The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today, we will begin by talking about the intentions of the personalities participating in this course and how to develop an attitude towards our tasks.

If you want to fulfill the intentions associated with this course, you will go out in the near future to work for the impulse of threefolding in the world. This work is eminently necessary in our time. And we must start from this conviction that it is a necessity. We must be clear about the fact that it is basically high time to work for this impulse of threefolding, which we must consider as the unconditional demand of the civilization of the present.

We must, however, from the outset, take a position that excludes any kind of scepticism in our hearts towards the impulse of threefolding, while we are informing ourselves about the conditions of this work during these days. Because you will not be able to work if you are still somehow sceptical about the matter today. In the course of this course, we will be able to see how not only what we say or do has an effect in the world, but how certain imponderables, unspoken things, must accompany our speaking and our actions if we want to have an effect.

Furthermore, we must be clear about the fact that all the old forces of civilization, which are in a state of decline, are revolting against this impulse of threefolding, developing antagonisms, and that we have a great deal to struggle with if we want to bring this impulse of threefolding to bear with our strength. And we will have all the more to struggle with the more we have a certain success on the other side. Such success does not make the struggle any less, but sharpens it more and more. And you will have to arm yourselves against the very thing that asserts itself as struggle. Of course, I do not mean to say that we should prepare ourselves for struggle to any great extent; that is not what could advance us. But we must be aware of how strongly this fight will unfold in the near future, especially if we manage to get through it.

What I would like to say today will, so to speak, be individual psychological starting points. Of course, the only thing to be discussed here is to characterize the factual basis for your work. I would like to emphasize from the outset that this cannot be a guide to political-social or other oratory, but rather to creating the positive foundations for working in the spirit of the impulse of the threefold social organism. And here you may initially feel that I am putting it in rather general terms, if I start with some very general rules, which, however, will be of extraordinary importance for us if we think them through in a very concrete way.

You will only succeed in what you want to achieve if you act from two basic forces in your soul, and since today it is an extraordinarily serious matter that must permeate our cause and inspire our work , then we must first become fully aware, fully conscious, that we will not get ahead without developing these two basic powers of our soul: first, to speak out of a real love for the cause, and second, out of an insightful love for our fellow human beings. Be clear about this: if these two conditions are not present or if they are replaced by others, say by ambition or vanity, then no matter how logical your judgments are, you will be unable to achieve anything. The conditions for working through the word are basically not something that lies in the formation, in the shaping of the word alone. You need only start from the way in which effects are most often achieved by the word in our present day, and you will understand what I have told you.

Just imagine: two speakers appear before an audience. One of them is an unknown person with extraordinary insights, with a penetrating power of speech, and with full justification of the matter, and another speaker would appear before the same audience, as things are now, and he has held some public position for a long time, be it as the representative NN, the statesman NN, the well-known industrialist NN or the scholar NN. He will work with far less urgent motives, with a cause that is far less justified. What makes an impact is something that is added to the content of the spoken word. But we cannot base our work on such things as I have just characterized them.

But there are also other things that must characterize our speech, and these are precisely the two soul qualities of which I spoke: real love for the cause, which alone can carry inner conviction, and love for humanity. Of course, these two soul forces cannot replace what the content of the spoken word is. The content of the spoken word must, of course, be unimpeachable. But it has no effect if it is not supported by the two soul forces that I have mentioned. Therefore, today, when we are more inclined to dismiss, I would say, the formalities, it must be said that we must bear in mind the extent to which we have these two forces present in our souls. If we come to the conclusion that we do not have them, then it might be better not to participate in the important action that is to be undertaken, because it would be wasted strength, wasted labor. And one would be convinced that the effect of something that arises from other impulses could not be great, while the effect of something that arises from love for the cause that carries the conviction and from love of humanity may initially be directly small, but it will nevertheless be there.

My dear friends, the truth chooses all manner of paths, which are unobservable at first, in order to come among people, and it just so happens that where the two imponderables, love for the cause and love for humanity, are present, there must also be an effect, even if it does not initially come to light. We can be sure of that.

But other things must be added. There must be full insight into what we are speaking about today when we present such a matter as the impulse of threefolding to the public. We must not have any illusions about the state of mind of the people to whom we are speaking, about the conditions that are given by the fact that we have to speak to the people of the present. Among these people of the present age there are by no means a few who are quite capable of absorbing what we have to say to them. But it is particularly true of the majority of the leading personalities of the present age that the forces of those people who would be capable of absorbing the impulse of threefolding are initially suppressed, and quite brutally at that.

