Hot and Cold Running Violence
Some thoughts on a murder in New York City
Unless you’ve been happily living under a rock, you know what happened. Early one morning in NYC, a youngish white man fatally shot the CEO of a major medical insurance corporation. The corporation was notorious for shady dealings, with litigation outstanding over allegations of insider trading and unjust claims denial. On bullet casings left at the scene, the mystery shooter had engraved three words that appear to refer to a book about insurance companies that arbitrarily deny claims and “what you can do about it.”
To the great surprise of no one other than the clueless one percent, the Internet promptly exploded with an emphatic lack of sympathy for the victim and vociferous condemnation of the predatory dealings of American for-profit healthcare. People from otherwise bitterly divided progressive and conservative camps found momentary common ground in their reaction. Some even went so far as to express warm approval for the shooter. To many, he has become a modern hero.
A famous quote often misattributed to Mark Twain was widely repeated.
I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
— Clarence Darrow
In stark contrast, high-ranking Democratic politicians and corporate leaders alike offered condolences to the CEO’s family, and fulsome eulogia for the murdered man. He was, they all agreed, a great guy and a great loss to the world. Mainstream media for the most part expressed shocked disapproval as they watched the court of public opinion weigh both men’s careers in the balance… and sympathise with the killer more than the victim.
How, the editorial pages demanded, could the public be so heartless, so indecently cruel? Where was their empathy, after this act of “brutal violence” against an innocent and respectable man?
Where indeed?
The phrase of the week is “cold violence.”
“Cold violence should disturb us far more than the beast of rage in man.”
— Jonathan Glover, author of Humanity
Cold violence is the kind that is impersonal, distanced, bureaucratic, mechanistic.
It is cold violence that figures only one employee per decade will die if a safety improvement is not undertaken at the plant; then calculates the cost of the safety improvement and the likely cost of a payout to the employee's family in the event of a death; then decides not to make the improvement — because the payout is smaller than the cost of the safety engineering.
It is cold violence that presents numbers to the Czech government proving that tobacco smoking will help the national economy… by shortening average lifespans, so citizens won't collect as much of their potential retirement benefits.
It is cold violence that moves manufacturing jobs overseas where "it's cheaper" —cheaper because there are no unions, no safety standards, and coerced/slave labour is available.
It is cold violence that sets a target "denial rate" at an insurance company — possibly with the help of AI software — so as to protect shareholder value, and diverts funds away from provision of healthcare and towards gatekeeping.
It is cold violence that surveils a workplace closely enough to catch anyone slacking or slowing down, but not closely enough to respond immediately to an employee who collapses under the strain with a heart attack.
By making the maximisation of profits the paramount or even sole goal of enterprise, capitalism routinely commits cold violence. On the daily, on the hourly, consistently, ever since the birth of modern capitalism on the island of Madeira in the 1600’s.
Cold violence, because it's abstract and statistical and not personally targeted, because the perp and the victim never share the same physical space, seems to us "less criminal" somehow than hot violence, in-person violence… such as the shooting of a CEO on a city sidewalk in the early morning.
Cold violence is masked by dry statistics, trends, ratings of nations using indices like "maternal mortality" and "longevity" and "cost of healthcare per person". Oh dear, our nation has slipped in the ratings. That "looks bad". But it’s about more than looking bad; it really means "more people suffered and died unnecessarily, so that others could get richer." Others just like the $10M/year CEO of a health insurance company that maximises profits by denying coverage to its paid-up policy holders.
Health care bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy for Americans. 45,000 or possibly more Americans die annually as a result of not having health insurance. No one seems to know how many die as a result of having health insurance, yet having their claims denied. The industry apparently doesn’t follow up on the consequences of its denial strategy. Their accounting methods only follow the money.
Capitalism discounts externalities.
People’s lives and health are externalities.
This is cold violence: it’s nothing personal. It’s strictly business. No one's name is ever on a hit list.
Yet Americans understand quite well that they are dealing with a brutally predatory for-profit "health care" system, a system whose primary mission of delivering healthcare to its clients is derailed by its conflicting mission of maximising shareholder value and annual profit. Americans know that some percentage of their neighbours, their family, their friends, will be injured or disabled or experience unnecessary suffering — even die -- so that some of their fellow citizens can see larger numbers in a database kept by their bank, the scoreboard in the giant poker game we call an economy. Perhaps most appalling of all is the way a financialised economy renders us all potentially complicit — we ourselves (if we are fortunate enough to have pensions or other mutual-fund-based investments) may be benefiting from this cold violence, from the predatory practises of the health insurance industrial complex.
The established media report on cold violence only in the most detached terms, often taking no interest in its real cost. They are more likely to celebrate the stock market performance that results from stochastic human sacrifice, than to investigate and report on the body count. But they report on hot violence with great interest and outrage. Murder, after all, is just plain wrong.
But which is more evil? personal murder, or stochastic murder?
To kill one man, as a lone operator, involving no one else... or to kill unknown numbers (hundreds? thousands?) annually, secretively, impersonally, while roping in millions as unwitting accessories both before and after the fact by means of their portfolios, their employer's retirement plan, their pension fund?
The court of public opinion appears to have delivered its verdict.
I want a world with no violence. I do not want to read about people being shot on the street in the early hours of the morning. I do not want to wake up to live video footage of a murder. It appals me.
But I also know that where there is no justice there is no peace. And I know that the grief and rage of the families of victims of cold violence are actually raw and hot; and the more that ordinary people are cheated, parasitised, and immiserated, the hotter that grief and anger will get.
The oligarchs -- like all oligarchs before them -- are sitting on a powder keg and playing with matches.
Thanks for reading. Illustration is by Midjourney, prompt by author. I do use AI to generate illustrations, but I don’t use it in any form for writing. I don’t monetise my writing. If you particularly like something you read here, and wish to reward me with more than kind words, please support another writer with kindred principles, or donate to FFRF, TST, The Guardian, ProPublica, or other left/secular charities or projects of your choosing.
If you are interested in the ethics of stochastic violence, you might like to read a companion piece: Unstable Diffusion: stochastic terrorism and turbulent priests.