1. INTRODUCTION

Three centuries ago the Enlightenment proclaimed boldly that it had discovered the source of man's unhappiness in society and offered the world a set of concepts with which to successfully pursue happiness.
During the years since that bold proclamation material production has boomed within the economic and political power structures of western civilization that were built from the Enlightenment's social engineering blueprints. But these structures and the boom they set off have not quelled the war of all against all. The last century was the bloodiest in history. The Enlightenment accomplished the attenuation of the church's political power in western civilization, as it set out to do. But liberated from the burden of the virtues pressed on him by the church secularized Economic Man is still unhappy in his life. Our social cohesiveness continues to be eaten away by something.
The current state of affairs may be a signal that there are tensions in human association that cannot be held adequately in balance. But I am not convinced that it is. I think the current state of affairs is a signal that the Enlightenment failed, and we have up 'til now failed, to correctly identify the corrosive force within human society and to understand how it destroys. I think once properly identified the corrosive force can be got rid of.
Moreover, I suggest that far from ridding us of the corrosive force at work in human society the Enlightenment exposed every nook and cranny of life to it. And I suggest that we have failed during the last bloodsoaked century to stem that corrosive infiltration because we have allowed our minds to be ensnared in the bitter black tangle of the Enlightenment's radical errors and oversights and misbegotten concepts.
The purpose of this essay is to clear a path out of the dark tangle bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment, and then to properly identify the source of societal dissolution. In order to clear that path I will correct the following errors:
-- The radical Enlightenment error that man is by nature solitary and at bottom motivated by a fear of death.
-- The Enlightenment's disregard of Aristotle's concept of Right Desire and of the power of the desire for Valued Place.
-- The Enlightenment's blank failure to analyze the Privilege To Waste that lies concealed within the conventions of property ownership.
--The Enlightenment notions of liberty and right, misbegotten from the above errors.

2. MISBEGOTTEN NOTIONS

I begin the path-clearing with a look at two well-known notions that have come from the lexicon of the Enlightenment and which have been used almost universally by contemporary social and political philosophers to ill-effect -- liberty and right.
These two ideas are basically defined by reference to each other in the Enlightenment's language of liberation. Liberty is the essence of right -- right being an interest in doing some things free from interference by others and in protecting the produce of that doing. Right essentially forms the just boundary of liberty.
But why ought men to be free to do some things? And free to do what things, specifically?
The answers given by the Enlightenment to these questions announced that at heart the Enlightenment was a battle for the authority to re-define man (as the naturally solitary "self") and to name the interests of the "self" that ought to be the basis for the good political regime. Reason was to be the new and sole authority supervising political (and intellectual) life, supplanting the authority of revelation and ecclesiastical structures.
The Enlightenment thinkers succeeded in winning the claim to that authority. Each man was proclaimed by the enlighteners to be an autonomous and naturally stable self, divided in the pre-enlightened world, but split between nature and society not between body and soul as the ancients had asserted. The enlighteners proclaimed that man was solitary by nature, and though he lived everywhere in association with other men he was unhappy in those associations because they were not based on the interests of a naturally solitary being. And the enlighteners proclaimed that because man is naturally a whole and not an amalgamation or a composite of essentially dissimilar elements -- body and soul -- there might be a way for him to stay whole in society, if motivations to associate could be found that appealed to what was real in his natural self and not to virtues engendered by false notions of a "soul". At least a part of each of those three proclamations is false, as I shall demonstrate.
John Locke asserted that one of the things that was real in the self was the self's desire for preservation, that this was evident from everyone's fear of violent death. This overarching desire comprised the desires for food, clothing, shelter, health, and protection from predation (especially inter-human predation). He posited that one way to heal the split in man was to base society on a man's natural desires for these things and on a man's realization -- arrived at from an education founded on reason -- that he could acquire them better and hold on to them more easily by declaring war on Mother Nature instead of on other men, a war of all against all being the normal condition of naturally solitary man.
One of the cornerstones of this peace among men, according to Locke, was to be the recognition that what a man labored to obtain ought to be his. Another cornerstone was to be the recognition that the attainment of his material necessaries was slowed down when Reason was shackled by false authorities.
In practice this was to mean that because each man is unique each man ought to be free to utilize his Reason as he sees fit, for any interference in the use of a man's Reason is an impediment to the progress promised by the philosophic disciplines -- science, mathematics, and philosophy itself -- in subjugating Nature.
According to Locke, these freedoms to reason for oneself and to seek and possess property were a man's natural right because they allowed a man to be whole, which was necessary if he was to achieve happiness.
But through this natural right doorway of liberty created by Locke also passed a great deal of License. License in the social realm, license in the political realm, and license in the economic realm. This occurred in part because of the theories of democratism (popular sovereignty) that developed logically from the conception of man as a self who was naturally solitary. It occurred also in part because of epistemological efforts to shrink the scope of the legitimate claims to moral knowledge. And it occurred in part because of Locke's error of introducing an unnatural species of right in his analysis of property rights.
The structure of economic and political power we now have is a direct outgrowth of Locke's errors.
Jean Jacques Rousseau had his doubts that Locke's look into the interests of the self had penetrated deeply enough. Rousseau saw underlying those desires for preservation something more basic. The fact that man wanted to avoid death meant that being alive was good, desirable. But what was it in life that was desirable?
Rousseau answered in the main incorrectly because he, like Locke, allowed himself to be split on the false dichotomy of nature-society. The view of man as a naturally solitary "self" who is split by various aspects of society, a view which has hypnotized modern psychology in its other-directed/self-directed guise, hypnotized Rousseau, too. Split on the false dichotomy, Rousseau saw as the more basic experience of existence enjoyment in the life of the mind and art, contemplating beauty, reposing the mind in the truths it has discovered, the activities of noble idleness. These were the things wanted most deeply, and these were the things Locke's industrious economic creature -- the bourgeois -- had not time to attain or enjoy.
By intentionally disregarding a momentous occurrence, and constructing the artificial notion of man as naturally solitary and in a state of war with all other natural men, both Locke and Rousseau created a barrier that prevented the correct identification of the source of man's unhappiness in society. Much of modern intellectual life has been lived in that artificial tangle, consumed in playing out the confrontation between the two men's false ideas about a journey made by a fictitious creature.

