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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
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?
But it does require that the person own the tool in death. Burying it with that person is certainly depriving other living people of usage of that tool, which I guess is the relevant portion of "ownership" in this context.
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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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