Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1133

Penciling in a notebook

1939?

Original -> 1130

FREE WILL

The social organization raises the individual from the state of being a creature, dependent on and arbitrarily enslaved to environment, into the freedom and abundance dependent on but not enslaved by the society of which he is a functioning part. Without the services of his fellow social units, his whole life is ruled by the exigencies of environment and circumstance. It is determined apart from his election or will, and he must obey under penalty of death and extinction of his race.

     But when he enters into and practices the social relationship of serving many persons and being by many served, the productivity, the creativeness of this golden rule of exchange lifts him out of an almost completely necessitous state into a relative abundance that, setting aside the compulsions of nature, endows him with options, choices and many alternatives for exercise and fulfillment of his spontaneous will. Even his entry or continuance in social relationships is optional to his will, and when he has entered, his acts of service and exchange are by contract and consent of his own will in voluntary accord with that of his fellow men and with the social will. Out of the fruitfulness of the services performed and exchanged under their mutual freedom and accord of will, the energies of men are emancipated to activities not prescribed by necessity from without but in realizations of preference and choice — of the intrinsic and spontaneous individual will. For this gift of freedom to its individuals, society is requited with all the spontaneous researches, discoveries, recreations and the esthetic and creative arts.

     Man is composite of myriad fluid and fluent elements and parts forming and re-forming themselves in ever changing figures and patterns of relationship. The organization of energy in the individual is unique. It possesses an on-flowing entropy unpredictable and inescapable even by himself. It is capable of but statistical formulation or prediction but not any other. How it came or comes to be what it is has no relevancy in any discussion of freedom of the individual will, for it constitutes the personality of the individual, his very will itself. Since only the state of society, the kingdom of the golden rule of power by consent and exchange, gives men the freedom of contractual as against compulsive relationships, here his spontaneous will becomes a determinant factor in the selection and succession of events. In the degree that he extends these free relations, they supervene upon compulsive ones and man comes into his heritage of creative dominion over the environment whence he draws his energy of life. And thus in the measure that his will determines the outer world that conditions him does he attain and participate not alone in the universal creation but also in that self-realization which he imputes to the universal Reality as unconditioned and divine.