Death Penalty for CEOs: Is it Right?
The facts for anybody possibly living under a rock: On Wednesday the 4th of December 2024, 50 year old Brian Thompson, CEO of healthcare insurance company, UnitedHealthcare (UHC), was shot dead on the streets of New York. CCTV footage of the shooting was released, showing a hooded man with a grey backpack walk in to frame, and shoot Thompson, who had his back turned as he was walking along the pavement. This was then accompanied by CCTV footage from a nearby Starbucks where the suspect’s face could be partially seen. The grey backpack was later found in a park, containing only Monopoly money. And crime scene investigators found that each bullet shot at Thompson had a word etched on to it— ‘Deny’, ‘Defend’, and ‘Depose’ respectively.
Cut forward to Monday the 9th of December, and a 26 year old man is taken in to custody in a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania, after a customer called in the cops — believing the 26 year old to be the man from the Starbucks CCTV. The 26 year old in question, one Luigi Mangione, was found to have on his possession a silenced pistol, four fake IDs, and a handwritten manifesto explaining his motive for the assassination. At the time of writing, Mangione is currently being held in SCI Huntingdon, Pennsylvania’s oldest prison, awaiting extradition back to New York where he will stand trial on murder charges.
Once the headline broke that a healthcare insurance company CEO had been shot, even before the news broke about the politically motivated messages on the bullets, pretty much everyone knew why Brian Thompson had been killed. There wasn’t any head scratching, or theorising whether his wife had put a hit out on him or any other distractions like that — pretty much everybody knew from the very beginning that this was a political assassination. In other words, that Brian Thompson had been assassinated for being the CEO of a health insurance company — a company which, unequivocally, profits off of the sickness and death of the American people. Indeed, UHC is probably one of the most egregious healthcare insurance providers in the American privatised healthcare system — denying 32% of insurance claims, the most out of the 11 largest health insurance companies. Just for the sake of clarity, the industry average is about 16% — which, to be clear, is still too high! The revelation of this figure was compounded with the controversy that UHC had allegedly used AI to mass deny Medicare claims (something, I am sure, if true, they will pass off as just a bug in the new experimental system, rather than a purposeful choice that benefits them advantageously).
I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here, and that it really ought to go without saying, but what is so repugnant about the for-profit healthcare industry which the ruling class of America encourages is that healthcare is something with an inelastic demand — that is, you can increase the price of healthcare however much you like because there will always be a demand for it, because if people don’t get it when they need it, they die. Just like water, food, and air, we need healthcare to live — how can it be right that people sell back to us what we need to live, to make a quick and rather large buck off of us when we are desperate? Capitalism loves to sell us stuff that we don’t need, while making us all the time think that we do need it, and while also nickel-and-diming us for stuff that we do need — like life saving procedures, all at extortionate prices so that CEOs like Brian Thompson can have a net worth of $43 million, and health insurance companies like UHC can have a market capitalisation of $474 billion, while ordinary working people are forced into crippling debt and poverty!
The internet was, needless to say, set ablaze at the news of the assassination and the political intrigue surrounding it — women began “thirsting” over the hooded assassin, even more so when the (objectively physically attractive) 26 year old Luigi Mangione was revealed. Memes circulated, X was ablaze with discussion and jokes, and the general consensus, both on the left and the right, was that no tears were being shed or sleep being lost for Brian Thompson. Yes, even on the right! If one consults the comment section of right-wing political pundits Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh, and their coverage of the incident, you will see that their audiences are rebelling against the sympathetic coverage of the assassination. One commentator, on Shapiro’s video where he condemns the murder of Thompson and those celebrating it, stated: “This guy is so deluded, he is doubling down like this is a left issue, when it is a human issue , what a clown.” Indeed, it seems across the political spectrum, or at least across the working class, a consensus is emerging that believes Brian Thompson karmically deserved such a punishment. How many Americans have seen themselves or their loved ones have to forego life-changing, or, even in some cases, life-saving procedures, all because their insurance wouldn’t cover the cost? Mangione seems to be one such jaded American, having suffered a life-changing back injury from surfing, he clearly suffered under the for-profit healthcare system (though it is currently unclear whether UHC actually were his provider). Thompson amassed his vast fortune from the corrupt system of for-profit healthcare— and so, in a sense, he was responsible for the suffering and death. One might even go so far to argue that Thompson and other CEOs are social murderers — sure, Thompson might not have shot your loved one on the street like Mangione, but as the figurehead of a company, Thompson was responsible for the deaths of those who his company denied healthcare to. Those sick people died unnatural deaths — they could have lived longer, if UHC had covered their claims. If they had put people over profit. If you make your money off of the denial of life-saving procedures, you are a social murderer.
