By Joshua Appel, Public Discourse.
What makes Piker’s remarks so alarming is not just their immorality in practice but their epistemological brazenness: the open and proud rejection of the idea that morality exists at all as an objective category.
Earlier this year, far-left political commentator and internet personality Hasan Piker said what many on the progressive left now feel but rarely state so plainly. The Twitch streamer, currently on something of a mainstream intellectual tour, declared that “the fall of the USSR was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century” and that he would choose Hamas over Israel every time.
But in a recent sit-down interview with Nadja Spiegelman and Jia Tolentino for The New York Times, Piker went a step further. During the discussion, Piker said that the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was justified, that theft from corporations is virtuous and that “microstealing” from places like Whole Foods is not merely permissible but righteous. “I’m pro stealing from big corporations,” he said, “because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers.” On Thompson’s murder, he invoked German philosopher Friedrich Engels: “The UnitedHealthcare CEO was guilty of ‘social murder,’ the systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty … because of the pervasive pain that the private health care system had created for the average American, I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place.”
The predictable response has been to note Piker’s hypocrisy (as he is quite wealthy himself) or the precariousness of his political position. But a more serious problem lies not in the practical, but the philosophical: by rejecting an objective standard of law, Piker, and those who follow his logic, are not pioneering something new, but instead regressing to something very old—a pagan worldview that Western civilization was built, at great cost, to overcome.
What is Western civilization? While many answers to this question have to do with political philosophy or culture, a different school of thought sees the Western conception of divinity as the foundation. Any understanding of God is not only crucial for religious practice but for shaping the individual, family, community, state, and civilization as well.