Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1437

Letter to Dr. Will Durant, 5608 Briarcliff Road, Los Angeles, CA

September 26, 1945

Dear Dr. Durant:

My good friend, Dr. S.A. Schneidman, of Bellaire, Long Island kindly offered to write to you and request your examination of my manuscript Citadel, Market & Altar. I am very pleased to have him do this and am accordingly forwarding you a copy of it by Railway Express — Air Transport.

Among the ideas that I have organized in this manu­script and believe to be novel and fruitful are the following:

1. That the successive generations of men are energy waves whose frequency period is the average life span.
2. That it is the function of the social organism continuously to rebuild its environment and thereby itself.
3. That the functioning of Society lengthens the average life span and thereby lowers the frequency of its energy waves — transform/s/ its own energy.
4. Identification of the qualitative and creative with extension of the durational element in energy trans­formation.
5. That Coercion, Co-operation, Consecration — (Citadel, Market and Altar) — are the basic human techniques.
6. The free feudal community of reciprocal serv­ices and obligations — (not its military and servile corruption) — is the authentic social pattern.
7. Property in land /is/ the agency of social (i.e., contractual) distribution of community resources and advantages, potential for general public administration. Community services and protection for automatic recompense – revenue without rulership.
8. The Utopian Ideal is implicit in the evolution

of a state-emancipated system of free contract and exchange.

I hope you will find some of these ideas (and their implications) arresting and of possible aid in your search for the kind of knowledge that will advance Society and retard its opposite — that when discovered will be obvious to apply.

When you have sufficiently examined the manuscript kindly return, by air transportation if possible, all charges collect.

Sincerely yours,