3. A MOMENTOUS OCCURRENCE

We know little or nothing of the moment of origin of several traditional social institutions, institutions that exist to this very day, and that are still crucial (though withering) constituents in social cohesion. The experiences that led to their formation are experiences of which there is little or no tangible record. And it is doubtful whether we have the imagination to recreate fully and accurately those experiences and to live imaginarily in them for even a few moments. Nonetheless, the very lifecycle of a human tells us something of the greatest import about the individual and his relation to society -- some semblance of socialization, perhaps even some semblance of one or more of the ancient social institutions that still exist, existed at the moment man appeared on the planet, and when man entered the world he entered as part of a social fabric, however loosely or tightly woven it may have been.
The momentous fact of a priori socialization held a key that was there for the using, and both Locke and Rousseau (and a host of others) disregarded it and busily set about denaturing man so he would fit into a fiction they had created.
At the risk of overemphasis I reiterate: Man is not, nor ever could have been solitary by nature. We disregard that fact at the peril of our civilization.
Within that fact about man's nature -- the fact of a priori socialization -- lies a desire at least as basic as any asserted by Locke or Rousseau. It is this desire unfulfilled that is the source of the longing which Rousseau detected in the unhappy bourgeois. The ancients were acutely aware of the existence of this desire, and much of ancient society was structured to fulfill it. It is capable of tempering anti-social impulses, and of motivating us to do properly much of the work Locke'e theory exhorts us to doing without proper restraint. It is the glue that makes social cohesion possible. And it is at the same time a vital source of societal vitality.

4. VALUED PLACE

This crucial desire is the desire for Valued Place.
A working definition of Valued Place is needed here, and I offer the following: Valued Place is a functional place within a group that is succeeding in accomplishing its tasks. 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.
The desire for Valued Place interlocks all the varied and varying desires that we must each prioritize as time and circumstances demand. Without it it is impossible to comprehend fully the idea of Right Desire to which Aristotle pointed us as a touchstone of truth about Good and Bad in human behavior. And it is only with Right Desire that we can strip from liberty the contaminant of license and properly formulate right .
Next, then, a brief look at Right Desire.

