Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2235

CMA Chapters 27-30

 

Some original material.

 

 

 

PART III

General Survey

SPIRITUAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

When a seeker after knowledge of the earth discovers a whole new continent or world his first concern is that its parts shall be well described, the pattern of their relationships and configurations well disclosed, their plant and animal riches, rainfall and fertility, mineral and other resources made plain. He may then propose that mankind take over this new possession, avail themselves of its riches and bounties and build in it for themselves a world of affluence and abundance for all men — a milk-and-honey-flowing land.

So it is with him who discovers a new world of man, a new con­tinent of conceptions, fresh knowledge and thought. He is at pains to describe its parts, delineate their conformations and point out their relationships and their potentialities. He may then well pro­pose an application of them, a utilization of the new knowledge, the practice of its potentialities, the building of new values through new sciences, a new fellowship in production and creation and, incidentally, peace.

But having thus acquitted himself in the manner of the discoverers of material worlds, he may be permitted to stand on the pinnacle of his own thought and from this vantage point survey to its farthest horizon the world of nature and of mankind.

 

CHAPTER 27

The Qualitative Transformation

 Physical science teaches that all nature consists of one universal energy and that this energy is organized from primary and elemen­tary units or particles called quanta, photons, electrons, etc. These are the prime individuals, the fundamental units of nature, by the multiplication and in the combinations of which are organized all the actions and events, all the substances and all the structures and manifestations of energy that occur and thus are said to exist.

 

 This casts nature in her role as the Great Collectivist. She brings her ultimate quanta together in myriad forms and her children are the atoms, the molecules, the cells, the structured plants and animals, the societies of men, the stars and the systems of stars. In all these forms of “action” and in us, nature organizes her ultimate elements in all the terror and in all the creative beauty we behold. This is the creative collectivism in which the cosmos evolves.

 

 Shall we say, then, that nature has regard for the mass and not for the individual? — for the whole and not for the part? — that she destroys the unit that the structure may grow? Rather, we may per­ceive at every stage that only through combinations of their lesser units do organized individuals come into being, and in this being they are not lost; their natures are fulfilled. Nature works always away from undifferentiated mass towards higher organic unities of the individualized components. It is the nature of individuals to com­bine and fulfill themselves always in the growth and being of a higher organic unity. Being so created makes them acceptable in this higher membership. In this they are not lost, but their own nature is realized and self-found. Thus alone can they be “saved” from their own disintegration. For it is the law of each individual being that it shall attain such harmony of self-hood, such integrity of life and being, as qualifies it for the associative relationships that constitute a higher order of existence. This is the true collectivism.

 

 Trace this law of nature in the life of man. As his nature grows in balance and beauty, in the fullness and integrity of his own being, does he not become more acceptable for associative relationships, for social integration into a society composed of him and his fellow men? And in this higher, this more complex mode of existence, this community life, does not the social environment and the freedom it brings condition him for still higher growth and realization of self in his individual being? Out of his own beauty and perfections, how­ever unconsciously, man builds his social world, and here he is far more than requited for his individual gifts in that higher freedom and abundance that only the providence of social organization and exchange can bestow. In the Great Society man builds his heaven, for it is the function of the social organization to serve and minister him into the perfection of his individual life.

 

 An individual may be defined as finite energy having its three attributes organized into a limited number of mass units endowed with a limited rate of motion or potential for a limited number of durational units or time. The individual’s mass and his potential or rate of activity appear to be predetermined for him. In general, they seem to be inversely related, the individuals of lesser mass having the higher activity rate and vice versa, as the extremes are exhibited be­tween the small but dynamic man and the phlegmatic giant. The duration of the individual, however, depends upon the manner in which the mass-motion activity takes place. If the parts act together in freedom, each without restraint of another, there is harmony and mutuality of action and the duration is long. But in proportion as there is conflict or restraint upon the harmonious energy transfers within the organization, its duration is limited and brief. The in­ternal activity or functioning takes the form of adjustment to en­vironment — adjustment of “internal relations to external relations” — the individual being subordinate to and not dominant upon the environment.

 

 But when the human individual becomes the unit of organization, as in a general society he does, then the continuity and duration of the society depends upon the inter-activity of its members being without conflict or restraint of one by another or among numerous groups. These free inter-activities are functional; they are manifested in the division and exchange of services that take place under volun­tary engagements with one another. These functionings result in such modifications of the environment that a higher degree and efficiency of adjustment is achieved. This conserves the individual energies, releasing them into length of days and for activities that are not mere adjustments —  mere reactions to stimuli — but are origi­nal and spontaneous to the individual in his practice of the progressive enterprises and creative arts that transform his world. The greater duration, the longer rhythm of life thus socially attained, is the qualitative transformation and advancement of human life into powers that are more free and creative, hence more spiritual, more divine.

 

 The implications springing from this concept of populations’ rhythmic energy rising out of environment are thus wide and deep. By its purely inductive and quantitative approach it brings the so­cietal life-form within the scope of the objective sciences. So doing, it discovers in those populations in which the units of living energy are organized in the free relations that lengthen their generations as pulsations between birth and death, the power to modify and re­fashion the system of environment whence they spring. In this posi­tive technique it glimpses a creative, and in that sense a spiritual world. Here it seems to discover organized mankind as derived from a self-existent universe and, through its powers so derived, able itself to become self-existent and self-creating, through its power of recreating its environment into its own likeness and desire. It seems to place and reconcile philosophy and science upon a common ground at the point where, in the organization of vital energy into waves of less frequency and longer duration, positively qualitative and creative powers arise out of and upon the merely quantitative. It lays the groundwork for objective examinations and adequate appraisals of the positive and creative, the harmonious and power-giving contractual relationships among men, that the institution of property and its administration by voluntary services under free con­tract and exchange affords.

 And such examination under the energy concept discovers in the conduct of public community affairs a singular, tragic and almost total failure of the political as distinguished from the proprietary officers, to practice the social technique of administering community services under the social freedom and productivity that can be real­ized only within the relationships of contract and consent. It leaves little doubt that the long suffering of men from the practice of ar­bitrary and the absence of contractual relationships between them and their “public servants” or rulers, is due to no scientific analysis in basic quantitative terms having heretofore been made, and hence to insufficient intellectual illumination in this field of phenomena where mass emotion and national hysteria have almost exclusively prevailed.

 

 The social organization raises the individual member from the state of being as a creature, dependent on and arbitrarily enslaved to environment, into freedom and abundance, dependent on but not enslaved by the society of which he is a functioning part. Without the services of his fellow social units, his whole life is ruled by the exigencies of environment and circumstance. His life is determined without regard to his choice or will, and he must obey, under penalty of his death and the extinction of his race. But when he enters into the social relationship of serving many persons and being by many served, the productivity, the creativeness of this golden rule of ex­change lifts him out of an almost completely necessitous state and into a relative abundance that relieves him from the compulsions of an

un-social-ized environment and endows him with wide alterna­tives and options for the exercise of his spontaneous will. And when he has so entered, his acts of service and exchange are by voluntary contracts under consent of his own will in accord with that of his fellow man — the “social will” — as its unforced expressions arise in the forums of exchange. Out of the fruitfulness of the services performed and exchanged, this as yet too limited mutual freedom and accord of individual wills, the energies of men are emancipated to activities not prescribed by necessities from without but by preference and choice — by realizations of the intrinsic and spon­taneous will. For this gift of freedom to its members, the society is requited with all spontaneous researches, discoveries and recreations and the practice and enjoyment of the esthetic and creative arts. It is in these esthetic and artistic creations that the intrinsic will of man is most completely fulfilled. In his necessitous world of im­perative needs, conduct is in the main prescribed, with almost no liberty as to what he must do, and choice only as to how. But in the communion of service with his fellow men that constitutes his social world, the imperative needs are so much more adequately met that a large part of his life becomes emancipated from these compulsions, and with this unprisoned power, he is not driven, but is free to move in what direction he will and to follow such leading as most inspires and brings fulfillments of supreme desires. For the free heart of man knows no love so high, no desire so strong, as the passion towards that Beauty whose inspiration lifts and leads it ever on.

 

 Man is composite of myriad fluid and fluent elements and parts forming and reforming themselves in ever-changing figures and patterns of relationship and change. This organization of energy in the individual is unique. It possesses a continuing positive or con­structive entropy unpredictable in pattern apart from itself and non­reversible in direction. It is capable of statistical formulation but not of any other, and therefore where large numbers are concerned it yields to practical although not to absolute prediction. How it came or comes to be what it is has no relevance in any consideration of the freedom of the individual will, for it constitutes the personality of the individual, his very will itself. Since only the state of society, the kingdom of the golden rule of life and power by consent and ex­change, gives men the freedoms of contractual as against compulsive relationships, here his spontaneous will becomes a determinant factor in the selection and succession of events. In the degree that he extends these free relations, they supervene upon compulsive ones, and man comes into his heritage of, and creative dominion over, the environ­ment whence he draws the energy that is his life. And thus, in the measure that his will determines the outer world that conditions him, in that measure does he attain and participate not alone in the universal creation but also in that self-realization which he imputes to the Universal Reality as the unconditioned and divine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 28

Mind and the Cosmos

Every observation or experience is a duality. It has two sides — action and reaction, objective and subjective. When the objective, the external, is dominant and compulsive, the subjective effect is in the form of feeling, negative feelings, prompting reactions in habit pattern of attack or escape, under biologic reflexes previously ac­quired. As the subjective, the individual, by aid of the social system of exchange, becomes dominant over circumstance and environ­ment, feeling then becomes positive and amenable to external harmonies. Now it rises into inspiration, and actions follow designedly, creatively and unerringly to heart’s desire.

 

 Without vision there is no understanding. Comprehension comes always as illumination of the mind, a light that beams also in the countenance and in the eyes. A new organization of neurons has taken place and become integrated with what was before. Each new conception is valid and can be verified in experience only as it is con­ceived in terms of what has been grasped and verified before.

 

 The social order, therefore, can be validly conceived and under­stood only in terms of those verified and finite conceptions of the universal reality upon which the natural sciences are based. Mass, motion and duration; substance, activity and period, or continuity of time; these are the three terms, in the unity of which reality, in the natural sciences, is experienced and conceived. The units of physi­cal measurement corresponding to these are the objective standards to which the descriptions and formulations of the sciences finally refer.

 

 These three units, taken together, constitute a unit of reality, a unit of “action,” or of energy-in-action, such as the kilowatt-hour, the pound-foot-minute, and the dyne (inertial mass of one gram)-centimeter-second, called the erg-second. There is no known limit in nature beyond which these units are not multiplied and combined; energy is believed to be universal and, by many, infinite. But physical science does find that there is a limit to the divisibility of energy, that there is a definite bottom limit, an extremely small quantity, in less than which the all-embracing trinity of mass, motion and dura­tion is not to be and cannot be experienced. This unit of action, or quantum of action, as it is called, is a very definite but almost infini­tesimal fraction of an erg-second. From this it follows that energy as action can manifest itself to us at any quantitative level upward, beginning with the quantum, but that it does not manifest itself ob­jectively to us in any less or fractional part of this small quantity of action or event. It thus constitutes an indivisible unit in multiples of which all organization of energy proceeds without any necessary limitations, which unit is also the bottom limit below which dis­organization can not take place. It follows from these fundamentals of physical science that it is the nature of reality, of the cosmos as universal energy, to be ever progressive, without any necessary limitation, into ever higher complexities of organization. And by the same token all disintegrative and retrograde movements or trends, by reason of their direction and of their own nature, cannot prevail but must come to a definite end. It would seem, therefore, that indefinite progression is the essential attribute of the universal energy or reality as it comes into human experience.

 

 As the erg-second is a compound of mass, motion and duration, so also is its smallest fraction, the quantum, so compounded. Quanta, therefore, are not simple but complex, and instead of being every one alike, they can be as variable as may be the ratios in which their three elements are composed. It follows from this that any integra­tion of quanta can be and probably is entirely unique, even though there may be a quantitative equivalence through equal numbers of quanta being combined. Even a combination so simple as only two quanta can possess properties very different from those of any other binary compound of quanta unless the latter are not only quantitative equivalents but also alike in the proportions in which their elements of mass, motion and duration are composed.

 

 Thus, at the very base of physical science, the “building blocks of the universe” have, or at least may be presumed to possess, the same qualitative differences that are found in all the higher structures into which they are wrought. This qualitative property may be defined as interior, and independent of any over-all quantitative relation­ship or equivalence, being that property of energy whereby its di­verse organizations are qualified to interact. All are qualitative; but the type or kind most qualified to prevail and endure — as the societal organization of men — is most positive, most creative and most real. And it possesses this property through the preponderance of duration or eternality among the three elements of which it is composed. Thus natural science and the Christian theology, in their ultimate conceptions of reality, are essentially the same. Each is founded on its basic trinity — the one composed of elements finite and measurable, the other of the same elements infinite and im­measurable; and there is within each the same ascending order of reality — mass, motion, duration — Substance, Power, Eternality.

 

 As in physics, so in mathematics, there can be no organization of indivisible units below the unit taken as one, whether symbolized as digit or fractional part. From that base, however, an indefinite or­ganization and evolution of numbers without any necessary end can proceed. But any reverse process or involution, as it is called, can regress only to the primary unit, upon reaching which it must and does abruptly end. From this point of view, it may be said that mathematics, so far as it has been developed, is an abstract reflection of the processes and organization of energy that constitute the uni­versal reality in concrete form. If this speculation is sound, it accounts for the fact of so many processes of nature, from the atomic to the astronomical, being describable by abstract and general mathematical formulations and terms. It was no accident, then, that the formula of Galileo that described the movement of falling bodies should also describe the path of a projectile, the orbit of the moon and the path of Neptune all unseen. If it seems strange that the abstract processes of the mind should so faithfully parallel and portray the processes of the concrete world, we may reflect that the whole mind and organi­zation of man is a product, a by-product, if we like, finite but still no less a part, of the total organization of the reality that constitutes the concrete world. Whatever man is or has he derives from the universal, and whatever is particular in him, as the child of the universe, must be in the veritable likeness of his objective and universal world.

 

 These thoughts leave no ground to doubt that the rational mind of man has the wit to come into conscious understanding of, and to formulate into general principles and mathematical laws, the special organization of universal energy that constitutes and maintains a population of men into a societal life-form. The scientific reason, the rational intellect of man is, within itself, wholly subjective, an order and process existing only in him. But when it is based on sound induction, on objective and verifiable experience, then it becomes one with the cosmic reality and has the power to create, for it gives foreknowledge of events and things to come.

