Spencer Heath Archive

Item 170

Pencil by Heath on notepad paper written in connection with

his reply to L. Frank’s criticism of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.

July 1945

NOTES ON THE POSITIVE SIDE

     A social process can no more be planned than physical, chemical or vital processes can be. They can only be discovered. They operate both prior and subsequent to their discovery. Before discovery they operate obscurely to man. Their weal or woe for him is fortuitous, providential. He is their creature. They impose conduct, habits, on him failing which he dies and leaves no issue. Pain impels him to escape or attack. Common fears and hates bind him in groups and group life is more secure. He has time to imagine, ultimately to think, to dream and create.

 

     To think, he had to think about his world, his environment and its processes that uniformly repeat. Then he could predict; then he could plan and create. Empirical knowledge gives instincts, habits, customs, traditions. Rational knowledge, based on ratio — measurement — guides to nature’s fulfillment of his dreams. Rational knowledge is the description by number and quantity of things as they continually are, as they occur and recur. Knowing nature’s ways we can walk in them towards desired ends — make our dreams her dreams and know the conditions we must provide, the path we must follow, for their fulfillment.

     In the physical world men have learned the conditions necessary for a process and its results. But the process is nature’s; she has prescribed it; only the conditions and the results are his own.

     In the societal realm nature has given men much that they desire                                                                  — but not all. They have not learned her processes — have not weighed and measured them. They have dreams and desires but know neither the process nor the conditions necessary to their fulfillment.

     In a vague way it is known that in association men find much satisfaction of desires. Association is of two kinds, the one biological and emotional, the other societal and impersonal. One is governed by feeling, the other by measurement. The one is limited to immediate contact or conscious communication. The other is finely measured and is as extensive as all the reciprocal services and intercommunications of men.

     These social, rational, measured relations of men constitute a balanced system of energy exchange. So far as it is a closed system without unbalanced loss — so far as its accounts are maintained in balance — it is stable and strong and its duration is long. This is the nation-wide and world-wide system of property and services, contract and exchange. It is the dynamic foundation of the system of society, as distinguished from the political and governmental organizations of the world.

     These two systems, social and political, constitute all the relations that men have towards one another wider in scope than the family, clan and tribe or other conscious brotherhood.

     The existence of these two systems of widespread human association rests upon a fact of nature as fundamental and as simple as anything that is known in any realm. Just as in mechanics there is push and pull, contraction and expansion, attraction and repulsion and no other basic polarities, so, in the field of impersonal human relationships there are only two polarities, positive and negative, corresponding with attraction and repulsion in the physical field. These relationships are the modes in which energy flows, the one in the direction of organization, the other towards disorganization; the one integration, the other disintegration; the one growth, the other dissolution and decay.[1]

 

     At the level of general and widespread human association the positive or integrative relationship is voluntary and social, the negative relationship is coercive and political. The social system, so far as it has developed, is the all-embracing harmonious and vital organization of mankind. The political system is divisive, incongruous as between its divisions and parts, prone to separatism and conflict, tending towards the disorganization of mankind. These two human systems, though now co-extensive, are not co-equal. Because of its wholly integrative nature, the one is dominant; because of its disintegrative tendency, the other is, in the long view, recessive. The long slow advance of mankind from their primal and more widespread barbarisms into their present relatively social-ized or civilized state is the irrefutable verification of this.

     Just as in the physical world there is attraction and repulsion, organization and disorganization and no third kind of process or relationship differing from or exclusive of these, so also in the universe of man there is the social and there is the political mode of relationship. There is no alternative other than these. And since the one is integrative and the other disintegrative the die is already cast; in the universe of man, life there also is, in the long term, dominant over death. Man’s social order cannot perish; it is determined that it shall serve him whether he knows it or not. Just as the earth itself has been his mother, so the vital and sustaining process of his human association and environment is determined to serve him whether he know it or not.

