Many years after apartheid supposedly ended in South Africa the white colonialists, 7% of the population, still ‘own’ 70% of the agricultural land.

I feel sure you can see how that capitalist and post-imperialist state of affairs might piss off 93% of The People.

To address their concerns, the democratic government there has passed a law stating that it is now empowered to seize land and redistribute it in some classically leftist fashion. Also, that they don’t even have to Compensate the landowning Afrikaners for it in any way.

I feel sure you as a fellow Owner find that wrong and egregious. (Cuz i-as-owner do too?)

Now comes the new US President suspending the flow of dollars into the country because of this radical new law.

I feel reasonably certain that will outrage you too, because, well, Truuump.

“I’m going to explain to you the true nature of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, and you will see that it is indistinguishable from the Biden administration, the first Trump administration, eight years of Obama, eight years of Bush … there is one single foreign policy because there is one single circle of special interests …”
—Berletic

A single circle, comprising, oh, about … seven percent, let’s say.

At each step, decade upon decade your whole life through, you are invited to indulge yourself in outrage or some adjacent kind of distraction, blue or red or right or left or apolitical and benign, whatever, and to vent this cope conveniently onto some social media scam, or your perfect and pristine blog, where it will collect some number of laughs and woohoos from your family, friends, and … followers.

Ultimately the point is to distract us.

From the perpetual fact that they own it all.

And the deeper truth that Ownership itself is the conceptual control mechanism they invented to make sure it stays that way forever, while we war with each other over the scraps of Property that happen to fall from their table.

The only way around the Machine is radical and arduous. Narrow, to use Christ’s word.

The Experiment of Complete Non-Ownership

Robin walked from Canada to LA and is there now, living in and around Griffith Park and planning to do so, without possessions, until April at least.

When I figured that out, my first impulse was to go there, and listen, and learn.

But then I realized that doing so would only be an attempt to own a new experience.

A self-devouring paradox going nowhere but fast, in the American tradition.

Instead I started to look around me, and to think about how the things I think I own …

Own me. Enslave me.

Yeah. I’ve joked about it often, how I’m trapped in this place by my three-hundred dollar mortgage … can’t afford to live anywhere else, right?

It seems right, but it is not.

I too could start another walk and just not stop walking this time.

Like my childhood hero Kwai Chang Caine. Like my new guru Robin.

You could too.

You won’t. I probably won’t either, in the real world, all the way, and yet …

Admitting the truth and doing it as a thought experiment has already been very empowering, in deep ways that are hard to describe.

It feels like I might start trying anyway.

But only as long as I can do it without having to own some image of myself as an an artist, heretic, belletrist, monk, or sage.

Because I am very much of a mind now to give shit away, and that kind of shit first.

To rewild in some hard non-fluffy sense.

To live anarchically without the need to own the label of anarchist.

To live like a saint without being one.