Sacrificial Violence and Retribution
2024-12-23
" Analysis Current Events
In the following analysis, we explore the responses to two different extrajudicial
killings as a way to understand the different forms of violence that are coming
to the fore in our society right now. In the appendix, we offer an incomplete
roundup of various responses to the shooting of Brian Thompson, the CEO of
UnitedHealthcare.
Just about every day, more than fifty people are shot and killed in the United
States. On December 4, 2024, one of them was Brian Thompson, the CEO of
UnitedHealthcare, the most profitable health insurance corporation in the
country. In the weeks since, we’ve all heard a great deal more about that
particular CEO than about any of the hundreds of other people shot and killed
this month. At the same time, there has been an outpouring of support for the
attack, despite the efforts of media platforms and employers to suppress it.
On December 13, president-elect Donald Trump and vice-president-elect JD
Vance invited Daniel Penny to join them at the Army/Navy football game—solely
on account of his having senselessly murdered a Black person and been
acquitted.
1
Here, we see some of the most powerful political figures in the world
attempting to drum up enthusiasm for extrajudicial killings—provided that they
target the marginalized.
We must understand the popular response to the shooting of the
UnitedHealthcare CEO in the context of a society in which life is increasingly
cheap. After the far right lionized George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse;
after millions participated in a countrywide uprising demanding that police stop
killing Black and brown people, only to see politicians across the political
spectrum double down on supporting police, with the consequence that police
have continued to murder people at a steadily accelerating pace; after
bipartisan support for the genocide in Gaza; after hundreds of school
shootings, hundreds of thousands of opioid overdoses, and millions of COVID-
19 fatalities, not to mention the countless avoidable deaths resulting from the
for-profit health and insurance industries—is it really so startling that one
person took a shot at an executive? What is startling is that in nearly every
other case, the killers have targeted those less powerful than themselves.
Trump’s decision to host Daniel Penny is a literalistic fulfillment of Frank
Wilhoit’s dictum that “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but
does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
By contrast, the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO suggests that the law
cannot always protect the in-groups from the out-groups.
But this is not just a question of violence aimed down the social hierarchy
versus violence aimed up it. We are talking about two entirely different kinds of
violence. Let’s call them sacrificial violence and retribution.
Sacrificial Violence
What is sacrificial violence?
According to René Girard, writing in Violence and the Sacred,
When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The
creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only
because it is vulnerable and close at hand.
Girard is part of a long tradition of European anthropologists whose
speculations boil down to a series of just-so stories about humanity.
2
But we don’t have to buy into his entire framework to recognize what he is
speaking about here:
The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it
prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of
dissension scattered throughout the community are drawn to the person of the
sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice.
Sacrificial violence, in short, is scapegoating carried through to the point of
murder, functioning as a ritualized means of preserving a society in which there
are tremendous unresolved internal tensions.
If left unappeased, violence will accumulate until it overflows its confines and
floods the surrounding area. The role of sacrifice is to stem this rising tide of
indiscriminate substitutions and redirect violence into “proper” channels.
And who makes for an ideal scapegoat?
All our sacrificial victims […] are invariably distinguishable from the
nonsacrificeable beings by one essential characteristic: between these victims
and the community a crucial social link is missing, so they can be exposed to
violence without fear of reprisal. Their death does not automatically entail an
act of vengeance. The considerable importance this freedom from reprisal has
for the sacrificial process makes us understand that sacrifice is primarily an act
of violence without risk of vengeance.
This equation explains why ordinary bigots seek their targets among the most
marginalized—those no one will avenge. But Girard’s framework goes further,
showing how this can help to protect the state in times of crisis.
Perhaps this explains why Trump was able to win the 2024 election by
promising to carry out gratuitous violence against undocumented people and
trans people. Carrying out “the largest deportation operation in American
history,” as Trump has explicitly pledged to do, will wreck the US economy. It
will deliver no material gains to the vast majority of his supporters, who benefit
from the underpaid labor of the undocumented and the resulting cheapness of
commodities. From a purely economic perspective, exploiting the labor of the
undocumented inside the borders of the United States provides more
advantages to Trump’s supporters than deporting them ever could. By any
measure, it’s a waste of resources: deporting a million people in one year will
cost eighteen times more than the entire world spends annually on cancer
research.
