What We Must Own to Exist
If we divide the Earth into even parts for all of us,
each of the six billion of us will have approximately
one trillion tons of it. At just one dollar per ton, it
would take 1000 billionaires to buy just your
portion or just mine.
The Earth is only a small part of what we must own
to continue our existence. We know we need the
Sun. Its mass is about 5 million trillion trillion tons.
If we were to divide the Sun among the human
inhabitants of Earth, what would your portion be?
About a billion trillion tons. Offering a penny for a
thousand tons, with all the money on this planet,
just your portion could not be bought.
The Sun and the Earth are only a small portion of
our needs. The Sun needs its galaxy for it to exist.
Perhaps the galaxy needs other galaxies for it to
exist. There is, for all practical purposes, no end to
what is needed for you and I to exist. What we
consider to be our possessions here on Earth are
such a small portion of what we "own" that it’s like
a joke. This is not to say that we don’t need
our
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food and other necessities, but all the wealth we
accumulate beyond our actual needs – and that we
use to compare our wealth to the wealth of others –
is a paltry sum compared with all we already own
and must own even to continue living.
Consider some different styles of ownership. We
own the house. If we’ve paid to the bank what’s
owed, then we possess a clear deed that says we
own the house. This ownership has the strength of
whatever state supports it. Anyone more powerful
than that state can take it, and then it would be
his. This deed has only the strength we and the
state may use to hold it. This "ownership" is much
limited by the very state which supports it. I "own"
my house, but the state says I cannot build a
grocery store there. Someone in the energy
business owns the mineral rights; I can't dig for oil.
I can't burn trash on it. My "ownership" is simply a
list of rights, and the state and deed tell me what
those rights are. I may live in it and sleep in it. I
may restrict others from entering. I may sell the
list of rights to another. I cannot really sell the
dirt to anyone. If I owned that, I could dig to the
center of the Earth, but surely as I dig, I will be
stopped by the state less than a hundred feet
down. All we can own is a list of rights, and
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they can only be kept if the state is strong enough
to keep them for us.
There’s an old story about a man in the south who
camps out on someone’s estate. The estate holder
comes out to the man’s tent and asks the man what
he thinks he’s doing there. The man then says, "Oh,
this is your land? Where did you get it?" "From my
daddy, that’s where!" "Oh, and where did your
daddy get it?" "From my grandpappy, that’s where!"
"Oh, and where did your grandpappy get it?" "He
fought Injuns fer it!" "Ok," says the camper,
retrieving his rifle from the tent, "I’ll fight you
fer it!"
Those have always been the rules of ownership. The
deeds and things came to organize and enforce,
with the state behind us, our holding on our
possessions. The truth is, the rules are still the
same, but it takes more than one rifle to take
another’s land.
Another style of ownership is the condominium. This
is a style that usually includes independent
ownership of some small portion of a property and
social ownership of the whole property. There may
be a hundred dwellings (like apartments), each of
which are occupied by an "owner," but then that
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same owner also owns the whole complex together
with the 99 other owners. Even in one’s own unit,
the two-by-fours within the walls are not his alone,
but belong to the group.
The universe is like a condominium. We own it
together. We must own it to exist. If someone
somewhere were able to take it from us, we would
be gone forever. We do not own any particular piece
of it exclusively. Instead, we own all of it along
with all the other owners. The redwood tree owns
it also, and could not exist without it. Any living
thing on any other planet must also own it all.
If, by some magic, most of the universe were to
perish into nothing, what was left would still exist
as matter in some form, but no life would survive.
Living things must own it the way it is, tolerating
only slow and small change. We need no state to
enforce our ownership of all this. Indeed, it would
take an extremely powerful force to take it from
us, and we are not aware of any force at all with a
purpose to do so. We don't try to protect it and
have no idea how we could. This ownership is the
most complete we may imagine, not just a list of
rights, but actual ownership in need of no
enforcement. Think of it. We own the Sun. We
don't lock it up or try to protect it in any way, and
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we know we are with no need to do so. We are
wealthy beyond the ability of any of us to begin to
imagine. When we try to separate out some
infinitesimal portion of this universe to call our
very own and no one else’s, we play a silly game.
Each of us must own a trillion trillion trillion trillion
times what the whole Earth is, just to stay alive.
The lizard, who cocks his head a little looking at us
in the garden, may not be able to develop a notion
of the infinite. That lizard must own the whole
universe to exist, the same as we do.
The concept of infinity is not well understood even
by us, and much less still by the little lizard. Our
ownership equality with the lizard may be hard to
acknowledge.
We may come to think that we own more or less
than our neighbor, but in truth, we own an infinite
and indefinable amount, essentially the same as
every neighbor and the same as that lizard, for
otherwise, none of us could ever have come to
exist.
Our concept of value is amazing. That lizard would
not, by choice, trade places with any of us, and one
of us, as a mate, would appear terribly ugly to the
little fellow. The wealthiest person on Earth has
not so much as a tiny speck more than that lizard.
So far as we know, only we humans have developed
covetousness, wherein we might wish to be another,
often because it is our perception that the other
person owns more. Not so. It’s simply not true.
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