5. RIGHT DESIRE

In his Nichomachean Ethics (Book 6, section 2) Aristotle suggested that there was another type of truth besides the truth that conforms to things as they really are. This other type of truth conforms to Right Desire.
Right Desire is a concept that was overlooked or disregarded by Enlightenment thinkers, and that continues to be disregarded today by many thinkers -- with disastrous results. Without it a problem posed by David Hume's assertion is insoluble.
David Hume asserted that a prescriptive conclusion cannot be drawn from a premise that is entirely descriptive. Hume's assertion is one of the underpinnings of the moral relativism that pervades modern thought. This relativism proclaims that if Hume's assertion is correct, then there can be no valid "ought" judgements -- and what a man does can be judged only on how well it achieves for him the fulfillment of his desires. Moral relativism is a concern in the context of properly conceiving liberty for the obvious reason that it removes from the concept of liberty any boundaries set by what is objectively good for man, and extends the boundaries of liberty to some nebulous region of Utility in maximizing pleasure and ease. Hume's assertion was crucial to removing the moral claims of religion from the realm of knowledge and consigning them to the realm of opinion -- a desirable outcome in the eyes of the enlighteners.
But Relativism's proclamation is not correct, because of the existence of a truth that conforms to Right Desire.
What is Right Desire?
As its name implies, it is the desire to seek what we ought to. And what ought we to seek? Simply answering, " The good," won't solve the problem of subjectivism and relativism because Baruch Spinoza is certainly correct that we often call a thing good because we desire it -- even if the thing is not always good in fact, and may be an apparent good merely.
The problem can be solved by differentiating between types of desires. One type of desire we acquire as a result of our experiences, these desires differ from individual to individual and from time to time. Another type of desire is that which inheres in man's nature, and these desires are therefore the same (in kind, if not in degree) in all members of the human species. From here on I'll use the phrase natural need to refer to particulars of the type of desire that inheres in our nature, and acquired want to refer to particulars of the other type of desire.
We cannot have a natural need to seek and to possess when attained anything in a degree of excess that injures our ability to fulfill all our natural needs, or to a degree of excess that knowingly and unnecessarily injures other's ability to fulfill all their natural needs. This is so because that which makes a man's unity possible cannot at the same time and in the same respect make that man's unity impossible. This unity -- the unified totality of a whole life enriched by all one's rightly fulfilled needs, needs that are mutually interdependent and complimentary and counter-balancing when fulfilled -- is happiness, philosophically conceived to be the total good. And because (as we shall soon see) some of our natural needs are for certain types of association with men whose efforts to attain happiness we are aiding, the prohibition against injurious excess extends to that which is injurious to others.
Thus all our desires for that which fulfills our natural needs are Right Desires, and whatever fulfills a natural need is an actual good, not merely an apparent good -- whether we have a noticeable desire for it or not.
This difference between natural need and acquired want makes possible the statement of the following self-evident truth: We ought to seek whatever is good (whatever we have a natural need for) and nothing else.
This self-evident truth makes possible the solution of the problem posed by David Hume's assertion.
By starting with the above self-evident truth as a premise and superadding a descriptive truth about human nature, one can move to a conclusion that contains prescriptive truth. This means that an "ought" judgement has objective truth if it is an expression of a desire for a good in a degree that fulfills a natural need. This in turn means that one may move certain moral judgements from the realm of opinion -- subjective and relative -- to the realm of knowledge -- objective and absolute.
This concept of Right Desire gives us some objective means with which to determine the boundary between liberty and license (to determine what is "excessive acquisition", for example), means which will help to clarify what one has a right to. And it corrects the Enlightenment error that man can be made whole by throwing off certain virtues the origin of which was putatively ascribed by the Enlightenment to be the false notion of the "soul".

6. NATURAL GOODS OF ASSOCIATION

The fact that some ways of associating not only fail to fulfill natural needs but are injurious to one's ability to obtain naturally needed association at all makes the selection of the means of associating a subject of vital import. And this fact raises a question: How can it be that a creature who is naturally social is even capable of anti-social behavior?
The answer to this question is found in the fact that man does not enter the world with a fully actualized set of instincts (endowments of knowledge and preformed patterns of behavior in accordance with that knowledge) adequate to all his needs. Instead, he is endowed with a set of potentialities that are barely, if at all, actualized at the moment he comes into the world. The barely actualized potentialities are the sources of those instinctive impulses upon which we act when young (and upon which we act when we are older, but no wiser). Man has a potentiality for social behavior. He also has a potentiality for aggressive violence which if not actualized rightly makes for war when war is not needed, detrimental.
The intellectual methods (beyond trial and error) by which humans develop their potentialites for social behavior are difficult to ascertain with precision. Jean Piaget suggested that because logic appears to be incompletely developed in young children it is likely that one method involves at its earlier stages a process that is not wholly rationally deductive. Piaget suggests this method consists of matching the reactions of one person whom the child is observing to the prior actions of another person whom the child has observed -- matching these reactions to actions more as reactions by the one to the "signals" from the other than as rationally chosen responses to "situations". Piaget's analysis concluded with the assertion that a form of infant determinism is at work. Recent studies are finding evidence that a childhood environment deficient in examples of adults interacting cooperatively and collaboratively leaves the child deficient in these social skills, but not completely irremedially so -- indicating that Piaget's determinism is unfounded, and that what is actually occuring in very young children is "habituation" merely.
This growing body of evidence supports the conclusion that it is a natural need of humans to have the type of association that imparts to us the social technique of cooperation and collaboration, lest we learn primarily the techniques of acquiring whatever we desire by a vicious form of competition (based on the use of brute force) -- techniques that injure our ability to acquire natural goods available to us only through association.
What are these goods that we are deprived of through a vicious form of competition? What is this vicious form of competition? And how does it work to deprive us of these goods?
Some of the important goods are: Sources of Valued Place; the cohesive and stable nurturing environment from which children learn much of their social technique; effectual social controls; and, the genuine participation in communal affairs that makes possible genuine, not merely numerical, individuation.
I have already defined Valued Place and taken a brief look at the stable nurturing environment that facilitates acquiring the habits of cooperation and collaboration.
Effectual social controls are all the various ways in which a society brings to the attention of a member any behavior by that member (short of outright criminality) which is injurious to himself or the society. The more numerous and widepread 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 wrong desires seduce him outside of those limits. It is important to note that by social controls I mean primarily the threat of the 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 withdrawing his allegiance to the community are not social controls in the sense that I am using the phrase.
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 accomplishing their tasks.
What is the vicious form of competition that deprives us of these goods?

7. THE BRUTE FORCE RIGHTS

Rights is one of those Enlightenment terms that has to do with defining what we may fence other people off from, which is what we think of as liberty. According to the lexicon of the Enlightenment there are two varieties of rights. Natural rights are those rights we have by virtue of the needs common to us all which flow from our human nature. Social compact rights are ostensibly those rights we acquire by virtue of consentual compacts with other men. In his Essay Concerning The True Original, Extent, And End Of Civil-Government John Locke pointed out the distinction between these two varieties of rights.
In the chapter Of Property Locke noted that men had a natural common right to that which they could obtain by foraging, and that the limits of this natural right were set by personal need and waste -- a man had a right to only what he could, without waste, personally consume (use) to satisfy his natural needs. Locke also noted that men had a natural common right to appropriate land from the common, and that the limits of this natural right were set by waste and by leaving "enough, and as good left" for those as yet unprovided for.
Locke went on to note that at some point in human affairs men conferred on themselves, by virtue of compact, the right to greater amounts of land and other property. This social compact right quickly created a condition in which there was no longer land "enough, and as good left" in the world freely accessible to the unpropertied. This condition gave to land some value beyond that which labor and ingenuity added to it -- the value of human-created scarcity. This added value meant that a man had a right to claim large possessions of property and to let it go to waste -- for even waste land had some value to the owner now that there was no longer land "enough, and as good left". Thus, the right to waste became part of the bundle of property rights.
The existence of the fences, physical and legal, made possible by the social compact right to large possessions of land, now deprive many men of free access to material necessaries with which to mix their labor. These fences, and the guns that defend them, are what put teeth into an owner's demand that his terms of trade be met or else, they enforce his or else -- his withholding access to his property, his wasting that property if he wishes. They superadd to the value of the property that is contributed by labor and ingenuity the vicious value resulting from human-created scarcity, a vicious value that Pierre Joseph Proudhon boldly asserted made such conventions of property ownership legalized theft. It is important to keep in mind that the superadded value is vicious because there is now no longer "enough, and as good left" in the world.
If there was still freely accessible land "enough, and as good left" in the world, the value added to an owner's land (and the property derived from it ) by the right to waste would be only that value freely added as a result of the would-be trader's willingness to trade more of his labor (or produce) -- physical, or intellectual, or both -- for the land (or goods) that are to be potentially left to waste if the owner's terms of trade are not met. The reasons for this willingness might include an appreciation for the skill of the owner's workmanship, or an appreciation of the ease which the ingeniously devised item will make possible in the trader's future labors. This condition is a truly Free-Market -- the values added to the items in the market have no hint of coercion in them.
"Enough, and as good left" is a precise formulation of the condition necessary to the existence of a Free-Market. Because it is not possible for unpropertied men to travel great distances when they are injuriously deprived of a material necessary, the "enough, and as good left" condition must be understood to apply locally -- that is, in practicable human terms -- and not merely cosmically. It is logically unsound to claim that a local market is free when the unnaturally scarce item in question is freely available half-way across the world but the trip half-way across the world is not physically practicable for those deprived of the item locally. The use of the word available in that context is absurd, making the sentence self-contradictory. For example, if I appropriated from the common a parcel of land that contained large quantities of a mineral necessary to human well-being and there are no other deposits of the mineral locally, then the market for that mineral would no longer be free -- the social compact right to large possessions of that which I can't personally consume would in this case introduce a value of coercion in the trade, an or else that entailed injurious deprivation to the would-be trader if he did not meet my terms of trade.
It ought to be clear now that in conditions of scarcity the right to waste gives men a means of coercing out of other men more in receipt for access to land (and the goods derived from it) than is given. This coercively added value is one of the factors, along with uncoercively added values placed on traded goods (labor and property) by personal judgement and personal whim, that cause the value of money to fluctuate in day to day use. And it is the coercive power to cause the value of money to fluctuate -- power derived from the right to waste -- that makes money useful as a means of concentrating wealth. So it is that the right to waste creates, in the form of money, a coercive means with which to monopolize power over other men's lives -- the power to control what they have access to and how they labor.
Why would any men consent, as Locke said they did, to a social compact that tossed out all original limitations on the rightful extent of property ownership? We now know why, in part -- because it allowed those who consented to get more from their property than they put into it. Even a man who was going to be put in a servile condition by such a compact might consent to it so long as that compact held out for him the possibility that he might one day be able to use what he obtained through his servility to gratify his desires for large possessions of property and the mastery over men they make possible.
But, of course, not all men consented freely, tacitly or otherwise, to the social compact that overthrew the rightful limitations on property acquisition set by common natural need . Many already lived in conditions of servility imposed on them by open violence or by the threat of violence and injurious deprivation, and these men accepted the "compact" in large part because they had not the force of arms sufficient to defeat the force employed to enforce it.
Locke's decision to avoid discussing the calculated violence (actually committed and merely threatened) that was in reality a part of the development of the social "compact" that made large possessions of land a right is understandable. He was a polemicist, interested in denaturing man in order to demonstrate how the trip from nature to civil society is short and easy for the "industrious" and "rational". It was not prudent for him to shine too bright a light on the violence underlying his social compact right. But the dissolving condition of our society gives us some reason to question whether Locke made an error by asserting that narrowly utilitarian social compacts made by brute force and unconnected to natural need are a proper basis for a political regime.
But consented to, or not, the social compact that granted the status of right to owning large possessions of land and controlling how others use that land and on what terms is the soul of the vicious form of competition that is working to dissolve society.
Rather than accept man's full nature and battle the social compact that conferred the right to waste, Locke chose to denature man and leave this corrosive force alone. We must not follow his example.
How does this vicious form of competition work to deprive us of the goods of association?