In other words, mass deportations are a costly luxury indulgence that Trump’s
supporters regard as worth the expense because they experience the need for
violence so intensely.
The same goes for the desire to see violence enacted—both judicially and
extrajudicially—against trans people and against women as a whole. The
mendacious propaganda falsely claiming that trans people are carrying out
mass shootings or that undocumented immigrants are contributing to a crime
wave is not received by its intended audience as cool-headed statistical inquiry,
but rather as an indulgence of their desire to do violence to the truth itself as a
step towards doing violence to those that they imagine can be harmed “without
fear of reprisal.” They have not been misled by erroneous reporting; their desire
for violence has created a market for falsehoods.
As we argued during the first Trump administration, Trump did not become
popular by promising to redistribute wealth, but by promising to redistribute
violence. This redistribution of violence creates a pressure valve for a whole
host of resentments. To quote Girard, once more:
The desire to commit an act of violence on those near us cannot be suppressed
without a conflict; we must divert that impulse, therefore, toward the sacrificial
victim, the creature we can strike down without fear of reprisal, since he lacks a
champion.
Why are societies driven to desire sacrificial violence in the first place? If it is
true that sacrificial violence serves to channel rage away from those who
provoke it, then we can infer that the more injustice there is in a society—the
more that people are oppressed and exploited and humiliated by those who
have more power and more privilege than they do—the stronger the urge for
sacrificial violence will be.
3
This brings us back to Trump’s decision to fête Daniel Penny. In a time when
there is increasingly widespread anger, the role that sacrificial violence plays
channeling violence away from those who are responsible for harm is essential
for maintaining the stability of the prevailing order. This is the world of The
Hunger Games, become real.
What would all these angry people be doing if their rage was not satiated via
violence against those more vulnerable than themselves?
A banner seen hanging in Chicago over Lake Shore Drive on December 9,
2024.
Retribution
Retribution is fundamentally different from sacrificial violence. For its target, it
seeks the person who is most responsible for a particular injustice, regardless
of where that person is situated in the social hierarchy.
As a general rule, those who are most responsible for injustice are usually
among those who possess the most power—otherwise, how would they have
the opportunity to do so much harm? The average person in the United States
has considerably more to fear from corporate executives than from
undocumented immigrants.
It is the powerful who are able to pose the greatest threat to others: this is
practically self-evident, despite the efforts of billionaire-owned media and
social media platforms to humanize the wealthy and dehumanize the poor.
When we see people fixating their rage on the powerless amid the worst
inequality in generations, this is a dead giveaway that they have been
hoodwinked. It is telling that the populist movement around the wealthiest man
to ever become president of the United States is presented as a “revolt against
the elites” even as it rallies people to worship oligarchs like Trump and Elon
Musk. There is no longer any way to rally people without at least pretending to
have a go at some subset of the ruling class.
It is terrifying to realize that one’s enemies are considerably more powerful than
oneself. It is much easier to take out one’s misfortunes on those who are even
worse off. Easier—and utterly pointless—and despicably cowardly.
The shooting of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare galvanized such a powerful
response because it posed the question very clearly: should violence be
enacted against the most vulnerable—or against the most responsible? It spoke
to millions of people because, across the political spectrum, all of them
understood that insurance profiteers are responsible for their suffering or for
the suffering of people they empathize with. Precisely because it was legible as
retribution, the shooting illuminated that injustice has been taking place on a
mass scale.
Commenters on Youtube discussing their feelings about the shooting of the
CEO of UnitedHealthcare.
Girard cautions us against vengeance, arguing that a single act of retribution
can set off a chain reaction:
Vengeance, then, is an interminable, infinitely repetitive process. Every time it
turns up in some part of the community, it threatens to involve the whole social
body. There is the risk that the act of vengeance will initiate a chain reaction
whose consequences will quickly prove fatal… The multiplication of reprisals
instantaneously puts the very existence of a society in jeopardy.
It would put the very existence of this society in jeopardy, at least. Of course, a
society in which capitalists are able to amass billions by ruthlessly exploiting
everyone else—a society that can only remain stable by targeting more and
more people for sacrificial violence—already involves a certain amount of
jeopardy.
Indeed, what the capitalists fear most is that this single act of vengeance might
come to involve the whole social body, that it could initiate a chain reaction.
This is why Luigi Mangione, the person accused of shooting the CEO of
UnitedHealthcare, is being charged with the same crime on both state and
federal levels, and with terrorism besides.
Is Girard right about the risks of vengeance? We can grant that many people
hold sincere but erroneous beliefs about who is responsible for their suffering,
quite apart from the inclination towards sacrificial violence that the powerful
seek to foster for their own protection. But is it better to inhabit a society in
which the powerful can inflict any amount of death and suffering on the
powerless without fear of consequences, up to and including outright
genocide? Is that really the best way to protect society?
We can also grant that it is far better to resolve conflicts to the satisfaction of all
parties than it is to descend into interminable blood feuds.
4
But the state does not actually exist to resolve conflicts. The judicial apparatus
and the hundreds of thousands of police who serve it exist to ensure that
conflicts need not be resolved to the satisfaction of all parties. They exist to
force unsatisfactory outcomes on people, almost always to the advance of the
wealthy—thereby perpetuating the conditions that stoke the desire for
sacrificial violence.
If Girard is indeed correct that sacrificial violence is always directed against
those who can be “exposed to violence without fear of reprisal,” then it stands
to reason that retribution is the only way to hold it at bay once it is unleashed.
Opposing retribution and accepting sacrificial violence in its place will not serve
to avert bloodshed; it can only function to ensure that bloodletting will not
threaten the social order. Today, the vast majority of us are closer to being
among those who can be killed “without fear of reprisal” than we are to
becoming executives whose deaths will be mourned on nationwide media—and
the less we act in solidarity with each other, the truer that will be. If we do not
wish to risk one day being subject to sacrificial violence ourselves, we must
become capable of forging common cause with those who are worse off than
us in order to defend ourselves from those who seek to exploit and oppress us.
In the absence of effective collective models for self-defense and social
change, retribution hangs in the popular imagination as the only remaining way
to take a stand against injustice. Sacrificial violence corrupts and debases all
who derive relief from it; by contrast, retribution at least expresses a forlorn
longing for a world without injustice. As Girard himself admits,
It is precisely because they detest violence that men make a duty of
vengeance.
Beyond Martyrdom
In the iconography of sacrificial violence and retribution, the scapegoat and the
martyr are twin archetypes. The former is sacrificed to stabilize the existing
order, the latter serves to sanctify a new order by giving his life for it. By
sacrificing himself, the martyr demonstrates that the new order has a
transcendent value—that it is worth more than life itself. These archetypes are
thousands of years old; their influence on us is deeper than we understand.
Of course, most people are only drawn to martyrdom as a spectator sport.
Martyrs’ sacrifices often prove most useful to those who have no intention of
risking their own lives for any cause. The popular response to the shooting of
the CEO of UnitedHealthcare shows how disillusioned millions of people are
with capitalism and its beneficiaries, but this response is also a symptom of
widespread despair and demobilization. The shooting aroused such an
outpouring of pent-up frustrations precisely because these people have not
been able to figure out what they themselves can do to put a stop to injustice
and exploitation.
It is up to us to show that there are ways to resist injustice and exploitation that
do not end in martyrdom. If we do not popularize collective models for bringing
about social change, if we leave people to choose between passivity and
martyrdom, the vast majority will choose passivity.
Those who approve of neither sacrificial violence nor retribution had better
demonstrate an effective alternative. Arguing against retribution without doing
anything to change the conditions that provoke it can only set the stage for
even more sacrificial violence to occur in its place.
Make no mistake, as economic and ecological crises intensify, we are going to
see more and more sacrificial violence—and more public figures will come to
view it as necessary, even if they dare not call it by its name. Trump’s violent
rhetoric is not a temporary excess; it is just the most visible manifestation of a
mechanism that has already resumed the essential role that it plays in
stabilizing the social order during every era of unrest.
