Klaus: If you weren't such an arrogant dick.

 

Regionalism / Grant Wood/ Stone City, Iowa

Long meander today.  I am pretty well content right now.  

Mostly I want to talk about not getting all het up about the way that the world seems to specialize in doing the wrong thing.  Well, not the world per se but the humans within it.

I have managed to carve myself out a precarious little habitat here on the fringes of riot-town.  I pretty much have what I want and sufficient energy and monetary flows to live a pretty well contained and satisfying life.  In a sense, I am living the dream of Herr Schwab of the WEF.  I don’t own anything and I am happy.  

Now there are folks out there who think that my happiness is a chimera.  That I am fooling myself.  Might be true.  In this good christian land (and the lack of capitalization is intentional) the teachings of the new testament are assiduously ignored:

Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me.

Now, don’t sweat it, but I can’t think of a single serious philosophical tradition where taking everything that you can get hold of and screaming “mine” is a central tenet.  But, it is a big world, maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough.  Most of the biggies in the philosophical world seem to think that your ownership owns you as much as you own the physical item.

Physical ownership imparts an incomplete security.  It also drastically limits one's ability to react to the world’s vagaries.  Now, not to kid myself, not owning anything is just a different set of limitations.  But both of these extremes of insecurity seem to me to be equivalent.  Ownership does allow for some depth in coping with the world as long as the concept is widely accepted.  But ownership itself tends toward making that depth of potential reaction ever growing. In my mind, ownership in itself is a means of controlling the environment in a constrained space/time.  

But, the reason that I find ownership unattractive for myself is that my life experience seems to point out that we are entering a period where the external environment necessary to maintain property is being eaten away.

Who knows?

I think that the ideal that ownership strives for, and rarely achieves is that of an independent smallholder.  Where the holding itself allows sufficient energy flows to sustain the person holding it.  Those types of holdings are not really possible in the world that we have currently inherited/crafted.  Ownership of an isolated smallhold that is self-sufficient is so rare as to be mythological.  Holdings now reflect the level that the holder is constrained by and beholden to a global system of symbol exchange.  Most holders could no more survive on the internal proceeds of their holding than they could chase down a deer with a spear.

I really have no way of guessing the outcome of this game.  We are well outside the possibility of sustaining the current system.  I have some guesses about what may come next, but to think that these are anything other than guesses would be naive in the extreme.