On December 4, Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealth, the largest health insurance provider in the US, was gunned down on the street in New York City. This blatant assassination in broad daylight was stunning, but only slightly more so than the torrent of vitriol and celebration that poured out, not just on social media, but on establishment media outlets as well from people who are not anonymous “posters” online.
Even before his capture and identification, Luigi Mangioni had overnight turned into a folk hero to many people on the left, and even some on the right, for striking a cathartic blow against what many view to be an exploitative and harmful system. This adulation was cranked up even further when, after his capture in Altoona, Pennsylvania, his rather elite background (and attractive shirtless pictures) were sleuthed out online.
Mangioni’s exact motives and reasoning are still rather unclear and, given his questionable decision-making in the wake of the killing, it seems possible that he was a person of high intelligence who had a psychotic breakdown in the wake of health issues and, it is speculated, the use of psychedelics to deal with said health issues.
Whether his actions were carried out in a fit of madness or not has not stopped his glorification and attempted justification for his actions. Taylor Lorenz, a former reporter for The Washington Post and Vox, is perhaps most infamous for openly celebrating Thompson’s death and saying that it brought her “joy”. She also posted the information of other health insurance CEOs in what seemed to be an encouragement for further killings.
She is not the only one. Many people’s comments go far beyond using humor to deal with the tragedy of human existence into openly celebrating a cold-blooded assassination because of who the victim was. (This also happened in July in the wake of the failed assassination against then-candidate Trump).
No doubt the vast majority of people who are celebrating his death had never even heard of Brian Thompson before he was gunned down. But basically all aspects of the health care system, including insurance companies, have a negative reputation among Americans. This industry is so vast and abstract that there is hardly one specific cause, person, or institution that can be blamed. As a result, when he was killed, Thompson was transformed from being just one of many important figures in an enormous industry to being its totemic representation onto whom millions could pour their frustrations.
Unfortunately, these reactions are not really aberrations in human history. This is a primal human reaction that is devoid of logic. But that has not stopped some people from attempting to justify Thompson’s execution on the sidewalk—and their gruesome reaction to it—on the basis that the company he ran is allegedly horrible or that he was being investigated for various crimes. However, at the end of the day, it does not matter whether Thompson was guilty of the crimes and injustices that he is accused of perpetrating. It is simple—if one thinks about it for more than two minutes—to extrapolate how the principles being espoused to justify Thompson being killed would quickly result in the complete collapse of the social order.
As Jeff Bezos noted in his editorial explaining why The Washington Post would not be endorsing a candidate, trust in the media is even lower than that of Congress. Should journalists, like Taylor Lorenz, really be trying to justify killing people because you think they are bad and terrible? That might not turn out too well for the media.
Similarly, Elizabeth Warren took to MSNBC to more or less justify Thompson being murdered, saying, “Violence is never the answer…but you can only push people so far and then they start to take matters into their own hands.” If history is any guide, such matter-taking usually manifests in the guillotine, the gulag, and the killing fields, and establishment politicians generally don’t fare well either.
If thinking you’ve been wronged by someone or even just thinking someone wronged someone else was the only criteria to justify unilateral punishment or execution, then many of us who have experienced life with its many tragedies would have quite a hit list we would be tempted to carry out. And, under the law of the jungle, such violence would be our only recourse in a nasty, brutish, and short life. However, we do not live under the law of the jungle, at least for now. Our vast and complicated interconnected division of labor is only made possible by there being strict boundaries on the use of force.
Without such boundaries, social life would cease to exist. Ludwig von Mises explains this simple fact in the sub-section “State and Government” in his classic book Liberalism. He notes that, “A small number of antisocial individuals, i.e., persons who are not willing or able to make the temporary sacrifices that society demands of them, could make all society impossible.”
In other words, even if we were to take at face value all the alleged crimes and injustices that Thompson has supposedly inflicted on the world, the costs of exacting mob judgment upon him far outweigh the supposed benefits. As Mises puts it,
The continued existence of society as the association of persons working in cooperation and sharing a common way of life is in the interest of every individual. Whoever gives up a momentary advantage in order to avoid imperiling the continued existence of society is sacrificing a lesser gain for a greater one.
Mises makes a very true and important point from a very consequentialist-minded perspective. However, there are other, more personal reasons to be skeptical of embracing an attitude that leads to celebrating unilateral judgment of the kind perpetrated by Mangione. Assuming the role of judge, jury, and executioner, as Mangione did, is truly an act of astounding epistemic hubris, which is all the more strange given how he seemingly didn’t understand much of the American health system, and how many of his cheerleaders had no idea who Thompson was to begin with.
Life is immensely complicated, and all the more so when it comes to attempting to parse out the rights and wrongs of a vast bureaucratic system. This complexity calls for humility in our views, not giving into vulgar base and primal violent instincts. It may be useful to reflect on the words of Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring, in response to Frodo’s statement that he wished Gollum—a pathetic and vile creature who had endangered him—had been killed. Gandalf admonishes him that, “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
Such a statement is not a call for pacifism, or a claim that no one should ever be punished, or perhaps even be executed. It is, however, a call to recognize the limits of one’s knowledge when it comes to complicated matters of justice and to exercise prudence in light of that fact. Mangioine and his cheerleaders have not only threatened the foundations of the social order, but ultimately the state of their very souls.
