Spencer Heath Archive

Item 558

 

White envelope has items 558-564.

Adjective

     Free       Latin, liber

Substantive

     Freedom        Liberty

 State of being unconfined, unrestricted.

 

Freedom — Liberty. Liberty — Freedom. These two words are derived from the Latin liber and the English frei, meaning unconfined or unrestricted. As applied to human beings, they mean, in their absolute sense, without any restraint due to external conditions. This of course can be realized only in degree, and never to any absolute degree. Liberty and freedom therefore denote a condition of unconfinement or non-restraint. They are negative words signifying some degree of exemption from the compulsions of environment.

The lower animals, lacking imagination, have but one will — the will to live. Lacking imagination they accept environment as ineluctable and have no dream of creation or control. Life adjustment and survival is their only tech­nique, and, in a slowly changing environment, only by changes in themselves, changes in their structure and in their behavior can they effectuate their will to live — and survive. Yet something innate in every living thing determines the specific pattern, type and form in which alone it can, under any conditions, survive. In this sense, then, all living things, given that they shall live at all, determine them­selves; their own prior and intrinsic nature prescribes the pattern in which they shall develop, the specific form in which, so far as they adjust and conform to environment, they shall be self-fulfilled. The organic form alone is self-determining. In all other respects the animal life is necessitous. It must conform or die. It does not determine external conditions but is determined by them. (It is true that some forms of behavior, originally no doubt necessitous and compulsive, have become uniformly instinctual in all members of a given species and thus embedded, so to speak, in a uniform general will to live but not as any unique and individual will.)

But the human animal is more than animal. He is distinguished by a faculty of imagination whereby he can plan and dream and change his environment in the image of his dream. He has an original nature like the other animals in which he is a destroyer as they are — always over the generations depleting or otherwise deteriorating the environment on whose bounty he depends — increasing his numbers at the cost of less abundant and thereby shorter lives. In the animal economy there is a “balance of nature,” an over-all static condition with no creative advance.

The creative and thus spiritual faculty appertains only to the Creator and to His creature, man, as delegated and breathed into him as a potential dominion over all lesser things. He has this in a common sonship with but not with any dominion over his fellow men. Such dominion is forbidden to him and its wages is death.

There are two kinds of exemption from dominance and restraint, two kinds of freedom attainable by the creative and inspired and thereby spiritual man. First, men can achieve freedom from the dominance and compulsions of environment and, second, from the violence of government, the dominance of men over men.

So far as the minds of men come to understand the ways of nature, the mind of God as manifested in His work, they discover there and come into accord with a marvelous rationality with which they have been in like manner endowed. As this rationality is achieved, man can command all lesser things, and nature smiles with beauty and wonders obedient to his will. Thus through his creative capacity can he prac­tice freedom and achieve fulfillment of his will.

But for the practical and long-time exercise of this dominance over nature there is a special condition attached. Man must not dominate the will of his fellow man. On the con­trary, he must obey the positive divine command to do unto others as he would have them do unto him.

Animals live, in the main, each for himself. When there is any mutual aid it does not extend beyond the family or other recognized common-ancestor kin. Blood brotherhood, actual or accepted, is all there is.

But man, as he emerges out of his animal limitations, is born again into a transcendent mode of life that, so far as he practices it, includes all men. His Golden-Rule technology unites him with all his kind as kin. Regenerate, he now acts according to his will. He can execute his dream. Before this he was enslaved to necessity; environment deter­mined him. Now, in concord and cooperation with his fellow men he can transform his environment. So far as his Golden-Rule contractual relationships with his fellow men extend, he at once relinquishes authority over and compulsions under them and is given ever increasing power of dominance over all material and all lesser things. So far as he practices and extends his free-enterprise technique even into the realm of common and public things government silently is transformed from a political and coercive into a proprietary and creative organization and at last he finds freedom from taxation and war.

Liberty and freedom! Not /by/ the bounty of the gods can they come, nor in the aftermath of clash of arms. Freedom is not a thing to be received; it is to be achieved. It is but an incident in the doing of God’s will and command…

 

                                      /Breaks off/