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The Riddle of Luigi Mangione www.gurwinder.blog/p/the-riddle-of-luigi-mangione

10.4k sats \ 30 comments \ @elvismercury 22 Dec mostly_harmless

One of the thing that's been on my mind for the last few weeks has been the assassination of Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare CEO. As assassinations go -- as the total viewing corpus of assassinations, both real and imagined, that have penetrated my eyeballs go -- it was pretty modest. If you see something like that in a movie or TV show you don't even blink. If you have kids, you're probably fine if they watch it. Internal radar doesn't even detect anything unusual.

And yet to see it in real life.

And then to wade through the reactions to it.

Many people celebrated the murder, mocking the victim and lionizing the killer. Some were frustrated that health insurance cost so much, and some were outraged that they or a loved one had been denied medical claims. For this they blamed Thompson, the CEO of the US’s largest health insurance company.

An enduring obsession of mine is the collision between people and systems. What those collisions portend, how to think about them ethically and tactically, perhaps strategically. Jesus, it's hard to know what to do when you run into the buzzsaw. It's hard to know what a person's attitude should be.

Anyway, as you might expect, this is a good and thought-provoking article on this topic.

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456 sats \ 1 reply \ @Fiatrevelation 23 Dec

Not to romanticize, but I am reminded of L'etranger by Albert Camus, when I read this article. The writer paints the assassin as being somewhat blasé, intellectually curious and having an obsession with the absurdity of a life without "agency."

In Camu's novel, the main character murders and stands on trial unable to account for what he has done. He neither denys nor shows any remorse for his actions. We see in him a character who is devoid of the usual emotive responses we'd expect. Finally, he comes to accept the hand that fate had delt to him, finding comfort in the thought that the universe is quite as indifferent to him as he is to it.

I think the blog locates the pulse of an absurdity similar to what Camus was trying to express in this character study novel.

The difficult to swallow part of this is that I think there is a certain amount of absurdity that each of us accepts, as part of a survival mechanism, when we face the world. If we didn't, and instead let all of the world's injustices penetrate the fibres of our beings, then how could we ever get on with life?

17 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 23 Dec

The difficult to swallow part of this is that I think there is a certain amount of absurdity that each of us accepts, as part of a survival mechanism, when we face the world. If we didn't, and instead let all of the world's injustices penetrate the fibres of our beings, then how could we ever get on with life?

I love this point. Indeed. To take it a step further, the more time that passes, the more I realize that what we consider to be the absurdity is itself a very deep question. The enculturation of certain absurdities runs so deep that we never consider them as grist for reflection at all -- most things are probably like this, the unexamined strata of our cultural legacies, whatever those are. But then every so often something pokes its nose out of the hole, and people ask, en-masse: does that actually make sense?

I don't like to bring everything back to btc, but the parallels are un-missable. You start digging into money, and you wind up in weird corners where most of your friends and family have no idea wtf you're talking about, or why you're obsessed with those things. The popular success of btc has somehow made this worse and not better, at least in my own small neighborhood.

224 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 22 Dec

My wife's been fascinated by this story. Don't you work in the health care industry, to some extent? How are people reacting internally?

Welcome back, btw. You were missed.

650 sats \ 4 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Dec

Don't you work in the health care industry, to some extent?

A prior life, to some extent.

How are people reacting internally?

People are horrified to find themselves the enemies for going to their jobs, following the laws and regulations, etc. They recognize the system is fucked, but as long as it's the operating system, what does one do? They go to work. And now people lose no social credit for publicly calling for their execution.

A handful of times I've been privileged to occupy an insider view as I hear the outsider narrative, and every time it's just madness. Bitcoin is one such -- you know what's true, and you know how people who understand nothing talk about it. It makes one uneasy about all narratives of all kinds. Or at least, it makes me uneasy.

Welcome back, btw. You were missed.

192 sats \ 3 replies \ @SimpleStacker 22 Dec

What frustrates me most is that I think many people put the blame in the wrong places. They blame the insurance companies because it's who controls access to the money, but few are looking at the cartel-like behavior of the medical associations and hospitals, or the broken patent system, or the misalignment of incentives caused by a system where the consumers don't foot the bill for their own choices.

