Anonymous
Luigi Mangione - Ivy League graduate, valedictorian, internet ‘hero’ - has recently taken the internet by storm. Accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson earlier this month, one of America’s brightest men now sits behind bars, faced with federal charges.
His motive? The simmering anger over health-care costs and the growing normalization of violence in the United States. The X-ray scans of his spinal surgery showed wrecked placement of screws, and a handwritten document in his backpack had rhetorics like ‘These parasites had it coming’ scribbled on them. In writing this, he is referencing an ‘anti-corporatist mentality that goes beyond an individual grievance towards a particular injury he may have suffered’.
For Mangione, violence can be justified to right social wrongs, perhaps influenced by his fixation with the ‘Unabomber’ by Ted Kaczynski. This sentiment is shared by mass Gen-Z’s in the US, as millions of people took to social media to demand Luigi’s release, and parties even erupted on the streets to commemorate Thompson’s death. That truly terrifies me.
Why? To make clear, I’m just as discontent over a capitalist society’s exacerbation of income inequality as these people are. But the fact that many American people, in particular Gen-Z’s, celebrate the death of a human being, is appalling. We seem to forget Brian Thompson was a living, breathing person. A father, a son, an uncle, a nephew…waging war against the super-rich by means of violence only creates the impression of the working people as selfish, cruel, and cold. This will only drive the wealthy and working people away from each other, with attempts to reconcile and discuss these critical issues becoming further from reality everyday.
For me, a better solution is to put pressure on these institutions. We have seen through the Black Lives Matter movement that global pressure on the US government creates the incentive to pass new laws, which in turn support the wants and needs of the people. Because this pressure on institutions has to be global, some may say we’ll never reach the scale needed for laws limiting healthcare prices to come into effect. But until we try, we’ll never know. And until then, the Luigi Mangione frenzy should worry us all, because it foreshadows a future generation of policy-makers, lawyers, and doctors that believe violence is justice, with no room for compassion.
Why exactly this article downplays the sheer evil of the late Brian Thompson is beyond me. Beyond simply being a millionaire CEO who made his fortune exploiting workers, this was a man who made his fortune specifically from denying care to sick and dying Americans at a greater rate than any other major healthcare insurance provider. This, looking beyond the veil of bureaucracy and business, amounts to nothing less than mass murder. Perhaps you do genuinely feel that to shoot someone in the back is actually orders of magnitudes worse than being at the head of an organisation responsible for mass death, but I struggle to believe that you might extend the rhetoric on show here to argue that, for…