Somebody Do Something: Luigi Mangione and a Culture of Violent Panic

Our political and cultural conditions breed violence and desperate acts. Understanding that is a key to making it better

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Following the identification of Luigi Mangione as the suspected assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the internet was awash in a flurry of harried research. Thompson’s murder had been a point of obsession for days, owing to the sensational nature of the crime, including the footage, the disappearance of the shooter, and, for some, the cathartic nature of seeing an executive of one of the most damaging and deadly industries being on the receiving end of a flash of violence. Having an individual to tether to the act naturally set off a firestorm of interest and breathless speculation.

As a 26 year old, Mangione has a robust online history, including active social media and a slew of reviews of movies and books. While we wait for the possible release of a manifesto relating to the shooting, these artifacts have supplied a roadmap of sorts for people to assume motive and ideology. Having done the research myself, I can tell you that, from what we have at our disposal, Mangione’s ideology is conflicted and incoherent. His interests range from tech utopianism to an embrace of “The Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future, which is a wild mishmash. Kaczynski’s manifesto, which accompanied his seventeen year crimespree that saw three people die and nearly two-dozen injured from his homemade bombs, is an argument that technology is at the root of all human problems and tyranny, which is something when you pair it with Mangione’s interest in tech as…the solution to humanity’s problems.

When it comes to acts of political violence, we tend to get distracted by personalities as opposed to the act and intent itself. This is a side-effect of our corporate media, which prioritizes narratives and characters over substance and analysis, a feature of our system that people should really come to understand. Our media is funded by the wealth class, stocked primarily with middle and upper class individuals, and, so, the message we receive tends to fortify the status quo, only communicates changes that benefit the wealth class and its subservient middle class, and colors any challenge, whether its political, cultural, or personal, as extreme, dangerous, and isolated.

Perhaps this helps in explaining the disconnect between the reactions to this crime by people on social media and corporate media, and hopefully this helps in explaining the sharp divide between media coverage of our politics and what the rest of us feel and think and know.

In regards to this particular crime, the shooting of Brian Thompson, a vast chasm grows between the action, the reaction, and the coverage. Ironically, this also happened with Kaczynski, the Unabomber. What we receive through the media is a portrait of an unwell, disturbed, confused loner who committed unthinkable acts that must be condemned and also, ultimately, dismissed as strange and disturbing violence. As this happens, the larger critique that motivates the violence, or, rather, informs the violence, is done away with as quickly as possible because it serves the main goal of defense of the status quo.

Regardless of what Mangione believed about the nature of the world and did, and regardless of what Kaczynski believed about the world and did, there is a truth that is being highlighted. In Kaczynski’s case, technology has contributed to human suffering, alienation, and tyranny. In this, he has been largely proven right. In Mangione’s case, the idea that health insurance in the United States of America is a predatory and truly deadly, awful blight on society is true.

But the disconnect between the actor, act, and message, as is often the case, gets largely discarded. You’ll notice a profound lack of discussion regarding reform of healthcare in the United States. Instead, in its place, an obsession with CEO safety and an uptick in personal corporate safety.

Piling Rocks

In a moment I want to discuss some related phenomena in American politics and culture, but I’d like to share something related as an example if you will gift me just a little patience.

Twelve years ago I lost my dad. For five months he suffered in the hospital terribly as his body gave out and his daily experience was wracked with pain, terror, and insurmountable sadness. It was one of the worst experiences of my life and still haunts me to this day.

The experience was nothing short of horrific. To go and visit him in the hospital was like a waking nightmare, the hours spent watching him hurt and beg and plead and feeling a profound sense of powerlessness. That lack of control ravaged me. I looked to establish that control wherever I could find it, most often relying on completely irrational sources.

At the time, I lived in a small town in Indiana. It was a sweet little community with a main road, a few restaurants, and, roughly a mile from my house, a city park where people played touch football and went for walks on their lunch breaks. I’ve been a runner for nearly twenty years now and am capable of daily runs of seven or eight miles. At this time, as my dad was dying, I regularly doubled that number, leaving my body exhausted and broken.

It was a locus of control. For some its prayer, rituals, consumption of drugs or products, any number of things. What mattered was the illusion in the face of reality.

