When I met Luigi Mangione He misunderstood human agency

Luigi first reached out to me via email on 6 April. He said he was a long-time fan of my work, and had just purchased a $200 founding membership to my blog, which entitled him to a two-hour video-call with me. A month later, on 5 May, we had our chat.

He was warm and gregarious from the outset, praising my writing and telling me how excited he was to speak with me. He said he was on holiday in Japan, and that he loved many aspects of the culture there, such as the sense of honour, but believed the country was full of “NPCs”, that is, people who don’t think for themselves. He then told me a story he’d first mentioned in an email. One morning he saw a man having a seizure in the street, so he ran to the nearest police station for help. On their way back to the man, who was seizing on the ground, the police refused to cross any street if the stoplight was red, even if the road was empty. For Luigi, this story represented “a lack of free will” in Japan, by which he meant a lack of agency.

I quickly realised that agency was a major concern of Luigi’s, especially as he mentioned three articles of mine which had particularly resonated with him, all of which describe threats to human autonomy.

He went on to explain why he felt Japan was the future dystopia I’d warned about in some of my writings. He spoke of the hikikomori, Japanese men who spend their lives alone in their bedrooms, sedating themselves with video games, porn, and other shallow entertainments. For Luigi, such people had lost control over their lives, becoming mindless slaves to stimuli much like the cops who stopped at red lights even when it made no sense.

But it wasn’t just Japan. Luigi believed people everywhere were becoming NPCs, increasingly living their lives as a series of reflex reactions rather than consciously choosing their behaviours. The West was following closely behind Japan, driven by tech companies intent on mesmerising us into servile consumers. Luigi feared that once we’d surrendered our agency, we’d surrender everything else.

Unlike most people who decry others as NPCs, Luigi showed enough awareness to identify that he, too, lived much of his life on autopilot, confessing that he sometimes wasted whole afternoons doomscrolling social media. He said he wanted to regain some of the agency he felt he had lost to online distractions, so we spent much of the chat discussing ways he could become more agentic.

Along with discussing how my favourite philosophy, Stoicism, could teach him to live more deliberately, I also suggested to Luigi that he should avoid automating tasks, which led us to discuss my essay about gamification.

Luigi had much to say about this essay, not least because it involves the story of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who shared his belief that modern life is taking away people’s agency. I made it clear that, while I agreed with some of what Kaczynski had written in his manifesto, I found his acts of terrorism abhorrent. Luigi agreed, saying something along the lines of: “he deserved to be taken seriously, but he also deserved to be in jail.”

Besides Kaczynski, Luigi’s intellectual tastes were relatively normal. Writers he spoke fondly of included Tim Urban, Sam Harris, Yuval Noah Harari, Jonathan Haidt, and Aldous Huxley. His political views were less conventional. When I asked him if he was voting in the presidential election, he scrunched his nose and said he wasn’t crazy about Trump or Biden, but liked some of the things RFK Jr. was saying. I regard RFK Jr. as a crank who regularly pushes harmful pseudoscience, but I didn’t mention it so as not to derail the conversation.

Somehow, from there we ended up talking about intergenerational trauma, and it was here that we had our only significant disagreement. Luigi implied that he believed trauma could be directly inherited and accumulated in families much like generational wealth. He claimed to have based this view partly on his own personal experiences. It sounded to me like he was describing a pseudoscientific misinterpretation of epigenetics, popularised by activist-academics and books like The Body Keeps the Score.

The idea that trauma is passed down epigenetically is not only unscientific, but also un-agentic. If you believe your trauma is hardwired into your DNA, you’re prone to passively accept it rather than actively trying to overcome it. And so, in a bid to increase Luigi’s agency, I pointed out, as politely as I could, why he was wrong.

After our chat, I sent Luigi an article debunking epigenetic trauma. He thanked me for the article, and also told me he’d bought me a six-month subscription to a reading app which he believed would help make my job easier.

I have Asperger’s, so I’m a poor judge of social cues. Further, I have liked every subscriber I have had a video-call with, of which I have had many, so I’m probably not very discerning in that regard. But to me Luigi seemed like a particularly nice guy.

It wasn’t just that he had bought me a subscription to an app that he thought might help me. It was also that he frequently expressed concerns about humanity generally. He viewed most people as NPCs who needed to be awakened, but he never came off as arrogant, regarding himself as equally zombielike. His view of society was somewhat pessimistic, but tempered with a sense of humour and a focus on solutions rather than mere complaints. And although he seemed to have some unscientific views, he was always open to other viewpoints, and was willing to be corrected.

We interacted on social media several times afterwards, and each time he seemed as polite and thoughtful as he had been in our chat. As the summer ended, I largely withdrew from social media to focus on my book, so I didn’t notice Luigi had vanished.

And then, a few months later, Brian Thompson was shot dead.

