Episode 173 - TheftTranscript

[00:00:00] Ellie: Welcome to Overthink.

[00:00:19] David: The podcast where your two favorite philosophers steal the show by putting ideas in dialogue with everyday life.

[00:00:26] Ellie: I'm Ellie Anderson.

[00:00:28] David: And I'm David Pena Guzman, and as always, for an ad free extended version of this episode, community discussion, and more, subscribe to Overthink on Substack.

[00:00:38] Ellie: We all learn as kids that stealing is wrong. Maybe you grew up hearing as I did, thou shall not steal as one of the 10 commandments, for instance. One of the weird things is that we also tend to have a deeply ingrained moral intuition that stealing is not always wrong. So let's say you get lost in the woods and you're gonna die of starvation unless you steal some food from a 7/11.

Most people would agree that your theft is justified in that case.

[00:01:08] David: Yeah, from the seven 11 in the middle of the woods where you're starving with no human connection, but magically there is a 7/11.

[00:01:16] Ellie: Okay. Okay. Okay. Fair. Okay, fair. Okay. Well, maybe you're like in the woods and then you stumble upon a main road that has a seven 11. You realize it was nearby all along, or, okay, maybe it's a farmhouse. There's like a nearby farmhouse and you can see a little light on, there's a fire going, you know somebody's there.

You wait till they go to sleep, and then you steal from them.

[00:01:37] David: You're like, I'm correcting this image to the T. I know, but your your point is well taken

though, This dual moral intuition that you're talking about, highlights two poles of our moral lives, right? So on the one hand, yes, it is uncontroversial that stealing is wrong, not just in a legal sense, but also in a moral sense. But then we also have this idea that, you know, theft is not the worst crime imaginable.

There's a lot of other things that are a lot worse. And it also is dependent on person and on situation. Especially when you consider the fact that we live in a deeply unequal world. And I think a good illustration of this is our identification as kids with Robin Hood. I mean, when I was a kid, I used to love the cartoon Robinhood in Spanish, of course.

[00:02:29] Ellie: I liked the old Errol Flynn. Robinhood. Like the Old Hollywood, black and white.

[00:02:34] David: Yeah, and the thing about Robinhood is that his personality is exhausted by the fact that he is a thief. Like that's the whole thing about Robinhood. he steals, but we recognize that it's for a good cause. And so we exonerate him morally. And I think as a character, he does exemplify this dual moral intuition that yes, it's wrong, but in some cases it's justified.

And in fact, it's not just justified, it's admirable because Robin Hood is not just an innocent person. Robin Hood is a moral hero.

[00:03:06] Ellie: Yeah. Yeah. And we'll come back to this idea of stealing for a good cause later in the episode when we talk about heist movies. Here though, I don't wanna ask you if you've ever stolen anything, because I don't wanna incriminate you on our show. But I do wanna ask you, have you ever had anything important stolen from you?

[00:03:25] David: So, yes, but you know, I don't mind coming clean. I have stolen stuff. I used to steal a lot actually, as a kid. I, it was little things, you know, I was not staging a heist.

[00:03:36] Ellie: Okay. Incriminate yourself. Let's hear it.

[00:03:39] David: well I went through this phase, I think it was like six to nine, so it was a long phase

[00:03:45] Ellie: A very young phase though. Alright.

[00:03:47] David: Yeah. Yeah. And I used to go to grocery stores and steal fruits and vegetables and not because I was hungry, so I was not the kid in the middle of the woods with a 7/11.

[00:03:57] Ellie: Okay. Okay. Good clarification.

[00:03:59] David: It was because of the thrill of the crime. And so I would go and I would very conspicuously walk around and like stuff a lemon into my pants or like you know, a tomato into my shirt. And then I would go home and either toasts them to the trash or like put them on our kitchen table. And nobody knew where they come

[00:04:17] Ellie: Oh my God

[00:04:18] David: but one time my mom caught me stealing a lemon.

So like all of this goes back to the scene in my childhood.

[00:04:26] Ellie: before you tell us what happened when your mom found you stealing lemon. I just wanna clarify, this is like almost so close to a standard childhood stealing story, which is stealing candy. Why was it fruits and veggies and not candy?

[00:04:37] David: So I don't know. I think maybe it's because in the stores in small town Mexico where I grew up, it was common for there to be crates of fruits and vegetables like outside. But the candy and all the more expensive stuff was behind the counter. So it was a problem of availability.

[00:04:55] Ellie: That makes a lot of sense. Okay, so what happened when your mom found this lemon?

[00:04:59] David: So she found me stealing a lemon because I was at the store with her and she made me walk up to the front and not only put the lemon back in its place, but she made me confess my crime to the store owner. And so she made me take out the lemon and go to the guy and say what I had done and apologize and it still lives with me as one of my earliest conscious experiences of moral shame,

[00:05:25] Ellie: Okay.

[00:05:25] David: as a kid I was like, I'm a criminal. And now everybody knows.

[00:05:30] Ellie: okay, so how did the store owner respond? And also did you understand that you had done something wrong and you okay, did you understand, did you think at, even at the time that your mom's action was justified, namely her insistence that you come clean, or did you think it was unfair?

[00:05:53] David: No, I thought it was justified. I thought, obviously that I would've preferred not to do it.

[00:05:59] Ellie: course, of course.

[00:06:01] David: No. And, and the guy, Pedro, that was his name, Don Pedro.

[00:06:05] Ellie: Oh my God, not Don Pedro.

