TCC #44: The UHC CEO shooter was a climate activist in an alternate timeline

In a world on fire, what counts as violence?

As I’m sure is the case with many of you, I’ve been fascinated by the aftermath of the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting. We all know what happened by now.

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Let me start by saying that violence is not the path I advocate — but we cannot ignore the societal forces that elevate it into relevance.

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The shooting itself isn’t all that interesting. After all — in The United States, 125 people are killed by gunshot every day. Firearms are the leading cause of death for children and teens in the US. We barely blink an eye at these headlines anymore. As Wendell Berry says in a recent essay, “The roving eyes of the media hesitate a due moment over the current sensation and hurry on to the next.”

So why did this particular attack captivate us? Well, the victim was a rich and powerful white guy who oversaw a company directly tied to the suffering of many. UnitedHealthcare allegedly denies an estimated one-third of claims they receive.

It didn’t take long for the internet to Do Its Thing. The shooter is, well, sort of beloved.

In fact, the response to the actions of the alleged shooter was so overwhelmingly positive that when a McDonald’s worker (allegedly) called him in, many expressed dismay.

“Deny.”

“Defend.”

“Depose.”

With these three words etched into the bullets found at the scene of the crime, one thing is for sure; the shooter made his message clear.

I lay no claim as an expert on the systemic injustices of health insurance (or do I? I did spend hours this week researching healthcare plans for my family to no avail… ) — but the parallels to corporate inaction on climate are impossible to ignore. The frustration and despair people feel over the injustices of the US healthcare system and the frustration and despair people feel over the injustices of broader corporate behavior are not so different.

The same forces that make the shooter’s actions resonate so widely also fuel the climate movement’s challenges in breaking through societal indifference.

The question is, could this shooting actually be heralded as a form of activism?

Allow me to use the alleged shooter’s recent-ish Goodreads review as a segue to my point:

Let’s be clear — I’m not condoning murder and violence. But there are some valid points here. We are so inundated with news and war and clips of violence and children being burned alive and GRWM videos and memes and GoFundMe campaigns and shitty ads and sequels and remakes and school shootings and and and — only the absolutely absurd breaks through anymore.

This shooting broke through. It has shaken — and (perhaps worryingly) united — culture in a way that I can’t remember seeing in a long, long time. It had an impact.

!! Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield reversed course on a decision to limit anesthesia coverage in surgeries that go over a set time the day after the UHC CEO shooting.

Nothing to see here, ladies and gentlemen.

Violence isn’t okay. Violence should never be okay. This is what we’re told time and again — and it’s what most of us want to believe.

The next question, then:

Is routinely denying care to those who need it not an act of violence?

Is going about business as usual when you’ve known for years such actions would lead to climate catastrophe not an act of violence?

Is spreading harmful disinformation and actively lobbying to bend policy to serve one industry’s own narrow interests instead of the public good (looking at you, fossil fuel execs) not an act of violence?

From Jia Tolentino, published in The New Yorker:

The Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung coined the term “structural violence” in 1969, in a paper that offers a taxonomy of violence—ways to distinguish between the forms that violence can take. It can be physical or psychological. It can be positive, enacted through active reward, or negative, enacted through punishment. It can hurt an object, or not; this object can be human, or not. There is either—Galtung notes that this is the most important distinction—a person who acts to commit the violence or there is not. Violence can be intended or unintended. It can be manifest, or latent. Traditionally, our society fixates on only one version of this: direct physical violence committed by a person intending harm.

Where exactly is the line of morality between violence against the many, by the hands of an entire industry, and violence against an individual, by an individual?

And the next question:

How can the climate movement achieve its goals, considering that, to date, nothing has worked?

Andreas Malm, author of “How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire,” argues that violence is practically a necessity to achieve revolutionary goals. He refers to the idea of a ‘radical flank’ — which refers to the positive or negative effects that radical activists for a cause have on more moderate activists for the same cause. Research suggests that the presence of a radical flank (the activists who are willing to say, sabotage new oil and gas production facilities) increases public support for a moderate faction (the ‘nonviolent’ protestors) within the same movement.

“Further, it is the use of radical tactics, such as property destruction or violence, rather than a radical agenda, that drives this effect.”

If only the extreme can break through in a world exhausted by information overload, where other than violence can we turn? Let us look to the other side of the spectrum. Climate comedy seems to work. At the least, it gets views — people understand and engage with it.

And boy could we all use some levity! Amelia and I are big proponents of humor in climate and broader sustainability comms. More of it, please! But it’s worth acknowledging that most of the best communications work that the climate movement has to offer has done little more than build awareness of the various catastrophes at hand. Awareness is good! It’s a precursor to action! But it’s not enough!

You know what else people understood and engaged with? Overwhelmingly so?

The actions of Luigi Mangione. In a society where corporate systems often feel untouchable, the alleged shooter’s actions were a pattern break that tapped into and shed light on a deep-seated undercurrent of anger.

“Of course, the solution, in the end, can’t be indifference—not indifference to the death of the C.E.O., and not the celebration of it, either. But who’s going to drop their indifference first? At this point, it’s not going to be the people, who have a lifetime of evidence that health-insurance C.E.O.s do not care about their well-being. Can the C.E.O. class drop its indifference to the suffering and death of ordinary people? Is it possible to do so while achieving record quarterly profits for your stakeholders, in perpetuity?”

Replace ‘health-insurance’ with ‘fossil-fuel’ and nothing changes.

Many view the alleged shooter’s actions, and his resulting lionization, as a sign of social decay. But is it not rot at the very core of our institutions that led us here? If the structures that sustain us are rotting, it’s up to us to build something better.

The UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting is a stark reminder of the depths of frustration and despair that can emerge when people feel abandoned by the systems meant to protect them. This particular shooting brought front and center the structural violence embedded in our institutions, the indifference of corporate power, and the apathy that typically pervades public discourse.

When it comes to climate action it’s clear that, if nothing else, something needs to break through the noise. Whether through radical acts, biting satire, or bold systemic reforms, we must find ways to make people care — and act.

Let’s hope we don’t need to wait for more violence to shake us awake. Maybe humor, art, and the audacity to demand better can create the momentum we need.

The question is not whether we’ll face a reckoning, but what form it will take.