Spencer Heath Archive

Item 755

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath

May 10, 1956

RIGHT DOING VERSUS WRONG DOING

Actions are not in themselves right or wrong. They are appropriate or inappropriate to the occasion. And the propriety of human behavior is not without its test. The test is this: Does it tend to preserve or to maintain or, best or all, does it tend to advance human life in such ways that men can have more of it — even unto immortality. That is why the Golden-Rule relationship — especially its impersonal practice in the processes of contract — is superior to the iron rule, the rule of politics and war, which degrades men by shortening their lives, even unto the level of the brutes, if not below. (Which is to say, governments brutalize men.)

But to practice life-advancing behavior, there must be alternatives. Where the situation presents no alternative to extinction but the exercise of brute force in defense, then brute force, and nothing else, is appropriate — nothing else available. But where men have developed an alternative relationship, or a golden-rule alternative to the iron rule of force, then the contractual relationship is possible and available and it alone is appropriate, for those who can distinguish and thereby discriminate and create instead of destroy.