 

 The concept of energy, that is, energy-in-action, as the ultimate reality, affords the key to the kingdom of man’s understanding and conscious mastery over his social world. Just as it reveals the basic life-functioning of the individual man in the balanced energy trans­fers among his ultimate units or cells, so it discloses the free energy transfers among the ultimate social units and organized groups as the fundamental function that maintains a population as a societal life-form. Just as the energy concept shows the three-fold nature of the individual man in his material substance, in his nutritional energy-supply and activation, and his neural coordination, these three — mass, motion, continuity — so does it reveal the three great divisions and departments of society: its mass manifestation in government as the organization of coercive and compulsive power, its service and exchange activity that supports its life and enables it continuously to re-create its environment and thereby increasingly to subsist, and its cultural department that gives coordination and continuity of func­tioning and thereby advances the organized life of the whole. It shows that the growth and development of human society is the gradual differentiation of these three departments — the state; the ex­change system; and the system of religion and creative arts, imagina­tion and intellect — each sustaining the other in the rising order of their development and each, in proportion as it is differentiated from the others, serving, refining and elevating them in the reverse and descending order, the order of their beauty and beneficence upon men.

 

 The basic and general pattern of the whole system of society thus is clear. But it is not full blown; it is seen only in the bud; it is far from mature. The rational exchange system is still in the toils of ar­bitrary power, in bonds to the Citadel, slave of the state. The world of the imponderables in religion and in the arts, the realms of fancy — and especially of pure intellect — are in large part enthralled to the political power. And in the commercialization of religion and of the arts and sports, its rude perversions of the Market stain also the graces and soil the outer vestments of the Altar. But the pure spirit of the Altar haunts the marts of trade and exchange, bringing the light of new knowledge, refining the ethics and raising the practice of those who function there. And the Market thus inspired is destined to cleanse the Citadel even of war and transform it into a thing of beauty and love, a solvent, serving, and a divinely protective power.

 

 The modern social-ization of land ownership, of community sites and resources, out of the Citadel, out of the power to tax and rule, that began during the period of political revolution toward the end of the eighteenth century, and the more recent widespread aspira­tions for a more business-like administration of community affairs, are among the many manifestations of the influence of the exchange system upon the system of force — the influence of the Market upon the Citadel. Silently and unobtrusively, it offers for the administra­tion of public affairs the exclusively social technique of exchange by contract and consent — in the further functional extension and de­velopment of the institution of property in land as the proprietary public agency and authority to maintain and exercise responsible supervision over the community servants and to give constructive administration to the public capital of the community, as it now unconsciously administers and distributes the community lands. For if civilization is to advance, this it is destined to do through land-ownership acting primarily in the interest of community members as tenants and purchasers and for community rewards to itself in rising rents and permanent values on such a scale as few now can conceive.

 

 This is the impending great step or leap forward in the evolution and self-development of the social organism. The intellectual light for it shines even now upon the Altar; it may soon spread to the Market-place; and then, through the administration of property in land and in pursuit of honorable recompense and profit, the Market will take all tyranny out of the Citadel by social-izing it into services and investing it with highest honors and rewards. This further light needs only to be seen; all the enlightened instincts of men, selfish and altruistic, will prompt and urge them to make avail.

 

 The energy concept of population affords the necessary ground for a truly rational and scientific approach to the three basic institu­tions of associated men: The Citadel, the place first of protection, then of compulsive tyranny, government, enslavement and war. The Market, where freedom’s first gift is peace, as force and stealth give way to contract and accord. And lastly the Altar, realm of the non-necessitous, where dwell the imponderables of spirit and mind, religion and the esthetic arts and all spontaneous play; where in­spiration descends and aspirations rise; where temples cradle muses and cathedrals foster colleges and schools; where faith flowers in the arts, philosophy sparks the torch of science, and creative mind and spirit find their ancient and their native home.

 

 These living institutions of men are in and of the cosmic system no less than are the atoms and the stars. They constitute the whole or­ganic society. They are peculiar to men alone and to none but social-­ized men. They develop in an ascending order; as their separate struc­tures differentiate and separately evolve, their successively higher functions are performed, and they are reunited in the supreme func­tion of conferring upon men the ever larger and longer life to which men in society unitedly attain. These basic social structures came into being without the conscious will or ken of man; so, they serve his needs and desires only to the extent that they have empirically evolved. Only for want of vision, of conscious understanding and development of them, do they but incompletely serve. Without such understanding, the Citadel fails to protect, violates the Market and enslaves it with the chains and wheels of government and war; and the realm of the imponderables, the Altar, is violated with false religion, intellect and art governmentally prescribed. But the Science of Society, new wonder child of the Altar, begins now to reveal the rational harmony implicit in the basic institutions of men no less than in the physical and natural world whose several sciences have made so many dreams come true and the creative will of man so near supreme.

 

 Citadel, Market, Altar: these are the social symbols of protection and stability; of nourishment, maintenance and growth; and of increasing freedom of creative and thus spiritual advance. In their rational development into differentiations of form with integration of functions, the organic society will bless its members with higher lives and length of days and invite them ever more into the perfect and ideal Unity of “Substance, Power and Eternity,” the Ultimate Reality, the mystic’s perfect dream and crowning joy.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 29

Society the Crown of Creation

All science is founded on observation, comparison and measure­ment — that is, upon induction. What constitutes the science is not the body or mass of data with which it deals, but the order and re­lationships that are found to prevail throughout the field in which the data are observed. This order and these relationships, when first apprehended, are called generalizations or hypotheses, and when later they are independently verified, they become truly established and accepted as theories, principles or natural laws. It is in this way that the separate sciences, each within its special and restricted field of observation, first appear; and each new science, as separate from the others, occupies a different field of observation. Thus the founda­tion sciences — mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, etc. — all have primary reference to existing and endur­ing relationships in particular fields. But each of these sciences, roughly in the order given, in addition to its own special field and data of observation, involves the inclusion and use of the principles and theories previously won. The factual parts of astronomy and physics possess no great significance except as they exhibit correla­tions with mathematical principles and laws. Chemistry assumes the relationships accepted as mechanical and physical laws, and biology accepts all of chemistry and physics as the frame and foundation upon which its special phenomena are superimposed. In the like way, psychology rests upon physiology as its necessary antecedent in the biological field.

 

 All of these sciences are founded primarily on the inductive data of present observation; they are, first of all, descriptive. When, in the descriptive data, relationships that repeat themselves are dis­cerned, or assumed and finally verified, the principles and laws appear as invariable; and a consistency with the mind of man is found in the relationships of the phenomenal world. All of this comes about from science making a rational and objective (contra-emotional) ex­amination of things as they are.

 

 But the observation of things as they are renders up many evidences of much previous development and change — that there has been a sequence in nature similar to the order in which the various sciences themselves have evolved. The scientific examination of these suc­cessive sequences and steps in nature at last leads to the hypothesis, not alone of invariable relationships, but also of a definite order in which these successively arise. From this the theory of evolution was born and, upon verification, accepted, bringing into the purview of science not only the relationships of things as they exist, but also the order, method and process by which they came. At first this was thought, in the living world at least, to have been by increments of variation within the otherwise relatively invariable relationships. It is now known that while minor variations do take place in the structures and functions of living things, great and significant changes came about through the emergence and growth of new organiza­tional forms. This frequently takes place through the association of previously independent or even antagonistic units or individuals in relationships tending towards stability and permanence in the new organism and giving it functions and powers far transcending those of the units or parts composing it. This is called creative synthesis or emergent evolution.

 

 Going beyond the static and looking upon nature from the dy­namic and genetic points of view, science sees that which was once formless and void evolving into units called electrons, protons, neutrons, etc. These it conceives as organizations of primordial ener­gy that have come to possess a degree of structural stability. These evolved units science sees as coming into group relations, through energy transfer and balance, until new and highly stable groups known as atoms emerge. Repeating this process, but now using atoms as the units to be balanced and reconciled to each other, nature puts them together in still higher organizational forms and the world of molecules comes to be. The time involved can only with difficulty be conceived. The paths of possibility vainly sought and attempted we can only faintly imagine; but undaunted nature still pursues her inherently creative way. She frames the atomic constellations in her molecules at last into that triumph and mystery, the biological unit, the living cell. Its complexities are extreme; its constituents are chiefly carbon and water, and its molecules are the most complex of which chemistry gives any account. It has the protection of a garment as versatile as its needs; it is capable of ingestion, excretion and even locomotion; and it achieves that supreme func­tion in which the cell becomes lost in its own progeny, in its self reproduced.

 

 What shall nature do now with so wondrous a creation? Shall she rest from her labors? Or is the essence of her own being that she must evolve — that she herself is not entity but really energy and process? We know the answer; it lies in the layers of the rocks throughout the vastness of geologic time; in the tragedy of endless trying and almost endless non-success. The myriad extant forms of organized cell life in the plant and animal world are those that have been weighed in the balance of changing environments — and not found wanting. The plant world itself only became secure by specializing in the molecu­lar organization of carbon from the air by utilizing energy from the sun. From this has come all structures of the animal world and the peculiar modes of energy and higher powers that distinguish all the animal forms.

 

 It was a great emergence when nature began to organize her cells, and again when she achieved her world-wide symbiosis in the uni­versal cooperation between plant and animal life.

 

 The plant, throughout its existence, converts its energy into structure and ceases to grow only when it dies. But the animal re­converts its structure into the energy of physical and neural activity that continues throughout its life, though after maturity it ceases to grow. The plant accumulates energy for the animal. Through the animal flows the energy that the plant captures from the sunlight. But the animal structure is constantly consumed and constantly re­newed. It takes as food the stored energy of the plant and puts it out again in the complex functions that constitute its higher life. Its myriad cooperating somatic cells constantly proliferate, give up their energy and die. Those that reach a critical maturity multiply by division (fission); and thus the animal structure is maintained until at last the capacity of the cells for integrated cooperation, in some vital organ or part, is lost; the interdependent parts can no longer serve each other; the structure disintegrates back to environment. The animal dies. But this does not occur with all; there are highly specialized cells called genetic that have the somatic structures as their special environment. Such of them as meet and unite with others that are contra-specialized as to sex set up new trains of cell multiplication and organization that constitute the individuals of the renewed and successive generations.

 

 It is to its much higher complexity that the animal organism owes its unique and transcendent functions and powers. This indebtedness it must repay in sensitivity and susceptibility to adverse environ­mental factors. To maintain its higher functions and complex forms, it must modify them in such ways as the necessities of its environ­ment impose; it must build up within itself such flexible powers of response and adjustment as will compensate the environmental changes that the individual and the race must withstand. The records left by extinct and surviving species tell this story of nature’s striv­ings in the animal world. Those extant are the animals of fixed habi­tat that have successfully modified and adjusted themselves to condi­tions that remained nearly uniform, and also those animals that have such versatile and compensating powers as have enabled them successfully to withstand wide changes within their habitat and, finally, without essential change in themselves, to inhabit the most diverse environments that the earth affords.

 

 The animals best modified and adjusted to fixed habitats and, therefore, most dependent on continuity of present unchanged con­ditions have hostaged themselves to the future. Changes in their en­vironment they must meet by changes of structure or perish, and the more completely adapted and adjusted they are the more difficult or impossible it is for them to change. For animals that are not able to modify their behavior or to compensate within their existing structures, the future is not bright. As external conditions change, they must perish completely.

 

 The only animal whose versatility and compensating powers enable him to inhabit the whole earth is man. Even in a relatively primitive state he lives at almost any altitude and in every clime, and he exhibits as an individual always the same essential structure with the same functions and modes of action. This power of internal adjustment and compensation without any permanent change of structure is, doubtless, what has enabled man to occupy the earth and out-survive all other animal forms.

 

 At this point, the story of man and his capacity is not half told; for, as a social being, in an organic and symbiotic or exchange rela­tionship with his fellows, he achieves an organization and powers by which he not only inhabits and occupies the whole earth, but actually inherits — makes it his property in the sense that he brings it under the dominion of his will and can remold it to his heart’s desires.

 

 It was a great emergence when a creature like man was lifted into powers of adjustment and compensation so far above his fellow animals. But his attempts throughout history to social-ize himself into a successful and permanent, organic relationship of free exchange with his fellows (dis-junctive symbiosis) presage a vaster and a higher emergence still. The one was the creation of a new animal form by higher synthesis of the original biological cells. But the emergence now going on is no less than the synthesis of a new living form in which the essentially similar units are the individual men themselves, an organization of life and therefore an organic being that stands in relation to its units as a living animal body stands in relation to the living and cooperating biological cells of which it is composed, but whose individual capacities the animal body so far transcends.

 

 In like manner, the living social organism exhibits capacities far transcending those of any of its units, either as isolated individuals or in any unsocial-ized mass or horde not organized upon the symbi­otic basis of service by exchange. Yet more, the social organization releases, in its individuals, powers and potentialities that under no other state of being could be exercised or fulfilled. In fact, the ulti­mate function of social-ization, of the human society unlike that of insects and animals, is the fulfillment of itself through service to, and the self-realization and fulfillment of, the individual units of which it is composed.

 

 It is the peculiar glory of man that nature has wrought into his being so much of her own modes of action and organization that through the eye of his mind she can look back and trace her own evolvement from mere primordial energy through all the structured systems, suns and stars, atoms, crystals and cells — through the myriad organic forms that lead, at last, to man, her most complex and most completed offspring, gifted with versatile powers of internal adjust­ment to the widest habitat or environmental change, and endowed through his social and cooperative nature with power to modify conditions external to him, to shape environment to need and desire and, measurably at least, to rebuild his world to the pattern of his dreams.

 

 But just as man’s marvelous powers of internal adjustment derive from the fine cooperation that exists between the component organs and parts of his individual organization, so does his building of his world depend upon the like cooperation of the individuals and groups, the specialized organs and parts, of which the Great Society of mankind, the social organism itself, is composed.

 

 Into this Great Society of man, nature combines the best fruits of her tree of evolving life. Creation cannot rest with the building merely of the animal man. In the long nights of barbarism, nature may rest from her labors; but still she must move on to the building of society, of organized mankind. “Saith Life, ‘I am that which must always transcend itself.'”

With lesser creatures, nature has made experiments resembling but not rising into social organizations. Herds, hives, flocks and schools are advantageous modes of life. The creatures thus united come better to withstand the rigors of environment. They multiply and prosper, but unlike man they do not refashion their environment and make it increasingly serviceable to their lives. On the contrary, as their numbers increase, their environment becomes impoverished and their place in the living world less secure. To this hazard nature responds, in general, by giving them higher reproductivity. As the insufficiency of food and other factors shorten their lives, fecundity, at the expense of other capacities, increases the number of the shorter lives. Thus the vital balance is maintained. But increased numbers again press upon a declining subsistence until the stronger are com­pelled either to kill and eat, or to starve out the weaker, lest all should expire. This downward spiral must lead to complete extinction or to an increasing number of increasingly shortened lives — a reversion to the bacterial form and condition — but for the circumstance that elimination by conflict and starvation raises the vital resistance and virility of those who are thus able to survive.

 

 Nature here again resorts to an improvement in the individual units before better and stabler organization can be evolved. Her at­tempts in the form of herds, flocks and hives, all falling short of social organization, have been complicated by climatic and other en­vironmental changes and by cross conflict between variant forms and species. But the general process of increasing the numbers with de­pletion of environment, higher fecundity to compensate a shortening vital span and selection of the superior to improve the race, has still gone on.

 

 At last, in man, a creature appeared who, in addition to his pre­vious animal techniques possessed a new and further instinct — that of social organization. In him, the services between individuals and social groups are not entirely unconscious. Although, consciously, men do act primarily with regard to their individual advantage and only secondarily with a view to the advantage of the social group as a whole, unconsciously they enter into reciprocal relationships, biologically in their intimate and familial groups, and economically with other persons who are not so related. Distinguishing him from all other creatures, man’s social instincts lead him gradually to abandon force and the relationships of dominance and subservience and to enter into a voluntary democratic relationship of exchanges measured by value and price with a system of charges and credits for the keeping and adjustment of accounts, so that the utmost division of labor and elaboration of service and exchange can be engaged in throughout an entire and extensive population. This highly productive and creative relationship, corresponding as it does with the symbiotic relationships in the lower forms of life and also between the individual cells that constitute these forms, leads to a social metabolism that guides the individual energies of men into their special participant functions in the society, the social organism.

 

 Society thus becomes the universal servant of the individual by maintaining for him an exchange relationship in which his special services are most abundantly performed for all, and in which he, in turn, is most richly and abundantly served. The preponderance of this new intimate and intricate relationship is what constitutes all the life and power of the organic society. Upon its rise or its decline hangs the fate of civilized nations and men.

 

 The question may arise, why will not this social-ized population of men also be compelled to exhaust its environment, consume its substance, and, in the ensuing hazards of shortened lives, multiply its numbers into the necessity of starving, exterminating and finally devouring each other until only the ruthless and resistant survive?

 

 The answer is that these more perfect and widespread exchange relationships of men give them the unique power of improving and rebuilding their environment and thereby raising their substance far above anything that their increasing numbers can require. The further answer is that the high biological security that such social­-ization provides lengthens the days of the individuals and thus re­lieves nature of the need to multiply the units of life to compensate for a shortening of the span. Thus, a far higher biological economy and efficiency is obtained through prolonging the individual life and thereby putting forth vital energy more in functional and less in maintenance and reproductive forms; for all the years of each in­dividual leading to maturity are years of cost to, and dependence on, the vital power of the race. The society or race in which the lives are many and brief is the least efficient. In a social condition of but little division of labor and exchange of services, the span of life is but little more than the time taken to mature. This condition is but little above that of those ephemeral plants and insects that live only to bloom, bear seeds and die.

 

The function of the social organization is to bring about, through its exchange relationships, that higher subsistence and biologic se­curity under which not more, but more perfect individuals may grow and come into being and in which there is a longer span for the exercise of their mature powers and for the utmost development of the potentialities of their individual lives.

 

 In the evolution of living forms, clearly such is the condition and achievement towards which the integrative processes of nature have long conspired. It is as though Nature, with justifiable pride in man as the highly organized and efficient unit that crowns her commend­able labor from an infinite past, in whom she combines and confides her most precious powers and delectable dreams, leads him now into the household of social creation, endowed with creative, and thereby spiritual, powers. By exercise of these powers society evolves. By the practice of exchange, men grow into cities, states and nations — creations of ephemeral glory that seem to rise only to decline. As voluntary service and exchange raise wealth and subsistence, so does the coercive public power increasingly penalize and pervert this vital process. Instability and insecurity set man against man, group against group, race against race, nation against nation. Divisions arise, bar­riers are set. Deadly agencies and instruments of attack and defense are piled up. The “nationalized” states penalize and paralyze their peoples’ exchange, both within and without. Impoverishment fol­lows. They blindly destroy themselves and fall by each other’s hand.

 

 By her rigorous penalties, nature has taught men and groups of men to specialize their labors and exchange with each other in order to survive. Under the like penalty of death she commands the same upon her public communities — her cities and states. The conduct of the public business, of community service, which is the only proper reason for government, must be lifted above the barbaric practice of force and violence against the property and social relationships of the community members; it must be established on the firm and en­during principle of the golden rule, the principle of voluntary ex­change, as any other successful business is.

 

 As in the long barbaric past myriad millions of men must have perished from failure to follow the principle of peaceable exchange in their private relations, so have countless communities gone down from their failure to practice exchange instead of compulsion and force in the conduct of their public, their community affairs.

 

 By what our predecessors have learned, we exist merely as we are. Only as we ourselves learn can we make any advance. Standing now before the threshold of a social glory the realization of which will dwarf all poets’ dreams, men must again choose whether in their community affairs the practice of force shall cast them from the House of Life into outer darkness or the practice of public service by profitable exchange shall lift them into its awaiting freedom and fullness of life. The great social mutation that awaits and impends is the social-ization of public force into public service by exchange.

 

 When the great business of community service is carried on as a business and not by depredation upon business, it will be magnificent above all other business in the world. In one country alone it will have a hundred and sixty million customers, every one a consumer of its community services. For its capital structure, it will have all of the existing public works, facilities and materials now employed in public and governmental activities. In its executive positions, from highest to lowest, it will have the most creative and constructive officers and experts that the owners of the land, the now potential administrative owners of all the public capital, can engage. Most of all, it will create its products and services with greatest facility, for it will bear no crushing burden of tribute or taxation. It will have no expenses and make no payment except for its needs in the conduct of its business. And the value of the public services thus performed will be commensurate with their great utility, for they will be sold to tenants and customers who likewise will be free from all burdens of tribute and compulsory taxation, and whose economic produc­tivity and effective purchasing power and demand for public services will therefore be higher than was ever known or dreamed.

 

 Society, thus, will have a free and unrestrained economic system including a free, efficient and self-supporting system of public services. Each will exchange its wealth and services with and thus enhance the productivity of the other. Nature will have achieved a form of integrated life in which the component individuals will be circumstanced in completest freedom to give and to receive. The consequent abundance of economic goods will come to them almost as automatically as the filling of the lungs with air.

 

 Emancipated alike from the environmental compulsions that beset and enslave the whole primitive world, and from the political and governmental repressions and restrictions that bind and burden the functioning of the social realm, the spirit of man will leap upward in the free practice and culture of all the artistic, esthetic and spiritual powers with which it is essentially endowed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 30

The Inspiration of Beauty

 

Human Emergence into the Divine by Creative Artistry

 

In the natural world great discoveries are made by men who delve into the order of nature and her laws under the inspiration of the beauty that they seek and find. Such labors are esthetic; art and beauty for their own sake, and for no other reward; fruits of the creative spirit of man.

 

 But these spiritual gifts come into the practical service of men only through the operations of production and exchange. The engineers, the technicians, the men of business who buy and sell, must give bodies to these gifts of the spirit and market them to the populace in tangible forms — and for great tangible rewards.

 

 So also is it with nature as she manifests herself in the living so­cieties of men. The working of her laws in the social organization can be discovered only by pursuit of the beauty that in them lies. This done, practical business alone can embody them in forms of utmost service to man.

 

 What distinguishes human from other beings is that they are en­dowed with a spiritual and creative power that gives them dominion over the whole earth and makes them the “children of God.” This power has lifted them into a new mode of life, a social organization, in which each member finds his enrichment indirectly through specialized service to others and, by a system of measured exchanges called business or trade, enjoys the products and services of others in vast variety, convenience and abundance. The growth of this mighty mutuality of service is the divine pathway to that transcendent state, visioned in poets’ dreams, in which the highest being is attained through each becoming, in effect, the servant of all.

 

 In their un-social-ized state, nature lays heavy restrictions alike upon animals and men. Without the power to create and exchange, their subsistence is only what nature provides, and this they cannot employ to rebuild their world but only to multiply their kind. They cannot bend the forces of nature to their needs and desires. But social-ized men, by their technique of trade and exchange, can raise their subsistence to vastly higher levels than their increasing numbers can require. So it comes about that in the animal and un-social-ized world, even the existence of an individual or group is inimical to every other, and the necessary technique is to seize, violate and de­stroy. This crude relationship among men is the heritage of their animal past. All creativeness, all the sciences and arts, all social cul­ture and growth, is the product of the distinctively human — the divine — technique of creation through exchange of service. However little we are aware of it, this is the divine symbiosis, the living with God through living divinely with men.

 

 Evil is atavistic, reversion to actions no longer adaptive, and hence not enduring. When the sum total of human energy shall flow out­ward in functional and creative modes, then evil can no longer exist. All activity either for or against evil is creative energy misdirected, perverted and lost. But the putting out of the divine, the creative, power transcends all evil, resolving it into the beauty of the divine. This is the cosmic pageant of evolving nature, for only the positive can prevail, only the creative can abide. It brings into being relation­ships that endure through being synthesized into higher relationships. It is the divine business of universal life, the abiding reality. The character of evil, as such, lies in its impermanence.

 

 Salvation from evil is not any advance but only a salvage at the best, for it does not enter into the progression of the divine. Life manifests itself in creation by growth into higher relationships. Its real business is to flow forward in forms transcending all its past. The enduring office of religion and of all the esthetic arts she has nurtured and brought forth is not to destroy nor yet to save. It is to inspire. It is to qualify the crude energy of life with the divine beauty of its creative expression.

 

 Amid the vicissitudes of life, and above all merely negative gratifi­cation or relief, there are relationships, receptivities and appreciations that suffuse with a sense of unity, integrity and creative power. This is the sensing of beauty, the veritable inspiration, the authentic reve­lation of the truly divine. It is expressed outwardly in the uplifted eyes, the parted lips, the inward breath, the outstretched arms, the heightened muscular tone and the sense of being fully alive. Its recipient is at once, and for the moment, however brief, perfect and whole, a “child of God” in whom there is no guile. To cherish and cultivate this receptivity is the true “spiritual discipline,” for the in­spired mind cannot destroy; it is the seer, it is illumined, it alone understands. The deep and secret beauties and potencies of nature and of human nature are revealed to it. It is “at one with God” in the joyous putting forth of divine power, for it has emerged into the perpetual springtime of infinite creation.

 

 In every age, so far as men have practiced the golden rule of service by mutual exchange, the creative “power of God” has blessed them with a measure of freedom; and with freedom, abundance; and with abundance, peace and length of days. The energies so liberated from conflict and wars on wings of inspiration divinely rise, not in flight from death, but in an eternal seeking after light and life. Touched by this esthetic perception, the children of men’s lifted vision spring from their hearts and hands as works of art, evangels of the Universal Beauty whose mark and sign they bear. Under this inspiration men create objects as symbols, devise actions as ritual, weave words into melody, and sounds into symphony and song. Thus through the esthetic arts do they worship and commune with Beauty, and by their works pay homage to this, their Source divine. As its inspira­tion descends they clothe it in color and form, in rhythmic motion and melodic sound, and in the magic of story, poesy and song. These rouse the sense of wonder and awe, feed the awakened aspirations and release in ecstasies the potential powers of man. Thus through the esthetic arts does religion speak and move, and in ever-flowing concord bind men’s hearts to creative Beauty — to the divine.

 

 Yet more: awakened and uplifted eyes trace out heavenly beauty, and the swinging constellations make music in the rational and reflective mind of man. The world is traversed in its breadth, its summits scaled, its depths explored, its history revealed; and there also man finds order and process native to his emancipated mind. In the joy of this new light he learns the sure way of knowing and of doing that is called science, and by its employment widens all his limitations of space and time. The vision of the intellect, of the eye of the mind, gives the hand of man its grasp upon eternal power — the power wherewith to mould to heart’s desire his physical and, no less, his social and therewith his spiritual world.

 

 Those who respond to the persuasions of beauty are, so far, ex­empt from the rude compulsions of animal life. They enter the posi­tive phase of existence where they strive not for less pain but for highest exaltation — where they love not possession but to be pos­sessed. Such persons alone can clearly distinguish the integrative and creative modes of action either in the social organism or in the in­dividual life. The ecstatic vision alone can limn to seekers and seers the patterns of living beauty that lie in the social institutions of men no less than in their essential selves. Transcending all expedience and quickening creative power, is the inspiration — the very spirit of re­ligion — that consecrates the esthetic and the abstract arts and endows with visions that transform the world.

 

 The uninspired will protest that degrading conditions of life dim the minds and dull the hearts of men against creative inspiration, casting down the weak and rousing in the strong a wrathful fury to destroy. But the appeal of the spirit is not to victims nor is it to avengers. It is to those unpretending servants and redeemers of man­kind who thrill to the rationally understandable beauty that inheres in all the life-ward ways of peace, however mean or commonplace they seem. For they, of all men, are sufficiently detached from the rigors of mere animal existence and from the sweet seductions of organized brute force to discern the creative harmonies in free human relationships no less than in the singing of the stars.

 

 When private persons put others under compulsion of force or deceit and thus get without giving, such actions are forbidden and punished as crimes. But precisely similar acts, systematized under governmental power, we morally approve and applaud or blindly accept and endure. Men acting as government, supposedly as servants of all, have no code of pro-social conduct such as there is for plain and private men, for those who are limited to the voluntary relationships of consent and exchange. We have not apprehended the divine beauty, the golden-rule character, the spiritual quality of the exchange process and so have scarcely yet dreamed of its potentiality, its awaiting beneficence, when extended into those ter­ritorial or community services that men must have not separately but in common and that are essential to community life.

 

 And so in our blindness to the beauty of the voluntary relation­ships of contract and exchange, in which our creative and thus our spiritual power dwells, we have all too little enjoyed the blessings of this divine technology in the production and distribution of com­munity services and goods. The miracle of social organization lately evolved out of ancient tyranny is the highest form of organic life; but it is very young, hardly adolescent, not yet sufficiently evolved.

 

 The modern free society employing the process of contract and exchange took over from the ruling classes, from the governments of ancient and medieval times, agriculture and most of the services then performed by serfs and tax-ridden “free” men under domina­tion of their ruling powers. Only a century or so ago it separated the administration of land, of community sites and resources, out of the power of government by bringing this basic property under the noncoercive jurisdiction of ownership or possession determined by free contracts sanctioned by common consent. But society has not yet so far evolved as to bring within this non-coercive administration the providing of general community services (other than the mere dis­tribution of them) which are appurtenant to the sites and lands and available to the public only through its occupancy or use of them. Under this evolutionary lag, ancient political power now so moves forward as to threaten complete reversion to the slave technique. In this adventure, mountainous public debt mortgages future pro­duction to past dissipation while advancing seizures of property and curtailments of freedom prevent the productive employment of lands, of capital and of men. Thus stalks the warning shadow of a com­pletely political or “socialized” society which, of course, would be no society at all.

 

 All of the social and spiritual energies of men spring from their divine sublimation of otherwise destructive and undifferentiated brute force. This energy cannot be destroyed. When blocked in its creative flow, it finds expression in public and private violence and crime. Every social perversion, every business depression and the downward trend of production and exchange that marks the social decline, can be traced to cumulative repressions of the social process by political authority. This dries the very springs of public revenue, bankrupts the productive economy and destroys all the values that society creates. Yet a higher public technology waits, and it must evolve. Just as the whole organization of private enterprise can serve its myriad customers with no need to enslave them, so must society evolve the like system of public enterprise through the organization of community owners to provide common services to their habitants without ruling or enslaving them.

 

 Public services are those conferred publicly on a territory through portions set apart as rights of way for communication and for other common purposes or needs. These services enable wealth to be pro­duced and exchanged within the territory served. The portion of this wealth that by contract and consent of all is rendered up to the territorial owners as location rent is the public revenue given in exchange for the owners’ services in making contractual and thereby peaceable and productive allocations of the varying advantages ap­pertaining to the sites and resources. This includes any balance of services above the dis-services of the political regime — if such balance there be. And as in all other transactions in which property or its use is transferred, the market is the real arbiter of the terms. For the free market, by its consensus of many minds, gauges the recompense according to the social advantages of contract above the alternative of political administration by force. And in this it is governed by all the circumstances as to present demand and the alternatives available, and not merely by the physical properties or advantages possessed by the property rented or sold.

 

 Society can do no act otherwise than through its public officers. The owners of the land are officers of society established by custom and consent and constituting the membership of its basic institution, property in land. The functioning of this institution provides the society with the vital service of a contractual allocation of its sites and resources with security of possession on equal terms for all. For per­forming this necessary service of merchandising socially, by free con­tracts and without coercion or discrimination, the society voluntarily awards to these proprietary officers a recompense out of its resulting productivity that is called land value or ground rent. Like the owners of a lesser community such as a hotel, it is also their function, as yet undiscovered and unperformed, to supervise their community services, protect their tenants against violence at the hands of the community servants and to meet the costs of the public business out of the enormous revenues thus to be created and freely obtained. For the public business when so administered will yield rents far exceed­ing all present rents and present taxation combined, and the high revenues remaining above all other costs will be the earned recom­pense of the owners for their administrative services. Unlike mere elected officials, such owner-administrators will have everything to lose by force or fraud or any inhibitions of the social process and everything to gain, in fortune and in honors, by their fruitful and efficient administration of the public affairs in the communities they own.

 

 The social-ization of government into a contractual agency of public services, by transforming the present practice of seizures, compulsions and restraints into one of protection and assistance to men’s employment of and services to many others through their voluntary relations, will result in almost unimaginable improvement in the material and the spiritual condition of mankind. The abun­dance of goods can be like that of light and air, and the energy that now wastes in strife and war can flow into creative services and sublimest artistries. Fear and hate will be transformed, under in­spiration, into the ministrations of love. Through loyalty and de­votion to Beauty, men will find abundance and peace, and even those who sought only security and ease will awaken, God-like, in the liberty of free spirits to the majesty of creative labor and to the grandeur and the glory of the Cosmic Dream.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Deep from the rhythmic heart of Time, ‘mid all

  The Cosmic Process, and the rise or wane

  Of human hopes and dreams, comes the refrain, Betimes, of Beauty’s rapture-raising call.

She led that hand on carven cavern wall,

  Those eyes of shepherds skyward on the plain;

  Inspired by her and scorning mortal pain,

Artist and seekers glory in her thrall.

For she endows with vast creative urge

  The earth-born spirit risen from the sod.

Beyond all impulse to destroy or purge,

  Her inspiration lifts the self-bound clod

From creature, as creator, to upsurge

  Enraptured in the song — the work — of God.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Appendix

 

 

On the Meanings of Terms

He shall be as a god to me who can rightly define and divide.    —Plato.

Men are ever prone to construct systems of thought and of action, philosophies and laws, moralities and economics, to guide and rule other men. These always fail. For the systems of Nature in all her realms are only to be discovered as they are. They can never be con­structed or imposed.

 The use of terms is no exception. A writer has no valid choice but to use them as they, either obviously or by subtle implication, are. He cannot give them new meanings. The meaning of a newly formed or adopted term is seldom if ever wholly new to it. Its roots are deep in the experiences and the usages of the present and of all the past. Its meaning springs from its aptness, and this is discovered, not assigned or imposed. Words are really founded on experiences. Even words that idealize things yearned and dreamed as full blown and fulfilled are wish-projections conceiving in full-orbed splendor some good or beauty that has been in some degree attained. Ideals are happy experiences magnified in dreams.

 

 Language reflects experience as it is and also as it is wished and hoped to be. In much human action the ends sought are gained. Here the words have single meanings (except in metaphor) easy to define in terms of what they speak about. We may call them fact words. For example, wages always means payment for time-gauged or piece-gauged services; community always means an inhabited place having common services.

 

 In other fields of action the objects desired are but little attained. Here the words are wish words, and they are paradoxical. In one moment they signify ideals, in another they refer to a cherished means habitually attempted towards attaining them. For example, Government, as an agency of service and as an instrument of rulership; Democracy, both as equality of freedom and as equality of con­dition.

 

 Socionomy searches and discovers not what has been said concern­ing a population but what distinguishes it as a society. It must employ words as they are found, seeking always their operative significance.

 

 The following principal terms are defined and explained not merely in their literary or controversial and often contradictory significances but with a view to underlying objective distinctions implicit in their ordinary use but not always sufficiently understood or even known to exist. They are arranged in order from the most broadly abstract significance to the most broadly objective and con­crete, from the most widely abstract activity of the mind, without regard to quality, to the most inclusive fulfillment of desires in con­crete experience.

 

1. Reality	19. Social	37. Competition
2. Eternality	20. Societal	38. Exchange
3. Energy	21. Anti-social	39. Credits
4. Action	22. Government	40. Wages
5. Mass	23. Law	41. Salaries
6. Motion	24. Democracy	42. Fees
7. Duration	25. Ownership	43. Profits
8. Life-year	26. Property	44. Price
9. Structure	27. Wealth	45. Rent
10. Entropy	28. Administration	46. Interest
11. Quantitative	29. Social-ization	47. Value
12. Qualitative	30. Economics	48. Capital value
13. Rational	31. Labor	49. Income value
14. Socionomy	32. Capital	50. Speculative value
15. Service	33. Land	51. Citadel
16. Population	34. Public capital	52. Market
17. Community	35. Land administration	53. Altar

The Meanings of Terms

1.   REALITY

In its conceptual and absolute sense, transcending experience, this means the ultimate totality of universal existence, advancing by structural differentiation through infinite time into ever more enduring types and operational forms. It is the first and ultimate postulate on which all the sciences, including phi­losophy, are based.

 

 In its experiential and limited sense, reality is the quality of continuity, dura­tion or relative eternity manifested in any organization of energy, structure, process or event.

2.   ETERNALITY

The absolute and infinite reality in its aspect of duration, the highest quali­tative aspect or manifestation.

3.   ENERGY

This is the scientific name for the cosmos or total reality. In its absolute sense, it is the totality of passing events, of action — actuality. In its relative sense, it is any finite integration of mass, motion and duration, as the horse­power-hour, kilowatt-hour, pound-foot-minute, erg-second, man-hour, life-year; or as atom, animal, object, star, system, etc., when the manifesta­tion is of great duration, stabilized at low frequency of disintegration and recurrence, repetition or reproduction.

 

 A dyne is the metric unit of force which, acting for one second against the inertia of a mass of one gram, is sufficient to accelerate the mass to a velocity of one centimeter per second. An erg is the metric unit of energy or work — the amount of energy expended or work done by a dyne acting through a distance of one centimeter; a dyne-centimeter. An erg-second is a dyne- centimeter-second, an erg of energy ex­pended or work done during one second of time. It is the metric unit-rate of energy per unit of time. When this is multiplied by time — taken any number of times in succession — the product is the quantity of energy-in-action or action during that time. The quantum of action is an exceedingly small, apparently the smallest possible fraction of an erg-second that can be ex­perienced.

4. ACTION

That which energy does, or can do, when or if it acts. Work.

 

 Energy is treated variously as the ability, or possibility, of a stationary body or force to do work — potential energy; the work that can be done by a moving body — kinetic energy; and also at times identified with a particular quantity of work actually done or per­formed, which is action itself and not a mere potentiality or possibility of ac­tion, nor a mere ratio or rate of action per unit of time. Energy may be con­templated variously, but it does not enter into objective experience otherwise than as action.

5.  MASS

The conception or aspect of energy as static and without change. That which resists motion or change of motion. That to which motion or change of motion appertains. That upon which, when its motion changes, a force is said to act.

6.  MOTION

The aspect of energy that relates mass or inertia to extension or space.

 

7.  DURATION

The aspect or conception of energy with respect to its persistence or con­tinuity in a particular form of organiza­tion, rhythm or functioning. Period, life-span, “lease of life,” etc. Inverse of frequency.

8.   LIFE-YEAR

The unit of measurement for energy or action as manifested in a population. A single human integration of mass, motion and velocity during the period of one year.

9.   STRUCTURE

Any organization of energy relatively stabilized; considered without reference to motion, process or change.

10. ENTROPY

The progressive movement or change of any organization of energy towards or into a particular pattern of relation­ships.

 

 The movement of a particular or­ganization of energy may be in either direction, towards a greater or a lesser degree of order. Scientific materialists use the term in the second sense only, meaning greater and greater disorder — randomness.

 

11. QUANTITATIVE

The characteristic of any organiza­tion of energy taken as a totality with­out respect to its composition as to mass, motion and duration, and having no reference to human objectives or de­sires.

 

 Quantity is objective; dimension is subjective. A dimension might be de­fined as a quantity conceived sub­jectively in numerical terms.

 

12.  QUALITATIVE

The characteristic of any organiza­tion of energy with respect to the rela­tive magnitudes in its composition, respectively, of mass, motion and dura­tion.

 

 A transformation of these magni­tudes in the ascending order, in the direction of duration, is a positively qualitative or creative change. A trans­formation in the descending order is negatively qualitative.

 

 With respect to human concerns, a transformation of environment con­ducive of individual and thus of social continuity (duration) is a positively qualitative or creative change. Since the will to live and to live abundantly is the dominating desire, those activities and resulting conditions that tend to realize human desires, dreams, plans, aspira­tions and ideals are qualitative in the positive sense.

13. RATIONAL

 

 All rationality is fundamentally a matter of ratios, the weighing and bal­ancing of related magnitudes or quan­tities. The process of thinking is rational only in the degree that it involves comparisons under quantitative appraise­ments.

 

 So far as the magnitudes, quantities or dimensions comprising any object, process or event are taken by means of specific units of measurement, the description or analysis is numerically quantitative, involving numerical ratios, and thereby strictly rational.

 

 Among men, relationships and proc­esses are rational so far as they are voluntary, balanced and reciprocal in their numerically measured quantities based on specific and accepted units of service or value. Thus, the free societal relationships of contract and exchange are rational.

 

 Political or governmental relation­ships — those enforced by a dominating sovereign power — are not voluntary, reciprocal and numerically balanced. They are therefore of necessity empiri­cal, non-rational.

14.  SOCIONOMY

Theory or formulation of the organic laws exemplified in the organization and de­velopment of society — Webster’s New In­ternational Dictionary.

 

 The Science of Society.

 

 It treats of population as organized energy or structure manifesting func­tional and creative energy within itself and upon its environment — social-ized mankind as an agency of creation.

 

15.  SERVICE

Human energy flowing voluntarily either directly to others or indirectly through being organized and accumu­lated in structures called wealth, being such human energy as induces a volun­tary counter-flow, recompense or value. Service, as a highly differentiated and positively qualitative form of energy, and not merely wealth, is, next to population, the principal object-noun of socionomy.

16. POPULATION

Any aggregation of human beings, occupying or inhabiting a specific territory, community or property, without any necessary reference to their being organized and having inter­relationships.

17. COMMUNITY

The territory or place occupied by a population as a society. A place having common security, and other welfare services used and enjoyed by the inhabitants generally and in common. The word is often used loosely to in­clude or personify the inhabitants of a community.

18.  SOCIETY

A population the individuals of which are organized in a relationship, more widespread and universal than the bonds of blood, tradition or belief, that dif­ferentiates them into a system of re­ciprocal services by free energy inter­change called trade or economic functioning. It is a population occupy­ing a community, its members sustain­ing contractual or exchange relation­ships towards one another with respect to services, both private and public. These services are public with respect to the use of land and all that is appurtenant to it. They are private with respect to all else.

 

 Notwithstanding its incomplete de­velopment, a society has functions and capacities far beyond those of any or all of its members under any other re­lationship, and it confers upon them powers and capabilities that they cannot otherwise possess or attain. It is com­posed of three basic departments into which its membership is functionally although not perfectly or completely divided: government, the exercise of physical force; economics, the contractual relationship and process among men with respect to jurisdiction over property and services; and esthetics, the engagement in non-necessitous, spon­taneous activities freely chosen by a feeling for them for their own sake without ulterior ends. Their respective symbols are: Citadel, Market and Altar. Government, as the forcible re­pression of violence, is a necessary service, active or potential, to society — a prerequisite to societal relationships. Economics is the means by which at any attained state of development the so­ciety is maintained and exists. Esthetics, which includes all spontaneous intel­lectual, artistic and religious activity, is the realm of creative spirit in the light and inspiration of which all social advance is made and higher development proceeds.

 

 Culture and civilization are attain­ments and attributes of society. Both refer to the fact of, and to the general results flowing from social organiza­tion. Culture refers particularly to the intellectual and artistic achievements of a society and to the ornate.

19. SOCIAL

Having reference to a society or its processes and relationships; contractual, as opposed to coercive or compulsive. In loose language, it may mean any human or even any animal relation­ship.

20. SOCIETAL

This differs from the term social only in being more specific. It has reference always to the general organization of a population under the voluntary re­lationships whereby it functions cre­atively upon its environment, whereas social often includes any kind of human, or even animal, interrelationship.

21. ANTI-SOCIAL

Compulsive, coercive or fraudulent as against any person or number of persons acting as members of a society.

This term does not apply to the em­ployment of force for protection against violent or criminal persons as such — persons whose anti-social con­duct places them, temporarily at least, beyond the social pale. The restraint and prevention of such conduct is a necessary societal service.

 

 When performed by the community owners, without violations of the per­sons or properties of the inhabitants, then such public services are highly re­warded and freely recompensed in rents and location values. All anti­social conduct, whether criminal or governmental, diminishes rent and, unless restrained, finally extinguishes all community (land) values.

 

 Any service (so-called) that rests upon coercion and does not create its own voluntary revenue is, ipso facto, anti-social. Community services (when not canceled by coercions) always create their own revenues.

22. GOVERNMENT

That portion of the population in a community which, by custom, popular election or as a result of conquest, is accepted to practice coercion and com­pulsion over persons, and thereby has dominion or sovereignty over the ter­ritory and exercises rulership over the population as a whole.

 

 The meaning of the word government is in process of very slow transition due to a general inability to distinguish community services from community conquest and rulership. Educated minds, no less than vulgar ones, under the in­fluence of academic habit and classical traditions, completely confuse the pred­atory practice of conquerors, and of those who become their political suc­cessors, with the service-for-recompense function of community owners, of which they are only dimly if at all aware. It is not realized that conquest and rulership are alike anti-social and equally destructive of both ownership and public services. The forcible takings of despots or of their elected successors are thought of as contributions to public welfare. Tribute or taxation is patriotically and feelingly rationalized as recompense for public services and thought to be compatible with social and voluntary relationships.

 

 The effort to combine these two anti­theses under one conception persists. So the word government has two diamet­rically opposite meanings as a result of this inveterate belief that a people must be robbed and ruled in order to be served.

 

 When superior minds discard this psychological anomaly and discover the present and potential public service power of the institution of property in land, then governments as proprietary agents will rise to utmost affluence upon the voluntary recompenses induced by their own services. Then all but the criminal or irresponsible will be free men enjoying the protection of their freedom and other public services for which they voluntarily pay. Govern­ment, in the ideal sense of public serv­ices, will then be more fully experienced and the pro-social implications of the word will become clear.

23. LAW

Any uniformity of process or pro­cedure, customary conduct or behavior.

 

 Social law, the natural or common law of society, is that body of voluntary custom or any part of it whereby the social relationships are practiced and maintained, and departure from which leads automatically to deterrent conse­quences and results. Because of its autonomous operation, social law is generally taken for granted and but little examined or understood.

 

 Political or governmental “law” is the body of special enactments or statutes set up, some of them in confirmation of social custom and law, but principally in violation of or in sup­posedly necessary or salutary opposition to the natural law of society, and pre­scribing artificial penalties not naturally or directly resulting from disregard of these statutes.

 

 Social law is the manifestation of voluntary service relationships, wide­spread and impersonal, throughout a population. Statute “law” originates in conquered or enslaved societies and maintains compulsory relationships. Social law can only be discovered and observed; it cannot be enacted or pre­scribed.

24. DEMOCRACY

Democracy is the term by which the desire for non-coercive and happy com­munity relationships is perhaps most frequently expressed. The term is seldom used descriptively in an objective sense, but rather as a subjective ideal that in practice is only partly and pre­cariously achieved. It is thought to be attained or maintained by resort to its contrary — struggle, conflict, war — rather than through the social device of contract, consent and exchange.

 

 Owing to widespread feeling that social justice and well-being are some­how dependent on popular elections, democracy is often wishfully identified with “majority rule.”

 

 In the science of society, the term is applied only to the practice of the free and voluntary, the social relationships. Thus used it is practically synonymous with social, contractual, voluntary, etc. In this objective sense, democracy may be defined as: Doing things together by consent of all and coercion of none.

 

 The only circumstance in which democracy in this sense is consistently practiced is in the making and performing of contracts, of self-imposed obligations. As in ancient and primitive times, the market is still the forum of democracy.

 

 When persons contractually pool their separate titles to property by tak­ing undivided interests in the whole, they elect servants — officers — and other­wise exercise their authority over their property by a process of voting, as partners, share owners or other bene­ficiaries. This is authentically demo­cratic in that all the members exercise authority in proportion to their respective contributions. Coercion is not employed against any, and all persons are as free to withdraw their member­ship and property as they were to contribute it.

 

 As a form of government or type of rulership, democracy is the exercise of coercive power, more or less limited, over persons generally, by popular decree or by persons elected and thus authorized to do so.

25.  OWNERSHIP

The social relationship between in­dividuals with respect to property under which the subject matter can be (1) peaceably enjoyed or (2) contractually administered for the limited use or service of others or (3) sold outright, whereby its unlimited use, and thus its ownership, is completely transferred. Ownership, if any, not sanctioned by a society would have no social, con­tractual or service significance.

 

 Ownership of property as capital, as social-ized wealth, connotes the social obligation to administer it for the use and interest of others; the social penalty for failure to do so is a decline of in­come and value. This is always, and especially true of land ownership, which carries with it an obligation to protect from violence, and otherwise publicly serve the occupants or inhabitants of the land. The final liquidation (running out) of land and income value in all politically controlled communities is the historic penalty for this failure.

 

 In its Anglo-Saxon meaning, now only dimly realized, to own was to owe. Ownership was inclusive of others, not exclusive. What was owned, chiefly land, was held in trust, as it were.

 

 Ownership, as a social function, is the making and performing of con­tracts conferring the use, limited or un­limited, of either natural or artificial things as property.

 

 Ownership, as a status, is the socially acknowledged and accepted exclusive right of possession or use, and of the unlimited disposition of any natural or artificial thing.

26. PROPERTY

Almost any element of human en­vironment can be or become property. It becomes such, not alone by act of its possessor, but by the natural law or custom of the society, designating it under various circumstances and con­ditions as property, and resigning or appropriating it to him as the owner.

Property results only from societal custom, convention or agreement; wealth from the labor or activity called production. Property can exist, as property, only in a society.

The social will creates property in both natural and artificial things — so far as it holds them subject to none other but voluntary or contractual dis­tribution or disposition. Natural things cannot themselves be created or pro­duced; wealth is created by artifice or labor applied to what once were natural things. Neither land nor wealth is, of itself, necessarily, property.

 

 Property may be anything that by the custom of society becomes the sub­ject matter of ownership and thereby of the social, non-violent processes and re­lationships called contracts, between persons, with respect to its disposition or use.

27.  WEALTH

In its social aspect, wealth is any man-made object, any natural substance or thing modified by human work or labor, that by common custom and consent is the subject of ownership, or property. When used by its owner or owners administratively, as the subject of contract and hence for the benefit of others, it is then the administrative or social-ized wealth called capital.

 

 Wealth, when considered physically and without reference to the social re­lationships of contract or exchange, is any portion of environment (land) so affected or transformed, by human energy or agency, as to yield satis­factions.

28.  ADMINISTRATION

The practice of ownership in the social or contractual sense of putting property or wealth to the use or service of others. To ad–minister is to serve to. By such administration, property or wealth is lifted into the category of capital in both the physical and the societal, or functional, sense of that term.

29. SOCIAL-IZATION

Adoption of the social or contractual process of consent and exchange with respect to property or services; the bringing of property and services into a market and thus submitting them to the social jurisdiction and common will as to their distribution or re-distribu­tion.

 

 Because of the constantly serious, often tragic, distortions caused by in­vasions and restriction of the social freedom of distribution by consent and exchange, it is the common belief that the taking of property and services out of the common pool and social juris­diction of the market, and yielding them up entirely to government juris­diction, will result in a social, or at least a more desirable, distribution of them. Under this fallacious belief, almost any complete change from free social to governmental and political jurisdiction is thought to be social­ization, notwithstanding that this is, in fact, de-social-ization.

 

 This inversion of the term is one re­sult of the widely prevailing disbelief in free relationships, a disbelief engen­dered by our classical slave-state tradi­tions of government, and the belief that rulership by force is of the same nature as society, and not of a contrary nature, tending to destroy it.

30. ECONOMICS

This is the general term of reference for the subsistence department of a society. It applies to the relationships in­volved in the use of property as capital in the production and distribution of services and goods.

31. LABOR

As used in the social, economic or functional sense, the term labor desig­nates collectively those persons who under contractual engagements per­form services for others, only as servants or employees and without being the owners and administrators of the prop­erty they use in connection therewith.

 

 In those exceptional cases where a person serves others as an employee, but also owns and administers property for the use of others, this term labor applies to him only in respect of his in­terest or capacity as an employee. Such cases are common or exceptional in proportion as the society has attained structural differentiation and thereby functional organization, development and growth.

 

 In the strictly societal sense, as a func­tion or activity, labor is any human exertion that under a social or con­tractual process becomes service and thus induces a recompense or value in exchange.

 

 In the literal, non-social and per­sonal sense, labor is any human activity or exertion that is necessitous and not pursued or indulged in as an art or recreation for its own sake.

32.  CAPITAL

In the social, economic or functional sense, capital is correlative to labor. The term designates collectively those persons who, as owners and administrators of the property used in connection therewith, employ labor and thereby perform services for others through contractual engagements for the sale or use of property, or of the services of themselves and their employees, to their patrons or to persons generally, without themselves being specifically engaged as servants or employees.

In the literal and physical sense, capital is any or all wealth let for hire or otherwise in course of distribution by exchange, or used to facilitate the production, use, distribution or ex­change of services or of other wealth or property. Instruments of credit or obligation are neither wealth nor capi­tal, except in a figurative or representa­tive sense.

 

33. LAND

In the social, economic or functional sense, land is the term that designates those persons (or their services), taken collectively, who, by the law of custom and consent in a community, are en­titled and authorized to make social or contractual disposition or distribution of the use of sites and natural resources, including the advantages of all artificial things appurtenant thereto as public capital, and to transfer such title and authority.

 

 The original possessor of land, prior to title, whether by conquest or other form of occupancy or appropriation without contract or title, does not by such possession or appropriation per­form any societal service, nor does he have thereby any voluntary recompense or value, any social acceptance, or recognition of his possession. But on being accepted and invested with title, he no longer holds possession by his own force but by the common law and consent of a society. This consti­tutes him a proprietary officer of the society, with authority to administer the land, no longer by his own personal or physical force, but by the social or contractual force of voluntary energy exchanges that constitute the function­ing of the society. From this point the land becomes property and its possessor, now become owner, is in position to perform the contractual services of social administration, distribution or disposition of the land.

 

 If such services are not actively or immediately required, there being no present market demand for the land or for its use, then, pending such requirement, the owner performs a passive, waiting or stand-by service, the accumu­lated value of which, be it little or much, is the selling price, if he sells it, or the basis of his ground rent if he puts it out on lease. In case of sale, his successor in title pays him the market appraisal of his accumulated stand-by services, or, if the land is sold while under lease, then the sales price is the capitalized value of the current net in­come according to the market ap­praisement of its probable continuance and future magnitude. In any case, after the first investiture of title, the selling value, income and increments to land are the market appraisements and awards for the services performed in the course of its social and contractual administration.

 

 Each time unoccupied land is sold, the selling price is the net value of and recompense for the accumulated past services of a stand-by character that the owner and his predecessor, if any, have performed. This recompensing of stand­by services is of the nature of a social insurance against the land reverting to the barbaric or tyrannical dispensations of the pre-social or the anti-social coer­cive or tyrannical condition. During all the time that the land is under lease, the current net rent is the recompense or value of the contractual services per­formed in keeping the land socially placed, maintained in possession of the most productive tenants and devoted to the most productive and therefore most profitable kind of use.

 

 As public improvements to the land, in the form of public capital, come to be placed adjacent to and between the several plots or holdings of land, the net annual value, if any, of the use of this public capital is reflected and in­cluded in the aggregate net rent.

 

 When this public capital is maintained by the services of and its increase provided out of the net incomes of the owners of the community lands, the taxation of labor and capital or their products will be as unnecessary as it is undesirable. In such case, the value of the public capital, instead of being destroyed will be reflected enormously in the aggregate income and value of all the land.

 

 The supplying of any public or com­munity services or advantages without destroying their value by taxation is recompensed in the thereby lifted values and incomes from the community lands. This takes place on a community scale in response to the public improve­ments (those for the use of which there is need, purchasing power and demand) abutting, adjacent to and between the private holdings, precisely as the in­dividual plots have their value and in­come enhanced by the placing of private capital improvements or advantages directly upon them, without levying forcibly on the properties or infringing the liberties of the tenants in order to do so.

 

 And, entirely apart from the adminis­tration of public capital as such, when­ever there is a rising productivity of labor and capital, remaining above taxa­tion, for free redistribution out of the market by the contractual process, there is a correspondingly great increase in the need and in the effective demand for a societal distribution of all the ad­vantages appertaining to the use of land. This is the explanation of high rents and land values during those times when the productivity of labor and capital is large and the tax-seizures of it out of the societal jurisdiction of the market have remained relatively small. Land, in the merely physical sense, without reference to any social organization or societal relationships, means simply the whole natural en­vironment of a population.

 

34. PUBLIC CAPITAL

In the physical sense, this means all of the artificial things appurtenant to land that are open to the general and common use of the occupants of a com­munity. These constitute the lateral improvements adjacent to and between the privately held plots of land and occupying the public or common land used as highways, public health and recreational areas and as sites for public enterprises and agencies of every kind. In this physical sense, the public or community capital is the wealth that is publicly appurtenant to the individually and exclusively occupied portions of a community. It consists of the man-made public facilities with which the private parts of a community are supplied and their occupants served.

 

 A social or contractual distribution of the advantages arising from the ex­istence of public capital in a community — as contrasted with a more or less ar­bitrary distribution under political authority — can be carried out only by the owners of the community. For none but the community owners can make contracts with respect to community occupancy and thereby distribute so­cially its public advantages. And this remains true even though the com­munity owners function, as at present, only to distribute its access and use and give no further administration to the public capital nor exercise any super­vision over the salaried public servants to whom it is entrusted. But the com­munity owners forfeit and forego enormous rents and property values by their failure unitedly to further super­vise the common properties and serv­ices appurtenant to their lands.

35. LAND ADMINISTRATION

 Land and its resources, together with all public appurtenances and the com­mon use of them, is administered by sale or transfer outright of its unlimited use, or by the sale of definitely limited uses called leaseholds or tenancies. This is land ownership in the social and functional sense. It is the performing of contractual services in the transfer or distribution of ownership, or of the private and exclusive occupancy or use of land and its resources, including also the use of the public parts of the com­munity and of the community capital wherewith the public parts are im­proved.

 

 Before the Norman Conquest, the land of England was so far adminis­tered in this manner that the voluntary revenue of rent defrayed all public and governmental expense. Not until the Conquest and Doomsday Book was any permanent system of taxation in force. Under the Conqueror, the new owners of England acquired kingly and compulsive powers. Land ownership thus became a political institution. It so remained generally until, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen­turies, it became re-social-ized — de-governmentalized — divested of its pow­er to seize private property. Bereft of all political prerogative, land owner­ship again began to function socially as property in the administrative sense of making contractual instead of political distribution of it.

 

 Potentially considered, and looking forward to a condition of social freedom and permanent peace, land administra­tion comprises the ownership type of service and control, not alone over the natural locations and resources privately held, but also the like administration in connection therewith of the public do­main and the entire public capital facilities with which a community is improved and with which its inhabi­tants are, in common, served. Public service through land ownership and administration is consensual — sanctioned by the societal will. It abrogates force; it gives a basis for community services without forced contributions; it makes contracts possible and thereby gives social freedom, for none but contractual relations are consensual and free.

 

 A great step in societal evolution will be the non-political administration by the public proprietors, not only of the sites and resources, but also of the community services and the community capital appurtenant to the sites.

36. CONTRACT

This term, in its general sense, de­notes the relationship and process under which the wills of particular persons come into voluntary accord, each with the other, and with the general will, respecting any exchanges of property or of services.

 

 A particular contract is a mutual engagement to enter into a new or to modify an existing relationship be­tween persons respecting any property or services. It prescribes the terms upon which services are exchanged or the use or ownership of property is transferred. Since the equivalence of things in ex­change is determined by the natural law or custom of the market, the con­tract expresses not only a resolution of individual wills and desires, but, also and automatically, the prescription of justice and well-being by the social or community will. This contractual relationship and process is truly demo­cratic, in the sense that it ascertains and executes the common will and welfare through measures and transactions of mutual service that are accepted by all and which none oppose.

 

 Contract, a psychological relation­ship, a “meeting of minds,” is the matrix or adhesive between men in society which, through the institution of ownership, relates them together into the societal organism. Civilized men as freely follow the voluntary customs of the market as, in fulfillment of its instinctive nature, the honeybee follows the law of the hive.

 

 Contract is the social technique that, through ownership, puts property to the use of others.

37. COMPETITION

In its societal sense, competition is the measuring process whereby the ex­change equivalence of services and properties is socially determined, con­tracts with respect to them made and exchanges of them effected. It is the voting democracy of the market in which bids and offers are harmonized at particular levels or points of exchange-equivalence called ruling prices or market values.

 

 Without competition registering the social will as to the proportionate re­distribution of the services and prop­erties pooled in the common markets, there would be no objective basis of reference for the reconciling of indi­vidual wills in the formation of par­ticular contracts.

 

 Since the competition of the market guides individuals into non-coercive relationships in the distribution of properties and services, it is the reverse of conflict and in no proper or societal sense the same.

 

 Competition is the technique by which a society, to the extent that it can function, abrogates conquest and con­flict through the establishment of contract and exchange. As its root and pre­fix suggest, it is the mutual petitioning of persons who wish to serve and to be served.

 

 The ill-founded moral opprobrium so often laid upon this vital social process springs from confusions of competition itself with the invidious compulsions and restrictions that cancel its benefits and distort its operation into anti-social results.

 

 The opposite and contrary from com­petition is monopoly. Monopoly exists when government by its coercive power limits to a particular person or organization, or combination of them, the right to sell particular goods or services, and thereby abrogates the right of any other person or organization to compete. It is an infringement of the right to make a living, for it limits the right of the general public both to sell and to buy. Where the liberty to sell and opportunity to buy are not forcibly infringed, there can be no invasion of any rights. Neither big­ness nor singleness can be injurious, so far as it results from the unforced preferences of purchasers and freedom of competition prevails.

38. EXCHANGE

The social metabolism or general function that transforms a population into and maintains it as a society — the process by which population energy is social-ized into services.

 

 Exchange is not the forming but the carrying out of contractual engage­ments. Conducted otherwise than in accordance with contract, it ceases to be a societal phenomenon.

 

 Exchange of services is the basis of every societal relationship.

39. CREDITS

Parties to contracts not immediately and   completely performed become mutual creditors and debtors. When one party performs his obligation before the other, the numerical token or promise he takes is called his credit or the other party’s debt or obligation.

 

 Tokens and instruments of credit are not wealth or services; they are signs and measures of property or wealth to be delivered or services performed. Credits can be liquidated or promises performed. As between the parties to them, this may be effected by transfer to and substitution of a new party, when done by the consent of all.

 

 Credit tokens that are treated as a charge against the general market are called money. Credit tokens issued or prescribed by a government as the medium in which publicly enforced payments of private debts must be made become thereby legal tender and are so called. Legal tender is based on the governmental enforcement of pri­vate obligations.

40. WAGES

The credits or drafts against the general market that are received im­mediately in exchange for time-gauged or piece-gauged personal services.

 

 “Real wages” are the actual wealth and services that these credits presently or finally command.

41. SALARIES

Recompense received in exchange for continuing personal services not gauged strictly by time nor measured by any specific output.

42. FEES

Recompense for highly specialized or professional services, usually involving the exercise of discretion and being such services as the recipients themselves have but little ability to understand or perform.

 

 The performance of some kinds of specialized services is limited by statutes prescribing effectively deterrent penal­ties upon the acceptance of fees in recompense therefor by any but special persons or classes designated by political authority and having, presumably, superior capacities or qualifications.

43. PROFITS

The recompense for owner-adminis­trative services performed in the pro­duction of wealth or services for others. The recompense to an owner for the services he combines with property or services owned by him, including the service or services of selling them — of bringing such property or its use into the market and making a social, or con­tractual, distribution of it.

 

 Profits are stated usually in terms of increase in credits or assets above debts. Stated in terms of money, as a charge against the general market, they are called cash or liquidated profits. Like wages, profits are not “real” profits unless or until they are liquidated into property or services.

 

 Profits are distinguished from wages, salaries, fees, etc. in this, that although they are recompenses for services, they are obtained only as residues after meet­ing all contractual obligations. They are nowhere prescribed in the terms of any particular contract. Hence, the services recompensed by profits are often called “independent enterprises.”

44. PRICE — SALES PRICE OR PURCHASE PRICE

The exchange recompense received by an owner from a purchaser of specific property in exchange for its unlimited use — for the transfer of his entire ownership and title to it.

 

 Prices are stated almost invariably in terms of money. They are indices of the voluntary social will as to the exchange­ability and hence as to the distribution of goods and services — so far as the social will can operate within the governmental regulations and limita­tions under which it is bound.

 

45. RENT

Rent is the term almost invariably used to designate the recompense to the owner for the time-limited use of specific property of any kind.

 

 The property may be the owner’s physical wealth or capital or it may be land, either with or without improve­ments upon it, but always including the use of any public improvements appurtenant to it. The owner usually maintains the property; he parts with only a time-limited use; and it is always fully returnable to him.

 

46. INTEREST

The contractually determined recom­pense received by the holder of credits or money (drafts against the general market) for the limited use (as to time) of these credits or money to draw from the market property or services of any kind, usually as actual capital for pro­ductive administration or use, and the creation thereby of new capital and credits.

 

 Just as rent is paid for the use of specific property, so interest is paid for the use of generalized property, as credits or money, returnable only in the generalized form of credits or money, and not in any specific property as in the case of rent.

 

47. VALUE

That property or service which, in the course of exchange, is received for property or services given. When two things are exchanged, each is the value of the other.

 

 In all those exchanges that are not immediately completed in property or services, the term value is applied to the credit or money-token by which the actual value or recompense must be measured when finally received.

 

 Value is often thought of as being intrinsic or inherent in property. Any such “value” is only an estimate or an­ticipation of what credits or recompense the property would command in case of sale or exchange.

 

 The word “value” is used also in a great variety of figurative, metaphysical and subjective senses in no way con­nected with exchange or any societal process.

48.  CAPITAL VALUE

The over-all value of capital wealth or property, in outright exchange, as distinguished from its annual value or the annual recompense for its use.

49. INCOME VALUE

Recompense for the use of capital wealth or property in terms of its annual use, as distinguished from its sale outright or unlimited use.

50. SPECULATIVE VALUE

Any estimate or anticipation of a future exchange value, as distinguished from a present or actual value in hand.

51. CITADEL

The symbol of physical force or its equivalent in duress or coercion, prac­ticed principally but not exclusively by public authority, such as the taking of taxes, imposing of penalties, the waging of wars, and the prevention or punish­ment of crimes, as well as the perpe­trating of them.

 

 The social and legitimate function of the Citadel, as a community service, is the suppression of violence or other contra-social behavior by persons at­tacking the social organization from within or from without, and not the imposition of force upon the society itself, its processes or its functioning members. From the standpoint of society, the office of the Citadel is to pro­tect and serve, not to dominate or con­trol. To the extent that community services are performed and recompensed by exchange, without domination, the Citadel is social-ized by the Market. Such services are maintained out of the voluntary revenues called ground rent.

52. MARKET

The symbol for that department of society whence its subsistence is de­rived — in which contracts are made and performed, goods and services pooled, social-ized or commun-(ity)-ized for redistribution to the contracting parties or interests in accord with the social election and will, as registered publicly in the common scale of prices and terms, and carried out by their respective contracts and exchanges.

53. ALTAR

This term is the symbol for that de­partment of society concerned with the intangibles of intellect, feeling and imagination, and with the spontaneous activities of scientific research and dis­covery, artistic creation, and of the inspirational, spiritual and recreational life — things done by unforced election, selection and choice, recompensing in themselves, and not to be measured or exchanged.

 

 This department of a society is often referred to as its culture.

54. CIVILIZATION

The functioning of the social or­ganization.

 

Civilization develops through the progressive differentiation of three modes of human behavior into Citadel, Market and Altar, and the interfunctioning of these departments of society to raise a population from coercion, through cooperation, into creative con­secration.

 

 It is any state of being that a society achieves in consequence of its capacity to modify and rebuild and thus to create its environment and thereby to extend its numbers and its power to serve all its members, liberating them into length of days with growth of individual capacities and powers.

 

 

[Insert Index of Principal Terms –     from CM&A page 243]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliographic Note

Ancient and contemporary, there is a rich bibliography of “the good life” from the conceptual and subjective point of view. But these writings propose none but subjective technologies — the trusting heart, submission to divine will, triumphant love, all being conditions attained within the personal consciousness of the indi­vidual mind.

 

 Against all this, there is a vast literature of revolt and of “reform” by the re-enthroning of old tyrannies under popular slogans and signs. For in “reform” and revolution alike, there is no process but coercion by government and by war. Apart from the natural sciences, there are no specific and workable procedures for the externalization of dreams and ideals.

 

 The literature of the natural sciences, in recent times, is the first to reflect untrammeled adventures of the mind into realms of order and beauty in the natural world. But until now, the rational mind of man has not risen to the impersonal system of order and beauty that exists in the societal realm.

 

 Here is the unique and original contribution of the present work: It discloses the creative and durational character of the contractual, the free processes among men, and it shows how infinite realizations of human hopes and ideals await only the proprietary administration of community affairs through the business-like development and growth of the modern institution of property in land and of the community services and properties accessory and appurtenant thereto.

 

 Of this there is no bibliography. For original discoveries, no pre­cursors are known.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Insert DIAGRAM OF GENERAL PHILOSOPHY from CM&A page 245, together with new text explaining it.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INDEX

 

 

 

Action: 55; defined, 229; see also Energy.

 

Administration: 102-103; defined, 235; basis of all business, 153; by owners, 126 ff; of community, 141ff; of public capital, 149; by non-owners, 143; social function of owner­ship, 124, 143; sales the ultimate ob­ject, 159; see also Ownership, Pub­lic Administration

 

Adulthood: necessary to creativity, 24

 

Advance: social, 214; freedom essential, 15; business basis of, 113

 

Age Groups: productivity versus reproductivity, 42-43; effects of changes in average life-span, 42-43, 36-38

 

Ageing of the population, 42

 

Agricultural Communities, 86; see also

Village Communities

 

Alfred, Age of, 76, 80, 94

 

Altar: 58, 203; defined, 242; function, 54; see also Citadel, Market and Altar

 

Alternative to political revenue and ad­ministration,  93-94; see also Land Administration, Public Administra­tion

 

Altruism, 26; see also Motivation

 

America, North: see North America

 

“American Plan,” 183

 

Anglo-Saxon England, 80, 91, 94-95, 161; social organization based on ownership of land, 76; destroyed by Norman power, 76; flowering under Alfred, 76-77; proprietary pub­lic authority, 76-77; basic community pattern, 79

 

Animal Life: supine status, 24; highest destiny, 25; limitations, 116; versus plant life, 207; conditions, 208

 

Anti-Social Acts, 59; defined, 232; proper restraint, 51

 

Apartment housing, 183

 

Arts, 116; function, 218

 

Association of Community Authorities, 85, 96

 

Atlantic World, Wars of the, 67

 

Authority, contractual, 73; see also Ownership

 

Authority, political: see Political Government, Public Administration

 

Barbarians, 75

 

Barter, 105; limitations, 46

 

 Basic Social Pattern, 71ff; biological parallel,79

 

 Bay Tree, 106

 

 Beauty, 216ff; inspiration of, 20, 63-64, 197, 216ff, 219; manifested in man, 218; paen to, 223

 

 Biological Bonds: see Familial Organiza­tion

 

Birth Rate: see Reproductivity

 

 Business: as administration of property, 153, 159; basis of social advance 8, 113; see also Administration, Free Enterprise, Industry

 

Business Administration, 141ff.

 

 Business, Public: how administered, 148

 

 Capital, 159; defined, 127-128, 236; economic factor, 176-177; public, 112, 153; public versus private ad­ministration, 182 ff; break-down of national income to labor, capital and land, 180 ff.

 

Capital Goods, 124

 

Capital Value, defined, 242

 

Cell, least biological unit, 207

 

Century of Lengthening Life, 41ff.

 

 Change: see Energy, Environment, also under Qualitative, 230

 

“Child of God,” 216, 217, 218

 

Church: fostered freedom, 92

 

 Citadel, 57; historic origins, 62; functions, 54, 62, 242; see also Citadel, Market and Altar

 

Citadel, Market and Altar, 54, 55ff, 203, 204, 242; imperfect differentiation, 60-61, 202; interfunctioning, 59; continuing evolution, 59; see under Society, 231, also separate headings

 

Cities, coastal, 93; law merchant, 106

 

Civilization, 141; defined, 243; advance, 139; distinguishing factors, 104; based on contractual administration of property, 139

 

Classical traditions of rulership, 79, 80, 90-92

 

Climate and Conquest: influence of climate and terrain, 65ff, 74

 

Collectivism, in nature, 193.

 

Collectivist Ideal; tendency towards, 184; inherent in capitalist system, 187

 

Commendation, 62

 

Common Law: property as social con­vention, 98; instruments of exchange under law merchant, 106; see also under Law, 233

 

Communism in land, 123

 

Community: first essential of, 50; out-of-doors, 142ff, 179; hotel, 82, 141ff; organization and operation, 141ff; basic free pattern, 79; services by community owners, 98 ff; historic failures, 213; see also Land Adminis­tration, Public Administration, Village Community

 

Community Business; how administered, 148;

potentiality, 214; see also Land Ad­ministration.

 

Community Capital: community properties as,

174; organization and management, 141; see Public Capital

 

Community economics, basis of, 141ff

 

Community services, see Public Services

 

Competition: definition, 239; operation, 117; measuring instrument, 117; regional, under proprietary public administration, 135

 

Conflict essential to sovereignty and among pre-societal groups, 72

 

Conquest related to climate and terrain, 66

 

Consanguinity: contract supervenes upon, 87; see also

Familial Organization

 

Contract: defined, 239; authority to make, 73; not a physical process, 159; peaceful distribution by, 175; see also Ownership, Contractual Relationship

 

Contractual process distributes land, 72

 

Contractual Relationship, 8, 23, 98; emergence

76; origin in village com­munity, 87; importance, 119; medieval growth, 92; 19th-century expansion, 44; application in public affairs, 52; transcendent nature, 88; societal development through ex­tension of, 104 ff; see also Co­operation

 

Cooperation: freedom in, 26 ff; effect of climate on, 65; universal principle, 83; see also Symbiosis, Contractual Re­lationship, Reciprocal Relationships

 

Cosmic Energy: see Energy

 

Cosmos; man as microcosm, 200; society related to the, 114, 195, 203

 

Counterfeit Money, 106

 

Creation, Society the Crown of, 205 ff

 

Creative Change, 15 ff, 193 ff; see also Qualitative

 

Creative Synthesis, 206 ff; see also Synthesis

 

Creativity: in a population dependent on proportion of adult years, 31-33; self-creative potential of man, 195

 

Credit: 105-106; defined, 240; time dimension in exchange, 46

 

Culture, see under Society, 231-232

 

Custom, see Familial Organization, Common Law

 

Cycle: individual or population, 14; see also Duration, Life-Span

 

Darwinian Survival, 67

 

Death, nature of, 29; see also Life

 

Deflation: see Depression

 

Demand necessary to value, 148

 

 Democracy: 98; defined, 233; political versus economic, 44; through popular proprietorship, 136;

Market, 44 ff, 175; mechanism of, 45

 

Depression, 100-101, 163, 221

 

 Differentiation: of function, owner­ship, institutions, 25; of structures in society, 58 ff; see also Society, Specialization

 

Discovery: in the natural world, 7, 216; motivation, 216

 

Distribution; as a change of relationship among men with respect to thing distributed, 104-105; services of, 116; social versus political, 175

 

Division of Labor: as affecting land ownership, 128-129, 154; see also Specialization

 

Drawing Room, habits and manners of the, 192

 

Duration: defined, 230; see also Life, Life-Span

 

Durational Power of Society, 55-56

 

Dyne: see under Energy, 229

 

 Economics: defined, 141, 235; basis of community

economics, 141 ff

 

Eddington on “Man-Years,” 11

 

 Efficiency, measurement of, 115; see also

 Specialization.

