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?
Here's a great physics/science question: "What if the laws of physics were a tiny bit different?" Answer: Life as we know it would be impossible. Those laws of physics began the cascade of cause/effect that lead to our existence. Those laws must be tuned perfectly in order for anything like our reality to exist.
Isn't the same true for any complex system? Why should we expect to get it right on the first or even the thousanth try? An unreasonable obsession with the "original" "founding" documents and principles that established a society is totally unfounded. We should re-create the rules every so often -- wipe the slate clean and reassemble - using the best and discarding the worst of what came before. Our measely intellect(s) are no match for the extreme complexity of a whole society.
The only ones who should have rightful cause to oppose this idea are those with a lot of power under the current story. And there are very few of them compared with the rest of us. Who cares about their precious stockpiles? I don't.
What works about our creation rule and what doesn't? What alternative creation rule(s) might we try?
Before we start over though, we need to foregive one another for getting so wrapped up in the game we created. I play hockey, so I know. I can get punched in the face and have beers with the guy afterward, because we were just wrapped up in the game, and we foregive each other for that. The game is more fun when you're really invested. But when you let your grudges carry over to the next game it becomes personal, and it's hard to play fairly. I know as a white guy this is really not fair to say, as I have statistically the fewest number of violations to foregive others for, but that doesn't make it any less necessary to foregive.
No comments:
Post a Comment