Somehow we aren’t able to think about surrender without thinking about things. Surrendering is always the thought for surrendering something, some thing, of dispensing with something, of renouncing something, of letting go of something that we possess. It inevitably refers to some property we hold, an to which we feel some kind of natural or acquired right . It might be a material thing, what we commonly call ‘private property’, a book or bicycle or a house. Or it might be a non-material thing, an idea or a thought which invented or are the originator of and to which we therefore have a similar kind of right.
This way of thinking about ‘private property’ is distinctly Western in its origins, even if it has spread to become a global norm. Its most puzzling feature is the problem of its origin.
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