Back in July, one of the blog writers for Fast Company wrote another excellent post about how businesses can try to maximize selling to the new “young adult” generation moving into their 20s….the Millennials. What I doubt he really understood was that his writing was really explaining how our country continues to move clearly away from one of the core foundations—owning property.
Most of the post was focused on how to sell to Millennials, or at least realize that their buying patterns are different. Yet, leading into it, he wrote one of the most telling statements about our country.
Humanity is experiencing an evolution in consciousness. We are starting to think differently about what it means to “own” something. This is why a similar ambivalence towards ownership is emerging in all sorts of areas, from car-buying to music listening to entertainment consumption. Though technology facilitates this evolution and new generations champion it, the big push behind it all is that our thinking is changing.
“Our thinking is changing.” Yes, sadly, yes it is. This is big….really big. I’ve tried to make this point before, but let me attack it again. When the first English-speaking colonists arrived here in the early decades of the 1600s, Europe was still a place where 70-80% of the people owned little property, most owning nothing at all. It wasn’t just that they were poor; they weren’t allowed to own property. They weren’t slaves, per se, but on the whole, most lived in a semi-servitude status where they had to gain permission for much of life from someone else.
England was a bit better, but with a population boom happening also in the 1600s, there wasn’t a lot of property anyway. So, over that century, people left to try their luck in the New World. When they arrived, they did find rules, context and rich people, but generally, they were in a situation where they could pursue their own future. If they made it, great. If they didn’t, well dying by trying would be better than wasting away back in Europe. Even women realized that this “New World” held out options for them better than in Europe.
Into the 1700s, England, France, Austria and Prussia spent the first 60 years fighting with each other for control, and while no single country necessarily was a superpower over the others, England emerged supreme. As they did, the ideas of the English began to spread through an event we call the Enlightenment. And as the wars continued, others from Europe also came over to this new world, and specifically they came to East Coast where the English had established permanent colonies. They came, again, still, for the right to pursue property. Owning property WAS the American Dream before there was a real United States of America.
It was that fear of LOSING their right to pursue property, their right to have free ownership of the thing, freedom from any government anywhere coming and taking, either by force or through taxation, that LED TO THE REVOLUTION. That same passion is what led to the Civil War 80 years later; we may no longer appreciate the fact that Southerners saw the slaves as property, but at the root of the general frustration that sent the country into disunion was the willingness to fight for the right to own property.
Now, if we really are alive when “our thinking is changing,” well I won’t say we are doomed, but clearly this bodes ill for anyone hoping to maintain the formula for success that got us through the last 220+ years. Property is everything, and when society AGREES with not owning, especially when technology contributes to the point that it is nigh impossible to own something, well John Locke must be turning over in his grave.
I am not going to tell you that everyone must go out and buy a car. That’s not the point at all. But, when our thinking moves to a place where we no longer value ownership, then perhaps President Obama has succeeded in what he promised 4 years ago—to fundamentally change the country. Since I disagree with him on this point, I can only hope that it isn’t too late.