Rule 1: Anyone can have whatever they want as long as it is acquired fairly. Fair acquisition means that either someone else gave it willingly, or it was found. Found means that nobody else claimed ownership over it previously. Ownership means that a thing belongs to a person.
Addenda for rule 1:
- Anything can be owned.
- "A person" can also be a group of people, as long as they go through the proper channels to declare themselves as an appropriate group.
- Damaging someone else's property is basically taking it unfairly, and therefore is not allowed.
- A person's body is their own posession and cannot be acquired by another person for extended periods of time. Let's not define "extended periods of time" just yet.
Ok one rule is enough since we have the addenda.
So what might be the story that follows this creation event? I'll speculate.
Initially, there's a huge boom in acquisition. Anyone with initiative has access to lots of stuff not previously acquired. The population booms along side wealth.
Eventually, resources become more scarce. New ways to explore hard-to get-to-places (e.g. underwater, underground, space, etc.) are invented in order to provide access to more "found" stuff. Those with a lot of stuff have to justify having it while others have very little. Those with a lot of stuff have more resources with which to explore for more stuff. Those who make such "investments" wisely, continue to grow the amount of stuff that they own.
This becomes a game, since a lot of people are now paying a lot of attention to who has what. Everyone wants to win the game. Some devise clever tricks to distract lots of people, either by keeping them super busy or super entertained (emotionally invested). Others devise clever tricks to get people to give them their posessions willingly.
Eventually it is discovered that information is a resource, and that while it has little or value in and of itself, its availability can have a huge impact on who can get more stuff.
Eventually, some devise ways of inventing value that can be traded for actual value.
With all of this cleverness going on, the majority insists that more nuanced rules be implemented. This opens the door to all sorts of new rules, some of which are meant to protect people from one another, but many of which are used as further distractions or tools to reduce competition. The cause of protection is used to justify large scale violence.
In the face of all of this confusion, lots of dogmatic value structures become popular as tools for simplifying things. The deliberately ignorant class proliferates.
Eventually, resources become so scarce that fighting begins breaking out. Everyone wants some of everyone else's stuff. Those with the most invest in protecting themselves, and futher distractions to keep everyone else's attention aimed at one another.
Meanwhile the distractions continue to get more austentation and elaborate. Important decisions happen behind closed doors, while farsical ones are performed in public with much fanfare.
Eventually this broken and unsustainable dynamic completely collapses. Eventually society collapses. All of the artificially valued items become valueless. Revolt consumes a large portion of the population. The super-wealthy mostly hide and wait out the chaos, to emerge when the dust settles and begin where they started, except that they now have their stockpiles of such and such.
Maybe sound a little familiar?