 

Efficiency Ratings Based on Time, 17

 

Emergent Evolution, 206 ff

 

 Empire, consolidations of, 66; oceanic, 67; see also Political Government

 

Empiricism in social practice, 60, 78, 106-107

 

Energy: defined, 229; units, 229; source, 9, 16; manifestations, 9, 114, 116, 193; periodicity, 55; three­fold nature, 55, 229; composition, 16-17, 55; internal change of pro­portions qualitative, 16-17; meas­urement, 114; conservation of, 114-115; transformations, 114-115; durational element, 19; creative potential in, 19; qualitative versus quantitative, 19; metaphysical aspects, 19

 

Energy Concept of Population, 9 ff

 

Energy, Cosmic: 9; nature of, 193; evolu­tion, 71; conservation, 29; transformations, 29; human life, 21-22; man as microcosm, 200; so­ciety a manifestation, 114

Energy of Exchange, 47 ff, 114 ff.

 

Energy, Human: social-ization, 115; frustration of, 221; cannot be blotted out, 47-48, 221; sublimation, 47-48, 221

 

Energy, Mechanical, 115; forms, flow, qualitative differences, 12

 

Energy, Population, 9 ff, 30 ff; contrasting

modes of flow, 12-13; transformations, 13; continuity, 14-15; qualita­tive changes, 16 ff, 23; generations as energy waves, 21-23; conservation, 28-29; creative transformation, 30 ff; see also Population

 

Energy, Societal, 14, 111-112, 114-118, 221

 

Entropy defined, 230

 

 Environment, 188-189; source of all life-forms, 49; extremes, 65-66; familial organization predatory on, 86, 216-217; desired change, 17; modifica­tion, 195; dominion over, 18, 23-25, 49

 

 Erg, see under Energy, 229

 

Esthetic Motivation: see Motivation

 

 Esthetics; see under Society, 231-232; also Beauty

 

 Eternality defined, 229; freedom the technique of, 26 ff; see also Duration

 

Evil: negative nature, 7, 217; nature of death, 29

 

Evolution, 70, 206 ff; societal life-form, 209; order of societal, 84 ff; cosmic, 71

 

Exchange, 141, 213; defined, 240; time dimension, 46; limitations of barter, 46,105; function of money and credits, 105; creation by, 47 ff; not a physi­cal process, 48; social process, 99; rationality, 48; accountancy, 117-118; retardation of, 118, ownership essential, 48; essential to com­munity functioning, 48-49; benefits, 104, 106; effect on environment, 104; societal development through extension of, 104 ff; value and exchange a system of social-ized energy flow, 114 ff; energy of, 47 ff, 114 ff

 

Exchange System, 104, 106, 175; operation, 98; universality, 115; services contributed, 177; see also Exchange, Market, Contractual Rela­tionship

 

Experience reflected in language, 227

 

Expropriation, evils of, 52; see also Public Revenue, Taxation

 

Familial Organization, 84, 85 ff, 115; nature of, 71-72; dependent on con­scious awareness, 72; predatory on environment, 86, 216-217; see also Village Community

 

Federation, political, 66; see also Politi­cal Government.

 

Fees defined, 240-241

 

Fertile Crescent 90

 

Feudalism 75, 91-93, 126

 

Force, legitimate practice of, 51, 59, 232

 

Free Enterprise: why so called, 77, 188;

performing public services, 136, 214;

potentials, 187; defections from, 188; miracle of the modern age, 188

 

Free Will, the exercise of choice, 53; gift of society, 193-197; see also Will

 

Freedom, key to abundance and long life, 23, 26 ff; in organization, 26 ff; nature of, 45; property the instrument, 50 ff; essential to progress, 53; of Choice, 53; potencies, 69; in fertile flat lands, 74; in wooded mountain lands, 90; individual, 92; path to, 112; North America, 173; gift of society, 193-197

 

Freeholders 62; reduced to serfs or slaves, 74

 

Frequency 15, 55

 

Functioning antecedent to pathology  7, 29; see also Growth

 

Galileo 200

 

 Generations as energy waves, 22-23; overlapping, 30; see also Popula­tion, Energy

 

George, Henry, 122

 

Germanic institutions, 91

 

 Gifts of nature, distribution of, 178; see also Land, Property in Land

 

Golden Horn 90

 

 Golden Rule relationship 189; see also Contractual Relationship

 

 Government: Definition and dis­cussion, 232-233; see also Political Government, Land Administration, Public Administration

 

Great Society 210

 

Ground Rent: Defined, 241; recompense for service, 74, 149, 178, 222; historic perversion, 92; public revenues in Saxon England, 94; rise and fall, 100; taxation a charge against, 151, 156, 165-170; measure of net public services, 130-131, 132; index of public values, 146; springs from ad­ministration of public capital, 149; fixed by market, 221-222; nature of, 158, 221-222; see under Land, 237; also see Rent, Property in Land, Public Administration, Public Revenue

 

 Growth, 7; nature of, 29; see also Life

 

Guilds 92

 

Headship 86

 

Heaven’s First Law 71

 

Heptarchy 95

 

 History, written; largely a negative ac­count, 104

 

Holmes, Justice Oliver Wendell 2

 

Hostility among alien groups 86

 

 Hotel model of free community, 82, 141 ff

 

House of Life 214

 

House of Man divided against itself, 66

 

 Human Nature: Improvement, 23, 192; see also Man, Individuals

 

Ideals 19, 227; socialist 184, 187

 

 Immortality 40; measure, 18; see also Life, Life-Span

 

Income Value defined, 242

 

Income, Real 176

 

Individualism: historic emergence of, 76, 92

 

 Individuals: freedom 92; complexity of life under primitive conditions 154; benefits of society 23, 32, 53, 189, 212, 213; constituent elements 57, 194, 201; units of societal organiza­tion 194; statistical integration, 4, 197; fate of in organization, 193 ff; changing role in society 154; uniqueness 197; free will 7, 8, 53, 98, 193-197; habits and manners 192; self-realization, 197, 243; future liberation, 214-215; see also Man

 

 Industry, taxation of 156,165; liberation 168 ff; see also Business, Pro­duction.

 

 Infancy years of non-productivity 24; infant versus adult life-years 33

 

Inflation: derangement of the system of exchange 163

 

Inspiration of Beauty 20, 63-64, 197, 216 ff, 219; see also Beauty

 

Installment Buying 183

 

Intellect: nature of, 201; spiritual office of, 218, 219; see also Rationality 230

 

Interest: defined, 241

 

Investment: foreign, 41; in private versus public enterprise under proprietary public administration, 182 ff

 

Japan: 76, 94

 

Kingly Power: 161

 

Kinship: see familial organization.

 

Kropotkin, Prince Petr: 87

 

Land: profits of business source of de­mand for land and its services, 157; distributed by contractual process, 72; advent of free trade in, 95; ownership versus use of, 124-126; anomaly of the owner-user 128-129; effect of government on use of, 126, 139; con­solidation of titles to, 135-136; services supplied through highways, 160; liberation of users of, 168 ff; taxation on ownership of, 169-171; as an eco­nomic factor, 177; primitive versus social ownership of, 124; break-down of national income to labor, capital and land, 180 ff; definition and general discussion of, 236; see also Ground Rent, Property in Land, Land Admin­istration, Land Owners, Land Value

Land Administration: defined, 238; essen­tials of, 153, 156; access to community advantages as the   primary public service of, 50 ff, 160-161; relation to public administration, 107; its potential productive and administrative powers, 134 ff; specialization of function, 124-129,154,183; extension into the public field, 63, 121, 153 ff, 222; future of, 50, 138, 171; see also Public Adminis­tration, Public Services, Ground Rent, Ownership

 

Land Communism: 123

 Land Owners: 160-161; officers of so­ciety, 221-222; purged of political au­thority, 95,106; services performed by, 100; unenlightened, 136; identified with the public interest, 165-170; beneficial owners of public capital, 150; compared with building owners, 155; obligations of, 150, 160, 222; authority of, 167; inattentive to public services, 156, 161; need for organiza­tion, 95, 159, 162, 166; golden oppor­tunity of, 172, 180

 

Land Question: 122

 

Land Taxation: 169-171

 

Land Value: 105, 139; defined, 174; in 19th-century America, 173; depend­ent on efficient public services, 147, 157-158; recompense for distribution, 100; effect of tax reduction on, 151; how affected by taxation on industry and business, 156, 165; dependent on demand, 158; reflex of all other values, 174; future of, 174; see also Ground Rent

 

Language reflects experience, 227

 

Law: definition and general discussion, 233

 

Law, Heaven’s First, 71

 

Law Merchant: instruments of exchange under, 106

 

Law, natural: 3, 233; discovery and application of, 7; see also Science

 

Labor: defined, 235; as an economic factor, 176-177; break-down of na­tional income to labor, capital and land, 180 ff

 

Legal Tender; see under Credits, 240

 

Liberty and property: infringement of, 120-121

 

Life: 13; versus death, 7, 29, 217; nature of, 9, 217; source of, 22, 49; human aspiration toward, 11; of an individual and of a population, 14; sensed as fleeting, 17; daily increase of, 22; a century of lengthening, 41 ff; necessities abundant as light and air, 222; complexity of primitive, 154; rationality  of, 219; self-transcendent, 210; the House of Life, 214; see also Life-Span

 

Life-Span: of societal organization, 14; of organizations and units function­ing in them, 71, 194; conditions of lengthening, 15, 18-19, 23, 26 ff; reproductivity correlated with, 23-24, 28, 38; lengthened span favors in­crease in numbers, 37; extremes of old age, 42-43; effects on population of changing life-span, 36-38; changes in age-groups resulting from lengthening of, 42-43; shortening of, 68; see also Energy, Population, Reproductivity

 

Life-Years: defined, 230; unit of popula­tion energy, 4, 11 ff; as horsepower-hours, 13; comparison of equal quan­tities of, 31 ff; infant versus adult, 33; proportion available in a population for creative functioning, 36; actual decrease in, 37; creative release of, 63; see also Energy

 

Literature of Revolt and “Reform,” 245

 

Lobby interests, 167

 

Maine, Sir Henry Sumner: 87

 

 Man: versus animal, 28, 116; dominion of, 18, 23-25, 49, 209; three-fold nature of, 55 ff, 194, 201; divided against himself, 66; aspiration toward life, 11; as microcosm, 200; rational mind of, 201; adaptability of, 28, 208 ff; creative powers of, 116, 195, 210; instinct for social organization, 211; Nature’s pride in, 213; essential endowment of, 195, 215, 216 ff; spiritual power of, 27-28, 53-54, 195, 204, 218, 219; un-social-ized state, 216-217; see also Individuals.

 

Man in Society: 209; functions and powers, 25; creativity of, 28, 195

 

Management: importance, 143; see also Administration, Ownership

 

Manorialism: 75, 78, 80, 82, 84, 88, 92, 94, 97

 

“Man-Year:” unit of measure­ment, 11

 

Market: 203; defined, 242; democracy of, 44 ff, 175; as a social institution, 45; exercise of freedom in, 45; time dimension in, 46; function of, 54; symbol for cooperation by contract and exchange, 58; operation of, 98, 105-106, 117, 175; fixes ground rent, 221-222; influence on the Citadel, 202; see also Citadel, Market and Altar

 

Mass: Defined, 229

 

Mass, Motion and Time: 55, 60, 200, 229

 

Mathematics: in nature, 200

 

Measurement: science dependent upon, 3; competition as an instrument of, 117; man-year a unit of, 11; measurement of energy, 114; of population, 9 ff; of net public services, 130-132, 146; see also Units

 

Merchandising: as distribution, 129-130; performed only by owners, 129-130; essential equity of, 129-130

 

Metabolism, Social: 48, 58, 114, 116, 118

 

 Metaphysical aspects of energy: 19

 

 Metaphysics Related to the Physical World, 19-20

 

 Method: Quantitative, 7

 

 Mexico: 76, 94

 

 Mill, John Stuart: 122

 

 Money: nature of, 46; counterfeit, 106; see under

 Credits, 240

 Money and Credits symbols for measurement in

 exchange, 105

Monopoly: see under Competition, 239-240

 

Morality: public versus private, 219-220; systems of, 227

 

Mortality: 29, 86

 

Motion: 55; defined, 229

 

Motivation: Esthetic, 64, in, 216 ff; Profit, 69, 112-113; Altruistic, 26, 113, 192; Selfish, 26

 

Mystical Sovereignty: 91

 

 National Income: hypothetical dis­tribution under proprietary public ad­ministration, 175 ff; break-down to labor, capital and land, 180 ff; growth of, 188; significance of, 189

 

Nationalistic States, 75-76; see also Po­litical Government

 

Natural Laws: see Laws, Natural

 

Natural Sciences: see Science

 

Nature: Ascendant order in, 247; emergence of new orders, 70; distribution of gifts of, 178; the Great Collectivist, 193; organization reflected in man, 200; method of organization, 206 ff; relation to man, 210; her pride in man, 213

 

Nature, human: 23, 192; see also Man, Individuals

 

Nineteenth Century: 41; democracy in the, 44; land question, 122; abundance of food, 183

 

Nomadism: Transition to village com­munities, 77

 

Normality, 88

 

 Norman Conquest, 76, 95; see under Land Administration, 238

 

Norman kings: 161

 

 North America: Democracy in, 44; rise of land values, 173; abundance of food, 183.

