Last week I wrote about Luigi Mangione's outreach to his favorite author, Tim Ubran. Mangione had contacted Urban to praise his work but also said something that got Urban thinking later. He had praised a line Urban had written but he actually botched the quote a bit.

He remembered it as “A high-level thinker sees a foggy world through clear eyes, while a low-level thinker sees a clear world through foggy eyes.” In fact, what I’d written at the time was: “The scientist’s clear vision shows them a complex, foggy world, the Attorney’s foggy vision shows them a world that’s straightforward, full of crisp lines and black-and-white distinctions.”

It's sort of a paraphrase of what Urban wrote but more importantly, Mangione seems to have seen himself as the high-level thinker even though his actions peg him as the person who saw things in black and white.

It turns out that Urban isn't the only blogger Mangione reached out to in the past year. He also became a top tier subscriber to a UK blog called The Prism written by Gurwinder Bhogal. As part of that subscription, he got a 2-hour video conversation with Bhogal which took place in early May. Today, Bhogal wrote a piece for the Free Press describing his interactions with Mangione.

He was warm and gregarious from the outset, praising my writing and telling me how excited he was to speak with me. Mangione said he was on holiday in Japan, and I asked him about it. He said that while he loved many aspects of Japanese culture, such as its sense of honor, he believed Japan was full of “NPCs,” or non-player characters—which is internet slang for people who don’t think for themselves. He then told me a story he’d first mentioned in an email: One morning in Japan, he saw a man having a seizure in the street, so he ran to the nearest police station for help. They followed him back to the man, but refused to cross any street if the stoplight was red—even if the road was empty—as the man was seizing on the ground. Mangione lamented what he called “a lack of free will” in Japan, by which he meant a lack of agency...

Mangione went on to explain why he felt Japan was the future dystopia I’d warned about in some of my writings. He spoke of the hikikomori, Japanese men who lived their lives alone in their bedrooms, sedating themselves with video games, porn, and other shallow entertainments. For Mangione, such people had lost control over their lives, becoming mindless slaves to stimuli much like the cops who stopped at red lights even when it made no sense.

This feels like foreshadowing since, obviously, Mangione ultimately decided he didn't need to observe the cultural "red lights" that would normally prevent someone from planning and carrying out an execution on the street.

The author says Mangione never came across as arrogant, in part because he seemed to see himself as not so very different from the NPC's he was criticizing. But just to step out of his narrative a bit, this did strike me as arrogant. In fact, his whole effort to contact and befriend authors he saw as important, wise or insightful strikes me as an effort to place himself in their elite company. He may have seen himself as struggling with some NPC tendencies but he was also the guy discussing the issue with someone he considered a top author. He wanted to see himself as a deep thinker and he wanted others to see that too.

After their chat, Mangione gave Bhogal a six-month subscription to an app that he thought might be helpful. It was a generous gift to an author he was already supporting and someone who, apart from the video chat, he really didn't know. You get the impression that he was not only looking for friends but a certain type of friend that would give him a specific kind of intellectual respectability.

After the shooting and the arrest that followed, Bhogal found himself thinking back over their interactions, wondering if he'd missed something.

My mind raced back to our chat, searching for clues that he could’ve done this. The only thing that stuck out was when Mangione briefly mentioned healthcare in the U.S. was expensive, he also said we Britons were lucky to have a socialized National Health Service. But even this statement, by itself, gave no indication that Mangione was capable of what he was being accused of.

When someone is found to have committed murder, friends and relatives will usually say things like, “I can’t believe it, he seemed like such a nice guy.” I instinctively said the same thing about Mangione. But as the shock faded and my wits returned, I ceased to be surprised. 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. It’s why many of the people celebrating the murder are those who self-identify as “compassionate” leftists.

Ultimately what surprised Bhogal most was how little actual thought Mangione had put into the assassination. His "minifesto" was not very thoughtful at all. He points to another blogger who wrote a fisking of it.

A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy.

This is not off to a good start. The first fact—that the U.S. has the “most expensive”—healthcare system is poorly conceived. For one, “most expensive” shouldn’t be what the killer wanted to say. That could mean the prices in the system, or the total costs of the system, or the cost per effective unit of care, or a lot else. What he wanted to say was that the U.S. spends the most on healthcare and it doesn’t get a lot for it. But that’s wrong.

Firstly, the U.S. does not spend all that anomalously much on healthcare. It is just vastly wealthier than its peer countries...

Others have noted that Americans lag for the same sets of reasons: obesity, eating too much, being too lazy, being violent, driving fast cars and, more unfortunately, being near people who drive fast cars, and so on. It should also be noted that much of the obesity-related death delta against the U.S. doesn’t seem unique to the U.S. It appears more like a disease of affluence.

The 2024 John’s Hopkins Life Expectancy Report reiterated these facts. It reported that 57% of the life expectancy gap between the U.S. and the U.K. was down to cardiovascular disease, another 32% was down to drug overdoses, 20% was down to firearm-related homicides and suicides, and 17% was due to motor vehicle accidents. But, as the above treatable/screenable cancer note suggested, the report also concluded that, if anything, America is ahead when it comes to mortality from conditions the healthcare system can actually affect—namely, COVID and cancer.

In short, Americans are more likely to be fat and reckless and that's why health outcomes aren't good compared to other countries, not because our healthcare industry is terrible.

Getting back to Bhogal, he feels that Mangione was feeling isolated and so he looks back with regret on Mangione's last known effort to contact someone on the internet before the shooting.

On June 10, I received my last communication from Mangione. It was a seemingly innocent request; he wanted me to help him curate his social media feed. I’d already given him tips on how to do that, so the question struck me as odd. I directed him to a relevant article I’d written and offered to answer any questions he had about it. I never heard from him again.

Would anything have changed if Bhogal had offered more time and friendship instead of a brief response? It's impossible to know but clearly at some point Mangione just gave up on the world. He may have convinced himself that he was seeing things clearly and acting with agency (instead of being an NPC) but it also seems like he was just desperate for attention.