On the surface, there is nothing mysterious about the dearth of public sympathy for the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was gunned down on a Manhattan street last week by a still-elusive assassin. By now, anyone with an internet connection has heard the litany of justification for the killing: Since Thompson profited from denying people care they paid for, he was himself a mass murderer and only got his comeuppance; “the people” can only take so much; and so on.
The revelry over Thompson’s murder is part of an overall trend of online celebrations of death when it befalls those regarded as too “privileged” to deserve our sympathy. Consider the June 2023 reaction to the Titan submersible implosion. This horrifying accident, which initially was thought to involve the days-long suffocation of the submersible’s occupants, was also an object of glee for many social-media users. Those who died included a deep-sea explorer and conservationist Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 19-year-old college student Suleman Dawood and his philanthropist father, and aviator and Arctic adventurer Hamish Harding. All were fabulously wealthy, but none of them made for an obvious villain, as Thompson did.
These high-profile examples of social-media schadenfreude are only the most noteworthy instances of a wider callousness that doesn’t spare even the most ordinary among us. Take the lethal shooting of small-business owner Ashli Babbitt by police during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which instantly prompted a wave of celebratory memes referencing Little Durk’s song “No Auto Durk,” about “smoking” rivals. On the political right, the jeering is often directed even lower down the social scale, toward people like Jordan Neely.
Many will object to any suggestion that a single explanation can encompass the reactions to such disparate tragedies. To some, chortling at the death of Brian Thompson probably seems obviously justified, while doing the same to Jordan Neely seems unconscionably sociopathic. But to believe this denies an essential truth: At the point of death, the differences between these two men cease to matter.
A frequent motif in medieval art was the Danse Macabre, which depicted members of all classes of society being led in a universal jig toward the grave. At an earlier moment of Western history, religion encouraged all classes in a regular meditation on death. Just like someone who has suffered a certain hardship feels sympathy for others with that same hardship, the knowledge that one must die instills a respect for the deaths of others. If we have lost that respect, it is because we lost sight of our own mortality.
If Brian Thompson had remembered his own death, would he have conducted his business differently? The medieval ideal of noblesse oblige, surely more often espoused than practiced, has vanished along with the knowledge that Lord and Peasant are bound for a common end. In looking at this story of death, I find myself unable to resist the old, hackneyed conservative idea that Justice and Virtue are inseparable.
We cannot murder our way to a society in which life will be respected. Respect for life must begin with respect for death, which is the essence of religion. In a society that was religious in this sense, neither Thompson nor his murderer, and certainly not the cackling hordes of online celebrants, could exist.