The Enclosed Generation

Property is only ever as real as the ultimate determiner of its outer boundaries. In the same fashion that the self is an organism constructed within its larger context, and that self is thus only as real, in its outer-bounds (or foundations), so too, is a piece of property only existent within the system that constructed it. A feudal fiefdom can only come into existence by that which creates it, the living-within by the peasants and the lord’s context within the system of codes and ettiquetes that govern the broader social order of rural ownership. Property in this fashion, can never be private, but is always emergent, a property arising-from the way a given society parcels its profit-ownership.

In the twentieth century and beyond, Enclosure had been so fully solidified as to create a new form of property than what existed previously. With the dramatic flight to the industrial core of impoverished peasantry and the destruction of the rural gentry, the old form of the fiefdom was replaced by a new form guaranteed by the centralized state-bank apparatus, a combined network of meaning draped across the land in order to create the Nation, using as a foundation, what had previously existed. The ultimate ends of this new form of property can be seen in the United States, the western states and counties blocked into geometric borders with little regard for practical function or use, land masses carved up before settlers had even arrived to survey its full expanse. 

Its within this new form of property, that form of property guaranteed by the centralized creation-engine of the Nation (the State and its Banks), that a new form of the self is constructed by these relations, just as the peasant was within the feudal order. This self is complete by full integration into the whole body of the state, as a functioning organism. The cry of the American conservative belies this - “get a job!” they should, in attempt to enforce the obligation of conformity as a self constructed as a unit within the organism of the State. Such is the purpose of the phenomenas of this selfhood - home ownership, done inextricably through banking, car ownership, employment, proper paperwork, etc. The cases of keeping up the Joneses leading into bankruptcy and extreme debt are nothing more than the deepest expression of this, a buy-in so complete it overwhelms the older facets of the self, those that desire for the removal of debt, for the freedom of accounting in the black.

It’s the wealthiest generation in human history, raised within this incredibly expensive mesh-net of paperwork, that has grown a psyche as naturally within it as a fish breathes in water. Formed in the body of the state, it’s the self of the boomer that comes into the world as more of an intersection point between various flows of the state than anything else. The body of the United States is an edenic one in which they were grown within and to this day are defending the spongious corpse of, even to the death they cannot believe in. In a universe existing of the State and nothing beyond, their terminal weakness has been shown in their response to Coronavirus. Formed solely as beings of the State, death to them simply does not exist. Its for this reason that countless have come forward, declaring it a hoax, believing themselves immune for all manner of bizarre excuses, boarding plague ships and attending gatherings. Nothing more than a cell within an organism they cannot even see the existence of, the risk of death is unapparent to them as the very existence of death is incomprehensible to them.