In the last scene of Terrence Malick’s 1973 film, BadlandsA recently arrested serial killer sits handcuffed next to a state trooper. Unfazed by the prospect of the electric chair, the killer compliments the soldier’s state-issued Stetson. “You are quite unique, Kit,” said the soldier. Kit looks at him and deadpans: “Do you think they’ll take that into consideration?”
Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare’s CEO last week in Midtown Manhattan, is quite an individual: full-bodied bookworm, certified computer genius, scion of Baltimore wealth. Or at least he seemed like a complete individual, until he was found with a manifesto on him, which made it clear that Mangione’s policies were as banal as they were deplorable.
The manifesto, according to a police report, says: “Frankly, these parasites simply had it planned. » He then lists some false or misleading statistics about the American health care system. Companies “are abusing our country to obtain immense profits,” Mangione said, before congratulating himself on having been “the first to confront (the problem) with such brutal honesty.”
The clichés betray the absence of reflection. Brutal honesty— I find that honesty and brutality often conflict. Mangione acknowledges that others understand the failures of the American health care system better than he does. What is really new, then, is not honesty but brutality, which, according to his manifesto, is honesty in its pure, medical form.
In addition to this social criticism, Mangione reportedly experienced personal frustrations regarding medical care for back pain. He was residing in a co-living space in Honolulu, and RJ Martin, the community leader, said The New York Times that Mangione suffered from persistent back pain that made sexual relations impossible. The back pain is a nightmare, but it’s unclear what form kept him from having sex while seemingly leaving him free to stalk and kill a man and ride through Central Park on an electric bike. Regardless, we can understand his pain, and even his frustration at the idea of having his claims processed. But that would reduce his fight from an anti-capitalist crusade to a private jihad against customer service reps, and reduce him from a propagandist of action to an armed Karen.
Before Mangione’s capture, when it was widely known that a man had walked up to an insurance executive and shot him several times in the back, many people seemed ready to turn the assassin into a hero popular, an avenger who had interrupted a mustache-twirling predatory capitalist mid-step. Writer Taylor Lorenz, formerly of The Washington Post, The New York Timesand this magazine, said she felt “joy” over the CEO’s execution and shared a celebratory image (complete with cartoon party balloons) reading Broken CEO. Someone else seems to have gotten a tattoo of Mangione. Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and former Biden administration official, said he refuses to “tolerate violence,” but job on social media, that through its own unethical behavior, UnitedHealthcare had “encouraged others” to “abandon basic ethical principles” – in this case, by assassinating its own CEO. Senator Elizabeth Warren had a similar difficulty distinguishing between rage at a broken and labyrinthine health care system and the impulse to kill. “If you push people hard enough,” she says said HuffPothey are “starting to take matters into their own hands.”
Wu deleted his position. It is not difficult to see the moral error of his message, if we imagine these same mitigations demanded, for example, for having skinned the CEO, or for having slowly plunged him, feet first, into a vat of boiling oil while her children were forced to watch. Did the health insurance fund also encourage these forms of revenge? In the spirit of civility, I suppose he would say that the failures of the insurance company do not explain or mitigate the murder for the same reason that they do not mitigate these other horrible crimes. The murderer, like the executioner, may well have his own moral failings, unrelated to those of UnitedHealthcare.
Lorenz, on the other hand, has the courage of his lack of conviction. After feeling his elation at this man’s execution, she went on Piers Morgan’s show to giggle She maneuvered her way into justifying the situation by claiming that “greedy health insurance executives like this one” had “murdered” tens of thousands of innocent people by denying their claims. She said the CEO’s summary execution “feels like justice,” while adding that she would rather “fix the system” than resort to murder.
“Philosophers have only analyzed the world”, Karl Marx wrote in 1845. “But it’s about changing it. » It’s been a very long fall since Theses on Feuerbach laugh on Piers Morgan’s show. Lorenz, like Mangione, gives no evidence of his knowledge of left-wing debates about the use and abuse of violence – much less more recent debates. research on the power of non-violence. Moreover, she and Mangione seem to have ignored Marx’s view that changing the world is inseparable from the process of understanding it. In Mangione’s notebook, he would have derided the UnitedHealthcare executive as a “bean-counting conference,” as if bean-counting was not an important part of allocating limited resources.
Only the most incurious moral observer could accuse this CEO, whose name few activists knew until they started tattooing his assassin’s face on their legs, of mass murder – as if his company was stalking its customers and shot them down in the street. The claim that insurance company executives are murderers, and therefore easy prey for murderers, is the health care equivalent of Bertolt Brecht’s quip that we don’t know who is greatest. thief, one who robs a bank or one who opens one. But the most serious Marxists have now come to the idea that only with a well-regulated banking sector can an economy grow enough to allow people to live decently. (In Cuba, one of the few countries to still have a Brechtian vision of banks, poverty is such that beggars approach tourists in the street to ask them for leftover soaps that they might have brought back from abroad. ) On the other hand, otherwise intelligent people don’t seem to realize that health care involves trade-offs, that countries without private insurance tend to ration it, and that many health systems healthier than ours still have extensive private insurance, administered by infuriating bureaucracies that sometimes refuse reimbursement requests.
Then there is the question of strategy. The “entirely individual” state soldier Badlands was played, in an unlikely appearance, by John Womack Jr., then already a prominent left-wing historian of Mexico. At Womack last book called on organizers to think strategically about how unions can force a company to treat workers fairly, using workers’ own technical expertise to help identify choke points in the economy where their strikes would have an effect maximum. They could do this through purely voluntary action: no violence, no threats of violence, just people effecting change in a society by showing how society works and how it fails to function without its workers.
It sometimes seems that the activists have learned nothing and have forgotten everything. Consider Womack’s sophisticated theory of social and economic change, born from careful study of electricians’ unions in Mexico, and compare it to the theory that achieving health care reform requires putting on a sweatshirt hoodie, shoot a man in the back and then get caught a few days later while eating an Egg McMuffin. From this action and the joy it aroused, we learn not that the health system is broken, but that many of us are.