A System Built to Eat People Never Stops Eating

I've been thinking a lot these days about the rising religious fascism and murderous oligarchy of the Republican Party, which clearly is the culmination of a decades-long strategy, and also about the near-total capitulation ahead of the fact of the Democratic party, which also seems to have been the result of a decades-long strategy. And I've been thinking a lot about opposition, and what it will look like for us to become the opposition party that we need and which doesn't yet exist.

Let's start with Luigi and Danny.

This month a man murdered the CEO of UnitedHealthCare, which is a company that makes tens of billions of dollars by denying health care for people who desperately need it, in an industry that competes to see who can deny the most health care for the most people. (I read yesterday that they sometimes repossess prosthetic limbs for nonpayment, which holy shit.) They think they caught the guy who did the murder; his name's Luigi Mangione, and people are calling him "Luigi" like a friend, and sort of making a folk hero out of this guy who has murdered the head of a murder company. Luigi is being charged as a terrorist, which is something people have noticed did not happen to people with much bigger body counts—for example Dylann Roof, a young neo Nazi who committed mass murder in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, who killed 9 Black people in hopes of starting a race war. And yes, they made a show of perp walking Luigi down the streets of New York, where he was not captured, flanked by an army of storm troopers who did not capture him, as well as New York mayor and famous canned ham Eric Adams, who also didn't do shit to catch him. A McDonald's worker did the thankless job, as McDonald's workers often do, and this ended the nationwide manhunt, which is not the sort of institutional attention that most murder victims receive. Word is they'll seek the death penalty for Luigi, which I've noticed doesn't disturb most of the people who have been saying killing is never the answer. It's reported the Democratic governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, is proposing structural changes to New York's emergency calling system, creating a new special hotline just for CEOs, one presumably that the police—an institution that costs New York City $5.8 billion annually, for which they provide important services like not stopping murders and shooting into crowds to stop fare jumpers—will actually answer. Anything at all to make CEOs more safe, appears to be the word, now that exactly 1 of them have been murdered, an act that is apparently more disturbing and dangerous to our system than piles of corpses of schoolchildren murdered in one school shooting after another, year after year after year, none of which I'm told can ever result in structural change, because I am told that taking political action to prevent future tragedies would politicize the tragedy, which I am told is the most disrespectful thing you can ever do. Apparently there is a carve-out for CEOs.

What I'm saying is, our system could not be making it more clear, in bipartisan fashion, that the murdered CEO's life matters more than yours or mine or anybody else's who has been murdered in the last year, including all the thousands or millions of people murdered by the murdered CEO.

Meanwhile the entire chattering class spent the better part of this month—which has featured some of the world's most powerful people doing and planning some of the most awful and upsetting things imaginable—wondering what could possibly lead the public to be so callous as to celebrate the murder of another human being, somebody with a life and a family. You can read more of what I think about the killing and the reaction here, but it's understandable the professional chatterboxes would raise an eyebrow; giving murderers first-name-only hero status is very common, but it's usually the exclusive purview of conservatives, who really enjoy the sight of one of their own murdering somebody they think needs killing and getting away with it; however, the celebration of "Luigi" is more of a bipartisan affair, and that seems dangerous to the chatterboxes in a way that celebrating for example "Kyle" is not.

Let us turn to a different New York City murder. Last year a man killed a Black homeless guy named Jordan Neely on a subway, just choked the life out of him right in public. And this month the guy—people call him "Danny Penny" because that's his name—was acquitted of a charge less than murder after having a more serious charge that was also less than murder dropped. And now Danny Penny is a lauded hero of conservatives everywhere, feted in a luxury box at the Army/Navy game by incoming president and aspiring dictator Donald Trump and incoming friend of Nazis and bearded alleged couchfucker Junior Degenerate "J.D." Vance, and cheered at a recent gathering of Trump Youth, where it was said of him by incoming Republican Texas Republican Brandon Gill "we need a lot more Daniel Pennys in this country, because we have far too many Jordan Neelys." Later at the same event NYYRC chief Gavin Wax called Penny "the hero that a 'post-Constitutional America' needs," and I'll just note that the public's celebration of Luigi Mangione is treated by our mainstream press with far more curiosity, and as far far more dangerous, than is the now mainstreamed Republican concept of a "post-Constitutional America."