Until Americans can look at the healthcare system and its flaws more systematically and holistically, I don't think much progress can be made

123 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 22 Dec

Well said -- all those things, and more, feeding back into each other over and over; and the people themselves, millions of them, directly and indirectly, demanding the dysfunction in various ways: by which assets they own, the markets in which they're embedded, the public discourse that is and isn't allowed, the discourse that can't be had because people can't be bothered to understand, all of it.

22 sats \ 1 reply \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 22 Dec

You forgot the state’s little infusions of monopolization and other minor interferences. That the state may have some sort of responsibility for this mess is inconceivable for many people, if not most people. I certainly miss those doctor’s home visits, black bag and all!

34 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 23 Dec

Agreed, the influence of the state is felt throughout all the issues mentioned above

153 sats \ 3 replies \ @freetx 22 Dec

I understand peoples hate of the healthcare system
Simultaneously its frustrating because the current system is almost entirely brought on by gov mandates (HMO act of 83, etc.). Watch any TV show from 50s (Leave it to Beaver?). Doctors used make housecalls and people could pay cash. "Medical Warehousing" (ie. Hospitals) is the result of continual regulations.
Simultaneously I find it abhorrent how the left + msm are cheering this on. This is how fully commie revolutions are born. Don't think they are going to be content with murdering some healthcare CEOs, it will soon move to Real Estate owners, food retailers, etc. The commies will end like they always do with murdering the "kulaks" (farmers) when everything else fails.

21 sats \ 2 replies \ @Bell_curve 22 Dec

Caliifornia has a home insurance crisis (also condo/renters) as many carriers have left the state or will not accept new customers.

Regarding health insurance, if you want to assign blame, your kill list should be the architects of Obama care and 219 House reps and 60 Senators who voted for it and the 5 Scotus justices who upheld it

24 sats \ 1 reply \ @freetx 22 Dec

It seems that Obamacare was an intentional scheme to collapse the system, so they can usher us into to healthcare DMV-style.

For what its worth, my UK work colleagues are now fully feeling the rationing of the wonderful UK NHS health system. A friend fell off a ladder and injured his side, also after the fall he has been experiencing random periods of extreme dizziness. He booked an evaluation and after a month was permitted to see the Dr...while explaining his vertigo symptoms he also mentioned that his side still was hurting, to which the Dr abruptly cut him off and said "when you scheduled this appointment you said it was for vertigo, if your side is an issue you will have to go back and make another appointment for that...." - but we are told "rationing won't happen".

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 22 Dec

Obama: You can keep your doctor and your plan

add: another curve ball into NHS is immigration. I have read numerous stories about immigrants get priority, their wait times are shorter, they can cut in line

30 day wait is not bad for NHS. I have heard nightmare stories of 6 week or 6 month waiting periods.

Canada has a similar awful system.

If I were a doctor or hospital administrator, I would prioritize cash patients. Cash is king and moves to the front of the line. Then private insurance. Then Medicare. Last priority is Medicaid. Ideal situation would be no Medicare and no Medicaid.

I can think of 3 things that would ameliorate the disaster called ACA:

eliminate mandatory essential benefits
allow catastrophic coverage in the individual market
let organizations like Costco offer health insurance to its members
repeal MacCarran Act so people can buy insurance out of state

283 sats \ 0 replies \ @oklar 22 Dec

That was extremely well-written and interesting to read a first-hand account. My reaction to the news was not admiration of zealotry, but more like viewing colateral damage from afar. What struck me was at the end of the interaction between the perp and the writer was this ask to help him curate his social media account.

I read the Gurwinder piece about Tiktok after I read that and I had the feeling that social exclusion must be a factor in obsessive-compulsive behavior or fanaticism. I only know Nostr these days. Maybe this guy just needed to unplug? I'm pretty sure 2020 was damaging in ways that we still don't fully realize and have not completely recovered from.

Quite sad to read that many people reacted to the newswith emojis. Makes me feel I understand the theory about his obsession with NPCs, but from the bit about his thoughts on Japan, it's clear to anyone who's become adjusted to living in a different culture, not everyone does or should attempt it. It also made me wonder, would the reaction of a healthy society be a more measured one or an indignant one.

111 sats \ 0 replies \ @Satosora 22 Dec

"But it wasn’t just Japan. Luigi believed people everywhere were becoming NPCs, increasingly living their lives as a series of reflex reactions rather than consciously choosing their behaviors." I feel this is very true, and you can see it everywhere. It is even here on SN at times. So many people have blind faith in the government, taking poison when told to do so. Morals have become muddied, its hard to tell how people will react to different situations.

