By now, the details are familiar: Minutes before sunrise on December 4, a man wearing a hooded jacket, a gray backpack, and a mask over the bottom half of his face fired three shots from a silenced pistol at the back of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, outside the Hilton Hotel on West 54th Street. Thompson stumbled forward, turned to face the gunman, and collapsed. The shooter appeared to point the gun at Thompson a final time before walking away. The gunman escaped through Central Park, possibly by bike; Thompson was pronounced dead at 7:12 a.m. The NYPD recovered shell casings at the scene imprinted with the words “DENY,” “DELAY,” and “DEPOSE” — references, it seemed, to the tactics insurers use to avoid paying medical claims.
Homicides in America are often described as “senseless.” As in, a senseless killing; a senseless act of violence. In general, we prefer it that way. After a mass shooting, we quietly hope to find out the killer was mentally unwell, deprived of his senses. (The other form of senseless we can tolerate is evil, but that is harder to come by.) In the days since Brian Thompson’s murder, we have seen, by contrast, a surfeit of sense-making from across the political spectrum. Almost immediately, the “brazen, targeted attack,” as the NYPD termed it, was interpreted as an act of retribution against the for-profit health-care industry, of which Thompson — who had raised UHC’s profits from $12 billion to $16 billion since 2021, earning $10 million in 2023 for his trouble — was a prominent beneficiary and potent symbol. Vitriol against the insurance industry, and UnitedHealthcare in particular, flooded social media. The shooter was celebrated as a folk hero. Macabre jokes multiplied. “Unfortunately, thoughts and prayers are out-of-network,” someone quipped. “Pre-authorization for our condolences required.” In response to one New York Times story headlined, “A Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO’s Killing,” reader comments teemed with health-insurance horror stories: denied claims, byzantine appeals processes, bankruptcy, misery, death. As one Times reader put it, “You get what you pay for … or in this case, what you don’t.”
On Monday morning, law enforcement detained a man matching the shooter’s description at a McDonalds in Altoona, Pennsylvania. The suspect, police say, had a gun, a silencer, and fake identification in his possession. Also: a handwritten manifesto criticizing the health-care industry. (“These parasites had it coming …” it supposedly reads.) For as long as he evaded capture, the shooter had remained the anonymous author of a very short story, one whose parsimonious symbolic logic was impossible to ignore. Now, assuming the police have their man, bits of biography, political sympathies, medical records, and other details will complicate the plot, adding friction to its brutally elegant conceit. Much of the media seems pleased, as of Wednesday morning, to note the suspect’s privileged background; his Ivy League degree, it is presumed, will diffuse any remaining sympathies. Americans may love an underdog, but they always hate an ingrate.
In the meantime, the question remains: what to make of the public’s initial response. Anger, Schadenfreude, cynicism, glibness, bloodlust — what does it say about our country that a murderous spectacle was greeted this way? Had a latent appetite for vengeance, for coercive violence, for revolution even, been revealed? Experts wondered. “It’s being framed as some opening blow in a broader class war,” Alex Goldenberg, an intelligence analyst, told the Times. “Which is very concerning as it heightens the threat environment for similar actors to engage in similar acts of violence.” And what about plain hard-heartedness? Thompson was a human being, with a wife and two children. Did we not endanger our souls, if not our social order, by justifying their suffering?
It is a rare thing for an American CEO or other public figure to be targeted in this manner. But the structure of feeling it unleashed did not seem novel to me. Americans have a great deal of recent experience assessing the worthiness of strangers for execution. It’s one of the things we do together online: when someone is killed by a cop or vigilante; when a protester is mowed down by a car; when a Palestinian child is killed by an Israeli sniper or an Israeli civilian by Hamas. Arguing about whose lives are expendable is one of America’s favorite pastimes.
