The Serious Businessman Who Counts the Stars
On the fourth planet, the Little Prince meets a businessman too busy even to raise his head. He keeps adding numbers and counting stars. He says that he is a serious and exact man with no time to stare idly at the sky. When the Little Prince asks what he does with so many stars, the businessman answers that he does nothing with them; he simply owns them. Owning stars makes him rich, and being rich enables him to buy another star if someone discovers one.
His logic resembles that of the drunkard in the preceding chapter. The drunkard is ashamed of drinking, so he drinks again to forget the shame. The businessman owns stars to become rich and becomes rich in order to buy more stars. The reason for becoming rich and the reason for needing more stars disappear, while the act becomes its own purpose. He circles endlessly inside a loop from which he cannot escape.
The businessman argues that no one else owns the stars and that he was the first to think of possessing them, so they belong to him. His logic is that an unowned diamond or island belongs to its discoverer, while an idea belongs to whoever first conceives and patents it. The Little Prince replies that if he owns a handkerchief, he can wear it around his neck or take it with him; if he owns a flower, he can water it and do something beneficial for it. All the businessman does is write the number of stars on a piece of paper, put it in a drawer, and lock the drawer. He is of no use to the stars.
The words I draw from this chapter are calculation, ownership, and wealth. Its central sentence is “to claim that something is mine.” I can reduce the argument that follows to one sentence:
Ownership is an illusion.
Calculation Is an Abstraction That Turns Reality into Numbers
The first thing the businessman does is calculate. To calculate, we have to turn something in reality into a number. When rice is exchanged for blankets or shells, expressions such as “this much” and “a little more” make comparison difficult. Human beings therefore standardized units of length, weight, and volume, quantified objects, and made them available for addition, subtraction, and comparison.
Objects in the actual world, however, do not fall into numbers so cleanly. If I say that my height is 169.7 centimeters, that number is not my height itself. Measuring to ten decimal places would produce a closer approximation, but that number would still have been cut off or rounded somewhere. Every shell is a different size, and no two sacks of flour are perfectly identical. Calculation requires us to surrender some of those differences and group things under a single unit.
I describe this as quantization: setting the continuous differences of reality into determinate values so that calculation becomes possible, something like rounding in its simplest form. Calculation is indispensable and extremely useful, but the calculated number must not be mistaken for reality itself. A number does not copy the actual value intact; it is an abstraction made for comparison and operation. The businessman who precisely counts hundreds of millions of stars believes that numbers allow him to possess reality completely, but what he actually grasps is an abstract sign.
What Is Required to Claim That Something Is Mine?
Now consider ownership. Almost no one looks at the stars and says, “Those are mine.” Yet once human beings travel into space, they may divide the Moon into one person’s sector and another person’s sector. Today we do not say that a certain percentage of the Sun belongs to someone, while we draw boundaries around land, mountains, and rivers and assign owners. What creates that difference?
The businessman says that because he discovered something first and first thought of possessing it, it is his. In the actual world, discovery and assertion alone do not complete ownership. If two people both say, “I discovered it first; it is mine,” who receives it? The oldest answer is violence. If one person has the strength to put a blade to another’s throat and demand the object, the other hands it over. If someone can draw a line around land and threaten to beat anyone who enters, he can turn the area inside that line into his territory.
Ownership created by violence requires the continuity of violence. A person may seize something through superior strength today and lose it when he weakens tomorrow. National territories have continually changed through conquest and division as countless states have risen and fallen. No land has belonged inherently to one country from the beginning. Ownership is recognized only while the power supporting the claim “this is my land” remains in place.
If ownership were a property inscribed in the object from birth, it would not change when power changed. Yet borders change when states collapse, and paper records of property become scraps of paper when a monetary system disintegrates. Ownership is not a substance contained in an object. It exists only within the conditions that sustain a claim and defend it.
How Violence Becomes Law and Agreement
Maintaining ownership through violence alone is exhausting. The dispossessed keep asking, “Why is that yours?” and try to take it back. The next stage is therefore to make everyone believe that it belongs to the owner. The same claim is repeated across generations: fathers and grandfathers say that this land belongs to the king and that this person is the lord’s slave. When everyone nearby treats the claim as self-evident, it becomes extremely difficult to say that it is false.
The repeated claim is then proclaimed in the name of law. At first, land is taken with swords and spears. After enough has been seized, the conqueror orders everyone to stop using violence and stop stealing because the result of conquest is now “my land.” Ashoka did not expand his realm by entering dialogue and reaching agreements with the many states of India. He conquered through weapons, force, violence, and killing. Once a ruler has taken as much as he wants, he says, “Do not fight from now on. Do not take anything from me. This land is mine,” and turns the result of conquest into a legitimate order.
Buddhist writers often praise Ashoka as a great king, but I do not agree with presenting him as simply admirable while erasing the violence of conquest. Was the land truly Ashoka’s? Or did he insist that he was the king and that the territory was his until others learned to believe the same thing? The structure of ownership is a process: claim that something is mine, support the claim with violence, and eventually instill it in everyone under the names of law and agreement.
The same question applies to air, water, and mountains. If someone first declared that the air belonged to him and demanded payment for every breath, people would ask why the air was his. But if he could block access by force and solidify the arrangement through generations of law and custom, people might eventually regard payment as natural. Calling an arrangement an agreement does not settle the issue. We must ask who agreed with whom, when they did so, and who possessed the power to define the agreement.
