The Universe Has Mass & Energy; You Have Life & Property
We all learn in high school physics class that mass and energy are the fundamental components of our universe. There are many forms of mass and many forms of energy. Those two categories are the building blocks of everything we know about our physical world.
I would like you to consider the proposition that life and property are the fundamental components of human civilization. We are all born with life (energy) and over the course of our lifetime we convert some of that energy into property (mass). The fundamental elements of being human are that we have life and we gradually convert our life energy into many forms of property.
I’m not prepared to offer a mathematical equivalency the way Einstein did, showing energy and mass are exactly related as E=mc2. For one thing, I ain’t no Einstein.
And it also seems pretty obvious that different people can expend the same amount of energy and produce property of greatly different value. One man can spend 1,000 hours of his life cutting down trees and building a log cabin. Another man can spend 1,000 hours turning a block of steel into watch springs worth many multiples of what the cabin’s value. While Rembrandt could spend his 1,000 hours turning canvas and paints into something worth even more.
So if somebody, someday comes up with an equation showing the equivalency between life and property I think it might look more like Drake’s Equation (illustrated above) for the likelihood of other advanced, communicative civilizations being in our galaxy.
He used these variables:
R∗ = the average rate of star formation in our galaxy.
fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets.
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets.
fl = the fraction of planets that could support life that actually develop life at some point.
fi = the fraction of planets with life that go on to develop intelligent life (civilizations).
fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.
L = the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space.
That’s a lot of variables and assumptions to consider.
So I suppose the Life = Property formula might need variables such as:
Ingenuity of the individual
Knowledge previously acquired from others
Sophistication of his tools
Tenacity of his effort
All divided by the unwanted coercive interference against his productivity
It would take some serious modeling to begin to approach a formula that accounts for the observable reality that one lifetime might produce X-amount of property, while another equally long lifetime produced 1,000 times more.
But I Digress…
My primary point here is that all humans are endowed with a life force and we all convert that life force into property that we expect will benefit us. Property like food and shelter are at the most basic level.
And just as there is a Periodic Table to categorize all the elements of mass, I suppose someone could construct a much larger Table of Property to organize everything from food, shelter, and knowledge; to money, factories, and Louis Vuitton® handbags.
Understanding this concept of trading life for property (which I would characterize as an imperial reality) leads to a clarity of thinking around fundamental issues of being human and living in a society.
First of all, who owns your body? Who rightfully owns and controls your bones, blood, brain, and organs? I think you own yours and I own mine. If I have a bum liver, I have no inherent right to take your liver. Likewise, if you take the time and effort to learn to speak Italian, that knowledge does not migrate into my brain. It’s just a fact of nature that we are all biologically autonomous.
Secondly, if you spend some of your finite life energy (and we all know it’s finite in 100% of cases) making a million dollars, or a log cabin, or writing some original music, I believe you own that property because you spent your life energy creating it, not mine. So I don’t own any of it. Zero.
If you believe those two premises are valid; that you own your life and you own the property you create with your life — and I think a few billion of us worldwide do believe those two premises — it logically builds to the conclusion of creating a society where people’s daily conduct, their work, their financial system, and their respected rituals and customs inside that society would all be devoted to the protection of individual people and their property.
In that society an action would only be a crime if it was a successful act of coercion. Actions would be moral only when they involve an absence of coercion. And that freedom would be defined as the societal condition of everyone have 100% control over his or her own property.
I invite you to think about these fundamental concepts of human society. To me, they are easy to embrace because they appear to be empirically true and have been true for all of known history. And they are applicable and available to people everywhere in the world, irrespective of their personal circumstances. Anyone, anywhere can decide to acknowledge and believe in the value of each human owning his or her own life and property.
A Warning
But I warn you. When you see these concepts as self-evident truth and you embrace them as your own belief, you will never see our contemporary world the same way again.
You will see coercion everywhere. You will see the plunder of property as a codified social system. You will see theft, fraud, and war as the foundations of every nation state and the essential fabric of every fiat financial system, now and in history.
You will see billions of people born into public debts they did not incur. They are forced to pay the interest on that debt throughout their lives. You will see billions of people who must seek permission from others in order to simply live their lives on their own terms. And you will see that permission is rarely granted.
Because, my friends, we live in nation states where we do not own our lives and we do not own the property we create with our lives. Others own us. All of us. And there is always a prison cell or a gallows waiting for those who oppose that condition too visibly or vocally.
. . . until some of us can quietly build a better social system to supplant the ones we’ve had imposed upon us for thousands of years. At long last we have the technologies we need to protect all of us, but do we have the enough time and do we have the will?
This is brilliant! Thank you for writing it. I wish you had gone further though - the ownership of our body. That concept, that fundamental understanding has gone right out the window with the idea of "public health" where anyone can come along and force you to put something into your body that you not just do not consent to but vehemently do not consent to. We jab things into our baby's bloodstream every time one is born, how dare we! The concept of body autonomy is creeping away if we let it. Sure take vaccines, take poisons, take anything you like but don't try to force it on others. What about the skies being poisoned and the water fluoridated, and GMO's - meddling with nature's genetics. Who got my consent to do this? Who got yours? We certainly can get through this prison. And it's not hard. All it takes is the will. But I feel like I am the only one with that will and nobody can go it alone. We could take back our life and liberty wholly by the middle of next year. That's how soon we can do it, IF WE HAD THE WILL.
Great article, thank you. I'm with Buckminster Fuller and his suggestion that we build a new world not by opposing the current psycho-system, but by making it irrelevant. This is likely to include resilient communities, the gift economy, and a massive stepping out of the consumer society.
I reprint here Percy Redfern's 1920 statement about our power as consumers, written over 100 years ago:
“In our common everyday needs the great industries of the world take their rise. We – the mass of common men and women in all countries - also compose the world’s markets. To sell to us is the ultimate aim of the world’s business. Hence it is ourselves as consumers who stand in a central relation to all the economies of the world, like the king in his kingdom. As producers we go unto a particular factory, farm or mine, but as consumers we are set by nature thus to give leadership, aim and purpose to the whole economic world. That we are not kings, but serfs in the mass, is due to our failure to think and act together as consumers and so to realise our true position and power.”