And so, after all is said and done, to be "enlightened" is to accept this flabby, unmanly, weak-eyed rapaciousness: this perverted sense of entitlement standing slyly behind one fellow or another's banner of rights: this dogged and sullen grabbing: this surly unreasonableness: this corrosive promiscuous unjustness that is coursing through our ways.

How did the Enlightenment come to this?

It could come to little else. The enlightened ethics bequeathed to us by Locke and Company were unwholesome.

There are three aspects of human nature that must be borne in mind if one is to see clearly the unwholesomeness of the ethics suffusing our ways of living. One, humans come into the world without a set of instincts (pre-formed patterns of behavior and indwelling knowledge of the world and ourselves) adequate to see us through a happy life. We come into the world largely ignorant of how the world operates and of how we may live well in it, and we need knowledge gleaned from experience (first- and second-hand experience), and the time to acquire it, in order to progress towards the attainment of Happiness. This gleaning is the first part of true progress in humane terms.

The obvious need of children to be nurtured is a manifestation of this fact of human nature, but the fact goes deeper than this mere need for assistance in acquiring somatic and intellectual necessaries. It touches on the way in which the scope of pregnant Reason develops and expands. More on this need for progress in a moment, but the second important aspect of human nature needs to mentioned now.

From the standpoint of acquiring the self-knowledge requisite for human progress towards Happiness it is important to bear in mind that human nature is not merely a set of potentialities common to all humans. If it were merely this, then human nature could not be the source of any intelligible good towards which progress could be made -- it would be indifferent to whether any of these potentialities was actualized, and we should not be able to make human nature the referent for our estimation of what is and is not good. We could infer from the mere presence of these potentialities that it is desirable that all of them become actualized, but such an inference has very little solid ground beneath it. An opponent to such an inference could adduce the vestigial fin of the salmonid as an actualized potentiality of doubtful essentialness to the present-day salmonid's nature, and he then could point to any one or more of the set of human potentialities (the appendix, for example) and cry out, "Useless vestige of a former nature, no longer necessary to human Happiness."

Human nature, if it is to be a reliable source of an intelligible good, and it is, must have in its very constitution all the goals which when obtained are a humanly recognizable happy human; and, this human nature must have a constitution that is actively directed towards the attaining of these goals. In short, human nature as a source of the good must be a constituting force in a living being, a force that biases our matter and energy to take on the form and the activity of life directed towards the attainment of goals that makes us recognizable, and capable of recognizing others, as a happy (or unhappy) human. The attainment of all these goals is the ideal (Happiness) that is the basis for the moral sense common to all men, an ideal the attainment of which is demanded by our nature.

The road to human progress begins when human nature is imparted to one by his parents. From that moment human nature works towards entelechy through a mutualistic process of growth. This mutualism suffusing human development is the third aspect of human nature that must be understood in order to see clearly the unwholesomeness in the American ways of living. A man's animated matter intrudes into and receives intrusions from the environment. If it is fortunate, through some of these intrusions it receives nourishment and in consequence retains its ability to respond to the organizing energies of its constituting nature. Organization proceeds apace, and makes possible a widening scope of activity for more and more organs discretely and a widening scope of activity for the community of organs that is comprised by the human form, activities which the formal cause of his development -- that is, his nature -- is energetically prodding him to engage in. Through these activities more energy is received and utilized, material growth continues, widening further the scope of activity, increasing capacities, developing capabilities, making possible more activity. The mutualistic developmental interplay between form and activity, between intrusion and intruding, that constitutes organism is manifest, and continues throughout life. This mutualistic character of human nature accounts for the potential for instability that lurks within the human personality -- the individual is not capable of being wholly self-stabilizing.

When a human emerges from the womb he possesses an organized form that is pregnant with potentialities and with a wide array of instinctive impulses, but he lacks adequate knowledge and adequate capabilities of coordinating his faculties and organs -- a knowledgeable coordination that constitutes skill -- to get along in the world without the addition of needed developmental matter and energy. Some of these are supplied to him in the form of food, water, etc., by others who are nurturing him. Others come to him in the form of the sensations he experiences -- sensations of both internal origin (from his own body) and external origin (from the environment that surrounds him).

Some of these sensations fail to resonate with a nature-inhering impulse and consequently fail to excite a desire, to get the attention of an organ of intellectual activity. Some sensations do resonate, excite a desire, get attention. During this early period many sensory and non-sensory organs are receiving excitations and the organs of the intellectual faculties are being stimulated by these to engage in the activities their form and energy make possible. Eventually, after some threshold of repetition of sensation that is unique to each human, the attention of the relevant organs of intellect are aroused to the point that identification of distinct external objects begins. The young human now has the possibility and occasion to match impulses or desires to distinct objects that gratify them. Once this young human both remembers the ineffectualness of a spontaneous effort of his to attain one of these distinct objects of impulse or desire, and develops a rudimentary capability of a relevant skill, his pregnant means-devising faculties have a scope of activity.

And once the young human has identified a conflict of demands, either between demands within himself or between his demands and the demands of another, his pregnant moral sense and pregnant Reason each have a scope of activity.

The import of our nature-inhering almost-total initial ignorance of ourselves and the world around us is tremendous. It largely accounts for the difficulty in achieving human happiness, something that cannot be achieved without a considerable degree of intra-personal and inter-personal harmony, which cannot be achieved without a considerable degree of self-knowledge and knowledge of how one's actions are affecting those folks on whose cooperation one's Happiness in part depends. Our ignorance of the world, our self-ignorance, the developmental need for conducive environmental intrusions, and the frequent lack of a conducive environment are the primary culprits in the battle between a man's various and varying desires that has been noted for millennia, and which has been variously and incorrectly attributed to a schism between body and soul, between nature and civil society, and between self-interest and the Common Good.

This view of human nature, which for ease of expression I shall refer to as mutualism, gives us insight into the proper formal aim of Reason in a man's life: Harmonization; the harmonization of all one's nature-inhering needs so that all may be fulfilled; and, the harmonization of one's endeavors to attain Happiness with the endeavors of one's fellows on whose cooperation one's Happiness in part depends.

This view of human nature and human Reason also accounts for the difficulties and limited possibilities of actually living a life guided by Reason. In a complex society living a life guided by Reason is impossible without the assistance of proper institutions. This is so for several reasons, not the least of which is that there are practical limits to how much knowledge any man can actually acquire. And because a life is actually lived by doing things that require of the doer some quantity of specific knowledge, it is for all intents and purposes impossible for any man to personally acquire enough special knowledge about the endeavors of all those folks on whose cooperation his Happiness in part depends to be capable of discerning how to harmonize his endeavors with theirs. This means that in a complex society there must be some institutionalized ways of associating that are formal means of harmonization, which help men to harmonize their endeavors with the endeavors of others in spite of incomplete knowledge of one another. Some such institutional means of harmonizing economic endeavors is obviously necessary in a complex society. Some such institutional means of harmonizing political force is also necessary, serving to represent to those who are entrusted with the powers of government all the various and varying endeavors that are the result of compactions of special knowledge, without empowering any special endeavor by virtue of sheer weight of numbers or influence to utilize the force of government to achieve injurious domination over others. There are no doubt other such institutional means of harmonization necessary in a complex society.

Just as mutualism suggests the necessity of formal harmonizing institutions in a complex society, it also suggests the utter impossibility of determining the behavior of men by subjecting them to an environment calculated to compel them to be virtuous. A thorough investigation of the question of motive forces in man -- whether those forces are wholly uncaused by external environment, in what important ways the so-called will is free, etc. -- is beyond the scope of this essay. But I remark here that the formal cause of human behavior -- namely, human nature -- that makes possible a sufficiently similar outcome of development such that each man is capable of recognizing other men as being of his kind, also makes every human unique in form and activity by virtue of the mutual generative and degenerative interplay between a man and his environment, and the fact that the intruding environment is unique for each man because of the parallax phenomenon. Moreover, human nature as the formal cause of human activity in each man, a nature consisting in part of organs that react differently to different amounts of energy and which receive some of this energy from sources that are within the body and that are not constantly coordinated, makes possible more than one outcome from any particular experience (or accumulation of experience) -- which is the essence of what is often called freedom of the will. This variability makes it is impossible to isolate the environmental conditions that cause (in the determinist's view) any particular thought in any particular human -- for example, the thought "he got caught but I will get away with it" -- let alone to isolate an environmental condition that causes the identical thought in all men. And without the ability to perfectly control thought by manipulating an environment that is common to all men the project of legislating into existence a society of perfectly virtuous humans must necessarily end in disappointment. A cooperative environment is necessary to the attainment of Happiness, but it is not sufficient to the attainment of Happiness.