Let us dwell as little as possible on generalities and go straight to the details. The most common thing people say when you approach them with something like the impulse of threefolding is something like this: Yes, especially in Central Europe, the need and misery are there first. We have to fight for the dry crust. It is the economic interests that we must take into account first. What use are lofty ideals? What use is what is presented from spiritual backgrounds? You will hear this objection in all keys. And one cannot deny that it arises from the oppressed souls of the present. At first glance, it has a certain justification. But if we let the most important questions of the present, which could become the foundations for our work, pass before our souls, we will see that this view, that today it can only be about solving economic questions, is based on a complete illusion. For it assumes another question, or rather the answer to another question, as if it were self-evident; but it is not self-evident. The starting point, namely, is the assumption - and we shall be discussing this matter in great detail shortly - that it is not the fault of human beings, not this or that human being, but of human beings in general, that the civilized world has ended up in its present situation.

When we consider the world economy spread across the whole earth – and it must be considered today – then we have to say to ourselves: nature gives us no less today than at any other time, if we can properly wrest its results from it and if we can distribute these results in the right way among people – as a whole of humanity, of course. That people today are in a greater state of emergency than they were before is not caused by physical factors, but is caused precisely by the spirit of people. If people are in need today, it is because of wrong spirituality, wrong thinking. Therefore, there can be no other way out of this emergency than to replace wrong thinking with right thinking. It is not nature, nor some unknown forces that have brought humanity to its present situation, but it is people themselves who have brought these things about. When there is hardship, it is people who have brought about this hardship; when people have nothing to eat, it is people who do not let this food reach them. Therefore, it is important not to start from the wrong premise: some unknown forces have caused the hardship, and one must first remove this hardship before one can start thinking in the right way – but to make it clear: because the hardship is caused by people's wrong thinking, only right thinking can remove this hardship.

We must look at this superstition from every conceivable angle. It says that we can provide bread for humanity, and then, when they have enough bread, they will also come to better thinking. This is a terrible superstition. And nothing beneficial will ever be able to penetrate into today's civilization unless people decide to discard it and replace it with the right faith, which consists of a reversal, a re-education of thinking about the things of this world itself. This is also what must gradually enter a sufficiently large number of human minds.

But we shall only find the opportunity to speak to these people if we first rid ourselves of any illusions about two things. The first is the fact that at present there is, to a great extent, no sense of the productivity of intellectual life. The silliness with which, not so long ago, the phrase “the road to success is open to the brave” was coined – not the word, but the way the word was coined – was a silliness that should be thoroughly eradicated from people's minds in view of the facts that prevail in today's civilization. For the facts of today's civilization are such that they, by their very nature, always carry a selection, a selection of the unfit, to the top.

We live today in a time that particularly favors the unfit. We will also talk about this in detail and will have to seek the forces that lead to this selection of the unfit in particular in our time. Today, I would like to start by saying just one thing. But I do ask that we take into account the following: we must stand firm from the outset here, in that we are aware that we are talking among ourselves and creating the conditions for our work, we must stand firm from the outset here, in that we are aware that we are talking among ourselves and creating the conditions for our work, we must stand firm from the outset here, in that we are aware that we are talking among ourselves and creating the conditions for our work, we must stand firm from the outset here, in that we are aware that we are talking among ourselves and creating the conditions for our work, we must stand firm from the outset here, in that we are aware that we are talking among ourselves and creating the conditions for our work, we must stand firm from the outset here, in that we are aware that we are talking among ourselves and creating the conditions for our work, we must stand firm from the outset here, in that we are aware that we are talking among ourselves and creating the conditions for our work, we must stand firm from the By standing on this ground, we will be able to see what I am about to say now not as an immodesty or the like, but as something that is factually related to the conditions of our work in general.

Take the “Key Points of the Social Question”. Consider the way in which it is often understood today, look at the things that are put forward by the opponents, and then try to judge what the opponents are saying from. You will only be able to get to the bottom of these issues through a psychological approach, through psychological observation. The opponents usually talk past the content of these “key points” – I am of course referring to the book. As a rule, there is hardly any reference in what they talk about to what the content of the “key points” actually is. For example, I recently discussed the content of the “key points” in Bern. Afterwards, the economist from the university spoke for three quarters of an hour. In not a single sentence did he succeed in addressing the content of the “key points” themselves. This can be proven. And he certainly did not address the content of the lecture. He was completely unprepared because he did not know the “key points”, did he?

