By Pomen
This article was part of MSWB L’Été Éternel magazine NO.1
The right to defend what is yours is one of the cornerstones of civilization. The question becomes more about how one forms this into a functional system within a society. One way people did this was to create the idea of property, which has expanded and reformed itself throughout history. We form our nations based around these ideas, but it is flawed and they can be made better. The biggest issue is that people forget about the externalities of property. It is the effect one property has on its surroundings. We can see this is what we oftentimes call ghetto ethics: that one cares only about one’s own property and surrounding your property a ghetto is formed. To understand this, I will tell you a story:
We had lectures in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2019. Before the lectures, we met at Maiden Square and it started raining. While standing underneath the yellow gateway in the middle of the square. There, we met a man from Sweden. He asked us about our business in Ukraine. We told him we were performing lectures with a think tank, and what the lectures were about. We gave him the idea of Property-in-toto as a new way of seeing property, and a criticism of Rothbardism (caring only for one’s own property). He liked our idea, and he said Ukraine lacked that exact philosophy and gave us a small history lesson. It was a good analogy one can say.
When Ukraine became independent, there were no rules in place on how one could, for example, remake their balcony. It was a free-for-all on changing your balcony to look however they wanted, and so people did. They wanted to express themselves away from the old soviet aesthetics. In doing this, every balcony became unique and different, but the entire apartment complex looked ugly as a result. This lasted a few years, but small changes had to be made to make sure the apartment complex did not look ugly just because one person wanted a new and radical balcony.
The analogy can be summed up as follows:
"If a person only focuses on their own aesthetic, then they forget the entire apartment complex aesthetic, and the entire apartment complex matters when it comes to individual balconies aesthetics."
This is exactly what is often forgotten with modern-day property. There are so many examples of property without thinking about its surroundings. There are examples of Brutalist grey art in the middle of a modern city, ATMs destroying old historical places, and the list can go on and on. This is what is forgotten today. Modern city planners and architects don't see the full picture, and people have no way to complain or fight back when the surroundings get destroyed by ghetto ethics. There is much that can be done to help to fix this problem; laws can be changed, grassroots activism, etc. It is quite hard to get laws passed because of the complexity surrounding property law and the unseen consequences of reforming those laws. We have ways to work on this to help, but mostly what has to be changed is the mindset people have. They need to rethink. Here is how:
We have a theory called Property in Toto. It is a way to go back to the fundamentals of why we have property in the first place, and to see what we can learn and implement. The fundamental is that we used violence to protect what we felt we had the right to defend. Then we created law to make sure the use of violence is not necessary, but the basis of protection is still within those laws. We not only wish to defend what we directly own, but also what we are a part of, such as community, language and history. Of course, we cannot directly own a community or language, but we can still defend it. Henceforth, Property and the rights and laws that exist around property should in some parts be transferred to support defending community, language, history, and more. And this transfer applies to that which is not directly owned by an individual, and should not be made worse because of the externalities of someone else's property.
Different laws within these ideas already exist on different subjects. It is often on a case-by-case basis, and that is good. But we should start looking into this more in law, and make sure that people have the right tools and language to defend their community. If you go back to the apartment complex analogy, what tools did the tenants have to state the fact that other balconies made the entire apartment complex worse? And that comes to everything. ATMs are all over the city and destroying historical sites. What rights do they have? There is even a real and worse case than ATMs. There is a massive company polluting the nearby area; what tools are available to fight this? None. These cases can differ in scope, but we need to at least start looking at externalities.
People can rally, people can strike and increase the cost to those who do not consider Property in Toto. That can work at times. For example, a historic building in Istanbul was about to be destroyed. There were tons of rallies to stop it, and they did it successfully. But rallying should not be needed, and one should not create disorder every time someone does something that hurts the community or one’s property. That is why we first need to rethink how we frame property to think of the whole, and then create tools to make people be able to defend the whole. Only then can we make sure the civilizations are not just ghettos with ugly balconies. This article was part of MSWB L’Été Éternel magazine NO.1 get the full magazine here https://tyrord.gumroad.com/l/MSWB_mag?layout=profile
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