Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1478

Typed draft material for a letter to Miss Florence Norton, Managing Editor, The Freeman Magazine, 240 Madison Avenue, New York 16, New York

1953?

Dear Miss Norton:

An intellectual pioneer seeking to understand the structure and the processes of the social organization is in no large company. He finds most minds prepossessed with the negative, the counter-trends, in human affairs and, in con­sequence, deeply infected with traditional misconceptions contrary to the enduring long-term actualities of life, thus largely immune against positive forward thinking. Conflict intrigues them. Knowledge of evil outweighs, even disdains, knowledge of the useful and the good. Unless very young, nothing but effective challenge of long accepted premises can stir complacency into free and unshackled inquiry. This is all there is to justify any attack on implicit hidden false assumptions and traditional mass beliefs. Like physical surgery, the operation is wholly uninspiring. Yet it is psychologically necessary to remove the long and currently accepted malignancy against the inspiration, the creative beauty of the intellectual understanding wherein lies the high human power of objective creation.

The above is my apologia for the accompanying exposi­tion of the positive and creative social relations, so far and so long obscured under the anti-social premises derived from Malthus and Ricardo, that constitute the commonly accep­ted land communist creed.

Sincerely,