So what do people feel when they approach the ideas of the threefold social order? Why do they form things out of the depths of their souls that don't fit at all? Because they feel something very special. They sense, without being aware of it, what is active in them. They sense that if the impulse for threefolding, as set forth in the Key Points, were to take root in the world, it would bring about a selection of the able, and the unworthy would be pushed down from their pedestal. For the impulse that lies in the threefold social organism is one that takes effect in the most real way as soon as it is carried into humanity in some way. But it works unconditionally to exclude the incapable from being effective. This is what people feel in the subconscious. Of course, they cannot say this, so they come to what they do say. If a psychologist makes an effort to understand what people are saying, especially if he makes an effort to analyze the way they work, then he will certainly come to a confirmation of what I have just said. And in the end, all this is based on the fact that in the present day there is actually no sense of spiritual productivity. People have become too accustomed to letting the spiritual be carried by the impersonal or by the personal, which is not itself spiritual: by the state or by state personalities who do not primarily have the living spirit as such in mind.

You only have to look at things in detail, you only have to ask yourself: What do the theological faculties want? Today, in the theological faculties, the aim is much less to get behind the secret of the spiritual primal forces of the world than to create useful religious officials in the service of the state or the denominations. In jurisprudence, the aim is not to seek the reasons and essence of the law, but to teach people what is customary in a particular state, what has been established by those who did not want to create the essence of the law either, but who, out of some interest, made this or that into a law. And so one could go through all the things that ultimately become leading in spiritual life, and one would see everywhere that there is hardly any sense in the present for the productive element of the spirit, which must actually carry civilization, for the living influence of the spirit into human souls.

People have gradually been educated to a lameness of intellect, to mere thinking without this thinking being imbued with the will. People are absorbed in a merely contemplative thinking. You will see this first hand as an experience when you give your lectures. You will be able to experience it again and again, that the people who listen may even be satisfied by one or the other thing they hear; the words rush to the ear, enter the soul; people have a certain voluptuousness about the thoughts; they feel satisfied in them; they would most like to hear just that which fills them with a certain inner voluptuousness. But inwardly they are always somewhat annoyed when one expects of them that the words should not remain words, but that the whole person should be filled with them and energetically, from the point of view that the words open up, must now intervene in life, if the words are to have any consequence. For centuries people have been accustomed to a certain way of receiving the word. When they listened to the preacher in the pulpit, they sat in the pew, and the sermon should be “beautiful,” should draw them inward with a certain warmth, though it was usually a philistine warmth. They wanted to feel a certain inner voluptuousness, and also have a certain inner yearning of the soul satisfied, so that the satisfaction comes from outside. But then, when you had left the sermon, you didn't want what was offered in the sermon to really penetrate your life. Of course, people said that often enough, but basically it never happened for a long time. You are well aware of how things stand today in this regard with other things that are said. It cannot be said that in most cases young people today enter the university doors with a certain inner passion to go through their hours, that they have an enormous inner warmth and cannot wait to hear what the teacher will say tomorrow based on what he said today. There seem to be more cases where people just sit out their hours because it's their duty to do so – or maybe many don't even sit them – and where they are then glad to have crammed in what is necessary for the exam, which which really does not determine whether one is an able and capable person, but rather whether one has what it takes to become a good theological or legal official, that is, to fit into any state structure in an appropriate way.

Under these conditions, we shall see what factors were at work in the last centuries, but especially in the 19th century, the sense of the living work of the spirit in humanity was gradually lost. Think what truly effective religions would have become if they had not proceeded from this sense of the living spirit. All religions that have become religions at all did not start from what our present-day intellectual life starts from, namely, that everything we carry in our minds is basically just an ideology, a sum of abstractions. Rather, the religions started from the premise that the objective spirit present in the world has revealed itself through certain personalities, that it has worked as such, that the spirit is something real, a real power. Most people who are involved in today's spiritual life hardly understand anything about this.

