Spencer Heath Archive

Item 479

About 1942?

Nature builds structures wherever there are functions to be performed. The energy that is organized in the structure of the individual man has its several departments, systems and parts. It is the harmonious operation of these parts with respect to one another that constitute the life and being of the whole. This life is sustained and has its subsistence by an inflow of energy from the environment. This energy, flowing through the structure of mam, is modified, changed and transformed. If flows back upon the environment and works changes there. The primitive man, as he multiplies his numbers deteriorates his environment, reduces its organic complexity and its fitness for his needs and thus /this?/ gives him diminishing days.

But the socialized man, organized into a social structure, has the power of creation over his world. The structure is so organized that its units and parts can and to a large extent do move in harmony and without conflict in a system of exchange uniting indefinitely large populations, extending far beyond mere biological and emotional bonds. Thus small groups, mere hordes or tribes, into a general community are united and transformed and a society is born. The population energy that was chaotic, the lives that were precarious and brief, have now become to a degree organized and relatively secure.

A society is a population in which the units and their specialized groups are more or less perfectly organized upon a societal relationship of contract and exchange throughout. This transcends the limitations of mere biological, consanguineous and emotional relationships and bonds in which the members are in conscious contact and relationship to one another. It develops a new and wider, a more general technique governed by the social process of performing, measuring and exchanging services in the freedom and peace of contract and consent. This freedom and peace consists in persons making contracts by consent and performing them by exchange. This is the functional process that gives to the society its birth, maintains all the life that it has, and without which it ceases to exist.