I don't normally post entire articles written by someone else, just enough teasers to get you to go read the whole thing. In this case I'm making an exception. This essay probably has the most articulate expression of my political philosophy that someone beside me could have written. Indeed, reading Butler Shaffer's essays have helped clarify my
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Thank you for sharing this. I'm marking this down for future reference if I have to take a Government class again down the road.
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If there were such a thing as congregational Thelema...
But now I'm being too abstract.
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"Property" is not simply some social invention, like Emily Post’s guide to etiquette, but a way of describing conditions that are essential to all living things. Every living thing must occupy space and consume energy from outside itself if it is to survive, and it must do so to the exclusion of all other living things on the planet. I didn’t dream this up. My thinking was not consulted before the life system developed. The world was operating on the property principle when I arrived and, like the rest of us, I had to work out my answers to that most fundamental, pragmatic of all social questions: who gets to make decisions about what? The essence of "ownership" is to be found in control: who gets to be the ultimate decision maker about people and "things" in the world?
~Do You Own Yourself? 2002, Butler Shaffer ( ... )
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I feel responsibility for and toward myself, my family, my friends and others I've entered an agreement or come to an understanding with, such as work and such. I don't know if your reaching for it or not, but I don't really feel much responsibility toward society or other larger abstract constructs. My relationships are with people, not classifications or categories.
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