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The Murder Of Brian Thompson: How Individual Acts Of Evil Get Justified
One of the outlying symptoms of evil is to use broad-based rationalizations about systemic problems in order to justify individual acts of evil.
The most recent example: the murder of Brian Thompson, a father who was the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
I know a lot of doctors who don’t like how UnitedHealthcare runs. They think UnitedHealthcare rips off customers and fights them at every turn.
But whatever you think about U.S. health care is irrelevant to the question of whether Thompson should have been shot to death on the streets of New York.
According to The Wall Street Journal, it appears the reading interests of Thompson’s alleged murderer started with ideas about activism but crossed over to an interest in violence at some point. He is an upper-class citizen from an upper-class family. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in computer science and earned a master’s degree. So, he apparently has quite a high IQ.
He also underwent some sort of recent serious health crisis, which, as The Wall Street Journal reports, was probably exacerbated by psychedelic use. He may have had a spinal fusion surgery, which has a very low rate of success; it often leaves people with significant pain for life. His friends said they had not heard from him for months.
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The alleged murderer also seems to have posted about the Unabomber’s manifesto on Goodreads. What he wrote offers a window into his mind and illuminates how people who have “social concerns” can start channeling those into acts of individual evil. The review reads:
Clearly written by a mathematics prodigy. Reads like a series of lemmas on the question of 21st century quality of life.
It’s easy to quickly and thoughtless write this off as the manifesto of a lunatic, in order to avoid facing some of the uncomfortable problems it identifies. But it’s simply impossible to ignore how prescient many of his predictions about modern society turned out.
He was a violent individual – rightfully imprisoned – who maimed innocent people. While these actions tend to be characterized as those of a crazy luddite, however, they are more accurately seen as those of an extreme political revolutionary.
The review also quotes someone who had written about Kaczynski in a Reddit thread, saying he “had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere.” The commenter also wrote that “‘violence never solved anything’ is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.”
The extreme political radicalism is obvious and suggests violence is justified because the system is unworkable and unfixable and because grievances are justified.
Ironically, many of the same people who were presumably cheering on the alleged shooter in this case are in favor of a health care system that ends with lower life expectancy and actual government rationing of care.
Yet there is something deeper, a sickness that is going on in our political class, best exemplified by the absolute nutjob Taylor Lorenz, who used to work for The Washington Post and for Vox. She was fired yesterday after proclaiming on Piers Morgan’s show that she felt actual joy when Thompson was murdered on the street. “I do believe in the sanctity of life,” she stated. “And I think that’s why I felt, along with so many other Americans, joy, unfortunately.”
How can this make you joyful? Thompson was a father, and he was gunned down in the middle of Manhattan.
People in the United States who cheer for murderous criminals is nothing new. This has happened for a very long time in the United States. Bonnie and Clyde were made famous in a film. John Dillinger, who robbed some 24 banks with his gang, was widely proclaimed a folk hero in the 1930s by one segment of the population.
You can easily see the logic of this extending to most aspects of free market enterprise in the United States, including health care, oil companies, banks, anything. If you don’t like the way a business is acting, this logic says you should shoot somebody.
Why is that? Why is that happening?
There is now an entire media and political class dedicated to a simple proposition: that America is so flawed and its systems are so corrupt that criminality is a reasonable response to those flaws.
This is demagoguery. The way to change policy is by electing politicians. And then those politicians work with each other and with regulators at both the state and local levels in order to change the policy. Once you say that the system is so broken that the only resort is revolutionary violence, you have to make the case for overthrowing the entire system.
But that’s not what these people are doing. It’s just nihilistic violence, lashing out at a system that these people believe is targeting them in some way.
Why do they believe that? Because instead of saying the truth, which is that these systems are really complex and difficult to fix, there’s a whole class of demagogues in political office and in the media who spend their days saying that all problems are easily solved, but aren’t because there is an intractable coterie who want to keep people in misery for their own profit and they just don’t care. If they just cared more, then all would be solved.
This is ugly, stupid, and not true. There may be those who are perfectly willing to keep people in misery for profit, but they are not the vast bulk of people in the United States or in positions of high power or in positions in high industry.
That is not how it works. This is a political strategy discussed by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, involving the idea that instead of making an argument against the policy a person is promoting, you ascribe bad motivations to that person. That person is evil. That person is wrong. And they are not just wrong, but they are motivated by a sociopathic evil.
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The only way someone kills a man like Brian Thompson is by suggesting his motivation is not to keep the company working and operative in a very difficult regulatory environment with a bizarre system of subsidies and administrative details and so on. Instead of disagreeing with his decisions, someone says he’s evil and just trying to maximize profit.
This attitude can be found on both sides of the political aisle. It is predominantly on the Left, but there is a swath of people on the Right who are also espousing this.
And it’s ugly. I will say that there are elites who have lent credibility to this particular argument through their malfeasance. People like Anthony Fauci have told platonic lies to the American public, lying for their own purposes, and, in many cases, quashing their political opposition.
But the generalized argument is made too much in politics, and it does boil the pot. It leads to an increasing temperature that justifies violence.
It’s an argument that says the reason the health care system is a mess is because Brian Thompson is an evil person who is trying to kill grandma. It’s the same argument that says the reason the oil companies are attempting to pump more oil is not because there is high demand for carbon-based fossil fuels or because it’s still the most effective form of energy production on the planet, but because they don’t care about destroying the Earth. It’s an argument that says the reason the bank denied your loan is not because the bank looked at your loan, assessed the risk, and found it wasn’t worth the price; it’s because the bank manager is actually Mr. Potter and is trying to deny your bank loan because he himself is evil.
And the argument is dangerous.
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