the central issue. In other words, I really do mean to downplay the significance any ideological commitments or developments. Intense physical pain, financial ruin, and the shaming dismissal of his claims by an insurance company would, in my view, be more important. Perhaps he is less as an old-school anarchist than an old-school seeker of personal vengeance. One might even go ahead and call it feud. But then, for at least some actors, pursuit of feud (aka, "violent self-help") may be what propaganda of the deed is.
Indeed, and my goal is not to persuade anyone of my views. Rather, I was sort of hoping to spark discussion that would help me learn better how to articulate, in a theoretically informed way, the difference of opinion.
The Times stated he discussed this on reddit and Blue Cross/Blue Shield/Anthem was his insurer. Though if he just turned 26, perhaps he got insurance on his own for the first time and UHC denied coverage for post-surgery something or other.
I continue to think that more investigation into what about life in America over the past 20 years makes it seem so broken and alienating is greatly needed.
I think TikTok explains that. Plus the fact that people don't get it that prices never come down, except maybe for gas sometimes. Deflation is bad, but people don't know that. One friend told me that we were in a recession worse than The Great Depression. She had seen a TikTok video about a guy complaining that his fast food meal was expensive. Turned out he had had it delivered by door dash. That was later revealed. Chinese misinformation on TikTok is massive.
I think the psychotic break/ schizophrenia angle needs more discussion. I feel pretty confident that when and if we get to know Luigi's thinking better, it will be obvious that his top level thinking is disorganized and delusional. That doesn't make this any less of a social or political issue. Both a person with mental illness and and a person with physical illness need "care" from medical providers. What I mean by "care" is not just the mealy mouthed definition used in the insurance industry. That isn't care, that is a business transaction for medical services. What people need when the are sick is real human beings actually caring about their health, ie they need mental support.
Anyone who has had a significant run in with the Medical insurance industry knows that it does not care about you. They try to brainwash us into believing they care like a friend or family, but it is purely transactional. As one struggles to navigate the system, it becomes clear nobody in the insurance industry "cares" about you. It's not surprise that a young man that is struggling to cope will lash out at what he perceives as the primary object that is supposed to be helping him, but instead doesn't care if he suffers, lives, or dies. This is the inevitable outcome of a system that works only for money and does not recognize it's social obligations.
It's also interesting to think that the insurance company will seek to solve the problem with PR and greater security for it's most privileged. Solving the social disorder with guns instead of solving the actual material problem.
People keep noting that we must be in a new Gilded Age- anarchist assassin basically seals it. Doesn’t hurt that Leon Czolgosz and Luigi Mangione practically rhyme.
Hot young guy from a prominent Catholic family whose exterior charm hides a crippling back injury destroys a self-made striver born on a farm at America's margins who rose to power through his wits and a competitive advantage in amorality?
It's Nixon vs Kennedy!
It confuses the people who wanted to see a morality play about the oppressed masses fighting back against elites, though. But no worries: they will find a way to enjoy it anyway. They won't give up their folk hero!
My crowd already loved it before they found out he was from a wealthy family. On Friday, my book club friends engaged in a group text conversation, the gist of which was that anybody who got mad enough to shoot a health insurance CEO was probably completely justified. I was shocked: these were middle-aged and old women who are committed Democrats. I tried to push back and say that, yes, for-profit health care in America is sometimes terrible; that Democrats have worked hard to make it better, culminating in Obamacare, which DID make things better for a lot of people, including me; but that you can't just shoot somebody because you're frustrated and angry.
During this conversation I found out how completely ignorant these women were about the history of health insurance. One woman thought that Reagan had "privatized health care." I had to explain that health care had been almost completely private, or not part of the government's social safety net, until the mid-1960s, when Medicare and Medicaid started. Nobody else knew that. Before that, there were charity hospitals, and Catholic hospitals run by nuns. My dad worked at one of those hospitals in Nashville. My grandfather owned a tiny small-town hospital in Lebanon, TN. It was his family's business. My grandmother grew the food for the patients. That's how it used to work. Sometimes that hospital took non-paying patients, or patients paid "in kind," that is, with produce from their farms. Although some of the women in my book club were born in the 1940s or 1950s, none of them remembered any of this apparently.
