What is ownership? In
its most basic term it seems to imply the occupation of something by
someone. This someone has since the original term was used been
expanded to also include organisations and institutions such as
corporations and even countries or groups of countries.
What it legally means,
however, is simply that this something you have legally bought or
acquired is now reserved for you by the enforcing institutions of
your community. Is this just a silly overanalytic way to say that the
something is yours?
No.
There is a vast
difference between the idea of ownership and the actual phenomenon of
ownership. You see in the idea of ownership it is possible to say
that something is yours. But in the actual world nothing is really
yours. It can all be taken away, if not by other people then by
external elements operating outside the rule of ownership, such as
your dog deciding to eat it or a tsunami washing it all away.
So what you are left
with is simply this illusion backed up by real world enforcement that
in the event that your something is taken away from you and still
desirable for you, then you may call upon these enforcers to bring it
back to you or at the very least punish the ones that took it and in
some cases recieve a monetary settlement in exchange for your
something. It is an illusion that only works because we are all
hooked into the same feed of rules, norms and acceptable behaviour.
Just like money it only
works as long as everyone operates under the same principles. As soon
as someone breaks the norm and becomes a thief, then you need to bend
the guiding principles of reality to incorporate enforcing parties,
such as the police, to shield you from this asocial behaviour.
And just like money it
is only required for society to work properly as long as everyone
operates under the same principles. As soon as someone breaks the
norm and becomes able to grow their own food and gather their own
water from natural sources, they start breaking the need to
compromise themselves as individuals to function in this game of
monetary exchange.
This clash of topics
will most likely raise the issue of what happens to ownership when
nothing is bought or sold anymore. When money is no more.
It obviously ceases to
exist as the illusion it has survived as for so long. Surely it is a
requirement for society to function though?
When you think about
it, it should be a perfectly viable model for adults to share rather
than own. After all we are not the primates we evolved from, nor are
we the child we grew up from. If you connect the reality of sharing
rather than owning with the reality that our current means of
production could produce an abundance of high quality items for
everyone, so long as there is no need for a profit to be generated
anywhere, then you will see that this idea of ownership really only
serves the salesman. The buyer is left with purchasing illusions.
So this is where the
closing question arises. How much do we believe in the modern social
sciences proving to us that we are extremely adaptive to the rules of
whatever context we apply ourselves to?