5
As anarchists, the spiritual economics of guilt and punishment that underlies
the framework of retribution is foreign to us. Calculating culpability and meting
out suffering is the work of the state, its judiciary, and its God; we have other
ambitions. We do not wish to see the guilty punished as an end unto itself—we
seek to do away with the means via which they oppress. We would pass up the
fulfillment of any vendetta if we could thereby bring about the abolition of
capitalism, even if that meant permitting every former billionaire to walk free.
We don’t seek to goad others into becoming martyrs on our behalf. We aspire
to model the sort of courage, humility, and care we hope that others will
express alongside us so that together we can change the world.
But until we succeed, there will be sacrificial violence—and retribution.
Graffiti seen in Seattle, Washington.
Appendix
According to a survey, over 40% of young people polled deemed the
assassination of Thompson “acceptable.” Photographs of graffiti, banner drops,
and altered billboards expressing support for Luigi Mangione, the person
currently being charged with the killing of the CEO, have gone viral and
generated headlines. The December 4th Legal Committee is helping to run a
fundraising campaign in support of Mangione’s legal defense; interviews with
spokespersons Sam Beard and Jamie Peck have been featured on outlets such
as CNN, drawing hundreds of supportive comments. As of this writing, the
online fundraiser has raised over $186,000.
Here follows an incomplete roundup of graffiti, posters, corporate media
interviews, and demonstrations addressing the shooting of Brian Thompson or
expressing support for Luigi Mangione, the person accused of carrying it out.
Sam Beard speaking on CNN on behalf of a fundraising campaign in support of
Luigi Mangione’s legal defense.
Pacific Northwest
A poster seen in Portland, Oregon.
Graffiti on a freeway in Medford, OR
California
A banner appeared in Turlock, California.
Two banners appeared on the bridge connecting San Francisco, California.
Graffiti seen in Riverside, California.
Billboard redecorated in Inland Empire, California.
Graffiti seen in Hollywood, California.
Graffiti seen in San Diego, California.
Freight train graffiti photographed in the Bay Area.
Southwest
Graffiti seen in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Graffiti seen in Tucson, Arizona.
Central
A stencil seen in Austin, Texas.
Also in Austin, on December 21, several people participated in a demonstration
and circulated the following report:
Today, six Luigis took a couple banners to a highly trafficked foot bridge in
downtown Austin and danced to the Mario theme song. Pedestrians cheered,
wrote letters to Luigi, and even took photos with the banners. Letters ranged
from heart-wrenching stories about family members being denied healthcare to
love letters. The overall reception was extremely good. Flyers were handed out
that called out the largest health insurance company in Texas, Blue Cross Blue
Shield. They read:
“On December 4th, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down.
The bullet casings told the story: this was act of vengeance against
UnitedHealthCare, who denies over 30% of health insurance claims—a
company emblematic of a system that kills. Every year, over 50,000 Americans
die from lack of insurance. 38% percent of us avoid necessary care because
we’re scared of the cost. One in twelve is drowning in medical debt. Health
insurance companies aren’t doctors. They don’t heal—they profit by restricting
access to care. While we ration medications, delay appointments, and worry
about bills, they rake in billions. We get sicker and they get richer. This violence
isn’t on the evening news. It’s buried beneath their marketing, their endless
paperwork, their fine print. But make no mistake: this is violence. And they’re
laughing all the way to the bank. Blue Cross Blue Shield, Texas’s largest insurer,
denies one in five claims while pocketing $18 billion in revenue. Whether
Thompson’s death filled you with joy or horror, it ripped the mask off. The truth
was laid bare: these companies are complicit in widespread suffering. Think
about the last time you or someone you love worried about a medical bill. Put
off care because of the cost. Cut pills in half to make them last. You’ve felt the
violence they inflict. Now, the media and government scramble to spin the
narrative, calling working-class mother Briana Boston a “terrorist” for uttering
“Deny, Defend, Depose” when her claims were denied. We must remain clear
headed: a small group gets rich off our illness. The solution is just as simple:
abolish these corporations and nationalize health insurance. Single-payer
healthcare works everywhere else in the developed world, where people live
longer and healthier lives. Texans, by contrast, die three years younger, victims
of private healthcare. The only question left is this: When will we stop waiting
and take what is ours?”
Austin, December 21.
Midwest
Graffiti seen in Chicago, Illinois.
