Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1449..

Letter from 11 Waverly Place, New York City 3, to Winslow T. Porter, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts

May 6, 1947

 

 

Dear Mr. Porter:

It was very kind of you to write me so interestingly and at such length in your letter of April 25th from Win­chester. We did indeed have a delightful trip in the Caribbean to the chief ports of Colombia and Venezuela and an Andean trip by air for four days to the chief inland cities of Colombia, Bogotá, Medellín etc. However, I, myself, had to take this literal part of our hegira vicariously through my daughters, since there were only two plane seats available on the only possible schedule. So while they traversed the air I had to go by “vapor” as the Spanish-speaking call it, from Cartagena to Barranquilla at which latter port the girls rejoined me via the empyrean. We had many interesting adventures.

You certainly were kind to refer my manuscript to Professor Sorokin. I am sorry you had difficulty in making contact with him; the more so that you were em­barrassed by the delay in doing so.

It is indeed a credit and compliment to both of us that you found my manuscript as interesting as you did — a compliment to me that I should have developed some impor­tant original points of view in regards to the organization and functioning of the social community and stated them with some degree of intelligibility and a compliment to you that your mind should have the necessary resili­ency to travel over so much roughly broken new ground without completely breaking down. You know what is the usual reaction to any new or considerable advances either in the sciences or the arts.

I have been hoping to run up to Boston about now, the more so since my daughter Lucile finds it necessary to go to Andover again, but I find it necessary to go to Maryland instead. Moreover, there has been unaccountable delay in sending my Car license tags from Baltimore to me here, so I am not able to drive it. Lucile is going on the train probably Thursday and looks forward to the plea­sure of seeing you and all your family before she returns.

Please let Professor Sorokin keep the manuscript as long as he seems to have any use for or interest in it. If he thinks the principal ideas outlined in it are significant and worthy of further development I will be glad of an opportunity to talk with him about it and will arrange to do so just as soon as I can, hoping you will be in or near Boston at the same time. I shall be glad to learn that Professor Sorokin has a high regard for the basic methodology on which the practical technologies of the engineering sciences have been built up.

 

I have long known of Sikorsky as a designer of airplanes but not in any other capacity.

I appreciate your kindly comments on my manuscript. Its literary style I know is very uneven, as might be expected from one who has never written extensively. I find it unqualifiedly praised by some and by others unqualifiedly condemned. Except as a means of communication I regard the literary form as of wholly secondary importance. It is anything but an attempt to endow dubious or threadbare propositions a seeming validity by reason of the literary splendor or seductiveness in which they are clothed. It attempts to describe the actualities of social organization and operation in terms of some very broad generalizations on which all the natural sciences seem to be based, notably the concept of energy as action — all events, phenomena, being basically trans­fers and transformations of finite (and therefore measurable) quantities of energy and all structures being closed energy systems, just as the atoms are, each having its period of integration and disintegration ranging from the exceedingly brief (radioactive) to periods so long (frequencies so low) that they are for us of indefinite or seemingly permanent duration. Each structure is thus but a phase of an energy wave and the succession of structures is a system of energy waves.

A generation of men is thus a composite structure. The succession of genera­tions is a system of waves whose period is the average life span, its frequency being inverse to its period or duration. A portion of this human energy interchanges among the structural units (individuals), some of it directly and some indirectly through environment, more or less modified as goods or wealth. If this process involves collision (so far as it does) it is slavery or war; it shortens the lives, raises their frequency. So far as it is without collision it lengthens lives, lowers their frequency. This latter is the social process.

As in all energy manifestation, there are only two phases, positive and negative (ana and kata-bolism). All that energy flow which is voluntary and induces an equal measured counterflow is social and positive; it transforms environ­ment, lengthens the life span, lowers the frequency of its dissolution and re-formation. The process is con­tractual, as distinguished from coercive or political. It transcends all limited relationships, biological and familial or emotional, for it is impersonal and social, capable of becoming universal among all men. It is based on the institution of property (which government does not protect but destroys). For there is no universal freedom in any relationship but the contractual, and contract de­pends upon property for every contract must have subject-matter and only that which is owned — held by general consent instead of by force — be it services, goods or lands can be the subject-matter of contract.

Thus pro­perty in land is what constitutes a place into a community, provides literally a common defense against coercion or violence, for it emancipates from nomadism and force by providing a contractual process, a voluntary social rela­tionship, within the security of which the inhabitants are enabled peaceably to arrange their several possessions of the community itself. None but the accepted owners of sites and resources can execute this contractual process of their distribution, and their recompense for performing it (by sale or lease) is called land value or ground rent. Exercising a contractual or social juris­diction over the territory, they thus perform the basic public service non-politically, without coercion and for a revenue that is evoked by the services itself. This implies a Citadel to maintain the contractual process against those only who would violate it, a Market for the practice of free social relationships, and an Altar to symbolize the spontaneous activities of emotion, in­tellect and imagination that flower in the freedom and leisure that the practice of the market creates.

