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 what books speak to you—and, specifically, what passages—now I can get a sense of how your mind works. Of course, it won’t be definitive or even permanent. Our readings of great books change as we change. I just reread The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne because I loathed it in high school. I came away from it this time with a completely different opinion and appreciation of the book.

But because these specific books and words apparently meant something to Mangione within the last couple of years, I think they provide some insight into what mattered, and perhaps still matters, to him. This post will look at Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and the quote Mangione retweeted on May 1st of this year.

Quote reads: “But I don’t want comfort, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

The passage from Brave New World to which he was responded is this one (also reproduced in the image above):

“But I like the inconveniences."

"We don't," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. "You're welcome," he said.

First, for those who haven’t read the book or who are a few years removed from their reading of it, Brave New World is a dystopian novel set in a speculative world where humans are genetically engineered and socially conditioned to—what else—maintain order and stability. There is a rigid caste system, individuality is suppressed, and happiness is achieved through recreational drugs—soma, in particular—, sex, and consumption. Gender roles are super strict but women no longer give birth to or raise babies.

Our protagonists are Bernard Marx, a genetic “unfortunate” in this highly controlled world and John, a “savage” who was raised outside this society, and we watch as they struggle with loss of freedom, autonomy, and authentic human experience in a “brave new world” that operates on the twin principles of comfort and control. Lenina Crowne is an interesting and troubling symbol of the dehumanizing effects of extreme social control, especially the control of women’s bodies, desires, and roles. If the plot line sounds familiar, it’s because Brave New World was published in 1932 and dystopian writers have been piggybacking on Huxley’s premises for coming on a hundred years. He was the OG.

Anyway.

The passage Mangione is reacting to here is from a pivotal scene between John (referred to as “the Savage”) and Mustapha Mond, the World Controller of the World State, which prioritizes stability, happiness, and social order at the cost of individual freedom, creativity, and real emotions. John, who has only known life on the reserve, but who is deeply familiar with the emotionally complex works of Shakespeare, has been brought into this controlled, sterile, pleasure-driven and anesthetized society, and really is not feeling it. The line Mangione highlighted is this:

“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

When we do this with lines from books—highlight them, separate them, isolate them, put a spotlight on them—we are telling anyone who is out there: This is what is in my heart.

To anyone who is engaged in and by the world outside their phones, social media, election-related absurdities, etc., this line speaks for itself. Broadly, John is longing for authenticity and real human experience, including suffering and moral struggle (completely absent in the World State, of course). He wants moral agency, but in this world people no longer have to make difficult moral decisions because everything is perfect, safe, controlled. Imagine living in a world where there are no moral decisions to be made. In such a world, does morality even exist?

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley was published in 1932—the OG of dystopian novels (if you don’t count HG Wells).

So let’s look more closely at how this line could potentially have resonated with Mangione, based on the scant information we have about him. As we know, in this passage, John is longing for a life with emotional depth, intellectual complexity and richness, and the freedom to make choices—even bad choices. But the World State mandates comfort and pleasure at the cost of these (once) human traits. Implied in the brilliance of the line, of course (for authors rarely give their most brilliant, morally incandescent lines to their villains), is that this trade-off is insupportable for good, thinking people.

But have we already made that trade-off in our not-yet-fully-brave new world? A compelling argument could be made for yes, and I think Mangione was already making this argument, in his earnest, sometimes contradictory way. We know that he had concerns about the potential damage smartphones have done to his generation, as demonstrated by his interest in Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

On April 16, 2004, he emailed Gurwinder Bhogal about a planned trip to Japan, saying “Japan is peak NPC-ville” and “scary lack of free will in this country.” Bhogal said Mangione worried people there “don’t really live their lives — most of the young men are addicted to video games, pornography, and other shallow entertainments” (collectively the soma of our modern society?)

Later, Gurwinder shared that Mangione was particularly disturbed when, in Japan, he noticed a man experiencing a medical emergency and summoned police officers to help, but they refused to cross the street until the lights changed, even though there was no traffic.

Fourteen days later, he posted this quote from Brave New World.

Mangione had the “misfortune” of being a young person living with his eyes wide open, much like the young people who so courageously work toward a climate solution in the face of ruling class legislative obstruction and law enforcement’s complicity. You can tell he saw all around him proof that the World State had come into existence, that soma was real, and that people “aren’t really living their lives.”

On May 25th, 2024, the final post that appeared under his Reddit handle was shared in the now-banned sub “tedkaczynski” and featured a video from China, featuring a series of video clips showing crowds of people standing next to or near one another all separately streaming on their cell phones. He titled it “Streaming overdose 2024.”

He didn’t post this in /damnthatsinteresting or /tiktokcringe. He posted it in /tedkaczynski. It’s possible he felt his intent in posting such a video would be better understood in that now-banned subreddit. If so, I’m not entirely sure he would’ve been mistaken.

There are no real ciphers or mysteries in Huxley’s work, or even in this particular passage. No deconstruction or literary analysis is necessary even for the line Mangione highlighted—it is, after all, one of the most famous sentences not only in Brave New World, but also in all of world literature.

What it does make me think about, though, is what Mangione, and likely other young people like him, feel that they want from this world but which they also feel they have no access to: freedom, beauty, authenticity, presence, hard choices, and meaning. Trying to live a life absent of these fundamentally human values is difficult, unless you've soma-tized yourself into acceptance or grown addicted to the narcotic of consumption and “shallow entertainments.”

But living a life with these values is also difficult at times. Finding meaning isn’t easy. Authenticity isn’t always pleasant or comfortable—it can come in the form of shame, a trauma response, a disturbing confession, the absence of empathy, or a radical and dangerous act.

This definition of authenticity—which includes the danger and poetry, the sin and freedom John claims—may be what Mangione preferred to the sanitized, commodified, anesthetized “world state” he felt he lived in. Perhaps he felt that while he understood he was living in this dystopian reality, no one else did. Or, worse, people know but don’t care. Some may even prefer it. Such a state of being can make a person feel isolated. Some people might turn hopeless and recede. Others, however, might feel compelled to act, to break others out of their trance in order to find the authenticity lacking in their world.

This makes me think of something I grappled with when writing my novelette Muri, a weird eco-horror story based on Melville’s Benito Cereno. In a climate-impacted near-future, polar bears are being relocated to Antarctica in order to “save the species.” However, the bears mutiny, take over the icebreaker, and can speak.

The human captain, deposed by the mutineers who wish to turn the ship around in order to die in their now-liquid Arctic rather than perish in unfamiliar lands, tells Muri that he will never be believed, that he will be thought mad by his superiors should he try to explain the events that unfolded on board the boat.

“What is considered madness by men,” Muri responds, “is oftentimes nothing more than comprehension.”

In a world where comprehension is considered madness, I wonder if we ignore the “mad” at our peril.