Chapter 5: Claim: The Will to Own

Chapter Five
Claim: The Will to Own

Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.

— e.e. cummings

Having considered the physical nature of property, our attention now turns to its social implications. Contrary to the assumptions of our politically conditioned thinking, is it possible for a system of privately owned property to maximize, without contradiction or conflict, both individual liberty and societal order? Why do such forms of entropy as victimizing crime, political oppression, and the unintended injuries we inflict upon one another, ultimately reduce themselves to conflicts over property? To explore such questions, we must look at the interplay of the two elements of property that are rarely understood, even in our materialistic, industrialized culture: the claim of ownership to, and the exercise of control over those interests we call “property.” To comprehend the meaning and importance of these concepts is to understand how respect for the inviolability of our lives and other property interests is what human liberty and social order are all about, and why all political systems are at war with individuals concerning these factors.

The element of “claim” is the most philosophically controversial feature of property ownership. This is because all property, in order to be owned, must be claimed by someone, whether they be private persons (e.g., an individual, a corporation) or a political entity (e.g., the state). To claim ownership is to assert a right to decision-making control over an item of property. But, contrary to our materialistic assumptions, a claim of ownership does not involve our relationship to an item of property (e.g., a car) but to our neighbor concerning that item of property. Which of us will have the authority to decide the use—or even the destruction—of the car? Upon examination, the idea of having a relationship with your house, or car, or a painting, borders on silliness. It is to others that our claims are directed, something we would not need to do if we were the only human being on earth.

Because property ownership is a social concept, a consideration of the claim element must begin within the context of societal definitions and practices. A claim of ownership is the assertion of one’s will, addressed to others, to be the exclusive decision-maker over oneself or some resource; to have what one claims be immune from trespasses by other persons.

Political and other social systems are defined by how property is owned within them. Every political system owes its existence to some degree of collective claim over property, for each form of government is only a variation on the theme of how authority over property is to be exercised by the state. The claim element is murky for one major reason: the state could not exist in an environment that recognized an unrestrained right of private ownership. Politics is unthinkable without property trespasses and takings. For the sake of their very survival, political systems must convince us that “property rights are not absolute.” On the other hand, the authority of the state to define the limits of our ownership interests is regarded as absolute! As we shall discover, all property interests are, by the nature of ownership, absolute, it being only a matter of determining whether individuals or the state will have the ultimate claim of authority.

Feudalism is a politically structured system of land ownership, wherein all feudal lands are ultimately owned by a ruler— such as a king—who grants rights to such lands in exchange for continuing duties and services (e.g., participation in fighting wars, which was that system’s principal purpose).

In a communist system, the state nationalizes the ownership claims of all the means of production. Other factions of state socialism part company with the Marxists over the question of what types of privately owned property are to be brought under state ownership (e.g., steel mills, mines, or railroads, as opposed to small farms or retail shops). In each of these systems, the state confiscates both the “title” (i.e., legally recognized ownership interest) and the “control” (i.e., effective decision-making power) of the property in question.

Welfare state systems operate on the premise that a portion of private property will be confiscated from its owners, through taxation, and redistributed to others whom the state chooses as beneficiaries of such programs, be they “poor” persons or “rich” corporations.

Under a system of fascism, the title to property remains in private hands, but the state exercises actual decision-making authority (i.e., control) over the use of such property.¹

This helps to explain why increasing numbers of people correctly intuit that there are no fundamental differences among major political parties: at their core, each embraces the authority of the state to regulate how property will be owned and used. That the modern neo-conservative movement has been greatly influenced, if not dominated, by socialists and ex-Marxists,² dramatically illustrates the collectivist nature of all political systems. To the extent that James Burnham’s “managerial state”— or the modern “corporate state”—has supplanted political ideologies, the scope of its power is nonetheless measured in terms of control over property. Collectivism is a generic concept, not restricted to partisan usage of either the “Left” or “Right.” Since control is the very essence of ownership, one can begin to understand how disingenuous it is to pose “socialism” and “fascism” as polar opposites along a continuum. Each system involves a coercive taking of private ownership, a truth not lost on Adolf Hitler who gave the name “National Socialist German Workers Party”—or “National Socialism”—to his fascist regime.

By contrast, a stateless society is one in which the ownership and control of property remains in the hands of individuals or voluntarily-constituted associations.

Because every political system is grounded in certain assumptions about how property is to be owned and controlled, how we resolve the claim question tells us whether our lives are to be individually or collectively directed. This, in turn, defines the extent of personal liberty in a given society. To the degree control over property is decentralized among individuals, we can be said to have a free society while, conversely, a society in which such authority is centralized in the state is, to that degree, a non-free society. Liberty, then, is defined not in terms of how much property you own, but how much authority you exercise over what you do own.

At this point, collectivists can be expected to object to any individual’s claim of ownership. Citing Proudhon’s self-contradictory phrase that “property is theft,”³ they would interject a presumed collective claim on behalf of all mankind. But what is the historic or principled basis for such a claim? Given the diversity of preferences, tastes, values, and other interests that distinguish one person from another, is it conceivable for an abstract “mankind” to express a common will concerning the employment of resources? If it is, is there any evidence that a collective humanity has ever asserted a prior claim to such resources and, if so, against whom was such a claim addressed? Upon what basis can those who exercise political authority allegedly on behalf of such a collective will be assured that they know of what that common understanding consists? Does this proposition amount to anything more than a preference for collective thinking—upon which all politicalsystems depend—over individual behavior? This is a topic to which we shall return in chapter nine.

An analysis of the claim of ownership question begins with the most basic of inquiries: do you own yourself? Because of the central importance that the question of self-ownership has to an understanding not only of property, but to the nature of a free and peaceful society, the first case I have my students read for their first day of law school is Dred Scott v. Sandford.⁴ Scott challenged his legal status as a slave on the grounds that when Congress enacted a statute prohibiting slavery in the Northwest territories, he had obtained his freedom when his master took him into that region. The United States Supreme Court refused his claim in part on the grounds that he was not a “person”— and thus could not seek redress in the courts—but remained the “property” of his master, an ownership interest that could not be lost by a person taking his property from one state into another.

This case has far more profound meaning than its racial implications, going to the question of whether the state should be in the position of conferring legally recognized “personhood” upon human beings. Self-ownership and other private property principles have long been denied by governmental regulation of transactions among people. In 1861, Henry Maine addressed this problem in an essay concerning the locus of authority for determining the sources of the rights and duties of individuals.⁵ Were such matters to be decreed by traditional, family-based definitions, or by agreements entered into by individuals? Maine characterized such rights and obligations as deriving either from “status” (e.g., family birth order, gender, caste) or from freely-negotiated “contracts,” adding that “the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.”⁶ By this, he meant that, historically, the determination of one’s rights and obligations had moved away from legally defined status to those based upon voluntary contracts.

