I have given some thought to the concept of panetics. I believe that in its spirit and in its good will it has everything to recommend it. However, my studies of capitalism and of exchange societies are leading me to the conclusion that, if our present situation is not an aberration, then it was the analysis (objective quantification for the purpose of control) that put us here. Continuing to seek solution to problems created by this analysis that put us in our present situation is likely to lead to our peril. I hope to be wrong. Panetics, to the extent that it does not attempt to supersede the analysis of capitalism, is limited by its terms.

Hence, I believe that I am ready to open up a third front of inquiry, based upon the inquiry as to the nature and control of societal power. Pain is a consequence of the exercise of power. Power, as exercised by humans, upon the earth and upon each other, creates the dissonance between the actor and the system that makes pain all but inevitable. Our present concept of property, in which a person exercises rights as to a thing, to the exclusion of all others, is a veritable pain-generator. Those constructs thrown up in reaction to it, I refer specifically to Marxism, have laid the groundwork for oppressions of unprecedented scale.

I suggest that the thinking of Lovelock (“GAIA: A New Look at Life on Earth”) and Schumacher (“SmalI Is Beautiful”) are among the best, well organized, and defensible thinking that addresses the issue of pain. Both propose concrete analyses that advance balance in the relationships betveen humans and between humans and other creatures. These analyses proceed from fundarnentally different assumptions about how the world works, yet are coherent and workable....

Law, as an acýivity, modulates specific social exchanges in a manner comparable to that of homeostatic phenomena in the natural world, of which mammalian homeostasis, the oxygen cycle and the water cycle, are suggestive examples. Hence, law has the same significance and importance to exchanges within societies as have such natural cycJes to exchanges within biological systems (Lovelock). Because legal method proceeds as a description of the allocation of power, when a particular decision favors certain values or policies over others, its modulating effect on regularly repeated exchanges will either reinforce or adapt existing norrns to new exigencies, until a new set of circurnstances or a political reaction redirects that modulation.

Another aspect of the law courts can be seen in the drive toward uniformity of law, in the various model codes, e. g., the UCC and the role of certiorari in US Supreme Court to resolve conflicts among the circuits, the automatie jurisdiction accorded many state supreme courts to harmonize conflicts among their several courts of appeal.

This modulation is especially apparent and important in law touching on rights in real estate or land. In these real estate eases, paramount values affecting land use priorities and the underlying assumptions concerning expected and endorsed land uses are laid out by the judges in no uncertain terms. Examples of this modulation are found most dramatically stated in the various condemnation cases to reach the US Supreme Court.

It is no mistake that the establishment of the rule of law around the globe has been of such importanece to western capitalist societies, since such rule of law is essential to the smooth functioning and expansion of profit-driven exchanges (Braudel). Nor, in like manner, is it any mistake that to the West communist regimes that repressed capital accumulation and profit-driven exchange were such anathema...

The framers of the US Constitution set out to create a government in which privilege could not crowd out profit; that is to say, contract would always be paramount over consanguinity. .