Chapter 14

Deserving to Exist

Human Contradictions in the Market

I have always wondered how profit could be derived through individual equal exchange. The answer I want to give is that profit flows through gifts that come to exchange and the market from nonexchange areas. These gifts come first from our giving value to equality (as do mothers with the son's similarity to the father), second from our giving value to ego orientation and exchange itself, third from nurturing the worker and fourth from giving to the capitalist through surplus value. There is another 'equal' exchange, between worker and capitalist, to which value is given from the outside. The worker agrees to work for a salary, but only because s/he can't survive any other way. Extra time, attention, labor and loyalty are gifts given in exchange for the 'privilege' of being paid the going rate for labor of a certain kind. Going 'up' a logical step, in scarcity the chance to have a paid job is a 'gift.' Care, honesty, loyalty, work excellence, and good humor are given in reciprocity for the 'gift' of the job. (We could look at this almost as a reciprocal exchange of gifts--as happens in some pre-capitalist societies.)While market exchanges may be equal at one level, at another level unseen gifts are constantly being given to, through and around them.

Marx's 'surplus value' is the value of labor in excess of a salary based on the cost of reproducing the laborer. Actually, surplus value constitutes a gift from the laborer to the capitalist. Since the wife's or mother's gift labor is uncounted in the reproduction of the laborer, its value also flows into surplus value. Scarce jobs are over-valued, and gifts flow to them and to those who have them from those who do not have them.

Economic operators usually do not pay attention to what the source is, but only to the accumulation of quantity for future use without qualitative variety. They are justified in this by the hall-of-mirrors, the self-similarity of all of the equal exchanges going on in the market and at different levels which constitute the context of each exchange. Moreover, the homogeneity or 'one word' character of money allows the market to replace the qualitatively varied vocabulary of language with the quantitative hierarchy of prices.¹ In the market, the only way we could name and thus recognize and appreciate a gift as a value is by exchanging it for money, which would contradict its gift character. Thus the gifts remain unvisible and unvalued.

Profit derives, in part, from our giving to equality and valuing it over need. Because someone participates in the equal exchange, s/he receives the gift of being valued instead of someone who only has a need. Any surplus that might otherwise have gone to the person who only has a need is thus 'free' to flow as a gift into the profit of the equal exchanger. The person with the need is seen as unequal unless s/he also has some other product or money as the result of a previous transaction. Actually, being equal as exchangers only implies that people practicing the behavior of exchange have produced for and exchanged with a group of others who are equally self-interested and adversarial. Their equality as actors and as values in the exchange process implies exchangeability--reciprocal substitutability, and their lack of bonds implies indifference.

There are needs which come from the process of exchange itself--like the needs coming from the process of masculation--which must be satisfied by gifts given to that process from the outside. The giftgiving way stands aside for exchange to take over, transferring its own ignored potential value as the mode of distribution to it, nurturing it and those who practice it. If it competes, if there is an abundance of a product, through over-production, for example, prices go down. If prices go down, more of the product's value is given to the consumer as a gift, and future production for exchange is jeopardized.

The market, like the masculated ego, is an artificial psycho-socio-linguistic invention using decontextualization. Like the ego, it needs to receive value directly (without an exchange) from giftgiving, while at the same time competing with it and winning. The people who are participating in the artificial invention, doing the exchanging, develop a need to be valued as opposed to those who are outside the market. They also need to be maintained by others. In order to be motivated to engage in this artificial practice, they include an extra recompense for themselves (an 'incentive') in the price of their products. The profit they receive is a gift, not only from the producers of surplus value (and those who nurture the producers), but also from the buyers of scarce goods. It is a contribution of gifts from the unknown and the unknowing many. Scarcity of jobs and scarcity of goods function together to keep the equal exchanges high and the flow of gifts going towards the 'haves.'

De-serving is a self-similar way of giving value not only to the exchangers but to exchange. Those who produce for the market de-serve a recompense. Exchangers receive the value of being equally defined as adversaries belonging to the same contradictory class. They are seen as superior to those who are unemployed or unemployable, those who cannot sell or buy. The equality of their products to money seems to imply the (mutually exclusive) equality between them, just as the ability to use the same words regarding similar things implies a (mutually inclusive) equality between interlocutors.

If our communitary selves are developed through language and material giving, then exchange, the material interaction of not-giving, can be understood as the basis of a particular kind of self. Materially it develops a private owner, while psychologically it develops an ego which is functional to the process and to ownership: competitive, striving to have more, to have and/or be the definiendum, and to become the masculated privileged one.

Those with the ego type adapted to exchange enter the dominant class of the self-interested many, all of whom are attempting to be privileged ones. The individual macho competitive action coincides with the logic of substitution by taking the place of giftgiving. So does the masculated nation, class, race or religion, over-taking others who are constrained to give up and give value and goods to the conquerors. Self-reflecting and male-reflecting groups overcome other-oriented groups and are nurtured by them. The egos which are produced by exchange define their expansion and the expansion of the market system as 'civilization.'

The Definition as Model:

Another Turn of the Self-Similar Screw

Gender is actually something that we create and impose on ourselves as we go along, but it is made by cultures to seem biological and, therefore, impossible to change. We tend to see gender roles as constants and consider individual adaptations as variables. For example, differences of individual temperament are read as gender differences. An aggressive girl is said to "act like a boy"; a compliant boy is seen as "acting like a girl." The idea that a characteristic of ours is our nature causes us to look deep within ourselves to find it. But if it is a cultural construct we are looking for, it is, at least at early stages, something that doesn't already exist within us--we have to make it, according to the models and definitions that are given to us. Language itself is an important modeling element. Let us look again at how it functions in masculation.

We have not realized how cultural factors are responsible for the definition of gender because the form of the definition is tangled up in the content of gender, and its genesis is involved in its present practice. These are complex and confusing cultural factors. The definition of gender incarnates the structure of definition itself in its content, as male takes the place of female. Male behavior strives to carry out the general, over-taking position of the definiendum. We recognize this behavior as a thing related to the word 'male' and feed it back into the original equation, causing a social self-similar structure. There is a meta

Figure 22. Gender roles and the definition coincide, creating self similar images at the levels of form and content.

level involved, perhaps without our knowing it. We feed the form of the definition itself into gender. Then we feed gender back into the form of the definition.