While Maine focused on family-generated expectations in his discussion of “status,” these competing concepts also apply to politically-imposed versus individually bargained-for relationships. To illustrate the point: a legal system may prohibit married women or minors from owning property or entering into contracts on their own behalf. This is not because such persons had agreed to such arrangements, but because they were imposed upon them by virtue of their legally-defined “status” (i.e., “married woman,” or “minor”). A legal system operating upon such principles is, to the extent of such imposed restraints, status-based. On the other hand, if these same individuals are able to freely bind themselves, their rights would reflect a contract-based system. Minimum wage laws, rent control ordinances, and government mandated product standards, are a few more examples of how status-based rights conflict with those freely contracted for by employers and employees, landlords and tenants, or retailers and customers.

Dred Scott was challenging the practice of state-conferred “status” that defined him as the property of another instead of recognizing his claim to be an owner. From its very inception, this nation’s history has been characterized by a profound disrespect for claims of self-ownership. The institution of slavery and the despoiling of the lives, lands, and cultures of many American Indians, represent a form of entropy that our society has still not managed to work out of its system. While such practices have been attributed to racist inclinations—which is certainly true—what has been overlooked in the assessment of such brutalities was the implicit denial of the principle of selfownership. While almost all thoughtful men and women now condemn these earlier practices, there has been little awakening to the importance of asserting the case for self-ownership. To the extent that we deny our own self-ownership, we have not ended slavery, but only redefined it. By subjecting our lives to the control and management of institutional authorities— particularly the state—we have done little more than transfer our allegiances to new masters. Since the ability to overcome entropy is essential to survival, and since external resources are the only means available to any living thing trying to overcome entropy, state control of any sort has anti-life implications.

How you answer the self-ownership question has profound implications, for control over your life will be exercised by someone, be it you or another. If you are unwilling to assert a claim to your own life, you can be assured that there are others who are prepared to do so in order to further their interests. The question of whether you or the state is to have the ultimate control over your life underlies most political and legal issues.

While there are no objectively “right” or “wrong” answers to the self-ownership question, there are consequences that flow from how we answer it. How the question gets resolved—or whether it even gets asked—goes to the essence of what is meant by a claim of self-ownership: the assertion of one’s will to have exclusive power and control over one’s life. As we explore this question, we get a sense of how deeply it cuts into our lives— whether we think of ourselves as self-controlling, and, therefore, self-responsible individuals, or as subjugated and dependent members of an undifferentiated mass.

Social conflict arises out of a sense that one’s interests have been trespassed by another. As we have seen, the extent of our ownership interests is defined by the boundaries of what we claim. Since it is not an expression of our liberty to transgress the boundaries of others, our decision-making authority necessarily ends at our boundary lines. If each of us confined our actions to what is ours to own and control, conflict with others would cease. This is why peace and liberty are compatible only when considered within the self-limiting context of property ownership. Can we imagine a violent act that is not a trespass to some property interest? Can we imagine a peaceful act that is a trespass? Only when each of us enjoys an absolute authority to determine what we will and will not do with what is ours— insisting upon the boundary line that assures both our inviolability by others and confining the reach of our own actions— will we enjoy what political systems deny: a community of mutually self-respecting men and women.

It may be easy to agree with such an idea when it is offered only as an abstract proposition. How such a concept plays itself out in a social setting, however, is dependent upon whether, and under what circumstances, any of us can assert a property claim that others are bound to respect. Does the urban gang member whose sense of territorial integrity is violated by another gang’s graffiti have a property claim that should be honored and, if so, by whom? Along related lines, is an offense to one’s “egoboundary” identity, such as in the uttering of a racial slur, or the burning of his or her nation’s flag, or denying the existence of a god to a religious person, worthy of being considered a trespass or, in the alternative, should such acts be respected as the behavior of a property owner? What about a local retailer who resents a competitor moving into “his” neighborhood and attracting away “his” customers? How free, peaceful, productive, and orderly would a society be if property claims were not considered inviolable, but could be taken from the owner by force? In order to answer such questions, how do we assess the basis of one another’s claims of ownership? Is there a principle to which we can resort that rises higher than the childish refrain “I want what I want when I want it?”

In a culture that dotes on material values, the “claim” element appears to have mystical qualities. It has certainly been the most difficult concept for my students to fathom. But there is nothing any more mysterious about human beings proclaiming themselves to be the owners of things than there is for wolves to urinate, birds to sing, or elk to bellow their respective territorial claims. While the “right” of individuals to acquire and maintain control over property has been articulated by numerous “natural rights” advocates, the claim element does not depend upon ideological commitments. The need of all living things to occupy space and ingest energy from their external world offers an adequate explanation, and justification, for their assertion of exclusive interests in property. Because we are social beings who can sustain ourselves only by the individual consumption of resources, the property principle is at the core of our well-being.

Another basic question relates to what it is that may be owned. Over what may I make a claim of ownership? Do I own my children? My pet animals? My organs once they have been removed from my body? My thoughts? My reputation in my community, such that I should be able to maintain libel or slander actions against those who make false statements about me? May I own another human being and, if you answer “no,” upon what is your response based?

Thomas Pynchon has stated that, “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”⁷ It has been our failure to ask relevant questions that has generated so much confusion in our thinking. This is evident from the question: do we own our children? If we answer “yes,” we are left in the uncomfortable position of acknowledging the right of a parent to do whatever he or she wants with their child, regardless of the degree of harm involved. Because ownership is manifested in decision-making control, the owner (i.e., the parent) is free to do anything with that property interest, so long as it doesn’t involve a trespass on another person’s property interests. Brutal beatings of the child, or even taking its life, would seem justified if, indeed, the parent is the owner. On the other hand, if you answer “no” to this question, how do you respond to the person who insists on taking “your” child away from you for their own purposes? What if a neighbor used candy to persuade your child to come live with him: if you do not own this child, what claim would you have to regain your custody?

What if we rephrased the question to read: “do you have a property interest in an exclusive decision-making relationship with your child?” In much the same way that a husband and wife, or an employer and an employee, have property interests in contractual associations with one another, a parent could be said to have a property interest in a continuing relationship with the child. The parent does not own the child—any more than an employer owns an employee—but has an inviolable interest in raising and caring for the child, at least until he or she has developed to the point of being able to exercise self-control.

