Property
BREAKING NEWS, BREAKING NEWS: Nothing belongs to us, except ourselves! That’s right, our houses, cars, cats/dogs, trinkets and gadgets; nothing! We do not own a single thing in this world, not even the clothes on our backs.
For thoroughness, I am going to divide this section into three parts:
Earthen, Material, and Intellectual. And since it is not very wise to build on anything aside from a firm base, we are going to go at this from the ground on up.
So here we go.
Earthen
Way back when, before everything was ‘settled,’ the Earth was in a state where what existed was yet to be ‘discovered.’ What existed had yet to be ‘claimed.’ What existed simply existed. Keep in mind that this is still how it is today, but with an added catch on top of it all.
Now we have human beings laying ‘claim’ to plots of land ranging from a thousand square ‘feet’ to thousands of ‘acres.’ But at what point were these people able to say “I own this land, and precisely this much?”
Perhaps this sounds silly, I know, because the answer is obviously “When they bought it, of course!” Okay hold up though, who did they buy it from? Another person, another human being, yes? All right, we’re getting somewhere, but we still need to take it back a little further.
Precisely who did that person buy the land from? Another person…and who bought it from them? Another person…who bought it from another person…who…well, eventually we get to someone who ‘inherited’ the land. But who did this person inherit the land from?
Someone who went and decided to say “Aha! This land is what I call mine, this land is what I call America! And since it is I that decides this is mine, so I shall build a fence and draw some lines on a map to prove it!”
Now if you would please excuse myself, I hope I am not the only one hearing the outrageous audacity in that statement. To just up and say something belongs to you, because you decided it so – how is that valid?
Well, let us break it down a little more. This is exactly what we are doing to this very day, only now we are under a different sort of impression where everyone thinks they are buying land from their local real estate agent like it is a commodity. But where do you think that real estate agent ultimately got the land from? The government? And where do you think the government got the land from? Christopher Columbus? George Washington? The Queen of England? The Native Americans?
No, none of the above!
Even the Native Americans I’m sure were not so naïve as to believe that they ‘owned’ the land they were on. But all of a sudden, the ‘Americans’ decided they were going to ‘take it away’ from them – and what kind of impression does that have on you?
To take something away that does not belong to anyone?
How can anyone take away what is not theirs? Worse yet, how can anyone wage war over ‘territory’ in an attempt to ‘make it their own’? You know, I don’t really know…but today's silly real estate process is not any better.
You see, back in the day, people fought and killed for a ‘plot’ of land. Now we all just work the majority of our lives to pay off a hefty mortgage, or continue shelling out rent until infinity.
But however far apart and different these two ways of ‘acquiring’ a home may be, they share one striking characteristic: they both have the element of human embedded in their situation. And it is this whole idea of humans fighting / paying for ‘territory’ that makes and breaks the validity of Earthen property.
What I am getting at is that the fatal flaw in the idea of Earthen property is that we have an extraordinarily small human being deciding what flies and what does not. Though wait a second Dear Little Human, who is in charge of this Earth? Who makes the wind blow? Who keeps this planet going around the sun at 66,000 miles per hour?
Let me give you a hint: NOT US!
Ponder this for a bit and let it sink in. And while you are doing so, here is the idea in poetic form:
So you say
this land is yours?
Well sir,
Mother Nature
is telling me
it is hers.
In case you missed it, we do not own the land we think we do. We do not even own a single grain of sand. Everything belongs to the Earth, while we only pretend to take possession of it. Our ‘land ownership’ is only a self-centered illusion in which we forget our origins. We forget that we belong to the Earth, that the Earth does not belong to us.
Material
Now that we have taken care of the ground we build upon, let us continue on to all the stuff that is built up from it. And keep this in mind, that every item we have is a direct descendant of the Earth.
At first glance, we do not see the real ingredients of which everything is made. We take for granted that these things are available to us, as if they are somehow products that magically appeared out of nowhere.
