I own me

If there was a single document that was the source of all our cultural assumptions, these three words (or something a little more eloquent, perhaps beginning, “We hold these truths…”), would be in the opening paragraph. Each word speaks volumes.

I

The locus of our culture is the individual. We rarely think of ourselves as intrinsically part of indissoluble collectives. Want to change country? All you have to do is find another willing to accept you as citizen. Want to change company? Hand in a letter of resignation. Want to change family? There are ways of making that happen. We are a culture used to thinking about ourselves primarily in the first person singular.

Own

We are a society of owners. We care very much for our things. We define ourselves by our stuff. Most of our work and much of our waking lives are spent in the acquisition and enjoyment of things that we own.

Me

Here the simple sentence becomes very meaningful. Our society ripples out from the core assertion that individuals have primary possession of their time, labour, intelligence and creativity. Because I am not a slave to a master, have no feudal duties to a lord, and no essential loyalty to a sovereign, I am the owner of my body, my time and the products of my mind and labour.

Much of our culture from sexual ethics to education policy is built on this assumption. Education becomes about the maximization of individual potential. Similarly, the only sexual taboos that can remain are those against non-consensual behaviour. Marriages can be reneged if the partners choose to part.

Extrapolated out, this assumption has become the framework of Capitalism. Billions of I own me’s trading the fruits of their work with each other in an attempt to increase the scope of their ownership.

What if the core assumption was wrong? What if fundamentally, I am much more complex than a package of self-ownership? What if you, by virtue of being human also, had important claims on me that I own me cannot acknowledge? And, with what words should we talk about we?

This entry was posted on 28/05/2010 at 11:38 am and is filed under Insight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

| Print