8.THE CORROSIVE PROCESSES OF COMPETITION

The process through which the failure to provide these natural goods develops in a civilization is the same process through which all known civilizations have been built.
In the early stages of civilization-building lines of communication are developed that allow information, commodities, and labor to move between the various territories that are coming under the control of the centralizing authorities who are providing the cohesive energy for the nascent civilization. If and when the value of the information, commodities, and labor that moves along these lines of communication becomes enhanced by the type of ownership "convention" that confers the right to waste on owners, then the coercion-created competition for wealth, and the concentrations of wealth thus generated, create along these lines of communication a flow of control of resources away from the local communities and towards the centralizing (wealth controlling) entities. The outflow of such forms of control to the centralizing entities immediately creates spiraling effects -- the outflow increasing whenever the diluting of a local (social, political, or economic) group's relevance to its members weakens their allegiance to the local group (or whenever the increased power gained by the centralizing entity enables it to merely wrest away from the local group another of the group's socially relevant functions).
An example of the consequences of this corrosive spiral effect is the decrease in the effectiveness of social controls. When a remote centralizing entity has acquired control of, say, a local business and begins to offer advancement within the business without any consideration of the individual's conduct within his local community, the web of effectual social controls is weakened. The more aspects of the individual's life that become detached from consideration of his local community life, the less effectual become the social controls. Eventually it is likely that the individual's behavior begins to succumb to the seductions of whatever temptations are strongest at the moment.
Spiral effects are not confined to merely personal conduct. The outflow of control and power to the centralizing entities eventually reaches the point at which the individual loses the sense of influence (and most actual influence) in the direction of the affairs of these colossi, and consequently in the direction of his own activities. If an individual is forced by laws issued from a personally uninfluencable remote authority to conduct the business of his life in ways unpalatable to him, he will likely lose interest in participating in that politics. Likewise, if an individual cannot obtain permission to try to accomplish a task that is part of his livelihood in a way he thinks will be an improvement on the existing method, then the individual is likely to feel insecure and eventually hostile toward the leadership of the enterprise at which he is working. This hostility provides impetus to join groups that are hostile to the centralizing entity's authority. Over time these hostile groups work to hasten the dissolution of the civilization.
An important aspect of this loss of personal influence is a loss of Valued Places. This loss is significant in itself, because the individual's search for new Valued Places contributes to the formation of those associations hostile to the civilization.
The loss of Valued Places is also significant because it is allied with the developing failures of the mechanisms of societal vitality caused by the right to waste.

