An Exegesis of Luigi Mangione – Part 0: Preamble

Setting the stage for the coming four-part series on Luigi Mangione

I started this project on Dec 11th, two days after Luigi was named as the suspect in the UHC shooting. However, after over a month, thirty hours of research, twenty hours of writing (including three rewrites from scratch), and still being nowhere close to done, it had become clear my original goal of coming to a precise conclusion on what motivated him to do it, meticulously laying out my case, and then bloviating at length about what the shooting means for society and the future was going to take a lot more time than I have available.

I perhaps could have managed it a few years ago when I was doing this full time, but these days I have two kids and a big important guy job (I bamboozled some chumps into giving my dumb ass a leadership role in their soon-to-be-9-figure company) so basically have had to neglect family, gym, or sleep to make progress.

To be honest, I would have abandoned this long ago if it were not for the fact that Luigi appears to have engaged with me more than anyone else online. And I thus felt an obligation to everyone who followed me over the last two months, as well as to Luigi himself, to persevere and write something worth publishing. So I carved out another twenty forty or so hours in the last two weeks to give it one final shot. And to none of my long term readers’ surprise, it turned into a four-part, 15,000 word seven-part, 40,000 word series.

• Part 0: Preamble - Background and stage setting for the series

• Part 0.5 – My Intentions – Why am I writing this series and what do I hope to gain?

• Part 1: Social Media Timeline – A unified timeline of his social media history

• Part 1.5: More Social Media – Luigi’s Instagram, Steam, and Twitter Lists

• Part 2: Our Relationship – My relationship with Luigi and what I thought of him

• Part 3: Social Media Analysis – Summarizing and analyzing Luigi’s online activity

• Part 3.5: Who Is Luigi? – My assessment of Luigi’s interests, life, and personality

• Part 4: Did He Do It? – Exploring possible motives or alternative explanations

• Part 5: Wat Mean? – What does the shooting mean for our society

Part One, Two, Three, and Four are mostly complete and will be published over the next few weeks. Part Five is in its early stages. Its likelihood of ever being published is predicated mostly on whether it seems enough people will care about it to be worth writing.

As you might glean from the titles, I am not confident in his motive for doing it. And I’m not even confident that he did it . Maybe I could figure it out if I had enough time. But I don’t. So my goal has changed to simply providing more clarity than presently exists about who he is and exploring possible explanations for how he ended up in the predicament he is presently in. And I am confident this series will do that.

With that said, I will be counting on your collective autism to tell me what facts I get wrong or miss, so we can together accrete the most credible and holistic picture possible. Please act like an adult with a fully functioning brain, providing sources and evidence for any claims. I know there’s a lot of strong feeling in all directions, but I am killing myself here to try and be as leveled, reasonable, and precise about all this as possible, and I request that you do the same.

Thanks all for your patience and support (especially my wife who has had to deal with an even more grumpy and pre-occupied Max than usual for the last two months).

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