Property, friendship and hierarchy

Some considerations on private property, friendship, and marriage which I thought fit well together into one blog post.

0. Contents

1. Property is of one
2. Friendship is of similars
3. Marriage is hierarchical
4. Notes

1. Property is of one

The perfect form of property ownership is to be owned by a single man, that is, private property, as opposed to common property.

The essential reason for this is that of action conflicts. When property is owned in common, the common owners may have conflicting plans of what to do with the property. Since the plans are conflicting, the same property cannot be used for both: the conflict must be resolved.

There is no perfect method of conflict resolution except the foregone decision of the winner. A majority vote is the best one we have, and yet it may result in a tie when there are even numbers, or it may not solve anything at all if a minority party is sufficiently strong, and willing to resort to violence. The perfect conflict is solved instantly, which is to say, there is no conflict: the owner decides.

In many cases, property must be considered the property of a society, which engages in a joint enterprise. The analogue of private property in the case of a society is hierarchy. Conflict is avoided among the members of a society by its foregone conclusion: the head decides.[1]

This is, I believe, the essential reason why private property is the best form of property; but there are other alleged reasons, which I will not discuss here.

2. Friendship is of similars

Friends are, properly, of one mind. “It is proper to friends to approve and disapprove the same things, and to be delighted in and to be pained by the same things.”[2] “God is ever drawing like towards like, and making them acquainted.”[3]

Against this it was urged[4] that similars can do nothing to each other that they could not do to themselves; hence, they cannot be of use to each other, and therefore cannot be loved by one another. But friendship requires mutual love, and therefore friendship cannot be of similars.

This argument, which is perfectly valid, only seems soluble by denying the major. What, then, do similar friends provide to each other?

I think the answer is another body. Even if friends start with the same knowledge, unable to teach anything to each other, they must of necessity have different pairs of eyes, and, therefore, notice different new things about the world. They can share this new knowledge with each other for mutual benefit. They can also do more things together than apart.

This is the meaning of the assertion that a friend is “a single soul dwelling in two bodies”.[5] Friends are of one mind, and they provide to each other the benefit of additional bodies; there is no conflict in this, because they agree on everything, insofar as the friendship is perfect.[6]

Given this fact, and only given this fact, can we explain the assertion that “friends hold all things in common”[7]. Friends, being alike and similar in all things, can enter upon no action conflicts: they always desire to do the same things with their property. They may consider each other’s property as their own because they are, to some extent, the same person. “Things we do through the agency of our friends count, in a sense, as done by ourselves.”[8]

Partly because of this, friendship is acknowledged by all to be an equal relation; neither friend is the head of the other.

3. Marriage is hierarchical

Another reason why friendship is an equal relation is that a friendship is not a society; it is not created to achieve a specific end or purpose.

When a society is created to achieve an end, some property usually needs to be considered property of the society, so as to divide what is dedicated to the ends of the society as a whole from what may be used to achieve the exclusive ends of its particular members.

For this reason, companies are considered to have property of their own, even when there is no “limitation of liability”; this property is dedicated to achieving the ends of the society, which is, for instance, the making of shoes, in a shoe company. States have their “state-owned” property, to achieve the end of the state, which is the general good;[9] and families also usually have some property as a family, such as a house or a collection of books, in order to achieve the ends of the family, namely the begetting and education of children.

Friendship, by contrast, is not created to achieve some end, and hence no property is properly needed to be owned by the friendship, qua friendship. Friends hold all things in common insofar as they are friends, but if the friendship is faced with the fact of its imperfection – if the friends turn out to have some conflicting desires – there need be no property of which the control is ambiguous. If it comes to it, each friend has his own property.

Moderns, because of their Epicurean sympathies, tend to err by making marriage and family into nothing but a close friendship – one involving living together and having sex, say. They see no necessary connection between marriage and children. As such, they see no need for the existence of societal property of the marriage; couples hold some things in common in just the same way as friends do.

Besides, they deny the perfection of private property, which is affirmed here. It is best for every society which owns societal property to be hierarchical, in order to achieve the perfect resolution of action conflicts among members. This is especially true of a marriage, where a majority vote is impossible, since there are only two members.

It is not necessary, in principle, that the head be the man. But generally, and traditionally, it has been, and not without reason.

The man is, generally, stronger: it is difficult for the stronger party to be the submissive one, since the stronger can easily challenge the rule by threat of violence.[10]

The man was also, traditionally, the only, or the primary, source of income of the household, which made it easy for him to make the choices, since he could threaten not to contribute any more income to the society if its decisions were not his liking.

I believe that these are the essential reasons why the rule of the man was instituted, but there are other alleged reasons, which I will not discuss here.[11]

4. Notes

[1] ‘head’ of the hierarchy, which word is substituted in specific hierarchies for ‘leader’, ‘boss’, ‘chief’, ‘king’, ‘bishop’, ‘Pope’, etc.

[2] SCG, 3, 151.3; Thomas attributes this quotation to Cicero elsewhere – see fn. 10 of page 44 here – but it is actually from Sallust, Bellum Catilinæ, ch. 20.

Addition, 2022-02-20: See also Plato, Republic, 5.462b

[3] Homer as quoted in Plato, Lysis, 214a

[4] Plato, Lysis, 214e

[5] Aristotle, as quoted by Diogenes Laërtius

[6] I might, in a future blog post, attempt to give an explanation of the precise respect in which friends are similar, so as to explain friendships which seem to be very close, and yet between widely different people.

[7] Plato, Phaedrus, 279c; see also Xenophon, Memorabilia, 2.4.6

[8] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 3.3, slightly changed

[9] Whatever the hell the “general good” is. I might make another post about that.

[10] This blog post originally said that the rule of the man is “fitting” for this reason. An update on 2022-01-25 removed this phrasing. The same update also added the following reason, about income, which was not listed before, with strength being the only reason I could originally think of.

Besides these changes, however, the update did not fully bring this blog post to the way I would have written it in this later date, which is why I left in the reference to “Epicurean sympathies”, despite that blog post having since been retracted.

See the newer blog post, which was written on the same day as the update, for more on hierarchy within marriage, in particular.

[11] cf., for instance, C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, book 3, chapter 6 (quoted here)