We Want to Be Owners of Everything

Theory of Mind

Third-party enforcement plays a critically important role in ownership, because the power of ownership depends on people's ability to observe the rules even when no owner is present. Behavior that turns a blind eye undermines the entire value of ownership. If there were no third-party punishment, inter-group cooperation and society would collapse, and so this is one of the core features of ownership not observed in animals.
Why do children begin to understand the logic of third-party punishment around the age of three? One answer can be found in the development of understanding others and others' belongings. This is especially related to what psychology calls "theory of mind," the intuitive ability, in one's own mind, to put oneself in another's place and understand that person's thoughts and actions. Theory of mind is among the most studied subjects in human and animal cognition, because such mental abilities are crucial for social interaction and for predicting others' behavior. If you can read another person's mind, you can anticipate their next move, and you can also leak false information to manipulate their behavior. There is evidence that other animals possess a rudimentary theory of mind, but the theory of mind of a child around 3–4 years old is far more sophisticated and observed far more often. Younger infants seem to know that other people have minds, but they are not as adept as more mature children at reading others' minds. Around the age of three, a child's theory of mind becomes powerful, and they begin to understand others' thoughts and attitudes about their belongings, and the sense of loss when those belongings are lost. Hence the desire arises to punish those who do bad things. The ability to understand others' emotions is enormously helpful in establishing social norms and ownership. p. 90



Possession and Ownership

The reason art is connected to ownership is that both are conceptual in nature. The world is full of concepts constructed by the human mind. But how did this come about? As a developmental psychologist, I devoted my career to studying the development of children's concepts, which include everything from understanding of the physical world to belief in the supernatural world. Concepts in every domain seem to develop from a few principles we are born with, becoming ever more refined through experience. Ownership, too, is a concept that developed from "the principle of possession" — a primitive behavior humans share with other animals.
Before there was ownership, there was possession. Possession is simply controlling physical access to a resource. Holding a resource, carrying it around, sitting on top of it — these are forms of possession. As described above, many animals seize and defend their possessions. In children's development, too, possession comes before the concept of ownership. The psychologist Lita Furby analyzed the development of possessive behavior and proposed two principles of possession that operate everywhere in the world. First, in interviewing people from age 5 to adults in their 50s, all agreed that possession grants control over the object. Second, all agreed that possessions can become part of one's identity. This is the psychological ownership we noted in chapter 1 — the bond formed between me and my belongings, the experience of the self being extended through possessions.
What torments us is not merely the financial loss but the intense feeling of having been violated. Someone uninvited has entered our world and weakened our sense of control. The loss when one is forced to give up something one wishes to keep can also cause heartbreak. This reluctance to relinquish reveals well the relationship between humans and their possessions. Consider the rise of the storage-rental business after the postwar consumer culture's decades-long ascent — an industry that emerged in the late 1960s. Every year more and more people, instead of throwing things away, stuff them into storage units. Today there are more personal storage facilities in the United States than there are McDonald's locations, and 65 percent of storage users also have garages. Many of those garages contain not cars but possessions that can no longer be brought into the house. Why can't we throw things away? Why do we need a depot full of personal belongings that are nearly useless to us? Why are we so emotionally dependent on our possessions?
The reason is that what we own is, in fact, our very being.



Self-construal

In 1890 William James, the father of American psychology, wrote about how the self is defined through the ownership we claim:
But in its widest possible sense, however, a man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his. Not only his body and psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands, and his yacht and bank account, are all included in this. All of these things give him the same kind of feelings. If they grow and prosper, he feels triumphant. If they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down. Not necessarily in the same degree for each thing, but in much the same way for all.
What James is describing here is what today's psychologists call "self-construal," one's view of one's own identity, and the emotional impact of loss that reveals one's special relationship with possessions. It is not particularly surprising that we think of our body and mind as part of the self. After all, who else is going to claim ownership of these but us? Yet the material things included in the list above are not uniquely ours; others can own them as well. Houses, land, yachts and so on are property we have acquired. The fact that losing such things can affect us personally to a profound degree is, in fact, very surprising.

Many thinkers have reflected on the inner connection between humans and their possessions. As is well known, Plato did not hold the material world in high regard, believing that we should pursue higher, immaterial ideas. He argued that a system of communal ownership was needed to avoid the social divisions caused by private property — which leads to inequality and theft — and to encourage the pursuit of common interest. His pupil Aristotle, who was constantly arguing with his teacher, was more pragmatic and emphasized the importance of investigating the material world. He thought private property promoted thrift and a sense of responsibility, but he also pointed out that we tend to envy and be jealous of others because of property. Two thousand years later, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre argued that the only reason we are possessive is to enhance our sense of self, and that the only way to know who we are is to observe what we have. This is almost like saying we have to dress ourselves up through our possessions. Possessions are visible markers of success. As studies of American wealth show, we may not become especially happier after annual income reaches $75,000, but looking at our possessions strengthens our conviction that we have succeeded. Through our possessions we make ourselves known to others, and our possessions in turn tell us who we are.
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre realized just how thoroughly humans are defined through possession. "My entire possessions reflect my entire being… I am what I have. What is mine is myself." He proposed several ways in which this happens. First, by exercising exclusive control over something, we claim, "This is mine." This was already observed in infancy. Second, similar to John Locke's view, what we make from the very beginning becomes ours. Finally, Sartre thought possessions evoked passion. p. 229




