In 1990, a young man named Christopher McCandless graduated from Emory University in Georgia. McCandless, who grew up in an upper class family in the DC suburbs of Fairfax, Va, had decided to reject the trappings of contemporary American bootstrap ideology. He donated his college savings (about $20,000) to Oxfam and transformed himself into a hitchhiking vagabond, leaving behind his family and friends, determined to head off, as the book and movie later made about his life would later be called, Into the Wild.
We know how the story ends: In 1992 a hunter discovered McCandless’ decomposing body in an abandoned school bus near Fairbanks, Alaska. An intellectually curious young man with a contrarian streak—he was a devotee of Henry David Thoreau, Jack London, and Mark Twain—McCandless embarked on a quest to leave behind a society he saw as irrevocably corrupt. He died, most likely, of starvation in the Alaskan woods, and in so doing, became something of an American icon.
In the early morning hours of December 4, Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was assassinated outside of the midtown Hilton in New York City, allegedly by a 26-year-old man named Luigi Mangione. Like McCandless, Mangione comes from a wealthy family. He attended boarding school in Baltimore, not far from Fairfax. And if the online trail he left behind is an accurate representation, he is intelligent, curious, and highly skeptical of contemporary notions of success. While McCandless sought escape in the wilds of Alaska, Mangione recently traveled to the fern and bamboo forests of Hawaii, where he was captured in a photo posted to Instagram, smiling, tawny, chiseled, and seemingly healthy.
Mangione was arrested with a manifesto denouncing the healthcare industry, and friends say he was suffering from a painful back injury. As observers have, inevitably, been speculating about Mangione’s motives to commit the crime for which he stands accused, many have been bewildered by what the evidence suggests about his political sympathies. He’s not the radical leftist, answering the injustice of the American healthcare system with violence, that some people online fancied him to be. Nor does he seem to be a rightwing gun obsessive or woman-hating incel. And yet, as much as he resists the political polarization that pundits have been telling us for years defines our country, he’s also a familiar figure to anyone who knows guys who listen to Huberman and Lex Fridman.
On X Mangione followed personalities, politicians, and influencers who might, on the surface, seem to have little in common: Andrew Huberman, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Tim Ferris, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Edward Snowden, and Joe Rogan, among others. But they do share a throughline: besides being highly influential voices online, they all defy easy political categorization. AOC—a democratic-socialist with a populist streak—won reelection this year in a district that veered hard for Donald J. Trump. Ferris, Huberman, Rogan, and RFK, Jr. all loosely share an interest in fringe self-improvement, often backed by a kind of dubious bro-science. RFK, Jr., descended from Democratic royalty, zigzagged his way into Trump’s inner circle thanks in part to “anti-science” takes on things like vaccines and fluoridated water that were incubated on the hippie left.
None of this explains why Mangione might have killed Thompson. (There’s plenty of freewheeling speculation online about other triggers, too.) But Mangione’s media diet does help explain a certain young American male worldview that is unaccounted for in a conception of the country that divides everyone into either an MSNBC or a Fox News viewer or a Biden or Trump voter.
Mangione, who studied computer science and mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania as an undergrad and graduate student, engaged with libertarian-leaning, tech-positive “post-rationalist” thinkers online. But like many of his contemporaries as well as young men from generations past, he was also—at least until he allegedly committed murder—just a guy determined to articulate his own ideas about the world, chafing at institutions and rules and injustice.
McCandless left home almost a decade before the Columbine shooting ushered in the age of the school shooter, 20 years before the term “incel” entered the mainstream, and long before the proliferation of the internet. McCandless was, by most accounts, a pretty normal guy before he left home. And until Luigi Mangione allegedly shot and killed the CEO of United Healthcare, he too seemed to be living the average life of a contemporary young man. Maybe what he ultimately reveals about America in 2024 is less about our politics or even our healthcare system, and more about the men we never hear about on the news.
