Spencer Heath Archive

Item 999

Original is missing.

A stream of vital energy flows. If the place is an easy one for it the flow is swift — each unit flows swiftly — each life is long — much energy is manifested in each unit. The vital technique is passive — tropic — external conditions are not improved or even maintained. Only numbers multiply and, correspondingly, subsistence declines. Then conditions become harsh. Out of vast numbers only a few can survive to maturity or for very long. The same vital stream has now many units but the duration, the life span, the energy charge of each is small and brief. The stream has changed in form but not in amount. At the beginning the few who existed grew well and lived long, drawing much from environment. Now this is done by many and each unit must take on and transmit less energy. If any live long they needs must do so by forestalling the others or by “liquidating” them and shortening their lives. If the few who live long do not take directly from environment the energy necessary to do so, then they must take it indirectly from their fellow units. Thus, in order that a few may have many days, many must have few days. There is activity between and and among the units, but it is dissociative, not associative, in the main. However, among the few who thus live long the interactivity cannot be wholly dissociative, else they cannot live long. It must be, on balance, more symbiotic than parasitic, predominantly associative.*

Now, out of this net associative relationship, by this new technique, a higher mode of functioning emerges. This association (society) within or superposed upon the general dissociation (anti-society) gains a new kind of power — the power to change its environment, create its subsistence, rebuild (in measure) its world to its needs and desires.

*If a new and associative relationship does not emerge the energy per individual as shown by the life span, becomes less and the number of individuals becomes more. The stream changes from one of fewer units of greater energy charge to one of more and more units of less and less energy charge until all self-determination is lost, its energy is mingled with other energy and the separate identity of the stream is lost.

Meantime, and especially if there be infusion from without by conquest or migration, there may exist a relatively static and unprogressive society. Such a society exhibits a short average life span for its members and a correspondingly high reproductivity, gradual and continuous depletion of its environment, a complete incapacity to transform and rebuild the physical world in which it lives and a fatalistic philosophy whose ideal is both a present and a final conformity and submission to all present-existing external forces and conditions. It is a vital stream that must take on the character and form of the channel in which it flows; it must adapt itself to the compulsions of environment as its members are enslaved to the conditions into which they are born. In such a society infant mortality is enormously high and longevity correspondingly rare. Age is venerated as showing the rare and special favor of the gods and all projection of hope, as of life, is bound and found as life is projected not by duration or extension, but by swift reproduction, /?/so are individual hopes and ambitions centered on the ideal of many descendents.

The nascent society in which few live long and the many die young can exist only in warm, flat and fertile lands where men require the least in food, clothing and shelter to sustain life and where rude and primitive agriculture can bring forth the most subsistence. Here the natural conditions are such that two men may subsist on the labor of one and, since men retain the predatory instincts from their animal past, slavery is the natural condition for the masses of men.