What about our bloodlust? Should we be concerned that Americans have betrayed an appetite for political violence? Perhaps. But the flip side of appetite is metabolism: not what we want, but how we bear what we are given. Americans, we might say, have a prodigious capacity for metabolizing brutality and death — we have been conditioned for it. As the writer and gun-violence expert Patrick Blanchfield put it to me, “This event gives us something fairly rare: a situation where a person victimized by a distinctively American system of normalized human liquidation — i.e., gun homicide — is also representative of that other distinctively American institution for disposing of human life, our for-profit health-care system, a key function of which is determining how much individual human lives are worth, and enforcing those assessments with ruthlessly incentivized efficiency.” For Blanchfield, Thompson’s murder, and the system of mechanized cruelty from which he profited, are part of the same regime of “human disposability” — a system in which human life, instead of being precious and priceless, is “a fungible commodity like anything else.”
I sense the reader’s trepidation: Does acknowledging this link implicitly ratify the killer’s logic? Violence, we intuit, is not something that should be reasoned about. To tolerate — let alone celebrate — the elimination of one life for the sake of a political message feels like a perilous surrender, a step on a path toward routinized horror. Humans are too fragile and various to be reduced to such ruthless arithmetic.
But why should our moral intuitions stop there? Ruthless arithmetic already governs our world. We are always subject to a regime that reduces people to numbers, and disposes of them as means to ends. In the larger social order, death and reason are wed. Our military bureaucracies, arms industries, police departments, hospital systems, and, yes, private insurers, agree: The expendability of human lives can and must be rationally decided. Every day, powerful individuals make calculations about who should live and who should die, guided by assessments of relative value — sometimes by ideas of safety and who deserves it; often by the aim of keeping shareholders happy.
The shooter claimed this prerogative for himself without a corporate bureaucracy, an algorithm, or a system of laws to authorize the privilege. It is a terrible thing to destroy a human life for the sake of propaganda, and a terrible thing to do so for the sake of profit. (There is hubris in both.) We will not be able to disrupt our metabolism for social suffering by indulging our appetite for political violence; we can’t kill our way out of a society premised on human disposability. But it must be said that violence finds more purchase, seduces more persuasively, in the absence of other obvious and meaningful pathways for registering discontent. Americans are dying, going bankrupt, and wallowing in despair under a health-care system that prioritizes the profits of some over the basic needs of others: Where should they turn? Who is listening?
In Stephen Sondheim’s bleak musical satire Assassins, the ensemble cast is composed of presidential killers and aspirants (e.g., John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr., etc.). Each is depicted as some variety of loser or freak; their motives, if political, are also conflated with a generalized sense of dissatisfaction, the feeling that the American “right to be happy” has proven as hollow as it was tantalizing. (“Hey, kid, failed your test? Dream girl unimpressed? Show her you’re the best / If you can shoot a president …”) For Sondheim, violence makes sense — a very American sort of sense — in this way. If America is a land of opportunity, it remains so only because, in the last instance, when your life has failed to turn out, and your portion of happiness has been distributed to somebody else, you can always claim your consolation prize — spectacle, celebrity, fame — and shoot the president.
Like America, Sondheim’s play wears its cynicism on its sleeve, but only to guard against a naked sincerity beneath. We are sardonic about America’s promises because it’s too painful to face our feeble faith that they are real. (Only a true believer is capable of blasphemy.) What the play suggests, at least to me, is that political violence isn’t incompatible with democracy; it feeds on the despair that democracy, in its crippled form, produces. Democracy cultivates in us moral impulses, imagination, and desires that demand satisfaction. Violence is alluring when they can find no plausible outlet, when the systems that govern our lives are overzealous in containing our fugitive hopes. As a pair of Sondheim’s assassins sing:
And all you have to do
Is squeeze your little finger
Ease your little finger back —
You can change the world
Whatever else is true
You trust your little finger
Just a single little finger
Can —
Change the world
More on the UnitedHealthcare Shooting
- Luigi Mangione Charged With Terrorism in Killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO
- The Bigger Vigilante-Worship Problem Is Happening on the Right
- Luigi Mangione Has a Fan Club at Pennsylvania Prison