Immersed in language as they are, gender terms are disguised to look like other terms, and the disguise adds to their potency² as self-fulfilling prophecies. The self-similarity of gender terms--with their aggressive and over-taking referents in the case of terms for males, or in contrast the self-similarity with things which give way in the case of terms for noncompetitive females--appears to embed the behavior mandate of those terms within the terms themselves. (See Figure 22.) The mandate appears to reside 'inside' the terms but actually depends on an external context that has already been influenced by it for generations. The father's gender behavior has already been influenced by the self-fulfilling term 'male' when the son takes him as model. The mother, like her mother before her, reinforces the mistake by giving up being the model for the boy. As she gives him into the other category because she is female, she becomes a model for the girl of giving up and giving-way.

The father, who is related to the word 'male' as its sample, also assumes in the family the position of the word, taking the place of the mother as sample. Meanwhile the 'thing' (the mother) related to the word 'female' steps aside as a sample, assuming the relative position as one of the many (and the girl follows her example). The analogy here with our concept process forms specifically in regard to the moment in which the word takes the place of the sample, which is then no longer necessary as a point of comparison to maintain the common quality of the relative items.

The mother gives up the sample position and takes a position as a thing among the many things related to the word which now maintains the polarity for that category. The (self-reflecting) sample position of the father coincides with the word because, like the word, he over-takes the mother as sample. This family situation is also repeated in the definition, where the definiens performs a service and gives-way, functioning like the mother. The definiendum takes over as a permanent equivalent and substitute for things in that category functioning like the father. The father possesses the phallus and the mother and is the 'incarnated word-sample' for the concept of the boy--and perhaps for all concepts (as children of both sexes might see it).³ Again, the situation in which male takes the place of female (and patriarchal values take the place of women's values) repeats the situation in which the whole process of exchange takes the place of giftgiving.

Women serve and step aside, and the gift economy steps aside, while men step forward and take over as the equivalents in the focus. This pattern can be seen reflected in yet another way in the definition. The character of definiendum reflects back on the definiens when the content is male. Vice versa, when the content is female, the definiendum becomes 'feminine,' more like the definiens. For example, in 'Women are the weak sex'--'weak sex' as the definiens weakly stands aside, and 'women' takes over as the definiendum. Thus, the content (women as things or beings who give-way) resonates with the giving-way transitional function of the definiens. The 'things' (women) related to the definiendum in this case have characteristics of the definiens.

'Men are the strong sex' functions in the opposite way, with strength resonating or repeating the 'over-taking' characteristics of the definiendum, which takes the place of the definiens. The 'things' (men) related to the definiendum in this case have the characteristics of the definiendum. A bridge is thus constructed by self-similarity between the level of content and the level of form in the definition. Neither level is necessarily that way, but each has been weighted by the function it performs in the social construction of gender. After the definition has been incarnated into masculated 'over-taking' behavior, the definition of gender resonates with its own heterosexual behavioral image.

The epistemological level, constructed according to the giving and receiving grain, is surely influenced by the way we do our definitions and infected with our cultural mis-interpretations of gender. Human beings are artificially driven into 'male' and 'female' roles because we mistakenly interpret our physical 'givens' to imply that we belong to drastically different categories, almost different species. The male artificially creates a content for his gender by retracing some of the steps of categorization, and this pattern reflects back onto the linguistic mechanisms by which the categorization was imposed. Females enable the repetition of this pattern by serving it, which causes them to enter into it because, in fact, it is an asymmetrical pattern of nurturing and categorization-domination.

The giftgiving way is thus locked into a relation with categorization which opposes it. Then it gives-way as a consciously viable principle and is canceled by domination, which, in a self similar motion, takes over. There is complementarity of the two conflicting ways at the object level and at the meta level. The naming of the boy as 'male' is projected into the human relations of the society, and these reconfirm the naming of the boy as 'male.' (See Figure 23.) Thus every definition becomes an exercise in artificial hetero-sexism. Every definition resonates with the social projections of the gender definition. Then the gender definition is continually projected back into the individual consciousness through our speech, our capacity to self-define and to define others. The definition itself becomes the norm and discounts not only the service of its own feminine definiens but the importance and even the right to exist of those who do not correspond to its heterosexual patterns.

For example, the judgments of right wing bigots have a self-confirming aspect because the heterosexual form of the definition (and naming) bears out dominance and discounts the importance of those who give way to their definitions. From the epithets used by teenage boys to dominate teenage girls, 'bitch' and 'whore,' to the judgments expressed by bosses, husbands or other authority figures, 'incompetent' and 'dumb,' women are required to give-way to the over-taking definiendum when it is spoken by the masculated men whom they serve.

Gay bashing, racial, ideological, religious, ableist etc. derogatives also often 'degenerate' into actual physical violence. The definers take over and the defined give way. The over taking definers have 'become' the definiendum, the defined have become the definiens or the 'thing' giving way.

We do not recognize the heterosexualization of the form of the definition partly because we have given it a 'sample' which allows us to ignore its genderized functioning. That sample is the abstract equation, which appears to be the form or 'essence' of the definition itself. Using alphabetical notation 'A = B' substitutes empty place-takers for words or 'values.' Because they are empty

Figure 23. The reciprocal action of masculation and the definition spawns social self-similarities.

place takers, not general like word-gifts are as substitute samples, they seem to imply reciprocal substitutability: if A = B, B = A.⁴ Moreover, the equation can seem to be simply a more complicated version of the (completely reciprocal) tautology: A = A. Taking the equation, which is a simplified and abstract imitation of the definition, as the 'sample' for all definitions, their model or 'form,' allows us to leave aside as irrelevant the overtaking and giving way that are actually taking place in the heterosexualized definition.

In fact, the reciprocal, neutral (should we say, 'sanitized?') equation takes over from the definition much as exchange takes over from barter and giftgiving and even from forced servitude. Then we give value to this image of neutrality or 'equality' and the overtaking, giving and giving way processes begin again.The equation of value for the market already takes place only among those products which (like masculated men in the OBN) already belong to the valued category and only deals with quantity of that value. It is used exclusively with things that are already considered exchangeable. Though the equation between a product and its price appears neutral, money becomes the incarnate definiendum which physically takes over while the product in exchange physically gives way. At the same time the whole process of exchange for money takes the place of giftgiving.

The feedback of the heterosexualized form of the definition into the definition produces self-similar patriarchal images at different social levels. Women's inferior position (like the definiens) serves as something unseen for the form of the definition to feed back into (and cancel). Then the unseen giftgiving activity coming from this position gives value to the form of the definition and the equation and lets its place be taken by it as the model for human interaction. In fact, a proliferation of self-similar images ensues.

