The proper philosophical justification for private property and self-ownership

A non-antrocentric approach

Past philosophical attempts on justifying the “moral” ground for private property and self-ownership have been unsuccessful. The foremost example of justifying private property rights and self-ownership are those who originate from Hans Hermann-Hoppe’s argumentation ethics. Argumentation ethics’ flaw comes from its inability to account for Hume’s law. I will not discuss any other past attempts but henceforth only present my own arguments.

The first hurdle that I will tackle is antrho-centrisim. Past philosophical attempts on justifying any ethic, morality or value have had uncessfull attempts on answering the question:

Why does a principle only apply to humans and only them?

Attempts to argue or prove a certain morality will fail if it is unable to answer said question, else the whole argument falls flat due to Hume’s law. This persistent flaw in philosophy is due to its inability to incorporate the philosophical implications of evolutionary theory.

Evolutionary theory shows us that the categories we use to differentiate organisms, such as homo sapiens, do not exist a priori. All of these categories, whether it is species, tribes or families do not exist independent of the organisms that categorized or observed them.

Organisms who are categorized according to same or alike have features , but every single of those features vary within themselves and are never exactly the same. They all exist in a continuum. Everyone has a hand, but the features composing the hand are different, the shape, fingerprints, grip strength, size, finger length and so on.

The measures we choose to determine different organisms from each other are decided by those who categorize them, meaning, the definitions can be stricter or looser, all depending on those doing the categorization.

This means that ANY philosophy utilizing the framework of “humans” and “non-humans” is philosophizing within an anthro-centric framework which can’t exist independent of those doing the categorization.

Instead, one must take account of every single organism when attempting to justify a certain morality, ethic or value. The principles must be valid independent of evolutionary trajectory and not contingent on the current evolutionary trajectory that created us humans. This heuristic will guide us for the rest of this text.

Self-ownership

Let’s start by imagining that only the organisms A and B exist in this world.  All organisms need resources to continue their existence. Resources in this world are scarce and times of extreme resource scarcity are unpredictable. In events of extreme resource scarcity,  there is a risk of not everyone surviving.

In anticipation of unforeseeable events, it is in the interest of both A and B to eliminate the other organism to prolong their own existence. The cost of being aggressive in a two organism world is zero. After eliminating the other organism, the aggressor has free access to all the resources.

However, if we add organism C, D and E, things change a lot. Aggressing in a world with third parties leads to the aggressor incurring a cost, being regarded as an aggressor. C, D and E would incur no cost from forming a coalition and aggressing upon A, since she is aggressive. I will use the term the non-aggression pact to refer to coalitions which aggresses upon aggressors

In a world where non-aggression pacts can be formed, it is still in your interest to eliminate other organisms for the unforeseeable events of extreme resource scarcity. And as there are more organisms in the world, it becomes harder to eliminate other organisms. The threat of the non-aggression pact increases with the size of the third party.

It is therefore in the interest of the individual, to avoid the non-aggression pact and instead align itself with it. The elimination of other organisms will always be in the interest of your long-term existence and the possibility of doing so without incurring any costs becomes possible with the non-aggression pact.

This is the foundation of self-ownership. In the event of the formation of a non-aggression pact, it is in your interest to have adhered to the non-aggression principle during your lifetime. The threat of the non-aggression pact is what protects your self-ownership from being violated.

Private property

Suppose our island example with multiple organisms again and all organisms may consume any amount of resources they so desire. All organisms differ in the amount of resources they require and suppose one organism requires a high amount of resources which affects the resource supply heavily. In the event of an extreme resource scarcity, this person’s resource consumption will put everyone else’s existence under threat. Therefore, it is of interest to do away with organisms with unusual high amount of resource consumption. An example of such an organism is a hog who usually destroys a lot of land in the process of feeding itself.

However, doing away with organisms with a high resource demand will still brand you as an aggressive organism. It is impossible to measure what the appropriate amount of consumption is due to the variability of the consumption level between organisms but also the variability of the consumption level between time for a single organism. Such a system, in varying degrees, will always end in a slow race towards mass societal aggression.

The alternative is private property. Private property is the least non-aggressive form of resource distribution. In the absence of unambiguous, rigid, and easily understood delimitations, the possibility of conflict becomes almost inevitable. By respecting other’s private property, you are commiting yourself to non-aggression and become predictable for others. The delimitation between your and other’s resources, limits the costs of your consumption to only yourself.

