The First Shall Be Last: Why being 'first; beats Creation in One Domain—and Nowhere Else

Imagine you're at the Sydney Olympics, watching the men's 100-metre final. The gun fires. Usain Bolt explodes from the blocks, his impossible stride carrying him past the field in 9.69 seconds—a new world record. The crowd erupts. But then something strange happens. The officials gather. They announce that the gold medal will actually go to a different runner: the one who arrived at the Olympic Stadium first that morning. He registered early, you see. He was here before Bolt. His prior presence on the track creates an ongoing moral claim to the rewards of the race, regardless of performance.

You'd think this was madness. Yet this is precisely the logic we apply—without apparent irony—to one specific domain of human life: the claims of indigenous peoples to the wealth generated in settler societies.

This isn't a polemic. It's a puzzle. Why does "we were here first" function as a near-sacred trump card in debates about national wealth, land rights, and political power, when it is systematically ignored or reversed in virtually every other sphere of human activity? In sports, markets, science, family inheritance, and even neighbourly disputes, priority of arrival rarely beats superior performance, value creation, or improvement. The patent system doesn't grant eternal royalties to whoever filed first; it grants temporary monopolies to incentivise innovation. Squatters' rights expire. Olympic medals go to the fastest, not the earliest registrant.

Yet in the politics of settler societies—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States—"First Peoples" rhetoric often demands perpetual shares of riches built by later arrivals, riches that transformed subsistence economies into prosperous ones through institutions, capital, technology, and trade. This moral asymmetry deserves scrutiny not because indigenous peoples' claims are invalid, but because the underlying principle seems to operate nowhere else. It's as if we've collectively decided that one specific historical circumstance activates a moral rule we reject everywhere else—and we haven't quite explained why.

The Inconvenient Universality of Conquest

Let's start with an uncomfortable fact: there are no aboriginal Edenic originals. Every square metre of the Earth's surface has been conquered, settled, displaced, or migrated to multiple times. The romantic notion of pristine First Peoples living in harmony since time immemorial doesn't survive contact with archaeology or anthropology.

Consider Australia, where the narrative of 65,000 years of continuous connection to Country is central to contemporary indigenous identity. This is true as far as it goes—Aboriginal peoples have the oldest continuous culture on Earth. But "continuous" doesn't mean static or pacific. Archaeological evidence shows that Aboriginal groups fought over territory, resources, and water rights for millennia. Fire-stick farming—a sophisticated land management technique—also altered the landscape so profoundly that it contributed to the extinction of Australian megafauna. The giant wombat-like diprotodon, the marsupial lion, the three-metre-tall kangaroo—all vanished within a few thousand years of human arrival. Aboriginal Australians were brilliant ecological engineers, but they were engineers, not passive inhabitants of an untouched Eden.

Move to the Americas. Before Columbus, the Aztec Empire extracted tribute from conquered peoples across Mesoamerica. The Incas built their vast domain through military conquest, forcibly relocating populations and extracting labor. On the Great Plains, the Comanche became a regional superpower in the 18th century, displacing the Apache and terrorising Spanish settlements—all enabled by their mastery of horses, an animal introduced by Europeans. In New Zealand, the Māori practiced warfare long before European contact; the musket wars of the 1810s-1830s saw northern iwi (tribes) with access to British firearms nearly annihilate southern rivals, including the Moriori of the Chatham Islands, who were invaded, enslaved, and massacred.

Why does this matter? Because it demolishes the implicit assumption underlying many indigenous claims: that they represent a uniquely innocent category of humanity wronged by uniquely guilty colonisers. Human history is creative destruction. Every population is descended from people who displaced someone else. As Jared Diamond documented in Guns, Germs, and Steel, the European colonisation of the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific was simply the latest—and most technologically lopsided—wave in an ancient pattern. The Bantu expansion across Africa displaced or absorbed countless earlier populations. The Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain pushed the Celtic Britons to the margins. The Han Chinese consolidation displaced dozens of ethnic groups. The Arab conquests of the 7th century transformed the Mediterranean and Middle East.

