Humanitarianism

Humanitarianism is, in the Wheel of Heaven framework, the Raëlian doctrine of property and inheritance — the second of the seven New Commandments that Yahweh delivered to Claude Vorilhon (Raël) during the December 1973 contact at the Puy-de-Lassolas crater and that Vorilhon recorded in The Book Which Tells the Truth (1974). Its proposal is stark: outright ownership is abolished in favour of forty-nine-year rental tenures, inheritance ends at the family home, and every person begins adult life on roughly equal financial footing, free thereafter to be rewarded for their own work rather than their parents'. The forty-nine-year term is not arbitrary — it is drawn directly from the Jubilee of Leviticus 25, whose cycle of seven sevens the source names as scriptural precedent.

The doctrine is offered as a third way. It rejects Capitalism, which lets fortunes compound across generations, and Communism, which the source judges to have failed for want of any incentive to excel; against both it keeps the individual reward of the first while ending the intergenerational accumulation of the second. To keep it distinct from the generic ethic of humanitarian aid, the corpus writes the doctrine with a capital H: lowercase humanitarianism is the broad commitment to human welfare associated with the Red Cross and the wider relief tradition, while capital-H Humanitarianism is this specific Raëlian programme for how a planetary economy should hold property. This entry sets out the doctrine and its proof-texts, its place among the New Commandments, its parallels in the modern property-reform traditions, and the objections it draws.

The doctrine

The argument opens on a diagnosis of the two dominant systems of the twentieth century. "Your world is paralyzed by profit," the source has Yahweh say, "and Communism fails to provide a carrot big enough to motivate people and encourage them to make progress." Capitalism is faulted for what it concentrates, Communism for what it fails to motivate; between the two, the doctrine sets out to keep merit and abolish inheritance.

Its foundation is equality at the starting line: "You are all born equal; this is also written in the Bible. Your governments should ensure that people are born with approximately the same level of financial means." Unequal starting positions, on this reading, hide genuine merit behind inherited advantage — and the injustice runs both ways. The source presses the point sharply:

"It is unacceptable that children of low intelligence should live in luxury thanks to the fortunes amassed by their fathers, while geniuses die of hunger and do any menial chore just to eat. This way they forsake occupations where they could have made discoveries benefiting the whole of humanity."

The remedy is to replace ownership with tenancy. "This world is not yours," the passage continues; "you are only tenants. Thus all goods should be rented for forty-nine years. This will eliminate the injustice of inheritance." Under the scheme no one owns land, buildings, businesses, or capital outright; all of it is held on a forty-nine-year lease from the community and reverts when the term ends. The naming comes at the close: "This political orientation of humanity is not Communism; its preoccupation is the future of humanity. If you want to give it a name, call it 'Humanitarianism'."

The source works the mechanism through concrete examples. A young worker of twenty-one who wants a home does not buy it but rents it for forty-nine years from the State that built it — paying, say, a hundred thousand francs in monthly instalments — so that by seventy he has paid in full and lives there rent-free until death, after which the house returns to the State, which must then let his children use it freely. Enterprises follow the same rule: "If someone creates a business, it is theirs for their entire life, and they can rent it out, but never for more than forty-nine years," and the same for farmland, which passes back to the State to be re-let. Merit is preserved throughout — the harder worker rents a larger house, or two, or builds one to lease out and draws the income — but at death everything returns to the community except the one standing exception, the family home: "Inheritance must be completely abolished, except for the family house. This does not, however, prevent each person from being rewarded individually for their merits."

The whole design turns on the forty-nine-year figure, which the source ties explicitly to Leviticus 25 — the passage naming the sabbatical cycle of "seven times seven years" that yields "forty and nine years," the instruction to price land by the years remaining to the Jubilee, and the principle that "the land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me." On the canon's reading, Humanitarianism is less an invention than a recovery: the Jubilee was given to the Hebrew tradition by the Elohim, forgotten over the centuries, and now proposed again for the incoming age at planetary scale.

Etymology and naming

The English humanitarian descends from the Latin humanitas — "human nature, kindness, refinement," the ideal Cicero cultivated — by way of humanus and homo; the -ism marks it as a doctrine rather than a disposition. The word entered wide English use only in the nineteenth century, at first in theological argument and then as the general name for a commitment to human welfare. The Raëlian coinage borrows that word and narrows it: capital-H Humanitarianism is a programme for property and inheritance, not a synonym for charity.