Recently, I was extremely interested to learn the following. Based on the idea expressed in the first chapter of my book Kernpunkte, I said that, from the spiritual side, an essential part of the proletarian question is that the modern proletariat regards all spiritual life, customs, law, art, religion, science, and so forth, as an ideology, and that it is this conception of the spiritual life as an ideology that forms the basis for the desolation of souls, which then, by virtue of their instincts, arrive at what in many respects is today the social movement. I have explained this in my “Key Points”. I recently hinted at it in a lecture, and a professorial debater understood the matter so well that he said, roughly: Yes, it was stated that the proletariat lives in a kind of ideology in spiritual terms; but that cannot be stated, because all classes, all estates, all of humanity lives in ideology all the time; it is quite natural that everyone lives in ideology! The good man has absolutely no concept of what is meant here, because he has completely lost the concept of the reality of spiritual life. It was a matter of course for him that what fills our spirit and our soul is an ideology. As a good bourgeois, he could not grasp anything other than that one lives quite justifiably within the ideology; so if the proletariat lives in it, that cannot be the reason for the social impulses of the present!

You see, these things are so thoroughly ingrained in those who are “the educated” today that one must speak of it: people have no sense of the productivity of the spiritual life. We must give the people of the present age a concept of this productivity of the spiritual life, of the creative spirit, of the power of the spirit. That is the first thing that is needed. This is the one thing about which we must have no illusions, for otherwise we would not know how to speak to the people of the present age.

The second issue is that, basically, the sense of the needs of other human beings has been lost due to the particular form of social life that has emerged in recent centuries. But without this sense of the needs of other human beings, there can be no shaping of economic life at all. Economic life can only be shaped by people who, in their thoughts about economic life, can initially disregard their own needs and who have a feeling for the needs of some other people and thus learn to feel for humanity. What is needed in economic life is insightful understanding of what can be called the consumption of humanity.

Economic life consists of production, circulation of commodities, and consumption. But it is not primarily the business of economic life to control production and to ensure that the right amount of energy goes into production. You can see this from the “key points”: capital is first put into circulation by the spiritual member of the social organism. The way in which one produces is a purely spiritual question. The question of consumption is essentially an economic question. Of course, those who are members of economic associations must have the opportunity to control and organize production on the basis of intellectual life; but one only learns about the intensity of production, the nature of production, if one has a sense for the needs of other people and not only for one's own, not even as a group.

But what has emerged in more recent times? In those talking shops that we call parliaments – it is, after all, a literal translation, and a very apt one at that – the custom of forming interest groups has become widespread. Federation of Industrialists, Federation of Farmers, and so on. In the Austria that was the basis for the outbreak, there were initially four economic interest groups at the starting point of chatterism. So, just the opposite of what leads to real economic understanding has actually been at work recently. Interest groups, that is, people were there who said from the outset: I decide what I think is right, depending on whether I am interested in the matter. However, in economic life, decisions can only be made if one can abstract from one's own interests and has a sense of the interests of others.

I had already expressed this years ago in a series of articles entitled “Theosophy and the Social Question”. There I formulated with a certain certainty what I am saying now. But you see, with such things I always meant something that should not just be talked about, otherwise one could also say it in parliament, in the chatterbox, but with such a thing I always meant something that concerns all of humanity, that should evoke a response. I stopped doing it back then because no one cared about it. Of course, theoretically some people may have taken an interest. But for a long time now, it is no longer enough to be interested only in theory. For the social forces that arose in humanity in earlier centuries have passed away. Today we need words that can also have an immediate social impact. What I mean by this may become clear to you if I say the following. Take the most radical socialists, the communists, the Leninists, the Trotskyists and so on, take them all. Do they start from a fundamental principle of social life? No, they take a framework, something that is already there. Even Lenin and Trotsky do not take something objective as a basis, but the existing state, from which they start. So the Communists do not take some objective thing either, some territory with a coherent economic life and the like, but they take existing frameworks and start from them because they do not dare, however radical they may otherwise be, to create frameworks first. They do not dare to start from the beginning.

Look around you in another area: today, even the educated flock to Roman Catholicism in droves. A Young Catholic Party is now being formed, which will probably take on very strong dimensions. Why? Because people today do not dare to search for the beginnings of an intellectual life in their souls, because they do not dare to start from something original. They want to lean on something that already exists. They want to run into what is already there. Because people do not want strong inner activity that draws from the original. They do not dare to do that. But that is precisely what we need. To achieve this, we have to awaken a sense of purpose in people. And that is what we need now. It is high time that European civilization came to an understanding in a sufficiently large number of people. That is what we need: to start from principles of origin, and not to lose ourselves in abstractions.