Again, Daniel Penny's sole distinction—the cause for which he is celebrated—is that he choked a Black homeless man to death in public and then beat the charge in a court system, the very system that is designed to make Jordan Neely as isolated and marginalized and desperate as he was, the very system designed to help people like Danny Penny get away with killing people like Jordan Neely. And contra incoming representative from the American Nazi Party Brandon Gill, there are not so many Jordan Neelys in this world anymore, because newly minted hero of Republican boys everywhere Danny Penny murdered him.

As far as I can tell, elected Republicans openly calling for young white men to choke Black homeless people to death was not a cause for weeks of handwringing by the chattering class.

Donald Trump is incoming president, as I said. This is because he won the election. He shouldn't have been permitted to run, because he tried to overthrow the U.S. government 4 years ago, but he was allowed to run, because forbidding a domestic enemy of the United States to run for president was not seen by our system as being dangerous in the same way as letting him run is. He won by running an openly fascist, openly authoritarian campaign. It was a Nazi campaign in all but name, a celebration of white racist violence and male sexual violence and the indifferent violence of neglect and the promised violence of rounding up millions of people and putting them in camps. He promised vengeance and retribution and corruption and chaos and bigotry, and the same chattering class shocked by public reaction to Luigi Mangione did everything they could to treat it as normal. It was a disgusting spectacle.

It seems to me that when only the celebration of only one murder is treated as deeply concerning political violence, it means the concern is not political violence or murder or its celebration, but something else. It means that it is not human life that is being defended, but something else.

We might well wonder what that "something else" is.

I think the answer can be found in the story of Luigi and the story of Danny, or rather the story of a system that would respond to two different murders in two different ways, with a show of consequence for one, and a celebration of impunity for the other.

I want to give a brief history of the United States of America, because if we are to set ourselves in opposition to what's coming, we should name exactly what it is we oppose.

OK?

Let's talk about the system we inherited in my nation.

Maybe you've noticed that it's getting harder to truly know what's going on these days. Legacy media—controlled by corrupt billionaires and addicted to the false equivalency of balance rather than dedicated to the principle of truth—has failed us. I am recommending that if you have money to do so, you subscribe to independent journalists and writers instead. This week I'm suggesting The Racket, which is the newsletter of independent award-winning journalist Jonathan Katz. Katz does the important work of real journalism without being beholden to billionaire interests.

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So I live in a nation, and so do you, maybe. Nations are made-up things, but they are wicked popular these days. They're literally everywhere. Mine is called “The United States of America,” and growing up I was told that it was the greatest best country in the whole world and of all forever times, and I believed it, too. There was even a rumor going around that God loved us most, which even as a kid seemed fishy to me, but damn if a lot of people didn't believe it.

The USA was originally a colony, which is a construct wherein people go to a place where they weren’t already, and steal it away from the people who were already there by murdering them. Colonies worked very well for a handful of people who were the most effective at stealing and murdering, and who became immensely wealthy as a result, realizing individual fortunes that would equate to billions of today’s dollars, which is why I will refer to them as "billionaires" even if what they actually had in the bank was 5 crowns, four pounds, seven shillings, 12 sovereigns, and a ha’penny, or whatever the hell. Colonization also seemingly worked—although less well to varying degrees—for most of the other people who worked for the billionaires and did a lot of the actual murder and theft.  However, and as you might have guessed, it worked very badly for the people being murdered and robbed. This created a fair amount of strife, and so there was a lot of the type of fighting known as “war.”

War is what happens when killing gets so organized that it involves songs and uniforms and so forth, and the bodies pile up by the thousands or the millions. The billionaires and their allies, who were engaged in all the murder and theft, called the war they did “self-defense,” while the war waged by their victims, who were being murdered and robbed, they referred to as “savagery.” This is the sort of thing you should expect from people who believe that theft through murder is their natural right, and that the wealth they accumulate is proof of their goodness, and that this goodness converts anything they do, no matter how horrible it is, into virtue, and delivers all the blame for all the suffering to the people who are made to suffer. This is what the billionaires believed, and they said so, too. Put it on paper and everything. And the legal systems they built agreed with them, so everything was nice and legal, too.

The billionaires won their war against the people that lived here already, and they were successful in their efforts to paint the people they murdered as the aggressors and themselves as the defenders, to paint their theft as virtue and the attempt to stop it as savagery. They’re still winning, still successful. Just turn on the news.

