My Most Important Idea
My most important idea is that a certain psychological trait, which I call “propertyism”, is a significant and underappreciated part of human nature.
Below I explain propertyism (Part 1), my idea about it (Part 2), and why that idea is important (Part 3). But those explanations are just the tip of the iceberg, designed as much to stir your interest as satisfy it. If you want to learn more, follow these links: [NOTE: links not added yet!]
What is propertyism (and what does it do)?
How propertyism became such a significant part of human nature
Does propertyism really exist?
The mind-blowing benefits of learning about propertyism
If you’re new to propertyism, start with the general overview below, then follow link 1 to a much more thorough introduction, including detailed explorations of real-life examples. Links 2-4 can be read in any order, but each presupposes an understanding of the material at link 1.
1. WHAT IS PROPERTYISM?
In a nutshell, propertyism is caring about properties.
But what are properties? And what does it mean to care about them?
1.1 WHAT ARE PROPERTIES?
I use the word “properties” as scientists do, as when they talk about “the properties of water” (transparent, liquid between 32º and 212º Fahrenheit, composed of H20, etc.). In this sense, properties are characteristics, features, or attributes – something’s properties are how it is or what it is like. Properties so understood are ubiquitous. Look at any object in your environment and consider what it’s like: it’s size, shape, color, weight, composition, use, etc. You are considering its properties.
A property is a certain way things can be, and for something to have a property is simply for it to be that way. Redness, for example, is a property, and for something to have that property is for it to be red. Every red thing – every red car, shirt, flag, etc. – has the property of redness, and nothing which isn’t red has it. For any property, we can divide the world up into two sets of things: those which have it and those which don’t. That means: things which are that way and things which aren’t (e.g., red things and non-red things).
Properties aren’t the same as the things which have them. Redness, for example, isn’t the same as the cars, shirts, flags, etc. which are red. The set of red things is constantly changing: e.g., when a red pepper is charred to black on the grill, there’s one less red thing in the world; when a brown fence is painted red, there’s one more red thing. But throughout all those changes in the things which are red, redness itself – that way of being – remains the same.
There are certain sorts of properties practically everything has: size, shape, and color, for example. But some properties are rarer, and had only by specific sorts of things. Human beings, for example, have psychological properties that most things don’t have. Unlike rocks, tables, and chairs, you have a mind, a personality, thoughts, feelings, hopes, desires, fears, memories, etc. Those are among your properties, just as much as your size and shape.
There are many properties. There are also many things which aren’t properties. Physical objects are not properties: rocks, tables, and chairs, for example, have properties but are not themselves properties. Most relevant for us, people are not properties. We are property-havers – that is, we are certain ways – but we are not ourselves properties. I call anything which isn’t a property a particular thing (or “particular” for short).
1.2 CARING ABOUT SOMEONE’S PROPERTIES VS. CARING ABOUT PROPERTIES
Since our properties are what we are like, they include much of what we care about most deeply. Do you care whether you’re happy or miserable? Healthy or sick? Loved or lonely? If any of these possibilities matter to you, you care about your properties.
When we care about our own properties, what we care about includes properties, but also includes a particular person (ourselves). We don’t just care about properties, we care about someone’s properties. Consider Sally, who wants to be happy. Sally wants other things too, but just think about that desire for a moment. So far as it goes, the property of happiness is indeed a crucial part of what she wants: she doesn’t just want to be some way, she specifically wants to be that way. But her desire isn’t just for happiness, it’s for her happiness. What she cares about is neither just a property nor just a particular but a state which combines the two: happiness-in-Sally. The same goes for her desire for her son Max’s happiness: what she wants isn’t just happiness but happiness-in-Max. In both cases what she cares about is the having of a certain property, but not just that: it’s the having of that property by someone in particular.
Desires like those are normal and familiar, of course. But they’re not propertyism.
Propertyism is caring which is simply about properties. Suppose that, in addition to her other desires, Sally does just want happiness, regardless of whose happiness it is. That’s to say, she favors that way of being, that sort of state, whoever is experiencing it. That is propertyism. If she dislikes suffering, whoever the sufferer may be, that too is propertyism. Likewise if she wants an end to world hunger – not just because it’ll benefit particular people she knows and cares about, but because she doesn’t want anyone to starve. Or if she wants unjustly imprisoned people to be freed, sex slaves to be liberated, kids (any kids, anywhere) to be treated well, etc. Insofar as she cares about something simply because of the properties involved – independently of who in particular has those properties – her caring is propertyism.
In short, propertyism is caring about how things are – what they are like – independently of which things they are.
1.3 TWO POINTS ABOUT CARING
I started by defining propertyism as “caring about properties” and I’ve said a lot more about “properties” than “caring”. That makes sense, since everyone already knows what caring is. But I do want to make two points about it.
First, I’m using “caring” in the broadest possible way. As I mean it, to “care” about something is simply to have some positive (favorable) or negative (unfavorable) orientation to it. Any positive or negative orientation counts. Unless you’re totally neutral about something – utterly indifferent to and ummoved by it – you care about it.
Caring is thus extraordinarily rich and diverse. We care about an unfathomably large range of things, in a dazzing variety of ways, with widely varying degrees of intensity. And what we care about and how we care about it is constantly in flux (though some concerns remain with us for a long time), and varies from person to person and culture to culture (though there are similarities).
Second, caring is always caring about something. I use the word “target” for what any given state of caring is about. For example, the target of Sally’s desire for her own happiness is her happiness. Likewise, her desire for Max’s happiness targets Max’s happiness, her desire for happiness targets happiness, and so on.
