Property: Moral Grayness in our Time

BlueVino

Resist1776.info

5/14/2013

Lately, there are a lot of people talking about property rights, patents, copyrights, and the proper use thereof.  The internet has really changed the playing field & the perception of how these rights work & apply to various things.  Part of which now includes living things.  Right & wrong have all but been lost in this discussion & moral grayness prevails.  Meanwhile, corporate fascists are having a field day while we’re all busy trying to fight over what’s okay & what’s not okay.  There are even those who believe property is simply an illusion & nothing can be “owned” by anyone.

To begin, I’ll start with land, or real estate property.  Does it exist, or is it bullsh!t?  Well, back when America was just beginning to be settled by Europeans, Native Americans would ponder the notion of property when they were asked to trade their land.  They would inquire:  how can one own a part of mother earth?  It is where all living things live.  It is not ours to give.  It is nobody’s to take.  However, they did have tribes & there already was a border of sorts from tribe to neighboring tribe.  So, one might say that seems hypocritical.  But it’s all in the perspective in which you look at the situation.  The tribe wasn’t a patch of land, it was the people.  So one could argue that it was more of a proximity from which the tribe lived.  If the tribe ended up moving for some reason, that proximity went with them.  This all changed when Europeans began overwhelming the Natives.  So Native Americans then were forced into the existence of physical land property for the sake of saving their own existence & way of life.  It is in this way that land property DOES exist.

Lets apply that to another type of property:  things you own.  Like a house for example.  For me, this is a big deal.  As, being an Anarchist, one would believe I think all Government should be abolished & therefor borders wouldn’t exist & neither would property.  This is false.  Anarchy isn’t exactly chaos, as people would still want to look out for the well being of themselves & the people they care about.  What I’m getting at is:  if you have a house.  Is it not yours?  If someone came to kill you & take it for themselves because “Anarchy is CRAAAZZY” would you not defend yourself?  Or even if they weren’t trying to kill you, say they were just a squatter that believes “hey man, you can’t own things man.  Like, everything is for everyone, man.”  Depending on who you are, who lives with you, & how you feel about trusting the stranger (because nothing is preventing anyone from being a jerk.  Laws don’t prevent it, absence of laws wouldn’t either), you may or may not want to let the stranger in.  Are you some jerk because you “believe the house is yours?”  The same applies to borders.

Even though there are people who think “man, the fact that there are people who think they can tell other people where they can or can’t live is just wrong.”  I bet that same person doesn’t pick up every single hitch hiker they see.  Well why not?  Oh, it seems risky?  Welcome to reality.  Or if they woke up to find a homeless person living in their car, I very much doubt they’d just think “well, I guess he lives there now because I have no right to tell him/her where to live.”  Or, maybe some people are actually firm in that belief & they have tons of homeless people living in & around the stuff that they claim isn’t necessarily “theirs.”  Growing up, I knew people who lived in a shared-purse community where they all shared what they “owned.”  Your neighbor could literally come over & borrow your car because it belonged to the community.  But you know what?  They still asked first, & if you really couldn’t let them borrow it, they respected your wishes.  So even then, the “thing” still had a person it belonged to who was in charge of what happened to said thing.  If anyone violated this kind of trust, you can bet they would be kicked out of the community.

What about other things you own?  A great comedian by the name of Jim Gaffigan has a joke where he claims that nobody owns an umbrella, & that there are only about 12 of them worldwide that we actually just pass on to each other through various circumstances unknowingly.  That the umbrella’s are just “on loan from the universe.”  While it is a funny joke, what if everything really was like that?  Say people who claim you can’t own things are right & they get their way.  Say I come over & then take all the stuff they have that I don’t have.  Well, after all:  none of it has an owner.  I’ll just take these clothes.  “But I’m wearing them.”  Yeah so what, you don’t own them.  I feel like wearing all the clothes I can wear at once just because I want to do that.  What’s the matter?  You have a look on your face like you’re not enjoying the whole not being in control of things you need.

Another example that gets thrown around is food.  We need food or we’ll die.  This has led to a conversation about a “right” to food.  There are people who claim we all have a right to food just because we’re alive & thus have a right to keep ourselves alive.  Well, they’re not wrong, but this certainly isn’t a complete thought.  You do have a right to food.  So go get some.  Go on.  Go get it.  Wait, you can’t grab those chips.  Why not?  Well the guy that made those chips grew the potatoes himself.  He went out, managed to find some wild potatoes & has been working hard at cultivating them himself.  He says you can have some, if you help him out.  But if you go grabbing for the food he’s worked so hard to make, he’s going to shoot you.  (this is a fantasy to prove a point, so just go along with me here).  “Well what am I supposed to do then, I have a right to food!”  You do, but that would be the right to physically go get the food from it’s source:  Nature.

Now we’re getting into another form of property:  that of which you make yourself.  It can be all sorts of things.  Like in the previous example, the food my made up character wanted was potato chips.  But that’s not how they are in nature (obviously).  So to get that thing, one would need to make it themselves.  If you cannot make it yourself (lacking in skills or means to do so) then you trade.  This places ownership of the made thing onto you, per the one who made it & deemed you worthy.  Children understand this very much.  The fact that some adults do not is just sad.  “Everything belongs to everyone, man.”

What about works of art?  Music for example.  Remember when Metallica’s drummer got all bent outta shape over Napster?  There were people on all sides of the spectrum in regards to belief in ownership & what’s okay or not okay.  Still to this day, if you have a tape recording radio boombox, you can record songs from the radio as they’re being broadcast.  As far as I’ve ever listened to the radio, I don’t ever remember hearing an FBI warning about copying what was being broadcast.  Then lets say you take that tape, copy it & give it to a friend.  Most people won’t see anything wrong with that (even though the person recording the music hasn’t even purchased a copy of the music). As technology has progressed, the ability for one to obtain a representation of someone’s artful creation has gotten so easy, that it’s become normal to “steal” whatever media you want.  You don’t have to be a hacker, or even really all that good with computers.  So even though the “property,” the work of art, belongs to it’s creator, the creator will never again be reimbursed like they used to.  Cutting to the chase:  it was a respectable & valued way to earn your place in society because people needed that beautiful reminder of what humanity is, via art.  So it rewarded you the ability to obtain what you need (and more).  But, it’s still a much needed thing for humanity.  Any more, I’m on both sides of the argument.  I want my work heard more than I want to fulfill my needs with said works.  If pirating it, or recording the audio from a YouTube video of it is the way it gets passed around, so be it.  Morality isn’t going to change this aspect of property, unfortunately.

FULL ARTICLE HERE