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What if our fundamentals are exactly backwards?
New to The Motte, looking for constructive, critical discussion.
Here's an example of what I mean by a "fundamental":
Every economic system that has seemed credible to most people since the dawn of civilization has revolved around the legal establishment and safeguarding of property through the concept of ownership.
But what is ownership? I have my own ideas, but I asked ChatGPT and was surprised that it pretty much hit the nail on the head: the definitional characteristic of ownership is the legal right to deprive others.
This has been such a consistently universal view that very few people question it. Even fewer have thought through a cogent alternative. Most people go slack-jawed at the suggestion that an alternative is possible.
Here's something from years back, before I'd zeroed in on the perverse nature of ownership:
Anyone want to brainstorm a viable alternative to "ownership"?
/images/17459352527399495.webp
Okay, I'll bite.
So what is your solution to the paranoid who don't understand the concept of sharing?
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Only if you've stopped stealing from other people.
If ownership is deprivation of others, then that deprivation is theft. After all, to deprive is to deny someone the possession or use of something. If this is supposed to be an immoral characteristic ('paranoid,' 'not sharing,' 'psychopathy), then the moral state is for it to not be deprived. The immoral deprivation of personal or even public goods is understood to be theft.
However, you are posting here. On the internet. A medium that requires a computer of some sort that could be not-deprived to someone else. Moreover, you repeatedly responded to others. This entails further use of time depriving the device to others. It also implies a surplus of time, and thus material resources you are depriving others of, that enable the hobby rather than sharing like a non-paranoid should. These resources are deprived from benefiting other possible beneficiaries and potential users by virtue (or sin) of your use. Your use and expected ability to use is demonstrating a de facto, even if not de jure, ownership.
It's generally understood that it is fair to judge people by their own standards, even if it's not fair to do so by your own. So be it. A priest who declares any who disagrees with their message is damned to hell will be a damned priest by their own hypocrisies. A revolutionary who declares it an act of cowardliness to not participate in a protest is a coward for not participating. You are someone who deprives others by exercising ownership and mutually exclusive use of limited resources.
Why should anyone brainstorm alternative ownership with a thief in the middle of a robbery?
I mean... I don't agree with the OP but isn't your comment just this meme?
The difference between the meme and hoisting someone by their own petard is that a petard must be provided by the owner and initial user.
The nature of the meme is that the counter-argument strawman figure is claiming 'gotcha' moments, despite not actually addressing any position presented. The person on the iphone criticizing Apple's pay of employees is arguing from a position that Apple could be paying the employees more with what has been provided, not that Apple should be boycotted for not paying people more. The car seatbelt person is not a hypocrite for saying there should be seatbelts, because they have not made a standard that such an expression would be hypocritical by. Society-peasant's panel isn't even about a choice of action, which is the punchline against the strawman's degeneration. The strawman first deflects on the basis of an unrelated action (buying a iphone vis-a-vis how the seller pays workers), then an expression of preference (cars should have seatbelts), and then existence (you live in a society), but never a position actually made by the protagonists.
In the meme, the strawman is not actually using anyone else's standards, not least because they provided no standard of 'right' by which they violated. The strawman has to invent a standard they did not claim in order to condemn them. Critiquing arguments made on a basis of morality on their own terms is different because they provided a standard that the arguer can be judged by. They present an argument of right or wrong that applicable examples can be compared to. The use of moral connotation language indicates what the arguer views as correct / incorrect behaviors. Pejorative language is a framing device- no one calls a reasonable decision 'paranoid' because paranoia is by its nature unjustified/unwarranted/irrational.
The OP chose to offer a definition to judge others by. They used emotive and condemnatory language to indicate their own judgement. Having established the standard and a moralist framing, they can be judged by it in turn.
This is The Motte- positions are for defending.
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The people who boldly suggest all of society radically change its behaviour have a burden of at least knowing they personally can live by the rules they are prescribing.
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Say I make a piece of software people want to enjoy. I can release it for free (and have done so tbh because I made something for an incredibly tiny niche of people). But I'm obviously going to put more effort into something I expect to get payment from. People want work which lots of effort has gone into. Isn't it appropriate that they pay me? Plus I need to pay my web hosts and service providers. It costs them physical resources and human effort to make their product. If lazy and uncreative people get the fruits of the diligent and inventive's labours then why would anyone be diligent or inventive?
Coding is one thing, physical labour and danger is another. Who the hell is going to work in a bauxite mine unless they're being paid for it?
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This ideas were actually explored by Georgists. But the conclusion is that ownership only of natural (non-renewable) resources (with land as the main natural resource) is depriving others. Ownership of these is a zero-sum game and allows the owner to extract a rent. I have and you have not so pay me for having or using it. Anything else is not. Creating anything else brings value.
If I buy a car (or crate my own with my labor), only the ownership raw materials make the effort of buying (or creating) your own car harder. But the whole non-scrap value of the car is not. If I paint a painting so good than many people find it valuable, I created the value from nothing using only raw materials worth only cents. Nothing prevents you from using your brain and skills to create something valuable on your own.
Most of the things people own (with the exception of real estate that Georgists single out) have this non-exclusive part of the value as the main component. Owning that is not "psychopathic" at all.
The Georgists solution was to tax the rent value of owning these natural resources. And getting rid of most (if not all) other taxes.
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No, because having without owning is something I already experience in live service games and software and it is decidedly not pleasant.
If you've ever heard the slogan 'you will own nothing and you will be happy', perhaps - I'm assuming on your part - that sounds pretty good. But there is a great majority of people who will react to that with complete revulsion, and on further thinking about it, will want nothing to do with your anarchist deconstruction of ownership (and call the police on you if you persist.)
A billionaire can have a lot of stuff. Is he depriving me of stuff because of inequality? Only in a ethos that supposes equal distribution. But I don't want his stuff: I want my stuff. And the system that protects his stuff from arbitrary seizure is the same as mine. Overall, property as a concept is worth its tradeoffs. Inequality that emerges from a differential of effort is good. Others, not so much. The slice I would get from redistribution is smaller from the peace of mind knowing that my stuff won't be messed with.
You may not like this logic, you may even have arguments that rebut it: but this is how the majority of the people in the world think.
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The a definition that has stuck with me is: "property is peace." Land, houses, real goods, etc, all have the fundamental attribute that they are at least partially or wholly rivalorous. This is a law from nature or nature's God, not from man. Either my cattle can graze the land or your cattle can. Either I can eat the cattle or you can. Either my family can live in a certain house or your family can. A property right, ie ownership, therefore, is a public declaration that a certain person or organization has the right to determine how that property is used (subject to certain restrictions of course). They may of course choose to share it. It may even be assigned to an organization that has a charter and rules about how to share the property. It's ironic that you say capitalism doesn't understand "sharing" when one of the fundamental inventions that separated capitalism from fuedalism was the idea of a joint-stock corporation and the idea of splitting up "shares" in a company. A corporation is highly structured sharing. The alternative to assigning a public property right, is friction and squabbling and overuse at best, and war at the worst. The origin of all property rights are either squatters rights, adverse possession, or most commonly, a peace treaty after a war. To say that someone's property right is illegitimate is to say, I no longer accept the terms of the peace, I am trying to rile people up for extra-legal action and/or war.
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Freeing oneself from old paradigms can be a very noble effort. Capitalism, Communism, Economics, Rights... These concepts, along with many others, have in many cases done discourse more harm than good. But it is easier said than done to get past them.
I appreciate the argumentative nature of your post. It certainly fuels discussion. I do however think it is marred by the fact that it tethers itself to a few poor concepts. To that end I'm not sure if it is conducive to your goal of brainstorming alternatives to ownership, as you've seemingly managed to push a lot of people into old 'capitalism vs communism' trenches. And, as we can see, many people here will jump at any opportunity to brandish old bayonets, if only to see if they are still sharp.
To chime in I'd ask you, as I've seen you post about your 'personal riches' in a comment: Can you, in some sense, hold 'ownership' over your family? I for one would look at myself as having a certain duty towards my family members. But I also see there being a certain kind of possessive nature to these relationships. Is there some way you would broach this topic?
As for inanimate objects in general, the old Venus Project line came to the conclusion that human society was on the cusp of post scarcity, and that the main problem was organization and distribution. Is that close to an alternative to ownership in your mind or are you looking further afield?
My personal caveat, and where I diverge from Jacque Fresco and friends, would be that I'm very partial to the notion that our 'possessive nature' is very much innate, along with a lot of other things. To that end I find imagining a society, even a post scarcity one, that doesn't have a problem with emergent hierarchies based on other peoples possessions to be very difficult.
I mean, figuratively, what are you to do when your boys go out into the woods and one finds a cool stick, and the other can't find one that looks as good and becomes jealous? Instigating a search for some sort of final solution to this sort of problem seems odd to me. Rather I'd say that encountering this problem is a part of being a child and a parent. Both have a duty to ameliorate the situation, but both are also saddled with their emotions and competence, or lack thereof. Parents usually demand one son suffer. Be that to be forced to share or be that to settle for whatever less cool stick they can find, as the forest is full of them.
To that end I'm not sure if the question can be answered in any meaningful sense. Take the low road and side with either boy. Keeping the stick, if you have it, seems emotionally straightforward for one boy. Demanding it, by the same token, being emotionally straightforward for the other. Or assume the role of a parent and find some kind of answer on the high road. Which is where I'd ask for your take.
It would also be dangerous even in a post scarcity society, since we are not the only sapient beings in existence and the other sapient beings are unlikely to have that attitude to property.
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I'll admit, I did a bit of digging and found the ReLOVEution manifesto (You might want to work on the name, the first few web hits are for a clothing brand). The philosopher who kept recurring to me while reading your text was, of all people, Mozi. I mean, love is in the name, and universal love is his catchphrase. Obviously you guys diverge in practice and application, he was more concerned with the exorbitant cost ritual was imposing on the people and the state, but on the low you guys are coming from the same place: love as the solution to our tumultuous relationship with capital.
How does your universal love work in our factionalized world? I'm doubtful that my love is identical to that of someone in sub-saharan africa, just as his is different from someone in japan. How are we meant to square these conflicting desires? Also, how does universal love replace our existing system? How does empathy for others organize people to build spaceships or even just work long, hot hours harvesting food in the central valley?
