Life in the Global Capital Aquarium

We are all alienated

It wouldn’t be too crazy to infer from David Foster Wallace’s vast writing on freedom and alienation that he, perhaps echoing Marx, believed everyone, including the wealthy and the powerful, are alienated under capitalism (fingers crossed that he was indeed echoing Marx).

This is no more to say than that the actors within the inhumane system all of us must live under, who wield power and influence over the vast majority of the populace, the one percent over the ninety-nine, while certainly not experiencing anything remotely like the hardship and suffering that the working and middle class must endure, still experience alienation.

Looking at society from this perspective renders all of us as creatures subjugated, as, in one way or another, cogs in some subjectivity-less machine that grinds us through its gears like processed beef.

Some of us experience less grinding, are able to purchase our way out of the suffering of material need, out of the incessant anxiety of wondering where next month’s rent is going to come from.

But none of us are, at the end of the day, exempt from persecution by the system of capitalism.

In this sense, all of us, from the lowliest lumpenprole extending their hand out in some littered street, to the highest echelon of penthouse wealth, are alienated from the project of reaching the true potential of our humanity.

By now it might seem to you that, as per recent events, I might have dreamt up this essay as a defense of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare who was gunned down in cold blood two mornings ago (the gunman is still on the loose at the time of writing).

Perish the thought, for I believe that the ancillary story to this event, the near universal valorization on Twitter/X and elsewhere online of the gunman for the taking of a life in the cold, early morning hours of this past Wednesday, which has effloresced in its wake like a restless symphony, deserves a high degree of credence and attention.

The crux of this gigantic, collective spitting on the grave of the CEO is this: under the present system, thousands to millions of us are subjected to the same degree of cold-bloodedness, a host of routine “shootings” by the healthcare insurance industry that, unlike the one that happened the other morning, go unreported every day.

Every day someone is getting fatally iced by the profit motive fueling insurance giants’ heartless denial of claims.

The now famous chart showing the various denial rates places UnitedHealthcare, the late Thompson’s company of which he was in charge, at a fat 32%, well above all the others. To say this cold statistic had nothing to do with his targeting would be rather obtuse.

So, in light of the obvious violence that insurance giants perpetrate on ordinary Americans every single day, much of it murderous, quickly summoning our universalist principles to condemn the ghastly phenomenon of the internet’s hive mind praise for a homicidal action against only one man seems hasty at the least.

I also don’t think it’s even worth supplementing this compassion for the online vitriol, much of it coming in the form of actual “you’re next”-style death threats to other CEOs, with the usual bromides about walking down the street and chewing gum, that we must condemn both this and that, that we must decry the homicidal violence of the shooter while also decrying the violence of the healthcare insurance industry.

Save all that for other venues, like Bernie Sander’s Twitter account or a donation drive for the DSA.

Rather, my point in writing this is to inquire as to what this phenomenon of mass thirst for CEO blood actually is.

Is it just the vulgarity of the internet?

Proof that Elon Musk’s anticensorship regime has produced a snake pit of grotesquely lowered standards of public discourse?

Is it the atrophying of civic life in the form of some Hobbesian mass brutality?

Or is it a principled, albeit ghastly, permissiveness towards free speech as enshrined in our quasi-holy document known as the Constitution?

What seems to account for the noteworthy lubricity of all of this anger and bloodlust being expressed online?

Again, we dismiss the realities that undergird the online reaction to the killing of a CEO at our peril. There is mass suffering going on, deep, intractable resentments and systemwide helplessness in this country, most of it going unreported all the time.

And every time The New York Times puts some jobs report, some wonky statement from Jerome Powell or some chart with a skyward thrust on the right side on its front page (they did this even today!) it just pours salt on the wound. If this past November’s election is anything to go by, we can be assured that these arrogant reports are at best technocratic attempts at quelling unrest, rather than real evidence that Americans have it better than they think they do.

My take is that the phenomenon of universal praise for the gunman’s actions, which we might call a much clearer, less problematic version of the type of praise Hamas received from the paraglider left one year ago—in essence, a praise of terroristic action—is actually a form of sublimated collective action.

The condemnation that the paraglider left received for expressing solidarity with Palestinian liberation in the form of approval for the terrorism of October 7th is supported by the understanding we have in the West that the lives that were taken on that day were innocent ones and therefore to praise Hamas’s actions is to praise evil.

Naturally, many others, not just Hamas, disagree. They believe that, as citizens of an apartheid state, they were complicit in the horrors Israel daily perpetrated against Palestinians for decades and, as such, were not so very innocent after all.