Women, the 'lower' classes, the many, children, the past, the future (everything but present tense, gifted and dominant men) play out the role of definiens to the men's definiendum. On a macroscopic scale, the relation is repeated among nations where one dominates and many serve. For example, the US dominates the nations in its area of influence, which give way and serve its cultural and economic hegemony. These gift relations are invisible to the majority of people in the US.

Self-Similar vs. Other-Tending Selfhood

The definition (along with its sanitized mirror, the equation) is incarnated inside us in the processes of the ego. It over-takes other-oriented giftgiving and gives value to itself. It makes others give value to it because (like any definition) it needs to have value given to it from the outside in order to function. In the market, at the micro level, in each exchange there is a shift 'up,' which also takes the place of giftgiving. Each exchange, with its equation of value over-taking giftgiving, functions in a way which is similar to the macro level of the market itself, which takes the place of giftgiving as the mode of distribution. The micro and the macro levels confirm each other (because similarity seems to confirm). At the same time, much value is being given from the outside to the market as the over-taking totality made up of innumerable exchanges--and hence to each exchange over and above giftgiving. Similarly, in masculated ego thinking the micro level of equation and definition is equal (in its structure or process) to macro level expressions of a self-reflecting and self-similar male identity which overcomes.⁵

Large scale incarnations of the word and of the definition, in exchange and in hierarchies, in commercial organizations and social, religious, and political institutions, function as macro levels, which again confirm the micro levels of the masculated ego and the form of the (hetero-sexualized) definition or judgment. These institutions also provide niches for masculated egos to play out their social destinies, creating chains of domination. We have created social self-similar structures and different scales at which they can 'reflect' each other. The form of the definition (and masculation) repeats again and again, justifying the importance given to similarity over difference--and the value of conceptual norm-based one-many processes over giftgiving need-directed processes.

No explanatory capacity is allowed to giftgiving, so gift-based activities (such as the attribution of value itself) are explained by valued professors as deriving from categories and concepts, from systems of mutually exclusive elements, from hierarchies of marginal choices under scarcity, or from sui generis psychological or physiological processes, or they remain a mystery.⁶ Our society is trapped in a hall-of-mirrors, and we are carrying mirrors in our minds, in our organizations, and in our purses.

The giftgiving, 'other-tending' self is not dependent on thinking for being because its bearer becomes socially relevant by satisfying the needs of others and receiving from them. Probably much of masculated identity also comes from participating in unacknowledged giftgiving and receiving, but the identity-forming capacity is attributed to thinking, to equivalence, to mirroring, and to 'finding oneself.' The identity of gift givers and receivers is created and validated by performing the process of material giving itself, rather than by performing only or mainly its analog, in language and thinking.

Moreover, since the one who derives his/her identity from thinking has many other needs, the giftgiver satisfies them and validates him (usually, though not necessarily, a male) as 'deserving.' If the person with the more abstract identity achieves a general social position, his/her nurturer is sometimes seen as giving to society as a whole transitively through him/her. (This is also the case for those in hierarchies who are in giftgiving positions serving those in higher social positions.)

Women have been nurturing men along with their mirrors. But rather than distributing mirrors to everyone, we need to put the mirrors down and turn our giving towards each other and towards solving the social problems they have created. Women need to nurture and solve general social problems directly ourselves, not to turn over our authority to masculated self-reflecting males. We need to care for society as a whole, promoting the giftgiving model at a general level, for all. Not only do we practice other-tending in our personal lives and in the solution of general problems, for example, by giving money, time, and imagination to satisfy general social, economic peace and environmental needs, ending hunger, war and pollution, but we propose giftgiving as the model of a necessary paradigm shift for all.

Thinking and Being

"I think; therefore I am" are the words of the exchanger as privileged 'owning sample.' Descartes' cogito denied the importance of the existence of others, the mother, society as a whole, and nature, for the individual's own existence. Descartes took on a position of radical skepticism--not accepting anything as a 'given.' His first step was to decontextualize himself from giftgiving and receiving and to try to find the self-evident basis of his being. Because the disqualification of other-orientation does not allow the exchanger to find the confirmation of her/his existence in the satisfaction of the needs of the other and the continued existence and well being of the other, s/he also has to find her/his source in mirroring her/himself alone. The receiver's lack of gratitude toward the giver also results in his/her ignorance of the other as source.

There is an aspect of self-similarity in the process which influences the ego formationand particularly the masculated ego formation in the cogito. Here, as in exchange, there is a shift to the logic of substitution which takes the place of the logic of giving. An example of the logic of substitution: 'thinking' is provided, by which the use of the verb 'to be' (I 'am') is justified. There is also a shift from discourse to definition and self-definition, leaving aside contingent communicative needs. Because it is decontextualized (or does that to itself), the ego usually has to continue being validated and over-valued in order to continue to exist. Descartes provided an internal validation of the ego by focussing on its self-similarity. The cogito is influenced by the equation and the self-similarity of exchange, and it involves valuing equality (even tautology) and logical consequence over need. The equality of thinking and being do indeed stem from the same source which is language-in-denial-of-giftgiving.⁷ Usually the being of the self would include relations with others!

Descartes' gift to patriarchy was the satisfaction of the ego's co-municative need for a logical proof of its existence. This need is derived from the denial of the giftgiving-and-receiving which already proves and creates human existence materially. Self-similarity in thinking constructs a norm, a sort of ceiling mirror to refer to, a reflection of the self, which is actually its product. It is a re-verberation in the microphone that we mistake for a message from the universe or from the structure of communication and selfhood--and it appears to be evidence that the self is the source of the self. As in the concept where the sample male is related to the word 'male,' "I think; therefore I am" is self-similar, self-referential. Descartes recognized thinking as definition; then the definition of itself became the tautological ('I am I') underpinning of "I think; therefore I am." Here the definition has an over-taking source--himself.