To say that propertyism is “caring about properties”, then, is to say that it is caring which targets properties. That is, propertyism is any positive or negative orientation to the sheer having of properties, independently of the particular haver of those properties. If you want things to be (or not be) a certain way - regardless of who is involved (who things are that way for) - that’s propertyism. So far as the definition of “propertyism” goes, the caring can be about any properties at all. As I explain in the next section, we tend to care about certain sorts of properties. But so far as the definition goes, all that’s needed for caring to be propertyism is that it targets only properties - no particulars. Caring which targets the having of properties by certain people in particular – like Sally’s desire for her happiness or Max’s happiness – isn’t propertyism but “particularism”. (I say a bit more about the definitions of “propertyism” and “particularism” in 1.5 below.)
1.4 THE TWO MAIN FORMS OF PROPERTYISM: WELFARISM & MORALISM
People vary in which properties they care about, but there are broad commonalities. We tend to care most about two sorts of properties.
The first are properties associated with well-being (quality of life). We like properties associated with faring well (happiness, health, flourishing, etc.), and dislike properties associated with faring poorly (suffering, sickness, poverty, etc.). Our caring about these sorts of properties is welfaristic propertyism, or “welfarism”. A common example of welfarism is compassion for the suffering of strangers.
The second are properties associated with moral character. We like properties associated with goodness (kindness, honesty, fairness, etc.), and dislike properties associated with badness (cruelty, dishonesty, greed, etc.). This caring is moralistic propertyism, or “moralism”. A common example of moralism is anger at the mistreatment of strangers.
When bad behavior causes harm, both sorts of propertyism can be elicited at the same time, by two aspects of the same overall situation: welfarism by the harm, moralism by the bad behavior. But they needn’t go together. To illustrate, if a child is badly burned in a terrible accident, for which no one is to blame, that may arouse compassion but no moralism. If it turns out the ‘accident’ was actually deliberately caused – part of a cruel plot to eliminate the child as a rival heir, say – the compassion won’t disappear, but it may be joined by a new feeling: furious indignation. And if the plot had instead been exposed and foiled at the last second, the appalling intentions may elicit moralistic feelings even though, thankfully, no one was harmed.
Because propertyism comes in these two forms, I sometimes refer to it as “caring about well-being and justice”. This label is better – more familiar and informative – than “caring about properties”. But I want to forestall two possible misunderstandings.
First, not all of our caring about well-being and justice is propertyism. Indeed, we care especially intensely about well-being and justice for ourselves and our loved ones. When I talk about that caring, I’ll make it explicit that I’m talking about particularism. For convenience, I’ll reserve the unqualified phrase “caring about well-being and justice” for propertyism: i.e., for caring about well-being and justice as such, independently of who is involved.
Second, “well-being” and “justice” are labels for categories of properties, not two specific properties. People care about different properties within those categories. Saying “people care about well-being and justice” is like saying “people enjoy jazz and rock-and-roll”. That’s true: people do enjoy jazz and rock-and-roll. But what does it mean, exactly? When two people enjoy jazz they have something in common – but what? “Jazz” is a category of music, not a piece of music. Among those who enjoy it, there are enormous variations in the details: which jazz they enjoy, how they enjoy it, and the role it plays in their lives. (The same goes for rock-and-roll, of course, and any other musical genre.) Likewise, there are enormous variations in the details of people’s caring about well-being and justice: which welfaristic and moralistic properties they care about, how they care about them, and the role that caring plays in their lives. Using two simple words to describe what people care about is convenient, but don’t let it blind you to the extraordinary richness and diversity of the underlying reality.
1.5 FAKE PROPERTYISM AND EXTENDED PROPERTYISM
Part of caring about something is being disposed to care about other things – things relevantly related to it. Your desire to avoid dying, for example, makes you want to avoid things which will kill you: being shot, stabbed, hit by a car, falling off a cliff, drinking cyanide, etc. Metaphorically speaking, caring naturally spreads out: extends from one thing to other, related things. It’s natural and automatic: not so much something we do as something our minds do, as our lungs breathe, with as little effort or notice.
Once caring starts spreading it can keep spreading, as the new things we care about make us care about yet further things – things related to them. Let me illustrate with a boring vignette:
I’m watching TV comfortably on my couch, with no desire to go out or even get up. Then I’m hit with a powerful craving for ice cream. Alas, I don’t have any. But my craving is strong enough to make me want to go get some, even though it means driving to the store. I now have two new desires: for ice cream, and to go to the store. The second is clearly just an extension of the first: just considered in itself, going to the store isn’t even slightly attractive to me (as moonlight just is reflected sunlight, so the attractiveness of going to the store just is the reflected attractiveness of the ice cream I can get there). My desire to go to the store, though merely an extension of my desire for ice cream, is nonetheless a real desire: I really do want to go. And it too spreads, making me want what’s relevant to it. Specifically, I want to go get in my car. And the spread doesn’t stop there. In a flash I have a long chain of desires, each an extension of the last, all ultimately an extension of the first: I want ice cream so I want to go to the store so I want to get in my car so I want my keys so I want to go to my bedroom (where I keep them) so I want to get up from the couch. (Note: my point is about how caring works, so it doesn’t matter whether I actually act on my desires. Suppose before I get up I think “Ugh, what am I thinking? I’m not going to the store at this hour just to get ice cream” - and remain seated on the couch. It’s still true that, at least briefly, I wanted to get up.)
Much of our caring, then, is extended: an extension of other caring. But not all of it. There are also things we care about in themselves. My craving for ice cream is an example. Other desires are extensions of it, but it is not itself an extension of any other desire. I want to experience its gooey sweetness melting over my tongue. I don’t want it because it’ll lead to something else I want. I want it just because of what it – that very experience – is like. That’s an example of non-extended (or “intrinsic”) caring.
The fact that a lot of caring is extended has two lessons for our understanding of propertyism.
The first is that there’s such a thing as ‘fake propertyism’. By this I mean caring about properties which is really just extended particularism. I’ll illustrate with an imaginary character, Selvio, who cares only about himself.
