Photo: Mike Segar/Reuters
The details are now known: minutes before dawn on December 4, a man wearing a hooded jacket, a gray backpack and a mask over the lower half of his face fired three shots from a silenced pistol at the back of his face. Brian Thompsonthe CEO of United Healthcareoutside the Hilton Hotel on West 54th Street. Thompson staggered forward, turned toward the gunman and collapsed. The shooter appeared to point the gun at Thompson one last time before walking away. The shooter escaped through Central Park, possibly on a bicycle; Thompson was pronounced dead at 7:12 a.m. The NYPD found shell casings at the scene with the words “DENY,” “DELAY” and “DEPOSE” printed on them — references, it seemed, to the tactics insurers use to avoid paying medical claims.
Murders in America are often described as ‘senseless’. As in, a senseless murder; a senseless act of violence. In general, we prefer to do it this way. After a mass shooting, we quietly hope to discover that the killer was mentally unwell and deprived of his senses. (The other form of meaninglessness we can tolerate is maliciousbut that’s harder to come by.) In contrast, in the days following the murder of Brian Thompson, we have seen an overload of meaning-making from across the political spectrum. Almost immediately, the “brazen, targeted attack,” as the NYPD called it, was interpreted as an act of retaliation against the profit-driven healthcare industryof which Thompson – who had increased UHC’s profits from $12 billion to $16 billion since 2021 and earned $10 million for his efforts in 2023 – was a prominent beneficiary and a powerful symbol. Vitriol against the insurance industry, and UnitedHealthcare in particular, flooded social media. The shooter was celebrated as folk hero. Macabre jokes multiplied. “Unfortunately, thoughts and prayers are off the grid,” one person joked. “Prior permission for our condolences required.” In response to a question from New York Times The story headlined, “A Outpouring of Hate for the Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO’s Murder,” reader comments teemed with health insurance horror stories: rejected claims, byzantine appeals, bankruptcy, misery, death. As one Times As the reader put it: “You get what you pay for… or in this case, what you don’t get.”
On Monday morning, police arrested a man matching the shooter’s description at a McDonalds in Altoona, Pennsylvania. According to police, the suspect had a firearm, a silencer and a fake ID. Also: a handwritten manifesto criticizing the healthcare sector. (“These parasites had it coming…” it supposedly said.) As long as he evaded capture, the gunman had remained the anonymous author of a very short story, whose sparse symbolic logic was impossible to ignore. Now, assuming the police have their man, bits of biography, political sympathies, medical records and other details will complicate the plot, further amplifying the brutally elegant conceit. As of Wednesday morning, much of the media seems to be happy with the suspect’s privileged background; It is believed that his Ivy League degree will diffuse any remaining sympathies. Americans may love an underdog, but they always hate an ingrate.
In the meantime, the question remains: what should we make of the public’s initial reaction? Anger, gloating, cynicism, frivolity, bloodlust – what does it say about our country that a murderous spectacle was greeted in this way? Had a latent hunger for revenge, for coercive violence, for revolution even, come to light? Experts wondered about that. “It’s being presented as an opening battle in a broader class war,” Alex Goldenberg, an intelligence analyst, told the paper Times. “That is very concerning because it increases the threat environment for similar actors to commit similar acts of violence.” And what about just plain harshness? Thompson was human, with a wife and two children. Have we not endangered our souls, if not our social order, by justifying their suffering?
It is rare for an American CEO or other public figure to be targeted in this way. But the structure of the feeling it released didn’t seem new to me. Americans have a lot of recent experience judging the worthiness of strangers for execution. It’s one of the things we do together online: when someone is killed by a cop or vigilante; when a protester is mowed down by a car; when a Palestinian child is killed by an Israeli sniper or an Israeli citizen by Hamas. Arguing over whose lives are expendable is one of America’s favorite pastimes.
What about our bloodlust? Should we worry that Americans have betrayed their appetite for political violence? Maybe. But the downside of pull is metabolism: not what we want, but how we endure what is given to us. We could say that Americans have a miraculous ability to metabolize cruelty and death – we have been conditioned to do so. As writer and gun violence expert Patrick Blanchfield put it to me: “This event gives us something quite rare: a situation in which a person who is the victim of a quintessentially American system of normalized human liquidation – that is, murder weapons – is also representative of that situation. another quintessentially American institution for throwing away human lives, our for-profit health care system, a key function of which is determining how much individual human lives are worth, and enforcing those assessments with ruthlessly incentivized efficiency.” For Blanchfield, Thompson’s murder and the system of mechanized brutality from which he benefited are part of the same regime of “human disposability”—a system in which human life, rather than being precious and priceless, is “an expendable commodity as everything’. otherwise.”
I sense the reader’s anxiety: does recognizing this connection implicitly confirm the killer’s logic? We sense that violence is not something we have to reason about. Tolerating — let alone celebrating — the elimination of one life for the sake of a political message feels like a dangerous surrender, a step toward routine horror. People are too vulnerable and too diverse to be reduced to such brutal arithmetic.
But why should our moral intuitions stop there? Ruthless arithmetic already rules our world. We are always subject to a regime that reduces people to numbers and makes them available as a means to an end. In the larger social order, death and reason are linked. Our military bureaucracies, weapons industries, police departments, hospital systems and, yes, private insurers agree: the expendability of human life can And must be decided rationally. Every day, powerful individuals make calculations about who should live and who should die, guided by judgments of relative worth—sometimes by ideas about security and who deserves it; often with the aim of keeping shareholders satisfied.
The shooter claimed this privilege for himself without a corporate bureaucracy, an algorithm, or a system of laws to authorize the privilege. It is a terrible thing to destroy a human life for the sake of propaganda, and a terrible thing to do so for the sake of profit. (There is pride in both.) We will not be able to disrupt our metabolism for social suffering by indulging our appetite for political violence; we cannot fight our way out of a society based on human disposability. But it must be said that violence finds more appeal and seduces more convincingly, in the absence of other obvious and meaningful ways to register dissatisfaction. As Americans die, go bankrupt, and wallow in despair under a health care system that prioritizes the profits of some over the basic needs of others: where do they turn? Who is listening?
In Stephen Sondheim’s bleak musical satire Murderersthe cast consists of presidential assassins and aspirants (e.g. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr., etc.). Each is depicted as some kind of loser or freak; their motives, while political, are also accompanied by a general sense of dissatisfaction, a sense that the American “right to be happy” has proven to be both hollow and seductive. (“Hey, boy, failed your test? Dream girl unimpressed? Show her you’re the best / If you can shoot a president…”) For Sondheim, violence makes sense in this way — a very American kind of feeling. If America is a land of opportunity, it will only remain that way because, in the last resort, when your life has not worked out and your share of happiness has been handed out to someone else, you can always claim your consolation prize: spectacle, celebrity, fame – and shoot the president.
Like America, Sondheim’s piece wears its cynicism on its sleeve, but only to guard against a naked sincerity underneath. We are sardonic about America’s promises because it is too painful to confront our weak faith in reality. (Only a true believer is capable of blasphemy.) What the piece suggests, at least to me, is that political violence is not incompatible with democracy; it feeds on the despair that democracy, in its crippled form, produces. Democracy cultivates in us moral impulses, imaginations and desires that require satisfaction. Violence is tempting when there is no plausible outlet for it, when the systems that govern our lives are overzealous in containing our fugitive hopes. As some of Sondheim’s killers sing:
And all you have to do
Squeeze your little finger
Move your little finger back –
You can change the world
Whatever else is true
You trust your little finger
Only one little finger
Can –
Change the world
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