I'm guessing you would reject the label of someone rejecting capitalism because that implies your idea would still reside in the greater system of ownership. I do really appreciate your highly unorthodox ideas and would love to engage further.
Overtime comment: Your post reminded me of this comic book in my middleschool that claimed to be a documentation of the development of civilization; one of the opening panels was the invention of the concept of property (via a fertile crescent subsistence farmer locking his wife in his house)
That piece of work is now 10 years old. I've changed much since then. Much more depth and far more confidence (which some take as belligerence!) You can imagine what it's taken for a guy who used to doubt his own intentions because others didn't fully validate them to tackle these things single-handed aside from some friendly "I get ya bro!" support. In the early days I was afraid I was headed towards losing my sanity, but when everything you see and understand diverges from the mainstream, and the mainstream has no sensible explanations, ya just gotta follow that little bouncy bunny tail of truth that no one you know of has ever refuted. So, yeah, I've still got oodles of work ahead of me. Working on my book, now: Law Itself Is the Violation. Side project: Truth and the Dishonesties of Belief. Lots more where they came from. I only wish I had the stamina and energy I did 20 years ago...
You're right on to see I'm coming from a place of love -- but it's not what you might think. It's not a moral or religious impetus, but my growing, evidenced conviction that the psychology of trust, love, mutualism, communality, cooperation, etc., are fundamental to our wiring, the result of millions of years of Homo evolutionary survival, and that virtually all the ideas we've had about "human nature" have been sourced from abused, traumatized, stress-damaged, cultified human nature, not human nature as it is prior to being compromised. If the only specimens you ever examine have lived lifetimes in sewage-fouled waters, you're gonna come to the conclusion that the whole species stinks, even that it's part of their "nature". Big mistake.
In fact, I don't promote "universal love" itself. And true, there are important variations in different people's experiences and expressions of love -- but it's about as significant, I'd say, as the fact that there are many flavors of ice cream -- not so different that we'd make the mistake of saying that the strawberry kind isn't ice cream merely because we grew up eating the chocolate kind. Our psychological similarities outweigh our significant differences by far.
I promote unapologetic, blunt, uncompromising honesty. Because of how we're wired, the only way to avoid love is to lie, deceive, delude and self-delude. Simply by committing to unflinching honesty, especially the kind and to the degree that scares us, creates feedback loops that inexorably tend towards recognition, familiarity, understanding, rapport, sympathy, empathy, and finally, love. There is only one response, ultimately, to seeing another person as they truly are in all the clarity of their preciousness, and that's to love them -- not really any different than beholding a masterpiece of art that really gets to us, resulting in a lifelong attachment to it and appreciation of it in the deepest sense of that word. As a result, I see both lies and bullshit (ala Harry Frankfurt) as the prime enemies of humanity, and I have a special interest and passion in obliterating them.
How does universal love replace our existing system? Emergently, stigmergically, through interpersonal attachment, person-to-person, along with enough intelligence to realize that human affairs that reach beyond the scope of our personal limits of awareness, attention, and empathy must be facilitated in ways that support and enable and align with the patterns of our ground-level, heart-to-heart humanness. What we have right now are antagonistic, adversarial systems designed to exploit our humanness. Short answer: honesty will blow the purple haze away and, seeing what's actually there and how it actually works, our humanness will ensure we separate wheat from chaff and find ways to properly, beneficially share the wheat.
You're right on about rejecting capitalism. I've actually come to reject -isms per se, because they're abstractions -- as are laws and moral codes and religious norms/commands, along with every other rules-based construct. We simply do not live on that abstract level -- not authentically, at least -- and imposing those abstractions on us is life-threatening, especially emotionally and motivationally. Huge psychological damage across the board and, in turn, relational damage.
Thanks for expressing your appreciation! I rarely get that. I'd love to engage further!
Interesting on that comic! I've dug for an explanation of where it all went wrong and came up empty, until several months ago -- an eventual result, as I can see now, of reading Graeber/Wengrow's book The Dawn of Everything a couple of years ago. What if the authoritarian supremacism which is foundational to everything we've ever called "civilization" turns out to be the simple, rather mundane result of a kind of severe cabin fever induced by taking wild, free humans built to roam and explore and imprisoning them in relatively cramped, stationary, bounded spaces under the "rule" of despots and their laws? I know it was making me crazy, at least. That's why I left the States for a little cabin on a hillside in central Mexico. I saw a video of Roald Dahl today, talking about writing. He writes in a little hut out back. Says he hasn't swept the floor for probably the last five years, and that was only because critters got in and pooped everywhere, LOL! Goes in, settles in, and 4-5 hours later emerges again, having been lost to the world. Yeah, Roald and me da same -- except I do sweep more than just every five years. 😁
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doubt
doubt
I for one do not welcome our robot overlords.
Okay, reading everything you have posted so far, I think you are using ChatGPT to generate some or all of your posts, and what isn't coming from ChatGPT seems to be mostly snarky, condescending, and belligerent. Or maybe that's ChatGPT too.
You have a steep hill to climb very quickly: convince me otherwise or I am going to suggest to the other mods that we just start banning with prejudice anyone who looks like "Har-de-har let's unleash ChatGPT on the Motte with a random hot take it can defend to the death."
Why do you think his post is AI generated? It doesn't have the hallmarks I'd normally look for, and I put his text through 3 ChatGPT detectors and they all came back with 0% match.
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You might be surprised how well formed an idea can be if you work on it together with an AI. Feeding it data, having it search, etc. Obviously you can’t just copy paste but it’s an art form. >How I learned to love slop.
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I tend to avoid people who make crap up and pretend it's got anything to do with the facts. Opine on your judgment of the quality or snarkiness of what I say, speculate all you like about its origins, it's got nothing to do with the ideas I presented. It's just another kind of rank-pulling diversion to avoid engaging with the ideas.
FYI, the ONLY things I use ChatGPT or any other AI to do are to fact-check, criticize and stress test my ideas, and perform gap analysis. No, I don't get my ideas from an AI. I got them from living, engaging with life and people, research, study, and experimentation. I included that screenshot because I was surprised to get agreement on the first pass. It usually takes multiple rounds of debunking its (all the other AIs') misreads, unwarranted inferences, just plain dumb illogic, etc., before we get down to the crux of it. I wasn't just surprised that it hit principled deprivation on the nose, but by how it presented it -- like an uh-duhr, everyone knows this.
I don't have to convince you of anything. I'll refrain from sharing anything AI-related since it seems to get your goat. I've been actively writing about these things since 2009. Care to check it out? I'll give you links if you're interested. Characterize my post and comments as "Har-de-har let's unleash ChatGPT on the Motte..." all you like. It's your figment, not mine, and it's wildly wide of the mark. Plus, it FAILS to engage with the thinking, whatever its origin.
Well, since you're new to the Motte, let me explain a few things to you.
I am not engaging with your ideas at all. I do not particularly care about your ideas. I'm a moderator here whose job is to keep the conversations civil and in accordance with our rules.
If you did not use an LLM, I apologize. The flood of LLM posts lately is probably making us a bit paranoid, and I will admit to scoring a false positive now and then.
That said, you're still being condescending and belligerent to a lot of people who are arguing with you. You need to stop that.
I'm not condescending to anyone, not intentionally at least. Nor belligerent. If someone talks like they know when they couldn't possibly know -- like making things up as they go along and presenting them as fact, aka bullshit, I'm frank about calling it out for what it is. Please give me a couple of specific examples that you consider to be such. I can't stop what I don't know I'm doing -- or meet expectations based on mistaken impressions of what I'm doing. I'm direct, explicit, and honest. Does that come across as condescending and belligerent to you?
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I think this guy might be for real.
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There isn't one. Well, technically, there is- central planning technically 'works' despite being shitty- but for all the effort people- and not dumb people at that- put into finding alternatives to private property they have consistently failed.
It's not that making mistakes with economic policy is bad(although it is). It's that the mistake has already been made and the results were bad.
No, there most definitely is one, and you're likely well familiar with it. Compartmentalization keeps it from occurring to you in this context.
Care to explain it?
I'm more interested in seeing how people deal with it (or avoid dealing with it, as the case may be). But let's try a collaboration. When I look for alternatives, I go for the jugular and think of as opposite as I can imagine. What's the opposite of deprivation?
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Speaking historically, property rights emerge most primitively, naturally, and originally from the simple fact that no two plots of farming land will produce the same. These differences compound over generations. There's also a human emotional component that things you view as "yours" naturally receive more full effort in cultivating. If you stack on top of that how craft specialization emerges in societies with surplus agriculture, the fundamental ideas of property already emerge, zero capitalism required.
You might find it interesting to peruse this list of human universals, where I will begrudgingly accept that anthropologists have assembled something useful. These are traits that exist in literally every single known human society. Not some, ALL. You might observe a few relevant entries: property, preference for own children and close kin, inheritance rules, economic inequalities, division of labor, envy, symbolic means of coping with envy, trade, males more likely to engage in theft, reciprocal exchanges, and gift giving, just to name a few. You may notice that many of these (aside from obviously "property" already being its own entry) presume that property is a real human thing. Yes, that means in literally all of human history, we haven't found a single society that doesn't have the concept of property. I'd argue ownership is similar enough to be near identical.
Edit: In light of your comments below pointing out that just because something is natural or even universal doesn't make it good, sure, that's true. But the approach needs to differ. If something is truly universal, the best we can do is mitigation! Not abolition. We cannot abolish war, it is not human. We can however mitigate their frequency, severity, and impact.
What you are trying to do is completely replace something that fundamentally cannot be altered. As such, you're philosophically barking up the wrong tree altogether. And we already have a word for the societal negotiation of laws governing how to mitigate the bad effects of property being a thing. It's called politics. You cannot escape politics.
Well, that's speaking "historically" for the last 10-15K years out of the currently estimated 2.8 million years that the Homo genus has been extant. You know what that's called? A statistically negligible data sample.
