There is an old folk song, of the variety heard in the age of medicine shows and tent revivals, that speaks to a peculiar terror of American society: the prospect of being left behind. The Carolina Tar Heels’ “Peg and Awl,” a string-band ballad with the rather unnerving melodic quality of ending on the third, features a shoemaker rendered useless by a machine that makes “a hundred pair” to his one. Progress has sped too rapidly by the shoemaker and the only option remaining for him is to “throw away” his pegs and awl. However, this conclusion does not seem to satisfy the ballad’s singer. Before embarking on a harmonically-adventurous harmonica solo, he mutters, with a hint of derision, “some shoemaker, lazy shoemaker.”
Is the shoemaker a lousy tradesman for not going full John Henry against the machine and dying with his pegs in his hand or a lousy person for letting a machine take away his vitality? In either case, the trouble is his inaction. He can’t solve this problem by simply working harder—to struggle against the machine is futile. But by lying down and letting the “purdiest little” machine turn him into a victim, the shoemaker loses his humanity. The shoemaker, then, is left in a bind: either he can facilitate his descent into unimportance and become a man without liveliness or reanimate himself to strike against the abyss into which he is being drawn; either he either can operate the machine or destroy it.
The Carolina Tar Heels probably could not have predicted the extent to which these anxieties over the powerlessness of average Americans would be realized. But “Peg and Awl” reveals that they were already picking up on the changes that, just a year after recording, would lead even them to throw away their instruments and become poultry farmers and carpenters. They recognized that a machine loomed above their heads and, if they were not prudent, could stun them too into being its stagnant victims.
Now, it is no longer 1928 and our world is no longer narrated by the Carolina Tar Heels but still, we live under a comparable web of capital and power buttressed by technology. In the present, however, technological advancements no longer make tradework less laborious and labor less dangerous. The days of ordinary innovation, of the McCormick reaper and movable type, are gone. Instead, the innovative technology of our day is artificial—artificial currency, artificial intelligence, artificial forms of life—useful not for harvesting crops or making shoes but instead for generating yet more technological advancement.
This loop is circular, revolving around intangible goods and primarily benefiting those who are already the best off and who least require innovation. As a result, present-day advancements are not created with any intention of producing mass benefit. Thus, American society today, despite being built on forward progress, serves only its own ends, leaving the vast majority behind.
This, of course, is not entirely new. A country with property and poll tax requirements was never intended to be an egalitarian enterprise. It was instead designed around the ideal that created it: change. The first eight presidents were all either lawyers or planters, people who would have been locked out of executive power in any previous governmental system. American society, in its radicalism, demanded a shift of those in power. It still, however, required that hierarchy itself endure.
This hierarchy was, by social convenience, to be headed by the wealthy. But the upper class had no need for change, it already had the best society could offer. And so while it was they who governed the social structure, it was the middle class, motivated by its realistic aspirations of taking their place, who came up with the innovations that maintained it. For those excluded from the power structure, meanwhile, there was no such mobility. Locked into poverty and disenfranchisement, the socially outcast, like the Carolina Tar Heels’ shoemaker, were left with only two options: either accept their dehumanized situation or seek to destroy it.
In recent years, the well-off, chasing only their own advancement, have allowed the social resources for innovation given to even the middle class to slip away. Without the middle class, however, there is no one left to develop innovation that betters the working person’s life. What developments we do experience now seem primed only for the wealthy. What good, to the janitor, is ChatGPT? What good, to the teacher, is extended reality? Nowadays, the elite few inhabit the world of the future, and do nothing to allow the rest of America to join them. The machinery of present change is no longer useful, only “purdy.”
Society is at a standstill but those who inhabit it are either entrenched in the remoteness of their contentment or without the social power to change anything. Now, a whole generation of Americans find themselves like the Carolina Tar Heels’ shoemaker: confronted by technology that serves only the already well-off and stuck in the chasm of grief and indignation that comes with being left behind by a society they can see but cannot access.
Into this paradigm steps Luigi Mangione. Born into a wealthy family and the recipient of a high-caliber education, it is strange that it would be he who would seek to rise against the machine. But it is not entirely strange. Born into a family on one of the outer valence shells of influence, he knew the comfort of power yet also received as his inheritance only the middle-class scramble to attain it. For Mangione, this scramble was a fall. Accustomed to the agency of his privileged upbringing, he did not know what to do with his newfound perceived powerlessness. His downfall was to come from this warped and desperate understanding of his personal vitality.
