Whose Lives Matter in Our Civilization
Yeah, more politics that don’t involve technology (though I promise to talk about the technology aspect of this story tomorrow). We are cursed to live in interesting times and further cursed to be subjected to least interesting public intellectuals.
The murder of the UnitedHealthCare CEO seems to have broken the brains of our reporting class. The man’s murder, while bad, is apparently the end of civilization, class war against the working class, an insult to the shooter’s family, and, probably, worse than cats and dogs living together. The whole conversation just demonstrates who our media considers important enough to be human.
We as a country have accepted mass murder since Sandy Hook. A man walked into an elementary school and murdered twenty-six people, including twenty elementary aged children and we did nothing to control all the guns in this country. In fact, we loosened laws. There have been at least 189 school shootings — not mass shooting, just dead children — since Sandy Hook. The Atlantic has not complained about decivilization because of those shootings.
On January 6th, 2020, MAGA adherents, urged on by Trump and other in the GOP, attempted to violently prevent the transfer of power to the new president. Four years later, a man bragged he was going to kill a Black Lives Matter protester, did, in fact, kill a Black Lives Matter protester, was convicted by a jury of his peers of, in fact, murdering a Black Lives Matter protester, and was pardoned by the governor of Texas. The Atlantic did not consider these actions a threat to civilization.
Vigilantism is bad. Society does not function well when people brutalize each other and when the justice system is regularly ignored, subverted, and flaunted. Those in power almost always react with even more organized violence and with tolerance for the mobs they consider to be on their side. But it is telling that civilization was not threatened by the ceaseless murder of children, or the attempted overthrow of democracy, or one political party giving permission to murder its political opponents. No, only the murder of a leader of capital, of someone in control of one of the systems that impoverishes and kills working people — only that signals the end of civilization. Not even, it seems, the violence that UnitedHealthcare imposed on its members.
Keep in mind that the following is considered perfectly acceptable in civilization. Using an AI system to deny 90% or more of insurance claims of old people. Having the highest rejection rate in the industry. Buying providers and paying those providers more than other providers. That is fine and civilized, apparently, because it is done with a spreadsheet, not a gun.
Defenders of this flavor of civilization would argue that insurance companies (really consolidated health systems) are serving a necessary purpose. Health care cannot be unlimited — there simply aren’t enough health care resources to go around. Someone has to decide what is medically sensible and cost effective, and the market obviously would do that better than a democratically accountable system. Except that argument is bullshit. The nutshell facts are that the American health care system spends more per person, especially in terms of administrative costs, and have poorer outcomes than almost every other industrialized nation. The market has failed, completely, in its job of efficiently allocating health resources. All of the pain and suffering it causes are not in service of better outcomes, but only in service of lining the pockets of the executives and shareholders. But that is okay — that is civilized.
Murder, to reiterate, is bad. No one should take another’s life except under the most extreme circumstances. But all violence is bad. Ignoring the violence against ordinary people, against children, against the institutions that protect and represent them, and suddenly be concerned about vigilantism is not protecting civilization. It is merely expressing your opinion that the only lives that matter to a civilization are those of the rich, the powerful, and the people who flatter them. If you cared about your society, you would be constantly railing against lax gun laws, against politicians that encourage violence against their political opponents, against industries that take money away from patients and put it in the pockets of executives. You would defend the mass of people against the predations of the wealthy and powerful.
I guess that wouldn’t be civilized, though.