Who Binds You?

The consequences of individualism as an ideology

This is an elaboration/follow-up to a piece I recently published along with NickS (WA) on the question of why America seems to tolerate a high level of public disorder, and why our public spaces tend to be subpar. Or, to put it differently, why America is “bad at cities.” These are all threads of the same conversation, I think, and here I’m trying my hand at articulating the operating idea behind this American “every space is your living room” attitude.

I wasn’t sure how exactly to make the point here, but a silly viral interview published in the New York Times with Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino reminded me of this. If you’re lucky enough not to have seen any of the “discourse” around that, Tolentino, in one segment, says that shoplifting is kind of wrong but not that wrong, it isn’t really political resistance, and then says that she stole some lemons from Whole Foods. There’s a lot more clueless privileged-leftist “How do you do fellow common people” stuff.

In my view, it all isn’t so much shockingly immoral as it is navel-gazingly imbecilic. It reminds me a lot of the kinds of conversations we’d have in college. Could I kill my professor for giving me a D? After all, he risked my future career, he may do it again, and you could argue that killing him would be a form of self-defense.¹ I recognize this kind of talk, and I don’t think it’s good, much less productive, but I also don’t think it should be taken literally. It is sophomoric.

In fact, my first thought was that there’s a good chance Tolentino did not in fact steal any lemons from Whole Foods, but is just worried that opposing shoplifting in the 2020s is like being against casual sex in the 1990s. She has too much to lose—a husband, two children, a successful career, a New York City home—to be a petty thief, but she wants people to think she’s one because all the cool kids are.

Of course, like every good leftist essayist, she once put her future husband on blast in a personal essay on the inequality of heterosexual marriage—“I Thee Dread”—and then explained that she only married over a health insurance issue. Maybe that was also a white lie to flatter her bougie-proletarian audience. This is the sort of person who inspires the right-wing talking point about left-wing elites who refuse to preach the normie virtues they practice.

It is true—in a descriptive sense, if not a moral sense—that a billionaire-owned corporation is a less sympathetic victim than a small business. It is easier to justify petty theft against the former. Such outsized levels of wealth can make it feel almost like a game or sport, Robin Hood-like, to get a little bit of it back for yourself. But again, it’s easy to think that; it’s not good to do it. And I doubt one out of a hundred of the leftist intellectual-types have the courage of their convictions.

Nonetheless, I can understand where this attitude comes from. There is a part of me that feels, in following the law, that I’m choosing not to steal—that it isn’t wrong “out there” as much as it is wrong in my own accounting, and that perhaps that could change. There’s something very American about viewing freedom as the right to get away with little things once in awhile. I put it this way, once, in another piece:

The “victim”—i.e., the petty wrongdoer—is more relatable to me than the enforcer. Because I don’t want to be the guy getting caught, but also, on some level, I want to reserve my right to do the wrong thing. I find it difficult to cheer for someone else getting caught for something I want to reserve the right to do. Not that I really want to do it! It’s just that…I might conceivably do it, and I don’t want any hassle.

With regard to shoplifting specifically, it’s easy for me to give it that old college try. I can tell myself that John Locke was right when he argued that private property implied a duty of stewardship. And that when supermarkets throw out so much food, they have ceded their right to private property, with regard to whatever merchandise they are going to waste. Therefore, what the law calls “shoplifting” is, at least in those cases, simply the customer taking what the company has already ceded its right to. Perhaps—because the preservation of limited resources is a higher good than a narrow interpretation of private property rights—the customer even has a duty to rescue that food. Et voila!²

Of course, even if this were morally correct, it’s still against the law. There’s a reason the law abrogates private property only in a few strict, select instances—chiefly adverse possession and eminent domain. And in theory, at least, eminent domain must come with compensation. My shoplifting-is-cool theory is more of a loosening of the principle behind adverse possession, but if it were the law of the land, everyone would steal all the time and justify it post-hoc. A society where everyone lives by their own rules is not a society.

It’s easy to make this political: “See, it’s the left that doesn’t believe in the rule of law,” etc. etc. Yet talk about the absolute sanctity of the law with regard to petty infractions to somebody who “forgot” his income from a garage sale. Tell it to an irate motorist ticketed for speeding.