A punk's luxury beliefs killed the CEO
Making idols out of symbols and symbols out of killing in an endless quest to break eggs to make omelettes.
Police found a trove of evidence when they picked up Luigi Nicholas Mangione, a 26-year-old punk, at a McDonalds in Altoona, Pennsylvania. So let’s look at that, from the little we know about him. Mangione graduated U Penn with a bachelor's degree in computer science, and went on to get his master’s. He had about three pages of writing on how corporate figures were “parasites.” He had a 3D-printed “ghost gun” that was allegedly used in the murder of Brian Thompson from Minnesota, an accountant by trade, who was also the father of two high school aged boys.
What makes a high school valedictorian who went on to an Ivy League education kill an accountant from Minnesota, a man who had excelled in his own career to take the CEO spot at UnitedHealthcare, a division of UnitedHealth Group? To be crude, it’s the belief that you have to break some eggs to make an omelette.
It’s the same belief that pushed Ché Guevara, a doctor from Argentina, to begin killing, and enlisting others to kill with him. Guevara succumbed to Marxism, a luxury belief that acts remarkably like a religion—giving the educated classes something gritty to believe in, a future marked by problems which need fixing, and eggs that need to become omelettes.
I don’t know what belief has taken Mangione, but I do know it’s a luxury belief that allowed him to self-radicalize and believe that he could make a statement, a symbol, out of snuffing the life from a man who no more deserved death than the peasants who died by the order of Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, or by the rifles held by Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries.
Brian Thompson no more ordered the deaths of cancer victims or others needing treatment whose insurance policies didn’t cover a drug or procedure, or the fact that approving such things takes time and effort, which leads to scarcity, than cancer itself discriminates between people based on their resume or job title. Health insurance in the U.S. is problematic, because we live in a very complex nation where some things are governed by federalism, and other things are mandated by the central government in Washington. Health insurance companies manage financial risk, not healthcare. If you want a good primer on this, read Kevin D. Williamson’s latest piece about it.
Killing the CEO of a large health insurance company is the mark of luxury beliefs gone off the rails. It’s when a punk like Mangione has so much time on his hands that he can fixate on making a symbol out of a man, and an idol out of an ideal. The ideal is that by killing the man, others will be activated to rise up and fix a system by burning it down and building something better.
Of course, that never works. It doesn’t work politically when we elect demagogues and populists bent on their own kingdoms, and it doesn’t work when lone wolf wannabes who think they are the latest version of the Unabomber carefully plan to assassinate CEOs. Mangione is the latter.
All the idiots and ghouls on social media who applaud his actions, even those who “apropos of nothing” describe their own frustrations with health insurers in the U.S., are succumbing to a religious luxury belief. Those who make idols of such things will never find peace or salvation. They will only find more eggs that need to be broken in an endless bloody cause to make another omelette.
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