I tried to make the point that reforming health care is hard because Republicans push back so hard against everything Democrats manage to accomplish. I reminded them of the intense activism in our own community to prevent Obamacare from being destroyed in 2017. I was involved in that. They didn't even know it was going on at the time. Some of these people are active in the Democratic party.
Finally we got together in person on Saturday. I talked with one of the younger women about that text conversation and how surprised I was that old ladies thought assassination was a legitimate political strategy. She said something like, "Well, people are just frustrated, and it's some kind of catharsis I guess. It makes them feel better." !! Note that as far as I know, there was nobody in the group who had personally been screwed over by an insurance company. They had just read stories online or seen TikTok videos about such people. Most of their information came from TikTok. This is the really alarming thing, besides the blood-thirst.
Later, we talked about a man we know who shot at some people in our town because they were his tenants and they wouldn't vacate a house he owned quickly enough. This happened four years ago, and his case was dismissed by a judge, so he never had to go to jail or even pay a fine. Also, his friends forgave him immediately for trying to kill people: after all, those tenants were bad and they wouldn't leave! Again, I said that you can't just shoot at people because you're mad at them. They started making more excuses for him, and I finally got so upset that I slammed my fist on the table and said, "You can't just shoot at people when you get mad!" They looked at me as if I was crazy.
The fact is, the mob is not just Republican gun nuts now; it's little old liberal ladies. Everybody thinks it's ok to settle things with guns. It's going to get worse before it gets better.
"Reforming health care is hard because Republicans push back so hard against everything Democrats manage to accomplish"
Maybe it's also hard because what Democrats "manage to accomplish" are literally Republican ideas from the decade before? As concerning as you find the revelation that many of your neighbors believe assassination to be an efficacious solution to political gridlock, let's not overcorrect and start pretending that, actually, the system works just fine! America was already great!
Being too old (early 1940s) to be a Boomer, I clearly remember the claims that Obamacare (kudos to Obama for embracing that intended insult!) was just Romneycare warmed over, and the many refutations of that claim. It's pretty hard to make a list of other Republican ideas that were adopted by Democrats without going back a whole century and more. (Teddy Roosevelt the Progressive and also warmonger, anyone?)
BTW America was great in many ways (if you want to rebut this, please open with a Heil Hitler) and horrendously imperfect in many ways. (I do recall those long-gone days when the country was deeply racist -- and maybe I should put that in sarcasm font?)
Given that Nazi Germany was inspired by America's racial regime in forming their own laws regarding the Jews - though they thought that the "one-drop rule" was a bit extreme - you might want to rethink those parentheticals. And I don't have to go back a century to find the Dems adopting Republican policies: Biden famously tried to outflank the Republicans on immigration earlier this year.
Somehow my reply to this got lost. So, it's certainly regrettable that I said nothing at all about American racism having been a bad thing!!
Hey, maybe I should put this in Sarcasm Font!!! Do you even know what that word means? Bye.
He had some weird views on the evils of modern architecture which seemed to come from Tucker. Someone else unearthed a post where he discussed Japan’s low birthrate and blamed it on some whacky things and proposed banning fleshlight sec toys should help.
So I am not sure if he was a normal guy but I agree his target seems odd.
Based on what I read, his family seems fairly Trumpy in the way many petit bourgeois are
Yeah but then he said Tucker's views were stupid conspiracism
This guy is probably somewhat similar to the guy who shot at Trump. That guy had no clear ideological grievance against Republicans. He had also thought about shooting at Biden that day. The guns themselves create a desire in guys to shoot at people. It doesn't seem to matter that much whom they shoot at. The guns are driving people crazy.
Maybe; but he went to the trouble of getting an untraceable ghost gun, possibly by 3D printing it. So I suspect the crazy preceded the gun.
I’ve had some conversations with a couple young Kaczynski fans and it’s dark. They say they respect him as an intellectual. But if you gently point them to the many better thinkers he got most of his ideas from (who were typically better people too), they’re not interested at all. So I have to conclude they like him primarily because of the killing.
