What do we really mean when we say ownership?
Ownership feels natural to us today. Self‑evident. Almost sacred.
But it isn’t.
Ownership is an artificial mental structure, created by humans — not a law of nature, not a universal truth, and not something the Earth recognizes.
At its core, ownership is simply an agreement inside a system:
We collectively pretend that something which existed before us, and will exist after us, can belong to someone in between.
That idea did not always exist.
From shared world to stolen world
For most of human existence, the implicit rule was simple:
No one owns anything — we belong to the land we live on.
Then something radical happened.
Power concentrated.
Kings emerged.
Empires formed.
And suddenly:
The king owned everything.
Land, forests, rivers, animals — even people.
Once that theft was established, something psychologically profound followed:
Being granted ownership of a small piece of what had been taken from everyone suddenly felt enormously valuable.
Worth defending.
Worth killing for.
Worth passing down.
Not because ownership is inherently meaningful — but because it was carved out of a prior injustice.
The emotional charge around property today is not proof of its necessity.
It is a trauma response to dispossession.
Indigenous wisdom: a memory we tried to erase
Indigenous and First Nations peoples never forgot what the rest of the world tried to overwrite.
Across continents and cultures — Native American nations, Aboriginal Australians, the Sámi, the Māori, and many others — the same understanding appears:
- You cannot own the Earth
- You belong to the Earth
- Land is not a possession, but a relationship
- What you receive must be passed on, not accumulated
To them, the planet was not property.
It was an ancestor.
A living system.
A trust held temporarily.
You didn’t inherit land.
You inherited responsibility.
These cultures did not collapse because they lacked ownership.
They were destroyed by cultures that believed in it.
Inheritance without ownership
Modern society treats inheritance as the sacred continuation of ownership:
What I own becomes yours.
But that logic only holds if ownership itself is valid.
What if inheritance were understood differently?
What if the only things passed on were:
- Access
- Stewardship
- Knowledge
- Caretaking responsibility
Not deeds.
Not exclusion rights.
Not artificial scarcity.
What if we declared the whole planet as the shared inheritance of all of humanity?
Then inheritance stops being a weapon of inequality — and becomes what it once was:
A promise to future generations.
Respect replaces possession
Removing ownership does not mean chaos, neglect, or disregard.
On the contrary — it introduces something deeper: respect for usership.
When a person is clearly using something — a piece of land, a home, a tool, an instrument — that relationship is respected.
Not because they own it, but because they are responsible for it.
Usership creates a natural ethic:
- You care for what you use
- You maintain what you depend on
- You return what you no longer need
In this sense, usership and stewardship become the new form of ownership — not a right to exclude others forever, but a living agreement based on care, presence, and responsibility.
What replaces ownership is not entitlement. It is trust.
When ownership dissolves, conflict dissolves
Most human conflict is not about survival.
It is about control over access.
Ownership creates:
- Borders
- Hoarding
- Rent‑seeking
- Artificial scarcity
- Power hierarchies
Remove ownership, and something remarkable happens:
- Conflict evaporates
There is nothing left to defend as “mine.” - Abundance becomes visible
Resources flow based on need and stewardship, not profit and power. - Humanity matures
We stop acting like rival heirs fighting over a stolen will — and start acting like a single family caring for a shared home.
This is not socialism.
Not communism.
Not ideology.
It is simply the removal of a mental construct that no longer serves a planetary species.
The quiet truth beneath it all
The Earth was never owned.
It was only claimed.
And claims can be released.
As we stand at the peak of technological power, we face a simple choice:
Do we cling to an idea born from conquest — or do we outgrow it?
Ironically, the future may require us to remember what the oldest cultures always knew:
We came from the Earth.
We return to the Earth.
And everything in between is shared.
If this resonates…
This perspective is the living foundation of my novel Waking Up – A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity — a story about what happens when humanity releases ownership and remembers who it really is.
👉 Discover Waking Up HERE.
When the idea of ownership ends, life does not collapse.
It finally begins.
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