Private property is losing its moral legitimacy

So great, moreover, is the regard of the law for private property that it will not authorize the least violation of it; no, not even for the general good of the whole community. 

— Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780), English jurist, judge, and Tory politician.

The centrality of property to political economy is a metaphysical error, institutionalized forgetting, spawning violence and uncountable injury. 

It might be duality’s most powerful bullet, aimed at a world that long ago declared itself unable or unwilling to meet even the most basic human needs. A world that believes it still doesn’t have enough, that on the way to having more, bodies, languages, cultures, soil, air, water, and species become disposable. Physical limits become mere mathematical puzzles to be cleverly solved—a new way of creating fictitious resources. 

The original justifications for privatizing the Earth were that its judicious use would benefit society. When that benefit became entitlement, belonging was fractured. 

The commons are not simply what no one owns. It is what everyone owns, that dimension of reality whose existence depends upon participation rather than possession. The consequences that followed the original fracture describe the world we have today. When belonging becomes the universal platform of participation, the world will turn. 

Property law was not founded on any meaningful provision declaring ‘owners’ beholden to the commons on which the collective depends. That singular error was ontological because, as time has passed, the increasing cost to the commons of such ownership has been denied or escaped the collective attention it deserved–except perhaps through the UN’s too-little-too-late Conference of the Parties (COP) process. 

Environmental law, containment, and accountability lag far behind property ‘rights.’ On top of dismemberment, the distance between economics and morality has only increased, so morality has virtually vanished, replaced by hyper-parsed legal definitions of harm.  

Meanwhile, the planet is not responding positively to the original expectation of benign return, especially as theocrats, late-stage capital, and Silicon Valley craft a technological monoculture bearing down on the last remaining spoils of the Holocene. 

At one time, the dismemberment of Earth may have been a legitimate venture to improve life, the commonwealth, or individual status. But at today’s scale, when acts of perpetual division and exploitation reach today’s extremes (see Amazon rainforest, tar sands of Alberta, rare Earth mines of China, the Mekong, Ganges and Niger deltas), when the other side of the property equation becomes ecological devastation, mass extinction, suffering and death, when the costs of further extraction overrun the benefits derived without any significant accounting, there is no sustainable virtue to be found in its administration. The legitimacy of property power collapses. 

We are now in the middle of that collapse. 

Reality has overrun Judge Blackstone’s absolutism. Property is an institutionalized fracture of morality. Because the economic priesthood considers property to be an indispensable signifier of economic vitality, efforts to cleanse it of moral, ethical, and ontological lapse meet strong headwinds. A redefinition of all landed and intellectual property to benefit the commons is unlikely, because the global operating system is incapable of facing its own ecological consequences. Since those consequences have become impossible to ignore, the only alternative to confronting them is to suppress the record of biospheric feedback. 

A revitalized recognition of existential entanglement, morality, and an economic definition of the responsibilities of property power to the commons is a more likely (however remote) possibility. But as we know, planetary repair will take much longer than a few hundred, or even a few thousand years. The romanticized individual acquiring a unique piece of Earth, claiming territorial sovereignty, including over whatever improvements ensue, without any meaningful accountability to the collective, under the auspices of a world system that guarantees inequality, is an ontology that has long overstayed its welcome. 

As long as the liberal individual, when faced directly with a clear and specific choice…thinks first of oneself, free to choose to suit themselves, to act as the unchecked “gunman,” to act through ego, without any regard for others, then consequences, or what the economists innocuously refer to as externalities, will inevitably follow.

— Paul Babie

According to Iain McGilchrist’s framework of brain function, the concept of property would belong with the left hemisphere. The conceit it attains is directly related to the ego-satisfaction it provides: the certainty and order of the mechanical view, even at the cost of claiming, channeling, or diverting the river of belonging. I want what I want, so to speak. Damn the relational consequences! The right hemisphere, prioritizing relational participation, is more inclined to be faithful to the tension of paradox, the infrastructure of human morality, desires and ethics in a constantly changing field of limited material resources: tensegrity. 

If tensegrity defines the field of belonging, then belonging is akin to gravity. It holds us apart as much as it brings us together. Participation is its natural expression, one’s attunement to the delicate balance of belonging. To privatize the Earth brings management to the natural, uninterrupted mutuality of existence. It objectifies the world, especially those who share that world with us. 

Property reifies a single moment in the flow of time and redefines the terms of that mutual influence for the sake of certainty. It casts tensional ripples through nature, culture, and, for that matter, the metaphysical body. 

The yang-oriented left brain thinks in terms of product, while the yin-oriented right hemisphere thinks in terms of process. Can humanity recover from being locked for centuries into the (left hemispheric) Enlightenment view?  Can we recover an integrated, balanced archetypal ground sufficient to restore life-enhancing governing principles? Whether we continue our headlong rush toward civilizational suicide may depend on it. 

It was the radical American revolutionary Thomas Paine who declared in his 1796 pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, that property is the ‘progenitor of wretchedness,’ creating conditions of such wealth disparity that would never occur in what he called, ‘the natural state.’ 

Property incites conflict across the world; it is a constant fuel for simmering revolutionary intent against the egotistical grip of property power. Paine further claimed, 

As it is impossible to separate the improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, the idea of landed property arose from that inseparable connection; but it is nevertheless true that the value of the improvement only and not the earth itself is individual property. Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community a ground-rent for the land which he holds.

Paine proposed this “ground rent” (or tax) to be proportionate to the amount of property owned and the product of that property. Today, in the absence of adequate standards of stewardship, property becomes a progenitor of violence spread across the globe into every ecosystem. As scholar Holly Doremus argues in her paper, Climate Change and the Evolution of Property Rights, published in the UC Irvine Law Review: 

Strong property rights encourage moral hazard, increasing the costs of adaptation to a warming world, and standing directly in the way of material adaptation.

In his book, The Age of Reason (1794), Paine anchored the locus of divine revelation in what he called ‘The Book of Nature’. The Bible, he said, is not a product of divine revelation; God speaks to the world through nature, and the only universal language is the language of God’s creation. For Paine, an unmediated personal relationship with the divine was only possible through direct reverence for the process of the natural world. 

When the imperial operating system says, ‘There isn’t room for both of us,’ it is the unmoderated left brain speaking. Continuity becomes the object of all transactions. The universal subject (union) is denied; belonging is dispersed. 

The lonely catechism of scarcity, driving intense competition at the expense of everything disposable, spells enduring conflict and ultimate doom. In today’s hyper-connected world, the wound is existential. The harm becomes universal. When the imagery of the spaghetti Western becomes doctrine, when the world-as-object never honestly confronts the source of its own suffering, the commons become an inconvenient truth. And truth is dismissed as myth.

This piece has been edited for clarity.