Take for example the nearest window(s) to you. We do not see that the glass for our windows was manufactured out of sand, limestone, and soda ash melted together inside of a blazing furnace. [2] But when we investigate manufacturing processes such as this, we realize a very striking characteristic about each ingredient: they all come from the Earth!
In the end, or shall I say at the beginning,
Everything comes from the Earth.
Think about that for a while. Everything comes from the Earth. Or at least, almost everything. Obviously, the stuff from space did not come from the Earth, and we are not particularly sure where all these atoms came from in our universe, but
at least we know that the things we create come from the Earth.
By now, I think you can probably see where this is going. Just like the concept of Earthen Property, what we have does not belong to us – it belongs to the Earth. Just because the store sells us something that we pay for does not mean that we own it. Especially when we ask ourselves what ‘owning something’ really means.
And so, what does it mean to ‘own’ something? What does it mean to possess a possession? Well, let’s think about it. Owning an item would mean that it belongs to someone, that it is one person’s, or perhaps, even a few persons in the case of ‘group ownership.’ But if something truly belongs to someone, this must mean it is an inseparable part of them, something that cannot be taken away without taking something from them.
With that said, now ask yourself what happens when someone just walks into your house and takes your shoes just before they are on your feet. You get pissed off, run after them, and beat them into submission while unleashing all curse words from the gates of hell, right? …NO, NO, NO!! Stop right there, that is not how to go about things here.
What really happened is that ‘your’ shoes just got transported to another location, with no direct effect on your individual being. When your shoes were taken, nothing was taken from you. It would be a little different if someone just came up and amputated your feet, but these are shoes we are talking about. They do not have any physical connection to you, whatsoever. You may have your receipt showing you paid $120 from Footlocker on May 7th, 2008 at exactly 11:54:29AM but of course, that is all just more man made material bullshit. Let’s elaborate.
Ask yourself, where exactly did you ‘acquire’ those shoes? Footlocker. And where did Footlocker ‘acquire’ the shoes? From the supplier who shipped them in. But where did the supplier get them from? From the company that manufactured them. And when that company made them, how did they get all the materials to create the shoe? From other material suppliers, correct? Okay, and those suppliers made their products out of various other raw materials, which of course came from the Earth. And so, all in all, what is happening here?
If we look closely at this chain of events, every stage has one thing in common, and that is Repositioning. When an item is ‘acquired,’ it is simply repositioned and secured for convenient use.
With that said, it is clear that nothing can be ‘bought,’ ‘sold,’ or ‘stolen.’ What really happens in a ‘transaction’ is the provisioning of what is necessary for the accomplishment of a certain task. And when something is ‘stolen’ so to say, it is actually the inhibition of one man’s ability to accomplish something.
Once this is understood, it is also clear that there are two ways of conducting oneself:
1) There are those who Promote the abilities of another, and
2)
those who Inhibit the abilities of another.
And obviously, one should not inhibit another, and such conduct is ‘wrong.’
Of course, a person should not take a pair of shoes that another person uses to get from place to place, but rather, they should take them from a store (supplier's) shelf to promote the abilities of the people that produced them. However, they should also not take more than the one or two pairs they need because their over-consumption would then proceed to inhibit our natural resources.
And this is the only time we should inhibit another, is when a person’s ambitions are reaching into harmful superfluity and degrading our environment – thus, by inhibiting them, we would be inhibiting inhibition. Or, shall we say, Promoting ability through Inhibiting inhibition itself.
For the rest of the time, we should be directly promoting the development of ability in one another. We should be helping each other improve themselves, always allowing for the betterment of civilization by providing the means to do so.
And of course, the means to do so involves Education and from it, the demonstration of moderation and self control. But more on that in the following chapter.
Hopefully by now you have realized that although our shoes insulate our feet from the pavement, they do not belong to us. If you got it and got it good, then let us extrapolate on this beautifully simple principle. If not, reread above, think, and repeat.
