Victims of a Commodified Society

I

On 28 July 2025, four people were killed in a mass shooting in their Park Avenue office tower in central Manhattan. Among the victims were Wesley LePatner, a senior executive at Blackstone and a mother of two, and Didarul Islam, an off-duty police officer working in private security who served as a building guard and management employee. The gunman, Shane Devon Tamura, aged twenty-seven, ended his own life after the attack.

Tamura was a former high-school football player. He left letters blaming the National Football League, headquartered in the same building, for the brain injuries he believed resulted from repeated trauma. His grievance was not personal but structural, seeing his life as derailed by institutions that elevated others while leaving him disabled on the margins.

Like so many similar incidents, this was not merely another chapter in the relentless American cycle of gun violence, which began, in my mind, with the on-screen spectacle of cowboys and Indians, showing Native Americans being annihilated over and over again by western settlers. From there to Clint Eastwood, the fastest gun killing indiscriminately often in the name of justice, these cultural icons now appear retrospectively as one long advertising strategy for the future burgeoning US gun industry. It has now become, at least for this writer, a parable of what happens when people are reduced to functional market value and usage: a world where human beings come to see themselves, and are seen by others, as assets or failures, winners to be rewarded or discards to be forgotten. And in the mind of the forgotten, their phallic potency can only be regained, like Clint, by shooting the bullets of failure and death into another.

II

This was not the first such tragedy. On 4 December 2024, Brian Thompson, Chief Executive of UnitedHealthcare, was shot and killed outside a Manhattan hotel. His alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, by now a folk hero in some quarters, engraved his bullets with the words delay, deny, and depose. The message was unambiguous. It was an act of retribution against a healthcare system he experienced as profiteering from human suffering. Those very words, it is said, were used by his insurers to triage cases they would or would not underwrite. Mangione, who lived with chronic physical disability, probably felt he had been chewed up and spat out by a medical system that saw only his cost and not his need.

At first glance, these killings appear unrelated. Yet they reveal the same underlying logic: violence directed not against people in their humanity but against what they had come to represent. The victims were transformed into the embodied faces of impersonal systems that reward a few, exclude many, and appear in their cold business certainty to punish vulnerability.

III 

These systems—finance, healthcare, and elite sport—are presented as meritocratic. They are experienced as brutally selective, and those who fall through the cracks are abandoned and made to feel that their failure is deserved and therefore shameful. Donald Trump once declared of Senator John McCain, “He is not a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” In that line is distilled the ethos of a society where anything associated with weakness is not to be met with care but erased as a blemish.

Donald Meltzer might have called it a cultural claustrum, a sealed mental world in which pain and dependency are repressed, denied, and projected onto scapegoats. The executive who “makes it” and the worker who keeps the system functioning live within the same chamber of denial, though in different corners.

Wesley LePatner, by all accounts, was a gifted and compassionate leader, respected by colleagues and devoted to her family. Her murder is a devastating loss, as is the death of Brian Thompson, whose role, whatever one thinks of the industry he served, did not merit his becoming the object of symbolic revenge. Yet the same story also holds for the death of Didarul Islam, the man who guarded the door. He was not a symbol of privilege but of invisible labour, and his death collapses the false distinction between powerful and powerless, as both were caught within the same machinery of commodification, different cogs in the same relentless and cruel system.

IV – “I needed a life, so I took one”

We must also look at the gunmen, not to excuse but to understand. Tamura and Mangione were not merely monsters but men who had come to feel worthless in a culture that equates human value with wealth, institutional status, and cultural visibility. They had been converted into commodities, used and discarded, then left to rot in psychic isolation.

The forensic psychotherapist Murray Cox once wrote of a patient who said, “I needed a life, so I took one.” The sentence carries the tragic clarity of psychosis; beneath its brutality lies a desperate wish to belong, to feel alive, to matter. For example, the figure of the disillusioned fan who turns his weapon on the idol he once adored has become a recurring emblem of our age. Such acts capture the psychotic underside of fame and commodification: the wish to destroy what one loves because it mirrors one’s own exclusion. The adored celebrity embodies the promise of visibility and the unbearable proof of invisibility. 

When admiration curdles into annihilation, the bullet becomes a demand to be recognised, to enter the world that has abandoned or ignored the shooter. 

The culture that produces such contradictions offers fantasy instead of belonging, spectacle instead of meaning, and weaponry instead of words. Violence, in such cases, becomes a counterfeit form of symbolisation, a way of forcing recognition when all other routes to visibility are closed; the act kills not life but lifelessness.

In a commodified society, the capacity to feel alive has itself become a privilege. As Bion might say, those without it dwell in a mental wasteland where experience cannot be digested or named. Violence then appears as a perverse attempt to think, to make something happen in a psychic world that feels frozen. The gun becomes the instrument of the unrepresented self.

Within this economy of despair, hierarchy collapses. The executive, guard, patient, and athlete are all reduced to units of productivity. Their worth is measured not by who they are but by what they can produce or consume. The guard’s death, in this sense, exposes the symmetry: he was both protector and victim, the invisible life sacrificed to maintain the illusion of order.