9. ESSENTIAL INEQUALITY AND SOCIETAL VITALITY

What is it that constitutes a society's vitality?
A primary source of a society's vitality is beneficial strength flowing freely to points of weakness. Societies disintegrate, collapse, die, when this flow of beneficial strength to points of weakness is impeded excessively.
Impediments to the free flow of beneficial strength to points of weakness can be properly understood as Cost in human terms. Some of the forms in which this cost is imposed are: Forcing one into labors one does not value; forcing one into labors that consume too much of one's day; limiting one's access to forms of labor one values; and limiting one's ability to find associations in which one may authentically participate personally in the political, economic, and educational affairs of the community. All of these forms of cost are imposed through covertly coercive means by civilizations which have reached a definite level of social complexity that the right to waste allows them to reach, and all reduce one's ability to find Valued Place and genuine individuality.
An example of these covert impositions of cost is the need for having money . This imposition has the effect of drawing an inordinate amount of a society's intellectual vigor into economic pursuits -- commercialism flourishes, and ingenuity is 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. 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 necessaries (goods and services) of a society are produced or provided by a relatively small fraction of the available labor of a society. In an economic scheme powered by the manmade scarcity created and legitimized by our right to waste, and in which goods and services are distributed by money, 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 most people 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 make money 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 an more persons. The Valued Places it offers become scarcer and scarcer.
The consequences of this loss of Valued Place are demoralization, alienation, and all the social ills that attend those conditions -- today these include crime, suicide, and addiction (to alcohol, drugs, gambling, TV, electronic diversions, buying things, etc.).
Other losses of societal vitality resulting from the costs that civilizations with long lines of communication between leaders and the led impose on a society are throttled explorations (personal and collective), falling rates of invention, falling rates of political participation. and a skewing of the production of goods and services towards undynamic and unnecessarily wasteful enterprises.
All of these losses of vitality are evident in America.
What is the genesis of this flow of beneficial strength to points of weakness?
There is, manifestly, an essential inequality between humans -- some are male, some female, some are bigger, some more intelligent, some more aggressive, etc. This essential inequality has as its source a natural biological phenomenon that is largely beyond the control of human agencies. It is this essential inequality that creates the initial differential in strengths (physical and intellectual) which makes possible the flow of relative strength to relative weakness.
This essential inequality between persons is a vital factor in the process of individuation that each human undertakes in the quest for happiness -- making possible an individual that is distinct from others in more than a purely numerical sense.
This essential inequality is also a vital factor in one's ability to find Valued Places -- for a person in need of another's strength-in-aid is a potential source of Valued Place for a person with the needed strength.
This essential inequality between humans is not eradicable. But it can be affected -- increased or decreased to some degree -- by human interventions. The process of beneficial intervention in this regard, of strength aiding weakness to become non-weakness when non-weakness is desirable, is itself part of the flow and crucial to a society's vitality. We see this flow of beneficial strength to weakness in the process of rearing children, in education, in health care, etc.
Another source of societal vitality is competition between functionally relevant associations for the allegiance of members.
Functionally relevant associations are embodiments of certain values, of sets of goals, and of means with which to attain the goals towards which those values direct us. The complex interplay and competition between these associations is a rich source of ingenuity, vital to the health of a society.
Further, this competition between functionally relevant associations stimulates the desire to acquire genuine personal freedom of action -- the freedom to choose between competing means of obtaining natural goods. This is so because the desire for personal freedom thrives on one's belief in the possibility that there can actually exist competing external means between which one can choose to obtain natural goods.
Any administrative scheme to monopolize the power of a society must, in order to achieve and maintain its power monopoly, absorb the socially relevant functions of institutions that are competing with the scheme for functional relevance in society. This monopolization of socially relevant functions effectively kills off the socially vital competition between institutional means of obtaining natural goods, just as it impedes the flow of beneficial strength to weakness at the personal level -- killing off Valued Places. (In our era the Impersonal Provider State and Capitalism in its State and Corporate forms are exemplars of this type of administrative scheme -- each fueled by the power of the right to waste.)
Both of these forces -- the right to waste that makes money valuable, and the monopolistic administrative schemes of societal power the right fuels -- operate through vicious competitive mechanisms to disengage the individual from forms of association that are vital to his obtaining all his natural goods. And not only do they disengage the individual from associations that can restrain him from giving into the Wrong Desires that result from the buffetting we receive from the flux, they actively encourage him to act licentiously and injuriously with regard to his own happiness and the happiness of others. These are some of those disastrous consequences that I suggested have come from the Enlightenment's disregard for Aristotle's concept of Right Desire, from the Enlightenment's erroneous conception of man as by nature solitary, and from the license-contaminated notion of liberty and right that flow from those oversights and errors.

