Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com.

When I started this essay, the hitman who assassinated Brian Thompson was still running free, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, the company that provides health insurance coverage to over 50 million Americans.

As I finish this essay, the police have arrested 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, who was found with a gun and a handwritten document that indicated “ill will” toward corporate America, according to the chief of a detective for the New York police.

While much is unknown, we can still explore various scenarios. We may discover that Thompson was a paragon of virtue in upholding conventional morality. He may have excelled as a community leader, a churchgoer, and a family man.

In his own words, he may have felt that he had done nothing wrong, pointing out that he was specifically trained to run a company this way in business school. In other words, he was only following an ideology that permeates this country as deeply as the air we breathe: capitalism.

The “banality of evil” is a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt to describe the idea that ordinary people like Thompson can commit evil acts by following the law and just doing their jobs. Arendt first used the phrase in her 1963 book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” after attending the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi who organized the transportation of millions of Jews to concentration camps.

Arendt’s thesis was that Eichmann was not inherently evil but rather shallow and clueless. She observed that Eichmann showed no guilt for his actions or hatred for those who tried him and claimed he was simply “doing his job.” Arendt concluded that Eichmann performed evil deeds without evil intentions, which she attributed to his “thoughtlessness.”

This is a serious question we should all think about. And is it possible that we, too, sometimes act thoughtlessly?

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We live in a culture of capitalism based on the notion of competing against each other. As a consequence, it follows that there will be winners and losers. That’s where thoughtfulness comes in.

Most people will say it’s okay to beat someone at gin rummy or beat someone else out for a job. But most people will say it’s not okay to cause the death of a customer by denying necessary medical treatment just to increase your profits.

Unregulated capitalism is about going to that extreme, a Darwinian drama in which only the fittest survive. In the economic arena, it has always been preached that unregulated capitalism leads to maximum competition, resulting in the lowest prices and the best selection.

The trouble is that it’s been repeatedly proven false.

Instead, larger players gobble up smaller, less powerful companies, which inescapably leads to anti-competitive monopolies. These monopolies always result in a decline in innovation and an increase in price.

Over the years since the Gilded Age, we have continually increased regulations to soften the sharp, jagged edges of capitalism by dismantling monopolies while providing protection for citizens through programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA).

At this point in time, we don’t know much about the motive for Mr. Thompson’s death. But we know much about Donald Trump. We know he wants to free businesses from the government’s regulatory grasp.

We know that Trump wants to end ACA, a government regulation that makes health insurance more affordable. He would have applauded Mr. Thompson, seeing nothing wrong with how he ran UnitedHealthcare. In Trump’s transactional world, health care is not a right. It is a privilege if you can afford it.

So, in conclusion, using Hannah Arendt’s analogy, Mr. Thompson was, perhaps, merely thoughtless. What is evil is the brand of unregulated capitalism that Donald Trump fantasizes about.