Divine Violence and the End of Pain

What can René Girard, Yukio Mishima, and the original Luddites tell us about Luigi Mangione's violent act?

An X-Ray of Luigi Mangione’s spinal fusion surgery.

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“Left-wing or Right-wing, I’m in favor of violence”

—Yukio Mishima, Debate at the University of Tokyo, 13th of May, 1969

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A few years ago when I was a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University, I spent Thanksgiving in the Baltimore suburb of Roland Park where Luigi Mangione graduated from the Gilman School as valedictorian. I was struck by how serene, quaint and architecturally pleasant the neighborhood was, and its resemblance to the idyllic scenes of American suburbia I’d seen in many films. It stood in stark contrast to where I was subletting a room not too far down the road in Hampden, near what I assumed was an addiction clinic for opioid addicts. Not being able to drive, and much to the shock of some colleagues, I often walked to the university and sometimes into the city. Some mornings when walked past the clinic, I would briefly exchange pleasantries with some patients congregating outside chatting and smoking. They seemed a very heterogeneous group of people, and not entirely conforming to the popular perception of drug addicts. I surmised that many had come to addiction and immiseration through the pharmacological route, through medication mis-prescribed by unscrupulous doctors for debilitating pain. I’ve only briefly experienced the type of pain for which such medication is necessary, after a minor surgery, so I can well understand how more constant, intense and unabating pain could lead to desperation for respite, or the mere ability to function day to day.

Pain is something that psychically transported Mangione from the plush upper-class surroundings of Roland Park to the wretched realties of Hampden and other parts of the city—that is to say, from one insulated and exclusive American existence, to one more exposed, vulnerable and universal. The manifesto which Mangione wrote expresses opposition to the parasitism of the health insurance industry, while on another level conveying some degree of loyalty to authority. He was educated at Ivy League institutions, worked in the tech industry and seemed to have been committed to physical fitness, self-improvement and self-actualization. It’s doubtful we will discover his actual motivations, and its likely there will be a concerted attempt to moderate them. Yet we know that a marked change in his personality and fortunes occurred when he began to suffer from debilitating chronic pain from a spinal injury, with many speculating that he experienced callous treatment by America’s obscene and byzantine health insurance system, and its recent turn towards Artificial Intelligence to assess claims.

In the perplexing case of Mangione we find ourselves confronted with two perennial themes—Pain and Violence, two fundamental features of human experience that are related but distinct, which we scarcely seem to fully understand. They nonetheless hold the key understanding the mollifying nature of modern technological society, and why it increasingly drives men toward acts of extreme retribution—and by looking at a rather odd collection of sources which will include, amongst others, Ernst Jünger, Peter Thiel and Yukio Mishima—we might be able to better understand the nature of the problem.