To be precise, Selvio intrinsically cares only about himself. He cares about lots of other things – it’s just that all of his concern about other things is merely an extension of his caring about himself. For example, he cares about his car: he doesn’t want it to be destroyed, stolen, or even scratched – because he wants the benefits of a nice-looking, well-functioning car. The same goes for his phone, clothes, furniture, etc. What happens to them affects him, in ways he cares about, so he cares about what happens to them. The same goes for certain people. For example, his doctor (Dr. Excellente) is devoted and insightful. She’s helped Selvio a lot over the years, and he hopes to keep benefiting from her care. So her well-being matters to him: he doesn’t want her to die, get horribly sick or injured, addicted to drugs, deeply depressed, etc. Those things would be bad for her, of course, but what matters to Selvio is that they’d be bad for him.
Selvio’s concern for Dr. Excellente is fake altruism. It resembles altruism. Dr. Excellente and others might mistake it for altruism. It might move him to act in ways that are indistinguishable from how he’d act if he really did care about her for her own sake. But it’s just extended self-concern, no more altruism than his concern for his car.
In just that way, Selvio might have fake propertyism. Suppose, for example, he wants less suffering in the world, not just for himself but overall: if he could wave a magic wand and have there be less suffering, he’d do it – even if he knew the reduction would only occur among total strangers. Suppose that’s because…
he figures that the more suffering there is, the more needy people will be – and therefore the more help they’ll want from him (for example, his taxes may go up to pay for the relief of their suffering);
he recognizes that he may desperately need help some day, and he worries that he won’t be able to get it if many others are also crying out for help;
he reasons that – because suffering can make people do desperate things (like resort to crime to get money to help relieve their suffering) – the more suffering there is, the more at risk of being victimized he is.
Selvio’s concern for suffering resembles propertyism. People might mistake it for propertyism. But it’s not propertyism. Like his concern for his car and for Dr. Excellente, it’s just an extension of his self-concern – which is particularism.
Our first lesson, then, is that we need to distinguish real propertyism from fake propertyism: caring about properties which isn’t just extended particularism from caring about properties which is. So we need to tweak our definitions. If we use “caring about properties” as a blanket definition of propertyism, Selvio’s concern for suffering will count as propertyism. To avoid counting fake propertyism as propertyism, we need to specify that caring about properties is propertyism when it is intrinsic. Unlike Selvio, Sally dislikes suffering in itself. She doesn’t just care about it because of its connection to herself (or to Max, or to anything else she cares about). That’s why Sally’s concern for suffering is propertyism.
Likewise, particularism is intrinsic caring about particulars, and any caring which is an extension of that. That’s why Selvio’s concern for suffering counts as particularism: it’s not about particulars, but it is an extension of his intrinsic concern for a particular (himself).
Of course it goes in the other direction, too – which brings us to our second lesson. Just as caring about properties can be extended particularism, so caring about particulars can be extended propertyism. In fact, fake particularism is abundant, and comes in many forms.
For example, suppose you see a stranger suffering and your heart goes out to them. You want their suffering to be relieved – not because it’s their suffering in particular, just because it’s suffering. Your concern for that particular person’s suffering is extended propertyism: an extension of your concern for suffering.
With propertyism, too, chains of extended caring can be long. Suppose a natural disaster causes great suffering in some far off land. You care, not because of who they are, but simply because of how they are – what it’s like for them, whoever they are. That’s to say: your caring is propertyism. Now suppose a relief effort is underway, and you want to donate. The easiest way is to use your credit card, which is in your wallet, which is in the other room, so you want to get up and go there. Here too we have a chain of extended caring: you dislike suffering and want it to be relieved so you want their suffering to be relieved so you want the relief effort to work so you want to donate so you want to use your credit card so you want your wallet so you want to get up and go in the other room. All of it is propertyism: the first because it’s intrinsic caring about properties, the rest because it’s an extension of that. It’s all propertyism, even though it targets particulars. Your concern for properties moves you to care about those particular people, not because they’re those particular people, but because they’re the ones who happen to be having the properties you care about. Further, your concern for properties makes you care about what you do. Your desire to get up and go to the other room is about what a particular person does, but it’s (extended) propertyism.
Extended propertyism shows up most often in our caring about ourselves and our loved ones. If that seems contradictory, remember that propertyism isn’t ‘strangerism’. Propertyism makes us care about strangers – but not because they’re strangers. It’s because they have the properties we care about. And so do we and our loved ones, of course. So it’s common for our propertyism to be aroused by things which also – usually far more intensely – arouse particularism. For example, Sally mainly cares about Max’s suffering because it’s Max’s suffering. But she may also care about it simply because it is suffering.
That sort of thing is common. But it usually goes without notice. Introspectively, our feelings aren’t presented to us neatly divided up into ‘particularism’ and ‘propertyism’. If Sally introspects, she’ll just notice that she cares about Max’s suffering. Our feelings about things are just feelings. Unlike food packages, they don’t come with handy labels indicating their sources (‘90% particularist concern for Max, 10% propertyist concern for suffering’).
It’s much easier to notice our propertyism about strangers, because it’s basically the only sort of caring about them we have. So noticing your caring about them is noticing your propertyist caring about them. But our propertyism about ourselves and our loved ones is dwarfed by our particularism. So noticing it requires a further step: distinguishing the caring which is propertyism from the caring which isn’t. That’s why it makes sense to introduce propertyism with examples where it targets strangers. It’s the same reason why, if you want to point out a certain sound to someone, it’s best to do it when it’s otherwise quiet - when there aren’t lots of other sounds they’ll have to distinguish it from.
So propertyism about ourselves and our loved ones is harder to notice – but it’s just as real. And since we’re so frequently and vividly aware of our and our loved ones’ properties, it’s very common. Our propertyism extends to people we spend time with more often than those we don’t for the same reason it extends to groups news outlets focus on more than those they ignore: we’re simply more often aware of situations involving them in which the properties we care about are at stake.
2. WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
My “big idea” about propertyism is that it is a significant and underappreciated part of human nature. By “a significant part of human nature” I mean that it is pervasive, influential, and deeply rooted. I’ll briefly explain these and then say a bit about how it’s underappreciated.
2.1 PROPERTYISM IS PERVASIVE
Most people have propertyism, though there are significant individual differences. In some people it is very strong, deeply shaping their emotional landscape and their most solemn and passionate commitments. I call people like that ‘ultra-propertyists’: examples include Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malala Yousafzai. (Of course most ultra-propertyists aren’t famous. For a glimpse into the mind of an ultra-propertyist, click the first link and read about Parker.) At the other extreme, some people have no propertyism at all, or only negligible amounts; e.g., egomaniacal psychopaths. Most people are in the middle.
Traits like musicality and sense of humor are nice models for the distribution of propertyism. At one extreme are people who are ultra-musical or ultra-humorous (e.g., Mozart, Robin Williams). At the other extreme are those with little or no capacity or interest. Most people are, like me, in the middle: music and humor play some role in my life – I enjoy them, and value them enough to invest time and money in them – but my life is mostly about other things. Their role in my life is nothing like in the lives of musicians and comedians. Similarly, most people have some concern for well-being and justice, but its role in their lives is far smaller than in the lives of ultra-propertyists.
2.2 PROPERTYISM IS INFLUENTIAL
Propertyism’s influence is most obvious when it moves ultra-propertyists to sacrifice themselves for a greater good, most of the benefits of which will go to strangers. But its influence goes far beyond that.
The keys to its influence are its pervasiveness, expansiveness, and convergence.
Its pervasiveness gives it a powerful collective impact: just as individual drops of water are weak, but together can carve the Grand Canyon, so propertyism – typically weak in individuals – has significant causal power due to its presence in many people.
Propertyism is naturally expansive because well-being and justice are often at stake on a large scale. Thus, more often than narrower concerns – for self and loved ones – propertyism makes people want large-scale impact.
Finally, propertyism ‘converges’ in the sense that it often leads many people to care about the same thing. Wanting happiness is in this way very different than wanting to be happy. You want to be happy, and I want the same thing. But do we really want the same thing? Only loosely speaking: we both want happiness, but you want it for you and I want it for me. But if we both want happiness then we literally want the same thing. Only a tiny portion of humanity desires specifically your happiness. A far greater number desire happiness. Propertyism thus often generates widespread shared concerns (and not just intrinsic concerns but extensions of them as well).
For these reasons, though it is pretty frail in most people, taken as a whole propertyism is massively influential. For example:
Propertyism shapes basic norms of social interaction we take for granted, both directly (by making people care about the well-being of everyone they interact with) and indirectly (by making people care about how anyone treats anyone, generating moralistic social pressure on everyone to treat others well).
Propertyism plays a big role in the creation, design, and use of powerful social institutions, including governments and religions.
Propertyism animates social movements devoted to improving well-being and justice.
Of course, human motives are always complex: propertyism is never the only driver of any significant social event or practice – never even close. Still, our lives and societies – human history as a whole – would look completely different if propertyism had never existed. (Click the first link for some in-depth descriptions of specific ways propertyism has been influential.)
2.3 PROPERTYISM IS DEEPLY ROOTED
“Deeply rooted” is shorthand for a cluster of related features: centrally, that propertyism is evolved, ancient, and robust. That is, it arose due to a process of natural selection, long before cities and civilization, and generally develops without the need for deliberate cultivation (and, barring radical genomic or environmental changes, will continue to do so). At the second link above I sketch an account of propertyism’s origins. Here’s a summary:
Propertyism emerged when our ancestors lived in small, nomadic hunter-gatherer bands. Genetically based particularism was already deeply rooted: desire for my well-being and anger at mistreatment of me, for example (or concern for mates, children, friends, etc.). Propertyism was initially due to genetic quirks yielding variants of those concerns which, though otherwise similar, omitted individuals from their targets: desire for well-being and anger at mistreatment, for example. Groups in which this occurred cooperated better than those in which it didn’t: welfarism promoted social bonding, helping groups manage the challenges of selfishness and narrow favoritism; moralism bolstered prosocial norms such as those deterring behaviors likely to induce within-group conflict. Groups with propertyism thus fared better than those without it, passing on their genes at a greater rate, resulting in wider distribution of propertyism over time. And since groups with more propertyism cooperated better than groups with less, propertyism became more prominent over time, resulting eventually in the pervasive, influential, deeply rooted propertyism we find today.
On this account, propertyism co-evolved with tribalism: caring about this group and caring about properties were both ways of bolstering cooperation made available by pre-existing psychology. Each has advantages over the other. Propertyism’s advantages are due to the simplicity of its target: concerns about properties are more efficiently and reliably elicited than concerns about something’s properties. (It also better enables the incorporation of new members than tribalism, as it more readily generates concern for them before they’re members.) Propertyism’s disadvantages are due to its expansiveness: in principle, propertyist concern applies as much to those outside one’s group as to those in it. In practice, this was moderated by constraints on awareness and influence: from our ancestors’ perspective, when well-being or justice was at stake, it was almost always in their group. An inverted invisible hand was at work: just as a market economy can transmute narrow motives into broader benefits, our ancestors’ limited reach transmuted broad motives into narrower benefits. (More speculatively, we may also have evolved counters to the expansiveness of propertyism, including, perhaps, some of the more toxic elements of tribalism; e.g., dehumanizing outsiders, which weakens welfarist concern for them, and demonizing them, which prompts antagonistic moralism.)
