Voluntary Associations

Voluntary associations, in the context of human society, are functions of the technological ecosystem, which is language-based but which has extremely deep roots in bioecology. In their highest form, voluntary associations are altruistic.

The right to voluntary association is more than the freedom of association guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. The freedom of association provides for the spontaneous formation of groups who may protest, march, cavort, or celebrate. Voluntary association, however, includes not only the right of association but also the right to organize for stability and longevity. Voluntary associations can come into existence and have an ecological life of their own. They can grow, develop, mature, senesce, and die or mutate. Voluntary associations, in short, have considerably different and more properties than are found in simple freedom of association.

The importance of the voluntary association to the citizens-sovereign is that it gives the citizens-sovereign a mechanism by which to participate in the process of government. The average Representative to then U.S. Congress has hundreds of thousands of constituents and a single individual may be effective by writing him/her a letter, however, the individual can be even more effective by petitioning the congressman as part of a group, particularly if the group is large, has national standing, and, a track record.

As citizens-sovereign we have a duty to align ourselves with other citizens-sovereign who have similar visions and objectives, and a duty to support voluntary associations in their efforts to make a better nation and world. At the very least, a voluntary association should have a public affairs function to inform its members of activities of the government that affect the group and to express the group's views on the same or similar topics. If the voluntary association lobbies in addition to informing its members, so much the better. However, there is a caveat to all this: Voluntary associations have to be altruistic or they are not worth supporting. Narrow, parochial, sectarian, or special interest groups do not merit the support of the citizens-sovereign. Why should citizens-sovereign lend support to an organization that could have as its purpose either to take unfair advantage of the public largess, to undermine basic rights and freedoms, or to use public support to obtain private gains?

So as not to get ahead of ourselves, however, let's go back to what I wrote in the first paragraph, namely, that voluntary associations have extremely deep roots in bioecology. Humans are social animals. They share sociability as a trait with most of the higher mammals. The father absent human family grouping (a grouping we are finding more common today), is probably the standard (i.e., most often occurring) family grouping in other higher mammals, differing only in how many groupings of mothers and children occur—for example, many in the elephant, a few among lions, while mostly only one in humans. Biotypic interchangeability occurs in the family groupings in many mammals. While the mother is absolutely vital in the birth and earliest life of a child, cub, and baby elephant, as the offspring gets older, mother substitutes (and fathers, in humans), can function effectively as well. It is in this early association of mother (or substitute) and offspring that the process of altruism is first and firmly established in the life of the new individual, with the potential for the later consequence of it being established in the life of groups. This potential is one of then most important in the life of the species.

Altruism, born and nurtured on the basis of a mother's love, is a motivator of human morality that has a profound effect on all social interactions, both ecological and technological. It contrasts with fear, paranoia, and anxiety, also basic and profound influencers of human behavior, which are based on the evolutionary biochemistry of humans—Homo sapiens L.—as a prey species in the predator/prey relationship. Over compensation for fear, paranoia and anxiety produces aggression, greed, selfishness, and the downside of human behavior, whereas altruism leads to no over compensation: It simply extends itself to share and to help. Fear becomes a component of an altruistic deed only when the person performing the act feels incompetent to carry it out alone. Even then, the altruistically inclined individual rises above the fear, for he/she calls on another like minded person to help. Fear is seen, therefore, as not all bad: It is a likely candidate for being responsible for the fact that humans developed language whereby they could be more efficiently cooperative.

The earliest social groupings of humans were in all likelihood democratic. If altruism was the early social glue, democracy was the logical outcome. Then, with the advent of language-based technology, the concept of property replaced that of territory in most social systems—especially those destined to become capitalistic, high civilization. Without fail, these young capitalistic groups developed slavery as part of the concept of property—an economic concept that was later deemed morally unacceptable despite its often occurring role of helping to maintain some economic stability for a dominant group. Slavery is an expression in property of fear, paranoia, and anxiety.

