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It’s hard to say which had more drama: the manhunt for Luigi Mangione or the cultural reaction to his arrest. On December 14, 2024, Saturday Night Live referenced Mangione multiple times, including in the and . Host comedian Chris Rock perhaps best captured the story’s ambivalence during his . Offering genuine condolences to the victim and his family, Rock added, “But sometimes drug dealers get shot. You seen The Wire, right?”

The internet, meanwhile, seems to still love Mangione. Social media purrs with people “,” while on Yelp and Google piled up for the McDonald’s where an employee provided key information leading to Mangione’s arrest. A quick dive into Reddit threads and X posts reveals a mix of support, concern, and dark humour. Yet as news reports and pop-culture commentary demonstrate, the focus remains on Mangione’s popularity. What do these jokes, reviews, and conversations reveal about our culture’s relationship to violence and justice?

Violence often becomes acceptable when the systems meant to uphold fairness and justice fail. In hockey, this plays out in fights, celebrated as acts of schoolyard justice. In society, it takes the form of vigilantes like Luigi Mangione, whose attack on Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was both a symbolic and real act against a system that sacrifices human lives for profit. When people believe that those in charge can’t or won’t distinguish between good and evil, they take matters into their own hands. We often feel that if this means the gloves need to come off, violence is unfortunate but acceptable. But tolerating hockey fights and vigilantes like Luigi tells us something about the culture that produces and celebrates them.

Both reflect a shared dynamic: a failure of the system to regulate fairness and justice, and the rise of an informal, self-policing “code” to fill that gap. In hockey, the “code” is the unwritten ethic of self-regulation—a jungle law where players settle disputes themselves through fights. My colleague, ÌìÑÄÉçÇø professor Stacy Lorenz, has done extensive research into the history of fighting in hockey. In one entry on "Thinking Sociologically about Fighting in Hockey and ‘The Code,’” Lorenz describes the code as any player who “crosses the line” in the game “must pay the price” by fighting. Much of the debate over fighting in hockey is whether or not it prevents further violence (spoiler alert, according to Lorenz, it ). But what gets less attention is how the helped shape a model of masculinity and race for national identity. In-game confrontations ultimately reinforce the broader community ethos.

In society, vigilantes like Luigi operate within a similar code. His act of violence targeted Thompson as the embodiment of corporate greed, a CEO accused of denying healthcare to increase profits. Luigi’s actions were more than symbolic—they reflect a collective frustration with a system that prioritizes wealth over humanity.

But unlike hockey, where the narrative it’s-all-part-of-the-game signals closure, our culture doesn’t offer catharsis for these acts of vigilante justice. Instead, we replay the drama on platforms like Saturday Night Live skits, podcasts, and viral tweets. As the podcast noted, this cultural phenomenon aligns with the “Ryan Murphy effect,” where stories of killers or vigilantes are dramatized to make them attractive and relatable, changing the audience’s relationship with the story’s outcome. Luigi becomes the good-looking antihero fighting for justice, much like hockey enforcers are celebrated for defending their teammates. These figures reinforce our desire to see systemic failures addressed, but they also distract us from holding those systems—and ourselves—accountable.

This dynamic reveals a deeper problem: our trust in formal systems has eroded. In hockey, the “code” exists because players don’t trust officials to enforce justice fairly. In society, vigilantes like Luigi emerge when people no longer trust that corporate or government leaders know—or care—about the difference between greed and equity. The key message of both hockey fights and vigilantism is the same: we’ll settle this ourselves. But this ethos, while satisfying in the moment, leaves the system itself intact. Heroes and fighters may address the symptoms of injustice, but their exceptionalism ensures that systemic change remains elusive.

And as spectators, we are complicit. It’s not just that we find these dramas entertaining—it’s that we rely on exceptional figures to address systemic problems, outsourcing our responsibility for justice. This reliance reinforces the failures of the system, perpetuating a cycle where the exceptional few bear the burden of fixing what’s broken while the rest of us look on.

However, this spectacle also has the potential to sharpen our moral imagination. Watching hockey fights or vigilante justice unfold shouldn’t just entertain us; it should provoke reflection on why these acts happen and what they reveal about our world. In both cases, violence dramatizes systemic failures, but it also offers an opportunity to critically analyze the systems we live in and our role within them. We’re not just watching players drop gloves or vigilantes act; we’re watching politics, culture, and morality play out before us. The question isn’t whether the violence is justified—it’s whether we can use these moments to better understand, and ultimately fix, the systems that fail us all.