It should come as no surprise that these best-of-all-people developed and maintained institutions that allowed men to own women, and certain types of people to own other types of people based on their appearance. The institution that allowed men to own women was called “patriarchy.” The institution that allowed some people to own other people was called “whiteness.” The institution that told them they were good for doing so was a perversion of an ancient anti-billionaire movement the billionaires had inherited called “christianity.” You should be familiar with these institutions; they’re all still going great guns today. You need these sorts of institutions when you have a human-eating system, because humans generally do not like to be eaten, but if you are a billionaire you don’t want to have to do the hard work of robbery and dangerous work of murder yourself, so you need to find absolute thousands or even millions of people to ally with you. For this, you must give them stories that convince them that they are the best-of-all-people, too, just like billionaire you, and they won’t ever be eaten, beloved of billionaires as they are, and if they are very good billionaire helpers, they might be billionaires someday, too. You get these allies by focusing your intention on eating other types of people that your intended allies fear, and stoking the fear with an institution called "propaganda," and hoping the people you haven’t gotten around to eating yet won’t stop to wonder what happens when you run out of those types of people.

That’s what the songs and uniforms are for. That’s what nations are for. And that's why these days billionaires want our young white men to believe that they have the right to rape women and murder Black homeless people on subways, and that they too can be empowered and celebrated for it if they have the gumption.

So whiteness is fueled by an invention of the billionaire system called “racism,” and patriarchy is fueled by an invention of the billionaire system called “sexism,” and the perversion of the ancient anti-billionaire movement known today as christianity is fueled by an invention of the billionaire called “supremacy,” which is the belief that some people matter and other people don’t. The billionaire offer is that you get to matter even though other people don't. And you will get to matter, too ... until it's your turn to not matter, anyway.

The core operational beliefs of any billionaire system were and are: 1) that wealth should come to the wealthy as much as possible and by any means, and 2) that any wealth going anywhere else represents a violation demanding immediate redress, and therefore; 3) any attempt to stop this robbery, no matter how virtuous, is theft demanding punishment, and ; 4) any attempt to stop the punishment, no matter how peaceful, is actually violence demanding murder.

Our colony was no different. There came a point about 250 years ago now, when our founding billionaires got entirely fed up by the fact that their nation was taxing them. A “tax,” when properly applied, is an institutional recognition that all our thriving comes from human society, and so those of us who have managed to thrive most bear most responsibility to maintaining the society from which all of our accomplishments spring, and upon which we depend in the same way as a plant depends upon soil. It so happens that this tax was being levied on those billionaires by even bigger and more violent billionaires who were using tax as a mechanism allow them to eat their share of the murderous lunch our Founding Billionaires had prepared for themselves, but if we keep pulling at this thread, we’ll never stop, so let’s just enjoy the irony and move on.

A “tax” when applied to these billionaires did not send wealth to them, and thus, in their eyes, it was a crime deserving violence. So there was a war, and there were songs and uniforms and bodies in piles, and our founding billionaires won the war against the even bigger billionaires for various reasons, mostly having to do with the fact that the bigger billionaires had bigger fish to fry than our billionaires, who were still only little backwater billionaires back then, as such things are counted. It was a big deal, because little billionaires usually lose to bigger billionaires. Who doesn't love an underdog? (Them, that's who. They got right to murdering every underdog they could find.)

So that’s how our colony became a nation.

This nation was founded in the traditional belief that creating wealth by consuming human beings—owning them and using them and murdering them—was not only good, but goodness; generative, nurturing, sustaining. This nation was founded in the belief that the proof that winners are noble is that they had won, and the proof the losers are savage is that they had lost, and so the winners should have not only wealth but all exoneration, while the losers should have not only poverty but all consequences.

It's a very successful system.

It's also doomed.

There is a big problem with the billionaire system. You might have spotted it, but if not, don’t worry; I’m going to tell you.

The problem with the billionaire system is that it just so happens the notion that it is a virtuous and generative thing for fewer and fewer people to seize more and more of a system's resources by robbing and murdering everyone else simply isn’t true. It's a giant scam. The institutions of patriarchy and whiteness and christianity that support the practice of billionaires aren't real, and the invented divisions of sexism and racism and supremacy that fuel those institutions aren’t real, even if their effects are. And, like any scam, it's unsustainable. A system that insists that all the wealth must go to the wealthy and that the poor must be used and then destroyed will inevitably rob you and kill you. The system eventually gets around to you no matter how comfortable you are. Everyone has a human body, you know. A healthcare system that makes its money by refusing heath care will eventually get to almost every one of us. Lies aren’t sustainable. And unsustainable things do not sustain.

