Monaco - 10/20 hours

I was all set to write a post about the romance of thievery, about the way that it gets depicted in video games and popular fiction as a kind of daring alternative to making an honest living, and about the way that many fictional thieves are also portrayed as heroes, with their tendency to steal being a kind of charming character quirk.

But then, last night at the hotel, one of the guests had their bike stolen from the parking lot. It was not fun to be the one who had to tell them. When you see theft from that perspective, it's apparent that it's not a romantic adventure. It's cruel.

I also have more sympathy for the guards, now. It's not really my job to protect people's possessions in the parking lot, but I do walk through it a couple of times a night just to keep an eye on things, and if I had interrupted the thief, maybe they would have just run away, or maybe they would have assaulted me. Certainly, if this were a scenario in Monaco, and I were controlling the thief, that's what I would have done. How many of those poor, pixelated security guards were just ordinary working stiffs, trying to scrape together enough pay to keep their tiny simulated lives going?

I guess the romance of theft comes from the fact that, in fiction, the victims are almost always the wealthy. Then it's not so much about taking away the prized possession of a regular person and causing them to miss the big bike race that they took a vacation to participate in, but rather about setting yourself against a larger societal power structure. The things you take, the art, the jewels, the cash, and whatnot, are not important in themselves. They don't have stories attached to them, nor are they central to the victim's hopes for the future. Rather, by their very abundance, they are commodified - entries on a balance sheet, distinguished only by a price tag.

The implication is that property itself is the crime, that what is true of art is true of people - to the very rich they are merely a tool to be manipulated, valued only to the degree that they impact a balance sheet. By leveraging their wealth into a form of social power, the rich make themselves legitimate targets for theft.

That's pretty ideological. On the other hand, the opposite - genre fiction that portrayed the rich as mere hapless victims who were terrorized by heartless criminal scum - would also be signalling a strong, counterfactual ideology. I think, then, that the fantasy of theft boils down to two things - elaborate plans are pretty cool, especially when they cleverly circumvent reasonable and intelligent security features; and the expression of a poorly articulated emotional truth - in our society, wealth is intimately tied up with coercion.

The "steal from the rich" fantasy is essentially the same as the "quit your job and live in harmony with nature" fantasy. In both cases, money acts as the connective tissue in a rigid hierarchical structure that seeks to place every individual into a position of optimal utility, regardless of their personal potential or basic desires. The main difference between the fantasies is their vision of what escaping the system means. Theft is much more materialistic than a spiritual awakening. It posits that while you may not be able to invert the hierarchy, you can sidestep it and live like the rich without playing by their rigged set of rules (designed as they are to keep themselves at the top and you at the bottom).

That's why a thief doesn't necessarily have to be altruistic to be considered heroic. They are resisting a force that we've all felt to one degree or another - brutal economic necessity shaping our lives into something we never asked for, something that our younger selves would despise and our older selves will regret. And sometimes it is impossible to imagine being authentically free without also being free of the illusion of property.

The problem is that there is no such thing as an abstract crime. The poor are a lot easier to steal from than the rich, and truthfully, even the absurdly wealthy probably do have an intense emotional connection to the rare Monet they absolutely have no right to own and which would better serve the world hanging in a museum. And while one could make persuasive arguments that the distribution of wealth in our society is unjust and that we should take corrective measures, a single person cannot take it upon themselves to make that decision. You can't hurt people and have the moral high ground . . .

Except in video games (don't worry, I didn't forget what sort of blog this is). In a game, justice tends to be more elemental. There's always someone more corrupt, and vigilantism really can clean up the streets. I never got the impression that the characters in Monoco were noble, or that any of them were doing this for any reason other than their own personal gratification, but they are masters of their own destiny (when they aren't backstabbing each other - which may or may not be canonical), and that's what the fantasy of theft is all about.