So it emerges that the salvation and progress of society lies in the organization and extension of the proprietary jurisdiction and service into those community affairs so sadly dominated by the political and essentially slave state — the only great agency of violence and war that exists. But this will violate no freedom, for these public services will induce their own recompense and revenue the same as private services do.

My, what a long strung out resume. Take it for what it is worth to you.

Now to your comments and questions:

First let me say that I do not propose any scheme of society. I only discover the existing scheme and its mode of operation, so far as it does operate at its present and not very advanced stage of development. This makes obvious the manner of its further extension, whether its further extension and development must be merely empirical as in the past and therefore very slow or whether it become conscious and rational, as it well may be, just as rapidly as its basic mode of operation comes to be rationally examined and understood, just as all other scientific progress has been made. /Sentence? check original/

Of course all discoveries and creative technologies proceed in the teeth of popular ignorance and opposition. Great services to mankind are never understood by those who receive them; only by those who discover and perform them. Almost as fast as they are put into effect by those who have some understanding of them the popular opposition dies down and the unacceptable becomes the indispensible. Moreover, all great new services, when well organized and profitably performed, afford a highly advantageous field for the investment of savings and thus a wide dispersal of ownership and its benefits — of its ownership as well as of its benefits. Doubtless some of the farmers who shot at the automobile are now the owners of shares in General Motors Corporation. It will be the same with the administration of public serv­ices when they are efficiently and profitably performed by the owners of the territories served.

There are now many large organizations who own and administer the private and vertical improvements on lands, such as great housing and other community projects. The next great social advance must come through the application of the same process and principle to the horizontal im­provements, the great public capital that lies in between the private holdings, surrounding them and making them available for private capital use and improvement. The value of the “bare land” is the value of this public capital. Land owners now distribute access to and use of the public capital whenever they distribute nominally only the possession and use of the land to which the public capital appertains. In order to extend and develop their contractual services they will not need necessarily any more capital than they already possess.

The further development of proprietary administration of public services depends upon further and higher organi­zation of the proprietary interests — the land owners. Something like a corporation will be formed. This organ­ization will administer the territory, the land, of the community as a whole, procuring every possible public benefits and immunities for its inhabitants that it finds possible. Those land owners who do not at first enter the organization will also be benefited, but not to the same extent. That will induce them to come in. Additional lands will be brought in by present owners joining, by new owners who will purchase land for the purpose of bringing it into the organization and by the organization itself purchasing it out of the proceeds from sale of its securities for that purpose.

Once the proprietary interest understands its posi­tion and opportunities politics cannot enter into its operations because that would be a dis-service and impair or even destroy the value of the properties owned by the organization. Political administration will continue but will gradually diminish just as fast as the proprie­tary organization undermines it by taking over its functions, performing them efficiently and profitably instead of at a total loss every year.

The local proprietary authorities will merge into such sized communities as can be most efficiently adminis­tered under single management. These will federate with one another for such interconnecting services as may inter­connect among them or otherwise be common to them. Among their widest and most general co-operations would be the maintenance of peace and security for the preserva­tion of the values and incomes from their properties, if for no higher or worthier motive. Wars and conquests are carried on by political organizations — states — from the loot motive, one that some of our super patriots seem to regard much more highly than the good old reliable and non-coercive profit motive. The profit motive — recompense for service — is the only motive that has ever practically transcended the motive of loot. Altruisms, philanthropies, charities, are always self-limiting, even if not self-destructive and subject to metamorphosis into rulership and plunder. Bread and circus and “social security,” for only two examples out of many.

The ultimate of this extension of the free capitalist system into the field of community services — the services that people have in common — is a practical realization of the collectivist ideal of a unitary public administra­tion of substantially all these staple services and com­modities that nearly everyone desires and consumes. As these become more abundant they will become appurtenant to the places and occupancies to which they will be sup­plied, just as the common supply of water is now appurte­nant to dwellings as well as public places. This will place private enterprise almost exclusively in the field of new discoveries and inventions of such things as are new and not widely in use but which when they become more general and widely in use would be more profitably administered by the general proprietorship. Private enterprise would then attract venture capital, leaving the field of general and community services open to those who prefer to invest their capital or savings in the more certain, conservative and dependable lines. There would be no reason against practically all the inhabi­tants of a community becoming shareholders in the community organization and voting in it accordingly.

There are many phases and aspects that might be gone into and I shall be happy if at some near future time we can talk it over at some length together.

Thanking you for your interest and many kindnesses and with kind regards to both the Mrs. Porter, I am,

Sincerely,

 

   Spencer Heath