Charles Eisenstein

Indeed, most of us participate, in one way or another, in the ongoing theft of the commons.

a revolution that is insufficiently deep, and so re-create the old order in a different, distorted form.

The transition from the early days, when ownership of land was as unthinkable as ownership of the sky, sun, and moon, to the present day, when nearly every square foot of the earth is subject to ownership of one sort or another, is really just the story of our changing view of ourselves in relation to the universe.

Thus God has created everything in such a way that all things be possessed in common. Nature therefore is the mother of common right, usurpation of private right.15

Even more ironically, most people today who profess to follow Christian teachings have turned everything inside out and associate socialism with atheism and private wealth with God’s favor.

The first economist to develop this idea fully was Henry George, in his eloquent 1879 classic Progress and Poverty.

especially when the origin of that ownership is based on ancient injustice?

Gesell’s reasoning is compelling and remarkably prescient in its understanding of ecology and the connected self. Read this extraordinary passage from 1906:

this mutilation is even worse than the amputation of a body part, for wounds of the body heal, but
the wound left … by the amputation of a piece of land festers forever, and never closes. At every term for the payment of rent, on every Quarter Day, the wound opens and the golden blood gushes out. Man is bled white and goes staggering forward. The amputation of a piece of land from our body is the bloodiest of all operations; it leaves a gaping, festering wound which cannot heal unless the stolen limb is grafted on again.

Any squirrel is freer than I am, any deer.