Luigi Mangione’s Favorite Author Tries to Make Sense of His Actions

When Luigi Mangione was arrested in Pennsylvania, I had a look at his social media account and was struck that it did not appear to be what I expected. On the contrary, he seemed to be something of a moderate.

Luigi Mangione was tweeting Jonathan Haidt, Tim Urban, Thiel, pro-nuclear content, complaining about DEI.

HIs politics seem moderate and sensible.

Maybe the CEO guy just stole his girlfriend? She left him because he was wasting his time on AI safety instead of making money. pic.twitter.com/DspLG2LFsG

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) December 9, 2024

Of course it’s not as simple as that. Mangione had also written a favorable review of the Unabomber’s manifesto in which he seemed to endorse political violence. But his most glowing review on GoodReads was reserved for a book by author Tim Urban. Urban’s most recent book is titled “What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book for Societies.” Here’s a bit of the blurb for it.

What’s Our Problem? is a deep and expansive analysis of our modern times, in the classic style of Wait But Why, packed with original concepts, sticky metaphors, and 300 drawings. The book provides an entirely new framework and language for thinking and talking about today’s complex world. Instead of focusing on the usual left-center-right horizontal political axis, which is all about what we think, the book introduces a vertical axis that explores how we think, as individuals and as groups.

Mangione read the book and was a huge fan.

I believe this book will go down in history as the most important philosophical text of the early 21st century https://t.co/Ez189GgLm4

— Luigi Mangione (@PepMangione) January 24, 2024

Today the NY Times published an interview with Urban asking him what it was like to have such a big fan commit such a notorious murder.

Tim Urban: Honestly, confusion and sadness. Confusion about how someone who really likes my stuff could also be a person who does this.

If I imagine the Venn diagram circles of “people who not only like my stuff but evangelize about it” and “those who not just support political assassination but do it themselves” … if he is in fact guilty, he might be the only person in the overlap. And what that tells me is that, most likely, he had a really bad mental health break of some kind.

It’s not clear what happened to Mangione but we do know that he disappeared off the radar weeks before the shooting. His mother had even made a missing person’s report to the police. There are also reports that he had back surgery which left him in constant pain, though UnitedHealth was not his insurance company.

But there was a surprise midway through the interview. It turns out that Mangione had written to Urban before the murder to praise him for the book and one particular quote that he loved. But Urban noticed that he got the quote wrong.

He emailed me personally. …

What did he say?

He said he’s a big fan of the blog. He’s been reading it since early high school, and then he was specifically saying he really liked one line. He said, “I think it is the most poignant line I have ever read from you.” But what’s really interesting is that he seems to have misremembered the line. He remembered it as “A high-level thinker sees a foggy world through clear eyes, while a low-level thinker sees a clear world through foggy eyes.” In fact, what I’d written at the time was: “The scientist’s clear vision shows them a complex, foggy world, the Attorney’s foggy vision shows them a world that’s straightforward, full of crisp lines and black-and-white distinctions.”

Clearly, Mangione saw himself as the “high-level thinker” who saw the world clearly. He was smart, top of his prep school class and went to an Ivy League school. And his manifesto ended with a reference to himself seeing things as they are: “Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.” But as Urban points out, he seems to have not only botched the quote but misunderstood it.

On one hand, I could see how someone would read this and become convinced that they had a special ability to see the world with clarity. But when I read the line again, I get confused. Because the message is that the cleareyed person sees the true complexity and messiness of reality. For someone seeing things that way, it would be apparent that Brian Thompson is a human being who had kids, and his kids are going to, for the rest of their life, be kids whose dad died at a young age. When you think of him in those terms, as a three-dimensional human being, you don’t assassinate him. To assassinate him you have to dehumanize him, and call him a monster and a cockroach and a burden on society — which is the simplified worldview of the foggy thinker in the quote.

Political murder is the act of someone who believes the lines are simple. He was convinced he was on the right side of history and that’s all that mattered. But clearer vision would have shown him a world with more nuance, not only about Brian Thompson but about alternative health care arrangements like single-payer. Those systems are not without their own significant trade-offs. Mangione skipped over all of that and became a street thug with a cause.

This is one of the things that happens when you dehumanize your enemies and think in black and white, a murder can just become … whatever. Or that’s just a chess move for our side.

That’s what all of the leftist currently tweeting #FreeLuigi believe. They aren’t clear thinkers either, though I’d bet most of them also see themselves that way.