Why The (Alleged) Killer Did It

And: Google's God Machine; Evil Public Schools; Beauty & Politics; Soviet Britain

Luigi Mangione, suspect in Brian Thompson killing

So they arrested a suspect in the health insurance CEO’s killing, and charged him with murder. Luigi Mangione sure looks like the dude in this pic:

Also, they pulled some pretty incriminating evidence off of him:

An American Christian friend reached out to me about this news. He did a dive into Mangione’s online profile. Apparently Mangione is a user of psychedelics and a sufferer of chronic back pain from misaligned vertebrae. From the NYT:

Mr. Mangione was in regular contact with friends and family until about six months ago when he suddenly and inexplicably stopped communicating with them. He had been suffering from a painful back injury, friends said, and then went dark, prompting anxious inquiries from relatives to his friends: Had anyone heard from him?

More:

Mr. Mangione did not make a habit of complaining, and did not seem to be on any type of painkilling medication, Mr. Martin said.

Still, Mr. Martin said, he and others in the community came to understand that the pain was no small matter to a young man yearning for a normal lifestyle. “He knew that dating and being physically intimate with his back condition wasn’t possible,” Mr. Martin said. “I remember him telling me that, and my heart just breaks.”

The image of his spine below suggests that he had a spinal fusion operation.

That poor man. My friend spent a few years in a lot of pain from a doctor’s screwing up his treatment for a sports injury. He writes:

The amount of rage and betrayal I felt toward the healthcare industry after all I went through was unbelievable. If I had a screw loose too from mushrooms or whatever, who knows.

Very serious about that, by the way. Brought it to confession a few times, the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted that doctor to be in as much pain as I was. I got over it, and of course I wouldn’t have done anything, but when someone takes your life away and puts you in constant pain while claiming to be healing you… that’s a very deep thing.

I remember when he was suffering all this. It was intense. As I remember from our conversations back then (this was, obviously, when I lived in the US), he was being jacked around by doctors, and nobody could fix his problem, which didn’t seem like that hard of a fix to my uneducated eyes. He got a second opinion from a doctor who recommended an opposite course of treatment. What to do? And what to do if you are captive to the whims of health insurance companies? When I would see him, his pain was obvious in his face, a pain exacerbated by the clear fear that this would last forever. He tells me he’s fine now, but he spent a long time thinking he wouldn’t be. And he fears that it will come back.

I can relate, a bit. I have an un-fixable condition from whiplash in a minor car accident in 2016. The nerve in my right C5 vertebra is permanently damaged. The doc says that I could have surgery for it, but back surgery is risky. I can manage it for now with medication. If I don’t take the meds, it feels like I have a hot coal burrowed into my upper back. I’ve tried to get off the meds, but the pain is so great that I can’t focus on my work. I texted a few years ago with a well-known public intellectual who was in a serious auto accident years ago, and who is angry that opioid abuse by others makes him feel like a dirtbag for renewing a prescription that allows him simply to stand in front of his classes and teach. Yeah, that’s me too.

Please understand that I am in no way justifying what Luigi Mangione might have done! In fact, when I asked my American friend if I could share his words with me, he said yes, but don’t give any details about him that might let anybody tie him to sympathy with an alleged killer. I dwell on my friend’s words: “That’s a very deep thing.” From what I understand about his situation, his pain really was prolonged and exacerbated by bad medical advice.

I’m guessing my pal’s doctor was no idiot; he just got it wrong with my friend. Yet my friend is a real person, a person who was in a lot of debilitating pain, and recalling those days, I seem to remember his incredible frustration that the doctor wouldn’t take him seriously when he kept saying “This isn’t working.” The doc was so certain of his method and judgment that he didn’t want to hear it.

(Similarly, I developed a prejudice against therapists because of an expensive and well-regarded marriage therapist who treated my ex-wife and me for a year and a half. My judgment of her is that she was so wedded to her treatment model that she dismissed clear evidence that it wasn’t working for us, and could not work for us, because of issues particular to my ex-wife and me. That was seven or eight years ago, and I still get angry when I think about challenging her multiple times on this, but she just looked at me like I was an idiot. Trust the science. Given everything that has happened since we left her, I am absolutely sure I was right. Her arrogance!)

To be fair to doctors, we perhaps expect too much of them. They are human beings too. They make mistakes. The human body is not a machine, and they are not mechanics. They manage to do so much good that we find it hard to accept that they aren’t miracle workers. And yet, in my friend’s case, as I recall, it really was the case that the doctor did not seem to appreciate how much he was suffering. He was just a body. A data point.