The "list of human universals" is changing radically, thanks to the archaeology of the last 50 years, especially the last 15-20 years. I'll let you review your list to see how out of date it now is. Anyone interested in the nature and history of our species and its immediate predecessors really should read Graeber/Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything. Anthropology is in the beginning of a 180 away from the thinking of prior centuries.
Hearsay, speculation, and superstition, man. Dogma, more like. There has been no serious academic work that has established any of that. And again, ALL of our extant thinking rests on less than 10-15K years' worth of information. That's like trying to navigate the Titanic looking through a hole where one of the rivets popped out.
Wrong. Baseless. And I've already "escaped" lol. Already done.
Well, some of the oldest deliberate burials we know of (predating civilization) in the IIRC 100k-30k range had bodies that were accompanied by tools. If the concept of ownership were not in effect, burying a perfectly good tool with the dead would not be a thing at all… if we are talking longer than that, it seems reasonable to extrapolate modern human behavior backwards rather than desperately grasp at other animal analogies or something.
Even with our narrow look into mostly civilizational era human behavior, the sheer exponential explosion in human accomplishment, society, potential, and complexity makes comparisons to ill defined pre historic eras somewhat useless. Especially when examining modern human constructs. Scoping in the entire homo genus to talk about problems unique to the last few thousand years seems bonkers. Historians first think property rights and inheritance showed up in the village to town transition in the 5500-3500 BC range, at least per my notes from class with an actual professor, though possibly earlier when we start seeing agrarian-urban centers show up maybe 11k-1500 BC in different spots.
All of this to say that the burden of proof is in your court! For example, you’d be hard pressed to find notable eras of history without war. Unless we somehow missed some awesome society somewhere as a major proof of concept that war-free life can be possible, war seems like a reasonable default.
On a more personal note, I am Mormon. According to the Book of Mormon, after Jesus’ personal visit to a group in the Americas, there was actually peace for about two or three generations, at least so the story goes, and came alongside people having all possessions in common. This implies to me, which is also visible in society at large even without a spiritual outlook, that while humanity is its current ‘sinful’ self, a true no-property society is impossible, or at least there is a natural hard limit to how long society can go without war and major contention. People are jerks too often for that. Early in our church’s history, we even tried a version of this a few times, and it worked OK for a while but eventually broke down. An ideal heavenly society though? You are absolutely correct. No ownership is absolutely a thing. It’s just not currently feasible nor sustainable.
You might however find some accounts of our church’s attempts (there were several) at changing the paradigm interesting. Basically, everything would get signed over to the local bishop, who would then re-distribute first needs, then wants equally. You might find Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation among the Mormons" by Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean L. May an interesting read.
A common speculation is that the tools were buried because the dead person would need them in the afterlife. That doesn't require that the person had owned the tool in life.
Conversely, even if the dead person had owned it, why bury the tool when the living inheritor could use it?
Because it didn't belong to their heir and they had a strong sense of ownership!
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There are many kinds of attachment. It's normal and natural to develop attachments to things, places, ideas, etc. Children are much less than 2-y-o when they first start attaching to objects, even before they can say, "Mine!" And for the most part, early attachment isn't so much to the thing itself, but to the activity they were engaged in with the thing. Without the thing they can't do the activity. Direct attachment to objects comes a bit later, and you can see it in their eyes and in the fact that they'll hug the thing. Not all forms of attachment are the same, and none of them constitute ownership -- because ownership is a legal right and a legal status that has little to nothing to do with attachment or lack of it.
So, nothing stops us from characterizing attachment as "ownership", but that's just a way of talking about it which, strictly speaking, misrepresents the attachment.
Again, I'll caution you like I've mentioned a few times elsewhere, you can't base confident claims on statistically negligible data samples. 10 - 15K years of authoritarian supremacism and the practice of "ownership" does not define a species that's been extant for at least 300 - 400K years (and now some are suggesting far longer than that,) nor a genus that consensus says has been around for a few million. I'm not sure what, "Scoping in the entire homo genus to talk about problems unique to the last few thousand years seems bonkers," means, and I'm not sure what I've said implies that, whatever it means, but I am sure that you can't cast claims across millions of years of evolution that you've gleaned from looking at just the last few thousand. I bring that up in response to the argument form that we've "always" done it that way (ignoring that thousands of years don't constitute "always") so there's no way, no how that we could diverge radically from what we've "always done". And that's not even to touch on the fact that all but a minuscule few of human beings have lived those few thousand years in distress, fear, oppression, and severe lack. Generational trauma is now recognized by many. What kind of millennial trauma has resulted from the evils of civilization? So, besides being an extremely small sample, it's also heavily tainted. We've got no clue what wild, free, mobile humanity was like. We did a couple hundred years ago, but "nomadic peoples" were viewed with disdain and bias as "uncivilized", so despite what was done to observe them externally, little was done to understand them. For the most part, Euro-Americans were only interested in what they could extort and, eventually, how to get rid of them.
There is no burden of proof here, because I've made no argument. Just food for thought, a super-brief orientation to my perspective, and an invitation to explore. You're treating that as an argument, though. It's not.
I was a Christian for 22 years and have deeply studied the thinking both during that time and in the 30+ years since. No supremacist, authoritarian religion -- Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Mormonism, and plenty besides -- has any hope of improving things, because supremacism and authoritarianism are inherent to the deprivational approach, and those operations would cease to exist as religions if supremacism and authoritarianism were eliminated from them.
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This is ass-backwards.
The definition your chatbot put out may serve your position, but it's clearly not standard and obviously not how ownership normally works. Which is this: Ownership is the right to not be deprived. I.e., the opposite of what you posit.
Do I deprive you of my car? Does my mother-in-law deprive you of the vegetables she grows in her garden? Does my landlord deprive me of the apartment I rent? Do I deprive my employer of the wages I earn? Does a customer deprive a store of the products he buys? Does a hunter-gatherer in a jungle at the other end of the world deprive me of some berries and a squirrel? Do you deprive me of the device you use to post here?
You can argue that any of those statements are true, or come up with some other semantic acrobatics, but in the end it's transparently extremely motivated reasoning.
I normally advise any would-be revolutionary to first understand why the world works the way it does before they waste everyone's time by implementing some half-cocked utopia that's made of fairy dust and ignorance. But posts like this are the opposite of understanding. It's wilful nonsense.
There can be arguments for alternate economic systems, but positing a useless definition of ownership isn't making any of them.
I like people who try flipping tables. Sometimes it has remarkable results. However, your chronology is backwards. At the point where ownership is established, there is no opportunity for anyone to deprive the owner -- at least for the short time during which no one is yet aware they own the article. Ownership establishes the right of global deprivation of every other human being on the planet of the owned article. That's its genesis. That must be in place before deprivation of the article from the owner even becomes a rational question.
Here's a point on which you're confused. Ownership is not the act of depriving. It's the legal right to deprive at will anyone, at any time or place. Again, the right precedes and justifies whatever action the owner wants to take. So, in answer to all those questions, for every single one, you have the right to deprive anyone you choose from access, use, "enjoyment of", benefit from the article, even if it would be judged immoral and causes great harm. No, having the right is not the same as exercising it, nor is there any requirement on an owner to exercise their right of deprivation. The owner can give the article away, share it, rent it, loan it, etc. So, those questions are actually irrelevant to question of whether the right of principled deprivation constitutes ownership.
LMAO! Don't confuse your lack of clear thinking as lack of real experience in the real world on my part, especially since you don't know diddly about me.
You can only deprive someone of something if it was in some sense theirs to use in the first place. You're operating under this unstated assumption--that everyone naturally has rights to everything, and ownership actively deprives others of those rights.
The exact opposite is more accurate. Only the owner has the right to their stuff in the first place.
Let's take another example. I own my body. I have the right to do lots of things with it. Barring exceptional circumstances, nobody has the right to do anything to my body. Does this ownership mean I'm actively depriving others of their rights to do what they will with my body? No, that's absurd. They simply didn't have those rights to begin with.
Yes, I have the right to engage in self-defense when someone threatens my rights, but that doesn't mean I'm depriving them of their rights to my body--because those rights don't exist. The right to bodily autonomy, and the right to defend the right to bodily autonomy, are two separate things, and you're getting them mixed up. Just because ownership entails the right to defend your property doesn't mean that that is all that ownership is. In fact I'd argue that that "right to defense" is fundamental to all legal rights. If you can't enforce a legal right, it's not a legal right in the first place.
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Ownership is the right to deprive another of his own property. For example your mother in law has the right to beat you with her cane for pilfering from her garden. She probably won't, but it wouldn't be unjust. A primitive in New Guinea has the right to shoot you with a bow and arrow for trying to eat his pig- again, he probably won't(mostly because you are unlikely to try to eat his pig) but it would be just if he did.
What a backwards definition.
Given a garden, the right to pilfer isn't automatically granted to everyone. When I buy a garden, you're trying to apply extremely circuitous logic to say that I'm "buying the right to deprive others the right to pilfer this garden." No, I'm just buying the right to pilfer it myself. Nobody else had that right in the first place.
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Sure, but that doesn't a priori mean it's a bad idea. A lot of the most useful things in rationalism involve taking a normal word, and making a better, non-standard definition that fits better to a coherent concept (e.g. "belief" is just a predictive model of the world)
Yes, to all of the above. Not just if we assume OP's worldview, but just in the normal sense of the word - all of these are examples of OP (and me) being deprived of something.
But, under the way the world currently works, these are all things that the respective parties are allowed to deprive OP of.
I think OP is wrong in wanting to change the system, and also in describing the right to deprive others as the "essential" part of the concept of ownership. But he is right that ownership of X is fully encapsulated by the notion of "having the right to not let others use X".
I just think this falls under the general pattern where people attempt to pathologise normal, functional things by "deconstructing" them and describing them in bizarre, but technically accurate ways ("marriage is a way for a man to control a woman's body", "capitalism is a system where billionaires spend millions on yachts whilst homeless people freeze to death on the streets", "we live in a Eurocentric, cisheteronormative society", "jail is society locking human beings up in cages")
"Being deprived of" implies that something is actively being taken away. This is not the case--you never had access or rights to those things in the first place. If I were to hand you the keys to my car tomorrow, would you say I had given you my car, or that I had "ceased depriving you" of my car?
