Once upon a time, the societal decay of the western world seemed confined to “moral” issues, not ethical ones like theft and murder.

That the social cancer has spread to even such fundamental elements of civil society was on public display recently, when The New York Times Opinion section hosted a video conversation featuring two 30-somethings, New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino and socialist “influencer” Hasan Piker.

Ms. Tolentino is a previous deputy editor of Jezebel, an aptly named feminist website. Mr. Piker is an extremely popular socialist and anti-Israel commentator, and, not to put too fine a point upon it, a reprehensible human being.

He has said that America “deserved 9/11,” that Hezbollah flies his favorite flag, and that Zionists are modern-day Nazis.

The headline of the conversation was: “The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?”

The Free Press’ Suzy Weiss pithily characterized the offering as a “litigation of the Ten Commandments.”

The eighth one, for instance, was referenced in the subtitle of the event: “Why petty theft might be the new political protest.”

When the host of the production asks her guests if they would “steal from the Louvre,” Mr. Piker doesn’t hesitate to say yes. Ms. Tolentino laments her logistical inability to do the deed, but that she would “cheer on every news story of people that I see doing it.” And, to dispel any doubt about her support of such thievery, adds, “Absolutely.”

Mr. Piker asserts that “We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.”

How about stealing—“microlooting,” in the host’s words—from something, well, closer to home? Whole Foods, for example?

Ms. Tolentino feels not only capable of such a heist, she confesses to it. “I did steal,” she shares, “from Whole Foods on several occasions.”

“I will say,” she in fact says, that “I think that stealing from a big box store…[is] neither very significant as a moral wrong, nor is it significant in any way as protest or direct action.” So why do it? Well, once, for instance, she forgot four lemons. And so returned to steal them. No point wasting time at a checkout counter.

Mr. Piker jokes, “You should go to prison.” All present laugh.

“I was like,” the pilferer says, sheepishly, “this is not a big deal. Right, guys?”

Right.

Mr. Piker reassures her. “The lemons that you stole,” he explains, “are factored into the bottom line of these mega-corporations regardless.”

He himself, he notes, would not lift lemons. Why? Because when he was younger and stole some trading cards from a friend (the seeds of larceny sprout early), “my father punished me,” which was “such a harrowing experience that I literally can’t even steal a candy bar.”

So it’s a childhood trauma, not any pang, or even ping, of conscience that keeps his itchy sticky fingers to themselves.

Moving to Commandment Six, the program host raises the brazen murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street, and how she finds it “scary to be in a society where people feel that murder is morally justified.

“I’m curious how we thread that line.”

Mr. Piker has plenty of thread: “Yeah,” he muses. “Friedrich Engels [co-author, with Karl Marx, of The Communist Manifesto] wrote about the concept of social murder. And Brian Thompson…was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder” through “the systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty, the for-profit, paywalled system of health care in this country.”

Whatever that means. It all combines, though, he says, to cause “tremendous amounts of pain, tremendous amounts of violence, tremendous amounts of deaths.”

And so Mr. Thompson’s being shot in the back by a person who had never met him before was…if not exactly justified, well, at least understandable.

We of the conviction that stealing and murder are sins might have a hard time comprehending ethically oblivious Gen Z-ers like Mr. Piker and Ms. Tolentino, much less the fact that such miscreants not only exist but are even celebrated as sages by once-storied institutions.

Here, though, we are.

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