I think that's right. Guys, and even women now, enjoy the spectacle of killing. This is truly terrifying. People pretend to "abhor the violence" (sometimes) but secretly they are getting off on it. You could see this a little more clearly in this assassination of the CEO guy. The glee was more out in the open. But sadly, I think people enjoy the entertainment factor of mass violence a lot. Maybe they voted for Trump because they knew he would create more entertaining violent and abusive spectacles for them.
Quite so; but I believe that the old Chinese proverb has been debunked as such. Not that that makes it less insightful.
There seem to be a fair number of people on the left and the right or most commonly in an ideological muddle that have convinced themselves reform is a combination of undesirable and/or impossible. The only option is to rip it all down and start again.*
The big issue here is that people want to rip it all down and start again for a variety of largely incompatible reasons. So Democrats, including very progressive ones like AOC and Warren, are left arguing for reform and improvement with an electorate where enough of the voting population considers reform/improvement undesirable to impossible.
*People never seem to think the replacement after burning it all down could be much worse than the previous structure. There is a weird optimism in nihilism sometimes.
After all, everyone knew that when the proletariat had seized power and established their dictatorship, the predictions of Marx-Engels would come true, with the withering away of the State and all.
Funny, how Russia didn't wither away, but that's life.
I read the social media post that cited Tucker. Though interestingly, hating modern architecture seems to transcend political class. I'm not the hugest fan of Brutalism but there is a lot of 20th and 21st century art and architecture I do like. I also know plenty of liberals and lefties who hate modern architecture and sometimes art as the right-wing cranks especially modern architecture.
As a retired clinical social worker I see a young man who has either had a psychotic break or is at the beginning of schizophrenia. 26 is about the time schizophrenia starts to become apparent. He was smart, social and high functioning. Then he isolated himself, had odd/distorted thoughts.
A nation awash in guns, with schizophrenics easily able to buy guns, results in these sorts of murders.
To me the issue of guns should not be the first focus. I think we will have more luck fixing the healthcare system, then getting keeping guns out of the hands of people like Luigi. Also, I believe in this case he turned to guns because the healthcare system is inadequate. And certainly the message i our society is, "guns can solve your problems". Be that as it may, getting guns off the street may solve some problems, but it won't solve his. We should be looking at his problem as well as ours.
Yup. The back injury was the final straw. He ran out of coping mechanisms. A life of chronic pain can disorder the thoughts of many people even the mentally healthy.
Kind of a trivial matter, but I’m really curious to learn why the guy hung on to the homemade gun. Along with the fake IDs and clothes, he kept virtually all the physical evidence that ties him to the crime. My suspicion is the gun is pure, even banal engineering pride. Any normal assassin buys a stolen untraceable gun and dumps it. This guy is like, “I made this thing, no way I’m chucking it.”
I agree with much of the spirit and conclusion of this piece. But to say that 'our' social problems resist "normal" political solutions seems to put the focus, wrongly, on the problems, when it seems to me that the focus really should be on the "normal" political solutions.
It has been decades since our "normal" politics have been able to solve social problems of long standing and increasing severity: race discrimination, stagnation of working class wages, job security, immigration, affordable housing, social security, health care affordability and access, education affordability and effectiveness at all levels, climate change, infrastructure deterioration, etc. The "crisis of institutions" is, I think, better and more specifically described as a "crisis of legitimacy" which affects virtually all institutions: state institutions, social institutions, economic institutions, cultural institutions, civic institutions (including the so-called 'fourth estate'). And one of the institutions that has lost the most legitimacy is 'the meritocracy'.
In many ways the celebration of the "information revolution" has promoted a belief that it is possible to do away entirely with institutions. The trouble with attempting to abolish institutions is that they aren't abolished — they are just concealed and continue to do the work of the elites who run them hidden from public view. And what remains is mass of isolated and increasingly discontented anomic individuals.
I recall a profile of most (all?) of the 2001.09.11 hijackers that noted that they were upper-middle-class guys, largely engineers, acting, they thought, in the name of their poor notional brethren too beaten-down to act. See also: the Weathermen, the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhofen.
I dunno; we'll learn a lot more when he goes to trial. The political thinking sounds like a lot of techies', but Mangione himself sounds like a lot of other bright young men who cut ties in their twenties and become drifters as they devolve into mental illness and eventually kill someone or try to.