Definitional thinking reflected in the equation becomes the 'mark' of the 'one' who is the sample for the concept of existence. Both are over-valued, like exchange. Like the phallus, the self-similar 'mark' which puts males into the privileged category, the kind of thinking which Descartes was doing at the moment he thought up his immortal phrase puts those who do it into a privileged category as 'existing' and thus takes the place of giving as the justification for being. Definitional thinking and the verb 'to be' both function using substitution, and 'to be' brings thinking (the acts of substitution related to the word) into the present. Thinking is defined as definitional, equational, and logically consequential--if/then--instead of as transposed giftgiving.⁸

But something's 'being' just means that it is socially valuable enough for it to be related to words (for others), by an act which may be substituted by the verb 'to be.' So, thinking is a socially valuable activity, and the social subject who is doing it 'is'--especially if s/he succeeds in making this valuable (to others). Descartes' saying he is thinking brings forward a social general character of thinking, which he identifies with himself. 'I am thinking' is self-referential and seems obvious or clear because it is self-similar: We call the activity--expressed in such phrases as 'I think,' 'I am' and 'I think; therefore I am'--thinking. There is a shift into substitution in the sentence itself, as there is with the verb 'to be.' And he satisfies others' ego needs to know they exist, when they read his book. What a gift!

But Descartes was not really alone, even though he was de-contextualized, because thinking had to be valuable to others in order for it to be related before him to a word as its name as well as to other words contingently in discourse. Both thinking and the words are evidence of the existence of others, and of the context in which the (supposedly decontextualized) thinker is operating. Value has been given to thinking by the many in the past.

But value is also given to the thinker in the present, not only by her/himself but by all those who are nurturing her/him generally as part of society, and individually as a person they know. The formula is: take thinking as the important quality (the sensory in variant?) of the thing that's the sample, then say we are doing it, so equal to the sample, so substitutable by the sample and by whatever words substitute for it, so our acts are all substitutable by the verb 'to be,' so they and we, exist. It's another 'having' that makes us 'deserve' to exist. We correspond to 'existing.' Perhaps I could call all this 'Anti-Cartesian Linguistics:' Descartes was just re-writing thinking as being, or vice versa, and (like Chomsky and the many other thinkers who have been misguided by masculation) over-emphasized the importance of the rewriting (re-naming) process itself.

Being is Masculine

Membership in the privileged category is a prerequisite for possibly eventually becoming its norm. For boys, this is the possibility of becoming a man, a father, a sample for the family and for 'human.' For both boys and girls, it now might imply being in a top position in a profession. Being a member of the privileged category creates a need to continue to be relevant in that way, to merit the definition. For boys (and other exchangers), it is a need to develop a masculated (exchange) identity--which means over-taking, giving up the mother and giftgiving, etc.

The gift the boy (or the exchanger) gives up is his 'feminine' (actually human) nurturing identity. He/she is validated by others because of this, economically anyway, and is rewarded with the self-esteem allowed to those of us who act according to the masculated norm, becoming successes 'in the system.' Such successes seem to exist and 'deserve to exist' more than those who do not succeed. We embrace the paradigm of exchange, much as at an early age we embraced language, or boys took on their male identity. It seems to be just the way things are.

We have been saying that the verb 'to be' substitutes the acts of substitution of the other words in the definition, giving to being a partial similarity to masculation and to the shift into exchange. 'Is' becomes similar to '$.' The degree of existence of males seems superior to that of females, as it does of some races and classes over others. If we then add the idea of deserving, we can see how the different 'shifts' to a 'higher' level all validate the supposed superiority of white upper class males, who seem to 'deserve to exist' more than others.

By playing out the role of the definiendum in the tautology ('I am I') or ('I am a thinking being') males are substituting the act of substitution, like the verb 'to be' substituting the act of substitution in the definition. Being seems to imply being masculated, and the most masculated (or most-often masculated) over-takes the others, and 'deserves' to exist the most. This occurs because 'being,' like masculation, is already connected with substitution and exchange.

The masculated egos are the categorizers, who include themselves in the category as samples, validated by the verb 'to be' and by money--so they 'naturally' use money to further their own existence. How could they deserve to be categorizers if they did not deserve to exist? Then those women or classes or races or sexual preference groups who are made to believe they don't deserve to exist (they are not 'good enough') have to justify their own existence by taking care of, serving, those who do 'deserve.' (They can also be just anyone put into the category of the undeserving by those who control the definition.) 'Existence,' then, becomes just another privileged category.

Existence by Proxy

Exchange places people and things into a special category, which receives value from the outside. In their role of giving value to that category, the many who serve the deservers also deserve. They seem to participate, to some extent, in the privileged category by proxy. By giving value to the system and helping another person succeed in it, we put ourselves in a chain of transitivity, so that some goods flow to us from the exchanges of those in the category. This is the case for 'nonworking' wives who receive the table scraps of exchange. The fact that some goods do come back to them makes it appear that exchange is the source of gifts, the great nurturer.

This is one reason why women continue to nurture exchange and the exchangers with our credence, our love and our un-monetized work. The model of masculation appears more attractive and deserving than the model of mothering, and we mother it. At puberty, we choose the masculated model over the mothering model, as more viable. Many daughters leave their mothers (at least in spirit) because they become convinced that masculation is human, and it is their duty to nurture someone in that category or to become someone in that category--someone who 'contributes' and who, therefore, deserves to exist and to be nurtured.

The person who does not somehow succeed in deserving to exist remains in a no-person's land. Her lack of 'self-esteem' is really due to the co-optation of (privileged) existence by successfully masculated women and men and their help-meets. Both deserving and existence bring with them the substitution of masculation and exchange for giftgiving. We must either join the substitutes and give up giftgiving, or we must nurture them if we want to deserve to exist.

Being Balanced

It may seem to women that they can 'balance work and family,' maintaining a nurturing attitude towards their husbands and children, while working in the exchange economy. This very balance, however, validates the masculated mode. By giving equal value to giftgiving and to exchange, we hide the creativity and fertility of giftgiving, constraining it into a comparison according to the principles of (equal) exchange and eclipsing its capacity as a model--draining the energy of the givers. We validate exchange again by using its principles to regulate giftgiving.

Men are also encouraged to 'rediscover the feminine' in themselves, mitigating the extremes of masculation without shifting paradigms. Like reformism or charity, these attitudes only make patriarchy more livable for some of its members. The principle of 'nothing in excess' is used excessively. Privileged groups 'balance their masculine and feminine sides' while reaping the advantages of an exploitative masculated economic and ideological system, which forces the many into a position of giftgiving towards them. Again, equations are overvalued and needs are ignored. The golden mean which quantifies caring (balancing it equally with not caring) is just that--mean. It allows privileged groups to live more comfortably with each other, without solving the problems that are causing the unhappiness of the whole.

