Thread by @KenSlackBledsoe

Luigi Mangione doesn’t fit neatly into any box. He wasn’t a downtrodden laborer raging against the wealthy elites. Nor was he a far-right agitator, though he sympathized with some of their gripes...(a thread) 1/

Raised among privilege, educated in the Ivy League, and fluent in high-demand STEM skills that most of us can only pretend to understand, Mangione should have been a poster child for the American Dream.
Instead, he found himself arrested at a McDonald’s, ...2/

carrying a ghost gun and handwritten notes condemning the healthcare system. His alleged crime? Murdering a CEO—arguably the apex predator of America’s elite caste.
What happened to Luigi Mangione? And why does he feel like a character plucked from the pages of history... 3/

one of those people who stumble into the wrong place at the right time to set something immense, something unstoppable in motion?
Maybe Peter Turchin has an answer—or at least, the beginning of one. Turchin, a scientist and historian, isn’t your typical academic. 4/

He doesn’t just study the past; he looks for patterns that might explain why societies crumble. One of his big ideas is “elite overproduction.” It’s a fancy way of saying, “Too many ambitious people, not enough big chairs.”
In societies like ours, where everyone’s told they...5/

can climb the ladder if they just work hard enough, Turchin warns that the top gets overcrowded.
You end up with too many lawyers, too many MBAs, too many tech geniuses—and not enough room for them all to become comfortable successes, let alone titans of industry... 6/

When these aspiring elites find their ambitions thwarted, Turchin says, things get messy.
When members of this elite class begin to sense the bitter taste of failure, they start to turn on one another, or worse, they start looking for someone else to blame. That’s when ... 7/

societies can go off the rails: revolutions, civil wars, assassinations. History isn’t short on examples. Just ask the French aristocrats of 1789 how that surplus of lawyers and intellectuals worked out for them.
And then there’s Mangione. If Mangione wasn’t exactly an elite.../8

himself, he moved among them, close enough to touch the hems of their robes.His family was wealthy; he went to prestigious schools and graduated into a field—tech—that traditionally guarantees success.
But somewhere along the way, the system that had always worked for him ... /9

stopped working.
His chronic health issues left him incapacitated, sometimes bedridden, and forced him to abandon his dreams of building apps and climbing corporate ladders.
For someone raised to expect success, this wasn’t just a setback. It was a betrayal. And it ...10/

wasn’t the kind of betrayal you shrug off with a yoga class and a glass of kombucha.
Imagine working your whole life to get a comfortable seat at the table, only to find that the table was rigged by the healthcare industry—or so it seemed to Mangione... 11/

The American Dream, in his eyes, wasn’t just unattainable; it was actively conspiring against him.
According to Turchin’s framework, Mangione fits the mold of a “blocked elite”: someone groomed for greatness but denied a place among the winners.
Blocked elites don’t just sulk 12/

in the corner; they lash out.
And Mangione’s alleged target, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, wasn’t random. It was a strike against the very system he believed had sabotaged his future—against an elite that he personally blamed for the ruination of his dreams... 13/

Does that make him left, right, or just… angry?
Mangione’s actions—and his motivations—don’t map neatly onto America’s political divides. Was he a leftist, angry at corporate greed? Was he a right-winger, disgusted by bureaucratic overreach? 14/

Maybe he was both. Or neither. Even in his own explanation of his actions, he emphasizes that he’s not the best person to provide analysis of what went wrong: he saw his role as being a person of action, an agent of change.What’s clear is that he saw himself as a tragic victim/15

of a broken system, his future robbed from him by members of his own elite class; and he decided to use his knowledge, privilege, and resources to fight back in the most grim way imaginable. Turchin’s theories remind us that social instability isn’t just about the poor rising /16

up against the rich. It’s also about those near the top who feel pushed out, overlooked, or betrayed. For every Mangione, there are countless other “blocked elites” feeling the same frustrations, simmering just below the surface. If Turchin is right, this isn’t just one man’s 17/

story. it’s a warning sign. When society produces more elites and promises them more cushy roles than it can sustain, and when privileged people discover that the systems that they expect to help them thrive instead leave them to flounder, the results aren’t just individual...18/

tragedies. They’re societal convulsions.
Turchin points to revolutionary figures l/ Vlad Lenin as a predictable result of these dynamics: highly educated, well-positioned elites who found themselves blocked by a rigid system & instead channeled their ambition into revolution. /19

People who would rather destroy the system than accept mediocrity—or misery—or the humiliation of being told they should have been capable of better.
Does that resonate with you?
Lenin wasn’t alone— /20

he was the tip of a frustrated iceberg, mobilizing others who felt betrayed by their own elite aspirations.
If elite overproduction creates enough Mangiones—angry, alienated, and convinced the system is irredeemable—the result isn’t just individual vendettas and violence. /21

t can snowball into something larger, something revolutionary.
When enough people like Mangione start believing the game is rigged, they become willing to break it entirely.

Credit to- Catmin's Anticapitalist Treehouse of Solidarity
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