Spencer Heath Archive

Item 131

Pencil by Heath on notepad paper.

No date

 

 

 

    

     This essay will be peculiar, probably unique, in that it will regard the fine arts as having a definite place and a specific function as a department of the living organization of community-dwelling and voluntarily interfunctioning men.

     Society, specifically and in any functional sense, is the organization of men organically related in exclusively voluntary and reciprocal engagements called contracts. These relationships, being contractual, operate among indefinite numbers of men unaffected by their diversities of race, religion or any merely personal or tribal characteristics.

     In their practice of other-service instead of self-service men, consciously or unconsciously, submit themselves, their services and properties to the rational jurisdiction of the common markets which, so far as freely-operative, determine the social equivalence between what is contributed and what is to be withdrawn. Thus the contractual technique of market affords a social alternative to the distribution and redistribution of services and goods. And so fruitful is this creative social process that over long periods the impersonal process of the market enables each to be served with increasing abundance by many, despite the practice of governments withdrawing by force vast contributions to the markets without any corresponding contributions thereto.

     A civilized society exists upon the balance of its productivity that remains for its members after the unbalanced exactions of its coercive yet dependent political organization.

     For all the political burden it must support, the voluntary exchange system of society — no dominance imposed and no subservience accepted — is the source of all the higher productivity, of all the richer and therefore longer lives, of all the general and legitimate freedom from necessitous toil, to which its general membership attains.

     To live civilized community lives, there are three kinds of compulsions from which men must become largely exempt. The first is violent or stealthy depredations of wild animals or of wild men, neither of them operating within but wholly extraneous to the social organization. The second is the crude necessities imposed by the physiological necessities of men. The third is the compulsions imposed, whether by conquest or consent, by the organized governments of men. The first is achieved by the convention of property. Under this convention men as individuals enjoy exemption from violence with respect to their possession and change of possession of property whether of lands or of goods. This convention of ownership is the necessary basis for any contractual, as distinguished from coercive and compulsory distribution of properties and goods.