Communist sympathizer and Democratic Party influencer Hasan Piker wants to normalize theft in America.
In a New York Times podcast, Piker advocated stealing from the Louvre as well as other “cool crimes” such as “bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.” Referring to companies such as Whole Foods, he declared, “I’m pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers.” Pilfering from stores has now been given the soothing term “microlooting” by the podcast’s host.
Piker isn’t the disease. He’s the fever. And you don’t cure a fever by arguing with it.
Dissecting Piker’s rhetoric on theft would add little value because Piker is not the problem. We have confused cause and effect. Piker has millions of social media followers, and his Twitch streams regularly hit over one million viewers because his listeners are already seeking ideas that support their something-for-nothing passion. The real problem is a prior moral collapse.
When our actions increase the possibility of human cooperation, we are on the side of team humanity. When our actions sow mistrust and increase societal friction, we are against human flourishing.
Normalizing Theft, Destroying Civilization
F. A. Hayek warned in his final book, The Fatal Conceit, that discarding our evolved moral traditions in favor of a deliberately designed socialist morality would ultimately “destroy much of present humankind” by dooming “a large part of mankind to poverty and death.”
One of Hayek’s central teachings in The Road to Serfdom is that well-meaning advocates of socialist policies fail to understand that such policies may lead to a totalitarian outcome. He argued, “If the people whose convictions now give [socialism] an irresistible momentum began to see what only a few yet apprehend, they would recoil in horror and abandon the quest.”
Of course, they don’t know where all this is going. And even if they did, they would scoff because their positions were reached through passion rather than reason.
David Hume provides a foundational explanation for why trying to save the world merely by convincing others is a fool’s errand. In his A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume argued, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
Hume saw that human behavior is driven by sentiment and emotion rather than pure logic, and you cannot simply argue someone into becoming virtuous if they lack the underlying moral foundation.
People often actively work to defend their passions by deploying “reason” to dismiss any evidence or ideas that contradict those passions. It is hard to overstate how important but how ignored Hume’s ideas on passions and reason are.
In his essay “The Sceptic,” Hume explicitly addresses the futility of trying to reason with someone who lacks a moral center, who “feels no remorse to controul his vicious inclinations” and “malignant passions.” He wrote of his frustration: “I know not how I should address myself to such a one, or by what arguments I should endeavour to reform him.”
He wondered, but ultimately rejected, the idea that he should “tell him of the inward satisfaction which results from laudable and humane actions.”
Hume’s conclusion is blunt: When dealing with an opponent who denies basic moral distinctions, “the only way, therefore, of converting an antagonist of this kind, is to leave him to himself.”
But do not mistake Hume’s counsel of disengagement for moral indifference.
Piker is working to incite people who want to believe that capitalism and private property are the source of evil. There is an overwhelming philosophical case against Piker’s indignation that must be clearly understood by those of us who value civilization.
If property depended on the “merit” of the person, Hume writes in A Treatise of Human Nature, “the avidity and partiality of men would quickly bring disorder into the world” because everyone is “naturally partial” to themselves and their own perceived excellence.
Hume explains that because human nature is “insatiable, perpetual, [and] universal” in its desire for possessions, the rules of property must be “unchangeable” by “spite and favour” or by “particular views of private or public interest.” Respect for private property is inseparable from the evolution of civilization itself.
In short, there is all the difference between a subjective emotional impulse for social justice and the objective, rule-based justice required for a functioning civilization.
We cannot choose to ignore established moral rules simply because the immediate effects of doing so seem “pleasant” or “just.” As Hayek observed in The Fatal Conceit, “If humankind owes its very existence to one particular rule-guided form of conduct of proven effectiveness, it simply does not have the option of choosing another merely for the sake of the apparent pleasantness of its immediately visible effects.”
Am I painting a bleak picture? Not at all.
The Self-Governing Answer to Moral Vacancy
Hume believed we can reform ourselves by elevating our passion through “study and application”:
Let a man propose to himself the model of a character, which he approves: Let him be well acquainted with those particulars, in which his own character deviates from this model: Let him keep a constant watch over himself, and bend his mind, by a continual effort, from the vices, towards the virtues; and I doubt not but, in time, he will find, in his temper, an alteration for the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson paints an even brighter picture. In 1867, Emerson delivered an address, “Progress of Culture,” to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard. When Emerson used the word culture, he did not mean something exogenous to us. He meant self-culture: the internal process by which a person gains “possession of his own powers.” The true progress of society is measured by the quality of the individual mind. Emerson told his Harvard audience that a single “wise and good soul” is worth more than “foolish and sensual millions” because that individual has achieved a state of internal alignment with universal truth.
Famously, Emerson declared, “Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.” Leonard Read, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education, quoted those words often and understood why. It is our invisible beliefs, habits of mind, and passions that are behind our experience of reality, drive human action, and thus advance or hinder societal flourishing.
For an advocate of self-government, this is a healing balm for despair. One mind in alignment with the truth ultimately has more power than the millions influenced by Hasan Piker. Piker may think he is important. He is merely a manifestation of a prior moral vacancy. Moral vacancies can be filled by good or evil.
Our work is not to shout louder than Piker. We don’t argue with a dark room; we turn on the light. We have the freedom to choose which ideas we pay attention to and which we reject.
The work is to become the kind of person whose self-culture clearly recognizes Piker’s arguments to be as hollow and dangerous as they are.
