Safe and Beautiful World
by Zito Madu
A rush of essays, articles, posts, and news reports on the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson presented the actions of his alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, as chilling, unimaginable—the act of a deranged, unstable lunatic who must be roundly condemned, lest we become a violent society with no respect for human life. As I read this avalanche of moralistic responses I kept saying to myself, What the fuck are these people talking about? Where is this safe and civilized world—now potentially shattered—where life is precious and humanity is respected?
Whenever someone prominent but highly unpopular dies unmourned by the public, whether it’s a CEO like Thompson or the late David Koch, or a politician like Henry Kissinger, certain people inevitably rush in to scold the rest of us for our brutality and stupidity, seizing the chance to display their own pure, superior ability to recognize and cherish the value of a human life. This is obviously laughable. Brian Thompson lived in a country in which just yesterday at a private Christian school in Wisconsin a 15-year-old girl went on a shooting rampage, wounding several and killing a classmate, a teacher, and herself; it was the 83rd school shooting in the U.S. so far this year. It’s not possible to live in such a country and consider the murder of Brian Thompson as anything so far out of the ordinary. Rather, it is incredibly insulting to pretend that this fantasy place is the same one that you and I live in, this peaceful country that would be in danger of sliding into dystopia if killing and violence were to be normalized and accepted.
There was once a time when kids could go to school without the fear of being shot, in fact generation after generation of kids grew up in the United States without ever experiencing the trauma of an active shooter drill. But modern life in the U.S. means closeness to death and violence everywhere you go. We have seen people killed at concerts, movie theaters, grocery stores, bowling alleys, dance studios, and banks. The government supports mass bloodshed abroad; the militarized police have near-impunity to abuse and kill whomever they please, so long as the violence is aimed at some marginalized person or group. Death may come from a bullet, a chokehold, or forced social conditions that make people’s lives so desperate and impoverished that illness and death come too soon, a category that includes people who are denied lifesaving treatment and are left to die—sometimes even when they’ve paid for the protection of medical insurance.
That so many journalists, pundits, and politicians came out to advocate for our shared humanity—but only in the context of Thompson’s life—doesn’t challenge the brutality of a hierarchy in which some have the right to live and others do not. Instead, these writers chose to validate that structure, drawing attention to the empty space where a larger empathy should have been.
To see the killing and mass indifference to Thompson’s death as a sign of moral decline, while ignoring the normalization of the death and suffering of every victim beneath him, is to advocate openly for the idea that there are those who deserve life and those who don’t. It is to show that your idea of the human begins and ends with those at the top. There aren't enough rhetorical tricks in the world to hide the bad faith in an argument for humanity that starts and ends with the most privileged.
That Luigi Mangione has the background and education of someone in a protected class has complicated this argument for certain writers, whose narratives demand that wealth be considered virtuous, and criminality as the exclusive province of poor and marginalized people. Few are prepared to say openly that it’s this argument itself—and the obvious and false hierarchy it underpins—that is degrading humanity and pushing the world into dystopia: the idea that it is “those other people” who die in the darkness and silence of what is normal. When the brutality was turned against a millionaire CEO, that tacit arrangement was both violated, and revealed.