An Astonishing Level of Humanisation

I've mentioned the difficulties of both promoting/censoring violent action on social media before and I can't really think of much to add to that post. The whole arena is a minefield of problems and wading through it in a way that wouldn't violate some policy or other is (rightly) fraught with difficulty. Suffice to say that the kind of language I'd use about certain people in ordinary conversation wouldn't be appropriate online, where the differences between rhetoric and genuine advocacy are often poorly understood. To put things are directly as I dare, there are cases where I believe violent action should happen but where "should" is in the highly abstract moral sense : that is, it would be right if this thing happened, as opposed to, "I want to join/start/support an actual mob". Likewise there are things I would endorse after the fact, wouldn't lose any sleep over if they occurred, but wouldn't ever actively instigate.

What I do want to mention though, is this bizarre piece in The Atlantic about the killing of UnitedHealthcare's CEO, and how this is being outright celebrated across the internet. The Atlantic, I have to say, is a truly strange journal. Sometimes it offers highly intelligent, comprehensive reviews that provide vital context to a story, and sometimes it goes off on bizarre rants about how subtitles are basically worse than the Holocaust. This piece is much closer to the latter.

For some context of my own, I got really quite disgusted by some of the reaction to the deaths of those aboard the Titan submersible a couple of years ago. Sure, the company who designed and operated the Titan seem shady as hell, but I saw no evidence that this was true of the passengers. Rejoicing because some people died simply because they were rich ? What's wrong with you ?

This time my sympathies lie elsewhere. Two particular quotes do often come to mind :

For the corrupt man it's better not to be alive, for he necessarily lives badly. – Plato

No attempt at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. – Nye Bevan (founder of the NHS)

Obviously, some violence is justifiable in some conditions. Only the most diehard pacifist would argue otherwise; pretty much everyone else would agree that you're allowed to fight back against oppression. The Atlantic piece does not seem to understand that at all. It seems to actively confuse simply "being a person" with "being a good person". The title, "An Astonishing Level of Dehumanisation" aptly sets the tone, and as the piece elaborates :

At Jewell’s South Hamilton High School, the Times reported, Thompson was valedictorian, a star athlete, homecoming king, and class president. A teacher described Thompson as an excellent student, a model person, “a super kid.” As a corporate leader, he kept a low profile; friends and colleagues remembered him as mild-mannered and humble, down-to-earth and self-deprecating. He was a passionate advocate for the Special Olympics and a devoted father to his sons, Bryce and Dane. His obituary described his love for his sons as “limitless.”

“Brian was an incredibly loving, generous, talented man who truly lived life to the fullest and touched so many lives,” his wife, Paulette Thompson, told Fox News.

Err, hang on. All murderers are human. Very few indeed are truly monstrous, moustache-twirling pantomime villains cackling with delight as they torture kittens. All of them are somebody's son or daughter. Few indeed (though I think not none, despite the claims of various ancient philosophers) are malevolent purely for the sake of being malicious. Most people believe they're acting correctly most of the time – that's precisely what makes them dangerous. 

Which means that just because it's absurd to equate "being a billionaire" with "being evil", it doesn't follow that the two are mutually exclusive either. No demographic – none at all, be it race, creed, religious affiliation, wealth, anything – has a monopoly on evil. When it comes to judging whether someone is good or bad, you have to fully consider the individual. You can't reduce it to demographics.

So the mere fact of Thompson's humanity simply isn't relevant to the case here. I don't have a hard time believing he loved his family or had perfectly ordinary, harmless interests outside his career. Without ever having heard of the guy before his death, I'm not the least bit surprised that other people loved him. I don't doubt it. Instead I claim it doesn't matter. Not at all.

Why ? Because that doesn't negate his actions as a CEO. Being loved, taking care of one's pets and/or elderly relatives, helping the disabled... none of that would give anyone pause for thought in condemning someone for, say, stabbing a stranger in the street. So it seems awfully strange to me to use any of this to mourn the passing of someone who seems to be a straightforward, clear-cut, self-serving villain. As AOC said :

For anyone who is confused or shocking or appalled, they need to understand that people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them.

I mean... yeah ? When you hear about the kind of claims Thompson's company denied people, when you hear how many they denied compared to other companies, it's hard to see them acting as anything other than a force of oppression, nakedly profiting from the misery and suffering of the masses. It's very hard indeed to see it as anything other than a black-and-white case of this guy being the villain and the other side... not. 

Should he have been murdered ? No, of course not ! I mean it. What should have happened is that America realised it had a phenomenally stupid, ludicrously inegalitarian society and healthcare system and restructured itself accordingly; what should have happened is that Thompson spent his billions on providing healthcare to those less fortunate on the grounds that that would be patently the right thing to do. None of that happened or showed any indication of happening. And if you cut off all legal avenues of change to people, or, worse, make it so that they technically have legal possibilities but make them de facto impossible to actually exploit... well, look at history. Look at how democracy started. It wasn't because the tyrants generously decided to stop being oppressive one fine Greek morning.

The Atlantic nutjob raises another line of argument :

What a lot of people who are celebrating Thompson’s death and demonizing UnitedHealthcare don’t seem to understand — or don’t seem to want to understand — is that in every modern health-care system, some institution is charged with rationing care... if they didn’t do it, someone else would need to. The reality of scarcity is not their fault, nor is it “social murder.”

