The Real Risks of Modern Technology: Obscuring Human Moral Responsibility Thanks to Irrational Beliefs and Uninformed Demands

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May 22

The understandable decision of Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek the death penalty in the murder trial of Luigi Mangione, charged with killing 50-year-old health care executive Brian Thompson by shooting him in the back just because Mangione saw Thompson as exemplary of the supposed callous greed of his industry, was perhaps surprisingly met with the news that donations to Mangione’s defense fund have already exceeded $1 million. Many of the donations to the fund, whose goal is $1.5 million, come accompanied with expressions of sympathy, of belief in Mangione’s innocence despite video evidence of the shooting, or the slogan “We Stand with Luigi.” The fund is managed by the December 4 Legal Committee, named after the date last year on which UnitedHealthcare CEO Thompson was killed. The extent of the donations to support a likely first-degree murderer, himself the scion of a wealthy family and the graduate of an expensive prep school and the University of Pennsylvania, is only the tip of the iceberg of expressions of support and even adulation Mangione has received from members of the public. Perhaps most remarkably, as Faith Bottum has reported in the Wall Street Journal, numerous posts name him a “saint,” as in “Saint Luigi, Patron of Health Care Access for All.” Available for sale, Bottum notes, are T-shirts bearing the motto “A Patron Saint of Capitalism’s Victims,” devotional candles showing his image and “A Prayer for Saint Luigi” on the back, and Saint Luigi Christmas ornaments.

In a three-page manifesto he is believed to have authored prior to the killing, Mangione wrote about the grandiose size of UnitedHealthcare and how much profit it makes, and went on to condemn health insurance companies more broadly for placing profits over care. He seemed to defend his alleged actions by remarking that “these parasites [those who worked in the health care industry] had it coming,” since the United States had the “most expensive healthcare system in the world,” while allegedly ranking only 42nd in life expectancy.

The reasons for differences in life expectancy among different populations are complex, hard to measure, and of course no excuse for committing murder. But it is noteworthy that Mangione’s victim, the 50-year-old Thompson, a married father of two, in contrast with the single, 26-year-old Mangione, had graduated with an accounting degree from the less prestigious University of Iowa, where he was valedictorian, and worked his way up to the top while being known as an advocate of “value-based care” focusing on preventive health strategies. By contrast, the privileged Mangione apparently didn’t need to pursue a career from which his education would enable him to “profit.” (In a spiral notebook reportedly discovered by authorities in Mangione’s possession, he wrote a 'to-do' list in which he flirted with the idea of bombing midtown New York City to kill Thompson.)

What is particularly striking, and of broader concern, is the way in which the celebration of Mangione’s supposed “accomplishment” parallels the growing admiration, documented in a March 30 New York Times Magazine story, being expressed by prominent individuals for the “philosophy” expressed in a longer manuscript titled “Industrial Society and Its Future,” issued thirty years ago by onetime University of California math professor Theodore Kacyznski, better known as the Unabomber. Having sent a series of letter-bombs that killed three individuals and seriously disfigured or disabled 23 others, Kacynski promised to cease his attacks in return for the publication by the Times and Washington Post of his manifesto. (It was their agreement to do so that led to Kaczynski’s identification of him by his brother, and his subsequent conviction on murder charges that led to a life sentence, which was subsequently followed by his suicide.) One of Kacyznski’s victims, left severely disabled by a bomb, was Yale computer scientist David Gelernter, not only a leader in his field, but a serious Orthodox Jew, who went on, despite his disability, to pursue a career as a writer, a painter, and a proud American patriot, one of whose books was titled Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion – not a work of narrow nationalism, but one that instead celebrated our country’s credo of individual rights and the rule of law. Apparently, Kacynski simply pulled his name out of some random source dealing with computers.

None of those quoted by the Times excuses Kacyznki’s acts of terrorism and murder. Yet everyone from venture capitalist and former Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters to far-right online journalist Tucker Carlson to Elon Musk praises some of his (largely banal) ideas, which amount to a condemnation not of one single industry, invention, or economic practice but of the modern industrial revolution as a whole. (Kacyznki’s opening sentence claiming that the revolution has “been a disaster for the human race” is judged by Musk as follows: “He might not be wrong.” This is from the world’s richest man, whose fortune derives from his advances in technology.) Though the individuals just quoted are associated with the far right or Trumpian wing of the Republican party, the Times reports, Kaczynski has become a “crossover figure” whose views draw “nods from everyone from vaccine-skeptical Republicans to Musk-skeptical Democrats to internet-native teenagers.” And his manifesto, once dismissed as impenetrable, “is now the subject of YouTube videos drawing millions of views apiece.”

