Is it wrong to steal a painting from the Louve?
Change comes from collective action, not individual bad action.
Is it wrong to steal lemons from Whole Foods? To steal paintings from the Louvre? To kill health care executives?
Last week, the New York Times published an interview with writer Jia Tolentino and streamer Hasan Piker about the purpose and morality of petty and not-so-petty crimes in a country where the ultra-wealthy do not seem to play by the same rules as the rest of us. It’s worth a listen, because I think it illustrates a critical flaw in too much of today’s left (a group of which I still consider myself a member): In the pursuit of equality, we too often race to the bottom instead of creating conditions for more people to rise to the top.
In the interview Tolentino (a writer whose work I admire) admits to occasionally swiping lemons or a loaf of bread from Whole Foods if she’s already gone through the checkout, paid for her groceries, and then realized she forgot one thing on her list (something she was getting for a neighbor who put the Whole Foods order in via a local mutual aid group). This admission has spurred an absolutely massive backlash, with a truly repulsive reporter from the Daily Mail showing up to her home to confront her and then publishing a piece that emphasizes the price of Tolentino’s brownstone and her “second home in the ritzy upstate New York town of Saugerties,” a cabin that she and her husband bought for… $200,000 (lol on several counts).
The lemon scandal feels very, very silly, especially since Tolentino repeats many times that collective action and reigning in exploitative companies is the path to change — the only viable path to a better, fairer society. But, she rightly notes, it’s hard to do.
The interviewer, Nadja Spiegelman, talks about shoplifting and says, “My friends and I have started calling this microlooting, because it has a slight political valence to theft, as opposed to just the thrill of getting away with something. Have you noticed this around you online? Have you noticed more people talking about stealing in this way?”
And Tolentino responds:
Microlooting — it feels akin to posting about something. As an atomized individual action, it’s useless. It’s much harder to get a job and accept $17.50 an hour and then to organize your colleagues, a process that takes years and is often unsuccessful.
The thing about actual collective, direct action — it’s so much harder. And it often doesn’t profit you whatsoever, such as, you know, me getting an extra 10 bucks by grabbing my extra loaf of bread for Miss Nancy.
We are also lazy as humans; we’re also selfish. We’ve lost not only the language and the union density and the structure to engage in things like this, but we have also lost the muscle that is built up to be able to engage in these sorts of things. We’ve lost the rooms in which these things are planned.
Tolentino and Piker are being lumped into the same category of “leftists who like stealing and murder,” but in reality they say very different things. It’s Piker who really seems to revel in the idea of individuals who engage in violence, thievery, and sabotage, even as he personally does not steal after being punished as a child for it by his dad. The one point in the interview where I paused, a bit stunned, is when they both agreed that’s it’s fine to steal from the Louvre. This was, to be fair, said in a jokey tone — a “more cool crimes please!” kind of thing. And I too like movies and podcasts about art heists. In reality, though, art museums are places where incredible works of human creation are made available to the public — stealing them for personal benefit and ensuring they will be hidden from public view and living in the private collection of some extremely rich person strikes me as the opposite of the socialist ideal. So it’s also been shocking to see other leftists genuinely coming to the defense of “steal from the Louvre,” not just because doing so is cool, but because they have more paintings in the basement.
There doesn’t seem to be much of a theory of change here. Tolentino provides one, but that’s largely ignored in both the interview and the discourse around it. Some leftists and socialists, like Piker and Spiegelman’s “micro-looting” friends, seem to believe that acts that feel transgressive are themselves political activism. It reminds me a bit of the cyclical feminist discourse about beauty culture (and a bunch of other things): If you’re wearing lipstick and high heels is that Feminist because you are a woman who is choosing her choice? If something feels good to you, and you are a woman, is that thing Feminist? My answer is no, of course not. That’s not an argument against feeling good, or against wearing high heels or red lipstick; I do all of those things. It is an argument against the self-flattery of believing actions one simply prefers to take have some political impact. We all comply with our culture’s expectations of us to some degree, and sometimes that feels good. Most of us will transgress those expectations too, and often that can feel good because it’s thrilling. But just as cheating on your husband is probably not a feminist action simply because marriage is a patriarchal institution, stealing from Whole Foods is not a socialist action simply because Whole Foods is a company in a capitalist nation. I personally find the idea of shoplifting to be so anxiety-producing that I cannot imagine doing it, and the one time I did do it (eighth grade) it was by accident — I walked out of a shop holding a Bush sticker I intended to buy, forgetting it was in my hand — and I went back and paid for it. But I can certainly comprehend how shoplifting is a little thrill for some people, and I generally feel like whatever — just be honest that it’s wrong, you know it’s wrong, and that’s why it feels fun. It’s not some great act of anti-capitalist transgression.
But it certainly might be fueled by a sense of frustration and bitterness at an unequal and exploitative system.
It’s easy to understand how resentment over rank inequality — not just inequality in terms of wealth, but inequality in obligation and accountability — curdles into antisocial action. A great many benefits are handed to the wealthy, from lower-interest loans to fee-free banking; it really does pay to be rich, while it’s expensive to be poor. Many billionaires have a lower tax rate than I do. Over the last few decades, wealth has exploded at the very tippy-top, while life feels increasingly precarious for the vast bottom and even the middle. America is far behind many of our peer nations in benefits citizens of other developed countries take for granted: Universal healthcare, paid parental leave, affordable childcare. Many billionaires avoid paying the taxes that would support the broader society that has supported them in amassing spectacular wealth; worse, many use their spectacular wealth to put their thumbs on the political scales, buying greater political representation in a system that promises one person one vote.
But there’s something else particular about America: We’re a much more dangerous country than most of our economic peers. We have significantly higher murder rates, thanks to our unique proliferation of weapons designed to murder. And we have pretty middling rates of social trust — not as low as countries with astounding rates of crime, corruption, and violence (Brazil, Nigeria, and so on), but lower than the high-trust societies of Scandinavia, and lower than Australia, Canada, and the UK — and much lower than China, despite that country’s authoritarian government and aggressive surveillance state.
There’s a pretty clear pattern to the countries with high social trust. They tend to have low levels of corruption, low levels of inequality, and robust social safety net programs. The United States, interestingly, is an outlier: Given how unequal our country is, we should be less trusting than we are:
