Ownership: the principle of "Deprive first, ask questions later"
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You say that the three listed things are your “findings”, which are the result of you “investigating” “the idea of ‘ownership’”. Could you say more about this? What was the nature of this “investigation”? By what means did you proceed, what sort method or approach did you use? What questions did you start with? In other words, could you tell us more about how you got here?
Excellent question!
Like I said in the post, I've been at this particular point for over a decade, as I see from looking back on my notes. My research MO, aside from the obvious, is to educate myself, write up my thinking, expose it for criticism to the most intelligent people I can find, (blogs, social media, the occasional "expert" who'll take the time), endless hours of discussion, and see what comes up in the process. This post is an example of my method. Over the last 1-2 years, I've made heavy use of AIs, lately DeepSeek and Claude. I do the same with them: present my ideas, deal with their criticisms and objections -- whether to correct them or take correction myself -- until we're agreed or the AI starts looping or hallucinating.
So, when I say I have yet to hear, after all this time, credible, convincing arguments to the contrary, it's after having spent the time and done the work that most people don't even attempt.
The question I started with was, "Why are things so fucked up and almost nothing makes sense?" That was in my teen age, when I stopped asking my parents for answers because what they insisted on made no fucking sense. I worked my way up through the educational route until I finally got so frustrated and repulsed by the attitudes in academia, I dropped out just credits short of my BA in Philosophy. Since then, I've been self-educated.
So, I got "here" -- a career in construction as a business owner, a career in IT at major corporations, currently a writing career, and six grown sons later -- covering a helluvalot more ground than just the nature of ownership, by listening to every non-absurd theory I could, and even some that were absurd, too, trying to make them work (something almost no one these days seems to have the balls to do,) accepting and incorporating what did work and discarding the rest, rinse, repeat. What I have now is what I'm left with, and none of it is sacrosanct. It's all provisional, open to question, discussable, criticizable, correctable, debatable (although I'd much rather discuss than debate), and rejectable whenever good reason for doing so appears.
Thanks for asking.
This post is an example of my method. Over the last 1-2 years, I’ve made heavy use of AIs, lately DeepSeek and Claude. I do the same with them: present my ideas, deal with their criticisms and objections—whether to correct them or take correction myself—until we’re agreed or the AI starts looping or hallucinating. So, when I say I have yet to hear, after all this time, credible, convincing arguments to the contrary, it’s after having spent the time and done the work that most people don’t even attempt.
Or, to put it less flatteringly, "I harangue the most sycophantic and new-agey LLMs I can find until they finally agree with me, in the absence of any objective feedback or empirical evidence, about something I'm already certain of, and I think this is intellectually valid work which deserves the name of 'findings' and is an 'investigation' far superior to whatever it is 'most people' do, rather than deserving the name 'intellectual masturbation'."
I have yet to hear, after all this time, credible, convincing arguments to the contrary.
You don't say.
Some specific examples might help me understand what are you talking about.
It seems like you posted a conclusion of some long thought process, without any clue about what happened before that last paragraph. But all things we could have an intelligent discussion about are in the missing part!
The post contains discussable ideas, if you're interested in discussing them. I'm happy to dive in with you. Your request for examples makes no sense to me. I defined what I mean by "ownership", there's no hidden subtext here. Examples are any case in which a person claims the right to deprive others of a desirable.
By that definition, refusing to have sex with someone is ownership. You might call it self-ownership, but you've said a lot of negative things about ownership that don't really apply to it.
2Yes, by that definition, a person has a right to deprive others of sexual access to their body. But that would imply that they are not their body, but that their body is an object they have absolute rights over, like a car. An owner breaks no law by taking their brand-new 2025 AMG GT 63 SE to the wrecking yard and having it crushed. So, then, if we own our bodies, why is suicide frowned on, outlawed, and a sin in many religions?
I happen to find objectifying myself and my body that way to be disgusting, because it's dehumanizing.
Btw, the post is an invitation to discuss. It's completely fiine to decline an invitation. But the fact that you responded as you did makes me wonder why you felt you couldn't just gracefully decline.
Responded as I did? Questioned its implications, you mean? That's to be expected when you put out ideas.
Yes, responded as you did. You can't intelligently question what you've got near-zero familiarity with. And again, it was an invitation. No obligation.
