A Note On Looting

The curfew is in effect.  Good luck enforcing it.

I consider myself a very minor Katrina-ologist, because I read a book once.  I think what Tom Scocca at Slate says is right.

Looting often does occur when law and order break down.  Now, there are some conspiracy theories in Egypt right now that the looting maybe being done by state security in order to make the police state look more appealing.  I have no idea if that's true.  It's plausible, but it's also classic conspiracy theory stuff, because it fits into the world view of the protestors.  State security = evil, looting = evil, state security = looters.

But it is striking to me that when we see looters in times of chaos, we tend to act with revulsion.  Which is not to say that we should be all "Yay!  Looters!" but in the wake of Katrina, a lot of the "looting" was scavenging for supplies.  I was in LA for the Rodney King riots, and I understood that the anger manifested in the rioting was a product a very racist and repressive police force.  I got to see it in action before and after the riots.  But when the riots degenerated into a free for all looting of TVs and air conditioners, well, that seemed less politically motivated.

In times of chaos, assaults on property are inevitable.  Maybe they are justified, such as the Egyptian protestors attacking the ruling party's HQ or a family scavenging food and water from a Walgreens in New Orleans.  Some times, they are simply acts of greed or nihilism like the attack on the Egyptian museums.

What I saw in LA, Katrina, Tehran and now Egypt is not about property per se, but about the collapse or the non-existence of the social contract.  When Hobbes and Locke and others formulated the philosophy of the social contract, they were talking in large part about property.  Property needed to be protected in order for prosperity and human advancement.  So human beings formed societies to help manage the relationship between people over property.  Where does my property end?  What should I give up in taxes for the common weal?  How do we determine whose property this is in the case of competing claims?

For the African Americans in LA and New Orleans and the Actual Africans in Egypt, there never was a social contract that they were a part of.  There was poverty and political disenfranchisement, but no social contract. There was order, though.  They felt that order every day.  Blacks in the inner cities knew that their lives weren't worth much to the community at large as manifested by police action.  Egyptians knew that they were oppressed.

Once order - or oppression - breaks down, there is no sense of obligation to preserve the social contract in its absence.

And this is why repression never works forever.

If the "mystic chords of memory" aren't there, then there is only force.  And force cannot be maintained indefinitely.  And once force begins to crack, the absence of self-regulating behavior means that looting will take place.  We're buried under a mountain of snow that is stretching the capacity of the government to deal with it.  But we won't loot, because we more or less buy into the idea of the social contract.  Also, we wouldn't be able to drag the HDTV home through the snow.  I mean, DAMN.

But the forces that DID benefit from whatever social contract did exist will inevitably desire to protect the "stuff" that they accumulated under the regime.  And so looting becomes a capital crime and property trumps political change.

Until it doesn't.

Good luck, Egypt.  Blessings be upon you.

You're going to need them.