Précis
On December 4th at 6:45 am, Brian Thompson was shot in the back while walking along West 54th street toward the Hilton. Less than half an hour later, upon being rushed to Mount Sinai West, Thompson was declared dead. Targeted for his line of work (Brian was the CEO of UnitedHealthcare), Thompson’s murder triggered a five-day manhunt which finally ended yesterday with the arrest of Luigi Mangione, the man suspected of killing him.
The time between Thompson’s death and Mangione’s arrest was filled with intense speculation, self-righteous indignation, and to the surprise of more than a few, a not inconsiderable amount of approval. Mangione quickly became a folk hero, despite the initial poverty of information available about him – such is mythic identification during a time of wanton injustice and callous leadership.
From the moment the story first broke, commentators rushed to assess his potential motivations, his background, etc., in the hopes of comfortably fitting the murder into their existing worldview. Many were overeager to signal their moral and political identification online. Was it a professional job? Revenge for a denied claim? Who was the shooter really? Why did he choose this victim? Was he based or cringe?
At first, there was widespread agreement: the target was a CEO working in an especially maligned industry, and so the attacker must have been an anti-bourgeois hero of the proletariat, striking a fatal blow against the 1% (and global capitalism more generally). While support for the shooter’s action was not strictly determined along partisan lines, so-called ‘communists’ and OWS-styled left-wingers lauded the violence while the most prominent voices of the online Right derided the shooter as resentful genetic detritus. Surely there was nothing more to the story, nothing else worth considering…
Almost immediately, the most popular accounts on Right Twitter/X went into overdrive to police public opinion on Thompson’s murder, thereby establishing a chilling effect on pro-vigilante sentiment. But then we got our first look at the suspected shooter and the consensus began to break apart. Handsome (at least by psycho killer standards) and leaving behind a trail of inscrutable clues, suddenly it felt as though we were living a real-life version of a Nolan Batman film. An undeniable mystique began to develop, and by the time Mangione was arrested, online opinion had shifted (aided in large part by the discovery of his social media footprint).
Once his internet activity had been uncovered, perceptions began to change. Those on ‘the Left’ now had buyers remorse, while those on ‘the Right’ who had so strenuously chastised their followers for sympathizing with the shooter flipped positions. Perhaps least surprising of all is the fact that women of every stripe began engaging in horny-posting. With a fuller picture of the man now available, questions about Mangione only multiplied as it was clear that the shooting did not comport with existing heuristics about politically-motivated violence.
The frailty of our political heuristics
If the last four years have taught us nothing else, it is that the things we claim to understand are further out of reach than anyone is willing to admit. Whether it is COVID-19 or voter fraud, J6 or the war in Ukraine, presidential assassinations or the war in Syria – I could really keep on going – our political situation is far more fluid and uncertain than most realize. The assumptions and heuristics we use to inform our thinking about the world require an upgrade, for this shooting has revealed a few things which contradict conventional wisdom:
- There isn’t really blanket support for representatives of the upper class anymore.
- Anti-corporate sentiment is no longer just a left-wing cause.
- A great many people are comfortable with so-called ‘political violence’.
- ‘Political extremists’ no longer come from the fringes of society.
Our heuristics are now just prejudices, inherited from a bygone era in American history that few realize we have left behind. ‘The map is not the territory’, as Alfred Korzybski once said. Not only are we, as Americans, a different people from who we used to be (demographically or otherwise), but the world around us has changed dramatically. To understand the world we now inhabit we must dare to think differently.
#1: Especially post-COVID, contempt for the wealthy and well-established has reached a fevered pitch. No longer just a cherished pastime of self-styled ‘socialists’ and the chronically unemployed, people of all ideological backgrounds harbor a resentment of the upper class, whose material and moral avarice have grown beyond comprehension. By promulgating their luxury beliefs, the upper crust have contributed nearly as much to the ongoing social decay as have the actual ruling elites.
#2: Decades of corporate homogenization have taken effect and now the average person does in fact treat employees not as people, but as representatives of the entities they work for. Brian Thompson – the living, breathing, person – disappeared. In his stead, a doughy blue-eyed stand-in for corporate malfeasance (at least, in the eyes of millions of X users). The facts of his life ceased to matter, for not only did he represent the detached upper-class but he was also the face of an undignified and ‘parasitical’ industry.
#3: While this has certainly become apparent in recent years (since at least the summer of 2020, though the attempted assassination of Trump this past summer certainly woke many more up to this reality), hyperpolarization has led to a circumstance where the average person is no longer bothered by the principle of vigilantism or political violence, only by the target. To some this is an improvement, for it denotes the population’s move towards an overt friend-enemy distinction. On the other hand, it means there are those – like Luigi Mangione – who guiltlessly take matters into their own hands.
#4: Now this one is the most important. Luigi Mangione may be the first practitioner of normie political violence, or said differently, non-partisan political violence. He was neither a communist nor a White nationalist. Mangione was not radicalized by police violence against Blacks or the movement against women’s reproductive rights. He didn’t want to free Palestine or liberate any other oppressed group for that matter. To the extent that we could place him in any easily understood political category, he was effectively apolitical, a centrist. Mangione is the first neo-normie: not ‘woke’ in the sense in which the word is typically invoked (i.e., fixated on racial and sexual identity politics), but certainly animated by a sense of persecution at the hands of systems, institutions, and networks. Ideological, yes, but not in the way most other ‘political extremists’ of recent years have practiced it.
This makes sense considering Mangione’s background. High-IQ, neurodivergent, and with an interest in objects over people (owing to his education as a computer scientist), Mangione’s life represented the intersection of distinctly 21st century trends:
- Psychedelic esoterica and avant-garde health advice
- Tech-bro optimization-maxing
- Erratic Zoomer hyper-literacy
A prime example of my McLuhan-ite theory of internet radicalization, Mangione represents the profile of a different kind of ‘extremist’, one whose autistic psychology and masculinist physiology led him to a pure rationale for committing unconventionally-ideological political violence.
Thinking like a data engineer or computer scientist would, Mangione analyzed ‘the system’ and, just as his career prepared him to do, generated ‘a solution’. He than dispassionately (and seemingly without remorse) applied that solution. Mangione appears to be a man of conviction, who having retreated from social life due to a back surgery gone wrong (or so the story goes), discovered the DMT machine elves and Ted Kaczynski. Obviously down in a hole of despair, rage, and confusion, Mangione decided to be the man that no one else dared to be. The one who would stand up and do what is necessary. At least, that’s how he appears to have seen it.
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