Public enemies and killer angels

Here’s (gift link) a really interesting discussion between Michelle Goldberg, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Zeynep Tufekci regarding the transformation of UHC CEO Brian Thompson’s murderer into a folk hero of vigilante justice.

Goldberg: The question isn’t whether he should be a folk hero — it’s why, to some unquantifiable number of people, he indisputably is. Obviously, it speaks to the intense rage people feel toward these insurance companies, which I understand and share. But it’s also part of a broader societal embrace of vigilantism, which until now was mostly a right-wing phenomenon, and which derives from a collapse of faith in the institutions that are supposed to provide redress. . . .

Tufekci: Dealing with health insurance companies when you are vulnerable — facing illness, pain and loss — and knowing that such a company is profiting off you is a visceral, enraging experience. Some people want to be rescued, even by an outlaw. A recent Senate report says UnitedHealthcare more than doubled the rate of denials for post-acute care for the elderly as it pressured the company’s human reviewers to strictly hew to the algorithmic recommendation system that it had introduced. The sense that a cold, calculating, profit-making automaton can come at a person when they feel the most fragile, and without accountability and recourse, is the type of environment that can find people cheering on vigilantes. . . .

McMillan Cottom: I thought about how we have an economy with perverse incentives and impact. If billionaires and C.E.O.s want to enjoy the spoils of power, visibility and access in our celebrity culture, they have to understand that they are in essence a public entity — a stand-in for industry but also for politics. I make this point because the moralizing about the public response to the killing conflates a personal dimension of this story — a murder and the fallout for the victim’s family — with the public dimension, about industries that affect and control our lives, our futures, our pain. A family lost their kin and a community lost a member. That is a personal tragedy. At the same time, a public actor was presumably targeted because he had a tremendous amount of power over people’s well-being. The system has to make a profit and, in doing so, the system victimizes a lot of people.

McMillan Cottom’s point reminded me of how, in his now more than 40-year-old book looking at the class system in the United States in the 35 years or so immediately after World War II, Paul Fussell named the highest stratum “Top Out of Sight.” In those years, the very richest people were both vastly less wealthy than they are today — in the first Forbes 400 survey around 1980 or so the richest individual, a shipping magnate from South Haven, Michigan — had a fortune that was, inflation-adjusted, about 2% as much as Elon Musk’s current net worth — and much, much more discreet about flaunting their wealth and power.

It seems that certain developments between 1917 and 1945 had encouraged, as Voltaire might have put it, a certain discretion, as well as a greater willingness to accept things like being taxed as a cost of living in a minimally civilized society.

We may be moving into an age where the deterioration of that set of prudential insights is beginning to have stochastically violent consequences.