 

 Order: nature of, 71; see also Organiza­tion

 

Organic Pattern: Persistence of, 71

 

Organic Society: see society as a life-form

 

 Organization: In nature, 206 ff; defined, 85; always numerical, 85; need among land owners, 159; fate of in­dividuals, 193 ff; life-span of or­ganizations and units functioning in them, 71, 194; minimum limits of, 200; see also Cooperation, Society

 

Outlaw: 50

 

Owner-Administration: 126 ff; see Pro­prietary Administration

 

Ownership: 62, 98 ff; essential to con­tract and exchange, 48, 73; importance, 78-79, 99; inclusive of others, 73, 99, 123-124; means of social-izing property, 98; specialization of, 124-129, 154-155, 183; defined, 234

 

 Pathology: derivative nature of, 7, 29; of the societal life-form, 69

 

Patriarchy: 74, 86-87

 

Pax Romana: 67

 

Periodicity of energy: 15, 55

 

Photosynthesis: 22

 

Physics: social order related to, 198

 

Pirates, 93, 106

 

Plant versus Animal Life, 207

 

Political Government: defined, 232-233; origins and development, 66, 74, 85, 88-90, 93, 126; universal acceptance, 80; attempted limita­tions, 63; classical tradition, 91; popular forms of, 93; aggrandize­ment of, 66-67, 75-76, 91, 93, 173; conflict essential to, 72; affects land usage, 126, 139; impinges on na­tional income, 177; necessity of taxa­tion, 52, 146, 164; moral con­siderations, 219-220; domination by, 220, 221; transformation, 62 ff, 102,172,222; see also Taxation, Public Administration, other categories under Public

 

Politics versus proprietorship, 158-159

 

Population: defined, 231; measurement of, 9 ff; energy waves, 14-15, 21-23, 30 ff; effect on environment, 21; qualitative change in, 16 ff, 18, 22, 23, 30 ff; increase of, 22; creative potential dependent on proportion of adult years, 31-33; age-groups, 36-38; effects of changing life-span on com­position, 36-38; ageing of, 42; if moved to a new land, 173; see also Energy, Life-Span

 

Power: Creative, 18, 216

 

Predial, 90

 

Pressure Groups, 167

 

Price defined, 241

Private Enterprise: conversion to public under proprietary public administra­tion, 182 ff; see also Free Enterprise

 

Private Property: see Ownership.

 

Production a physical process, 99; see also Industry

 

Production and exchange: factors in, 176-177

 

Productivity versus Reproductivity, 21, 27-

256

 

Profit: 159; nature of, 241; real-estate administration for, 153 ff

 

Profit Motive: see Motivation

 

Progress, social: 214; freedom essential to, 53; business basis of social ad­vance, 113

 

Property: 98 ff; defined, 234; social convention, 98; inclusive of others, 73,99, 123-124; seizure of, 120-121, 161; specialization of, 124-129, 154-155, 183; see also Ownership, Prop­erty in Land

 

Property the instrument of freedom, 50 ff

 

Property in Land; explained, 122 ff; function

of, 50, 63, 124, 126-127,129,131,134, 160-161, 164, 166, 169; foundation of free society, 99; functionally antici­pated in village moot, 87; historic emergence out of politics — its non-political nature, 73, 95, 101, 120, 238; historic origin of prejudice, 101; public discussion, 122, 137-138; importance, 99, 102, 134; re­lation to public administration, 107; extension of functions, 63, 120-121; future of, 50, 95-96, 102, 202; see also Land, Ground Rent, Public Adminis­tration

 

Property in land a new relationship, alternative to

slavery, 98

 

Property, Public: see Public Capital

 

Property title: 99; see also Ownership

 

Proprietary Administration: in private affairs, 52; see also Ownership, Public Administration

 

Proprietorship versus Politics, 158-159

 

Psychology an extension of physiol­ogy, 6

 

Public Administration, 141 ff; need of sound principles in, 82; evolution of, 84 ff; proper to land owners, 126-127, 152; proprietary versus political, 158-159.

 

Public Administration: political, 196; maintained by force, 52; Classical precedent, 80; nature of, 129-131, 137, 167; no property of its own, 179; quasi public agencies, 186; modern tendency towards, 101; grow­ing alternative to, 93 ff, 102-103; see also Political Government and other categories under Public

 

Public Administration: proprietary, 52, 134-136,   174; nature of, 129-131, 158-159, 222; ex­amples, 94; emergence out of no­madism and village communities, 78, 85, 87; historic lapses, 74, 75, 92; three categories of services, 178; means of democracy, 136, hypo­thetical distribution of national income under, 175 ff; regional competition, 135; public versus private ad­ministration of capital under, 182 ff; natural limitations on, 185-187; pro­prietary community-service authori­ties, 85, 95-96; potentialities of, 96, 102-103; as artistry, 135; see also Land Administration, Property in Land and other categories under Public.

 

Public Affairs, need of sound principles, 82

 

Public benefits canceled by political mode of supplying, 68 ff, 130-131, 166; distribution of, 131; special privileges creating no value if not merchandised, 132-133,  137, 165; manufacture, 136; exchange for value received, 139, 164; supplied through highways, 160; accessed through land owners, 160-161; see also Public  Services, Public Administra­tion, Public Works

 

Public Capital: 112, 178; defined, 238; source, 171; community properties as, 174; beneficial ownership of, 145, 150; administration of, 134-136, 141, 153 ff, 171,174; administration proper to land owners, 129-131, 152; how raised and administered  politically, 130; see under Land, 237; see also Public Administration

 

Public Debt, 52

 

Public Enterprises: financing, 135; extension, 182 ff

 

Public Interest identified with the pro­prietary interest, 129, 160

 

Public Property: see Public Capital

 

Public Revenue: 133-134; in Saxon England, 94; normal, 126; politically raised and administered, 52, 93, 130; growing alternative to political administration of, 93-94, 102-103; see under Land, 237, also Public Ad­ministration, Taxation

 

Public Servants: recompense of, 133; properly a service class now unsuper­vised, 130, 148, 161-162; under proprietary administration, 214; see also Public Administration

 

Public Services: 140, 220; defined, 221; function of land ownership, 131; measurement of, 130-131, 132, 146; performed by free enterprise, 136,214; administration of real property as, 153 ff;   necessity, 166; without servitude, 82, 141 ff, 174; impractica­bility of duplicating certain facilities, 186; see also Public Benefits, Public Administration

 

Public Utility Corporations, 186

 

Public Works: popularity and nature of, 68; tragedy of, 68 ff; inequitable burden, 164; see also Public Bene­fits, Public Services

 

 Qualitative: defined, 230; differences in energy, 12; creative, 19; change, 15 ff, 193 ff, 230; comparisons of equal quantities of life-years, 36; see also Energy

 

Qualitative change in population energy, 16 ff

 

 Quanta of Action: fundamental units of nature, 193; qualitative differences, 199; see under Energy, 229

 

Quantitative: 7; defined, 230

 

Quiet Possession, 77, 87

 

 Race Suicide and Deterioration, 41-42

 

 Rationality: defined, 230; of societal process, 73, 107; of life-ward processes, 219; see also Intellect

 

Real, as abiding, 64

 

 Real Estate: see Land Administration, Property in Land, Public Administra­tion

 

Real estate administration for Profit, 153 ff

 

Reality: 60, 200, 217; defined, 229

 

Reason: nature of, 201; spiritual office, 218, 219; see also Rationality, Intellect

 

Reciprocal relations: in society, 15, 211, 216; freedom in, 26 ff; universal principle, 79, 83; effect of climate on, 65; see also Symbiosis, Contractual Relationship, Organization

 

Recreations and Arts: 116, 218. Redeemers of Mankind, 219. Reform, 245

 

Religion: the real office of, 217, 219; in

practice of the arts, 218

 

Rent defined, 241; see also Ground Rent

 

Rental Basis, general trend towards, 154-155, 183

 

Reproductivity: 86; acceleration of, 21; correlated with life-expectancy, 23-24, 28, 38; desirability of high birth rate, 27, 28; inverse of productivity, 27-28, 38-39; of youth versus productivity of age, 37-38; differential birth-rate, 38; sense of insecurity, 28, 43, 69, 210 ff; see also Life-Span, Popula­tion.

 

Reproductivity inverse to Productivity, 27-28, 38-

39; seeming exception, 39

 

Revolution, 245

 

Rome: 90, 161; traditions of, 91

 

Rugged Lands, 90

 

Salary defined, 240

 

 Sales the ultimate object of adminis­tration, 159

 

Salvation from evil, 217

 

Scherman, Harry, 52

 

 Science: 245; nature and methods, 3, 111; employment of units, 3; dependent upon measurement, 3; specific fields of, 6, 205; related to metaphysical world, 19-20; applica­tions, 69-70; predictive power, 111; trinity of, 60, 200; interde­pendence of the sciences, 203; spiritual office of, 19, 219

 

Science and the social order, 70

 

Science of Society: see Socionomy

 

 Security of Possession, by what means

possible, 131

 

Senior Citizens, 42

 

Serfs; freeholders reduced to, 74

 

Servant of All, 216

 

Service: defined, 231; general term for social-ized energy, 118; service of others ver­sus self service, 177

 

Services of distribution, 116

 

Shopping Centers, 183

 

Slavery: antiquity, 65-66, 74, 84, 89-90; Saxon England, 95; taxation a form of, 66; tax-based sovereignties versus slave-based sovereignties, 89

 

Smith, Adam, 129

 

Social defined, 232

 

Social Planning, 104

 

“Social Will,” 7, 8, 98, 196

Socialist Ideal; tendency towards, 184; inherent in the capitalist system, 187

Social-ization: defined, 73, 99, 235; of property through ownership, 98; of human energy, 49, 115; of govern­ment, 62 ff, 102, 172, 222

Social-ized energy: 114 ff; service the
general term for, 118; see also Energy

Societal defined, 232

Societal life-form: see Society as a Life-
Form

Society: defined, 231; functions of, 7, 104, 137, 212, 213, 231; durational power of, 55-56; changing role of in­dividual in, 154; benefits to its members, 23, 32, 53, 189, 212, 213; struc­tural differentiation of, 53 ff, 58 ff, 79, 137, 201 ff, 231; freedom the gift of, 193-197; disorganizing factors, 51, 59, 232; nature of pre-societal organiza­tion, 71-72, 84 ff, 216-217; distin­guished from pre-societal organization, 15, 48, 72, 115, 154, 211; origins and development, 76, 84 ff, 209; empiricism in social growth, 60, 78, 106-107; modern   development of, 113, 123-124; impending transformation, 8, 59, 104ff, 107, 214; rationality of, 73, 107; spiritual quality, 53-54, 195, 204; relation to the cosmic whole, 114, 195, 203; the crown of creation, 205 ff; see also Society as a Life-Form, Individuals, Man, Energy

 

Society as a Life-Form: 23, 27-28, 47-49, 53, 79, 104, 114, 116, 118, 137, 209, 214; organization and functions, 7, 53, 55 ff, 57, 104; world-wide, 38-39; metabolism, 48, 58, 114, 116, 118; immaturity, 220; pathology of, 69; permanence of, 56; qualitative trans­cendence, 56, 104; see also Society

 

Socionomy: 4, 5, 107; defined, 231; de­limitation of field, 6 ff; terms employed, 228; application, 7, 8, 15, 19, 60, 69-70, 107, 111, 119; see also Science, Energy, Population

 

Sovereignty: 66; conflict essential, 72; tax- versus slave-based, 89; mysti­cal, 91; see also Political Government, Public Administration, Taxation

 

Special Interests, 167

 

Special Privileges, 132-133, 137, 165

 

Specialization of Property and Owner­ship, 124-125, 128-129, 154-155, 183

 

Speculation: Benefits, 46

 

Speculative Value: 105, 147; defined, 242

 

Spencer, Herbert, 122

 

Spirit: things of the, 64; of man, 216; appeal of the, 219

 

Spiritual Gifts, tangible forms of, 216

 

Spiritual Power of Man, 27-28, 53-54, 195, 204, 218, 219

 

Spiritual World, 195; related to the material, 19-20  

 

Stand-by Services in the distribution of land or any property, 100

 

Statistical Integration, 4, 197

 

Structure: defined, 230; living versus non-living, 9; see also Organization

 

Sublimation of Human Energies, 47-48, 221

 

Sun: Energy from, 16

 

Sunlight, source of all organic com­pounds, 22

 

Survival of the Fittest: 25; applied to sovereignties, 67; among pre-societal groups, 72

 

Symbiosis, 47; disjunctive, 38-39; plant and animal, 207; social, 217; see also Reciprocal Relationships

 

Synthesis: in social world, 7; physical with metaphysical, 19-20; in science, 111; creative, 206ff.

 

Taxation, 93; necessity under political public authority, 52, 146, 164; forms of, 52; Saxon England, 80; related to slavery, 66, 89; cumulative evil, 168; present extent, 161; charge against rent, 151, 156, 165-170; effect on community services,   130, 166; growing alternative, 93ff, 102-103; see also Public Revenue

 

Tax Relief, 134; public service, 150-151; dependent on land owners, 170; effects, 173; see also Land Administration, Public Administra­tion, Public Revenue, Taxation

 

Tenants as purchasers of services, 155-156

 

Teutonic Tribes, 91

 

Theology, 60, 200

 

Threefold Nature of energy, 55, 229; of man, 55ff, 194, 201; of society, 54, 55 ff, 59-61, 201-204, 231, 242; see also Trinity

 

Time: Human sense of, 17; efficiency ratings, 17; credit as a time dimension in exchange, 46; rhythm of change, 48; mass, motion and time, 55, 60, 200, 229; see also Duration

 

Titles: Merger of, 135-136; see also Ownership

 

Totalitarianism: 20th-century trend, 101; see also Political Government, Public Administration, Taxation

 

Trade-in Allowances: 183.

 

Tragedy of Public Works, 68ff.

 

Transformation: see Energy; En­vironment; also under Qualitative, 230

 

Tribes: see Familial Organization.

 

Trinity: science, 60, 200; theology, 60, 200; see also Threefold Nature, Energy, Society

 

Twentieth Century: wars, 67; totalitarian trend, 101

 

Units: Energy, 229; measurement 3; prerequisite to organiza­tion in nature, 71; social organization, 194; population, 9-11; value in exchange, 117-118

 

Utopian Dream: Towards the, 175ff

 

 Value: 102; defined, 242; speculative, 105, 147, 242; social, not intrinsic, 105; dependent on income and de­mand, 147-148; value and exchange a sys­tem of social-ized energy flow, 114ff; see also Land Value, Ground Rent, Rent

 

Value Tokens established by the Market, 105-106

Value Units employed in exchange, 117-118

Values and Ideals, 19

Village Communities: 84, 86-88, 89; intermediate between nomadism and society, 77-78; allocation of lands, 87; lack of effective defense, 87; lapse, 74, 88-89; see also Familial Organi­zation

Village Moot, 87

 

 Voting, proprietary, 136; see also De­mocracy

 

Wages defined, 240

 

Wars of Twentieth Century, 67

 

Wealth: defined, 235; misconceptions, 123-124; other than capital, 128

 

Will: Individual and social, 7, 8, 98, 196; see also Free Will

Will to Live, 11; see also under Qualitative, 230

 

Wilson, Woodrow, on Germanic Insti­tutions, 91

 

Words, 227-228

 

Youth versus Age: reproductive versus productive power, 37-38