An Exegesis of Luigi Mangione - Part 0.5: My Intentions

Why am I writing this series and what do I hope to gain?

This is part zero-and-a-half of a four-part series on Luigi Mangione:

• Part 0: Preamble - Setting the stage for the coming 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 2: Analysis – My relationship with Luigi and speculations about him

• Part 3: Did He Do It? – Exploring possible motives or alternative explanations

• Part 4: Wat Mean? – What does the shooting mean for our society and future

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My first few drafts of this series (back when it was only one post) started with a detailed section laying out my experience of this whole saga and my intentions with writing something.

However, I had since deleted it because I figured that half of the readers won’t care about me they just want Luigi, and the other half won’t care about what I say my intentions are as they have already made up their mind on them. And so making it significantly longer to prattle on about myself just seemed pretentious and self-aggrandizing.

But after how much the preamble’s comment section blew up yesterday with people lambasting me, seemingly under the impression that I intend to defame him with this series (not correct), I figure it’s worth publishing my goals so anyone willing to hear my side doesn’t have to speculate. And so such people can tell me anywhere I fail to fulfill them and help me correct course—something that a few thoughtful commenters yesterday have already done.

First, let me set the record straight about my “behavior” on Twitter.

My Twitter “Behavior”

For me, X serves two purposes:

One, it is one of the many strategies I used to satiate my seemingly inborn appetite toward transgression. This expresses itself in many forms over many mediums, but is mostly evident to you as politically incorrect jokes, ideas, and trolling. You might say this makes me irredeemably evil, that some topics just cannot be joked about, some ideas never allowed the light of day. And I am entirely content to acknowledge your claim as fair. I certainly agreed with you for most of my life.

But in the event you’re curious, I see it more as this kind of weird, intellectual Tourette’s Syndrome that has been a part of me for as long as I can remember. I spent over a decade trying to suppress my transgressive nature, and it led to severe mental illness or running out of will power during a critical personal or business situation and screwing my life up. It is only through much suffering that I have learned I—nor most people—can repress fundamental aspects of who we are and get away with it. And it is only in recent years that I have found ways to direct this energy into mostly-productive things like entrepreneurship, business, and philosophy, meanwhile quarantining the rest into mostly-harmless things like meta-ironic bigotry and trolling on Twitter or with close friends.

With that said, the aforementioned quarantine was thrust into an environment it was not built for by my recent “fame”. My account went from accumulating two thousand or so mostly-thoughtful, scientifically-minded followers over many years, to ten thousand mostly-zealotrous Luigi stans or haters, flooding my comments with insults, threats, or other inane drivel basically overnight. This put me into a defensive posture, ramping down the fairly-vulnerable-and-mostly-thoughtful content that constituted the bulk of my tweets while ramping up the incendiary stuff that was formerly only an accessory. Upon reflection, I realize this was in an attempt to protect myself from the flood of criticism through agree-and-amplify, while also trying to shed some of the least thoughtful people from my new followers (the “Social Justice Fundamentalists” as Tim Urban, seemingly Luigi’s favorite writer, likes to call them), in hopes of eventually returning to the fairly-vulnerable-and-mostly-thoughtful content that was formerly predominant but just with more readers.

However, in retrospect it is now clearly evident that this was the wrong strategy for dealing with this situation. While it did appear to get rid of most of the more vocal haters, it ultimately made a lot more enemies than I probably otherwise would have had, all of whom were lying in wait to take me down a peg when the opportunity arose. And worse, likely turned off many who would find my content fascinating and insightful albeit with a few rough edges.

So let me correct the record and address a few concerns directly: No, Luigi was not a racist, a sexist, or any other kind of bigot. Or at least I have seen no evidence to suggest it and have only seen evidence to the contrary. The few times I said something suggesting otherwise was just me trolling some Luigi stan after they insulted me. When taken in the context of the whole conversation, each should have been obviously a joke, aimed at getting under that person’s skin. And if one were unsure, a quick look at my other tweets—evidently full of thoughtless, off the cuff, bullshit that I do not take seriously—or frankly even my Twitter bio (“A gay and retarded moron”), the case should have been cinched that they were non-credible statements. But in retrospect, I can understand how “outsiders”, particularly those prone to snap-judgements or of extremely dissimilar ideological leanings, would take them out of context or just overall more seriously.

