Luigi Mangione’s assassination of UnitedHealthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson somehow brought to mind the Aztec ritual sacrifice in which the victim’s still-beating heart is ripped from his chest to be offered as an appeasement to the sun god.

Nothing personal. Mangione apparently neither knew his victim personally nor even had any interaction with the company he’d led. The sacrificial temple was that Manhattan doorstep to an investment conference. The act, we are led to believe, was fueled by blind revenge, for what is not entirely clear.

More telling and troublesome, though, was the public reaction to the hit. A study from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) revealed an alarming surge in anti-civil activity following the Thompson assassination (click: Hashtags and Hit Lists: Social Media's Role in Justifying Violence). Social media, of course, was the first tell, with all the fancam edits and viral videos that glorified Mangione as an anti-establishment icon.

The transition of violent rhetoric from online spaces to real-world actions, however, was the most troubling revelation of the NCRI study (Killing with Applause: Emergent Permission Structure for Murder in the Digital Age) as it cited real-world behaviors among those gathered to celebrate and parody the assassination, glorifying a so-called permission structures that could inspire others to perceive violence as a legitimate form of activism.

Flash points abound. Perhaps start with the very frustration at the center of the case at hand i.e. the business of medicine, the topic of our MM 10/19/20 Addressing the Medical Industry Complex in which we examined a dysfunctional industry more accurately regarded in terms of sick care rather than healthcare, one that is riven by conflicts of interests and perverse incentives, lack of transparency, and overly beholden to special interests.

Or, maybe, take Henry Ford’s observation, “It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be revolution before tomorrow morning” or perhaps reflect on that so-called immigration policy that’s amounted to little more than an open-border national death wish along with our ham-handed pandemic response as we slouch our way to central planning.

All this might amount to mere spectator sport, that is, until you add the psychologically susceptible individual that creates an insidious feedback loop. While a change in the cultural zeitgeist is always a difficult undertaking in the present tense, we may reflect on what our gut tells us as to whether there’s now an “emergent permission structure.”

So many pitchforks, so little time.

Let us hope we come through this recent spasm of populist energy back to some common sense political reform rather than an opening for a proliferation of Luigi-like avenging angels seeking to appease their god du jour.