Bad Ideas and Nightmares

This whole post is a response to something Dror Feiler, an Israeli Swede, said while discussing the concept of punk on Swedish radio. Despite being a middle-aged man, he is a proper punk himself, or maybe rebel is a better word. His best idea and dream is peace between Israel and Palestine. He uses some unconventional methods to say the least. Still I will choose to discuss the worst of his ideas, and what implications it has:

I believe that we should not be able to own anything. We should not even be able to "own" a relationship (no man can be someone's husband and no woman can be someone's wife).

I feel the world tremble as illegal downloaders jump with excitement. The above is not a quote and it is translated from Swedish to English. The idea is communist without a doubt, and it will not work… ever. The real problem is that it does not even work in theory. There cannot be a society where nothing can be owned. A whole legal system would collapse. For instance, how do you define theft? If I see a BMW that I know nobody owns I could just take it. A person who also wants it could kill me (can I own the right to live?) and take the car. Chaos.

I got really angry at the first statement but then Dror Feiler continued with a real life example where they had tried this. Somewhere on Earth a group of people put all their watches in a basket. Then they all picked a watch from the basket and got stuck with it. Amazing, but wait. Didn't they just trade their own watch for another (which I suspect they didn't like)? Trade: You give something you own in return for something else. If they didn't like their new watch could they go to someone with a watch they like and trade again? After endless watch swapping would everyone end up with the same watch they had in the first place? Probably yes.

Modern humans (well since forever) define themselves by what they own: The clothes we wear, the amount of money we own and the property we own. This creates class differences (which communists don't like but from which we cannot escape) and it has always been this way. For many years it has been about land, the more you own the better. The Roman and British Empires are examples of this and in the animal world the owning of big pieces of land is sometimes essential for survival.

High on some hippie drug, Dror Feiler, thinks that humans should do something that has never been seen before: create a community where nothing can be owned, where everyone is the same, where no one has the right to choose and where any present swingers club will look like Sunday church. I hear the lions roaring with laughter.