I had to go to the doctor here in Hungary for a routine appointment. I can afford private insurance — because medical costs are so low here, even for private care, the best possible medical insurance policies are insanely cheap by US standards — so I go to a private clinic. I got into a conversation with my doctor about medicine here in Hungary, which has socialized medicine, like most of Europe. The doc went on a tear about what his father-in-law had to endure when he had a heart issue. He told a story that sounded like a Third World horror story.

“The whole time he and the other patients were laying there getting no water, no nothing, some of them lying in their own piss because there weren’t enough personnel to give them basic care for human dignity, on the floor above, there was a two-million euro robot doing advanced medical work,” he said, viscerally angry. “How is it that the system has enough money to buy those robots, but not enough to hire enough nurses to make sure patients have water, and their linens changed?”

This was a doctor, mind you, who was complaining about how the system is under-funded and under-resourced — and also, the resources being mis-spent by the government, in his view. I’m thinking about his comments in the context of the Luigi Mangione situation. The poor man lying in his piss in the hospital room, and my doc’s father-in-law lying next to him, smelling his neighbor’s piss, and desperate for a glass of water that nobody will bring — who do they hate? Maybe they all understand that This Is Just How It Is In This System. Or maybe they personalize it.

Since I began writing this, I received a text from another American friend, who said that when his very sick wife was being jacked around last year on some necessary tests that were being delayed by the health care bureaucracy, he had fantasies of doing a Luigi Mangione. He says he never would have done it, but he understands the feeling.

The thing is, if Mangione did it, he is guilty of dehumanizing Brian Thompson, who was not just a data point on a corporate organization chart, but a flesh-and-blood human being. How do we know that Mangione is the victim of anybody but fate? I mean, maybe the problem is not that the health care system mistreated him, but that there was and is nothing that could be done to relieve the pain that drove him to despair and murder? However much one suffers, one can’t just go out and kill people for symbolic reasons.

But even as we condemn the killer of Brian Thompson — as we must, if the killer is tried and found guilty — we need to try to understand what drives a man to do something like that. To try to understand it is not to excuse it, but, one hopes, to find the wherewithal to improve the system. If Mangione really is the killer, it is interesting to consider that he is not a poor man, but an Ivy League graduate from a prominent family. He is one of society’s winners, yet he did not escape suffering. Nor did he have what it took to deal with it like a good and decent man. For example, if he was in chronic, serious pain, and he refused to take painkillers, that’s on him.

Google Creates The God Machine

Willow, the AI quantum computing chip

Is this good news or bad news? From the NYT:

On Monday, Google unveiled a new quantum computer that may end this back-and-forth race with traditional machines and that points to a future in which quantum computers could drive advances in areas like drug discovery and artificial intelligence.

Google said its quantum computer, based on a computer chip called Willow, needed less than five minutes to perform a mathematical calculation that one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers could not complete in 10 septillion years, a length of time that exceeds the age of the known universe.

Here is a link to Google’s own announcement of Willow.

The good news: new drugs that can heal our diseases!

The bad news: goodbye online security. This technology can break any code. And more broadly: how can anybody resist a machine this powerful? A machine like this in the hands of the State? It strikes me as a horror show.

Once again, this excerpt from Martin Heidegger’s final interview (1966), in which he reflects on what the absorption of humanity into “technicity” (technology as a way of lie) means for us. Heidegger says in the interview that technicity has nothing to do with tools, and that “technicity in its essence is something that man does not master by his own power.” More:

SPIEGEL: Obviously, you see a world movement -- this is the way you, too, have expressed it -- that either is bringing about an absolutely technical state or has done so already.

Heidegger: That's right.

SPIEGEL: Fine. Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it? Or can both together influence it, insofar as philosophy guides the individual, or several individuals, to a determined action?

Heidegger: If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.

SPIEGEL: Is there a correlation between your thinking and the emergence of this god? Is there here in your view a causal connection? Do you feel that we can bring a god forth by our thinking?

Heidegger: We can not bring him forth by our thinking. At best we can awaken a readiness to wait [for him].

Where will the god come from who will save humanity from slavery to his machines? How will this deity descend from the heavens? What solution will he offer? While the world scans the skies looking for the advent of this god, you and I had better make ready to recognize the lies he will tell. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

675 Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.

That’s what I think this is all leading to. But you knew I would say that.