What's interesting to me is the schadenfreude. Gutting Medicaid and veterans' benefits is pretty core for the incoming administration, certainly the DOGE and Heritage people. But it's potentially toxic for Trump's populist persona. It will be interesting to see if he cares.
I wondered how many of Luigi's fans and celebrators voted for Trump. Probably a lot. Do they realize that access to health care will only get worse when Republicans take over? Probably not. People are very confused about where health care "comes from." Because we have a patchwork system, with the VA, Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers, insuring different people at different times in their life, a lot of people don't understand the system. For example, in TN the state legislature turned down money to expand Medicaid to poor people without children. But when poor people without children can't get free care, they blame Obama, because "Obamacare doesn't care about me." They don't know that Obama and Democrats TRIED to get people like them covered, and Republicans undermined that effort. People who have been voting against health care for themselves for decades are still mad that they don't get free care. They think black people and immigrants get it instead. Having had conversations with these people, I know how difficult it is to explain reality to them. They just don't want to hear that their "own" Republican reps have been screwing them.
Trump absolutely depends on that ignorance. Funnily enough, when he was floating his candidacy in 1989, his ghost-written campaign book THE AMERICA WE DESERVE called for universal healthcare and a one-time supertax on the mega-wealthy to reduce the national debt. He'll say anything that gets him applause, and the beauty of it is that he can deliver a different set of applause lines to the billionaires in their living rooms, at cabinet meetings, and in the Mar a Lago dining room, where the unwashed MAGA people won't hear him. But once the cuts begin, he won't have Biden or Obama or Hillary to blame for them.
That won't stop them from blaming Obama for anything. People have no notion of history - I'm sure plenty of people would bite if the right person suggested that Obama was responsible for Pearl Harbor.
What I find interesting is that the corporate monied class solution is more bodyguards. More isolation inside their communities and concentration on security measures. As opposed to introspection of how a politically and economically divided Country might course correct to limit the disparities perceived by the majority.
They do in fact use their wealth for political outcomes to divide and suppress and that historically results in a backlash of violence. The cohort of "haters" on social media widens every hour of every day. The clock of patience is nearing the enough is enough measurement.
It's said one can't fix the stupid. One can't correct for the crazy. One never knows when the two will show up together convinced they are on the right path to salvation.
I don't think this is uncommon. A friend of mine is from Malaysia. Her family qualified as upper-middle class likely. The middle-classes and above in countries like Malaysia live in complexes that are guarded/gated even more so than American gated communities because the country is fairly lawless when it comes to the kind of crime that people said was rampant in the United States during the Biden years.
These compounds usually have everything you need to lead a hermetically sealed existence. You still need to go to work, school, potentially shopping/eating out on the outside but recreational stuff like a gym, pool, sometimes a golf course, or even a grocery store are in the compound.
For emerging and third world Nations, as one goes up the scale of wealth, security is a greater concern at a lower level than the issues here.
I think we could live much better with as many guns—though I don't think we'd desire to have so many—if we didn't have the gun culture we do, which makes the misunderstood man who is The Only One Who Sees It and uses a gun to right wrongs a culture-hero, and his skill with a gun an exact index of his righteousness…like the Forty-Seven Ronin.
EDIT: [please! un-like if this changes your opinion of the whole]
…but with guns instead of swords, and without the check of a group to keep you something like within reasonable limits. Hell, if gun-ownership required you to drill with a sanely-regulated militia, the people around you might _notice_ your going around the bend, and would have incentive to stop you, out of both self-preservation and unit pride.
luigi appears to have had pretty plumbline "grey tribe" politics, a term coined by scott alexander siskind of slate star codex, which puts him in the ideological orbit of scott's ssc blog, the lesswrong reddit, eliezer yudkowsky, the TESCREAL zeitgeist, etc
also seems to have been a big fan of airport bookstore business grindset and pop intellectual works like the ones if books could kill podcast covers
labeling him "rightwing" or associating him too closely with silicon valley technoreaction would be an outgroup homogenous category error
the only thing out of left field is a guy like him doing propaganda of the deed
Someone described him as a "THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING" kind of bro, a guy looking for a unified and singular theory for everything. His sources for this ranged from the benign (Michael Pollan) to the dangerous/violent (the Unibomber).