From the vantage point of mutualism, then, one can see clearly that a society whose institutionalized ways of associating fail to provide formal harmonization of the various and varying nature-inhering demands of its members, whose institutionalized ways of associating fail to prevent not only witting but unwitting injurious domination of some part of society by another, fails the formidable test of reason.

American society is one that fails this test of harmony, as must all societies that are creatures of Lockean enlightenment.

Part of John Locke's socio-politico-economic thought experiment was his presumption that the irreducible solidarity of mankind rested on the fear of death, and that by appealing to the strong desire in all men for self-preservation a society that best offered the instruments of self-preservation would win the allegiance of all men.

The framework of mutualism reveals the manifold errors lurking within Locke's presumption. One error is that the irreducible solidarity of mankind rests on the fear of death. Rousseau penetrated more deeply here than did Locke, offering a reason for self-preservation by suggesting that the pleasant experience of life undergirded the desire for self-preservation. The mutualist view of human nature supports Rousseau in this (though in little else). Human nature supplies a man with all the goals that when achieved constitute Happiness, and with a push in the direction of its attainment. And the road to Happiness is paved, if one is lucky, with a succession of occasions to acquire the goods that fulfill these right desires. Thus, human nature provides us with a reason for self-preservation -- namely, the fulfillment of the desires that move us towards Happiness. The irreducible solidarity of mankind, then, rests not on the fear of death, but rather on the hope of fulfilling desires -- a hope that is generated by the interaction of nature-inhering impulses, our environment, and imagination. When such hope evanesces, or when the hope of achieving some ideal that one believes can be accomplished by self-sacrifice becomes powerful enough, the fear of death departs.

Another error is that even if this solidarity did rest on the desire for self-preservation, a society that was structured to service that one powerful desire while disregarding other right desires could never conduce to human Happiness. Such a society must by virtue of the nature of the humans constituting it overtime forfeit their allegiance as the realization of its inadequacy as a setting conducing to their Happiness settles in on them. Proper human society, then, is a setting that serves not to aid us in the fulfillment of a primary human desire, merely, but rather one that serves to aid us in the fulfillment of all our nature-inhering desires.

Before I leave off criticizing Mr. Locke, I must take up the concept of rights offered by Hobbes and developed, with dangerous perversions, by Locke.

The conception of a right as something inhering in the individual that is necessary to his Happiness, inalienable from him, his prior in time and sanctity to any civil society, comes to us from Hobbes. That conception, when it rests on a proper understanding of human nature, is a very useful political tool. Unfortunately Locke perverted it and knocked it off its proper foundation in his famous Second Treatise on Civil Society, with disastrous results.

As the conception comes to us from Hobbes, our rights must be our reason-restrained behaviors that enable us to satisfy all our nature-inhering needs that when satisfied are a vital part of human Happiness. No other conception of rights fits the description of them set down by Hobbes. No other conception has the moral ground beneath it. If a right can arise from contract, then it cannot belong to a man prior in time and sanctity to any civil society.

A right cannot, therefore, be the product of consent or contract, which is what Locke suggested in his Second Treatise.

Locke was correct when he wrote in his Second Treatise that the appropriation of material resources (in particular, land) from the common could be a right so long as there was "enough, and as good left", for such an appropriation could not cause anyone injurious privation. And he was also correct when he invoked need as the original basis of ownership. But his zeal as an apologist for the Money Idea carried him too far, and into perverse error, when he contrived to make owning more of a resource than the owner could personally use in itself (or owning it and not using it) when there was no longer "enough, and as good left" a right that grew out of the consent of men.

Locke's error, compounded by so-called progressives, conservatives, and libertarians alike who wrongly use the word right to mean a legal entitlement, merely, has led to all manner of irrational and inhumane social schemes -- in which all manner of things, education, surgery, most of the land in the world, etc., are supposedly due a fellow merely because he is alive or because he has made a contract with someone.

With regard to notions of property Locke's perversion of the concept of right has been utterly noxious, setting the course run by America and the West of excessive industry fueled by the domination made possible by excessive private concentrations of ownership of material resources, concentrations that are themselves made possible by a no longer reasonable way of implementing the Money Idea.

The Money Idea is this: That the meaning of ownership shall properly extend to include not merely control of who has access to a resource not needed in itself by the owner, and to how this resource is worked on, but to the demanding by the owner of some tangible token of wealth in exchange for access to the resource from those who need that access.

Retaining the Money Idea in an ancient form as a basis for economic activity after the point in human affairs when this form was no longer proper has had the disastrous effect of depriving us of the formalized institutional economic harmonization necessary in a complex society. It has transformed the general human behavior of trade from a means of accommodation (a means of attaining Happiness) to an instrument of domination (a means of thwarting the attainment of Happiness). It has created a schism between a man's "job" and what we now call the "rest of his life". It has perverted much of materially productive labor into something onerous, a thief of the time needed to become a happy human being.

Because economic activity has become domineering in America as a result of our unwholesome ethics (even adduced as the primary management concern of government by so influential a Founder as James Madison), I begin my survey of the noxious effects of these ethics with a more thorough look at the lethal manifestations of the Money Idea in a world in which there is no longer land "enough, and as good left".

There are some ideas in human affairs that are humane only in a particular historical context. This is so because the concept of good does not have meaning in vacuo, but only in terms of a living being, and a living being lives in a particular place at a particular time. The outhouse may at some time and place in human affairs be a humane idea, but in many of those places the time comes (or has come) when it is no longer a humane idea -- for the idea, symbolizing an ethical relation, begins to produce unnecessarily noxious effects which justly arouse enmity in our fellows. The Money Idea is an idea of this type.

It is easy to conceive, as did John Locke, of a time when there was land enough in the world in proportion to the human population such that no man was deprived of a material necessary by another man's appropriation of land for personal consumption. In such times the Money Idea was innocuous, and perhaps even a positive good to men. Every man could work to produce more than he needed to consume at the moment and then trade his surplus for surplus another man had produced. At no time was either party dependent on the other for the item desired in trade, each man could himself obtain from nature the desired item, it was merely a matter of convenience to trade for the item.

And it is not difficult to imagine that as time passed and more men came to inhabit the earth, though there was still land "enough, and as good left" this land was inconveniently distant to some men. At this time the Money Idea was clearly a positive good. For, at least to those whom land "enough, and as good" was inconveniently distant, the Money Idea served as a means of gaining access to and enjoying the fruits of another man's labors without resorting to outright violence, which might have been attractive in light of the inconvenient distance to adequate land. A man could work land that was capable of producing only one or two of his material necessaries, and trade the surplus of that labor for the rest of his material necessaries.

Of course one does not need to imagine that some men chose violence as a means of circumventing inconvenience in acquiring material necessaries (and surplus), one can simply read a history book.

At any rate, over time it came to pass that there was no longer land "enough, and as good left", and worse, there was not even enough left that each man could own a parcel of land that could produce something in adequate surplus that he could trade for all his other necessaries. When this came to pass the Money Idea ceased to serve as a means of accommodation and began to become noxious to some men -- especially to those who did not own land "enough, and as good".

One form of the noxiousness caused by the retention of the antique Money Idea after there was no longer land "enough, and as good left" in proportion to the human population is a vicious form of competition for control of material resources. Victory in this competition has come to require a certain amount of exploitation of laborers, who are coerced into an excessive servitude that robs them of several things at once.

