Boundaries of Order by Butler Shaffer

Author:Butler Shaffer [Shaffer, Butler]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Ludwig von Mises Institute

Chapter Seven

Private Property and Social Order

Every thing that tends to insulate the individual- to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state; — tends to true union as well as greatness.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson1

Because life is dependent upon the use and consumption of property, it is the nature of any property system—whether private or collective in form—to generate divisions between those who will, and those who will not, be entitled to the enjoyment of various resources. It is the entropic nature of life itself, not some belief system, that dictates such harsh realities. The competition that invariably exists among all living things for negentropic resources injects an element of conflict into the life process that cannot be wholly excised. There will also be disappointments or even hard feelings over the outcomes of such contests. Nothing in the holographic model of social systems suggests that billions of people will suddenly develop a collective mindset, and agree to allocate resources in a manner that reflects a cheerful unanimity. Such illusions of group-think are what have turned the dreams of utopian thinkers into the nightmares under which others have suffered and died. Society will become more peaceful and cooperative only as individuals transform the nature of their conduct with others. Such changes will arise marginally, at the boundaries where people transact their relationships and exchanges with one another. Like the young boy at the party chaperoned by my daughter, such individual transformations in consciousness are more likely to arise in an environment in which one’s claims to ownership are respected by others. As a means of harmonizing our needs for both self-centered activity and social cooperation, a system of private ownership allows us to experience the deeper meaning of being human.

Again, what is being proposed here is not a utopian ideology, in which humanity will miraculously march off together, in lockstep cadence, to yet another visionary millennium. Utopian thinking is premised on the delusion of universally shared preferences, as well as the idea of a fixed end state. But a creative and vibrant society is a continuously changing one, comprised of people with a multitude of varied tastes, preferences, ambitions, and skills. And as history has demonstrated, creative change is not necessarily favorable to all mankind. There were many contemporaries for whom the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution were not beneficial. The Luddite riots, for instance, were greatly influenced by the reaction of many artisans to the threats that industrialization posed to their established economic interests.

Regardless of the form of the social or political system under which we live, it is unavoidable that each of us will be entitled to use and consume particular resources to the exclusion of everyone else. This is but a fact of existence. Again, we witness the interrelatedness of apparent opposites: both individual liberty and social order depend upon a system grounded in the division that inheres in the nature of property.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.