On Pain and Privilege
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In another life, I might have been Luigi Mangione, though writing this feels like bullshit. From what I can tell, I have very little in common with the man. I’m a generation older, and from markedly more humble origins. According to the headlines, and the interviews with friends, he’s always excelled academically, and in no field more than maths and sciences. The humanities are my love, and past literature, history, art, music, and theatre, I can’t be bothered. He’s handy with a firearm. That’s not my skillset. He has allegedly killed the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. I allegedly have not.
Mangione is from a prominent family, had every advantage handed to him, and came up through the Ivy Leagues. I didn’t. There is, however, one thing I have in common with him, other than a seething disgust with the American healthcare system. We went to the same high school.
You may have heard a bit about Gilman School lately, though it is mostly being referred to as a “private primary and secondary school.” Just about every article on Mangione’s arrest mentions his attendance there. Most observers would see this as strange, and they are probably right. None of the reporters who covered the Beltway shooters mentioned the high school attended by John Allen Muhammad. Nobody really cares that David Berkowitz went to Columbus High School or Bronx Community College.
No, Gilman School has been mentioned so much because Mangione’s attendance there adds to the flavor of shock and scandal. Gilman is an elite, all-boys preparatory school, one of the oldest in Maryland. Its alumni includes senators, governors, publishing magnates, CEOs, and hedge fund managers, to say nothing of the large number of star athletes. Mangione didn’t just attend Gilman, he thrived there. He graduated valedictorian. There is video of him delivering a speech at the school’s Founder’s Day celebrations.
From there, he went to the University of Pennsylvania, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Then onto the tech industry. Reporters have zoomed in on his measured words for the Unabomber, but they aren’t focusing as much on his admiration for Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. The Mangione family is a prominent one in Baltimore society. They own country clubs and nursing homes. For all the younger Mangione’s spite toward private healthcare, his family has famously built and owned several private hospitals. Naturally, they have the politics to back it up. They own at least one local right-wing talk radio station. Luigi’s cousin Nino is a Republican member of the Maryland House of Delegates.
In other words, mention of Gilman is intended to paint this whole episode – from the murder of Brian Thompson to the sensational trial the media is hoping for – as an episode of pure madness and absurdity. No more raw, gleeful class spite. No more contrasts between the murder of one CEO and the tens of thousands who died because of his company’s decisions. Sorry, but the Healthcare Hitman is a rich kid. A boy whose silver spoon came courtesy of private healthcare. A hypocrite. Liberal papers like The New York Times are swooning with feigned confusion – He had everything he could ever want! – while outlets straining for a more populist posture like the New York Post are hinting at East Coast elite depravity. What just a few days ago was the sharpest edge of discussions about inequality is now being respun into “it’s more complicated than that.”
It would be both lazy and dishonest to lay Mangione’s actions at the door of Gilman School. The temptation is there, though. How did I wind up there? It’s a long story, but a lot of it comes down to my father — native of a small autoworking town in Pennsylvania — being one of the first in his family to go to college, and riding it all the way through to a PhD. It was a classic case of a parent wanting their kid to have opportunities they didn’t, even if it meant going without in other respects to pay for those opportunities.
I’m ambivalent about my years at Gilman. My first year there was the hundredth anniversary of its founding. The celebrations were as magnetic as they were alienating. The schedule at Gilman was demanding, including two hours of mandatory sports after regular classes. All in all, there wasn’t time to breathe in much of anything other than the knowledge that you were under a lot of pressure.
Plenty of the students tried hard, but the most visible ones were those who didn’t have to. Those who very likely would never have to worry or want, who could have any door opened by simple dint of who their parents were. The administration would do everything they could to obscure this fact, to create the sense that we were all on a level plain, but it didn’t take much to remember that the rest of us were there at the leisure of powerful and respected family names.
Like any American school, public or private, there was bullying. The all-boys environment made the insecure machismo and homophobia rather stultifying. There was also a kind of not-so-subtle, WASPy, blue-blooded distrust of the different that was intrinsic to the student body’s worldview. A tendency to equate respectability with a certain amount of wealth and a certain kind of whiteness. The first time I was on the receiving end of antisemitism – fifteen years before I mulled converting to Judaism – was at Gilman. A classmate told me he had always assumed I was Jewish because I hung out with the theatre kids (a group which at the time included the one openly gay student) and because I have a nose that is, ahem, prominent.
My years at Gilman were not hell, however. Many of those who taught me were doing it because they loved it (they had to, given how little they were being paid). I spent months on end in the art room on the top level of the main building, looking out over the impeccably maintained football and track fields. After spending much of the day feeling like I didn’t belong down there, it was nice to find a refuge up here among the paint stains, charcoal smudges, and the faint smell of turpentine. I was taught how to appreciate and understand literature. I discovered an affinity for theatre and history. Not bad for the son of an autoworker.
Every institution like this is bound to produce a handful of misfits. Yes, the politics of this sheltered world tended rather heavily to the right. But every graduating class seemed to have two or three students who had stuck their noses in Chomsky and Zinn long enough to at least dip their toes in the far-left. Some of us even stuck with it. So here I am.
