In this new regular feature I’ll investigate some popular memes that I think need to be questioned or critically examined.

Today I’ll take a look at the Property Ladder meme. In the UK we are experiencing the beginning of a house price correction / crash, supposedly there one already underway in the US. Now the reasons and consequences of this are varied but I believe the Property Ladder meme has played some part in it, at least on the consumer side of things.

Here’s how Wikipedia defines the term:

The property ladder is a term widely used in the United Kingdom to describe an individual or family’s lifetime progress from cheaper to more expensive housing. According to this metaphor, cheap houses for first-time buyers are at the bottom of the property ladder, and expensive houses are at the top. ‘Getting on to the property ladder’ is the process of buying one’s first house, in the hope of leaving it for progressively better houses as one’s salary rises.

The above paragraph explains the crux of the matter. These two words are just a metaphor for a reality. The metaphor isn’t necessarily an accurate description of what is really going on.

First of all ‘Property’ in this phrase implies that the average person signing a mortgage owns that house. But an investment is something that puts money into your wallet. Like a business you own or a stock that pays dividends. A house is a liability, it takes money out of your wallet.

Most people don’t own they house they think they do. The bank owns the house. When you take out a mortgage ( mortgage means ‘a pledge till death’ in French) you are taking out a loan with the bank to pay for the house. The bank owns the house, they’ve invested in it and it puts money into their wallet in the form of your mortgage payments.

The second part of the phrase is even more insidious. What else are ladders for other than climbing higher of course. See how all the associations you have with ladders are brought to your false idea of owning property. You are tricked into thinking that you own something and that it is a normal thing to try and get bigger and better property when you can.

So a couple of years ago someone came up with the term Property Ladder to describe what they were doing. It has a nice ring to it and seems to describe succinctly what people were doing and wanted to do, so it caught on. But here’s where the real memetic effect takes place. It started spreading and affecting peoples behaviour. All of a sudden everyone wanted to be a property investor, and hold a property portfolio. UK TV was flooded with programs about becoming property and buy to let investors.

This deluded idea that everyone could become a property millionaire overnight (and the availability of cheap credit to those that couldn’t really afford it) is causing a massive financial problem in quite a few countries. This isn’t an isolated problem, the credit crunch, commodities bubble and inflation are all related.

Now these issues have been going on for years, but as long as everyone thought they were benefiting no one really seemed to care. It’s incredible but I have friends that studied economics and business that just parroted the term ‘getting on the property ladder’ like mindless automatons, without thinking what it actually means. They just assumed that because everyone else was trying to get onto this property ladder then it must be a good thing to do right?

When the Matrix first came out in the cinemas some people enjoyed the philosophical questions and ideas of the film. Soon essays and books appeared discussing those concepts. It surprised me that so much of what was written focused on the, in my mind, relatively inconsequential questions; to what extent is what we experience ‘real’ and is there such a thing as free will. This is the material of introductory philosophy courses looking to introduce students to Plato and Descartes.

Now I accept that films have many layers of meaning and ways to interpret them, there is no right or wrong explanation. But I was surprised that most of the mainstream commentary seemed to miss one of the most obvious interpretations. The Matrix described is a metaphor for the consensus reality that we humans live in. A reality consisting of social conventions, the language that we use to describe the world and our experience, our beliefs and emotions. All these things filter what is out there in the world before we experience it subjectively. It’s pretty obvious from the following dialogue:

Morpheus : The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

The advertisements on TV attempt to create associations between certain emotions and products. ‘Buy X to feel Y’ or ‘You can not be happy until you own X’. The world religions have instilled certain kinds of morality which have now been pervasive in our culture for so long that they are taken as given. Politicians keep telling us we live in democracies when it’s hard to reconcile that with what we experience day to day.

It’s scary once you realise how so much we take for granted in life is completely arbitrary and conventional. The great thing is, once you know it’s all a game you can start changing the rules.