When the Moral Levee Breaks

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... where, for the first time, I saw the video of the looting that was taking place, in broad daylight, throughout The Big Easy, unencumbered by anything so prosaic as law and order. To me, the looting came as no surprise: it was a completely natural phenomenon. It was exactly what my own theory of the social order would have predicted. What else should you expect when a civilized order collapses? ...Yet Smith's failure to take humankind's primordial instinct for theft was not unique; on the contrary, all political theorists of the modern era... have implicitly assumed that we are living in a world in which acts of theft are simply unthinkable -- an unspeakable No No that protects our civilization in the same way that the levees around New Orleans were once considered to have protected its population from inundation. Alas, none of these modern political theorists ever thought to ask themselves the question, "How did it come about that the societies of the West were provided with a moral levee against the flood of self-interested and non-altruistic individualists?" ...had been so well brought up that he was no longer able to sympathize with the motives of human beings who were behaving in precisely the same way that all human beings always behave when they are struggling for survival in the state of nature. He was indignant at the thief who inhabits the id inside of every one of us. He was livid at evidence of other people's humanity.