[DoughnutHole]

That is entirely still a societal norm and a statement of personal belief about specific rights. You might believe those rights to be inalienable and that your property is necessarily yours, but that doesn't actually translate to to a guarantee of maintaining that possession in the absence of the institutions that currently protect that ownership.

Anyone who's lived through a massive societal upheaval, collectivisation, dictatorship etc can attest to this - your ownership of property only means anything in as much as it's protected. If the state fails, or if society's understanding of private property radically changes then your investment is only valuable if you can hold on to it.

Even in the private-property loving West the value of an individuals property can often turn out to just be the amount that the state decides to pay them when they seize it via eminent domain.

[galaxyLogic]

All true but still I think there is a clear difference. Assets can and are traded in exchanges. Their value goes up and down based on what is the "shared belief" of their expected value. Laws are not traded. They can change but do so many orders of magnitudes less frequently than the value of assets on the market. Laws are not beliefs they are societal contracts.

[zikzikzik]

> Laws are not beliefs they are societal contracts.

Societal contracts are just collective beliefs. When the number of people upholding a particular societal contract goes to zero it ceases to exist. Just as any other belief, it requires believers to exist. Unlike, for example, the space rock that some group of sentient organisms decided to call Mars.

[galaxyLogic]

it is not about "believing a societal contract". It is about believing that other people follow it or not. Contract is not a belief.