Getting It All Together
Many times in discussing ideas, we tend to go off on flights of fancy and we don't get our feet back on the ground.
So today I'd like to do that, get right down to bedrock. Let's be practical.
Let's figure out how to put the pieces together so that this world of ours can be organized in such a way that we can work and work successfully toward a better life for humankind.
Now, the first point that we're going to have to understand is this.
Man by his nature doesn't have enough time, enough wisdom, or enough energy as an individual
in order to accomplish everything that he would like to see done.
It's not possible.
Each one of us has a limited amount of time, a limited amount of energy, a limited amount
of ability, and it stops there.
Not a one of us is able to create all the problems that exist in the world, and not
a one of us is able to cure all those problems. The best we can do is to be a part of either
a problem or a solution.
In order to get things done, men have learned long ago that it is essential that they organize.
Human organization is one of the basic tools that we have.
Beginning in primitive times, when we learned to organize around a hunting or foraging chieftain
and to follow his suggestions and even his commands in trying to find an adequate food
supply right up to the present time, our ability to get things done depends upon our willingness
to provide labor specialization, that is to say, there is a division of labor in which
one man will do one thing and concentrate on it until he becomes superbly qualified
to do that one thing, whereas another man will concentrate in another area so that he
becomes superbly qualified to do something else.
By means of doing this, our limited energy, ability, and time is multiplied many times
over so that you and I have the benefit, by working together, of the skills and the time
and the energy of other peoples.
Human organization is an essential whatever it is you want to do.
Now we have to begin with an ultimate given, a self-evident truth.
And the self-evident truth that we want to deal with is, man is. And man is what he is
by his nature. That is probably not going to change, or if it does change, the change
will be made very, very gradually over countless ages of time.
Man as a species is fairly well locked into a particular pattern. According to Rostand,
Man, as a physiological specimen, has had no real change in the last 250,000 years.
We are simply what we are.
We are a species.
So man is, and one of the characteristics of man is, that as individual units of our
species, not a one of us is capable of providing everything that we want, or getting everything
So we have a subordinate given, and that is that the nature of man, as nature has established
it, requires human organization.
Now the characteristic of every human organization, of whatever kind of description, is that human
choices are limited.
That's the reason for any kind of organization.
Whenever any kind of human activity is coalesced into an organized method of some sort, the
purpose of it is to limit the choices of the members of that particular organization.
That's what it's for.
So there is a feeling among a number of people who are very devoted to the idea of individual
and Social Freedom, that organization per se is anti-human, because the minute any kind
of organization occurs, then the individual who is in that organization may not have the
total range of choices that he would have had prior to his getting into that organization,
never mind what the organization is, and they would be correct in that.
All human organization delimits in advance the number of choices that a member of the
organization has.
If you take a job, it means that during certain working hours, you are going to have to limit
your choices to the things that the job demands.
Now, of course, if you don't take the job, well, then you don't have to limit your choices.
If you were to enter into a marriage relationship or into any other kind of a contract, then
and your choices are limited according to the terms of the contract or the marriage relationship.
Whatever you do in concert with other men, you begin to divide the labor and consequently
you tend to concentrate in one area and not in another.
And that means that you just automatically stop choosing to do certain things and you
do choose to do other things instead.
That is the nature of all organization.
Now the real problem that we face here is not the problem of organization per se.
Organization is necessary because of the nature of man.
However ruggedly individualistic you may believe yourself to be, the fact is that you will
do better when there are others who agree with you and will work with you toward a common
goal.
The real problem here is the method of organization.
How do you get organized?
In all human experience, there are two general ways of creating an organization.
You can do it systematically, or you can do it structurally.
When we are engaged in creating a systematic organization, we are engaged in creating a
Location and a method wherein human energy can be coalesced toward the accomplishment
of an agreed-upon goal by voluntary means.
Now, what that implies is this.
It implies that every individual in this organization, although his choices are limited by virtue
of Money, Money and State, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of Money and State,
In order to become a concert violinist, you would have to practice almost endless hours learning how to master that very, very sensitive instrument, the violin.
If you make up your mind to do this, and you do it in such a way that it requires you're getting up at four in the morning and you stay up until ten at night just working and working on your violin, this is not oppression. This is self-discipline.
True, your choices are limited. While you're engaged in learning mastery of this instrument, you can't go fishing, you can't have dates. There are just a lot of things that you can't do.
So you deprive yourself in certain areas so that you can master yourself in another area,
but the significant thing is that you do it.
You make up your mind and you exercise your decision-making function, and when this happens,
there is nothing of a despotic nature involved.
We think of despotism and oppression not where an individual controls himself, but where
someone other than himself controls him. And so you can organize systematically, which
means that you can create organizations that depend on their support entirely for the voluntary
choices of the members and those who have any relationship, whatever, with that type
There is a quid pro quo relationship. We call it ecology. In actual fact, it would be properly
known as bio-nomics. That is, it is the science of biological economics. That's the way we
live in this world. One species exists because there is another species upon which it depends.