This coerced servitude robs them of opportunities for the expression of genius (in much the same way that Hayek saw central planning retarding ingenuity). It often robs them of opportunities to find and cultivate Valued Places -- both in family and in community. It robs them of time in which may be found opportunities for experiences that energize parts of their nature as yet unenergized, which left unenergized will deprive them of the fullness of life needed to attain Happiness. In short, it robs them of time to seek, and opportunities to obtain, the other goods that constitute Happiness.

Furthermore, the coerced servitude and the excessive division of labor engendered by the Money Idea not only robs, but breeds more robbers.

The imposition of the Money Idea has the effect of drawing an inordinate amount of a society's vigor into economic pursuits -- commerce becomes domineering, human ingenuity becomes more and more directed towards devising means of increasing profits. One means of increasing profits is increasing a man's productivity. As productivity increases the cost of material necessaries decreases. In the early stages of commerce's domination the material standard of acquisition (the "standard of living") increases overall within society. Eventually, however, high-productivity becomes hyper-productivity, and the necessity of having money in the economic scheme that is now unbalanced by hyper-productivity becomes hyper-corrosive, socially.

When hyper-productivity is achieved all the material necessaries of a society are produced, transported, distributed, and serviced by a relatively small fraction of the available labor of a society. In an economic scheme powered by the Money Idea this hyper-productivity means that there are no longer enough jobs the produce of which is in high demand, and the wages of which are correspondingly high, to go around -- and especially to go around to those who wish to support more than themselves on their income. This is the point at which hyper-productivity becomes socially hyper-corrosive.

Because in a society dominated by the antique Money Idea folks need money with which to purchase goods and services, and because most acquire money from working at a job, hyper-productivity means that in addition to the necessaries-producing jobs some sort of other jobs need to be created for folks to work at -- and these jobs are in the aggregate lower-paying than the now relatively scarce necessaries-producing jobs. (These created jobs are relatively lower paying because their produce is in low demand, or because they can be filled from a very large labor pool.) These jobs are in an important sense artificially created, and their advent and continued existence requires that a desire for their produce likewise be created or heightened artificially -- usually through the techniques of marketing. The term Consumption Society has been coined to describe this state of affairs. Through this process hyper-productivity begins to make it more and more difficult for more and more persons to support a family on a single income. As a result, a person must either work more hours per week in order to support a family, or more than one person in the family must go to work to make money. The traditional family becomes less and less attractive to more and more persons. The Valued Places it offers become scarcer and scarcer.

Wealth is a good only to the extent that its absence is an injurious privation. If it is excessive -- either because unused in the attainment of Happiness, or because its unnecessary acquisition has deprived someone of timely fulfilling another nature-inhering need -- it is an outright evil.

The social destructiveness of the consumption way of living has been felt for some time now, frightening even the staunchest defenders of capitalism. But at least as frightening is the fact that the very existence of the consumption way of living has become entirely dependent on government interventions into social relationships, interventions undertaken ostensibly to ameliorate the social destructiveness of the Money Idea -- but most of which actually serve only to exacerbate the social destructiveness.

The Provider State -- a marvelous example of managerial hubris-- is the generic name commentators have given to the totality of social intervention by government, and the Provider State is exemplary of the ways in which government interventions have exacerbated the social destructiveness of the Money Idea.

For instance, the Provider State undertakes to ameliorate some of the economic indecencies -- low wages, for example -- that result from the Money Idea. The means by which this amelioration is accomplished are primarily the absorption of economic responsibility for children. However, by absorbing the economic functions of parents the Provider State has made a nuclear family less desirable in the eyes of many women and men. A valuable source of Valued Place in society -- the nuclear family -- is as a result unavailable to many men and women. And, unfortunately, the Provider State has not provided another source of Valued Place to replace the source it has helped to devour.

Unfortunately the Provider State does not stop absorbing having absorbed from the parents the function of providing food, clothing, and shelter for their children. It has absorbs from the parents much of their educative function, largely through the advent of obligatory government-controlled schooling for children. Deprived of its former economic and educative functions the nuclear family has lost nearly all of its functional relevance in society -- and no longer has much with which to claim our allegiance. Its dissolution in consequence is not surprising.

Not content with having absorbed the vital function of schooling children, the Provider State has gone on to absorb from labor unions, for example, some of the educative and labor-directing functions with respect to adults. It has drained from other forms of the traditional guild their functions, too -- making it necessary, by virtue of professional and occupational licensing laws, that many adults obtain government-approved schooling before being allowed to labor at the task of their choice. The complications of the licensing processes have made it even more difficult for certain members of society to obtain jobs which they

consider valuable, further exacerbating the problem for these persons of finding Valued Place.
The Provider State has gone on to drain from the neighborhood and the church much of their functional value by absorbing their traditional mutual-aid functions. Having little functional value with which to attract and retain the allegiance of persons, these institutions, too, have withered slowly, leaving the impersonal state as the functionally relevant institution to which we can give our allegiance -- a fatal condition for a society.

As these two evils work their corrosive way through society eating away at important institutions they contribute to destabilizing the human personality by isolating the individual from the relatively stable micro-environments that are these important institutions. And here we see yet another error lurking in so much of Enlightenment thought -- namely, the false idea that a human is by nature a solitary and autonomous "self", that the individual has within him, irrespective of his associational contexts, a stability of personality, an enduring set of motivations to seek liberty and order, and a nature comprising instincts and reason that can make him autonomous, sufficient unto himself. The individual is not sufficient unto himself. The nature-inhering reactivity of humans to intrusions, the nature-inhering need for a full range of desire-heightening experiences in order to attain Happiness, and the fluxlike condition of our environment combine to account for the instability of the individual.

The competitiveness of life lived under the Money Idea has done curious things to modern thinkers.

Charles Darwin, his eyes evidently jaundiced by a life lived in a setting in which the Money Idea created a vicious competitiveness between men, seemed insensible to the amount of accommodation that actually occurs in nature and saw at work there much more competition and struggle than accommodation. His fallacious model of animated interaction has had destructive echoes for over a century, lending as it has so-called "scientific" support for the various unnecessary and vicious competitions for domination of men by men that are the hallmark of barbarity.

Libertarians, who preach the non-initiation of force, the sanctity of property and it nearly unlimited personal ownership, and the blessings of competition in the "free-marketplace", seem insensible to the fact that land acquisition (appropriation) after there is no longer "enough, and as good left" is an initiation of force that introduces coercion into human affairs, and that in consequence participation in the modern marketplace is in no meaningful sense free of coercion. This insensibility to the presence of initiated force in property, and to the presence of the coerced servitude in the modern marketplace, has allowed libertarians to cling to the imbecile notion that the non-initiation of force is the categorical imperative on which rational ethics rests.

The compact theory of association, implemented as a basis for political governance, is another of the errors that is a source of the noxious unwholesomeness in human affairs today.
It is an article of faith in America that "government derives its just authority from the consent of the governed". Given all the other unreason coursing through the veins of America it oughtn't to shock me that a nation supposedly founded on Reason has as one of its articles of faith such an irrational proposition, but it does.

Is a good government considered to be without just authority to punish those of the governed who do not wish to be ruled in accordance what is good and who withhold their consent to be governed in accordance with what is good?

Just authority for government certainly does come from something that is within the governed, but not from the governed's consent.

External government exists because it is inevitable in the affairs of social creatures who are capable of concerted force and who do not possess a complete set of instincts that harmonizes every act of every individual with the acts of all the other individuals in the society on which personal Happiness in part depends. George Washington was quite wise in holding the view that government is force. And I repeat, government is inevitable -- it takes a deep ignorance or hatred of human nature to suppose that government can one day wither away.

The good of any external government lies in its ability to create and preserve a setting in which the Happiness of all who are governed is more attainable than it would be in the absence of that particular external government. And it is the concordance with the demands for Happiness that are present within every human by virtue of human nature that the just authority of government properly rests on, not the mere consent of fanciful men. One task of mankind in the quest for progress is to rationalize the force that is inevitable in human affairs -- in other words, to turn it to the service of the Happiness of all those persons whose Happiness it affects. The fact that few if any governments in human history have been adequately just and rational does not make consent the just basis of the authority for a government's power.

