Humanitarianism is, in the Wheel of Heaven framework, the Raëlian doctrine\nof property and inheritance — the second of the seven\nNew Commandments that Yahweh delivered to\nClaude Vorilhon (Raël) during the December 1973 contact at the\nPuy-de-Lassolas crater and that Vorilhon recorded in\nThe Book Which Tells the Truth\n(1974). Its proposal is stark: outright ownership is abolished in favour of\nforty-nine-year rental tenures, inheritance ends at the family home, and every\nperson begins adult life on roughly equal financial footing, free thereafter to\nbe rewarded for their own work rather than their parents'. The forty-nine-year\nterm is not arbitrary — it is drawn directly from the Jubilee of Leviticus 25,\nwhose cycle of seven sevens the source names as scriptural precedent.
\nThe doctrine is offered as a third way. It rejects Capitalism, which lets\nfortunes compound across generations, and Communism, which the source judges to\nhave failed for want of any incentive to excel; against both it keeps the\nindividual reward of the first while ending the intergenerational accumulation of\nthe second. To keep it distinct from the generic ethic of humanitarian aid, the\ncorpus writes the doctrine with a capital H: lowercase humanitarianism is the\nbroad commitment to human welfare associated with the Red Cross and the wider\nrelief tradition, while capital-H Humanitarianism is this specific Raëlian\nprogramme for how a planetary economy should hold property. This entry sets out\nthe doctrine and its proof-texts, its place among the New Commandments, its\nparallels in the modern property-reform traditions, and the objections it draws.
\nThe argument opens on a diagnosis of the two dominant systems of the twentieth\ncentury. \"Your world is paralyzed by profit,\" the source has Yahweh say, \"and\nCommunism fails to provide a carrot big enough to motivate people and encourage\nthem to make progress.\" Capitalism is faulted for what it concentrates,\nCommunism for what it fails to motivate; between the two, the doctrine sets out\nto keep merit and abolish inheritance.
\nIts foundation is equality at the starting line: \"You are all born equal; this is\nalso written in the Bible. Your governments should ensure that people are born\nwith approximately the same level of financial means.\" Unequal starting\npositions, on this reading, hide genuine merit behind inherited advantage — and\nthe injustice runs both ways. The source presses the point sharply:
\n\n\n\"It is unacceptable that children of low intelligence should live in luxury\nthanks to the fortunes amassed by their fathers, while geniuses die of hunger\nand do any menial chore just to eat. This way they forsake occupations where\nthey could have made discoveries benefiting the whole of humanity.\"
\n
The remedy is to replace ownership with tenancy. \"This world is not yours,\" the\npassage continues; \"you are only tenants. Thus all goods should be rented for\nforty-nine years. This will eliminate the injustice of inheritance.\" Under the\nscheme no one owns land, buildings, businesses, or capital outright; all of it is\nheld on a forty-nine-year lease from the community and reverts when the term\nends. The naming comes at the close: \"This political orientation of humanity is\nnot Communism; its preoccupation is the future of humanity. If you want to give\nit a name, call it 'Humanitarianism'.\"
\nThe source works the mechanism through concrete examples. A young worker of\ntwenty-one who wants a home does not buy it but rents it for forty-nine years\nfrom the State that built it — paying, say, a hundred thousand francs in monthly\ninstalments — so that by seventy he has paid in full and lives there rent-free\nuntil death, after which the house returns to the State, which must then let his\nchildren use it freely. Enterprises follow the same rule: \"If someone creates a\nbusiness, it is theirs for their entire life, and they can rent it out, but never\nfor more than forty-nine years,\" and the same for farmland, which passes back to\nthe State to be re-let. Merit is preserved throughout — the harder worker rents a\nlarger house, or two, or builds one to lease out and draws the income — but at\ndeath everything returns to the community except the one standing exception, the\nfamily home: \"Inheritance must be completely abolished, except for the family\nhouse. This does not, however, prevent each person from being rewarded\nindividually for their merits.\"
\nThe whole design turns on the forty-nine-year figure, which the source ties\nexplicitly to Leviticus 25 — the passage naming the sabbatical cycle of \"seven\ntimes seven years\" that yields \"forty and nine years,\" the instruction to price\nland by the years remaining to the Jubilee, and the principle that \"the land\nshall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and\nsojourners with me.\" On the canon's reading, Humanitarianism is less an invention\nthan a recovery: the Jubilee was given to the Hebrew tradition by the\nElohim, forgotten over the centuries, and now proposed again for\nthe incoming age at planetary scale.
