The Enigma of Luigi Mangione
And the Madness Of His Apologists
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At first, it seemed like a story we could intuitively grasp. An idealistic young man becomes angered by the callousness and injustice of American healthcare, after struggling to get proper treatment for his painful back condition. He concludes that the system will never change unless pain is inflicted on it, and resolves to carry out a very public murder of one of its most powerful executives.
Once you look just a little deeper, however - and we’re all squinting into the dark right now - that story unravels. Nobody has yet found evidence that Luigi Mangione had a rough time at the hands of any insurer. He is from a wealthy family, and rich Americans tend to get first-rate healthcare. He certainly wasn’t a customer of United Healthcare, the company headed by the victim, Brian Thompson.
Was Mangione acting on behalf of the less fortunate - those effectively shut out of the system when they need it most? That is what his many admirers on the radical left fervently believe. Perhaps he was. But while journalists have trawled through his social media, and interviewed his friends, they haven’t discovered prior evidence of disgust with the inequities of American healthcare.
Neither does the political logic of his target hold up. In the wake of Thompson’s murder, the economics blogger Noah Smith published a post explaining why health insurers aren’t, in fact, the fat cat villains of the US healthcare system, even if they’re the ones who have to turn down claims. Their average profit margin is about half that of most big US companies. They pay a higher proportion of Americans’ healthcare costs than the state insurance systems of Sweden, Denmark and Britain. The reason Americans pay high prices is that the providers - the hospitals and doctors - charge a lot more than other countries. While there are obviously problems with the system, most Americans are happy with their insurer.
But what makes this case truly mystifying is the radical disjunction between the Mangione that people knew and the Mangione who apparently committed this act of violence. It’s not just that he wasn’t a healthcare campaigner, it’s that he didn’t pursue any causes or express strong political views. He just doesn’t fit his own profile. Those who encountered him recall a friendly, gentle, open-minded guy, not a firebrand or a troubled soul.
When reports first came from his active online life, warnings were sounded about the dangers of alienated young men getting lost in the netherworld of radical blogs and podcasts. I nodded along gravely until I realised Mangione read and admired many of the same writers I did - writers loosely associated with the rationalist and tech community. These thinkers are not cranks, but intellectually curious and scientifically minded. They are deeply suspicious of ideology and partisanship, and take pleasure in debunking conspiracy theories. They dislike simple solutions and obvious explanations. They are the exact opposite of the people now turning Mangione into a political hero.
Mangione wasn’t a radical leftist; he was a liberal centrist. One of his favourite authors was Tim Urban, founder of the hugely popular rationalist website Wait But Why. Urban is the author of a book about why we should try to improve democratic institutions and reinforce liberal norms, rather than sweep them aside, as many on right and left seem keen to do. Mangione chose it for the book club he co-founded while living in Hawaii, along with Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.
Mangione loved Urban’s book so much he wrote to the author to tell him, and they had a pleasant correspondence. Mangione also struck up an online relationship with the blogger Gurwinder Bhogal, who writes thoughtful posts about human psychology. They ended up having a two-hour video conversation. Bhogal didn’t come away worried about the young man’s mental stability. He came away thinking Mangione was one of the nicest people he’d ever met. After the call, Mangione gifted Bhogal subscriptions to online services that might increase his productivity.
The book club also read Industrial Society and its Future, by Theodore John Kaczynski: otherwise known as the manifesto of the Unabomber. Mangione didn’t introduce it but seems to have been at least somewhat impressed by it. On his GoodReads page (if indeed it is his) Mangione says, “It’s impossible to ignore how prescient many of [Kaczynski’s] predictions about modern society.”
He then quotes another online reviewer’s opinion to the effect that Kaczynski was correct to see violence as a valid means of change in a society where the powerful ignore peaceful protest. Mangione doesn’t exactly endorse this view but he calls it ‘interesting’, while noting that Kaczynski is ‘rightfully imprisoned’ for maiming innocent people. This might be the only pre-dropout glimpse we have of his mind turning towards extremes, albeit in a rather affectless way.