[00:06:07] David: he was very polite and civil and he played his role as morally edifying adult, like I understand, just promise never to do it again.

but you're welcome in my store anytime. And he was basically a neighbor. So, you know, it added to this, shame, the fact that he was a familiar relationship and I had breached his trust

[00:06:27] Ellie: Dawn Pedro's mother. So is your mother in this story. Oh my gosh. Have I told you about the time I got my wallet stolen in Paris? This is like my best stealing story.

[00:06:39] David: I wanna hear and maybe I've heard it, but I don't remember.

[00:06:42] Ellie: was just thinking, I actually thought that you were gonna go, when I asked the question, I thought you were gonna go in a direction of telling us about how you got your wallet stolen in Mexico. But I realized, I think you already talked about that in a previous episode in our city's episode.

[00:06:56] David: Yes I did. Yeah. Of and getting pick-pocketed.

[00:06:59] Ellie: So instead you gave us like this glorious lemon story, which has led to you being a better person ever since. You know, I probably stole, I stole like a couple of things when I was a little kid too. Not from stores, but like from other kids, and then got in trouble and had like some similar tales.

But I think my most compelling story of theft is one in which I was the victim. But ultimately triumphed. So when I was studying abroad in Paris at age 19, my sister who was 15 at the time was visiting me, and she was really nervous to come visit. You know, like visiting her big sister

[00:07:31] David: In the big city

[00:07:32] Ellie: Yeah. Like flying across, you know, halfway across the world, completely alone.

Her first night in Paris. I decide to show her around. So we take the metro to like some mojito bar, which like she wasn't drinking. At least, I don't think she was like 15. But you know, my friends and I like loved going to this mojito bar in Saima. So we took my sister there and when we were coming out of the metro, some guy pointed at me and like revealed to me that my purse was hanging open and that my wallet had been stolen. And so I was like, oh my gosh. And he also pointed behind me and I realized, oh, when I was coming out of the metro, the guy behind me had kind of bumped up against me and I thought it was just like.

A moment of like sexual creepdom, and instead he had bumped into me to distract me while stealing my wallet from my purse

[00:08:22] David: Oh,

[00:08:23] Ellie: I know. And so luckily my navigo pass was not in my wallet, and so I like flashed my navigo pass to get back into the metro. I remember really vividly that I was wearing red sparkly ballet flats

[00:08:37] David: as you're just like speeding through the metro.

[00:08:40] Ellie: exactly. They gave me little wings. And so I run back into the metro station and I'm running down the hallway and I get out to the platform and I had seen who this guy was because I gave him a weird glare he bumped into me

[00:08:53] David: oh, so you knew you could recognize him?

[00:08:54] Ellie: Yeah, I was like why is this guy being a creep?

So I had, like, I knew what he looked like and I saw him on the opposite platform. And then I started yelling, and I yelled, arrêtez cet homme, il a volé mon, which means like, stop this man. He stole my, but I forgot the word for wallet in my panic. And so I just said like,  il a volé mon, and then like left it at that.

[00:09:19] David: Ellipsis. Dot, dot, dot for traumatic effect. Maybe that helped in a French context. All the people were like, what is going on?

[00:09:26] Ellie: yeah,

[00:09:27] David: I wanna know the end of this story.

[00:09:29] Ellie: and so then he kind of motions at me and he starts walking back out to the hallway and I follow him and I encountered this man in the hallway.

[00:09:39] David: He came toward you?

[00:09:40] Ellie: Yes. Because I called him out in front of everyone. I told him that he, yeah. And so

[00:09:44] David: Why didn't he run the opposite direction?

[00:09:45] Ellie: Because he would've been stuck on the platform. And there was only one, there was like the hallway was in between the two platforms, so I would've passed him anyway. So he could either just like kind of awkwardly stand there. And also, you know, in Paris it tells you when the metros are gonna come and one was not on his way. Yeah. So he's like, I can't wait like four minutes.

So he meets me in the hallway and he just hands me back my wallet silently. And I open it up and I see that I had 40 euros at the time, at a time in my life when 40 Euros was like, you know, a ton of money. The exchange rate's bad

[00:10:18] David: that's five mojitos.

[00:10:20] Ellie: I mean, yeah. And like one mojito a week was kind of my going out money studying abroad in Paris in 2009 when the exchange rate was 1.6.

I subsisted off of lentils, baguettes, and an occasional mojito, I'll tell you that. And so I told him, yeah, so I like looked inside my wallet and I was like, I had 40 euros cash. Where is it? And then he just kind of like. Sheepishly fishes out my cash.

[00:10:43] David: You're 40 euros.

[00:10:45] Ellie: Yeah, and gives it back to me. And then he said to me, he was like not much older than me, probably even similar age.

And he goes, can you spare any money? I'm a student. I know. And I was like, I was like, absolutely not. I'm a student too. And then I just like, irately left the metro.

[00:11:02] David: Oh my God. You missed your opportunity to be Don Pedro and be the morally superior being by saying, here, take 20 of my 40 euro.

[00:11:10] Ellie: I not

[00:11:10] David: That's would've done 'cause I've become a better person since.

[00:11:15] Ellie: No, but I mean, I think this is a case where I was really pissed and I was like, you definitely wronged me. But I also understood in a broader context, like, you know, he probably didn't, he probably like, needed the money, but yeah, so I feel like on the one hand it was, I had every right to get the money back, and I'm, and I'm proud of my wherewithal in that situation, although it has been pointed out to me multiple times since that maybe it was a little bit rash because like, what if he had actually been dangerous?

