Hybristophilia, not Activism

The independent journalist, and former contributor at The Young Turks, Ken Klippenstein, has published on his Substack “a copy of suspected killer Luigi Mangione’s manifesto –the real one, not the forgery circulating online”. One New York Times article, “Suspect in United Healthcare Shooting Lauded Himself as a Hero in Manifesto, Police Say”, quotes from this manifesto: “Frankly these parasites simply had it coming”. Another, “Suspect Charged: Who is Luigi Mangione?”, describes the manifesto as “a 262-word handwritten document”, and quotes it again: “To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone.” Seeing as the manifesto uploaded to Ken Klippenstein’s Substack meets all the criteria aforementioned, I see little reason to doubt that it is genuine. As for the concern that presenting the manifesto here will risk enabling copycats, all I have to say is that the arguments that Luigi Mangione appears to make are so abundantly obvious and simple to explain given his interest in anti-corporate political philosophy and his probable personal grief with the health insurance industry (one of the background images of his Twitter profile appears to be his own spinal cord with screws in it) that they read more as part of the popular culture at large than anything challenging, dangerous, or new. If you have seen any movie or TV show about corporate corruption in the last two decades, which if you’re a young person has been pretty unavoidable, the ideas in Luigi Mangione’s head are already in your own. This, to my mind, makes significantly more radical and better argued texts like Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021), currently discoverable in Waterstones, much more of a concern. They make new arguments and prompt new violence. Whereas the mere paragraph below from Mangione is nothing but familiar.

To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD [perhaps Computer Aided Design?], a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas [sic] but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the (indecipherable) largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown, but as [sic] our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [corporations?] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed [sic] them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.

A gloss on Rosenthal: this seems to be Elisabeth Rosenthal, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, who wrote the book An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back (2017), and who continues to write for the New York Times. As Sarah Cascino summarizes in her review of the book, “Rosenthal lays out a concise summary of 10 economic rules of the dysfunctional health-care market”, including, “Economies of scale don’t translate to lower prices.” This is because whereas for other goods and services, “The more a price increases, the less people will want to buy”, “[t]his does not hold true in our health-care market, where pursuing medications or treatments is often not optional, so prices can increase if demand decreases.” Another technique used by such corporations is apparently the “patent play”, “in which a company with a highly profitable drug patent that is nearing expiration makes a new molecule that is slightly different than the existing one in order to receive a secondary patent”, thereby preserving that company’s exclusive right to sell the drug.

A gloss on Moore: this seems to be the well-known filmmaker and activist Michael Moore, whose film Sicko (2007) considers the enormous influence of companies on the government of the United States, noting, for example, the donations provided to sitting senators in one sequence, and strongly contrasting the unaffordability of American health care with the comparable accessibility and affordability of the National Health Service in another.

Given my own skepticism of Coronavirus lockdowns, and having read the White Coat Waste Project’s allegations that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s “NIH division shipped part of a $375,800 grant to a lab in Tunisia to drug beagles and lock their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sand flies so that the insects could eat them alive”, I am sympathetic to these arguments. I am even willing to say that I am sympathetic to most of the sentiment Luigi Mangione addresses in his short manifesto. And yet neither I, nor Michael Moore, nor Elisabeth Rosenthal, nor even Andreas Malm, are responsible for assassinating UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson, using a “ghost gun”, without a serial number, seemingly assembled using a 3D printer. Further, even if I, or Michael Moore, or Elisabeth Rosenthal, or even Andreas Malm, suffered from traumatic back pain and felt exploited by UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, in particular, would that necessarily entail any of us 3D printing a ghost gun and killing him?