None of this justifies atrocities. Massacres, broken treaties, and the deliberate spread of disease are moral horrors regardless of historical context. But it does raise a question: if we applied the "firstness" principle consistently, who exactly would owe whom? Should modern Turks pay reparations to Greeks for the Ottoman conquest? Should Mongolians compensate Central Asians for Genghis Khan? Should we track down Neanderthal descendants—oh wait, we are the Neanderthal descendants, via interbreeding—and pay ourselves?

The selective application of "firstness" suggests it's not a universal moral principle. It's a culturally specific narrative that serves particular interests in particular times.

The Philosophy of Property: When Does Mixing Labor Trump Prior Presence?

John Locke, writing in the 17th century, gave us a framework that still dominates property theory in liberal democracies: you gain legitimate ownership by mixing your labor with previously unowned resources. You fence the land, plough it, irrigate it, build on it—and it becomes yours. This isn't theft from those who were there before, Locke argued, because leaving valuable resources unused is itself a kind of waste. Improvement creates value that didn't exist before.

This is the logic that justified—in the eyes of European settlers—the doctrine of terra nullius in Australia: not that the land was literally empty, but that it was legally unowned because Aboriginal peoples hadn't improved it in recognisable ways (fences, agriculture, permanent structures). We now reject terra nullius as a legal fiction that ignored 65,000 years of occupation and sophisticated land management. But notice what we've not done: we haven't rejected Locke's labor-mixing principle itself. We still believe that building a factory on empty land creates ownership rights. We still grant mining rights to those who locate and extract resources, not to whoever happened to be walking past.

The asymmetry is striking. Consider two scenarios:

Scenario One: In 1850, a farmer arrives in rural Victoria, clears heavily timbered land, builds fences, plants wheat, and creates a productive farm. His great-great-grandchildren sell it in 2025 for $5 million, reaping the rewards of that initial labor mixed with subsequent generations of improvement and rising land values. We think this is just. We don't demand they share the proceeds with the descendants of whoever hunted kangaroos on that spot in 1849.

Scenario Two: In 1850, European settlers establish Melbourne, draining swamps, building wharves, creating a grid of streets, importing legal systems and capital markets. Over 175 years, this transforms a mosquito-infested river delta into a metropolis of 5 million people generating hundreds of billions in annual economic output. Should the Wurundjeri people—who fished and hunted in the area for thousands of years but didn't build a city—be entitled to an ongoing share of that wealth purely on the basis of prior presence?

You might argue yes to the second and no to the first, but explain the moral difference. In both cases, later arrivals created value that didn't exist before. In both cases, earlier inhabitants were displaced. The scale differs, but the principle seems the same.

Or consider patents. Australia's patent system grants inventors exclusive rights for 20 years, then the invention enters the public domain. We don't say, "You thought of it first, so your descendants get royalties forever." We balance incentives for innovation against the public good. Time-limited exclusivity, then open access. Why doesn't this apply to land claims based on ancestral priority?

The race analogy crystallises this. When Cathy Freeman won gold in the 400 metres at the Sydney Olympics, no one suggested she owed a share of her prize to whoever arrived at Stadium Australia first that day. The medal went to the fastest runner, not the earliest registrant. Yet Australia's current debates about the Voice referendum, treaty negotiations, and constitutional recognition all rest on the assumption that indigenous Australians have a special moral claim—based on priority—to influence over resources and decisions that affect everyone.

The Psychology of "Firstness": Why It Feels Sacred Only Sometimes

Here's what's fascinating: our inconsistent application of the "firstness" principle isn't random. It follows a pattern that tells us something deep about human nature.

Evolutionary psychologists have long known that humans are tribal creatures. We're wired for in-group loyalty and zero-sum territoriality. "My ancestors were here first" is a powerful identity claim because it signals purity in a world of mixed ancestry and moral ambiguity. It's the ultimate LEGO brick of identity politics: simple, modular, unassailable. You can't argue with chronology.