Nothing belongs to us besides our consciousness and the body we are in, and even this is arguable in the long term, as we do not really know if we hold onto ourselves once we pass on. But we will keep this statement at an immediate worldly perspective for a second.
Nothing belongs to us. Not our house, not our car, not our television, not our computer, not our bed, not our clothes, not our toothpaste, and not even the piece of crap we poop; nothing belongs to us. It is all an illusion that people create for themselves.
Everything is rooted in the Earth, not our existence – for our existence is also indeed rooted in the Earth. And again, we belong to the Earth; it does not belong to us.
Imagine yourself a few years down the road on that deathbed, slowly fading away. What are you going to be taking with you to the grave? What is going to follow you down, into the soil, into the Earth from which you were born?
Or for those crematoria types, what will follow and be of use to your ashes – wherever they are placed?
Better yet, if you are of the prospective type, what is going to be following you to wherever you may go? Well, I don’t know about you, but even though I do not know where my mind is going to go, I know for sure it does not involve what I have here!
In other words, I know our consciousness has nothing to lose
besides itself.
(PS: In case you have the thought, we cannot just create secondary ownership, with the Earth being primary. That is again another invention of reality.)
Intellectual
What a relief, to have set free our hands and feet of the hopeless grasp they have on the world, isn’t it? If you have indeed made it thus far, then it is now time for the finale, to set free the thoughts of our minds.
I am now going to talk about so called intellectual ‘property,’ the idea that ideas belong to the person who came up with the idea
But first off, who invented that idea? Let me give you a hint: it was not me, but I can 100% guarantee it was some two legged mammal who believed they were from the species Humanus Maximus.
Especially in today’s digitized world, there is now an enormous effort being made to coerce everyone into believing in intellectual property. Specifically, just look at the major film and record executives – they would all like us to believe that their Money Making Ideas belong to them so that the consumers surrender all their earnings to who they ‘righteously belong.’
Take for example the music industry and the now rampant transmission of music in MP3 format. We have people claiming that it is wrong to share music without paying for it and that it is a Crime, such as the anti-piracy promotion that goes like this:
You wouldn’t steal a car.
You wouldn’t steal a handbag.
You wouldn’t steal a mobile phone.
You wouldn’t steal a DVD.
Stealing is against the law!
Piracy. It’s a crime.
Mmmkay... Stealing, eh? Let’s think about this for a little bit. A car, a handbag, a phone, a DVD... What do these four items have in common? Well, they are all tangible items! They can all be substantiated by physical means.
Not that this fact means much by now, but bear with me, it is the most tremendous difference possible when talking about ‘stealing.’ Remember, as previously defined, ‘stealing’ is really the inhibition of a person’s ability, though we will talk about stealing in the classical sense to get this point across.
When someone ‘steals’ from another, they are taking something that is tangible – for example, a car. If a person takes a car, they now have something they can touch and feel, while leaving the ‘previous owner’ grasping for air.
Stealing is when someone takes Some-Thing from Some-One. With digital media, that Some-Thing is still left with the original owner. In other words, No-Thing was taken from Some-One. The original owner never lost anything they did not have in the first place.
With downloading, there is not any loss on the original owner’s side. Digital media can be duplicated infinite times with barely any effort at all, while physical items, like a car, cannot. There is a limitation to how many cars can be produced, but there is not a limitation to how many times an MP3 can be replicated (that is, assuming an infinite continuation of time).
So, considering the intangible nature of digital content, it is clearly implausible to think of an MP3 or any other digital file as we do with a car or a handbag. There is nothing tying them together – quite literally in this case.
Though of course, the real argument is that downloading is the same as stealing because it does not compensate the artist for their work and does not provide them the means to live.
In other words, it inhibits the ability of the artist to survive.
But why can’t they survive if they do not sell anything? Because they don’t make any money, right?
Well, maybe without that, then perhaps they could live just fine…
and so begins the next chapter.
(Continue to Money)
