Your Home Is Your Defense: Truth, Responsibility, and the Last Metaphysical Right of Property
Take Care of What Is Yours or Risk Losing It All
“The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
“Hence that general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack.”
— Sun Tzu, Art of War
Don Quixote and Sun Tzu may not be your first choice (or last) as the duo defending the right to property but I firmly believe they are the proper scope in uncovering the essential realities necessary in gaining a metaphysical understanding of truth, responsibility, and property.
The Best Defense…
Recently I mentioned that our new home had a leak. To catch everyone up, water was in some of the walls but nothing too terrible. A water & restoration team assessed it using a thermal gun (you can purchase the one they used for only $300!). It was good to see and grasp where the water collected, however, while the assessment was free, the charge to fix the mess was around $1500. I said no rather quickly. Water collected behind the wall of the washer and dyer which thankfully could be accessed underneath the stairway closet. I first drilled some holes but eventually we decided to just bust the walls open enough to gain airflow in the areas mentioned. Then I placed a powerful dehumidifier along with a squad of fans into this small space. Everything dried in a day but we continued the process for three whole days. Our best defense to preventing mold was to take quick action and a hard offensive despite a few holes that no one will ever notice. And all at zero cost. The underlying principle:
We are each responsible for our own actions despite what we may believe to be true or real and whether we caused it or not, especially, when it comes at the cost of our family, home, land, and all that we “own”and/or “belongs” to us from either birth, purchase, trade, or discovery.
There is much to unpack philosophically as we reason through this principle. Distinctions must be made in order to not fall victim to poor categorization or allow for misinterpretation that could possibly damage credibility or future readers understanding.
Obtaining clarity is awfully difficult in our postmodern setting. Humanity has determined that each individual interpretation can be true and false since there is no ultimate truth, no absolute reality as late modernity’s prophets professed. Yet alarmingly to some, another stage of this chaotic knowledge has developed. Societies are undergoing a return to the experts; to a upperclass of another kind, a class of global technocrats who are quickly changing the rules of the game to their advantage and have been doing so for some time. C-19 has only expedited events. The postmodern lie remains beneath the cloak (you read that correctly, not a cloak but THE cloak). What the cloak has been and remains to be is not a conspiratorial cabal—the Freemasons or the Illuminate—but aristocrats turned CEO’s, Businessman, Politicians (in the modern sense), Experts, Administrators… they control the valves of power and authority. For a time, people of modernity experienced an unreal explosion of wealth and freedom, a pinnacle we are now witnessing with Transgenderism, Socialism, and even Veganism. An end to a neoliberal order. People continue to live “free” but freedom of the modern was short-term and a completely unsustainable event that has wrecked man and earth. Presently, that is the setting in which I speak.
Marriage & Family
I only share this because I believe it will begin to illuminate the principle in question. Globally, marriage and child birth are in decline. Answers as to why are clear, at least, for Christians and Conservatives alike. As the Institute for Family Studies insinuated in a 2018 study concerning the United States:
Essentially all of the decline in fertility since 2001 can be explained by changes in the marital composition of the population. Married, single, and divorced women are all about as likely, controlling for age and marital status, to have kids now as they were in 2001. But today, a smaller proportion of women are married during those peak-fertility years.
Well prior to the 2000s, going as far back as the 1950s, conservative thinkers have looked at the decline of the family with the understanding that its depreciation is a moral failure of society and equally the result of the economic shift away from the family unit toward corporations and the welfare state. Resources have been taken away from the family—a very stable institution in human history—in exchange for the working mother and working father and the children taught by public or private educators and tutors and youth pastors and… the list goes on and on. Divergence of power has killed the family and families have allowed it to occur.
Should a couple be married and have children, divorce rates have robbed the institution from any growth. The path of least resistance, divorce, is a lie that claims no one is at fault or that the fault can be possibly cured in the next marriage or the next after it.