A near-coincidence is worth noting. The Polish oculist L. L. Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto, gave the name Homaranismo — "Humanitarianism" in Esperanto — to an ethical doctrine of universal human community set out in his Deklaracio pri Homaranismo (1906). Zamenhof's doctrine is ethical and cultural where the Raëlian one is socio-economic; the shared translation is a parallel of vocabulary, not of content, and the two stand independently of one another.

The Wheel of Heaven reading

Read in the canon's own voice, Humanitarianism is not Vorilhon's private economics but the Elohim's stated intention for the age. Because the Raëlian material is presented as Yahweh's first-person account, the corpus treats the forty-nine-year scheme as a designer's instruction rather than a human proposal — the property-and-inheritance dimension of the single Aquarian-age programme the New Commandments lay out.

That programme is meant to be read whole. Geniocracy supplies its governance, World Government its coordination, Demilitarization its peace, Science as Religion its cultural reorientation, Telepathic Cultivation and the Metaphysical Clarifications its cognitive and doctrinal ground; Humanitarianism supplies its property law. The commandments presuppose one another, and Humanitarianism in particular leans on two of them. It leans on Geniocracy, because a reform this long-range needs leaders able to grasp its logic — the source says so in the same breath: "If geniuses are admitted to power, they will understand the usefulness of these reforms." And it leans on World Government, because a forty-nine-year tenure system cannot hold in one country while capital flees to another: "You must also see to it that all the nations of the Earth unite to form only one government." The doctrine, in short, is not implementable piecemeal; it presumes the rest of the programme around it.

It is also a direction rather than a deadline. The corpus is explicit that the New Commandments describe where the Age of Aquarius — roughly the span from the mid-twentieth century to the fifth millennium on its chronology — is to travel across centuries, not a change to be legislated tomorrow:

"These seven commandments — geniocracy, humanitarianism, world government, demilitarization, science as religion, telepathic cultivation, and the metaphysical clarifications — constitute the specific political and religious program the alliance has proposed for the Aquarian age. Their full implementation is a long-term project, extending across centuries rather than years."

Two neighbouring doctrines sharpen where Humanitarianism sits. Paradism — the Raëlian vision of a fully automated, moneyless society — describes a further horizon in which money and labour have themselves become unnecessary; Humanitarianism is read as the nearer-term transition that still runs on money and work, Paradism as the destination beyond it. The two are stages, not rivals. And the digital-abundance movement Cyberparadism shares Humanitarianism's commitments to equity and shared access, pursuing the same end through different means.

Comparative and adjacent traditions

Humanitarianism's central moves — common ownership of land and capital, finite tenure in place of freehold, the abolition of inheritance — recur across a long line of thought, and the corpus reads the doctrine alongside these parallels rather than as their equal. The resemblances are close enough to be worth naming; the differences are real, and worth keeping.

The scriptural anchor comes first, and is treated as more than parallel. The Hebrew Jubilee of Leviticus 25 — the fiftieth-year "liberty throughout all the land," the return of every family to its holding, the principle that land belongs to Yahweh and is only leased to its tenants — is the text the doctrine cites directly. Mainstream biblical scholarship (Roland de Vaux, Jeffrey Fager, John Bergsma) tends to read the Jubilee as an ideal prescription with little evidence of consistent practice; the framework reads that limited implementation not as a strike against the principle but as a symptom of trying it at less than planetary scale.

The closest secular parallels cluster around land and inheritance. Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) held that land value belongs to the community while improvements belong to the improver, to be captured by a land-value tax — an overlap with Humanitarianism on land, though George reforms through taxation where the doctrine reforms through tenure. The left-libertarianism of Hillel Steiner and Peter Vallentyne argues, on independent philosophical grounds, that natural resources are owned in common and that private appropriation owes compensation to the excluded — again convergent on natural resources, though narrower in reach than the doctrine's hold over all assets. Silvio Gesell's Freiwirtschaft pairs a "free land" of rental tenure with monetary reform; the Rawlsian ideal of a property-owning democracy, developed by Elizabeth Anderson, seeks to disperse capital widely and block dynastic concentration, though from within a reformed capitalism the doctrine means to leave behind; and the Catholic distributism of Chesterton and Belloc offers yet another third way between capitalism and socialism, keyed to the wide spread of small property. Thomas Piketty's work on inheritance and the r > g dynamic supplies, five decades after Vorilhon, a data-driven account of exactly the intergenerational concentration the doctrine names — while proposing progressive wealth taxation rather than the abolition of ownership. Universal Basic Income, in the arguments of Philippe Van Parijs and others, addresses the same floor of economic security but operates within existing property arrangements rather than replacing them; the corpus reads it as a possible complement to Humanitarianism rather than a substitute.

