Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1145

Thoughts for the promotion of Citadel, Market & Altar

1947?

Original -> 9

 

 

 

More recently, under the title, Citadel, Market and Altar, he has outlined the basic structure and operation of community organization in terms of present-day knowledge of organization throughout the physical world

Once in a blue moon, often centuries apart, some original mind, learned or self-taught, views some field of experience from an unprecedented point of view in which number and quantity are employed to describe the relations involved in events. Being wholly unaccustomed, this simplification seems at first terribly complex and obscure. Yet ratio-minded men have found in it the lever wherewith the whole world of rational technology is moved.

     The present book attempts uniquely to view the successive generations of men in their aspect as energy waves — as rhythmic integrations of the fundamental quantas /quantities?/, mass, motion and time, the time quantity in its ratio to mass and motion being the variable as the average life-span is increased or diminished and the frequency is thus transformed.

 

     Whether or not this view is realistic remains yet to be seen. The answer may be determined in part at least by whether or not a rational technology for reducing the frequency logically evolves. The author claims that it does. He points to the free contractual relationships among men as the numerical measurement, in terms of value units, of their energies transformed and mutually exchanged. He holds, with some elaboration, that this process of maintaining even ratios of energies transformed as products and utilities and /transferred?/ as services and satisfactions creates the standard of living and thereby determines the average life span. A quantitative relationship thus subsists between the number or quantity of lives and their period of duration on the one hand and the number or quantity of services and satisfactions, as value units, produced and exchanged among them. He observes, accordingly, that the life span lengthens or declines as the volume of free contract expands or contracts.

     The rational (ratio) technology consists, then, in expansion of the process of contract, as opposed to coercion, that prevails throughout the field of private interrelations. But these free relationships are necessarily limited by the necessities of public and community business as currently conducted, for political revenue must be raised prior to and to cause public services instead of being subsequent and consequent upon services as private revenues are. The system of voluntarism must therefore be invaded and unbalanced by both the peace powers and the war powers of the sovereign (by conquest or consent) political organization. The unbalanced values, instead of inducing equal values in exchange, are dissipated by force. The standard of living is thereby depleted, with tragic consequences upon those whose accumulations are least.

     The voluntary system must at all times support the coercive. Hence social advance can occur only when the contractual system is developing more rapidly than the political. Political remedies exact revenues invariably without any recompense in exchange and thus can only compound the evils they are intended to set right.

     The alternative, then, is to carry the life-serving technology of free enterprise into the field of public services and community needs. It is to make the ideal of community service actual and progressive and the practice of public coercion therefore less and less necessary. Just how this can be begun seems to most of us a mystery. But the author does not propose any entering wedge. He claims to have found not merely a wedge but a foundation, a whole plateau of basic public service, contractually performed and recompensed but not heretofore understood, upon which rests the whole structure of society in every community. This he calls the dark continent in social science, a field of exchange services often denounced or deplored but never understood or /explored?/ even by those who practice in it.

     Nature herself, in the social evolution, has founded all modern communities on basic public services contractually performed. The nineteenth century witnessed the system of property in land no longer as a political and coercive institution but as the modern system of allocating sites and resources without bias or discrimination and upon equal terms to all. The institution does not create the community lands but it does distribute them. And for performing this necessary service by free contracts without force or favor, it receives the voluntary recompenses known as ground rents and land values. Thus maintaining a contractual and voluntary relationship among men with respect to the desirables of their environment, this institution now affords them, with respect to the sources of their subsistence, security from barbaric violence

1. Here is a book that deserves attention by any thinking person

 

2. A searching, probably revealing light is thrown

Dark continent of thinking about free enterprise

 

3. (Author) His practical accomplishments should command respect for his present vision

A wholly new approach    May well implement great advances