Why Light Yourself on Fire?
Thoughts on the man who burned himself alive outside the Trump trial.
“My name is Max Azzarello, and I am an investigative researcher who has set himself on fire outside of the Trump trial in Manhattan.
This extreme act of protest is to draw attention to an urgent and important discovery:
We are victims of a totalitarian con, and our own government (along with many of their allies) is about to hit us with an apocalyptic fascist world coup.”
The above is the beginning of a manifesto by a 37-year-old Florida man named Max Azzarello, who several days ago threw a bunch of pamphlets into the air moments before setting himself on fire in Manhattan in the closing minutes of the Trump trial. The pamphlets contained links to a Substack newsletter titled "The Ponzi Papers," which are written by Azzarello himself.
The Substack blog’s ‘About’ section contains this:
“After Peter Thiel started a bank run in March 2023, we did 1,500 hours of research and uncovered proof of a totalitarian con-job that's been bleeding us dry since 1988 and will soon collapse the world economy.”
1,500 hours? Has he been keeping a timesheet?
Whether it was really 1,500 hours or not, clear Azzarello dedicated a lot of his time towards internet ‘research’. Note that he even called himself an ‘investigative researcher’, rather than ‘just some guy in his thirties’.
Here’s a little context on his beliefs. This is too reductive to give a full picture, but his full manifesto is linked above.
On Politics:
“As it turns out, we have a secret kleptocracy: Both parties are run by financial criminals whose only goals are to divide, deceive, and bleed us dry. They divide the public against itself and blame the other party while everything gets worse and more expensive and handful of people take all the money.”
According to Azarello, cryptocurrency is a giant Ponzi scheme and the Elites are swarming the global public in dystopian media and cultural narratives to produce pessimism and reduce the desire for revolutionary change.
“And on, and on, and on, and on. When it comes to any popular media, if you ask yourself the question, “Why would secret doomsday cult kleptocrats want the public to consume this?”, you will find your answers.”
In conclusion:
“Lastly, we string these major discoveries together: Cryptocurrency is an economic doomsday device; our government is a secret kleptocracy; The Simpsons exists to brainwash us. From there, the only research we need is critical thinking and we’re able to piece together the true story of our circumstances.”
The call to action:
“If a small number of people quickly put on these truth-colored glasses, we are in for an unimaginably bright future. If not, we get an apocalypse.”
***
Plato says that ignorance may be divided into two sorts: ‘simple ignorance’ and ‘double ignorance’. Simple ignorance is less serious. Double ignorance "is accompanied by a conceit of wisdom; and he who is under the influence of the latter fancies that he knows all about matters of which he knows nothing" (Laws, 863cd).
One effect of the internet is that in curing simple ignorance through the immense availability of information, the internet unfortunately renders us vulnerable to the latter. Unfortunately, this man was smart enough to research on the internet, put together an argument, and bold enough to publicise his ‘findings’. However, he was not smart enough doubt anything he believed it. It’s not important that Azzarello is this level of narrow-minded, it’s that the internet tends to produce this kind of thinking en masse in people. It’s a widespread pathology – there’s so much information available nobody knows what to do with it, so they just use it to help them believe things they already want to believe.
Also, there is nothing ever published online that doesn’t have some aim (or multiple ones) in mind. Even everything you see online is the product of deliberate design. You only get to see and know what other people want you to know. The most basic of these, and the aim of everything every produced for the internet is the pursuit of interestingness. This isn’t just about interpretating an event in the most emotionally titulating way, but also purely what gets focussed on as well. Everything that can’t be spun into an enthralling story gets cast away and left out. This changes the style of thinking of many people. It also isn’t an inherent evil, nor an inherent good.
So, the internet allows the delusion that you know things that you really don't; the mistake that the thoughts you do have are your own, and changes the way you think, reinforcing this style of thinking.
If you read Azzarello’s manifesto, this becomes clear. He consistently draws far-reaching judgements and conclusions, weighting things incorrectly, and frequently makes the cardinal error of ascribing evil to instances of sheer human ignorance. The world is a balance of extremes, good and evil, exciting and mundane. But Azzarello purely focuses on the evil and exciting. There is plenty of these, yet if this exclusively comprises your worldview, you are thinking a mile wide and an inch deep.
Perhaps, just perhaps, he was consumed by internet interestingness in politics because he was existentially bored. What’s worse than fighting an enemy is the realization that the powers that be may not even consider you threatening enough to oppress. People aren’t oppressed, they are isolated. The lack of clear, immediate enemy in our Western 21st century world may lead people to seek one out, find it and implant it into their brains. I submit to you that in fact this is necessary psychologically, for if people had no ‘bogeyman in the closet’ they would cease to function out of sheer boredom.
Instead of curing his existential boredom by going deeper into himself, as Kierkegaard would suggest, he went deeper into the internet, which is other people’s thoughts. But remember one of the consequences of the internet is the delusion that other people’s thoughts are in fact your own. He learnt that reading other people’s thoughts were the only way he could cure his bored despair, his ‘inability to be himself’.
His Instagram provides a public history of who he was, and his transformation of identity, public and private, is clear if you look at it. The comment on his most recent posts are a flood of interest, some find him a martyr, others mock him, others, like me, wish to understand him. The people who agree with his beliefs prove that he is not unique or alone in his ideology. Many in fact share his views to some extent on the government, cryptocurrency, the elites and the economy. They believe the same things as him, but they do not follow in his footsteps. Why?
Azzarello at some point made the shift from a passive consumer of the internet through ‘research’ to a more active contributor via his Instagram posts and Substack. He wanted to become a public, not private identity. His life became an existence for the internet, which took his despair happily into its arms and told him he would never face it again if he became a performer. Yet to do this, he needed to be interesting to strangers. To be worthy of discussing. And what’s a better way of doing that than setting yourself on fire?
The medium of the internet was inextricably a part of what happened to this man.