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An alternative is unlikely unless we solve scarcity emotions using technology and/or massive shock-driven consciousness changes like in Star Trek (hyper-advanced tech and WW3). Basic mammal nature in the presence of scarcity is to priviledge oneself, one's family, and one's friends over others. This usually only fails to hold true in the presence of extremely powerful emotional ideological or political forces like nationalism (where one emotionally feels like the entire nation is one's family) or political authoritarianism (where you are forced to fight for the government because they will hurt you and maybe your loved ones if you don't). And those have their own negative consequences.
Communism could work if we were all near-constantly on an MDMA trip type of immediate feelings of love, but I'm not sure that the average human is even physically capable of being like that without some of the hardware burning out. Some spiritual teachers have claimed that they have gotten there without drugs, but whether or not they are telling the truth, the fact is that clearly even if they did reach it, they have consistently failed to teach that state to anything more than a tiny fraction of the human population. Although I will say that, even by trying, they have probably helped humanity. Modern Western morality is much better than the morality of 2000 years ago, which was basically "tough shit if you're poor or crucified, I guess the gods don't like you lol".
All that said, I do find it funny that most modern proponents of meritocracy do not challenge what is probably the biggest modern source of un-meritocracy in the West, which is inheritance. Even the most wild-eyed free market libertarian who advocates for pure meritocracy typically does not call for all humans to be put on a truly level playing field, which could only be done by forbidding parents to pass on their wealth to their children. And the truth is that, whatever you think about passing on wealth to children, all meritocratic ideologies that accept inheritance are at best just nipping around the edges, and not addressing the biggest un-meritocratic phenomenon in the whole human world.
In the UK we have inheritance tax at 40% and the Left is indeed hugely against inheritance. The main reason people hate it is because it double-dips: you get taxed when you earn money and you get taxed again on the same money when you pass it to your children. VAT also double-dips of course but it's smaller and built into the price so people don't notice, whereas inheritance tax hits you with a huge bill plus interest when you're grieving the loss of a parent.
People work hard to try and pass on as much as they can before inheritance tax kicks in.
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I agree we need to solve scarcity emotions. In broader terms, we need to teach kids to mature out of infantilism, and we need to teach codependent adults to deprogram, relearn, and develop/mature into fully functional adults. Tech can help if used helpfully, but it's not required. The process is the same as coming out of a cult and taking back on the responsibilities of adulthood.
LOL, love it! Yeah, good feels can do what mountains of argument can't even touch. But communism? No. No way of thinking about these things that prioritizes material stuff first and higher over the far more important things and issues like every living being, their preciousness and integrity, intangibles (except you can feel them) like love and practices like honesty and collective experiences like peace, safety, freedom, and a bunch beside is ever going to "fix" anything or escape the vicious cycles.
Really good point about inheritance.
I see nothing about an alternative to the principled deprivation of ownership tho.
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Negative for what?
'Work' in what sense? I don't think that most if any of the problems with communism resolve to 'people don't care about each other enough'.
Probably going to need to define 'meritocracy' here because this doesn't make sense to me. Under that rubric, surely an even greater source of 'un-meritocracy' is allowing parents to even raise their own children? We'd all be on a much more 'level playing field' if children were taken at birth -- or, better yet, cloned en masse under expert supervision (some moms drink after all) -- and raised in batches by the state.
What sort of 'merit' are you trying to select for?
Anyway, I think the children of the rich are in aggregate substantially genetically different from the children of the poor and the two serve different functions in the societal organism. It's good for more-capable people to receive more resources, as this allows them to more fully develop their potentials, which benefits us all. Why we would want to change that, I do not know. It could certainly be improved, but I think we're much more likely to break important things in the process of attempting that, and it's still not clear to me what it is you'd be trying to accomplish in the first place.
'Meritocracy' as I understand the concept means that the more-fit are more likely to end up in positions capable of making use of their virtues, not that everyone gets an equal chance, which is an incoherent idea to begin with. What would that even mean? And why would it be a good thing?
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I do agree, in theory, that inheritance tax should be 100% - a dead man’s belongings is a far more legitimate source of funding for the state than a man’s salary. My dad’s money is not really my money, while my salary, or my stock gains, are. But I worry about the distortion – of course most people would then spend wildly and die with nothing, and nothing would be gained.
OP, you know, we have places for people like you. Communes. Go there and share, show up all the psycho squares. Jokes aside, I really think you should, it’s the nicest, most cooperative, failsafe, beneficial way to determine who’s right. Can’t break anything (except dreams) and it’s a fun adventure.
Money is just a way to affect the world. Taxation is fractional slavery--the government is confiscating some of our power and using it to serve its own ends.
No, your dad's money is not really yours--it's his, and he's choosing to give it to you. He's decided to exercise his power that way rather than some other, shorter-term way. Why should the government have any more right to confiscate money intended for this purpose than money intended for any other purpose?
Because he’s dead, for one. A man’s right to dispose of his money as he pleases considerably diminishes with his passing. I don't consider a corpse an equal citizen.
Then, it’s more of a value thing, but I think a man should pay his own way. Not rely on handouts, be they from the state or his family. I think this is good, results in a more productive & happy society. I’m more of a minarchist than a social democrat, however even I find inherited wealth inequality unfair. Heirs give wealth a bad name. The populace would be less supportive of high taxes if that contingent was reduced to zero.
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I do not support pure meritocracy or communism :) I am just pointing out a very common blind spot in many meritocracy supporters' views.
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This is because we don't want to optimize for consumption, production, or accumulation within single human lifespans. Not for nothing do we have the proverb: “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
I understand your logic and I think it has a lot of truth to it but that said, I still find it silly when people talk about how we should have more meritocracy but do not want to address the fact that some people are born with 1000 times more resources than others.
That is not the true objection of those who do talk about that, considering they do not sing the praises of billionaire orphans and refugees, but rather want to take from them more than they want to take from a dissolute trust-fund kid.
Well sure, but that's not me and my point. That's those other people. I'm not claiming that taking all of the billionaires' wealth would improve society, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't unless it was done in some completely unrealistic sci-fi fantasy way, I'm just dunking on people who claim to be all about meritocracy while ignoring inheritance.
I view inheritance as part of meritocracy. If you have an inheritance, excluding adoptees, chances are high that your parents are some variety of high-quality stock and you will be too. If you, the inheritor, are not well adapted to present conditions then you’ll lose all the money and it makes its way to everyone else anyways.
I consider that there would actually be a lot more meritocracy if there was an effective way to keep coffin-dodgers from spending down most of their children’s inheritance just to hang on to another 4 or 5 years of rapidly decreasing life value. I also reserve blame about this for descendants who are unwilling to just let Mom and Pop die with some dignity.
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Ownership exists because many (most?) things are rivalrous - if I have it, you can't, and vice versa - and finite. Even things which are not rivalrous or finite are generally produced with such things (e.g. software may be functionally free to reproduce, but producing it in the first place took real labor effort and material resources). Different ownership schemes are different ways of determining who gets to decide to use/have/dispose of various rivalrous things.
You can't escape from this. A communal ownership arrangement is still an ownership arrangement. If the question is "why private property?" the short answer is that private property with regulation has so far proven to be preferable to alternatives in most cases.
This is a word game, intent on framing things as negatively as possible by drawing a dubious analogy. There's a fair point about how original title is often rooted in a claim asserted by violence, but there's an equally fair counterpoint of "so what are we going to do about it?" Someone is getting final say over the disposition of stuff. That's not a distinctive feature of capitalism - the State (or Community or whatever entity you imagine) asserting their right to dispose of resources is no less arbitrary - so the real question is what gets us the best outcomes (or at least better outcomes)?
I call it adversariality. It's a mental pathology, and a lot of people can't manage to think about things in any other way. To them, it's not "realistic". Well, that just shows the narrowness and lacks in their experience. Love and mutualism and cooperation are very real, and over the span of homo sapiens' history, it's by far the majority report. Even these last 10-15K years, although our "history" gives the opposite impression, quantitatively, the vast majority of human experience in person-hours has been at least mutualistic and cooperative, if not friendly, if not loving.
Your last paragraph is a characterization that does not engage with the idea. It's a tactic. You made a couple of fair points, but nothing that detracts from the obvious parallels.
Yes, the real question is what gets/gives us the best outcomes. How are you going to determine that without trying alternatives? And how are you going to try alternatives when a guy can't even get you to explore them?
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One reason to enforce property ownership of things is to incentivize people to create or improve things. This seems to have mostly worked.
The natural follow-up is, if we made children perpetual slaves of their parents, would that increase the fertility rate and/or the quality of the average person? Why or why not?
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The Mayflower pilgrims tried first to build a collectivist society. “Their ideal was the communism found in Plato’s Republic. All would work and share in common, knowing neither private property nor self-interested acquisitiveness.”
It was a disaster, a death spiral into low productivity and social conflict, which could only be remedied through the reinstatement of private farms, which egoistic incentives caused hard work which produced a bountiful harvest:
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-pilgrims-tried-socialism-and-it-failed/
Yes, but don't make the silly error of thinking that one or many failures establish "impossibility". The very things we pride ourselves on now, especially science and tech wise, were at some time considered by the majority or even universally as "impossible", and most of them as "ridiculous". Besides, have you every tried to relate to a Puritan? Alternatives to ownership will never work if implemented by supremacists. The first requirement is peerness -- the commitment to deal with each other on level standing, the simplest, most basic form of fairness and mutual respect I can think of.
I suppose I should make this a hypothetical, just to be clear it is a statement of an idea and not hostile.
You meet a person, and in response to your statement they say the following.
“Okay, but I’m not interested in granting you peerness. You are not my peer. I am not interested in dealing with you on level standing. I am not interested in extending to you fairness or mutual respect. I want everything you have because I think I will use it better.”
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"I just declared 10000 years of humans are all dumbasses and couldn't see obvious problems that I could see in ten minutes. Who is with me to spend the next ten minutes figuring out how to manage the affairs of humankind correctly? It can't be that hard..."
Sorry, not my cup of tea. Feel free though.
Don’t paraphrase unflatteringly.
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LMAO! No one's twisting your arm, dude. But just FYI, more like 15 years of research, study, analysis, and debunking has shown that 10K years (a mere blip in the history of humankind) is full of shit.