Our culture retains so many after-effects of the vulgar practice of slavery that we tend to answer with a reflexive “no” to the question of whether or not we can own another human being. But let us consider the matter more analytically. Slavery has existed in so many cultures throughout the world and over such prolonged periods of time that we need more than moral outrage to react to the practice. Using a property-based analysis, the principal criticism of slavery rests on its denial of an individual’s claim to self-ownership.

It may be argued that a particular slave made no claim to selfownership and, therefore, no property violation had occurred as to him. Such a contention, however, overlooks the fact that few of us have ever expressed such a claim. This argument presumes a claim to rest on a formal declaration, whereas such should be inferred from the autonomous, self-directed nature of one’s actions. That force may be resorted to by others—including the state—to secure our participation in their undertakings, is an implicit recognition of a claim to immunity from trespass having to be overcome by threats of violence.

Once an ownership interest has attached to any item, including ourselves, a respect for property claims requires those of us who wish to make use of such property to secure, by contract, the right to do so. Thus, if I am a respecter of property claims, and I would like Smith to come to work for me, I would need to secure a claim to his services from his present owner, Smith. To try to force him into my service, without his consent, would be to take his property interest by an act of theft, rather than respecting the property interest of the claimant. Such are the implications of Maine’s important distinction between legal rights premised on “status” as opposed to “contract.”

Likewise, if I desire to exercise some control over your property, such as using your land for some limited purpose, I may purchase from you, by contract, a portion of your authority, as an owner, to exclude me. This is why governmental takings, whether through eminent domain, taxation, conscription, asset forfeiture, or other involuntary means, amount to acts of plunder: the owner’s claim is not contracted for by the state. It is also why those who characterize a contract of employment as “wage slavery” do a great disservice to the need for clarity in our use of words. Those who do not know the difference between a coercive system of involuntary servitude, and a voluntary system of contractual employment, deserve to find out.

Can we claim ownership over other living things, such as animals? The animal-rights advocates would answer “no,” declaring that nonhuman creatures are as entitled to their lives and self-control as are we. But why limit such protections to animals? What about vegetables, or viruses (are they living microorganisms, or chemical agents?)? If we extend coverage to all living things, upon what shall we feed in order to reduce entropy in our lives and survive? The need for living things to survive at the expense of other living things, effectively destroys the so-called “natural rights” and “animal rights” arguments. After all, if we acknowledge all living things to have “rights” to their lives, each of us would have to content ourselves with such limited food sources as milk, beans, unfertilized eggs, fruits, nuts, and seeds—and only then until someone else came along to remind us that these products of living things are also life forms entitled to protection.

Life, as we know it, is both carbon-based and contains DNA, meaning that even what we might regard as the lowest form of life is a distant cousin of each of us. As we came to understand that the entire universe is alive, including the subatomic particles that exhibit so much of what appears to be free will, we would even have to give up these food sources. If human beings, or any other species, actually tried living by such a premise, it would not be for long. They would face starvation, as such restrictions on food sources could not provide enough protein to support many people.

Restricting the sense of personhood to humans, alone, does find support in the behavior of other species, which may suggest a genetic basis for such a distinction. This is why the insistence, by other life forms, on respect for territorial boundaries tends to be confined to members of the same species, ignoring the intrusions of members of other species. For the lioness to respect the personhood of the aforesaid wildebeest would be as fatal to the lioness as it would be to the wildebeest making the same concession to the grasses. This might suggest to us a biological basis for our exclusion of nonhumans from the “rights” equation.⁸

Whether or not we continue to have an ownership interest in our bodily organs, once removed from our bodies, is answerable in the same way as any other item of property in which we are no longer in possession. If I have a claim to the ownership of my car, do I lose it to a thief simply because, at the time he took it, I was not in control of it? Or, if a repairman removes the CD player from my car to work on it, have I lost my ownership interest in the player? The answer to this question necessitates our revisiting the “boundary” element, as well as going to the very essence of what is meant by a claim of ownership.

“Ownership” is not the same as “possession.” The latter amounts to being in physical control of an item, while the former is based upon the assertion of one’s will over the item. It is the owner’s sense of personality—not his or her physical power—that attaches to the item as a claim of ownership. While a claim may include a right to possession—unless that right has been contracted away by the owner, as in a landlord-tenant relationship—it transcends a mere possessory interest. This is why, when we speak of purchasing property from another, we are not buying the “property,” but the owner’s claim to the property.

Every contract amounts to nothing more than an agreement, by two or more property owners, to transfer their respective claims of property ownership to one another. The property involved may be realty, a chattel, an intangible interest (e.g., a copyright), or one’s personal services. If you and I enter into an agreement by which I am to sell you my car for $5,000, I am promising to do more than provide you with possession of the automobile: I am agreeing to convey my ownership claim to the car, just as you are agreeing to transfer your ownership claim to the $5,000. Thus, if I have not transferred, or abandoned, my claim to the ownership of any item of property of mine—be it a removed organ, or my car, or a CD player—I have not lost my ownership interest in any of such items.

The continuing recognition by others of an owner’s claim even when he or she is no longer in possession, is a rather sophisticated practice. Other life forms do not seem to exhibit this trait. It is an attitude that is essential to any complex, longterm system of economic production and exchange. A huntingand-gathering society, for instance, might not have need for such a principle. If an owner’s being out of possession was an invitation for others to take control of his interests, significant investment in either the creation or employment of tools would be unlikely to occur.

This is not to disparage possessory interests in property. One who possesses the property of another, whether rightfully or wrongfully obtained, has a sufficient ownership interest that the courts will protect against anyone other than a person with a superior claim. There have even been cases in which thieves have been able to recover their stolen property from another thief,⁹ the rationale being that a man who has been forcibly deprived of a possessory interest might not always be able to prove his right to same, providing wrongdoers with a field day for expropriation. The legal doctrine that possession gives a presumption of ownership that another claimant must overcome— the basis of the popular saying that “possession is nine points of the law”—is intended to prevent the disorder that would arise from property interests being taken by force.

This is why, other than forced takings by the state, an act of theft does not deprive an owner of his or her legally recognized claim. Only a willful act by which the owner no longer chooses to be an owner can accomplish this. Apart from state takings, the common law courts have taken a fairly consistent position: one does not lose his or her ownership claim by silence or inaction. An owner must make a conscious choice to either sell the claim (for consideration), or make a gift of it (without consideration), or abandon it. Even the concept of “adverse possession” has been rationalized by the courts as either an “abandonment” of ownership by the record owner, or the product of a “lost grant,” either of which would explain the prior owner’s longstanding disinterest in the land.

