Kill the Economy

[NoOneMan]

92. To be blunt, most animals cannot even prove they are self-aware

This is a pre-requisite to private ownership, for an animal must understand it is a unique entity before it could see that entity as solely having access to a specific object according to a universal law.

How many times have you heard a parent telling a child to share, because the child isn’t doing it on their own?

As far as children are concerned, it isn't private ownership that babies & toddlers are attempting; their early desires preclude anyone else from owning anything. They want to touch, taste, hold, interact, etc, with everything that interests them without the understanding that other people have a "right" (ie, private ownership) to that object. Clearly, if a baby/toddler cannot grasp other people have private rights to objects, then certainly I could not extrapolate their sole desire for objects follows any cognitive pattern that suggests they perceive a natural personal "right" to have objects; rather, it suggests that they do not recognize the necessity of having "rights" in the process of "possessing" an object (and we are assuming children even want possession as we understand it rather than holding, interacting, loving, etc. Our very observations are filtered through our conditioned lenses and we are labeling behaviors according to our guesses). In other words, they think they should have immediate access to everything simply because they want access to everything (not because its "theirs" and will forever be "theirs" alone). From these early points on, much of our organization of reality and interacting is taught from parents (who do in fact understand private ownership and try and mold the child's behavior to become cohesive with society).

Raising children is very interesting, and I quickly learned they do not naturally understand the "way of the world". They do not understand why we cannot live in every open-house we may go to, or drive any car that we see, or eat out of some else's garden (despite picking wild blackberries), or even go down to the beach on a private access path (that one really threw my 5 year old for a loop--a "private" beach?!?). These are things you have to explain once or twice, and then after that, these concepts quickly become building blocks they use construct their understanding of reality with.

By the way, I make some effort to teach primitive perspectives to my children about labor, ownership and existence, and occasionally take them foraging with me. While I do what I can with my limited white-guy world-view, they seem to very quickly and easily assimilate these concepts--much quicker than modern concepts about labor, capital, ownership and religion. Their brains soak it up like a sponge, as if animist/pantheist spirituality, communalism and foraging are hard-wired. In any case, Im just trying to offer a diversity of thoughts by presenting lots of different ideas of reality, but anecdotally, I do not find our modern ways of life as the way "natural" brains are wired to function as much as more simpler, primitive ideas. We have a very complex society; of course a child's brain would not easily grasp these concepts. Private ownership is an immensely complicated topic in itself that you take for granted (that is why its such a large part of the law). Our entire economy depends upon recognizing it. Natural? Its a tough sell


on edit: With a little more thought, I'd have to conclude that the "natural" urge (before conditioning) is to want immediate universal access to everything, without complexly answering if anyone else should have the same thing (which causes a conflict societies must resolve). Our society resolves this conflict by teaching people they must earn universal access to some things, and respect other people's ability to do the same. Communal societies resolve this by teaching people they can have near-universal access to everything, insofar as they allow other people the same by co-operatively sharing when there is a conflict. So simpler communal societies are probably closer to our natural state, by just trying to work out how two people can share the same tool. Our society must introduce concepts of earning and limited access to resources that could be better utilized if commonly shared, which is much more complex and seems to lead to conflicts or inefficient usage of resources.