An environment conducive to the Happiness of all its people, relatively stable and secure from noxious intrusions, then, is a primary goal of a good society and its just government. What are the goods comprised by Happiness, what setting can better conduce to their attainment, and what form(s) of government can create and preserve this setting?

The order in which I present our nature-inhering needs and the goods that fulfill them denotes no prioritization of them in human affairs.

1) One nature-inhering need is access to the things the body must consume in order to continue living. These include: Adequate nutrition; adequate water; adequate air; and, when these consumables are not produced in adequate supply without human labor, access to the available means by which one may produce and preserve for one's use these consumables is also a nature-inhering need.

2) Other nature-inhering needs are rest and sleep.

3) Another nature-inhering need is access to material goods with which one may protect one's person (and the person of whomever one is rightly responsible for) from injury by the environment (environment includes humans -- mutualism does away with the notion of humans alienated from the environment). These include: Adequate clothing; adequate shelter from inclemencies and against the spread of disease; adequate fuel for heating, cooking and sanitation; adequate means of personal hygiene; adequate means of defense against inter-special and inter-human predation; and, when these goods are not available in adequate supply without human labor, access to the available means by which one may produce and preserve for one's use these goods is also a nature-inhering need.

4) Knowledge of how the world operates and of how we may live rightly in it is another nature-inhering need, as are means of obtaining this knowledge. This is so because we do not enter the world with a set of pre-formed patterns of behavior and indwelling knowledge that enables us to fulfill all our nature-inhering needs throughout our lives.

5) Moral virtue is a nature-inhering need not only because we have various needs that all require fulfillment if we are to attain Happiness, but also because of our behavioral capacities. More about this later.

6)Desire-heightening experiences are a nature-inhering need.

7) Ordering one's priorities is a continual task for every person. Some of our needs are ever-present, some are not. Some are vitally pressing one moment, but not the next. Our priorities for action change with our level of maturity, with our changing capabilities, and with our changing responsibilities. Our priorities also change because of the ever changing nature of the environment in which we live.
Because each human is unique, whenever a choice is practicable between which nature-inhering needs one can fulfill at any given moment, or whenever a choice is practicable between rightly directed means of fulfilling a nature-inhering need, it cannot be known by any human which choice will be best for another human. This means there is no single set of priorities we can establish as a model for every person. The impossibility of a single set of priorities means that we need a degree of liberty in choosing when to pursue which goods and by which means if we are to attain personal Happiness. The security of this degree of liberty to choose which nature-inhering need to seek to fulfill and when and by which rightly directed means is, therefore, itself a nature-inhering need.

8)Healthful forms of human association are nature-inhering needs because there are several nature-inhering needs that are only fulfilled by healthful human association.These are:

8A)Valued Place.

8B) Effectual social controls.

8C)Genuine participation in communal affairs.

8D)The cohesive and stable nurturing environment from which children learn much of their social technique.

It may be that the reader will think this list is not exhaustive. I suggest, however, that whatever other goods the reader may contend are necessary to Happiness, he will find their attainment facilitated by the setting I propose.

A humane setting is one in which a life lived in accordance with rational ethics is possible. practicable, and to some extent required. Because economics has become domineering I begin with a suggestion for a humane economics.

The framework of the mutualist view of nature and human nature suggests that at this time in human affairs we must abandon the Money Idea in its antique form. An economic idea suitable to our circumstances -- circumstances in which there is no longer land "enough, and as good left" -- and in conformity with human nature must replace it.

I have eschewed using the word justice until now because it has been used erroneously by so many persons that the word may well carry with it a taint that may miscolor in the reader's mind some of the ideas I have been presenting.

Aristotle said that justice has to do with equality in some way. He was correct. But what sort of equality?

This sort of equality: Justice has to do with the ideal equality of every human's Happiness, and of every human's need for Happiness. The conceptual goal of Happiness (the totum bonum commune hominis) is the same for all men, because all men possess the nature of a human. And because of human nature all men possess the potential to recognize this ideal as properly belonging to them. To act justly is to pursue one's Happiness with sympathy for one's fellow seekers, to pursue one's Happiness in ways that do not unnecessarily impede others in their pursuit of Happiness, and which preserve and enhance the bonum commune communitatis (the Common Good that is community -- a personal good enjoyed by all those who participate in it).

Every man's intimation of the ideal immanent in human nature undergirds the inchoate sense of proportion that is commonly felt by men of what is due a man, of the range between what is not enough and what is too much. For example, this inchoate sense of justice informs a man that when he is engaged in a cooperative or collaborative effort whatever his diligent labor gets him and costs him (in terms of time, and the opportunities to obtain other goods), ought not to be out of proportion to what an equal amount of other men's diligent labor in the enterprise gets and costs them.

Within the framework of mutualism Ulpian's view of justice (suum cuique -- to everyone his due) suggests that what is due a man -- for instance, for his labors -- is something quite different from what he is allocated by the Money Idea retained in its antique form in modern times.

A man alone on the planet, growing his food from seeds he obtained from mature plants gleaned from nature, and using tools he fashioned from raw materials, must be said to be due all that he reaps from his agriculture. But can a man who is growing food from seeds obtained from other persons still alive, who is using tools produced by other persons still alive, who was educated by other persons still alive, who is protected from predation (both inter-human and extra-human predation) by other persons still alive, who lives in a house built of materials produced by other persons, who is the father of an infant child, etc., actually be due the entire fruit of his agriculture? What share of his produce is due all those for whom the farmer is rightly responsible, due all who contributed to the farmer's well-being and the bounty of his harvest?

The means we call money is purported by its apologists to give a man, through an elegant representation of these myriad transactions, what he is justly due from his labors. But, of course, it does not, because the value of money is relative to its marginal utility to its possessor, and while marginal utility takes into consideration the normal societally imposed costs of re-acquiring money that is about to be spent, it fails to make a judgment about the moral relations represented by these normal costs. And so in still another way we see the Money Idea veiling something monstrous in men's acts that would instantly offend mankind if the monstrousness was more immediately visible.

What is a man's just share for his contribution to the produce of society's cooperative and collaborative efforts? In America we now reckon the just share for a man who has committed a not too heinous murder to be a lifetime of more than subsistence living in a relatively secure environment. On the other hand, we reckon the just share for a husband and father who works 40 hours a week at a menial task to be less than a subsistence living in a relatively threatening environment.

Are these reckonings just and rational? If not, can we use the irrationality and unjustness as an out-of-bounds marker for a just estimation of a man's share?

In the cooperative and collaborative effort required to produce necessaries under present day circumstances (in which there is no longer land "enough, and as good left") what is due a man who "plays by the rules" (who lives his life in accordance with rational ethics) is an equal share of the material produce of a society at its initial distribution, a share based on a sympathetic appreciation of his various and varying labors and his law abiding.
Such a distribution allows the general behavior of trade, in voluntary redistribution, to retain its useful nature as a means of accommodation and as a means of expressing personal preference. Also, it provides a means for rewarding extraordinarily appreciated personal service -- say, to a physician, or to a leader whose efforts at direction have been beneficial to the led.

Further, such a distribution opens up channels of access to necessaries, channels presently clogged by licensing schemes --such as medical licensing, for example, which unnecessarily restricts the flow of medical materiel to the sick (as well as restricting the availability of doctoring).

Money cannot properly be used as a means of accounting or exchanging these shares, for it veils the rational value of things in a green fog of fungibility that makes humane valuation of the things difficult, and consequently it makes rationalizing use of the shares of things difficult. This veil, by simple-mindedly reckoning value in merely mathematical terms, introduces a degree of irrationality in calculations of marginal utility that is incompatible with a life lived in conformity with rational ethics. This veil conduces to and facilitates the monopolization and hoarding that plagues modernity. These shares of the material produce of a society ought to be explicitly shares of things -- shares of foodstuffs, shares of automobiles, shares of x-ray machines, etc.

