I don’t really believe there are any scientific laws that determine political history. Politics is what people do, and people are always free to do otherwise. Nevertheless there are patterns, and some of them are so consistent that they might as well be laws of political gravity. One is that economic inequality eventually brings political instability.
This is one very good reason to limit economic inequality. There are better reasons, like the fact that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. But it’s hard for the rich to feel the weight of that reason (which is probably why it’s true). By contrast, the rich have a pecuniary interest in political stability, since it’s difficult to enjoy your money when your head’s on pike. Thus they have sometimes been persuaded to support policies aimed at distributing (some of) their wealth.
That is one way to read a sign of the times in the recent murder of Brian Thompson. Thompson ran UnitedHealthCare, a $500 billion insurance company and one of the richest corporations in the world. His own net worth was $43 million. That made him a member of “the 1%,” a class of Americans which owns 30% of the country’s wealth. The man who shot him engraved words of protest on the bullet casings. The conclusion is easy to draw.
Two facts complicate this conclusion, which is otherwise correct. One is that Luigi Mangioni is himself a member of the 1%. His private high school cost $37,000 a year. His grandmother left him a $30 million dollar inheritance. And the Mangioni family, which owns high-end resorts and clubs, may be worth as much as $100 million. Brian Thompson, by contrast, was apparently a middle class boy who worked his way to the top.
That fact adds intrigue to the story, but it is not in itself so significant. Every class war has its class traitors: maybe Mangioni is part of that long tradition. Or there could be some other explanation, like his use of psychedelics. Whatever was behind his own decision to kill, what matters more is the fact of who he killed.
Luigi Mangioni did not kill a random rich person. He killed a person who got rich running a health insurance scheme. People went bankrupt and died to make Brian Thompson rich. That, at least, is how Luigi Mangioni saw it. There is something about the insurance industry in particular that drove him to murder. And on the Internet, millions of people united across ideological lines to express often unqualified sympathy for his view. To justify it they almost invariably referred not to Thompson’s wealth but to the system he helped manage. Remarking on this reaction from the left, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez suggested that “people . . . experience denied claims as an act of violence against them,” while Elizabeth Warren said that while “violence is never the answer,” “people can only be pushed so far.” On the right, Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh condemned the murder as expressions of an evil “revolutionary left” sensibility, only to be condemned by their own audiences for being out of touch. One said: “Republican pundits don’t realize this isn’t as politically partisan as they wished it were. We all hate our health care system. We may not advocate for murder, but sympathy for CEOs of these organizations is at an all time low, regardless of R or D.”
I happen to have gold-plated health insurance. Everything is covered, there are no deductibles, no out-of-pocket expenses, no surprises. The monthly premium is more than our mortgage, but a lot of people would kill to have what I have—so to speak. I don’t have much of a choice, though. There are cheaper plans, but I have to pay for the best coverage because my wife, who has multiple sclerosis, depends on a drug that costs $150,000 a year. When she had her first symptoms, about twenty years ago, we were young and free and had no insurance at all. Her runner’s legs went limp, and she spent a week in a hospital bed—the worst thing you could do for an MS symptom—because the doctor misdiagnosed her. Uninsured patients often get that level of attention; later, another doctor would describe it as malpractice. After she got out, she couldn’t walk for six months. And we owed so much money for her “health care” that we had to declare bankruptcy.
That is one of a million similar stories. In fact it is an especially happy version of the story, which often doesn’t end so well. My wife learned how to walk again, and then how to run again, and a few years after that she ran the Boston marathon. Bankruptcy turned out to be a blessing for us, and now we have that gold-plated insurance and the income to pay the premiums. But others lose everything and never get it back, and their loss is some insurance company’s gain.
