The Mysterious Origins of “I’mma Just Take This” Crime
The stuff people need in order to live isn't exactly scarce. It's just that somehow it's all already 100% owned, and not by the people who need it to live. But also some people are assholes.
I wonder if it would help people understand that the bulk of crime, a.k.a. “I’mma just take this,” stems from the fact that basic needs like food and shelter and medicine are literally millions of years older than money.
We evolved under the pressure of taking risks—exposing ourselves to the elements or predators or territorial defenders (from venomous insects to other tribes of our own kind) or dangerous terrain or merely wagering calories already consumed in athletic effort—in exchange for obtaining food and shelter. Evolutionarily, this is the struggle we’re designed for.
Not, as it turns out, sitting in office chairs doing favors for business owners in hopes of a scoring enough tokens to pay other business owners for food and the readily revocable right to live indoors.
Not that everybody is cut out for the hunting or gathering work. That was always handled as a tribe. Making tools, preparing and storing the food, caring for the children and elderly and sick, education and training and entertainment—all of this stuff needed doing too. The people who brought back the food shared it to everybody who needed to eat, just like the builders built the houses for everybody and the weavers and potters and teachers and doctors took care of all of those other things for the whole tribe.
When someone needed something, you’d give it to them as a gift, and then you’d feel good because you were useful enough to be helpful.
Also greed and hoarding would get you knocked on the head and fed to the wolves.
Before money was invented, anyway.
Money adds a layer of indirection—one extra layer of complexity—that makes this stuff harder to talk about and think about for many people. Maybe even for most people. Money makes wealth seem less real. This works the same way that chips in a casino make money seem less real, which works for the casinos because it tricks people into taking more risks with their money. Money seems to trick people into taking stockpiled wealth less seriously.
Hoarding all of the village’s grain is obviously terrible. Hoarding all of the village’s money so that no one has enough money to buy grain (apparently) seems somehow less heinous despite having the exact same effect.
But the grain is right there in the warehouse. It’s perfectly legal for you to take some as long as you hand over some money. But (apparently) it’s nobody’s problem but your own if you don’t have any money.
The problem is the hired bastards with clubs who, being well fed/paid themselves, are happy to beat you, no matter how hungry you are, if you attempt to take grain without paying. Under this type of scenario, they have no purpose other than beating hungry and starving people, and perhaps a few people trying to provide for hungry and starving people, for the excuse of protecting the hoard—and to protect the hoard’s owner from being knocked on the head and fed to the wolves. And I guess also to protect themselves from being knocked on the head and fed to the wolves for their complicit glee.
In order for this perverted system to occur and be sustainable, both money and grain have to be hoarded. It’s kind of pointless otherwise.
This is the system that results:
I need to eat → take food. × BEATING. Oops. Need money. I need to eat → take money, buy food. × BEATING. Oops. Need job. I need to eat → get a job, get money, buy food. × RIDICULE. Oops. Need to look “presentable.” I need to eat → take “business” clothes, get a job, get money, buy food. × BEATING. Oops. Need money.
Ugh.
It’s more complicated than that, even.
Need identity documentation. Need a secure location to store and protect important documents/clothes. Need rest and hygiene facilities. Need a job. And, always, need food, need clean water, need clean air.
Somehow, while fending off exhaustion and exposure and hunger and longer-term malnutrition, you’re supposed to get your shit together enough to get all those fake needs seen to before you can get to the real needs of a safe place to sleep and food and clean water.
Nowhere on Earth do these weird fake needs actually trump the real ones when you’re psychotic from having nowhere to rest and starving and sick from whatever scraps you’ve dug up to eat. And if you don’t have help from a friend or family or a kind stranger, you’re gonna either die or turn to crime.
It seems that, in the bizarre terms of “social contract” (in which authorities claim citizens have bought into and endorse the rules by failing to successfully riot and rebel) the bulk of society has decided to let a system like this stand. Perhaps we allow these fake needs exist so we can sort the people with no friends or family from everyone else on the assumption that if someone has been ostracized, it was probably because they somehow deserved to be, either for something they’ve done or for how they act or who or what they are fundamentally.
…even though we know that it’s just shitty luck sometimes that takes away everything. Or an asshole. All we have to do to find this out is ask someone who has been through the transition.
But let’s talk about assholes. Because assholes also take stuff.
Assholes take stuff from vulnerable people because they can, not necessarily because they need it. Assholes take stuff because it make them feel like the Big Dog to be able to take something and get away with it. Assholes also need to eat and sleep somewhere safe and have clean water and air and such, but they go beyond a basic satisfaction of being able to provide for themselves and those who depend on them, and they revel in the demonstrated fact of not being at the bottom of an arbitrary social pecking order. Sometimes they revel in the cruelty and enjoy it. Sometimes they start their own hoards.
