Random Reflections: Property, Isolationism, Partisanship
Private property.– Beware the man who suspects or critiques private property. It is not your material possessions he has in mind, at least primarily. For what is personal property in the ordinary (though artificially limited) sense? It is nothing but the outward manifestation of your life — your time, your thought, and your effort. The tangible results of the time, thought, and effort that you have applied on this earth are your property. Of course, time, thought, and effort do not manifest themselves exclusively in the form of material goods — the chair you have built, the bowl you have attained through trade with another. In addition, and more essentially, since we are rational beings with natural ends beyond material goods, your time, thought, and effort manifest themselves in personal opinions, faiths, disbeliefs, doubts, agnosticisms, antagonisms, unanswered questions, desires great and small (including the ones to which you never give outward expression). And furthermore in those activities that form a nebulous bridge between the private inner life and the physical or practical realm: private letters and notebooks, conversations, and memories of experiences shared with one or a few others which you seek to carefully preserve in their most pristine form, partly by never sharing them with anyone else. Everything is property, then, which is encompassed under the general rubric of privacy: unrevealed truths and wishes; precious feelings and recollections; your deepest self-doubt, self-hatred, or shame; ideas and intimacies entrusted to you by, or shared with, others on the implicit and inviolable condition of exclusivity and secrecy; and the vague intuitions that sit precariously on the edge of your awareness for decades, swirling up into the foreground intermittently, usually in your quietest moments alone, teasing you with the possibility of ultimate insight. All of this, from the obvious and material to the hidden and immaterial, comprises your property, because property is nothing but the manifestation of your time, thought, and effort on this earth. For there is no logical distinction in principle between the material and immaterial manifestations, with respect to the essential term that defines private property in its ordinary sense, namely with respect to what they are manifesting. The material and immaterial results, or physical and spiritual if you prefer, are equally your property because they derive from exactly the same source. They are manifestations of you — of your life on this planet. Property is merely an extension of that, or rather it is a shorthand way of saying “everything you are, for better or for worse.” Thus, a person who disregards or disrespects the idea of private property, no matter how simply he couches it in the language of economics and political justice, cannot be trusted with anything that is yours, right down to your time, thought, and effort themselves. For it is all yours in exactly the same way, and for the same reason, from which it follows that his denial of the inviolability of any of it is a denial of the inviolability of all of it. And the speed with which this fact is revealed will be directly proportional to the ease with which you make concessions to him on the issue of private property as he applies it in its popular, material sense.
Isolationism.– It would be very pleasant if we could make problems disappear by refusing to engage with them. (How much of what is now called “Stoicism” — not to mention what are now called “libertarianism” and “nationalism” — amounts to little more than such pleasant dreaming?) Unfortunately, what actually happens to most problems when we refuse to engage with them is that they gradually become much bigger problems, and therefore increasingly more difficult to evade. As is typically the case, the lurch toward immediate pleasure or comfort gives rise to far worse, sometimes insuperable, pain down the road.
Democracy in action.– George Washington noted, two hundred and twenty-eight eternities ago, that the rise of political parties would be the death of liberal democracy. When will history decide that it has beaten this dead horse enough? Is there a party of prominence and electoral plausibility in the democratic world that has not long-since prioritized the machinery of “victory” to such an extent that there is almost nothing it would not sacrifice in the name of that single, vacuous goal? (In the case of a few of our oldest and most distinguished democracies, of course, you could go ahead and omit the “almost” from that last sentence.)
