Ownership as Psychosis

I’ve been pondering the concept of ownership for well over a decade now. Here’s one of my first pieces on it: And You Thought the Titanic Was a Disaster…

Nothing I’ve found has changed the course of my thinking on it, and I’ve looked hard for anything that would.

You just can’t get around certain black-and-white facts.

Ownership is the declaration of a protection for which there is, empirically speaking, no demonstrable real-world need. Zero. Absolutely none.

As such, the impetus for the fanatical devotion to this idea is psychotic in the literal sense: originating from minds that have severely broken from reality.

This isn’t hard to see from the fact that, just like any other kind of cultist, people obsessed with this device—this gambit, if you will—are absolutely, positively, 100% sure that it’s right and true and necessary and unavoidable. In fact, they wonder why I’d even want to avoid it—without the slightest inkling about why they think so.

That ought to be the first huge fucking clue.

But then you listen to their explanations, their arguments, their protestations, and their denials—I have, over and over, until it degenerated into broken-record boredom—and you realize that nothing they’ve said explains why they’d opt for the gambit. Most of it comes down to a consequentialist OMG!—just like most moronically preemptive authoritarian, supremacist shit does: without ownership, everyone would take your shit away and leave you with nothing.

Did I mention psychosis?

Look, dude, if that’s the kind of people that surround you, you really need to find better friends.

In point of fact—if you check out real happenings between real people in real situations where sharing is the rule instead of your hysterical but-what-if hallucinations—no.

That shit just don’t happen, and it ain’t gonna happen, my friend.

But what’s really wild isn’t just that ownership-crazed people think it most definitely will happen. It’s that they actually think that ownership will help them in any way or shape if and when—they just know—it does happen.

If you’ve ever been mugged, robbed, or someone broke into your house and stole things, tell me…

What the fuck good did your claim of ownership do for you?

You know the answer as well as I do.

Nothing. Fuckall.

And, unless you’re rich and “law enforcement” actually gives a shit about you, it usually does shitall for you in the “justice system”, too.

Ownership is an artifact of psychosis in this way: if you weren’t convinced that you live in a place where everyone will steal your shit unless you stop them preemptively, what the fuck could possibly possess you to declare unilaterally, with no tangible or historical or evidential basis whatsoever, that your belongings have thereby been universally deprived from every other fucking human being on the planet because… well, just because.

Amber’s Caticorn Cali has been unstolen and unmolested for months since she got it. Why? Because everyone in the family knows how precious it is to her. But one day she suddenly bursts into the room and announces to her family that none of them can ever touch, take, or use it under penalty of punishment and 9-y-o female wrath, then storms out.

Why? Because she started thinking how sad she’d be if her Cali got lost or damaged or stolen or… then she started spinning out. Laying down the law for her family was the only thing she could think of doing to keep little Cali safe.

Safe from whom?

In actual fact, safe from no one real.

You want to say it’s not that simple, there’s more to ownership than that. Cool. Go ahead. Explain the complexities. Explain what in fact—not in general, not hypothetically or theoretically—actually prompts your move to declare universal deprivation. What specific people of a mind to rob you are you thinking of dissuading? How exactly is your declaration of ownership going to dissuade them from robbing you?

Have you ever once thought this through realistically, intelligently?

You might be surprised to hear me say that I agree, though: it’s way more complicated than that. We have created entire “societies” and “civilizations” around this primal idea of depriving the entire world of the belongings we “own”. Very fucking complicated.

Which only underscores the incredible depths and density and intricate convolutions of the psychosis that gives rise to the gambit and sustains it so invincibly.

No, you’re wrong about ownership in every actual, real-world sense.

99.99% of the things you’ve ever “owned” were never at risk of being taken away from you—not ever. Proven fact, because they in fact were not taken from you—were they?

And it wasn’t because you were the “owner”.

99.99% of the time, 99.99% of the people who even knew what your belongings are have no fucking intention of taking anything away from you. None. Law or not, “ownership” or not, the idea of taking your shit is odious to them.

That is why they steal nothing from you.

That is the proven reality.

So, where the fuck have everyone’s heads been stuck when it comes to this?

When I say, “psychosis”, it’s not rhetoric.