We abandon our claims to property with far greater frequency than either selling or giving them away. We make a daily habit of abandoning our property claims through the practice of disposing of “garbage” (i.e., unwanted claims). We purchase a grocer’s ownership claim to a bottle of soda, drink the beverage, then throw the empty bottle—and our claim thereto—into a trash container, which my students learn to define as a “claim abandonment center.” We engage in this practice with such frequency that, once a week, trash collectors come through our neighborhoods to collect our abandoned property claims and transport them to dumpsites (i.e., larger claim abandonment centers). In the language of chaos, we can think of trash containers and dumpsites as “attractors” for the disposal of property claims.

While we are unable to transfer more than what we own to others, we may transfer lesser amounts of our total claims. In such a case, we reconfigure the boundaries of our property interests so as to conform to what we are transferring and retaining. Thus, a woman who owns a parcel of land in “fee simple absolute” (i.e., the highest estate, free of any limitations) may convey a lesser interest, such as a “life estate”, and retain a “reversion” in herself. The redefined claims would, if combined, recreate the original fee simple absolute interest. The land, itself, would reveal no transformation to an observer by virtue of such a conveyance, reminding us that it is not the physical property that is being transferred, but only the claim of ownership.

In each of these examples, the owner is expressing his or her will to no longer be a claimant—or a sole claimant—to an item of property. In anticipation of death, we then arrange for the disposition of our ownership claims through a document we call our “last will.” In it, we proclaim to exercise our “last will” over what we own by having our claims transferred, upon death, to various designated persons.

Having explored this issue, a number of other questions arise: how will this claim of ownership be established? To whom is the claim addressed? May one properly assert a claim of ownership over property presently claimed by another and, if not, why not? Over what may I claim an ownership interest? There are four principal means that have been employed to answer such questions: the formal legal means, the philosophical means, the biological means, and the informal social means.

From the perspective of a legal positivist, a recognizable claim is defined by whatever criteria the formal political/legal system recognizes and defends through state enforcement (e.g., judicial action). This approach constitutes what most of us regard as our “rights” in any matter (i.e., whatever the government considers our rights to be). At any given point in time, the existing political system has determined who would and who would not be entitled to assert a legally-recognizable claim to the ownership of a property interest. Slaves were denied their claims of self-ownership and were, in fact, determined by the formal legal system to be the property of their masters. The American Indian tribes’ claims to the ownership of their lands were legally invalid because the political/legal system did not choose to recognize them. Likewise, there was a time when males could rightfully claim ownership of property, but married women could not. Upon her marriage, a woman’s property claim automatically transferred, as a matter of law, to her husband, yet another example of Maine’s “status” defined rights. Other would-be property claimants, e.g., minors, persons lacking mental capacity, et. al., continue to be denied legal ownership rights because of the refusal of the state’s legal structure to recognize them. There has been a continuing political jockeying for a redefinition of these categories (e.g., the abortion issue is based on the same question as the slavery debate: is the fetus a self-owning person, or the property of the mother?), with the legal outcome turning on the age-old question: who gets to make decisions about what?

The principal shortcoming of a formal political definition of ownership interests lies in the coercive, conflict-ridden nature of all political systems. Contrary to our high school civics class understanding, political processes do not consist of principled or rational inquiries into the kinds of profound philosophical questions that stirred the minds of Socrates, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, or John Stuart Mill. As modern experiences with violent coups, political assassinations, genocides, bloody repressions of dissent, and massive levels of warfare attest, having recourse to politics as a means of determining the “rights” of parties, is always a resort to legalized violence. Because the concept of a legal “right” derives from notions of formal state power, it necessarily implies a coercive authority to define such standards. Furthermore, the state’s power to confer or deny ownership interests to anyone is always at the expense of somebody else, a somebody whose talents for mobilizing the forces of realpolitik are less developed than those of their more successful rivals. Since the state generates no property interests on its own, but can only despoil the property interests of others, and since the state has no power to confer a capacity for ownership upon any of us that was not already present within our self-seeking natures, the tendencies for political institutions to produce anything other than social conflict should be evident.

As an alternative to the legal positivist position, a number of political thinkers have advanced the idea that there are certain philosophical principles—usually spoken of in terms of “natural law”—that transcend the formal authority of the state and condition an individual’s legal duty of obedience to legal mandates. John Locke made a respectable effort to formulate such a natural law explanation for the origin of individual rights to property. Beginning with the assumption that each person has a property interest in his or her self, Locke employed the “labor theory” of ownership to extend one’s ownership of self to include the right to acquire ownership of various resources in nature. In his view, a claim of ownership arose when a person “mixed his labour” with some previously unowned resource such as land and, in so doing, incorporated his will into the property.¹⁰ The labor theory of ownership is certainly compatible with the idea that private property is necessitated by the entropic nature of life. Since we can overcome entropy only by consuming external sources of energy, our existence depends upon the exertion of our will upon the material world.

While the natural law approach has a certain emotional and logical appeal to it—assuming one accepts its premises—it suffers from the major shortcoming of all normative thinking: how does one discover the content of these principles? How do we distinguish one person’s identification of a transcendent “moral principle” from another person’s expression of a private prejudice? Are the natural rights theorists doing anything more than projecting their subjective preferences onto the universe and then characterizing them as “eternal principles?” Do moralistic debates amount to anything more than sophisticated shouting matches for the rationalization of a speaker’s biases? How do we verify that we have a natural law principle before us? Is it possible to do so without translating such ideas through our own prior experiences and thoughts? How can normative propositions be made subject to empirical proof? Furthermore, is not the insistence upon justifying liberty as an imperative emanating from “God” or “nature,” simply another example of our traditional, pyramidal-based thinking that assumes our affairs to be governed by higher authorities; that our claims to immunity from coercion must be conferred by external forces?

The “natural law” theory also suffers from a failure to identify causal relationships associated with their violation. If someone speaks to me of Newton’s “second law of motion,” I can set up an experiment to test its validity. While one may justifiably quarrel over the propriety of speaking of regularities in nature as “laws,” one can at least identify a relatively clear cause-andeffect connection. But if I argue that I have a “natural law” right to my property, and my neighbors proceed to violate my interests, what will occur? Will the forces of nature suddenly turn upon them —perhaps by suspending the principle of gravitation —causing them to no longer be able to function in the world? And if the inviolability of my property is mandated by the laws of nature, how could my neighbors succeed in despoiling me in the first place? If their actions violated “natural law” they could not, by definition, carry out their act. The “natural law” advocates have another difficulty to overcome: given that most of the land on Earth has, throughout recent human history, been under a claim of authority from some political power—and that stateless societies today are the great exception rather than the rule—the idea that state systems are “unnatural” is rather difficult to defend. How, after all, can anything that happens within nature be considered to be in violation of nature’s laws?