So maybe I don't present this as like, oh, wow, this is how you successfully get your money back from some random man who steals from you. I, well, I mean, it was just like. I think I got lucky in this case, but even at the time I recognized like as a 19-year-old, this is part of a system and that drives some people to things that they might not be proud of, of course.

[00:12:02] David: But I think this is also a really interesting case because. Often when we are victimized by theft in the moment, we can only see our rage and our morally justified anger. But there are maybe more cases than we want to realize, where if you learn the background conditions, maybe the theft actually falls into those categories that we were just talking about of a case where the circumstances and the conditions justify the act, or at least make us have empathy for the person who committed the theft.

[00:12:30] Ellie: I just happen to be the 7/11 in this case.

[00:12:34] David: Today we are talking about theft.

[00:12:37] Ellie: Why are thieves both vilified and venerated,

[00:12:40] David: How is theft tied to the concept of private property?

[00:12:43] Ellie: and what do heist films say about 21st century capitalism? As we get into this topic, we have to talk about the figure of the thief. It's important to remember that mainstream discourses about crime and theft are steeped in all sorts of social prejudices and power structures, and I think especially when we're in the American context, one of those major structures is race and racial inequality.

It's well known that black people are far more likely to get followed in stores under suspicion of stealing to the point that there's even a name for it. Shopping while black. And this is especially an issue in expensive boutiques because black people are often assumed not to be able to afford what's being sold in these boutiques.

And so they experience like major levels of racial profiling and discomfort. And so it's not a surprise that there are widespread and really insidious racial stereotypes about what kind of person steals. And these then justify things like mass incarceration and the over-policing of black and brown neighborhoods.

But in addition to this racial aspect, I was surprised by how gendered theft has been over the last few centuries. And in shoplifting in particular. David, how much do you know about kleptomania?

[00:14:09] David: Not much other than seeing the term appear here and there, for instance, in the history of psychiatry. But you know, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, I was a klepto.

[00:14:18] Ellie: have a little firsthand experience.

[00:14:20] David: I was a little klepto kid myself and aside from stealing from stores, I also used to steal money from my grandmother's purse because I knew where she hid it.

[00:14:31] Ellie: Rude.

[00:14:32] David: yeah, so like definitely a, like a pattern here. But either way, if we're thinking about Klepto mania, I think my main cultural point of reference is Winona Ryder getting caught, for shoplifting in the early two thousands. And you know, that case really tanked her career and it was not until Stranger Things, the series that she made this comeback.

And I suspect it's because enough time had passed that people kind of culturally forgot that, you know, she was accused of stealing at a high profile

[00:15:01] Ellie: That was such an iconic moment of the early two thousands because I think a lot of young people nowadays might not realize how culturally relevant and cool Winona Ryder was at the time. And so then

[00:15:12] David: she's like the mom.

[00:15:14] Ellie: I know, but then when she was caught stealing, it was like, wait, we really looked up to you. We thought you were awesome. Are we supposed to understand this as subversive and cool or as like sad and fucked up. And also I think, you know, that narrative around kleptomania added psychological or pathologizing dimension to it,

[00:15:32] David: yeah, and it made this story salacious, right? That like it was like a mania, kleptomania.

[00:15:37] Ellie: And so this is a great example for getting this discussion of Kleptomania off the ground because I think it has a lot of the elements that are important to draw out here.

The medical diagnosis for impulsive shoplifting that is kleptomania is actually not very old. The historian, Elaine Abelson notes that a pathological understanding of shoplifting only really emerged with industrialization in 19th century England and the shifting class and gender dynamics that came with it.

And Abelson gives the example of the trial of Walter and Ella Castle. These were two wealthy American tourists who got arrested over stealing a fancy fur accessory while traveling in London. The newspapers were all over this trial over the course of a single month. The New York Times ran 19 separate articles

[00:16:27] David: Oh wow.

[00:16:28] Ellie: I know that is a lot

[00:16:29] David: really like zooming in on

[00:16:31] Ellie: They're like, here's our daily coverage of Walter and Ella's fur theft. And this was sensational in part because Walter and Ella Castle were wealthy and prominent Americans, but also because of their legal defense. So Ella Castle was presented by her lawyers and the press as mentally unstable and physically ill afflicted by Kleptomania.

And this was portrayed as a uniquely female disease that made her unable to resist shoplifting. All of the medical specialists who were summoned for the trial testified that she was not mentally capable and therefore not responsible for her crimes, and the couple was then acquitted on the condition that her husband promised to quote, take charge of her.

It's giving conservatorship.

[00:17:16] David: Yeah, I mean, maybe she's the precursor to my girl Winona, you know, from another century, both in terms of the stealing and also the class position. But I think here we see how the diagnosis of klepto mania is actually a double-edged sword because on the one hand, it certainly shields upper class and middle class white women from criminal responsibility for their acts, especially acts that are technically speaking illegal.

But because the concept of kleptomania turns shoplifting specifically into an affliction. It also entrenches these reactionary ideas that women are intrinsically weak. That they are fundamentally irrational, and then it lends those ideas an air of medical authority, right? Because it's medical experts who are speaking on the subject from a position of medical knowledge.

And so the diagnosis reduces women to their biology, and then that biology is construed as a burden that women have to carry. You know, like I'm just a woman with my weak woman mind. And that burden in turn. Is how we justify this idea that women are dependent on men, to sort of like protect them from themselves and to keep them from deviant behavior.

So I think at the root of this example is the notion that men are the psychic and moral guardians of women's upstanding or uprightness.

