Almost immediately after Luigi Mangione was arrested last week in connection with the killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, you could go pretty deep into the rabbit hole of Mangione’s particular internet. At the top of his X feed, I noticed a reference to the work of Tim Urban, the popular blogger, essayist and author of the website Wait but Why and a 2023 book dilating on the problems of uncivil political discourse, called “What’s Our Problem?”
“I believe this book will go down in history as the most important philosophical text of the early 21st century,” Mangione wrote in January, and scrolling down his X feed, I saw one Wait but Why post after another.
This was striking to me for many reasons, including the way it made a 26-year-old accused of perpetrating an act of spectacular political violence seem not like a creature of the internet’s radical left but of its contrarian, podcast-y center. Another reason was that Tim is an old friend of mine. On Friday, we spoke for an hour about Mangione; what follows is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.
David Wallace-Wells: When you saw that the alleged shooter was a big admirer of yours, what was your reaction?
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.
I’ve wondered about that. Because one of the things that seems most striking to me about the portrait we have, at this point, at least, is how stable he seems.
We’ve seen the video of him shouting at the press as he’s pulled into the courthouse, which suggests perhaps some disquiet. But we also haven’t heard from anybody who interacted with him at any point in his life who found him anything but levelheaded, cleareyed, calm and even kind. He does seem to have somewhat disappeared over the last six months, and it’s possible that period was full of a lot more personal messiness. But we haven’t heard from any strangers he encountered during that time in an alarming or erratic state — nobody who saw him that way while traveling, or at a supermarket, or on the street. In many ways, the obvious explanation is that the attack was the result of some kind of breakdown. But aside from the shooting itself, we haven’t seen any real signs of a breakdown.
That’s how I feel, too, though it does seem like people reaching out and saying they haven’t seen him, that he kind of went off the map, which is a signal — that’s not normal.
His mother filed a missing persons report, too. But if you compare him to the shooter from the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump — as soon as that person was identified, all these people who’d known him were publicly talking about how troubled he was.
That’s the other thing. It’s not even that Mangione was in better mental health than some other mass shooters as much as he was accepted by society. He was at the top of society in every way. He hasn’t been kicked to the outskirts.
He wasn’t beaten down, resentful, full of grievance — at least from what we know.
Or deeply troubled, at least on the surface. It seems like he’s got a ton of friends, and it seems like he was a happy guy. Now, there’s the story about his back, and maybe chronic pain can drive someone really mad. But there’s not really an obvious story here, and so all we’re doing is kind of making them up.
When the news broke, there were a bunch of stories that were being told about him. A lot of them were partisan, which is predictable, given the way that our world and our internet works. But pretty quickly it became clear that, to the extent that we could perceive his political inclinations and intellectual interests, he was not really a member of either the left fringe or the right fringe, but something you might call a new internet centrism. Some people use the word “heterodox.” How do you see the boundaries of that community, which you’re also a part of?
I would describe it as “high rung.”
What do you mean by that?
I think of it in terms of a ladder. And up in the high rungs you’re looking for truth, and you’re not being tribal about it. And then the low rungs, it becomes this religious thing about your beliefs.
But when I say the people he was following were high-rung, I don’t mean that in some elitist way. To me, it means that these are people who don’t identify with their beliefs. They have strong beliefs, but the strength of their beliefs is pretty well tied to actual things they know about, and they don’t B.S. often. They’re humble. They treat their ideas like science experiments. You find this in a lot of the mainstream podcast people he seems to have admired. It’s people who have the basic message, free speech is good and discourse is good, and the typical style of radical politics is not productive.
What’s striking is that the people who are now celebrating him are the exact opposite people. They embody the low-rung, tribal mentality, where politics is a black-and-white war of good versus evil, where you dehumanize your enemies, where you identify so strongly with your political beliefs that any challenge to them feels like literal violence. This is the mind-set that leads people to celebrate political violence.
Pretty quickly, as people were poring over Mangione’s social media, you made a point of posting, “very much not the point of the book.”
If I had to sum up the essence of my book, it’s a reminder of why liberalism is good — the kind of liberalism that Martin Luther King Jr. was talking about when he said that the founding fathers wrote a promissory note and check bounced. I think of it as a house that we’re all living in. Inside the house you have progressives and conservatives and you have far right and far left, and you have centrists and you have libertarians, and you’ve got all kinds of people and they’re sitting there arguing, but we all agree the house is good. But the house isn’t in perfect condition — this door isn’t working the way it’s supposed to, the heating isn’t working, let’s fix it. And some people argue: That’s not how you fix the house, or it’s working fine, or it’s not working fine for me. This is what’s going on inside the house, and that’s great — that’s liberalism. Fight about the house and over time the house gets better. And then there are movements that I see as outside the house, with wrecking balls. And their movement is, let’s break the house.