The model of balance, like the more completely masculated model, really discredits the originary and creative aspect of giving and receiving. It confuses the issue by integrating the feminine according to the masculine standard. It keeps us from looking at the needs that are crying out to be met. There is, first of all, a meta need for us to go beyond balance, in order to satisfy the needs of all. But, of course, this is not a balanced point of view. The principles of masculation and of mothering battle it out, causing a see-saw effect. We are like a person shifting from foot to foot, never becoming unbalanced enough to take a step forward or a step up to a true meta level--or even to put a foot down to take a step to stop the destruction of the planet.

Everyone embraces the masculated model. Daughters admire their fathers and boyfriends while taking their mothers for granted. Mothers over-value their sons and husbands, under-valuing their own giftgiving way for themselves and for their daughters, who often eventually do the same thing. Feminism is changing this somewhat, and women's caring thought and behavior is recounted in stories and poems and even sociological studies, but we do not yet attribute to it the kind of value we attribute to exchange and to masculated thinking and behavior.

Nurturing is the origin of our species--not competition and hierarchy or the survival of the fittest. Human mothers ensure the survival of the unfittest--infants. And all of us are unfit in many ways; our soft skin, vulnerable bellies, short teeth, and varied diets make us animals with many needs that others' gifts can and must satisfy. Our very adaptability allows a proliferation and specification of needs and desires. (I am hungry--not just for anything, but for tamales like they make in South Texas--even though I don't know how to make them myself. My need--in this case, my delight--is specific and comes from my history.)

The process of identifying needs and satisfying them--during which we learn the culturally specific varieties of goods and services that can be provided for a great many needs and desires, and then actually learn to provide for them and also to receive that provision from others--is the basic human process. Giving more value to giftgiving, and in this case to the handing down of culture, might allow us access to the generality we now seem to find in money and other one-many social structures. Now the artificial need to exchange has been extended to everyone and creates a degree of generality in the means of exchange which is rivaled only by heads of state--whose images, after all, are stamped upon it.

The Creation of Scarcity

By Those Who Deserve to Exist

Exchange challenges us to prove that we can satisfy others' needs, making our own survival dependent upon our being 'fit' enough to produce, in an 'unnatural selection' process. Some species of animals develop hierarchies in times of scarcity while, in times of abundance, the dominance model is relaxed--and mating and feeding take place in less structured ways. The creation of scarcity which facilitates exchange among humans makes the hierarchical mode seem essential to survival. We imitate the hierarchical behavior of animal groups beyond which we had already evolved through generalized mothering. The giftgiving in language still maintains our evolutionary leap on an abstract plane, while concretely we seem to have leaped backwards by making nurturing as difficult as possible, acting in ferocious, parasitic and adversarial ways.

Technologies of various kinds, including earth-friendly technologies, have the potential for providing abundance for all. This abundance threatens exchange by making it irrelevant and unnecessary. Giftgiving in abundance can provide for everyone, and abundance is necessary for effective life-enhancing giftgiving. In abundance, forced giving, as it appears in exchange and hierarchies, has no reason for being because needs can always be satisfied by a multitude of ready sources.

Hierarchies are used to continually re-create scarcity by siphoning off surplus wealth. They thereby maintain exchange as the mode of distribution for all. Wars are fought to counter the challenges to hierarchies and markets by other hierarchies and markets. These wars destroy resources, creating scarcity, thereby ensuring the continuation of an environment appropriate for exchange. Preparing for the wars and spending the money necessary for high-tech armaments and the support of large armed forces also depletes the civilian economy in 'peace time,' so that abundance does not accrue.

The appearance is the opposite. Employment in national war industries is highly visible and lucrative and appears to 'contribute' to the economy. However, these are jobs which produce nothing, gifts from the public to the workers. Paid for by tax money and devoted to the protection of the group or system, they seem to have the generality and social significance to which all in the society aspire. Unfortunately, the content of that generality is not nurturing but the propagation of death. The products of that labor never enter the nurturing economy; they are used instead to destroy the potential abundance of the local and global co-munity.

The increased government spending that is necessary in wartime (and the gifts of time, energy and enthusiasm given by patriotic citizens to the national effort) inject more elements of giftgiving into the economy as a whole, which stimulate it (creating more profit) while allowing a 'use' of the output--its destruction in fighting the war--which does not threaten the system of exchange by remaining in the economy and creating abundance.

Colonies and conquered territories provide the (minimally monetized) gift labor and resources necessary to allow excessive profit-taking by a few in the colonialist countries, which can then be reinvested as capital in war industries in the colonialist countries. The gifts thus come from 'elsewhere' and do not threaten the 'developed' monetized economy with their abundant presence, because they can be quickly cycled out in waste production--of armaments.

Now, in spite of the geographical distance, the North has found it useful to create scarcity in the South through World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans,⁹ structural adjustment, and environmental depletion. This makes it possible to channel the gifts of the many with even more precision into enterprises that do not create the abundance which would challenge the system.

Instead, the stream of gifts--cheap labor (labor of which a large percentage is a gift) and low cost (high gift-quotient) raw materials--create an abundance of consumer goods to which only those working at a certain level in the exchange economy have access through their 'effective demand.' These goods again distinguish the 'haves' from the 'have-nots.' The communications industry uses radio, television and computers to broadcast 'free' information, music and images--products of our artistic gifts. These products are 'chosen' by the market and, therefore, usually help not only to sell other products (by modifying needs and desires), but also to create a consensus around the market system itself.

All of these extreme results come from the co-validation of masculation by a large number of overlapping, misinterpreted self-similar structures. From government to language, from economics to religion, from the military to academia--these structures overlap, repeat and validate each other. The ways we formulate our ideas of existence, being, and decontextualized thinking validate masculated males through similarity between their processes and the process of masculation (which originates in naming and the definition anyway).

Exchange, as the substitution of the logic of substitution for giftgiving, brings up the question of de-serving as well as the question of power, and of inclusion or exclusion from the category to which value is given. Our assertion of 'being,' though it may be logically and developmentally prior to exchange, validates exchange through similarity and vice versa, after the shift has occurred.¹⁰ Many of the different substitution processes--masculation, the verb 'to be,' exchange, and the judgments of correspondence and deserving--hang together to form a self-structuring and self-perpetuating 'reality,' a sort of servo-mechanism which, at many different levels, takes the place of and overpowers an ever-present and still possible gift-based world.

