Mr. Know-It-All: Should I Feel Guilty For Watching Pirated TV?
My sister watches pirated TV. I do too, but she won’t admit she’s breaking a rule. Why does this bug me so much?
“I’m going to bury this auditor in paperwork,” Norm brags, shuffling phony receipts and faked mileage logs around his corner of the bar. It’s halfway through Cheers’ 11th season, and after years of atrocious negligence with his income taxes, everyone’s favorite mug-coddler has found himself in the IRS’s crosshairs.
Norm doesn’t care about taxes. He doesn’t think about the importance of equitable burden-sharing or pitching in to help sustain millions of less privileged citizens or even paying the salary of his mail-carrying, federal-employee best friend, Cliff Clavin. Nope. For Norm, the tax situation is all a game. And now that he’s caught, he has skipped straight past remorse or reparation to concocting new tricks to cover up his crime. When those don’t work—when the gruff, husky-voiced auditor arrives and threatens him with imprisonment—he resorts to an even more dishonorable gambit to wriggle himself free: He tries to seduce the auditor. And she goes for it! She tells him to meet her at her hotel that night.
Norm immediately has regrets—not because it’s wrong to bribe an IRS employee with sex, but because he’s “not really that attracted to her.” So he starts brainstorming new unethical tricks to get himself out of the consequences of his previous unethical trick, which itself was intended to get himself out of the consequences of the unethical trick he’d pulled before that. Cliff, for his part, volunteers to prevent the tryst by knocking on the hotel room door and releasing “a big bag of wild squirrels with sparklers attached to their tails.”
Reader, I watched this all on Netflix, using an account I pay for every month. Maybe, in your eyes, that makes me a sucker. We live in an era of rapidly changing manners, eroding taboos, and oft-fudged rules. Sometimes it’s thrilling and good—disruption!—and sometimes it’s scary. (It didn’t always feel normal to rent a stranger’s home or to have emboldened Nazis shouting at you online.) Sometimes, as with pirated TV, it’s actually illegal. You ask, essentially, if it’s important to recognize each of those lines as we skip over them, as we watch those obsolete standards recede behind us—if, in effect, we must audit all of our norms.
Yes, I say. Absolutely. We all break rules; it’s inevitable, even for the best of us. Refusing to admit that—clinging to denial like your sister, like Norm—locks us inside some principle-less alternate reality, enabling ever more reckless slippages. In short, it opens a proverbial bag of wild squirrels with sparklers affixed to their tails. Even worse, that denial seals us off from others who are more forthright.
And this, I suspect, is what really upsets you about your sister. I’m guessing you’re generally a principled and law-abiding person. So when you watch pirated TV, you must find some way to reconcile that, to weather the paradoxical turbulence stirred in your sense of self. Whatever small stress that causes is the price you pay. And fine, you’re willing to pay it. But she’s found a way to avoid this reckoning entirely, to feel totally untroubled, to transgress without consequence—and this, in turn, pushes you to the irritated, resentful place from which you’ve written this question. You don’t want to be there, I know, alienated by your differing consciences. You want to be where you can see our troubles are all the same.
Write to [email protected].
This article appears in the September issue. Subscribe now.