Property And Power
By Lionel Anet
30 January, 2015
Countercurrents.org
The top 0.01% of the 1% own about 12% of USA’s wealth. But that’s not the real problem; the reason to acquire so much wealth is to increase ones power. Well, may we talk about equality? Because there’s no such thing in civilisation, as it would contradict competitive ideology. As an aside, to attempt to fit equality into capitalism it gets mired into unresolvable complexity, so it’s largely ignored. Furthermore, life is far too complex, for nature to contain within it the simplistic concept of equality. On the other hand, fairness is straightforward, it’s what enables us to be social; hence, as private property is used to have power above and over others. This’s unfair, dishonest and antisocial.
Fair-honest
To be fair, is to be honest it’s the criteria for sociality, wealth must be socially owned, it’s what we produced by using natural renewable resources in a sustainable way. Non-renewables are trickier, especially fossil fuels, because it’s a little difficult to recycle them, it’s one of many reasons to leave them alone. Without private power it would be a social decision how to use that wealth. We could have free food, clothing, education, health care, and transport. All we would need is to provide (work) for our wants by sharing out according to needs and ability to provide in a sustainable way. If Murdock owns all the media in the world it would be alright as long as he didn’t have controlled (power) of it. Like The Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and a lot of other place, which makes the Queen the biggest landowner on Earth, but she has no power over those lands. That is, if everyone was on that footing Murdock would be one of us owning his empire, but would have no power over it and no need of private property. We only need fairness and honesty like we have between the best of friends.
At present the 1% are only a burden and a hindrance to our survival as they got us by “the short and curly” with their increasing control of all medias. We need cooperative attitude and action and that can only be achieved by convincing the 1% that controls the planet to see they need the 99% to be where they are and exist.
It’s that revolting sort of sharing that produces the violence in civilisation and will destroy us and the 1% as well. Competition for power is what gives rise to the gross disparity and violence in civilisation and as revolutions is an extreme form of competitive activities; it’s liable to maintain the unfairness in the power structure of society. That’s why we still have an increasingly unfair-dishonest society.
We tend to see the world and life in the way we were educated, it includes the view that blames people nature for the terrible things we do, which are the highlight of history. Therefore, with that thinking, there’s little we can do to fix major problems including that of global warming. However, nearly all our ideas and how we see life comes from the intellectuals, who have also given us a faults importance of the power of the intellect.
It’s necessary to redress the elution given by intellectuals of agriculture as it wasn’t an invention it was a survival backstop. The intelligence status of Australian aboriginals for instant was said to be inferior, by the intellectuals of the early 20th century, because they didn’t farm. Europeans overlooked the difficulty in Australia, which was the animals, plants and the environment; they were unsuitable for the Asian or European type of farming. However, without farming there were no beneficial opportunities for private property and for warriors to take it. Therefore, Aboriginals could and had to, and knew how to control their population, while agriculturist had an advantage to increase their population due to the competition between societies.
The positive aspect of agriculture is well known for civilisation, on the other hand people found it impossible to see the negative side of agriculture until late last century, we now see some of it, but only with difficulty. The reason we found it so hard to evaluate agriculture’s effect on society is it enable the powerful people in civilisation to be so, by competing. Civilised knowledge is focused on what enables the powerful to have the dominant power, which is now justified with the ultimate power of public disinformation.
If you’re very powerful and dominant you want competition, especially if by winning one becomes more dominant. It was naive of us to fall for such deceptive device, which was very much against our interest that is about 98% of us. Admittedly it took many decades to get such a foot hold as it is today, where nearly everyone seems to believe that the more competitive the economy and throughout society is the better off we will be. All living things tries to grow but there’s limits, they also avoid competition if possible, because a loss means annihilation, to seek competition as a way of living is insane but it’s pursued by us in a fanatical way. It’s an antagonistic interaction for social beings to be competitive, but we were lured over millenniums by our rulers, originally warriors and now the people involved in finance – bankers.
Those wealthy ones are ignorant of the danger they are placing themselves in, because we have focused our concerns on the poor one who are in direct danger. This has little effect on the wealthy; they are wealthy (powerful) because they lack concern for the poor. Nevertheless, they must have interest in themselves to own so much. It’s their power or their life. They must choose, however, we must give them that option.
Lionel Anet is a member of Sydney U3A University of the Third Age, of 20 years standing and now a life member
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