"Be the change that you want to see in the world"
Perhaps Luigi Mangione was doing...exactly what his Ivy League education told him to
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. How to Change Your Mind, by Michael Pollan. Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death, by Martin Seligman.
The stereotypical tech bro reading list is as predictable as an airport lounge (Atomic Habits, Meditations, etc). I didn’t realize that the “modernity is driving me insane” variant was just as easily reproducible. Luigi Mangione’s 21st century reading list (now private, archived here) hit me like a ton of bricks. The media is wondering why someone who supposedly had such a bright future ahead of them - Ivy League degree, cute looks, analytical horsepower to the nines - would go and do such a thing.
I’m not sure that it’s so surprising.
Every message you receive at Penn as an undergrad is that you, as a smart human being, so full of agency and potential, should go and do something that matters. To reinforce this message, they bring in role models of what such “mattering” ought to look like. Folks like Malcolm Gladwell and Peter Thiel will come and give opinions on what to do with your life. Think critically. Be contrarian. Your opinion matters. Your actions will shape the world.
Publishing books is ok. Founding startups is ok. Heck, even getting a run-of-the-mill finance or consulting job where you don’t do much at all but get paid well is also perfectly ok.
Shooting a CEO apparently crosses a line. The website of the video game club that Luigi helped to found at Penn has largely been scrubbed of his name1. A professor was given a slap on the wrist for showing support.
In response to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro said the following:
“In America, we do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint”…
It’s the expected sound bite for a state governor. It also rings hollow because it’s simply not true. America does, indeed, frequently kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences - it just tends to happen overseas, to people who are not American citizens. Penn likes to appeal to the fact that it was founded by Benjamin Franklin, a venerable founding father and one of a group of men who conceptually framed the United States using the following rhetoric - and then backed it up with muskets:
that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.
American higher education is a hypocritical and rhetorically confusing backdrop. In retrospect, the only surprising thing about a twenty-something Ivy League grad shooting a health insurance CEO is that it doesn't happen more often. It requires the exact kind of unabashed, I-shall-exercise-agency-in-accordance-to-my-worldview kind of confidence that such schools select for and encourage. It is applauded when it is directed towards founding startups or writing bestsellers, quietly ignored when it is directed towards securities fraud, and actively shunned when it comes from a US President who talks about grabbing people by the pussy. But at the end of the day, it is that same recognizable brand of extreme confidence, a capacity for execution, and a certain willingness to disregard the haters. Murder is not the kind of notoriety that Penn hopes for in its alumni, but the ethos of the action itself is anything but out of place.
Public response to the shooting has been compelling, to say the least. Never have I seen so many people scramble to say, “but I don’t condone murder.” Never have I seen so much sympathy for the vitriol preceding that “but”. You can come at it with personal anecdotes, or with data (i.e. a UHC model that determines coverage with a known 90% error rate). Either way, the public outpouring of hatred against UnitedHealthCare should surprise only those who have never interacted with the American healthcare system before. To say that it is “flawed”, as UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty puts it, is the understatement of the century. His attempt to remind us of Thompson’s humanity underscores precisely why so many Americans are enraged. Their own loved ones had no op-ed in the New York Times to scream “but they’re a human being” when an unseeable, unaccountable force behind a screen deemed their quality of life to not be worthwhile. Mince no words: American health insurance is the epitome of institutional violence. It is a system that uses technology and bureaucracy, at scale, to trade lives for profit. It is an institution that kills people.
For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay.
-RFK, “On the mindless menace of violence” - April 5, 1968
Yes - it is absolutely still reasonable to ask for murder to remain off the table as a response to such systems. It’s hard to see how doing otherwise would lead to anything but deeper hell.
But we live in a world where Ivy League institutions - at one point a signal of social promise in an individual - output US presidents who actively undermine democracy. They hold glamorous recruiting events2 for companies that are known for such honorable acts as insider trading, and exacerbating public health crises for profit. Words, laws, principles, and reason seem to land on deaf ears in all corners of the world - especially in those that bill themselves as the most enlightened. If all that seems to determine outcomes in America is money and power - are we really all that surprised that somebody has crossed a line?
#156
This is poignantly self aware though: https://pennupgrade.wordpress.com/college-simulator/
In my junior year, the McKinsey on campus recruiting event consisted of renting out the Penn Museum, and showing Powerpoint presentations of weddings from alumni who had met their partners there. Because, you know - between insider trading and helping an opioid crisis along, you, too, might meet the love of your life.