Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1990

Notes penned in a notebook containing dates between July and October 1934

Original is in item 1978.

METHOD

     When any condition or result or any certain thing is greatly desired and people at last find out how to obtain or produce this thing, they finally come to the practice of doing it by a certain definite method. This is called the technique of that production. Notice, it is not called a technique but the technique. This is because, generally speaking, there is one and only one effective way to do anything. Certain basic principles are found to be involved, and these principles must be utilized in substantially the same manner wherever and whenever the particular desired result is obtained.

     Modern science and invention have taken advantage of nature by learning her secrets, by finding out the basic principles and procedures that lead to desired results. To obtain great heat or cold, high or low pressure, to cause things to dissolve or combine, or even to build a great ship of the sea or of the air, it matters not by whom it is done, the procedure must be basically the same.

     Now, just as there are uniform basic methods for getting good things done, so also are there fundamental procedures by which undesired results are or may be brought about. Travel with me in fancy for a moment and let us suppose that we could desire not less but more of the bad things and conditions from which we are now unable to escape. Suppose, in our world of social relationships, we desired more idleness of men and machines, less turnover in transportation and trade, a more limited exchange of services and commodities, in short a greater amount of unemployment and underproduction than we now have. And then suppose our best minds set to work to bring such conditions about. Would they not discern a definite technique, just one basic procedure, leading to that end? And when the evils I have mentioned were well established would they not surely bring in their train such other and related distresses as insufficient public revenue and the venal administration of public affairs? Once we were shown how we might or could do these things — what, in fact, we would have to do in order to produce these unhappy results — we would then know in a definite manner just what we have done and are now continuing to do to bring about these conditions with which we are so sorely afflicted; and, what is very important, we would then be in position to choose whether or not we would continue to do those things.

     Now, my friends of the air, I would not have you think that I am an original discoverer of fine ways of doing ill, but I have given quite a lot of observation to what men do in their collective and governmental capacity that leads to such unhappy social and collective results.