In that essay, “Theosophy and the Social Question,” I said that social life can only become healthy through people who start from the interests of others. In response to this, the abstract thinkers usually say something like, “That's nothing new, it's been said long ago.” If you then ask them where it was said, you learn: by Schopenhauer. He said quite correctly: “It is easy to preach morals; it is difficult to establish morals”; namely, morals must be based on compassion. Yes, you see, there you have the abstraction! In Schopenhauer you find an empty abstraction, which as such is quite correct. Because if you want to be abstract, you can say: to have a sense of the interests of others is to have compassion. But you have transformed the concrete fact that leads you to intervene in life into a shadowy abstraction. And with these shadowy abstractions, something is given with which people are very satisfied. If you come to people with something very concrete, as has just been attempted in the literature of threefold social order, then the opponents come and say: Yes, that is all already there! If you then look into what they mean, they mean some shadowy abstraction. One person finds that everything I have just pointed out is already contained in Schopenhauer's doctrine of compassion, another perhaps even in Kant's categorical imperative, and so on. This is a point to which we must look very carefully so that we can find the possibility of taking up the essential.

And so it is necessary that we do not speak out of some prejudice about what is right, but that we constantly let ourselves be dictated to by what we notice around us, that we let ourselves be taught by what people have and, above all, by what they do not have. But for that we need to really familiarize ourselves with what is happening in the present.

You see, it is of course right to defend oneself against the attacks that are now coming from all sides against anthroposophy and also against the threefold social order. But defense alone is not enough. We must be fully aware of that. No matter how well we defend ourselves against certain currents in the present day from which the personalities who attack us come, there is not much that can be done with defense. Take, for example, the type of religious Dadaist who recently wrote in the “Tat”, his name is Michel. A real religious Dadaist, that is what actually characterizes him. And no matter how much you defend him, you cannot deal with such a person. You will never be able to deal with him. Because what emanates from anthroposophy, what emanates from the threefold social order, he does not understand even in a subordinate clause. Such a person has the feeling, for example, that he should only write nouns when he writes. Although he is always speaking of “grace” and of what Catholicism has given him, in his feelings and in his way of perceiving things, which of course comes from the standpoint of a religious Dadaism, he is quite materialistic in his outlook. If he senses that in order to think spiritually about the spiritual, one must dissolve the nouns, then he calls it a “lack of style”. From his point of view this is quite understandable. But naturally you will never be finished discussing or defending it. Of course one can point out such impurities, that is all well and good, but one cannot achieve anything through these defensive measures alone.

And we must become fully aware of this if we want to be effective: today it cannot be a matter of merely defending ourselves against the attacks. That may be necessary sometimes. But what is at issue is that we get to know the currents of the time, the directions that are there, and characterize them ruthlessly before the world. It is not really about the spirit of Michel or something similar, but about this particular kind of religious Dadaism. It must be characterized before the world. It is not Mr. Michel who is of interest, but this particular kind of religious impotence, which is becoming a current. We must present it in such a way that, as it were, from the mirror in which we show such currents to people, those people who are also there and still have a healthy feeling can see what it is about. Of course, this is much more difficult than mere dialectical defense. But this is especially necessary. We must familiarize ourselves with what is in the undercurrents of our contemporary civilization. Then we will grasp it at the root and place it before the present.

In this respect, a great deal is contained in the material that is simply available from the lectures I have given since April 1919. In these lectures, I have always tried to point out the so-called intellectual and economic currents at work in the present day, and to characterize individual personalities as they had to be characterized. But most of these things have been buried. They lie there. They have certainly been read. But further work must be done. The ideas must be taken up and developed.

That is what is at stake. Then, gradually – now we no longer have much time to do so, the “gradually” could take a long time – then, gradually, something will emerge in our movement for the threefold social order that is a positive, fruitful critique of contemporary civilization as a whole. And it is on the foundation of a thorough critique of contemporary civilization that we must build up the positive ideas that are to enter into hearts and minds. People must realize how fragmented what is present in the current trends is, and that much of it is only a rehashing of something old. For when they see how it is splitting up, they will be inclined to accept the positive things we have to say, because the leading personalities are actually living in illusions everywhere. Until something catastrophic comes from one corner or another, people will continue to deny any danger. That is the characteristic of the present time.