Something else is in the works, over and above political sentiment or even medical injury. Perhaps the easiest answer to this is the one that many have already come to: Luigi Mangione was an admirer of Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber, so called because he came to the attention of the FBI in 1978 when he sent a homemade bomb to Chicago University, abbreviable to “Una-”. On Luigi Mangione’s Goodreads account, now leaked, he has this to say about the Unabomber’s manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future (1995):

Clearly written by a mathematics prodigy. Reads like a series of lemmas [intermediate theorems in argument of a proof] on the question of 21st century quality of life.
It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless [sic] write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.
He was a violent individual -rightfully imprisoned- who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.
A take I found online that I think is interesting: “Had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere and at the end of the day, he’s probably right. Oil barons haven’t listened to any environmentalists, but they feared him.[”]

Case closed: he was a disciple of the Unabomber, who saw himself in him; they even had overlapping backgrounds in STEM; CBS notes, “he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s and master’s in computer science in 2020”. But taking a look at the books in his Goodreads list of favorites puts this conclusion into question. Industrial Society and Its Future is not there, but present are Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2011), Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek (2007), James Clear’s Atomic Habits (2018), and Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk (2015). These are the productivity oriented and pro-capitalist books that a libertarian STEM student likes, not some raging hippy. If anything, this explains why the references that Mangione makes to Moore and Rosenthal in his short manifesto feel tacked on, and why he stresses, “frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument”. There are many libertarians I know that have read the Unabomber Manifesto, but none that have read Andreas Malm, or for that matter, Peter Singer, whose Animal Liberation (1975) might be considered the founding text of the animal rights movement. Why? Because the Unabomber does not come to his conclusions about the alienating effects of modern technology from any kind of tradition in the academy of philosophy or politics, which tend to be the preserves of leftism. The Unabomber comes to his conclusions based on his own, extremely libertarian perspective of the world, as well as a hatred for the very left-wing academic types that generally endorse degrowth economics and deindustrialization for environmental purposes nowadays. Surprisingly enough, this hatred is so strong in the Unabomber, that the entire first section of his manifesto, “The Psychology of Modern Leftism”, is dedicated to it. To single out just two sections:

Political correctness has its stronghold among university professors, who have secure employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual white males from middle-to-upper-middle-class families.’ (This probably needs updating.)
Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives.

To a frustrated libertarian in STEM, surrounded by apparently idiotic Humanities students, these words might sound like music. To someone who is sincerely trying to wield the powers of the university and the state to achieve either civilizational degrowth or health insurance reform, they sound belittling, since such a person is probably on the left, or simply off-topic. More to the point, all these criticisms, both of leftists as products of an alienating society and of the nature of technology in that society, have been raised by more significant, albeit less accessible, voices on the right in academia. Martin Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology (1954) immediately comes to mind, followed by Roger Scruton’s Green Philosophy (2012), which advocates a return to the Oikos (household) of your own land, recognizing it as the extension of you and your ancestors, so you can take better and more meaningful care of it in a culturally homogenous community.

But, in truth, the reason that the Unabomber manifesto is popular and that these books are not is due to the fact its author killed people, and there is a mystique that comes when you kill someone for a cause. If this article has seemed overly accommodating to Luigi Mangione so far, then here is the turn in the road. The publisher and writer Lomez has postulated that Mangione was driven to murder Brian Thompson by an “ayahuasca-shaped hole” in his head, a reference to a modified form of the psychedelic DMT that Mangione might have taken on his apparent journeys around South America. But I also know people who take DMT, have read the Unabomber Manifesto, and have had problems with the health insurance industry, yet remain harmless. I posit that what pushed Mangione over the edge was a desire to inspire Hybristophilia, the love of the criminal, in himself from the general public, and that this not only explains his target but also a unique aspect of his crime: according to The Guardian, Mangione labelled his bullet casings, “deny, defend, depose”, a reference to Jay M. Feinman’s book Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It (2010).

Just as there was a comic book villain mystique to the Unabomber evocative of the Riddler, there is a fixation on poetic justice here evocative of the Punisher, who wears a skull on his shirt, fixates on his guns, and takes the law into his own hands. Yet, given that Mangione’s manifesto is only 232 words in contrast to the Unabomber’s 35,000, Mangione seems much more self-conscious about crafting his image than philosophizing. As for Mangione’s target, Brian Thompson is a straight white American male, with a wife and two children, whose father was a grain elevator worker. Despite the fact he presided over an increase in UnitedHealthcare’s rates of insurance denial and might be criticized for the enormous grants he received in compensation from Medicare, Thompson can also be considered in himself a representation of the American dream. More importantly, he is also a member of the white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant founding stock of the country that its almost universally leftist controlled cultural institutions have, over the last fifty years, made it fashionable for the public to revile. This is partly because the diversifying base (meaning more minorities and fewer whites) of the Democrat party has meant that an Other has been required to bind increasingly different groups under the aegis of one leadership.

