Projectiles Lead to a Different Theory of Property
Yesterday, I was thinking that without our irrational desire to retain the things that we have in our hands by violence if necessary, for example your cell phone. Somebody could make a living just by walking around slashing things from people that weren’t worth fighting to retain.
It doesn’t really make sense that someone would chase you down for half a sandwich for example. I didn’t bring this up yesterday because it seemed too hypothetical to be interesting.
This morning I saw the abandoned shell of an Amazon package that someone had taken from a doorstep, plundered, and thrown into a bush in an alley. Something about the human mind doesn’t latch onto the contents of the package until the package is actually opened. This is probably why the phenomenon of mass package theft exists and why it’s such a low criminal justice priority.
It’s interesting that the commercial legal system reflects the idea that a good belongs to the sender until the recipient takes delivery. This is an example of the legal system evolving to line up with our innate sense of property.
I have a theory that owning a projectile weapon causes the human sense of property control to expand to include the range of the projectile. This makes sense because the tactile sense adapts to the reality that one can physically influence objects further away from the body.
