Bear with me- Acceptable Theft

I think I am on the money to suggest that the excusability of thieving from individuals is not a topic that regularly comes up in philosophical and social debates, even in the left of field social groups that I flit around in. It might occur, as I will detail later, but it is never really analysed. Rarely have I been sitting around at a dinner table having pleasant chats and sipping glasses of cheap cabernet-sauvignon when someone has asked, “I nicked the crockery that your all eating off from the pensioner down the road, is that wrong?” However recent events have got me thinking about the moral implication of theft amongst members of my herd, and the very indistinct line that we and indeed wider society draw between theft acceptable and inexcusable theft.

Let me take you on a journey. Recently my herd of housemates (that is the collective noun that I have patented and will henceforth use) decided that we would have a themed party to celebrate the upcoming Australian Federal Election. Being the witty, imaginative and generally left wing devils that we are we decided to take the piss and call it “The Liberal Party”, where people would dress up as members of the voting pools for Australia’s main, and currently elected federal conservative party. Amongst our guests where a white supremacist carrying a caged gollywog doll, a pregnant teenager just after the ‘baby bonus’ (a cash payment given to all new mothers in Australia) and a local hick who was just plain outraged by kids these days, muslims and the disintegration of our traditional family values.

To compliment the planned chants of “it’s a damn shame” and “no it’s not like it used to be” we decided to decorate our house with pictures of our local Liberal Candidate, doctored of course to portray them ass the social outsiders (like gays, women and those that don’t own a BMW 5 series) that they so despised. The easiest and most fun way to get lots and lots of high quality, colourful images of our local member was to collect all the Liberal support pickets placed in peoples yard throughout our suburb. And we did. This often required climbing trees, jumping fences sneaking into yards and generally executing late night commando stealth tactics to avoid being caught by pensioners in their unmentionables. I would be lying if I said that we had a good old time ripping the fuckers out of the ground and running the hell away.

However, and this is where the meat of this random diatribe comes in, after we took the pickets someone from the media got informed and decided to run a story on our escapades. Throughout the corse of his planning he contacted the local Liberal branch who where suitable not amused. Throughout the corse of the Liberal Parties planning to get back at us pesky kids they decided to refer the matter to The Law. It was only then that I, or anyone from my herd realized that some people, and indeed the police, might consider what we did to be illegal.

An herin lies the dilemma. Why did my herd and I not even conceptualise the possible illegality of our actions, and what constitutes acceptable theft?

As I thought more into this issue I realized just how non-linear our conceptions of theft as a crime are. Almost no-one in my herd would think twice about stealing from the government, and my house has been filled over the years with street signs, caution signs, and even recently one of those giant water filled interlocking road barricades you see when they close of a lane of the highway. However none of us would walk into a government department and walk out with a new office chair. Likewise big companies are pretty much considered fair game and I have one mate who spent the best part of her teenage years stuffing as much rubbish Target makeup into her oversized bra as she could. She however would never steal from the local store where the person that owns it serves you; that would be wrong. And while we might nick the political pickets from our neighbour’s lawn, we wouldn’t break in to their house and take their super sweet 28inch plasma TV. Why, isn’t all of this still theft?

And it isn’t us that have these bipolar attitudes, examples of confusion between acceptable theft and unacceptable theft are everywhere within mainstream industries. A singer can steal another artist song riffs or lyrics under the guise of ‘sampling’ and its legal, however if you download that same song for free its illegal. Blog Queens like Perez Hilton have been allowed to steal photographers pictures without royalty payments on a website that makes him money by very mildly modifying the pictures with quote bubbles and labelling it ‘parody’, however if you used Perez’s image on a T-shirt and sold it you would be breaking the law. Furthermore, almost every one of us will ‘steal’ in our everyday lives.

Take home a few surplus reams of paper from work, make up a few extra deductions for your tax return, gleefully accept the extra Diet Coke the vending machine spit out at you instead of reporting it; YOUR ALL STEALING! But no-one would even consider these acts as being in the same category as bank robbery, or stealing someone’s wallet. Why? Does size and worth really make that much difference? Does the fact that the pickets we took are free, easily replaceable and only put up by hardcore (read evil) conservative voters make the action okay? Does the fact that a company might be huge and won’t miss their Loreal Wet Shine Cherry Lip gloss really make the matter okay? All these little things add up.

A company probably looses far more money from every employee ‘harmlessly’ taking home staplers and paperclips then they do from the unlikely event that Joe in accounting might winch a photocopier out a window at three in the morning once the cleaners have gone. The lip gloss might be small but lots and lots of lost lip glosses might cost an employee somewhere their job in the long run. The Liberal Party pickets may have been free, but the act of taking them off that persons property is, if only in a small way, stealing from them the right to peacefully declare and support the political party of their choosing; perhaps the most basic and fundamental right of a progressive pluralist society. Can there really be an acceptable theft, or are we all just in a state of mutual denial?

I know I am definitely not the moral authority to answer this one, but I am interested in the dilemma. Anyway I have to run, the person whose Internet account I have been logged in as is coming back and I have been using up their entire download quota. Is that wrong?


wasteland