Marriage and raising a family takes commitment—a discipline of responsibility. Marriage and family require openness and transparency—a discipline of truth. And marriage and family are not a utility, but a Form/form in the Platonic and Aristotelian sense of the term; a form that is property. I do not mean to suggest that a child or a woman or any person is property. Rather, they are metaphysical in nature, and property is the grounding point: I belong to you, you belong to me, we belong to one another.
In a Christian context, a child is a parents responsibility but the child ultimately belongs to God. That child is mine or yours, not the state or the community (an important subject to be sure), however, a metaphysical boundary of nature—birth and raising X or Y by parents. Marriage is a bond (not physical bondage like slavery or imprisonment though we may jest); it is a bond in the sense of responsibility, of truth, and of belonging to one another. Rightly calling this metaphysical form property hurts modern sensibilities because of its relationship to slavery and the abuses of women but it also takes away an essentialness to the argument long believed and followed since ancient days unrelated to those misfortunes.
Principally Speaking
Again, the principle I have laid out says:
We are each responsible for our own actions despite what we may believe to be true or real and whether we caused it or not, especially, when it comes at the cost of our family, home, land, and all that we “own”and/or “belongs” to us from either birth, purchase, trade, or discovery.
Take each step as a rule of thumb.
“We are each responsible for our own actions…”. It may appear simple enough. Yes, I pushed over a glass of milk on purpose, I should clean it up. But what if that “I” was a three month old or a person suffering from a mental illness? Their actions are not automatically devoid of consequence rather it may be consequence deferred through another person. I am an angry 90 year old woman who pushed her glass of milk over on the floor, but my caretaker cleans up my mess. The caretaker is responsible to the elderly woman while the elderly woman remains responsible for the actions committed because she committed them, not the caretaker. Our actions do not disappear to put it plainly, they merely attach themselves to another through our irresponsible actions.
“Despite what we may believe to be true or real and whether we caused it or not…” This is the rule of imputing or ascribing. Person X murdered person Y but Person X was a three year old child or woman suffering from poverty or a man with a mental disability; the exchange of accountability cannot take away from the wrongness or sinfulness or guilt of an action. That is to say, it remains wrong to murder despite circumstances and not all circumstances are equal either. The child still committed a horrific wrong though possibly by accident thus not making the “intent to murder” yet the action in of itself was still a crime no matter the glossing over. Should the child be seen as such? Certainly not, if the action was a three-year old grabbing a gun and killing their parent by accident, however, I am going to make the radical claim that the action remains wrong with a role of accountability even falling upon that three-year old. Clearly, no perfect justice can be distributed in such a terrible situation as the one mentioned. And by “wrong” I mean that a responsibility falls in a multitude of ways upon the child and all those involved in the life of that child before and after the incident. We are each responsible for our actions in the actual act and in the layer of our irresponsible actions in relation to others.
“Especially, when it comes at the cost of our family, home, land, and all that we “own”and/or “belongs” to us from either birth, purchase, trade, or discovery.” Taking responsibility may simply be a means of acknowledgment. Like in the hard case I mentioned of a young child killing their own parent by accident; whomever their caretaker, that child ought to know what they had done at some point in their life and to take a means of ownership of the event. Not that it has to be directly a place of legal guiltiness or unreconcilable burden as much as a means of ownership of knowing and placing into reality events. These terms of belonging and ownership are metaphysical properties that can be brought to the form of property. Intellectual property to the physical property of land, they may differ legally and socially while holding a similar nature of truth and responsibility in the highest order of things.
Life is managing our attitudes and actions by taking ownership through responsibility to our family, friends, and community at large; to fix the leak in our home or to let it flood; to work for your marriage or allow it to depart. Each have results but not all results are equal. Nor is equity of any kind guaranteed in a world of endless flaws.
Fight for what is yours or risk losing it all. Take hold of your metaphysical realities for God and Kingdom; or surrender them. Choice matters little in these decisions except for the one that take responsibility seriously.
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