Spencer Heath Archive

Item 862

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath on the road between Baltimore and New York.

December 1, 1955

Original is in item 860.

“Did you say you could write an ‘expansion’ of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid?”

The idea of community — communism, freedom, collectivism, political sovereignty, proprietary administration — all of those fit into a picture, you know, of relations that could very properly be defined, and distinguished one from another, showing how, properly understood, how the collectivism and how proprietorship, and freedom, how all of those things form an integrated whole, a life-giving whole, advancing the creative powers of mankind, and how the political aspect of it has been but a bungling attempt where it has not/been/ raw conquest. Merely the gratification of egos for power. Where it has had any legitimate sentiments behind it, it has always been by reason of not understanding it that they failed. In most cases, it has been an opera buffé of real freedom.

     Political democracy might be called an opera buffé of real social freedom. It is a clown’s performance. People voting for their rights and so on, supposedly to protect their liberties, to defend their rights through the democracy of political voting, is much like a clown trying to climb a ladder and putting his feet on the wrong steps, going at it awkwardly and not getting there. The general idea everybody wants to achieve is okay, and his efforts are very commendable, but not well directed /chuckling/, an opera buffé of the real climbing of the ladder, the real scaling of the heights.

     What Kropotkin describes there are crude, childish, primitive movements, all proper and legitimate, aiming towards proper ends and not succeeding very well — only in a very limited way. And then the political takes on the color, trying to imitate the virtue of the social, and people believe in that to their undoing. And that becomes a clownish affair, the poor public blundering around, trying to scale the heights but not succeeding — for lack of knowledge, for lack of understanding of the nature of the means that must be employed, in other words the will of God, the plan of nature, how things must evolve.