In the last scene of Terrence Malick’s 1973 film, Badlands, a recently arrested spree killer is sitting handcuffed next to a state trooper. Unperturbed by the prospect of the electric chair, the killer compliments the trooper’s state-issued Stetson. “You’re quite an individual, Kit,” the trooper says. Kit looks at him and deadpans: “Think they’ll take that into consideration?”
Luigi Mangione, the man charged with murdering the CEO of UnitedHealthcare last week in Midtown Manhattan, is quite an individual: hard-bodied bookworm, certified computer genius, scion of Baltimore wealth. Or at least, he seemed like he was quite an individual, until he was found with a manifesto on his person, and it made clear that Mangione’s politics are as commonplace as they are deplorable.
The manifesto, according to a police report, says, “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.” It then lists a few false or misleading statistics about America’s health-care system. The companies “abuse our country for immense profit,” Mangione says, before complimenting himself for being “the first to face [the problem] with such brutal honesty.”
The clichés give away the absence of thought. Brutal honesty—I find that honesty and brutality are often opposed to each other. Mangione acknowledges that others understand the failures of the U.S. health-care system better than he does. So what’s really novel is not the honesty but the brutality, which his manifesto suggests is honesty in its pure, medical-grade form.
In addition to this social critique, Mangione reportedly had personal frustrations with medical care for a bad back. He resided in a co-living space in Honolulu, and R. J. Martin, the commune’s leader, told The New York Times that Mangione suffered from persistent back pain that made sex impossible. Back pain is a nightmare, but it’s unclear what form of it stopped him from having sex while apparently leaving him free to stalk and kill a man and ride away through Central Park on an e-bike. In any case, one may sympathize with his pain, and even his frustrations with trying to get claims processed. But that would reduce his struggle from an anti-capitalist crusade to a private jihad against customer-service reps, and reduce him from a propagandist of the deed to an armed Karen.
Before Mangione’s capture, when all the public knew was that a man had walked up to an insurance executive and shot him repeatedly in the back, many people seemed ready to turn the murderer into a folk hero, an avenger who had interrupted a predatory capitalist in mid-mustache-twirl. The writer Taylor Lorenz, formerly of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and this magazine, said she felt “joy” at the CEO’s execution, and shared a celebratory image (with cartoon party balloons) reading CEO down. Someone else appears to have gotten a tattoo of Mangione. Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia and a former Biden-administration official, said he refused to “condone violence,” but posted on social media that by its own unethical behavior, UnitedHealthcare had “encourage[d] others” to “abandon core principles of ethics”—in this case, by murdering its own CEO. Senator Elizabeth Warren had similar trouble distinguishing between rage at a broken and labyrinthine health-care system, and the impulse to kill. “If you push people hard enough,” she told HuffPo, they “start to take matters into their own hands.”
Wu deleted his post. It is not hard to see the moral fallacy in his message, if one imagines these same mitigations claimed for, say, flaying the CEO, or slowly dipping him, feet first, in a vat of boiling oil while his children were forced to watch. Did the health-insurance company encourage these forms of vengeance, too? In the spirit of comity I shall assume that he would say that the insurance company’s failings don’t explain or mitigate murder for the same reason they don’t mitigate these other horrific crimes. The murderer, like the torturer, just might have moral failings of his own, unrelated to those of UnitedHealthcare.
Lorenz, by contrast, has the courage of her absence of convictions. After taking heat for her elation at the man’s execution, she went on Piers Morgan’s show to chuckle her way through a justification, by saying that “greedy health-insurance executives like this one” had “murdered” tens of thousands of innocents by denying their claims. She said the summary execution of the CEO “feels like justice,” though she added that she preferred to “fix the system” rather than resort to murder.
“The philosophers have only analyzed the world,” Karl Marx wrote in 1845. “But the point is to change it.” It is a very long fall from Theses on Feuerbach to laughing on Piers Morgan’s show. Lorenz, like Mangione, gives no evidence of acquaintance with the debates on the left about the uses and abuses of violence—let alone the more recent research on the potency of nonviolence. Moreover, she and Mangione seem to have disregarded Marx’s point, which was that changing the world is inseparable from the process of understanding it. In Mangione’s notebook, he reportedly derided the UnitedHealthcare executive as holding a “bean counting conference,” as if the counting of beans were not an important part of allocating scarce 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 killing—as if his company hunted its customers and gunned them down in the streets. The claim that insurance-company executives are murderers, and therefore fair game for murderers, is the health-care equivalent of Bertolt Brecht’s quip about not knowing who was the greater thief, the one who robs a bank or the one who opens one. But most serious Marxists have by now come around to the idea that only with a well-regulated banking sector can an economy grow enough to let people live decently. (In Cuba, one of the few countries that still takes a Brechtian view of banks, the poverty is such that beggars approach tourists in the street to ask them for leftover soap bars they might have brought from abroad.) By contrast, otherwise smart people seem not to realize that health care involves trade-offs, that countries without private insurance tend to ration it, and that many health-care systems healthier than our own still have extensive private insurance, administered by maddening bureaucracies that sometimes refuse claims.
Then there is the question of strategy. The “quite an individual” state trooper in Badlands was played, in an improbable cameo, by John Womack Jr., then already a distinguished leftist historian of Mexico. Womack’s last book called on organizers to think strategically about how unions can compel a society to deal equitably with workers, by using the workers’ own technical expertise to help identify the choke points in the economy where their strikes would have maximum effect. They could do this with purely voluntary action: no violence, no threats of violence, just people effecting change in a society by showing how the society works, and how it fails to work without its workers.
It sometimes seems that activists have learned nothing and forgotten everything. Consider Womack’s sophisticated theory of social and economic change, born from careful study of electricians’ unions in Mexico—and compare it with the theory that to achieve health-care reform, one should put on a hoodie, shoot a guy in the back, and then get caught a few days later while eating an Egg McMuffin. From this action, and the glee that it has elicited, one learns not that the health-care system is broken but that many of us are.
2024-12-11 19:45:00
