This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://luigimangione.quora.com/What-do-you-think-of-Luigi-Mangione-1“

This question cannot separate the person from the act that introduced the person to the world. The person and the act are now inseparable. No one can answer this question independently from knowing why he is known.

What people think of Luigi Mangione will forever be the act superimposed upon a subjectively constructed image of him.

The only means by which one can now render an objective description of him is by offering up statistical data and facts about his life. Who he is as a person is now beyond anyone’s comprehension. No one can know what motivates his existence or what comprises the subjective state of Luigi Mangione beyond surmising a person who has experienced a breaking point in their life in which it was better, in his mind, to do the unthinkable for most of the rest of us than to continue an invisible march into a nightmare he could no longer endure.

No one can know what that feels like unless they’ve been forced to walk in similar shoes.

One conclusion that can be drawn about his personhood is that he demonstrated an ability to sacrifice himself to act on behalf of thousands of faceless victims forgotten in the march of greed.

Along with losing the ability to think of Luigi Mangione as a being separate from his act, neither can we separate the notion of the tens of thousands of victims lost to us every year in service to the God of profit. We can no longer forget how easy it is for many among us to justify murder if it means pocketing riches and obtaining a life of material wealth for oneself.

None of us can separate Brian Thompson’s callous extinguishing of lives from an algorithm to be rewarded for it in service to the monsters who refuse to honour the social contract and a local thug who robs a convenience store for a drug fix without admitting to being a sociopathic monster.

The reality between the two scenarios is that the local thug is less of a monster than the billionaires who think nothing of the lives they extinguish while offering up the lie that there is nothing they can do about it.

None possess the courage or the integrity to distinguish between ability and desire.

Every insurance billionaire can choose otherwise, but they don’t and hide behind the lie that the protocol they devised to protect their material luxuries is immutable and outside their control.

What I think about Luigi Mangioni for sacrificing his life to show us all our ugliness in a black mirror of a broken society is that he should not have been forced to put all the rest of us to such severe shame, and even more so is the pity that we still can’t grasp how evil our world has become.