I couldn’t help my dad, but I could make my body do things. This irrational behavior didn’t end there. Going back to graduate school, where I suffered my own existential crisis, I began starving myself as I was unable to control my life beyond my weight. From time to time, I found myself performing small compulsions through my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. If things were tough in my life, if I needed something good to happen, a positive change to occur, I became obsessed with getting the placement of objects absolutely “perfect.” It was an instinct completely devoid of any actual logic. During my dad’s suffering, there was a small pile of rocks just off the running path in the park. When I went for my daily marathon run, I would only stop to arrange those rocks, unconsciously believing that if I could only get their placement perfect, if I just arranged them the “right” way, that maybe my dad’s health would take a turn for the better.

Of course, it didn’t.

Removed from all of that, and with some distance, therapy, and healing, I now know that was nonsense. That my desperate need for control led to irrational behaviors completely divorced from the actual situations. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t believe, on some level, that it would make a difference.

Undoubtedly, this is what someone believes as they’re carrying out an act of political violence. That, through this act, something somewhere might actually change, whether that’s sparking a revolution or the eventual downfall of technological society. And, to be fair, acts of political violence have certainly changed politics and the course of history more than a carefully constructed pile of rocks.

“A Change Election”

I have been very forthcoming regarding what I believe the fundamental problem in the United States is and what I believe the solutions require. The corrupting influence of Neoliberal Capitalism has redistributed historical resources to the wealth class, setting off worsening precarity and exploitation, the decline of the U.S. as both a world power and nation state, and creating an environment in which that wealth class is poised to cement total control over our politics, economy, and culture. To counter this, it will be necessary to build a populist movement in opposition that brings together local, regional, and national associations and organizations into a coalition that pressures our political structure to adopt a different course.

When it comes to elections, we have been told a convenient story that a trip to the ballot box every two to four years is sufficient enough to realize this type of change. Everyone knows, save for the wealth class and their subservient acolytes in the political and media class, that the country is declining and going in the wrong direction. And, yet, we are given two choices that do not reflect the availability of positive change. The Democratic Party has come to represent conservatism and the maintaining of the status quo and the Republican Party full-on fascistic accelerationism.

(For more on these topics, please refer to my articles on the 2024 Election and my explainer regarding our present strange circumstances)

Once more, I want to remind you that moments of powerlessness breed illogical drives for a semblance of control, whether that is violence or an acceptance of irrational thinking.

I have been quite critical of The New York Times as the main communication of corporate liberal talking points and as a driver of manufacturing consent, but one thing I will always recommend is their revealing conversations with voters. This morning’s edition “These 14 Voters Think Trump Has One Mandate Above All, And It’s Not About The Economy” is an absolute corker. In it, a focus group of 2024 Trump voters are asked about their motivations in the election and, predictably, the results are utterly incoherent. In fact, this is how every one of these focus groups goes, whether it’s in The Times or aired on CNN.

Close scrutiny reveals something important: American voters are extremely confused. Their command of issues is just a reflection of whatever media they’re consuming and reflects a lack of engagement or critical thought. Sometimes they’ll come incredibly close to touching on something of substance, but it gets lost. Take for example this answer from Joseph.

Outside of the framing you get from the GOP and even the liberal media - the dangers of the political divide and “wokeness,” the fantasy fairy-tale “past” communicated by media and popular culture in which people were actually happy that fuels Make America Great Again as a faux-populist movement - there’s a glint of truth. The stagnation of income in the face of rising prices and ballooning corporate profits. Meanwhile, Joseph is voting for a billionaire conman who is serving as the puppet of the wealth class that created the problem in the first place.

This list is absolutely wild. “Optimistic” is a hell of a way to describe a guy who has spent the last eight years screaming about how America is in the garbage and if he isn’t given power it’ll be the end of the world. Brandon says “change,” which is what the Trump Campaign and the fascistic Right has successfully branded itself as. “Common sense” is quite the thing to look at, as is “Compassion.” And “Patriotism” being used to refer to the most transparently self-serving individual who is more than happy to strip the country down to spare parts on behalf of his corporate benefactors and foreign dictators is something that will make you tear your hair out.

