Luigi Mangione expresses his anti-corporatism in a typical, Ivy League way. He makes showy demonstrations and inscribes all sorts of words on paper (and shell casings) as he drinks Starbucks coffee, eats breakfast at McDonald’s, and carries his belongings in a $300 Peak Design backpack. Does he get his own irony? Mangione allegedly murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last Wednesday morning by shooting the father of two in the back and then in the leg (Merry Christmas!). Five days later, a McDonald’s employee — a person of a caste Mangione did not much interact with — called the cops on him in Altoona, Pennsylvania. There, the police say they found the fake identification used to check into a hostel on the Upper West Side, a firearm made from a three-dimensional printer, and a manifesto. “I do apologize for any strife and trauma,” this manifesto reportedly reads, “but it had to be done. These parasites had it coming.” Parasites? That sounds like projection. Mangione derived enormous privileges by virtue of his family who live on a Maryland golf course. He attended the upscale, all-boys Gilman School, which charges $38,000 annually for high school students. Mangione started his own company in high school, which may have been when his hatred of corporate overlords first manifested. He graduated as valedictorian. “He was a smart kid, he was a nice kid, and he was relatively unassuming,” a classmate told the Baltimore Banner. “He had a healthy social circle and was very well-read. He had a lot going for him.” Mangione parlayed the prep-school education into a college education at the University of Pennsylvania, the site of much disturbing activism in recent years. There he received both a bachelor of science in engineering and a master of science in engineering, both degrees involving computer science. His LinkedIn page further advertises his peculiar relationship with the object of his hatred (corporations). He apparently worked in data for TrueCar, a digital retailing site for automobiles traded on NASDAQ for the last decade. “I guess he just got caught up in some ideologies after school,” that high-school friend theorized. “Something has to go pretty wrong to lead to this.” Or maybe, from the perspective of the educators who pushed such ideas upon Mangione, something went right. Despite coming from enormous wealth, enjoying profound educational benefits, and reaping corporate dollars, Mangione could rail against corporations without the laugh track inside his head accompanying his harangues. Perhaps all that social insulation caused him to crusade without ever wondering if he ranked as the right man for that job. (RELATED: The Most Shocking Part of the Shocking CEO Assassination) Rather than an antidote to such behavior, Mangione’s upbringing amounts to about the only type that could allow one to murder a perfect stranger for abstract, impersonal reasons based on ideology. All sorts of people take the lives of others. But to assume the power of God in a dispassionate, non-impulsive situation involving neither money nor lust nor longstanding grudge, one must see oneself above others. Does that not fit the prep-school valedictorian and Ivy League whiz-kid? Long ago, America knew another such narcissist from Baltimore who imagined that he knew best. Alger Hiss also attended prestigious universities and his peers regarded him highly. Then he decided to betray his countrymen by sharing secrets with the Soviet Union because he knew better than the president what information rated a classification and what information did not. In the case of Hiss, he did not murder but instead empowered one of history’s great mass murderers. Both acts required profound arrogance. “To belong to the masses is the great longing of the ‘alienated’ intellectual,” Czeslaw Milosz wrote in The Captive Mind. This applied to Harvard Law grad Hiss as much as it does to Ivy League counterpart Mangione. They shared intelligence, tellingly absent from the 14 traits of leadership outlined by the U.S. Marine Corps. Many people boasting high IQs lack judgment, justice, integrity, knowledge, courage, and a few traits unmentioned by the Marines (prudence and wisdom come to mind). Society often confuses smart with wise, moral, and anything “good.” But some very intelligent people exhibit compulsivity, evil tendencies, mental illness, and a proneness to extremism. Mostly, they fall for the delusion of intelligence as a catchall for positive traits instead of one positive trait among many. From this, they suffer from God complexes. Mangione, a son of privilege and corporate lackey, expressed his cognitive dissonance by murdering another who was drawing a dime from corporate America. A long, cynical look in the mirror or repeated visits to a psychiatrist could have solved rather than exacerbated his problems. READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn: The Most Shocking Part of the Shocking CEO Assassination Dems Click Off MSNBC and Discover There’s No Place Like Home Weekend in Review: Joe Biden Pardons His Son, Critics Come After Trump Picks The post Luigi Mangione’s Cognitive Dissonance appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.