In many shamanistic (animistic) religious societies, however, the concept of property never came into its own. Group use took the place of individual ownership, as we see in many American Indian groups. It's not that there is no personal property, for there is lots of it in such societies. The point is that surviving and thriving in these societies is not dependent upon personal property; it does not make the difference between the good life, and destitution for the group's members because of the commonly practiced act of sharing. This behavior comes about, not because of political ideology or scarcity, but because of abundance. There is enough, or more than enough, to go around when all contribute to the pot. We find that this is close to the meaning and use of property in the primitive Christian sense.

When the earlist Christians were too few and too poor to be taken seriously, they subscribed to democracy. They accepted humans as intelligent, sentient beings, capable of making their own decisions. The believed that, in the normal course of events, Christians would form democratic societies and, as believers were all one in the body of Christ, that private property was of little concern because of abundance and sharing.

Early Christian practice was in compatible with an Emperor. As long as only the demes (demes = people, cracy= rule; democracy = rule of the people) belonged to the Christian faith, democracy was easily affordable. However, when the Christians became "somebody" because the Emperor had adopted their religion, the full force and power of the political system of the Roman Empire collided with the simple concepts of Christian democracy. The winner was the Empire and, with Augustine as the apologist, Roman Christian doctrine was altered to accommodate the Emperor. The Emperor became the Viceroy of Christ on Earth.

The Roman Catholic Pope, a Patriarch in the Greek system later became an Emperor/Pope in the Latin system (Emperor = Maximus Pontiflex, Pope = Supreme Pontiff), and the Cardinals were invented to be the new Cardinal/Patriarchs. (Two major groups of Christians—Orthodox (Greek) and Catholics (Latin)—still adhere to these forms, while large numbers of usually smaller groups have opted for the earlier democratic forms.)

Civil governments followed the empire structure for millennia, finally fragmenting into smaller units with a variety of forms of government, increasing in tendency to be democratic. To this day our large military alliances bear an outward appearance to the Roman Empire, as evidenced by the present NATO alliance, which is seated in Brussels, the former seat of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.

In today's world, some people return to the simple pastoral life, eschewing property (earthly belongings) and enjoying communion with a similarly inclined group that usually believes inn immortality, paving the way to bliss. Such an effort may require of the group a redefinition of time and space, but usually this is not necessary. It is only necessary for the group to be able to think in terms of being able to withdraw from the plane of space and time as we now experience it. For the first group, the escape is into the void—chaos, the condition of existence without an ordering principle. To the second group, the escape is to an existence based on an ordering principle beyond anything humans now know. Essentially, the belief in immortality assumes either a future withdrawal from a future oriented technological ecosystem and a retreat into a real time biological ecosystem—a return to Eden and beyond to a place of the here-and-now with no past and no future, or a future "advance" to a place with a set of laws (perhaps physical and biological in types, perhaps not) different from those yet known about or experienced by humans. (An acceptance of such a possibility wasn't/isn't difficult for those with faith in a God-Man who brought the dead back to life and arose from the dead himself...nor for those familiar with science fiction, where it is common for authors to portray other places in other galaxies with other ordering principles.)

As we've already said, humans are social animals. They are not comfortable in the main unless they live in groups, and it is not conceivable to have humans, in the language-based sense, without having them reared in a human social grouping. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa unwittingly demonstrated this when he had some young, pre-language children isolated to see which language they would speak as they developed. Of course, as they developed they spoke no language as they had not heard any from others.

Human surviving and thriving is very much a group activity. Early humans hunted in groups and they lived in groups. Humans still live in groups, rear their children in groups, and travel in groups. Group norms control all human life cycles. A man and a woman can produce a child, but it takes a human social group to rear one equipped to survive and thrive as a human being.

Increasingly, technology has made it possible for humans to live in ever larger groupings, until now these have reached the point that it is not only impossible for someone to know every person in, say, a national group but, at best, to know only a few—the ones with whom one is most often associated. Technology, through one of its products, agricultural surpluses, makes living today in large, impersonal groups possible.

Social order is older than the species Homo sapiens L. and represents an evolutionary step in the survival of higher order animals that have longer gestation periods as well as longer learning and maturation cycles. The need for small groups of people to act in their own self interest is as old as the bioecological human family. It seems that, as early altruistic morality tended toward democracy, so a technological society tended toward authoritarianism. After a hiatus of two millennia, we are finally back at that point in the evolution of human social systems where we are again, in general, embracing democracy, or at least self determination.

