Another one for the property junkies
You Think You Own Your Property But You Don’t
The concept of ownership is a mental disease.
I watched that show on Netflix called ‘Don’t Look Up.’
One of the underlying subplots was around a Colonel at the White House who charged the team for freely available snacks. It seemed to me that the subplot symbolised the notion of capitalism and what it is based on — creating ownership and the right to transact out of fresh air.
Nobody inherently owns anything.
That’s not some fucked up hippy ideal either. For something to be owned, someone has to come along at some point and steal it.
In Australia, the aboriginal people have been fighting for their land rights for a long time.
Most people believe now that the white man came along and stole the land from the aboriginal people. But this isn’t entirely correct.
When the aboriginal people first fought for their land, they told the courts that they did not believe in ownership. At the centre of aboriginal culture is the idea that the land owns us rather than the other way around. They believe that, as humans, we belong to the earth as leaves belong to a tree, and it is our task to work in service of the land.
Of course, our dumb legal system did not recognise that, so at some stage, they were forced to change their argument to one where they claimed to be the rightful owners of the land.
This had to happen because ownership is a capitalist notion.
The aboriginal people are much more intelligent in their ideas and capitalism is like a noose that is slowly choking the human race.
You think that this piece of land belongs to you because you have a piece of paper that says so and that having that gives you some rights. But this is bullshit.
You may have bought that land off John, who received it in a will from his father. He may have bought it off a woman called Jemima, who bought it off an opium farmer named Andy.
It all works well until you hit a point where someone didn’t pay for the land because there was no one to pay.
There was a stage in every instance of land ownership where someone took the land without an exchange of currency.
They stole it.
And, the fact that the land was initially stolen means that every single transaction that came after it was illegitimate.
You don’t own anything. No-one does.
And, sure, now some of you are probably thinking, No Frank, you don’t understand the legal system.
But the legal system isn’t real. It’s something that we humans have created to legitimise things like this.
We have gotten to a point where many residents of earth are told that they have no right to walk on a specific piece of the planet because they don’t have the correct papers.
It’s not just land ownership. It’s passports. Countries don’t own land either.
Young families are locked up on an island off the coast of Australia in terrible conditions for literally years by the Australian government. Meanwhile, the people are fed this lie that it is because they arrived ‘illegally’.
What this means is that they arrived by boat without going through ‘official’ channels. But landing as a refugee by any means is perfectly legal under international law.
The entire point of the process is that people in horrendous countries don't have the time to sit down, fill out a visa application and pay the excessive fees.
So the Australian government makes up lies that the actions of these people are illegal, sells it to the people and then locks them up like prisoners.
I was discussing whether we would be better under a dictatorship than a democracy, and someone said that a dictatorship always rises through violence.
I pointed out that every system arises through violence. Do people genuinely think the British empire, the USA and all that rose through peaceful means? Does anyone believe that the occupants of any country would just let someone take them over without a fight?
Ownership is a type of violence.
It’s saying I have a right to something that you don’t. It’s a tipping of the scales in favour of oneself over another. That’s violence.
If I want to live on your land, the only thing you can do to stop me is to get the police involved and if I won't move they have to drag me. The whole system is held in place by violence.
Governments take over land through violence, and landowners take over through violence. Sure, a transaction may occur at some point, but the entire chain of transactions is based on the fact that someone initially took the land that didn’t belong to them in the first place.
And because that original person didn’t own the land they took, the latest person doesn’t own the land either.
I believe there will come a time in the future when people will be collectively intelligent enough to realise how we fuck ourselves through our invention of concepts like money and ownership.
It is hard for someone brought up under such imaginary regimes to accept another way — especially those of us that are in the top one per cent of well off people in the world. We see the benefits of capitalism, but the other side of the see-saw is hidden carefully from us. That’s why we continue to prop up the system.
Under capitalism, for every person that is living well, there is someone else living in hell.
Ideas like communism are always accompanied by our culturally conditioned pictures of oppression, poverty, and red flags.
It is hard for us to consider that if the world embraced communism, another word for sharing, we could create a model of luxurious communism where everyone could have whatever they want.
But while models of imaginary corporations and billionaires who hoard money like angry rats exist, this planet will never be able to see peaceful times.
Ownership is a mental disease used to elevate some and oppress others. It is held in place by violence. It is not balanced, and it is a forced concept that has no basis in reality since it has to be based on an original theft.
One day we will realise it’s a big fucking weight around the neck of the human race.
Until then, ‘Don’t Look Up’ is well worth a watch.
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