When it becomes evident that the so-called natural law or moral principles being advocated by someone just happen to coincide with the speaker’s preferences, the self-serving nature of such rationalizing becomes even clearer. I say this as one who continues to be attracted to much of the thinking of Locke and other “natural law” theorists. It is not that their understanding of the importance of private property is invalid: quite the contrary. Human society would function much more peacefully were we to live in accordance with such principles. But having said that only confirms the subjective nature of all belief systems.

As I suggested earlier, there is little doubt in my mind that the world has an objective existence, but I can only surmise that subjectively, as an opinion derived from my experiences. My views regarding the desirability of certain social attitudes and practices are no less the product of my experiences and other subjective influence than are yours, or those of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, or Karl Marx. That I embrace my opinions with great intensity is no justification for my regarding them as any more than deeply-held sentiments. Any attempt to elevate my opinions to the level of eternal moral truths would be but to engage in self-delusion, no matter how valid I may consider my views to be. Such efforts amount to intellectual devices for deceiving ourselves that our opinions have a ring of certainty to them. They also serve to manipulate the thinking of others in order to get them to behave as we want them to behave. At the same time, in believing that externally-derived ideas and moral philosophies are essential to living as a free individual, and that one’s claim to be free from the trespasses of others must be founded upon something greater than the expression of one’s will, we reinforce the sentiment that we are incomplete within ourselves; that we lack integrated wholeness. To delude ourselves that our preferences for liberty depend upon forces beyond our will is to acknowledge our fundamental unworthiness as autonomous individuals.

One of the principal debates arising out of the “legal” versus “philosophical” explanations for the origin of property rights has been whether such interests preceded or followed the establishment of governments. John Locke embraced the former proposition, while John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham espoused the latter point of view. Bentham was rather succinct in stating that, “property is entirely the creature of law.”¹¹ He then reiterated one of the central articles of faith of every legal positivist: “Before the laws, there was no property: take away the laws, all property ceases.”¹² Again, we see an expression of the pyramidal model of social order: the conditions necessary for the very existence of life had to be conferred by the state! That human beings survived for hundreds of thousands of years before settling down into the agricultural communities that preceded the development of any political institutions, and that property must have existed before those institutions would have had anything to tax and regulate, should be apparent. Furthermore, because life itself is dependent upon the existence of property (i.e., space to occupy and resources to consume, to the exclusion of everyone else), Bentham’s absurd proposition presumes that legal systems preexisted life itself! Thomas Hodgskin has offered one of the more poetic critiques of the view that property rights were created by governments:

we must believe that men had naturally no right to pick up cockles on the beach, or gather berries from the hedge—no right to cultivate the earth, to invent and make comfortable clothing, to use instruments to provide more easily for their enjoyments—no right to improve and adorn their habitations—nay, no right to have habitations—no right to buy or sell, or move from place to place—till the benevolent and wise law-giver conferred all these rights on them. If the principle be true in one case it must be universally true; and, according to it, parents had no right to the love and respect of their offspring, and infants no right to draw nourishment from the breasts of their mothers, until the legislator— foreseeing, fore calculating the immense advantages to the human race of establishing the long list of rights and duties which grow out of our affections, and constitute our happiness—had established them by his decree.¹³

One recalls from the previous chapter the works of Ardrey, Lorenz, and others regarding the sense of territoriality exhibited by other animal and plant species who, as best we can tell, had no state apparatus to confer such “rights!” These interests—reflective of the purely physical needs for property that all living things require for their survival—express the biological rationale for ownership. So widespread is the role of territoriality throughout nature, that one is tempted to characterize it as a “natural law,” with all the subjective baggage that such a term entails.

As our social systems continue their divergent transformations, the question arises as to how private claims to property might be established. If state systems were no longer in a position to confer or acknowledge ownership interests, might another means be available for protecting such rights? How, in other words, might our interests be protected in a society operating upon what might be thought of as a holographic model of organization?

The variable and unpredictable nature of a world of six billion people makes it absurd for anyone to propose utopian blueprints for humanity. I suspect that thousands of alternatives may be experimented with by different groups of people. Still, a suggestion can be made as to one way in which some might choose to respond in a decentralized world. In what I would call an informal social means of recognizing claims to property, a marketplace approach could be employed. In much the same way that any economic transaction occurs, we and our neighbors express our respective expectations of one another regarding our claims to property. Through our neighbors’ responses to our behavior and stated intentions, we informally seek their respect for our claims.

Upon what basis might such claims be asserted? As with other social and economic transactions, might we not be expected to appeal to the values, preferences, beliefs, and other interests of our neighbors? For listeners of a pragmatic disposition, appeal might be had to utilitarian arguments that respect for our claims would benefit not only ourselves but also the rest of the community. For those with a legal perspective, resort might be had to common law property principles and case law. If the audience were religiously or philosophically attuned, we might insist upon our “God-given” or “natural law” right to our claims. Just as the marketplace is comprised of men and women bargaining for the buying and selling of claims to goods and services, members of a community can confer recognition for one another’s respective claims to be exclusive decision-makers over some resource. The community’s recognition of such a claim could be said to confer upon the claimant a “right” to the property, meaning a claim to immunity from being trespassed. The process could work in much the same way that “consensus” techniques work in such places as were discussed in chapter one. Most of us might be inclined to do so in the hope that, should some other party forcibly intrude upon our interests, our neighbors would be inclined to come to our defense.

The following hypothetical may help illustrate the social, or informal transactional approach to property claims. Suppose that twenty of us are marooned on a previously deserted island, and that I manage to locate—and lay claim to —the only source of fresh water on the island. Perhaps I erect a fence around the area I am claiming, in the expectation that those with a Lockean perspective might regard this act as a sufficient mixing of my labor with the land. Having asserted my claim, I now await your decisions as to whether to respect it or not. In an effort to persuade you to do so, I may try to rationalize my claim by appealing to what I perceive to be your religious or philosophical dispositions, or only the felt need for territory that motivates other species. Whatever argument I employ has no inherent substance to it, being important only as a sales argument designed to help convince the rest of you to acknowledge and respect my claim. Will you be likely to do so?

If you are inclined toward Locke’s view, you might insist that I do more than put up a sign; that I should extend my labor to improving or preserving the water source itself. Socialists among us might deny the validity of my claim en toto, on the grounds that individual claims to productive lands ought to be denied in favor of collective ownership. An environmentalist might object to my claim, believing that my control of the fresh water supply might disturb wildlife presently living on the island. There may be a sizeable number of persons who don’t care, one way or the other, whether the water should be privately or collectively owned, as long as they are assured of an adequate supply.

