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Comment by _m8fo | Hacker News Reader

I doubt anything will beat property ownership, agriculture, and money, in that order. I reckon if you remove those these three things and wait a year and the human race will be unrecognizable from a cultural point of view.

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I think property ownership is an instinctive trait. Just like you don't have to tell a cat to piss against all the trees to assert ownership, you probably don't need to tell people about property.

I guess we could tell them "communism is bad" but that's a bit too cold war even for me.

Is property ownership instinctive? I'd definitely agree that [usage] is instinctive, in that one may want to use something without interruption or threat of having it taken away during usage. However, the idea that one needs to own something after it has been used, no longer needs to be used, or simply is no longer in use seems interesting.

Maybe I'm too idealistic, but I could imagine a society where everything is communal. I just think we started off in a way that would make it too difficult to transition to that now (too many people have too much to lose).

Can we somehow tilt the balance by encouraging more Coops to form etc? I too think society where everything is communal is a worthy goal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Some concept of ownership of the kind of things that are the subject of tangible personal property seems to be nearly universal and likely reflects something inherent. Other categories of property (real property, intangible personal property) this is less true of.

Consider 'ownership' as 'control' of a resource instead if it helps (control of access, of distribution, of use, etc.).The word has a lot of subjective baggage from our own culture and economic system that can cause confusion in these sorts of discussions. Whether you're talking about private or communal ownership, it's still just a form of ownership. Even when we talk of communal ownership, such as Hawaiian lands pre-Cook (actually, it's a pretty fascinating subject to read about, especially with how they wound up transitioning over a relatively short time and the protections they tried to build into that transition),[0] there's still some method of controlling access and use. That can be as simple as cultural norms that exemplified a sort of "don't be a jerk" attitude towards shared property that's widely accepted, or some sort of ruling authority that granted access, dictated acceptable usage, punished misuse, etc.

0. http://files.hawaii.gov/dcca/reb/real_ed/re_ed/ce_prelic/lan...

Ah, but can any of those things actually be removed? Each is not just an idea, but a representation of the one constant limitation to human economy: resource scarcity. The particulars might change, but the basic idea--some means of distributing resources--will arise to limit and shape whatever civilization might follow. We don't have to tell them anything; it'll instinctively develop on its own.

David Graeber does a good job of debunking the theory of currency as a replacement for barter in his book _Debt_ (if that's what you're getting at with the ordering).

I completely agree. I personally believe barter is implicit in property ownership. Since you can't barter anything you don't own, and once you do own something bartering (in my opinion) is inevitable.

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