You gave an invitation to discuss it, and then got upset when I accepted the invitation and started to discuss it.
"Discuss" doesn't mean "praise".
You're hallucinating. I didn't ask for praise. I responded to the only statement you made that was discussable. Your upshot was that I wasn't very nice to ownership because I said negative things about it that, according to you, don't apply. That's so vague it's worthless. Your comment as a whole serves the claim that there's nothing worth discussing here, which just raises the question in my mind why you commented at all. "Nothing to see here folks!" Well, enough that it moved you to state the obvious, supposedly. So, naw, there's definitely something to see here. But you'd like to dismiss it as nothing, apparently.
Your upshot was that I wasn’t very nice to ownership because I said negative things about it that, according to you, don’t apply. That’s so vague it’s worthless.
No it isn't, I gave a specific example.
If you use something for a purpose A, you cannot use it simultaneously for a purpose B. And if the purpose A somehow spends the thing, that means you will never be able to use it for the purpose B. So it seems to me that some kind of deprivation is already in the nature of this universe.
As I see it, these are the basic options how to organize the use of spendable objects:
- whoever grabs it first, decides (no ownership)
- the strongest person decides (informal ownership)
- the owner of the object decides (formal ownership)
When you say that the third option is insane, do you prefer the first or the second one?
One could argue that ownership is a concept used for future-proofing. A way to "mortgage" our future in an ever-changing world. It provides a basis for longer-term strategic actions by ensuring permanence and durability of conditions and choosing the right strategies. It's also psychologically important because it removes anxiety and hyper vigilance or a related PTSD. Maybe it's worth just for the clarity knowing whether one owns or not - instead of irrational ambiguity. I wonder what would be a "working" alternative to ownership? Resources are limited.
There certainly is such an idea, though calling it "ownership" requires to strip any other aspects - like "maintenance" - and assign them other labels.
In fact, when you prevent an "owned" subsystem from doing something in a way always aligned to it, then you're almost one and the same so no talk of something owning something;
on the other hand, if you make a choice malign to the subsystem, then it is best described by depriving it of something.
Regarding a possible dialogue: did you have any more-precise anticipations and predictions using this model?
I'm not sure what precisely some of your statements relate to what I posted, nor even what you intend them to mean. I'm left guessing.
Maybe you're referring to my lack of mention of other rights often associated with ownership: access, use, disposition, transfer, destruction. However, not only do none of those, or all of them together, constitute ownership -- none of them are necessary to constitute ownership.
"Necessary but not sufficient" doesn't even apply here, because the only necessary right that constitutes ownership is the right to deprive others from the access to, use of, disposition of, transfer of, or destruction of a desirable whether the owner accesses, uses, dispositions, transfers, or destroys the desirable or not. An owner can have completely forgotten about a piece of property for 50 years, has not accessed, used, dispositioned, transferred, or destroyed it in all that time -- but if their deprivation of the property from all humankind is violated, it will be considered illegal or even immoral.
I had misinterpreted your text; since "deprive" is an emotionally charged word, I assumed you mean that owner deprives the owned of something, some autonomy.
An owner can have completely forgotten about a piece of property for 50 years, has not accessed, used, dispositioned, transferred, or destroyed it in all that time -- but if their deprivation of the property from all humankind is violated, it will be considered illegal or even immoral.
This makes your intended meaning clearer. So, owner prevents every other being from interacting with their owned. I can totally see where you're going with this (after all, "Utopia" by Thomas More did state something similar), but the productive discussion is blocked on these three things:
- Evidence. Lots of evidence wanted, and a bunch totally required.
How would you expect situation to play out under no ownership, but "reasonable use" rules or like? More importantly, why do you expect that? Have you seen examples how reasonable use works? Have there been demonstrating experiments, or human tendencies to play nice? - Shared ownership, its limit being the cases where every being has control over a thing - like environment (atmosphere, more specifically).
- Are you that sure that "ownership" concept is so rigid these days? See: marriage (historical) and polyamory. See: fair use exemptions on copyrighted material.
Have you read Utopia? I have. The problems with More's thinking are the same assumptions that corrupt most thinking on the topic of the structure and operation of society: supremacism and authoritarianism. "Power corrupts" because it's corrupt itself, embodying supremacism and authoritarianism and using violence as its chief tool.
