Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1830

Pencil notes enclosed with annotated article, “An Approach to the Problem of Government,” by Edmund A. Opitz, Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York.

About 1956

     Robinson Crusoe was a solitary, not a society. We cannot look to him for example of relationships among men, least of all any of the voluntary relationships under which alone men constitute themselves into an organic society. Nor was there any society after he enslaved Friday — only government, whether Friday consented or no. Robinson practiced sovereignty. Friday endured slavery, whether mild or abject. Nor is any mere association a society, whether village family, prison population or wandering tribe.

     Organizations, like organs, are properly distinguished by the functions they perform. When a new function springs from the interacting of the associated units or parts, then and then only does the higher organism or organization exist.

     The function of a family or a tribe is biological, to keep itself alive and propagate its kind, as no single one can do. It does this in a state of dependency on environment, which it ever tends to deplete and destroy. As society evolves, the family continues within it but it does not distinguish it. In a society the interfunctioning of its members is societal, creative, not biological. The reproductive function remains with the still dependent family, still dependent on environment, which it does not create but still tends to consume and destroy. But society is distinguished by the higher function it performs. The interfunctioning among its individuals is not personal and biological but impersonal and universal — societal. Society is creative, productive upon its environment; not merely reproductive of itself at cost and loss to environment as are all lesser and simpler forms of life. Society is the only organization of life, the only living thing that can create and re-create its environment, that can make its habitat progressively more and more habitable for its members. It is spiritual. It can create continuously an ever higher …