Within hours of being identified as the assassin of a UnitedHealthcare CEO, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione gained hundreds of thousands of followers and was catapulted into fame by a fandom who believes that his murder of a father was justified violence – akin to a modern guillotine in the hands of the oppressed.
Mattias Desmet, renowned worldwide as the leading expert on ‘mass formation’ and the madness of crowd behavior, joins psychiatrist Dr. Aaron Kheriaty to examine the shocking public support for a suspected murderer and why people react differently to a crime if it’s supported by a crowd who believes they are oppressed – even when their hero turns out to be an Ivy League heir to a multimillion dollar fortune who doesn’t follow gun control laws.
Mattias Desmet is professor of psychology at the University of Ghent in Belgium and author of The Psychology of Totalitarianism. Desmet is the author of over one hundred peer-reviewed academic papers. In 2018 he received the Evidence-Based Psychoanalytic Case Study Prize of the Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, and in 2019 he received the Wim Trijsburg Prize of the Dutch Association of Psychotherapy. Follow him at https://x.com/desmetmattias and learn more at https://mattiasdesmet.org
Dr. Aaron Kheriaty is a psychiatrist, the director of the program in Bioethics and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and author of The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State. He formerly taught psychiatry at the UCI School of Medicine, was the director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health, and was the chairman of the ethics committee at the California Department of State Hospitals. He is also the author of “The Catholic Guide to Depression: How the Saints, the Sacraments, and Psychiatry Can Help You Break Its Grip and Find Happiness Again.” Follow Dr. Kheriaty at https://aaronkheriaty.substack.com and https://x.com/AaronKheriatyMD