The 'new' reality seems to be more valid, more 'real' than the earlier one which, nevertheless, continues to support it. Although it is unacknowledged, the giftgiving process, like an oyster making a pearl out of a grain of sand, keeps on giving to the harsher reality of exchange, making it viable and humanizing it (to some extent). The masculated status quo, with its hierarchies and privileged ones, is maintained by the gifts of women and men both inside and outside it. As what is, it seems to deserve to exist more than its alternatives (the alternative realities of so-called 'primitive' peoples, for example) and we nurture it.

Meanwhile, not to be outdone by hidden givers, those who have succeeded in the exchange economy sometimes balance their egotism by dispensing a (usually not abundant) bit of charity to the underclass, or by proposing tendentious solutions to the social problems they have helped to create. For example, I recently heard of a proposal according to which the children of mothers who were on welfare would be sent to orphanages, as if paid professional 'experts' in an institutional setting were better for children than their single mothers. Having reduced the mothers to direst poverty, making nurturing almost impossible, politicians and 'social thinkers' propose to take their place with one more paternalistic, monetized model.

The reward for these thinkers lies in 'showing' that the masculated model is not only more efficient but more compassionate than mothers doing direct nurturing. Mothering becomes one more job from which women can be fired, with power over the inclusion or exclusion from the category given again to masculated men and institutions. The mothers' identities as giftgivers is unrecognized and, even though the job is unmonetized, it can be taken away from them. Robbed of their children, they are also dispossessed of their giftgiving identity and their exchange identity. They have no way to create an identity or to deserve to exist. Lacking all possibilities for masculation by inclusion in superior categories, these women give to the privileged categories by contrast, and they receive the punishment for lacking which allays the fear and envy of the havers, thus expiating the crime of proposing the model of mothering without men.

In fact, the state steps in as a substitute for the father, once again eclipsing women's way. Whether as capitalist welfare or as management of resources by a communist or socialist state, the law or the charity of the collective fathers discounts and often defiles the reality of giftgiving life.

The visitor from outer space would recognize the importance of the fact that women do some 60% of the world's agricultural work, yet own only about 1% of the world's property. Feminists usually think of this strange disproportion in terms of justice--that is, of creating change to make women own as great a quantity of property as men do. I would like to propose that the reason women own so little property is that we have a different way of relating to our surroundings. We need to dismantle the structures of patriarchy, including the structures of ownership that are based on masculation, and propose a women's model of property based on giftgiving.

Does Giftgiving Exist?

Money is the means for satisfying co-municative need in the community of exchangers, private property owners. Exchange value is the relevance of products to that kind of contradictory mutually exclusive co-munication. Like the verb 'to be,' money substitutes the act of substitution of one product for another.

I believe that the co-municative value of things is expressed in words, which take their place as gifts in creating human bonds. Words may also be seen as having a positional value relative to each other in the system of the langue.¹¹ If kinds of things were not relevant to human beings repeatedly, they would not become related to words as their names (though they could still be talked about in sentences). Thus, the reason anyone has any words given to her/him by others is that they are in use in the collective, which is made up of many others whom each of us will never know.

The value of something for the collective is outside the individual communicative interaction and outside the individual money exchange transaction. It is really for others. The identity of a cultural item can be found in its verbal substitute gift, outside the individual communicative interaction, in the collective. An analogous situation happens with the quantitative determination of a price. The price is determined by the value of the product for others in the society whom we will never know. If we look at the qualitative value of things for communication as expressed in words, and the quantitative value of things for the contradictory kind of communication that is material exchange, as expressed in price, and correct for the difference between qualitative value and quantitative value, we can understand the mechanisms of both.

In fact, for both, it is the importance of things for the community that brings them to the forefront of our conversation, or to the forefront of the market. They are 'for others and therefore for me.' Cats are called 'cats' in English because for each of us that is what they are for others. A can of coffee costs $4.00 because that is what it is for others, also. When the amount others will give for it changes, it changes for the individual, as well. We can look at the value of the different component parts of the coffee, the price of the beans paid to the coffee grower, the price of the labor paid to the workers, the price of the transportation of the beans, their grinding, the price of the can, etc.

Each of these, and whatever component parts it might have, depends upon what that part is 'for others,' what others give for it. For each linguistic or economic transaction, the identification of what something is depends on what it is for the collective--for the many--outside that transaction itself. We talked about the verb 'to be' being the substitute for the act of substitution, and money as having a similar process. For the linguistic and the economic realms respectively, something is valuable when it is important enough to the collective to have its place taken by a word as its name, by 'is' as a substitute for that act of substitution, or by another product in exchange--and by money as its equivalent in the quantity of its price.

Both language and exchange leave co-municative giftgiving out of focus (particularly when exchange value has become the sample of value) and this happens in the collective mind. The gift aspects of life remain relatively unconscious and undiscussed. Gifts taking-the-place-of gifts has been assimilated to exchange (which is a very magnetic model) and to the definition influenced by masculation. For this reason, the value of giftgiving is not recognized collectively. It is almost not named.¹² It would seem paradoxical to say that giftgiving is valuable; value is the existence of something for the collective, and that giftgiving is not recognized by the collective as existing.

On the other hand, if we look at both the verb 'to be' and at money as substitutes for the act of substitution, we can see that giftgiving--which is not substituted--may reasonably seem to be not pertinent to language nor valuable to exchange. Thus if language and exchange both require substitution for the assertion of existence or of value, giftgiving, which does not involve substitution, may seem to be nonexistent and not valuable. Masculation, on the contrary, which is a construction of self-similar substitutions, appears to exist and to be very valuable. It is not surprising that it attracts the many gifts that are not given to giftgiving.

On the other hand, both 'being' and exchange for money are influenced and 'distressed' by masculation, which feeds back the principle of over-taking into the definition and into the economy--so that 'being' or 'being valuable' seem to imply over-taking or even being the one or sample. Again, none of this is our 'fault.' These contradictions are mostly just due to logical tangles.

Thus the verb 'to be' and money reflect the power we have given to language to take us away from our mothers and the Mother. We do not see 'being' or 'value' as having relevance to substitution because we deny the reality of what has been substituted, just as we deny the mother (and the earth) as substituted model--as if she didn't exist (especially if existence has to do with substitution). We 'for-get' that the mother is active and that she actively gives and compassionately gives-way. Our original framework comes from giftgiving but, through being masculated or through caring for those who have been masculated and their processes, we learn to give value to the definitional aspects of language and lifesubstitution, having, keeping and 'being'--rather than to the gift aspects and to giving.