I don’t hold this view. If I did, I would also have to approve of what Al Qaeda did on September 11th and, since I don’t approve of what happened on that day, I believe that the lives taken on October 7th were innocent lives.

Just as the life of Brian Thompson was an innocent one.

The response to his killing therefore mirrors that of the paraglider left after October 7th, which evidences a belief that the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, along with, by extension, many other CEOs, actually deserved to be assassinated, that the terrorism that the shooter enacted Wednesday morning was justified.

You can see what kind of slippery slope we’re going down here. Because if we continue to stack minerals on the scale in order to arrive at some sort of generalized permission for the taking of a life in such a manner as the surveillance footage outside the Hilton shows us, next thing we know, given the extent of the state-approved suffering of the Palestinian people, we are well on our way to actually doing the thing that rightwing propagandists say about the left when they want to degrade us in the eyes of the public, that we are “in league” with Hamas.

In that case, well, I hate to say it, they would be right.

Which is why we must always be incredibly vigilant never to allow ourselves to be so pigeonholed.

And why, after all I suppose, it is in fact important to emphasize, not just the reasonableness of the anger fueling the online response to Brian Thompson’s murder, but also the innocence of his life.

We do not live under a system that enables mass revolutionary working class subjectivity. We are atomized and siloed. The possibility for systemwide collective action, for general strikes, for political action taken by the working class, without interference from capitalists, seems foreclosed for the near, or far, future.

That ghastly anger, the virtual vein-popping and feral scowls rising from the coldness of our screens, is what you get when you have a system that prohibits true worker power. The avenue with which to conduct a humane response to capitalist aggression simply doesn’t exist.

We can see a reflection of this dynamic in the Middle East: the Palestinians’ only defenders were a ruthless, terrorist organization. They can hardly be blamed for letting them defend them, given what they have to endure.

While setting aside the inhumanity of what occurred on October 7th, it is clear that the political environment has changed on a mass scale and in that sense much of whatever political motivations Hamas’s actions on that day had were successful.

But can we say that the political change that Hamas achieved has in any appreciable way improved the prospects of Palestinian liberation, whether in the near or far future? That is almost impossible to say at present, given what is unfolding, but so far the answer seems to be no.

The most that can be said is that more of the contradictions of transnational capitalism and the way it promotes regional violence such as we see in the Middle East is being revealed, which, given the violence our eyes are exposed to every day, seems like a truly dystopic “benefit.”

And so, in the same way that the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are doomed, so are the lives of ordinary workers here in the United States, just in a different way. In lieu of such desperately needed measures as the alleviation of suffering of the working class, or in lieu of real political agency for the working class, instead we take to our knives and to our guns.

The sad thing is how impotent the reaction really is. For it will come to nothing. No meaningful political action, to say nothing of meaningful change in the healthcare sector, is going to come out of it. It is a vaporous, hopeless and vituperative emanation, as effectual as a cold gust that subsides in two seconds, our picnic blankets momentarily flapped. All it is is anger, with no object, with no plan, with no possibility.

All it is is evidence.

We are all alienated. That includes Brian Thompson. That includes Elon Musk. That includes Jeff Besos and all the rest, all of those bandits who subsist within the rogues gallery of wealth inequality we are told every day is merely a result of human nature. They are victims, too.

Yet, though we are all cogs in this machine, realizing this does not take away from the fact that we can never leave it up to them to make the change that is desperately needed.

The cost of their comfort is their absence of consciousness. We can never leave it up to the winners to decide the fates of all of the losers because the winners will never be able to step outside of the cushy spaces that the system puts them in. Revolutionary subjectivity can belong only to the suffering, specifically to the suffering from the want of material resources.

But the wealthy and the powerful are suffering, too. They, too, are powerless to do anything to change the system.

Saying that they, too, are cogs in the machine is not intended to deflate the efforts to enact revolutionary change but rather the opposite: for understanding that the system of capitalism is not some military spacecraft piloted by conscious villains but rather a subjective-less entity with its own evolutionary intelligence, is necessary in order to take the steps required. We cannot proceed unless we know the enemy precisely. And the enemy is not human.

The shooter was powerless, as well, as are all of the haters online spitting on Brian Thompson’s grave.

True power won’t come until there is collective action. Until then, we will have to make do with the daily silent violence perpetrated by the wealthy against the poor, with the sporadic eruption of spectacular violence on the street against the one percent and with the ultimately ineffectual ghastly tableaus of online anger that follow in the wake, like the parting of a canal-way from the passing of a yacht, the waters destined to return to their placid, albeit oppressive, silence.