In 1785, Immanuel Kant introduced his “categorical importance”. In short: Do as you want others to do. This commandment, a version of the Good Code, has been the basis of moral philosophy for centuries. But for The New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino, Kant’s “primary-necessity” no longer applies. Moral correctness, in some corners of left-wing opinion, is out; The blatant disregard for the social contract is internal.
Yesterday, The New York Times posted a video of a conversation featuring Tolentino, pro-communist streamer Hasan Piker, and Times opinion editor Nadja Spiegelman, under the headline: “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. It started with Tolentino, a very successful writer, admitting to stealing lemons from Whole Foods. “I think that stealing from a big box store — I’ll just say my platform — is not so important as a moral offense, nor is it in any way important as protest or direct action.”
“But what about the argument that if everyone just starts pilfering,” Spiegelman replies, “Whole Foods will eventually raise prices?”
“Yeah, chaos,” Piker says. “Complete chaos. Let’s go.”
“I kind of have a tendency towards this,” Tolentino adds. “Everyone, try it. See what happens.”
It is difficult to know where to begin with such moral ideas, if they can be called imagination. In a time of kleptocratic rule and corporate oligarchy, Tolentino and Piker decided to use a rap game. For them, theft is a kind of perverse signs of virtue. Social problems do not only cause personal mistakes; they glorify it.
Tolentino and Piker seem to justify stealing from big companies like Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, because those companies exploit workers and already budget for theft. Why should we throw up our hands about shoplifting when it counts? Such an attempt to legitimize petty crime makes Vicky Osterweil’s 2020 manifesto, In Defense of Looting, appear highly intelligent.
As with Osterweil, who argued that white supremacy can make even violent looting a legitimate act, Piker and Tolentino suggest that certain crimes are not only morally justified but even admirable when combined with claims against structural injustice. Spiegelman uses the term petty lootingto dress up as petty theft for political self-assertion.
Piker, who has 3 million followers on the streaming platform Twitch, and is sometimes described as the left’s answer to Joe Rogan, says that he “supports piracy everywhere, like, everywhere,” adding that if it were technologically possible, he would even pirate a car, whatever. Both Piker and Tolentino brag about IP theft. Tolentino encourages readers to skirt The The New Yorker‘s paywalls and read his articles for free. “I say, go ahead, use the Wayback Machine.”
“Can you steal from the Louvre?” Spiegelman asks.
“Yes,” Piker says.
“I wouldn’t have been able to carry out” such a robbery, Tolentino adds. But would I enjoy every news of people I see doing it?
“I think it’s great,” Piker says. “We have to go back to high-profile crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing valuable art, things like that.”
This statement is completely ridiculous, but the conversation starts in a dark place. Towards the end of the discussion, Spiegelman asks for an example of something that shouldn’t be done but should be. Tolentino replies, “Maybe things like blowing up a pipe.”
“I can relate to what you were saying, Jia,” Spiegelman replies. “It is very difficult to live morally in an immoral society.” He is fine. Instead of leading a conversation about the difficulties of maintaining integrity in this immoral age, he ended up calling for a celebration of evil.
Tolentino’s treatment of sabotage is indicative of the general irresponsibility of the discussion. He continues, “Some kind of fire can be conceptually prepared within a collective action that is very important.” Piker agrees: “Sabotage has played an important role in trade unions.”
During the riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in the summer of 2020, as fires burned nearby, a masked soldier shouted into the camera, “Black Lives Matter, not building lives that matter!” The meaning, which was widely accepted at the time on the left, is that property damage is limited but human life is sacred.
Yet both Piker and Tolentino move from discussing harmless crimes of nuisance and destruction to making excuses for murder. As the conversation turns to Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Piker claims that the executive was involved in “an enormous amount of social murder.” He and Tolentino framed the sometimes euphoric public sentiment about the killings as understandable because the health care industry is structurally oppressive.
Watching the video, and not just reading the article, is appropriate here. He asked as one must killing a health care executive, all three say no, even as they refuse to treat manslaughter with anything approaching seriousness. In fact, the way they exchange insults about it, you could be forgiven for thinking they were still on the subject of shoplifting.
And so a very silly conversation leads to a series of positions that are far from silly. Its central premise is that law loses its legitimacy when political and economic elites violate—or are perceived to violate—the social contract. In such a world, ordinary people have the right to ignore the law as they see fit. Neither Piker nor Tolentino openly condone violence. But it’s a short conceptual bridge from where they sit behind the microphone to political murder.