Many people celebrated the murder, mocking the victim and lionising the killer. Some were frustrated about the costs of health insurance or outraged that a loved one had been denied medical claims. For this they blamed Thompson, CEO of America’s largest health insurance company.

But while thousands reacted on social media with laughter emojis to Thompson’s murder, I was sickened. Vigilantism is always wrong. If you celebrate someone gunning down a defenceless person in the street, then you advocate for a world in which this is an acceptable thing for anyone to do. You advocate for a world in which a stranger can decide that you’re also a bad person, and gun you down in the street. In such a world, I promise you, your health insurance would cost much more.

When Luigi was revealed as the suspect, I was bewildered. My mind raced back to our chat, searching for clues that he could have done this. The only salient detail was probably when Luigi briefly mentioned that healthcare in the US was expensive and that we Britons were lucky to have the National Health Service. But this statement alone gave no indication Luigi might have been capable of murder.

When the shock faded and my wits returned, I ceased to be quite so surprised. I have long known that people who are capable of great kindness also tend to be capable of great cruelty, because both extremes are often animated by the same crazed impulsivity. It’s why many of the people celebrating the murder are those who self-identify as “compassionate” Leftists. And it’s why most of history’s greatest evils were committed by people who thought they were doing good.

Much more puzzling than the cruelty, though, was the stupidity. Luigi had seemed intelligent, far too intelligent to do something so dumb. Smart people might be better able to rationalise stupid actions and beliefs, but Luigi’s alleged rationalisation, given in a short “minifesto”, was nowhere near the intellectual standard I would’ve expected of him.

As shown by data blogger Cremieux Recueil, the minifesto gets a lot wrong. It claims that “the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy”, ignoring the fact that America’s life expectancy has little to do with health insurance and much more to do with Americans being disproportionately obese, violent, and drug-addicted. Further, it makes basic factual errors, such as confusing market cap with revenue. The writer even admits they don’t know what they’re talking about: “I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.”

Not only was the justification for the targeting of Brian Thompson stupid, but the targeting itself was stupid. While it’s true that UnitedHealthcare has the highest denial rate for medical claims, the CEO doesn’t set the approval rate — that’s done by the actuaries, who themselves are constrained by various considerations, such as the need to keep costs low, including for policyholders. But even if Thompson did have carte blanche to set his company’s approval rates, it wouldn’t have made a big difference.

Health insurance companies don’t get rich by denying payouts. As the economics blogger Noah Smith points out, UnitedHealthcare’s net profit is about half of the average of S&P 500 companies. According to the Harvard economist David Cutler, even if the United States cut every pharmaceutical price in half and eliminated all profits on health insurance, the gap between US medical spending and that of other rich countries would fall by less than a quarter.

Brian Thompson was a normal, flawed guy trying to keep costs low both for his company and his policyholders, while keeping his duty to shareholders whose investment his company depended on. He was a tiny cog in a vast and unfair system that’s controlled by no single person but by the cumulative actions of millions of people operating in their own immediate interests. Ted Kaczynski called such decentralised problems “self-propagating systems”, recognising that they weren’t the result of human coordination, but rather, a lack of it. If Kaczynski’s bombs and book-length manifesto couldn’t destroy such a system, then Luigi, with his alleged 3D-printed pistol and shoddy minifesto, certainly can’t.

People allocate agency strategically, assigning praise to allies and blame to enemies. Luigi’s supporters misattribute total agency to Thompson so they can scapegoat him for a societal problem he had little control over. Meanwhile, they deny all agency to Luigi, claiming he was pushed by a corrupt system or simple back pain.

But, while they’re wrong about Thompson, they may have a point about Luigi. If he was in extreme pain, or in the grip of mental illness, it would explain why a man who was consistently thoughtful in his interactions with me may have committed a monumentally thoughtless act, rationalised by an equally thoughtless note.

On the other hand, if Luigi was mentally or physically unwell, it’s unlikely he’d have been able to carry out a meticulous assassination and then evade authorities for almost a week while travelling across one of the most surveilled regions on earth.

In my limited interactions with Luigi, I never got the impression he had spinal or mental issues. But I did get the sense he felt alienated. He often decried the lack of social connection in the modern world, and on a couple of occasions he lamented that the people around him were “on a different wavelength” to him.

On 10 June, I received my last communication from Luigi. It was a seemingly innocent request; he wanted me to help him curate his social media feed. I’d already given him tips on how to do that, so the question struck me as odd. Rather than accepting a call, I directed him to a relevant article I’d written and offered to answer any questions he had about it. I never heard from him again.

In retrospect, I wonder if his request was an awkward cry for help, as a New York Times journalist told me it was his last known online communication. It’s hard not to wonder if, had I answered his call, things might have turned out differently.

I don’t know if Luigi ever found the agency he came to me looking for. If he didn’t, I hope he gets the help he needs. But if he did find his agency, well, the price of agency is culpability.

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A version of this article was first published on The Prism on 22 December 2024.

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