It's also suicidal. When you get people who have tied their identities to the billionaire system's institutions of supremacy, you'll find that they prefer the lies they've believed even to life itself. We are facing climate catastrophe, by the way, and our nation just voted for a guy who wants to accelerate the effects. We are still in a global pandemic and we just voted for a guy who wants to outlaw vaccines. And so the pain will spread, and those who chose it will not be spared, but they will be angriest of all about it, because while many of the rest of us can see the scam now that it has been made as plain as possible, they have bought the bill of goods, and the billionaire system is founded in horrible and unsustainable lies that generate the opposite of what it claims: instability and violence and unrest, until it finally and inevitably collapses the natural human systems it has captured and perverted.

This collapse is what the United States of America, founded in the billionaire scam, has been dealing with, again and again. We’ve had civil wars (one of which even involved uniforms and songs) and economic collapses and riots and civil unrest, as the billionaire system eats more and more people for the benefit of fewer and fewer, until people who never thought they'd be eaten start to feel the teeth, and— taught by the billionaire system's institutions of supremacy that violence is their sacred individual right, a freedom to be deployed against any target they choose and the natural solution to any of life's problems—start to bite back. And that, I think, how you get a well-off young white kid with chronic pain who prints a 3D gun and trots out to make the news.

Yes, the billionaire system, like any scam, is doomed. It's dangerous, and if we don't fight it, it may destroy us all before its done, but it's doomed.

The billionaire system has competition, it turns out. I just mentioned it.

It's the natural human system.

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What evil intention always does is capture and pervert something true.

A natural human system is true. It starts with the natural value we find everywhere. It is shared, recognizing the truth of universal human belonging. It is foundational, recognizing that all value springs first not from the individual but from the collective value created by humans in community. It is generative, recognizing the truth that humans society creates far more value together than individuals can ever create apart. It is configurable, which demonstrates the truth that we have the ability to continually improve our system, and have the shared responsibility to one another to do so. It is inherited, which demonstrates the truth that we have a shared responsibility for the choices made by those who came before us, and a shared responsibility to those who will come after. It's automatic and inextricable, which demonstrates the truth that we cannot separate ourselves from the gifts of society, so there is no basis for deeming anyone undeserving of society's gifts or free of its responsibilities.

The billionaire system seeks to destroy all of this truth, not by irradicating it, but by capturing it and perverting it into something that serves its evil intentions, which let's not forget are theft and murder. The thing about a scam is it needs some truth as starter dough, and the billionaire system is no exception. Theft and robbery and lies, not being generative or sustainable, just aren't ever going to get a system off the ground.

So it is that the billionaire scam, which runs on murder, feints toward life. Where it runs on robbery, it feints toward prosperity. Where it runs on its own unaccountability, it feints toward personal responsibility. For every one of its grotesque unsustainable lies, it points toward a sustaining truth, not to honor the truth, but to capture it and pervert it. It profits by imprisoning people and calls it justice. It robs the public coffers and calls it prosperity. It sabotages our systems of health and education and calls it choice. It fills the public square with hate and murder weapons and calls it freedom.

This means that, in this billionaire system we've inherited, the desire for the good and true and sustaining virtues of a natural human system have grown entwined with the perversions of the billionaire scam, like a choking vine around the trunk of a sapling.

You might have noticed that the billionaire system, like many scams, uses religion to establish a mixture of unassailable blamelessness and self-exonerating moral superiority for itself; convincing people bought into all the murder and theft that not only are they not the bad guys, but the best guys. You might have also noticed that the religion our own particular billionaires are using—christianity—started off as an anti-billionaire movement. It leaned into deeper truths: that the natural world is a place of plenty not of lack, that love can cast out fear, that all humans are equally worthy of love, and that the best use of power is to divest yourself of it for the sake of those who are in need without a thought to what is deserved, that the correct posture toward a world that nurtures life is gratitude and stewardship, that greed is the root of all evil and will create a hell for you and others that begins in life, not after it, and that heaven can be made on earth, too.

The dominant military and economic empire of its day tried to stamp out these truths by murdering its leader, and when that failed they tried to stamp it out with force, and then when that failed, they incorporated the movement into itself and made it synonymous with its own power and wealth and all of its abuses, turned it into an institution that existing not in opposition to the billionaire scam but in support of it, and then, having captured and perverted it, spread it to the very ends of the earth, and that last tactic is the one that succeeded.