BUT, just because you are a murderer does not mean, necessarily, that you deserve to die, and this is the worrying thing about what we are seeing online currently. Whenever someone condemns Mangione’s violence online, someone will pipe up saying ‘well think of all the death Thompson was indirectly responsible for’. As if that somehow makes it okay. It doesn’t — Mangione was wrong for killing Thompson, and Thompson was wrong for indirectly murdering all those people. Two things can be true at once, two things can both be bad. Though there certainly is a bipartisan consensus around Thompson’s assassination, it is especially concerning that leftists are, if not condoning, at the very least not outright condemning Mangione’s actions. Though on a very human level, we can perhaps empathise and understand why Mangione did what he did, we must ask ourselves as a society whether it is morally right. I don’t want to just approach this from the sappy liberal/centrist/establishment perspective — “Thompson had a wife and family”, that’s all well and good but he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the families of all the people his company socially murdered, and from which he amassed his fortune. No, instead, let us approach this from a different framework. Luigi Mangione saw an injustice in the world, the for-profit healthcare system, and sought to do something about it — we must investigate the efficacy of this, but for the time being, let’s look at the ethical aspect.
As a humanist, I believe the death penalty is never right — yes, even for rapists, even for serial killers, even for pedophiles, even for the lowest of the low. The death penalty is always wrong. Not only has it historically been used disproportionately based on race, and often in cases where there are reasonable grounds for doubt (even as recently as September of this year in the unfortunate case of Marcellus Williams) , but it above all denies the possibility for change, for redemption, for penance, and for rehabilitation. Though I admit this is radical (60% of Americans favour the death penalty for those convicted of murder), our judicial system should not simply punish offenders but rehabilitate them — especially as a large swathe of crimes and criminality stem from poor material conditions. And I grant that some crimes come from more complicated places than materiality, perhaps from mental factors (serial killers and pedophiles, for instance), but we must not give up hope. And that's exactly what the death penalty does — it says that there is no hope for these people to change.
So, why am I talking about the death penalty? Well, because Mangione, by taking justice into his own hands, and being a vigilante judge, jury, and executioner, decided that the punishment for a social murderer such as Brian Thompson was the death penalty (in a state, by the by, which doesn’t actually practice the death penalty)— he decided that for men like Thompson (and it is mostly men), there is no rehabilitation, there is no changing, there is no reasoning. For social murderers, Mangione would have us believe, there is only the death penalty. I don’t believe that’s right. I can understand the frustration — peaceful non-violent protest is often an incremental process, a process which requires patience, a process so slow that the change it effects is typically barely perceptible. Attempting to reason with CEOs and corpos often seems like a fruitless task — trying to convince our oppressors not to oppress us does feel pointless. And yet, it needs to be done — as Paulo Freire argues in his seminal work The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the oppressor, by denying the humanity of the oppressed, also denies his own humanity. It is only the oppressed who can restore the humanity of both, through praxis and dialogue, and thereby overcome the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy. Mangione may have a more Fanonian view — namely that killing those who oppress and dehumanise you, rehumanises you — but I would proffer that killing that which dehumanises you does nothing to rehumanise you. All you are left with is a corpse and a gun in your hand.
