The thief who neither knows nor admits that he is a thief seldom comes into court. And this is the most dangerous sort, because the market value of his stolen property cannot be economically assessed; he is the thief of his neighbour's privacy, patience, time, energies and of his very identity. How are such thefts licenced? By the general axiom that man, being a gregarious creature, enjoys, or should enjoy, casual visits from his neighbour whenever he is not ill, or working concentratedly at his trade or profession. He is held to have stored up a certain amount of social pleasantness, and this he must share with his fellow-creatures when they are impelled to call on him by a vague feeling of self-insufficiency - with which they also credit him. Like themselves, he must need 'company'. Thus they are following the conventions of social inter-change: being neither decently interested in his personal problems, nor willing to accept any burden of responsibility towards him. This neighbour-dogma is added to the theory that all aberrations from normal behaviour are 'news' and therefore public property (social pleasantness heightened to social excitement); the person who first secures the news, far from being a thief, is entitled to a reward from the news-hungry public. Indeed, nine out of every ten people are willing to share themselves with the public to a most generous extent - the hatchet-slayer summons the reporters and asks anxiously: "This is front page stuff isn't it?"
Neighbour-dogma is strongly held by country people, for whom any refusal by a newcomer to go further than 'good morning' and 'good evening' when amicably greeted in the shop or post office, constitutes a social danger; and his privacy will be assailed in a hostile, though surreptitious, way. Yet once he has admitted the first caller (the local person) inside the house, his time and energies will be at the mercy of all neighbours belonging to the same social class, who feel entitled to share his humanity. And in the city, where nobody is expected to know even the occupants of the flat above, or the flat below, there is always the State - brusquely presenting itself on the bureaucratic pretext or another, with inspections, demands, subpoenas, and forms to be completed. Such thefts of time and energy are excused on the plea that everyone is a member of the State and enjoys a claim on the attentions of all fellow-members; the assumption of social community being based on that of national community. If a private citizen feels victimized by thievish officialdom, the remedy is held to lie in his own hands as a national or municipal voter. Furthermore, continuous thefts are committed in the name of Business, Politics, Charity-invasions of privacy, draining of energy, wasting of time, legitimatized by an extension of the neighbour-dogma. That this organized theft is hardly ever challenged, suggests that few people consider themselves private individuals.
The question of what may rightly be called one's inalienable own, safe from encroachment, grows most confused in the case of private amenities. According to the democratic view, each of us may control his immediate surroundings to reasonable extent, only the too 'particular' people being regarded as freaks and trouble-makers. Between one person and another a no-man's-land of property is assumed to exist, over which neither has any special control. And if we dislike the new buildings going up along a favourite old street of ours, the sole grounds on which we are allowed to protest are those of impersonal artistic taste; though entitled to our private opinion, we can claim no right to be consulted. The favourite old street is 'ours' only in a manner of speaking. Its architectural effect must be regarded as public property subject to our control through the municipal system alone; our personal reactions as individual citizens do not, and cannot interest this remote and stubborn authority.
Few even of our purely local amenities are protected by law. A successful action might perhaps be brought, on economic grounds, against the planting of a glue factory next door to a tea garden, or of a kennel next door to a hospital for psychopaths. But no remedy can be found against the spoiling of the view from one's rural sitting room by the erect on of a gas-works or a neo-Gothic castle. Nor can a neighbour be prevented from raising a tall structure in his garden which will command a view of our own and thus destroy its privacy; unless his actions when posted there are noisy, offensive, or menacing. Again, though we may sue a neighbour for stealing flowers from our garden (and recover their market value), we are powerless against him if he steals the affections of our cat by giving it richer food than we choose to give it at home. Actions have been successfully brought against fashion pirates who make surreptitious sketches of new models at private preview; but can a woman prosecute a neighbour who plagiarizes her individual way of dressing and thus steals from her the sense of looking fastidiously like herself? I may sue a publisher for an infringement of copyright, but not a man who tells my favourite story or joke as his own, and thus steals from me the peculiar flavour of wit that is part of my social identity. An inventor may sue a manufacturing company for an infringement of patent, but what remedy have I against an acquaintance who copies the interior decoration of my house and thus steals the dignity of its uniqueness?
Private taste is, in fact, at the mercy of public depredation. If we enjoy a particular view, we cannot prevent its being spoilt, precisely because our liking rests no taste, not on mere material considerations. It we fancy a particular combination of colours and express it in the decoration of our sitting room, we are powerless to prevent a visitor from imitating what can be described as 'only a matter of taste': the sensibilities associated with taste being too subtle for recognition in the register of public property. We do not really own the view on which we have bestowed thoughtful choice when we designed the house, and which has played an important part in our local orientation; nor do we own that thoughtfully devised sitting room colour-scheme. We possess no more than a taste for a certain kind of view, or a taste for certain colour scheme. Our consolation must be that this taste cannot be taken from us by even the cleverest of thieves.