Furthermore, the fears that our DMs contain anything which will damn his public image in this way are totally unfounded. First, it’s literally like five messages. And it was mostly him reaching out to say that I should stop being sexist and racist as they get in the way of the interesting stuff I say. He did call me a “retard” in them, a no-no word to members of the aforementioned Social Justice Fundamentalists but 1) calling me a retard is an inside joke between my followers and any socially savvy person (of which Luigi undoubtably was) knows that mirroring the language of the person you wish to persuade is a highly effective tool in persuading them and 2) it was specifically used in the context of him saying that being sexist and racist is retarded. Honestly, the DMs will if anything redeem him with those on the zealotrous left for associating with me in the first place because he went out of his way to challenge me on precisely the things they see as the most reprehensible.

With all that hopefully cleared up, I must now share the second purpose Twitter serves me:

As a means through which I enucleate all the memetic tumors that attempt to infect my psyche and would otherwise derail my productivity and focus toward normal human stuff.

Most of the time the excision works. But on rare occasions I can’t get something out no matter how much I tweet about it. And thus I must upgrade to a more invasive method: Substack posts.

Things which I will say flippantly as a single sentence on Twitter, turn into multi thousand word, multi-part, hyper-nuanced, and often deeply-researched articles here. They are categorically different than my tweets (okay fine I usually include one or two edgy jokes or slurs somewhere in there but come on man no one is perfect) to the point that some have already made comments that it seems like my Twitter posts vs my Substack comments seem like two totally different people.

So why am I telling you all this?

One, because there are a lot of new readers here who came after the Luigi saga and thus have only seen me “at my worst” on Twitter, never having read any of my Substack work, and I want to ask them—to ask you—to set your preconceived notions aside when reading this series. Pretend like it was written by someone else entirely if that helps you.

And Two, because this Luigi situation has been one of the largest of these memetic tumors I have ever had to excise. It has occupied like 50% of my mental capacity for more than two months now.

Yes, sure it was kinda fun and made me feel cool for the first few days. But it’s mostly been overwhelming and stressful. My first worries were over whether there was enough PII exposed on my social media for a Luigi hater to find my real identity and try to ruin my life, or worse, come try to find where I live and hurt my family. Or whether law enforcement was going to come knock down my door and arrest me under charges of “radicalizing” him.

After several days of no one showing up and things starting to settle down on Twitter these concerns mostly dissipated. But I still could not stop thinking about this situation, incessantly asking questions like “Why did he do it?” “Did he even do it?” “What does this mean for society?” “What does it mean that he was engaging with me?” and going on long internal monologues about what I would say if I wrote something on it.

And this was severely impacting my work, family, and mental well being. So I decided to take a few days off to publish something in hopes of closing this box and getting back to my IRL life. Obviously, a few days turned into a few months. But the goal never changed. And thus, the first objective and original intent of this series:

Objective #1: Get this out of my head so I can get back to my life

However, I quickly realized that I needed to meet four additional objectives before I could publish something.

Objective #2: Maintain my integrity

It was very important that outside of some minor engagement farming or various spats of frivolous bigotry (again, no one’s perfect) I did not tarnish my reputation as a thoughtful person of high integrity interested ultimately in the pursuit of truth with the type of people who share such values.

I have rejected all requests from reporters, my friend’s suggestions to start a meme coin (mostly a joke) or lock Luigi’s DMs behind a paywall (less of a joke), and anything else that would very obviously be low integrity, grifter behavior.

These I was not too concerned about, as they never even crossed my mind as legitimate possibilities. My real struggle was over whether or not to share the DMs between Luigi and I.

On one hand, sharing DM’s is unethical. And duly so for someone who you had a positive relationship with.

On the other hand, the dude (allegedly) killed a big time CEO, inarguably worse; And two, it’s like five messages and they don’t in-and-of-themselves reveal anything special, instead only adding a little bit more data on top a mountain of publicly available social media information. In my mind, they function like just a few additional tweets, nothing else.

I naively asked for input on this on X, which led to a massive shit storm of hundreds of people demanding I release them, hundreds of others calling me an evil clout chaser grifter for even considering it, and a few people providing thoughtful responses but which were ultimately not super helpful because they just didn’t have enough context to provide adequate advice. While I fully admit that I knew the question would get some engagement, I was genuinely wrestling with and looking for advice on the decision. And I had no idea it would become the singular thing everyone obsessed over. If this seems absurd for me to not know, sorry I have Aspergers and am still learning how to human. I can assure you that if another oomf ends up on the news, I will handle things better next time.

Ultimately, I have decided to include them because I think they add minor-but-non-zero context to help us get a better sense of who Luigi is (foreshadowing to Objective #4), and if nothing else will get everyone to stop pestering me about whether to post them or not.

