With the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO and the arrest of an Ivy League graduate all over the news, I couldn’t help but ponder what drove an intelligent, young man to commit such a brazen deed. Alluding to my other more satirical article, “Menace to Society: From Eating Out Your Wife to Eating Your Wife”, I reminded myself that everyone is capable of committing terrible acts. It only depends on one’s personal reason for committing that act. If the reason is compulsive enough – fending off starvation while braving the Andes winter or protecting your family from a home burglar–then that person wouldn’t hesitate to act in whatever manner the circumstances call for – eating the corpses of friends and family or gunning down the home burglar who posed a threat to your two young daughters and your wife that’s built like Sara Jay. Each person has their limits.
Research indicates a general trend where lower intelligence quotients (IQs) are associated with higher rates of violent behavior. A study published in Psychological Medicine found that individuals with lower IQ scores had higher prevalence rates of violence perpetration. Specifically, 16.3% of individuals with IQs between 70–79 engaged in violent behavior, compared to only 2.9% among those with IQs between 120–129. Even after factors like demographic variables, childhood adversity, and psychiatric conditions were adjusted, lower IQ scores remained significantly associated with increased odds of violent behavior.
However, this does not imply that high IQ individuals are incapable of committing violent acts. One of the article’s subjects, Luigi Nicholas Mangione, had an IQ of 137. Valedictorian of his private high school The Gilman School, he went on to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he got his bachelors and masters in Computer Science. Anecdotally, someone has claimed that Luigi was one of the smartest people he had ever met at the school. Mangione professionally worked as a data engineer. Despite all this, Mangione then went on to shoot the UnitedHealthcare CEO in broad daylight. We can look at another case – Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, notorious as the Unabomber. Kaczynski, was a mathematical prodigy with a genius-level IQ of 167. He graduated from Harvard University at 20 years old and later earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan, specializing in geometric function theory. He also became the youngest assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, but resigned after two years to live a secluded life in the wilderness. Kaczynski then utilized his brilliance to avoid detection and commit a series of bombings against institutions for 17 years.
Mangione and Kaczynski’s actions are reminiscent of the literary Robin Hood, who stole from the rich and gave back to the poor. Just like Robin Hood, they immorally acted against oppressive authorities under the banner of the greater good. These modern-day “Killin’ Hoods” have donned their own personal hoods of justice and escalated their crusades up to murder.
Kaczynski and Mangione both showed a disdain for industrial systems, believing that these systems induce unhappiness and offer superficial remedies. Kaczynski claimed that society’s industrialization was impeding on the natural fulfillment and pursuits of humans. He believed that natural survival, such as hunting, foraging, and fighting off predators, fulfilled the human purpose. However, when complex social structures made natural survival obsolete, we were left to pursue artificially fulfilling goals, such as a 9-5 and climbing up the corporate ladder. To quote Kaczynski, it is “demeaning to fulfill one’s need for the power process through surrogate activities or through identification with an organization rather than through pursuit of real goals.” As a consequence, the Unabomber believed that humans were not free. The very notion that our primary desires are met as long as we obey, such as joining the rat race, means control of our lives is placed into the hands of others – bosses, technocrats, and other organizers of society. This lack of personal control leads to a dependence on others and systems. For Kaczynski, freedom is taking back command of our own lives without control or manipulation.
Ted Kaczynski deemed industrialization threatening enough that he wrote anarcho-primitivist manifestos and sent pipe bombs to academics, airline executives, and business officials. Psychological evaluations suggested that Kaczynski’s actions were influenced by paranoid schizophrenia. The disorder’s symptoms include delusions, disorganized thinking, speech that’s difficult to understand, and unusual, erratic behavior. However, nothing from his manifesto resembled the ramblings of a madman. He followed the rules of logic and reasoning while using valid observations. Even Mangione stated in his GoodReads review of the manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future,
“Clearly written by a mathematics prodigy. Reads like a series of lemmas on the question of 21st century quality of life. It’s easy to quickly and [thoughtlessly] 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.”
Mangione corrects the label of “crazy luddite” with the more accurate description “extreme political revolutionary”.
From his alleged manifesto and the “Deny, Defuse, and Delay” inscription carved onto his shell-casing (an allusion to Jay Feinman’s book of the same title), Luigi Mangione made his own motive clear. In a seemingly live adaptation of Revenge of the Nerds, Mangione assassinated Brian Thompson, the figurehead of a company that people believe to prioritize profits over patient care, with a 3D-printed pistol and suppressor. Statistics show that UnitedHealthcare had the highest claim denial percentage out of any healthcare provider. They refused a third of all its claims, over twice the industry average of 16% in 2023.
Although lower IQ individuals may be prone to indiscriminate acts of violence, higher IQ individuals are more focused and only resort to extreme, utilitarian acts of violence after considering it a necessary evil. From the backgrounds and manifestos of Mangione and Kaczynski, their acts of violence don’t seem to stem from mental illness, but rather calculated thought and observation. Before their breaking points, they weren’t violent nor mentally unbalanced. They were and continued to be completely rational human beings.
Besides all the questions raised, one cannot deny that the whole course of events relating to Luigi is an attractive story. Groupchats everywhere were saturated with messages of people trying to one-up one another in the game of “Who has the least minimal degrees of separation from Mangione?” We shouldn’t care whether Luigi Mangione was your coworker’s best friend’s ex-boyfriend or your pledge master. What we should care about is the reason why these very intelligent individuals after intense contemplation finally decided that the most viable steps forward were their fatal actions. What are we missing? Are these industries really so damaging to human life and we’re just blind? Are we just sheep? And if we are sheep, do we save ourselves by rallying behind these modern-day Robin Hoods? Do we also take action? Now, that’s something to shoot the shit about.
Media References:
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
Delay Deny Defend: Why insurance companies don’t pay claims and what you can do about it
Industrial Society and Its Future
Psychological Medicine
Revenge of the Nerds