Why Brian Thompson’s death has provoked such complicated reactions from the public.
A man was killed. That’s the kind of thing people normally get upset about. But not this week. This week, when UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead in Manhattan, the internet erupted in cheers.
Many people, including many progressives and liberals, said they would refuse to mourn the UnitedHealthcare executive because of the habitual unfairness of health insurance providers like the one Thompson oversaw.
The backlash against Thompson spread across social media, from TikTok to Twitter, LinkedIn to Bluesky — typically acerbic jokes about the poster’s empathy being out of network or that Thompson’s claim to sympathy had been denied. Some users commented with “deny, delay, depose” — a reference to the three words reportedly inscribed on the gunman’s shell casings, themselves a reference to the well-known insurance system tactic of “deny, delay, defend” when warding off claims from patients.
The online reaction felt uncomfortable to some bystanders given that we’re all supposed to care about human dignity — the idea that every single person has intrinsic and inalienable value. The concept is at the heart of human rights: It’s because every person has value that they have the right to, say, not be murdered.
Yet the people posting vitriolic comments about Thompson feel justified in being smug about the death of this human in particular. That may be understandable, given the millions of Americans who suffered as a result of the industry that he represented. But disregarding human dignity by committing or cheering on an act of violence can’t be the answer. So, what is? Is there a better way to square moral outrage at someone and what they represent, while keeping faith with a belief in their human dignity?How to think about human dignity
Our greatest philosophers and spiritual thinkers have considered this same dilemma over the course of centuries. We can learn from the insights they surfaced along the way.
The idea of human dignity crystallized in the wake of World War II, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed in its first article, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” But the concept goes back much, much further.
It goes back to the Hebrew Bible, which teaches that humankind was created “in the image of God.” Both Judaism and Christianity took this to mean that each person has something of the divine in them. That means they have inherent worth, a fundamental sanctity that should be respected. In other words, the theological doctrine of imago dei, or “image of God,” isn’t just a creation myth, it is the grounds of a moral imperative: You have to treat people as though there’s God in them, because there is.
To get a sense of how this idea played out in the ancient imagination, consider this story. According to the Bible, when Moses was liberating the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, he parted the sea so they could walk through to the other side. Pharaoh and his Egyptian charioteers came chasing after them. But as soon as the Israelites made it safely through, God sent the waves crashing back down, drowning the Egyptians.
The ancient rabbis, embellishing this biblical story, wrote that the angels in heaven started cheering and praising God when they saw the Egyptians drowning. God got angry at the angels and rebuked them: “The work of My hands, the Egyptians, are drowning at sea, and you wish to say songs?”
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.