Reality of scarcity, eh ? Doesn't seem very plausible when some have basically enough money to live in a solid gold house and others, err, don't. Doesn't seem very plausible when plenty of countries are able to provide free or affordable healthcare to their whole population and the US chooses not to. And it certainly doesn't seem very plausible given the obscene levels of wealth at work in the health industry itself, let alone that UnitedHealthcare denies claims at a rate twice the industry average. Or when you hear the horror stories about denying payments for anaesthetic and the like. And if even in the US, with its jaw-droppingly awful insurance system, most companies manage to do so much better than this, then you can't give UnitedHealthcare the excuse that everyone does it by necessity. That's an absurd claim to make. 

There’s legitimacy in the frustration and anger many people feel. Nevertheless, turning to lethal violence is horrifying and ominous. So, too, is applauding and justifying assassinations...  consider what happens when the logic of those who are celebrating Mangione is applied to a different issue.  

The list of organizations and individuals who could be targeted because their critics on the left or on the right believe they support policies that lead to suffering or death is endless: gun-rights lobbies; those who want to defund the police; individuals opposing childhood vaccinations, and those who administer them; groups that want to cut funding for the global AIDS initiative; those that want the United States to withdraw from the Paris climate accords; those that oppose a higher minimum wage. So who decides which Americans are guilty of “social murder”?

This is a (somewhat) better point. It's a perfectly fine to note that the rule of law is important. Nobody wants anarchy or the tyranny of the mob; again, changing the system so that people wouldn't have felt oppressed would be, by far, the better outcome. It's also fair to point out that those in charge have to think differently and more statistically than the rest of us. That's why we have them, to make the difficult choices we can't make ourselves. Somebody has to be the one to make the unpopular choices; that we disagree with them is not as problematic as when we get mad at them for simply making the choice at all.

On that note : it isn't really fair to equate the actions of a madman with a shotgun who goes on a killing spree with those of a CEO, or political leader, whose (in)actions cause far greater causalities. The one voluntarily chooses evil, the other often has no choice but to decide between the lesser of two evils. The idea that choosing the lesser evil is still choosing evil is wrong-headed, because some level of "social murder" is unavoidable. But... and it's a big but... this doesn't mean that some CEOs and executives aren't straightforward villains either. Just because some unpleasant choices are unavoidable doesn't mean that all of them are. It certainly doesn't mean that some CEOs and leaders aren't criminally awful people. "Social murder" may not be morally equivalent to regular murder, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be stopped or its consequences are less real.

And I think there's also a fair helping of whataboutism at work here. Again, being rich hardly by itself equates with being a villain; likewise, each issue that polarises people is something to be dealt with on an individual basis, not something that can be readily generalised. Nor is it fair to equate "those who support policies" with "those who actively implement or profit monetarily from those policies". 

Crucially, while it may be indeed "horrifying and ominous" to resort to violence, certain aspects of American life are already horrifying and ominous. Pointing out that the horrible nature of the situation and the potential for further violence only ducks the question of how else the oppressed people, exactly, are supposed to change their lot; why are they supposed to suffer oppression and corporate violence routinely but are forbidden to retaliate ? This is cowering from the root cause of the problem. Again, nobody wants anarchy and violence, but you won't avoid it merely by declaring that such an outcome is bad. You have to tackle the issues that led here, and not all of those are at all equal. Crying, "slippery slope !" is nowhere near adequate to the task at hand.

The thing is, in the end it doesn't really matter if you think this is "right" or not. What really matters is that if you push people too far for long enough, they will fight back. Whether or not they "should" is absolutely irrelevant. If you don't want them to, you have to either address their concerns or change their minds. Doing nothing is a recipe for disaster.

Finally :

The American health-care system certainly has its flaws, but those are hardly the fault of UnitedHealthcare alone. Nations such as the United Kingdom, which offer the sort of single-payer public health care that Tolentino extolls, have long wait lists for treatment, significant staff shortages, and outdated hospital infrastructure. Public satisfaction with the U.K.’s National Health Service is at a 40-year low; only 29 percent of the British public is “quite satisfied” or “very satisfied” with the NHS.

Srsly ? Sure, the NHS is in trouble, but that might have had something to do with, oh, I don't know, 14 years of Tory austerity, perhaps. During the Blair era it was routinely cited as one of the best in the world. Just as the author omits to mention how bad UnitedHealthcare is in comparison with other health insurance companies, not providing context for the UK's difficulties is disingenuous in the extreme. The author's following quote about how bad the service is I find to be downright misleading, and utterly missing the fact that we have free healthcare for all while the Americans don't.

I'm not sure I've succeeded in managing the fine line I've tried to walk. My point really is that the Atlantic arguments don't make a lot of sense. Just because someone isn't entirely evil doesn't mean they don't commit awful acts. Just because they aren't of the same moral category as someone who derives sadistic pleasure from torturing their victims doesn't mean they aren't committing oppressive, immoral acts. I find it unfair to simply say that "violence is bad" without acknowledging that a violent response was undertaken only in retaliation to acts of violent oppression. And equating different healthcare systems which are demonstrably unequal is outright misinformation. Finally, being appalled by one particular kind of violence should not be an excuse to avoid dealing with the other. Granted, they're not the same. But the consequences are, and you can't avoid dealing with the one by saying that the other is bad. It doesn't matter how you think people should behave – push them far enough, and eventually they will snap.