Spencer Heath Archive

Item 619

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation

Fall 1955?

Doesn’t that reduce it to absurdity? You write a constitution and give it to the government and say, “Now this is what has to restrain you.” The government takes a look at it and says, “All right, this only means so and so, and I’ll enforce it in my way.” That doesn’t restrain any government; to do that is to think that the government will restrain itself and, if so, won’t have government — the same as they think people will govern themselves, and call it self-government. A lot of people — all the people — will no more restrain themselves than one person will when he has the power; and Acton hit it on the head when he said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” All we have between us and absolute power is a paper document, and that paper document is constantly being reinterpreted by the power which it is supposed to restrain. So that government is supposed to govern itself. So self-government comes down to being government of government by government.

The first half of the 19th century, in fact pretty much all through the 19th century, the idea prevailed as it does now with unenlightened people, that when government powers can be divided up so that two of them can gang up against a third, and the third one can restrain the two, then the people are governing themselves — or the schizophrenic idea that people can govern themselves, which means to say one part of the man has to be set up above and govern the other part of the man. When one part of you gets out of balance with the other part, they call that schizophrenic, in psychology. They call that hydropepsia /?/ in digestion — the stomach gets to digesting too much.

“Well what should be is that the two parts of a person operate together in harmony.”

Yes, which means to say that as among people, they must have contractual relationships, not coercive or political. That means they must do business with one another instead of trying to rule one another. Nature gives us the pattern for it all the time by how she creates the mechanism of land ownership for people to practice. And because they don’t know how to use the thing that nature endows them with, they pervert the whole thing into politics…