Beyond the modern West, common-ownership and finite-tenure arrangements appear in nearly every major tradition: the early Christian community of goods (Acts 2 and 4), the common ownership of the Benedictine and Franciscan rules, the Islamic institutions of zakat and waqf, the property discipline of the Buddhist sangha, and a wide range of indigenous common-property systems, down to the modern experiments of the utopian communes and the Israeli kibbutz. The corpus takes the breadth of this pattern as evidence that private property with unrestricted inheritance is one arrangement among many rather than a human default — and reads the recurrence, in its own interpretive voice, as scattered memory of the arrangement the Elohim first set out. Mainstream economic history explains the same pattern through pre-modern constraints and religious-cultural elaboration; the framework does not dispute those factors so much as add its own reading on top of them.

Critical perspectives

The doctrine draws the objections that meet any programme of this ambition, and they deserve stating plainly.

The first is feasibility. A universal forty-nine-year lease requires an administrative apparatus of a scale and honesty no society has demonstrated — valuing every asset, tracking every tenure, cycling property back to the community at each term without corruption or capture. Critics note that the doctrine assumes rather than shows how this machinery would work, and that the reversion of businesses and farms at a fixed term could blunt exactly the long-horizon investment it means to reward.

The second is coordination. By the source's own admission the scheme cannot hold in one jurisdiction while wealth moves freely to another, which makes it hostage to World Government — itself a distant and contested proposal. A reform that presupposes planetary political unity inherits every objection to that unity.

The third is the family-home exception. Letting the family house pass to children reintroduces, in miniature, the very inheritance the doctrine sets out to abolish; where the line falls between a protected home and prohibited dynastic property is a question the source leaves largely to be worked out.

The corpus does not treat these as fatal. Consistent with its reading of the whole programme, it presents Humanitarianism as a direction for debate across the long Aquarian age rather than a finished blueprint — a claim about which way an economy ought to develop, offered for the centuries rather than the legislative session.

See also

• Wheel of Heaven
• Raëlism
• Raël
• Yahweh
• Elohim
• Hebrew Bible
• Message from the Designers
• Geniocracy
• World Government
• Demilitarization
• Science as Religion
• Telepathy
• Metaphysical Clarifications
• New Commandments
• Paradism
• Cyberparadism
• Jubilee
• Embassy
• Age of Aquarius
• Apocalypse

References

Principal Raëlian source

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Le Livre qui dit la vérité. 1974. The principal source articulation of Humanitarianism in Chapter VI (The New Commandments).

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Les Extra-Terrestres m'ont emmené sur leur planète. 1975.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Accueillir les Extra-Terrestres. 1979.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Message from the Designers. Tagman Press, 2005. The consolidated English-language edition.

Hebrew Bible Jubilee tradition

The Hebrew Bible. Leviticus 25:1-55. Various translations and editions.

Fager, Jeffrey A. Land Tenure and the Biblical Jubilee: Uncovering Hebrew Ethics through the Sociology of Knowledge. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Press, 1993.

de Vaux, Roland. Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions. Trans. John McHugh. McGraw-Hill, 1961.

Gottwald, Norman K. The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B.C.E. Orbis Books, 1979.

Bergsma, John Sietze. The Jubilee from Leviticus to Qumran: A History of Interpretation. Brill, 2007.

Wright, Christopher J. H. God's People in God's Land: Family, Land, and Property in the Old Testament. Eerdmans, 1990.

Zamenhof and Homaranismo

Zamenhof, L. L. Deklaracio pri Homaranismo. 1906. Various editions and translations.

Zamenhof, L. L. Various essays and addresses on Homaranismo. Available principally through Esperanto-movement archives and zamenhof.info.

Korjenkov, Aleksander. Homo sum: Ludoviko Zamenhof: vivo, idearo, agado. Sezonoj, 2009.

