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Notes -
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
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.
I disagree. Property is naturally occurring. Theft is a concept that requires morality.
Again, as Rand and Marx and in specific opposition to Locke, I do not recognize property to be some ethical boundary. It is a state of affairs.
Because we're talking about one of the most discussed topics of political philosophy, and having the same debates for the millionth time is tiresome. Let's at least use the existing scholarship instead of reinventing the wheel.
There are depictions of humans pierced with arrows that date back to the Aurignacian-Périgordian (so around 30 000 years old) that are attributed to fights over game and territory. Not to mention all the records we have of the lives of tribal humans since the beginning of history. And there's no reason to believe that the large parts of human existence that are not recorded validate your theory, they are at best silent on it.
You can argue that ownership used to be less codified and more communal than it is now, and I will gladly agree with you. But to cast property as a creation of civilization (even of mere sedentarism) is absurd.
If canids can understand and abide by the concept all on their own, I see no reason to believe that humans just made it out of thin air.
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