But we suppress this intuition in domains where it would break the system. Sports and business reward achievement because they require objective metrics and repeated play. If we allowed "I was here first" to trump performance in the Olympics, athletics would collapse. No one would train. The entire edifice of competitive sport depends on merit—on the fastest, strongest, most skilful winning regardless of when they showed up.

Markets operate similarly. If squatters could claim ownership of commercial real estate simply by arriving first, property rights would evaporate. Economic development requires that value creation, not mere occupancy, generates ownership. This is why adverse possession laws have strict time limits and conditions. Priority matters—but only when combined with improvement and continuous use.

So why the carve-out for indigenous claims? Several psychological and cultural factors converge:

Loss aversion and narrative asymmetry. Humans hate losing what they feel entitled to more than they celebrate gains. The indigenous loss of autonomy and land is visceral, immediate, and easily narrativised: invasion, dispossession, destruction. The settler creation of wealth is abstract, diffuse, and spans generations: institutions, capital accumulation, technological diffusion, trade networks. One makes for compelling storytelling; the other is just boring economics.

Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for documenting loss aversion: we feel the pain of losing $100 more intensely than the pleasure of gaining $100. Applied to group identity, this means indigenous peoples experience their historical losses far more acutely than settler populations appreciate their created gains. And in the modern attention economy, vivid narratives trump dry statistics. Media and academia amplify grievance because victimhood confers moral status—what Jonathan Haidt calls the "care/harm" foundation of morality trumping "fairness/proportionality."

Post-1960s Western guilt. This is the elephant in the room. Vietnam, civil rights, decolonisation—these created a cultural reflex in Western societies: our success must be stolen. Non-Western conquests get a pass. No one expects Mongolians to flagellate themselves over Genghis Khan's empire. Turkey doesn't apologise for the Ottoman conquests. China isn't racked with guilt over Han expansion into Xinjiang or Tibet. Japan doesn't endlessly debate its obligations to the Ainu.

But Australia? Canada? The United States? We've institutionalised self-critique to the point where "Acknowledgment of Country"—a ritual declaration that we're on land that always was and always will be Aboriginal—is now standard before government meetings, university lectures, and corporate events. These cost nothing to perform but signal moral sophistication. As Robin DiAngelo might put it (though from the opposite political direction), it's a low-cost way for elites to purchase moral credentials without changing anything structural.

The myth of the noble savage. Here's an uncomfortable observation: accepting that modern wealth derives largely from value creation threatens a cherished progressive narrative. If Aboriginal Australians lived sustainably but created relatively little economic surplus, and European settlers built cities, industries, and institutions that generated prosperity, then the implication is uncomfortable: creation matters more than priority. This doesn't justify colonisation's brutalities, but it does complicate the simple theft narrative.

Many people find this intolerable because it conflicts with egalitarian intuitions: outcomes should be roughly equal unless someone cheated. The vast gap between indigenous and non-indigenous outcomes in settler societies must therefore be explained by theft, not differential productivity. The alternative—that different economic systems generate different levels of wealth, and modern institutions are more productive than hunter-gatherer or subsistence farming economies—feels like blaming the victim.

But consider the data. Australia's GDP per capita is roughly $65,000 USD. Before European contact, Aboriginal Australians lived in hunter-gatherer bands with no agriculture, no metal tools, no writing, no permanent structures. Estimating historical GDP for such societies is fraught, but economic historians peg hunter-gatherer output at perhaps $200-500 in modern equivalent value per person per year—a 100-200x difference.

This isn't stolen wealth. It's created wealth. The resources were always there—iron ore in the Pilbara, gold in Ballarat, farmland in the Murray-Darling Basin—but they generated almost no economic value until someone had the technology and institutions to extract, process, and trade them. Aboriginal Australians passed over these resources for 65,000 years, not because they were foolish, but because hunter-gatherer technology couldn't exploit them. European settlers brought property rights, capital markets, metallurgy, and industrial organisation. That's not plunder; it's creation.