The mother does not have to give way. If the mother did not give way, we might re-frame our view of the world and see how much of life is already in her giftgiving mode. We could see things as gifts from Mother Earthnot just as products of Adam's dominating names--and we would therefore treat them with the care which they need if they are not to be destroyed. Many of us are already doing this now, as we appreciate the gifts of nature, culture, synchronicity, good will, and the gift of life itself. What we sense as the immanence of 'being' is really the result of our creative receptive mode directed in gratitude towards the gifts of life and the earth, while suspending (for the moment) the distressed mediation of language and exchange.

Perhaps we could see community as part of the Mother, giving value to things as giving to us and giving value to us, and things giving value to their names, which we give to each other, giving value to us. The earth would co-municate with us through her fruit and birdsongs, our bodies and our giftgiving selves. We would participate in a co-municative relation with nature. Now the model of the community is formed of one-many mutually exclusive owners with owned property giving value-as-position to themselves and discrediting the categories of the 'have-nots.'

Property having to do with giftgiving (giveable and receivable property) is different from the private property that goes through exchange. We can create a caring relation with property rather than a relation of domination. Perhaps the gift paradigm would require a lighter kind of ownership, more like the property of our bodies which (in safety) are basically shareable but usually not for the moment being shared. We would have a relationship of companionship with property, of use, gratitude, and stewardship. We could consider it according to the model of the breast, not the penis--the property of something that can give in an on-going way, rather than the property of a penetrating tool or a 'mark' that puts us in a superior category.

A women's model would pay attention to needs and, in abundance, needs could proliferate in variety and specificity. They might also include psychological needs for security and for a bond with one's surroundings, so that the one who cares for something is the one it is for. In abundance, the need for property would be less intense than it now is because the consequences of not-having would be only that gifts would come from some other direction. Where having and not-having are no longer psychologically invested with the nightmares of childhood, law and retribution would no longer be 'needed.' Nor would the state be required or allowed to step in as the collective father-owner.

At present, the kind of property that involves sharing with ease and the enjoyment of nature and her abundant resources is usually reserved for the wealthy as a reward for having more. The point is not to keep everyone, including the rich, from enjoying the abundance of nature and culture but to extend that possibility to everyone. All of us need to realize how deeply our society is under the spell of a collective psychosis. We urgently need to heal it and ourselves.

Indigenous peoples have often had cultures which used the mothering model and the giftgiving way much more than our own. It would be interesting to find out to what extent they integrated linguistic mechanisms along with their giftgiving and what different kinds of property they propose. The Iroquois, a matriarchal society in which a council of women had important decision-making power, and which used the word for woman (instead of the word for man) to mean 'human being,' gave different proper names to each of the tribal members. A name became available only when the person bearing it died.¹³ The names of the tribal members thus constituted a langue, and we could see the members of the tribe as the socially valuable 'things'--a culture, a world--related to those words. In European patriarchy--or puerarchy--we have made some people into things: women, and some into words: men--and we mediate between their 'properties' with the 'money-word.'

Our patriarchal state of affairs is certainly not a more rational way of organizing the society than the gynarchical way of the Iroquois. All of the different cultures that existed before they were overtaken, destroyed and redefined by the White Man and his ways were socio-economic experiments engaged in by the many. Some of them gave value to mothers and to symbolic and co-municative giftgiving. We can learn alternative ways of living from them.

In the gift mode, 'being' is actually co-munication with the earth or other humans, and we are actually still in the gift mode a lot in spite of our participation in exchange. Our experience itself involves receiving sense perceptions and information--giving destinations to the world as we experience it, in needs which we can satisfy, whether they are other's needs, our own, or needs of our surroundings. Needs grow according to the means of their satisfaction, the ear becomes educated to the kinds of music it hears. Some needs are more basic than others, but even they diversify into tastes and preferences for the different means of satisfaction, the different gifts Mother Nurture and Mother Nature provide.

Women's existence does not consist in giving-way or being owned or owning but in a completely different relation to the world (and to property), a relation which is potentially not mutually exclusive but need-destined, 'other-destined.' Boundaries are only made necessary by fights among 'one-manies' striving to be larger 'samples.' If we gave value to needs and recognized and appreciated their complexity, we would also recognize and satisfy each other's needs for keeping and for independence. Women's care extends logically to the environment. Giving value to needs at all levels also allows us to give value to large-scale general needs.

At present, the need to heal the planet is a need of the collective, and it is being collectively addressed--without, however, passing through the human mothering model. Many of us are concerned about Mother Earth but still consider human mothering unimportant. It is in mothering, however, and being mothered that we can fi nd the framework for living in peace with each other, so that we can stop over-taking and destroying the earth.

If we could diminish the exchange economy and its castration envy motivations of having and not-having, we could live in harmony with a kind of semi-private property, which was also pertinent to the collective as environment. The forest would no longer be seen as valuable to the logging company that owned it, but rather to those humans and animals who live in it and use its direct gifts respectfully with gratitude, cherishing them. The forests transformed into logs do not satisfy a real need of the collective, but only the profit motive need of the private owner. The need of the buyers with effective demand has to be created. Whether the trees are to be transformed into toilet paper, chop sticks, or building materials, alternatives exist and the needs of the public can be educated towards them and towards the collective and environmental good.

Instead, on the large scale, capitalistic exchange uses the collective as means to the satisfaction of everyone's need for the means of economic communication, for money. The need for profit is abstract. Everyone needs the same thing. This common unitary need for (more) money distorts our view of other needs. The value of money is like the linguistic value of everything, of 'being,' seen as substitution (over-taking), not as the immanence of the gift.

Nothingness is not the opposite of being. What is really the opposite of being involves a reinterpretation of the verb 'to be', which includes nonsign giftgiving connected to language through the gift, not through over-taking or substitution and giving-way. Similarly, the opposite of the one-many property¹⁴ relation is not not-having but woman-based gentle property. Because of masculation, an abundant nurturing relation with property seems to be a prize of the privileged haves. Similarly, a nurturing wife seemed to be a reward given to men for being male. Keeping property away from others makes us unable to receive and transmit its value, and unable to appreciate its relevance to a sharing collective. According to the linguistic logic, it is for ourselves and, therefore, not for others and therefore--not for ourselves. When we keep something within the system of mutually exclusive private ownership, we cannot imitate the mothering model with it.

