One person was killed. This is something that people usually get upset about. But not this week. This week, when UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shoot dead In Manhattan, the Internet erupted in glee.
Many people, including many progressives and liberals, have said they will refuse to mourn United Healthcare executives because of the habitual wrongdoing of health insurers like Thompson.
Backlash against Thompson spread across social media, from tiktok from Twitter, LinkedIn from Bluesky — usually acerbic jokes about the poster being outside the sympathy network or Thompson’s claims of sympathy being denied. Some users commented with “deny, delay, submit” – a reference to the three words engraved on gunner’s shell casings, themselves. a reference The well-known insurance system tactic of “deny, delay, defend” when closing claims from patients.
The online response left some viewers feeling uneasy that we should all care about human dignity — the idea that every single person has inherent and inalienable worth. The idea is at the heart of human rights: because every person has value they have the right, say, not to be murdered.
Yet those posting misleading comments about Thompson seem justified in making a mockery of the man’s death in particular. That might be understandable, given the millions of Americans who suffered as a result of the industry he represented. But demeaning human dignity through acts of violence or cheering is not the answer. So, what? Is there a better way to square moral outrage at someone and what they represent, with faith in their human dignity?
How to think about human dignity
Our greatest philosophers and spiritual thinkers have pondered this same dilemma for centuries. We can learn from the insights they reveal along the way.
The concept of human dignity crystallized in the wake of World War II during the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. announcement In its first article, “All men are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” But the idea goes back much, much further.
This goes back to the Hebrew Bible, which teaches that mankind was created “in the image of God.” Both Judaism and Christianity have taken this to mean that there is something divine within each person. This means they have intrinsic value, a fundamental sanctity that must be respected. In other words, the The Theological Doctrine of the Imago Deior “god figure,” is not just a creation myth, it’s a moral imperative: You have to treat people as if they have God in them, because there is.
To understand how this concept played out in ancient fantasy, consider this story. According to the Bible, when Moses was freeing the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, he parted the sea so they could cross to the other side. Pharaoh and his Egyptian charioteers chased after them. But as soon as the Israelites passed through it safely, God sent the waves back, drowning the Egyptians.
The ancient rabbis, embellishing this biblical story, wrote that when the angels of heaven saw the Egyptians drowning, they began to rejoice and praise God. God was angry with the angels and He scolded them: “The work of my hands, the Egyptians, is drowning in the sea, and you want to sing?”
The story shows the tension between anger at an oppressor and the idea of human dignity – and it comes out on the side of human dignity.
This idea filtered through Western thought and expanded during the Enlightenment. The 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant gave it a secular form when he argued You should never treat a man as a means to an end; Man is an end in himself. It provided the foundation for human dignity as it was incorporated into the secular human rights movement and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The same basic idea arose among Eastern thinkers. Buddhist philosophy, for example, emphasizes All beings that have “Buddha nature” or the potential to become enlightened. Yes, we sometimes do harmful things, but that is because we have certain “causes and conditions” – such as ignorance and suffering – that keep us stuck in wrong views and habits. This philosophy encourages us to empathize with the person who is trapped in suffering and therefore acts inefficiently. This doesn’t mean we have to approve of their actions, but we shouldn’t hate that person or wish them ill even if their actions hurt us.
When a human acts in a way that is morally reprehensible, you can remember that all human beings have value and dignity, while recognizing that sometimes their conditions—the systems in which they are embedded—make them morally flawed creatures. It’s sad, and we mourn it. It has tragic consequences for many other people and we mourn that too. And then we turn that grief into action: action to change the situation, so that tragedies like this don’t happen again in the future.
How to feel about people trolling Brian Thompson
Why has the public response to Thompson’s murder been mockery of the dead man and praise of the unidentified gunman?
It would be easy to dismiss this trend as functional ruthlessness or a satirical form of social media politicking. And it’s true that people across social media have an overwhelming tendency to respond to juicy political moments with politically edgy sound bites and memetic phrases — for example, Abstaining from “thoughts and prayers.” or demonstrative Lack of empathy Many show up whenever a prominent anti-vaxxer dies from Covid or another preventable virus.
Yet there’s more going on here than just knee-jerk trolling, and it’s important to think about why frustration is so high. Instead of blaming each other for not responding to the news of the shooting in the “right” way, perhaps we should recognize that shortcoming as a desire for a society that shows more compassion by default for its most vulnerable members.
in Reddit’s News subreddit Thread above The shooting was quickly filled with first-hand accounts from people whose claims were denied by UHC and other insurance providers. “My wife has MS, and we’ve been fighting the insurance company for months because they’re denying her medication,” wrote A user. “I don’t condone violence against these CEOs, but I understand it.”
in him NewsletterIndependent journalist Marissa Kabas contends that the overwhelmingly negative public response to Thompson in the wake of the shooting was more than just performative vitriol. Comparing the reaction to the death of former Secretary of State and accused war criminal Henry Kissinger, he wrote, “[I]t became clear quickly [Thompson] was someone many Americans think of Violation of the human contract“
When someone “violates the human contract,” it challenges us to think about how compassion works: does it flow toward the greatest number of people harmed, toward a high-profile individual victim, or is there room for both. ?
Ideally, the answer is both.
But when we look at how the world works, and all compassion is needed and often denied, it’s no wonder we find ourselves in short supply. In a more polarized society with vastly unequal wealth and large pockets of anti-capitalist sentiment, many people are impatient to show compassion for those who care, for humanity, or for the planet. .
CEOs are arguably high on this list. Corporate regulation is done whittled down Over the past 40 years, and executives generally face little personal accountability for their most inhumane decisions. A recent Supreme Court ruling that limits the power of federal agencies to oversee various business sectors has made it more difficult to demand accountability — and it has especially huge implications for the health care industry.
Health Policy Outlet KFF Conclusion After that SCOTUS decision, “Medicare will have more barriers to important health care protections such as prescription drug affordability, eligibility rules for Medicaid beneficiaries, communicable disease control and public safety standards, as well as consumer protections for self-insured private employer-sponsored plans.” in a separate 2023 votesKFF found that 58 percent of adults have had problems with their health insurance in the past 12 months, and of that number, fully half have not resolved the issue. Then there is Suffering is involved Starting with paying for insurance.
Certainly Thompson and his family deserve our condolences. But his decisions are a core part of the system he often operates with little empathy for the people on the other end, and the default responses to jokes about being “out of network” underscore this. United Healthcare regularly brings in its revenue Over $100 billionWith a 2025 revenue forecast Over $450 billion. In the meantime, Thompson himself may have taken home 10 million dollars a year.
These amounts are staggering, and it seems profoundly difficult to reconcile that much money with the many deeply personal social media stories today — stories of denied claims and painful struggles for basic services, including An AI-based claim authorization system That was wrong up to 90 percent of the time. But it’s also worth noting that Thompson was reportedly aware of the problems in his art. an employee told the New York Times That Thompson often spoke of the need to change health care in the United States.
The humanity we show each other is a complicated thing. It’s possible that when we try to express our need for it—in this case, to other people caught up in America’s health care system—we’re moving further away from that same humanity. After all, it is hard to see the efficacy of a memetic response when it comes as callous disregard for personal tragedy, as a refusal to care for a dying person and his family.
Perhaps what is needed to combat this moment is an expansion of empathy rather than limiting it. You can sympathize with Brian Thompson and his family, and you can sympathize with the millions of Americans who were affected by the decisions of his industry and the companies he oversaw.
And then you can refocus on calling for meaningful systemic reforms that can actually make a difference — before the next viral alert prompts another cyclical cultural conversation about who deserves our sympathy.