2.4 PROPERTYISM IS UNDERAPPRECIATED
Propertyism is mostly overlooked. This is for cultural reasons, not because of individual deficiencies. People never received the necessary pedagogy: the conceptual, doxastic, and socio-linguistic foundation and tools they need to construct an adequate representation of propertyism over a lifetime. They notice bits of it here and there but have only a hazy idea of what they’re noticing, and their observations don’t add up to much. Those interested enough to have ideas about it usually don’t fare well: genuine insights are almost always enmeshed in a complex web of confusion and error, usually religious or ‘spiritual’. (Of course specialists are a different matter: some have a far more refined grasp of propertyism. Still, even their ideas are often fuzzy and limited, as I point out in the third link.)
Our collective blindspot to propertyism is so entrenched that, I have found, merely learning what propertyism is and taking an interest in it is compatible with continuing to radically underappreciate it. I believe most people – probably including you, even if you’ve understood everything so far – would be astonished at how much there is. If you could suddenly ‘see’ all of it at once, my guess is that it would seem to you that the world is awash in it.
The term “hypocognition”, coined by the anthropologist Robert Levy, is usefully applied to our current situation. Levy studied Tahitian culture in the 1960s-70s and noticed a striking lack of vocabulary for feelings of distress: where we distinguish “sadness”, “grief”, “dejection”, “exhaustion”, and “anxiety”, for example, they used a single generic label for all those feelings. They didn’t lack the feelings, of course. The difference between Tahitians and Americans wasn’t psychological but cultural: kids growing up in America inherited a richer set of cognitive and linguistic tools for identifying, exploring, and communicating about the various forms of distress than kids growing up in Tahiti. As I’m sure you know, that sort of thing isn’t unusual. Cultural variations in awareness of psychological traits is common, as are changes in cultural awareness over time. Consider, for example, how different it is to grow up in the USA now as opposed to say, the 1950s, when it comes to neurodivergent traits, trauma, sexual orientations, gender identities, cognitive biases, and attachment styles. When there are cultural deficits in the conceptually and linguistically elaborated awareness of a trait, Levy said that culture is in a state of “hypocognition” with respect to the trait. So Tahitians in the 60s-70s hypocognized the various forms of distress, America in the 1950s hypocognized the traits just mentioned - and, today, humanity (every human culture) hypocognizes propertyism.
Whatever you do, don’t just dismiss propertyism’s significance with a cynical wave of the hand. Yes, humans are often callous, cruel, and unjust. But that doesn’t make it naïve to believe that propertyism is a significant force in human life. To infer otherwise would be foolishly hasty, as you can see by considering a similarly grounded cynical dismissal of parental love (a form of particularism). Parents, unfortunately, often abuse and neglect their children, but that doesn’t make it naïve to believe parental love is a significant part of human nature. The following are all true: (a) some parents don’t love their children; (b) many parents don’t love them very much; (c) parents care – often a lot – about many things other than their children; (d) because of (a)-(c), parents often do horrible things to their children; nevertheless, (e) parental love is pervasive, influential, and deeply rooted. Likewise, some people don’t care about well-being and justice at all, many don’t care about them very much, people care a lot about other things, and, because of all that, often do horrible things. Still, propertyism is a significant force in human life. It’s a significant force, not the only significant force. Dismissing it due to an abundance of contrary behaviors would be like dismissing gravity because of birds, planes, and clouds.
3. WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
That’s the idea – why is it important?
Its importance derives from three facts:
1. Propertyism makes the world a better place.
2. Greater awareness of propertyism is well within our reach (in fact, it’s more or less inevitable).
3. Greater awareness of propertyism will massively boost its impact (in the long run).
Taken together these entail the possibility of a certain route to the world becoming a better place, which can be summarized like this (↑ = “increased”):
↑ awareness of propertyism → ↑ influence of propertyism → ↑ improvement of world
In a nutshell, my idea is important because it contributes to awareness of propertyism, and thereby to improving the world. I’ll explain, by saying a bit about each of the three facts.
3.1 PROPERTYISM MAKES THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE
Propertyism is by no means always a good thing. In fact, it’s played a significant role in many horrors; e.g., atrocities seen as steps toward a utopia of well-being and justice. Still, on the whole, propertyism is more beneficial than harmful. It’s a big part of why societies function as smoothly and pleasantly as they do, why they aren’t much worse, and why they improve.
That’s because its influence tends to be prosocial: it moves people to promote well-being and justice, and reduce suffering and injustice, not just for themselves but for others – whoever they may be. Propertyism isn’t the only source of prosocial motivation, but it is unique in the expansive scope of the prosocial concern it generates. Other sources of prosocial motivation – enlightened self-interest, love for friends and family, loyalty to favored groups – are powerful, but far more restricted. Propertyism moves us to care about those with whom we have no personal connection at all, and from whom we have no prospect of personal gain, including distant strangers, nonhuman animals, and future generations.
Propertyism thus provides precisely the sort of motivation needed to help with humanity’s most pressing problems. I mean problems like the climate crisis, poverty, corruption, racial injustice, war, economic exploitation, political manipulation, ignorance and disinformation, the horrendous mistreatment of animals on factory farms, and the increasingly existential threats posed by advanced technology. Solving these problems relying entirely on people’s narrow motivations – their self-interest and concern for friends, family, and tribe – would be extraordinarily difficult. The more encompassing motivations provided by propertyism renders them more tractable, though still extremely challenging of course.
Those are certainly the main benefits of propertyism, but there’s another worth mentioning: it counters the corrosive effects of cynicism. By “cynicism” I mean a cynical view of humanity: the idea that, on the whole, people are rotten. It’s well-known that cynicism is a social poison: in societies afflicted with it, it sours interpersonal feelings, fuels selfishness, erodes moral integrity, and undermines mental health – causing myriad downstream harms. Propertyism is an antidote to the poison of cynicism. It moves people to feel and act in ways that foster more socially beneficial – not to mention more accurate – estimates of human goodness.
