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GunNewsDaily.com
Survival, Looting, and Restitution William Lolli Gun News Daily Contributing Editor Thank you for the many emails I have received in response to my last
editorial An Entitlement
to Loot [ Most responses approved of my position; however, there were those who
cited me for not being more compassionate to the unfortunate in the One email responder stated: "I honestly don’t care if they're looting. They've been abandoned with no food, no water, and no electricity. I'm sure the store owners would hardly begrudge them their stock." [My first reaction to this letter was to wonder whether or not the writer considered all of the looters "children" in some way.] There were other responses, in a like genre, but this particular response [above] caught my eye as it was a good representation of the collective sentiment. There are two things I would like to say about the act of looting and the act of protecting life and property from looters, particularly using the threat of deadly force or the consummation of deadly force. But before I do, I would like to remind you that Law and Order are not for the law-abiding, but for the lawless and the savage. Thus my previous comments about looting and looters centered around the general nature of the environment of looting, mainly an environment lacking in both law and order. That said, I firstly would like to speak to the aspect of the Scenario-Driven nature of survival-interaction between desperate human beings. I would like for you to ponder for a moment of how many different
survival-interaction scenarios there are being played out at this moment, and
have been played out for the past week, in the What do I mean by a "survival-interaction scenario"? I mean examples of the following genre: a desperate man coming to another man's home to beg for food; a randomly socialized group of desperate acquaintances collectively looting a drug store; an organized territorial gang emboldened to sack a populated elder-care facility of its food and water stocks, leaving the elderly to die; a teenager who steals an abandoned school bus, but takes hundreds of strangers to safety out of harm's way in the city. Need I go on? There are as many survival-interaction scenarios as there are human beings interacting in the region. In many similar ways, survival-interaction scenarios are much like economic transactions. We don’t want to think of them as economic transactions because economic transactions are "civilized" and survival-interaction scenarios have an emotional-charge associated with them and manifest themselves in more barbaric ways. [I use the comparison between survival-interaction scenarios and economic transactions as a metaphor of degree. I only point to the parallels. It would be cynically absurd to say that robbery is just another economic transaction.] Just as it is impossible to centrally manage an economy without possessing near-infinite God-like knowledge of all of the one-on-one transactions that occur within a commercial-universe; so it is just as impossible to have precognitive knowledge of the intents and motives of every defender [of property] and every looter [of property]. None of us possesses this kind of knowledge, yet it seems to be popular at the moment to pass judgment in the form of giving participants in this disaster the Permission to Loot. Another email responder said, "These people need the food [so] of course [it is okay] to loot the stores." Or another who said, "I can't blame those people who need [food] for breaking into stores." The writers of these thoughts have applied a judgment to each of these survival-interaction scenarios whereby they have given their permission to the looters to do harm and to take the property of someone else. In my article An Entitlement to Loot
[ When the convenience of access to goods and services is disrupted, the entitlement to it remains. Thus, the "needy" can clearly articulate the legitimacy of their position, even as they set fire to buildings and kill and rape and murder-- and, oh yes, loot. To summarize the first point therefore: · The individual circumstances of each survival-interaction scenario are very complex. · Society is addicted to its sense of entitlement to economic convenience. Put together in a politically correct light and you have a destructive formula for excuse making and the justification for any savage behavior. [Is that a judgment or a statement of fact? You decide.] Secondly I want to briefly touch on the morality of the act of looting and the act of protecting life and property from looter, again with emphasis on the use of deadly force. Protagoras of Abdera (480?-411? B.C.E.) created the term "Sophists" (i.e., experts, wise men, masters). Protagoras believed that nothing was absolutely good or bad, false or true; everything was relative: in other words, truth was not, as we would say, "objective" but only a matter of opinion. Each person, Protagoras thought, had to decide his own beliefs. "Man," Protagoras famously said, "is the measure of all things." From the interviews with the looters I have seen on TV, I certainly would be led to the conclusion that looters were Sophists. I would also conclude that many in the media covering the looters were sophists as well. In all the reporting over the past week I have not heard the word [or the concept] of restitution mentioned once. What is restitution? Webster says: Restitution: an act of restoring or
a condition of being restored: as I submit to you that Protagoras of Abdera was wrong. It is a good thing that he was wrong and his thoughts were abandoned in favor of Aristotle, Moses and others who introduced the concepts of Law as a foundation for morality to western civilization. In short, let me say this: Every person that has stolen, looted,
robbed, confiscated, or performed any act that has harmed another or
another's property in this disaster is morally bound to perform restitution
to the injured party. Yeah, right, you say! Impossible! Maybe so. Maybe it is as impossible as reversing the timeline. But it does not absolve the requirement. Did you take a bottle of water from the store? You owe the store a bottle of water. Did you steal a bus? You owe the bus owners the return of the bus, plus damages. Did you smash a window to get a pair of sneakers? You owe the store owner the sneakers and a repaired window. This applies to the government as well: Did you confiscate a bus that was paid for by a hotel owner so he could care for and assist his guests in evacuating the city? You owe the hotel owner for the cost of the confiscated busses, and any subsequent harm done to those whose lives you affected. Did you, the government worker, fail in your responsibilities to do your duty to the people you were sworn to protect? [How about all those busses, Mr. Mayor?] Then you are culpable for negligence and for the abuse of your office. You see: the ramifications are just as vast in the demands for restitution as are the scenario-based acts of looting-entitlement. The magnitude of the Rape of New Orleans has been exceedingly great. But so is the demand for the justice in the restitution to all those who suffered at the hands of those who through their demands of entitlement, have littered the streets with the dead and dying. And this moral demand for justice in the application of restitution applies to everyone from looters to bureaucrats. When these two competing concepts [the looting based upon entitlement versus the just demand for self-defense and restitution] collide, the scenario plays out in sometimes barbaric ways. Where there is no law and in a true "animal-to-animal" survival conflict, only the survivor will live to tell the tale of sophistry. In our present age, our culture embraces with compassion the looter as the oppressed victim and the defender as the insensitive villain. If Was it something I said? If this
commentary has effected you to respond, you can send your reactions directly
to me at william.lolli@gunnewsdaily.com |