     The darkness and confusion that hangs over his collective life, dimming his inveterate hopes today, is due to man’s almost complete obliviousness to the nature and potentialities of his social organization. His conscious concern is almost wholly with the political and governmental in which, despite all history, he blindly puts his trust.

 

     Time was when men were as little mindful of the sustaining powers, the fruit and blossom of the earth. They were obsessed with its terrors of fire and flood and storm. These they personalized, worshipped and appeased. The earth still nourished them as her creatures but they knew not how. They doubted and denied the order and system of the physical world and its potentialities for them but put their trust in the supposed divinity and power of conquerors and kings to conjure with the natural order and save them from its supposedly evil and demoniacal powers, just as all mass-minded men today, in their blindness to the system of society and its processes and powers, put their trust in governments to conjure and control the social order and its laws. There came, here and there, exceptional men who sought not to control or escape but, above all, to examine and understand the natural world. They and their successors discovered much of its laws and their potential further usefulness to mankind and gave to the present-day social organization all the marvel of its technological power to transform the physical world — to create, or to destroy, the physical conditions in which men may enjoy the benevolence of its natural laws.

 

     But the social organization itself has not been (is not yet) understood. To it are attributed the same evil nature and demoniac powers that the primitive-minded men of an earlier age charged against (imputed to) the order of their natural and physical world. Even its mechanical facilities are by some branded as an evil in themselves, as though they were a power over instead of a mere instrumentality in the hands of men.

     Mankind is strong in its uses of the powers of the earth and air but pitifully inept consciously to create the free conditions in which the social processes can bring fulfillment of its hearts’ desires. Here, as in the physical world, only knowledge can give creative power. Like the order of the physical world, the social order must be examined and understood before its resources can be consciously employed and its beneficence amply enjoyed.

     We are again face to face with the fact that there are two, and only two, modes of widespread human association, the social, which is voluntary and contractual, and the political, which is coercive and deceptive. Freedom and government are reciprocal. An individual is free only so far as he is not governed; he is governed only so far as he is not free. The exercise of freedom, the only free or social relationship, consists in the making and performing of contracts and exchanges. Contract depends on ownership. Contract must have subject-matter. Property and ownership are prerequisite. There can be no contract with respect to anything that is not owned. Property is a covenant — a guarantee against the exercise of force or fraud — the highest, most essential, element of contract, which is the exercise of freedom. Force and fraud are always against persons, never against property or things. The primary ownership is of one’s person and powers, one’s own services and self. Property in, the ownership of, places and things, consists of and depends on / particular persons, the owners, their agents and delegates, being inviolate with respect to those places and things. Hence it is that property and ownership, being prerequisite to contract, are fundamental to social or community life, the basis of all other than political or coercive relationships.

     Politics is the practice of government, of dominance and servility, in all its varying degrees. When the dominance is recently imposed or the submission only physical it is called oppression and tyranny. When the submission is mental and emotional as well as physical it is called government. Mental and emotional submission to government, for most persons, rests upon their traditional belief in its supernatural powers. For others it rests upon the ambition or hope to participate in government or in the proceeds from the exercise of its coercive powers. Among all persons, it is not conceived how public or community services are or can be socially performed — that is, by any free process not involving either moderate or extreme exercise of coercive power.

    Society is the antithesis of government; community — literally /com–munitas,/ the common defense — is the contrary from conquest and sovereignty. Society has power, all the powers of creation that mankind has over its physical world — but its power is different from and more perdurable than the powers of government; it is the power of freedom to contract and create, not the physical power to rule, to conquer and destroy.

     Society depends upon community. Its first requisite is a place of common defense. And its defense must be self-defense — must rest on its own powers of free contract and exchange, not on coercion or conquest. It must rest on property and ownership, and the first thing to be owned is the community itself, the territory, sites and resources, occupied by the society.

     By circumstance and spontaneous accord, but without knowledge or deliberation, the nascent society designates one or more of its members

                                      /Breaks off/