I’ve been watching the news about Peter Thiel, and the flood of private, deeply personal videos that have been weaponized against him. The easy, predictable response is to celebrate. To see a powerful man, a king in his own right, brought low and to feel a sense of righteous satisfaction.
But I want to ask you to do something harder. I want you to join me in an act of radical empathy.
Forget the politics. Forget the billions. Forget the man’s public persona. I want you to see the human being at the center of the storm. A man who, by all accounts, is terrified. A man who built an impenetrable fortress of wealth, power, and intellectual certainty, only to have its walls turned to glass for the entire world to see.
The foundation of his life has been shattered by a profound, existential loss of security. And in that, we have an opportunity. Not to gloat, but to learn.
We have a strange paradox in our world. We assume that the person with little—the farmer, the tradesman—is the one who lives with the most anxiety. But often, the opposite is true. The person whose security is tied to the tangible world, to the plow they hold in their own hands, to a life where “enough” is the goal, has a resilience that the wealthy can only dream of. Their wealth is real.
The person whose security is tied to a vast, digital, and fleeting empire of wealth and influence lives in a constant state of low-grade terror. Their fortress is an illusion, a string of ones and zeros that can be erased in an instant. They have everything to lose.
And when that loss comes, the grief is real.
This is not an excuse for the actions of the powerful. It is an explanation of their humanity. The work of The Human Covenant is to have the courage to see that humanity, even in our adversaries.
But you are right. Compassion is a two-way street. It is a team sport, like navigating rush hour traffic. It requires all of us to have a shared understanding of the rules of the road. We can offer an olive branch to a man like Thiel, we can see his fear and acknowledge it as a human emotion, but we also have a right to demand that he, and others like him, begin to see the profound and often invisible ways that their own actions have created that same fear and insecurity for millions of others.
The goal is not to bring the powerful down to our level. It is to create a world where all of us, from the billionaire in his glass fortress to the farmer in his field, can agree on a single, shared principle: that the only security that truly matters is the one we build together.