10. EMERGING FROM THE ENLIGHTENMENT DARKNESS

With these insights in hand we are now able to correct the radical errors in the Enlightenment notions of liberty and right.
Properly understood, liberty -- when conceived as freedom of action -- is bounded by Right Desire. A man ought to be free to seek and to possess when obtained whatever he naturally needs. And because every man is unique, he ought to be free to use whatever means to fulfill a natural need that do not cause injury to his ability to fulfill other natural needs, and that do not unnecessarily injure another's ability to fulfill any natural needs.
From this conception of liberty and with our "ought" judgments now firmly reconnected to natural needs we can see that there is only one species of political right that is morally defensible, that there is only one species of right that we ought to have -- the species John Locke referred to as natural common right. There are no morally valid rights that derive from compact merely. This means that one has a right -- a natural common right -- to seek and to possess when obtained only that for which one has natural needs. When seeking and possessing something not itself naturally needed results in the natural good of satisfaction AND when the object sought is innocuous when possessed -- that is, when its possession does not produce injurious privation to anyone -- the pursuit and possession of such an object is also a natural common right.
The attainment of our naturally needed goods is affected by time and place -- by the local conditions in which individuals actually live from moment to moment. At present many persons live in places that are inadequate to all their needs -- and distribution of resources from other locations to these locations is a necessity for these persons. The right to waste, which is the foundation of the means of production control and of distribution control currently employed, is socially destructive. We need different, non-destructive means. What means can we use?
Now that we have properly conceived the notions of liberty and right and cleared away the rest of dark tangle of Enlightenment errors we can begin to see means that are not socially corrosive -- means that do not rest on the right to waste, but rather rest on the desire for Valued Place.
With regard to land, the conventions of ownership that allowed charging others for access to land are obviously manifestations of license, and as such are morally wrong. Without these conventions the grant of power to keep others from one's excess land or from the produce of one's excess land becomes morally wrong, too. This means that one has the natural common right to the exclusive possession of only that land one's exclusive and personal consumption of satisfies one's natural needs while not unnecessarily injuriously depriving others -- exclusive possession of land to any greater degree constitutes license and not liberty, and is therefore not a right. (An exception to this is the case of ownership of excess land when the excess is worked by the owner and the produce of this excess land is not withheld from others on condition of the owner receiving something in exchange for the produce. So long as the owner of this land is not unnecessarily depriving anyone of material necessaries by virtue of the way he is working the excess, his possession of the land is innocuous, and his working of it is a natural common right.) This, in course, means that a great deal of the absentee ownership -- especially of rented properties -- now countenanced by the right to waste would cease to be a right. The distributism suggested by Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton is worthy of a more thorough look in light of these proper conceptions of liberty and right.
With property properly limited it is problematical that money will have a use in society. This is so because if one cannot withhold access by others to one's excess property, nor charge others for access to one's excess property, money becomes nothing more than a token of performed labor -- a token the value of which would be reduced by inflation to worthlessness unless the type of labor for which one could obtain a token was restricted. Such a restriction would likely unvalue intellectual labor to some extent, as well as unvalue other types of not purely materially productive labor that are vital to a society. Another objection to such a restriction is that due to the circumstances of time and place many persons are not physically near an enterprise at which remunerated labor could be performed, and they would therefore have no means of earning money. But perhaps these objections will be overcome and some form of money will be retained.
The unvaluing of money will have a profound effect on our political power structures as well, as it must have on all power structures that grew out of the Enlightenment's vision that a rational man is primarily an Economic creature. The general tenor of the effects throughout society will be to shorten lines of communication between leaders and the led, to increase the value of personal authority (an endogenous force) as it decreases the means of obtaining power (an exogenous force), and to diffuse the power within society into a variety of institutions as the ability of any administrative scheme to monopolize power will be weakened by the loss of the easy means of power concentration that was license-created wealth.

11. CONCLUSION

The changes in our way of living that will flow from these proper conceptions of liberty and right will present great challenges, challenges for which the vast majority of persons in America are hungry. But the challenges cannot be met, as we have seen, by persons whose minds are in the thrall of 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, self-sufficing. The notion of an autonomous "self" is as essentially false as the Nature-Society dichotomy of which it was begotten.
A wiser vision of man is needed. Perhaps that wiser vision is the vision presented in this essay: That man has a socialized nature; that man can only find happiness through the right fulfilling of all his natural needs, needs which are mutually complimentary, mutually interdependent, and mutually counterbalancing -- each fulfilled natural need a good that makes it possible to seek the fulfillment of other needs; that possessing a social nature and needs that are mutually complimentary, interdependent and counterbalancing, our natural needs for the goods of association are intergral to our happiness; that mutually complimentary, interdependent, and counterbalancing, every good sought is a good in part because it helps us to aid others to fulfill their natural needs; and, that this nexus with society created by every man's mutually complimentary, interdependent, and counter-balancing needs is the primary source of societal vitality and cohesiveness, benefitting the strong and the weak alike -- strengthening the weak, and stabilizing the strong through his attainment of Valued Place.
Without this wiser vision, and instead saddled with the corrosive trade-off between obtaining some goods at the expense of others that is created by the false rights formulation bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment, it will likely be our fate to endure the dreary repetition of the decline and fall of another increasingly inhumane civilization, ours

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