[00:18:44] Ellie: absolutely. And kleptomania was associated with hysteria, menstruation, whatever womb disease mania was supposed to be, and so you can see that it's part of this overall ecology that is pathologizing women as irrational and weak. All these kind of classic ways that women are reduced to their biology or some weird conception of it.

Interestingly, it's still in the DSM five as a legitimate diagnosis, although like other parts of the DSM Kleptomania has been criticized by psychologists who are just like, look, there's not really evidence that this should be considered its own disorder. And what's amazing about this particular trial is that it became entirely about Ella Castle, even though police also found stolen property in her husband's belongings.

They concluded that she had stolen the items so skillfully that her husband simply didn't notice and assumed it was just their belongings. Right. So it's like, oh, we found stolen belongings on both of them, but it was just her. They didn't even consider, you know, the possibility that was the other way around.

That he was stealing stuff and putting it in her things or

[00:19:54] David: Or that they were working together.

[00:19:55] Ellie: working together.

[00:19:56] David: Yeah. Well, and I think there's also here the assumption that when it comes to that kind of thing, which in this case is clothing, like you said, it was a fur accessory, right?

[00:20:05] Ellie: Yeah, that was what she was arrested for.

[00:20:07] David: Men just don't know about domestic things like clothes or accessories. So obviously he could not possibly have been invested in stealing that property.

[00:20:16] Ellie: It's just like kind of lady stuff. And I mean, I think this reveals the real contradiction here, which is that Ella Castle was considered both mentally incapable of understanding what she was doing, right? That was the legal defense that provided the grounds for her acquittal, but at the same time, she's considered a skilled criminal mastermind who was like pulling the wool over her husband's eyes.

[00:20:36] David: That contradiction is so telling of our stereotyping of people based on gender. But I also wanna highlight another aspect of the class discussion that's floating around here, and that is that the assumption in this case appears to be that, in her case, there must have been something really wrong with her because she came from a well off marriage, right?

Like her husband was well off, they had no reason to steal. And I think what is implied by this assumption is that maybe if she had been a member of the working class, it would've been rational for her to steal. And you know, I'm very open to that conclusion that the working class, the lower class might have legitimate causes to engage in theft or reasons to engage in theft.

But I think when we think about it now from a social perspective. The fact that an entire socioeconomic class could have a reason to steal is actually an indictment of the mode of production itself, right? It's an indictment of capitalism much more broadly.

[00:21:42] Ellie: Yeah, and I think there are a lot of examples of this, but I'm thinking in particular about piracy and copyright infringement, especially now in the context of AI. There have been a lot of lawsuits recently targeting websites like Psub and Anna's archive, which are websites that let you download PDFs of copyrighted books and other media for free.

And these websites are so widely used that they're basically an informal part of academic infrastructure, given how difficult and exclusive it can be to find the right literature, especially if you're not associated with the university and even if you are associated with the university.

[00:22:20] David: I used it. Yeah.

[00:22:22] Ellie: The precursor to Anna's archive, which was lib gen, is like basically what got me through grad school starting in 2011.

[00:22:28] David: the precursor to that was my lemon, you know? So it has continued into the present.

[00:22:33] Ellie: Oh my God, David. Yeah. Wow. That was a reach I thought you were referring to like a, a website called My Lemon. You know, it was like the Napster of books at the time, in the early two thousands. In any case, a lot of students use these to access materials. But these websites have always had to fight an uphill battle against constant legal challenges.

They're always having to change their URL because they're in legal trouble and so on and so forth. And so you have that situation. On the one hand, this widespread social acceptance of websites that are constantly facing legal challenges on the grounds that they're stealing. And on the other hand, we know that companies like Meta are downloading terabytes of files from these same websites in order to train their new AI models with zero consequences.

And so it's like wait, what's going on here? Why are we targeting these websites and not targeting these other corporations that are profiting? Like you can't believe off of what these websites have provided.

[00:23:32] David: Yeah. Like if the crime is big enough, it just ceases to be a crime, it seems. And and consequences I think is made really stark by the case of Aaron Schwartz, the trial of Aaron Schwartz in the early 2010s. So Schwartz was one of the original members of Reddit and of the team members, right?

Like not the first users. And he became a defender of an open access internet. He also helped develop the RSS feed that is used to like distribute podcasts for free.

[00:24:07] Ellie: Oh my God. Thanks Aaron Schwartz. That's a really crucial technology podcasts. I love RSS feeds.

[00:24:14] David: Yeah, so a lot of things that fall into the category of what are called the creative comments, things that are open to the public and used for the common good, but then he was caught downloading huge amounts of files from JSTOR, using MIT computer infrastructure.

Which he planned to distribute for free, and the state decided to make an example out of him. And so they charged him with a bunch of felonies. And during the trial, he was facing up to 35 years in prison and a million dollars in fine. And very tragically, he died by suicide before the trial concluded.

But here we see an example of how individuals committing an act on a small scale trigger the largest consequences, but corporations doing the same thing on a larger scale, walk away completely unscathed. And, you know, the fact that these companies like OpenAI are accessing all of this information and using it to train their AI models without originally having the right to do so, but also without any legal repercussions, just ends up making a mocky of the very idea of intellectual and copyright, right?

Because they are just saying we have the right to trample over all these legal protections. Ironically, at the same time as their algorithms are heavily protected intellectual property, right? Like they're not part of the creative common. So they protect their intellectual property, but they disrespect everybody else's.

Now that we've talked about theft at the level of individual shoplifters like myself, I want to zoom out and think about theft at the scale of social structures and political processes. Sometimes theft cannot be produced to individual thieves, and their trickery

[00:26:07] Ellie: Winona Rider, Ella Castle, what have you?

