Spencer Heath Archive

Item 851

Random taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath regarding Citadel, Market & Altar.

December 1955

 

 

 

Going over the “Prefatory Note” in the light of some detailed objections and criticisms that have been made to it, it isn’t going to be difficult to reinforce it at those points so as to make it less susceptible of more or less, you might even say captious, criticism.

 

     I find that that isn’t very difficult to do. But to make the thing completely self-explanatory calls rather for a treatise on the whole principle of organization, beginning with the fundamental unit of physical organization, known as the quantum, elaborating its mode of operation and development, carrying it into the biological field, in which the unit has now become capable of a new type of organization having additional powers and functions not found in the field of physical organization. And then following the biological unit, in its organization and performance of its functions, through what may be called the familial department at the biological level in which biological units form associative relationships under a bond that is commonly called “consanguineous,” which involves a specific recognition of membership and in which there is a degree of reciprocal relations not to be found where the units do not so associate.

 

     Then we come to the field in which the unit ceases to be merely a biological unit and becomes what we may call a societal unit, in which the relationship now becomes reciprocal on a more complex basis, the bond of union not being any conscious recognition of consanguinity or equivalent psychological bond prompting reciprocal relations within this limited membership group, but becomes a more abstract, more purely rational, bond, in which the members of the societal organization establish units of service, through exchange of which they become reciprocal unto one another without reference to any consanguineous or, I may say, emotional and limited exchanges one with another. Their relationships become quantified. The energy that is reciprocally exchanged among them is exchanged on the basis of values expressed as numbers, or numbers of units expressed as values. And in this the indivisible individual becomes the basic unit of the whole societal realm. Just as the quantum was the basic unit of the physical realm, the biological cell /of/ the biological realm, so this indivisible individual becomes the basis of the societal realm.

     At each of these levels, there is scope for a vast treatise of delineation and exposition as to how the units unite and interfunction at their respective levels. The first might be called physics, the second biology, and the third, etymologically, sociology, but practically socionomy, in order to avoid the limitations with which that more appropriate word has been abused.

     So I have to choose between touching up the “Prefatory Note” so as to make it less pregnable, or more impregnable, to specific criticisms, or I have to so elaborate it that it becomes a vast treatise or possibly three vast treatises dealing with organization at those three respective levels, the physical, the biological, and the societal.

     Since Citadel, Market & Altar does not undertake to deal, except incidentally, with either physical or biological relationships, but is aimed specifically at the societal form of organization and mode of functioning, it does not seem appropriate or practical to incorporate in it in full detail any delineation of either the physical basis of organization and its operation or the biological unit and basis of organization and its mode of operation. It only seems more appropriate that there should be annexed to it enough physical and biological background to give the societal exposition a standpoint, a platform on which to proceed.

     What I have been writing a great part of the night covers the whole ground, the physical, the biological and the societal with more elaboration than I have done heretofore. I will undertake to type it out, and then I think I shall have to use it as a source from which to draw elements for strengthening and reinforcing my more summary treatment of the matter as in the present mimeographed edition of the “Prefatory Note.” I’ll get myself dressed now and proceed to that typing.