Is Private Property Immoral? #067

Fromm and the Ethics of Ownership

Hey, welcome back to Every Dawn, I'm Andy, a philosophy lecturer. In the past few episodes, we've been talking about Erich Fromm, the German-Swiss-American psychoanalyst and writer, and today we will delve a little deeper into his theories about how we can become happier by reducing our reliance on having things.

Of course, when we talk about "having," one important consideration is money. We all want to have money, and we want to exchange this money for things that we can buy. However, it's important to notice that there has always been this other current of people in human history who try to do exactly the opposite—who try to not have, who try to just be in the present without accumulating things. This starts, you know, in ancient Greece with the philosopher Diogenes, who lived in a barrel and did not need anything else but his barrel. At this point, where he was living in the barrel, perhaps you would think this is a poor man, this man doesn't have a good life, but look today, we're looking back, and he is one of the great philosophers of ancient times because he was living in this barrel. Whatever hardships this barrel involved are now forgotten, but this man has become an inspiration for us to see that we can live perhaps in a slightly different way.

So, nobody says that we need to live in a barrel, but perhaps we are sometimes exaggerating what physical needs we have or what material needs we had. And we think of material stuff as something that will give us status or will make us more desirable. And in this way, one of the most tragic examples of this I ever heard was a boy who sold a kidney in order to get one of the first iPads. This is so crazy because the iPad that he bought with his kidney, after 2-3 years, it was old, it was something that wasn't supported anymore. He had to exchange it for a newer one, but his kidney was gone forever. So, this is such a crazy thing to do, but of course, it's something extreme. Most of us would not do this, but perhaps we are doing similar things that we just don't realize. We are doing things that are equally damaging to ourselves and to our happiness just because we want this newer thing.

People like Diogenes remind us that perhaps we don't need as much, or quite as much as we think. Let me read you a little bit of what Fromm says about private property. This kind of property, he writes, may be called private property from Latin prare, to deprive of, because the person or persons who own it are its sole masters, with full power to deprive others of its use or enjoyment. While private ownership is supposed to be natural and universal, it is in fact an exception rather than the rule if we consider the whole of human history, including prehistory and particularly the cultures outside Europe in which economy was not life's main concern.

Aside from private property, there are many other kinds of property, he says. For example, self-created property which is exclusively the result of one's own work; restricted property which is restricted by the obligation to help one's fellow beings; functional or personal property which consists either of tools for work or objects of enjoyment; common property which a group shares in the spirit of a common bond, such as the Israeli kibbutzim.

What is interesting about this is that he combines the idea of private property with the root of the word deprive—privation, to deprive others from having the thing. And very often this is at the root of why we want private property. We want a bigger house because we want to deprive others from having one. We don't say it like this; we say we want a bigger house than our neighbor, but this of course is included. If I have a bigger house than my neighbor, then I'm depriving him from having a house that is equally big as mine.

Instead, Fromm points out we can share things. We can have more of a sharing economy in which everybody can make use of something without depriving others of it. A public library is a good example, where I can have access to all these books without needing to own them. Whenever I want, I can go to the public library, I can get the book, I can read it, I can have fun with it, then I can give it back, and somebody else can enjoy it.

And I don't need to have thousands of books in my possession. I can just share them with others. Or the internet, you know, information gets shared. Classic books are available for free, legally, of course, because they are old enough, or the ancient philosophers. There's no need to own these things; we can just share them with others. But perhaps this can also apply to cars. This can apply to shared cars. Some people are doing this within a neighborhood; they're sharing a car because we don't need our car every day. Perhaps we need it only a few times to go shopping, and then it's okay to share a car.

And all this sharing, of course, has environmental benefits. It has also benefits for myself because now I don't have all these burdens that come with private property. I don't have to be afraid that my things will get stolen, they will get destroyed, I will lose them. If I have my car shared with others, if I have my books from the library, then I'm not as much stressed by these things. I have more space at home, I don't need to have a parking space, I have more space at home because I don't have all the books, and so on. I have lots of benefits from this for my own life. So, it is not a sacrifice, as we often see it; it is a way to a more free life, to a more liberated life.

And Fromm writes about the role of the ego. Our ego is the most important object of our property feeling, for it comprises many things: our body, our name, our social status, our possessions including our knowledge, the image we have of ourselves, and the image we want others to have of us. Our ego is a mixture of real qualities such as knowledge or skills, and of certain fictitious qualities that we build around a core of reality. But the essential point is not so much what the ego's content is, but that the ego is felt as a thing we each possess, and that this thing is a basis of our sense of identity.

So, we live our lives by seeing ourselves often as just the focal point of our possessions. Our ego is the sum of the things we possess, and if we lose these things, we lose our ego. So, there have always been other ways of living. We talked of Diogenes, but less extreme ways, monks for example, live in a community where they share things. But also, if you look on the internet, there's this whole movement of leaving society on YouTube, for example, becoming a farmer, having a smallholding, which is another expression of this, of the wish to go off this capitalist consumerist way of living and to live in a way that is more sustainable, that is more free of material goods.

Or the small home movement, the tiny home movement as it's called, where people will move into a very small home somewhere and save themselves the rent, save themselves the cleaning, and the maintenance of a big house, and actually live a much happier life in this way. So perhaps have a look at these alternative ways of living if you have not yet done this. Just go to YouTube, say tiny home, and have a look. I find these things endlessly inspiring.

Always, we ourselves live in a tiny home by American standards, not out of choice necessarily but because in Hong Kong every home is a tiny home because you don't have more money for a bigger home. And so, I can well relate to how living in a small space feels with a family of four, but it is okay. You just put your effort into something else. I put my effort into these videos instead of putting it into acquiring a bigger house, which I don't really care about.

So yeah, let's have a look at these movements. Let's have a look whether in our own lives we can perhaps reduce our reliance on these things, on material things, and find some happiness and some relief in not having to chase all these material things and instead being able to concentrate on perhaps things that matter more to what we really are and who we really are.

If you want to know more about Fromm, there are more videos, and let us meet again tomorrow for another video. Thank you, and see you. Bye-bye.