Let us not steal—NOT EVEN IN NORMALISED CASES.

One way of causing harm is theft, since no one likes having what is theirs taken away. The damage can be very great, ruining lives and causing depression, anxiety, anguish, etc. For all these reasons, the right to property is a human right, enshrined in Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

“Article 17. Every natural or legal person has the right to respect for their property.”

The fact is that greed for what belongs to others is part of human DNA. And within that is envy, which is part of the nature of many homo sapiens. This leads to feeling resentment or even hatred toward those who possess something we desire and do not have, as well as wanting to take it from them and, at times, to harm the owner of the desired object or quality.

Even in early childhood, children steal toys from other children, because it is in our genetics.

WHY DO ALL OR ALMOST ALL OF US HAVE THE “THIEF GENE”?

If this is so, it is because since the Neolithic, thieves/conquerors/plunderers have passed on a great deal of their DNA to subsequent generations, century after century and millennium after millennium, through the widespread practice of rape:

Neolithic villages

During the period of Neolithic villages, which lasted several thousand years, as their population grew and they needed more arable land, they attacked other neighbouring villages to steal it, as well as their wealth and women. And certainly not to distribute it fairly, but to keep everything “because I can and because I want to; because I am stronger than you”. Pastoral tribes did the same, stealing livestock, water wells, and women from one another. All of that was the rule, not the exception.Those who were both more ruthless and stronger were the ones who raped more and, therefore, the ones who left more offspring.

From chiefdoms to the Second World War

When Neolithic villages evolved into simple chiefdoms (larger villages led by a chief), complex chiefdoms (a chief ruling several villages), kingdoms, and empires, the appropriation of what belonged to others soared to even greater levels.

That is why, since ancient times, there have been laws to prohibit theft—except for the powerful who created those rules, who for millennia granted themselves the right of conquest. In other words, they awarded themselves property rights over the lands and wealth they seized from others through force of arms.

That right included plundering, looting, and taking whatever they wanted as spoils of war, including the conquered people, often subjected to slavery, servitude, or forced labour. In short: “might is right”—power is law, or, in other words, the law of the strongest. What is more, this right of conquest was recognised as a principle of international law until after the Second World War.

For this reason, plunder has been widespread throughout history. In fact, until the Industrial Revolution, the main way to become wealthy was to steal land and riches through conquest.

Because conquerors/thieves/plunderers left a great deal of their DNA over the millennia during which this period lasted, through the widespread practice of raping women in numerous wars and sexually abusing their enslaved women and serfs on their large estates, the consequence is that we are more the heirs of their genes than of those of good and honest people.

THEFT AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR

After the Second World War, there has been significant civilisational progress, but despite this, theft remains widespread, with the difference that it tends to take place in a more veiled and disguised way. Since it is socially frowned upon, it is not usually done directly (for example, taking someone’s wallet), but often through more or less socially accepted “sharp practices” and with sugar-coated narratives that justify them.

It is logical that there continues to be a great deal of appropriation of what belongs to others, since our thieving and corrupt nature remains carved deep within us, to very different degrees—unless our parents, educators, or we ourselves have chiselled it away. This is largely what has happened in the most civilised countries in this regard, which are basically the Nordic countries and Japan. There, you can leave a wallet or a mobile phone on the street and find it the next day. Or have an unattended point of sale where customers take the product and pay by leaving money in a jar, with no one checking that they really do so and no one taking the jar.

In the rest of the countries, both—at very different levels (from the most honest, such as Switzerland and the Netherlands, to the least, whose names I will not mention)—legally prohibited theft and institutionalised theft tend to be widespread:

Illegal theft

Some are very obvious, such as a bank robbery or a shop assistant stealing money from the till, but much more frequent are other, subtler forms that have a certain degree of normalisation, such as employees and civil servants stealing the time they are paid for in order to devote it to non-work matters, the cleaner taking bedsheets,breaching contracts and agreements and many other types…read…

Institutionalised theft

They are very numerous and of many different types; we will highlight 10: corruption, petty corruption, public waste, authorities’ complicity in theft, clientelist systems, state complicity in benefits fraud, theft from future generations, from non-human animals, inter-territorial plunder, and levelling cicadas and ants… read…