With regard to labors not immediately part of the production, transportation, initial distribution and service of material necessaries, the question of incentive remains: What will induce a man to devote adequate time to studies necessary for certain occupations -- doctoring, for example?
The desire for things personally important can be the only satisfactory inducement. This is so because a man can desire and think -- remember, imagine, analyze, etc. -- only with his own faculties. He can therefore never be wholly outside the influence of himself. Even self-sacrifice will be for the purpose of attaining something ideally important to the self-sacrificer. (Service to the Common Good --bonum commune communitatis -- always serves to fulfill a good of the servant. Properly understood, altruistic service to the Common Good always has a selfish component in it -- the dichotomy between altruism and selfishness, in this case, is quite false.)

What personal goods can a man be allowed to obtain, rationally, in return for the devotion of his time to learn and practice arts that aid others?

Valued Place, for one. Man, social animal that he is, has a nature-inhering need for Valued Place. Valued Place is a functional place within a group that is succeeding in accomplishing the tasks the group wants to accomplish. This functional place gives the individual the opportunity to attain the pleasure of satisfaction in accomplishing a task that is relevant to his needs and to the needs of his community, and it gives him a sense of being valued by others who would miss him if he was absent from his place. He can obtain this by means of channeling his relative strengths towards the relative weaknesses of others, for the purpose of strengthening the weak. The forms of this strength flowing to weakness are myriad -- doctoring is but one example -- and are a crucial mechanism of vitality in a society. It is this flow that enables a society to meet the challenging intrusions that it will likely experience as a result of the flux that is the world.

But Valued Place can be evanescent in the flux. So it is that some tangible token of appreciation for a service performed, a token that may endure when Valued Place has not, may be desired by the service provider. The possibility of voluntary redistribution of wealth in the mutualist framework of economy satisfactorily provides for this means of incentive.

And here another essential aspect of a humane setting reveals itself -- multiplicity of Valued Place-creating opportunities. I noted earlier that the modern Provider State has been a terribly proficient assassin of these opportunities. A humane setting will allow a much greater freedom of Valued Place-creating association. It can do this in part by curtailing the powers of the state to license activities. Licensing is an activity of the state, third-party credentialing is a civic activity. Though both seek to provide a means of evaluating the competence of persons personally unknown to us, the effect of each is crucially different. Licensing, under the color of state authority, restrains forcibly those without a license from engaging in activities that could provide them with Valued Place and the means of acquiring additional wealth. Third-party credentialing, on the other hand, provides a would-be service provider with a means of demonstrating to strangers that he possesses a level of competence adequate to the task he wishes to perform, but such credentialing does not foreclose the possibility of service by those who do not possess a credential. Credentialing leaves open to persons a far wider range of personal discrimination than does licensing.

It is now time to look, if only briefly, at what ought to be the "rules of the game" that when played by entitle one to an equal share of the material produce of society.

Playing by "rules of the game" implies that an organized activity is underway in which one is a participant. The organized activity is the pursuit of Happiness, and in particular contributing to the bonum commune communitatis -- of which production, transportation, and initial distribution of material goods is a part, merely. In this economic part of the bonum commune communitatis there is one task or another for every person qualified to be emancipated from the control of one's parents or guardians. Autonomy of each enterprise is vital, for many goods arise from autonomy when it is spread throughout a multiplicity of small groups -- more about this later; and the so-called evil of "irrationality" in production that leads to over-production here, and under-production there, is only truly an evil when inefficiency results in a privation that is injurious to extant beings.

Because an equal share is to be obtained, in part, by participating in the initial economy playing by the "rules of the game" must, in part, be an objectively verifiable minimum amount of time spent participating in the material goods economy during a finite period of time. Manual participation is the only objectively verifiable type of participation. Putting in the established equal minimum time of verifiable manual labor at the job in the initial economy is, then, part of the rules of the game. The time to be spent at this form of work is a thing relatively easy to calculate. There are sufficient records presently kept of all such labor currently being performed yearly (or monthly, or weekly). The number of hours of such labor divided by the number of emancipatable person will give society a usable average to be demanded of all persons, as a place from which to start. As the demand for material production increases or decreases, for whatever various and varying reasons, adjustments can be made.

Another aspect of the game is rearing one's children. The pertinent "rules of the game" with regard to children are that one shares with one's children the fruits of one's labors to the extent of fulfilling their nature-inhering needs for those fruits; and, that one provides one's children with a stable and healthful nurturing environment (one relatively free of unjust noxious intrusions) that will provide one's children with the qualifications of emancipation.

Rearing one's children is a "rule of the game" because a humane setting must also cultivate the good that is the cohesive and stable nurturing environment from which children learn much of their social technique. Study after study during the last century has added support to the hypothesis that humans to a great degree acquire by experience, and not from an endowment of instincts, the techniques of our various behaviors and the heightened desires to utilize those techniques. The intellectual methods (beyond trial and error) by which children develop their social technique are difficult to ascertain with precision, but because analytical faculties appear to be incompletely developed in young children it is likely that one method involves at its earlier stages a process of correlating the reactions by one party the child is observing to signals from another party the child is observing. This is followed eventually by a more complicated matching process in which the reactions of one party to the actions of another are understood to be chosen responses to situations. The absence of a nurturing environment in which proper social techniques are passed on to children evidently does not wholly preclude the possibility that a person can acquire these techniques through healthful association later in life -- Piaget's infant determinism, like all determinism in human affairs is fallacious because too simple-minded -- but there is mounting evidence that such "remedial" association is less effective, less influential is habituating behaviors than a proper environment during early childhood. And this reinforces the importance of cultivating such an environment through as many means as is practicable and consonant with human nature.

Of course playing by the "rules of the game" includes abiding by the laws of society, which when properly founded are in essence boundary markers between what is unnecessarily and intolerably injurious behavior and what is not. To put it another way, properly founded laws are expressions of the proper limits of exercising our need-fulfilling characteristic human behaviors -- limits which reflect the mutualist view of justice, which dictates that one's behaviors do not unnecessarily and intolerably injure the useful nature of another person's need-fullfilling behaviors. Our behavioral capacities are normally large enough to enable us to meet some extraordinary challenges. This is part of what makes us capable of "adapting" to a wide range of environmental conditions. The raw range of behaviors we are capable of that enables us to meet extraordinary challenges, however, also make us capable of behavioral excesses. Our capacity for behavioral excesses can be a problem for us both intra-personally and inter-personally. Reasoned restraint on the range of our behaviors is, therefore, required in order for us to attain Happiness. These Reason-limited need-fulfilling behaviors are our rights.

In addition to securing a just first distribution of the material produce of a society, and requiring responsible behavior from the responsible, a humane setting will preserve the need-fulfilling autonomy of small groups, for it is only within small groups that genuine individuality and the stability of personality necessary to the attainment of happiness can be found.

Genuine individuality can only be found in small groups because it is only in small groups that the uniqueness of an individual can be felt by the group, and this felt uniqueness is an integral part of the Valued Place which every human has a nature-inhering need for. Further, effectual social controls can only be exercised over an individual's behavior if the individual is personally known to the members of the groups that can wield that control. Effectual social controls are all the various ways in which a society brings pressure to bear on a member when any behavior by that member (short of outright criminality) begins to exceed the limits normal for that individual. The more numerous and widespread throughout a person's life that social controls are the more effective their combined action in helping the individual to keep his behavior within right limits and to return to behavior that is within right limits when powerful desires seduce him outside of those limits. It is important to note that by social controls I mean primarily the threat of the loss, or actual loss, of things desired by the individual which he obtains through the consent of others. Punishment inflicted by impersonal entities, or restrictions forcibly imposed by impersonal entities for the purpose of preventing the individual from behaving outside of social norms are not social controls in the sense that I am using the phrase.

Another aspect of genuine individuality that can only be achieved in small groups is genuine participation in communal affairs. Genuine participation in communal affairs means, foremost, influential participation in the selection of means by which the different groups of which one is a part go about trying to accomplish their tasks. If a group is so large that the lines of communication between an individual and a decision-maker are too long for effective communication of the individual's decision-influencing input, then influential participation by that individual in that group is not possible. It is important to note that effective communication from the standpoint of the individual who initiates it means a successful outcome from the communication. It is not enough to have one's communication received and disregarded, for a disregarded communication means to the person who sent it that the message it contained was not adequately communicated -- if it was adequately communicated it could not be disregarded by the person to whom it was sent.

