In 1785, Immanuel Kant introduced his famous “categorical imperative.” Put simply: Act the way you want others to behave. This dictate, a version of the Golden Rule, has been a bedrock of moral philosophy for centuries. But for the New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino, Kant’s “categorical-imperative-type thing” no longer applies. Moral rectitude, in some left-wing corners of the commentariat, is out; flagrant disregard of the social contract is in.
Yesterday, The New York Times posted a video of a conversation featuring Tolentino, the pro-communist streamer Hasan Piker, and the Times opinion editor Nadja Spiegelman, under the headline: “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?” It began with Tolentino, a highly successful author, admitting to shoplifting lemons from Whole Foods. “I think that stealing from a big box store—I’ll just state my platform—it’s neither very significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest or direct action.”
“But what about the argument that if everyone just starts stealing wantonly,” Spiegelman replies, “Whole Foods will eventually raise the prices?”
“Yeah, chaos,” Piker says. “Full chaos. Let’s go.”
“I kind of am inclined toward this,” Tolentino adds. “Everyone, try it. See what happens.”
[Marc Fisher: Shoplifters gone wild]
It is difficult to know where to begin with such moral reasoning, if it can be called reasoning. At a time of kleptocratic governance and corporate oligarchy, Tolentino and Piker resort to a game of jaded whataboutism. For them, theft is a kind of perverse virtue signaling. Societal problems do not just excuse personal wrongdoing; they ennoble it.
Both Tolentino and Piker seem to justify stealing from large companies such as Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, because those corporations exploit workers and already budget for theft. Why wring our hands about shoplifting when it’s been accounted for? Such an attempt to normalize petty crime makes Vicky Osterweil’s 2020 manifesto, In Defense of Looting, look high-minded.
As with Osterweil, who argued that white supremacy can render even violent looting a legitimate act, Piker and Tolentino suggest that certain crimes become not just morally justifiable but even admirable when coupled with a claim against structural injustice. Spiegelman uses the term microlooting, dressing up petty theft in political pretensions.
Piker, who has 3 million followers on the streaming platform Twitch, and is sometimes described as the left’s answer to Joe Rogan, states that he is “pro-piracy all the way, like, across the board,” adding that were it technologically possible, he would even pirate a car, whatever that means. Both Piker and Tolentino brag about IP theft. Tolentino encourages readers to skirt The New Yorker’s paywalls and read her articles for free. “I say, go off, use the Wayback Machine.”
“Would you steal from the Louvre?” Spiegelman asks.
“Yes,” Piker says.
“I would not be logistically capable of executing” such a theft, Tolentino adds. “But would I cheer on every news story of people that I see doing it? Absolutely.”
“I think it’s cool,” says Piker. “We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.”
These remarks are manifestly silly, but the conversation ranges into darker territory. Toward the end of the discussion, Spiegelman asks for an example of something that is not considered acceptable to do but should be. Tolentino responds, “Maybe things like blowing up a pipeline.”
“I can relate to what you were saying, Jia,” Spiegelman replies. “It is so hard to live ethically in an unethical society.” She’s right. Rather than lead a discussion about the difficulties of maintaining personal integrity in an immoral age, however, she wound up convening a celebration of vice.
Tolentino’s treatment of sabotage is emblematic of the discussion’s overall irresponsibility. She continues, “Some sort of fire could hypothetically be framed within a collective action that is tactically useful.” Piker concurs: “Sabotage has played a formative role in labor unions.”
During the Kenosha, Wisconsin, uprising in the summer of 2020, as fires raged nearby, a masked rioter screamed into a camera, “It’s Black Lives Matter, not building lives matter!” The implication, which was widely accepted at that time on the left, was that property destruction is trivial but human life is sacrosanct.
[Graeme Wood: The pinnacle of looting apologia]
Yet both Piker and Tolentino move from discussing nonlethal crimes of nuisance and destruction to making excuses for murder. When the conversation turns to Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Piker asserts that the executive had been engaged in “a tremendous amount of social murder.” Both he and Tolentino frame the at-times-gleeful public reaction to the killing as understandable because the health-care industry is structurally oppressive.
Watching the video, and not merely reading the transcript, is worthwhile here. Asked whether one should murder a health-care executive, all three dutifully say no, even as they refuse to treat the extrajudicial killing of a man with anything approaching gravity. In fact, the way they exchange smirks about it, you could be forgiven for thinking they were still on the subject of shoplifting produce.
And so a very silly conversation leads to a series of positions that are far from frivolous. Its overarching premise is that the law loses its legitimacy when political and economic elites violate—or are merely perceived to violate—the social contract. In such a world, ordinary people become entitled to ignore rules as they see fit. Neither Piker nor Tolentino explicitly endorse violence. But it is a short conceptual bridge from where they sit behind microphones to political murder.
The post Since When Is Looting a Form of Virtue Signaling? appeared first on The Atlantic.
