Between Revolution, Disillusion and Redemption: Rescuing Society from the Maw of the Void

Insight by my colleague Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone

When news of the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson broke, the mysterious murderer became a viral sensation among certain perennially online voices.

After the apprehension of the murder, Luigi Mangione, this week the customary dissection of his social media corpus revealed not a radical revolutionary populist, but rather a child of privilege, born into a wealthy and prominent Baltimore family, who attended an elite prep-school, and lived in Hawaii. What is more, his posts showed someone who followed right-libertarian personalties online and read books on Silicon Valley self-help, psychedelics, and futurism. He posted both his fascination and fear of AI’s growing influence.

Of course even wealth can only go so far in addressing chronic back pain and repeated polls have shown that the majority of Americans are unhappy with our healthcare system.

As Tech Tribe friend Caroline McCarthy posted, “[i]t really shouldn’t surprise anyone that a smart young guy who worked in tech appeared to have political views that didn’t fit a left-right divide, because frankly neither do the priorities underpinning the tech industry.”

Mangione, elided the political binary because, as a ‘centrist tech bro,’ he professed a worldview that ”wasn’t pinned to a standard left-right axis. The closest thing we have is that he seemed convinced that technology and modernity had led us astray.”

This deep rift in tech, the nihilism that originates as the techno-optimists are drawn into the gaping maw of techno-pessimism, is one that society urgently needs to address.

In these pages we’ve written at length about the dangers technological innovation, untethered from its redemptive purpose… and therein lies the needed salve to modernity’s gaping wound.

When society, be it populists on the left or techno bros on the right, experience the matestisation of technology estranged from an uplifted it purpose, then logic inevitably warped to justify horrific action.

“It’s not particularly hard to imagine,” Brian Merchant writes in his Substack, “how great personal pain and anger and a sense of injustice… [could] yield a conclusion … that a reasonable way to strike back at the suffering caused by insurance industry, was in-fact to strike at one of its chief executives.”

As Mangione quoted in his review of the Unibomber’s writings “We're animals just like everything else on this planet, except we've forgotten the law of the jungle and bend over for our overlords when any other animal would recognize the threat and fight to the death for their survival."

This loss of the divine image and responsibilities of humanities, is on the Rebbe addressed following the John Hinckley Jr.’s attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan.

Hinckley, not unlike Mangione, was someone who’d grown up not in poverty, but with relative access and privilege.

The best way to address the corruption of a modern society, was to tether it to its core:

“A simple faith in the existence of the Creator and Master of the universe, Who watches every individual, which negates the notion that life is a free-for-all in which one need only be ‘smart’ enough… to utilize one’s opportunities in order to inflict harm upon both himself and the victim…”

Mangione, who earned both a bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, had access to knowledge robbed of purpose.

As the Rebbe saw it, education could not suffice as merely “an accumulation of knowledge,” so that “as long as one accumulates knowledge, he is “educated.”

After all, “the perpetrator may have excelled in his studies, or perhaps he didn’t excel, so he added to his array of knowledge the skill of handling arms. He even mastered the subject. His accumulation of knowledge was not connected to a purpose – the ideal purpose being, to bring true good to oneself and one’s surroundings; rather the goal is to prove that “I am the only one that matters,” and therefore, “Why should I consider another person, never mind obey someone else?””

We must, therefore, remain entered on goodness, by being tethered to the transcendent.

Wishing you an uplifting Shabbat,

Rabbi Mendy & Mussy

p.s. As always, we would love to chat with you over coffee or drinks, about Judaism, or just life - reply to this email.

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