None of us knows the real people, Brian the CEO or Luigi the aggrieved assassin, but we are very familiar with these characters in art and popular culture. And when we encounter them, “Brian the CEO” is almost always the villain.
FWIW, the NYT says that he suffered spinal misalignment and resulting pain so intense that he considered himself unable to date or enjoy physical intimacy. Seemingly in 2023 (the article is a little ambiguous about the timing), he underwent a spinal fusion procedure. It will be interesting to learn if United HealthCare was his insurance provider and if there was a dispute between him and United about payment. It would not be at all surprising if someone of his nature would intellectualize physical suffering and a bad relationship with his insurer. I do not mean to downplay the significance of the specific content of his intellectual statements, only that his health condition and payment situation needs to be considered (if the reporting is accurate). (Perhaps a Marxist might say that his health and insurance situation sparked in him a new "consciousness.")
Right, as I noted he experienced a terrible spine injury...
You are right, I should have noted that. But, having thought further, I guess what I honestly mean to say is I think the injury and any possible resulting payment dispute with his insurer needs to be considered the central issue. In other words, I really do mean to downplay the significance any ideological commitments or developments. Intense physical pain, financial ruin, and the shaming dismissal of his claims by an insurance company would, in my view, be more important. Perhaps he is less as an old-school anarchist than an old-school seeker of personal vengeance. One might even go ahead and call it feud. But then, for at least some actors, pursuit of feud (aka, "violent self-help") may be what propaganda of the deed is.
That's your opinion, this is mine
Indeed, and my goal is not to persuade anyone of my views. Rather, I was sort of hoping to spark discussion that would help me learn better how to articulate, in a theoretically informed way, the difference of opinion.
Man if you don't want to engage with commenters just don't reply. I like your writing, but this sort of stuff is just obnoxious
The Times stated he discussed this on reddit and Blue Cross/Blue Shield/Anthem was his insurer. Though if he just turned 26, perhaps he got insurance on his own for the first time and UHC denied coverage for post-surgery something or other.
I continue to think that more investigation into what about life in America over the past 20 years makes it seem so broken and alienating is greatly needed.
Well, I wrote a book about 30 years ago
Right I think your book is great but I don't think it is trying to answer the question of why people don't like the economy of 2024.
I think TikTok explains that. Plus the fact that people don't get it that prices never come down, except maybe for gas sometimes. Deflation is bad, but people don't know that. One friend told me that we were in a recession worse than The Great Depression. She had seen a TikTok video about a guy complaining that his fast food meal was expensive. Turned out he had had it delivered by door dash. That was later revealed. Chinese misinformation on TikTok is massive.
I think the psychotic break/ schizophrenia angle needs more discussion. I feel pretty confident that when and if we get to know Luigi's thinking better, it will be obvious that his top level thinking is disorganized and delusional. That doesn't make this any less of a social or political issue. Both a person with mental illness and and a person with physical illness need "care" from medical providers. What I mean by "care" is not just the mealy mouthed definition used in the insurance industry. That isn't care, that is a business transaction for medical services. What people need when the are sick is real human beings actually caring about their health, ie they need mental support.
Anyone who has had a significant run in with the Medical insurance industry knows that it does not care about you. They try to brainwash us into believing they care like a friend or family, but it is purely transactional. As one struggles to navigate the system, it becomes clear nobody in the insurance industry "cares" about you. It's not surprise that a young man that is struggling to cope will lash out at what he perceives as the primary object that is supposed to be helping him, but instead doesn't care if he suffers, lives, or dies. This is the inevitable outcome of a system that works only for money and does not recognize it's social obligations.
It's also interesting to think that the insurance company will seek to solve the problem with PR and greater security for it's most privileged. Solving the social disorder with guns instead of solving the actual material problem.
People keep noting that we must be in a new Gilded Age- anarchist assassin basically seals it. Doesn’t hurt that Leon Czolgosz and Luigi Mangione practically rhyme.