Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2840

Fragment. Numbering indicates that about 2½ typed pages should precede this.

No date

 

… The difference in the ratio of energy (mass and motion)
to time. The quantity of action manifested in a given number

of men having average (or equal) amounts of mass, motion and
time is the same as that of a less number of similar men

acting through a correspondingly longer period of time. There is no quantitative difference because the over-all product is the same but there is a qualitative difference due to the change of ratio between the energy (mass times motion) and the period of time. Social engineering or technology, when developed will consist in increasing the time element in the ratio between the number of lives in a generation of men and their average life span. In modern times, the nineteenth century notably, this has been only empirically and unconsciously and therefore but insecurely achieved. Nature has given man a great object lesson in the favorable changing of her fundamen­tal ratios. This change of ratio needs only to be rationally examined and understood in order to be rationally extended and the principle progressively and without reversal indefinitely applied.

 

  All science deals fundamentally with energy and time. It treats ___________ as organizations of balanced energy positive and negative into and from which energy constantly flows. Energy flowing and building up the organization is called positive (anodic); energy flowing out and disintegrating the organization is called negative (cathodic). As between structure of whatever kind there is only positive and negative and no third mode of energy flow differing from these as they differ from each other* To the extent that the energy flow between structures or units of organization is balanced, reciprocal and without collision a higher a more complex organization is maintained* When such energy flow becomes more reciprocal and thereby less collisional the higher organization develops and grows; when it becomes more collisional and thereby less reciprocal the higher organization disintegrates and dissolves (or dies).

 

 Society is an organization whose unit structures are men. It is maintained by the energy flow between its units that is reciprocal and non-collisional. A society in which the energy flow between its units is increasingly reciprocal and thereby non-collisional is a growing and developing society — a free society — free to grow. One in which the interflow is diminishingly reciprocal and thereby increasingly collisional is disintegrating and unstable — a people moving out of society and into slavery.

 The organic society is functional. It so transforms and rebuilds its environment as to raise their subsistence and circumstance and thereby lift and lengthen its members’ lives. It is the only form of life that makes its habitat more and more instead of less and less habitable. The political and coercive organ­ization is dysfunctional. Its subsistence diminishes, environ­ment deteriorates and its members lapse through its slavery back into the merely biological relations of families, clans_: and tribes without any rational (measured) or generalized reciprocal or exchange relationships and thus at a lower level of living for their members and far fewer days.

 Society, as we know it, has only half evolved.

 Society, like any other living thing, exists and depends upon its function­ing, — upon the flow of energy among and between its consti­tuent units being balanced and reciprocal0 — non-collisional. Such energy flow at the social level is service and not servi­tude. It flows into public markets as contribution and flows out again to one or all as distribution. Here it is measured democratically by the constant voting and consent of all, and thereby distributed in the ratios automatically prescribed by the social and common will — so far as not obstructed by po­litical or other violence or chicane.

 But society, as we know it is only half evolved. Its members require of one another two kinds of services: (l) Those which flow to individuals separately and apart from others, commonly called private and personal services (or goods) because they are movable, attached to the person instead of the place. (2) There are also those services (or goods) which come to individuals collectively and in common, by reason simply of their residence or other occupancy of the place or community in or to which common services or amenities are appurtenant and are supplied. These are commonly called public or community services because they are supplied not to particular persons but to persons generally through being attached or appurtenant to the real and immovable property or place occu­pied by them.

 Now the great unbalance and instability of the current society is in this: that wherein private or personal services have been and still are, for the most part, created and distributed through free enterprise under contractual engagements and with­out coercion or collision as between those who are thus serving and being served, this social and non-coercive process has not as yet been extended into the field of public or community services. The services supplied publicly to the community it­self, — to the real or non-movable property — thence and thereby to the inhabitants, are for the most part not supplied by the community owners for the sake of voluntary recompense in return, as is done in a hotel or other non-political com­munity. The public community services are in the main under domination not of service but of coercive organizations — elected sovereign successors of the ancient slave states. They play no part therefore in the general voluntary system of ser­vice by contract and exchange. On the contrary, they are an enormous burden upon it for every so-called service that they perform is founded on such continuing infringements of liberty as the seizure of property, and restriction of contracts so that the harm they inflict upon the social organization doubtless far outweighs all its so-called services to the social organization as a whole. Nothing but the almost miraculous productivity of the modern system of free production and exchange enables it to withstand the depredations of political sovereignty.