People act differently when they really own things.
In a sense this is obvious. How do you treat your own car versus the rental you got on vacation? How do you treat the park versus your own yard? But the mechanism isn't so obvious and the shift in mentality hard to describe. So in this essay, I'm going to articulate exactly that.
When you own something, you have more room for creativity. This is one of the reasons why Uber has been so successful. The drivers own their cars and so they tend to be cleaner, less cluttered and have more amenities. It's striking seeing the wide variety of different Ubers and how they operate. I've been in many where they'll offer me water, others that have charging cords for different types of phones, still others with a tablet for some form of entertainment. There's a creativity that owning something unleashes.
I'm sure taxi drivers have asked for similar things with their management. But because they don't have ownership of the vehicle, they're both less invested and less able to carry out whatever experiments they want to try with their vehicles. The point is that when you own something, you can try more stuff.
There's also more skin in the game. It's the revolutionaries that have nothing who want to "burn it all down." The people that have stuff have little interest in creating chaos. Thus, for any society, there's a natural conservatism (literally desire to conserve) by those that own things. Nobody likes having their stuff taken from them and rule of law is part of the security around your stuff. The people that have things become more respectful of other people's things. Such behavior leads to social stability. It's the people with nothing to lose that are most likely to commit crime.
Finally, there's the desire to make the property worth more. This results in improvements of various types and a general bettering of the things that they own. That means the rest of society gets better goods and services that the property provides, which is what builds up civilization.
Unfortunately, the current monetary system is one of theft, so money itself is being debased constantly. That means, in a sense, that we are not really owners of our own money. And because of the monetary debasement, there's a faster debasement of goods that don't store value well and a premium on things that do. Thus, fewer people own stuff. You get a class of have-nots.
The political solution has been to give these have nots something from the haves. But this presents problems, because the people that get stuff for free generally don't tend to value the stuff nearly as much. It matters how they got their stuff.
Bitcoin has a huge advantage here because you can truly own it. And it doesn't debase. And for all the owners of Bitcoin out there, there's incentive to take care of Bitcoin both locally (self custody) and globally (supporting development). But even more importantly, it takes away the store of value premium from a lot of other assets, making them more affordable. And more people owning stuff means a more stable and prosperous civilization.