The third thing the article needed to do is…

Objective #3: Remain neutral, impartial, and respectful to all involved

I am extremely fond of

Darryl Cooper

’s podcast and his approach to historical conflicts, leaving you at the end of things no longer believing either side is “good” or “bad”, but “just humans experiencing the things we all experience and responding in ways that may be ‘bad’ but which even the best of us would struggle to do better in”. It is a strategy I use every day in my job as basically a corporate conflict mediator and something I would say I have become uniquely skilled at in my two decades of attempting to understand and cooperate with the Sapiens. And this is especially important in such a precarious situation as this. I have done my absolute best to write with the utmost precision and remove my own bias, positive or negative, presenting only the facts and a reasonable analysis from them in the succeeding commentary.

While I don’t expect Luigi, his family, the victim, nor their family, to ever read this (I will send it to him though once its done), it was important to me that I did what I could to write something that all people on all sides would see as fair, empathetic, and perhaps even insightful.

The fourth objective I needed to meet is…

Objective #4: shed more light on who Luigi truly is

This blog was inactive when this whole thing started. And I was entirely content with that. If some other guy was named as the shooter, it’s highly unlikely I would have resurrected it to write an article. But with a giant brainworm sucking the life out of me demanding I vivisect and excoriate it, and a giant audience demanding the same, it certainly feels like the choice to write something was made for me.

With that said, this blog is called Minor Dissent for a reason--I only write about things which I greatly (the minor is ironic) disagree with people on. And furthermore, where I feel no one else has sufficiently made the case I wish to make.

With Luigi, both of these boxes are checked. Irrelevant to any “relationship” we may have had (which to be clear, were limited entirely to like ten tweet replies and five DMs over the course of only two months), I have a lot I want to say about the man. But it’s things anyone could have said if they were actually committed to trying to understand him and had the skill set to do so. My speculations on who he is (and, to again make myself crystal clear, they are just that: speculations) are only minorly influenced by the extremely limited personal relationship we had, the majority coming from simply applying my years of study and reflection on human psychology within myself and others to his social media activity which you and everyone else have access to.

What I am contributing, if I contribute anything at all, will not come from “knowing” Luigi personally (because I don't) but rather from me just being a thoughtful, articulate, and highly incisive person doing their best to build a reasonable, fair, and honest picture of someone who seems to have been mischaracterized by all sides.

Any writer with any level of journalistic integrity could have technically written this series. But no one seems to have even tried. At least that I can find. Everyone is too busy slotting him into whatever emotional void he fills for them—hero, criminal; good, evil; worship, vilify; sexy chad, entitled sociopath; and all the rest—erasing who he actually is and replacing him with who they need him to be.

And I personally see this as a great injustice. Say what you will about his alleged actions: everyone deserves a fair trial. And that doesn’t just mean in the court room. It means in the court of public opinion too. And that doesn’t mean only preventing unjust condemnation, but also unjust veneration.

So actually I guess there is one bias that I will not only not try to remove, but actively reinforce throughout this series: my belief that all humans are exactly that—humans. Not deities to worship or demons to destroy, but just peculiar little monkeys with strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices, successes and failures, and all the rest. I have made a meticulous effort to try and elucidate the human Luigi is to the best of my ability based on the limited information I have (and 99.9% of which you also already have). Some things will be speculative. And I will specify when that is the case. But other things should be obvious to anyone who is willing to look. And as far as I can tell the only reason so few know them is because so few are actually looking with any sense of rigor.

Ultimately, this seems like an entirely fair, reasonable, and just thing to do. And if no one else will do it, then I feel an obligation to. At least while ensuring I…

Objective #5: Don’t ruin my life in the process

Call me selfish, but at the end of the day, priority one is: don’t get zeroed out.

I have made significant efforts to ensure this objective. But I realized last night that writing this addendum was necessary given the likelihood this gets shared to large swaths of people who have never read anything I’ve written, or, more likely, have only read a handful of my most salacious tweets.

And given that just as a matter of basic demographical realities, most readers will fall into prefering “Lawyer” or “Zealot” strategies on Urban’s Thinking Ladder (if you’re not familiar with it, you should learn because it was one of Luigi’s favorite mental models), salivating at the opportunity to deem me as an embodiment of evil, I saw it necessary to do what I can to bring people to their senses.

I thus hope that helping them—helping you—understand that I too am just a guy, trying to live my life, with human issues more or less just like you, and doing my best to articulate the truth and respect all parties in the process, that maybe you won’t go out of your way to try and ruin my life.

Disagreement, counter-trolling, insults—that is all fine and good. I encourage you to play and have a good ol’ time on the internet. But please just keep it scoped here, doing what you can to respect me and my family’s privacy and physical safety. If you won’t do it for me, do it for Luigi, who I am trying my darnedest to do right by with this series.

As long as we can agree to that, I am confident that I have met the additional objectives to your satisfaction.

Now please: take a chill pill and let me cook so I can finish this thing :)