So every day we have to make a new effort to show people how the illusions they are shrouded in must shatter. From this point of view, it is extremely interesting to study how the fear of the leading personalities initially worked when we started our threefolding movement in 1919. At first, for a few weeks, there was still a general atmosphere of fear. In the first few weeks, one could see quite clearly how, among certain industrial and commercial people, the question arose, half grudgingly and half reluctantly, which they naturally understood in their own way: How are we to get along with the Socialists? How are we to do this or that? And they deigned to talk about such things, even if they mostly did so with caricatures of socialization issues. Then a few weeks passed, the socialists did one foolish thing after another, and then the leading personalities of the old days were back on top.

This is an interesting movement that could be observed, because it showed how strong the tendency is not to simply move on to inner activity, but to devote oneself to what already exists, to work from what already exists and not to realize at all that one is basically dancing on a volcano. Even now, it is quite true that people are unsuspecting. It is therefore necessary to create understanding in the broadest circles for the fragmentation of our civilization in all areas. In these lectures, we will discuss how one finds this. Today, I wanted to emphasize the formal aspects and show where we should focus our thoughts first. After all, these days you cannot effectively represent a cause through external things alone.

For a long time, the education of humanity was entirely theoretical. And today, every person – especially the so-called practitioners, whose practice is basically just routine – has the theorist breathing down their neck. They have some theoretical phrases that they “implement in reality”. This is why so-called reality, so-called practice, is so unreal today. It is indeed completely unreal because people are educated to be theorists. Our entire school system was designed to intellectualize people, to turn them into theorists. And that is what we must come to: that we stop representing anything theoretically, — that every word is an inner deed,

It is extremely interesting, for example, to study the debates that have taken place in political economy regarding the idea that only physical labor productively creates goods, but that intellectual labor does not, that intellectual labor is unproductive. In the literature on political economy you will find extensive discussions of this. And two of the most important leading figures in political economy in the 19th century, in particular, started from this principle as from an axiom: Karl Marx and Rodbertus. Both take the view that intellectual work does not create goods, that only physical labor creates goods. This view is to be understood historically. But the way it is put forward is based on the idea that, for example, manual labor exhausts a person when it is performed, and the exhausted strength must then be compensated and replaced by nutrition; but an idea does not exhaust itself when something has been invented, when thousands and thousands of things are imitated according to the template. This is an argument that has been put forward very often. But it is nonsense. If one were to calculate how much energy is needed to find an idea, one would see that the energy expended on ideas, which must be replaced, is by no means less than that expended in physical labor, because what is done in thinking is just as much dependent on the will as what is done with the hand. You can't separate them at all. It is the greatest nonsense to distinguish between mental and manual labor in reality. But things have gradually become a cliché because there has been a tendency, especially in recent decades, to create clichés out of what used to be actual reality.

If you have experience in these matters, you can follow this step by step. I remember, for example, hearing a lecture that the socialist leader Paul Singer gave to proletarians. There were some among them who began to speak disparagingly of the “souls of writers”. They should have seen how the old Singer, in all his corpulence, protested and argued that he would not put up with it, that if you do intellectual work, it should not be treated the same as any other kind of work. But that was back in the early 1890s. Since then, one could clearly observe the process of becoming a cliché in the socialist world as well.

Such observations are important to find our way into life and to speak out of life. Of course, this cannot be done to a great extent overnight. But one must have a sense for it. And if one has the sense, then certain imponderables come into our speech. And then our speech will be such that it bears fruit.

That is what I wanted to say to you at first, as a formal introduction.

We shall now only make headway if we succeed in establishing the things we have to say for the recovery of the present civilization in a satisfactory way, that is, in a way that is convincing to the individual people. And much depends on our taking our stand on valid starting-points in dealing with the various questions. Above all, a sound judgment must be spread about what is actually involved in such statements as those contained in the “Key Points” and in everything that follows from them.

