“Property" Generates the "War of All Against All" that Destroys Liberalism and Conservatism

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“Mark [Zuckerberg] has this will to survive above everybody, and it feels like he is always plotting to kill off those things that get in his way to ensure his survival.”

-Sarah Wynn Williams

Careless People

Property:

The Constitution is based on, and designed to defend, the concept of “property”. The Founders traded the king for property as the central organizing principle of the USA, a good trade from the liberal perspective. Colonists became “free” by taking and living on “free land”; in other words, the theft of the property of indigenous people, and the extermination and transfer of them, by invaders created the pecuniary wealth of the USA, and the Jeffersonian political philosophy of liberalism.  

Native peoples had a concept of property, but it was not Abrahamic. Rather, the earth was alive and they shared that life. It was not property; it was life.

Written language fostered a concept of property that over time in the "West" increasingly presumed humans were meant to "subdue" the earth and, ultimately, make it the subject of science and engineering. The earth was property, to be recorded, apportioned, controlled, expanded and defended. 

Title to property was established at the edge of the frontier. Earth became property as “civilization” advanced. Prehistoric became historic.

Equality and Property as Antagonistic Concepts:

The Jeffersonian vision of agrarian democracy presumed an endless frontier where democracy would be continually renewed; slavery, theft and genocide were the means of acquiring property in the pristine natural environment where democracy was born. Liberalism is (supposed to be) self-correcting, though, and the Jeffersonian vision was one of learning from mistakes and “progressing”. The Civil War, return of Native lands, DEI were/are attempts to correct the problem of liberalism’s founding in genocide; they materialize(d) the Declaration of Independence's ethos of equality.

Liberal equality must be experienced physically to be actual, which is another way of saying: political equality occurs only with economic equality. The balance between them can’t be exact, but it must be fair, and ensure good living for all. 

It has been centuries since political equality has been experienced, and it’s possible to argue it never was experienced. Presently, in the wake of Citizens United, the law of our government is that money is free speech. Those who have the most property have the most right to be free.

The Founders’ Constitution was approved in 1783, just at the very beginning of the rise of the fossil fuel machine takeover of the earth. Their definition of property is not the same as ours, but our government, which is thanks to written language and idealist memory the main subject of our history, presumes that it is. 

Jeffersonian agrarianism, while endorsing slavery and genocide, presumed that a life lived close to the earth was the best life. The farther away you got from the earth, the more corrupt you became. No one could be more honest and noble than the person who gained all the necessities of life through gardening and farming. The kind of property it imagined was alive and gave life. “Progress” meant that, as Locke had explained, hunter gathering nomads must be removed from the lands because they did not have written documents that granted them title to it; the written word exterminated all that was not written, especially when all that threatened its existence.

Which brings us back to:

“Mark [Zuckerberg] has this will to survive above everybody, and it feels like he is always plotting to kill off those things that get in his way to ensure his survival.”

-Sarah Wynn Williams

Careless People

Zuckerberg has the most free speech of all, and is not a liberal. He's not conservative either.

At this moment, property is king. Corporations govern us and they do it by channeling all communication through digital/internet domains, algorithms, surveillance systems. Our technofascists aren't liberal or conservative as those terms were defined before 911, COVID, social media and Israel's genocide of Palestinians. What they share with the old political philosophies is a sacred belief in "property". As long as they consider property sacred, they can be considered "American".

When property is considered sacred, and it is created through the destruction of the earth, the result is Zuckerbergism: "always plotting to kill off those things that get in his way". Zuckerbergism is not new because bloody tyrants have been around since written language recorded their presence.

What is new is that technofascists have access to everything within the digital/internetiverse and all over the earth. The Abrahamic dream of a planet divided and transformed into property has come true, hallejuhaha

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I think I'm done for now with this contemplation of why liberalism always loses to conservatism, except to declare that I abide by the American Creed, am cosmopolitan because the USA is a multicultural nation of Natives and immigrants and think Abraham Lincoln was our greatest president.

Since we are all under attack now, in this war of all against all that is the result of a central organizing principle that cannot be sustained because it is, when made sacred and forced into every single action of our mass population, suicidal.

This is not the time for us to give up on "equality" as a central organizing principle mainly because equality IS a "natural law". Birth and death make all living beings equal.

My next contemplation will imagine how equality is natural: because property is unnatural. I'll imagine a biocentric political philosophy that is not liberal, conservative or fascist, or even socialist. I am confident that it is one that we already carry around, that moves us, that we need to find the best words for.