Theory of Indivisibility: Current Complexities of Ownership
This post corresponds with Episode 13 of my podcast Theory of Indivisibility, where I talk about the evolution of ownership. Be sure to check it out on Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, Spotify, or Stitcher!
Growing up, the idea of owning property and land was a foundational core value in my family. When I would visit my paternal grandparents in Apalachicola, Florida each summer during my childhood, my grandfather would drive around his very small town and show me the various plots of land that he and my grandmother owned. While at home in Philadelphia, PA, my father would pick me up on weekends to work on one of the many rental properties he owned in West Philly. So it was drilled into me at a young age that the ownership of property and land was a means for creating security and wealth.
The philosophical foundation of my Theory of Indivisibility is Systems Thinking: a holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way that a system’s parts are interconnected and how systems work over time and within the context of larger systems. There are two types of systems. Natural systems and human-made systems.
How does ownership fit within the context of larger systems?
Ownership is a human-made social system, and it is a subsystem of patriarchy. Patriarchy is a subsystem of power-over, which means that, like religion, the concept of ownership is rooted in power-over and control. We’ll address these interconnections and interdependencies in more detail as we move along.
To fully understand the current complexities of ownership in human societies we must acknowledge that there was a time when the concept of ownership did not exist at all for any humans in any context.
As I’ve explained in previous episodes, for the majority of the approximately 200,000 years of human history on this earth, people lived in small, egalitarian, hunter-gatherer, nomadic bands. These bands had a symbiotic give-and-take relationship with the land and each other. No one owned or had power over land and no one owned or had power over other people.
That way of life began to gradually change over the past 10–12,000 years, with the advent of farming and sedentary living. The shift from power-with social norms to power-over social norms happened at differing rates in different contexts all across the world. Our continent, what came to be known as North America, was one of the last places for these power dynamics to shift after colonization began relatively recently in 1492. Prior to that, the indigenous people of this continent (which many of them call Turtle Island) held a sacred partnership with the land.
The following is an excerpt from an article titled “The Western Idea of Private Property is Flawed. Indigenous Peoples Have it Right,” by Julian Brave NoiseCat.
While indigenous values, beliefs and practices are as diverse as indigenous people themselves, they find common roots in a relationship to land and water radically different from the notion of property. For indigenous people, land and water are regarded as sacred, living relatives, ancestors, places of origin or any combination of the above.
British and American empires dispossessed indigenous people of their lands in the name of property and productivity. Many indigenous children were sent to church and government schools where their languages and cultures were literally beaten out of them. Despite this brutal and enduring history, indigenous people today stand on the frontlines of global movements fighting for a more just relationship between humanity and the land.
Only in the last few years have we been learning that thousands of indigenous children at residential schools died and were buried in unmarked graves.
To assist us with analyzing and synthesizing the current complexities of ownership I’ve created a cluster map. Cluster maps are an important Systems Thinking tool because they help us to see the interconnections, interdependencies, and dynamic complexities of the elements (subsystems) that make up a system.
To make a cluster map, draw a large circle and then write all of the elements that make up whatever system you’re exploring. Anything that comes to mind when you think about ownership, write it down inside the circle.
As a call to action, I want to invite you to make your own cluster map of ownership. It can help you learn to diagnose and understand the complexities within systems.
My cluster map of ownership includes the following systems:
- Power-Over — The environmental sustainability issues we face today are the culminating effects of humans evolving to believe that we had power over land. This led to the belief that humans can manipulate land for our benefit without any acknowledgment of the harm that we may cause to the balance of nature’s ecosystems and the pollution we are causing.
- Patriarchy — because only recently — in the 20th century — did women gain the right to own land.
- Marriage — a form of legal ownership: Before 1870, any money made by a woman either through a wage, from investment, by gift, or through inheritance automatically became the property of her husband once she was married.
- Parenting — Many parents view their children as property.
- Gentrification — I call it modern-day colonization. The Colonization era was fueled by kings and queens expanding their territories to gain more riches and in exchange, settlers received benefits such as the freedom to practice their own religions without persecution. This was oppression masked as opportunity. The byproduct was that the indigenous people of those lands lost their land, culture, and entire way of life. The settlers felt justified in taking over the land because they were spreading their religion and “developing the land”, they had the power of guns and military forces behind them, and they viewed the indigenous people as “savages”. Gentrification today is fueled by the opportunity for people with money to invest and buy homes to buy really low in poor neighborhoods in order to maximize their chances of a bigger payoff or net worth later when the values go up due to more and more people with means investing in the development of that neighborhood. Gentrifiers say things like we are “bringing this area back” or “it’s an up and coming area” and they are justified as being good investors who are prudent financially. The byproduct of their investment savvy is that the poor and low-income people in those areas are displaced.
We can clearly see the many issues with ownership, so where do we go from here? Many people have already begun to imagine how the damage done by ownership in human societies might be repaired, and how to meet our basic needs of housing and security without ownership at all. We’ll explore how to transition away from ownership in the next Theory of Indivisibility transcript.
Until next time,
I love y’all — peace!
Dr. Sundiata Soon-Jahta
2022. Podcast brought into written form by Ray Lightheart
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Articles:
The Western Idea of Private Property is Flawed. Indigenous People Have it Right.