3.2 GREATER AWARENESS OF PROPERTYISM IS WELL WITHIN OUR REACH (IN FACT, IT’S MORE OR LESS INEVITABLE)
Greater awareness of propertyism is (more or less) inevitable because, simply put, once people start looking for it, they’ll find it. Lots of it. That will make them want to look for more, and tell other people to look for it. And the same thing will happen to those others. In other words, awareness of propertyism will snowball: the more people look, the more they’ll find, and the more they find the more they’ll want to look.
Of course it’ll take a while. Getting it going will require ‘propertyism pioneers’: people willing to explore it on their own, even though (almost) no one else is encouraging them to do it. Most people will give propertyism its due only when it’s fashionable. So it’ll start slow, but speed up as the circle of awareness grows. The bigger the snowball, the faster it will grow.
I pointed out earlier that hypocognition is common. So is transcending hypocognition. Social awareness of psychological traits is constantly changing. That’s especially true now, given the power of our information and communications technology. When awareness of a trait snowballs, it culminates in what’s aptly called cultural awareness of that trait. Cultural awareness is the opposite of hypocognition. It means that awareness of a trait has reached a self-sustaining threshold: habits of thinking and talking about it are so widespread that kids pick them up simply in the ordinary course of growing up, eventually establishing the conditions for cultural transmission to the next generation. Cultural awareness is exemplified in its most extreme form with traits like curiosity, romantic love, and jealousy. We think and talk about these traits so naturally it’s hard to imagine that they were at some point hypocognized – that our cultural awareness of them had to be achieved.
The culmination of snowballing awareness of propertyism, then, will be cultural awareness of propertyism. That means pretty much everyone will learn of it – and acquire skills and habits of recognizing, thinking, and talking about it – simply in the normal course of growing up. That’s the “greater awareness of propertyism” that’s (more or less) inevitable. In other words, propertyism will follow the path of neurodivergent traits, trauma, sexual orientations, gender identities, cognitive biases, and attachment styles.
Of course cultural awareness is a matter of degree. I explain in the fourth link why I think cultural awareness of propertyism will eventually become highly developed. (It’s partly because, once it has been achieved, its benefits will be manifest, and so propertyism itself - desire for those benefits - will motivate further progress.) But all I’m predicting here is some cultural awareness.
You might wonder: if cultural awareness of propertyism is inevitable, why hasn’t it already happened? Partly it’s because the information and communications technology which enables easy and rapid snowballing of awareness hasn’t been around for very long. But mainly it’s because propertyism hasn’t been pointed out. The snowballing effect is inevitable only once people start looking for it. And they haven’t been looking, because it didn’t occur to them to look, and no one ever told them to. Now someone is telling them to – and, moreover, doing most of the work for them (click the links above and you’ll see what I mean).
Also, it’s not inevitable. Who knows what will happen? Totalitarian dictatorship, civilizational collapse, outright human extinction – these are just some of the possibilities which would preclude cultural awareness of propertyism. I say it’s “more or less” inevitable because I’m optimistic, not certain, that no such possibility will come to pass.
3.3 GREATER AWARENESS OF PROPERTYISM WILL MASSIVELY BOOST ITS IMPACT (IN THE LONG RUN)
Awareness of propertyism is a matter of degree, and its boosting effect varies accordingly. Put simply (and a bit simplistically): the more awareness of propertyism there is, the more influential it will be. So, to see the upper reaches of what’s possible, we should look to the long run: the effects of cultural awareness, especially after a few generations have inherited and enhanced the relevant cognitive and linguistic resources, skills, and habits. (Henceforth, unless otherwise specified, “cultural awareness” means of propertyism.)
Predicting the effects of cultural awareness is challenging, of course. All bets are off if there are fundamental changes in human psychology (e.g., due to wholesale genetic and neural restructuring guided by superintelligent AI). But aside from possibilities like that, we can be confident that cultural awareness will usher in an age of unprecedented influence for propertyism. That’s because it follows from familiar and robust psychological and social tendencies.
Given those tendencies, cultural awareness will result in three forms of increased influence for propertyism, which I’ll label Proactivity, Power, and Prominence. (Please take these claims, and everything I say about them, to be stamped with an implicit: “in general, on average…”. Don’t forget this, as I won’t mention it again.)
Proactivity: People’s propertyism will influence their actions more.
Power: People will be more socially influential in proportion to their propertyism.
Prominence: Propertyism will be more prominent in people’s view of the world, and influence their attitudes and decisions accordingly.
In the rest of 3.3, I’ll say a bit about why cultural awareness will have those results. You can use Figure 1 as a guide; the numbers indicate the order of discussion. It might help orient you to point out that Figure 1 is simply a more detailed depiction of the same causal structure indicated by “↑ awareness of propertyism → ↑ influence of propertyism”. In Figure 1, “↑ awareness of propertyism” has become “CULTURAL AWARENESS”, “↑ influence of propertyism” is now PROACTIVITY, POWER, and PROMINENCE, and “→” has expanded into the pathways indicated. (The arrows in Figure 1 are where the “familiar and robust tendencies” play their role. I say more about them at link 4, but I don’t think you’ll need that.)
Prominence is easy to explain: it just means that greater awareness of propertyism will amplify the anti-cynical effect mentioned in 3.1. Greater awareness of propertyism will do that even aside from any other change in propertyism’s influence. (Other increases in propertyism’s influence will make it even more visible – i.e., I could add arrows from Proactivity and Power to Prominence – but to keep things simple I’ll ignore further causal relations among the elements of Figure 1.)
Proactivity and Power make sense in light of how a certain general fact applies to propertyism: the fact that cultural awareness of a trait makes the most difference in the lives of those who have the trait – or, when it’s a widely but unevenly distributed trait like propertyism, those who have it most. Cultural awareness of gender dysphoria, for example, is most transformative for those in whom it is most intense. Following this pattern, cultural awareness of propertyism will be most transformative for those who experience it most strongly (‘natural propertyists’).