The violence of the excluded mirrors, in distorted form, the structural violence of exclusion itself. However delusional, Tamura’s and Mangione’s acts echo the collective disavowal of a society that refuses to acknowledge how many of its members are rendered redundant economically and existentially. All are trapped within the same social claustrum, a sealed psychic chamber where care is derided as inefficiency and need is redefined as failure. In such a world, even the innocent become targets, because innocence provokes resentment when it exposes another’s deprivation.

V – Psychic despair in the market’s shadow

Volkan describes how humiliation seeks an enemy—when inner space collapses, the enemy becomes its architecture. Tamura’s and Mangione’s acts of violence were a grotesque attempt to rebuild meaning through destruction. Where Bion’s “container” fails, thought is replaced by action. The violence of the gun becomes a crude effort at communication, a punctuation mark in a world that no longer reads.

The marketised mind is a claustrum with spreadsheets for walls. Inside, need is mistranslated as inefficiency. Compassion becomes a managerial problem. We have built a civilisation where success metrics have replaced the languages of care. Young people who once dreamed of healing now choose banking because medicine cannot guarantee a living. Ambition is redefined as accumulation. The professions of the spirit and of service are devalued.

David Bell foresaw this in his paper “The Primitive Mind of State.” Psychoanalysis, he writes, is a knowledge of the mind that situates need and vulnerability at the core of both individual and institutional life. In a marketised state, care becomes contemptuous, and need becomes a target for disavowal. The self that cannot be recognised as needy becomes a self that must destroy or conceal itself.

In our consulting rooms, we encounter the same collapse. Patients speak of rising fees, vanishing empathy, and an atmosphere of transactional calculation. Analysts are not immune; we are also pulled towards the market’s logic: visibility, competition, brand. Even within the talking cure, the discourse of profit seeps in, turning therapy into another form of managed performance.

Beckett’s line from Waiting for Godot captures the psychic residue of such a world: “You must go on. I cannot go on. I will go on.” It is the voice of the commodified subject, required to persist without belonging. When endurance becomes the only remaining virtue, destruction is the only possible speech.

Acknowledging this does not justify violence but it shows that the cure for despair is not condemnation but containment. We must rebuild the social capacity to bear pain without expelling it. A humane society requires institutions that can metabolise anxiety and need rather than outsourcing them to the already vulnerable. Without such containment, the next catastrophe is already in rehearsal.

VI – The commerce of death

The US gun industry itself stands as the most literal emblem of profit over human care. Nowhere is the commodification of death more nakedly displayed, and each fresh massacre produces not repentance but revenue. Stock values climb in the aftermath of tragedy, as though grief were a sign of economic vitality. The weapon becomes both object and fetish: a promise of autonomy in a world that otherwise renders people powerless. Its marketing trades on fantasy, offering restoration of potency to lives hollowed out by structural neglect. The industry thus mirrors the psychic economy it sustains, converting anxiety into consumption and despair into data. What ought to be mourned is monetised. The right to kill is sold as the last unregulated form of freedom, capitalism’s final sacrament, a communion of fear and profit that consecrates violence as a price of belonging.

In recent months, more shootings have followed, some political, some personal, all symptomatic of a culture that confuses visibility with worth and outrage with agency. Each repeats the same pattern of grievance turned spectacle, reinforcing the tragic truth that in a society where every wound can be marketed, even despair is made to serve the marketplace.

VII – The moral hinge

If we wish to prevent the violence of despair, we must learn to recognise all its victims, the executive and the guard, the patient and the insurer, the visible and the unseen. The death of Didarul Islam, the man at the door, stands as the moral hinge of this parable. His life was neither glamorous nor symbolic. He was doing his job. His death shows how deep the web of complicity runs: those who kill and those who are killed, those who command and those who serve, are all caught within a system that feeds upon human need while pretending to ignore it.

To mourn properly is to reject the question, “What are you worth?” and return to the older, more human one: “Who are you?” Until we can ask that question again of every person, regardless of their position, we will continue living in cultures of shared trauma, divided only by which side of the trigger one happens to be on.

VIII – Afterword

In Britain, unlike the US, we still possess institutions that, however frayed, are capable of catching those who fall. The NHS, the welfare state, and universal free education remain, at least in principle, structures of care. But the nets are full of holes, and our political imagination, rather than mending them, seeks scapegoats. Today, it is the migrant who bears our collective failure; tomorrow, it may be someone else.

H. G. Wells foresaw this division in The Time Machine. The bright and leisured Eloi live on the surface, while the Morlocks toil below in darkness until, starved of recognition, they rise to feed upon those who once ignored them. The buried do not stay buried. What a society represses, its pain, its care, its dependence, returns as terror. Unless we learn to bear those truths, we will repeat them unconsciously, turning the wounds of inequality into cycles of revenge.

If redemption is to occur, it must begin with rebuilding our capacity for collective mourning. We must mourn not only the victims but also the relentless system that keeps producing them. As the British MP Nye Bevan proved in creating the NHS, a humane society can be built from the ruins of cruelty if the moral will exists to do so.