I have no head for the numbers, but insurance is a beautiful idea. It’s a practical and elegant way to give concrete form to the common good. Each member of a community contributes to ensure the good of any one member who faces trouble, and this sharing of risk is good not only for the one member in trouble but for the community itself, because it gives each member an interest not only in her private advantage but in the success of the community itself. But, as the Latin adage oft-cited by Ivan Illich has it, corruptio optimi pessima—“the corruption of the best is the worst.” What Luigi Mangioni reacted to with such violence, and what many other people are reacting to with such anger, is the way that insurance companies turn the common good into private gain, by flipping the idea of insurance on its head. Few people understand actuarial science, but everyone can see that behind their bloodless calculations these companies are using our contributions to ensure the “good”—the financial good—not of the one in trouble, but of the ones at the top who manage the scheme. They are turning the common good to private advantage. Of course, insurance companies do not pretend to be governments; they are explicitly for-profit. But this is not a matter of how much money the CEO makes, or of how much profit the company generates. It is about the fact that the CEO makes that much money, and the company generates that much profit, by (in the case of UnitedHealthCare) denying 35% of policyholder’s claims. The issue is not that insurance companies are rich; it’s that they get rich by not using the premiums they charge to pay for their members’ healthcare.
There is something else about what these companies do to the beautiful idea of insurance that makes them especially ugly. For those who do understand it, the mathematics of risk is no doubt beautiful in its own right. But there is also something in it that disgusts us. One reason I can afford my top-notch insurance is that I get a discount for being healthy. Every year I get a little check-up—height, weight, bloodwork, with a questionnaire at the end—and if my score is high enough, my premiums decrease. I’m happy to pay less, but the whole thing makes me queasy. This isn’t because I don’t care about being healthy. Quite the opposite; people know me as a “health nut.” And like most health nuts I believe not only in being healthy but in taking personal responsibility for your health, a conviction that often puts me at odds with the medical system, which prefers us to think that our health depends primarily on how often we make use of its highly profitable services. No, my almost physical discomfort with the whole thing comes from a deeper and to many people much stranger conviction, which is that human beings cannot be disassembled into risk factors on spreadsheets without doing damage to their souls, and to the souls of the calculators themselves.
I believe in personal responsibility; insurance companies believe in impersonal responsibility. They may reward people like me for healthy living, but the real rewards come back to them, and are proportionate to their ability to slice and dice me into the sum of all my parts save the one part that makes me me. As Ivan Illich puts it, via his biographer David Cayley, risk “‘is a strictly mathematical concept.’ It does not pertain to persons but to populations—no one knows what will happen to this or that person, but what will happen to the aggregate of such persons can be expressed as a probability. To identify oneself with this statistical figment is to engage . . . in ‘intensive self-algorithmization.’” In the “risk society,” as Ulrich Beck calls it, we are indeed personally responsible: we are responsible for submitting to this reign of quantity.
To many people this probably sounds like superstition, like those old-time indigenous folk who didn’t want their photographs taken for fear it would steal their souls. I think they might have been right about that, but never mind. Even if you don’t buy Illich’s idea that there’s spiritual danger in the rhetoric of risk, you still know what it feels like to be reduced from a person to an item, because that’s what it feels like whenever you have to interact with any large institution (“your call is important to us!”).
It’s bigness that makes us feel small. It’s not insurance but big insurance that turns the common good to private gain and turns persons into profit centers. It’s bigness that enrages and sometimes drives people to murder. Wealth, of course, usually comes from bigness, and the economic inequality that reliably leads to political instability is usually the inequality between a few titans who benefit from bigness and a crowd of little people who resent it because they’re dependent on it. In practice, wealth and bigness often go hand in hand. But it’s worth distinguishing them, because the crowd is often seduced by the promise that some other, even bigger thing—a political party, a mass movement, a new president—will put the wealthy in their place and make us feel human again. It’s usually a ruse. I like the line from the Ben Folds song: “once you were the revolution, now you’re the institution—how’s it feel to be the man?”
Sometimes, someone in that crowd gets seduced by a different promise: that by striking down the man, they can strike a blow against the institution. Luigi Mangioni opted for the grand gesture of violence, the bigness of doing something about it, the action that makes you feel like you’re free to do otherwise, institutions be damned. This too is a ruse. Mangioni was not doing something about it: he was doing it. Insurance companies enrage us because they dehumanize us. Dehumanizing their CEOs doesn’t change that story; it feeds the beast. I was honestly pretty freaked out by the casual glee with which many of my own students celebrated Thompson’s murder. I didn’t know how to respond to them; mostly I just let it go. But I think I heard in their laughter another sign of the times.
Image Via: Daily Montanan
