Luigi Mangione’s common place, deplorable politics

In the final scene of Terrence Malick’s 1973 film, Badlandsa recently arrested felon sits handcuffed next to a state trooper. Unfazed by the prospect of the electric chair, the killer compliments Stetson, freed from the soldiers’ state. “You’re quite an individual, Kit,” says the soldier. Kit looks at him and thinks, “Do you think they’ll consider that?”

Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare last week in Midtown Manhattan, is quite the individual: tough bookworm, computer genius, scion of Baltimore’s riches. Or at least, he seemed to be an individual, until he was found with a manifesto on his person and made it clear that Mangione’s policies are as banal as they are deplorable.

The manifesto, according to a police report, says: “Honestly, these vermin just came.” He then lists some false or misleading statistics about America’s health care system. The companies are “abusing our country for huge profit,” Mangione says, before congratulating himself for being “the first to face (the problem) with such brutal honesty.”

Read: Murder is a horrifying response to health care fury

Clichés reveal the absence of thought. Brutal honesty— I find that honesty and brutality are often opposed to each other. Mangione acknowledges that others understand the failings of the US health care system better than he does. So what is really new is not honesty, but brutality, which his manifesto suggests is honesty in its pure, medical-grade form.

In addition to this social criticism, Mangione had personal frustrations with medical care for a bad back. He lived in a co-living space in Honolulu, and RJ Martin, the leader of the commune, said The New York Times that Mangione suffered from persistent back pain that made sex impossible. The back pain is a nightmare, but it’s unclear what form prevented him from having sex, while apparently leaving him free to chase and kill a man and ride around Central Park on an electric bike. In any case, one can sympathize with his pain and even his frustrations in trying to process the claims. But that would reduce his fight from an anti-capitalist crusade to a private jihad against customer service representatives, and reduce him from a propagandist of the deed to a one-armed Karen.

Before Mangione’s capture, when the public only knew that a man walked up to an insurance executive and shot him repeatedly in the back, many people seemed ready to turn the killer into a folk hero, an avenger who had interrupted a predatory capitalist in middle whisker-spin. Writer Taylor Lorenz, his ex The Washington Post, The New York Timesand this magazine, said he felt “joy” at the CEO’s execution and shared a celebratory image (with cartoon party balloons) reading CEO down. Looks like someone else got one tattoo from Mangione. Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and former Biden administration official, said he refused to “tolerate violence” but POSTED on social media that through its own unethical behavior, UnitedHealthcare has “encouraged others” to “abandon basic principles of ethics” — in this case, by killing its own CEO. Senator Elizabeth Warren had similar trouble distinguishing between anger at a broken and labyrinthine health care system and the urge to kill. “If you push people hard enough,” she said HuffPothey are “starting to take matters into their own hands.”

Wu wiped his post. It’s not hard to see the moral fallacy in his message if we imagine the same mitigations claimed for, say, flaying the CEO or sinking him slowly, feet first, into a vat of boiling oil while his children were forced to look Did the health insurance company also encourage these forms of retaliation? In the spirit of courtesy, I will assume that he would say that the failures of the insurance company do not explain or mitigate the crime for the same reason that they do not mitigate these other horrible crimes. The killer, like the torturer, may have his own moral failings unrelated to those of UnitedHealthcare.

Lorenz, by contrast, has the courage of her lack of conviction. After taking heat for her glee at the man’s execution, she went to Piers Morgan’s show at chuckle her way through a justification, saying that “greedy health insurance executives like this” have “killed” tens of thousands of innocent people by denying their claims. She said the CEO’s summary execution “feels like justice”, although she added that she preferred to “fix the system” rather than resort to murder.

“Philosophers have only analyzed the world,” said Karl Marx he wrote in 1845. “But the idea is to change it.” It’s a very long fall from Theses on Feuerbach to laugh at Piers Morgan’s show. Lorenz, like Mangione, gives no evidence of familiarity with leftist debates about the uses and abuses of violence—much less the most recent ones. research on the potency of nonviolence. Moreover, she and Mangione seem to have ignored Marx’s point, which was that changing the world is inseparable from the process of understanding it. In Mangione’s notebook, he according to reports derided UnitedHealthcare executives as holding a “bean-counting conference,” as if bean-counting wasn’t an important part of allocating scarce resources.

Read: UnitedHealthcare gunman understands surveillance state

Only the most uncurious moral observer could accuse this CEO, whose name few activists knew until they began tattooing the killer’s face on their legs, of mass murder—as if his company had hunted customers and would shoot them 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 joke about not knowing who was the bigger thief, the one who robs a bank or the one who opens one. But most serious Marxists have by 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 that still adopts a Brechtian view of banks, poverty is such that beggars approach tourists on the street to ask for leftover soap they might have brought from abroad.) In instead, smart people. they 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 maddening bureaucracies that sometimes deny claims.

Then there is the matter of strategy. The “rather individual” state trooper of Badlands he was played, in an unlikely cameo, by John Womack Jr., by then already a distinguished left-wing historian of Mexico. Womack’s the last book asked organizers to think strategically about how unions can force a society to treat workers fairly, using workers’ technical expertise to help identify choke points in the economy where their strikes would have maximum effect. They could do this through purely voluntary action: no violence, no threats of violence, just people effecting change in a society, showing how society works and how it fails to work without its workers.

Sometimes it seems that activists have learned nothing and have forgotten everything. Consider Womack’s sophisticated theory of social and economic change, born out of a close study of electricians’ unions in Mexico—and compare it to the theory that to achieve health care reform, you have to wear a hoodie , shooting a guy in the back and then getting caught days later eating an Egg McMuffin. From this action and the joy it caused, it is not that the health care system is broken, but that many of us are.