And the point of the book isn’t that you should never be mad at the health care industry — it’s that the house’s liberal nonviolent tools have historically been the most effective way to fix things. Granted, I’m sure people who hate the health industry are saying, “Where’s the change? We’ve been trying and it’s still awful.” And that may be true. But when you use political violence, what you’re doing is you’re trying to fix something in the house while smashing through one of the house’s support beams. And if you keep doing that, now someone else will assassinate someone on your side, and before you know it, it’s the road to hell.
And I don’t think he misunderstood that. He was holding book clubs about the book, and he seems like a smart person. I can’t imagine he didn’t understand the message. So then I’m like, how do you go from there to doing something that is so distinctly illiberal?
If we don’t entertain the idea that he had a sort of dramatic personal or psychological break but think about it in ideological terms, is there any story that you can tell yourself that explains it?
It’s really hard for me to draw that bridge. I want the book to make people angry. But I want them to be specifically angry at the people who are destroying the house — the people wearing the cloak of, I’m just a progressive or I’m just a conservative, but who are wielding those wrecking balls. As another example, in 2016 and again in 2020, Trump makes it clear prior to the election that he will only accept the results if he wins. At that point, if you’re in the house, you just have to say: This is not an option. It doesn’t matter how much I like the guy, how much I agree with him, how much I feel desperate about the country. That is actually a support beam issue in the house.
But if we’re taking this seriously as an ideological act, one way of explaining it would be that this is someone who has concluded that the house is broken and cannot be fixed from within.
That is a radical position that I don’t agree with and I don’t think history supports. The amazing thing about liberalism is that it enables improvement over time with nonviolent means, and as flawed as it is, the alternative is worse.
Another way of telling the story — not one I would necessarily endorse myself — is that the book suggests that all of these other people are just deeply confused about politics — in fact, that the whole way that we tend to talk about partisanship and political change is in some ways misguided. That might feel like a special kind of knowledge, which might make you feel like you occupy a special position in the political landscape. And that can be kind of an intoxicating intuition or perception.
Take what’s been called his manifesto. First of all, it’s not really a manifesto. It may be a confession, but he almost doesn’t bother to really lay out his argument, he’s just using a very quick shorthand to express broad outrage at the health care and insurance systems. And that outrage is actually pretty glib, all things considered. But in some ways the most striking line to me is the last one, when he writes, “Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.” In certain ways that’s undermined by what he writes earlier, since he appears to cite Elisabeth Rosenthal and Michael Moore. But it’s also a vivid description of how he sees himself — as the only one who can see things clearly. It’s almost a Trump line: “I alone can fix it.”
I think that is probably the best guess, and I have a reason to say that, which is I have an email from him from January. 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.”
In some ways the opposite meaning.
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.
But one thing that’s striking to me is that, beyond the assassination itself and to some degree the manifesto, we don’t have all that much evidence that he was so consumed by ideological passions or commitments — at least before the paper trail ends. Even the manifesto — his objections seemed pretty pro forma.
He didn’t even get all the facts right. And if I think, in 10 years, what will the biggest story here have been? It’s the fact that we live in a time now where this is celebrated by a larger number of people than I think it would’ve been in 2010.
And what I want to say to these people is, you don’t get to pick only your favorite causes. Maybe you are hugely pro-choice — when you’re celebrating this, you are also theoretically celebrating the future murder of the Planned Parenthood C.E.O. You are celebrating the murder of the Pfizer C.E.O. by an anti-vaxxer. You’re celebrating the attempted assassination of your favorite senator.
I don’t know exactly how to quantify the various responses. But hypocrisy is pretty pervasive here, right?
Yes, definitely. 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 sounds like a description of political culture in the internet era. And that’s also the interpretation I reach for, intuitively. But it’s also the case that Mangione’s period of radicalization — if that’s the right way to describe it — seems to have taken place almost entirely offline. At least at the moment, we simply don’t have a record of him sounding off online in any especially aggressive way.
It is striking how quickly he seems to have moved, given that he did not seem very ideological or even focused on health insurance six months before the shooting. I had a healthy-seeming interaction with him as late as April. That’s not very long ago.
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