On the word, who receives it, and everything that gets taken from you without anyone ever using it.
Say the word thief to yourself and watch what your mind produces.
Look at how the word actually gets handed out. Take a phone from a person on the road and you are a thief, and your face goes up online, and a crowd may beat you in the street for it. Take the pensions of nine thousand people through a structure your lawyers designed, and you are a businessman with a difficult year behind him. Take the treasury of an entire state, enough to have built the hospitals that were never built, and the word that finds you is honourable. Somewhere between the phone and the treasury, the language changes hands. The scale goes up and the word falls away, and at the very top, where the largest takings in the world happen, no word attaches at all.
Understand what that tells you. The word thief was never a description of an act. It is a description of who committed it. It lands on the poor, the young, the unprotected, the ones with no lawyer and no name and no institution standing behind them. The same act, performed by someone with sufficient standing, receives a different word, and the different word is the whole privilege.
There is an old principle in matters of justice that ought to be repeated more often than it is. A society that has failed to feed its people forfeits the right to be outraged when they take bread. Hunger indicts the society before it indicts the hand. This principle comes from a tradition people usually think of as severe about theft, which makes it more striking rather than less. Even within a system of hard penalties, the wisest of them understood that you cannot leave a man with nothing and then stand over him in judgment when he reaches. Ask that question in your own city. Before you decide what the boy at the stall deserves, ask what was owed to him for eighteen years and never delivered, and by whom, and where those people are eating tonight.
Now let me take you somewhere heavier, and then I will leave it, because it will swallow the whole piece if I let it.
Go and look at our things in their museums. The works of our ancestors sit behind glass in cities they were never made for, taken in the last century by men with ships and guns, and the plaques beneath them say collection, and acquisition, and the names of the men who carried them off are on the walls of universities. Those objects were made by hands like the hands of the people you pass on the street here, formed out of the earth of this place by makers whose names nobody bothered to record. They were taken. Everyone knows they were taken. And the word thief has never once been attached to any of it, because the men who did it had ships, and museums, and the ability to write the description of their own act. A hungry boy takes bread and is called a thief for the rest of his life. An empire takes a civilisation and is called a collector.
Hold both of those in your hands at the same time and you will understand exactly what the word is for.
Turn now from what is taken by hand to what is taken invisibly, because most of what has been stolen from you was never called theft by anyone.
Somebody has taken your time. Perhaps many people have. The employer who kept you late for years doing work that was never going to lead anywhere. The person who strung you along for a decade of your life knowing exactly what they were doing. The friend who called only when they needed carrying. Money that is taken can be earned again. The hours of your one life cannot. No court sits for this, and no crowd gathers, and the person who took four years out of the middle of your life sleeps well and does not think of themselves as having taken anything at all.
Somebody has taken credit for your work. You have watched your idea walk into a room inside somebody else’s mouth and receive applause on the way in. There is a particular kind of theft in that, because they cannot take the years in your hands that made the idea possible. A person can copy a form and never own the practice that produced it, and this is the one theft in the world that fails at the exact moment it succeeds.
Somebody has taken your peace. This one is the least visible and the most expensive, and it is where I need you to be honest, because a great deal of it is being taken with your permission. Notice who you have given access to. The person you keep letting back in who leaves you shaken every time. The conversations you agree to have again and again with someone who has no intention of hearing you. The doors of your own life that you leave standing open to people who take something from you every time they walk through. Your peace is being handed over daily, by you, in small amounts, to people who never once asked whether you could afford it.
Which brings me to the hardest turn in this piece, and I would rather you heard it from me than found it out at sixty.
You have been stealing from yourself.
There is a person who is going to be sitting in your body in ten years, and everything they will have was supposed to be built by you, now, in the ordinary weeks you are currently spending. Every hour you hand to something you do not value is an hour taken directly out of that person’s life. The skill they will not have. The health they will be repairing. The work they were meant to be halfway through and will be starting from nothing. You will never meet a thief who takes more from you than you do, and there is no crowd for it, and no name for it, and no shame attached to it, and it happens every single day inside a life that looks perfectly respectable from the outside.
Now let me turn the mirror the rest of the way around, because I have spent this whole piece asking you to look at what has been taken from you, and it would be dishonest to stop there.
What have you taken?
Whose time have you wasted, knowing you were wasting it, because it was convenient for you? Whose work have you presented as your own, or accepted praise for without correcting anyone? Whose peace have you disturbed, over and over, because you were entitled to their patience and you knew they would keep giving it? Who has been drained by you and never said so? Everyone reading this is somebody else’s example in a piece like this one. You are the person taking hours out of the middle of a life you have not been paying attention to.
Here is the whole of it. The word thief was built small on purpose, so that it would only ever fit around the wrists of the powerless while everyone above them takes freely and is called something else. Refuse the small definition. Widen it until it covers what is actually being taken in this world, the hours, the credit, the peace, the inheritance of a whole people sitting behind glass in another man’s city. And then, having widened it, be brave enough to turn it around and hold it against yourself, and see how much of it fits, and go and give back whatever you can still return.
You have been robbed. You have also robbed. Both of those are true this morning, and only one of them is still in your hands to fix.