Spencer Heath

Item 1489

Letter to Mrs. Lloyd W. Maxwell, 1536 – 7th Avenue, San Diego 1, California

August 29, 1953

Dear Mrs. Maxwell:

     It is nice to hear from you and know where you are in California after these many long years. I do hope that you have been in good health and that the world has been using you well since those good old days when I enjoyed your company so much at the Henry George School.

     It was wonderful then to be working for the cause of human freedom according to our best lights and to continue doing so throughout the years. But it is necessary for us to realize that human society is in a process of organic evolution. As men gain more and more freedom from the political tyrannies and restrictions of the past they spontaneously move into relationships of higher and higher organic unity. This proceeds only to the extent that men practice freedom from arbitrary power over one another, and this is done only through increasingly serving one another by extending the practice of contract and all the wonderful processes and cooperation of the market. Men have only made headway in this direction by concentrating on their possibilities and opportunities – by developing the potentialities of the social situation and not by any action aimed at directly overcoming the evils, real or imaginary, in their path. This development of the voluntary society superseding political organization is a spiritual process in which men are becoming less and less merely creatures and more and more the creators of the world. All of this has come about through social as against political organization.

     Henry George had bright visions of a great future for mankind, but the best thinkers of the world and of his time had not yet realized how none of this could be achieved through any beneficence of the taxing and war-making power, whatever might be men’s intentions with regard to that. Happily there is a divine providence which gives us social, or spiritual, power through serving one another in freedom and only in so serving, to unite our­selves spiritually and productively, and without violence or war to build the new Kingdom of Heaven on earth to take the place of all the old political with its slaveries and wars. Those of us who have this newer vision realize that Henry George dreamed well of freedom, but it was an ill dream that freedom could be won by coercive means. He knew that his thought had not reached the end and he en­joined his followers to further the application of the principles of freedom upon which his heart was set.

     I have learned a great deal more about the social organization since the days we were working together. Most people, however, are too much concerned with the negative side of things to be quickly inspired by the beauty with which we have been endowed. It is only to draw attention to the positive that I have exposed the fallacies of Henry George’s argument for political in­stead of social and non-coercive administration for /of?/ the bounties of Nature for the benefit of mankind.

     We are only slowly and somewhat blindly moving in the direction of free as against political administration. I am trying to get intelligent people more and more to understand the nature of the social as against the poli­tical organization, so that the good things we are now doing blindly and empirically can be done rationally and in full volume in the field of social affairs the same as science has enabled us to do in the field of physical and chemical affairs.

     Please read what I am sending to you with a view to a wider understanding of the social evolution moving to­wards the fulfillment of the highest intellectual, artistic, and religious aspirations of mankind.

     It is nice to know that you are still in the land of the living and have remembered me all this time with con­sciousness of the beauty and the unity of our ideals.

     With best wishes and kindest remembrances,

                                        Sincerely,

 

SH:sm

Enc.

 

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