I have been thinking about the role of government
within both the state and society… and one particular
aspect of the state/society is this aspect of conflict resolution…
I suspect that every aspect of our society, acknowledge or not,
is conflict resolution…and I suspect, but can’t prove, is
that property rights are another example of conflict resolution…
as is the idea of the judicial branch of government…
The courts do nothing else but conflict resolutions…
and the police do nothing more than work on conflicts
and their resolutions… I would even bet that property rights,
as we know them, are another example of conflict resolutions…
How we resolve conflicts is pretty much the entire
scope of the government, society, and economics
and of course, property…
But to understand this, we have to travel back to
the beginning of humans…
In the beginning was the hunter-gatherer society…
This is the longest lasting economic system ever devised…
this system is where a person and/or a culture survives
by foraging for wild plants and hunting animals…
The hunter-gather follows the food which means there
is no set location for either the tribe or the individual
member… which is to say, there is no private property involved…
and the very beginning of property comes when one tribe, to
avoid conflict with another tribe, agree that the border between
the two lies at the river, for example…that side of the river
is yours and this side is mine… but ownership is not individual,
it is collective… the entire tribe owns the land, not individuals…
this stage lasted, with staggered results, until the Mesolithic age…
where tribes started to live near water and began semi-permanent
camps… This was roughly a million years of hunter-gatherer
society… and if the tribe is constantly on the move, there
is no need or point to ownership of land…
the purpose of land ownership, owning property, I believe comes
from conflict resolution…and doesn’t begin until the arrival of cities
or at least this idea of semi-permanent camps…
to avoid conflicts over who has possession over what land,
the tribe began the idea of private ownership… this is an attempt
to prevent conflict over land usage… and in some fashion,
the tribe has to keep track of who owns what land, thus
we get the beginning of the govenment… is the need for
property build into people, as part of our evolutionary heritage?
No, I would say… as everything comes back to the needs
of people and owning property doesn’t really fulfill a need per se…
we do have a need for shelter, but that isn’t necessarily about
property… and we have psychological needs, one of which is
safety/security… and property does, in a limited fashion,
does fulfill that need…but not everyone has this need to
own property… which suggests that owning property isn’t
a universal need of human beings…and the fact is that
we didn’t even have the idea of property until fairly
late in human history… Human beings are over a million
years old and I believe that property rights are about
12 to 10 thousand years old… set property rights prevents
many of the arguments that might happen if property rights
weren’t so clearly spelled out… I can imagine two people
arguing over some property if the ownership of that property
wasn’t so clearly spelled out… I believe the ownership of
property was established to prevent such argument, conflict
resolution, to happen…
In fact, I hold that our entire human structure, from
cities, to law to government to the ownership of property
come into being because of this conflict resolution idea…
enough conflict and the entire idea behind Hobbes ‘‘State of Nature’’
which is the war of all against all…is in regard to conflict resolution…
there can be no resolution to conflicts in Hobbes ‘‘State of Nature’’
conflicts can be resolved by a state or institutions that are greater
than our own person…
we have as conflict resolutions between nations, the original idea,
which is the League of Nations and now the United Nations…
and other conflict resolutions institutions are NATO, the courts,
police, and even Armies…
The entire reason we exists today is because of successful
conflict resolutions along the path of human existence…
Wars are a means of an attempted conflict resolution,
but the problem with wars, as with violence, is that they
create more conflict than they solve…
Because the conflict in WW1 wasn’t correctly solved, it
caused the conflict of WW 2… had WW 1 been correctly solved,
there wouldn’t have been a need for the second World War…
So, today America seems to be in crisis, and I suspect the reason
is because of our failure to correctly engage in conflict resolution…
the path into the future lies in understanding the conflict
resolutions of our times… How do we solve the conflict between
the red states and the blue states, to put a face to our
American conflict… we must begin to look at, to understand
life and existence as a conflict resolution method…
how do we resolve this or that conflict? that is the point
of existence, for now anyway… as all forms of conflict
resolutions lie, today anyway, in government, institutions,
the military, the police, the Judicial branch of the government…
Part of the question of existence lies within this conflict resolution
idea… think about this question of religion… of god, heaven,
hell, angels and Satan, these are all example of conflict resolutions
at work… but this conflict resolutions are part of the path of
becoming human…once we begin to understand the nature of
existence being conflict resolutions, then we can move further along
the path of becoming human… or think of it this way,
how do animals engage in conflict resolutions?
and how can we show we are above animals? by resolving
conflicts without violence…
Kropotkin