Spencer Heath Archive

Item 916

Penciling in a notebook

Fall 1950?

Original -> 912

Socionomy discovers and explains “the organic laws exemplified in the organization and development of society” (Webster’s International Dictionary) Unlike Sociology, this science takes no account

     Socionomy looks on society as a super-organism in process of development beyond the family or the tribe and capable of extension to include the entire inter-communicating human race. It finds mankind organized by force or duress under sovereignties, national or world-wide, and also organized to a degree as a society under the non-coercive technique of contract and consent, non-violent and constructive, in which all the participants find advantage and none need be under the dominance or coercion of another.

     Men in this voluntary and free relationship and in this alone, Socionomy looks upon as society. Society operates or functions by the voluntary interchange of services as such and as the use of property or consumption of goods. This functioning progressively rebuilds the physical and other conditions of environment and as it increases it lengthens the life-span of men and the abundance of their lives.

     Thus there are two systems of men. Civilization is the growing out of the one by growing into the other.

     First, there is the ancient unfree system in which the generality of men are under the rule of individual or collective brute power — arbitrary or legislative.

     Evolving out of this is the modern system of world-wide contractual exchange. In this there is no domination, no subordination; no master, no slave.