Follow the money to find the crime...
In this episode we explore a hidden problem right at the roots of the possession-economy…
“All property is theft!” - remember that old slogan? Laughable, right?
Not so laughable, actually - because it turns out that it actually is true. Maybe only in a strict technical sense at first, until we start to look a bit deeper. And even if it is true only a technical sense, that fact is still important, because it ultimately demolishes the entire basis for the possession-economy. A definite ‘Oops’ there…
“Yeah, yeah, right… sure we believe you", you might say, in a suitably sarcastic tone. Or at least I’d guess most people would start off by saying something like that, anyway. And yeah, I do know that it sounds crazy at first - but bear with me for a moment, okay?
The trick here is to play a game of ‘follow the money’.
So here’s what’s going on. We live in a money-based possession-economy. That means that we buy stuff to get what we need - for everyday like food and shelter and clothes and so on, but also things like the computer or phone or whatever that you’re using to read this newsletter. And you paid for it, or someone else paid for it for you, in the right and proper way. It’s property, and no theft of any kind - so the notion that ‘all property is theft’ is obviously false. And saying that it is theft feels insulting, too. Very.
Yet this is where gets a bit tricky… Remember the headline here: ‘Follow the money to find the crime’…
The way we prove that we haven’t stolen whatever-it-is is that we paid the proper price for it. There’s a trail of provenance there: receipts and all that. That’s how we justify the rights of possession: we bought it from someone, who bought it from someone else, who bought it from someone else, who bought it from someone else. All fair and correct, right?
On the surface it’d seem so, yes. (Other than perhaps a few questionable oddities along the way, but let’s just ignore those for this exercise?) Yet to see what’s really going on, we need to play ‘Follow The Money’ all the way to the very start of each trail of provenance. Because that’s where we discover that every single one of these so-honest trails of provenance starts with a theft.
Ouch…
And no, that’s not an exaggeration. That theft is actually a requirement: a possession-based economics can’t work without it. Remember, in a money-based economics, each link in a monetary trail-of-provenance is created when when someone pays someone else so as to acquire from them the exclusive ‘right’ to possess that item. The point there is that possession is defined as a right – the right to personal property, and so on. In British law it’s actually defined the other way round, which is probably more accurate: it’s defined as a right to exclude others from access to resources that they may need. As the 18th-century English jurist William Blackstone put it:
“that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe”.
After the start-point in a trail-of-provenance, the ‘right’ to the property - or to exclude others from access to that property - is transferred from one person to the next via agreed some form of exchange, such as payment, a gift, barter or suchlike. But that isn’t what happens at the start-point….
Instead, what happens at the start-point is an expropriation - in other words, an arbitrary assertion that their supposed ‘rights’ to that item somehow magically overrides else’s. That’s it: there’s no more justification than that. Or, more accurately, no justification at all.
It may have been arbitrarily expropriated from someone else - in others, what we’d normally describe as theft.
It may have been expropriated from people in the past, or in the future. Who, conveniently for the thief, can’t object to the theft, because they’re either already dead, or not yet alive - but that inability to object doesn’t justify the theft.
It may be expropriated via conquest - which doesn’t make it any more right, it merely means that the thief has probably added the crime of murder to the crime of theft.
It may have been expropriated by selling something that doesn’t actually exist, - otherwise known as a scam - but supposedly does exist once someone has paid for it. That’s how a mortgage works: the bank pretends that the money exists, sells it, then uses the interest from the buyer’s promise-to-pay as the imaginary money to sell to the next patsy in the scam.
Or in an extreme example, it may have been expropriation of an entire country from everyone who lives in it, and even expropriation of the lives of those people themselves - otherwise known as colonialism. In that type of case, it doesn’t matter how much flowery language is used by the person and people asserting ‘rights of possession’ that are most certainly not theirs to claim, it’s still an arbitrary expropriation, a theft on an enormous scale:
…and despite its pompous grandiosity, in reality it’s exactly as ludicrously laughable invalid and indefensible as this childish schoolroom possession-squabble:
The fact that the colonial claim might be backed up by a murderous amount of ‘guns, germs and steel’ doesn’t make it any better, either…
So let’s summarise all of this. Some of these trail-of-provenance can be centuries long - but if we pick any trail and ‘follow the money’ all the way back to the start, we’ll always find the same crime: although most or all of the subsequent links will be honest enough, that very first claim of ‘right of possession, right at the start of any trail-of-provenance, will always be based on some kind of expropriation or theft.
Or, to put it in another painfully-accurate form: no matter how honest we ourselves may be, the way that the possession-economy actually works is that it ultimately requires us all to be receivers of stolen goods.
Not exactly a comforting realisation, I’d imagine? But if we want a socioeconomics that is actually sustainable and survivable, we really do need to do better than this…
Tom, extremely interesting article as always. This very scenario is the catalyst for a lack of innovation in most companies, where contractually organizations claim IP "Rights" for innovative thoughts and documentation created whilst an individual is employed by the organization. The mass resignation across the globe would seem to be fuelled by a need for individuals to remove the yoke of corporate compliance to allow them to more freely innovate.
With the possession economy starting with barter we would seem to be returning to a barter system which will be tokenised in a digital world of assets.