Steiner-Vallentyne school

Steiner, Hillel. An Essay on Rights. Blackwell, 1994.

Vallentyne, Peter, and Hillel Steiner, eds. The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings. Palgrave, 2000.

Vallentyne, Peter, and Hillel Steiner, eds. Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate. Palgrave, 2000.

Vallentyne, Peter. "Left-Libertarianism: A Primer." Available at https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10355/10449/LeftLibertariansimAPrimer.pdf.

Otsuka, Michael. Libertarianism without Inequality. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Henry George and Georgism

George, Henry. Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy. Appleton, 1879. Various subsequent editions.

George, Henry. Social Problems. 1883.

Foldvary, Fred E. The Soul of Liberty. Gutenberg Press, 1980.

Silvio Gesell and Freiwirtschaft

Gesell, Silvio. Die natürliche Wirtschaftsordnung. Verlag Selbstverlag, 1916. Trans. The Natural Economic Order. Peter Owen, 1958.

Onken, Werner. Silvio Gesell und die Natürliche Wirtschaftsordnung. Verlag für Sozialökonomie, 1999.

John Rawls and property-owning democracy

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1971.

Rawls, John. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Ed. Erin Kelly. Harvard University Press, 2001.

Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press, 1993.

O'Neill, Martin, and Thad Williamson, eds. Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Elizabeth Anderson

Anderson, Elizabeth. Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It). Princeton University Press, 2017.

Anderson, Elizabeth. Value in Ethics and Economics. Harvard University Press, 1993.

Thomas Piketty and inheritance scholarship

Piketty, Thomas. Le Capital au XXIe siècle. Seuil, 2013. Trans. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Harvard University Press, 2014.

Piketty, Thomas. Capital et idéologie. Seuil, 2019. Trans. Capital and Ideology. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Harvard University Press, 2020.

Piketty, Thomas. A Brief History of Equality. Trans. Steven Rendall. Harvard University Press, 2022.

Universal Basic Income

Van Parijs, Philippe, and Yannick Vanderborght. Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. Harvard University Press, 2017.

Standing, Guy. Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen. Pelican, 2017.

Mariana Mazzucato

Mazzucato, Mariana. The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. Anthem Press, 2013.

Mazzucato, Mariana. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. Allen Lane, 2018.

Jubilee 2000 movement

Pettifor, Ann. The Coming First World Debt Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Various Jubilee 2000 campaign documents (1996-2000).

Early Christian community-of-goods

The New Testament. Acts 2:44-45, 4:32-37. Various translations and editions.

Bruce, F. F. The Book of the Acts. Eerdmans, 1988.

González, Justo L. Faith and Wealth: A History of Early Christian Ideas on the Origin, Significance, and Use of Money. Wipf and Stock, 2002.

Monastic traditions

The Rule of St. Benedict. Various translations and editions.

Lawrence, C. H. Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Routledge, 4th ed., 2015.

Burr, David. The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis. Penn State University Press, 2001.

Islamic zakat and waqf

Kuran, Timur. The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East. Princeton University Press, 2011.

Kuran, Timur. "The Provision of Public Goods under Islamic Law: Origins, Impact, and Limitations of the Waqf System." Law & Society Review, 35:4, 2001, pp. 841-898.

Indigenous common-property traditions

Banner, Stuart. How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Williams, Robert A., Jr. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. Oxford University Press, 1990.

Utopian-experimental communities

Holloway, Mark. Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America 1680-1880. Dover, 1966.

Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective. Harvard University Press, 1972.

Israeli kibbutz movement

Near, Henry. The Kibbutz Movement: A History. 2 vols. Oxford University Press, 1992-1997.

Web resources

"Humanitarianism." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarianism.

"Homaranismo." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homaranismo.

"Left-libertarianism." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism.

"Jubilee (biblical)." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical).

Zamenhof, L. L. "Collection of Ideas." Zamenhof.info. https://zamenhof.info/en/idearo.

"Deklaracio pri Homaranismo, L. L. Zamenhof." https://rudhar.com/religion/Homaranismo/homaeoia.htm.

Humanitarianism. (2026). Wheel of Heaven. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/humanitarianism/

"Humanitarianism." Wheel of Heaven, 2026, https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/humanitarianism/.

"Humanitarianism." Wheel of Heaven, 2026. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/humanitarianism/.

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