After a manhunt involving drones, dogs, and scuba divers, the masked vigilante who murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was finally found, wanly eating hash browns at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He was identified as Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old scion of a wealthy Maryland family who holds computer science degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and had been working in tech. 

The Meta, Reddit, X, and Goodreads accounts connected to Mangione indicate that he was interested in right-wing and right-coded figures like Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman. And while those interests make it hard to imagine Mangione as a left-wing radical, he did seem to sympathize with the working class, condemning, in his manifesto, billionaires who “abuse our country for immense profit.” As John Herrman pointed out in New York magazine, Mangione, were it not for his alleged crime—and his wealth, I should add—would seem “stubbornly normal.” That someone with so much support and capital may have been driven to murder by his health struggles highlights how broken our social systems really are. Amid all this brokenness, it is hardly surprising that those searching for meaning might turn to cynical self-help blather and neoliberal economic theory.

The emerging picture of Mangione is indeed eclectic, resisting easy political categorization. Like many of his peers, he used medicinal psychedelics, pursued “clean eating,” and gravitated toward anti-woke, “manosphere,” and “retvrn” (nostalgically anti-modern) content relating to ancient Rome. In line with this last interest, he was deeply concerned with the effects of technology on the human brain, commenting repeatedly on the “evolutionary mismatch of homo sapiens and [their] 21st century living environment.” He called Catherine Price’s How to Break Up With Your Smartphone a “top-25 to-read,” and professed his preference for paper books over e-readers on his now-suspended Reddit account. This skepticism toward technology aligns him not only with Luddite terrorists like Ted Kaczynski, whose manifesto Mangione gave four out of five starts on Goodreads, but also mainstream cultural commentators like Jonathan Haidt, whom he often retweeted on X.

Mangione’s Goodreads lists have become tantalizing fodder for Internet sleuths seeking insight into the mental state of an accused CEO shooter. There are obvious standouts like the Unabomber manifesto or JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, but amid these higher-profile picks is a more mundane work in the genre of corporate self-help: Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. This book appears only in Mangione’s “want to read” list, but his handwritten notes on a different text that mentions Flow, Angela Duckworth’s Grit, show that he had already engaged with Csikszentmihaly’s main precepts. “Flow,” Mangione explained to his future self, “is a state of complete concentration at [a] high challenge level, yet [it is] effortless.” Csikszentmihaly himself defines flow as “the state in which реорlе are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.” When we are in this state, he writes, we are released from the “anonymous forces” that usually harass us and begin to feel that we are “in control of our actions, masters of our own fate”—a feeling that, however painfully acquired, brings “exhilaration.”

Csikszentmihaly originated his signature concept in the 1970s, while working as an academic psychologist at the University of Chicago. In the half-century since, it has become, in the words of scholar Braxton Soderman, ubiquitous in “the aspirational worlds of self-help, self-care, and wellness.” A useful tool for corporate managers trying to squeeze more productivity out of their employees, flow has also attracted self-styled experts in “life-hacking,” wellness, and the optimization of the self—as well as both centrist and far-right politicians.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton called Csikszentmihalyi “one of his current favorite authors,” while Newt Gingrich “put his work on the reading list for a political planning committee.” It’s not hard to see why Csikszentmihalyi’s style of corporate self-help draws in acolytes of American-style capitalism, from regional managers to US presidents. For one thing, he defined success as they do: in terms of the amount of money and power one can amass on one’s own. For the psychologist, men like Lee Iaccoca and Ross Perot exemplify “the best sensate approach to life” because they turned their frowns upside-down, channeling setbacks into successes.

Current Issue

January 2025 Issue

What does any of this political crossover have to do with Luigi Mangione, beyond the fact that he apparently intended to read Flow? The answer lies in the affinity between self-help culture and neoliberal economics. Csikszentmihaly claimed that his techniques enable “every person, no matter how unfit” to “rise a little higher, go a little faster, and grow to be a little stronger.” This language echoes human capital theory, which posits that workers’ value derives not from their labor but from the investments they make in their own education or training.

Inspired by Adam Smith, the term “human capital” was already in use by the early 20th century. It gained traction through the work of Milton Friedman and Gary Becker, who developed their own version of the idea in the same period—and in the same place, the University of Chicago—as Csikszentmihaly was refining his concept of “flow.” Along with Friedman dicta like “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” the title of his best-selling free-market apologia, human capital theory has helped justify austerity, deregulation, and disinvestment from public projects since the Reagan era. It can also be read as a radical form of self-help in and of itself: To believe in the power of human capital is to deny that structural factors, rather than individual effort, could contribute to success or failure.

The ideal practitioner of human capital theory becomes an army of one, hauling themselves up by their bootstraps toward what Flow calls “optimal experience.” At its limit, human capital theory turns mystical, departing the realm of the rational to become the “the power of positive thinking” or “the Secret.” A more modern incarnation is “lucky girl syndrome,” a trend in which TikTok influencers encourage followers to “manifest” the things they want by “assum[ing] and believ[ing] it before the concrete proof shows up.” The ultimate promise of this type of thinking is that, even if society and its protections fall away entirely, we can simply will our joys and successes into being.

The emphasis that this variety of self-help places on achievement and personal responsibility has assured it enormous influence among centrists, liberatrians, and anyone politically to their right—including, perhaps, Mangione. A favorite book of his, according to his Goodreads and X accounts, was Tim Urban’s cartoon political tract What’s Our Problem (2023). Subtitled A Self-Help Book for Societies, this volume earned Mangione’s praise as “the most important philosophical text of the early 21st century.”

If the crime of which Mangione stands accused has made him a “social media folk hero,” it’s worth asking why. The obvious answer is that almost every American has been victimized by our for-profit healthcare system. But another related explanation is that, as a society, we have reached the point where human capital theory cannot redeem us. If a “prosperous turbo-normie” like Mangione, with a high “human capital” of youth, good looks, generational wealth, and an Ivy League STEM education could be undone by chronic back pain, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Since Mangione’s arrest, commentators have sought to rationalize his alleged act according to their own political views. As one Reddit user noted, “the American right thinks he’s an antifa terrorist (Ivy, PhD [sic], and reads [the] Unabomber),” while “the left thinks he’s an entitled tech-bro jock (past praise for Musk and Rogan on X, richest-in-Maryland family, owns nursing home, and attends an Ivy).” But these claims, along with finer-grained arguments that frame him as an engineer-brained “tinkerer” who decided to take matters into his own hands, or a black-pilled product of the Zynternet, downplay this moment’s importance in American social history.

If Mangione is eventually convicted, we might see his case as an indication that self-help is losing its power to mollify a public stretched to its economic and social limit. Mangione’s trajectory suggests that, when ambient conditions—like the continued existence of a world-historically cruel and wasteful health insurance industry—combine with a personal factor like debilitating back pain, no amount of “manifesting,” weight-lifting, or clean eating will help. (One could also say Mangione took the logic of self-help to its most extreme conclusion, eschewing systemic change in favor of a DIY murder complete with a 3D-printed gun.)

Managerial propaganda like Flow divides all humans into winners and losers, powerful, “gritty” creators and those incapable, or unwilling, to realize their potential. But what happens when, through no fault of their own, someone moves from the former category into the latter? Aren’t we all “losers” at our most vulnerable—and isn’t everyone bound to become desperately vulnerable at some point in their lives? Because self-help is self-centered, it offers few answers. As Mangione wrote in his notes on Grit, “It isn’t suffering that leads to helplessness; it is suffering you don’t think you can control.”