The Comparative Test: Where Else Does "Firstness" Rule?

If "firstness" were a universal moral principle, we'd expect to see it operating across different domains. We don't. Consider:

Scientific discovery. Credit goes to whoever publishes first, not whoever thought of it first or worked on the problem longest. Einstein doesn't owe royalties to all the physicists who pondered relativity before him. The structure of DNA belongs to Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins—the team that cracked it—not to the centuries of scientists who studied heredity before them.

Family inheritance. The firstborn child in Australia has no automatic claim to a larger inheritance than later siblings. We abandoned primogeniture because we decided birth order shouldn't determine life outcomes. Yet we maintain that temporal priority—being on land first—creates permanent moral claims.

Neighbourhood disputes. If your neighbour plants a beautiful garden, you don't get to claim part of the increased property values just because your house was built first. If they renovate and increase the value of the street, you might benefit from positive spillovers, but you have no moral claim to their improvement.

Immigration and settlement. This is particularly revealing. Every immigrant to Australia displaces someone else—if only in housing markets, job markets, and competition for public resources. Should third-generation Australians have moral priority over recent arrivals? Should descendants of the First Fleet convicts have priority over post-war European migrants, who in turn have priority over more recent Asian immigrants?

We reject this explicitly. Australian multiculturalism is built on the principle that your contribution to society matters more than when your ancestors arrived. A Vietnamese refugee who arrived in 1975 and built a successful business has no less claim to being "Australian" than someone whose family has been here since 1788. Merit and integration trump temporal priority.

Except, apparently, when it comes to Aboriginal Australians, where we insist that 65,000 years of prior presence creates a special category of moral claim that persists indefinitely.

The View from Elsewhere: How Other Societies Handle This

Australia isn't unique in facing questions about indigenous rights and historical justice, but we handle it unusually. Consider some international comparisons:

Japan dealt with its indigenous Ainu population by largely assimilating them into the dominant culture. There's been some recent recognition and cultural preservation efforts, but no one seriously proposes that Ainu descendants should have veto power over resource development in Hokkaido or receive perpetual payments for priority of settlement.

South Korea and Singapore built extraordinary wealth in two generations without any "firstness" claims at all—they're relatively homogeneous societies where everyone has roughly the same claim to priority, so success depends entirely on value creation. South Korea went from roughly Ghana-level GDP per capita in 1960 to first-world wealth today. No historical firstness was available to claim.

New Zealand offers an interesting contrast. The Treaty of Waitangi created a partnership framework that's led to substantial settlements—the Waitangi Tribunal has awarded billions to Māori groups for historical grievances. But there's growing evidence that the outcomes are mixed. Some iwi have used settlements brilliantly, building commercial empires. Others have seen the money dissipate without closing socioeconomic gaps. The gap in life expectancy between Māori and non-Māori is still about seven years. Educational outcomes remain stubbornly divergent.

Consider the comparative evidence. Asian immigrants to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States generally outperform both indigenous populations and the majority white population within a generation or two, despite arriving with no historical claims whatsoever. They had no "firstness" to claim, no land rights to assert, no treaty to invoke. They just participated in market economies with strong property rights and meritocratic institutions. And they flourished.

This doesn't mean racism doesn't exist or that indigenous peoples should just "get over it." But it does suggest that value creation matters more than historical priority when it comes to generating prosperity.

Why the Default Persists: Cui Bono?

So if the "firstness" principle is philosophically inconsistent and economically dubious, why does it persist? The cynical answer: because it serves interests.

Indigenous leaders gain political leverage and resources through perpetual grievance. As the saying goes, "There's no money in solutions, only in problems." Treaty processes, land councils, compensation schemes—these create permanent institutions and bureaucracies with strong incentives to maintain rather than resolve historical claims.

Western intellectuals gain moral superiority through self-flagellation. Academic careers are built on postcolonial theory, critical race studies, and indigenous scholarship that frames Western prosperity as theft. These fields don't exist to solve problems; they exist to theorise oppression in increasingly elaborate ways. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay documented in Cynical Theories, much of contemporary academic activism is about acquiring status through victimhood narratives.

