Spencer Heath Archive

Item 876

Penciling on note-pad paper, then typing on a ring-binder page. Editor Suggests a title: “Civilization the Logos” or “The Utopian Dream.”

No date

 

 

 

Above all creatures man alone gains any heights from which to fall and rise again. In this he stands apart, above all other living things. He has the gift of conscious vision, waking dreams. His sensations prompt him not alone to act but also to conceive, to compose within himself a never, never land of dreams to be. Civilization is the logos, the word, the thought becoming flesh, first in the man and then through him in the realization of his dreams. It is his growing sovereignty over nature and the world — a kingship not of one or of the few but the joint sovereignty of all.

 To achieve this creative power over the world, men are by instinct impelled and by the wise enjoined to love one another, that is, to serve and do for others (for there is no other expression of love) in such manner as they would be served and done by, that is, by the just and golden rule of consent and exchange under which giving by all is blessed by abundance for all and the greatest in honor as in reward are those who most abundantly serve. This is the rule that abides and endures, for it enriches all and none does it not sacrifice or enslave, deplete or destroy. It knows no bounds of time or space, transcends all bonds of blood or race and makes men free. It leads them to a high technique called science that measures and dissolves the world in myriad elements and parts and then resolves them into body’s needs and heart’s desires. It is the servant savior that lifts their lives, fulfills their dreams.

 The folk-lore of the ages reflects their dreams. Many have, in measure, been attained. But the age-long yearnings of the peoples for more of safety and peace, richly creative lives and length of days seem still in vain. The Utopian ideal of the modern age is of socialism, communism, collectivism etc. The dream is high but the means envisaged for attaining it is low, like Islam’s dream of salvation by the sword, of holy ends by unholy means.

 The culture of Eurasia and the West, even until today, is founded wholly on the practice and traditions of ancient slave states. It is an unstable balancing of ideas and ideals, of the Western ideal of conquest and dominance, /including? check original/ the Roman-Christian ideal of rulership and enslavement over men for their sacrifice and salvation, and the Oriental-Stoic seeking of the “good life within” by acceptance, submission and non-resistance. These two opposite attitudes towards life are complementary. Each depends on the other. Neither could prevail without its opposite — no subjects but by dominance of governments and kings, no masters without their acceptance by subjects and slaves. The prevalence of these two opposite yet complementary attitudes, the directive and the subjective, influenced by the old Utopian dream, explains today’s wide acceptance of socialistic thought. It is the ancient belief, incited by would-be successors, that whereas present masters are evil the new ones will be by miracle divine, or at least benign by popular election or acclaim. And so “democracy” becomes the conjure word for protean tyranny in a change of guise.

 But in the long perspective, dreams are never vain. Mankind has made no upward gain it did not harvest from the bloom of ancient dream. The socialist visions, worthily, a good life in a stable society, but his plan of the means to it is not service and recompense but authority and submission, ancient and vain.

 Mankind has never or ever can advance by rulership and obedience, only by services performed and by consent exchanged. Crass and sordid though it seem, selling and buying has been the effective technique-at-large by which men have really served and truly, widely, loved. It is service without subjugation, freedom without sacrifice, mutual benefit springing from mutual desire. All upward advance has come through creation of instruments and articles of service called capital and their administration for the well-being of others by ownership pooling them in markets and redistributing them (or the use of them) by this long scorned social Cinderella of buying and selling by consent and exchange.

 Long scorned by her proud, much worshipped sisters of the sword, smirched as she may be with the grime of honest toil, yet must she emerge gloriously in the festival that celebrates at last her realization for men of their Utopian dream.

 For, however crude and futile the means thus far proposed, the dream, as an end or condition to be attained, is sound. It visions an organization in society of a general public authority to own and administer for the use of all the gifts of nature and creations of men as instruments of production and trade, in which all capital will have become public capital and all will be administered to all in proportion to their several contributions of service for all. But the proponents of this state of affairs have not examined but only condemned the existing organization and hence do not know that their ideal is implicit in it as a matter of social development and growth. Like many others they scorn to understand and would resort to revolution and destruction in lieu of growth. They call themselves Socialists, yet they propose no social but only political and coercive means. They would abrogate what still remains of voluntarism of the market and by a perverse inversion of the term would “socialize” the common wealth out of the truly social process of distribution by contract and mutual consent into a compulsive technique of permissions and denials, punishment and rewards, licenses in lieu of liberties.

 Civilization has ever been a growth into wider freedom …

 

 

/On the back of one page:/  Services always by proprietors, never by despoilers