But the second species exists because there is a third species, upon which it depends.
This species exists because there is a fourth species, upon which it depends.
And lo and behold, the fourth species depends upon the first species.
And you have a complete link-up in which there is a quid pro quo relationship, that is, exchange
occurs in nature.
Let me give you an example of what I mean.
In the early days of the settling of this country, as the pioneers moved west, they
came into the prairie states and ultimately began to put in farms and to settle them and
raise crops.
When they did, they found that they had an enormous problem.
There was a coyote that they were not familiar with, and it was a noisy brute.
It made a lot of noise at night.
In fact, two or three of them sound as though there's a pack of 50, because they're very
vocal.
And also, they will kill small farm animals such as calves or colts, and of course chickens,
and they sometimes run in packs and conceivably they could bring down larger animals or even
pose a threat to man. In a sense, they're like a small wolf. The farmers didn't like
the coyotes. They saw them as bringing an ecological imbalance to their ideas of how
The Theory of Money and Credit
In order to get the money, the government taxed the farmers, who were to receive the money if they caught a coyote.
Naturally, the government kept a major part of the money to administer the program, so the farmers were actually worse off financially than they'd been before, but they didn't quite see that at the time.
Instead, they took their guns and went out and started shooting coyotes, and they brought in the coyote scalps and they got paid for it.
And now they got a real problem. They suddenly found themselves overrun with an infestation of jackrabbits.
The coyotes, it turned out, were the natural prey of the jackrabbit, and kept the jackrabbit from multiplying excessively.
Now with his natural enemy gone, the jackrabbits multiplied to such a degree that the farmers had a real problem,
because the jackrabbits just don't kill an occasional chicken.
They start at one end of the field and they can eat everything you've got planted, and that's a disaster.
Did the farmers learn their lesson and go to the government and say, take the law off, we've made a mistake? No.
They went back to the government and said, we've created a problem here, you've got to put a bounty on jackrabbit scalps, too.
And so the whole process of dislocating the bio-nomic relation continued.
We have one thing after another of this sort that human beings have done.
Now, make up your mind to this. It is not possible for any species to survive in this world without creating a burden on some other species. That's not possible.
I hear many people today who think of themselves as naturalists, who are thinking that it would be possible for us to live without imposing at all on any other living thing. And this, of course, is an absurdity.
Life lives on life. Whether you are surviving because you are eating food animals, or whether
you are eating food plants, the plants and the animals both have life. There is this
ecological hookup that is the only thing that makes life possible, and some dislocation
of a given species occurs every time a species survives. There is no other way out.
The problem is to understand it, and to understand that there exists in nature a
bionomic, that is to say, a quid pro quo, a something-for-something relationship through
all of nature. Now, that's what we learn from nature, and from it we derive the science of
Economics is simply a man-made market where exchanges occur, wherein one group of people
are completely dependent upon another group of people, because there is a third group of people
upon whom who in themselves can be dependent upon by the second group, and so on around the loop.
Just as in nature herself, one species depends on another, so in the marketplace,
businessmen depend on workers, workers depend on customers, customers depend on businessmen,
businessmen depend on financiers, financiers depend on businessmen, and so on. We are all linked up
in an economic relationship, and in addition, we are all linked up in a biological economic
Relationship, which Nature has provided. This is why we organize, and why when we organize
voluntarily, without seeking to impose violence on anyone, we get into a systematic way of operating.
We exchange what we have voluntarily with someone else who has something that we don't have.
and the exchange occurs, whether it occurs in nature or in the man-made market doesn't matter.
What is significant is that if it happens in nature, the exchange occurs because of the nature of the
creatures involved. And when exchanges occur in a man-made market, the exchanges occur because
Because it is beneficial to both parties to the exchange that the exchange occurs.
The characteristic being in a man-made situation that all exchanges be voluntary and that no
one be coerced, and the characteristic in natural exchanges be that the exchanges occur
according to the nature of the creatures involved in the exchange.
Now we discovered this. Probably we were not able to theorize on it. We simply began the
process of copying what we saw in nature. We copied it in our art forms. We copied it
in human living. We always went to nature for our model. And then we began acting that
way. And whenever we did, it worked out. But man is gifted with an enormous amount of impatience
and an enormous amount of desire, and this is a very strange thing, to live forever.
And here is the place where we began not to rely on systems, but to rely instead upon
structuring.
And when I use the term structure, I want to convey the idea that here we have a type
The type of organization that people can put together that relies not on a voluntary exchange
process but on the use of force to some degree.
This would be the characteristic of a structure.
When human beings decide to create structures rather than to rely on systems and the voluntary
Method, it is because either, one, they are impatient of results, and they want their
results right now, and they are not willing to take the longer route of persuading others
as to the merits involved in an exchange.
They simply use the direct method of producing force and compelling an exchange.
The difference between a structure and a system is the difference between a man who enters
the bank with a gun and gets the money, and that is the quickest way to get it, and the
man who enters the bank having built up a reputation of reliability and asks for a loan
and obtains it that way.
Now it's going to take him longer to build up the reputation and to borrow the money.
It also creates the necessity of his paying it back. But you can obtain money either way.
You can obtain money by the longer, honest process of obtaining it by voluntary exchange,
or you can use the direct method that impatient people use of taking it by force. That's the
fundamental difference. And so when people become too impatient of the result they want,
And they are not willing to work long enough. It seems like just a waste of time to put
that much effort into it, and so they cut across lots and impose force and violence
to get what they want rather than taking the longer way around. That's the difference.
And of course, either way will work. The system produces results, and the structure produces
One of the reasons, in addition to impatience, that causes men to try to structure a system,
or in essence to corrupt it by the use of force, is their desire for immortality.
The desire for immortality is something that has more or less plagued our species ever
since we discovered that we had minds and could visualize and imagine things that we
really know nothing about.
From the very beginning, when men began to realize that life was a temporary condition
On this earth, they began to imagine perpetual life, and then they longed for some magic
elixir or some touchstone, some way of making life perpetual. And men are still struggling
with this. Now, the important reason here is that people have been led to believe by
by their theologies, by their fear, and even by government itself, that life is always
good and death is always evil, and therefore death must always be opposed and we must retain
life no matter what the cost. And the sad fact is that that is not true.
What is true is that functional life is good, but a part of the function of life is death.
Death is as much a part of life as new birth.
And when we become disenchanted with life to the place where we intend to support life
at whatever cost in order to avoid that part of life that we call death, then we begin
to create dysfunction not only out of impatience, but out of fear of that ultimate point when
we might cease to live.
That is also a reason why we create structures.
Because if we could create a structure and arm it with enough force, it would be able
Government is an agency that is created by men with the idea of creating an agency that
will have perpetual existence. No matter what happens to human beings, government is supposed
It is to go on forever. Agencies that governments sanction, often in the legal wording, it will say, this particular agency is organized and is to have perpetual existence. The idea being that no matter what, it's going to live.
This is the thing that causes us to corrupt our environment in order to make it possible for that particular organization to survive even when there is no real justification for it to survive.
You may have noticed that this is exactly the kind of thing that happens in our modern society constantly.
An organization will be created, for example, to deal with a particular problem.
I'm thinking, for instance, of the great idea that was named after President Roosevelt that created the March of Dimes and the idea of dealing with paralysis and muscular dystrophy and so on.
A very splendid idea. In fact, the work done by this organization was so outstanding that they virtually rolled back scientific knowledge in this area
in this area and brought cures where we didn't think it was possible for cures to occur.
And now what happened? The organization fulfilled its function. It should have died. But it
didn't. Because it was created for perpetual existence. And so they had to cast around
for some other chore to take on because you have to maintain the organization no matter
I see businessmen doing this all the time. A business that has no more justification for existence than anything in the world will run off to Washington to get a subsidy, to keep it running no matter what, even if people don't want the product, even if there is good reason to suppose that the product is deleterious and we ought not to have it, nonetheless you've got to keep it going because it was created for perpetual existence. And we do the same thing in our
are relationships to each other. We don't leave room for vibrant, living, changing life.
We try to nail everything down and structure it because we feel safer that way if we could
only predict the future unerringly. And that's, of course, what we try to do. This is a problem.
It is a very real problem. And if we are going to maximize human well-being, we are going
to have to learn how to live at peace with life and death. Please don't misunderstand
me. I am not suggesting that death is a good. I am suggesting that death at the right time
is a good. And I am not suggesting that life is evil. I am suggesting that life that is
is dysfunctional, is evil. And this is what we have tended to do. Because we believe that
life, no matter how it is, how it is lived, is always good, then we will corrupt our social
order, corrupt our environment, corrupt our marketplace to keep life going even when the
Life is dysfunctional. Now, when life becomes dysfunctional, many times it can become dysfunctional
temporarily. Something can be done. Any one of us could become ill. Any one of us could
have some kind of damage occur. I'm not suggesting euthanasia. I'm suggesting that you do everything
you can to make the life functional. But when you finally know that the life cannot be made
Functional. Then the proper thing to do is to accept death as the next step in life,
as a logical good, not a logical evil. And if we can ever learn that lesson, then we may discover
that we do not need to structure anything, that we can rely upon voluntary exchanges,
If we learn patience and learn that life and death are together a part of life, then we
can go on into a new way of dealing with each other that is a way based upon nature on the
quid pro quo of ecology and bionomics and free market laissez-faire economics.