\nThe English humanitarian descends from the Latin humanitas — \"human nature,\nkindness, refinement,\" the ideal Cicero cultivated — by way of humanus and\nhomo; the -ism marks it as a doctrine rather than a disposition. The word\nentered wide English use only in the nineteenth century, at first in theological\nargument and then as the general name for a commitment to human welfare. The\nRaëlian coinage borrows that word and narrows it: capital-H Humanitarianism is a\nprogramme for property and inheritance, not a synonym for charity.
\nA near-coincidence is worth noting. The Polish oculist L. L. Zamenhof, creator of\nEsperanto, gave the name Homaranismo — \"Humanitarianism\" in Esperanto — to an\nethical doctrine of universal human community set out in his Deklaracio pri\nHomaranismo (1906). Zamenhof's doctrine is ethical and cultural where the\nRaëlian one is socio-economic; the shared translation is a parallel of\nvocabulary, not of content, and the two stand independently of one another.
\nRead in the canon's own voice, Humanitarianism is not Vorilhon's private\neconomics but the Elohim's stated intention for the age. Because the Raëlian\nmaterial is presented as Yahweh's first-person account, the corpus treats the\nforty-nine-year scheme as a designer's instruction rather than a human proposal —\nthe property-and-inheritance dimension of the single Aquarian-age programme the\nNew Commandments lay out.
\nThat programme is meant to be read whole. Geniocracy supplies\nits governance, World Government its coordination,\nDemilitarization its peace,\nScience as Religion its cultural reorientation,\nTelepathic Cultivation and the\nMetaphysical Clarifications its cognitive and\ndoctrinal ground; Humanitarianism supplies its property law. The commandments\npresuppose one another, and Humanitarianism in particular leans on two of them.\nIt leans on Geniocracy, because a reform this long-range needs leaders able to\ngrasp its logic — the source says so in the same breath: \"If geniuses are\nadmitted to power, they will understand the usefulness of these reforms.\" And it\nleans on World Government, because a forty-nine-year tenure system cannot hold in\none country while capital flees to another: \"You must also see to it that all the\nnations of the Earth unite to form only one government.\" The doctrine, in short,\nis not implementable piecemeal; it presumes the rest of the programme around it.
\nIt is also a direction rather than a deadline. The corpus is explicit that the\nNew Commandments describe where the Age of Aquarius\n— roughly the span from the mid-twentieth century to the fifth millennium on its\nchronology — is to travel across centuries, not a change to be legislated\ntomorrow:
\n\n\n\"These seven commandments — geniocracy, humanitarianism, world government,\ndemilitarization, science as religion, telepathic cultivation, and the\nmetaphysical clarifications — constitute the specific political and religious\nprogram the alliance has proposed for the Aquarian age. Their full\nimplementation is a long-term project, extending across centuries rather than\nyears.\"
\n
Two neighbouring doctrines sharpen where Humanitarianism sits.\nParadism — the Raëlian vision of a fully automated, moneyless\nsociety — describes a further horizon in which money and labour have themselves\nbecome unnecessary; Humanitarianism is read as the nearer-term transition that\nstill runs on money and work, Paradism as the destination beyond it. The two are\nstages, not rivals. And the digital-abundance movement\nCyberparadism shares Humanitarianism's commitments to equity\nand shared access, pursuing the same end through different means.
\nHumanitarianism's central moves — common ownership of land and capital, finite\ntenure in place of freehold, the abolition of inheritance — recur across a long\nline of thought, and the corpus reads the doctrine alongside these parallels\nrather than as their equal. The resemblances are close enough to be worth naming;\nthe differences are real, and worth keeping.
\nThe scriptural anchor comes first, and is treated as more than parallel. The\nHebrew Jubilee of Leviticus 25 — the fiftieth-year \"liberty\nthroughout all the land,\" the return of every family to its holding, the\nprinciple that land belongs to Yahweh and is only leased to its tenants — is the\ntext the doctrine cites directly. Mainstream biblical scholarship (Roland de\nVaux, Jeffrey Fager, John Bergsma) tends to read the Jubilee as an ideal\nprescription with little evidence of consistent practice; the framework reads\nthat limited implementation not as a strike against the principle but as a\nsymptom of trying it at less than planetary scale.
