Stealing for the Greater Good: Theft as Social Protest

Recently a new word just popped up courtesy of the NY Times: “microlooting.” 

Microlooting is a word that justifies petty theft (shoplifting) as a political statement. The idea is that as long as you are stealing from “big corporations” it is a protest. NYT reporter Nadja Spiegelman interviewed The New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino and political commentator Hasan Piker both of whom have no reluctance to engage in microlooting when it suits their needs, or they believe it supports what they believe is a common political goal. Stealing content from Netflix, pirating music, not paying for articles behind a paywall, stealing food from Whole Foods. They don’t stop at “micro.” They believe that, say, stealing from the Louvre or billionaires is a social statement as long as it is done in support of a larger social justice goal.

As Piker says. “I’m pro stealing from big corporations. Because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers.” He’s all for chaos, “Yeah, chaos. Full chaos. Let’s go.” Tolentino says, “If someone were to be stealing with a purpose, we love that in America. We do. We can love it again. We just have to do it with a purpose.” They both agreed that if the laws don’t feel moral you have the right to ignore them. The sanctity of private property is one of them. 

You may sense the irony here. Does anyone really believe that shoplifters are making a political statement? “Like, man, I steal from Whole Foods all the time, but they steal from their workers, so they deserve it.” But the food is pretty good at Whole Foods.

Both are enamored of some form of socialism. Piker spouts Engels (Karl Marx’s patron and intellectual partner). “Well, the rules are already designed in a way [that] if you steal from the poor, you become rich; if you steal from the wealthy, you go to prison.” He’s referring to big corporations whom he says engage in rampant wage “theft.” How, they say, do you think Musk, Tim Cook (Apple), and Bezos got rich? Small is good; big is bad.

How far do you go? Spiegelman asks, was the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson justified? Piker says it’s understandable because the private health care system creates universal pain, violence, and death for the average American. Tolentino references social murder (a concept dreamed up by Friederich Engels as the premature, preventable deaths among the working class). To be sure, they say, many know murder is wrong, but many found the rage of Luigi Mangione understandable.

If you justify theft as a social protest, then where do you stop? Ask Mao and Stalin. It’s an ends-justify-the-means philosophy. 

It’s curious that these two Millennials decry capitalism when they both benefit from it. Tolentino has a cush job at The New Yorker and wrote several best-selling books. The New Yorker is a cog in a large multi-billion-dollar media corporation. Piker is a well-known controversial commentator, streamer, and influencer with a large following on YouTube (owned by Google). He comes from an educated, upper-class family. He bought a house in L.A. for $2,700,000. I would label him as a hard-core socialist rabble-rouser. Tolentino and Piker are Neiman Marxists, people who have greatly benefited from the system they despise. 

As college educated, intelligent people, they somehow missed out on learning about the traditions of Western philosophy or economics, much less the history of socialism. It appears that they have not sought anything that offers an opposing view to their destructive, failed ideas. 

They are intellectuals-lite, or what is called “bien pensants” which is someone who accepts and/or espouses a fashionable idea after it has been established by elites and maintains it without a great amount of critical thought. 

The bottom line with these folks is that if it’s a big corporation it’s ok to steal from them because they are inherently corrupt. Ditto billionaires. And, in the Marxist tradition, breaking and stealing stuff is fun.

These people have no idea how the world works. They are children toying with fashionable ideas that history has shown to bring poverty and oppression. Our political and economic system of free market capitalism and a democratic political system founded to protect our individual rights has created the greatest explosion of wealth the world has ever seen. Billions have been lifted out of poverty. 

Microlooting isn’t a political statement, it’s stealing and it’s the path to the destruction of social order.