All of this is merely background for looking further into the idea of voluntary associations, but first we must contrast voluntary association with involuntary association. The newly born baby is not queried to determine into which family he/she wants to be born. The newborn, involuntarily, is brought into a specific family—one that may be rich or poor, nuclear or extended, father-present or father-absent, with then mother alive or dead at childbirth. The child has no control over the circumstances of his/her birth. The mother/child relationship is primarily hormonal, physiological, and animal behavioristic. A mother may voluntarily terminate a pregnancy, but if the pregnancy is allowed to go to full term in a supportive environment, mother/child altruism develops. Over time, the mother/child altruistic relationship extends to the rest of the family, although this extension is voluntary. These groupings are the basic biological structures of an altruistic human society. Without them there is no human society, let alone a humane society.

Our modern divorce laws and our child protection laws underscore that the modern family is a voluntary association that has special recognition under the law. However, after a certain stage of development, family members are biotypically interchangeable. It may not be the most desirable or the most economical arrangement to change the cast of players in a family, but newly rearranged families can work and many of them actually work better than the dysfunctional families they replace. As the family is the evolutionary root to bioecological voluntary association and, ultimately, to voluntary association in the technological ecosystem, we should not be surprised to find that families whose main purpose for association is altruistic are the families that have the greatest potential for surviving and thriving.

Participation in government and government functions should be voluntary, but in many societies these are most often coercive, as in life under dictatorships, tyrannies, and authoritarian governments. Slavery was and is involuntary servitude. The militia and later the national draft required involuntary service to country, but these have been replaced, for the most part, in our time by the National Guard and the all-volunteer army. The militia as an in voluntary service was not workable and was replaced by volunteer army groups, (prominent in the Civil War), and finally by the National Guard.

Under the 'Jim Crow' laws, racial segregation was mandated and therefore, involuntary, and association for almost any reason, including civil rights, was prescribed by race. Sex discrimination has been and still is prescribed in similar ways in many situations.

Voluntary association made its first vitally important mark with regard to a fundamental moral question when advanced by religionists who espoused primitive Christianity. The issue was slavery. The voluntary association supporters were religionists in England who opposed the practice of slavery on purely moral grounds. These associations were made up of individuals who were sentient and capable of reasoned thought, and who also knew right from wrong. They were democratic and urged democracy for an oppressed group of humans and, in accomplishing their goal, changed the property system. They represented the mass of people in England, and they spoke in very certain terms to the government. As a result, the trade in slaves, but not slavery, was halted by Great Britain.

Actually, the toughest opposition to anti-slavery voluntary associations in England came from magnates who owned West Indian slaves. Their business organization, the West Indian Society, was so powerful that it even could control the public discussion of the issue, and it did! (These people were the forerunners of the magnates, their media moguls, and the teflon presidencies of the Reagan-Bush Administrations in this country in this decade.) Abolitionist Members of Parliament let it be known that if the public discussion did not recommence, the discussion could take the form of revolution. Parliament saw the better of it and abolished the slave trade. However, although the slave trade in England was abolished, slavery was not because the government could not solve the problem of compensating capitalist slave owners for the potential loss of their capital. Ultimately, of course, property in humans was converted to non-property.

The problems of abolishing the slave trade, and finally abolishing the practice of slavery in the United States and elsewhere, points to the treacherous aspects of property. On the other hand, altruism and taxes, together with private and public property, promote capitalism with a human face.

Through the millennia of authoritarian governments, religionists found ways to voluntarily associate, usually pressing for ways to worship freely. However, religion backed with the authority of the Emperor (Constantine) was a tough system to go up against and once empowered, the Christians went from being the oppressed to being the oppressors.

Islam had a different kind of history vis-a-vis slavery. In its earlier days, Islam was tolerant of other religions, particularly those that had the Bible as their authority—the people of the Book. As a person could not be a Moslem and a slave, Islam used slavery as a recruiting device for Islam.