Our Founding Scam Artists, those Constitutional drafters, who created a system founded on slavery and genocide, were not immune to this need for captured truths. They filled their founding documents with great truths about universal human worth, about how the purpose of society is to allow all people to seek life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that leaders should be accountable to those they lead, that power should not be centralized, and that all people are created equal.

They didn't mean it. They might have thought they meant it, I suppose. You'll still find people who insist that they did mean it, and will point to texts where our Founding Billionaires insist they mean it, but they didn't, and we know that, because what they actually founded was a country built on the murder of genocide and the theft of slavery, for the purpose of enriching a handful of people.

However, they did put all those truths in there,and people have been expecting leaders to make it true ever since. In the same way, you can find people who have actually familiarized themselves with Christian texts and notice that actually the hell-and-punishment thing isn't much of a focus, and the hatred for various types isn't there at all, but the liberation for the prisoner is in there, and so is feeding the hungry, and welcoming the stranger, and giving away your wealth, and so forth, and then, having read all this, they expect christians to actually be Christian, which annoys christians to no end, and then if the christians get annoyed enough the violence starts, sometimes with uniforms and songs, sometimes with firehoses and attack dogs.

Some of those people who expect christians to behave like Christians are even leaders of churches. Martin Luther King Jr. is a famous example; he expected white christians to step up and honor their book, just as he expected the government of the USA to honor their own documents. He was pretty disappointed in that expectation during his life, but he did fight for it, as did thousands and thousands of very brave people. I tend to return to King because white christians have done the same thing with King that they did with Jesus, which is to capture him posthumously and insist that he actually agrees with them, the same people who disappointed him so badly in life. By this they mean that they say they agree with exactly one of King's statements and none of the rest. The statement they agree with is that everyone should be judged by the character of their content rather than the color of their skin, which ignores that 1) that's not what King said; and 2) whenever they actually are judged by the content of their character, they get very angry.

I mostly want to point out that while King was disappointed in his expectations in life, his movement and other related movements did achieve significant and enduring advancements both during his life and after it. So did the fight for women's suffrage and abortion rights. So did the movement for gay rights and trans rights. So have movements for disabled people and unhoused people. So have many other smaller movements all around this country, which fixed broken things and improved things that needed improving. They beat the billionaire system back, by fighting it.

So, because of brave and determined people willing to fight, we've had more than murder and theft; we've also had progress—real progress. This is thing Trump and the rest of his Nazi goons want to demolish for good. That's what "a post-Constitutional America" means. They know the difference between the truths that our founding documents codify and the reality of the murderous scam that was actually founded, and they want to eliminate the truths. That's what "make America great again" means—a full return to the murderous scam unencumbered by even a feint at truth.

They didn't have superior force of weapons. They didn't start with public support. They didn't have the courts, at least not at first.

They had disadvantages. They also had advantages.

They were grounded in natural human truths that are generative and sustainable, while their opponents were grounded in grotesque lies. They knew the difference between the natural human system and the murderous scam, and they refused to accept the latter while demanding the former, and they were determined to fight. They started in a worse place than we are in, and they worked at it for decades.

So that's my first lesson today: We must know name the unsustainable founding lies we inherited, so we can better know the sustaining generative truths that are the true inheritance of all humans. That's what I tried to do today.

Knowing the truth, they fought for it. By making trouble, they forced people to fight for them who were empowered to do so but disinclined to trouble themselves, in their determination they made people who had given up the fight take it up, and by broadcasting the unpopular truth they popularized it, because the truth is when spoken is increasingly harder to hide beneath lies.

There's a corollary, which is that those who don't fight lend complacency to those who would seek comfort, cause people who do fight to despair, and allow the truth to settle beneath the silt of daily bullshit.

That's my second lesson today: people respond to a fight, so if we are to stand in opposition to the billionaire system of murder and theft, we should be fighters and we should refuse to accept as leader anyone who isn't a fighter.

That's for next time. See you then.

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A.R. Moxon is the author of The Revisionaries, which is available in most of the usual places, and some of the unusual places, and the essay collection Very Fine People. You can get his books right here for example. He is also co-writer of Sugar Maple, a musical fiction podcast from Osiris Media which goes in your ears.