Therefore, the foundation of private property lies on its non-aggressive nature. There is no more efficient way of resource distribution that avoids the possible wrath of the non-aggression pact. In the light of private properties non-aggressive nature, commiting yourself to other alternatives than private property can be possible regarded as an aggressive stance to others.

Summary

These principles are valid independent of our evolutionary trajectory. In our previous examples all of the organisms can be of any combination. The island examples with A, B and C, could be a human, dog and a firefly. It is this difference from previous moral philosophy, that makes the principles of anarcho-capitalist ethics valid independent of evolutionary trajectory.

So, the right to self-ownership is protected and realized through the non-aggression pact. It is through adhering to non-aggressive actions that we can make sure that any possible aggressors incur the cost of being branded as aggressors by the non-aggression pact.

To avoid aggressive actions and fully commit ourselves to non-aggression, we adhere to the principles of private property. Through clear delimitations between what’s yours and mine we avoid getting into conflicts which may brand us as aggressors. In the event of uncertain events, it is in our interest to approach it in a non-aggressive manner, by doing so, we avoid the possible wrath of the non-aggression pact.

Socialism and nationalism as a ladder

We all celebrate the independence of former colonies from their respective colonial powers. Colonialism was the most evil thing on earth. But what was bad about it? Was it expropriation? Taxation without representation? The racism? Massacres?

None of the former were unique to the colonial territories. But there was actually one thing that was unique. The ruling class was not of the same extraction as its subjects.

Colonialism came to an end when the foreign rulers were replaced by rulers of native extraction. The essence of colonialism was that the ruling class was not of the same extraction as its subjects. But why would that ever be a problem? It’s obvious in an evolutionary sense. The price of trusting individuals outside of your own group can be quietly costly on the long run.

However, there must be someone who initially articulates the ethnicity of the ruling class as a problem. By studying this process and the people who are the forebears against colonialism, one can find a quite interesting insight.

In India it was the Indian National Congress who led the country to independence. Both Nehru and Gandhi, especially Gandhi, became quite famous for their resistance against the British rule. But the origins of Indian National Congress is very intriguing. It was created by native colonial administrators who got disgruntled by the racial hierarchies in the colonial administration. Native Indians could only advance to a certain level in the colonial bureaucracy due to their race. The upper ranks were reserved for whites only.

And so started a story where disgruntled bureaucrats seized the power from the foreign rulers. The interesting point is that none of these anti-colonial leaders relinquished power from themselves. Rather they only seeked more. Muhammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, advocated a separation from India due to Pakistan’s Muslim identity, to only later decide that Pakistan was to be a secular state.

Anti-colonialism seems to be only a vehicle for a certain group of individuals to gain power. Now there is a very similar group within socialists. Every policy they advocate for, eventually means that the demand for occupations, that mostly they occupy (teachers, social workers, paper-shufflers and academics) , increases. The unemployable migrants can only be fixed by transferring more wealth to socialist occupations. Else we are “doomed”. And they are not lying.

When we don’t transfer wealth to the socialist elite, we end up with Castros, Guevaras and Maos. The liberal democracy bribes these agitators through fake jobs as social workers, academics and bureaucrats. In these positions, they don’t have the interest to seize the power from the ruling class.

It’s not that the the Castros, Guevaras, Lenins and Maos have a low IQ and are unemployable, no. They are obviously above average, but not good enough to be competitive. Instead of engaging in non-aggressive value creation, they find it in their own interest to transfer wealth and prestige by threat of violence. Instead of being a low prestige worker, they can instead be a bureaucrat or an academic, which has a lot more sexual value. The revolution is not in their interest if they are already being bribed with fake jobs.

Another case to clarify this phenomenon would be Ashkenazim over-representation in socialist literature (and leadership). Not every Ashkenazim is a successful wealth creator. However, an Ashkenazim loser is not the same as an European loser. The Ashkenazim loser can still think. And when he thinks, he comes up with the idea that he can cover his power and prestige loss, by extorting the “capitalists” with threats of violence from the masses.

Another great case is student protests and revolts. Often it is students of social sciences who engage in these activities. Never have students marched for more capitalism. It is always for socialism, meaning, higher sexual value of their grades. They are marching for higher incomes and prestige for THEM, not anyone else. Even if they are not the direct recipients, they will always be one of the beneficiaries of the stealth that they are advocating for.

