What are the origins of this? Private property is believed to have emerged in the state of nature. In ancient times, when the human population was driven by sheer necessity, by the brutal needs of its stomach and flesh, hunger was the driver of rivalry and violence. The natural desire for self-survival surpassed any premeditated evil that did not find fertile grounds in the famished mind. This was rather tempered by an equally natural sense of compassion, that enabled peaceful interaction amongst men and women. The noble savage stood on the edge, between the biological boundaries that tied him to the soil, and the empathetic instinct that slowly sedimented and allowed for the construction of civilisation as a whole. According to some social contract thinkers, the origins of civility have perverted the wild flowers of the human sense of life, severing the innocence and humility of a young umbilical cord that connected these to the earth itself. In the words of Rousseau, “the first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society'', and thus began the rushing motion towards inequality, bore by the need to abandon the whole. ''What miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!” ''. Private property was then brought into the world as civility developed with it. This human invention, more than all else, shapes a world which often seems to define success as a measure of what one possesses, rather than offers. Setting aside any plausible origins of private property, it is however implicit that this entails a separation, the drawing of a line, however symbolic, that lies between one man and another. Here, boundaries and limits rejoice in all their metaphysical power as they reshape the human understanding of the world. From this moment, the metamorphosis of our understanding also defines a new perception of space: the land is no longer an open plain of which we are part, but it becomes that which lies within established boundaries, carved by our imaginary lines as the markings of one's will on the ground. The dangers of leaving these signs on the land, as it comes under the ownership of one person, have been at the root of history's unfolding, where the only unowned elements left in our natural reality are the open seas, as no country has jurisdiction over them. The Law of the Seas, in fact, was established as an international UN convention to essentially share responsibility for the world's oceans. As the approach on the land has taken a separate route, segregating rather than bringing together, history has brought forth much conflict over these invisible walls we have collectively built within the social mind. From the tragedy of the commons, to the ethnic removal of peoples from the land during the Highland Clearances, to the islands that today are struggling, as the ownership of properties is moving offshore and becoming unsustainable for local communities to survive: land expropriation keeps persisting and presenting itself as a quiet form of homelessness. We must retrieve and rediscover the idea that the removal of persons from their own land is as harmful and repugnant as the burning of a forest. As the possession of a land by one person changes the situation of all others, the shifting of these imaginary boundaries also transforms the contours of freedom. Land and ethics, for this reason, can never come apart. It is our turn to question all limits that surround us and upon which we build the structures of our lives. As well as this, it is our moral duty to make ourselves useful and contribute to refining the meaning of the human seed we let ferment upon our earth. In the words of Marilynne Robinson: "Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant, or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view. Scarcity is said to create value, after all.'' As we are told we are all debtors or sinners, lending what we can from this life, we must remember that, in truth, we are all free to give up the envy for our time. Only by doing so, we can cease to colonise the future and rather hand an unbroken earth, as one hands to the wind a timid bird who does not trust its wings, to those who are yet to be born. The point is not how long we still have to live, but how much is left to do as we find ourselves here having to deal with ourselves and with the lives of others. Rather than focusing on one's having, it is time to commit to one's gentle being.
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THE ANTI-NEWS.
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