Aswad
Posts: 6914
Joined: 4/4/2007
Status: online
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quote:
ORIGINAL: xBullx
Hmmmm, I wonder if that might be defined as theft or the renunciation of another or even one’s self.
Modernity is definable by theft: when each self is property of all other selves in a domain. A dog eating its own leash should perhaps replace the snake eating its own tail to keep the symbolism up to date, except the world has quite a number of dogs, so it quickly converges on something looking like minced meat and metal links. Perhaps it's been an inevitability for the bulk of society since the rise of the agricultural revolution, the domestication of Homo sapiens, making livestock, starting with children, then women, then men. What are we to the eyes of the modern world, if not chattel in any meaningful sense?
For me, property is a sentiment of attachment, while possession is a claim not overcome by others.
Course, when the law backs sentiment with armed men, it's a bit... anyway.
Once upon a time, a very annoying Dane took it upon himself to write an unwelcome quotation in a book of mine. A rare, limited run of a book that was a collector's item at the time, even more so now. But its value to me was not financial. I still have it. And it still has the unwelcome quotation in it: «Property is theft.»
What I see, is my sentimental attachment to a collection of art and words, and the willingness to take steps to avoid it being lost or destroyed. What the Dane apparently saw, is a confusion of ideas: the definition of theft as being an act of deprivation is not a bad one, in itself, but the automatic notion that the possessor by possession alone inflicts deprivation is. That notion is the one that invokes the dangerous misstep, the simulacrum of Justice that leads many compassionate hearts astray into the darkness of the soul that is socialism. Or maybe it's the other way around, that the failure to recognize and value choice, and the freedom that enables it, which is at the root of the sickness and socialism is merely an advanced stage symptom. I only know how to spot the disease, not how it works, nor how to cure it, save with fire.
I did not choose to inflict. My choice was to safeguard. And, at the time, I was inclined to let just about any decent seeming folk borrow such things. The value I saw- the good I saw- in such works merited sharing. Sharing that went on until this Dane did what I hadn't done: made a choice to act against another, to inflict. Then I stopped sharing with anyone not above the revised threshold for required trust to lend the book. He hadn't accomplished anything, other than to piss me off and to create the deprivation he worried about. In my time of being required to associate with him, I learned well that it's not property such people fail to respect, but other people.
In his view, he's the just, I'm the thief. I'm not sure I care to even address that view. If this be thieving on my part, so be it. That book had it better in my care than in any other, was seen and appreciated by many, and borrowed and used by half of them or so. Some have suggested that seems to be a common condition for much of what I've possessed over the years. And the recurring theme is that it's people that need respect, not property. Then theft and legal rights and such are the straw on the floor of the stall, no more, no less.
Respecting a man, you respect his possession adequately, methinks.
Health,
السود
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Theft - 
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