The Architecture of Violence: How We Built Systems That Reward Harm
The recent shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson sparked something troubling across social media. Millions of people celebrated it as justice.
I'm not here to justify murder. And I can't ignore what that reaction revealed: vast numbers of people have experienced our healthcare system as a form of violence against them. The question that keeps me up isn't why someone finally snapped. It's why we built systems that make such violence feel inevitable.
My thesis is this: The violence in our current systems stems from a foundational choice to organize society around scarcity and competition, rather than abundance and cooperation. Every layer of harm—from corporate incentives to legal structures to individual psychology—flows from this single decision. And because we can know this is the case, it is a decision.
This goes deeper than healthcare. The pattern repeats across industries. To change it, we need to trace the problem to its source and understand the foundational choices that make such systems possible.
The Surface: Why CEOs Make Deadly Decisions
When we ask why CEOs run companies in ways that cause human suffering, the answer is straightforward: their compensation, job security, and reputation depend on it.
Brian Thompson's salary was tied to UnitedHealthcare's profitability. His success required denying claims. This wasn't sadism—it was a system design that rewarded harmful behavior.
Quarterly earnings targets create pressure to cut costs. Executive bonuses tie directly to financial projections. Stock prices determine long-term wealth. Professional networks reward "shareholder value" over community impact.
This creates what I call "moral outsourcing"—leaders point to fiduciary duties while making decisions they'd never make personally. The system absolves conscience by making harmful choices feel normalized.
But this supports my thesis: these reward systems exist because we've legally enshrined scarcity-based competition over stakeholder cooperation.
The Structure: Competition Codified into Law
Companies prioritize profit over people because it's legally required, not natural law.
Publicly traded companies operate under fiduciary duties that mandate shareholder returns above stakeholder welfare. Legal precedents like Dodge v. Ford established shareholder primacy as binding obligation. Corporate law gives companies rights without proportional social responsibilities.
The result: doing good becomes legally risky while causing systematic harm becomes legally protected. I've seen executives want to make better choices, then get overruled by lawyers citing shareholder lawsuit exposure.
This confirms my thesis: we've legally codified the scarcity mindset that treats stakeholder interests as zero-sum competitors rather than collaborative partners.
The Foundation: Scarcity Thinking in an Abundance World
These frameworks emerged during industrialization, when rapid growth was prioritized over social stability. We can’t say for sure, but perhaps that was what was needed at the time for a massive wave of innovation in that epoch of humanity, but it means we created systems that treat labor as a cost to minimize, rather than as a partnership to nurture.
The deeper issue is our acceptance of scarcity thinking—the belief that there isn't enough to go around, so we must compete rather than collaborate. This is one major factor among others (technological development, cultural evolution, political power dynamics), but it's the foundational assumption that shapes how we approach the others.
Scarcity thinking justifies hoarding by making it seem rational. It creates hierarchy by positioning some people as more deserving. It makes collaboration seem naive and competition seem realistic, despite cooperation being humanity's primary survival strategy.
Here's the core of my thesis: we've maintained scarcity thinking long past its usefulness. We have enough food, housing, healthcare, and education for everyone, but scarcity thinking prevents us from organizing distribution systems that reflect this reality.
Once we tamed nature, we lost our mutual antagonist and turned on each other. Tribes versus tribes, scaled through history into today's interconnected competition. But what if we redirected that competitive energy? Instead of a people-versus-people competition, we could have competitive cooperation—people working together to solve systemic problems while competing to build better solutions.
This confirms my thesis: we're running scarcity-era software in an abundance-era world.
The Psychology: Why Scarcity Thinking Persists
This psychological layer supports my thesis by showing how individuals maintain scarcity thinking even when abundance is obvious.
People with power maintain scarcity thinking because acknowledging abundance would require admitting current suffering is choice, not necessity. This threatens their sense of being good people.
Cognitive dissonance makes it easier to believe "this is just how things work" than accept responsibility for changeable systems. When you're succeeding within extractive systems, you rationalize rather than recognize.
We've also built elaborate abstractions separating decision-makers from consequences. Insurance executives see actuarial tables, not dying people. Investors see portfolio performance, not bankrupt families. These abstractions enable participation in harmful systems without moral resistance.
This confirms my thesis: we've designed systems that make scarcity thinking psychologically easier to maintain than abundance thinking, even when abundance is materially possible.
The Core Choice: What We Believe About Human Nature
At the bottom of this analysis, I find the foundational choice that proves my thesis:
We've organized society around the assumption that human nature is fundamentally selfish and competitive, rather than cooperative and collaborative.
This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. We design institutions assuming people only act in self-interest, which rewards self-interested behavior, which produces evidence that people are self-interested, which confirms our assumption.
But anthropological evidence shows humans survived through cooperation, not competition. Our greatest achievements—agriculture, medicine, space exploration—emerged through collaboration.
Here's what actually happened: once we tamed nature and learned to survive despite it, we lost our mutual antagonist. So we turned on each other. Tribes versus tribes, scaled up into today's interconnected competition. Even capitalism becomes scarcity thinking combined with people-versus-people competition instead of people-versus-environment cooperation.
This validates my thesis: the violence in our systems results from running scarcity-era software in an abundance-era world.
What Becomes Possible When We Choose Cooperation
Recognizing this choice opens up possibilities that seem impossible under scarcity thinking.
We could design economic systems that reward contribution to collective welfare rather than individual accumulation. We could structure legal frameworks that give communities standing equal to shareholders. We could organize politics around abundance rather than scarcity, focusing on how to distribute prosperity rather than how to manage deprivation.
The technical solutions already exist. Worker cooperatives demonstrate that businesses can be profitable while prioritizing worker welfare. Stakeholder capitalism models demonstrate how companies can effectively serve multiple constituencies. Universal basic services prove that abundance is affordable when we organize for it.
What's missing isn't technical knowledge. It's the collective decision to choose cooperation over competition as our organizing principle.
The Path Forward
The most hopeful part of this analysis? Recognizing that our economic and social systems aren't natural laws—they're human constructions based on assumptions we can choose to change.
This doesn't require revolution. It requires evolution. We can start designing systems that assume cooperation and build toward abundance. We can create institutions that make it easy to do good and hard to cause harm.
The shooting of Brian Thompson was a symptom of systems designed to reward systematic violence against human welfare. The cure isn't better security for CEOs. It's better systems that align individual success with collective flourishing.
We built this architecture of violence through thousands of individual and collective choices. We can build something better the same way: one choice at a time, until cooperation becomes as systematic as competition is today.
The only question is whether we'll choose to do it before the violence escalates further. Or after.