The Daily Bendiken

To understand the causes and consequences of Lockean property customs, it will help us to look at them from yet another angle; that of animal ethology, specifically the ethology of territory.

Property is an abstraction of animal territoriality, which evolved as a way of reducing intraspecies violence. By marking his bounds, and respecting the bounds of others, a wolf diminishes his chances of being in a fight that could weaken or kill him and make him less reproductively successful. Similarly, the function of property in human societies is to prevent inter-human conflict by setting bounds that clearly separate peaceful behavior from aggression.

It is fashionable in some circles to describe human property as an arbitrary social convention, but this is dead wrong. Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers came near its owner’s property has experienced the essential continuity between animal territoriality and human property. Our domesticated cousins of the wolf know, instinctively, that property is no mere social convention or game, but a critically important evolved mechanism for the avoidance of violence. (This makes them smarter than a good many human political theorists.)

One major strength of a relatively open democracy is that most potential revolutionaries find it easier to make progress toward their objectives by working via the system rather by attacking it. This strength is easily undermined if established parties act together to “raise the bar”, making it more difficult for small dissatisfied groups to see some progress made toward their goals.

(A similar principle can be found in economics. Open markets have the strongest competition, and generally the best and cheapest products. Because of this, it’s very much in the best interests of established companies to make market entry more difficult — for example, by convincing governments to require elaborate RFI testing on computers, or by creating “consensus” standards which are so complex that they cannot be implemented effectively from scratch without large resources. The markets with the strongest entry barriers are the ones that come under the strongest attack from revolutionaries, e.g. the Internet and the Justice Dept. vs. the Bell System.)

An open process with low entry barriers encourages participation rather than secession, because one can get results without the high overheads of secession. The results may not be as impressive as what could be achieved by seceding, but they come at a lower price, and most people will consider that an acceptable tradeoff. (When the Spanish government revoked Franco’s anti-Basque laws and offered the Basque provinces their own schools and limited local autonomy, most of the Basque Separatist movement evaporated almost overnight. Only the hard-core Marxists insisted that it wasn’t good enough.)