There are several other goods that require the existence of autonomous small groups -- for example, heightening the desire for freedom, the desire for which requires the existence of choices in ways of doing things -- but an exhaustive discussion of them all is beyond the scope of this essay. The crucial point is that autonomous small groups are essential to the continued existence of variety and ingenuity and strength flowing to weakness, essential to human Happiness.

The framework of the mutualist economy facilitates this autonomy, for it provides a better separation of the power that is wealth, and the concentration of wealth (at least the promise or expectation of it) facilitates the absorbtion of the functions of one group by another.
A humane setting also makes available to the individual the widest practicable access to the collective experience of mankind, and the widest practicable scope of personal experience. This is desirable because through imaginative experience as well as through practical experience humans can make progress towards possessing adequate knowledge of how the world operates and of how we can live humanely in it.

A humane setting also requires a government that governs well.

At the risk of overemphasis I repeat: An environment conducive to the Happiness of all its people, relatively stable and secure from noxious intrusions, is a primary goal of a good society. The primary function of just external governance is the creation and maintenance of this setting in which a life lived in accordance with rational ethics is possible, practicable, and to some extent required. External government performs this function by wielding, through various means, restraining exogenous force.

The modern political state has demonstrated itself incompetent in attaining this goal. I have shown that some of its failings are tied to an outmoded Money Idea. But the source of the modern political state's incompetence, and of western civilization's unwitting regression towards barbarism, is the lack of clarity about the depth to which mutualism suffuses this thing called Happiness we are all pursuing. Moderns do not see clearly through the fog of modern life the amount that others contribute to one's Happiness, to one's successes in one's pursuit of one's Happiness. In this fog, which obscures from our view all the other actors on the stage who are playing supporting roles in the drama we entitle My Life, all our scenes begin, "I have what I have as a result of the work I have done." In this fog we mistakenly see as the only truly relevant fact about this thing we call Happiness the very real fact that at bottom the attainment of one's Happiness requires one to actively pursue and use oneself the goods that are comprised by one's Happiness, a fact on which quite properly rests the doctrine of individualism. But humane individualism, even when it assumes the form in our minds of rugged individualism, is never isolationism. Individuals exists only as parts of a group -- no paradox there, if a person was all alone in the world the very word "individual" would have no practical meaning, for there would be no others of his kind from which he could individuate -- and mutualism is as necessary to healthful individuality as is individualism.

In the absence of a clear sense, commonly held in society, of how much one's successes in one's pursuit of Happiness are the product of mutual effort and cooperation, no amount of cleverness and ingenuity in devising structures of government will suffice to constrain the wielding of government power within the bounds of justice. And over time a society bereft of a common sense that is resting properly and firmly on the ethics of mutualism will degenerate progressively into internal discord, a discord that will be reflected, despite institutional checks of government power, in the degeneration of its politics into a constant use of government power by one group or another to satisfy unjustly the desires of some in society at the expense of the Happiness of others.

The nascent United States had hold of an ethical concept its Founders hoped would suffice as the standard by which Americans could judge, and reach accord, on the question whether their government was acting justly. This ethical concept informed men that in order for their pursuit of Happiness to have a reasonable chance of success they needed decent personal liberties of action. These liberties were held to be a man's rights. One of these liberties was the freedom to own property, as much property as a man's talents and industry could get him, for property was needed if one was to avoid being tyrannized over by those who could withhold access to the necessaries of life. (Of course, Negro slavery could not be reconciled with this concept, and men of sense realized the institution would, eventually, have to be abolished if the moral force of the concept was to endure.) But the ethical concept the Founders hoped would suffice, could never suffice. For it contained a lethal flaw.

It was in the idea of property, that the lethal flaw lurked -- namely, Locke's notion of what was properly one's property. This flaw prevented the Founders' concept of rights from being an expression of a rational ethics that resonated with every man's moral sense, one that could provide a sense of moral cohesion for the nation.

In less than a generation this flawed notion of a proper ethics ran aground on the shoals of conscience and experience. The dense concentration of populations that were being made possible by industry, and their exploitation under the capitalist system, quickly created a sense that something was amiss. The American Dream was being strangled, by the system of property acquisition. This system made it impossible for everyone to have a reasonable chance of actually attaining Happiness. Some men's rights were being reduced to worthlessness by the system. Thereafter the ethical confusion, the systematic domination of some men by others, and the use of government to abet this domination quickly created a schism in society that found expression in a violent effort at political disunion.

John C. Calhoun in his Disquisition on Government noted the inability of the checks and balances of the U.S. system of governments to protect the competing and conflicting interests in society that were arising in the industrial capitalist environment. He offered his theory of concurrent majorities as a remedy, which sought to place the federal legislative veto power in the representatives of "significant" interests, "significant" interests that were common only to some minority or another of the whole people.

Calhoun's insight into the lethal divisions of interests that were being created by the workings of industrial capital was deep, and his intellectual effort to avert the Civil War was herculean. But he did not see all the way to the source of the problem he was trying to correct -- namely, the lack of a commonly held proper ethical ideal. As a result, the analysis that suggested concurrent majorities is flawed and the remedy prescribed fails to cure the affliction because it doesn't reach it. Calhoun's failure is an object lesson worth some attention here, for it reveals the inevitable futility of trying to check government power through mere mechanism.

Failing to see the source of the affliction Calhoun made three errors in his presuppositions about what constitutes proper government: 1)That the essence of civilized government rests on consent ; 2) That government can and ought to be something other than an imposition ; and, 3) That proper governments are established primarily to protect minorities, for preponderant majorities can get along in a rough and tumble way without government, protecting themselves by brute force.

The first two of Calhoun's errors are misapprehensions about human nature -- specifically, what it is in human nature that makes government a necessity (which Calhoun understands it to be).

If proper external government is a necessity, it is a necessity because something in human nature makes the attainment of human Happiness impossible without it. What is this something?

It is the mutualistic character of human nature that makes government a necessity.
Personal organs of self-regulation are not fully developed in us at birth, and are never wholly self-sufficing in life. Our nature is such that each person requires intrusions from our environment in order to make progress in attaining Happiness. These intrusions are needed fuel for reactions in and by us. Consciousness, for example, is budding throughout most of our life. It is enlivened by the intrusions of experience -- both imaginative and practical experience. Memory interacts in the process, sometimes retaining something from an experience, sometimes forgetting it later on. In a very literal sense we grow in consequence of environmental intrusions and the reactions they produce in us which enable us to continue to intrude into the environment. The process of growth in humans is mutualistic at its very core. But growth is haphazard, and easily unbalanced -- inadequate experience can leave us ignorant of the contributions that are being made to our lives by persons quite literally "out of sight, out of mind". In consequence we may be fail to do things that need doing. A man's desire to fulfill a particular nature-inhering need may be cultivated to an outsized proportion because his inexperience has not made him aware of things that would stimulate competing desires, leaving him at least for a time a fragment of a man masquerading in the guise of a whole man. In this condition he retains the irrationality of an inexperienced youngster. A single such individual may be nothing more than a nuisance in the world, his behavior easily restrained by the collective force of those he may quite unwittingly be harming. A nation of such men may prove to be catastrophically noxious in the world.

And so it is that the fact of our initial incomplete self-knowledge and self-consciousness, the possibility of a continuing lack of self-knowledge and self-consciousness due to inadequate experience or forgetfulness, and the fact that human Happiness depends in part on the actions of others, all combine to make government a necessity.

Most adults are aware of this necessity in general terms, but few are fully aware of the essential cause of the necessity (namely, the mutualistic character of our nature), and fewer still are fully aware of what practical acts of an actual government are necessitated by this cause. And here we are confronted with the question of consent.

Ethically speaking, consent cannot properly be a meeting of the minds merely, for minds can meet in wrong places. Nor can it properly be voluntary acceptance merely, for this acceptance can be volunteered for wrong reasons. Utilizing either of these notions of consent as a basis for authorizing the exercise of government power -- as a means of establishing the justness of the exercise of power -- will lead to the horrifying spectacle in which mathematics are cleverly substituted for ethics in politics, a spectacle in which errors in the placement of the veto power is only a sideshow.

