Luigi Mangione was 10 years old when Lehman Brothers collapsed in a heap of financial misdeeds and human greed in September 2008, an event that both symbolised and triggered a $10 trillion global financial crisis.
The 26-year-old Ivy League graduate now charged with murdering Brian Thompson, CEO of America’s largest healthcare company, belongs to a wealthy Baltimore family. His world was cossetted against the storm brought on by the actions of Lehman and similarly cavalier financial companies. The Mangiones, owners of country clubs and golf courses as well as a chain of care homes and a conservative radio station, did well enough that Mangione’s grandmother left an inheritance of $30m when she died last year, albeit to be divided between 10 children and 37 grandchildren. In 2008, they were well padded to avoid the ripple effects of austerity and reduced government spending in every country whose taxpayers had to incur monumental levels of debt to rescue the world’s banking and insurance sectors.
His privileged background makes Mangione a strange candidate to be lionised on social media as some kind of justice-warrior. But since his arrest and charge, people across America have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to crowdfunded legal defence funds; online merchandise has appeared in which he is portrayed as more martyr than alleged murderer, including a T-shirt that reads: “In this house, Luigi Mangione is a hero. End of story.” American politicians and media have expressed horror at what they see as moral inversion.
Mangione’s good looks may have something to do with his elevation, of course, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that overt sympathy for an alleged killer rather than his victim is a symptom of something else.
The crime of which Mangione is accused would normally attract opprobrium, especially in the US, where the presumption of innocence rarely applies for long in the media or online. The habit that American police and prosecutors have of rehearsing the evidence and the prosecution case for the media within hours of an arrest and months before the accused appears before a jury would not be considered a fair process in the UK.
So why in this case is the “perp” the focus of support not revulsion?
Perhaps the answer lies in a comment left by an anonymous donor to one of the legal defence funds, which had raised more than $100,000 in small donations by 15th December: “Denying healthcare coverage to people is murder, but no one gets charged with that crime.” The death of Brian Thompson was “justifiable homicide”, they added. And this was no isolated view.
“You’ve lit a fire in the hearts of the working class of America that’s long overdue,” said another donor. “If Trump can be president again, Luigi can be free,” said a third.
On one social media platform, a report of the killing was greeted with more than 50,000 “laughter” emojis. It’s hard to imagine the feelings of Thompson’s family and friends, but the fact is that large numbers of Americans saw his death as striking back at the industry he worked in so successfully. The murder was levelling what they saw as a deeply unfair playing field.
Whoever shot Thompson dead outside a Manhattan hotel on 4th December had engraved the following words on bullet casings found at the scene: “Deny”, “Defend” and “Depose”. These are words supposed to describe the principles behind the attitude of companies like Thompson’s UnitedHealthcare to dealing with claims by their clients (the 2010 book Delay, Deny, Defend: Why insurance companies don’t pay claims and what you can do about it became a bestseller on Amazon in the week following the murder).
Certainly, Mangione’s social media fan club seem to regard him as a fighter in a simple cause. This was partly because, before he was identified, a large number of people had been speculating online about what kind of “champion” would be so “bold” as to resist the unfairness that befouls the relationship between American consumers and the corporate world, but particularly healthcare.
Almost every ordinary American family has a horror story to tell about health insurance, which when you consider a few basic statistics, should not be surprising. In 2022, average per capita spending on healthcare in the US, at $13,943, was approximately double the average spent per citizen in a selection of 11 comparable OECD countries, including the UK. Yet, judged in stark terms, Americans get worse healthcare than any of those countries, with significantly lower life expectancy (77.5 years vs 82.2) than the OECD average and a much higher rate of mortality from all causes (923 per 100,000 compared with 727).
The higher cost of medical services means that Americans have a lower chance of seeing a doctor when they need to, not least because the US has fewer doctors per head of population than any comparable country. Premature death rates are three times greater in the case of people under 50 than the next closest country (Britain) and more than twice as much in the case of under 75s.
You might say it was fair enough that many Americans feel they get a poor deal from their frighteningly expensive healthcare system. And fairness is what is at play here.
The global financial crisis precipitated by the fall of Lehman Bros was followed by a global fairness crisis. While the taxpayers of so many countries had to foot the bill to bail out the banks and watch helpless as governments cut public services and imposed austerity measures, there was almost no pain inflicted on the industry that caused all the damage. Only one banker was jailed in the US, none in the UK.
And, as Donald Trump constantly reminded the electorate during his successful presidential campaign this year, the price of everything in the US has gone up and the quality of service has gone down. This is particularly so—at least as far as popular, shared perception is concerned—in healthcare.
That simple equation—price up, quality down—taken together with the imbalance of power in the relationship between vulnerable patient and mighty insurance company, undermines the basic predicate of business: a fair exchange. Nor does it back up the Trump rhetoric on unfairness.
For the president-elect has cited unfairness as a rallying cry hundreds of times, particularly unfairness directed at him. Not long after his first inauguration, he made the surprising claim that “No politician in history… has been treated worse or more unfairly”. As a sample, between 2015 and 2017 he used the word “unfair” 109 times in public speeches and banged on the same drum in his second successful campaign.
This is politics based on instinct, but also science. Unfairness is felt in parts of the human brain so deep in our evolutionary recipe that we derive it from our common ancestor not just with primates, but with dogs. Because being treated unfairly indicates to a social animal that it may be suffering demotion in pack hierarchy, it is matter of survival. That is why we feel unfairness so viscerally, both for ourselves and on behalf of others.
Politicians, including and perhaps especially Trump, rarely appeal to our instinct for fairness, though. It is a different instinct, processed in a different, more modern and sophisticated part of the brain that few if any other species share.
Behavioural psychologists will tell you that we learn as children that to be fair, even when it may not be to our advantage, can be good for us in the long term. Partly it promotes a shared respect for fair play, but partly what scientists call “reciprocal altruism” is likely to be good for our reputation particularly when we treat strangers fairly.
If we feel unfairness in the centre of our brain close to the area where disgust reactions prevent us eating rotten food, we feel fairness in a location associated with reward.
Often people use the word “fairness” as a synonym for “equality” or “justice”, but it is a different and subtler instinct. As a team at Yale University proved with studies of thousands of lab tests: “Humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality. Both psychological research and decisions by policymakers would benefit from more clearly distinguishing inequality from unfairness.”
Being fair is both natural and good for you, something Trump and his acolytes might not recognise. In the case of Mangione, if he has become a folk hero to some—and indeed to so many that it has caused alarm among American commentators—it is not because of some shift in the tectonic plates of human behaviour. Quite the reverse, it is because both he and the unfortunate Thompson are being portrayed and regarded as symbolic of instincts that we ignore at our collective peril.