220 sats \ 4 replies \ @ek 22 Dec

going to read now¹ and then reply properly to give you a real welcome back, but already regarding:

If you see something like that in a movie or TV show you don't even blink.

When I saw the clip where he gets shoot for the first time, I also thought about movies and replied with this in #795445:

That’s what movies get wrong: your enemies won’t wait to face you head-on or offer you a chance for last words—they’ll shoot you in the back the moment they get the opportunity.

or at least try to. I am so excited to see a post from you again, I can't even focus on reading, lol ↩

680 sats \ 3 replies \ @ek 22 Dec

I’m finding it hard to reply because this feels like one of those posts where nothing I say will do it justice—whether to the post itself, the world, or even my own thoughts. The more I reflect on agency, the assassination, my similar tendency to see most people as NPCs, and the term NPC itself and what it does to us when we use it, the more I realize I am just treading water.

It feels like I’m trying to say some things, but I don’t know what they are. I only know that when I say something else, that’s not it. What if we quite literally don't have the words for certain modern feelings, and all we can do is to circle around them without ever explicitly stating them? Maybe that sounds overly dramatic, but that is how I feel. Do others ever feel this way? Is there a specific term for it? Or is it just an intrinsic part of the human condition—so universal that we never even bothered to invent a word for it? I must admit, that would be terrifying. It reminds me of George Orwell's 1984, but instead of eliminating words to limit human thought, we created societies with bigger problems than a single human mind can ever comprehend in full.

Anyway, with this disclaimer out of the way, I want to say that this post reminded me that I dismissed the news about the assassination as "just an American thing." However, I am usually pretty aware that the US basically defines Western culture and whatever happens there, usually also starts happening here in Europe not too long after, at least to some degree. So there is the first conflict. Why did I not really care? I think partly it was because I perceived most reactions as noise: some people were shocked, some were cheering, some people were shocked that others were cheering, but none of them struck me as original, thoughtful or unbiased. I don't blame them though. If someone asked me what I am thinking about the assassination I would probably just have replied: "that's probably not good." Not very thoughtful myself.

But I also didn't care about the assassination because I didn't think that it matters that I do:

Do I have to care about it? I mean, surely it matters that some people care about it, but does it matter if I do?

I think this brings us back to the question of agency. It's pretty hard to be agentic when in 99.99% of the things that happen in the world, what you did or didn't do didn't matter. So much is beyond our control, it's very tempting to just lean into that realization.¹

In that sense, I can understand why we take mental shortcuts and dismiss the fact that every single person has an experience as complex as our own by labeling them as NPCs. But it’s also somewhat ironic since thinking of others as NPCs is itself kind of NPC'ish. After all, it’s a mental shortcut, not so different from the mental shortcuts we see in others that lead us to think of them as NPCs.

So perhaps the key difference is that some people are more aware of them than others, as mentioned in the article:

Unlike most people who decry others as NPCs, Luigi showed enough awareness to identify that he, too, lived much of his life on autopilot, confessing that he sometimes wasted whole afternoons doomscrolling social media.

But I’m also increasingly worried that people like me, who try to remain neutral observers, will also end up in the crossfire eventually anyway.

I think that was most of what I wanted to say. I hope there was at least a shimmer of original thoughts in there.

Oh, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to force myself to listen to my thoughts, as the author of the article described it here:

Writing forces you to hear your thoughts. It is a confrontation with yourself. This is its greatest value, and its greatest pain.

I guess that makes me a bit of an existentialist?? ↩

112 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury OP 23 Dec

What is agency, to you? How would you define it?

54 sats \ 1 reply \ @ek 23 Dec

Mhh. I would say agency is what I feel when I wake up and feel a strong motivation to follow my plans for the day because I think it actually matters in the long run.

So basically, for me, agency is about believing that what I do matters. But it doesn't mean that I can't also believe that there are limits to how much it matters. 🤔

77 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 23 Dec

This is on my mind a lot -- on the one hand, we are unspeakably small cogs in the machinery of the world, and nothing we do matters on the macro. On the other hand, you can view every act as a thing itself, echoing into eternity, and it's the act and not its consequence that matters.

