Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

UK Government wants your crypto keys... by law.

<< < (6/6)

CWuestefeld:
Sadly, cultures that have adopted a farming or animal rearing ... way of life tend to view the land that sustains them as belonging to them ... and thus have a clear concept of "ownership" of the land. Rather than being in tune with, or part of, nature, they tend to see themselves as masters of nature .... Unfortunately, it's a short intellectual leap from "mastering" nature to "mastering" other people... -Darwin (October 04, 2007, 05:13 PM)
--- End quote ---
That's certainly the prevailing PC view, but it's dead wrong. Viewing the land as held in common leads directly to the "tragedy of the commons".

On the other hand, when any resource is viewed as property, the owner of that property will safeguard it. This is known as the Coase Theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem. For example, corporations dumping pollution into a river would never be able to get away with their behavior if someone owned the river; the owner would sue the dumper so fast your head would spin. But since there's no river owner, everyone uses up their little bit of it.

Ownership, even if for selfish reasons, does result in positive outcomes. I noticed this bit in the news the other day, addressing a hunting group that safeguards wetlands: http://www.businesstn.com/pub/4_10/features/8319-1.html?utmsource=ducks. Sure, they do it because they love to hunt ducks rather than through altruism, but what's the difference why?

Holding the land (and other resources) in common is the surest way to flush it all down the toilet.

Darwin:
Er... how do you make the leap from the members of a small food foraging group viewing themselves as part of nature to those same individuals viewing the land that they live and hunt on as being held in common? I'm just curious, because food foragers have NO concept of ownership, so it's not accurate to state that they view land as being held in common because it's not "held" in our sense of the word.

At any rate, I was responding to Carol'snote about the Native Americans (and Australian aborignes) and their failure to understand the European concept of "ownership" of the land. Nothing more, nothing less (and "PC" certainly doesn't enter into it). Cultural behaviour and custom is adaptive in its original context. What worked for food foragers, living in tiny nomadic groups largely in isolation from other such groups in vast, incredibly low population density landscapes, clearly won't work in densely populated industrialized regions of the world and while it would be nice to share their view of the landscape and their relationship to it, it's not practical in our "neck of the woods".

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page