Our anti-colonial and socialists leaders seem to act out from the same “genetic profile”. Individuals with this profile are the “extortion class” of a society. Their contemporaries appear in modern identity politics (minority nationalist movements). Ethnic leaders, or self-claimed ethnic representatives, claim to have the best knowledge about their own group, rather than anyone else, and therefor they should have the highest and best positions possible in every single existing institution. Equality is not 50/50, but 100/0, with 0% being European males.

Their issue is not ethics or morality. Not policy or consequences. But power and prestige. Nationalism, anti-colonialism and socialism are ladders, nothing else.

Western-centric ontology of the left: Part 2. Social Constructions

Humans don’t exist. We know that evolutionary change does not happen categorically but gradually. The dog didn’t become a wolf in one day, but it took several generations, and the moment when the dog became something separable from the wolf was decided by humans. Meaning, what makes a dog a “dog” is not evident by itself but is decided by humans. This means that the categories “dog” and “wolf” do not actually exist. They are merely social constructs. If we apply the same logic to humans, who are also the result of evolution, it becomes evident that the category human doesn’t exist either.

It is important to remember that the human category existed before biologists. It’s not their creation. The human instead seem to have its origin in Christianity and western civilization. Compared to Hindu ontology who supposes there is a connection between all animals through reincarnation and there are different categories of Vishnas creations (humans). Christianity abolishes all these categories but says that we are all one and all the same and something separate from all other animals.

The western-Christian construction of the human is mostly put to critique because it constructs all humans as one category and rejects the existence of any races. This critique has been well-formulated and even the sloppiest arguments are most of the time correct due to the former’s rejection of evolution theory, making it impossible to look foolish in comparison. But what is rarely critiqued is the existence of categories itself.

Critique of different forms of categorization do exist. It is mostly done by academia (the left), who claim that they are“deconstructing” concepts such as race and gender. But these “deconstructions” are not philosophical attempts to disprove the ontologies of race and gender, but are instead studies on the origins of the categories themselves and their supposed political motives. The political motive, of course, always being something evil that can solely be solved by the bureaucratic class.

The left, however, never critiques the most fundamental construction of them all, the “human” category. Why would they stop at race and gender? Maybe it’s because they do not have the theoretical tools (evolutionary theory) to deconstruct anything. You can deconstruct the existence of race and sex with evolutionary theory too. But they don’t.

But let us suppose for a moment that they know of the implications of deconstructing the human, and therefore avoid it.

Through the human construction, there is an assumption of “sameness” between me and you. Since you and I are the same, we are put to the same expectations. These expectations are sometimes lighter or none when it comes to disabled people, animals and minorities. One of these expectations is that you and I should be governed by the same laws. If you kill someone, then you should go to jail, and you’d expect the same should happen to me. But suppose that I’m an alligator, a non-human, let loose and I kill someone. My punishment would however be different. I will probably be either executed or not punished at all. But I’m for some reason held to another standard. All this is due to the difference we make between humans and non-humans.

(Now that I think of it, disabled people and minorities are treated like our alligator. Either they are killed (treated harder) or treated more leniently).

But we know that the categories “alligator” and “human” are social constructs. Why can the alligator get off with a more lenient punishment or put to death and not in jail?

Let’s have another example. No one expects an alligator to work and pay taxes towards humans. Because they are not humans. Why should the alligator be exempt of paying taxes, while I as a human should, when these categories don’t exist at all?

The human construct is a tool for the communists and the bureaucrats to infringe upon my body and property. Since they and I are the same, I, for some reason, have a responsibility towards them. Meaning, being born a human is akin to being born into slavery.

The foremost defenders of above mentioned categorical slavery, are the communists and the bureaucrats. They are the most dear adherents of Western-Christian (WC) ontology. It is on the foundation of aforementioned that they are able to steal other individuals money and wealth.

Through rubbish pieces of propaganda, such as the deceleration of human rights, they propagate for unlimited stealth of private property and infringements on your right to your own body. But how can something that doesn’t exist have any rights? And why should I be forced to believe in your social constructs if you don’t believe in other’s (such as Allah or the prophetic nature of Mohammed)?

What we essentially come down to is that the current the current dominating ontology about the world, the WC social construct of the human, is nothing but a lie that is ferociously exploited by the left to violate your property and body. All this while they bemoan you as ethnocentric, eurocentric and an old white man, while they (who are mostly younger fellows) are the foremost defenders of ancient western-christian lies about the world!