It is a matter of social conditions and of forming judgments that are socially directed. When seeking such judgments, the following always applies: if one judges these real circumstances, in which people are always involved with their feelings and their will – because that is the case with social circumstances – on the basis of mere intellectual logic, then one ends up in endless debates; and this must be borne in mind, especially in discussions. In matters that involve human beings and are therefore uncertain in reality, one must start from experience, from some kind of experience, not from rational logic, because from this or that point of view, one can indeed say the same for and against a matter. These things can only be judged from the standpoint of experience. We have ended up with so many different and contradictory socio-political views in modern times precisely because the people who put them forward did not start from experience, from observing conditions, and did not judge from this standpoint.

This has in fact been attempted in a comprehensive sense for the first time in the “Key Points”. And it must be made clear to people that actually all of the science and education that exists in the present day does not provide a basis for such a judgment, except for that which is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It does not proceed from logic alone, but from comprehensive experience. And it teaches one to judge from experience, whereas the insistence on experience among our present-day scientists is only an illusion. They talk a great deal about experience, but basically they judge from mere abstract intellectuality. Our spiritual science does not do that. Therefore, it also essentially trains one to make judgments based on experience.

You see, the man I mentioned here the other day in the public lecture, the economist Terhalle, he quoted a saying of a man who is not particularly authoritative in this field, Georg Brandes, who said that it is so difficult to arrive at the right solution in social conditions because the broad masses of the people judge not according to reason but according to instincts. It is easy to get the impression, if one firmly believes that one has a certain infallible point of view from which to judge all things, that everything that arises in the soul of a social group is based on instinct rather than reason. In a way, it is perfectly legitimate to say such a thing. But it does not achieve very much. For if not an individual comes into consideration for the formation of the judgment, but groups of people - be they ethnic or class groups - it is never possible to judge from reason. For what emerges as judgment is not always the result of the confluence of what the different people think, but also of what they feel and want. A clear judgment can never arise from this.

From the standpoint of reason, there is no such thing as an unequivocal social judgment. One can only judge socially from the standpoint of imagery. You must not tell people this without further explanation, because without it it will be misunderstood. But today, if you want to make and justify a social judgment, you have to know that it is only possible from the point of view of imagery, that is, from a point of view that the judgment is such that it can be bent and shaped, that it has, so to speak, even if the word is frowned upon, a kind of artistic structure and not a merely logical structure. Only judgments that have such a plastic form can be applied to social life in some way. That is something I had to say to give our intention a certain direction.

Furthermore, however, it is necessary today to accustom people to having a certain broad outlook. We actually face a world today in which everyone passes judgment from the narrowest conceivable standpoint, and in fact passes judgment in such a way that they believe things are absolute, are infallibly correct. They overlook nothing but what is closest to them; but they judge everything. That is the characteristic of our time. You will have realized, therefore, that in all that I have tried to give, especially since April 1919, when it was already the case earlier, my aim was not to present ready-made judgments everywhere, but to point out such things from which the individual can only gain a judgment. To create the basis for one's own independent judgment has been my aim since April 1919. This is something that should be made clear to the widest possible audience: we are not dealing with ready-made, dogmatic judgments, but with guidelines that enable individuals to form independent judgments. And you would do well in your work and in your speeches not to hold too much to ready-made, dogmatic judgments, but above all to see to it that you provide the basis for a judgment that one person can form in one way and another in another. For it is only from such judgments that something flows together that we can actually use in reality. Unfortunately it is only too true that the present world is very rich in judgments, but that basically it is far removed from the actual foundations of justified judgments.

And here I come to a point that I want to put at the beginning of our considerations, a point that must be clear to you above all, from which I would say you must start more in the formation of your speeches than in saying exactly the same things to people as I am now explaining to you here. But you must start from the consciousness of what I am now going to try to explain when formulating your speech.

You see, within European civilization, over the last 100, 150, 170 years, the most diverse judgments and the most diverse forms of agitation have emerged in the most diverse areas of social life. Just try to get an overview of all the views on social life that the 19th century brought forth, and you will always see, as you go through these things, that every single such endeavor always has weak points. You see everywhere that a proper overview of what is needed is actually not available. The people who have judged and discussed social issues in the last century have put forward many astute, many extraordinarily astute ideas. But in the end one had to say to oneself: yes, all of this does not actually achieve much in reality; one cannot do anything with what has been put forward by national economists, by practitioners and so on, about any social institutions and the like. Sometimes it could be used in a small area, but nothing could be done with it on a large scale. And that is because, basically, for almost two centuries within Europe, questions have been “resolved” on the basis of very first principles - at least, it is believed that they are resolved on the basis of very first principles - which cannot be resolved on the basis of these principles.

