Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1459

Letter to Darwin Meserole, Hotel George Washington, Lexington Avenue at 23rd Street, New York City

September 13, 1949

 

White envelope has item 1459 & 1460.

Dear Darwin:

Thank you for your kind remembrance in writing to me from Waterbury; also for your note enclosing your current circular urging legislation to establish an addi­tional multi-billion bureaucracy to subsidize with politi­cal patronage the lives of all persons who, from whatever cause, currently do not or are prevented from making any contribution of services or goods to the general capital (socialized wealth) upon the productive administration of which the entire population depends and alone subsists.

By no feat of imagination can it be conceived how such a vast overhead organization, including its dependent wards and beneficiaries, could ever add an iota to either the productive wealth or to the consumable goods and services of mankind. To the contrary and far worse, it would impose a vast unproductive compulsory, and there­fore self-expanding repression and overhead drain upon the whole productive economy, most burdensome and un­checked at the particular times when our productive system periodically slackens or falters under its increasing burden of servitude to what still remains with us of the ancient powers of state, of slavery, public works and war.

There is, among the great body of benevolent and otherwise intelligent persons, a long inherited superstition, almost an obsession, that their organized and accepted powers of violence (having no support but taxation and tribute, failing predatory foreign wars), can somehow act subordinate to and as the servants of those over whom they rule; and yet more, that under some blind benevolent motivation these accepted sovereignties can be sanctified into healing evangels for surcease of the pains and sorrows they impose.

Must we never inquire what restraining and enslaving power it is that so frequently breaks down the creative cooperation of men under the golden rule of reciprocal exchange? Must the vaporings of stunted misanthropes forever din it to our dull senses that the unforced and creative, the divine relationships of men are inherently depraved and of their own undoing? Must it still be dis­loyal and profane, as it was of old, to take any note of the baleful part played by our complicated successors of the ancient slave states? Shall we never learn, in our large affairs, that only the doing unto others in the manner we would have them do unto us — that is, without violence or duress — is the kingdom, the rule of heaven, and that this lately-emerging world-reaching dominion of objective love, impersonal service, by voluntary rational (measured) exchange “suffereth violence” (that of “principalities and powers”) and that on every hand “the violent take it by force?”

The freedom, and thus the creative divinity of man, consists not in proscribing nor yet in prescribing the ways and works of men; nor is it in any amount of resist­ance or rebellion against such rule. It consists in the positive practice of a diviner rule, the rule of love made manifest in action, of love become rational under the social process of measured exchanges, and thus universal and im­personal — truly divine. We need to examine and under­stand, and not to condemn, this kingdom of peace in our midst and give our hearts and hands to its growth, that its divine manner of doing may be expanded to serve our public interests and needs, just as it does the needs and welfare of our private lives.

Doubtless you are thinking, what has all this to do with relieving the distress of those who most directly suffer from our scant understanding and hence imperfect and insufficient practice of Heaven’s golden rule, thus leaving ourselves so much under the ancient slave dominion of politics and powers. It has this to do: it shows how under a spiritual inspiration we can devote our diviner powers to seeking out the ways and works of God among the relations of men, just as the cold clear light of science has found them in the relations of atoms, crystals, cells and stars and gathered there God’s ways — a portion of His divine dominion – into the hand of man.

Meantime, our best sentiments and intentions — those most self-approving — can find active release and expres­sion in many kinds of voluntary aid and relief, organized and unorganized, in which we need not resort to government and thereby forfeit freedom and so at last make all but our accepted sovereign masters slaves.

More intelligently and constructively, and without vapid sentimentality or self-vaunting altruism, we can seek productive employment of whatever properties and funds or personal powers we are still free to so engage. Such activity is valid aid to our fellow men because it is mutual and reciprocal and thereby creative and enduring — spiritual in its manner and in its effects, whatever be the conscious intent. It means participation in the functional organization and administration of property and services by investing in profit-making and thereby productive enterprises. Every such investment puts more and better organized tools and materials under productive administration and so provides more employment for labor on the one hand while raising and enriching the flow of consumable goods — the real wages of labor — on the other hand. This may seem very prosaic, but it is God’s order of unconscious growth and creation, not less here than in the rootlets sending their sap upward to create the food that descends to feed them. For the freedom of the market is God’s field of photosynthesis in which the light of His impersonal love resolves crude elements into sustenance and growth for both the high and the low.

Let us think for a moment of what happens when investors, willingly or unwillingly, withdraw their properties and funds to unproductive uses, such as philanthropy or government and war: the whole process is reversed. The facilities of saleable production are reduced, less labor must be employed in operating them, business is unstabilized, and the flow of consumable goods to the needy is diminished while their purchasing power is destroyed. Surely there is nothing creative or divine in all this.

/Retyped by Heath to this point with amendments. Con­tinuation from rough pencil notes./

We cannot intelligently let ourselves become the unwitting agents of the so-called “welfare” state in which service and production by appropriation or force is increasingly and eventually all and entirely for the state and the population becomes its dependents and slaves. We may be, as ex-President Hoover has so gravely warned, on the last mile. How shall Freedom beckon that we may turn the tide?

In my own private view, the issue, for the long term, is in providential hands and the Divine will never cease to provide. The creative processes will prevail, in God’s good time, whether human reason wakens to them or not. But as we discover the works and ways of God in human society, as in His cruder and lesser works, we can take the divine power into our own conscious hands as co-workers in creation and make magic speed toward heavenly ends and goals.

We need inspiration of the essential beauty in which the Cosmos moves and evolves — the beauty ever and in all things waiting for eyes not veiled in doubt and fear and hate or closed with even a compassionate belligerency. When reason, the emancipated eye of the mind, delights in the rhythmic ratios in which all upward and enduring things proceed, then the warmly rational, the innate creative divinity in man has awakened. He measures and finds how the numbers in the rhythms of nature are arranged and by this rule of ratios, in rationality and in concert, under the golden rule of exchange mankind brings about the conditions and events towards which it ever aspired.

For the last hundred years a great leap forward in the social /evolution/ has been in preparation and now impends. The conscious minds of men have failed to recognize these gathering forces and have observed them with much doubt and fear. The pattern of normal society has been cast and its mode of development exemplified in many ways that we have not known as such. (God serves men in ways they know not.) As soon as this mode of growth comes into the consciousness of a considerable number of enterprising and profit-seeking men it will be extended full scale. Achievement and not problems will then be the order of the day.

In another letter I will try to tell you something about the present twilight signs and the coming dawn.