Ethically speaking, consent is properly acknowledgment of the reasonableness and justness of an act. A rational man will consent to an exercise of just power because Reason compels him to, and the exercise of that power will not seem to him an imposition but rather a reflection of his Reason. An irrational man will perhaps not consent that the exercise of a just power is just, and the exercise of a just power will seem to him an imposition. In any case the just authority for the exercise of a government power lay within human nature itself, not in the act of saying, "I consent." And in no case can we know whether another man's "I consent" signifies Reason At Work.

This is where Calhoun's third error, probably made in large part because of the historical context in which he found himself, looms large. Proper governments are not instituted primarily to protect an "interest" that is exclusive to any minority of any type or reckoning. Proper governments are instituted to secure a setting in which Happiness is a reasonable possibility for all members of society. This means the "I consent" of an interested minority is no more relevant to the justness of a government's exercise of power than is the consent of a majority.

In consequence of these errors Calhoun's theory of concurrent majorities acquires at least one essential defect. It does not take into consideration the very real possibility that an interested minority will use the veto to thwart legislation that checks an unjust domination of some portion of society by that minority. In fact this consideration applies to the sectional conflict that led to the Civil War. Had the southern slaveholders had a legislative veto in the federal government and used it to block federal legislation outlawing slavery, the interested minority of slaveholders would have been wielding the veto unjustly. Government by concurrent majorities would have been no protection to the "significant interest" in society that was the negro slaves. It would essentially have allowed a "man (an interest -- slaveholding) to be the judge in his (its) own cause" -- the negation of external governance. John Adams saw this defect in democracy, which moved him to pronounce that democracy was not in any meaningful sense government at all. The same pronouncement can be made against concurrent majorities.

What effectual means, then, are available to a society to secure its harmony and the good of all its members against those who may attempt to use government power as a means of injurious domination by some part of society over another part?

There are many -- but I repeat, their effectualness rests on something more than mere ingenuity in applying majoritarian principles. Their effectualness rests on the ethical cohesion of a society, on the obviousness to all of the proper and everpresent purpose of their government. Without a proper and commonly held ethical ideal no manner of mere mechanistic check on the wielding of government power will suffice. With a proper and commonly held ethical ideal very little is needed to restrain injustice under color of authority.

And so I begin my assembly of the means by which a society can see to it that its governments act justly by stating in clear terms a proper ethical ideal, a clear and readily apprehensible notion of a good life lived that resonates with the moral sense common to all men, and which can serve as the standard by which we Americans may judge the propriety of any and all acts of our governments:
We hold this truth to be self-evident -- that all men ought to seek whatever is good and nothing else. The sum of all good things is Happiness, a whole life enriched by the timely fulfillment of all one's nature-inhering needs and lived in accordance with the dictates of justice -- namely, that one act to fulfill one's nature-inhering needs only in ways that preserve to all men in one's society the usefulness of their rights in fulfilling their nature-inhering needs -- so that all men in one's society may attain Happiness.

With this ethical ideal in hand, we may begin crafting means of utilizing it to secure ourselves against those who are tempted to use the powers of government unjustly.

Part of this security may be found by endeavoring to see to it that the wielders of political power are men known by the governed to be just and rational, that they are men who have demonstrated in their day to day dealings with those among whom they live the justness and reasonableness appropriate to the duties of office.

Another part of this security may be found by seeing to it that the duties and powers of each particular office are appropriate to that office.

Republics -- whether they are democratic or aristocratic -- have tended to conflate the two activities of representation and legislation, and place them in the same person. Within societies domineered by the antique form of the Money Idea the result has been that the raiding inclination of the represented often becomes empowered by the force of law. The discontent felt by those of the governed who are being raided instead of being guarded is in part what fuels the legislative instability of societies governed by republican forms of government under the antique Money Idea.

The function of a legislator is essentially that of judging either the justness of the means through which a proposed law will work to accomplish its purpose, or judging the justness of the end sought by the legislation.

A properly structured process of selecting legislators will include requiring a legislator (law-judge) to be elected to office by those voters who are eligible to vote in the elections of the most local level of government in whose jurisdiction the candidate currently resides.This will provide some evidence that the folks who live in the local community from which a candidate embarks on his journey to office, and who are more likely to possess personal knowledge of the candidate, have expressed their confidence in his excellence and moral virtue. The current system of electing federal legislators allows a man to attain office merely by obtaining the suffrage of folks who do not have any personal acquaintance with him whatsoever.

Insofar as a legislator (law-judge) is called upon to render a judgment it is desirable that he not be rendering a judgment about a cause to which he is an interested party. But this is a desire that cannot be perfectly fulfilled because as a member of society it is impossible that he should be totally disinterested in, or totally unaffected by, the outcome of a proposed piece of legislation that is intended to bring about a harmonious social order. However, this desire can be fulfilled to the extent that a legislator (law-judge) not have the opportunity to be party to the proposing of legislation.

If a legislator's (law-judges) function is not to propose legislation, then to whom does this function properly belong? It belongs to those who are seeking the use of government power. We cannot know with certainty the reasons why someone would be moved to propose a piece of legislation, so we must simply look to the fact that they are moved to do so. But it would be a gratuitous use of a legislator's (law-judge's) time to ask him to render a decision about every piece of legislation that it may be the whim of anyone to propose, so some means of limiting the flow must be crafted. One obvious means of restricting the flow is seeing to it that only a person who has invested the time, energy, and talent, and who has interested enough folks in his ideas to get himself elected to the office of legislation-proposer, has the privilege of formally proposing legislation. And if we further filter the flow by making it a requirement that any proposed legislation have the concurrence of a majority of legislation-proposers, then we will have given a number of men with different combinations of knowledge and experience, and whose ideas for legislation have won them the votes of a large number of the electors in their neck of the woods, a crack at shaping a proposed piece of legislation so that it will produce an outcome that takes into consideration the special endeavors of a sizable portion, if not all, of society. This is the proper function of representation.

The US House of Representatives, then, is properly a consultative body and ought not to have its members institutionally allied to members of the law-judging branch -- for example, by political party affiliation or by standing for election before the same constituency. To allow such an alliance would be to negate the value of separating the representative function from the legislative function.

How can this separation be achieved and maintained in practice? By adding to the requirement that a legislator (law-judge) be elected by members of his local community the procedural check of making election of local legislators (law-judges) non-partisan. And if we require that a legislator (law-judge) not be eligible to actually render a verdict until one session of the Federal House of Representatives (or the State House) has intervened between his election to the pool we shall probably have diluted the influence of political parties on legislators to the extent practicable. This attention to the local legislator is necessary because this is the pool from which the legislators (law-judges) for all the levels of government with greater jurisdictional scope are to selected.

Selected, not elected, because there ought to be a different combination of legislators sitting in judgment of each proposed piece of legislation, just as different combinations of jurors are seated to render judgment in each case requiring the judgment of a jury. The process of selection ought to be sortition, for the tribunal's purpose is not representation of the various parts of society, but rather to render an ethical judgment which all members of the pool have been reckoned capable by their electors.

This means, of course, that there are not separate elections held to create pools for state or federal legislators (law-judges).

The size of the actual tribunal that sits in judgment of the piece of proposed legislation that comes before it ought to be smaller rather than larger in consideration of the disruption that sitting on such a tribunal causes in the life of a law-judge. The fewer legislators (law-judges) called to the seat of each level of government, the less disruption.

The verdict of the tribunal ought to require near unanimity, but not unanimity, for to do so leaves open the possibility that a single man shall end up being the judge in his own cause. A three-legislator (law-judge) panel suffices in regard to this consideration.

If there is not unanimity about the necessity of attaining a particular end that is aimed at by a piece of legislation, then a required concurrence of interested minorities who refuse their consent merely forecloses the possibility of legislation towards that end without facilitating compromise on the question, which is a necessity in all governments.This applies also to the question of the necessity of a particular means to an end. In a system of concurrent majorities the intransigence of any interested minority actually precludes the compromise of putting a contested question of necessity to trial by Felt Experience and judgment by experience-tempered, sympathy-tempered Reason. This is the court that all honest disputes about ways of attaining Happiness ought to be tried in.