If you have to not only straw man an issue, but belittle it, you just unwittingly hoisted a white flag thinking it's your banner.
I do feel free, btw. 😁
For some movements, one has no need to mount opposition, as the movement is self-defeating.
You will not succeed in brainstorming a novel, viable alternative to ownership. You might learn something from the exercise, though, so have at it.
This comment was filtered for me, FYI.
emptied the filter, thanks.
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Can you put a little more effort into formulating your point here? This really just seems like a bunch of Russel conjugations. You take issue with the concept of ownership and then go on to describe consequences of this concept in unflattering terms. Ownership is a useful concept for many reasons, principally because it solves tragedy of the commons problems once society scales up enough that free riding becomes a problem. You really need to propose an alternative to ownership as a concept and not just leave it hanging out there if you want this to go anywhere. It's very difficult to actually build any organization without the concept of ownership without it being incredibly brittle. Not just in the case of physical goods but ownership in decision making.
Sure I can put more effort into it. I just wasn't interested in wasting my time writing a tome if all I was going to get (as usually happens) are snide responses like JarJarJedi's (above).
What points do you need clarification/elaboration on?
My point at this point, which I think is quite clear, is that ownership is essentially and definitionally the right to deprive others. That's it. I don't like that. In fact, I detest it with passion and rage. I hate it. So, I want an alternative.
In fact, the alternative is sticking us in the nose, which makes the fact that most people act clueless about it (whether they are or not) all the more ironic. One minute (not 10, JarJarJedi) is all it would take for a relatively intelligent person doing nothing more than looking for the logical compliment to deprivation to realize what a very familiar alternative is.
I really don't care how thousands of years of use has convinced us that ownership is useful or what "problems" it "solves" -- problems conceived of in the same paradigm where ownership was conceived, characterized by thousands of years of staunch neglect and refusal that it's all about deprivation. "Usefulness" is beside the point. War is universally considered useful, too. How is that relevant to the fact that it's obscene, horrific, and destructive?
Have you ever considered the fact that ownership is the right to deprive? You might spend a little time ruminating on that.
"You really need to proposal and alternative to ownership as a concept and not just leave it hanging out there..." Oh, really? No, not at all. How does the fact that there aren't enough lifeboats on the Titanic we're sailing, or the fact that I can't tell you where there's one with room for you, have any bearing on the fact that the ship is going under? No one owes you a solution. Are you just going to stand there until someone gives you directions or leads you by the hand? It's up to you if you want to use that as an excuse to refuse considering facts that are right all our faces.
I agree, it's difficult to build anything without using a central concept that we've been indoctrinated with from birth and never thought beyond. Just like it's difficult for cultists to take their minds outside their cult paradigms and think about things from different angles.
Regardless, none of the practical considerations you brought up have any bearing on the clear point: ownership is right to deprive. What do you think about that fact? What could possibly be an alternative to predicating entire societies on the principle of deprivation? No idea?
What's your address? I'm coming over to drink all your beer.
Sorry to be flippant but I don't think you actually 'don't like that'. I think you don't like some people having more than you think they should, maybe a certain category of good that you think should be the commons in all cases. You can make an argument for, eg, right-to-roam laws on privately owned wilderness land without trying to abolish the concept of trespassing entirely.
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This is why proposing an alternative is important. Because I really don't think you can have a system free of deprivation. For any finite item, say my nail gun, its use necessitates depriving someone else of its use at lest for the duration of its use. You can certainly create systems that minimize deprivation but its existence is a brute fact of the universe. And I'd go so far as to argue that our systems of free exchange and property rights actually does a pretty good job of minimizing deprivation in practice through enabling growth.
I'm afraid it is not sticking me in particular in the nose and would appreciate a more explicit spelling it out. If you want to say communism or whatever you can just come out and say it. We entertain much more fringe positions here from time to time even if there are those who jeer rightly or wrongly you'll usually find some interlocutors willing to approach in good faith so long as you're clear and not too unpleasant about it.
This is a really unsatisfying answer to people who have to actually live in any of these proposed worlds. It actually matters quite a bit if you don't have an alternative because we rely on ownership as a foundation to this very complex world full of wonders that we have built.
Yes, I have thought quite a bit about this kind of thing. My conclusion is that the ability to deprive is probably necessary for any social system that scales past around the Dunbar number and depending on how you operationalize "deprive" maybe far below that number.
I don't see us to be sinking in any meaningful way. Society is more prosperous than any time in history. So yes, I will need some kind of assurance that your plan to meddle with these fundamental axioms of society isn't going to be really really terrible before I sign on. It could be like slavery where we really are better off with it. Or it could be like the need to consume calories and expel waste that we really just need to make peace with.
Genuinely just coming up with childish noble savage myths about how native Americans live in 90s era cartoons. Why are you so resistant to actually describing what you're after?
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Then speak plainly (that's one of the rules around here) and say what this alternative is. I'm expecting your answer to be some variation on Marxism/Communism/hippie dippie "why can't we all just, like, share everything dude?!" nonsense but I'm not being sarcastic when I say I'd love to be wrong here.
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You can detest it all you want, you still didn't answer @aqouta's question, which is what is your alternative?
There is a reason we have property, and why it's central to all human civilization. Provide literally any alternative and we can discuss, but you are just saying you hate it and then asking antagonistic questions here.
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Yep, and all your dark hints about "this means UNKNOWN BUT SINISTER FORCES can come along and TAKE YOUR STUFF BY FORCE or stop you from trying to take other people's stuff by force, oh hang on, pretend I never said that last" won't change the basic fact that "this pile of stuff is mine and no you can't have it, or take it, or claim it by right of necessity" is what everyone feels from the time they're two years old onwards.
It's the story of the Little Red Hen or the Grasshopper and the Ant. If fifty peasants are all sharing the forest to gather firewood and then the local lord comes along and declares he owns it now and they can't gather firewood there anymore, that's bad. But so is it bad when the local commissar comes along and declares that the state is now in charge, that everyone has a share (which means in practice nobody has a share) and by the way, hand over all your firewood because the high officials living in town need to heat their homes.
If you're just going "it's not my job to educate you" about any possible insight you might have had around "how can we do this differently?", then I'm going to suggest you did not, in fact, have any useful insight and thus we can all ignore your shower thoughts.
I would also push, quite strongly, for 'it's not my job to educate you' to be a bannable offense.
"Speak Plainly".
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The good news is that people who double down on that line tend to run headfirst into three or four other rules already.
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Ownership greatly predates humanity, much less civilization. Stick a bunch of GPS collars on wolves and you can see which territory each pack "owns". Establishing a Schelling point of "this is ours, that is theirs" is what naturally evolves to reduce negative-sum conflicts over rivalrous goods as soon as you have a species whose minds can handle such a distinction, which is much earlier than you get a species whose minds can handle (much less invent - Schelling was writing less than a century ago!) the underlying game theory.
If anything, civilization started out with a step backwards in the conception of ownership. The early "palace economy" city-states, where you gave your production to the ruler(s) and hopefully enough of it was eventually doled back out to you, are much more accurately described as a way to "Usurp rights over resources ... by fiat and, if necessary, by fraud and/or force" than anything capitalists typically do. It took a very long time before the study of economics (famously named "the dismal science" in a pro-slavery screed, because it "finds the secret of this Universe in 'supply and demand', and reducing the duty of human governors to that of letting men alone") managed to successfully convince most economists that individual ownership can be more fruitful than collective ownership, not just more moral, and I'm afraid it still hasn't managed to become convincing to most non-economists.
The above wiki link is one place to look to see why this is positively wrong, but here it's normatively wrong as well.
I don't disagree much with your points per se. My criticism of thinking like yours relates to contextual bias. Game theory is a prime (but not the only) example. It applies only to human affairs in which actors are predominately self-interested and operate from self-interest. The predication of the theory tacitly asserts that self-interest is fundamental in all human interactions among all humans. What if that premise actually applies only to people suffering from psychopathologies? At any rate, the idea that it covers the whole of human experience is ribald. No, it doesn't, as any loving parent can tell you.
That was just one example of contextual bias. There are more we could talk about.
"Ownership greatly predates humanity, much less civilization." Your data, evidence, serious empirical research for that claim? I've seen none, and I've been looking for it most my life -- let's just call it more than 50 years. If you've got some, I'm all ears -- produce it.
Ownership is a LEGAL concept. Wanting, using, belonging, possessing, protecting, depriving (and a lot more) are reflections of different kinds and degrees of attachment to desirables. Only ownership is legalized, which means ownership exists only in societies where laws rule -- even if just the "law" of a family patriarch. So, no, ownership does not predate humanity, unless laws predate humanity. I know of no laws among wolves. On the other hand, any human or animal attachment can easily and incorrectly (or at least baselessly) be characterized as "ownership". Characterizing something does not make it what it is. More often, when people resort to characterizations, it's precisely because the thing is not what they want it to be.
"The above wiki link is one place to look to see why this is positively wrong, but here it's normatively wrong as well."
I'm well-capable of researching. It's how I got to where I'm at. I didn't come to The Motte for unsolicited help on improving my research capabilities -- although I do appreciate the link and I'll look at it. I came here for discussion. If you think that "paranoid who don't understand the concept of sharing" is positively and "normatively" wrong, explain. If you can't explain, then you can understand that it casts a shadow on the credibility of your ipse dixit claim. How do you know it's wrong? How is it wrong? What parts? I register that you are one person, a stranger to me, who thinks it's wrong. Your opinion has weight with me. But I didn't come here to sift through opinions. If your opinion has merit, show it.
On top of that, what someone else said in something you link to says nothing about your thinking about the material. That's what's interesting to me. What's primary or important in your grasp of the material? What parts apply here, and to what degree, and to what result? I'm glad to make my thinking clear. I expect you to do the same.
Hardly. Evolutionary stable strategies (like mating strategies) are aptly modeled by game theory.
Not really. The selfish move in the prisoner's dilemma is to defect, yet the people studying games are not idiots and have noticed strategies that lead to cooperation and therefore greater payoffs.
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This is not new at all, it's the Proudhonian definition of property as privileges of exclusivity those who rule society grant themselves by the sword. Which is then naturally argued to be theft that should be abolished.
