Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1716

Penciled notes, apparently on the same notepad as Item 1701

No date

     World confusion springs from the world’s age-old illusion — blind faith that government, organized force and rulership, and not society, is the source of freedom, the fountain of salvation. From this cherished absurdity springs the world’s chronic slavery, poverty — its anxieties of peace, atrocities of war. Apart from government, few men know that society even exists much less that it is oppositely organized under a golden rule of service by exchange and thereby blesses, liberates and serves. The world’s millions are in an increasing servitude to their political elites — those who, whether by blood or ballots, crush all opposition and wield sovereign power.

     Why such servitude to sovereignties? It springs from fear. For countless ages man was slave to environment. Life and death were his portion as nature smiled or frowned. So he knew her as god or demon in what seemed Nature’s changing moods. Then uprose men of violence upon men, men of conquest to enslave and rule by arms and out of loot and booty, spoil and seizure, bestow great blessings where their favors fell. Now not only nature and ancestral gods could bless or curse mankind. There is a human power whose gifts and favors must be sought, appetite and power must be appeased. Thus governments become divine. The particular sovereignty is threatened by insurgency and menaced by rival powers; supported by superstition, maintained by tyranny, menaced by rival powers. Hence revolutions always latent, wars always potential and prospective when not violently waged. Sovereign power becomes divine power, the heads of states are gods or at least the anointed of God or by benison of popular suffrage or acclaim which, frequently renounced and transformed, gives rise to a widespread illusion of freedom through coercions imagined as self-imposed under imaginary self rule. Whatever be the sanction or the form under which is accepted the slavery or servitude and obedience that sovereignty commands, credulity, compulsions and conscience combine that the firstlings of all services and goods be regularly and increasingly sacrificed and even life itself be laid down to support and if need be defend (against all rivals) the accepted sovereign power.