He's Not Robin Hood

On Mangione and why it's idiotic to cheer on murder (omg, duh) and what that says about us.

And now comes the part where we celebrate the death of a man no one knew the name of until after he bled out on the streets of New York.

How quickly the American public can be radicalized if only the right victim is chosen. George Floyd, Gaza, and now Brian Thompson. Of course, the crowds that are lamenting the deaths of the former aren’t grieving for the latter; they’re rejoicing.

We’ve all been around for the last four years or so. We’ve seen every news-reading, Reddit-scrolling, jaw-working nitwit become an expert in police brutality, the Israel/Palestine conflict, and now, the American healthcare system. For a nation of polymaths, you think we’d be doing better than we are.

Brian Thompson was killed by some ill-informed wannabe revolutionary for the crime of being CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Oh, wait, my mistake, being CEO of a company — no matter how wretched — isn’t illegal in America.

The tepid or often outright applause Luigi Mangione has received for allegedly assassinating Thompson because of his occupation is disturbing. A father of two was shot in the back in New York City, and because no one likes the healthcare industry, it just might be an act of heroism.

To believe that executives of corporations are the sole harbingers of societal rot and suffering is the type of thing that leads one down the primrose path of Marxism. It’s part of a broader political dialectic that posits that every success comes at the cost of someone else’s misfortune. It’s also profoundly asinine to ignore the role government, culture, and complex systems — not just soul-crushing, Borg-like corporations — play in constructing the environment in which we live.

So, did Brian Thompson deserve to die? Should executives everywhere be shaking in their boots at the thought of some mentally ill vigilante taking justice into their own hands? Let’s find out.

First, as someone who does believe in the necessity of political violence, it’s worth asking what are the requisite conditions that would justify such a killing. Well, you know, it would have to be the familiar staples of history — oppression, legitimized violence, exploitation, etc. But it can’t be that alone; all other recourse would have to be exhausted before taking action — voting, protest, lobbying, public pressure campaigns, and the like. As far as I know, America’s new favorite Italian didn’t try to organize any of the aforementioned activities before going full Unabomber.

For all the people, from professors to journalists to whatever you call Joy Reid, who are romanticizing the murder as a politically justified crime of desperation, let’s be clear: Mangione was not Jean Valjean, and he wasn’t exactly stealing a loaf of bread. America is many things, but 18th-century France isn’t one of them.

Okay, but say those conditions were met, was the CEO of UnitedHealth really the appropriate target?

Executives, by and large, are the same as everyone else. Just as dock workers are generally dock workers, so are executives. It’s the same pool of people with the same ambitions, the same directives, and the same willing obeisance to the social order as the rest of their Greek-life cohort. Thompson wasn’t uniquely evil, he was just playing his part.

CEOs are obligated to act in the shareholder’s best interest. If Thompson had bucked the system for a more compassionate brand of healthcare provider, his tenure would’ve been short-lived. Plus, I’m to believe that the schmucks golf-clapping his killer would have had the temerity, independence, and virtue to not cash in a 9 million dollar salary, and work for the betterment of people’s lives?

And let’s suppose all of these things supported his death (which they don’t), what if I told you that this company of bloodsuckers and cretins employs almost half a million people? Has anyone bothered to do the calculus on whether or not the food they put on the table for 440,000 people is worth less than the harm they cause? Probably not, because that would be too complicated of a word problem.

Let’s look past the glass offices and to the corporations that use UnitedHealth as the insurance provider. Shouldn’t they be the ones culpable? After all, it’s a free market, and Walmart, Zaxby’s, and Best Buy are all able to pick whatever provider best fits their bottom line. If any of these companies are picking the cheapest of options, shouldn’t it be their CEO’s head on the proverbial pike? If enough retail and office chains took their business elsewhere, UHC would be forced to improve their offering.

Or what about the folks who decided to handcuff healthcare to employment? The Eisenhower Administration, through Congress, ushered in a tax break that made all employer contributions to employee healthcare tax-free. This cemented the employment-health insurance relationship so much that the consumer market for private insurance became effectively nil.

Obamacare (the Affordable Healthcare Act) made a bad problem substantially worse. Networks narrowed, and doctors switched those networks like baseball players swap teams in the offseason (sorry, Yankees fans). Premiums went up, and providers were further incentivized to keep the sick or those with pre-existing conditions off their books. There’s not anyone around from the Eisenhower days to take the blame, but I have a hunch there’s someone from the years 2008 to 2016 who isn’t issuing a mea culpa.

Or what about the FDA, which routinely approves dangerous drugs that have to be recalled within a couple of years? Or the pharmaceutical companies who are more interested in profits than effective medicine?

Or what about the companies that are allowed to put unnecessary chemicals into children's cereals? Maybe the descendants of whoever green-lighted the use of motor oil for human consumption after WWII could be tracked down. Or maybe we should do something about McDonald’s.

There is no silver bullet for complex systems, and the American public has hardly put forth a concerted effort to understand them, much less alter them, before issuing a glib ‘serves you right’ to the murder of a man who was just a small cog in the machine.

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in the novel, the main character ends up in an insane asylum — that makes more sense.

It wasn’t a one-off when Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto went viral sometime in the last couple of years — or when Osama bin Laden had all the rizz on TikTok. The lionization of Luigi Mangione is just another instance of the same trend.

Not to be overly cinematic, but modern society is at a precipice. In the coming years, millennials and Zoomers will receive the largest generational wealth transfer in the history of the United States. The boomers, who largely crafted all of the trappings of contemporary America, did so on the backs of the greatest generation that we’ve produced thus far. Patriotism, free markets, and actual American ideology are cornerstones of the older generation.

When we youngsters are fully in charge, not just in control of the diversity and inclusion branches of your favorite accounting firms, it won’t take but a couple of sparks to ignite a wildfire.

Undergirding the adoration of the pseudo-Robin Hood is an animating resentment and a pervasive nihilism that has yet to be softened by parenthood and responsibility.

It’s a particularly dangerous ideology in the hands of the soon-to-be economically and socially powerful, as the motivation for destruction is never far away but the inspiration to create is far more scarce.

How fitting it is that Mangione’s ‘manifesto’ offers no analysis of why he thinks the healthcare system is broken or what should replace it. The riots of 2020 offered no suggestion as to how to fix policing in America, just to tear it down. There hasn’t been a single pat on the back of Mangione coupled with an actual — and no, just saying single-payer doesn’t count as actual — proposal on how to improve healthcare in America.

A generation raised on Fight Club and superhero movies is predictably gleeful at the prospect of detonating the status quo, and adept at finding supervillains where there are none.

I’ve seen more celebration online for the murder of a run-of-the-mill executive than I did when the Butcher of Tehran’s helicopter decided it was on the side of humanity and plummeted into the side of a mountain. Not that every demographic doesn’t have their own suffering, but the egoism apparent in those cheering homicide in a wealthy, free nation is nauseating.

It’s not about you, it’s not about Mangione, and it’s certainly not about Thompson. It’s about a broken, imperfect, complex system.

And in the wake of the killing of an innocent man one December morning, it’s not the time to talk about it. It’s time to talk about us.

To a better next week,

Cheers,

~FDA