I need to make clear that when I talk about “differences”, “changes”, “transformation” and the like, I’m not talking about how cultural awareness will make a difference within the lives of those who are around when it is achieved. I’m comparing the entire lives of natural propertyists before cultural awareness with the entire lives of a totally distinct set of natural propertyists: those who will exist after. The latter group will lead very different lives than the former – because of cultural awareness.
Cultural awareness will change natural propertyists’ lives in three fundamental ways: (i) how others see and relate to them, (ii) how they see and relate to themselves, and (iii) how they see and relate to others. Most relevantly, natural propertyists who are born into cultural awareness will experience the following things far more than they do now:
(i) As they grow up, the adults around them will recognize and understand their propertyism, and raise them in correspondingly attuned ways. Partly as a result of that, (ii) they’ll become attuned to their own propertyism, constructing, as it develops, nuanced representations of its details and patterns. Over time this will yield cognitive and practical mastery of their propertyism: refined abilities to recognize, explore, understand, navigate, manage, predict, and describe it. Socially, they’ll see where they fit in: important ways they are like and unlike others: namely, in the strength, nature, and role of their propertyism. That will affect both their self-image and, turning to (iii), their experience of others. They’ll find an abundance of useful (to them) propertyism-related social resources: information about propertyism (both theoretical and practical), role-models, mentors, and opportunities for connecting with others in whom it is strong. When they meet other natural propertyists, their mutual attunement to their own propertyism – and their shared cultural inheritance of information about it and vocabulary for it – will give them a big head start in recognizing, understanding, and communicating with each other.
Those differences are easy to predict, as they’re hardly more than elaborations of cultural awareness itself: (i)-(iii) are what cultural awareness means specifically for natural propertyists (which is why Figure 1 labels them “[cultural awareness] for natural propertyists”).
They’re predictable - and they are profound. Most obviously, they’ll benefit natural propertyists themselves. But far more consequentially, because of (i)-(iii), natural propertyists’ propertyism will unfold more impactfully.
First, their propertyism will influence their actions more (i.e., Proactivity), due to a variety of further effects of (i)-(iii). For example, natural propertyists will exhibit the following features to a far greater extent than they do now:
PROPERTYIST SELF-IDENTIFICATIONS: Propertyism will loom large in their central, organizing self-conceptions and meaning-making personal narratives. This will – in familiar, well-documented ways – deeply shape their exercise of agency, including in the formulation and pursuit of their most ambitious long-term goals.
PROPERTYIST CONNECTIONS: They’ll engage in extensive propertyism-based socializing, both formal (joining groups) and informal (personal connections). Connections built around shared traits are, of course, major shapers of motivations and sensibilities.
FUNCTIONALITY: Their enhanced others-self, self-self, and self-others attunement will improve their overall functionality (i.e., they’ll be less dysfunctional). Of special relevance, they’ll be more skilled at managing the challenges of propertyism – both the challenges of simply having it strongly, and the challenges of integrating it into their lives in a balanced way – enabling more ambitious and effectively implemented propertyism-favored plans.
Power is largely a distinct effect of PROPERTYIST CONNECTIONS. Propertyism-based socializing will naturally result in collaboration on projects favored by propertyism. Due to the synergy of collaboration, this will yield an increase in propertyism’s social impact beyond what’s covered by Proactivity. (Proactivity and Power constitute, in effect, the internal and external empowerment of propertyism respectively: its empowerment within natural propertyists and their empowerment in society.) Power also follows from FUNCTIONALITY: in general, greater functionality means more impact of whatever sort you value – which for natural propertyists tends to include social impact.
That ends my overview of the main ways cultural awareness will boost propertyism’s influence. But I can’t just leave it there. If I did, you’d almost certainly radically underestimate how big the boost will be, especially in proactivity.
I need to say more about natural propertyists. You probably think of people like Gandhi, King, and Malala, who are both extremely rare and already highly proactive – leaving little room for proactivity gains. You should also think about a very different sort of natural propertyist – more or less the opposite of them.
The people I mean deserve the label “natural propertyist” because of their naturally strong propertyist tendencies. But they so starve and squelch those tendencies that they become more or less indistinguishable from people with little or no propertyism at all. For this reason I call them ‘second nature particularists’.
At link 4 I defend a hypothesis about second nature particularists. It has two main elements, the first of which is simply that there are a lot of them. The second is an account of why there are a lot of them. I can’t defend that hypothesis here, only sketch it. But it’s worth doing. I think you’ll see its plausibility – and that, if it’s true, the proactivity boost of cultural awareness will be very large.
Second nature particularists are endowed with healthy seeds of propertyism, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at them. By the time they’re adults they’re like everyone else: dominated by narrow concerns (how their own lives will go, and the lives of perhaps a few others). From time to time their propertyism may be stirred up by some powerful stimuli – vividly presented suffering or injustice, say. But it doesn’t go anywhere. It recedes with the stimuli, leaving behind nothing but forgotten feelings, or at most an impulsive one-off act (like donating, volunteering, or protesting).
The impotent sickliness of their propertyism isn’t some weird quirk. It’s not due to nutritional or neurological deficits, or because propertyism by its nature lends itself to feelings but not action. Rather, it’s their doing. They’ve adopted an oppositional stance to their propertyism. They actively disempower it, refusing to let it activate their executive machinery (plans, goals, intentions). And they avoid, minimize, and disrupt propertyist feelings, most obviously by directing their attention away from elicitors.
Of course, they don’t think of what they’re doing in those terms. They mostly don’t think of it at all, or even notice it. Their suppression of their propertyism has long become automatic: a set of practiced, internalized habits which work smoothly and effectively without their guidance or attention.
The reason so many people adopt and enforce an antagonistic relationship to their propertyism is that they experience it as a burden and a threat. And they experience it that way because it is that way.
