Spencer Heath Archive

Item 943

Penciling in a stenographic notebook with Items 938-943. A promising beginning of an essay but incomplete because it describes Citadel and Market, but not Altar. Is there a suitable ending for it somewhere?

 

 

 

 

 

 

/THE MISSION OF CIVILIZATION/

 

To raise men from brutes to gods is the mission of civilization. A vital process inherent in nature draws leaderless and serviceless men into the higher forms of organic association called communities and societies in which they obtain protection and subsistence by joint and united action with reference to each other in respect of these ends. This joint action is effectuated by acceptance of the conventions of property and ownership under which services and goods can be peaceably exchanged and thus made mutual under the freedom of contract and consent. So far as the energies of men are specialized and absorbed in this social technique they are blessed with abundance and peace and a higher level of life. The primitive human energies not thus tamed and socialized into service by exchange must manifest themselves otherwise, chiefly in frauds, crimes, tyrannies and wars.

     The individual in society has three basic needs — protection from violence and deceit, a higher material subsistence, and development of his mental and imaginative, his emotional and esthetic nature. In supply of these needs the society develops three basic and original institutions. These may be symbolized as the Citadel, the Market and the Altar. It is by them, in rude and rudimentary form, that a population emerges or evolves out of nomadism and general violence into the primitive organized and settled social state. Doubtless coeval in origin, these institutions develop unequally and in accordance with the intensity of their need.

     First, the Citadel, manned by strong men under strong leadership, protects the community against violence from without and from within. The employment of violence, no longer diffused, is reposed in a single institution, the State, where it is more regular and less destructive than before. Under protection of the Citadel, and without its tyrannies, the community can be safe and free.

     The Market, as the institution of freedom, is the place of exchange. Here men repair with all of services and wealth that they have and have prepared for others. Here their work and wealth is pooled and communized, and here by free election and accord of will in contract and consent they redistribute this common wealth, each having vote and voice according to his contribution and each receiving according to the common measurement and consent. This is the pure democracy of the market, of the technique that distinguishes the market, the free and creative process and relationship that modern men have so fruitfully used and yet so much abused that they have come to doubt its beauty and its power.