Claim. The principle of mutual existence replaces capitalist private ownership and socialist public ownership with a tri-level joint ownership — of God-and-self, whole-and-self, and neighbor-and-self — grounded in God’s true love rather than in materialistic property law.
Elaboration. Sang Hun Lee argues that both capitalism and socialism are materialistic in their conception of ownership: capitalism legalizes private monopolization of land and property, socialism transfers monopolization to the state, but neither incorporates love as a constitutive element of the property relation (A. Principle of Mutual Existence). Mutual existence treats all property as God’s possession entrusted jointly to humans through love — derived from Genesis 1:20-25, where sky, sea, and land are the joint possession of all birds, fish, and beasts under God’s love.
The paradigm case is the family: even when property is legally titled to parents, it is in fact jointly possessed by all three generations — grandparents (representing God), parents, and children. Lee extends this prototype to companies (God + executives + employees) and states (God + sovereign + people). In each case ownership is structured across “the other and I” on three levels simultaneously. The procedural implication is concrete: a founded enterprise should first be offered to God and then received back jointly, so that divine love, protection, and help can flow into the organization (A. Principle of Mutual Existence).
Lee anticipates the obvious objection — does this abolish private property? — by appealing to the dual character of humans as both universal image and individual image. Because each person has both a purpose-for-the-whole and a purpose-for-the-individual (purpose-of-creation), “appropriate possession” of private property is legitimate, calibrated by conscience to what each person actually needs to love others well. Higher-position persons may legitimately require more, since they have more relations in the six directions to maintain. Critics from both Marxist and libertarian directions will engage on the determinacy of “appropriate” — conscience-calibration is doing heavy lifting here that secular property regimes assign to law or market. Worth a counter-thread once the mechanism by which conscience scales across millions of people is specified.
See also. private-ownership-justified-by-individual-image-and-purpose-for-whole, mutual-righteousness-as-joint-ethics-superseding-religion, future-economy-as-unified-spirit-matter-circulation