Throughout history, minority religionists have sought some sanctuary where they could worship in peace. In a very real sense they became politico-religious minorities—the freedom to worship being one of the first 'civil' rights they sought after. The Bohemian Brotherhood, the historical forerunnner of Unitarianism, was able to survive in part because of the religious tolerance of the Turkish Sultans of the Ottoman Empire. At the time, the Emperor in Vienna would have made short shrift of them if he could have gotten hold of them.

Simple religious communities, seeking to attend to their own salvation, laid the foundation for our modern voluntary associations. Their motives were simple and altruistic—the basis of their communion and the key to their survival.

Why do we think that voluntary association should be an unalienable right. Quite simply because it is a Creator-given process for the assurance of the surviving and thriving of the community. In our modern political system, where each Representative in the House of Representatives may represent 575,000 people, lone voices, if not powerful in their own right, may never be heard. Single individuals, unless they, are outstanding authorities in their own right, or tremendously charismatic and articulate, are not consulted. Voters are not treated as humans, but as mere statistics for votes. It is not enough for a citizen to live in a Congressional District or a State and vote in the elections, although voting is one of the important acts. Influencing the Congress and the Executive Branch once the election is over is as in some important or, cases, more important. More changes in our laws are accomplished through lobbying than are ever achieved in elections. Even the Executive Branch can be influenced to (1) write regulations properly, (2) execute decisions according to law and, not arbitrarily or capriciously, and (3) do its job.

All aspects of government must be understood and appropriate influence must be exercised, if possible, at the right place and time. Political parties are important as focal points for belief systems, but voluntary associations do the tough work of making the government work in spite of its errant tendencies. The proliferation of voluntary associations in society reflect the complexity of society at any one time.

From the most ancient times, divisions of labor have created social divisions. As property is firmly established, it creates classes that range from slaves to magnates. Language-based technology from the earliest of times spawned industry and manufacturing—arrowheads to pottery. Self-generating decision systems are the warp and woof of the biological and technological ecosystems. While biological systems depend upon evolution to produce new genotypes, biotypes and ecotypes, technology spews out huge numbers of technotypes to go along with the genotypes, biotypes, and ecotypes.

In the biological ecosystem, ecotypic interchangeability is an important consideration in the surviving and, thriving of plant communities and their animal inhabitants. In the technological ecosystem, biotypic interchangeability predominates. What this indicates is that, in natural communities, various species of plants can play interchangeable roles in the aspect, look, and work of the ecosystem. In the technological ecosystem made up predominantly of humans, the human species (Homo sapiens L.) plays all the diverse roles—the tinker, the tailor, and the candlestick maker. Biodiversity in the natural community is supported by an admixture of species—different genotypes; in the technological community, biodiversity necessitates the proliferation of technotypes—language-based technological variations of but one species, Homo sapiens.

Throughout history, technotypes, trades, crafts, and guilds, have come together for their own protection and benefit. In ancient times, the nobility came together as the Equestrian Class, and usually had control of the Roman Senate. In even more ancient times and more modern times, rich people owned the means of production—slaves. In the Middle Ages free craftsmen formed protective guilds. The long distance traders differentiated themselves from the local merchants and formed their own guilds—the hansa. Every manner of differentiation and distinction gave rise to a new class of organizations dedicated to the well-being of its members. The University in the Middle Ages was organized by the college (guild) of students and teachers; the butchers and tanners had their own colleges (guilds). In the modern world the College of Surgeons is an exact match. Medieval students organized their own classes and paid the professor directly with their own funds. If the teacher was really bad, they could get their money back and refuse to hire the miscreant again. The student corporations were so tightly organized that they ran the universities, a practice still found in Europe and Latin America where the civil authorities are proscribed from setting foot On the campus.

In our American society, all the trades are organized. All the professions are organized. Every literate interest is organized. The Federal and State Governments recognize these organizations in the legal code as various corporate forms. Corporations for profit and corporations not for profit are the two big classifications.

