Luigi Mangione has our attention. By default, discussion centers on motivation and characterization. Was Mangione a madman and social outcast driven to extreme ends by illness and isolation? Or was he a revolutionary hero, a man of the people rebelling against an unjust system? Fox News and CNN united in unequivocally condemning Mangione; meanwhile, his fundraising page has already amassed thousands of supportive comments and well over $200,000.
But these are not the right questions, or at least not the best ones. Murders lend themselves to sensationalism, but murders happen every day. Why does this one matter? Mangione is telling a story, and America is listening.
The most popular and generous explanation for Mangione’s relevance consists of his folk-hero status. Mangione remains far from the typical everyman. His considerable affluence and Ivy-League education places him at the center of society. As one of his donors writes, “Luigi can get any kind of medical care he needs and wants, yet he chose to give up everything … to fight for the masses!” In this light, the alleged murder was not the hotblooded work of desperation or poverty, but an intellectual protest, an act of rebellion for the public good. Such moral crimes involve responsibility without guilt: Luigi needs no forgiveness for a sin he has not committed. America is ready to let its murderous prodigal son off with a slap on the wrist.
Before absolving Mangione, we must confront the very real result of his intellectual protest: Brian Thompson’s death. Here, many of his supporters turn to utilitarian arguments; they compare the singular suffering of Brian Thompson with what they perceive as vast systemic injustice — they cite horrifying anecdotes and disturbing statistics about the deeply flawed American healthcare system. But the utilitarian excuse for murder is nothing new. In fact, one of the most famous novels of all time, Crime and Punishment, deals with a strikingly similar case. Just before murdering a greedy pawnbroker, a young man considers the consequences and implications of the act:
Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange — it’s simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence! No more than the life of a louse… less in fact because the old woman is doing harm. She is wearing out the lives of others.
But if many Americans found this argument convincing, where has the revolution been? Even if we accept the premise of this analogy — that Brian Thompson was a “louse” — who gave Mangione the right to kill him? For the same reasons that we find the trolley problem unnerving, we do not collectively accept utilitarian arguments. This line of thinking leaves Mangione somewhere between martyr and murderer: as one donor explains, “you did a bad thing but i get it, i really do … i hope you dont spend the rest of your life in jail.” While the utilitarian argument plays a substantial role in our perceptions of Mangione, it provides an unsatisfying conclusion.
So far, this article has ignored the obvious. As one donor simply put it, “Luigi is beautiful inside and out.” While few would admit to making moral judgments based on physical appearances, beauty undeniably influences our decisions. As the platitude goes, killing a cockroach is heroism; killing a butterfly is evil. It is hard to imagine Mangione as the cockroach.
Mainstream media has largely avoided this talking point, perhaps out of modesty. In The Guardian, critic Gloria Oladipo conflates society’s love for Mangione with its inclinations to condemn Black men and forgive White criminals. While Oladipo successfully identifies this disparity, she never probes at the mechanism by which such prejudice takes root. Society loves men like Mangione — rich, White, educated, and handsome; it declares him beautiful and beloved on every front. Although the societal definition of beauty remains unfortunately intertwined with race, it is not only the racial element which influences our perceptions of aesthetic justice. In Crime and Punishment, just before the murder, rather than referring to the pawnbroker as an elderly lady, Dostoyevsky describes her as “the old crone” with a “hooked beak” and sagging skin. When the author wishes to dehumanize her, he describes her in uglier and uglier terms. The inverse of this statement holds: the more attractive we find Mangione, the more human and therefore forgivable he becomes.
But Luigi’s beauty holds “inside” too. Many of Mangione’s supporters describe his alleged actions in near-mythological terms:
If Luigi in fact did do it, it’s such a selfless, courageous act. It’s like someone slaying a dragon to protect the village. He is standing up for, fighting for and defending the people. It is heroic.
We often describe the aesthetic appeal of stimulating paintings, cathartic tragedies and other works of art. However, the entirety of Mangione’s narrative — the rugged individual attacking the heart of our most hated monolithic institution — contains a certain aesthetic appeal which his striking appearance only heightens. In a heavily ironic and deeply morbid sense, the murder was beautiful. For many, Mangione has committed an unpardonable sin reeking of privilege. But while they disagree with his conclusion, Mangione’s critics spend just as much breath condemning him as his supporters do praising him. He is a beautiful man selling a beautiful story, and we are all buying it.
This is the truth. We want to believe that someone is fighting for us; we want to believe in a perfect modern man; we want to believe in revolution without participating in it; we want to believe that the world is changing; we want to believe in myths; we want to believe in knights in shining armor; we want to believe in Luigi Mangione. Do you?