Delphic Maxim 64: Gain possessions justly
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
64. Gain possessions justly
Alright, we’ve spent the past couple of months locked into the world and values of the Ancient Greeks — occasionally translated into our contemporary lives. All acts of translation are approximations, something is always transformed — some say lost — in the process. Today’s maxim actually sits quite neatly in the domain of our capitalist, consumerist lives, but something will be transformed in translation. What I want to say today is that while we may spend a lot of time in pursuit of property and possessions, the way we gain those things actually says a lot about our character.
We are socialised every day to want possessions. Mass media — particularly television — are designed to manipulate and expand our desire for acquisition. Advertising is the most obvious way that this happens, but even the content and structure of the programs we watch trains us to be competitive consumers as well. Australian commercial television is the absolute worst. The ‘reality’ shows that exist now — a terrible, deeply inauthentic simulacra of reality — are designed to meet the ‘Australian content’ requirements set by regulators. Whether it’s cooking shows, Married at First Sight, Dancing With the Stars, or whatever else it may be, these shows present a worldview that is driven by competition between people.
This sense of competition might have seemed pretty unnatural to the ancients. It’s not to say that people didn’t have possessions (clearly, there’s a maxim about it, people wanted their stuff). But there’s likely a reminder here not to steal or betray people in order to get those things. In our contemporary society, we don’t have to worry so much about theft (policing, believe it or not, is far, far more effective and crime on the whole declines each year — at least in a number of categories). The lesson we can learn from the types of shows we watch is that our world is this kind of competitive dystopia where we must compete with each other for love, victory, success or comfort.
I say dystopian because these kinds of shows tend to mark out life as a zero-sum game. The Bachelor or Bachelorette suggest that love is not only a commodity, one that can be sold on television for advertising dollars, but also that it is necessarily a competition between suitors (actually, that’s a fairly ancient concept itself!). But that doesn’t really reflect the real-world experience — not in most scenarios anyway.
So we come to the idea of justice — this is a concept that runs right through the maxims, and which underpinned a lot of the value systems the ancients described too. What does it mean to gain possessions justly?
Well, it helps to remember that the idea of justice is one embedded in social relations. So the gaining of material goods — or commodities that can be owned — can’t happen outside of the web of social relations that we maintain. Possessing something requires an acknowledgement from others that something is your possession — it’s a meaningless concept if there’s no possibility that someone else might ‘own’ something. And because justice is so fundamental a virtue in maintaining a good society, it’s important that we gain the things we own justly: that means with care and community, not with competition and treachery.
This maxim is particularly salient in Australia, where the ‘possession’ of the entire continent by Imperial Britain was done unjustly. What’s the knock-on effect of this act of violent acquisition? Aboriginal Australians continue to feel that impact today, in gaps in health outcomes, life expectancy, income inequality, educational attainment, incarceration rates and the list goes on. The unjust ‘gain’ of a possession has a long tail of negative consequence — whether that happens at the interpersonal scale, or at the scale of the dispossession of an entire people.
The challenge from today’s maxim is to think about what we value in the world. If that’s something material, then of course it is fine to want possessions. But the way we go about gaining things matters. We have to think about others because we are a part of a community, not in competition but for mutual benefit. And justice, like so many of the virtues, is a fundamental part of that social compact.