\nThe closest secular parallels cluster around land and inheritance. Henry George's\nProgress and Poverty (1879) held that land value belongs to the community while\nimprovements belong to the improver, to be captured by a land-value tax — an\noverlap with Humanitarianism on land, though George reforms through taxation\nwhere the doctrine reforms through tenure. The left-libertarianism of Hillel\nSteiner and Peter Vallentyne argues, on independent philosophical grounds, that\nnatural resources are owned in common and that private appropriation owes\ncompensation to the excluded — again convergent on natural resources, though\nnarrower in reach than the doctrine's hold over all assets. Silvio Gesell's\nFreiwirtschaft pairs a \"free land\" of rental tenure with monetary reform; the\nRawlsian ideal of a property-owning democracy, developed by Elizabeth Anderson,\nseeks to disperse capital widely and block dynastic concentration, though from\nwithin a reformed capitalism the doctrine means to leave behind; and the Catholic\ndistributism of Chesterton and Belloc offers yet another third way between\ncapitalism and socialism, keyed to the wide spread of small property. Thomas\nPiketty's work on inheritance and the r > g dynamic supplies, five decades\nafter Vorilhon, a data-driven account of exactly the intergenerational\nconcentration the doctrine names — while proposing progressive wealth taxation\nrather than the abolition of ownership. Universal Basic Income, in the arguments\nof Philippe Van Parijs and others, addresses the same floor of economic security\nbut operates within existing property arrangements rather than replacing them;\nthe corpus reads it as a possible complement to Humanitarianism rather than a\nsubstitute.
\nBeyond the modern West, common-ownership and finite-tenure arrangements appear in\nnearly every major tradition: the early Christian community of goods (Acts 2 and\n4), the common ownership of the Benedictine and Franciscan rules, the Islamic\ninstitutions of zakat and waqf, the property discipline of the Buddhist\nsangha, and a wide range of indigenous common-property systems, down to the\nmodern experiments of the utopian communes and the Israeli kibbutz. The corpus\ntakes the breadth of this pattern as evidence that private property with\nunrestricted inheritance is one arrangement among many rather than a human\ndefault — and reads the recurrence, in its own interpretive voice, as scattered\nmemory of the arrangement the Elohim first set out. Mainstream economic history\nexplains the same pattern through pre-modern constraints and religious-cultural\nelaboration; the framework does not dispute those factors so much as add its own\nreading on top of them.
\nThe doctrine draws the objections that meet any programme of this ambition, and\nthey deserve stating plainly.
\nThe first is feasibility. A universal forty-nine-year lease requires an\nadministrative apparatus of a scale and honesty no society has demonstrated —\nvaluing every asset, tracking every tenure, cycling property back to the\ncommunity at each term without corruption or capture. Critics note that the\ndoctrine assumes rather than shows how this machinery would work, and that the\nreversion of businesses and farms at a fixed term could blunt exactly the\nlong-horizon investment it means to reward.
\nThe second is coordination. By the source's own admission the scheme cannot hold\nin one jurisdiction while wealth moves freely to another, which makes it hostage\nto World Government — itself a distant and contested\nproposal. A reform that presupposes planetary political unity inherits every\nobjection to that unity.
\nThe third is the family-home exception. Letting the family house pass to children\nreintroduces, in miniature, the very inheritance the doctrine sets out to\nabolish; where the line falls between a protected home and prohibited dynastic\nproperty is a question the source leaves largely to be worked out.
\nThe corpus does not treat these as fatal. Consistent with its reading of the\nwhole programme, it presents Humanitarianism as a direction for debate across the\nlong Aquarian age rather than a finished blueprint — a claim about which way an\neconomy ought to develop, offered for the centuries rather than the legislative\nsession.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Le Livre qui dit la vérité. 1974. The principal source articulation of Humanitarianism in Chapter VI (The New Commandments).
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Les Extra-Terrestres m'ont emmené sur leur planète. 1975.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Accueillir les Extra-Terrestres. 1979.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Message from the Designers. Tagman Press, 2005. The consolidated English-language edition.
\nThe Hebrew Bible. Leviticus 25:1-55. Various translations and editions.
\nFager, 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.
\nde Vaux, Roland. Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions. Trans. John McHugh. McGraw-Hill, 1961.
\nGottwald, Norman K. The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 B.C.E. Orbis Books, 1979.
