|
Overwhelmingly, I believe the issue we're facing is somewhat to do with identity and property being tied together, and not something specific to the US. And this is a factor that precedes 1776 in the rise of national identities: monarchs had a strongly individualized identity, but identity across a people via a national boundary was a more limited consideration until trade growth had sufficiently developed a reason to use such: language, religion and local allegiance did most of the work. The locals could often evade legibility by obscuring their identity. But property-based identity held a lot of currency by the time 1776 rolled around: it established credibility as an actor with some real agency and independence within trade relations, and therefore our modern nations have built their legibility around property. And what we've done since is to either try to position everyone somewhere within the property system, or to turn towards an authoritarian model to create identity without ownership(as in the various communist experiments, or the flat, hidden authority in "Tyranny of Structurelessness"). So when we have the idea of something like identity theft, or corporate personhood, that's a thing generated of having an identity to own, cascading down into human relationships as property, personal branding, etc. And the largest, most developed function of the legal system in the US is to make judgments about property. But we also have systems of identification that are imposed in an authoritative fashion(the SSN, DL, passport, etc.) - every nation is a mixed identity market in this way. And in this respect I think the philosophy is truly starting to fail in a world which has so greatly automated ownership, and we will need to consider both identity and property at the same time to reach useful alternatives. |