The "Ownership Society"

I've been mulling over your catch-phrase of the year, Bush--that "ownership society" you keep talking about--and why I find it so deeply repugnant. The reason my objections run so deep, I've concluded, is that they are philosophical, even spiritual, before being moral, social, or political, though it's hard to make a clear distinction at so profound a level of consciousness.

First, if you stop to think about it, death itself makes nonsense of the notion of ownership. Whatever I believe I "own" is simply no longer mine when I leave this world. As the cliché has it, "you can't take it with you when you go." And leave this world I must, willy nilly, and likely not at a moment of my choosing. Whatever I thought I owned will be left behind for others to distribute, disperse, dispose of, or destroy...

What of the things I think I own in the course of my lifetime? My money can be taken from me at a moment's notice, by theft, by accident, by reversal of fortune, by bankruptcy, by lawsuit. My house, with all its furnishings, its books, its electronic gadgets? They can all be taken from me in the flash of a fire or the cataclysm of an earthquake. Even my "identity", these days, can be stolen at the drop of a hat. So what is "mine"? My property? My little patch of land? My body? Even that most personal and basic of "possessions" is subject to the aging process, disease, death, decay.

Once, then, I admit to myself that I own nothing, I begin to question the whole idea of ownership. An "ownership society", as I see it, would be one where we all get attached to the illusion that we actually do own something, and will do whatever it takes to hold on to it, and get more. When I get more of some material "thing", it means, necessarily, that some one else will have less. Unlike such immaterial qualities as love, goodwill, compassion, material things are a finite resource: whatever I have--money, house, property, belongings--is something someone else can't have, by definition. Ownership, then, will lead inevitably lead to possessiveness, greed, and strife.

What's the alternative? I remember fondly the thinking of my late father-in-law, Michael, who was an art collector. On a modest scale. He was not one of those high-end acquisition demons who amass a fortune's worth of blue chip masterpieces. He simply loved the stuff. Art filled his home. But like many collectors I've had the good fortune to meet in my years as a professional art writer, he considered himself not the owner, but rather the temporary custodian of the pictures he collected. He felt privileged to have managed to gather them around him for a while, but remained always aware that they "belonged" to a much wider public than himself, and would eventually return to it.

This seems to me an eminently healthy attitude toward what we think is ours: that we are in some way blessed to have custodianship, for the time being, but that it will all flow back away from us in the same great flux of life that brought it to us. To the "ownership society", then, I'd prefer the notion of a "sharership society", in which we would all count our blessings, and value those things we're given to enjoy, in the full realization that they are not truly "ours", that we are fully prepared to let them go.

This attitude, I believe, if deeply shared and actually practiced in our daily lives, could make us all more understanding of each other, more generous. More human. When it comes to social and political discourse, there are surely those who will laugh at my simple-mindedness, and label me a socialist or, worse, a communist. I'm not that. I don't believe in trying to enforce some ideal of equality on the huge diversity of humankind that shares the surface of this planet Earth. But, by the same token, it seems to me equally, perhaps even more wrong-headed and absurd to propose "ownership" as the moral and political principle by which we all must live.

Thanks, once again, for listening, Bush. I hope this helps.