Western-centric ontology of the left: Part 1. Racism

The left is diligent in accusing everyone of “eurocentrism” and “ethnocentrism”. When the right is usually faced with these accusations, the common tactic used is ridicule. One such common example is the case of “White privilege”. Everything else being equal, a white individual will receive certain benefits that non-whites won’t. And there are actually studies where the theory of white privilege is actually validated.

However, the left is horridly wrong when it comes to the estimating the effects of white privilege on differences in education or income. There is literally no proof in any part of the world, or in history, where discrimination leads to poverty.

The two important words here are “the world” and “history”. If the left would study societies outside of the West, one could very easily come to the conclusion that the effects of discrimination, long-standing poverty and slavery on group differences in income and education is null.

This lack of interest in history and the world, leads to many of their ideas that they push through universities being western-centric. It is an monstrous task to not cringe when they accuse others of ethno/eurocentrism.

One of the most obvious examples of their western centric worldview is observable in their insistence that racism is prejudice with power. Power + Prejudice = Racism. Anything else is not racism at all. Therefore, non-whites can not be racist against whites.

To counter this argument, one could bring up the clear racial discrimination employed by Harvard Medical School against White and Asian students through affirmative action. And Harvard having institutional power, this fulfills the definition of racism. However, our leftist could counter this argument by simply answering:

“Yes, there is racial discrimination against whites in this particular institution. But if you account for the discrimination that non-whites experience in the housing, mating and job market, the system as a whole is biased for white people”

And that sounds as rational as it can be. Right? It is. But the problem is that the definition suddenly becomes western-centric.

What they essentially do, is that they make racism a zero-sum game. That means that we sum up all the prejudices that each group experience in society and compare them. The one’s that are on the top, who are whites, do not experience racism, since the system is most lenient and supportive towards them. While everyone in the bottom are devoid of all the privileges of the one’s at the top.

But let us see how well our Power + Prejudice definition fares outside of the west. Think of a country with 10 institutions with equal amount of yield and 10 equally large ethnic groups. Suppose that discrimination is forbidden by law, but in spite of that, every single institution is dominated by one of the 10 ethnic groups. Each ethnic group “owns” one of these institutions and do everything in their power to keep the other groups out.

Well, since they all posses equal amounts of power, there is no racism in our made-up country! Our western leftists have successfully eliminated racism in most of the non-western world, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, whose countries rarely have a group that is in actual majority, but solely in plurality.

But our leftists don’t have to leave their western world. They could just open any history book and study Ashkenazim Jewish history. Why did the Holocaust happen? Why did the Europeans keep slaughtering, exiling and stealing the properties of the Ashkenazim? Perhaps the Ashkenazim were a lot more richer than their European counterparts, in spite of the Europeans controlling the military, church and the state?

How do we use their definition to understand a situation when a minority has more power in the economic sphere? You can’t. A holistic and zero-sum definition of racism is the peak of the western-centricity. What other part of the world can it explain? It works on only in the contemporary relatively homogeneous western world, nothing else.

And if asked why were the Jews exiled from “109 locations” the leftists have no answer. The answer is easy to find if one studies other groups who had similar positions as the Jews. Why were the Christians of the Ottoman empire “exiled”? Why were the Lebanese in west Africa exiled? Why were the Indians in Uganda exiled?

It’s because they all were better at creating wealth in their respective societies. The Muslims, Europeans and Africans didn’t understand the contributions that these respective groups made to their societies. Just as contemporary leftists don’t understand the contributions of the entrepreneur to his society.

Then race instead becomes a vehicle for one group to violate the private property and self-ownership rights of another group. A non-western centric definition of racism would be the violation someone’s property rights or self-ownership due to their race. Examples of that would the crimes of Israel against the Palestinians, the Arab countries’ crimes against Mizrahim, Trans-Atlantic slavery and most past genocides in history.

Escaping western-centric thought means escaping socialism itself. And there lies the real problem. They need “Power + Prejudice” to push through their socialist agenda. Understanding racism through a non-western centric worldview illuminates the evil of socialism. Socialism feeds on the exact same mistrust, prejudice and superstitions that lead to the genocide of the Jews and Ottoman Christians and the expulsions of the Lebanese and Indians.

Western-centricity is a bliss for them, but a curse for the free world.

