Dostoevsky: Mangione must have seen himself as one of Raskolnikov’s ‘extraordinary people’

Luigi Mangione , charged with murdering U.S. CEO Brian Thompson , has been compared to Rodion Raskolnikov , the antihero of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1866 novel Crime and Punishment .

The similarities between Mangione and the Russian antihero are uncanny, writes Andrew Keen .

Keen: Mangione must have seen himself as one of the extraordinary people’ who have the right to transgress morality in pursuit of their ideals.

Keen argues that people must yield to principle and sacrifice individual lives for a greater good.

The universal revolutionary idea is that the lives of “ordinary” people are worth less than those of extraordinary’ people.

To this, Dostoevsky offers the notion that human life is sacred, and as such, cannot be quantified.

To take one human life, it is ethically exactly the same as taking one hundred million .

Dostoyevsky scholar Joseph Frank called the “embittered élitism” that stressed the right of a superior individual to act independently for the welfare of humanity.

In Crime and Punishment , the antihero suffers through his emotional torment and eventually finds redemption.

We are about to discover what kind of ending will prove fitting for the embittered elitism of 21st-century America .