Whether my claim will be respected or not may depend not upon the persuasiveness of my abstract argument, but on how I behave toward the rest of you regarding the water. If I deal with the water as a valuable resource, for whose use I would be willing to make contractual exchanges—such as for food or shelter—and the rest of you perceive that I am developing and caring for this resource in a way that benefits our community,¹⁴ my claim might well be respected by the rest of you. Should one or more of you try to forcibly dislodge me from my claim to exclusive control, the rest of you might be counted upon to help defend my interests against such an attack. Furthermore, when my claim is recognized by the rest of you—as something to which you have contributed—there is harmony generated between myself and my neighbors: the claim has not created division within the community. To the contrary, the rest of you are more likely to feel that you have a vested interest in supporting my claim because your willingness to respect it has given it strength.

On the other hand, should I deny access to the water to everyone—either by an outright prohibition of its use, or by demanding an exceptionally high price for its consumption—the rest of you would likely not respect my claim, particularly since your lives depended upon its use. I would then experience conflict with the rest of you—no matter how strongly I believe in the legitimacy of my claim—and my ownership would be difficult to maintain without a continuing confrontation with others. Thus, if one or more of you should try to forcibly take some of my water, it is unlikely that the rest of you would come to the defense of my claim. If that should prove to be the case, I might be able to defend my interests by myself—just as any of us are free to try to satisfy all of our economic wants without trading with others. But without the support of my neighbors, the security of my claim will never be any stronger than my level of constant vigilance in its defense. I might have to mount a twenty-four-hour-a-day defense of my property, which I could likely not maintain for more than a day or so. In a short time, my property claim would probably be overrun and, worse, I might come to be regarded as a pariah with whom the rest of you might choose to have no further dealings. The advantage, to me, of behaving reasonably toward the rest of you in order to have my claim respected, should be evident. By relying upon the respect accorded my claim by the community, my own time would be freed from having to maintain a constant vigil, thus allowing me to pursue other interests and to trade, to my benefit, with the rest of you. Such are the dynamics by which marketplace transactions—grounded in liberty and respect for property interests—generate individual and social well-being.

But in the real neighborhood in which I live, why would any of my neighbors have an interest in defending my ownership claims should my interests be threatened by a wrongdoer? Why would they be motivated to get involved in any way? In a world in which we have become content to allow political and legal processes to define our interests and resolve our disputes, we have forgotten the capacity of informal systems, such as neighborhoods and communities, to provide for social order. Whereas the interests of political systems are separated from those of the rest of us, within the neighborhood there tends to be an interconnectedness among neighbors, born of face-to-face relationships, that fosters mutual support and protection.

Because neighbors are less inclined to separate their interests from one another, they have a common fate in matters involving societal relationships. What this means, with respect to property questions, is that each of us has an interest in supporting those claims to property, made by our neighbors, that are consistent with the property claims we want to assert. In other words, our neighbors have an incentive to support what they perceive as our valid property claims, as a way of reinforcing the community recognition of their own claims. This is how our personal and social interests are fundamentally harmonious: respect for my claim depends upon my respecting yours. At the same time, our neighbors have a motivation to reject what they see as the invalid claim of an interloper who has ousted a recognized owner, so that the rest of the community may be inclined to come to the assistance of one who is faced with a “claim jumper.” There is more than just a theoretical rationale for such practices, as early gold-mining claims in California were established in such informal agreements among neighbors.¹⁵ The ways in which we bargain with others for recognition of our claims are not as formal as when we engage in buying a house or obtaining employment. Rather, they tend to be quite informal, a part of the socialization process that begins in infancy and continues throughout our lifetimes. Anyone who has raised children has observed their need to understand the appropriate range of their behavior. They want to discover principles that help them define the limits of their actions, and so they keep testing the boundary lines of what they may and may not do. They continue to ask us “why?” as they struggle for explanations to provide them with a rational and predictable basis for identifying these boundaries. They almost beg us for this information, and we often do a poor job helping them because we haven’t discovered such principles for ourselves.

Children continue this negotiation process with their peers, particularly when they are at play with one another. Jean Piaget’s studies of children’s playgroups are most illuminating here.¹⁶ The spontaneous and usually peaceful manner in which children informally bargain amongst themselves for the modification of rules to make a game more competitive or beneficial to all players, tells us much about ourselves that we have forgotten. Such child-directed practices should remind us of the developmental importance of allowing children to control their own play, rather than having it organized and directed by well-meaning adults who, without intending to do so, help their children learn how to be managed by others.

One expression of this informal process has arisen around ATM machines, in which people, without any formal direction, have developed the practice of standing a number of feet behind the person using the machine, so as to allow him privacy in his transaction. Contrary to the “social contract” fictions through which we fantasize the creation of massive nation-states, these informal processes have an authentic quality about them: they arise out of face-to-face dealings between and among people who may be total strangers to one another, and who bargain with the glance of an eye or the wave of a hand.

The prospect of bargaining with one’s neighbors for a recognition of property interests may sound unfamiliar to most of us but, on the other hand, we must already negotiate with the formal legal system for a determination of such rights. When we go into a court of law, we are trying to persuade a judge to confer upon us a “right” to some legally-protected interest. Lobbyists are also employed by various interest groups in an effort to convince legislators to enact statutes that will confer desired benefits upon their clients. The question now before us, in a decentralizing society, is whether our lives will be better served by having to deal with a representative of the state, or with our neighbors, for a determination of our interests. The process is the same in either instance: it is simply a matter of determining to which audience we wish to make our case. Our experiences with both the state and the marketplace, however, ought to apprise us as to where more abundant personal benefits and capacities to control our interests are to be found.

Some may suggest that it doesn’t matter whether we are appealing to the state or to a community of our neighbors for acknowledgment of our claims, that in either event, we are relying upon the judgments of others. But social negotiation for the recognition of property claims differs from politically recognized claims in one important respect: in the former system, there is no coercive, institutionalized means of enforcing one’s claim. They arise not out of a fear of being trespassed, but from the social need to relate to one another. Political systems are, by their nature, intrusive; their officials desire to advance their interests by expanding the range of their authority, an appetite that necessarily places them in conflict with our lives and property interests. Such conduct arises not from a need for genuine relationships with other persons but from the need to compress all of humanity into abstract categories so as to make them manageable for the system’s societally-defined ambitions. The distinction between the marketplace-focused study of microeconomics, and the politically-collectivized nature of macroeconomics, comes to mind.

