Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1154

Notes for a letter to Dr. F.A. Harper, about 1961

 

Original is missing.

 

 

Dear Dr. Harper:

 

How truly I wish I could suggest to you some persons who understand our free enterprise society and who also have found out how that understanding best can be taught.

Among those who understand the free society (so much of it as exists), I think I would place you highest on the list. For you seem to understand it in terms of itself, its own structure and mode of operation, instead of by ill-natured reference to its coercive, bureaucratic, and ultimately totalitarian opposite. The effective teacher _____________ glorifies his own goods /gifts?/ by his communication of the faith and understanding with which he is inspired. For if he conceives it merely as a matter of relief or __________, he is uninspiring as he is himself uninspired.

However, our libertarian efforts seem to be addressed more to the necessity to escape than the desire to attain, more to deplore what is evil than to glorify what is good. Let us look rather to the real and true subject-matter of the education and find in that some clues to the methods that can best be employed.

 

Economics in my life time has progressed from the “dismal” to the pedestrian. It is almost drably utilitarian, has no Utopian dream, no ravishing goals. Beyond its primarily materialistic aspect, we need to comprehend the basic exchange technology of the social organization in its over-all aspect as an evolving (or developing) high form of life in which the specialized members and groups, through their complementary processes and relations, are constantly improving the conditions of their lives and therewith their length of days. In this Golden Rule relationship (and in no other) they rise from being death-doomed as mere creatures, uncreative parasites and pensioners pressing against a diminishing subsistence, into their spiritual nobility of building not mere subsistence and utility but ever more order and beauty in their world in the very image of their desires and dreams.

The societies of men today, insofar as their free enterprise has brought them out of political bondage to their animalistic past, are blindly and painfully /?/ on their way to their kingdom of hearts’ desires. As in the unborn child, its organs and parts are slowly taking form in the womb of time, all unseen and unrealized by the con­scious minds of men. How can they be awakened with understanding, that it may sing in their hearts and minds and quickly speed the coming dawn?

“Principalities and powers” may retard the coming but cannot indefinitely postpone, nor can their darkness give way any faster than through understanding its rationale and its potential glories _______________ high practices of freedom through enterprise shall expand its public-serving and thereby value-creating technology into
the field of public administration as it has already so well begun to do.

 

Dear Baldy,

It gives me heart to know that you are starting a new project (Volker Fund auspices, I infer), and I^’ll surely be glad to help with your “furthering an understanding of the free society” in every way I can. I’m afraid I scarcely know of anyone who knows how to educate people to it who is not already better known to you. However, I think you might not know William Teague, Vice President of Pepperdine College in L.A. I know he is a very forceful and entertaining /?/ speaker and effective publiciser, and I hope to improve acquaintance with him. Norval Young, the President, is very much like-minded as is, I believe, the whole administration of the College, including Mr. Pepperdine himself.