We can all perhaps agree that, karmically, Thompson deserved a taste of his own medicine (pun unintended). In a world where karma actually functioned, people who built up bad karma — by, oh I don’t know, making their money off of denying healthcare to people causing their suffering and death — would have bad things happen to them as a consequence. And, on the reverse, good people would not have such bad things happen to them, but only good things. Wouldn’t that be great? Well, it would if such karmic interventions allowed the karmically bad person to learn why what they did was wrong and perhaps allow them to change their ways — but the death penalty doesn’t allow for that. Brian Thompson can never be reformed now, because he is six feet under. And regardless, the reality is we do not live in a karmically balanced world, though we might all wish it were so. Bad stuff happens to good people, and good things happen to bad people. We often don’t get what we deserve — and in many ways that is life, but in many other ways, the systems under which we live make it so. Neoliberal capitalist America allowed for Thompson to accumulate his wealth off the death and suffering of others through the for-profit healthcare system — that isn’t just nature being unfair, that is man-made inequality, which we can and should attempt to change. But that change should not, ethically, come at the barrel of a gun…nor can it.
Let’s consider the efficacy of the CEO shooting. What effect will Mangione’s actions have in regard to the for-profit healthcare system of America? From the jump, it seems that Mangione’s actions will act as a “warning shot” of sorts to the other health insurance companies and CEOs to be more consumer friendly — scaring them in to reform. Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, for example, are halting their plan to limit reimbursements for anaesthesia during surgery and medical procedures, which would essentially see Anthem cover only a certain allotted amount of time for anaesthesia during surgery, with the patient having to cover the cost of the rest themselves. When Thompson’s body hit the floor, Anthem axed the idea — for good reason.
However, who knows how long the CEOs will be scared. I think it is more likely that the fear and paranoia we have seen CEOs express in the past week is more likely a sign that things are going to get worse — higher security details, more crackdown on protest and dissent, and a consolidation of their power and security. Things getting worse can go in one of two directions, however. Either things will get worse and accelerate, making things desperate for American people, just crushing them under the boot of capital (right wing accelerationism) OR American people, under such harsh conditions, will band together and rebel even further, and actually achieve a number of concessions, if not the full abolition of for-profit healthcare in the long-term (left-wing accelerationism). Basically, hard times will either make harder times, or hard times will make strong people that fight hard times to make good times — to put it memetically. If it is the latter, my hope is that such progress is achieved through non-violent means, with as little bloodshed as possible. It is also worth noting that Thompson’s death is, in some ways, meaningless. The American for-profit healthcare system is a hydra — you can kill as many CEOs as you like, but another ambitious, greedy, opportunist will take their place. The whole hydra needs to be toppled — the wound needs to be cauterised to prevent any more profiteering opportunists to come up, and that will involve the creation of a radical public discourse in America that denigrates this system of healthcare, thereby disallowing it. Perhaps Mangione’s actions have set the light for such a discourse to be had more publicly, or perhaps not. We are too close to the event to tell.
Thompson was, at the end of the day, a figurehead for UHC and for capital at large, as every CEO is — a placeholder. Capitalism isn’t a shadowy cabal that you see in the movies, with an elite group or a single mastermind behind it, who, if you take out, will lead to the rest of the organisation being destroyed. There’s no Emperor Palpatine to chuck off the Death Star. As Mark Fisher forcefully argued in Capitalist Realism, Capitalism is centreless — it is a structure, not a group, a structure which we all participate and are, to differing extents, complicit in. Fisher, paraphrasing Campbell Jones, illustrates this through the question, ‘who is supposed to recycle?’ The answer, we have all been naturalised to parrot, is that everyone should recycle, but in making recycling the responsibility of ‘everyone’, structure scapegoats the responsibility on to us. In truth, no-one, no 1 person, is responsible for climate change, so why is every-one, every 1, now responsible — the cause of eco-catastrophe, as well as the suffering under for-profit healthcare systems, “is an impersonal structure which, even though it is capable of producing all manner of effects, is precisely not a subject capable of exercising responsibility. The required subject — a collective subject — does not exist, yet the crisis, like all the other global crises we’re now facing, demands that it be constructed.” This, however, is the impasse — “it is only individuals that can be held ethically responsible for actions, and yet the cause of these abuses and errors is corporate, systemic”. This allows for people like Thompson to evade individual ethical responsibility behind the shield of the structure, and the structure to hide behind the shield of people like Thompson. The system we live in is paper mache — you push against the paper thin walls, expecting it to give some resistance, for there to be a centre, to have a person or a group orchestrating it all behind the scenes, but in the end, it is just hollow, empty, fragile, and centreless.
