“NB: I said ‘everyone’, not ‘everything’. You wouldn’t recognise your ancestors as people, but they were, and you still are. Those ancestors were arrogant bastards—how else did they become boss species on our ball of mud? You’ve inherited from them just about everything that makes you human, apart from a few late glosses such as language. You got territoriality along with the rest. If somebody trespasses on it you’re liable to turn killer—although if you don’t like the idea you can kill yourself, which is among our few claims to uniqueness.
“Territoriality works this way. Take some fast-breeding animals like rats—or even rabbits, though they’re herbivorous rodents, not carnivores as we are—and let them multiply in an enclosure, making sure at all stages they have enough food and water. Early on you’ll see them behaving in the traditional rat fashion when conflicts arise: the quarrellers will square up to one another, feint, jab, charge and withdraw, the victory going to the more efficient braggart. Also the mothers will take good care, rat-style, of their young.
“When the pen becomes crowded past a certain point, the fights won’t be symbolic any more. There’ll be corpses. And the mothers will start to eat their young.
“It’s even more spectacular in the case of solitary creatures. Put a female ripe for mating into too small a cage that’s already occupied by a healthy male, and he’ll drive her out rather than give way to the reproductive urge. He may even kill her.
“Very baldly, then: shortage of territory, of space to move around and call your own, leads to attacks on members of your own species in defiance even of the normal group-solidarity displayed by pack-animals. Lost your temper with anyone lately?
“However, being a member of a species that’s nothing if not ingenious, you’ve figured out two directions in which you can abstract your territoriality: one is to privacy, the other is to property.
“Of the two, the former is more animal and more reliable. Your base need is to have a manor defined against a peer group, but you don’t have to do as dogs, tomcats and sundry other species do—mark it out with a physical trace, then patrol it constantly to scare away intruders. You can abstract to a small enclosed area where no one else trespasses without your permission, and on this basis you can operate fairly rationally. One of the first concomitants of affluence is a rapid raising of privacy-standards: someone from a comparatively low-income background has to accept that his childhood will be lived in a crowded, busy environment—in contemporary household terms, one room of the dwelling (if it has more than one) will be a family-room and that’s the centre of operations. Someone from a more prosperous home, however, will take it for granted from about the time he learns to read that there’s a room where he can go in and shut the door against the world.
“This is why (a) men from wealthy backgrounds make better companions under privative conditions such as a Moon voyage—they don’t feel that their human environment is a permanent infringement of their right to a manor, no matter how thoroughly it’s been abstracted from the original referent of a piece of terrain (b) the standard route out of the slum or ghetto is crime—equals getting your own back on other members of your species who trespass continually on your manor; (c) gangs develop primarily in two contexts—first, in the slum or ghetto where privacy as a counterpart of the manor can’t be had and a reversion takes place to the wild state, with pack-hunting and the patrolling of an actual physical patch of ground; and second, in the armed services, where the gang is dignified by being called a ‘regiment’ or some other hifalutin dirty word but where the reversion to the wild state is deliberately fostered by deprivation of privacy (barracks accommodation) and deprivation of property (you don’t wear the clothes you chose and bought, you wear a uniform which belongs to US!!!). Fighting in an army is a psychotic condition encouraged by a rule-of-thumb psychological technique discovered independently by every son-of-a-bitch conqueror who ever brought a backward people out of a comfortable, civilised state of nonentity (Chaka Zulu, Attila, Bismarck, etc.) and started them slaughtering their neighbours. I don’t approve of people who encourage psychoses in their fellow human beings. You probably do. Cure yourself of the habit.
“We are breeding so fast that we cannot provide adequate privacy for our population. That might not be fatal—after all, it wasn’t until as a species we discovered affluence that the demand for it became overwhelming. But we’re undermining the alternative form of abstraction of territoriality, and deprived of both we’re going to wind up psychotic in the same way as a good soldier.
“The point of abstracting to property is that the manor forms an externalised aid to self-identification. Put a man in a sensory deprivation tank, he comes out screaming or shaking or … We need continual environmental reassurance that we are who we think we are. In the wild state, the manor provides such a reassurance. In the state we’ve been describing a few paragraphs back, the ability to shut ourselves away from the continually fluctuating pressure of our peers enables an intermittent reassessment of our identity. We can lean on a group of objects—a clever surrogate for a patch of ground—but only if they have (a) strong personal connotations and (b) continuity. The contemporary environment denies us both. The objects we possess weren’t made by ourselves (unless we’re fortunate enough to display strong creative talents) but by an automated factory, and furthermore and infinitely worse we’re under pressure every week to replace them, change them, introduce fluidity into precisely that area of our lives where we most need stability. If you’re rich enough you go and buy antiques and you like them as a pipeline into the past, not because you’re a connoisseur.
“The classical slave system survived for a long while despite the paradoxical discontinuity of pan-human identity which is implicit in any such social pattern. The American slave system was already breaking to pieces before the Civil War. Why? The answer is in the Code of Hammurabi, among other places—the first truly elaborate legal code we have any record of. It lays down fines and other punishments for personal injury. Although it’s true that the penalty for injuring a free man is heavier than for injuring a slave, the slave is always there. Under the Romans, a slave had a certain inalienable minimum both of property (NB!) and of civil rights, which not even his owner could infringe. It was thinkable for a debtor to sell himself into slavery and pay off what he owed, in the rational—maybe far-fetched, but not lunatic—anticipation of recouping his fortunes. The first successful banker we know about was a Greek slave called Pasion who made himself a millionaire, bought his freedom and went into partnership with his former bosses.
“In the case of the American negro slave this possibility was not inherent in the system. The slave had the same human rights as a head of cattle—nil. A good master might conceivably manumit a slave who’d done him a good turn, or pension him off with his freedom as a favourite horse would be put out to pasture to spend his declining years in peace. But a bad one might decide to maim the man, brand him, or flog him to death with an iron-tipped cat-o’-nine-tails, and there was no one to call him to account.
“True, you’re not a slave. You’re worse off than that by a long, long way. You’re a predatory beast shut up in a cage of which the bars aren’t fixed, solid objects you can gnaw at or in despair batter against with your head until you get punch-drunk and stop worrying. No, those bars are the competing members of your own species, at least as cunning as you on average, forever shifting around so you can’t pin them down, liable to get in your way without the least warning, disorienting your personal environment until you want to grab a gun or an axe and turn mucker. (This is in essence why people do that.)