Western thought, from the pre-Socratics onward, sees man as living potential, capable of controlling his world and will. It prized above all not virtue but versatility: the capacity to change. This focal point allowed for the creation of mobile capitalist societies and displays of individual brilliance, as best attested by the classical cult of the hero. But the hero of antiquity was also a tragic mess. He dared to think himself above his circumstances and inevitably failed to pull himself out of the misery this hubris would result in. The revised, more moderate hero of the Renaissance, by contrast, brought it upon himself to bear the degradation of his political order. In turn, he inherited the privilege of acting and thinking freely within the bounds of human reason. His power, self-contained, allowed for a happy and comfortable life.
Mangione, however, a shadow of the happy and privileged man he, by all ordinary trajectories, should have been, could not bear the indignity of his revised situation. He believed himself still deserving of the capacity to enact change. In his mind, he was shut out only of power, which he could reclaim through destroying, both others and himself. Mangione, according to police accounts, believed himself to be “a hero of sorts”—acting not as the artifex of his destiny but instead the terminus of someone else’s.
But the humanism inherited by Mangione is a flawed one. A philosophy of action works only when one can freely act. The reduced man who, though obsolete, nevertheless violently insists on asserting his humanity, proves only his weakness. He does not act but only reacts, communicating not needed change but only his impotent outrage against the world. Instead of regaining his vitality, he only takes away someone else’s—pushing him only further away from his humanity, not toward it.
The other response to powerlessness though, the primeval doctrine of quietism, meanwhile, horrifies those newly unsettled into insignificance. Humanism can prevail while society’s foundation is unchanging and secure, but it cannot endure a system in flux. The conditions of the underprivileged cannot accommodate those who have previously grown accustomed to the aspirations of a more fortunate life. These newly disenfranchised destabilize the humanist society’s security; their insistence on action and volition upset its ossified core. Mangione, clinging to scraps of vitality, had grown up too close to power to content himself with inaction. Thus, he chose the remaining option: destruction.
Mangione’s situation is a key reflection of our era. American humanism, now without the mobility that industrial capitalism and social democracy had previously afforded it, exists as something shallowly universal. Power, meanwhile, confined only to the wealthiest in society, no longer allows for innovation, leaving everything broken.
Unable to fix it on our own, we, like Mangione and the shoemaker before him, are left asking ourselves: are we content to die in an odious system as long as we bring the system down with us?
But to lose ourselves in destruction would only serve to prove how significantly the machine has cut us down. Mangione’s revenge did no more than liberate himself from the moral weight of the cold bureaucracy of private insurance. It did nothing to create a solution. In the terror of being left behind, he neglected the rest of the world and thought only of his own need for destruction. In retrospect, his act was nothing more than a dull thud against the gates of power.
Again, it is no longer 1928. The ocean is rougher, there remains no bed of quiet endurance. Despite the asinine cruelty of Mangione’s act of self-redemption, he has become a hero of sorts for those who, with a fatalistic smirk, seek to topple the power structure and claim it for themselves. One cannot, however, destroy a machine and then expect to command it. Any new machine will be just as purdy and remote as the previous one.
Against the machine, society falls apart and humanity fusts, useless and unused. As long as being human is an inherently dignified thing, it will not be something destructively thrown away or capable of being thrown down. To prevent the silent irrelevance of the shoemaker and the violent irrelevance of the assassin, we must reteach our society to be a human one. We must accommodate our dynamism and our limitations. To do otherwise is only to send ourselves to a violent grave.
The Carolina Tar Heels, in 1964, nearly forty years after “Peg and Awl,” recorded a bright-eyed variant of the old-time standard “Lonesome Road Blues.” Like a follow-up to the older ballad, the narrative again is one of a man turned useless. Instead of throwing down his tools, however, he swears, despite the injustices he has faced: “I’m a-goin’ if I have to run away and I ain’t gonna be treated this-a-way.” Let the murder that Mangione committed be valuable at least for showing us that a society that destroys itself from the inside only hastens its demise. Instead, let us pick up our tools.
Image: Adolph von Menzel, The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes), oil on canvas, 1875 (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany).