Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2229

Citadel, Market and Altar, Chapters 8-12, with some slight revisions of punctuation

CHAPTER 8

A Century of Lengthening Life

For a century or more there has been a lengthening of the human life span. In the United States, during the National Period, the average span has risen from about thirty to almost seventy years — more than doubled in a century and a half. This has been due, doubt­less, to an unexampled freedom during most of this time from governmental or other compulsions and a consequently enormous extension of the area, the complexity and the productivity of free contractual relations. This made possible a continuous rise in the supply of the necessities, and enormous improvements in the physi­cal and other conditions favorable to the extension of life. In addition to this great improvement over Old-World deficiencies, a result has been the extirpation of many pestilences and a marked diminu­tion of disease, especially as affecting the mortality of the younger ages in the population and incapacitation by disease among the middle and older age groups. These favorable conditions, for a population initially endowed with a high biological fertility, made possible a rapid rise in its numbers with the lengthening of its days. And until recent decades, a great influx of virility, and of property, from abroad, seeking a field of freer contractual engagements and employment, resulted in a great acceleration of the native increase

 As the general length of living advanced, the population was main­tained and increased more by the growing infrequency of death than by its rate or frequency of reproduction, and by the end of the nine­teenth century its birth rate had notably declined. This became the basis of much professional prediction that by the year 1960 there would be no further population growth. And this seemed the more likely by reason of drastic political restrictions on the flow of popu­lation from abroad. The declining birth rate was publicized, and there was widespread public alarm that through “race suicide” the nation would go into decline. The excitement was aggravated by much public notice that the declining reproductivity was chiefly among those persons and in those regions that had achieved the highest productivity and thereby enjoyed the most ample subsistence and other favorable conditions for the lengthening of their lives, while the birth rate of the less productive elements of the population, and in the least productive areas and occupations, continued to be high. There was thus a double anxiety, on the one hand that population growth would cease and the population decline, and on the other that the continued high reproductivity of the less productive elements of the population would deteriorate the race.

 These anxieties, though academically current and widely indulged in before the two world wars, were never justified by events. For population was measured by lives, without regard to their length, instead of in life-years, and the normal inverse relationship between productivity and reproductivity — the conservation of human life in the energies of longer, maturer and more productive lives — was not understood. Little attention, if any, was given to the positive quanti­tative effect, the increase of numbers, that results from a diminished mortality, and no account at all was taken of the enormous qualitative improvement in the productivity and in the cultural capacity that follows from the lengthening and the thereby prospering lives. On the contrary, there was apprehension lest the “ageing of the popula­tion” should take place by extension of its upper age limits alone and thus oppress diminishing numbers of the young and middle-aged under a growing burden of senile dependency in the lives prolonged. And this gave rise to movements and to measures for the benefit of “senior citizens” by public pensions, gifts and doles.

 All these anxieties needlessly arose. For statistical data supported the common observation that increased longevity extends almost exclusively the lives of the mature and middle-aged and of the young, but of the very old perhaps not at all; for there are as yet no data pointing strongly towards any general lengthening of lives beyond what has long marked the extremes of old age.[1] Moreover, there is not only the well known greater administrative capacity and greater means among persons of or past middle age, but also, in recent times, much evidence of a continuing and improving competency in the generality of persons of advancing years and at the same time a general increase of acute terminations of life rather than through chronic invalidism or long senile decay.

 Viewed through the vicissitudes of human welfare and of world affairs, reproductivity seems most to decline in those periods like the late Victorian and in the fatuous “normalcy” that followed almost immediately after World War I, when wars were thought to be outmoded or to have ended and the race felt itself biologically secure. There can be but little doubt, if any, that the current mid-century excitation of the reproductive urge is the biological response intimately connected with the war-time psychology and the deep sense of atomic insecurity that continues to prevail.

CHAPTER 9

The Democracy of the Market

The nineteenth century has been called the century of democracy. Doubtless this refers to political democracy — the popular voting of men into office and measures into laws for the exercise of, or for the restraint of, compulsive power. More significantly, it was a cen­tury of economic democracy, and to this “democracy of the market” it unquestionably owes the vast extension of the human life span that the century achieved.

 The widening of Western geographical horizons — notably in North America — without any corresponding expansion of govern­mental “regulations” and restraints, but rather with a general reaction against encroachments by governmental power, permitted an un­precedented extension of production and trade. Thus the area of contractual relationships — the proportion of population energy flow­ing into free and voluntary engagements and productivity — as compared with that involving compulsion and force, was enor­mously increased. Production leaped to wide margins above taxa­tion. Values of every kind were created and for the most part maintained, affording security to all prudent investment with certainty of fair return upon savings as well as for services currently performed. These were the fruits of the democracy of the market — so far as this fundamental voluntary democracy was permitted to be practiced and performed. Notable was the almost complete freedom of contractual relationships across state lines in the United States, with an unprecedented though always limited freedom of international ex­change, especially during the first half of the century.

 Under this relatively unlimited yet still far from complete freedom, the technique of social or economic democracy spontaneously ex­panded and was increasingly carried on. Goods were produced and services rendered and prepared, not for the use of those performing them but for the use of others by way of contract and exchange. The current increasing recompenses or incomes were the current values, and the capitalizations of income from savings and profits — from the administration of capital property — were the growing capital values.

 Under the democracy of the market, goods and services prepared for others are voluntarily pooled in public places, whence their owners repair and by bids and offerings vote their wishes and desires as to the measures and terms upon which their common wealth and services, thus commun-ized or social-ized (in the best sense of these words), shall be redistributed among those who have contributed. This voting ascertains the common will and assures its execution forthwith and without any infringement of minority interest or right. This is democracy based on mutual service in mutual freedom — the right to serve in order to be served — the right of voluntary exchange. It is the fundamental democracy to which political democracy has at best a negative value in its partial and transient mitigation of the rigors of those more concentrated forms of govern­ment which so sharply impinge upon and finally extinguish the freedom of mutual service by voluntary contracts and exchanges.

 In the market we find the social institution by which in a civilized community a substantial portion of the available population energy is social-ized into non-violence and freely transferred and trans­formed into services and into realizations of the common will and of individual desires. This is not to say that the market is wholly free from restraint or from the perversions so engendered, as restraints on freedom always engender them; but it is to say that the functioning of the market is and gives rise to all the freedom from com­pulsions that can be practiced or attained. Freedom is not a condi­tion; it exists only in practice — in process. It consists in choosing and practicing the preferred out of various alternatives, all in some de­gree desirable. An enforced “choice of evils” is slavery.

 The process of the market, the making and performing of service contracts, is the mutual choosing from among desirable alternatives and freely acting upon them. This is what gives men their exemption from the compulsions of an uncivilized environment and all the freedom that they have from being compelled — enslaved — by one another. It is the foundation of social freedom and, therefore, of social progress into ampler living throughout increasing length of days.

Any reference to the functioning of the market would be incom­plete if it failed to give some account of the time (or change) element as a “fourth-dimensional” technique in the practice of credit and of speculation.

 To escape the narrow limitations of barter by simultaneous ex­change, in most transactions the obligations on one side are deferred by a credit which is evidenced by a token or written record. If the credit given was obtained from the general market and may become an immediate charge against the general market, it is called money or cash. If the obligation is that of a particular person or persons only, and deferred to a particular time, it is called simply an obliga­tion or debt. Credit in the first sense, as an obligation against the general market, gives him who holds it wide options as to the time, place, manner, and convenience under which he will exercise it. It gives access to reservoirs of optional satisfactions to consumers, and it brings service power to the hands of those who put their properties to the service of others in the course of production and exchange.

 Credit in the second sense — obligations of a particular person or persons deferred to a particular time — enables a consumer to enjoy present benefits without present payment. But what is more signifi­cant, it enables producers to prepare services and goods speculatively by anticipation of future market demand. This is a signal social service; by means of it the future needs and desires of a community are anticipated and provided in advance. Speculation, when rightly understood, is found to be the provision through which future needs are met and through which all kinds of new services and commodi­ties are created and supplied. This, of course, refers to speculative enterprises and not at all to “pure speculation.” In an exchange sys­tem severely unbalanced by taxation, speculation may and often does become a further disturbing influence.

CHAPTER 10

The Energy of Exchange

However blind the members of a society may remain as to the integrative and creative effects that grow out of their trafficking to each other of use or possession of services and of commodities into which services have been wrought, however little each may regard the welfare of others or of the whole, still he must give services to others if others shall be either willing or able to return services to him. This symbiotic functioning among the community parts creates and advances the wealth and welfare of both the individual and the group; it catalyzes population energy into creative reaction with environmental energy. It raises both the intensity and the duration of the individual lives and thus the societal integration is effected and maintained. This energy transfer by exchange gives rise to all that fine division of labor and transformation of the materials of the earth that fit it for the habitation and maintenance of mankind. From this comes the emancipation of the individual lives and their fullness of years. And this so far transmutes the en­vironment that increasing quantities of human life may emerge — nature herself being borne increasingly into the human process, form and mould.

The energy that is organized in the bodily structures of men is a biological and not a distinctively social or societal manifestation. Only the energy that flows between and among men can be asso­ciative in any sense. At its crudest, this energy that flows among men is dissociative and tends to destroy. At whatever stage of ad­vance, the energy among men that is not balanced mutually in service must expend itself in the impact of compulsions and de­struction, conflict and wars. The energy not so transformed cannot be annihilated or blotted out; it remains to be raised to levels of social or societal manifestation. Within the personal and blood-bonded group, the family and the tribe, sufficient is transformed to maintain the bond. At the societal level, a greater portion is trans­formed. It becomes impersonal, quantitatively reciprocal, contractual and thereby not limited but a service universal among men. Through its advance, conflict recedes, and men realize increasingly their creative, their divine dominion in their world and ever-length­ening days.

 The distinctively societal process is that of rationally, or numerically balanced, free and reciprocal energy transfers between and among members. This is the basic function or social metabolism whereby the societal life-form grows and is maintained. These energy transfers are mutual. They are carried on by contract and consent and exchange, a purely psychological transformation. This makes it necessary that things be owned, for it is not possible to exchange energies or services without the employment of instruments or things. Only those things which are owned can be exchanged or used as instruments of service or exchange. This exchange is not trans­portation; it is the transfer of ownership or title. This is a social and not a physical process. Distribution by contract and exchange, by the voluntary mores of the market, is the only rational (measured and not arbitrary) distribution known to mankind. And this is true whether the subject matter of contract, the thing — property — the ownership of which is being socially distributed, be nature itself — land — or things fabricated therefrom. It is in actuality the social act or service of conveying ownership or title, in whole or in part, by sale or lease, that the democracy of the market reciprocally rewards. The convention of ownership is, therefore, necessary with respect to the things of nature, or land, no less than with respect to the things of artifice and production in order that the social energy which men have for each other may be contractually exchanged and thus take the form of services to the respective recipients and in freedom unite them into an organic whole.

 The social organism, like every other complex life-form, is an integration and organization of lesser organisms, an assemblage of constituent and more or less modified and specialized parts. As its body is a mass and motion integration and organization of parts, so its life and continuance is their integration in time or change — the rhythm of change being the signification of time. This time or change relationship, this energy interchange between its units and parts, is the basic process or general function whereby the higher organiza­tion grows and maintains itself, and whence arise also all its specific functions and powers. In the social or community organization, this basic metabolism is called trade or exchange, and service is the name for the energy that is interchanged. From this basic, general function, the social organism derives all those specific functions in which it finds its creative dominion and power to transform its world. So far as this reciprocal process is free and unimpaired, the social or­ganism continues to develop and grow into the practice of its powers; when it is unbalanced or constrained, the organic structure is shaken, the functioning of its specialized individuals and parts is impaired, and thus they languish and live shorter lives.

 Just as every particular derives from and is still a part of its uni­versal, so every life-form, biological or social, constitutes itself out of its environment. It is created from the whole of which it is still a part, and from the whole it must constantly draw its substance and its strength — all of the energy with which it is endowed. Its capacity to draw this energy depends upon its self, upon its interior organiza­tion, upon the relations and interactions among its own units and parts. If the organization is not destructive of its own parts, it is effi­cient; its capacity is high; its life duration is long. Whereas the individual man must adjust himself to his environment, the contractually social-ized man gains the power to adjust environment to him. So far as the interactions among its members rise to the level   of freedom and service by consent and exchange, so far as free contractual relations supervene on the primitive and compulsive ones, the social or community life-form achieves its growth and power by its functional integration of its higher and ampler individual lives. Conversely, every encroachment of compulsive power, either anar­chical or political and governmental, upon the fields of service that are ruled by voluntary contract, consent and exchange, reduces the life and power of the individuals and thus the vitality and length of days of the society itself. To the extent that this basic metabolism of the society is inhibited or impaired, so must all its life and power as a living organism decline, and its members become less dominant, more abject — subservient to environment.

CHAPTER 11

Property the Instrument of Freedom

The social analysis in terms of energy transfers already con­sidered with reference to a society as a whole should be similarly ap­plicable to any of the specific institutions or functional groups of which society is composed — particularly to that primary and basic institution of contract and exchange, namely, property in land.

 The social mechanism for extension of the property and contract relationship of service and exchange into public and community affairs is found in the existing institution of property in land and its resources when that institution is examined with respect to the service to society that it now, silently and wholly unrecognized, carries on — and with a view to its great latent potentialities in the public service field.[2]

The first requisite to community life is a social and consensual holding and distribution of its sites and resources. Until this con­vention of property exists, no other contractual engagements can be entered into or performed; no goods or services can be produced or exchanged. By common consent of all, the society accepts the claims of those in possession. Thenceforth all new changes of pos­session are by a process of peace and consent, by a contractual dis­tribution in place of the former arbitrary one, giving a social security of possession that in no other manner, nor previously thereto, could be obtained. This making of a social distribution of sites and re­sources by the accepted proprietors is the primary and underlying social service by means of which men achieve the possibility of free­dom under a community life of contractual relationships instead of either anarchy or tyranny under those of compulsion and force.

 The process of transforming primitive human energy into social and consensual forms begins with the adoption of a proprietary and contractual relationship among and between the individuals as re­gards the possession of sites and resources. Upon the security of pos­session and of property so obtained, each creates for others services and commodities. These created things they pool in a common market and there, in turn, make a proprietary or contractual distribution of these artificial things, precisely as they have first made distribution of the things of nature by the practice of property in land. From this process of property and service by exchange, comes all the abundance, the enlargement, the prolongation and elevation of the individual lives that it is the function of the social organization to serve.

 The human energy not so transformed remains destructive, anti­social and predatory, as coercion and slavery, tribute and taxation, governmentalism and war. Whether it be by conquest or by con­sent, when a population goes predominately political, so far as it foregoes contract and exchange, and either submits to or employs increasing force or guile against its socially interfunctioning mem­bers, it is in process of disintegration back towards the wholly pre-social state from which it rose. But it must not be inferred that the appropriate proprietary authority cannot properly resort to all neces­sary force in order to protect and to serve its properties and lands and thereby serve and protect the persons and effects of their in­habitants against force or compulsion, anarchy or tyranny, of any kind.

 The legitimate and constructive use of compulsions or restraints is upon those individuals or groups who attempt other than the ex­change relationship by which the society lives — upon those who abandon that relationship temporarily or permanently and adopt the reverse. By such conduct they dissolve their membership and be­come, for the time at least, outlaw to the social body, and must be restrained until they can redeem themselves into the freedom that membership in the social body alone affords. A community in which violence, either private or public, gets out of hand is in process of disorganization, and all values therein, alike to its owners and to its occupants, ultimately are lost.

 Apart from the fundamental public service — that of making a social and contractual distribution of the community sites and resources and thereby of all the common benefits and advantages attaching to them — that is constantly being performed by the institution of prop­erty in land, the energy supply in the whole community-service field under present existing political administration is basically main­tained only by coercion and force. There is no other basic method of revenue for a political authority, however established and whether chosen or imposed. Political organizations (unlike the societal) draw their revenues in advance of their promised services, taking by force majeure within the limits of public tolerance, and indefinitely beyond by the deceptions of debasing the coinage and otherwise adulterating and inflating the medium of exchange, and by creating public debt in the form of promises which it hopes to repay out of future takings but is seldom if ever able finally to do.[3]

 The impact of this overpowering practice of direct and of in­direct expropriation upon the societal system of contract and volun­tary exchange, however well intended or even necessary under the present state of knowledge, nonetheless inhibits the societal process, destroys values, and brings on widespread distress, recurrent wars and social decline.

 All general distress, all world-wide wrongs and wars are fruits of the persistence of men in trying blindly and vainly to conduct their public and general affairs on the basis of compulsion, deceit and de­fault instead of by contract, consent and exchange, as men have learned to conduct almost all of their individual and lesser affairs. The last has been in modern times well learned; the other remains to be learned, and the order of nature decrees that the basic technique be the same. The voluntary contractual relationships of ownership of property and of services exchanged thereby on the basis of agree­ment and consent need only be extended into the field of com­munity property and services. In the degree that this principle is applied in local community affairs and thence upward to the national and the international, the vast available but unsocial-ized human energy can be brought into creative service and only thus cease to

manifest itself in coercive sovereignties, destructive tyrannies and recurrent wars.

 Survival and advancement seem to be the prerogatives only of those organizational forms, biological or social, in which the associated members, whether simple cells or highly organized individual units, are best and most served by free energy transformations and exchanges among themselves, and in which the lives of the con­stituent units are in this manner most advanced and prolonged. This process is the efficient employment by a population of its vital energy, above that requisite for reproduction and replacements. It is the transformation of this surplus energy, by specialization of ownership and services, into service forms freely distributed by voluntary ex­change for the automatic elevation of the units of which the popula­tion is composed. Quality, value and beauty are selective; they arise from voluntary choosing among various alternatives. They spring from that higher individual power and determination that gives freedom from compulsions and liberty to choose. They are social products and derivatives proceeding from the higher energy en­dowments and potentialities which the social process of exchanging energy, in free contractual relationships, confers upon the individual lives.

 This building up of the life and energy of the unit seems to be the prime function of the social organization. A coincident function appears to be to transform and rebuild, through exchange or co­operative power, the natural world into correspondence with its population’s needs and dreams. The ultimate and total function of the societal life-form may well be a progressive and indefinite ex­tension and elaboration of individual life and power in a progressively and indefinitely transformed world.

 A society has three basic needs. It continues as a society only so far as it finds creative and non-destructive ways to serve and satisfy these needs. It must have security from violence, that its members may have the services of property by free exchange and the conse­quent high subsistence and favorable conditions that are necessary to an abundant, a creative and thereby a spiritual life. These three needs, security, property, and spirituality, are supplied through the

institutions of politics and government, of commerce and trade, and of religion and the arts. These institutions evolve successively as Citadel, Market and Altar, the Citadel to maintain freedom from violence, to guard alike against the aggressor from without and the unruly from within, the Market to provide abundance in the neces­sities of life and the Altar to practice the non-necessitous, the spontaneous and inspirational, the spiritual and esthetic recreations and arts. The first is necessary to the second, the second to the third; but the third, the Altar, is the end-in-itself, the life of creative freedom, above all necessity — the spiritual realm. Upon the free development, differentiation and interaction of these primary institutions, all social advancement depends.