Life means so much new now. We focus on our things, our thoughts, our bodies – what we can see and smell and taste and feel, and what we can believe and discover and explore.

Of course, originally life was simply surviving. Finding food. Finding mates.

So at some point we learn to farm, not just hunt and pluck. We tame the soil – not all at once, but we figure it out.

Why?

Well, first, we’re clever enough to do it. We’re smart, that’s for sure, dangerously smart. It’s why you don’t find Mammoths in zoos. We aren’t physically threatening, but we are mentally capable and determined little bastards.

And second, we’re damn selfish. Greedy. We want more food. We want easier food. We want tastier food. This is all animal in nature – we are genetically disposed to wanting to survive and reproduce, and if we can make it easier and safer then so be it. But there are other creatures – even insects – that can “farm” to some degree – we’re not 100% unique in that arena. So why us? Why did we make life?

Third. We want things. Stuff. Other animals want things to survive, to attract a mate, to show their physical or mental prowess. But humans have a strange, strange desire to own, to possess – even when we are not using it. We could assign that abstract concept of ownership to inanimate objects – sticks and stones first, then maybe bows or spears, and later other people, land, air. We want to own Life.

And, food. So we farm. And we get better at it, learn more things, eventually make civilization, the Minoans, Greeks, Romans (all owners or richness in culture and gold), Huns, Mongols, Vikings (… so we declined a bit?) and later the French, British, American.

And that’s just part of one hemisphere.

Of course, the practical significance of this is that we now have cars and planes and computers and the Internet. All because we had enough food to sit our clever, greedy, ownership-paranoid asses down for long enough to shit out technology.

And now we have jobs and money and toys. And our entire daily lives revolve around exchanges of things – we work and exchange our time for money, use that money to purchase whatever we want – we transfer ownership of things many times a day. To us, this is mundane, an everyday thing that we are familiar with. What we consider interesting is the scale of ownership.

We care about how much we own. We care a lot. We care enough to kill each other over the differences in ownership – from petty thieves to revolutionaries, we are willing to die over things we could live without. More specifically, to remove property from those we view to have unfair amounts of it. And we even view liberty and freedom as a thing to have, to own.

There is unfortunately only a limited amount of wealth in the world. Most of the parts of the world that humans actually care about, they already own. It is distributed unevenly, of course – more even in some areas than others. But some areas possess far less wealth on the whole than others. It’s as if a handful of salt was thrown into the wind, and billions stretched up their hands to grab at the grains. No rhyme, no reason, some patterns, but for apparently the sake of randomness some people got a lot more than others.

And, being clever little greedy bastards, we want it. But we’re also smart enough to know that just taking it whenever you can would be anarchy, and anarchy is generally bad because people generally get killed.

The strong don’t like government because it impedes them, but the weak love it because it protects them. Or it is supposed to. Banded together, the weak hold collective power (which is better than no power). The strong dislike working together because it communalizes their strength, which reduces the individual’s worth among the weak.

But how in a society do we divy up the toys? Who gets what? Are there exceptions? Free for all? Predetermined? How do you maintain equality while providing for hard work? Is equality even important? Should we maintain a concept of ownership when it is what causes the majority of human conflict? How does this merge with the way a society forms?

The big question is: How do you form a society where people get along?

And as most big questions go, it is absolutely necessary to fall into a more complex subject in order to attempt to answer a question that will ultimately bring up more questions in the quest to answer it than actually answering it would solve.

Tags: Chapter I, Life