I’ve recently been having this discussion with Leland Beaumont and others and it’s worth posting here as well.  Ownership of all sorts of things is central to our society, and it doesn’t seem to be working well for many people.  It turns out that there are foundational psychological and sociological justifications for ownership in general.

The book "Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives" by Michael A. Heller and James Salzman explains these puzzles and many more. Surprisingly, there are just six simple stories that everyone uses to claim everything. Owners choose the story that steers us to do what they want. But we can always pick a different story. This is true not just for airplane seats, but also for battles over digital privacy, climate change, and wealth inequality.

The key thesis of this book is that our core ownership stories are wrong. They contend the each of us uses some version of six ownership stories:
1. First come, first served;
2. Possession is nine-tenths of the law;
3. You reap what you sow—we own the fruits of our labors;
4. My home is my castle—I own what is attached to me;
5. Our bodies, our selves, and
6. Family property stays in the family through inheritance

Once we step outside of our engrained social conditioning, we can start to evaluate our notion of ownership with regards to specific circumstances in our contemporary world. One prominent example: the inequities created by land ownership. Regardless of how ownership comes about in the first place (one or more of these six narratives), it is an objective fact that families are often able to build inter-generational wealth through land ownership, and the evidence shows that this has increased in recent decades. Families that are not able to invest in land are left out of this wealth generating process. Is there any way we might re-evaluate the notion of ownership by going back to the six narratives above and framing things slightly differently than what we've been used to in our society?

Brandon Norgaard

Founder, The Enlightened Worldview Project