More graffiti seen in Chicago, Illinois.
A banner displayed in Chicago, Illinois.
Graffiti seen in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Graffiti seen in Chicago, Illinois.
In addition, a rally in occurred Indianapolis, Indiana. From a report:
Today, we protest against Elevance Health not in its role as a distinct actor in
the health insurance market, a single agent in the hall of mirrors of
contemporary capitalism. Elevance operates in just the same manner as UHC in
the way it ranks bodies and judges some to be worthy of care and the rest
simply not worth the time or effort. In this manner, the only difference between
the two is a matter of degrees in subdomains. We believe it is necessary to
oppose this system of broad ranking of life expectancies in an age of
depreciating life expectations. It is necessary as a precondition to a life worth
living. We believe that everyone is worthy of care. We believe that everyone
deserves access to a healthy life according to their own standards. Both
Elevance and UHC stand as barriers to this possibility. This is why we oppose
them.
Graffiti seen in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Southeast
Graffiti seen in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Graffiti seen in Richmond, Virginia.
A sticker seen in St. Petersburg, Florida.
A banner drop photographed in Atlanta, Georgia.
Northeast
Posters appeared in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Graffiti appearedin Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
A banner displayed Vermont.
Graffiti appeared in Baltimore, Maryland.
Several instances of graffiti appeared around New York City, as well as CEO
“Wanted” posters. A noise demonstration also took place outside of the
Ziegfeld Ballroom. One participant said,
“You know the theme of the event tonight is the roaring ’20s. In the roaring
’20s, there was a lot of wealth and inequality, just like now. So while they’re
drinking champagne and thinking about glamor, we’re thinking about the
people that we love who are poor, who are sick, and who can’t afford
healthcare.”
Artwork in Santiago, Chile.
When they invited him to the football game, Penny had just appeared on Fox
News describing the “guilt” he “would have felt if someone did get hurt”—
making it explicitly clear that he did not consider Jordan Neely to count as a
human being. ↩
For example, Girard argues that desire emerges imitatively and that this
inevitably provokes violent tensions between people, as it causes them to
compete for the same scarce objects. One might counter that while some of
the things that people desire are indeed subject to scarcity, imitative desire
could also give rise to cooperation, producing abundance in place of scarcity
and diminishing the impetus towards violence, sacrificial or otherwise. In short,
Girard does a compelling job of describing the role of sacrificial violence in
afflicted societies, but he does not succeed in proving that it is inevitable. ↩
This explains why some of the new voters that Trump picked up in the 2024
election are immediately adjacent to the demographics he is pledging to attack:
positioned near the margins, on the receiving end of injustice, they feel the
urgency of violence more than most. ↩
There is a longstanding tradition, stretching back to Aeschylus’s Oresteia, of
works of philosophy and literature claiming that state power and its attendant
centralized judicial system were invented in order to put an end to the cycle of
violence that Girard claims is the inevitable outcome of the pursuit of
retribution. In the Icelandic tradition, the equivalent work is probably Njáls Saga,
which recounts blood feuds and conflict resolution across a half century in the
days before Iceland had a centralized government. Centralized state
governance took hold in Iceland much later than in ancient Greece, however, so
we can compare the myth presented in the Oresteia with the reality of Icelandic
history. In fact, centralized government did not spontaneously emerge in
Iceland as a means to resolve conflict; rather, once conflicts between various
local parties became irresolvable, the king of Norway was able to take
advantage of the opportunity to bring Iceland under his control and impose his
rule upon it. If this example is any indication, the reality is precisely the opposite
of the myth: those who cannot resolve conflicts among themselves will
eventually be subordinated to the state, which is itself the result of unresolved
conflict that has metastasized into a permanent condition, not the solution to
unresolved conflict. ↩
In order to supply the American public with sacrificial violence, the previous
generation of Republican politicians repeatedly invaded Iraq. That was a kinder,
gentler time, when sacrificial victims were chiefly sought outside the borders of
the United States. Just like today’s war on the undocumented, those invasions
were justified with discernibly false pretenses and scaremongering. The result
was sort of drunken spree from which politicians of both parties emerged with
regrets, having completely destabilized the Middle East and made the world a
considerably more dangerous place. ↩"
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