I agree with everything you're saying, except it's a handful of individuals. The top .000001% are responsible for 90% of the acceleration of the train. You can hardly blame someone for not paying for a tomato.

I don’t believe there’s any evidence whatsoever for that, and I refuse to adopt that kind of loser mindset, where the agency of 99.999999% of people don’t matter at all to how our culture and civilization develops.

so, essentially, you and the other commenter are arguing whether it is everyone that has a little fault for being naughty, or is it just a couple of psychos who are fucking everyone else over.

but even if it was just a couple of psychos that were responsible, it'd be hard to justify stealing from the grocery store, because you are not guaranteed to do damage to the psychos directly -- maybe what'll happen instead is that the grocery store employees will not get a nice raise due to the decreased revenue.

and this is why i think actions of this type are so dangerous to society. it's hard to find who is the victim and who is the criminal. so people feel like they are a victim a little, and then justified in being the criminal in a crime with invisible victims anyway. and so society degrades more and more in a vicious cycle and more people give up. it's disgraceful.

Those grocery store employees [at a national chain supermarket] were not going to get a nice raise regardless, and petty theft is either already accounted for or covered by insurance.

One outcome I can see though, is that if enough is skimmed off the top through self-checkout, then maybe the beancounters will realize that self-checkout isn't as 'efficient' as they thought, and will reinstitute human checkers.

Just like how we hope that the hotel that laid off the doorman eventually realizes their mistake and hires him back.

Using this alleged “pattern recognition” as an excuse for learned helplessness, and justifying theft from other victims of these top 0.000001% (if you believe that) is absolutely a loser mindset, yes.

You're confused. Either the world is one way or it isn't. Simply deciding it isn't might make you feel like a Chad but it doesn't make you any less of a fucking idiot. I know you think you can will meritocracy and the glorious principles of Democracy into existence and that's really cute, I'm sure it helps you get through each day, but recognizing that it's cope doesn't make you a loser.

It seems like you're saying that it's fine to steal and otherwise victimize people because "meritocracy and the glorious principles of democracy" are, in your view, dead. What a sad worldview. I hope you find some peace.