Luigi Mangione's senseless debt to the Unabomber

The lesson he drew from Ted Kaczynski's 35,000-word manifesto

In May 1996, the New York Times and the Washington Post did something they had never done before: They collaborated to publish a 35,000 word “manifesto” by an anonymous author, one only identified by the initials FC.

In the text, he railed against the impact of technology on society, excoriated “leftists” and echoed Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idealized vision of primitive societies. He acknowledged that the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of the press was a good thing but argued that in practice, it meant little.

“The mass media are mostly under the control of large organizations that are integrated into the system,” he wrote.

Then in chilling fashion, he said, “In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we've had to kill people.”

Over nearly two decades, the writer of those words — Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber” — had killed and maimed a random assortment of people who received his bombs, some through the mail.

The three who were killed were the owner of a Sacramento computer store, an advertising executive and the president of the California Forestry Association. An airline president, several professors and students were among the 23 people injured.

Luigi Mangione, who has been accused of shooting United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson to death on a New York City street on December 4, appears to have praised the Unabomber’s manifesto in a post on Goodreads.

Ted Kaczynski’s FBI booking photo from 1996.

While saying the bomber was “rightfully imprisoned” and had “maimed innocent people”, he added that “it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.”

One of Kaczynski’s observations in the lengthy 1996 manifesto was that “industrial-technological society cannot be reformed in such a way as to prevent it from progressively narrowing the sphere of human freedom.”

But that wasn’t necessarily the real takeaway for Mangione, whose gripe was less about eroding freedom than about the “greed” of corporations who don’t care what harm they cause.

The real takeaway

Instead, the most actionable lesson Mangione likely got from the Unabomber’s writings is that he “had to kill people” to get his message across.

Perhaps the viral and often admiring response on social media to the surveillance photos of Mangione can be taken as a vindication of that point, but if so, it’s an awful commentary on where America is today.

In the three decades since the Unabomber’s manifesto was published, the gate-keeping role of the mass media has largely been overtaken by tech platforms that enable anyone to write and broadcast their views.

Mangione’s own handwritten “manifesto,” according to the version published by Ken Klippenstein on Substack — is about 260 words, shorter than the Gettysburg address. Mangione writes, “A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as [sic] our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.”

If Mangione had written those words on social media, they might not have attracted many likes, but it’s possible they might have started a conversation, and some people, including Mangione, might have been wiser as a result of the exchange.

They might have realized that anger at insurance companies that increase profits by denying claims or refusing to authorize care is only one facet of an extremely complicated problem.

As Mangione himself added, “Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.“

He isn’t the most qualified. Nor does his argument make much sense.

The health insurance system can fairly be blamed for the high level of medical debt in the U.S., where 14 million people owe more than $1,000 for medical care and 3 million owe more than $10,000. It also is a player in the radically incoherent pricing system for health care.

As journalist and non-practicing physician Elisabeth Rosenthal, whose last name is mentioned in Mangione’s statement, wrote for CNN, “Our prices for tests, drugs, hospitalizations and procedures — old or new — have gone up dramatically year by year, and are vastly higher than in other developed countries. Indeed, prices for similar interventions in other countries have often declined...”

“We alone effectively allow businesses — mostly for-profit — to set the asking price. And, as these examples show, price and value have in many cases become completely uncoupled, allowing price to travel into the stratosphere.”

Life expectancy

In fact, the comparatively poor showing of the US in life expectancy relative to other developed nations isn’t predominantly the fault of health insurance companies, whatever you think of the obvious demerits of their business models.

“Why is life expectancy falling in the US,” Harvard’s Robert H. Schmerling, an MD, asked in a blog post. “Covid-19, drug overdoses and accidental injury accounted for about two-thirds of the decline in life expectancy,” he wrote, citing 2022 research from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Progress in fighting chronic lung disease, pneumonia, flu and Alzheimer’s disease kept the decline from being worse.

The Harvard post also pointed out that life expectancy at birth in the US was only 47 years in 1900, 68 years in 1950 and nearly 79 years by 2019, before the pandemic. It fell to just over 76 years in 2021.

But life expectancy has started to rise again in the US and is expected to exceed 80 years by 2050.

Yet even then the nation may continue to have poorer outcomes than other developed countries, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. (Comparable countries already have life expectancies over 80.)

Cause and effect

The reality is that lifestyle factors like smoking, obesity, drug abuse and high blood sugar levels shorten the lifespan of many Americans, and these are behaviors that implicate a much wider set of industries than just health insurance.

Some of America’s social pathologies have an outsize effect by cutting short the lives of young people. Megan Ranney, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, and several co-authors, reported in October that, if America’s firearm-related deaths (more than 48,000 per year), drug-related deaths (more than 108,000) and alcohol-induced deaths (more than 51,000) could somehow be eliminated, “life expectancy at birth would increase by 1.6 years.”

It’s natural (and unfortunate) that people try to blame those closest to hand in a crisis, but those who should know better have a responsibility to speak up against the wave of violence-glorifying memes after Thompson’s murder.

The barrel of a gun isn’t the place to hash out the ills of the American health care system.

The Unabomber’s capture

The publication of the Unabomber’s screed in 1996 was intended to finally crack the mystery of his identity.

The Times explained, “This text was sent last June to The New York Times and The Washington Post by the person who calls himself ‘FC,’ identified by the FBI as the Unabomber, whom authorities have implicated in three murders and 16 bombings. The author threatened to send a bomb to an unspecified destination ‘with intent to kill’ unless one of the newspapers published this manuscript. The Attorney General and the Director of the FBI recommended publication.”

The Washington Post published the document as a separate section to distinguish it from its normal content, and The New York Times shared the cost of the printing with the Post.

FBI officials hoped that someone would recognize the reasoning, if not the wording, that the bomber had employed. And the gambit worked.

Kaczynski ’s brother David and his wife Linda spotted the similarity, and he informed authorities. Ted Kaczynski was given four life sentences plus 30 years, and in 2023, suffering from cancer, he committed suicide behind bars.

When investigators arrested Kaczynski in his Montana cabin on April 3, 1996, they found bomb components, a live bomb ready for mailing and 40,000 handwritten pages, including descriptions of Unabomber crimes, according to the FBI.

To his credit, David Kaczynski spoke out this week.

His brother’s “actions are like a virus," David Kaczynski said. "He was a very angry and disturbed man. It doesn't mean his ideas are ideas of a lunatic, but his behavior, I believe, is the behavior of a lunatic."

"Just like acts of love can send out waves of benefit to other people, to humanity at-large in ways we can see and ways we can't see, acts of violence do the same thing, albeit in a very negative manner. It really gives me a great deal of personal pain to think my brother's actions have in any way contributed to influencing a man like this to kill an innocent human being."