Fundamentally that’s because of two features of propertyism we’ve already pointed out: its expansiveness and its weakness.
Re expansiveness. Propertyist concern is drawn to wherever the relevant properties are at stake, regardless of one’s personal stake. Unlike our ancestors in whom propertyism first emerged, we constantly know that well-being and justice are at stake on a mind-bending scale. And thanks to our technology, we regularly encounter perceptually and narratively provocative presentations of those stakes. The inevitable result is a big gap between what your propertyism moves you to care about what your particularism moves you to care about. Given our limited resources, we can’t wholeheartedly respond to both sets of concerns. By and large it’s either-or. (Earlier I pointed out that propertyism is more frequently elicited by those close to us, but typically the stakes are much smaller.)
Re weakness. Even in natural propertyists, particularist concerns usually predominate. When it conflicts with intensely felt personal needs and concerns, it easily gets cast aside as a dispensible indulgence. (It may be that in people like Gandhi, King, and Malala propertyism is strong enough to naturally dominate, resulting in particularism being ruthlessly regulated as a threat – a source of temptations to abandon the greater good in favor of personal comforts and delights. To put it crudely, perhaps most top 20% natural propertyists become second nature particularists, but not top .1% natural propertyists.)
These two features give propertyism a status similar to short-term whims which, if acted on, might ruin your life, like curiosity about heroin, illicit lustful urges, or impulses to go wild and trash your workplace. The source of the conflict differs – prioritizing properties vs. my properties rather than short-term vs. long-term – but the result is similar. Like those short-term desires, propertyism urges people to act in ways that threaten pretty much everything else they care about. And like them, it’s far from strong enough to get its way. So, like them, it doesn’t get acted on - it gets crushed.
If you review the pathways from cultural awareness to Proactivity with this hypothesis in mind, it may start to dawn on you just how explosive the proactivity boost may be.
At the moment, it’s all happening in the dark. Propertyist feelings and impulses arise, create friction for particularism, provoking a suppressive response which becomes automatic and habitual – all without any real sense of what’s happening, and certainly without any retrospective awareness. Cultural awareness will turn on the lights, making apparent the nature of the significant, long-term self-curation going on. Any personal identification with one’s propertyism will sour the process, mixing a sense of self-amputation into what otherwise just feels like self-protection. Blanket opposition to one’s propertyism will no longer be the default.
Cultural awareness will also make it less burdensome and risky to give propertyism an active role in shaping one’s life. It will still be inherently challenging, as it requires balancing concerns which tend toward radical conflict. But it’s the sort of thing people can get good at – with awareness and practice. Integrating propertyism into your life in a balanced way in the dark – i.e., in our current state of hypocognition – is like trying to prepare a fine meal with the lights off. Only those with the strongest desire to do it will even try.
To be clear, for natural propertyists, some suppression is unavoidable, on pain of complete exhaustion and dysfunctionality. Integrating a strong propertyist tendency into your life in a balanced way is like regularly indulging a powerful sweet tooth in moderation: you can do it, but it requires active measures to regulate feelings and impulses threatening imbalance. It requires self-regulatory skill, which takes time to develop, and learning from past experience and from others. It’s far easier in the light than in the dark – that is, when you inherit an understanding of what you’re regulating, concepts to track your interaction with it over time, and a shared vocabulary for it.
In short, cultural awareness will end the darkness and solitude in which people with strong propertyist tendencies grapple with the challenges they pose. When they grow up in societies aware of propertyism, natural propertyists will handle those challenges in bright light, armed with information, social support, and a lifetime of experience. Those who, today, would become second nature particularists – whom no one, not even themselves, would ever suspect of having tendencies to care about well-being and justice – will instead integrate propertyism into their lives. Maybe they won’t become Gandhis, but they’ll move in that direction. And there are far more of them than there are Gandhis. More than anything else, that is why cultural awareness will transform the world. It will unleash an immense wave of proactive, expansive prosociality. And it’ll come from a population which, absent cultural awareness, would to all appearances just not have it in them.
3.4 WHAT FOLLOWS
The importance of my idea is determined by two things.
First is the difference it will make to awareness of propertyism. Compare the distribution of probabilities over all possible trajectories of awareness of propertyism in two scenarios: the actual situation, in which my idea exists, and an alternative situation, otherwise similar, in which it doesn’t. The differential between the two distributions is my idea’s ‘awareness impact’. For example, if there’s a 20% chance of cultural awareness in 10 years, which only would have been 1%, that 19% increase is part of its awareness impact.
The second is the expected value of its awareness impact. What is the expected value of the actual distribution of probabilites over trajectories of awareness of propertyism? For example, if there’s a 20% chance of cultural awareness in 10 years, what’s the expected value of that? And what is the expected value of the distribution of probabilities over trajectories of awareness in the alternative scenario? E.g., what’s the expected value of a 1% chance of cultural awareness in 10 years? Subtract the second total from the first and you get the expected value of my idea.
Obviously it’s unknowable, at least with any precision. But consider the upper reaches of possibility.
How much faster might cultural awareness of propertyism be achieved, now that the idea is out there?
And how significant might the benefits of cultural awareness be?
You’ll have to decide what to think. My own view is optimistic. I see no reason why propertyism couldn’t become widely known very rapidly. And as I explained, and explain in more depth at link 4, I think it’s reasonable to anticipate extraordinary benefits.
When doctors discovered the value of the simple act of washing their hands, it created a dual awareness. Looking back it revealed a truly awful tragedy: countless unnecessary deaths from easily preventable diseases. But looking forward it was wonderful news: the promise of a much better tomorrow. Similarly, our ignorance of propertyism has been a tragedy for humanity, but it’s also good news. It means a powerful tool for forging a better world is ready to hand – a tool we have so far wielded only clumsily and haphazardly, due to the simple fact of our ignorance.