In fact, there seems to have been an odd, unacknowledged undercurrent of radicalism in the place. A few of the history or English teachers would identify themselves as lefties in trusted company. For my senior speech, I spoke about Elisabeth Woolsey Gilman: daughter of school co-founder (and founding president of Johns Hopkins University) Daniel Coit Gilman. Elisabeth was a candidate for senator and governor on the Socialist Party ticket in the ‘20s and ‘30s. She also founded a precursor to the American Civil Liberties Union, fought against racial segregation, and for the freedom of jailed union militants. The socialist movement in the first half of the 20th century had a long list of class traitors. People from privileged backgrounds who, horrified by the level of social deprivation, and influenced by old American utopianism of Paine and Emerson and Whitman, threw their lot in with the reds and a restive labor movement. Elisabeth Gilman was one of them.
Why go through all this? Why, if we cannot blame a school like Gilman for the actions of Luigi Mangione, am I subjecting us to this tortured trip down the memory hole? It’s not so much Gilman itself as the world it tries to fit into. A world that, ultimately, doesn’t exist. When we call an institution like this conservative, we aren’t just talking about its politics. We are talking about its deep philosophical inertia. And it weighs down just about every institution dedicated to reproducing America’s elite.
Private schools that aspire to this much prestige ultimately need the world to remain static. Or to at least change at such a glacial pace that they can always position themselves at a safe distance above and in front. That distance is necessary to mold these young men into what the school hopes will be the next generation of leaders.
Luigi Mangione was clearly on that path. Watch his Founder’s Day address. It’s not particularly remarkable, though it is clearly being delivered by a highly intelligent, well-mannered, and eloquent young man. How, in the span of eight years, does he go from this to a man willing to plan and carry out the murder of a CEO?
The simple answer is that the world doesn’t stay still, and change is painful. It can be traumatic, in fact. Novara Media, along with some other observers online, are suggesting that Mangione was “radicalized by pain.” The spondylolisthesis that had ailed his back since he was a kid, aggravated by a 2022 surfing injury, caused him an immense amount of pain. He had metal plates and screws put in the base of his spine. And yet, no relief.
We will probably get more details in the coming days, but Mangione’s actions draw a clear link between his own debilitating health problems and a system that failed to address them. Like all his friends have said, he had everything going for him. A wealthy, well-connected family. Direct connections to the healthcare industry. Still, he couldn’t get the care he needed. How dysfunctional is the healthcare infrastructure in this country that someone with every advantage can be driven to revenge?
Privilege doesn’t protect you from pain. Just like going to Gilman didn’t protect me from the 2008 crash, from the deprivations of chronic unemployment, from the indignities of food pantries, or having my electricity cut off. Going to school with the rich does not make you rich. And while some newspapers are signaling shock at the who and the why, I don’t think I’m off-base arguing that Mangione's background does go some way to explaining the how.
Look at the mishmash of intellectual influences in this man’s life and you see a lot of ideas and thoughts at odds with each other: Musk and Thiel on one end, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the other. And of course a dash of Unabomber thrown in, as the press is eager to remind us. What there isn’t is a sense of what is to be done.
That’s not just down to the world that shaped Mangione's ways of thinking, but the one outside it too. There isn’t much on offer in the way of alternative models, collective solutions. Without those, there’s no real framework to fall back on other than the one he’s used to. It’s the undercurrent of everything they teach you in economics, behind every push to succeed in business, the ambition of the teenager who’s never had to work. Turn someone’s life into a receptacle of numbers and cost-benefit analyses, and a simple act of revenge becomes feasible: another life rendered as disposable as the rest. If it can happen to Luigi Mangione, what’s to prevent it from happening to Brian Thompson?
Only the will to make it happen. Whatever contradictions there might have existed in Mangione’s beliefs, there was almost certainly, mixed with his rage at the healthcare industry, a curiosity to see if he could actually get away with murder. Part Alexander Berkman, part Leopold and Loeb.
There ultimately isn’t much stopping the chaos of climate change or the upshots of violent repression from arriving at the gates of Gilman. Ten years ago, while most of downtown Baltimore erupted over the police murder of Freddie Gray, the prep school set in tony Roland Park obliviously cooled its heels at the Maryland Hunt Cup equestrian event.
I wonder how much longer something like this is going to be possible. American affluence doesn’t shield like it once did. Same with American exceptionalism. Donald Trump, whose return to the White House is no doubt greeted with excitement by many in Gilman’s halls, is sure to destabilize the world at large to enough of a degree that acting like it will never touch you becomes foolhardy.
The more myopic a ruling class is, the less effectively it can rule. The blinders have been closing in for some time. This current generation of the most powerful seems to fear nothing more than being subjected to the same forces that make everyone – poor and rich alike – human. Of course, it’s never the most powerful who suffer the worst consequences. The notion of a world without pain is precisely what has millions of Americans currently hooked on opioids. They are predominantly working class, while the Sackler children almost definitely go to schools in the vein of Gilman.
They’ll likely grow into the task of trying to scrub clean their tarnished name, maybe playing leading roles in philanthropy and charity. But the belief that we can be engineered toward a world of security by a privileged few isn’t just wrong, it’s dangerous for all involved. Including the self-appointed engineers. No matter how tall you build a wall, you will never be able to keep yourself wholly safe. If nothing else, someone inside is bound to see you for what you are.
As for Gilman, if it really wanted to play a role in making the world safer, it would do what every other privately run school and college and healthcare company needs to do. Liquidate itself, its land and resources and endowments turned over to its anemically-funded public counterparts. Make privilege a right, and you’ll find very few of you get hurt. Go Greyhounds.
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