by Nathan Smith

“I’m going to miss this tree, and that tree over there, and all the memories in between.”

On the day they moved house, my friend asked his daughter what she thought about the decision to sell the family home. At first, it was the usual “I don’t know.” But her eyes were still thinking. That’s when she talked about the trees.

Some kids might regret leaving their neighbourhood friends behind. Others might reminisce about the view from their bedroom window, the nearness of the local shops or the trampoline in the backyard. Everyone sees the world slightly differently. The things you believe are universal, aren’t.

My friend’s daughter picked the trees because she’d watched them grow. They were nearly as old as her. She picked the trees because they bounded the property in space – her space. She picked the trees because they offered shade on hot days. She picked the trees because their fruit was predictable. Stability. She picked the trees because they had roots. Rooted, landed, somewhere. A thinly veiled metaphor of her gene-deep desire to say out loud, and for it to be true: “this is who I am because I come from there.” The trees can’t move. But she was. That’s why she would miss them.

Perhaps I am reading too much into a sentence from a 10-year-old. That’s possible. Other people’s words never really stick unless they exist first as seeds in our own heads. But her serious words about trees got me thinking: what are we? This isn’t a question about identity. I have written about that many times. I’m more interested in the type of people we are and are becoming, based on how we think about property.

Ostensibly, New Zealanders can own property. After all, the words and laws appear, on the surface, to support that we do have individual property rights. But looking at the actual praxis of those rights, it is clear that property ownership is a fiction. The mere existence of property taxes, for example, suggests that the true owner is whoever receives those taxes, i.e. not you.

Most people don’t notice this strange Kabuki ownership because they believe New Zealand operates with the assumption of full private property rights. That’s just not true. No one is surprised to hear that all land in China is state-owned, and that Chinese people can only lease property on long-term contracts. This makes sense because China is nominally communist. But New Zealand is not a communist country, so how are we to explain the existence of property taxes? If the state is the ultimate owner of all property in New Zealand, just like in China, why are we still using the obfuscatory language of “owning” land? Even a 10-year-old can see the problem.

Maybe you still think you own your property. Ok, try this thought experiment: Can you bury a deceased family member on your property? If the property truly belongs to you, then you should be able to do whatever you want on the land, right? Forget about asking if you can build a pool (without fences!). The real test of property ownership is always burial rights. Home is where the heart is, correct? Wrong. Home is where the hearth is. And if you can’t put down real roots by burying your ancestors on the land, you don’t really own that land. You are just leasing it, long-term.

Once you see this, it’s hard to unsee. The messaging of the system is that each of us can, and must, strive to “own” a piece of property. It is treated as the maturing waypoint in every adult’s life. We are told that a couple cannot begin a family unless and until they “own” a house. In fact, the most common reason people give for not getting married or having children is that they do not yet “own” a home.

But you will never “own” property if it is all owned by the state. The best you can do is build a house on state-owned land. At least then the wood, tiles and brick will be yours. You can own a house, but you cannot own land. It is a mistake to confuse the terms “property market” with “housing market.” There is no property market. There is only a housing market.

The truth about property is that if you can’t defend it, you don’t own it. At every time and place across history, there is always just one person with full property rights: the guy with the biggest stick. At the raw level of force, the state today has the biggest stick. By the way, “if you can’t defend it, you don’t own it” also applies to money. If you needed all your money right now, could you get it? Or is it sitting in a bank? Yeah, I thought so…

Some people look at this situation and predict that the future will be neo-feudal. In the coming world, we are all serfs performing salaried jobs in which every minute is managed by a Big Business, and we return each night to a house owned by that same Big Business. Since large hedge funds like BlackRock and State Street already hold significant shareholdings in most large companies and own huge amounts of housing and land, the theory of neo-feudalism could be the future.

But if we are serfs, where are the lords? The state is not a lord. It is not even a person. Just like God, no one has ever seen the state. As the French historian Hippolyte Taine wrote, “It is always difficult for rude brains to form any conception of the vague, invisible, abstract entity called the state, to regard it as a veritable personage and a legitimate proprietor, especially when they are persistently told that the state is everybody.”

In other words, the state is just a collection of civil servants, none of whom have any executive authority over whatever job they were hired to do. Not even politicians can claim anything remotely approaching executive decision-making authority. The most basic requirement of a lord is that he has executive authority. But this kind of power no longer exists. We cannot be serfs, because executive power is not a real thing in the modern state. There are no lords. There is just the state.

So, I doubt the future will be neo-feudal. Instead, we should listen to my friend’s 10-year-old daughter. If all we own are our houses and our cars, then we are nomads.

Nomads live light. Their homes are temporary, and nothing is built to last forever. The local world of the nomad is not something to be fenced in or reshaped. To a nomad, movement is not a disruption to life; it is the organising principle of life.

Time feels different for the nomad. Instead of calendars pinned to walls, they have seasons, cycles and signs. Decisions are reactive, not proactive. Wealth is viewed as movable, so it must always be liquid and measured by price rather than by inherent value. Rules are remembered rather than written down. The nomad has no real moral basis for preferring family over strangers, since today’s neighbours might become tomorrow’s lifeline.

Nomads move from house to house, place to place, suburb to suburb. Their happiness is tied to how long they remain in one house or at one job. Too long in one place, and the nomad worries about the opportunity costs. The nomad is always thinking: What can I extract from this location? How fast can I extract it? How much do I need to extract before I can move to another location or job? For the nomad, for us, one year at a single location is indistinguishable from 10 years at another, because the life of a nomad is routes, not roots.

My friend’s 10-year-old daughter could see the insanity of the juxtaposition in which we are promised property ownership, but we are treated like nomads. We treat ourselves as nomads. This constant, cloying, clawing, desire for fresh opportunity, just over the hill – “don’t miss out! Live for today!” – cannot be squared with our twin desire for a place to truly call our own. We pretend our routes are better than roots and that it is somehow better to build a better life for our children by building nothing that lasts.

Well, why don’t you ask the children if they want routes or roots?

Originally published on Flat Circle.