The Thing About Murder

Photo of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, allegedly by Luigi Mangione.

by Darryl L. Fortson, MD

  America has snorted several "lines" of Luigi Mangione’s vigilante justice. We’ve all had an opportunity to release our wrath upon the avaricious health insurance industry. But all highs must end, and the reality is that a human creation of God, with a wife and kids was gunned down and shot in the back without warning because another child of God decided that he, and he alone, had the authority to act as his judge, jury, and executioner. This is what happened to United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson this past December 4th.

    Here’s the thing about murder; it is defined as “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.” This means that, as opposed to homicide (defined as “the taking of a person’s life, regardless of the intent or the circumstances”) it is always against the law – always. He or she plots and schemes to murder someone, and in this case, the murderer planned to escape accountability for his crimes.

  But no one gets away with murder – no one. If the law doesn’t hold them accountable, then the Creator will. The universe maintains an equilibrium state. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for tooth,” is not merely a statement of retribution, but also an expression of the “thermodynamic equilibrium” that governs both the physical and metaphysical realms of the universe. When a man murders another, the murderer has committed both murder and suicide – maintaining equilibrium. When he transports another human being to the dimension of the non-living, he places his soul in that same dimension. The fact that the murderer may continue to live and breathe doesn’t change that; the lag time between the physical death of the murdered and that of murderer is merely a function of the differing rate at which the physical processes take place, but the metaphysical “death” is instantaneous and symmetrical.

  Know that if Mangione did what he has been accused of, he now exists in another “dimension” – the dimension of the damned. His soul is in a horrible place, whether he knows it or not. He killed a man.

  “But CEO Thompson deserves to die for all the people he has hurt or indirectly killed as a result of his compassionless corporate decision making!” says the justifier of Mangione’s alleged deeds. And the justifier is right – Thompson does deserve death. But so do I for my sins and you for yours, at least as far as Christian teaching is concerned – and not just physical death, but eternal death as well. The difference between his sin and ours is the difference between being crushed by a thousand tons of Mangione’s bricks and “only” ten tons of ours; only the weight of our sins change, not the eternal result. That’s what the whole “Christ and the Cross” thing seeks to rectify.

  This is what makes the murder of Thompson so absurd after we sober up from our self-righteous, vigilante “high.” It is as if serial killer Ted Bundy killed Osama Bin Laden and Bundy declared himself righteous and justified. What the what???

  Murder then, is suicide. When you take a man’s life with malice aforethought, you have given your soul to darkness, and absent sincere and profound repentance, you won’t get it back. Thompson hurt and foreshortened lives as a result of his corporate decision making, and absent that same sincere and profound repentance, his soul may not have been returned to him either. But he never got a full chance to repent because another unauthorized man took his life. As a result, two souls may well be lost, with no real assurances that the lives whose fate remain in United HealthCare’s hands will be engaged with any more regard by the new CEO, who is likely to be as driven by profit motive and caught up, literally body and soul, by the greed machine that is modern American health insurance as his predecessor.

  The thing about murder is that it doesn’t work for anybody involved in it or witnessing it. It is a damaging “free radical” that cascades into the lives of those affected – if not in loss, then fear; if not in fear, then hate, and if not in hate, then in callous indifference to evil.

  Murderers aren’t heroes. They aren’t pretty, handsome, or cute – they’re just murderers. All murderers do is change the destiny of their souls, and the pain in ours. And that’s a “high” none of us need.