The ultimate “bargaining” tool of the state is the threat of violence—which its devotees believe is the cement that holds society together. To the extent political mandates conflict with the expectations of members of the community to have their property claims respected, social discord will ensue. Over time, a politically-grounded society infects the community in destructive ways, as fear, force, confrontation, punishments, and other socially discordant practices manage to trickle down into all levels of social conduct.

By contrast, the thinking and behavior of our neighbors— when they are not organized politically—tend to be more conciliatory and respectful of one another’s interests. Voluntariness, negotiation, and cooperation, practices that are reflective of mutual respect for one another’s inviolability become disseminated throughout a community of people who regard themselves as neighbors rather than citizens. As with other transactions in the marketplace, there is no assurance of a sufficient support among one’s neighbors on behalf of one’s claim. Some may choose to acknowledge the claim, and some may not. But in a non-politicized setting, such as one sees among the Amish, for example, the refusal to respect another’s claim is more likely to be expressed in terms of a withholding of respect, or of ostracism, neither of which involves a trespassory intrusion upon the life or property of the other. We may not be able to count on the support of all our neighbors, but, unlike our experiences with the state, we will be less likely to have to fear their violent intrusions upon us.

It is such lack of general support that bothers many people, who look to the state to provide through its judiciary, consistent and standardized enforcement for such claims. But political definitions, and enforcement, of claims fosters a uniformity of thought and behavior whose standardizing influences, as we have seen, may prove to be detrimental to the well-being of both individuals and civilizations. As with marketplace transactions in general, decentralized rules of conduct—as negotiated within contracts—are more suited to the diversity of behavior inherent in individual tastes and preferences.

Because we are so accustomed to thinking of our “rights” as some fixed set of objectively-defined categories—rather than a plea for our subjective preferences that we try to get others to respect—we are uncomfortable considering that they may derive from the same processes as our economic interests. Just as we are able to satisfy our demands in the marketplace without the participation of everyone else, the strength of our property claims depends only upon enough of our neighbors being willing to respect and support such claims. In the same way that our neighbors help to determine the prices of goods and services in economic transactions, they also determine the value of our property claims by the intensity of their willingness to recognize them. I have no “natural law” right to insist upon your goods or services, no matter how important to my interests I may regard them. In order to obtain such a right, I must negotiate with you. That such a transactional approach is consistent with human history is confirmed by anthropologist E. Adamson Hoebel, who observed:

although an individual may be the possessor of some valued object, … that object does not become property until the members of the society agree, tacitly or explicitly, to bestow the property attribute upon the object by regulating their behavior with respect to it in a self-limiting manner.¹⁷

The idea of negotiating with our neighbors for a definition of our respective rights —rather than relying upon the state for such a determination—is no more implausible than the established practice of negotiating in the marketplace for our economic interests, instead of having the state make such decisions on our behalf.

Those who insist upon a politically-based structuring of property rights, out of a sense that formal, legal standards will be more certain, should be aware that state enforcement of claims is anything but consistent in either defining the criteria for claims, or applying such standards to a given set of facts. The state does not resolve the problem of inconstant support for property claims. For example, a court of law that laid down a principle recognizing A’s right to divert water from a river onto his land, might have its opinion reversed on appeal. Or, this principle might be overturned, years later, by another court, or be repealed by a statute enacted by the legislature. All that political enforcement adds to the recognition of claims is the coercive backing of the state to protect the claimant. While the property owners who benefit from such protection are happy over the result, those whose claims were denied by such decisions are upset. It is simplistic to believe that a political determination of rights assures any consensus or uniformity as to the propriety of such claims.

Nor ought we to forget that many troublesome practices in our society, including the defense of slavery, the denial of land claims acquired from Indian tribes, and the abortion issue, have been grounded in the formal, legal definition of property claims in spite of varying degrees of public controversy regarding the propriety of such holdings. Those who are inclined to celebrate the virtues of legal positivism should recall that the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were carried out pursuant to legally defined criteria and mandates. We too often assume, to our later regret, that state enforcement of values and the protection of interests will necessarily and permanently result in our values and interests being upheld.

The same process of social negotiation takes place in our adult relationships with family members, friends, neighbors, work colleagues, or total strangers. We negotiate with one another for space on freeways, elevators, or checkout lines in grocery stores; we assert claims upon those who try to crowd into a line at a movie theater, or whose cell-phone rings during an operatic performance. We usually find it sufficient to enforce our demands with little more than a glance that conveys to the other person the message that he or she has transgressed some established social norm.

We learn so much about ourselves from the responses others have to us. We know, also, the psychological problems experienced by persons who are kept in isolation. Sociopaths (e.g., serial killers, terrorists) are frequently described by neighbors as “loners.” Perhaps by living in isolation, such people have not maintained sufficient, continuing negotiations with others that will help them identify the boundary lines of proper behavior. We may also wonder whether the state’s efforts to expand the range of regulations over our lives, both as children and as adults, short-circuits these negotiating processes. When the propriety of our conduct is defined not by transactions we personally conduct with others, but by rules coercively imposed by institutional authorities, we may become socially isolated from one another, members of what David Riesman termed “the lonely crowd.”¹⁸

Many of our social difficulties arise from our failure to understand the importance of insisting upon the inviolability of both our own and others’ ownership claims, an attitude into which we are conditioned from early childhood on by repeated admonitions against “selfishness.” The pursuit of self-interest is the fundamental nature of all living beings, and yet we have been taught to deny this characteristic, a lesson that fosters an inner conflict that gets projected into our social relationships. We have been trained to put aside our personal interests and cooperate with others, unaware that true cooperation can occur only among people who respect one another’s inviolability. As marketplace economics continues to demonstrate, it is in our respective self-interest to cooperate with one another, a truth whose broader implications have been explored in Robert Axelrod’s study illustrating the beneficial strategies of cooperation.¹⁹

My youngest daughter witnessed an interesting example of this complementary interplay of selfishness and cooperation, with respect for property claims providing the catalyst. She was helping at a party for young children when she saw a small boy, between two and three years of age, playing with some toys of his own that he had brought to the party. A small girl was attracted to these toys, and when she reached out for them the boy grabbed the toys and said “mine!” The boy’s father, who was seated nearby, assured his son that “you don’t have to share your toys if you don’t want to; they are your toys and you can do what you want with them. It’s up to you.” The little girl wandered away and began playing by herself. A few minutes later, this boy took his toys over to the girl, sat down and began placing them in front of her, and the two started playing together.

I cannot know what the boy might have been thinking, but I suspect that, being secure in the recognition of his own claim of ownership, he had nothing to fear from sharing his toys with the girl. There was no separation, no contradiction between the boy’s ownership and his authority over his property. Contrast this example with that of so many children who, after having been browbeaten by their parents into not being selfish, can only clutch or hide their toys from others in an effort to protect the property interests that others have not respected. When we are allowed to express our self-interest, we are more willing to share; when we are compelled to share, our resentment intensifies into conflict-ridden greediness.