[00:26:10] David: Yeah, and so sometimes you have to look at the theft of things that individuals cannot steal on their own.

So think about the theft of large swats of land or large scale resources that requires its own analysis.

[00:26:26] Ellie: Yeah, I mean, theft isn't just a useful concept for moralizing about individual behavior, right? It's essential for also thinking critically about politics and history more broadly. So I think one place to. Start is the fact that a common charge against certain political systems is that they rely on large scale theft in order to get off the ground and or to sustain themselves.

And so some of the political systems that have been accused of theft by their critics include feudalism, colonialism, and capitalism. And these critiques I think, are still relevant for thinking about how power works today. So we've clearly got a lot of theft to cover here. Where do you wanna start, David?

[00:27:10] David: Yeah, you're right. There's a lot of things to cover. It's a very long history and maybe all recent political history is a history of theft. You know, who knows, but maybe we can start with feudalism in medieval Europe, because that's where a lot of our modern legal concepts around theft come from.

As a reminder, feudalism is a hierarchical system that is often compared to a modern day protection racket. You have a king who distributes land to lesser lords, and then those lords coerce peasants in their little domain into paying some portion of what they produce on the land in exchange for protection from other lords, even if that protection is not actually necessary. And this feudal order was grounded on a concept that is still very much relevant today for political theory and legal theory, and that is the concept of expropriation.

Expropriation essentially refers to the fact that the sovereign has the right to appropriate property for the common good. So the idea is that all land in a kingdom ultimately belongs to the king, and the king can do whatever they want with it whenever they want to.

[00:28:23] Ellie: Yeah, so for instance, if the king wanted to build roads or walls to protect the city. He could just decide that that land was gonna be seize and repurposed, because ultimately he owns everything already and has the authority to decide what the common good really is.

[00:28:39] David: Yeah, and so nowadays we have a different term to talk about this. It's essentially the same thing as eminent domain, which is a term that we have in our legal system. So nowadays we still need to build roads, we need to build public infrastructure, and the state reserves the right to take, for example, land from private citizens if that land is essential for carrying out those projects for the common good. And of course then, you know, there is like a legal process about what should happen in order to compensate that person. But it originates in this notion of expropriation from the feudal or, and in fact, in some places, like in Louisiana, the term that is used nowadays is still the original one.

So in Louisiana, we talk about expropriation rather than eminent domain, but that's because the two are closely intertwined.

[00:29:30] Ellie: Interesting. I wonder whether there were any limits to expropriation under feudalism or whether the sovereign could literally do whatever with impunity, because there are some limits, I think, to like eminent domain, for instance. But I would hope that just because expropriation was a right of the sovereign doesn't mean that they could do it whenever or however they wanted.

[00:29:50] David: No, that's right. So there were some limits to expropriation, even in the feudal system to begin with. Expropriation had to be for the common good, so that's already a constraint on sovereign power.

[00:30:04] Ellie: He couldn't just be like, you have a better summer house than I do. Give it to me.

[00:30:06] David: Yeah, I, um, and aside from that, the expropriation had to lead to fair compensation of the impacted parties.

[00:30:14] Ellie: Yeah. Okay.

[00:30:15] David: so surely the sovereign could, in theory, take land for bad reasons by force, but then there would be a kind of political and moral critique of their behavior. But the idea was that if those two conditions are not met, then expropriation was considered fundamentally unjust, and at that point it was called something else, and that something else is dispossession.

So expropriation is when property is taken by the king justly, meeting these two conditions. If either condition is broken, then it becomes a violent act of dispossession

and I think that's a really useful political concept for us to talk about a little bit, because not only was it used to criticize particular kings like, Hey, yo King, you dispossessed my family. And that's wrong. But with the passage of time, critics of feudalism started using this concept to launch an attack against feudalism as a whole, as a regime, arguing that the very power of the sovereign, no, you know, this idea that the sovereign owns everything anyways, and so they can always expropriate if they wish.

That that idea is only made possible by the fact that the king owns everything, but the king owns everything just because they committed an original massive act of dispossession, right? And so kings and queens who have massive amounts of property are nothing more than really successful large scale thiefs.

And so it's not as if, according to these critics, there is expropriation, which is good and legitimate, and dispossession, which is problematic under feudalism as long as there are kings and queens it's all dispossession and it's all problematic. And this critique was voiced in particular by 19th century anarchists.

So here I'm thinking about people like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and also Peter Kropotkin. Their slogan was very simple. Property is theft. And so for anarchists, the problem with both feudalism and then down the road also with capitalism, is that they both rely on the notion of property. The only difference being, of course, that under feudalism, the property is owned by the king or the queen, while under capitalism, it is owned by the capitalists. But either way, feudalism and capitalism share this in common, which is that they are founded on an original act of dispossession of the people, and therefore both of them need to be abolished.

[00:32:52] Ellie: I mean, I can definitely get behind the fact that not only is the king a thief, but the CEOs are as well. I wanna bring in now a contemporary political theorist, Robert Nichols, who wrote a book called Theft Is Property, a play on that slogan that you just mentioned David. In his book, he draws on some critiques of this anarchist tradition that you've just mentioned to show that its view of dispossession is more complicated than it might appear.

So on the one hand. It does seem true that a theft of land took place both by the feudal, sovereign, and again, by capitalists. You might think about the enclosure of the commons, for instance, where land used in common by peasants for their own subsistence was literally fenced off to be owned by capitalists. Like you can't let your sheep graze here anymore.

