Asymmetrical Justice | Peter Banks

Despite critiques of state power, it is not the sole source of tyranny. Rightly directed, the state can reduce tyranny by defending the powerless and ensuring peace, prosperity, and tranquility.

I’m going to include this content warning. I will talk candidly about issues like racism, crime, and the details of the stygian swamp of modern American poverty. Venture at your own risk.

On December 4th, 2024, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was in NYC for an investor meeting. At 6:40 a.m., Brian left the Marriott hotel where he had spent the night. Almost immediately after exiting the lobby, he was gunned down by a masked man. Video of his killing was caught on CCTV, and the shooter fled the scene. Five days later, in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Luigi Mangione was arrested. In his possession was a fake ID that had been used by the suspect to check into a hotel the night before the shooting. Additionally, Luigi allegedly had a 3D-printed gun and silencer. Finally, he had a handwritten manifesto confessing to the crime along with his justification for killing a healthcare executive.

I would be surprised if this story is new to anyone reading this. It has been plastered on every social media website and the traditional press. It has been the topic of discussion in my personal life, including with people who aren’t normally political. But what has been sitting heavily with me is the implication of how quickly the police were able to catch Luigi. The alleged shooter did not make it “easy.” He wore a mask, used a fake ID, 3D-printed a gun, etc., and generally carefully went about his business not to be caught. Yet, within less than a week, we were able to identify who he was and apprehend him. It now appears as if the justice system is working overtime to bring criminal charges against him. Good. He is, like all murderers, scum. But ask yourself: if the person Luigi had shot had instead been a homeless man in Central Park, would Luigi have been caught? Let alone, would any of us have even heard about it? We all know the answer.

The darkest truth of our society, and all Human societies, is that we do not treat all Human lives as equally valuable. No, we weigh you in accordance with something I would refer to as the “usefulness principle.” In other words, we care more about people roughly in proportion to how much they can affect our lives. In a capitalist society, like ours, this is normally proxied by how economically valuable you, as an individual, are to other people. The powerless don’t matter because they are powerless; they cannot seek revenge or sometimes even be noticed. The powerless generally die without so much as a peep from the grand social machine. Every night across America’s slums and ghettos, people pile up like statistics, lined up neatly for a PhD in public policy to regress against a plausibly exogenous shock.

But follow these victims home, look at them—your “statistics”. They are real people. They bleed like you. They experience love, pain, joy, and loss, just like you. Their suffering isn’t just a number; each of these statistics had their own slice of this insane thing called sentience. They are Human, no matter how poor they are materially or spiritually. Their deaths were Human deaths. Their suffering was Human suffering. To a man right now staring down a barrel of a gun knowing these are his final breaths, or the child watching their mother be raped, the fact that their tyrant isn’t the state, but instead the malicious actions of an individual, is little comfort.

Tyranny exists in many places and in many forms. If you can look at a police officer’s boot on a man’s neck with the horror it deserves, you must also look at the strangled women who show up every night in cities across this country.

Between 2005 and 2009 in Jefferson Davis Parish, Louisiana, the decomposing bodies of eight women appeared in the swamps and canals. These women, mostly prostitutes, appear to have been strangled to death. Given their occupation, and the reality of Human life, they were probably also raped before they died. Between 2001 and 2018, 76 women—Black and White—appeared in parks across the city of Chicago. These women were all strangled to death, possibly by the same person, possibly by 76 different people. Again, these women were mostly prostitutes and all came from the dregs of society. Many of them were doubtless drug addicts and criminals themselves. But their deaths were real. Their clawing for breath and final thoughts were real. Their suffering was part of this inescapable perception that we all share. They are owed justice, and their killers—along with all killers—should be hunted with the same indignant rage that our police used in avenging Brian Thompson.

The hard truth is that we will not accomplish this by individually becoming more moral. No, we have reached the maximum recursive depth of what morality has to offer. And we must now acknowledge that morality is downstream of economics, always. If the bottom rung of society acts and is trained to exist as parasites, then the state will treat them that way. We have to create paths for Americans of all skill levels to live productive, meaningful lives. There is no society in history, from Maoist China to Nazi Germany, that can overcome the fact that we do not equally weigh the value of all Human lives. Meaning the way you increase the value of a Human, the way you make it possible for society to sustainably care, is by making that person more valuable, by fitting them into the social organism in a useful way; so their death isn’t just a Romantic tragedy but an economic one.

Our current strategy of randomly arresting thousands for petty crimes that are infrequently and arbitrarily enforced, tied with large and generous cash transfers, doesn’t work. Spare me appeals to Europe—just look at their inner cities and tell me if they are improving, if somehow they are avoiding the encroaching stygian swamp American cities have, with few exceptions, sunk into. No, we need new 21st-century solutions, and we must look further. We must have no fear in adopting whatever policies are needed to abolish the bleeding wound that is American violence.

Places like the South Side of Chicago will never economically succeed as long as they are dens of brutal violence. Which means if you care about the lives of the powerless, you cannot be soft on crime, degeneracy, or chaos. You have no choice but to be strong on all these issues. Because it is the perpetual obligation of those who would dare call themselves wise to do battle with the devil wherever he raises his horned head. To bring fire and sword to injustice where it actually exists, not where we wish it existed.

They must stand up and say, “the law is good, and the law must be enforced.” And if you do not think that the law is good—if you think the law is unjust, as I do in many cases—then it should be changed. The solution is not to pretend that the problem doesn’t exist and to call people who address the problem racist or classist or idiotic, but instead to acknowledge that this problem actually does exist in the real world, and it’s manifested in the raped and asphyxiated corpse of a woman, countless times repeated across this country’s ghettos and rusted towns.

At this moment a great clamoring has emerged from the Literati classes of our society. They demand to know why I punch down. Why I focus on the least privileged of our society, rather than the gilded patina.

Because, yes, people like Epstein exist. Yes, there are white-collar crimes, but the concentration of American suffering, the bubbling cauldron of misery, is located not in Beverly Hills but in Skid Row. Not in the back offices of Google, but in the homeless shelters of San Francisco and the migrant shelters of New York City. If we are unwilling to face the heavy weight of the poverty of the bottom 20% of our society—poverty not just physical, but spiritual—then we are unfit to think of ourselves as people who are worthy of governing.

To defend the interests of the citizens of this country and to bring peace, prosperity, and felicity are the only objectives of the American government. It has no other tasks and serves no other purpose.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”