In the six months or so before the shooting, Mangione stopped calling his friends and family and stopped posting online. His mother posted a missing persons report. For now, this dropout period remains a black box. We don’t know why he entered it, what he did during it, or how his mind turned when he was in it. All we know is that he re-emerged from isolation with a plan, a gun, and a whole new personality.
It’s hard to see the pre-dropout Mangione writing of his intent to “wack” the CEO of an insurance company, as he did in a diary entry from October. It’s hard to believe this sensitive intellectual penned the blunt, lazily argued, badly written manifesto he had in his bag, with its megalomaniacal last line: “Evidently I am the first to face it [the evils of the healthcare system] with such brutal honesty.” It’s been suggested he developed a severe mental illness at some point this year, though we don’t know of any external signs of it. Either way, Mangione was not the man his admirers think he is.
The response of many Americans to this cold-blooded murder has been breathtakingly amoral. All over social media, Mangione is celebrated, feted, fawned over. A poll found that 41% of young voters believe Thompson’s murder was “acceptable”. And it’s not just young people or members of the public. Senator Elizabeth Warren was sympathetic to the murderer of Brian Thompson: “People can only be pushed so far,” she said. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came very close to justifying the shooting. An English professor at the University of Pennsylvania used TikTok to call Mangione, “the icon we all need and deserve”. It has come to something when Donald Trump is the voice of basic moral sense. “How can people like this guy?,” he asked reporters the other day. “That’s a sickness, actually. Especially the way it was done. Right in the back.”
Pre-dropout Mangione might have agreed. He might also have agreed with his intellectual mentor Tim Urban that it’s a terrible thing to dehumanise someone in the name of politics. He would have been right. To make the bereavement of Brian Thompson’s children collateral damage in your political project requires a kind of coldness towards other human beings that makes one doubt whether empathy for the suffering of others is really the point at all. “Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.” That preening line tells us on whom his attention was trained in the days leading up to the shooting.
Those who applaud him are playing a dangerous game. Justify political murder and you invite your opponents to do the same. When more people adopt the same logic, more people become targets. Violence ramifies. Trump, who knows what it is to be a target, is right: the adulation of Luigi Mangione is a sickness, and it’s catching.
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I thought immediately of what Hilary Mantel said in 2009 after winning theBooker for Wolf Hall: "Henry VIII was in chronic pain. I know what that does to degrade the personality, to detract from rationality". That kind of primal reaction is made far more likely by a context of systemic failure - the crazily high cost, low results US healthcare system which even at luxe level (my personal experience with no refusal of care or other serious battles), is still stressful, $$$$$ and pettily dehumanising (eg. unexpected "out of networks" eg for an anaesthetist in emergency care for my child, not allowingszid child even into emergency room until I had found my insurance card). Pain-wracked, isolated, feeling a cog in a terrible anti-human system: a horribly predicable risk equation for such a terrible act.
A couple of thoughts after reading this well argued post on Luigi Mangione (and of course Ian is right in his final judgment that "the adulation of Luigi Mangione is a sickness.") First, to say that "the response of many Americans to this cold-blooded murder has been breathtakingly amoral" gets at something fundamental about a very troubled country and its fading civic society. And second, nothing is more emblematic of this sickness than the American health care system, which has a business model built upon denying care and forcing patients to fight for what they're clearly entitled to, knowing most of them won't. My daughter was recently in a serious accident that required trauma surgery, but her insurance company denied everything at first because it was "out of network." A two-year battle ensued, in which the company ultimately paid everything—thousands and thousands of hugely inflated costs for the hospital, doctors, ambulance fees, etc. etc.—and, in the end, essentially acknowledged that all of its profit-maximizing denials were completely improper and unlawful. This is an incredibly sick system that's become accepted by everyone in America simply as the way things are. Maybe this helps explain why so many want to see Luigi Mangione as the hero he's clearly not.