Every time I read Richard Weaver’s magnum opus, Ideas Have Consequences, there is a sentence, written in one of the last chapters of the book, that really catches my attention: “It is not a little disquieting to realize that in private property there survives the last domain of privacy of any kind…”

The chapter from which I take this quote is a superb exploration, from a conservative perspective, of the institution of private property, explaining that its essence is the one a metaphysical right, because it “does not depend on any test of social usefulness”, and whose value is inherent to human dignity as it allows the free expression of man and woman in what they own and possess. 

This quote was a hard hit for me because, for reasons I do not think are pertinent for this essay, could see the conditions in which some very poor people in my city has to live and work in. 

By observing them, I could see the elements of I came to call ‘the problem of property’, which actually helped me to understand concepts such as alienation, which is very recurring in socialist theory, and rootlessness, which is frequent in nationalist doctrine.

Our modern society, spawned from the ideas of enlightened liberalism, has developed ways to protect, on both political and legal levels, an abstract right to private property, that is formally concentrated in rules and legal norms, but which gets widely diluted in the necessary procedures and formalities to exercise it in an efficient and legitimate way.

From my own experience in the study of libertarian philosophy, I know there are, at least in theory, various ways to acquire and possess private property.

Among these, Murray Rothbard highlighted the principle of personal use as the factual legitimation for the originary appropriation of land or any kind of (private) property in what gets denominated as ‘homestead’. A great number of perspectives within classical liberalism follow this line and promote a defense of hereditary property rights for the descendants of the first owner of said property.

However, we are very far from an ideal society in which these principles are invariably respected by everyone, and moreover, after having our property rights diluted by the State’s excessive intervention and regulation, we are currently seeing how these rights are becoming relative in the different contingencies and circumstances in which they may be materially applied, making the use and transfer of good and property titles almost imperceptible.

This is not new, and in a 2016 article published by the World Economic Forum in its webpage, there was already a proposal to make life propertyless by 2030, in a society in which we people would no longer individually own anything, and apparently, we would be happy with it, as this society would be centrally planned by algorithms, and it would be maintained in its production by robots and artificial intelligences.

Reading this article was eerie and disturbing, to say the least, because this kind of conception of the world is deeply at odds with the one I have been observing in real life, and which is way more attached to the very idea of private property, even as it is becoming more and more detached from its purely formal conception with the passing of generations.

Maybe the Marxist distinction between personal and private property is useful to understand the importance of property as a right, although it isn’t really corresponding as both are one and the same, as the sense of ownership and belonging to a certain object begins with its use by a certain person, who then tries to preserve it, as it associates it to himself, subjectively assigning a value to it for its personal usefulness to him.

According to social contract theories, this would eventually lead to the very origin of government, arising from a need to formally assign titles of ownership to the particular plots of (real) property in order to be recognized as belonging to someone and thus preventing any kind of conflict that could be sparked from the lack of knowledge of the identity of the owner of a certain good, mostly plot lands (which used to be  considered the most productive of them all).

However, according to some nationalist perspectives, land ownership and its agricultural work create a spiritual sense of belonging of the owner to its land, making him rooted in its property, as it connects the person to the land it lives and works in.

The hereditary transfer of ownership of that land property from the original owners to their descendants makes the latter to also be rooted in it, and to emotionally associate the land they are being given to their ancestors, as they were the first that lived and worked in it, and from which it has been transferred to them.

The material results of the work on said land were also assigned and collected by those who formally possessed its property titles, making it so that there was a logical association between real and formal property: the person work works and creates material wealth of a plot of land gets to be its legitimate owner, and the owner of what said plot produces.

The labor theory of value, originally developed by Adam Smith, and then adopted by Marx and his followers, is guided towards this direction, and even if it was refuted by the subjective value theory proved by the Austrian School, it still maintains some coherence on a social level that transcends all things economical, as it relates property with what is materially perceptible, and allowing for dignity to be measured by its material conditions.