But on the other hand, in order to recognize that enclosure as an act of theft would require a preexisting system of private property. Property law would have to recognize both the land as already owned by the peasants, right? Not just used by them, but actually owned by them, and the taking of it as unjustified.

And so there's a potential problem here in the anarchist slogan, property is theft, which is that like it's potentially question begging because it seems like the theft is only possible if it is a theft of property, which would mean that it was already property before it was stolen and became property

[00:34:23] David: Okay. So then the question is, can you steal something that is not already property in the first place? And maybe it seems like logically speaking, you can't. Right. Theft is taking. Property from somebody else. So if I steal something from you Ellie, it's presumably something that belongs to you, that is your property.

And that's why me taking it is an act of theft. And so we might say that the concept of theft presupposes that of property. And if we agree with that, then it would seem to follow that the 19th century anarchist slogan, property is theft is a self undermining claim because it misunderstands the logical relationship between those two terms.

[00:35:05] Ellie: Yeah, and that's exactly what Nichols points out. And he says, actually Marx made the same critique against the anarchist Nichols. So this isn't reason to throw away the concept of dispossession. However, whereas like Marx actually did abandon it, Nichols thinks that it's still important, especially in the context of settler colonialism.

We might just have to reconceptualize what exactly dispossession involves and whether it's inherently related to property.

[00:35:33] David: Before you tell us more that 'cause I do want more details. I can already imagine sort of the value of using this concept for thinking about colonization because we know that colonial history is full of land grabs, enslavement, genocide, resource extraction, and basically every kind of theft imaginable.

And this is something that we touched upon in our most recent episode, our closer look on Frantz Fanon's, the wretched of the Earth, and the idea that every imaginable abuse is materialized on the colony.

[00:36:07] Ellie: Yeah, and this critique of colonization as theft is still something you hear about a lot today. Recently, for instance, Billie Eilish made waves in her speech at the Grammys when she said no one is illegal on stolen land, and this is a common phrase for activists to use in the us. It's not like Billie Eilish like came up with it, but of course it blew up on social media.

There were a lot of people online and politicians calling her a hypocrite because she lives in la, which is on unseated Tongva land. Ted Cruz even brought it up in a Senate hearing as though he's in a position to like accuse somebody else of hypocrisy. But he was trying to bait the CEO of Netflix to say on the record that Eilish was wrong and nobody is living on stolen land.

And then the tribe put out a statement saying that Billy does live on their ancestral land and hasn't contacted them about her property, they appreciate her comments and hope to be named more explicitly in the future.

[00:37:04] David: so let me go back to Nichols for a hot second here because obviously it's important for the Tongva nation to be able to articulate their claim that land was stolen from them. We know that there has been a land grab as part of cellular colonialism in the US and in Canada, which of course people like Ted Cruz want to deny, but they probably don't mean that their land was stolen if by that we have in mind the notion of theft that implies property as it's defined in our system of property law.

So that's not exactly what they mean. And so here, once again, we see that same tension appearing in a different iteration. Can you say that land was stolen from indigenous communities if that land was not property already in the first place, which it seems like it wasn't, at least not according to the way indigenous communities talk about land.

And so I wanna hear more about how Nichols resolves this seeming logical contradiction.

[00:38:06] Ellie: this is a perfect example of what he's talking about and why he thinks we should rethink the concept of dispossession while still holding onto it. Sometimes colonization does involve regular old theft, but in this case, we should be able to say that Tongva land was stolen without reference to a particular system of private property.

That is, we should be able to talk about the ceiling of land without, you know, falling into that question begging that we've articulated and that you just reminded us of. Indigenous activists and theorists often say that land isn't something that can be owned in the first place, but that doesn't mean that they haven't cultivated along an important relationship with it.

They just don't conceive of this in terms of property. Rather, they are a part of the land, not the owners of it. So in this case, the stealing of land from the Tongva people isn't the change of property ownership from one party to another, but it's instead the very making of the land and the reciprocal kind of relationality that the people had with it, the making of the land into property to begin with, while also simultaneously the settlers are taking that property.

So it's the making of land into property and the taking of it simultaneously in which the stealing consists.

[00:39:20] David: So I think this is a really good argument because it highlights the fact that settlers carry out a form of cultural violence, first and foremost by forcing the very notion of property onto the way of life of indigenous communities, right? So there is this imposition of a property relationship to the land.

Then on top of that, then there is a legal violation when that land that is now construed as property is then arbitrarily stolen from those same communities. So it's like we force you to relate to this thing in terms of property and then arbitrarily snatch it away from you. And I think it's a good illustration of the exceptionalist logic that is at the heart of settler colonialism, which is that we institute by force a system of law, and we break it when it seems like it's in our benefit.

And that's where we get this very, very long and painful history of violated treaties between the US government and many tribes in North America. And it's a history that hinges on the imposition of law, followed by its violation.

[00:40:31] Ellie: Exactly. That's why the title of Nichols book is Theft is Property. It reverses the anarchist slogan, right in order to say dispossession is a kind of property producing theft, new forms of land rights and property law imposed, but only in specific conditions that dispossess indigenous people of their land. Concretely, this meant that indigenous ownership of land was recognized only to the extent that those tribes could sell the land to Europeans so that the sale would appear voluntary. It would appear not to be a theft even if those treaties and agreements were later broken.

People love a heist. We saw this recently with the art theft in the Louvre. People were absolutely fascinated by this story. I'll admit I was one of them. It was like we were watching a heist movie play out in real time. Regardless of how you actually felt about the fact that millions of dollars worth of precious jewels that had historical significance were stolen.