I'm not surprised a RLHF progressive would produce that definition at all.
Indeed, I therefore must ask why not join Proudhon in his later years in denouncing his early thesis by recognizing that security of one's domain is a natural and desirable thing for the individual and that instead of "theft", "Property is freedom"? The wisdom you gain by getting your own anarchist movement stolen from you by reds surely is worth some consideration.
My own view is that of the much more cynical Rand and early Marx: property is what you can defend by force. No more, no less. And as such carries no inherent moral telos.
It's what you do with your exclusive domain that may be judged. But unless you're willing to twist yourself into knots to justify why you should or should not share your toothbrush with your neighboor, or to invent parables of mythical states of nature, one has to recognize that exclusive domains of ownership are and always have been a natural part of the human condition.
Well, kinda not. I never said that ownership as deprivation is "new". I do say that realistic, practical recognition of the fact and its implications is almost non-existent.
Both "property" and "theft" make no intelligent sense except in the context of ownership as deprivation. Proudhon did not reject the deprivation central to ownership, nor did he attempt to find an alternative. His issue was with exploitative deprivation, not deprivation per se.
So, in that respect, what I'm talking about is quite "new". I'm really not sure how its "newness" matters and, frankly, I couldn't care less. It's irrelevant to the merit of the fact, admitting the fact, and exploring it. But since you brought it up, the idea of an alternative to the predication of our relationships to desirables on principled deprivation is definitely new. To wit: no one yet has said anything at all about what it could possibly be.
"... one has to recognize that exclusive domains of ownership are and always have been a natural part of the human condition."
No, absolutely not. On the contrary. Graeber and Wengrow made this very clear in the culmination of their joint work, The Dawn of Everything. Exclusive domains of ownership are and often have been a legally and socially enculturated part of the human condition in certain kinds of societies -- typically called, "civilized societies" -- during the last 10K - 15K (at most) of the millions of years of humanoid life on the planet. I give it precisely the statistical weight it deserves: not much.
The deeper problem is the fact that almost everyone ridiculously overweights the significance of this last little authoritarian blip on the timeline, far beyond any empirical basis for it. That's a colossal bias.
The "authoritarian blip" of the last 10k years is certainly not overweighted, because it coincided with the development of absolute human mastery over the entire world. It's heavily weighted in people's estimation of what matters because it was a heavy-ass ten thousand years.
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That is certainly a pragmatic definition. (I would amend it that getting others -- e.g. a state -- to defend your property on your behalf should also qualify.)
See, for example, Wikipedia on territorial waters:
The island of the Whisky War would not be considered property because none of the belligerents was willing to station a defensive force on it. And you can put all the flags you want on the Moon, or sell its surface by the square meter, but unless someone breaks the Outer Space Treaty by placing a gun there to defend their claimed property, none of that will matter.
The problem with that definition (which I will call ownership-A) is that it clashes with how the term "ownership" is used in societies where laws regulate such thinks, and where that term generally carries prescriptivist connotations (think "the rightful owner", I will call that ownership-B). The ownership-B relationship is of course contingent on a particular society and even individual.
Examples:
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This description of Capitalism applies to middle-men (e.g. quant traders, supermarkets, etc) - but it doesn't seem to fit the central example of a business: where it actually creates value by making a resource whose utility is greater than the sum of its raw resources (e.g. a shoe factory). If we treat the raw materials (leathers, rubbers, dyes, etc) as being "usurped and kidnapped", the shoe factory definitely does more than just "hold them hostage" before release.
Also I think it just doesn't make sense to refer to storage/warehousing as "holding hostage". The entire point of holding X hostage (even something non-living) is that you threaten to kill/destroy X unless your demands are met, and when someone pays ransom to release a hostage, they generally do not own the hostage. When I buy something from Amazon, it is so that I can own and use it somehow, at no point does Amazon threaten to destroy the merchandise if I don't pay up (and if they did, they would be met with perplexed indifference)
The question of how desirables come to be -- picking them up off the beach, digging for them, panning for them, building them, manufacturing them, painting them, or whatever -- has no relevance to how they're handled once they exist. I'm open to hearing how desirables (goods and services and more) are handled differently. Can you give me an example where they're not handled like kidnap hostages?
Threatening to kill a hostage or destroy "the merchandise" any other way is neither necessary nor central to kidnapping/hostage-keeping. Sure, it provides incentive. The real threat of kidnapping is that the people being extorted for ransom will never get the hostage back, not until they pay, regardless how that's achieved. Killing a hostage is just a method. This is exactly the case with storage/warehousing (and holding hostage in showrooms, for that matter): you will never get it until you pay the ransom. The only difference is that in the case of merchandise, you never had it and had it taken away from you. Or, you could see it like Proudhon: the fact that you don't have it even though you need or want it itself represents theft.
I just love how this model works. It's been around for a decade now. No one yet has succeeded in pointing out a significant, legitimate flaw in the parallels it presents. That doesn't mean there aren't any, though. That's why I keep exposing it.
A lot of people consider this to be a significant difference, enough that they have universally recapitulated social technology built on this distinction.
It is certainly true that if you define away the flaws in your argument, then by your definition there are no flaws flaws in your argument.
You say you want a discussion. Discussion necessarily means give and take, other people considering your arguments and you considering theirs. If you insist on controlling both sides of a conversation, you're just talking to yourself.
You seem to be hallucinating. I've responded to everyone who commented and addressed their arguments. Discussion, for me, isn't about give and take -- it's about honestly checking, constructing, criticizing, admiring, enlightening, correcting, informing, and a whole lot besides. If you actually read what I've written and how I respond to people, you'd see that.
I don't even know what "define away the flaws in your argument" even means, especially sincere there really wasn't an "argument" to speak of in the first place. What did you construe as an argument?
Okay:
Yes, everyone treats this as a massively important difference.
Anyone could do this. No one does, for reasons that can be demonstrated by my request that you kindly give me ten grand in fungible US currency.
I perceive you to be arguing that the "Proudhon" interpretation of property being theft is one people should pay more attention to, or consider valid in some way. And indeed, I am very happy to consider your current possession of accumulated value as theft from me, because I want what you have.
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It doesn't even apply to them. The middle-men legitimately obtain their goods, typically from central examples of businesses, they add value to the goods by moving them to a point in space and/or retaining them until a point in time and/or combining them into a context where they're more valuable, and they retain some of that value for themselves while passing some on to their suppliers and customers. Buying from a supermarket at a markup is a much better deal than trying to buy the same quantities of the same groceries direct from the supermarket's suppliers.
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Ownership is possession that is maintained via power, whether that is de jure or de facto, de jure just being de facto by formally distributed means. You can't create an alternative because you can't nullify possession.
Set aside legalities, if someone has possession of a piece of property and doesn't want anyone else to have it what are your options for taking it from them? Overpowering them. If you successfully overpower them and take possession yourself, how meaningful is it for the first person to say that they "own" that property while it's in your possession and they lack the power to deprive you of it? They could say that they're the rightful owner, but without a greater power to grant, recognise and enforce those rights they're not worth the paper they're not even written on.
I'm not a poli sci nerd but surely this has all been covered centuries ago. Hobbes, maybe?
The only plausible alternative I can think of is something like gay luxury space communism where there's such abundance that the value of material goods has come down to basically zero. Even then certain things can't be replicated, such as standing space at the top of the Eiffel Tower. At that point your faced with the problem of assigning that limited resource, and no matter what system or philosophy you come up with it will rest on you having the possession of that resource to enact your preferred method and defending it from others who would deprive you.
No, ownership is not possession, except in a marginally legal sense which is meaningless and useless unless ownership includes the more basic right to deprive. Loan, rental, lease, timeshare, etc., involve physical non-possession by an owner that continues to hold a right to deprive without regard to their physical possession of the property.
I don't know about "nullify possession". Both you and I know of an alternative that pays absolutely no regard to the question of possession, though. Would it be considered as nullifying possession?
// Set aside legalities, if someone has possession of a piece of property and doesn't want anyone else to have it what are your options for taking it from them? Overpowering them. //
But you're ignoring the preconditions for your scenario. If I have physical possession of a tract of land, what would possess you to try to take it from me at all? What is "possession" of property if not a legal concept? I can't physically occupy 100 acres, nor can I make incessant use of it in any way that totally deprives you of the opportunity of making any use of it, unless I set the whole plot afire -- and the fire will burn out. And if you want to "possess" it in the sense of make your own use of it, why can't you think of any way to do that other than overpowering me? Why do you uncritically assume that I'd resist? You've predicated your scenario in adversarial terms. Are those the only terms in which you can think about this?
// The only plausible alternative I can think of is something like gay luxury space communism where there's such abundance that the value of material goods has come down to basically zero. //
That's an interesting thought that actually gets to something fundamental which I'm not sure you had in mind. Scarcity of desirables is a huge factor. In the 80s, in an Econ 101 class, the definition of "economy" presented to us was "the science of managing scarcity". No scarcity, no economics? Maybe.
The problem is that almost no one (at least up to the mid-20th century) seriously questioned the doctrine of naturally-occurring, incessant scarcity. Big blind spot. No one ever established that scarcity is a given, a necessity, an inevitability, or any such thing. No one has ever gotten traction in any attempt to rectify the root causes of scarcity. Hardly anyone even thinks it's possible. Oxfam's decades' old report on "extreme poverty" claimed that it could be permanently eradicated globally with a one-time expenditure that amounted to 3 months' income of only the richest 100 people (at that time). Musk alone has equivalent capability today. Why haven't the uber-rich been able to do it? Well, because it's got nothing to do with capability and everything to do with the fact that they do not in any way, shape, or form WANT to do it.
We're not dealing with possibilities, capabilities, limitations, or anything else we can't change. We're dealing with perverse, entrenched will on the part of the elitist parasite class. The problem doesn't lie in the "economics". It lies in the psychopathy of a fraction of human beings.
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It's been quite the extensive topic of discussion since Antiquity and a main ideological divide in the wars of the XXth century. No less.
We're not exactly treading new ground here.
