Guillem GallifaI used to listen to it sporadically. For the last couple of years, monthly. Until a few months ago, every week. Now, the frequency is almost daily. I’m talking about theft and petty crime. It seems to be ‘fashionable’, as we would say, as a euphemism.
Good people, with integrity, assimilated into the system, apathetic, obedient, uncritical and, yes, with their current account more or less stabilised, are alert in their day-to-day lives, attentive, fundamentally, to maintain the stability of their lives. Euphemistically too, of course, because it is challenging to guess, behind appearances, that the only thing that exercises their alert instinct is the fear of losing some privilege.
And that is what I would like to talk about here. About theft, and crime, and privilege. Because they are inextricably linked.
As I was saying, the regularity with which people talk about theft and crime in everyday conversations is often closely linked to the accusation that immigrants are responsible for most of it, and for the fervent decision to vote for Aliança Catalana or one of its ideological congeners.
And well, who is it that accuses – shameless, insolent, confident of their uninformed opinion, taxing, arrogant – the aforementioned collective of being responsible – guilty – of these, it seems, gratuitous and never the fruit of necessity or desperation, thefts and crimes?
It is the neighbour on the fifth floor, and the hotel receptionist, and the school teacher, and the porter.
What do these seemingly heterogeneous profiles have in common? Yes, you guessed it: they are all Westerners. They have all grown up amidst the luxuries – what we call today, immodest, needy – of affluent European societies, where they have had to fight for jobs with generous salaries and public holidays. Not whether they will have eaten at the end of the day, just so we understand each other.
And it is this growing contingent of people – whom I, who, like them, also know how to grant license, will affectionately call representatives of the arrogance of ignorance – it is they, rather than the immigrant collective, whom I observe in alarm, when they utter these accusations, laden with certainty, exultant.
Because the exercise of recklessness, to be polite, in which they fall, seems to me rather frightening.
They do. And not because likely they will never brush against the circumstances of desperation they so lightly judge – the one that makes you risk your life to go to the country that has exploited yours for centuries, a fact that has caused your country to be sunk in misery, and it’s overburdened in opulence, but not because the brutal absence of its security insults an army of sociologists and other scholars who are dedicated to unravelling the causes of complex socio-political phenomena, no.
What I find frightening is their awareness that they are not jointly responsible for the thefts and crimes they denounce. That they childishly consider, from the outset, that most of the thefts are out of taste and malice and not out of necessity and desperation (as if committing illegalities and seeking prosecution by the police were an amusing hobby for people with nothing better to do). That they consider that they should not have to check anything in their lives, nor be aware of what they are collaborating with, just because they are full members of a well-to-do Western country. That they show manifest ineptitude in seeing the collateral effects of our modus vivendi or arrangement, which condemns the other half of the world to misery, to preserve our luxuries. That they participate in this blatant thoughtlessness, which would be considered a serious crime in a more evolved society. And that they point the finger without realising that, in this gesture, four fingers are pointing back at them.
This is because, as J.P. Sartre reminded us in L’enfer c’est les autres.
This fact, psychologically already known – the principle of projection, through which one points out to the outside what one identifies in oneself, but which is ethically inadmissible – would take on an astonishing aspect, were it not for the fact that it orbits another vertebral axis, which exceeds the pretensions of this article, but which is both motive and cause:
The absolute lack of ethics in relation to the money with which we act nowadays.
“It worries me because we have become very Americanised in just a few years“, a young friend who spent a few months there told me.
He was talking about stripping the economy of all ethical and political content.
“The more money, the better. This is the mantra we all follow, consciously or unconsciously.
That accumulation, moderate or excessive, above reasonable needs (a concept that we Westerners have long since transformed into a synonym for endless luxuries), has no implications, as if it were child’s play, with no consequences, is what has led us, in part, to petty theft and crime, we said for the common good of our fellow citizens, no less.
As you can see, I am not saying that there is no unjustified petty crime: I am saying, clearly and openly, that we are all criminals. And in this regard, I quote, legally, Article 195, On the omission of the duty to assist. Anyone who fails to help a person who is helpless and in manifest and serious danger, when they could do so without risk to themselves or others, will be punished with a fine of three to twelve months.
For those who are not wide awake: Going hungry or not having a roof over your head in the middle of winter is a manifest and serious danger. And to have a surplus in your bank account is to be able to help without risk to yourself or others.
As you can see, we are all, in effect, criminals.
In Respect, Eduardo Galeano has a little story, which contains the message I am trying to tell. The message that, as privileged people, we aggressively refuse to see:
“Of the poor we know everything: what they don’t work on, what they don’t eat, how much they don’t weigh, how much they don’t measure, what they don’t have, what they don’t think, what they don’t vote, what they don’t believe….
We only need to know why the poor are poor: is it because their hunger feeds us and their nakedness clothes us?
Impunity demands forgetfulness. There are successful countries and successful people and there are unsuccessful countries and unsuccessful people, because life is a system of rewards and punishments that rewards the efficient and punishes the useless. In order for infamies to be turned into exploits, memory must be broken: the memory of the North is divorced from the memory of the South, accumulation is disassociated from emptying, opulence has nothing to do with dispossession. Broken memory makes us believe that wealth is innocent of poverty and that misfortune has not paid, for centuries or millennia, the price of grace. And it makes us believe that we are condemned to resignation.”
And yet, a tale of Taoist origin, which perhaps still more briefly and clearly synthesises, in which, I am sure, our respectful citizens of whom I have spoken to you will never identify themselves with the character of the king, though his deeds are too obvious to disprove them:
It happened a long time ago anywhere. A king appointed a wise man as judge. He was
a Taoist. The king was confident that the wise man would solve many problems justly.
The judge’s first case seemed simple. It was about a thief who had confessed
and was caught “red-handed”. So the sage sentenced the thief to a year’s imprisonment.
Imprisonment for the thief. But he also sentenced the rich man.
– How is this? – said the rich man. I have been the injured party, and you arrest me?
– Yes, replied the judge. You are just as responsible as he is, if you had not accumulated
wealth, he would not have robbed you, all your accumulation is responsible for his hunger.
When he heard about this, the king immediately dismissed the judge because he will
think thus: “If that man continues his reasoning, he will come to me”.
Our Xavier Rubert de Ventós, already declared, in this respect, that “Democracy is the Totalitarianism of Appearances” .
And the writer Antonio Gala, who left us recently, warned that“The privileged will always risk their complete destruction rather than give up even a fraction of their privileges“.
Let us take heed and question ourselves daily, lest the real danger does not come from outside…. But that we carry it within us.
📎 Gallifa, G. [Guillem]. (2025, 10 February). L’enfer c’est les autres. PsicoPop. https://www.psicopop.top/en/lenfer-cest-les-autres/
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