The Tinkerer
Thinking about the UnitedHealth Killer
The first thing that struck me upon learning a little bit about the identity and background of the suspected UnitedHealth killer Luigi Mangione was that he seemed so normal. He comes from a prominent, well-to-do family in Baltimore that by all indications cared for him, he went to elite schools, was a bit nerdy but seems to have had a solid social life and friendships, and was physically fit and good-looking. He suffered from a terrible back injury and now there is much speculation that either the direct pain or the frustration with the medical establishment may have contributed to his fatal decision. But ideologically there’s not much to suggest that this person would take a turn towards political violence, except—and this is admittedly a big except—a sudden interest in the Unabomber. His politics, as far as I can sus them out from posts online, seem like a melange of center-right views that are pretty typical for a young male software engineer. Certainly not my politics, but not someone I’d identify as particularly aggrieved or hateful. There were dystopian fantasies at the edges: his Goodreads—now locked—had fiction like 1984 and Brave New World and his Twitter posts—now also locked—showed some concern about what AI future would be. But again, this is not that strange at all. Everyone reads those books in high school and everyone is thinking about that stuff, too. He seeemed to believe in tech-futurist solutions, in applying rational, systemic methods to overcome social problems. His posts sound like thought experiments. Then he took the steps of an old-school anarchist: direct action, propaganda of the deed.
So, was there a break, or was this on a continuum? From the perspective of an engineer, directly intervening and altering the system makes a lot of sense: You don’t bother with all the mediating institutions that don’t seem to function anyway, you simply reach down into the machine and start making changes. In a strange and disturbing way, Mangione was tinkering, that activity beloved by American inventors from Alexander Graham Bell to Henry Ford to Elon Musk. And, of course, Mangione participates in another hallowed American tradition: that of the vigilante gunman.
It’s too early to say if this marks the descent of the country into a new phase of political and para-political violence, a new Years of Lead. It’s important to remember here how incredibly violent America’s past has been. Just a few relevant examples: the American public feared (or celebrated) the revolver and bomb of the anarchist in the late 1900s and early 20th century, the 1960s witnessed mass civil unrest and assassinations, and for some reason, the waves of bombings in the 1970s are now almost entirely forgotten. From the 1980s to the 1990s, right-wing extremists carried on a campaign of terror that culminated in the Oklahoma City Bombing, the worst terrorist attack on American soil until 9/11. But these were by and large the work of ideologues. What we are facing in the United States today is an overlapping crisis of institutions: social problems that stubbornly resist normal political solutions and a sense that the old system of meritocratic recognition is either broken or, at least, deeply unsatisfying for the young. Like many well-off young people, he comes from a bourgeois family that owns property but decided instead of business to pursue a high-status profession that’s supposed to be about rationally improving the world, only to find that idealistic path blocked in various frustrating ways. Even for the “normal” and relatively successful something feels terribly broken and alienating. When you combine these things you will get tragic and desperate attempts at heroism. The crowd already loves it.
Hot young guy from a prominent Catholic family whose exterior charm hides a crippling back injury destroys a self-made striver born on a farm at America's margins who rose to power through his wits and a competitive advantage in amorality?
It's Nixon vs Kennedy!
My crowd already loved it before they found out he was from a wealthy family. On Friday, my book club friends engaged in a group text conversation, the gist of which was that anybody who got mad enough to shoot a health insurance CEO was probably completely justified. I was shocked: these were middle-aged and old women who are committed Democrats. I tried to push back and say that, yes, for-profit health care in America is sometimes terrible; that Democrats have worked hard to make it better, culminating in Obamacare, which DID make things better for a lot of people, including me; but that you can't just shoot somebody because you're frustrated and angry.
During this conversation I found out how completely ignorant these women were about the history of health insurance. One woman thought that Reagan had "privatized health care." I had to explain that health care had been almost completely private, or not part of the government's social safety net, until the mid-1960s, when Medicare and Medicaid started. Nobody else knew that. Before that, there were charity hospitals, and Catholic hospitals run by nuns. My dad worked at one of those hospitals in Nashville. My grandfather owned a tiny small-town hospital in Lebanon, TN. It was his family's business. My grandmother grew the food for the patients. That's how it used to work. Sometimes that hospital took non-paying patients, or patients paid "in kind," that is, with produce from their farms. Although some of the women in my book club were born in the 1940s or 1950s, none of them remembered any of this apparently.
I tried to make the point that reforming health care is hard because Republicans push back so hard against everything Democrats manage to accomplish. I reminded them of the intense activism in our own community to prevent Obamacare from being destroyed in 2017. I was involved in that. They didn't even know it was going on at the time. Some of these people are active in the Democratic party.
Finally we got together in person on Saturday. I talked with one of the younger women about that text conversation and how surprised I was that old ladies thought assassination was a legitimate political strategy. She said something like, "Well, people are just frustrated, and it's some kind of catharsis I guess. It makes them feel better." !! Note that as far as I know, there was nobody in the group who had personally been screwed over by an insurance company. They had just read stories online or seen TikTok videos about such people. Most of their information came from TikTok. This is the really alarming thing, besides the blood-thirst.
Later, we talked about a man we know who shot at some people in our town because they were his tenants and they wouldn't vacate a house he owned quickly enough. This happened four years ago, and his case was dismissed by a judge, so he never had to go to jail or even pay a fine. Also, his friends forgave him immediately for trying to kill people: after all, those tenants were bad and they wouldn't leave! Again, I said that you can't just shoot at people because you're mad at them. They started making more excuses for him, and I finally got so upset that I slammed my fist on the table and said, "You can't just shoot at people when you get mad!" They looked at me as if I was crazy.
The fact is, the mob is not just Republican gun nuts now; it's little old liberal ladies. Everybody thinks it's ok to settle things with guns. It's going to get worse before it gets better.