Politicians gain votes from guilt-motivated and identity-focused constituencies. Land acknowledgments cost nothing and offend almost no one. They're pure virtue signalling—a way to demonstrate moral sophistication without actually redistributing wealth or changing power structures. When Labor and Liberal politicians both recite the same acknowledgment, you know it's become empty ritual.

The media loves a narrative of oppressor and oppressed. It's dramatically compelling, morally simple, and generates engagement. The story of value creation—how institutions, capital, and technology transformed subsistence into prosperity—is boring. It requires understanding economics, history, and statistics. The story of theft and dispossession is immediate, emotional, and fits in a 30-second news grab.

None of these actors have incentives to question the "firstness" principle. And so it persists as a default moral framework, unchallenged except in venues like this where we can afford to think through the implications.

The Fragility of Prosperity

Here's what we risk by making "firstness" a sacred principle: we obscure the real sources of wealth and thereby endanger them.

Modern prosperity is historically abnormal. For most of human history, essentially everyone was poor. GDP per capita barely budged from roughly $500-800 (in modern terms) from the agricultural revolution until the Industrial Revolution. Then, starting around 1800, northwestern Europe and its settler offshoots experienced a Great Enrichment—incomes multiplied 10x, 20x, 30x. The economist Deirdre McCloskey attributes this to a shift in values: for the first time, commerce and innovation became respectable. Property rights became secure. Markets expanded. Creative destruction was tolerated.

This wasn't natural or inevitable. It required specific institutions: rule of law, limited government, protection of property, freedom of contract, freedom of conscience. These are fragile. They can be eroded by the assumption that existing wealth is simply there to be divided among competing historical claims rather than created through ongoing effort.

The "firstness" narrative encourages zero-sum thinking: there's a fixed pie, and the question is just who deserves which slice. But the pie isn't fixed. Australia's economy in 2025 isn't dividing up resources that existed in 1788; it's creating value that couldn't have existed without modern institutions. The iron ore in the Pilbara had zero economic value to anyone until BHP and Rio Tinto had the capital, technology, and markets to extract and export it.

If we tell ourselves that modern wealth is primarily the fruit of historical dispossession, we systematically undervalue the institutions that create wealth. And when you undervalue something, you're likely to lose it.

Conclusion: The Pattern Behind the Paradox

We return to the starting puzzle: why does "firstness" trump creation in this one domain when we reject it everywhere else?

The answer isn't that we've discovered a universal moral truth that applies uniquely to indigenous claims. It's that we've created a culturally specific narrative that serves particular psychological and political needs in contemporary Western societies. It allows elites to signal moral sophistication at low cost. It provides a simple, emotionally compelling story of good versus evil. It flatters our self-conception as enlightened, guilt-ridden moderns who acknowledge historical wrongs.

But it doesn't scale. It doesn't work in sports or markets or science or immigration policy. It creates perverse incentives—prioritising grievance over creation, identity over achievement, historical priority over present contribution. And it fundamentally misunderstands the sources of modern prosperity, which aren't looted but created through institutions, capital, technology, and trade.

This doesn't mean indigenous peoples have no legitimate claims. Historical injustices deserve acknowledgment. Broken treaties should be honoured. Cultural preservation has value. But these claims should be evaluated on their own terms—as questions of justice, dignity, and cultural survival—not through the intellectually incoherent framework of eternal "firstness" rights that we reject everywhere else.

The human condition favours grievance over gratitude because evolution wired us for coalitional defence and zero-sum competition, not abstract appreciation of value creation. We're storytellers first, accountants second.

But boring economics is what lifted billions from poverty. And if we want to preserve the prosperity that makes our moral debates possible, we might need to care less about who was first and more about who builds something lasting.

After all, Usain Bolt doesn't owe the early registrant. He earned his medal. And we shouldn't pretend otherwise just because it makes for a more comfortable story.