People Who Worship Commodities

Possessions are extensions of the self, but as new technology advances and digital substitutes proliferate, our physical connection to many material possessions is destined to disappear. In the era of Instagram and email, film photographs and handwritten letters have become rare. Interestingly, a few years ago people predicted that vinyl records and bound books would soon disappear, but because people loved that materiality, both have regained popularity. In 2017 in the UK, as people regained interest in "music you can touch," record sales hit their highest in 25 years. A similar trend can be seen in the decline of e-book sales and the preference for physical books.
One reason for this reversal is that it isn't easy to feel emotional attachment to non-physical objects. The desire to own and keep something tangible is a kind of fetishism. The word "fetish" derives from the Portuguese "feitiço," meaning "charm" or "magic," and was used by Europeans traveling in Africa who saw the practice of worshiping objects believed to possess supernatural powers. Since then, fetishism has come to refer to the emotional satisfaction people derive from inanimate objects. Sexual fetishism toward various types of clothing is among the most extreme forms.
All objects have the potential to evoke fetishism. In the first chapter of Das Kapital, his critique of capitalism, Karl Marx called the psychological relationship between people and commodities commodity fetishism. According to him, the value of things — the reason we are willing to spend money on them — is something we attribute to the things ourselves. This value gets transferred to the intrinsic properties of the things, even when there is no functional value. For example, for most of human history, gold and silver were not intrinsically valuable. They became valuable later, due to their scarcity and their usefulness as a convenient currency. As soon as the market regards certain commodities as valuable, consumers' emotional response to them develops.
Being deemed valuable can give rise to fetishistic thinking. Is there anyone who feels no special tingle when they touch gold? Goldsmiths who work with the metal every day might not. But for most of us, gold has long been a magical metal associated with touch through folklore and fairy tales. Anyone who thinks they gain something from the act of holding and touching things will easily understand fetishism. In magical thinking, this is also called positive contagion: people want to touch the object of their desire because they believe its positive qualities will be transferred. I once saw a solid-gold Nobel Prize medal hanging unguarded over the fireplace in the alumni common room near Trinity College, Cambridge — and everyone wanted to touch it. Today, too, banknotes have no intrinsic value, yet there is a special feeling when you hold a wad of cash. p. 234



The Diderot Effect
The term "the Diderot effect," coined by the anthropologist Grant McCracken, refers to the influence an individual object can have on subsequent purchases. For example, once you buy a luxury item, you are easily tempted to buy more similar items you don't even need. Many retailers exploit the Diderot effect by advertising goods to complement your initial purchase. This is also one reason Apple products are so attractive. According to McCracken, for many people the purchase of an iPhone becomes a "departure product" that increases pressure to purchase other Apple products, because such products carry an embedded identity. No matter how good the value of another product, if it sends the wrong identity signal, buyers are highly likely not to buy it.

The most extreme form of emotional attachment to things can be found in collectors. Collectors invest emotionally in their collections. This reflects not merely the monetary value of the items but the effort and passion the collector poured into gathering the desired objects. At times the fear of losing them can grow unbearable. In 2012, German authorities discovered that Cornelius Gurlitt, who had lived in seclusion in Munich, had piled up an astonishing quantity of art masterpieces estimated to be worth roughly one billion dollars. These works had been seized from Jewish people during the Nazi era and sold off cheaply to Cornelius's father during the war. Cornelius felt a sense of duty to protect this collection. Watching the police confiscate his precious collection, he reportedly said the shock was greater than the death of his parents and even greater than the death of his sister, who had died of cancer that year.

Cornelius told the authorities that, because protecting the collection was his duty, he became "very serious, possessed by obsession, isolated, and increasingly losing a sense of reality." One of the first studies to test James's claim about self-construal was conducted in 1959 by the Yale psychoanalyst Ernst Prelinger. He asked adults to classify 160 objects on a scale ranging from non-self to self, and found that body and mind play a more important role in the sense of self than personal belongings. But he also found that belongings were classified as more important to the self than other people. (As we will see shortly, however, this is a very Western perspective.) When children were asked to rank the same objects, almost the same pattern was found as in adults. The older the participants, however, the more they emphasized possessions reflecting relationships with others — which is understandable given that we grow into adults living together with others.