I do believe, however, that this sort of thing will become, unfortunately or not depending on your view, more and more common. What we are seeing before us in our daily lives is the breakdown of liberal democracies across the globe, and the failure of the liberal consensus — most obviously signalled by the defeat of liberal centrist candidate, Kamala Harris, to right wing populist Donald Trump in the election. In 1989, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama proffered that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union (the latter having not actually happened at the time of his writing the article, but only occurring after publication) marked a supposed “end of history”. Fukuyama is a dialectical idealist who believes that the material reality of history is driven by the ideas we have about the world, rather than the other way round — and it is the conflict between these ideas that he, borrowing from a longstanding idealist tradition, beginning perhaps with 18th-Century Philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, calls “history”. Fukuyama believed that 1989 marked the end point of history because liberal democracy had supposedly been shown to be the only realistic, stable form of organising the world — what with Socialism in tatters, and Fascism being in utter disrepute since the end of the Second World War. However, what we are now seeing is possibly a revival of history — liberal democracy, on the contrary, has been shown to have very many flaws and seemingly irreconcilable contradictions, whilst Fascism seems to be making a resurgence, and perhaps Socialism even too. The pure democratic process is clogged up through corruption (which we, in the Western world, call by the nice, neat, tidy name/euphemism of “lobbying”), the rule of law is routinely flaunted on both the left and right (Biden’s pardoning of his son, for instance, and Trump’s…well, everything), and the system is full of holes and hypocrisies (just look at the way Western leaders have flocked to praise genocidal Israeli officials with literal International Criminal Court warrants out for their arrest). The inevitable consequence in the face of the delegitimization of the rule of law is that people will take matters into their own hands, will become vigilantes and shoot people in broad daylight. So, if you thirsted over Luigi Mangione and like what he did, I guess you’re in luck, because there’s sure to be more where that came from…
All of this analysis, however, it is worth noting, is coming from someone in the UK — I have had the honour and the privilege of free, nationalised healthcare (as well as a judicial system which has abolished capital punishment). And to my British readership, let us not rest on our laurels, wipe our brows in thankfulness that we don’t exist under a for-profit healthcare system like America, and pat ourselves on the back. Starmer’s Labour, specifically the Secretary of State for Health, Wes Streeting, have intentions to further privatise the NHS — bringing us even closer to the American model. And though the NHS undoubtedly has problems, and needs more financial resources to resolve them, the way to do this is not through flogging it off to private and foreign investors, but to make it so that everyone in our society pays their fair share, and that public funds are used for things which actually serve the people of this country. The fight for the NHS is one that needs to be fought directly, but not, I believe, in the way that Luigi Mangione has done it in America. Yes, the material conditions we are living under radicalise us, but that does not mean extremism is the answer — though Mangione’s politics is difficult to pin-down, his methods stink of anarchism, with its fetishization of violence, individual action as opposed to collective protest, and spontaneity.
In short, I certainly won’t be shedding any tears over Thompson’s death, but I will also not be celebrating Mangione’s actions — I can only hope for a better future looking ahead, no matter how hopeless it might appear from this standpoint.
