Some earlier historians of China tell us that Qin Shihuangdi, the first Chinese emperor, was a thunderous tyrant. His word was law, and his mood was survival or extermination for those under his sway.

A tale often told about Qin Shihuangdi is that he ordered the extermination—the intellectual genocide, we might call it now—of scholars who he thought had deceived him.

Probably, modern historians say, the legends about Qin Shihuangdi’s cruelty have been embellished, even invented. He may not have been remotely as tyrannical as those later histories portrayed him. Nevertheless, in the popular imagination he is still remembered as a fearsome strongman. How his subjects and his ministers must have trembled at the sight of his shadow, people still whisper to one another. How they must have blanched at the mention of his name.

But whether Qin Shihuangdi was a tyrant or not means little when one considers an odd but important fact about the man: how he had himself buried. His Xian tomb, which is more famous than the man in it, is a menagerie of pottery people, sculpted individuals arrayed in serried ranks around their liege. The emperor who (subsequent dynastic historians write) once ordered long lists of human beings disposed of has surrounded himself with the human form in the hereafter.

Thousands of clay soldiers and their commanders—a whole army of statues—are guarding Qin Shihuangdi in the afterlife. Or are they keeping him company? What is the point of all those pottery bodies lined up around the once-great man? Is it that Qin Shihuangdi liked throwing his weight around, liked showing the world that he could make people do his bidding, even when the project would have seemed a profligate waste of time, resources, and the lives of real human beings? Or is it that Qin Shihuangdi, somewhere, knew that the loss of human contact is the price one pays for being the ruler of men? Was it tyranny that made Qin Shihuangdi order his corpse surrounded with fake people? Or was it a bottomless sadness, a desperation caused by his having crushed—out of lust for power—anyone who came near?

Maybe the human companionship that Qin Shihuangdi could not, or would not, have in life, he sought to make his own in death. On his throne, surrounded by terrified people bowing and scraping before him, there must have been moments when Qin Shihuangdi looked out on the quivering masses and felt alone. For a ruler, a realm, however flourishing, is a desert void of human connection. No one loves the man beneath the crown. Everyone, ruled and ruler alike, is hostage to the drama of the state, to the hard realities of politics.

Qin Shihuangdi’s exorbitant mausoleum, his terracotta army in the dirt around the bones of a powerful ruler from twenty-two centuries ago, is a strange, close cousin to the politics of today. Not that we order public-works projects to fill a gigantic grave for a single person with life-size replicas of the human form. But we shouldn’t let the scale distract us. In our politics we do, I think, have as ambiguous a relationship with the human other as Qin Shihuangdi did. Like him, we, too, don’t know what to make of our fellow human beings. We want to be close to them, but we find our own prerogatives getting in the way. Especially for the sake of politics, for our role in the drama of state, we often shun our fellow men and women in this life and treat their memories (and even their shades) with indifference when they are gone. We build our political worlds on friend-enemy distinctions. We make our nation-states out of outcasts and exploitation.

But for all that we are not satisfied. Our craving for human companionship comes through even as we turn our backs on the human beings right in front of us. In politics we are divided, across party lines and across militarized borders. But we cannot escape the most basic political fact: The one thing worth having in all of this alienation is our fellow human beings.

This became crystal clear to me as I watched the Israel-Gaza war unfold on television these past two months. A brigade of Hamas terrorists overran kibbutzim and residential neighborhoods in Israel, slaughtering and raping with a barbarism that not even animals could muster. The terrorists also took hostages. Elderly women, schoolchildren, babies—the barbarians snatched the innocent from their homes and cribs and disappeared with them into tunnels beneath the seething Palestinian streets. Suddenly, the long history of the Jews and the Arabs, the Israelis and the Palestinians, shifted into the background, along with geopolitics, elections, pundits, and opinion polls. There was only one thing—getting the hostages back. All of the machinations of the political world, the schemes and betrayals, melted away in an instant. The evil that men do to one another in the name of the state, and in pursuit of their position within it, was shown to be worth nothing. When the babies and women and children were taken, all that mattered was bringing the stolen human beings home.

The terrorists understood this, of course. For all of their contempt for human life, they knew perfectly well that the way to gain maximum advantage was to hold human life for ransom. It wasn’t money they wanted, but leverage, a way to stay the fury they must have known would be on their heads in hours. Kidnappers are the most contradictory of people—or, in another sense, the most honest of political actors. Kidnappers confess by their evil deeds that humans are at the center of political maneuvering. Even those who kidnap, rape, and murder cannot forget that the only thing that really counts is people.

Israel’s enemies abroad knew it, too. As people took to the streets in cities around the world demanding the innocent hostages’ return, others ridiculed them, threatened them, even tore down the posters bearing the faces of those who had been snatched away. Like kidnappers, those who cheer them on, who politicize pain and seek to gain advantage out of suffering, confess by their own actions that the only thing worth having in politics is life.

Qin Shihuangdi would have watched all this on television and shuddered. He would have known in the depths of his soul what hostage politics feels like. Tyrants and the tyrannized, terrorists and their victims, are bound by the thread of humanity, however much humanity is outraged. Whether in ancient China or the present-day Middle East, whether in Gaza or in New York City, everyone knows that politics—the art of inhuman behavior—rests on the preciousness of human life.