Spencer Heath Archive

Item 280

Penciling by Heath on page 35 of a pocket notepad (originals envelope of Item 274) containing many names of people met and notes from classes probably at Teachers’ College, Columbia University.

December 17, 1933?

/ABSOLUTISM/

     The social aim is organization and free functioning. The anti attitude, the negative approach, is exemplified in political or educational absolutism.

     The absolutist brings to you a pattern of thought or of action and seeks to impose it on you by shaping you to it by coercing your body or your mind from without, to repress and destroy the spontaneous force rising in you.

     In its grosser forms we instinctively resist and reject it (and in so rejecting we all too often hard-boil ourselves against some vital beauty). But in its subtle forms does not absolutism often pull us down with all our house.

     Let only the fire of our moral indignation be inflamed and by numbers enhanced. How seductive then becomes the call to impose and even to accept the iron frame. Let down but so little the guard of the intellect and through the back doors of our emotions pour in rapid repetitions enslaving us to patterns of feeling and action designed to degrade, to cheat and cheapen us.

     With Plato we must keep in mind that only that is divine which is persuasive to reason, and he only shall be a god to me who shall rightly define and divide. None other is free.