The concept of private ownership is not native to the evolved human genome. Our hominid predecessors were adapted to using what nature provided, without thought of “possessing” anything, or storing anything. If it was there, you used it. If it wasn’t, you did without until you traveled to where more was.
So in a world where ownership is not a concept, theft isn’t either.

Exactly as Marionville points out, when we stopped traveling to where the goods were and started training the goods to stay where we were, inside fences and gardens, then we had investments of time and effort that needed to be protected. If you plant a seed, you have to stick around (not travel) to reap the rewards of your labor, indeed, to survive. And you have to defend the space in which that seed is growing. Private ownership was born.

Our brains are still, for the most part, wired according to what worked for two million years or so of nomadic gathering in a world where ownership wasn’t a concept. In the blink of an evolutionary eye we have conjured up the notion of “rightful ownership” and somehow expect our Pleistocene brains to instantly recognize and respect that novel concept.

It is only due to our remarkable cognitive malleability that we are able to force ourselves (most of us) to live and behave within these brand new (a mere ten thousand years old) concepts. It amazes me that it works as well as it does most of the time. But the idea of crime is a paper thin veneer over our deep animal instincts.

So tenuous was the new system of modified behavior that it needed to be scaffolded by regular re-tinting of the rose colored glasses lest the plan be misremembered. Earlier animistic intuitions were quickly reworked into instructive mythologies, which had no need and no ability to conform to the as yet undiscovered laws of physics and rigid realism. Rather, the mythologies were image-based, that is to say imaginary and dramatic, for mnemonic purposes.

That served the need at hand for a handful of millennia and provided a stable base of operations for the development of purely rational systems of investigation, which then clashed with the image-based systems. But the image-based systems spoke, and still speak to the deep animal brain we all still carry, and the more precise but less memorable rational system speaks only to the incipient veneer.

Should we have compassion, and maybe more tolerance for the greater part of our evolved thinking machinery?

Can we do that without backsliding into neolithic times?

Can we invent a mnemonic device that doesn’t offend either the old mnemonic system or the new rigid-reality-purists?

Will Sally manage to catch Howard’s eye with her new brightly colored sash?

Tune in next week for…

As the Worm Turns

(on most local stations)

Many years ago I worked for a billionaire and I once heard him say that the only crime was getting caught. He would spend 90 days a year abroad to avoid paying income tax.

“A government cannot legalize an act, it can either make it illegal or leave it alone. To speak of legalizing an act implies a relationship between a superior and an inferior, between a parent and a child. The parentification of authority and the infantilization of everybody else.” Thomas Szasz

It seems that those who hold high office can ignore the law without serious consequences which is usually not the case for the proverbial John Doe. It appears to have become increasingly acceptable for some people to ignore the law; I wonder what kind of message their conduct sends out to the general public or is it simply a case of Quod licet Jovi non licet bovi. Is there is any further need to wonder why there is no accountability in politics.

In the days of our early ancestors…the days of the hunter-gatherers if you like to term it that way, man very soon found that in order to survive he needed to band together with other members of the tribe in a co-operative way in order to hunt and to share out food to survive. It was the beginnings of society, albeit a long way from society as we know it today. These groups eventually formed into villages and towns, being on the inside of the group and not on the outside was important as survival depended on it, so rules were very soon established and stealing (taking) from each other was usually punished harshly with corporal punishment, death, or banishment…which meant much the same thing when wild animals roamed beyond the pale!

Perhaps we’ve become morally and ethically incontinent regarding theft over time, because we’ve become less fearful of the punishment…which no longer deters. This of course applies to more than theft ..but to crime and unethical behaviour in general, and especially so in respect of politics and business practices.

Until 45 is indicted for something I'd have to say there is no law in SoA. Not for the elected class, anyway.

Seems that way to me.

Good question.

Nother good question.

Part ‘n parcel of H.sapiens.