[00:41:33] David: Well, it didn't, hurt that the guys who did it were also really hot, so everybody was obsesed.

[00:41:39] Ellie: Wait, but did they actually turn out to be really hot? I thought there were like memes that were about how hot they were, and then it was, it turned out, it was like there was some actor that people were saying like, this is the Louvre heist guy. But then it was just like, no, no, no, that's just like this actor.

[00:41:53] David: No, I thought it was real hot, young French guys. But I haven't, I don't know that for a fact.

[00:42:00] Ellie: In any case, while I try and find out the identity of the Luv heist guys to remember how hot they were, I mean, this already tells you we love a heist, but we also have like maybe a short attention span for these things that is like many news cycles ago at this point. But anyway, the reason I mention this is because the critical theorist, Anna Kornbluh, who has like really been popping off lately because her book Immediacy or the Style of Too Late Capitalism is the book everybody has been talking about. I have a lot of thoughts on that book, but this is not the time or place for it.  

Kornbluh, the same author though recently published an article in 2025 called Falling Heists, Rising Grift, which is about heist films and the way that they, while having been super popular starting in the 1950s and then having a heyday, especially in the nineties. And continuing in popularity in the first couple decades of the 21st century, seem to have been succeeded now by Grift Docudramas, and she has a lot of thoughts on why that is.

So, David, we're gonna be talking about this article now in the final portion of our episode.

[00:43:12] David: Yeah, and the article is about. Two things. It's about changes in capitalism itself in that time period from the 1950s to the present, but also changes in the representation of capital in media, right? And highest are one way in which we represent capital and the people who take it by force. And so there is here a kind of case of art imitates life because it is about capitalism, but also its depiction in film.

And the essential argument is that there is something fundamentally utopian about the genre of the heist movie, right? Because if you think about what makes a heist movie, it usually involves a group of people banding together engaging in a kind of democratic process about who performs what role.

Based on their abilities and their skills they negotiate. They come up with a plan together. That plan is supposed to be fair, but also highlight people's specializations, and then they carry out a heist that is meant to be essentially a reenactment of Robinhood taking money from the rich to the less powerful.

In the heist movie genre, we find a well articulated critique of capitalism because they reveal precisely by glorifying acts of large scale theft the criminality that according to her, is intrinsic to capitalism itself, right? So like nobody feels bad when we watch a heist movie about the victims of the heist, whether that's a museum or a bank or some large institution.

We usually are rooting for the protagonists, like in Oceans 11.

[00:44:53] Ellie: exactly, and in that way the heist film is really appealing because it allows us simultaneously to feel we are critiquing the system that is keeping us down, while also allowing us, you know, by our association with the protagonist to feel that we are triumphing within that system, right? And so we get to both be capitalist good guys and enemies of capitalism at the same time.

Also, I'm like still fully looking for the Louvre heist guys

[00:45:23] David: its fine.

[00:45:24] Ellie: David, I'm pretty sure that they didn't release their identities, but now I'm trying to circumvent A BBC paywall. Oh my God. Is that theft? Ah, I'm not trying to circumvent A BBC paywall yet anyway. Anyway, no, the one of the guys that was like initially identified, that actor that I mentioned was the guy who played Nate in Gossip Girl.

So anyway, yeah, I think the Louvre high skies being hot was like gay propaganda

[00:45:47] David: Was that fake news? Oh, no. Well, I, I'm, I'm spreading that propaganda.

[00:45:52] Ellie: Anyway, back to this Kornbluh The claim is that recently the heist film has been succeeded by the Grift Docudrama. She uses inventiIg Anna as an example of this. There was also the Amanda Seyfried one about Theranos.

There's like all of the, there was the one about, oh my God, which other one? There was a GameStop one, although maybe that's a little bit of a diff, that's not a Grif docu drama.

[00:46:17] David: Well, no, but there's also like some documentaries like the Tinder Swindler, you know, like that, that focus on petty swindlers and scammers who take advantage of other people and she contrasts that with the heist.

[00:46:28] Ellie: I think one of the parts that I found most interesting here is that she thinks the reason that the Grift Docudrama has come to overtake the heist tale is that Hollywood has moved from operating on the basis of large studios to now having those large studios either be owned by private equity or like we've circumvented the studio system altogether through streaming services, which are also owned by private equity.

And so there's now a really different relationship to capitalism that Hollywood has. Not that it was ever like outside of the realm of the capitalist, but it's especially now the case that these private equity firms aare controlling the kinds of films that are being produced. And not always directly.

Sometimes they'll say like, we just own this, but we wanna have let you have the freedom to make whatever you want. Like maybe, you know, an A 24 film or something like that. But it's not that simple.

[00:47:27] David: Yeah. Well, and the relationship here between the genres, right? The shift from the heist to the docudrama to the Grif Docudrama mirrors this economic change from the corporation to the private equity firm. The reason that she sees this as a kind of decline, or at least as a regrettable development, is because if the highest had a utopian self interpretation and a vision of working collectively toward a better future against capitalism, the grifter or grift, docudrama, valorizes capitalism in a way.

[00:48:03] Ellie: Exactly. It's like, oh, these poor investors whom Elizabeth Holmes, like, you know, deceived.

[00:48:10] David: Yeah, but even structurally, I mean, if you think about the difference between the heist and the docudrama, the heist is collective. It's a bunch of people working together. The docudrama about these grifters, it's always about individuals acting only on their self-interest. And also there's a difference in the victims.

