Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2318

Carbon of first three pages of a letter from Heath to Darwin Messerole, Hotel George Washington, Lexington Avenue at 23^rd Street, New York City

September 15, 1949

 

Dear Darwin

Thank you for your kind remembrance in writing to me from Waterbury, also for your note enclosing your current circular urging legislation to establish an additional multi-billion bureaucracy to subsidize with po­litical patronage the lives of all persons who, from whatever cause, cur­rently do not or are prevented from making any contribution of services or goods to the general capital (socialized wealth) upon the productive administration of which the entire population depends and alone subsists.

     By no feat of imagination can it be conceived how such a vast overhead organization, including its dependent wards and beneficiaries, could ever add an iota to either the productive wealth or to the consumable goods and services of mankind. To the contrary and far worse, it would impose a vast unproductive compulsory, and therefore self-expanding re­pression and overhead drain upon the whole productive economy, most burdensome and unchecked at the particular times when our productive system periodically slackens or falters under the increasing burden of servitude to what still remains with us of the ancient powers of state, of slavery, pub­lic works and war.

     There is, among the great body of benevolent and otherwise intelligent persons, a long inherited superstition, almost an obsession, that their organ­ized and accepted powers of violence (having no support but taxation and tribute, failing predatory foreign wars), can somehow act subordinate to and as the servants of those over whom they rule; and yet more, that under some blind benevolent motivation these accepted sovereignties can be sanctified into healing evangels for surcease of the pains and sorrows they impose.

     Must we never inquire what restraining and enslaving power it is that so frequently breaks down the creative cooperation of men under the golden rule of reciprocal exchange? Must the vaporings of stunted misanthropes forever din it to our dull senses that the unforced and creative, the divine relationships of men are inherently depraved and of their own undoing? Must it still be disloyal end profane, as it was of old, to take any note of the baleful part played by our complicated successors of the ancient slave states? Shall we never learn, in our large affairs, that only the doing unto others in the manner we would have them do unto us — that is, without violence or duress — is the kingdom, the rule of heaven, and that this lately-emerging world-reaching dominion of objective love, impersonal service, by voluntary rational (measured) exchange “suffereth violence” (that of “principalities and powers”) and that on every hand “the violent take it by force?”

     The freedom, and thus the creative divinity of men, consists not in pro­scribing nor yet in prescribing the ways and works of men; nor is it in any amount of resistance or rebellion against such rule. It consists in the posi­tive practice of a diviner rule, the rule of love made manifest in action, of love become rational under the social process of measured exchanges, and thus universal and impersonal — truly divine. We need to examine and understand, and not to condemn, this kingdom of peace in our midst and give our hearts and hands to its growth, that its divine manner of doing may be expanded to serve our public interests and needs, just as it does the needs and welfare of our private lives.

     Doubtless you are thinking, what has all this to do with relieving the distress of those who most directly suffer from our scant understanding and hence imperfect and insufficient practice of Heaven’s golden rule, thus leaving ourselves so much under the ancient slave dominion of politics and powers. It has this to do: it shows how under a spiritual inspiration we can devote our diviner powers to seeking out the ways and works of God among the relations of men, just as the cold clear light of science has found them in the relations of atoms, crystals, cells and stars and gathered there God’s ways — a portion of His divine dominion — into the hand of man.

     Meantime, our best sentiments and intentions — those most self-approving — can find active release and expression in many kinds of voluntary aid and re­lief, organized and unorganized, in which we need not resort to government and thereby forfeit freedom and so at last make all but our accepted sover­eign masters slaves.

     More intelligently and constructively, and without vapid sentimentality or self-vaunting altruism we can seek productive employment of whatever prop­erties and funds or personal powers we are still free to engage. Such ac­tivity is valid aid to our fellow men because it is mutual and reciprocal and thereby creative and enduring — spiritual in its manner and in its effects, whatever be the conscious intent. It means participation in the functional organization and administration of property and services by investing in profit-making and thereby productive enterprises. Every such investment puts more and better organized tools and materials under productive administration and so provides more employment for labor on the one hand while raising and enriching the flow of consumable goods — the real wages of labor — on the other hand. This may seem very prosaic, but it is God’s order of unconscious growth and creation, not less here than in the rootlets sending their sap upward to create the food that descends to feed them. For the freedom of the market is God’s field of photosynthesis in which the light of His impersonal love resolves crude elements into sustenance and growth for both the high and the low.

     Let us think for a moment of what happens when investors, willingly or unwillingly, withdraw their properties and funds to unproductive uses, such as philanthropy or government and war. The whole process is reversed. The facilities of saleable production are reduced, less labor must be employed in operating them

                                           /Breaks off here/