The concept of alienation, also taken from Marxist thought, is another product of this reflection, as it considers the situation of the worker who ends up dis-possessed of the wealth he creates because he does not own the property from which he creates such wealth, but only uses the one of a third party, who lets him use it for his own future benefit.

The bigger part of the problems that contemporary society is faced with when it comes to the issues of private property are a by-product of modernity, in which property rights, among other metaphysical concepts, have been relativized in such a way that their formal value does not correlate with their material one, as Frithjof Schuon pointed out in his essay titled The Contradiction of Relativism. 

Under the current financial capitalist system we live in, that could only have developed from and within the utilitarian positivism that rules the laws of almost any nation in the world, real private property has become dis-associated from its formal titleship, and even if this has allowed for an acceleration in the economic development of civilization, it has also produced disorder and unfairness in dignity from one socio-economic group to the other, in a phenomenon that has widened material inequality. 

For instance, Ametican TFP leader John Horvat II, in his book titled Return to Order, points out that this is nothing but the image of the rate and the speed in which the economy is operating, and that the more it growns, the faster social disorder is going to accelerate, transcending the livable standards of a higher material dignity (in comparison with past times).

On the other hand, neoreactionary forerunner Nick Land also observed this trend, but instead of calling for the end of a frenzied economy, has justified it as a form of accelerationism that would make humanity transcend its current state into whatever would go next, most likely a cybernetic and totalitarian dystopia, as Land himself would claim. 

All in all, the problem of property has always been an issue that conservatives and traditionalists worry about, and many of them end up rallying around and quoting the works of G. K. Chesterton and the doctrine of distributism that he developed alongside Hillaire Belloc, whose main tenet is that property should be as widely distributed among the highest number of people as possible.

Chesterton, most particularly, rejected modern capitalism for the contradictions he saw in it, declaring in his essay titled The Superstition of Divorce that “too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists”, an idea that got a more extensive treatment in his book The Outline of Sanity, where he wrote that capitalism is an “economic condition in which there is a class of capitalists, roughly recognizable and relatively small, in whose possession so much of the capital is concentrated as to necessitate a very large majority of the citizens serving those capitalists for a wage.”

And as I do not reject capitalism, since I have seen its virtues and benefited from the way they have allowed for technological development and a betterment of our living standards, I cannot reject the flaws that the British traditionalist has pointed in it, because they remind me that the problem of property still is an issue to overcome.

I managed to empirically confirm these realities as I had to observe them first-hand through the hard proceedings of having to legally defend the accumulation of wealth by a small minority of people while facing day to day the sad and difficult situations of all the beggars, immigrants, and refugees with whom I shared the public transportation system in my daily trips from home to school and then office and back home again.

I also could see how the absence of property creates a deep feeling of rootlessness in those who own nothing, since these people were completely absent from their communities and had no physical nor symbolic respect for all common spaces they shared with others, as they did not take care of them and even got to destroy it from time to time, which, of course, meant they were rejected by the members of their communities, breaking all social links with them. 

This ultimately means a huge social risk, for there is a chance of society becoming fully composed of the proletariat, to the point the working class fades away, as it no longer has the potential to save money and then invest it.

This would also society would divide itself completely between a minority economic elite, composed of millionaires that possess all the financial capital and all of the available real estate, and a large majority of dispossessed leaseholders, that can barely ask for financial credits to feed themselves and rent a room to live in, but cannot develop their creative and innovative potential for their own benefit or to sell to others.

We already have seen the prospects of this dark future in the way the fortunes of some tech billionaires grew during the COVID-19 pandemic, and as one of them, Bill Gates, became one of the largest landowners in the continental United States, whereas most of the global population had to stay confined and locked down during the government-mandated quarantines that where imposed to them by their local political administrations, who, all claimed, were acting in a state of exception.