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I would not say that. I would say that ownership is the legal right to do what you want with something. That can be depriving others, but isn't always. For example, I value ownership of my house because if I wish to run a network cable to connect the upstairs to the basement, I can. Or if I want to paint the walls a certain color, l can do that regardless of what others think. You can certainly frame this in terms of exclusion (any positive rights can be reframed as "you're making someone else tolerate you doing that", really), but I don't think that's a good way to frame it in this case.
You need to do some research on that. Just a couple of counter-examples. If you rent something, you do not have the legal right to do what you want with it. Your usage becomes contractually limited and, for any practical purpose, non-existent for the term of the rental period (or lease, or whatever).
The only right that always makes it ownership, the absence of which guarantees it's not ownership, is the right of deprivation.
What does that have to do with ownership? I am struggling to follow you here.
After thinking it through some, I think you're wrong about this. Your own example of renting gives a clue. If you rent an apartment, you do have a legal right to deprive people of use of the property. Even the landlord himself has to jump through hoops before he can assert his rights over yours. Yet that doesn't mean you own the property, you are still just a renter.
I really wish that instead of dismissively telling me to do research, you would point to what it is you think would clarify your views on property rights more. It isn't very helpful to say "you need to do research" without any pointers.
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But when you rent something out, you also no longer have the right to deprive the renter of it (for some pre-specified period of time), in much the same way as your own usage is limited.
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I think the question of which economic system is “right” should relate to function and results, which necessarily involves understanding evolutionary instincts (perhaps more than anything else) and metrics of national wellbeing. Our evolutionary nature enjoys both ownership and sharing. It requires incentive and status signaling to do things. It works best with peer competition for status.
So the question of ownership should be a question of degree, not “what is it” or “is it good”; ownership is our evolved desire and understanding that a thing is ours, which we crave knowing, and this concept is simply implemented differently in different economic systems. The healthiest and most dominant people have even more of this instinct, it would seem. A big problem with “capitalism” in my mind is: if we are giving people resources in excess of what is required to incentivize them, then it’s wasted resources. If Bezos would do all the same Amazon stuff at only 20% of earnings, then it’s wasteful to allow Bezos to keep the leftover 80%. Because all the wealth of billionaires in America combined is the lifetime earnings of something like 1.25 million median Americans; more when factoring in billionaire lifetime earnings and not just current wealth; there are better uses for it than expensive properties and cosmetics and ex wives and so on. Like, fuck, imagine being able to allocate one million people toward a project? And the project is necessarily better than the prodigal billionaire? It’s crazy all the resources we waste based on the modern fiction that people “deserve” what “they” made. I want utopia, not capitalist purity spiraling.
That question is completely off-topic to my statements and my invitation.
And to the rest of your comment, you're thinking wholly within the paradigm in which rights have been predicated as principled deprivation. I'm asking for an alternative to that predication. So, although there's some good stuff there, your comment is nonresponsive to my post.
If its not about whats right, then in what sense do you want an alternative? In a purely conceptual sense, denying any ownership rights is an alternative.
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Well, it's not as though billionaires generally put their assets into swimming pools full of gold coins and go diving. Most of that wealth is tied up in the companies and being put to work providing additional economic value. The very wealthy also tend to use spare wealth for other goals including charity and pushing boundaries which the government can't or won't: c.f. Blue Origin. On balance, I expect billionaires to be more competent and frankly lucid than your 'we' which I'm interpreting to mean 'the government'.
One has but to look to Europe to see what happens when 'we' make sure to not let innovative, driven people 'take' more than their 'fair' share. Stagnation.
And as Kulak once said so well, a 1% annual difference in GDP growth over 100 years is the difference between living in the US and living in Mexico. Still keeps me up at night.
Now, sure, some amount of that wealth is 'wasted' on unnecessary expensive things but A) it's comparatively insignificant and B) that also brings down prices for others since it effectively subsidizes the market. A company producing a cool new item that only the very rich can afford will be blessed by the income and often able to transition to the next level of scale.
I have no problem with billionaires investing, provided that every single time they take that money out for personal use, it is taxed so that most of the returns go to other people, and not wasted on their own consumption. This is an easy way to get the best of both worlds. Charity is part of the problem. Look at how Bezos’ wife spent her fortune on racial justice advocacy. I fundamentally dispute that “charity” can be better than raising the middle class worker’s quality of life, unless that charity is for something that actually does this. I have no problem with a law that demands billionaires give money to useful charities.
As for “subsidizing new technology”, I also dispute this and think that wealth inequality reduces technological development. This is because of economies of scale and competition. You can’t buy a new compact cassette player which is as compact as older models in their heyday, because the factories only built models with such precision because of the millions of people looking to buy them. When it’s only one wealthy person buying something, as opposed to millions of people with more money, the results are always worse. This is due to economies of scale and also due to the tastelessness of most billionaires. A billionaire alone could never get an iPhone made, only tens of millions of consumers (at least). Or if you consider the video game industry — there are billionaires who love video games, yet not a single product made specifically for billionaires. Instead, the best titles are made for millions of consumers, or else by a small group who has the “resources” to attempt to make a groundbreaking title!
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What is your definition of sharing? Or to put it another way, let's say you find a nice thing. A pretty rock, a fruit, a Galacta 9000 Zappa war fleet. Given that you have no right of ownership over it, if I march over and take it from you even though you like it and want to hold it / eat it / use it, have you meaningfully 'shared' it with me?
We all know how to share. It's one of the first things we were taught. I don't have a private definition for it.
To your example, it would all depend on what I do and how I think about the fact that you seized it, right? I could choose to share it even though you took it. I could choose to take it back. I could choose to make a scene and enlist the help of arbiters, whether peers or authorities. I could fucking punch you in the face, lol. I could do anything I wanted.
I would like you to share some of your resources with me. Should I send you a venmo link, or do you prefer paypal?
I'd love to be able to share some. As it is, I'm on a fixed income well below $2,000/mo, I have six sons, 4 DILs, 4 grandkids, and friends who are all in line before you. Sorry, but I think it'll be a long wait...
Why is there a line, and why did your hypothetical not mention the necessity of line-waiting previously? Why can't requests simply be made and granted in the order they were received? I doubt any of the people you listed actually have asked you for 10k USD, so shouldn't I get what I asked for now? I want it, you not giving it to me is theft by your own argument via Proudhon. Are you a thief? Nor is the fixed income really a substantive obstacle, I'm sure you own 10k worth of possessions that you could sell or hand over, and I'll even waive any amount above what you do currently possess if I'm mistaken.
Alternatively, I also am willing to "share" my resources with you, provided I also get to arbitrarily create a "line", place you at the back of it, and ensure that you never reach the front and hence that the sharing never actually happens.
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I have a fairly simple exercise that gets to the reason why 'ownership' is an easy, fundamental, universal concept:
If I hold out my open palm in front of you, can you make my fingers close and form a fist?
I'll give you a few minutes to try, just holding out my palm.
Then after a few minutes, I'll just announce my intention to close my hand, then easily make my fingers close into the fist.
The point of this demonstration:
"I" am in control of the matter that composes my body. You are not. And vice versa.
If we can agree on that basic premise (and avoid debating what "I" am, I'll stipulate that I'm just a brain which is itself composed of matter, I'll exclude the concept of souls for this conversation), then we can say that I own my body, and I can exclude you from control of it, as a pure matter of fact, for all practical purposes.
And everything else can build out quite naturally from that basic point.
I use 'my' body to extract resources from the world, and because I own my body, I likewise have a claim to resources I gained control of using my body, and my claim is inherently stronger than any 'second-comers.'
These facts about the world are easy to observe and thus a solid foundation upon which to build the 'social construct' of private property.
We don't have to get philosophical to agree "I can exclude YOU from my body, and you can exclude me from yours."
Humans are not a hivemind species. We can talk about egregores and social dynamics, but every human is, fundamentally, identifiable as an individual unit that 'controls' their actions. So 'control' of one's own body is something most of us can accept as a premise.
Ownership and Control are mostly coextensive as concepts. If we grant that 'control' of our bodies grants something resembling 'ownership,' then that's like 80% of the argument right there.
Can you explain why people don't 'own' their own bodies, or can you present an answer to my exercise that defeats the idea that I control my body?
Nope. You're confusing owning with being. Ownership is a right. As a right, it's not real, but an agreed convention, an abstract human construct. If I say you don't own your bike and take it away from you, you have no clear right of ownership unless you can prove that you do have the right. What if you stole it from me last week, and I'd bought it 2 months ago?
So, that's 4 working pieces: you, me, the bike, and your right of ownership. In your "I own my body" there's at most 2 working pieces. The scenarios are not comparable, even if you allow for the distinction "I" as separate and distinctly identifiable from "my body".
To compare the bike scenario, in which ownership is obviously relevant, to our relationships to our own bodies is a category error: several of them, in fact. The two are not analogous. This isn't just splitting semantic hairs: no one "owns" their body. Everyone IS their body (and mind, or even soul and spirit, too, if you like.) This isn't merely "logical" (although it is logical). How can you detach from yourself to form an attachment that could be construed as "owning" yourself? It's just a figure of speech that doesn't correspond to the reality of the matter. On the other hand, a comparable analog to you owning your body would be the bike owning itself. You can talk that way, but it's sloppy and implies things that simply are not the case.
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Yes I can. When I taser you there is good chance you will clench your fists.
Which is actually 'proving too much' because you've just demonstrated that you have to use a physical intervention to make the thing happen.
If you don't control your body, then how could you use a taser in the first place?
Same logic if you, for example, pull out a gun and threaten me to make me close my hand.
Or tell your buddy to come over and force my hand closed.
It all presumes your own control over your body. You might be able use 'your' body to exert control over mine or someone else's, but only by actively maintaining control over your own. Demonstrating control of your own body doesn't refute "everyone has control of their own body."
By comparison, I just have my brain send a signal down my arm and the fingers start moving. Its the simplest existence proof possible.
If I'm standing in front of you I'm perfectly capable of making your fingers start moving by having my brain send a signal down my arm. Anything that happens in between those two events is just an implementation detail.
Are you?
If I don't want you to make my fingers start moving, what do you think happens next?
If I have fewer 'steps' to take between the signal I send and the event that occurs, you're surely going to agree that I have 'more' control over that event, no?