The victims of a heist maneuver are usually very powerful bureaucracies like banks and museums. Whereas the victims of, you know, these grifters like Anna Delvey, the person after whom inventing Anna is inspired, they're victims are. Other private citizens, sometimes even their own family and their own friends.

So it's punching down rather than punching up. And so she sees there a significant political and moral difference between these two representations of capital, and that's what allows her also to lament about the movement away from the corporation or the studio to this new economic reality in Hollywood where, you know, platforms like Netflix, they don't really care about producing high quality films for aesthetic reasons or for cinematic reasons. They only care about profit, and in that way, they resemble the grifter, the scammer, the thief.

[00:49:26] Ellie: Excellent. Yes. Okay. So there is that kind of cool. Illusion with the very act that is being undertaken on film, that allows the private equity firms to imaginably distance themselves from that act.

[00:49:44] David: Yeah, I mean, I think essentially she's saying because now most, film and like TV that we consume is produced under these conditions, it's no surprise that the things that get represented are things that valorize essentially things. That are happening at the base, the superstructure is justifying the base.

[00:50:00] Ellie: Yeah.

[00:50:01] David: Whereas before even the act of making a film in a studio mirrored a little bit the act of a heist, right? You would have to get a band together of actors and you were working towards creating a project that was meaningful to everybody involved. And that is sort of lost, at in the present conditions of filmmaking and TV

making.

[00:50:21] Ellie: Well, and I also think this points to a very important difference between Grifts and Heists that we haven't mentioned yet, which is that grifts are indefinite, whereas heists have a definite point of achievement. And Kornbluh talks about how. The heist films very often are mainly about the process of pulling off the heist, right?

The, the climactic scene is usually the heist itself, and then the dumont is like, what happens after. Although sometimes we don't even get that. But the main rising action is getting the team together, figuring out how to make it work, having to, you know, deal with the possibility of getting caught.

They're mostly about the plan and the project. And, I think that also localizes what the thieves in the heist film wanna get away with. They're trying to reach some aim, and once they've achieved that aim, we get the sense that they might return to being good people. Right? And maybe they're good people all along, but even if we're like, oh yeah, that's kind of bad that they're trying to steal, you know, in the case of Oceans 11, which is one of the main examples that she talks about, whereas the grift, the grift is indefinite.

And what is the grifter trying to get? We're not. Always entirely sure, and it might not always be the same thing, but I think broadly speaking, they're the things that capitalism says we should want most clout, fame, and above all, accumulation of capital. And so I think that accumulative dimension is built into the grift, which makes the grifter immediately a less sympathetic character.

Whereas like the end goal in the heist film, it's like, oh yeah, maybe they're not trying to just like accumulate capital forever. They're just trying to do this one thing one time and then be done.

[00:52:03] David: Yeah, no, and the fact that there is the possibility of success for a collectively shared goal,

[00:52:07] Ellie: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:52:09] David: it kind of puts it in the domain of like potentially revolutionary activity. I mean, I'm maybe overselling that point, but at least if we think about the utopian potential of the heist, whereas the individualizing orientation, the psychologizing orientation of the Grift Docudrama takes you completely outside of that, the grifter grifts because that's just who they are, not because they have values that are pushing them to do that, and I really like that she also focused a lot on Ocean's Eight, which is the movie of the Oceans franchise that has an all women cast. And she had a great take on that, on how it exemplifies some of the tropes that are common in heist films, while also subverting them precisely along gender lines. So like, it's one of the few heist movies in that franchise that she says is not distracted by a love story, which is surprising

[00:53:02] Ellie: Ah,

[00:53:02] David: 'cause you would've expected that a movie with an all women cast would get distracted by a love story and they don't do

[00:53:09] Ellie: I love Rihanna's Star Turn in that movie.

[00:53:11] David: I haven't seen it

[00:53:12] Ellie: Yeah. Oh, you should watch it. It's really fun. And before closing, I just wanna mention one other film that I actually have a lot of complicated feelings about, and I don't necessarily like, but which I think is interesting in relation to what you were saying, David.

And it's One Battle After Another because  One Battle After Another is mainly a political film, but it has a lot of elements of the heist genre, and I think that reveals just how the heist genre can have revolutionary elements, because I think that's what makes  One Battle After Another's heist elements work so well.

Like given that it is a movie with a lot more of a political focus and that I don't think you can get with a grifter film.

[00:53:52] David: No, that's good. And I like that you brought this up because I wouldn't call that a heist film, and you're not saying that it is only that it shares certain features with it, but one thing that it lacks that makes it not a heist film is that the protagonists are not looking to enrich themselves. And that is essential to a heist, right?

People are there to get money from a powerful entity, but that's what also places the heist in between on the one end political activity or activism like we see with one battle after another, which is people acting for political reasons, altruistically, and then on the far end, on the other side potentially is Robin Hood who steals to give to the poor because the high stirs are not giving the money to the poor.

So they are less morally upright than Robin hood, but yet we identify with them. And I think the reason for that is because we recognize what the author of this article describes as the intrinsic criminality of capitalism. That even when people steal from centralized power structures, even if it's for selfish reasons, we still want to root for them.

[00:55:03] Ellie: We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider subscribing to our substack for extended ad-free episodes, community chats, and additional overthink content.

[00:55:12] David: To connect with us, find episode transcripts and make onetime tax deductible donations. Go to overthink podcast.com. You can also check us out on YouTube as well as TikTok and Instagram at Overthink_Pod.

[00:55:24] Ellie: We'd like to thank co-producer and audio editor, Aaron Morgan, production assistants, Bayarmaa Bat-Erdene and Kristen Taylor, and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.