Recently, reports of so-called 'primitive' people have become popular in the US because they describe ways of living which center around giftgiving, based upon a spiritual source. The story of the Australian Aborigines,¹⁵ who travel with no supplies across the outback, depending on the gifts of the creator for their survival--and receiving them--is an example of a gift-based way of life (though at this point taking place in scarcity). Such stories become popular in the US because they point to an attitude which is healing for us, although we are practicing an economy which contradicts it.

Religions and New Age therapies promote gratitude for our blessings, putting us into a gift framework. The questions that arise here are, "Can we heal individually or spiritually while the society of which we are a part marauds the earth and destroys the very people who inspire us with their faith and alternative ways?" and "Can our individual healing change the paradigm, rather than reinforce it by assimilating some of its principles on an individual basis?" Our attempts to heal individually and spiritually must connect with attempts to heal the collective and the planet.

Vice versa, attempts to heal the collective, such as the feminist movement, the 'left' movements for social and economic change, and the environmental movement must also pass through individual healing. The model of the mother exists on both the individual and the collective levels. The gift paradigm, with mothering as its carrier, is the functional and poetic norm to which society can return.

According to the logic of exchange, women's way of property deserves to exist because of what it has already contributed to humanity. If we want to shift paradigms towards women's way, however, we cannot use the logic of exchange, re-instating a paying-back mode. For-getting the mother involves embracing exchange, turning away from the mother and getting something else in her place. When we are for-getting, we are not for-giving the mother and the way of the mother. Instead, we must all be consistently for-giving if the gift way is to function. And we need to keep our definitions on the verbal plane rather than incarnating them.

¹Prices constitute a differential system like Saussure's langue, which is organized according to quantity by numerical progression rather than quality.

²Some languages do not use gender specific pronouns. Others compassionately extend gender distinctions to all nouns, as if to comfort children by showing that everything else is also similar to or different from the mother, and that this has little bearing on their value.

³The fact that the definition as a whole is a service which is being performed by a speaker or a writer for a listener or reader is often forgotten, so that the relation of over-taking and giving way seems to be taking place among the words themselves without human intervention. Value is being given to the words and to each other by the interlocutors from 'outside' the sentence, but this is not usually considered.

⁴In language, communicative need is a determining consideration. The abstract values of the equation seem to be closer to those of perception: perception X = perception Y would seem to be an appropriate content for an equation. But there is no need for us to communicate that to ourselves or each other in our ongoing daily lives because we already know it. Our perceptive apparata function. What we perceive is usually already a given as far as our consciousness of it is concerned. Our communicative needs arise in relation to others, regarding what perceptions we are paying attention to and their relevance to collaborations, understandings, collective or personal ideas, myths, histories, views of the world, etc.

⁵When a pecking order is established in which one male becomes the 'sample' or over-taker with regard to other males, those who give-way can still maintain their identities as 'samples' and over-takers with regard to their wives and children.

⁶Even Marx's 'labor value' could be viewed as a portion of gift value trapped and filtered through the definitional process of exchange. If labor could directly satisfy needs, it would result in co-munication and would attribute value to people. However, given the market, labor expended on one product is expressed relative to labor expended on all other products through the equation of value, as exchange value. In this, it is like a thing related to a (quantitatively divided) word. Marx did not include any of the other gifts that are given to the labor processwomen's work in the home, gifts of higher or lower prices, or gifts of natureas contributing to labor value.

⁷Similarly, the equation of work and money stem from distribution in denial of giftgiving.

⁸Perhaps the homunculus, the little man seen by philosophers sitting inside our minds recognizing endless regresses, is the internalized image of the phallus which corresponds with all things in the 'sample' position everywhere. But, as philosophers saw, he is only a figment of our imaginations, a reflection of reflections. They reasoned that, if knowledge is based on the reflection of reality, and we have a picture of reality in our minds, we would have to recognize those pictures and, therefore, have pictures of those pictures. There would thus be a kind of little man in our minds with pictures of the pictures, and a little man in his mind with more pictures, etc. What philosophers don't reflect on is that the homunculus should be replaced by a little woman--or better, a little mother, a matericula). Instead of just sitting there making pictures, recognizing the image of the baby crying, a mother recognizes the need and intervenes, does something about it (feeds her, for example). Thus, if matericula were there in our minds, she would recognize the picture of the baby crying but would feel a need to do more than that, to satisfy the needs the picture suggested to her. The division between internal and external would be bridged in different ways by matericula and by homunculus. The reason for this is that recognizing similarities is more static, less informative, than the process of satisfying needs. Thus, when satisfying needs is transferred to an internal scenario, it can remain an active process. Homunculus is totally dependent on matericula's care, since he can't do anything but reflect. But he does not seem to make pictures of matericula, either in 'his' own mind or in the external world. Perhaps she moves too fast for him. Perhaps she moves as fast as the electric charge going from one synapse to another. In fact, couldn't we see brain activity in terms of giving, a movement from an abundance towards a lack? In that case, wouldn't we be doing something on the physiological plane that more or less matched what we are doing on the linguistic plane and in the external world? Perhaps those interested in the brain-mind questions might try to satisfy their needs with this moving-picture theory of reality.

⁹Typically, the money from these loans has been quickly cornered by the elites, while the nations' poor are extenuated by trying to pay the interestand the principal hangs fire.

¹⁰See George Thompson on the influence of the development of money and philosophy. Studies in Ancient Greek Society, vol. II: The First Philosophers, 2nd ed. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1961 [1955].

¹¹Though their basic relation of words to each other in Saussure's langue is that of purely differential mutual exclusion, they do have some similarities that look like Vigotsky's complexes.

¹²For example, I have had difficulty using terms like 'nurturing' or 'mothering,' which bring with them too much focus on infancy.

¹³See Elizabeth Tooker, "Women in Iroquois Society," in Iroquois Women, An Anthology, ed. W.G. Spittal, Iroqrafts, Ohsweken, Ontario, 1990. "By Iroquois custom, each clan holds a set of personal names. When a child is born he or she is given a name 'not in use.' This 'baby name' is usually later changed for an 'adult name' that is not then 'in use,' that is, one belonging to someone now deceased or to someone whose name has been changed" (112).

¹⁴Including 'one-many' property of the State.

¹⁵Marlo Morgan, Mutant Message Down Under, Harper Collins, New York, 1994.