Sympathy for looters

American satirist and journalist P.J. O’Rourke once said: “Even a band of angels can turn ugly and start looting if enough angels are unemployed and hanging around the Pearly Gates convinced that all the succubi own all the liquor stores in Heaven.”

This image of beer-battered angels turning on their heavenly home’s stores of supposedly communion wine seems unimaginable and would likely warrant a one-way ticket to Hell.

However, the similar looting of one’s nation’s stores in a time of crisis and desperation is fast becoming an expected part of natural disaster news coverage. Glancing at pictures of a damaged Chile, one is probably just as likely to see a buckled building as police clad in riot gear tear-gassing crowds of looters. Since Hurricane Katrina, we have been privy to this dark and dirty side of humanity, people driven to depravity by natural disasters.

Where do we draw the line on reasonable looting, and when do we start condemning looters and doling out deterring punishments?

I propose we evaluate looting in terms of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which contends that different levels of needs must be met before a person can reach self-actualization. Our most basic needs are our physiological compulsions, which include eating, sleeping, breathing, excreting and having sex. Because our most basic level of need contains our physical requirements, we shouldn’t fault anyone for sustenance.

For example, readers of Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables” lend their sympathies to Jean Valjean, a man imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread. Just like Valjean, the victims of these horrid natural disasters have endured a storm blowing away their lives as they know them.

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet was right to be lax on enforcing the punishment for looting. She asked the toppled nation’s grocers to distribute food and other bare essentials to the public. Her desire to help her people is reflected by the understanding and empathetic conduct of the 14,000 troops she mustered to enforce the law and a curfew.

Some of these enforcers chose to look the other way when looters took only basics, and then other troops actually gave out bags of food from dump trucks in poor areas such as Concepción.

Finally, the looting and rioting is subsiding, and the response to more lavish quake spoils is appropriate as well. Along with essentials, looters stole and scavenged luxury items such as new televisions and furniture. Obviously, these items do not qualify as physiological needs, in the lowest level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Police have granted amnesty to looters who return these stolen goods. Again, it’s ridiculous to believe a person whose house was destroyed is going to use a new LCD television, so I believe it’s simply indicative of mass hysteria.

And given the mitigating circumstances, I think the victims of these natural disasters deserve our sympathies and not harsh moral judgments on their behavior during very trying times.
 

E-mail: yzchaudh@indiana.edu