The Gilded Age novel that helps explain our fascination with Luigi Mangione
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
Of course, the average person might remember the shooting (stressing might at this point) and almost none would know Luigi Mangione by name. Which is to say, almost any "fascination" today is just a reflection of a highly distilled internet alcove, a self-identified cohort which over time builds it's own culture and assumes that everyone around them is to some degree as "informed" as the are about their "fascination".
It does not take an obscure novel to explain the "fascination" the powerless have with the dream of somehow gaining power over the powerful - but as the movie Parasite so perfectly illustrated - that moment is likely to be fleeting, self-destructive, and ultimately meaningless as the world will quickly lose it's "fascination".
Once ordinary people start actually organizing and using violence, they tend get better conditions with society becoming reorganized for their benefit.
A good example is the Swedish peasants. The Swedish historian Dick Harrison wrote a book of which he states
>Huvudtemat är den politiska och socialhistoriska läroprocess genom vilken de svenska bönderna insåg att politiskt våld lönar sig, att en militarisering av det politiska beteendet resulterar i ökat samhälleligt inflytande.
i.e.
>The main theme is the political and socio-historical learning process through which the Swedish farmers learned that political violence pays off, that a militarization of the political behaviour results in increased societal influence.
Once it gets going and you learn how to do it leads to persistent and possibly permanent domination of society. In Sweden the farmer class owned at least 50% of the land. The Denmark, the nobility and church owned 90%. This kind of things saves whole peoples.
This influence also multiplies. When you own your own land and aren't dependent on others and make your own decisions, you become more capable. Look at the lowest classes in the UK, how they are unable to do anything. In Sweden, those don't exist, because people have always had a reasonable amount of independence, and this is because they had power, so when you start wielding it you get more and you get better and more capable, because you have to.
The equivalent of their level of military organization would probably not be minivans, it would be something like rolling out barbed wire, laying smoke, digging trenches with machines, mortar teams, snipers and ordinary riflemen. Something which in practice would be impossible to deal with and which would immediately necessitate negotiations.
I'm not propagating for that though, but I do think there is a similarity to the learning process-- how the Swedish peasantry chose to develop this capacity and strengthened it until it was useful.
Think of humans as these epsilon-greedy things, which with probability epsilon go and explore the payoff space. I think people see that things are being done to them that cross the line of screwing them over to something like crushing them, and this makes attempting to get back at those doing the crushing to get them to back off rational. Thus I think that it's reasonable to expect an exploration of violence to see where good payoffs can be had and where you can deterrence.
It should be noted that his assassination attempt followed a year where no less than 3 people set themselves on fire in protest of another arm of America's industrial grinder. Which is to say that the most recent act doesn't represent a sudden escalation, but is instead emblematic of a progression from despair to anger. Several billionaires also predicted this progression, warning their peers to ease up on their behavior. They're not listening, and some "ordinary people" seem ready to make them.
The brutal violence against an innocent person marked as a "class enemy", and the groundswell of support for it, is much more reminiscent of the communist violence that led to the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the decades of mass murder and totalitarian oppression that followed.
This can be seen by looking at very different Danish situation, which also existed, and which resulted from a situation which at one point probably did not differ substantially from that is Sweden.
I think the goal must always be that as many people as possible have as much power as possible, so that they are forced to exercise it and thereby get used to making decisions. If one ends up in the Danish situation, then it's reasonable to use violence to get at least to the Swedish situation, otherwise your descendants may end up as the British lower classes, which an unacceptable state.
Think like in the game Go. You calculate the score at the end and ask yourself what you want to become of your eventual descendants.
But a violent people setting things up as they like is what I prefer. You can stabilize it, with Swiss style direct democracy, but the public's capacity for well-organized violence is a good foundation which can restore the democratic, egalitarian system if it breaks down.
They gave fair disclosure and made war honorably, or as honorably as war can be waged. Going out and murdering some innocent person, and then celebrating that, and justifying it by vilifying the victim as a class enemy, as many in the far left are doing, is just creating an environment prone to mass-dehumanization and tyranny.
Many approaches work. Ireland, Israel, India, etc. all succeeded. I think one can do things in a very dirty way, and sometimes in a very clean way. It depends on the opponents and what they're doing, and the attitudes of the other relevant entities.
US manuals usually discuss this kind of thing as an early stage of destabilization, before things go to open warfare, and I think that's correct. I wouldn't say that it for sure is an effective way to creating something suitable for the kind of disorder where a revolution is possible, but I don't think that was Mangione's goal either.
I think this was personal-- that felt he that the company had wronged him or a group of which he was part in a way that he could not get righted by the courts, so that he had to obtain revenge on his own, but maybe I'm imagining him as having my own moral view of courts and the legal system-- basically, if they will not hear a matter where someone is exploiting me, they make themselves irrelevant and I can do what I like (i.e. imagine that you get shot, and the courts will prosecute people who shoot people, so you go them-- no need for personal vengeance, but if it was done by a diplomat, you beat him to death right there, because the courts wouldn't hear you-- i.e. by being willing to hear cases, take into account any kind of thing which affects you, the courts substitute for private vengeance, and I see this is their basic function, on which they've then built).