First there was the crime – on his way to a morning meeting in Manhattan, a health insurance CEO gunned down.
Then, there were those first few frames carefully culled and released to the public, with those eyebrows, those full and shapely eyebrows, the eyebrows were so thick and virile but they were also somehow delicate, they really were all you could see above the suspect’s mask back then, but at the same time, somehow, they were all you really needed.
And then, what next but the smile, that broad smile, have you recognized that smile, that smile just lights up his whole face, his cheekbones could poke someone’s eyes out, that smile sure seems memorable, has anyone recognized that smile, please, has anyone recognized that smile.
And, finally, someone did, and what did we get, but, LUIGI, with his prep school good looks, an Ivy League degree, and, as we know now from the missing person posters, exactly one-hundred and thirty-five pounds of delectable Sicilian scrawn.
In the eyes of some, to take a man’s life like that was truly an impressive crime.
But, then again, so was stealing all our hearts.
What a scamp!
Still, though, you have to to ask, just over five years ago he thundered through a back-yard frat party, opening a beer-can with his forehead. Now, as they allege, he traveled under a forged identity with a ghost gun and a bag of cash, as he stalked his paper-shuffler prey throughout the streets of New York.
To be quite serious for a moment here, if all that they’re saying is true, how in the ever-living fuck did that happen.
Loss of contact with his family could mean mental illness; a reading list that includes psychedelics could indicate abuse of drugs.
Still, though, everyone comes from somewhere, and it truly takes someone who’s incredibly vastly detached from reality, for there to be no world in which they make any discernible sense.
So, where could this Luigi guy have been coming from?
America lacks God, but that answer is too simple; even the most rabid atheist has to make decisions about what is good, and even then, others guide them. You don’t have to call it “religion” – say “values,” maybe, or “ideology,” or even “worldview” like the evangelical Christians do. Whatever you call it, though, and wherever it’s coming from, it answers certain questions: Who am I? How do I live? What now?
We now know that this computer sci guy was part of a digital surf commune in Hawaii. Hiking, surfing, reading groups, mindfulness. Buddhism? No thank you. Meditation maybe, but stripped down, in a secularized manner, with no reincarnation, and certainly no hungry ghosts. Getting our chakras realigned? Please, we’re moderns! I mean, maybe the supernatural crept in around the edges with some of the reading and with a few of the people and activities, but you’re not going to find a bunch of seekers less likely to dabble in spirit possession and set up seances and throw down planchettes that skitter around the Luigi board until someone gets taken over and a dark and gurgling voice begins intoning cosmic wisdom out at the stricken onlookers.
Instead, religion becomes palatable to engineer-types and gets disguised as big abstract nouns like KNOWLEDGE and REASON in a spirituality of whatever getting’s served up by the latest big-think bestsellers and TED Talks, all with the seeming imprimatur of intellectual respectability and grounded-in-this-world validity. What, you might ask, is “the most important philosophical text of the early 21st century”? Why, Luigi only said it’s What’s Our Problem? A Self-Help Book for Societies.
I mean, we don’t do spirits, nor do we talk about destiny all that much, or at least not explicitly so. Instead, we talk about SOCIETY and efficiencies and the economics of the social state. We talk about CULTURE and joy and smartphone addiction. We talk about HUMAN NATURE and the just-so stories of evolutionary biology, where MAN has become shoehorned into URBAN ENVIRONMENTS and DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTS that pervert and cripple his FUNDAMENTAL INSTINCTS.
Indeed, for Luigi, nothing was more anathema than Japanese pocket vaginas. Choosing to live out of a backpack less than a year ago, he sought out the East, only to find “salarymen” frequenting “maid cafes” and paying for dancing girls that they can never have, in a system that he saw as so rule-bound that it undermined basic person-to-person connection. As he tells it, he obtained help for someone thrown into a seizure, only for officers to wait to cross vacant streets so they wouldn’t violate the stoplight. Non-playable characters, he deemed them, since they had fallen so far from what he saw as essentially human that their stilted reactions more befit pre-programmed videogame figures than any truly living protagonist. And, this from the man who within the year by all appearances came out from behind a parked car, pointed a gun at an apex bureaucrat, and finished him there on the sidewalk, in footage so violent and disturbing that it still has not been fully released.
Luigi, it seems, was thinking deeply about what it means to be human.
For, if you had to slot Luigi’s thinking and what seems to be its bloody denouement, perhaps the biggest abstraction of them all is HUMAN POTENTIAL. As the gods have died, strivers have still striven, to improve themselves and live fully. This is Ayn Rand’s Objectivist self-help philosophy. This is the seminars of Werner Erhard’s est and the personal development events of what became the NXIVM cult. This had been L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics and its courses to help you overcome inhibitions and self-limitations, prior to all of those past lives and galactic wars that got increasingly folded into the system. This is any number of things you’ve seen and read about, about you being your best self through facing down all those things that are holding you back. That is, this manifold cultural stuff is front and center all about the “human” and what each one of us should be, by nature. And, in ways that can turn very dark, it’s also all very subtly about that “potential” half of “human potential,” with any number of stories about why this realization of our universal essence has gone unrecognized or even been prevented, whether through unwitting ignorance or even through some active malice. For, if it’s our nature and end – not “fate,” that would be too theistic – why aren’t we there yet? I mean, like, really, guys?