The number of "steps" isn't a well-defined concept (if I go into arbitrarily fine detail about the mechanism of a human body I can extend you "having my brain send a signal down my arm" into infinity steps) - I think the only coherent thing this idea corresponds to is how easy it is for you do it.
But there are systems where someone other than yourself could make you close your fists with just the effort of sending brain signals to their voice-box and jaw to speak. They could be a very powerful dictator or gangster, with an established history of extreme and brutal violence, and just order you to do it, or else.
Yes, threats could in theory make me close my fist against my own will.
Or, if I'm particularly brave or foolhardy, they don't.
Then what.
Seems obvious that this all comes down to having to physically interfere with 'my' body to make the thing happen, if I don't want it to happen. I'm the only one that has the actual 'entanglement' with the matter that composes my body that lets me control it with nerve impulses alone.
You can of course claim this is a distinction without a difference if defined properly. "The Universe" makes no distinction between "me" and "you."
But isn't it just WAY SIMPLER for us to agree "yeah I control my body, you control yours" without overphilosophizing it.
Well, then you get killed by the gangster, so in this formulation you maintain "ownership" of your body (at least before you die, then they control it)
And also most people (like me, and I think, in practice, you too) would just close their fist, despite the gangster not having to put much more effort into it than you would - which violates your principle of "I own my body, and I can exclude you from control of it, as a pure matter of fact, for all practical purposes."
For your contrived example, yes. In practice, there is just no incentive for anyone to threaten deadly violence to make someone close their fist. And I'm happy to accept that everyone has the negative right not to have their fist closed without consent.
But if we are going to step out of philisophical thought experiments, then "yeah I control my body, you control yours" is not really that simple. There are a lot of non-silly situations where someone is just, on an intuitive level, "controlling their body", and in doing so causing harm to society:
I'm sure you would be happy to just allow people to do many of the things on my list, but I disagree that it is some obvious "easy, fundamental, universal concept" that no reasonable person could oppose, on the level of, say, "not torturing people to death because you like to hear them scream"
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Therein lies the real proof of ownership, really. I agree with you that it's an universal concept but I'm not sure one's body is the best concept to illustrate it.
If I want something from you and can't take it, then you own it. If I want something from you and can take it, then you don't own it.
This is physical reality and one's physical body isn't exempt from this. Indeed there are many people whether imprisoned, disabled or otherwise incapacitated that don't really own their own body in a meaningful sense.
That's just the most convenient way to demonstrate since people usually have their body present when you're discussing things with them.
I mean, I see the point. But if there's any 'person' left in the brain, unless they're the poor sucker from Johnny Got His Gun, the brain is still in control of 'something.'
And the only way people can take that control is by directly and physically interfering. Which is to say, by exercising control of their bodies and using that to incarcerate you, restrain you, or damage you.
The strongest refutation of 'self-ownership' I can think of that actually exists are the cases of conjoined twins. We've got entangled nervous systems where maybe neither person really 'controls' the parts they share. But its still way more convenient for them to agree to coexist.
Otherwise, unless there's some entity out there that can unilaterally override your brain's functions and direct how your body is used regardless of your own will and wishes (hence: a hivemind species), it seems to me there's no way to overcome the conclusion "I own myself" because any actions taken to refute it would inherently prove it true.
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So if some guy uses his body to attack me and physically obtain my possessions, what claim do I have over ownership of those items under your paradigm? He gained control of them using his body; ought I to have any recourse to regain possession of them, besides using my own body to take them back from him in turn?
Is/Ought... If you want oughts you have to start somewhere, this one starts with "self-ownership". If you're just an is guy, cool, not sure what the point of talking about it. Is there a axiomatic ought you'd rather start with?
What I’m saying is that getting from “self-ownership of my body” to “ownership of items I obtained using my body” is not a useful line of reasoning, because it doesn’t deal well with questions of why only the first person to obtain an item has eternal first priority of ownership over it, even when others expend equal effort and physical agency in order to obtain the item in turn. (It’s an especially incoherent line of reasoning when we get to talk about purchasing items at a store, wherein all of the items were harvested or built by the physical bodies of others, as as the “customer” the only sense in which my “physical body” gained “ownership” of the items is by swiping a piece of plastic acknowledging the transfer of imaginary “funds”.)
If you accept "self-ownership of my body" as a founding principal, and someone else also accepts it, you have a shared axiom upon which to build further frameworks.
If people are capable of building such agreed frameworks, then everything follows pretty directly.
If people aren't capable of building such agreed frameworks, then its a fruitless exercise/question regardless of your position.
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If he uses his body to 'attack' you (I presume I don't have to define the term, but I can) then on what possible grounds could he object to somebody also 'attacking' him to take those possessions from him?
Everyone could use their bodies to take resources from others all the time, denying that any superior claim exists, but then they can't very well assert a superior claim when somebody else comes along.
Your 'claim' to the resources is that you got them 'first.' His claim is he beat you up and took them or snatched them when you weren't looking.
We can devolve everything to the 'might makes right' rules, that is also a consistent position, but the only persons who are 'better off' are those who happen to be the strongest at the time, and even THEY have to constantly risk physical harm to maintain their claims.
Isn't it much, much easier on everyone involved if we can mutually agree "you keep what you have, I keep what I have, and we can exchange things consensually as needed" then build out a system for tracking ownership, for resolving conflicts, and for minimizing transaction costs from that agreement?
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Aight, I'll bite. There isn't one. There's no form of collective ownership that doesn't involve the same definitional characteristic of denying someone some form of right over the property. Even the most enlightened form of communism will entail restricting some member of the community from doing some thing to the property. Even a nomadic society with the most minimal form of ownership imaginable will still provide exclusionary rights over personal property, and have rules about who gets preference in occupying any given site.
I think you're the first one I've read so far with an actually responsive comment.
Agreed. But that's the equivalent of saying, "There is no form of collective deprivation that isn't a form of deprivation." Who wouldn't agree?
The problem isn't that there's no form of deprivation that isn't a form of deprivation. The problem is that you're unaware of an alternative to deprivation -- even though you're intimately familiar with it.
We fail to see what's right in front of us thanks to compartmentalization. When you light on the alternative, you'll get it. Part of the problem here is that everyone has excluded the alternative from the "these are the only things that work" compartment, and for reasons that are still mysterious to me, they refuse to look outside it -- kinda like a statist who rejects anarchism not because they understand it, but because they decide without understanding that "it could never work".
Well, I didn't ask for an alternative "that works" or claim that there's an alternative that would work (even though there is and it does) did I? I just asked what an alternative might be. This is as hypothetical as it gets. The fact itself that people for the most part avoid engaging with hypotheticals is hugely telling. I mean, what risk is there? Why the reluctance and avoidance? Why throw up objections and attempts to dismiss? It's pretty wild, really.
I would like you to share some of your resources with me. Ideally I would prefer you to engage with this in a concrete sense by actually transferring a lot of resources from your bank account to mine, say about $10,000, or so but I'm happy to start by discussing the transfer in principle if you find engaging in hypotheticals to be more immediately useful way to approach things. If you don't have $10,000 cash on hand, I'd be happy to take deeds/titles/straight property and handle the conversion to liquidity myself.
And after writing the following:
...I think it would be "pretty wild" for you to ignore an instance of the exact sort of "sharing" you're arguing for, or for you to engage in reluctance or avoidance, or throw up objections or attempt to dismiss the very principle you've expended such effort to draw attention to.
I'd say I really need the money, which is entirely true, but at no point shave you argued that need should come into it, so I'll refrain from polluting your philosophical constructions in this manner.
Money please!
LOL, sure! But first see my reply to FCfromSSC at https://www.themotte.org/post/1860/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/323011?context=8#context
Sure would be... if I did...
I really need the money, too. Maybe even more than you do. So, where does that leave us?
More to the point, what do you think your comment actually demonstrates? I don't see anything much of merit.
At least you're clear on what the alternative is! Kudos for that! However, where did I "argue for" it? In fact, there wasn't a single argument in my post. You could take my little KFR comparison as an argument, but it's not. Nor did I present it as an argument, but clearly and explicitly as a way to give a sense of where I'm coming from.
argument : a coherent series of reasons, statements, or facts intended to support or establish a point of view https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/argument
Where did I present an argument? Quote please.
And see my reply to that reply. You claimed that holding things I wanted was theft on your part. I asked you for 10k dollars, you said "other people asked first, sorry". I observe that other people almost certainly didn't ask first in any strict sense of the phrase, and that you are still holding the 10k dollars that you've said I'm entitled to, because people who want things should have them. I've accused you of theft for having 10k I want and not handing it over. If you have an explanation for how that's not actually theft, I will use that explanation also when you ask me for my money.
I mentioned in the other reply that you made no mention of a "line" that I needed to wait in to "share" your assets. Likewise, you made no mention of a possessor's claim of "need" countering the claim put forward by another who wants what they have. By claiming that there is a line, and that requests to "share" should be judged according to "need", you are already 9/10s of the way back to capitalism.
I think it demonstrates that you are making assertions about how we should think about things, without even attempting to account for the obvious consequences of thinking about things in this way. Doing this is a good way to make yourself appear absurd, and if that is your intention, I am pleased to assist.
I too have seen the Argument Clinic sketch.
This is an argument. You are described a philosophical position and claimed that it is substantively correct.
This is an argument.
This is an argument.
This is an argument.
Every post you've made in this thread has contained what appear at least to be attempts at "a coherent series of reasons, statements, or facts intended to support or establish a point of view".
We have a rule here: speak plainly. It seems to me that in this post, you are pretty clearly violating it. Still, I'm involved in the discussion, and will thus keep my mod hat off. You've already drawn the attention of @Amadan, who has not involved himself in the discussion and is already issuing warnings. You should read the rules and attempt to comply with them, or you will likely be banned in short order. If you would like to discuss further while speaking plainly, either your original topic or the rules here, I can try to offer my assistance, but my own assumption at this point is that Amadan is correct and you are trolling.
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You're mistaken. I really want that money, certainly more than you. When can I expect you to open your heart and your wallet?
The fact that you have refused to stake out a position is not as exculpatory as you think it is.
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