Zen and the Art of Homicidal Malevolence
Coolness and violence are inextricably linked in American culture, from the Old West to Luigi Mangione.
Surely enough has been written already about Luigi Mangione, the ghost gun–toting Manhattan assassin who shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back. But arresting pieces of information keep floating to the surface. The New York Times, for example, reports his April 27 recorded message, “I want to Zen out.” His voice, says the Times, “quiet and contemplative.”
I’ve written about Luigi’s education, which may have included a prep school course, “Becoming Human,” that introduced him to Eastern philosophy and the Zen concept of “mindfulness.” Not that anyone has to go to a ritzy Baltimore prep school to encounter Zen Buddhism. Since the 1950s, it has been a fashionable destination for those seeking “alternative paths.” I still have a copy of Alan Watt’s 1957 The Way of Zen, the first American bestseller in a soon-to-be crowded genre, the capstone of which was surely Robert Pirsig’s contemplative 1974 opus, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.
As we anthropologists like to put it, Zen has “diffused” across the culture. A few years ago, one of my neighbors in Vermont, who had come to rest there once the ’60s settled down, gave me a copy of Ellen Langer’s 1989 book, Mindfulness. Langer was the first tenured woman in Harvard’s psychology department and is best known for adding the sheen of scientific respectability to Buddhist-derived contemplative practices.
Watts, Pirsig, and Langer did their parts in domesticating Zen long before Luigi Mangione was born in 1998. Does every search for benevolent bliss have a flip side of egocentric rage? I don’t know, but I would say that Luigi grew up in a culture where self-indulgent anger was the ruling norm of the political left and, more broadly, a common feature of American public life. My 2006 book, A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now, and my 2021 sequel, Wrath: America Enraged, are about how we became enamored with self-righteous fury, as though it would liberate us and somehow also bring about a better world. (Of course, it makes me furious that neither book sold as well as works by Watts, Pirsig, and Langer, but hey, I too want to Zen out.)
Young Luigi took his quest for transcendence first to Hawaii and then to the mother-of-all-Zen-mindful peacefulness, Japan. From whence he apparently returned with a plan to extinguish the people who bothered him. Christopher Rufo has a thoughtful consideration of how this apostle of non-non-violence made his ascent in “Luigi Mangione and Left-Wing Nihilism.” Rufo warns, rightly I think, that Luigi isn’t a singularity. He is an exemplar of…something. The adoration for him that has seeped out of social media, and the excuses from some politicians, point to this.
The historian Richard Slotkin published a book in 1972, Regeneration Through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860, that has been a scholarly touchstone for me. Violence, especially in the form of murder, has been celebrated (albeit often behind the disguise of condemnation) for a very long time in American culture. We are not exceptional. It is perhaps a feature of common humanity, but it has a particularly American flavor when it comes to coolly gunning down one’s supposed adversary. Where would Hollywood be without this fantasy? For the murder to have its proper catharsis, the killer must have a certain quiet self-control and aloofness from his own act. Long before we learned the word for it, we wanted our agents of revenge against the injustices of the world to be “Zen.” Luigi Mangione played that part and has been rewarded with the applause of his kind.
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