The thing that makes someone into an asshole is a lack of compassion and empathy for certain sets of others. This what lets them abuse people weaker than themselves, especially if those people are in these othered categories. This is what helps them think of people weaker than themselves as somehow lesser. This lack of empathy can be taught/trained—and frequently when it appears it _has_ been trained, in much the same way as domestic abuse. Frequently it is trained _by means of_ such abuse.
This is slightly off topic, but needs to be pointed out. Specifically the abuse is of the form of an assertion by an authority—or at least someone stronger—that 1) some categories of individuals are somehow lesser and 2) a targeted individual is a member of one of these lesser categories until that individual “proves” that they are not lesser by means of compliance to with the authority/stronger person’s arbitrary wishes and _possibly_ wins begrudging trickles of approval. This illness is transmissible because adoption of this schema is an obvious part of compliance and the largest part of how the schema has evolved to persist. Any time you see this pattern, especially when it accompanies badges and/or weapons, you must expect trouble.
But also sometimes assholery emerges with no particular training, as some people have lower levels of empathy naturally and cope poorly. Many successfully coping mechanisms exist, but not everyone finds one.
It’s not unconnected that assholes are also frequently hired to stand around hoards with clubs, resenting the fact that they’re not really the Big Dog, but at least they get fed/paid and are therefore not the Little Dog. People with a healthy sense of compassion or empathy could not perform the duties required.
So here are the two main reasons for property crime:
“I was in the middle of a life-threatening crisis, so I took something to help myself out directly (I ate it/drank it/wore it) or indirectly (I hope I can sell it for some money to buy what I need).”
OR
“I didn’t want you to have what you had so I took it/destroyed it to prove to myself (and incidentally to you, and maybe to anyone else who might be looking) that I’m more bad-ass than you. Stronger. More clever. Higher status. Better connected socially. Not lesser. Or at least more bad-ass that you thought I was.”
Justifications are a different matter. Justifications frequently use the term “deserve” and can be ignored. The term “deserve” implies some kind of universal standard of how things ought to be that is 1) somehow mysteriously responsible for dictating actions and 2) never universal and 3) merely serves to deflect the discussion from an individual’s personal motivation, which is always sufficient to explain an individual’s own action.
Consider: “My daughter didn’t deserve to go hungry so I stole food for her” versus “I didn’t want my daughter to go hungry so I stole food for her.” The first version could be debated by any individual inclined to do so. The second version doesn’t require or invite any further discussion. Nor does it need justification.
It seems that the entire system of fake needs exists merely to create a criminal class of the desperate, so that those who refuse to lay down and die may be beaten at whim by the assholes with clubs. It’s telling that those most often divided from what they need by this system of fake needs are of those categories most frequently considered to be “lesser” or “other” by our dominant groups of assholes. This is by design, because sometimes assholes are elected to public office and draft and sign legislation that is designed to tilt the slope of fortune against these othered categories.
If we want to be largely rid of “I’mma just take this” crimes, it would make sense to remove the desperation by providing, universally, shelter and food and clean water, by removing the wall of fake needs between any category of human being and basic survival, and also, incidentally, the ability to find legitimate work or a charitable sponsorship for children or elderly or the disabled or their carers that doesn’t require emotional or sexual indenture to some other citizen, or subjugation to some religious organization, or a corporate sponsorship, or any other equally heinous forced/extorted relationship.
Assholes will fight this, of course. The concentration of the categories they despise in the manufactured existential crises of desperation is how they confirm that those people are “lesser” and “other.” If those people are not more frequently in crisis, then the categorizations start to vanish. Assholes define their own identities in terms of “lessers” and “others” and won’t know how to make themselves feel superior or win approval from their betters by abusing those others or compete among themselves in their pecking orders without them. They risk becoming seen as “lesser” “others” themselves.
The problem here, of course, is that the removal of desperation—as if the assholes would let you do so without a huge struggle—only takes care of one of the major sources of property crime. Because you still have the assholes.
It goes without saying that if you could address the asshole problem—prevent the manufacture of new assholes from otherwise healthy and impressionable young people and treat the condition where it already occurs—you could reduce “I’mma take this” crime drastically across the board by removing the enormous impetus for making and maintaining these artificial “lesser” and “other” categories as well as dismantle these artificial systems for keeping significant quantities of these people in existential crisis.
Perhaps this makes it less of a mystery that most of the best religions start with the premise that “all people are brothers and sisters” and derive their operating ethics from that precept. A religious-authority-mandated abolishment of the concepts of “lesser” and “other” really cuts down on the number of assholes—and the knock-on effects of having them in your society, whether or not they have badges and/or clubs.
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