I mentioned this incident in one of my seminars, and a woman student of mine said: “I’d have whacked the little boy across his backside for not sharing,” an attitude that doubtless reflected her own upbringing. Other students immediately responded, pointing out that (a) such an act would have interfered with the boy’s ownership interest, and (b) the boy did eventually share his toys with the girl, voluntarily, without feeling resentment at having been forced to do so. The first student then said: “but if he was going to share, anyway, how would it have hurt to force him to do what he eventually did?” I asked her if she saw any fundamental difference between “rape” and “seduction,” which seemed to make the point clearer. The assumption, in her remarks, was that the result was all that mattered; not recognizing that the process leading to the result is not only what truly matters, but in a world of wholeness, is the result.

The incident involving these two young children provides a microcosmic illustration of our basic nature: we are social beings who have a fundamental need for cooperation with one another. But the price of our cooperation is in knowing that we have nothing to lose in doing so. As the experience of this young boy teaches us, what we really expect from having our property claims respected is not so much the exclusion of others from the use of what we regard as ours, but only to have others acknowledge the inviolability of our sense of personhood. When we are able to freely negotiate our interests and differences with one another, we retain the power over our lives that which is lost when the state intervenes. Each of us, I suspect, is far more amenable to cooperate and compromise with others when we are approached peacefully and with respect for our being, than we are when confronted with threats of force and violence.

To claim personal ownership of anything is to express a sense of existential worthiness one expects others to respect. It is to assert to the rest of the world a claim to something of far greater significance than a given item of property, namely, one’s inviolability. It is a claim to have the self-interested and self-directed nature of our being acknowledged by others, as we endeavor to sustain ourselves through the exercise of autonomous control over some portion of the world. It amounts to an insistence upon our rightful authority to exclude all others from making decisions about the use of such property interests unless consented to by the owner.

The spiritual undertones to this inquiry into the question of self-ownership go to the essence of how we conceive of human life. Is it the nature of life to express itself as variation, diversity, autonomy, and spontaneity, or as permanence, uniformity, and restraint? Is each one of us a sufficient reason for being, for pursuit of our own individual purposes; or are we simply resources for others to employ in furtherance of their self-interested objectives? Do we regard one another’s lives as having a fundamental sanctity, a respect essential to any decent and peaceful society, or do we look upon each other, mechanistically and materially, as only so much protoplasm to be exploited for our purposes?

As important as our industrial and commercial productivity has been to our physical well-being, it has been of little significance in satisfying our inner needs for spiritual fulfillment. We have learned to accept monetarily-defined values as a substitute for transcendent ones, and are no longer aware that we gave up the latter for the former. It is little wonder that, in our world of material comforts and resplendent wealth, so many of us confront an inner bankruptcy.

Despite the foot-dragging of socialists to admit to the fact, mankind has figured out how to maximize human well-being. The empirical record of performance by free-market economic systems, compared with the stultifying consequences of statesocialism, has resolved the pragmatic question of how best to satisfy our material needs. As thoroughly as the heliocentric model replaced the geocentric one, socialism retains its viability only within the minds of ideologues. Indeed, I suspect that it is our having answered the pragmatic material question that is giving rise to an examination of our inner, spiritual sense of being. Who are we?

Are we little more than organic matter to be fed, watered, and maintained so as to remain serviceable to others, or is each of us an expression of a more encompassing life force, a sacred center that is nonetheless ubiquitous? Our claim to self-ownership, in its fullest meaning, is the assertion of our will to become and remain spontaneous and autonomous in our individual efforts to discover and experience transcendence. Such an intuitive sense of awareness will not arise out of the mouthing of new platitudes, but requires the integration of our outer and inner being. Stoicism provides a necessary reminder of the importance of listening to the voices that speak to us from deep within, but it is not sufficient for living the transcendent life. One will never find a sense of wholeness in a fragmented life, wherein either the material or spiritual become subordinated to one another. To dissolve the boundaries that separate such expressions requires us to insist upon the inviolability of our claim to a place in the world.

There are others, of course—most notably those in control of political institutions—who regard the rest of us not as self-justifying, autonomous beings, but as resources to be exhausted on behalf of their interests. In order to overcome our self-interested nature, they have helped condition us in the alleged virtue of being “selfless”—of placing the interests of others ahead of our own. Political systems, organized religions, and ideologies, have been the principal exponents of this pernicious and demeaning doctrine. A friend of mine told me that he had been lecturing his young son on the importance of this belief: “we are here to serve others,” he informed the boy. The father was awakened to the absurdity of such a proposition by his son’s asking: “then what are other people here for?”

Trying to harmonize the irreconcilable notions of “selflessness” and “self-interest” creates a sense of division and conflict within the individual. Having been rendered weak and confused by an idea whose substance we had not bothered to explore, we are left without a clear sense of direction in our lives. In the renunciation of the primacy of our own sense of our self, we look to the state, or a church, or an ideology, to restore the wholeness that only we are capable of discovering. So spiritually and morally corrupting is the doctrine of “selflessness,” that many of us learn to accept our dismemberment on a battlefield as the essence of a “heroic” life, or to regard the act of tax evasion as “cheating” the state!

Whatever the nature of the social system in which we live, our claims to various “rights” are the products of our relationships with others. If those “others” are political or judicial officials of the state, the power to determine our interests will be centralized in those who enjoy a privilege that we and our neighbors do not, namely, of enforcing their preferences by coercive means. On the other hand, if those “others” are our neighbors, who enjoy no greater power over us than we do over them, then social power has been effectively decentralized into the hands of individuals. The contrast between command economies and the marketplace offers more than just an analogy. It expresses the fundamental choice we must always make between violent and peaceful systems of social behavior.

For people who have become accustomed to having most of their social questions dealt with through political means, rediscovering the informal, social means of establishing claims may take some effort. Not unlike the experiences of many tourists who, accustomed to dealing with the administered pricing practices in shopping malls, feel discomfort in haggling with merchants in third-world countries, there may be some initial anxiety in taking direct control over one’s affairs. Just as new technologies cause us to redefine how we deal with one another, learning how to negotiate for our interests will involve a good deal of trial and error. But as we learn to give to the opinions of our neighbors, with whom we share common interests and a sense of existential equality, the same regard we now have for the edicts of political authorities, who presume to command us, we may discover our lives becoming more peaceful, free, and cooperative, and more individually empowered.