The Future of Ownership

On the Spiritual and Social Foundations of an Egalitarian Utopia

by Dr. Hans-Joachim Rudolph

Abstract

This essay contrasts two visions of the future: a libertarian utopia built on ownership, competition, and exclusion, and an egalitarian one that allows for participation without structural sacrifice. It argues that social inequality is often rooted in the notion of being chosen, and argues in favor of a spiritual transformation in which identity is created through connectedness rather than separation. Ownership, in this vision, is not abolished but repurposed to serve the common good.

Introduction

What holds societies together at their core, and what threatens to tear them apart? In the age of artificial intelligence, where not only modes of production but also social structures are undergoing radical transformation, this question takes on new urgency.

In Life 3.0, Max Tegmark sketches two opposing future scenarios: a libertarian utopia with radical self-realization through competition, ownership and technological upgrading – and an egalitarian utopia in which AI enables all people to live in dignity and prosperity. Two visions, two architectures: one root-ed in exclusion, the other in inclusion.

This essay asks what sacrifices each system demands and whether a future is imaginable that requires neither chosen ones nor the excluded.

The thesis: The libertarian utopia is based on a secularized theology of chosenness — akin to the prosperity gospel. The egalitarian alternative, by contrast, calls for a fundamental redefinition of freedom, ownership, and spiritual identity.

Two Utopias

The libertarian utopia is built on competition, private property, and technologically enhanced individualization — a social order of the chosen, stabilized by efficiency and exclusion.

The egalitarian utopia, on the other hand, is founded on co-operation, participation, and the use of artificial intelligence to overcome material scarcity.

The central difference: In the libertarian order, status and identity arise from difference, competition, and possession; in the egalitarian one, from education, connection, and care (see Table 1).

The Prosperity Gospel

The prosperity gospel serves as a religious precursor to the libertarian utopia. Here, wealth is seen as a sign of divine favor, success as proof of spiritual election. Poverty and illness appear not only as social but as moral and spiritual deficiencies — a lack of faith, effort, or worthiness.

The wealth of the few is legitimized by the lack of the many. The excluded are not mere byproducts but necessary counterparts — they enable the self-assurance of the successful.

Chosenness requires sacrifice. The symbolic logic of this order persists even in its secular form.

The Libertarian Utopia

The libertarian utopia — suggested by Tegmark and more explicitly articulated in Silicon Valley’s transhumanist circles — promises maximum autonomy through private property, market mechanisms, and technological optimization.

But it comes at a cost: The “we” disintegrates into countless “I”s; solidarity is replaced by transaction.

At its core beats an old motif: chosenness through success — not by grace, but by efficiency, ownership, and innovation.

Possession becomes a badge of dignity — poverty a silent flaw.

This logic mirrors the prosperity gospel: Wealth appears not as luck, but as distinction. The poor are seen — implicitly or openly — as moral failures.

Competition becomes a sacred principle: it selects, legitimizes, sanctifies. It separates the “worthy” from the “dispensable” — and demands sacrifice: structurally, not accidentally.

Because: No victory without defeat, no belonging without exclusion, no brilliance without blemish.

Thus arises a tacit system of winners and losers, of chosen and expendable (→ basket of deplorables), without anyone needing to take the blame.

The order appears to be fair just because it is functional.

The Egalitarian Utopia

Tegmark’s egalitarian utopia is not merely a more just version of the present. It aims to break with the existing order and to rethink ownership, intelligence, and the common good from the ground up.

Its goal is a society in which no one needs to be sacrificed, no one to be humiliated in order to elevate someone else. Identity no longer arises through separation, but through connection. The logic of chosenness is replaced by a culture of participation: Everyone is meant to live, to learn, to grow — without anyone being left behind.

The very notion of wealth shifts fundamentally: not material possession, but inner maturity, emotional intelligence, and ethical responsibility become the new measure.

Education takes center stage — not as the accumulation of knowledge, but as self-education into a person who can exist without exclusion. Education in this order means:

• Recognition without domination,
• Cooperation without subjugation,
• A self not built on the devaluation of others,
• Thinking in cycles rather than hierarchies,
• Cultivating inner richness instead of outer symbols.

This utopia demands a new ethos — not merely fairer action, but different ways of feeling, judging, believing. Its transformation is not only political or technological — it is spiritual in the deepest sense.

Renouncing Sacrifice

In nearly all historical societies, sacrifice was not a marginal phenomenon, but their hidden center. The sacrificed animal, the scapegoat, the socially excluded — they secured the balance of the rest.

Chosenness and sacrifice are two sides of the same structure: one is chosen because others are sacrificed — symbolically, socially, or materially.

The radical idea of the egalitarian utopia is not to reform this structure, but to transcend it. Renouncing structural sacrifice means more than humaneness — it signifies a reversal of the logic of power. As long as there must be losers to define winners, violence persists — whether visible or symbolic.

A society without sacrifice demands more than justice. It requires structural renunciation — not from asceticism, but from insight. Not from morality, but from a new sense of identity.

It breaks with the identity machine that makes inequality a prerequisite for self-esteem – and opens up the possibility of an order in which the sacred is not created through difference, but through togetherness.

What Spiritual Order Can Replace Sacrifice?

In a world without structural sacrifice, identity must be reconsidered from the ground up. For millennia, our self-image has been shaped through distinctions: I am because I am not you; we are because we are not like them.

To abolish structural sacrifice is to strike at the root of this order — but this does not leave a void. It creates a new spiritual architecture:

• From exclusive to inclusive self-understanding: belonging becomes unconditional. Identity is no longer a fortress, but a node in the web of the shared.
• Relationship instead of transaction: it is not the victim that secures order, but the you. Not commerce, but resonance. Not benefit, but recognition.
• Education as a spiritual training: Education becomes a practice in communication, empathy and the opening of horizons—not out of usefulness, but out of humanness.
• A new concept of the sacred: what is sacred is not the otherworldly, but the inviolable. Not what is superior, but what is ungraspable in the shared.

This order is not weaker, but deeper. Its strength lies not in discipline through fear, but in meaning through connection. Identity becomes a body of resonance: I am because you are, I will be because we grow together, I participate because no one is excluded.

No Heaven Without Earth

The egalitarian utopia is not a reform agenda — it is a spiritual horizon. It does not aim for equal distribution, but for a new orientation toward the world.

Equality does not arise from sameness, but from the recognition of a common ground—unseen, unownable, yet experienceable: a spirit of connection that excludes no one, humiliates no one, sacrifices no one.

It is the radical idea that no one has to die for others to live. That dignity is not granted but recognized. That heaven begins not beyond, but between us.

What long made this utopia seem like a beautiful dream was not just the power of habit, but the power of scarcity: poverty, fear, insecurity. These created the psychological soil from which ownership, competition, and control grew.

But this scarcity is losing its coercive force. With AI, material need, illness, and fear of downward mobility could be overcome—not as utopia, but as a real option.

And the moment no one has to fear losing, ownership loses its role as protection and becomes a burden. Then, admiration no longer goes to the one who has everything but to the one who needs nothing to feel whole.

Not higher, but deeper. Not more, but different. Not above others, but with all. This kind of equality is not the end of history — it is its new beginning. It needs no structural sacrifices—and that is precisely why it deserves our support.