If you live in a community in which retailers don’t fear roving bands of thieves swarming stores and pillaging the place, count yourself lucky. Not everyone in this country can say that. More and more, street-level retailers face daily threats of having their products stolen right off the shelves, either all at once or just a bit at a time.
Dick’s Sporting Goods has explained a miss in second-quarter profitability by a reference to “elevated inventory shrink.” This means that customers, employees, or both are stealing stuff. And this is hardly the only company that faces this problem. Stores in large cities around the country are closing because of theft. The problem is so bad that police have largely given up trying to prosecute the crimes.
The whole phenomenon is a reminder that there’s no substitute for a baseline population-wide ethic of respect for property rights. All of the security cameras, locks, police, and guns can’t stop a rampage of immorality once it takes hold. Civilization itself requires a common trust that the rights of others will be respected. There’s nothing that can substitute for that.
Those living in urban centers in the Northeast and the West Coast should take a visit to any small town in rural Texas. They all have hardware stores, farmers markets, and various other retail shops that leave their goods on the sidewalk overnight. Feed stores will stack bags of stuff everywhere, completely open and unguarded. There’s zero risk of theft. That’s because everyone in the community has a well-formed conscience, that inner moral compass that dictates the right and wrong of our actions.
This is true in large parts of the country. Contrary to what New York City dwellers might think, most of the country is devoid of wandering vagabonds, stoners, and armies of thieves, to say nothing of muggers and murderers. Most of the country can still brag about having a civilization.
If that’s true, something is fundamentally broken in our culture.
In the course of his argument, Freud laid out for us what are the marks of civilization.
“Wild and dangerous animals have been exterminated, the breeding of tamed and domesticated ones prospers,” Freud said.
“We expect a cultured people to revere beauty where it is found in nature and to create it in their handiwork so far as they are able,” Freud said. “Beauty is an instance which plainly shows that culture is not simply utilitarian in its aims, for the lack of beauty is a thing we cannot tolerate in civilization.”
We do not think highly of the cultural level of an English country town in the time of Shakespeare when we read that there was a tall dung-heap in front of his father’s house in Stratford; we are indignant and call it ‘barbarous,’ which is the opposite of civilized, when we find the paths in the Wiener Wald littered with paper,“ he said. ”Dirt of any kind seems to us incompatible with civilization; we extend our demands for cleanliness to the human body also, and are amazed to hear what an objectionable odor emanated from the person of the Roi Soleil; we shake our heads when we are shown the tiny washbasin on the Isola Bella which Napoleon used for his daily ablutions. Indeed, we are not surprised if anyone employs the use of soap as a direct measure of civilization. It is the same with order, which, like cleanliness, relates entirely to man’s handiwork.”
“The benefits of order are incontestable: it enables us to use space and time to the best advantage, while saving expenditure of mental energy,“ Freud said. ”One would be justified in expecting that it would have ingrained itself from the start and without opposition into all human activities; and one may well wonder that this has not happened, and that, on the contrary, human beings manifest an inborn tendency to negligence, irregularity, and untrustworthiness in their work, and have to be laboriously trained to imitate the example of their celestial models.
“[Therefore,] beauty, cleanliness, and order clearly occupy a peculiar position among the requirements of civilization. No one will maintain that they are as essential to life as the activities aimed at controlling the forces of nature and as other factors which we have yet to mention; and yet no one would willingly relegate them to the background as trivial matters.”
Freud noted that “these creations of his mind are not independent of each other; on the contrary, they are closely interwoven, and this complicates the attempt to describe them, as well as that to trace their psychological derivation.”
“If we assume as a general hypothesis that the force behind all human activities is a striving towards the two convergent aims of profit and pleasure, we must then acknowledge this as valid also for these other manifestations of culture, although it can be plainly recognized as true only in respect of science and art,” he said.
Freud ended his striking discussion with this: “A great part of the struggles of mankind centers around the single task of finding some expedient (i.e., satisfying) solution between these individual claims and those of the civilized community; it is one of the problems of man’s fate whether this solution can be arrived at in some particular form of culture or whether the conflict will prove irreconcilable.”
Yikes, but there it is. Other important thinkers have dissected this issue of what constitutes civilization, but Freud’s views are less well-known and nonetheless trenchant.
In the same book, Freud wrote that the more government fears revolt, the more it seeks to control the behavior, speech, and thoughts of the people. It actively seeks to decivilize, thus unleashing the same in the population.
So it’s no coincidence that the widespread unleashing of uncivilized behavior, especially in the form of “elevated inventory shrink,” came following the mass violation of property rights by government. After all, the federal government declared most of the stores currently dealing with criminality to be “nonessential.” What message does that send to the population?
We would do well to revisit the foundations of what we call civilization lest we risk losing it entirely.
