My dad wrote a piece you might have seen on December 10th called “Violence in All Its Forms is Wrong.” He reminded us, amid a veritable ocean of jokes at the expense of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, that whether by bullet or denied coverage, suffering and death are always to be lamented, not applauded or made into fodder for comedy. He has worked for almost my entire life as a health insurance agent, laboring to help clients find the best coverage they can get, even when it isn’t profitable for him. He has a better-informed, more clear-eyed understanding than nearly anyone you’ll meet of exactly how brutal and unfair the health insurance industry can be for the most vulnerable people in the United States.
I agree with his view on the public response to Brian Thompson’s murder—the jokes are tasteless and cruel. While my spiritual and religious beliefs now diverge from my dad’s, I remain strongly influenced by the radical pacifist teachings I came up in at Park View Mennonite Church in Harrisonburg, Virginia. This sometimes sets me apart from some of my peers in secular academia, but I staunchly believe in both the moral and tactical value of nonviolence and peacebuilding.
And yet I can’t bring myself to reprimand those in my life who are sharing memes and jokes, hoping that millionaires and billionaires of all stripes are living with a little more fear than they used to. Who am I to tell my friend who incurred tens of thousands of dollars in medical debt because his wife gave birth while they were in between insurance coverage, or other graduate students at West Virginia University who can’t afford to visit the dentist, or my undergraduate students who have lost loved ones to an inability to pay for care, that they should grieve the death of a man who made tens of millions of dollars for himself, and more than $16 billion in profits for his company by denying claims, and allegedly even implementing AI systems to evaluate claims that are so faulty that 90% of their denials were reversed on appeal?
I fundamentally agree with my dad on the principles of radical empathy and the condemnation of violence in all its forms. But we cannot forget that the scale and scope of the violence committed by the shooter and Brian Thompson are wildly different, and that this fact has not been lost on the public. The incredible violence of the fundamentally broken American healthcare system, the slow deaths inflicted by denial of care, are what sociologist Johan Galtung called ‘structural violence,’ and Friedrich Engels called ‘social murder.’
The shooter’s actions were obviously wrong, but we also need to understand that our country’s decision to drive up costs of care and deny care outright to the poorest among us for the benefit of an unnecessary intermediary industry, the health insurance industry, constitutes no less than mass murder. It is invisible murder, with untreated illnesses taking the place of firearms, and untraceable to the decisions or actions of any single individual. Increasingly it is the outcome of decisions made by artificial intelligence instead of humans. But it is mass murder, often of the most vulnerable people in our society, enacted in the name of profit.
To be clear, the shooter’s actions saved no lives. He did not start a revolution to usher in universal healthcare, and the repulsiveness of the act of murder may well galvanize proponents of privatized health insurance. He solved no problems, provided justice to nobody, and tested the limits of our constantly-strained empathy for those with whom we have disagreements. He sought vengeance, which it hardly needs saying is not very Christlike.
My dad says that the jokes at Thompson’s expense, or those that celebrate the shooter as some kind of hero are also violence. I can agree here, too; they inflict further pain on Thompson’s family and loved ones and contribute to our social acceptance of violence (particularly with firearms) as a legitimate problem-solving tool. Still, if violence is an expression of power, forced on the body or psyche of another, then we can understand the response to this murder as both another form of violence and an effort to express some power underneath the systemic disempowerment produced by the American healthcare industry. Importantly, there is profound asymmetry in the power relations between those with an axe to grind with health insurance companies, and those companies and their executives.
My crucial point is this: violence is condemnable, and there are better ways to voice our pain under structural violence than to return it with direct violence. But that does not make all violence equal. Cruel jokes are not equivalent to the murder of a CEO, and the murder of a CEO is not equivalent to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and untold amounts of physical and psychological suffering and destitution resulting from our country’s unwillingness to adopt modern, let alone moral practices in the provision of healthcare.
My grandfather liked to say, as my dad pointed out, that laughter is a response to hurt that didn’t happen. He wrote at some length about this theory in an unpublished book that I edited for him (he insisted on keeping it in Comic Sans font if that tells you anything about his whimsy and appreciation for the subject matter). He was also conscious of the fact that laughter doesn’t always occur in the absence of hurt, and used the example of racist humor as a basis for the following claim:
“Ethnic jokes are cruel expressions of serious prejudice. But those who are threatened by the equality of others laugh because the implied hurt is dismissed by the picture presented in the joke. They laugh without thinking about why they laugh. What makes the jokes funny to some is their need for reassurance, reassurance that those others are not equal to them.”
Jokes that inflict pain or that dismiss the pain of others come from a place of insecurity or needing reassurance, in my grandfather’s view. Unlike him, I’ve not read dissertations on humor, so I can’t claim to know that that’s always true, but it is certainly true in this moment. This public response to Thompson’s murder is a frail expression of whatever power can be claimed by somebody who might be or have loved ones suffering under crushing medical debt or untreated illness. It is a feeble attempt to claim some agency, some reassurance that there is still some power we can assert within a system that has demonstrated that it is perfectly willing to kill us as long as profit margins increase. It asserts, to use the alleged shooter’s language, that health insurance CEOs are ‘parasites,’ not human beings who struggle and suffer like you and I, and that their lives are worth as little to us as ours apparently are to them.
Still, I cannot bring myself to condemn the jokes, though I know they are morally wrong, nor to criticize those who make them, though I disagree. I believe there are much more important targets for our outrage in the world of healthcare, and better uses for our moral clarity. The jokes, like the assassination itself, are an expression of pain, and we are better served by working to eliminate the pain and the systems that create it than by asking those who are suffering to express their pain more tastefully. Our discomfort at the jokes can be an invitation to care for those making them rather than a call to challenge their language. We should work to create a world where there is so little injustice and inequality that nobody feels the need to make such jokes or to shoot CEOs, and when someone is killed and leaves behind a grieving family, nobody has any reason to feel anything other than sorrow.