So, if you’re interested in committing a crime that will give you a certain sexual mystique in the world of Woke pseudo-morality, pick Brian Thompson, not someone who it might be considered politically incorrect to kill like a member of the Jewish Sackler Family. This form of leftist political capture is what made it attractive to say that you found Young Stalin cute around girls at university less than five years ago, but if you noticed the beady-eyed handsomeness of Young Hitler around them it would serve as an immediate turn off; at that time, an arduous quasi-bisexuality in conversation was mandatory if you wanted any success. At this juncture, it is worth mentioning that engagement with the Mangione Case on Twitter has been positive among some of the Dissident Right, who see the murder as an expression of masculine vitalism given Mangione’s impressive physique, but also, perhaps surprisingly, the left in the extreme. I have seen a leftist man with “deny, defend, depose” tattooed on his leg; also The Guardian notes that Amazon has removed products with these three words listed on its website, to prevent Mangione fans from purchasing them in solidarity. Furthermore, some members of the Vitalist Right, advocating an immanent hierarchical Paganism over a spiritually egalitarian Christianity, have been shocked to discover that Mangione follows them on Twitter: most notably LindyMan, or Paul Skallas, whose free-market absolutism was perhaps attractive to Mangione.

By far the most interesting engagements, however, continue to come from female “fans” of Mangione indulging the Hybristophilia I posit he sought to inspire in them as an extension of dark celebrity. So far, these have included: TikTok’s showering his photograph with love hearts as Britney Spears’s “Criminal” plays over the recording (the chorus of which runs: “But mama I’m in love with a criminal/ And this type of love isn’t rational, it’s physical.”); girls simply taking pictures of themselves in quote tweets of his Twitter background where his abs are on display; edits of Luigi Mangione being petted by a little animal character calling him “sugar plumb”; lengthy discussions of fetishistic sexual intercourse of all kinds; unfair comparisons between the unappealing physiognomy of the right-wing “shooter” Kyle Rittenhouse, though he was found not guilty of murder, and that of Mangione. As user ezi (@cuntrs) summarizes: “he’s hot, bisexual, italian, and a BLINK?! [a reference to the South Korean band ‘BLACKPINK’] Luigi Mangione got the full package, free him.”

The journal of Deviant Behaviour has recently defined Hybristophilia as “a paraphilia in which arousal is a response to being with a partner known to have committed a crime”, with the aside that “in most cases of Hybristophilia the individual never experiences physical intimacy or contact with the desired criminal”. The paper in question, “Unpacking the Construction of Online Identities of Hybristophilia Communities on TikTok”, usefully places Hybristophilia into its historical context; i.e. it is not at all new for women especially to love the criminal and rouge, the latter being a stereotype in Regency Gothic literature, although the return of a passion for such men in the way that we see it in the Mangione case does seem a distinctly late twentieth century phenomenon. As the paper notes:

A notable example of Hybristophilia was showcased during the case of the infamous serial killer Ted Bundy, where not only did the offender attract scores of admirers to the courtroom during his trial but he also received letters of admiration from members of the public, often stating the authors attraction and love for Bundy. The behavior of actively showcasing affection, attraction, and admiration for a criminal offender (prominent features of Hybristophilia) has occurred for other infamous criminal offenders of varying criminal actions, ranging from serial homicide to acts of terrorism.

That this kind of sexual intrigue exists generally among Western women (and some men) today, rather than Mangione representing an exceptional case, can be demonstrated by considering that a “bannable offence” on the enormous “r/TrueCrime” board on Reddit is the following:

We do not allow any type of criminal glorification or glorification of violence. If you want to talk about your crush on Dylann Roof or find an address to write to Steven Avery in prison, this isn’t the place.

