Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1087

Dictation by Heath to daughter, Lucile Heath MacCallum

Early 1930s?

I am not among those who believe in the magic of democracy. I regard the problem of government as one of services and results and not one of forms and theories. Underlying all forms of government there is a spontaneous impulsion towards the organization of human life in cooperative forms — toward the building of a social organism. This is a living being, the units of which are men and women and the various organs of which are the specialized service groups into which men and women organize themselves and thus constitute a higher organism and organization which we call society. The pattern of this social organism is implicit in human nature itself; it has been implanted there through countless generations of adaptations of men to one another in creative relationships.

In the animal kingdom subsistence depends upon the bounty of nature. They forage for their subsistence. At the lowest level men also live in this way, but so far as they establish social relations they become creators and provide and extend their subsistence indefinitely through their socially creative powers. In order to exercise these powers, mere animal destructiveness must be restrained. While this is at large men cannot maintain socially creative relationships. Therefore the first organ that must be developed in any social organization is a protective one. It is a group or class of persons whose special organic function is to protect individuals from their animal propensity of destroying one another in order that they may be free to enter into the creative social relationships which are necessary to their higher and more abundant subsistence. The name of this protective organ is government and the principal name of those creative relationships is trade or Industry. At its lowest term the business of government is to employ physical force in restraint of the physical force which men’s animal nature impels them to use to destroy or to enslave one another.

The form of the government like the form of the trade is of secondary importance. Wherever governments have arisen, in every age or clime, there has been a central sovereign power. This power has always been represented in some personal form, usually by a king but always by some person or class invested with power and authority to enforce the sovereign will.

The sovereign never acts directly but always through officers, agents, or some form of representatives exercising delegated powers. One class of these agents or representatives is charged with the administration of general powers, the maintenance of the territory, the establishment and maintenance of rights of way and such other portions of the sovereign domain as may be reserved exclusively for public use and purposes. Another class of representatives of the sovereign is invested with full power and authority over all remaining portions of the sovereign territory. These officers or delegates are called land owners. They hold directly from the sovereign and are responsible only to the sovereign while the occupants are responsible only to them. In the beginnings of all government these administrators of the private portions of the territory have been, in the main, also general administrators over the rights of way and other public reservations and all the services performed through them.