Spencer Heath Archives

Item 11

Fragment Penciled by Heath on notepad paper. Could be completed by adding from somewhere else the still awaiting performance by the landed interest of supervision and provision of all public services. This piece sets the stage for that.

April 7, 1945

ORGANIZATION AS THE SUBJECT-MATTER OF SCIENCE

     Science is a special kind of knowledge. First, it is more precise because it has units of measurement — units of mass, motion and time, such as gram, centimeter and second, and its object is always to describe the happening of events in terms of three fundamental units. Such description is analysis. Analysis discloses the quantitative or mathematical relations in which mass, motion and time are organized in any field of phenomena. Every science, therefore, is a science of organization, whatever may be its special and particular field. And applied science — engineering — is always the quantitative synthesizing or organization of mass, motion and time into events and experiences that are desired. The process is quantitative, but the attainment of desire is a purely qualitative result.

    Military science is no exception. It too is a science of organization. On the side of research, it is the analysis of military experience or events in terms of the mass, motion and time involved in them. On the side of application, it is the re-synthesizing of mass, motion and time into events desired.

 

     The object, however, is different: in other sciences the object is to bring about not only operations and events that are desired but that have also the character of permanency or continuity of operation, and the continuity of these desired operations gives increasing permanency and continuity to the mean life terms of the successive genera­tions of mankind. Its effects are cumulative towards crea­tion and maintenance of events desired, and the increase and maintenance of human lives.

     But the application of military science does not create and increase but does diminish and destroy. The object on each side is so to organize mass, motion and time that by oppositional events each will extinguish and destroy the continuity of the other side without equal sacri­fice of its own — avoiding so far as possible the fate of the celebrated calico cat and gingerbread dog. But victory is costly. There is no victory without a defeat. The result is qualitative, negatively qualitative on both sides, differ­ing only in degree. The number of lives has been diminished, their average term shortened and many of the events and processes that contribute to human life have come to an end.

     The highest positive desire is to create — to create anew the environment and thereby to live richer and longer lives. The greatest negative desire is for a cessation of wars. But war, conflict, is the primordial process. Civilization, in its degree, is the transcendence of conflict and war. It is the organization of mass, motion and time as manifested by human beings, in the higher relation of contract and consent, in the manner of service without servitude, a universal interfunctioning without coercion.

     Clearly there is need in this field for a new science, an objective analysis of the human energy that transcends war. The name of this science is Socionomy. It treats the successive generations of men as energy waves and thus resolves all manifestation of human energy into mass, motion and time. It segregates as contract that por­tion of human energy that does not collide or conflict and finds that to this integrative technique all the continuity of the social organization is due and on the extension of this all its possibilities of development and growth depend.

     Socionomy reveals that the synthesis of particular human events into a reciprocal flow by contract and consent is the relation in which the mass units of society are organized into its living and enduring structure. It finds that the life of society depends on two kinds of services, private and public, being performed. Private services are exchanged between particular persons or organized groups. Public services are conferred generally upon a territory, site or community and participated in by its occupants in common one with another. Food, clothing and shelter are in the former class. The common protection, water and drainage, facilities for public transportation and communication are examples in the latter class.

 

     Socionomy discovers that there is no accepted technique of private services but by contract and consent, and that the basic and accepted technique of public business is not reciprocal exchange but rulership by coercion, compulsion and force. The revenues of private business are voluntary; those of the public rest on coercion and force.

    Thus society is found to be a house divided against itself, and its foundations shake with conflict and war. The great need then is to extend the contractual technique characteristic of private services into the field of public and community affairs.

    Analyzing this field, Socionomy finds one community service so fundamental to the existence of a society in that community that it must be and is performed by contract and consent. This is the service of making a contractual and therefore impartial and non-coercive allocation of the community’s sites, resources and lands. This societal ser­vice is automatically performed by the institution of property in land and real estate — the fixed and immovable properties of which the community is physically composed. Before

 

                                          /Drops off/