Luigi had been a founding member of the Substack of Birmingham-based British “digital age” thought leader Gurwinder Bhogal, sliding into his DMs on occasion. “Schedule group video calls,” he reportedly once asked Bhogal, for, as Bhogal relates, “he really wanted to meet my other founding members and start a community based on rationalism, Stoicism, and effective altruism.” Despite rumors of a brief later return to Hawaii and inauguration of a book club that people quickly fled “due to discomfort in book choices,” Luigi had already moved on from that digital surf commune – or rather, ahem, that “co-living” and “co-working” space that celebrates “self-growth” and “individuality.” But, just like how he had lived there alongside “founder” R.J. Martin, now too with Bhogal he sought help from people who he strictly paid for other things. He sought out broader and more humane views, but with cash, and from relationships that ultimately devolved into that narrow client-merchant one. And, just like any market, self-selection played the dominant note. In his Italian-heritage family’s Roman Catholicism, you can parish-shop, but your priest is still ultimately vetted through seminaries and overseen by the bishop. If you feel a religious calling, you can join any number of communities, some of which can get pretty out there, but if they do, orders come down from the Vatican and suddenly – out, permission revoked. But Luigi, what did Luigi have? He had the internet and his pocketbook.
And, of course, his dreams.
Isolated communities indeed can get pretty out there, with people cut off from the rest of the world egging each other on and spiraling out of control. We still don’t know Luigi’s full story, especially where he was this summer, but self-imposed isolation may have played the role that community radicalization does with others. He had been backpacking with that wish to “zen out,” and he also had been getting into therapy-like self-help. And, just like Freud can shit on women – “You’re fucked up? It must be your mother! Maybe it’s something she did, in the womb!” – some divisiveness-fostering elements like that surface obliquely with him, in his interest in reading Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents. In a Reddit post from this year, Luigi tells of wanting a four-room house as his dream home, while his childhood friends envisioned “mansions.” In a still-earlier online book review, he recalls “a long-standing debate at my childhood dinner table” about the necessity of holding the knife in the proper hand when cutting and eating steak. Quite remarkably, that small but potent narrative shows him rejecting his mother’s “arbitrary convention” and her strange and illogical insistence on “proper manners,” and all that at the young age of six. Whatever elements were there – and who doesn’t have such elements, from their families and upbringing? – he may have been telling himself in retrospect that they were more and more important, as he re-created his life story and his sense of self, and as his contact with his family and friends halted, and as all the while his dated notebook entries reportedly began filling up with reflections on finding his purpose, and an increasing fixation on one certain CEO.
“Frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument,” Luigi stated in his manifesto, and indeed he was correct; news coverage quietly corrects his ranking of American life expectancy from forty-second in the world, to fortieth. So, he was nothing special there. “It’s completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people!”, he yelled, as police slammed him against the exterior passage-wall of a courthouse in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. And indeed, with all the people who have rejoiced in the CEO’s death, many would not dispute the nature of these “parasites,” as he called those middlemen who he saw as lesser beings siphoning off money and undermining collective welfare in sheer affront to any well-conceived social order. So again, too, Luigi was nothing special there. What is left is the act, the murder itself. Others can explain healthcare better, and everyone knows there’s something wrong with the U.S. healthcare system, but only one man followed through on these premises: the superior man, the killer. Human potential at the cost of another. Personal ascension through the extinction of a parasitic lifeform. Self-realization through death. One man comes into his own, but only through shepherding another out of this plane of existence. “It is not an issue of awareness at this point,” he wrote. “Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
We do not know what will still be revealed – per convention, we also must say that we still do not know for certain if Luigi was such a murderer, or even a murderer at all – but if Luigi did do it, besides where he was and what he was doing during those missing months of this summer, there still remains what he thought would have come next. How did he think society would respond? What would he himself now do? If mental illness or drugs were involved, he may not have had many thoughts at all, past narrow planning around that week of the climatic C-suite snuff.
You just look at his eyes now sometimes compared with the old pictures, and you see someone who looks very unwell. “You wack [sic] the CEO at the annual parasitic bean-counter convention,” he apparently wrote in the lead-up to the killing. “Parasitic” is an extreme word, but it’s one that others might use, and the misspelling of “whack” is understandable enough. The contemptuous “bean-counter,” by contrast, suggests nothing so much as someone overly dwelling in their own lone, peculiar thoughts. And yet, his thinking was not all that far off at all from what any number of us live by and swim in, even if we do not look inside ourselves or at the world to nearly the same degree. More than you might think, Luigi and his unstated logics reflect ourselves, in whatever search or in whatever state of development we may indeed be in. And, despite that familiarity, where many of us are right now and what many of us want is not necessarily all that pretty, or realistic. At best, we have become inured to our situation, and to our desires, whether for knowledge or for sex or for fundamental social and personal change, and we are above all deceived about the ease of these desires’ fulfillment. Misperception and self-delusion reign, and nothing comes easy, and the hunt for an indisputable good proves elusive.
Here’s looking at you, bro-man.
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David Mihalyfy received his Ph.D. in the History of Christianity from the University of Chicago Divinity School. His writing on New Religious Movements (popularly known as “cults”) has appeared in venues like the Atlantic Monthly online and the scholarly journal Nova Religio.