I Don't Want Comfort

Luigi Mangione's "Brave New World"

While math is the language of the universe, maybe even of life itself, words are the language of the human soul. Believing this, as I do, it’s probably not surprising that I’ve been thinking a great deal about some of the words that meant something to Luigi Mangione, the accused CEO shooter. Or that meant enough, anyway, to prompt him to share them with anonymous strangers online as a way of indicating, hey, this matters to me.

Just because I’m thinking about it right now, before I tackle my list of questions mentioned in my previous post, I wanted to highlight some of these quotes, and make some brief comments. This may seem like a contrarian opinion, but I don’t think you can learn a great deal about a person through their social media profiles, tweets, likes, and posts. We construct online personalities, not only for others, but also for ourselves, and I suspect they while they may be authentic in some ways, they are profoundly inauthentic in other ways.

However, when you tell me w…