Discussion is in no way blocked if you're interested in discussing. I'm not trying to prove anything. The reactions people have to these ideas prove that they're potent enough. Proof isn't needed.
Your #1 is an example of an almost universal reaction I get once a person sees that there's something to what I'm saying: they want me to tell them how it's going to work. One, that's not my job, but it would be dope to find people who want to explore that together. Two, the question whether you or I or all of us together have the information and understanding at this point to "make it work" is completely irrelevant to the question whether ownership is what I've said it is. If it is, it is -- and our ability or incapability to "make it work" is neither here nor there in that regard. There are far more important and foundational questions to deal with first:
- Why haven't we noticed that we've been trying to achieve fairness and prosperity on the basis of such a perverse principle?
- How could we be so naive as to think that we can make anything work until we figure out what went wrong with our thinking?
- What repulses us from the idea of a society founded on the principle of provide-first? The repulsion certainly isn't an intelligent reaction, because we've never even made the attempt to find out what it's like and how it would work, let alone experimented with it long enough to obtain reliable data from which to derive any intelligent conclusions or make any non-BS pronouncements.
- There is a deeply enculturated bias against merely entertaining the possibility that there could be something deeply perverse and dysfunctional about ownership. It expresses itself forcefully and smugly whenever I bring the topic up. If you can't even get people to think about an idea rationally, openly, and honestly, how the heck are they ever going to experiment with it properly to gain an intelligent basis for answering the "make it work" question?
To your #3, I don't think it will help the discussion to complicate it or bring everything but the kitchen sink in for consideration. The kind of ownership I'm talking about is obvious and ubiquitous: the kind recognized in a court of law. It's enough to start with that and focus on that. Let's talk about the camel, not its fleas.
There are far more important and foundational questions to deal with first:
Those "foundational questions", however, depend on whether we can make it work. You can't just ignore that there's no way to make it work and yet ask questions that depend on it!
For instance, if it's impossible to make it work, then the answer to "What repulses us from the idea of a society founded on the principle of provide-first? " is "because we are repulsed from ideas that don't work".
No, dude. You're thinking backwards. If you can't answer foundational questions, you literally don't know what "it" is, so how are you going to make "it" work? If you can't deal with an idea conceptually, what makes you think you've got the competence to deal with it practically?
I'm not ignoring anything. Focusing on first steps first doesn't mean you deny there are more steps...
But back your claim. You claim that the foundational questions "depend" on whether we can make it work. Explain that dependency. "You can't just ignore that there's no way to make it work..." So, you've already decided there's no way to make it work. How did you do that? What stops it from working?
Your last paragraph was interesting, though. There you allow that "impossible to make it work" is an "if". For every "if" there's a counter-if: if it's possible to make it work, then the answer to, "What repulses us from the idea of a society founded on the principle of provide-first?" is: because we're delusionally paranoid.
But your statement fails, because you can't determine if it's possible to make "it" work until AFTER:
1. You understand what "it" is.
2. You have answers to foundational questions about "it".
3. You understand "it" well enough to actually try to make "it" work.
4. You actually try very hard, in every which way you can think of, over and over, to make it work but fail to make "it" work -- at which point you are justified in saying, "We couldn't make it work," but no one is ever justified in saying, "It cannot be made to work."
So, you're really making claims without any rational/evidential basis here.
If you can’t answer foundational questions, you literally don’t know what “it” is, so how are you going to make “it” work?
Because your "foundational questions" are not the type of questions that describe what it is. They are the type of questions whose answers depend on whether we can make it work. The answers to your questions would be something like:
Why haven’t we noticed that we’ve been trying to achieve fairness and prosperity on the basis of such a perverse principle?
Because if other principles don't work, picking the one that does work, even if it has problems, isn't perverse.
How could we be so naive as to think that we can make anything work until we figure out what went wrong with our thinking?
Because if getting rid of property doesn't work, this question is based on a false premise--there isn't actually anything wrong with our thinking.
What repulses us from the idea of a society founded on the principle of provide-first?
People are repulsed by running society based on something that doesn't work.
If you can’t even get people to think about an idea rationally, openly, and honestly, how the heck are they ever going to experiment with it properly to gain an intelligent basis for answering the “make it work” question?
If it doesn't work, this question is based on a false premise, because if it doesn't work, they have in fact answered the question intelligently.
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