Spencer Heath Archive

Item 412

Typed pages by Heath

September 1954

 

Missing original

Every organism that functions does so by taking on energy and putting it out in such manner as to maintain the organism. Such energy as it takes on and puts out with­out maintaining or in ways inimical to the organism is dysfunctional and destructive.

The social organism is maintained by its members and parts interacting in such manner as to maintain the social organism. All interactions between its organized units or parts must be either cooperative or coercive, deceptive or otherwise anti-social. The cooperative relationships are technically called contractual, the coercive relationships political. There are, indeed, cooperative and coercive re­lationships that are neither contractual nor political, but this is only because they are comparatively limited and infrequent and do not extend throughout and are not generalized throughout the body of the society.

     Since the only /words missing; check original/ that an organism can do is to transform energy, then the society can function and maintain itself only by the flow into it and out of it of human energy suitably transformed. When men put out energy to one another reciprocally in ways that tend to increase the quality and the quantity of their lives, such energies are called services, which, with reference to society as a whole, must be defined as those actions of one towards others which evoke a voluntary recompense from those others. This voluntary recompense, whether given directly or indirectly by means of intermediary tokens, is itself a form of transformed energy reciprocal to that which has been received.

Society has a process of employing value units whereby to measure services (and/or goods) with respect to their equivalence to other services and/or goods. This process is called competition. By means of it, society places, in effect, a numerical price tag on every service that is con­tributed to its markets for exchange. This relates every service or thing so presented in terms of their exchange­ability one for another.

The whole process of accountancy in an economic society is a record-keeping of the flow of human energy which has been so transformed as to be exchangeable for other human energy similarly transformed, thus establishing a universal network of inter-changing measured value units precisely as engineers measure electrically transformed energy in value units called kilowatts and keep account of its complicated distribution throughout the society in exchange for other energy so rated and measured in the markets as to become exchangeable. This electrical energy is only one of the extremely many physical linkages whereby the socially trans­formed energy of each part of the society is exchanged for the socially transformed energy of other members of the society.

This social-ized energy is peculiar and unique. It is the only human energy that flows into the body of the society and out of it again in such manner as to maintain the func­tioning of the social organism. It is the only energy by which men become masters and creators over the environment in which they live. In this relationship of contract, in which, alone, men can practice the Christian Golden Rule of service without servitude, man enters into his divine inheritance. He ceases to become merely a creature and becomes increasingly the creator of his world. In the practice of this creative power, he realizes the creative divinity with which he was in his origin endowed.

There are other widespread relationships among men, and notably the political, in which the competitive and the contractual process plays but little if any part. Re­lationships are arbitrary instead of rational, and engage­ments when voluntary are covenants to desist from aggression or other evil instead of contracts mutually to do and perform creative good. The spiritual advancement of man cannot be effected in this manner. It is, therefore, not necessary that knowledge expand with reference to political or other evils. Such knowledge has no technological value. It is only necessary to know and understand the functional pro­cesses in the body of society whereby its existence is main­tained and the creative power of mankind unerringly advances.

Happily, the divinity in the cosmos does not await human understanding of its creation of order out of disorder, but blesses men with a high degree of its beneficence not alone through their planned practices of free relationships. Without waiting for this, men gravitate empirically into the practice of the Golden Rule of Contract without realizing what /it/ is that blesses them with freer and finer and thereby longer lives. It is in seeking after and finding this know­ledge of the good, the true and the beautiful, rather than with trying to understand their opposites, that men will come into a knowledge of the spiritual processes by which their lives are not merely redeemed from disorder but become conscious agents, co-workers with the divine, in the ever-transcending order and beauty that enduringly rules and dominates the world.