Falsifying socialization through philosophy

Epistemology concerns itself with questions regarding the nature of knowledge. Is knowledge objective or subjective? How does one articulate knowledge? Is it possible to acquire knowledge? All these of these questions are concerns of epistemology.

Different fields have different epistemic foundations. Islamic theology assumes that everything said in the Qur’an is true, and therefore nothing contradicting it can be true. But the foundation on which Islamic theology articulates knowledge from, is extremely shaky, due to the nature of God being unfalsifiable. We can’t prove its existence. Therefore, trying to understand the world through the Qur’an would be stupid, since the odds of the Qur’an being true is extremely low. And the Qur’an isn’t the only source which rests its’ epistemic foundation on something unfalsifiable, making it only one source out of many.

The epistemic foundation of social psychology rests on the assumption that an individual human’s psychology can be affected by its environment. So far so good, but that assumption itself rests on the existence of the category “humans”. And that is exactly what makes the epistemic foundation of social psychology rubbish.

Evolutionary change happens gradually, not categorically. Therefore, categories does not exist in reality. The difference between a wolf and a dog is purely decided by humans. Even if we had all the data, it wouldn’t be evident which exact progeny of the wolf was the first dog. The criteria we use to differentiate a wolf from a dog is in the end purely subjective. This means that the “dog” does not exist independent of us humans, and therefore, not independent of evolutionary trajectory.

But does anything exist independent of the evolutionary trajectory? Yes. The fields of physics and chemistry can without a doubt be articulated by other organisms, because they are always the same. The same theories can, and most probably would, be constructed independent of evolutionary trajectory.

However, social psychology is weak. The category human is a social construct, not something that we can observe independent of us humans. And it is a good to remember that the category “human” precedes evolutionary theory itself. It wasn’t Darwin, Lamarck or Mendel who laid the ground for the category “Human”. Rather the “human” is a construct of Christian-western civilization.

Now, evolutionary psychology is a whole other story. You don’t need the existence of any category to articulate knowledge about a certain population. It works on dogs, humans and sharks equally. Evolutionary psychology, just like physics and chemistry, can exist independent of evolutionary trajectory. Even an alien can articulate evolutionary psychology and use it to understand its own kind without any trouble, while the same can not in any way be said of social psychology.

The funny thing is that, we can’t falsify God, but we can falsify the existence of the Human. This means that the epistemic foundation of social psychology is weaker than the Qur’an and the Bible. And what is funnier is that, the same side which accuses everyone of Ethnocentricity and whatever, are actually the ones defending the remnants of Christian lies in academia. A mad world indeed

Where did the intellectual working class go?

The current working class European has an IQ below the average. You will not see complicated theories such as marxism and structuralism expressed by the working class. Marx, Althusser, Foucault and Gramsci are all absent in the library of the working class, that is, if they even have a library. But were the working class of the past like this? No.

The Swedish idea historian Ronny Ambjörnsson studied the ideas and ideals of sawmill workers in 1880-1930 in northern Sweden. The majority of the people who worked in the sawmills were also members of local civil society organizations, mainly in the temperance movement. They’d meet up for discussions regarding politics, have book clubs and have educational activities. Ambjörnsson writes that the ideal that was present in the sawmill society was that a worker should be educated, conscious and accultured. There was also a very strong class consciousness between the workers, and they leaned heavily towards social democracy and socialism.

But what happened to the working class? Why are they not so smart as they used to be? Why did the ideals and ideas change? Why do they vote for anti-immigration parties and are so conservative?

As soon as education is available for the general population, poor individuals with a higher IQ advance quickly in their respective societies. The most commonly known example of this is poor Ashkenazim and Asian immigrants who outperformed native US whites on average in education and income, and of course still outperform them today. But these people were not dumb when they were poor. Poverty doesn’t make you dumb.

The socialists of the past still exist, but they are now inside your government. They stepped up from the working class, only to become bureaucrats. They still yapp about stealing your wealth, but from a position of power.

Now, the question that I’m interested in is what this population would do if they were not in government jobs. Do we evade all the Ernestos, Fidels, Maos and Vladimirs by bribing them with government jobs? I think we do. But even then, they don’t sit still…

References:

Ambjörnsson, R. (2017). Den skötsamme arbetaren : idéer och ideal i ett norrländskt sågverkssamhälle 1880-1930. Carlssons.