The Forest Jar
Can the master's tool be used to dismantle the master's house?
The Forest Jar. Due to the vagaries of the algorithms, it’s been popping into my social media feeds more frequently in the past couple weeks. It leaves me wondering to what degree the content of my Substack publications are affecting my other social media feeds.
This piece, like many of the channel’s, focuses on philosophical and macrosocial matters:
Voiceover:
When some clown says, “I just want a small government,” they never mean the state should just tend a really big pot of stew so that no kid goes hungry. They never believe the state’s only concern should be ensuring that everyone has access to life’s essentials or that the sick are cared for. No, they are always talking about a state that limits itself to protecting property rights. They don’t mean the right we all have to the bounty of nature, or to enjoy the accumulated fruits of generations of human labor.
They are talking about the right of the few to claim those things as theirs alone. Property that’s defined by the ability to deny [others] any access to it. The size of the state is a red herring. Property is what they actually care about. This is a common clown pattern. They say they value hard work, but care not when property allows some to live idly off the labor of others. They profess to be against aggression, but don’t hesitate to justify the incredible violence carried out in the name of their imaginary lives.
They claim to love freedom while supporting policies that mean we are not free to access most of the world around us. Why do they do this? Well, the vision of the world that has private property as its moral center does not inspire anyone. It doesn’t even inspire them. So they convince themselves that their belief in property is downstream of nobler values. But it obviously isn’t because every time one of those values comes into conflict with private property, they discard it and reach for another. The only constant is property. Property is their world. And it is uninspiring because it should be, because their world is awful.