Private property, as the metaphysical right described by Richard Weaver, cannot and should not be reduced to mere abstract formalisms or to the possession of financial assets that have no real connection to the person that owns them or to the goods the refer to.

Private property, instead, should be understood as what common law calls ‘real estate’, and what the classical legal tradition calls ‘freehold’, which not only means land property, but also materially real property, whose owners are free to keep and to hold, and free to transfer to others.

To freely keep private property for years and for generations creates a much needed symbolic and spiritual hold over it, linking the person with their land and what it produces, and with it, creating a feeling of ownership and belonging to and with it, to what it morally means, as the person who owns it gets to understand in time that he benefits and survives from it.

Under these characteristics, the proprietor condition also creates a sense of equality to emerge among a group of them, as they begin to partner up para mutually protect and magnify their common rights.

As the community is born in that way, also rises a promise of common good that manifests in common goods, common grounds and common properties that need to be protected, kept and respected by all who have an interest and a sentimental hold to them, ending up in the establishment of a commonwealth which is the purely English name for what in Latin is called res publica, which means the common issues of the polity.

Real property creates spiritual roots in people, and from those roots is born a community guided towards the common good.

Moreover, private property also solves the Marxist problem of alienation in which a number of workers find themselves to be, since receiving the results of what one possesses, in addition to the work he puts to it, links the person with the goods, such as his tools, he owns, as he begins to appreciate and tries to preserve as his own personal fortune.

In contemporary society, alienation is not only a problem exclusive of the workers but also of financial capitalists, as once they get to come up with an investment idea, they tend to disconnect from the material reality in which said idea is materially developed, and simply guide it to increase they own abstract fortune through market manipulation, insider trading and other legal and not-so-legal means that disrupt these very markets that help them promote and sell their original idea. 

In all of this, the central problem of property is that is not as widely spread among people as it should be, but that it is concentrated in some minority social groups that have learnt to use political and economic power to consolidate their wealth, isolating it from the rest of society, and thus corrupting the system to prevent others from benefiting of the dignity than means to own property.

This situation sets a very complex moral dilemma moral, in which dignity has become hoarded by the very caste that has monopolized wealth and exercises power without justice and puts them against the rest of the people in society, whose right to propriety (and thus to dignity) has been blocked by the obscure excessive and oppressive regulation and procedures set by the first group.

All of the solutions I have thought to solve this problem end up being liberal solutions, but quite unorthodox, as they do not refer to the ideological liberalism that promote free markets as the private rule of corporations in their own self-interest.  

Instead, I think of solutions that promote the Christian virtue of liberality, which means generosity, and that, in that very fashion, would allow for a generous distribution of property for all, allowing everyone to freely participate in market dynamics under the same conditions of dignity, as all would share the same status as freeholders.

To extend property rights as social rights would also solve the rootlessness problem, for it would connect again the person with their property and they belongings, and it would solve the problem of alienation as well, as it would connect the proprietor with the society in which he develops his work and with the material results of said work.

This is the perspective defended by Plinio Correa de Oliveira in his Socialism or Rural Property and his Agrarian Reform: An Issue of Social Awareness essays, that promoted this idea of “property for all”, although considering that it would be irresponsible to simply grant land property to all dispossessed people, who could then ignorantly dispose of them and sell them for inferior market prices to the very corporations that later would employ them, 

Instead, his idea is the create a hold on the property itself, and thast way, to root the people to the land in which they work, so that they do not become alienated from the fruits of their work and connecting them with their land and their community of fellow landowners. 

On an urban level, this could be taken as the guidelines for a public policy model designed to break real estate and banking monopolies (such as Blackrock) through a free market strategy, reducing housing costs for the working class to own their homes and not only rent them, on the condition they remain on and maintain them, securing the spiritual goal of reconnecting them to their work and their community of peers through their own property.

The point of spreading the institution of private property is to make it easier to be recognized by all, and thus creating the political foundations of proprietor communities guided towards the common good.

After all, there is no dignity without property.