Left or Right?
The problem of this question is that both of these ideologies start out from the idea that material ownership is a real concept, the differences in ideology are simply differences of who they want to control the dissemination of material property.
Material Possession
We think of material possession as a reality, we being the inheritors of the main cultures of our modern world, but not all cultures had the same notions of possession. A good example is when European explorers “bought” land for trinkets. Even today this is characterized in such a manner that leads us to think of Native Americans as either completely naive or stupid. What generally is not portrayed is that the likely reason they took these trinkets is because they thought they were fleecing the Europeans. To them no one owned land, they might fight each other but it wasn’t about ownership of land it was about survival. That is not to say they didn’t have ideas about possession, just that some of the things we consider able to be possessed – they didn’t.
The idea of material possession rests on the idea of legal ownership, what is meant by this is: a family owns their home because they legally transferred it from a business, that business owned it through owning the land and the materials used to build the house, they owned these because they legally transferred ownership from others, this is repeated indefinitely but not infinitely. Eventually at the end of this chain you come to a time when no one owned the land or the materials, at that point how did these get transferred legally? Well in truth they don’t, because no one owns them, the law invariably gives the first person, or government, who takes them the initial right of ownership.
A byproduct of the idea of material possession is the idea of material theft. To take something by theft is to take possession of something that by law is not yours. This idea is even taken past one iteration of property transfer. If you bought an item that turns out to be stolen, even if you were not aware of the theft, that item is not yours because it could not be legally transferred to you. This is why stolen property if recovered is given to the original owners even if those who owned it previously thought they had legitimately purchased it.
Both of these ideas rest on the belief that material ownership is a real state of being, that independent of belief or statement there is a true owner of an object.
For this to be true, material ownership would have to pass two tests.
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- Ownership must always apply to an object. If the state of ownership did not always apply to the object then the only reason a person has possession is that at some point someone claimed ownership.No force can remove the state of ownership, only transfer it. If ownership is a state of reality then as long as reality exists ownership must exists, much like conservation of energy.
- All material ownership is derived at the beginning from a government or person taking possession and stating that they then owned said possession.
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Because there is no chain of transfer from the beginning of that material items existence, the first test fails
If material ownership were a state of reality then it would be impossible for said state to change short of destruction of said object. It is possible for an item to become lost and then through the death of the original owner, un-owned, the second test fails.
Intellectual Property
This is not to say that no form of possession can exist; beyond material property rights there is the realm of intellectual property rights. The amazing thing about intellectual property rights is they pass both tests that material property rights fail.
From the beginning of an intellectual properties existence, is it owned? As the direct product of an intellectual exercise, this property and the creation process are intrinsically linked, put simply, yes.
Can any force remove intellectual possession? Because intellectual possession is an expression of individuality and this expression creates the intellectual property then by its very existence the property is linked to the entity that created it. As long as the intellectual property exists it will be owned, again: yes.
One thing to note about intellectual property is it is not solely in the realm of art or science. Any creative process, even as simple as constructing a brick wall is a creation process and the process itself is intellectual property.
Left…Right…Reality…Disconnect
Most of those left of center don’t want the majority of material possession to be controlled by an elite few.
Most of those right of center don’t want what they have worked hard to create, intellectual property, to be redistributed in any fashion.
To this I say what’s the problem? While you may not be saying the same thing, nothing about the basic ideas are contradictory. The left dislikes material possession and the right wants intellectual property rights.
To those on the right I say, “All intellectual property should be sacrosanct and any material used for said property should be sacrosanct until it stops being used or maintained.”
To those on the left I say, “All people should have the right to use any part of the world that isn’t already being used as part of intellectual property.”
What does this mean?
Every person has rights to what they have made or are intellectually invested in conserving. You build a house; the creation gives you intellectual property. You maintain a house; the maintenance gives you intellectual property. You financed a house being built or being maintained; managing the process gives some intellectual property but not to the exclusion of full ownership.
No person would have a right to property that they have not through physical or intellectual effort invested in. All those empty plots of land everywhere that are only owned because someone said so in the past would be able to be actually used by anyone willing to put in the work.
What does this have to do with Men’s Rights
I don’t necessarily agree that politics have no place in the MRM but I think everyone needs to acknowledge that every branch of politics has been corrupted by Feminism. So any current political ideology that any MRA professes to me is suspect.
Libertarian, Marxist, or other, doesn’t matter to me. No matter what, in comparing these ideologies we’re talking not about better ideologies, or good vs. bad ideologies, but about the lesser of multiple evils. No political ideology that I know of has not been co-opted or corrupted by Feminism.
MRA’s will no doubt need to eventually become political, the question is not if we will need to get involved in politics, but are we going to get involved in the corrupt game of politics and then compound that sin by using the same rotting and infested equipment the other side is using. Can we as a movement have the strength to create a new ideology, one that is fresh and free from what is already corrupted?