The truth is that Trump is a product. Personally, he is devoid of principles or ideologies beyond his desperate need to enrich and empower himself and an intuitive fascist drive to eliminate any and all impediments to that need. MAGA is a marketing campaign by the wealth class to capture popular discontent and redirect the anger from themselves to their political enemies. What makes it possible, though, is the modern state of irrational activated thinking and the inherent impulse by human beings to project whatever they need to believe in order to stave off cognitive dissonance.

In a time of worsening conditions, the sense of powerlessness that Neoliberalism inspires activates these responses. As a project, Neoliberalism was intended to create a state of play in politics and culture in which the average individual was so far removed from power that their only means of feeling as if they had power was to consume products, thereby displacing democratic participation onto consumer habits and patronage. Purchases and brand loyalty thereby became loci of control. It is, by definition, irrational, but nonetheless effective in building a project that successfully redistributed tens of trillions of dollars and inoculated popular opposition.

It helps to understand that irrational actions are buttressed by personal narratives that we unconsciously construct. For an assassin or terrorist, the act of violence might be the necessary spark to set off necessary and overdue change. For a grieving child, torturing the body through excessive exercise or arranging inanimate objects might cure the dying father. For a Trump voter, believing an obviously fake narrative designed to convince them they can have power and play a participatory role in fighting back against an obviously corrupt and awful status quo is a door to making the world better.

These behaviors and beliefs only increase in times of growing uncertainty. The project of Neoliberalism and the wealth class’s attack on liberal democracy means that things, as long as they continue down this path, are going to increasingly get worse. Those projects are aided by the growing panic, leading to fracturing of existing coalitions and psychological impediments to building new ones. It leaves us vulnerable to irrational thinking, drives for simple solutions, conspiracy theories, and, over time, a loss of hope and direction and, eventually, resigned acceptance of whatever comes our way.

This is daunting. Worsening political violence almost always serves the Right Wing as calls for “order” and increased state suppression win out. The political order as it stands is tilted in the authoritarian direction because of capitalism’s desires and the orientation of the Democratic and Republican parties. Cooption of our government, economy, and culture by the wealth class is a huge, huge impediment to even understanding what’s going on, much less effectively changing it.

But I would advise that we pay attention to the story behind the story. Whether it’s the murder of a healthcare CEO or the embrace of Trump as a demagogue, what is beating under the surface is a widespread and passionate distrust of the status quo and an inherent understanding that something is very, very wrong. The way this gets expressed is disturbing. Undoubtedly you have experienced friends, family members, coworkers starting to believe bizarre things and spouting conspiracy theories that leave you feeling frightened and confused. Stripped of the narratives and the components, however, these things speak to the same fundamental belief.

The vast majority of Americans, and this has borne out in one poll after another, understand that something is very, very wrong. That capitalism, even if they do not understand the particulars, has wrought circumstances that are unfair, unjust, and untenable. There is a very loud agreement that something has to be done, that something somewhere has to change, what’s missing is the cohesive and rational answer to what that something is and what that change should encompass. This is made worse as media refuses to actually address the issue, education is focused on constructing narratives around the actual problem, and, in politics and culture, we are only given carefully constructed narratives that might, at times, hint at the problem, but never fully elucidate what is happening. With those components in place, we are left to construct our own narratives, which are most often infused with our prejudices, supplied stereotypes, and whatever compulsive behaviors we have found comfort in.

We are a terrified country. A lonely country. A confused country. And a desperate country. Those conditions predictably breed violence and destructive ideas and actions. The monumental task we face now is to do many things at once, which is made even harder considering the heightened and activated state we find ourselves in. We must come to understand the feelings and beliefs that motivate actions we might find repugnant and destructive while also working to channel those feelings and beliefs into something constructive that might actually change things for the better.

It begins with moving beyond what is given to us and coming to understand the larger contexts. From there, we must change how we engage with these stories and developments, how we perceive these issues, and, ultimately, how we talk to others and form coalitions with them. This present paradigm, with all of its fantasies and conventional explanations, makes this virtually impossible. And, from these examples and a nearly infinite supply of similar nonsense, you can tell the result is a psychological and intellectual dead-end, thereby making the authoritarian project of Neoliberalism and capitalism a fait accompli should we not readjust and reconsider.