On Violence

[John 6IX Breezy]

Look at the recent admiration for Luigi Mangione, the HCU executive shooter.  

Here's something odd I've noticed. In many ways, Brian Thompson died long before he was killed. And what was killed was the symbol, or category, of "Healthcare CEO." The admiration you find online seems to exist at this level of abstraction. And perhaps that in itself is not surprising, we tend to find this "dehumanization" of the individual for the symbolic in most places where violence becomes justified. It is almost a precondition for it. 


You can see this when you ask people why Thompson was the bad guy. They'll say something unsatisfying like, well he killed millions of people. And, who knows, that may be the case, but what we do know is that the person saying that doesn't know if that's true. They won't be able to name a specific person that was killed. They won't be able to name any policy or decision that Thompson made. They will say he killed with a briefcase, and not a gun, but still not be able to present the chain of events by which that was done. I'm not even sure Luigi himself had a reason for targeting him specifically, I guess in time we'll find out.

Because in the end, it wasn't Brian Thompson that was killed, it was the symbol of CEO. And we all know what we think about them.