Corporations for profit can be organized for any reason for which corporations can be organized to make money legally. Corporations not for profit have some categories recognized in law for the purposes of being tax exempt. Obviously, a corporation not for profit can be organized for any reason, but if it wants tax exemption from Federal income taxes it must meet certain criteria. Persons who contribute to organizations with purposes that support religion, charity, science, and education may, within limits, deduct their contributions from their personal income taxes. In addition, all income related to the purposes of such organizations is not subject to Federal income tax. Other not for profit corporations may also have tax free in come if the income is directly related to the corporations' purposes. These tax laws have fostered a great proliferation of corporations to do the public good. Non-profit organizations are treated liberally because it is presumed that they are doing work the government would otherwise have to do. Corporations for profit do their own good and pay taxes. A voluntary association that can tailor its purposes to some aspect of the tax code can benefit from favorable tax status.

The Encyclopedia of Associations lists thousands and thousands of non-profit corporations/associations. Every subject of human interest is covered by one or more associations. There are over 300 societies devoted to the biological sciences alone, and every business and industry has its own association. The association may only promote its members' desire to 'associate,' as is true for the scientific societies when their members meet, read each other papers, publish a journal, and adjourn until the meeting the following year. Or an association may defend civil liberties, as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) does, by taking violators of the rights of citizens to court and suing for redress of grievance. The ACLU more than any other organization, private or public, has defined the limits of civil rights. It defends the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and makes a perfect counterpart to IdT, which promotes the unalienable rights provided by the Declaration of Independence. IdT in no way compares to the ACLU in its effectiveness, however, as IdT is still busy defining what the unalienable rights are, let alone having a consensus on their meaning and application. IdT is a pioneer association ecologically, with almost non-existent power (except the power of the PC), while the ACLU is a mature community of believers and achievers. (I am a life member of the ACLU.)

An aberration of the voluntary association is the Political Action Committee (PAC), a creature of Congressional campaign reform. A PAC is not altruistic. Each PAC is a single-function organization that funds the election campaigns of representatives and senators who explicitly, or implicitly agree to carry water and cut wood for the PAC sponsors. PACS have corrupted politics in the United States, turning them into a caricature of what they were meant to be, and they have made a mockery of the democratic process. They have nothing to do with We the People, the citizens-sovereign: they have to do with vested interests trying to gain advantages for their vested clients, usually at the expense of the nation and its citizens-sovereign taxpayers. Lobbying is one thing; paying the campaign expenses of a candidate for public office is another. The fact that politicians can convert unused campaign funds to their own use places the PACs' practice in its proper perspective—advance bribes for future favors. Lobbying is fine. The purchase of the bodies and souls of servants of the citizens-sovereign to do the special bidding of special interests, however, is the prostitution of government and should be outlawed forthwith. No private monies should ever be allowed in any political campaign where the elected person will serve in public office for the public good. Politicians should be bought and paid for by the entire citizenry—the citizens-sovereign—through the use of tax funds to support political campaigns. If IdT were a well-funded voluntary association, it would lobby for changes in the election laws to favor the election of public servants who campaign solely with tax money, and who are dedicated both to the public good—the good of all people—and to respect for the unalienable rights of the citizens-sovereign.

A voluntary association must be a reservoir of public morality and ethics as regards the purposes of the voluntary association. If the voluntary association is organized with altruistic purposes in mind, it will follow that its actions will be ethical. It is in these organizations that the citizens-sovereign should invest their time, money and energy.

Altruistic voluntary associations promote ecological equity among the species of the biosphere and within the technotypes of the human species. Promotion of ecological equity provides for the sharing of the national abundance on the basis of merit, assuring all citizens-sovereign that they will have the ability to live and participate in the middle class of our society. Ecological equity undergirds life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Ecological equity promotes abundance and sharing on the basis of the exercise of the unalienable rights, not mindless competition, artificial scarcity, and deprivation.

In the final analysis, voluntary associations promote ecological equity as the mechanism for the surviving and thriving of the biosphere and our democratic society with its free and independent citizens sovereign, our system of republican governance, and the provenance of liberal abundance we call the nation.

...Ted Sudia...

© Copyright 1992
Institute for domestic Tranquility