\nBergsma, John Sietze. The Jubilee from Leviticus to Qumran: A History of Interpretation. Brill, 2007.
\nWright, Christopher J. H. God's People in God's Land: Family, Land, and Property in the Old Testament. Eerdmans, 1990.
\nZamenhof, L. L. Deklaracio pri Homaranismo. 1906. Various editions and translations.
\nZamenhof, L. L. Various essays and addresses on Homaranismo. Available principally through Esperanto-movement archives and zamenhof.info.
\nKorjenkov, Aleksander. Homo sum: Ludoviko Zamenhof: vivo, idearo, agado. Sezonoj, 2009.
\nSteiner, Hillel. An Essay on Rights. Blackwell, 1994.
\nVallentyne, Peter, and Hillel Steiner, eds. The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings. Palgrave, 2000.
\nVallentyne, Peter, and Hillel Steiner, eds. Left-Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate. Palgrave, 2000.
\nVallentyne, Peter. \"Left-Libertarianism: A Primer.\" Available at https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10355/10449/LeftLibertariansimAPrimer.pdf.
\nOtsuka, Michael. Libertarianism without Inequality. Oxford University Press, 2003.
\nGeorge, 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.
\nGeorge, Henry. Social Problems. 1883.
\nFoldvary, Fred E. The Soul of Liberty. Gutenberg Press, 1980.
\nGesell, Silvio. Die natürliche Wirtschaftsordnung. Verlag Selbstverlag, 1916. Trans. The Natural Economic Order. Peter Owen, 1958.
\nOnken, Werner. Silvio Gesell und die Natürliche Wirtschaftsordnung. Verlag für Sozialökonomie, 1999.
\nRawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1971.
\nRawls, John. Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Ed. Erin Kelly. Harvard University Press, 2001.
\nRawls, John. Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press, 1993.
\nO'Neill, Martin, and Thad Williamson, eds. Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
\nAnderson, Elizabeth. Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It). Princeton University Press, 2017.
\nAnderson, Elizabeth. Value in Ethics and Economics. Harvard University Press, 1993.
\nPiketty, Thomas. Le Capital au XXIe siècle. Seuil, 2013. Trans. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Harvard University Press, 2014.
\nPiketty, Thomas. Capital et idéologie. Seuil, 2019. Trans. Capital and Ideology. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Harvard University Press, 2020.
\nPiketty, Thomas. A Brief History of Equality. Trans. Steven Rendall. Harvard University Press, 2022.
\nVan Parijs, Philippe, and Yannick Vanderborght. Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy. Harvard University Press, 2017.
\nStanding, Guy. Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen. Pelican, 2017.
\nMazzucato, Mariana. The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. Anthem Press, 2013.
\nMazzucato, Mariana. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. Allen Lane, 2018.
\nPettifor, Ann. The Coming First World Debt Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
\nVarious Jubilee 2000 campaign documents (1996-2000).
\nThe New Testament. Acts 2:44-45, 4:32-37. Various translations and editions.
\nBruce, F. F. The Book of the Acts. Eerdmans, 1988.
\nGonzález, Justo L. Faith and Wealth: A History of Early Christian Ideas on the Origin, Significance, and Use of Money. Wipf and Stock, 2002.
\nThe Rule of St. Benedict. Various translations and editions.
\nLawrence, C. H. Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. Routledge, 4th ed., 2015.
\nBurr, David. The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis. Penn State University Press, 2001.
\nKuran, Timur. The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East. Princeton University Press, 2011.
\nKuran, 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.
\nBanner, Stuart. How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier. Harvard University Press, 2005.
\nWilliams, Robert A., Jr. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. Oxford University Press, 1990.
\nHolloway, Mark. Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America 1680-1880. Dover, 1966.
\nKanter, Rosabeth Moss. Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective. Harvard University Press, 1972.
\nNear, Henry. The Kibbutz Movement: A History. 2 vols. Oxford University Press, 1992-1997.
\n\"Humanitarianism.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarianism.
\n\"Homaranismo.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homaranismo.
\n\"Left-libertarianism.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism.
\n\"Jubilee (biblical).\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical).
\nZamenhof, L. L. \"Collection of Ideas.\" Zamenhof.info. https://zamenhof.info/en/idearo.
\n\"Deklaracio pri Homaranismo, L. L. Zamenhof.\" https://rudhar.com/religion/Homaranismo/homaeoia.htm.