As Sean Fleming, a British scholar currently writing a book on Kacyznski who is quoted in the Times, observes, the most important source of his ideas was French sociologist Jacques Ellul’s book The Technological Society (first published in English translation in 1964). It was Ellul who argued that modern society, in its pursuit of rational efficiency, had created an autonomous “system” with “a mind of its own.” Kaczynski in turn drew the conclusion that since “you can’t get rid of the ‘bad’ parts of technology and retain only the ‘good’” ones, “it would be better to dump the whole stinking system and take the consequences.” (Having given up his professional career, Kaczynski mailed his letter bombs while living in a remote cabin in Montana lacking electricity or running water, living as a recluse while practicing survival skills.)

What Kaczynski was objecting to was not just the industrial revolution that began in the late 18th century, but the consequences of what I shall call the “Baconian gamble” – that is, the original call, by such 17th-century philosophers as Francis Bacon and René Descartes, that philosophy be redirected from the pure pursuit of understanding, as practiced by the classical thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome, towards the enhancement of human power, for the sake of “the relief of the human estate.” This meant uncovering nature’s mode of operation in a way that would generate the capacity of making people’s lives longer, healthier, and more comfortable. It was a “gamble,” however, in the sense (as Bacon sometimes acknowledged) that the technological knowledge so gained might also be put to evil uses, in the form of endless advances in military technology.

Nobody living in the 21st century can doubt that modern technology has indeed been employed for evil purposes – most notably, nuclear weapons, terrorism, and Hitler’s gas chambers. But what reasonable person can lament the multitudinous inventions of the past three centuries that have made the lives of most human beings far longer and healthier, have vastly increased agricultural productivity, and have enabled the spread of literacy and higher education throughout much of the world? (The achievements of the free-market economy that have promoted these inventions are amply summarized by economic historian Deirdre McCloskey in her three-volume trilogy Bourgeois Equality, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Virtue.) Whatever some people’s complaints about supposed inefficiencies in the contemporary American health care industry, can anyone living in the developed world wish for its abolition (as Kacyznski would have wanted), or reasonably think that removing the “profit motive” by subjugating the industry entirely to government ownership (per Mangione’s apparent wishes) would have improved its efficacy? (For an excellent overview of the industry’s accomplishments, see Tevi Troy’s “In Praise of Big Pharma,” Commentary, April 2025. While providing a highly informative account of the drug industry’s accomplishments and the reasons why drug prices are often high in the initial stage of their development, Troy also describes the unjustified assaults that the industry has suffered recently at the hands of government, tort lawyers, and Hollywood, and reports that most of its defenders whom he interviewed insisted on speaking off the record, fearing the consequences of being known.)

Contrary to Ellul and his epigoni, technology does not have “a mind of its own.” Contrary to today’s technophobes, even their latest bugbear, artificial intelligence, does not threaten somehow to take control of humanity, in the manner of the computer Hal in the classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. While the latest computers can vastly exceed human beings’ capacity to make complex calculations (even defeating the greatest chess masters), machines lack the faculty of “inwardness” or self-consciousness, or therefore intentions. They are capable of doing only what their human makers have designed them to do.

Our real technology problem today, as it has been in the past, is therefore to somehow ensure that those who control and use our machinery are thoughtful, liberally educated, and morally virtuous human beings. Despite his wealth and genius, Elon Musk’s comments do not reveal him to be such a person – as is indicated by his remarks in praise of Kaczynski. Nor, surely, do HEW Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr.’s unjustified disparagement of vaccination, which has spared so many millions from death or permanent disability from illnesses like polio, measles, and COVID. And while individuals like Kaczynski and Mangione clearly suffer from severe mental illness (which does not mean that they don’t merit serious punishment for their evil deeds), the broader problem their cases exemplify is the manner in which nonsensical claims about both technology and free enterprise (which relies on the profit motive, albeit not without regard for the public good) have spread among the population at large, especially thanks to so-called social media, without adequate correction by leaders of our political, religious, and educational communities.

The bestowal of “sainthood” on a crazed villain like Mangione seems in part to be the consequence of a decline in mainstream, organized religion among the American people: in the absence of belief in a Biblical God, under the guidance of respectable clergy, all too many turn instead to fanatical and infinitely dangerous “faiths” or ideologies to give “meaning” to their lives instead. (In Mangione’s case, the deluded followers even created their own saints!) As well, it reflects a severe failing of our educational system to provide the population at large with an understanding of how both science and economic freedom work to their benefit. Finally, one must worry about the failure of both families and schools to inculcate in many people a respect for the rule of law and the equal rights of individuals, regardless of how one happens to feel about the legitimate industry they work in or the respectable political opinions they express. In a free society, no one should have to fear the personal consequences of even venturing to defend an enterprise like the pharmaceutical industry, as Troy’s essay reports!

(As the latest instance of the irrational hostility towards technology – and perhaps to life itself – with which America is now confronted, a 25-year-old “pro-mortalist” was found to have detonated a car bomb outside a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California, in mid-May, killing himself while injuring four other people. He reportedly had composed manifestos expressing his “pro-death” beliefs, stating his opposition to “bringing people into the world without their consent,” thus sparing them from “future suffering.”)