Topic: Possession

People have an obsession with possession. Since all the men in my head love social critique, I'm usually in favor of condemning many parts of society, even when I'm a part of it. Material obsessions do digust me, but I think a larger problem is the desire to own people in a sense. The little Freud upstairs takes me back to first grade, where I remember playing tug of war with some other girls over my best friend. MY best friend. She was mine. Not theirs. Middle school, too, was a time where I struggled to keep my best friend away from envious other potential best friends. But why couldn't she have more than one best friend? Or why couldn't I?
Maybe it's because we have problems with sharing. We have to share our toys, so we learn to hold onto our people. And when someone else is holding onto the same person, my little Pope Urban II tells me I need to fight them off and take hold of as many people as possible. You see, those men in my head are often pretty selfish. They just want friends but don't know how to go about that. While little Loyola's missionary-friendship efforts are commendable, sharing people is important. Sharing kind of implies ownership though, and my little Harriet Beecher Stowe reminds me that is wrong.
I think it's all those tyrants in my head that bolster the idea of ownership. I don't think other people have all these dictators upstairs like I do, but I think that people feel superior when they have more things, or as the case may be, more friends. My AP Psych teacher once told our class that holding hands with someone was no more than a way of saying, "This is mine." Does this imply that relationships are also about ownership? Are they tsar-serf relations or do we equally own each other to an extent?
But people aren't property and as Rousseau often reminds me, "Men are born free, but everywhere they are in chains." So let us thurst off this obsession with possession. Somehow. I would say stop listening to the tyrants, but all of my little peasants also really want to own things. And so I give unto them cake.

By the way, I'm not schizophrenic. Just a voice to a myriad of thoughts.

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