\n", "extra": {"alternative_names":["Humanitarianism","humanitarianism (lowercase, generic sense)","the second New Commandment","the Raëlian property-and-inheritance doctrine","the forty-nine-year rental doctrine","Humanitarisme (French)"],"category":"Raëlism","claim_type":"framework","editorial_pass":"2026-07","entry_type":"concept","infobox":{"core_articulation":"Abolition of outright property ownership in favour of forty-nine-year rental tenures; the end of inheritance beyond the family home; equality of opportunity at birth combined with merit-based reward across a single lifetime","distinguished_from":"Capitalism (permits inheritance-based concentration of wealth); Communism (read by the source as failing for want of incentive); mainstream humanitarianism (the generic ethic of humanitarian aid, distinct from the capital-H Raëlian doctrine)","parallel_contemporary_articulations":"Georgism (Henry George); left-libertarianism (Steiner, Vallentyne); Freiwirtschaft (Silvio Gesell); property-owning democracy (Rawls, Anderson); distributism (Chesterton, Belloc); inheritance-reform scholarship (Piketty); Universal Basic Income; Zamenhof's Homaranismo (terminological parallel)","parallel_cross_cultural_traditions":"The Hebrew Jubilee (Leviticus 25); early Christian community-of-goods (Acts 2, 4); monastic common ownership (Benedictine, Franciscan); Islamic zakat and waqf; the Buddhist sangha; indigenous common-property traditions; the utopian communes and the Israeli kibbutz","position_within_seven_commandments":"Second New Commandment; the property-and-inheritance dimension, alongside Geniocracy (governance), World Government (coordination), Demilitarization (peace), Science as Religion (religious-cultural), Telepathic Cultivation (cognitive), and the Metaphysical Clarifications (doctrinal)","principal_corpus_treatment":"*The Book Which Tells the Truth* (Vorilhon, 1974), Sixth Chapter — the principal articulation; later contextualization within the wider New Commandments framework","principal_source":"*The Book Which Tells the Truth* (Vorilhon, 1974), Sixth Chapter (The New Commandments), the section titled Humanitarianism","scriptural_anchor":"Leviticus 25:8-23 (the Jubilee); the seven-times-seven sabbatical cycle producing the forty-ninth year of release; *'The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me'* (Leviticus 25:23)","status_in_framework":"Foundational Raëlian socio-economic doctrine; one of the seven New Commandments; a direction for the Aquarian age rather than an immediate reform","type":"Raëlian socio-economic doctrine; the second of the seven New Commandments Yahweh delivered to Vorilhon during the December 1973 contact"},"lang":"en","lang_prefix":"","same_as":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q775858","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarianism","https://www.britannica.com/topic/humanitarianism"],"see_also":[{"description":"The political-governance commandment paired with Humanitarianism in the New Commandments.","path":"wiki/geniocracy","title":"Geniocracy"},{"description":"The seven-part Aquarian program of which Humanitarianism is the second commandment.","path":"wiki/new-commandments","title":"New Commandments"},{"description":"The source of the Leviticus 25 Jubilee tradition anchoring the forty-nine-year tenure.","path":"wiki/hebrew-bible","title":"Hebrew Bible"},{"description":"The Elohim president who articulated the doctrine to Vorilhon.","path":"wiki/yahweh","title":"Yahweh"},{"description":"The recipient and transmitter of the socio-economic doctrine.","path":"wiki/rael","title":"Raël"},{"description":"The consolidated source text recording the doctrine's original articulation.","path":"wiki/message-from-the-designers","title":"Message from the Designers"}],"timeline":["age-of-aquarius"]} }, "links": { "self": "/v1/wiki/humanitarianism/", "canonical_html": "https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/humanitarianism/", "index": "/v1/wiki/", "schema": "/v1/schema/wiki-entry/", "related": [{"slug": "geniocracy", "title": "Geniocracy", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/geniocracy/" },{"slug": "new-commandments", "title": "New Commandments", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/new-commandments/" },{"slug": "hebrew-bible", "title": "Hebrew Bible", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/hebrew-bible/" },{"slug": "yahweh", "title": "Yahweh", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/yahweh/" },{"slug": "rael", "title": "Raël", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/rael/" },{"slug": "message-from-the-designers", "title": "Message from the Designers", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/message-from-the-designers/" }] } }