we do not know what a thief can do

We simply do not know what a body can do. You have likely heard of that event that took place recently in Turkey: A man gathers fifteen homeless children from the street, takes them to a luxury restaurant, orders a feast fit for kings, fills their bellies, and when the moment comes to pay the bill, he vanishes. He leaves behind bewildered waiters, satiated but embarrassed children, and an unpaid check. Now, set aside the headlines and the moral guardians of social media crying "heartlessness," "theft," or conversely, "modern Robin Hood." Let us abandon morality—that judge’s bench of transcendent values—and descend into the laboratory of ethics, into the chemistry of immanence and encounters. Because this event is not a tabloid story; it is a pure philosophical problem; an experiment on good and bad, power and impotence, joy and sadness. Most of us view events through the window of "judgment." Is this man "evil"? Is what he did a "sin"? Yet nature, and human relations as a part of it, is not a courtroom but a chemistry test tube. Let us recall Spinoza’s famous, almost scandalous thesis: Evil does not exist, but the bad does. This may sound like wordplay, but it is not. "Evil" implies a transcendent defect woven into the fabric of the universe, a violation of divine prohibition. "Bad" (the bad encounter), however, is simply and solely an incompatibility, an indigestion, a poisoning. The story of Adam and the apple is the perfect prototype for understanding this. When God told Adam, "Do not eat that fruit," he was not speaking like a king prohibiting his subjects. In reality, like a parent telling a child "don't eat that mushroom, it will poison you," he was revealing a physical truth, an incompatibility. The apple, when encountering Adam’s constitution, decomposes the relations in his body, breaks them down, and rots them. This is what "bad" is: the decomposition of a relation, the dissolution of a bond, a sad passion. When we look at the restaurant incident through this lens—polishing our glasses like an optician—what do we see? There are three distinct "bodies" and their collision: the children, the business, and that unknown "troll." For the children, this encounter is indisputably "good." The food (those substances) entered into a perfect agreement with the children’s blood, lymph, and chyle—that is, their biological structures—increasing their power of acting and giving them joy. Here, there is a "composition," a combining of relations. For the business owner, however, the situation is the exact opposite; the money and labor leaving the register are gone without return, hindering his effort to persevere in his commercial existence (conatus). This is "bad" for the business; it is a type of poisoning, a dissolution of relations. But what about the man? Where does he fit into this equation? This is where matters rest on that fine, sharp distinction between Nero killing his mother and Orestes killing his mother. Nero, Orestes, and Children Eating Doner Kebab Let us adapt Spinoza’s crucial example to this restaurant case. Nero kills his mother; Orestes also kills his mother. Viewed from the outside, the act (the physical movement, the plunging of the knife, or in this case, the ordering of the food) is exactly the same. But one is a crime, the other is not (or is less of one). Why? Because what matters is not the act itself, but with which image and which relation that act is combined. Orestes, by killing the mother who killed his father, avenges his father; his act combines with the image of the father and a relation of justice. Nero, however, acts solely out of ingratitude and cruelty, that is, with a desire to dismantle relations. The physical act of the man in the restaurant is "ordering food." In itself, this is neither good nor bad; it is simply a use of power. But with which image does this act combine? If this man had combined the children’s joy with his own joy, while also giving the restaurateur his due (that is, without "dissolving" or destroying anyone), this would have been a "virtue." Because virtue is nothing but power. However, this man used the children as "tools." His act of feeding them stemmed not from generosity or mercy, but likely from a desire to put the business in a difficult spot, to "hack" the system, or simply to create chaos. This, like Spinoza’s Nero example, is the act acquiring an "ungrateful, unfeeling, and rebellious" character. What the man did was to establish a relation that did not agree with the restaurateur’s body (his economic existence), a relation that decomposed it. This is an act of "poisoning". There is a critical point here: we cannot call what this man did "Evil" (malum), because there is no absolute Evil in nature. Even Nero killing his mother contains something "positive" within nature's infinite web of relations; the movement of Nero’s hand, the sharpness of the knife, are all parts of God’s (Nature’s) power. The cunning of the man in the restaurant, his ability to plan, his will to take the children there are all powers. The problem is that this power has been captured by "sad passions". This man is not free; he is a slave, perhaps seeking to take vengeance on society, chasing the lowest level of joys like "mockery" and "humiliation." Because the free man knows he cannot increase his own power by deceiving or harming others. The act of the thief or the fraudster contradicts his own nature; because human nature demands the strengthening of reason and common life. The man who ran from that table actually ran away from his own humanity, from his own potentia. Spinoza would roar with laughter while watching spiders fight. Was this a sadistic pleasure? No. It was the intellectual joy of observing the tremendous and terrifying workings of nature, the efforts of animals to persevere in existence (conatus), and how they dissolved and decomposed each other's relations, viewing it all with an eye "beyond good and evil". Perhaps we should view the restaurant incident this way. A spider (the man) weaving his web, trapping his prey (the restaurant), and using other living beings (the children) as bait in the process. It is easy to be a moralist and say "how shameful." What is difficult is to understand the chain of causes and effects, the geometry of this "bad encounter." What lack in the man’s soul, what state of "blindness" (like a blind man lacking the faculty of sight) drove him to this act? Just as it is meaningless to get angry at a blind person for "not seeing," it is meaningless to ask this man, whose soul is crippled by sad passions, "why are you not virtuous." By his nature, at that moment, he could do nothing else. A stone not seeing is not a lack, but a man not seeing is a privation; the lack of virtue in this man is also a state of sadness that does not belong to his essence. The Economy of Sad Passions and Social Media Lynch Culture Consider the storm that broke out on social media regarding this event. Screams of "How could you!", "What heartlessness!"... Spinoza would call this "indignatio" (indignation, resentment) and he would absolutely reject it. Because indignation, hatred, pity, remorse... these are all sad passions. And sadness is anything that diminishes a person’s power of acting. When we get angry at that man, when we lynch him, we are not doing something "good." We are merely diminishing our own power and entering a reactive cycle. The ethical person does not feel indignation; they understand, they grasp the causes, and they act. The anger of the business owner is understandable (as he has suffered damage), but this anger does not lead him to repair the damage. Reason is not falling into a fit of rage, but thinking about how to manage this encounter and how to avoid similar "poisonous" encounters in the future (perhaps by taking payment in advance, perhaps through security measures). There is an interesting paradox here: partly because he fed the children, the man appears as a "phila…