Ownership...

I think the general pattern of these blogs is not that things are "wrong" but more that they are only half the story. This is in tune with the Hegelian dialectical view that for every thesis about the world there will emerge a counter view and the tension so arising is what pushes consciousness to develop a new transcandent view - the famous aufhebung if you follow German philosophy. And what is the aufehebung of that ;-)

So there is probably some truth to the notions of ownership that I have rallied against. The most convincing argument comes from Hegel... indeed a single line (which I can't find now) but it says that ownership is the physical projection of the notion of self so that we can examine it in its material form. This is a stage in the development of a spiritual consciousness, that is the best argument for the validity of ownership.

However its antithesis time in these pages and I want to ryle against it's absurdity more.

Walk down to the beach and the gathering of limpets and periwinkles off the rocks, which are good to eat, but better collect some drift wood, making a fire and eat a sumptious meal.

Now take the car to your local supermarket via the petrol station. Gather your food from the shelves, queue and pay at the check-out. Drive home and cook it.

What exactly is the difference? If you look carefully, not a lot. The supermarket won't let you take the food off the shelves, and the petrol station and gas company won't let you just take the fuel without exchanging actually precious metal (or its legally precious equivalent, money). Nature oddly will?

The argument is that the companies own the products and agree to exchange them at a price. To qualify for that exchange process we need to get some money and we have to do some "paid" work. The argument being that the products that the companies sell belongs to them because they have done some work, and we must do some work also.

But as the beach scenario shows this isn't true. There is little more work to collecting food from the beech than going to the shops and collecting it off the shelves, but the former is considered sufficient to demark ownership while the latter is insufficiant.

Nature it has always seemed to me get short changed every time. This is the real error in Mankinds thinking; past, present and probably future. Really Nature owns everything, or as the religions say, the fruits of our labours belong to God.

Once it can be shown that the qualifications for ownership are very unclear then a whole can of worms erupts, most famously the ownership of the extra productivity arising from machine labour and economy of scale. In Capitalist systems the machine owner inherits the machines productivity. Which is expanded to: the investors in a company own the companies productivity. But really this is absurd and more tradition than reason.

The tradition at work here I suspect is the one of ruling class. We accept a ruling class and they have evolved over the ages into the class which owns the industry. They don't really own it, but we accept this hegemony because it fits the pattern we are used to of a ruling class.

It is absurd that the sculpters and builders who built St Pauls cathedral in London are all subsumed by the name of Sir Christopher Wren whose own hands would have been too unskilled to do most of the work. The building - actually regarded as poor in archetectural circles - is the result of the English craft system of the 1700s, traditions going back centuries and having evolved over even longer. C. Wren on the other hand is a figure head from the ruling classes and we accept this, it is part of the tradition.

It is absurd to me that the cleaner who makes the foyer of a grand building look grand is considered "lower" than the owners of that building. Without the cleaner it won't look grand for very long, so really the cleaner is the grand one. The cleaner it is true wouldn't be able to be grand without the big house to clean, and the owners of the big house wouldn't be able to be grand without an army of servants and supporters of their lifestyle - they are inter-dependent and this is a dialectic. In this sense to the wise they are profoundly equal, but many people who think themselves Aryan (noble) are not really Aryan because they are not wise and do not see this. This is where society is collapsing and entering a darkness.

I'm signing off now for a return to the non-electronic world.