As J. Fathallah suggests in her paper “BEING A FANGIRL OF A SERIAL KILLER IS NOT OK’: Gatekeeping Reddit’s True Crime Community”, this rule demonstrates that “r/TrueCrime is aware of that Other kind of fandom, and contends that this is not the place for it.” In the instance of the “r/SerialKillers” board, another subreddit that is largely female, the rule “No glorification / imitation / fan fiction. Please do not glorify serial killers or otherwise encourage violence” likewise indicates that there is a large subset of the “serial killer fandom” that would like to do all these things. The titular post “BEING A FANGIRL OF A SERIAL KILLER IS NOT OK”, published by a young female user in 2020, similarly expresses an undercurrent of desire: “It’s ok to be interested in a killer. That’s fine. I’m interested in Albert Fish […] But straight up wanting to DATE a serial killer is wrong. Ted Bundy fangirls often say that he shouldn’t have died even though he killed over 30 people, including a 12 year old girl.”

Whilst the admiration of the rogue has existed for a long time in women’s literature in the Anglosphere, I conjecture this admiration for the psychologically distorted does seem modern. Given the fact the height of the American serial killer as a popular figure was in the mid-1970s, coinciding with the maturation of American Baby Boomers, is there an argument to be made that the violent but physically dominant criminal represented an attractive and war-like male with status to women whose privileged husbands had never had to fight in the Second World War, or any war for that matter? In our world of declining testosterone levels, perhaps Luigi Mangione appeals to the same impulse. Women who have never interfaced with a healthy, powerful masculinity will accept the first facsimile of it they can find, having starved for so long in the dearth of the low-quality men on offer.

That Mangione may have appealed to this sentiment, as well as a bipartisan political popularity, in committing his murder, can then be said to make him a possibly new figure in the history of crime. This is someone who is categorically not an incel; he is extremely unlike Elliot Rodger, or the awkward Columbine Shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who the “BEING A FANGIRL OF A SERIAL KILLER IS NOT OK” redditor happens to mention can be found in homosexual “Dylan x Eric fan fiction”. Mangione is not the unattractive male who wants to “get revenge” on the sociosexual hierarchy that he sees as dispossessing him, only to become attractive to some women through his criminality incidentally afterwards. Mangione is the already attractive man who carefully plots out his crime, partly in order to obtain revenge against the American health care system, but secretly to attain the dark celebrity that he knew would grant him notoriety, and, perhaps unconsciously, women. Is this the first anti-incel in a line of many to come? These are young libertarians who are so sick of the world as it is, despite all their own advantages, that they are willing to throw their lives away in bouts of anarchic violence that, paradoxically, massively increase their reputation. On this note, it cannot be forgotten that for about the last twenty years, film after film and show after show about taking revenge on the unjust billionaire class (or simply upper-middle class) have been pushed on the general public: to name just a few examples without even bothering to look them up, Joker, Money Monster, Mr. Robot, Money Heist, In Time, Parasite, Now You See Me, The Batman. Public morality, which is affected more by media secretions than any real binding religious sentiment, has received ample information for Mangione to know whom he could target and get away with killing, whilst reaping all the rewards of Hybristophilia — a rich, white, heterosexual, male — for a very long time. If there is any danger that Mangione copycats pose, it is to this group in particular. And seeing as white men are generally coded as billionaires relative to the ever-increasing minority population of the United States and Europe, whatever their actual background or wealth, I will not join some of my fellow Rightists in cheering for Mangione’s triumph against the modern world.

On the 10th December, Mangione emerged in handcuffs from a police car, surrounded by journalists clicking and shooting their cameras like paparazzi. As he was dragged into Pennsylvania’s Blair County Court House in an orange prison jumpsuit, he quite incoherently shouted, “It’s an insult to the intelligence of the American people!” at nothing in particular. To me, it sounded as much a facsimile of something that a righteous vigilante might say in a comic book, or one of the sloppy TV shows or movies mentioned above, as everything that Luigi Mangione pretends to stand for is tinged by emptiness. On top of just being a murderer, he is the hollow product of a culture that has forgotten how to produce upstanding strong men and educate at all civilized women. Doubtless, when he arrives in prison, the fan mail will begin to roll in.