This means that provision must be made to effectually "sunset" all laws, so that a new debate on their necessity can be held in the public institutional fora of law-making after some experience of the operation of the laws has been felt.

Another part of our security against injustice under the color of authority may be obtained by seeing to it that political governors feel the full force of the laws they make and enforce. This has been an inadequacy of all societies under the domination of the antique form of the Money Idea, for this form of the Money Idea has made it possible for government officers to live apart from much of the society they are empowered to govern. This ability to set themselves apart from society also has the very detrimental effect of injuring the fellow-feeling that must exist between the governed and their governors. Without the bonds of sympathy holding them fast to the governed, governors will often be seduced to disregard the needs of some part of society, or they will feel themselves outside the constraints of behavior they choose to impose on others, which will inevitably lead to a general lack of trust in government by the governed, and all the evils that attend such mistrust. The Mutualist economy is an integral part of this means of security, for government officers are not exempt from participating in material production.

The separation of some of the general powers of government into separate governments is desirable because it allows a society a means of testing the compatibility of various levels of personal freedom with the Common Good of Happiness, a means of tailoring to local requirements the broadcloth of rights weaved on the general framework.

Some of the genius behind the U.S. Constitution can be seen in the effort to separate some of the powers of government into different branches and levels of government. The writings of the founders gives us evidence that a greater separation of both the activities of the federal government and the sources of power or authority for these activities was considered but abandoned in light of circumstances.

With regard to the division of government powers between governments, and particularly to blocking usurpation of the "reserved powers" that are set forth in the Constitution we are brought face to face with one of the more glaring weaknesses in the current U.S. system -- namely, its reliance on an internal federal system of checks and balances as a means of checking federal usurpation of powers reserved to the several states.

A case can be made that the federal usurpation of the powers reserved to the several states will be better checked by the pool-system of legislation I have proposed than by a Senate elected either by popular vote or by the means originally laid down in the Constitution.

Additionally, the venue in which such a usurpation ought to be contested is not the US Supreme Court. This is so for several reasons.

One reason is that the justices of the US Supreme Court live near and are convened in the seat of the federal government, and thus acquire from their environment a similarity of experience. This similarity of experience is potentially injurious to Reason. The territorial pool from which would-be judges of these cases spring ought to be the whole of the nation. Reason demands this because of Reason's task. I have stated that the formal goal of Reason is harmonization -- harmonization of all a man's nature-inhering needs (desires)with one another so that all may be fulfilled, and harmonization of one's endeavors to attain Happiness with the endeavors of other's that affect or are affected by one's endeavors, so that all are satisfied. In order to accomplish this task reason must circumnavigate the question What ought I to do? from as many points of the Compass of Experience and Knowledge as it can so that no need is overlooked injuriously in the quest to fulfill another need. When this question is asked by a judicial body it must have the widest and deepest experience and knowledge of the world practicable so that it may answer the question as reasonably and as sympathetically as possible, which means that the pool of would-be judges ought not to be limited to men who live in the same locale.

Another reason why the US Supreme Court is an improper venue is that it is a creature of the alleged usurpers. If a state legislature holds the opinion that the federal President and Senate have been complicit in a usurpation of state powers, the verdict rendered in the contest will not likely engender respect if it is rendered by men who hold their office in part because of the suspect judgment of the President and Senate, and whose selection may well have been the result of a certain like-mindedness with respect to constitutional interpretation.

Therefore, this power of judging ought to be vested in a tribunal convened solely for the purpose and consisting of an equal number of both state and federal judges who are chosen by sortition from all judges seated in the respective jurisdictions. Three judges from the federal pool and three from the state pool are the minimum reasonable number because this makes it possible to require the concordance of two judges from each jurisdiction for a verdict, thereby preventing a single man (or a single interest) from being judge in what may be viewed "his own case", which would be the result of requiring a unanimous decision. And even though the power vested in the Supreme Court to sit in judgment of such contests came to it not by the Constitution, but by an act of federal legislation, this issue probably ought to be addressed through a Constitutional amendment.

Lastly, the contest is not properly decided once for all by this single verdict -- a great defect in the present system of adjudicating contests between cooperating powers.

It is a proper safeguard of the individual that he may not be twice tried for the same act (calling a single act by different names in different jurisdictions -- which is what the present practice of trying folks in federal court if they "get off" in a court of a more localized jurisdiction amounts to -- is an affront to Reason). It is proper because of many reasons, not the least of which is that the government may incarcerate a person while he is awaiting trial and being tried, and continual trials could have the result of permanent incarceration of a man who was being perpetually found "not guilty" of the act for which he was being tried.

But the same concern does not apply to contests between cooperating powers. Re-contesting a dispute, especially before a different set of judges and after some practical experience of the consequences of the preceding verdict(s) have been felt, is an acceptable means of applying Reason to the question at hand. It may be found that wielding the power in question in practice turns out to encompass a far wider expansion of power than was thought a priori. The tribunal and means of selecting its members that I have suggested affords a systematic process of applying both experience of the previous verdict and a disinterested re-hearing of previous arguments (disinterested at least to the extent that the reconstituted tribunal will be manned by different judges, who will consequently not have the personal interest of buttressing their own previous judgment).

The same consideration applies to verdicts rendered in contests about the constitutionality of any law -- federal, state, county, whatever the jurisdiction -- by non-government parties.

A fuller survey of the particulars of the means that are suggested by mutualism of obtaining security against injustice at the hands of the governments of the US is beyond the scope of this essay, but the foregoing illumines the way well enough.

How do we get from where we are to the humane setting I have suggested?

Somehow a frank and widespread public discussion of our unwholesome ethics must be got underway. This discussion has been stultified by the institutions whose powers in society depend on the continued acceptance of these noxious ethics. The "left" and "right" in America are both offspring of the same Enlightenment darkness -- misconceived notions of rights, misconceptions about human nature, wrong-headed notions about the conditions of healthful human individuality, etc. In the main all that separates the "right" from the "left" nowadays is a disagreement between their movers and shakers over which side shall get to make management decisions about how to keep money circulating. The quest for a decent personal liberty which animated the "right" for a time has been wholly subsumed by this management tussle, a tussle that has left the "right" in the shabby position of defending the Consumption Society as the last bastion of human freedom. It is probably no mere coincidence that the so-called "rightist" political party lost interest in securing a decent personal liberty for folks when it discovered recently that there is no longer a "silent majority" who want to preserve their jobs (because their jobs no longer garner for them a stable family life, Valued Places, etc.) and who can, therefore, be counted on to vote for the party of "business". Working stiffs are now just an agglomeration of "minorities", no longer the cohesive social group with the mass and inertia to stabilize the nation, no longer worth treating with respect after having been courted. The social instability that exists as a result of the disintegration of that stabilizing group is worth noting. The false dichotomy presented by the "right" and the "left" as being the significant dichotomy in social thought is an obstacle it will take imagination and boldness to overcome.

Imagination and boldness, but also a great deal of wisdom and care, for the detestation that has been awakened can easily be fanned into a frenzy of destruction, disintegrating societies are tinder boxes. We've had experience with a tender box America, in the early morning hours of April 12, 1861 - a lesson no sensible man will forget.

The difficulties and dangers notwithstanding, public discussion of our unwholesome ethics has got to get underway. For unless, and until, the cause of the felt uglinesses of our ways of living is identified clearly and in a way that is readily apprehensible to folks, the clear but false ideas that are its source will continue to eat away at our social cohesion until dissolution is beyond stopping.

Men of goodwill must not follow in the defeatist footsteps of Nietzsche, nor of the Republican leadership, nor of those who think there is a blank impossibility of passing on the experience from one generation to the next that is as necessary to humane progress as is reason. There is a possibility of human progress, at least for those who take advantage of the occasional opportunity for it that comes our way.

The purpose of this essay has been to demonstrate that one of those occasional opportunities stands before us beckoning .

Eastport, Maine
February, 2002

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