dragooni

[dragooni]

"That Lore Tho" | A four panel comic by Dragooni

[dragooni]

The Internet's obsession with Idolization

With all of the sudden increase of Luigi and Luigi related things flooding my fyp, I feel obligated to remind the masses as they interact with the news regarding him. STOP IDOLIZING PEOPLE YOU DON'T KNOW. 

To preface, I'm not saying that “Idolization is Bad” or “You shouldn’t idolize someone who murdered someone”. I couldn’t care less about why you're idolizing someone. I personally believe that he ultimately did a good thing, I have zero qualms about what or why he did that, it's just that the internet is now projecting their different what or why’s onto someone they’ve never met, let alone know. 

Yet, we are seeing something similar happen to our dear CEO shooter, Luigi Mangione. To most of the internet, he’s hailed as this sort of martyr. A person who did something incredible because “he is pure of heart” — or “based” as the kids say. As mentioned before, this post is not to discredit what he did, nor to tell you that “violence is never the answer”. What I'm trying to say is that Luigi is a person, a real human being who exists outside of the context of the internet and the media, it just happens that this man acted upon actions that most of us agree with, But in the end he is still just another person, with values and opinions that differ from any of us. Should we praise this action? Of course we should. Brian Thompson was an asshole, and deserved what was coming to him, but does that mean the shooter should be compared to the likes of Jesus Christ or Superman? Likened to literal god-like beings who dedicated their entire lives to helping humanity? 

Honestly, it's insane how the internet has twisted this image of “A random guy who was the victim of the system and took proper recourse” into “The idealized vigilante who sacrificed himself for the greater good”. Like, we don't even know if Luigi is the right person or not and were treating his every word as gospel, obsessing over his tweets, and thirsting over his pictures. But, tbh, the media is doing nothing but propagating these stories of him every time he appears.

Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it feels like he’s too perfect of a victim. Maybe I'm just jaded from the constant coverage, but this guy killed a CEO and that was it. I'm not trying to say that this wasn’t a monumental undertaking, because it was, but what I'm trying to say is that everything seems too grand and fits together perfectly too well. We have this median political, very handsome, media called “terrorist”, who disappeared for months before the murder, who also wrote a manifesto, and “Deny, Defend, Depose” on 3 separate bullet cases of the bullets that he shot into the CEO, who also gets a million photographs from different angles every time he appears in the media, who also is paraded like a pariah from a helicopter with way too many officers and guardsman for one person, and it just happens that he appears the next day in a McDonald's and is promptly arrested. 

It's not like he blew up the government or firebombed a Walmart, yet we are treating him as such. Not just news outlets and the government, but everyone. He was not an activist, nor a major public figure. He was a very wealthy son of a very wealthy family; A nepo baby at best, who, one day, decided that “Yeah, I should kill one of the most hated men in America” because of healthcare issues. (He also, supposedly, said that the Unabomber was a ‘political revolutionary’???, who was also an Elon Musk fan????? The more I read the more I get confused, I swear). He did a single action out of Revenge? Or was it because of hatred of capitalism? Also, There’s no way you expect me to believe that a person, who the media claims to have “meticulously calculated every part of his plan to cause terror” would have gone into a McDonald's IN PERSON, instead of just ordering online. There’s something off about this, I don't know what, but this whole thing feels like a show put on and controlled by the media, and we are eating it up. 

I say all of this, not as defense for the CEO or Luigi Mangione himself, but as a way to get people to think about the action he did. I’ve already seen some articles about people who graffiti-ed “Deny, Defend, Depose” on wall, or others saying how someone threatened their CEO’s, but what I’ve mostly been seeing is people saying “This will cause a revolution”, and “The CEO’s are scared”, but these are just words without substance. A revolution isn’t just carried with our words but our actions. We can’t just sit by idly, waiting for another shooter to kill another CEO, because revolutions are its people, and if we rely on a person to do the revolution, then is it really a revolution, or is it just the ravings of a crazed person. If your response is: “oh but I have work/school”, or “I’m too busy” then you have no claim to be part of the “revolution”, as going against “the system” means to reject “the system”, and if your not willing to sacrifice some of the comfort “the system” gives you, then you are inherently benefiting the one who profit of your health; literally become ungovernable. 

This doesn’t mean, go out and kill a CEO. You shouldn’t, because rampant blood-lust only begets more blood-lust, and if we killed all the CEO’s, we would start moving goalposts as a way to kill more people [Source: The French Revolution], also because murder isn’t in the cards for most people. But you should do something, anything really. It doesn’t have to be a big public stunt, it could be small, but all it has to do is send a message. You could: Pop your bosses tires, graffiti a building, throw a brick through a window, pirate something from large studios, shoplift, etc. It just has to be an action that tells the CEO’s that you are done with the bullshit. You can even join a march against something, or write about your hatred for capitalism and spread your words on the street. Sitting on your ass all day, confined to your online echo-chamber, parroting “Oh believe me, the revolutions gonna happen” is the worst thing you can do, because you're not proving anything but the opinions of the ones who agree with you. 

Every revolution has had action, Segregation was battled with the rejection of bigoted systems like buses and segregated areas, and the fight for LGBTQ+ Rights are still being fought today, but it started with Stonewall Riots that helped form the modern LGBTQ+ Civil right movements to this day. These movements weren’t just one person doing one thing, but a group of like-minded people who wanted to see change, so instead of waiting for change, they went to make changes themselves. Yes, people were hurt, and people were arrested but if we sit and wait, who’s to stop the ones who actually want to hurt us.

Tl;Dr: Stop idolizing people and start idolizing their actions as an example of how we can changes our lives for the better (also lay of Just Stop Oil as they are 100x better than the people who shame them)