At its most fundamental level, economists tell us, ownership is “the right to exclude.” It sets up boundaries and allows the owner to decide who may cross them. My possession is truly mine—the thing and I somehow belong together—precisely to the degree that I can bar you from access to it. This is an oddly negative vision of having and belonging, of course, but at least it is clear and simple. Ownership has, however, taken on a deeper meaning in our time and place. Much more than a regime governing access to property, ownership is now the primary way that many seek to belong, to be at home in the world.

A whole cultural paradigm has grown up around the fetishization of ownership. We might call this paradigm “ownerism”—a view of the world that pictures ownership as identity-conferring, indexed to the individual, and unbounded by duty. Ownerism has permeated many aspects of American life in the twenty-first century, and has come to seem simply natural to us: of course each of us always wants more for ourselves, and of course we will each grab and keep as much as we can, however we can; this has come to seem like bare human nature. It is not. Many outside observers have commented on the strange, sometimes pathological, nature of ownerist culture. The Oglala Sioux Medicine Man Black Elk, ruminating on the encroachment of this culture on the Lakota people, reported what he found on his first trip to New York City:

I could see that the Wasichus [white men] did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation’s hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. This could not be better than the old ways of my people.

If many of us assume that a large percentage of people would indeed take everything from their neighbor if they could, we would do well to remember that a broad swath of humanity has found this an unaccountably strange way to live.

We should not, of course, go so far as to imagine that the pursuit of wealth is a modern invention. Around two thousand years ago, the apostle Paul warned that the love of money is the root of all evil. But it does seem that the widespread and unabashed worship of wealth might be something relatively new. In 1944, in his epochal work The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, the economic historian Karl Polanyi reported that ethnologists studying premodern systems of labor and exchange have generally found a marked absence of “the motive of gain” and even of “the principle of laboring for remuneration.” These premodern systems were varied—some were characterized by a system of gift and reciprocation, some by centralized redistribution, and some by household-scale subsistence. None of them was perfect. There was still the possibility of conflict, injustice, oppression, and scarcity. But if the ethnologists are correct, the lust for money or material things was generally not a dominant, or even very significant, motivator of action. Instead, according to Polanyi,

The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only insofar as they serve this end.

These premodern societies encountered economics as a necessary part of larger human endeavors and values. Modern market economies have, Polanyi warns, removed economic activity from any larger picture of the good for human society and allowed the profit motive to run roughshod. Classical liberalism promised that the market economy could run, autonomous, on its own track, according to its own values and metrics, leaving the adjacent society basically undisturbed. Polanyi argues that, instead, the market has swallowed everything. We do not simply have a market economy; we have a market society.

Polanyi is a historian, not an ethicist. He mostly aims to show how historically unusual our current arrangements are. Aristotle—whom Polanyi quotes approvingly—goes further, arguing that commerce powered by avarice is at odds with human nature, and therefore bad for us. In the first book of the Politics, he writes:

There are two sorts of wealth-getting: one is part of a household management, the other is retail trade. The former is necessary and honorable, while that which consists in trade is justly censored; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another.

In Aristotle’s view, the unnaturalness of trade comes from its extractive, exploitative nature. Certainly, some kind of exchange is often necessary. No household is entirely self-sufficient, nor should it be. But trade in which I scheme to gain more from you than I give in return is predatory and greedy. It is a violation of the fundamental friendship that exists between human beings. This kind of greed has no upper end. It is hellbent on mere, raw, dumb, infinite accumulation, rather than the good of the household or the broader community. It is cancerous.

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