There are surely other ways of looking at it, but that seems the principal dichotomy that we have to navigate between, or else go mad. Perhaps an inability to come to terms with the left-hand side of the gradient is what leads people to become murdering psychopaths.

133 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 22 Dec

Elvis has entered the building.

Great article.

119 sats \ 3 replies \ @Signal312 23 Dec

I'm happy to be switching to Crowd Health (https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/) for the new year. Crowd Health is "not" health insurance - you have to sign all kinds of papers saying that you understand that - but it works similarly. I think the people who join in Crowd Health will be much healthier than the norm.

Also, they'll soon have a "metabolically healthy" group there - I think they call it the Carnivore Crowd. This means everyone has to a have a certain healthy level of weight, insulin resistance, etc. Since metabolic disease (cause by excess carbohydrates, obesity, etc) causes at least 80% of chronic disease in the US, I should be much better off with those people as my co-insurers.

Every time I deal with regular normie health insurance or health care is an absolute nightmare. It leaves me practically rabid with anger at the system.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 23 Dec

looks like cost sharing and crowd funding

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 23 Dec

That's interesting -- I've heard of things like this before, would love to see updates as you exercise it. Although hopefully you don't have to exercise it.

Also, they'll soon have a "metabolically healthy" group there - I think they call it the Carnivore Crowd. This means everyone has to a have a certain healthy level of weight, insulin resistance, etc.

Huh -- this would probably be one of the reasons they'd be so insistent that they're not "health insurance" since this kind of selection is illegal to underwrite in health insurance, and is a plague of insurance markets: the young + healthy flee ("Nothing will probably happen to me") leaving only the old and ill to absorb all the risk, which defeats the point of insurance in the first place.

The "ethical" solution to this would be to leave the uninsured to die in the streets if they got unlucky / can't afford care, which is how you keep these markets honest. Most find that an unpalatable solution, though. I've also noticed that dedication to market principles around healthcare erodes substantially when a person draws the short stick.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 23 Dec

Adverse selection

Some doctors and clinics have decided to accept cash only, no insurance

108 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 24 Dec

Santa delivered this year. :)

agency is culpability

This stung. I forgot, if I ever knew, that the cringe potential I carry around is the result of agency pursuits.

I’ve long known that people who are capable of great kindness also tend to be capable of great cruelty, because both extremes are often animated by the same crazed impulsivity.

I hadn't thought of kindness as impulsive. It's more consciously green lit, for me with a why-not, but it tends to be pretty risky too. The risk of diminishing myself is a big part of what I enjoy about being kind.

127 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 24 Dec

I forgot, if I ever knew, that the cringe potential I carry around is the result of agency pursuits.

Meaning: the things you do that are most cringeworthy are the flipside of you being high-agency, and taking decisive action in a way that produces something bad?

The risk of diminishing myself is a big part of what I enjoy about being kind.

Man, you have become more koan-like in my absence. What does this mean? How can kindness diminish? Normally I make an attempt at guessing but you got me here.

Santa delivered this year. :)

For both of us, brother. Nice to 'see' you again :)

108 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 24 Dec

Meaning: the things you do that are most cringeworthy are the flipside of you being high-agency, and taking decisive action in a way that produces something bad?

decode successful

How can kindness diminish?

Kindness requires sacrifice and it isn't always paid back. The author calling great kindness and great cruelty impulsive made me wonder why they're impulsive. I assume it's because both are risky.

koan

New word. Like it.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @stack_harder 23 Dec

if this was like, 30 years ago when health care costs, inflation and jobs were ticking along at a different pace, I'm sure the public would be more outraged.

but these days, people are so squeezed and the health care premiums so out of control, that it's not surprising that the guy was a lightning rod. people are fucking pissed and seeing some ultra-rich billionaire get whacked is cathartic.

look what happened when the submarine imploded with the billionaires on, people loved that too. not to say it's right or anything, but it's a litmus test of sorts

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln 23 Dec

Great article. Thanks for sharing. Lots to think about.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 23 Dec

Welcome back :)

An enduring obsession of mine is the collision between people and systems.

This happens because people create and prefer to live in their own realities. They often don't accept the general reality. The assassination can't be justified and shouldn't be celebrated but people do it for they think that's a win. But in reality, the system is the culprit not the man who got assassinated.

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