By Graeme Wood
Wednesday, December 11, 2024
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.
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