Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2880

Letter to Spencer MacCallum from F.A. (Baldy) Harper, Institute for Humane Studies, Box 3696, Stanford, California

October 11, 1963

 

 

Dear Spencer:

My heart and spirit were with you these last few days, even though I could not arrange to be there in person. It will mean some more readjustment in your thinking now, and I trust you will call on me at any — ANY — time I can be of help to you. Your future is bright and you will go on in the fine development of which Popdaddy was so proud, rightly.

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Now as to plagiarism, in response to yours of October 2, I’ll take a flier at some ideas on a superficial plane of thought about it. It would be good for me, I’m sure, to be able to engage in some of those discussions with Al and Joseph.

It seems to me that if you have an idea, as we call it, the perception was sufficiently the product of your own mental effort and use of your own faculties that it is your property to do with as you will; you can implement it in some way to advantage either yourself or others, or you can sit on it in silence forever. It is in that sense like discovery of a vein of gold on your farm, which you can go ahead and mine for the market, or cover it up with dirt and plant bramble roses over the refilled hole.

But ideas, or rather any specific idea, does not come universally in packages of only one forever more. The idea is universal property in the same sense as gold would be if additional supplies came into being merely by the mental perception of its form and function. This means that whenever a second person has this same idea, he is also its owner in the same sense as you were when you perceived it earlier. Ownership becomes synonymous with the process of its perception; the supply expands automatically with its perceptive production, always in this one-to-one relationship. The only sense in which one person may keep it from another is by his failing to give the other person certain conceptual aids he may have used to discover it; but these likewise are ideas in the same sense, which the other person may discover tomorrow.

The whole process is self-disciplining, in a way, because

the reason for our concern is mostly in the economic arena of potential advantage to the discoverer, and it is impossible for him to enjoy that value except as he implements the idea into some form advantaging others by its fruits — and then he has failed to sit on it, and the field of conception is opened somewhat to others. The problem arises, it seems to me, when governmental or other force is used upon other persons to prevent them from perceiving it with their own talents as you did in the first instance, or to prevent you from implementing the idea after you have perceived it.

Perhaps, as you suggest, the aspect of the issue so far as plagiarism is concerned, is the moral obligation to do justice to the sources of assistance in perception of a new idea, as much as can be realized and carried out with reasonable ease. It should not, in my opinion, be a function of governmental force to implement “justice”, for one reason if not others — the source of its creation as far as obligations to others is concerned is a matter of such a subjective nature that the government could not enforce justice if it wanted to do so. Since the source of help is so much a subjective judgment, the repayment of credit must be in like manner and degree a personal obligation of the benefactor. One would surely not vest this sort of thing in an agency of such centralized power (“corrupting”) and confiscatory self-interest as a political body of predators! In fact, as you suggest in your letter, the gross violators of property rights in ideas and the creativity of written words are great outside the relatively high standards the academic persons have maintained; the violations by top business executives is exceeded only by the politicians, in general occupational classes.

The repayment to source for the help in creative ideas, it seems to me, should probably be in the currency the individual person prizes most highly in that connection. For some, it might be a monetary reward of some sort; for many leaders in creative thinking, however, it might be of another sort — true and completely sincere friendship in appreciation could not be surpassed by some of the idealistic and non-mercenary type, who should be given the monetary benefits they may need by some indirect route.

As I may have mentioned, my attention to the problem of plagiarism became aroused in the instance of a person of extremely super-ego and self-ambition who was repeatedly using money given for quite a different purpose, I feel certain, to buy talent for words he would then sign without any indication of the contributions of others, to peddle to the outside world for additional self-credit and