Of course it was reasonable to focus on Mangione’s interactions with the health care system as we searched for his motive. But now, with his manifesto in hand and some of his personal history known, those interactions seem bizarrely scant. He suffered from chronic back pain, but could still go rock climbing. There’s no indication he was denied care by a health insurance company. His family was prosperous and could presumably have found alternatives if he had been truly desperate. His manifesto ends with an abstract (and dumb) complaint about U.S. life expectancy, not a specific tale of tragedy.
It strikes me as pretextual. Jason Koebler says it’s pointless to review a killer’s digital history, and maybe he’s right. But to me the UHC shooter now seems very legible. I think the digital history is important.
Luigi is a smart guy, an Ivy League grad and high school salutatorian, a fact he highlights in his pinned tweet. He likes podcasts and books that present grandiose ideas at a suspiciously rapid clip. He was not shy about making patronizing pronouncements about how others should live. He used his profile photo to show off his six-pack abs, a bodybuilding outcome that typically requires focused effort and techniques.
He was a beautiful, brilliant boy, who I am sure had been told, again and again, that he was destined for great things. He must have taken pride in that, worked to cultivate it the best way he knew how, and been eager to display his mastery to the world. This is narcissism, but it is a relatable narcissism, and maybe even an excusable one when performed by someone who is still young and beautiful.
I think Luigi’s LinkedIn is the true Rosetta Stone of his digital life. His time as a student bursts with enthusiasm: robotics! AI! An internship working on a famous videogame! Head of committee, founder, president, project lead. After graduation: four years at an internet company that sells cars. Data Engineer I, then Data Engineer II, then Data Engineer III. He delivered a 5% increase in net funnel engagement. A 34% increase in new vehicle payments. A/B tests, Java upgrades, metrics, dashboards. There is nothing wrong with this work and no reason to think it couldn’t have led him to more interesting things, but these tasks are not glamorous.
As this reality unfolded, Luigi moved to paradise. He started a book club, a way to showcase the big thoughts in his big brain. He was amiable and well-liked, clever enough to conceal his growing sense of desperation. Eventually, someone would notice and point him toward the future he was promised.
That’s how it seems to me, anyway, speaking in my capacity as a reformed beautiful, brilliant boy, who passed the tests put before him through talent and effort (but mostly talent), then was deposited in a disappointingly banal corner of American life and, for a while, despaired. Scholastic performance correlates with all kinds of things, but some people’s ability to figure out what to do with themselves lands far from the regression line.
Luigi did not accept this, and if something hadn’t gone so horribly awry, I would say that this instinct was admirable. He’d tried moving to a great place, and he’d tried saying great things, now it was time to perform a great act. He chose a path to glory that is perfectly consonant with the confused stew of privileged resentment that the internet’s dark, moist corners excel at incubating. The manhunt must have been the best time of his life as he watched the world celebrate his heroism and beauty through the lit rectangle of his phone, alone and exultant on a softly jostling bus.
Soon we will run out of new ways to understand Luigi. The manifesto’s account of his motivations feels confused and even self-disclaiming–he says he’s not the right person to construct his argument for murder. That’s left up to the reader (and to his credit, many are happy to do so). The manifesto instead focuses on explaining his boldness, his resoluteness, his cross-disciplinary mastery. These are instructions for how to admire him, the last ones he can be sure we will hear.
Yesterday, as he was dragged into the courthouse, he made a desperate exclamation to flatter his audience, to sustain its attention just a bit longer. But what he said made no sense. None of it ever made any sense.
