Young Men and the Internet

Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione are both young men in their 20’s. Both saw what they considered to be danger and injustice. Both acted. The similarities end there.

Penny is the former Marine who intervened when a mentally unstable homeless man, Jordan Neely, threatened commuters on a New York subway car. He placed Neely in a chokehold in an effort to subdue him, but that resulted in the man’s death. He was prosecuted for manslaughter and reckless endangerment. The judge in his case dismissed the more serious manslaughter charge and last week the jury acquitted him on the reckless endangerment charge.

Mangione is almost certainly the man who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by shooting him in the back as he walked to a meeting in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago. Apparently, Mangione believes he acted as some sort of avenger on behalf of those abused by the health care system. Incredibly, he is being lauded in some places on the Internet for committing cold blooded murder.

Penny acted as a Good Samaritan, believing he was protecting his fellow passengers from a dangerous and deranged man. So, I guess I’m glad he wasn’t convicted. But I have reservations about that because I do think he went too far in subduing Neely. If the jury had convicted him on the lesser charge and the judge had given him a light sentence, I would have been fine with that too. While I hate to see someone punished for stepping up to protect others, a message also should be sent that anything does not go. It’s hard to believe that the much bigger and stronger and well-trained Penny could not have backed off the pressure and not taken Neely’s life.

Mangione’s case will be less complicated. What he allegedly did was pure evil. I don’t care what you think of the health care industry, you just don’t kill a man because you think the system’s rotten. Given what seems like the airtight case against him, I assume Mangione will eventually be convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. He’ll deserve what he gets.

What links these two otherwise disparate cases is this notion, especially among young men, of being the avenging angel, the protector of the innocent. That was true for Penny while it was warped and perverted in the case of Mangione.

What we know so far is that Penny seemed to live a normal social life while Mangione apparently went down a lonely Internet rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. He found, devoured and apparently approved of the bizarre writings of Unibomber Ted Kaczynski. Apparently isolated from the real world, there wasn’t much to keep him tethered to reality.

I most certainly don’t want to make Mangione out to be a victim here, but there is a broader problem: the combination of the natural tendency among young men to want to be heroes, their underdeveloped judgement mechanism, and now their access to material on the Internet that can take that already volatile mixture and ignite it into things like the murder of an innocent man with a wife and two kids.

Penny had that desire to be a hero and we can question his judgement, but there’s no evidence that he was motivated by anything he saw on the Internet. Mangione has the hero complex, no judgement whatsoever and he was stirred by the worst stuff on the Internet.

I don’t want to imply here that I am in any way making excuses for Mangione. But I do think we have a crisis for boys and young men in this country and in the world in general. An economy that once rewarded physical strength and endurance no longer does. A culture that was once dominated by male attributes and preferences no longer is.

For those of us who are older, who no longer need to compete in the marketplace, and who never made a living or saw our value wrapped up in physical accomplishments in the first place, all these changes aren’t all that hard to navigate. But for young men, especially those in blue collar jobs, this is a challenge and not one that society even recognizes as a challenge.

Mangione, with his privileged background and elite education doesn’t necessarily fit the mold of the disaffected young man. Nonetheless, it’s difficult to imagine a young woman with his same background doing the same thing.

So, a project for our society is to find ways to help young men navigate their late teens and twenties. Leave them to the tender mercies of the Internet and some of them will do awful things.