Ownership among modern states is maintained by the same combination of claims, force, and law. A state draws borders, defends them through military and police power, and validates them through domestic and international law. When international law fails to function, military violence returns. Private property within the state is likewise protected by documents, money, police, and law. When those conditions collapse, ownership that seemed self-evident disappears. The world has not yet fully escaped this barbaric structure.
Ownership Turns Possession Itself into the Goal
To the businessman, counting and owning stars is serious and valuable work. Yet if a person owns hundreds of billions of won, can he eat hundreds of billions of won worth of food? If he claims to own the bodies of a thousand people, can he actually have a relationship with all of them? If a document says that a mountain is mine, does that mountain become part of my body? We have to distinguish practical use from value inflated in the mind.
The Little Prince waters his flower and cleans his volcanoes. His ownership is beneficial to what he possesses because it takes the form of care and responsibility. The businessman counts stars, writes the number on paper, and locks it away. The stars gain nothing from his ownership. Once ownership itself becomes important, a person becomes more serious about the sign “mine” than about the actual relationship with the object. What I made, said, thought, or drew is all declared mine. No matter how serious the owner feels, the spectacle may look like comedy from the outside.
This does not mean that every form of ownership should be abolished. There are personal and common forms of ownership with many functions. Nor are humans the only animals that claim territory. Dogs mark areas with urine, bears define their ranges, and ant colonies fight over territory. Many forms of territorial assertion exist throughout life. But a dog’s or bear’s mark does not make the land inherently that animal’s property. The important point is to remember that it is a claim.
The Rich-Get-Richer Structure Built by the Illusion of Ownership
Calling ownership an illusion does not mean that it lacks force in reality. On the contrary, an illusion built by claims, law, and violence rules people’s lives powerfully. One person’s wealth keeps growing while he sits still, whereas another person works for a lifetime and sees hardly any increase at all. Some claim the land, rivers, and nearly everything else as their own, while others can call nothing theirs. The present monetary and capitalist systems continually widen this difference.
The claim that raising the minimum wage automatically causes inflation is a blatant lie. Moving some of a corporation’s existing money into workers’ wages does not automatically increase the total amount of money in society. Greater demand for particular products may raise their prices somewhat, but that must be distinguished from a decline in the value of money caused by an increase in the money supply. The same applies when the government pays money to citizens: one cannot call it inflation without asking whether existing revenue was redistributed or new money was created.
In the modern monetary system, bank lending creates money that did not exist before, and the state can also issue money. When the money supply increases while the quantity of material goods remains unchanged, the value of money declines. A packet of noodles that once cost 100 won may then cost 110 won. The difficult term “quantitative easing” is likewise connected to increasing the money supply and reducing its value. This did not happen only in Japan; Korea has also expanded its money supply for decades. Ignoring that structure and blaming inflation on workers’ wages or public support means either misunderstanding or distorting the monetary system.
Industry and technology have advanced while inequality has grown. Wealth gives people far more choices in marriage, childbirth, education, and housing, while the poor abandon dating, marriage, children, and even hope in work. Politics is also conducted mostly by people with wealth, so the experience of part-time workers and the poor is rarely represented adequately. Merely saying that a country is democratic does not end the sacrifice of the socially weak.
Because I spent many years working part-time jobs, I tend to think from the standpoint of people with little money. I cannot claim to understand the most extreme poverty, and people in the middle or upper classes may find it difficult to share my position. Even so, we must ask how the present banking, monetary, and capitalist systems create a rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer structure. If 0.1 percent or 1 percent of society possesses half of all wealth, the question “Why is all of that solely yours?” cannot be avoided.
Redistribution and Thinking in Terms of Dependent Origination
Taxation is the state taking part of the money an individual claims as his own. But once ownership is no longer treated as an absolute substance, taxation and redistribution cannot be dismissed simply as theft. A society is ruined when extreme concentration of wealth is left untouched. Higher taxation on those who possess more and the redistribution of wealth produced by society as a whole therefore become necessary.
A person’s thinking changes after becoming rich. He believes that what he has was created entirely by his own ability and asks, “Why should anyone take what is mine?” Inwardly, he may regard himself as a king and the poor as insects while outwardly shouting about freedom and attacking redistribution as communism. He has already been conditioned to regard his ownership as unquestionably legitimate. Technological revolutions and artificial intelligence will not automatically redistribute wealth. As long as those who possess wealth regard it as their absolute property, they will resist sharing it.
Successful people often fail to recognize how much luck and circumstance contributed to their success. People who fail also often blame themselves for everything. Both are failures to think through dependent origination. Success and failure do not arise from individual will alone. They occur through education, family, capital, historical period, institutions, chance, and countless relationships. When these conditions are ignored, people believe exactly what society has taught them: the successful deserve to possess everything, and the unsuccessful deserve poverty.
Nor am I saying that a society automatically becomes happy merely because its industrial level is low and people are equally poor. Standards of happiness are relative, and conditions of life are complex. What I demand is not a simple slogan. We need a public discussion about which forms of ownership benefit individuals and society, why the present banking and monetary systems concentrate wealth, and what forms of distribution are required for people to live more happily.
We should not laugh at the businessman in The Little Prince and stop there. We too mistake numbers for reality, treat the claim “mine” as a substance, and turn increasing possessions into the purpose of life. Ownership operates in reality, but it is not an entity that belonged to us from the beginning. It is established through claims, force, law, and the conditioning that makes those conditions appear natural. Only after seeing its structure can we stop being dragged along by ownership and ask again what real benefit ownership ought to bring to people and society.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.