I didn’t really understand what the Left’s lax attitude towards crime meant until I was in Berkeley in California last summer. In a branch of Target, anything which cost more than about 20 dollars could not simply be taken off the rack. It was locked onto it in order to prevent theft. You had to ask the shop assistant to remove it for you. This is because petty theft is effectively legal in California. The police are unlikely to investigate any theft of less than about 950 dollars.
I’d never been to California before, and once I realised this, it became clear why prices, such as in restaurants, were sky high compared to other parts of the US: the prices were an insurance policy against theft. Berkeley is a wealthy town, yet the moment I stepped outside my hotel, the stench of human urine and excrement was obvious. Vagrants lined the streets and played loud music in the public library, with nobody attempting to stop them. A fair few lived in tents on the campus of the University of California. Obviously high or drunk and almost certainly schizophrenic, they shouted at or otherwise intimidated passing students. In the Finnish town where I live, theft is practically unheard of and will be prosecuted, vagrancy in non-existent and people who are high in public will be arrested.
Why do the Woke permit criminality to flourish? Do they, somehow, enjoy intimidation on campus, the stench of human excreta and ludicrous prices in restaurants?
As I have discussed before, as pack animals, we have five Moral Foundations. Conservatives are more group-oriented than liberals. They are more concerned with the moral foundations of in-group loyalty, obedience to authority and sanctity, in contrast to disgust. The latter causes people to react with disgust to that which impacts the group or themselves in a negative manner, including an invasion of outsiders, but also to disease.
People who are left-wing are concerned with the individually-oriented moral foundations of harm avoidance and equality. These allow you, as an individual, to ascend the hierarchy of the group, which was once necessary in order to pass on your genes. By being concerned about harm, you can avoid harm to yourself. By being concerned about equality, you ensure that you get proportionately more of the resources in a species that is highly cooperative.
It is useful to be particularly concerned about these issues if you are at the bottom of the hierarchy and, also, if you are physically weak. They are a means of covertly playing for status. Signalling your concern with them allows you to seem kind and morally good and is, thus, a means, in a pro-social species, of covertly ascending the hierarchy. Overall, conservatives are also concerned with these individually-oriented foundations but liberals are not concerned with the group-oriented foundations. Unsurprisingly, virtue-signalling and signalling your victimhood are associated with being a selfish individualist, with being high in Narcissism and Machiavellianism, for example.
Once you are in a context where individualist foundations are the key Moral Foundations, then power-hungry types—leftists—will competitively signal their interest in these foundations. Runaway concern with harm avoidance means that we have to be concerned about the feelings of the criminal. His criminality is not his fault; it is surely the fault of harm done to him by an unfair and uncaring society (or the fault of his genes), so why should he be punished? In the case of property crime, this is, surely, at least partly the fault of “systemic inequality” against which the looter’s “crime” is a noble form of protest.
According to transwoman American author Vicky, formerly Willie, Osterweil “rioting and looting are our most powerful tools for dismantling white supremacy.” He argues in his book In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action that the actions of looters are morally right, presumably until they threaten Osterweil’s property or safety, as it is mostly those of low socioeconomic status who are the victims of such crimes. Thus, for the power hungry leftist, the problems I discussed earlier are a small price to pay for the high social status which such competitive Woke signalling may achieve.
And, for most of them, it is only a small price. Being pro-crime is what Rob Henderson has called a “luxury belief.” It is a belief via which you can signal your Woke credentials while not having to deal with the consequences of your belief. It is also a means of signalling your confidence and wealth: you will experience no difficulties as there is no crime in your area. As Henderson wrote in the New York Post: “In other words, upper-class whites gain status by talking about their high status. When laws are enacted to combat white privilege, it won’t be the privileged whites who are harmed. Poor whites will bear the brunt.”
Even littering and vandalising public property, such as with graffiti—made respectable in among elites by Leftist writer Norman Mailer in the 1970s—are means via which a criminal has been able to express his legitimate grievances. Accordingly, society should not be protected from “traditional criminals” and they should receive only the lightest of sentences, if they must be prosecuted at all. By contrast, people stating that “you cannot become a woman” are challenging “equality” and harming people’s feelings. These people are attacking the dogmas that hold society together and, thus, they must be severely punished.
It is possible that there is a vicarious dimension to why leftists support such criminality. The pleasure of breaking the law is, for some people, a matter of feeling “empowered,” of experiencing a “power rush.” However, the bourgeoisie leftists aren’t really interested in a new television or in daubing graffiti. They are, however, interested in power rushes and fantasies of revolution, specifically “anti-hierarchical aggression,” as research on them has demonstrated. They will identify with criminals and enjoy their criminality vicariously, despite not being criminal in nature themselves, because they want power, they want to overthrow the current power. However, being high in anxiety, as Leftists tend to be, few of them can bring themselves to actually personally break the law.
As I have explored in depth in my book Breeding the Human Herd: Eugenics, Dysgenics and the Future of the Species, anxiety is part of a broader personality trait known as Neuroticism. Being high on this trait means you have strong negative feelings. This means they are resentful, jealous and power-hungry, because they wish to control a world which induces anxiety in them. They hate that which has power; the current “unequal” hierarchy. They deal with their negative feelings via Narcissism; by telling themselves that they are morally superior due to their leftism. But being high in anxiety, they fear a fair fight, so they play for status covertly — in the way that females do — by virtue-signalling about equality and harm avoidance.
The eventual result takes you beyond anything you might experience in Berkeley. It takes you down the road, to Hyde Street in San Francisco, where drugged-up zombies rock back and forth and dance, where people openly take and deal drugs in broad daylight, where people live in the street in tents, and where the street must be hosed down every morning. This runaway individualism will continue until it actually seriously impacts wealthy Woke people and so ceases to be a “luxury belief.”