I would like to use a comparison to make what I want to say understandable. When someone builds a house and the foundation and the ground floor are ready, it should not occur to him that he now wants a completely new blueprint for the first and second floors. He must continue building in a certain way, as he laid the foundation and made the basic plan. If something is in progress, you cannot go back to the foundations and make something completely new. But that is what happened in Europe. National economists, socialist agitators, bourgeois agitators, practitioners and so on wanted to solve the economic and legal questions, but everywhere the so-called solutions were actually in the air. It was simply not possible to start from the fundamentals. If you had the whole of modern civilized life in mind - which was increasingly becoming such a whole that you couldn't take individual things out of it - you couldn't help but say to yourself: Yes, after all, we live in development. We cannot ask today: What are the first foundations of the legal relationships within the civilized world, what are the first foundations of the economic relationships within the civilized world? That is something that people today completely ignore. It is curious in Switzerland, for example. It is believed that by disregarding everything else in the world, one can consider special “Swiss conditions” and think again about legal and economic conditions. But that is basically how it has been done for more than two centuries. And that is essentially how the chaos came about. Because, you see, people have just tried to “solve” questions - I have to put “solve” in quotation marks here - that actually, if I may refer to my comparison, all went as far as the first floor being completed in the 18th century. You could only build the next floor on top of what was already there. All this stems from the fact that within European civilization one had completely lost the ability to have the right feelings about historical events, about such historical events that lay the foundations for the life that emerges from them. And the most important historical events must be properly evaluated if one wants to judge later. One cannot always judge from the foundations.

And here I would like to point out two important events that, although they lie very far behind us, must now be clearly considered. For our spiritual life, as well as our constitutional and economic life in Europe, are based on such events, and one cannot think about modern civilization without being clear about what has been brought to Europe through these events. One of the events is that of 1721. It is the Peace of Nystad, which ended the Northern War. The other event is that of 1763, the Peace of Paris, which brought the differences between France and the Free States of North America and England to an end. These two events are actually in the world of facts in the midst of us in the life of European civilization; the real effects are everywhere. But the European has completely forgotten how to think about these events in the right way. That is why he judges unreal things everywhere. The facts that I have just mentioned are everywhere. I would like to say: at every breakfast table we eat as it has come about through these two events. But people do not want to know anything about it, just as they do not want to know anything about reality, but always judge only from their heads and logically from their heads but really - spin. Because most of what is judged in social life today is basically actually spinning in the sense in which the word is often used in the vernacular.

You see, if you want to evaluate these two events correctly, you have to bear in mind the direct connection between them and the European catastrophe in which we are currently embroiled. In the development of humanity, it is simply not the case that you can only judge a few years, because the facts simply extend over longer periods of time.

The situation is as follows: It was only in 1721, with the Treaty of Nystad, that Russia was recognized as a power to be taken into account in the intellectual, legal, and economic life of Europe. Now, that means an extraordinary amount. Because Russia, in terms of its spiritual constitution – we are not sticking to the buzzwords here, but to reality – Russia is still, in terms of the spiritual interests of humanity, quite an Asian power, an oriental-moral power. Its spiritual life is in a state that we only know in relation to oriental conditions of the soul. Only what came through Peter the Great was pushed into this oriental state of mind, which then led to Russia advancing as far as the Baltic Sea.

All later events were thus already decided. And that, in turn, is characteristic: Europe has continued to discuss whether Russia should come to Constantinople or not. The important thing was not that, but whether it should participate in European affairs at all. And this question was decided in 1721 in the Peace of Nystad. And that is the essence of all the European discussions: that they constantly wanted to resolve questions that had actually already been largely resolved. The solution was already there to a certain extent, and they kept starting from square one, without taking into account the fact that there were already facts on the ground.

What has become of this? If you take the whole history of Europe, insofar as Russia is involved in it in the 19th century, then you will have to say to yourself: This involvement of Russia, just think of the Pan-Slav and Slavophile aspirations, they are definitely going in the direction of raising the spiritual questions of European life in an oriental way. Before the Orient, for example, Rome had to capitulate in a certain way. The Orient wanted to maintain its spiritual state; hence the split of Oriental Catholicism from Roman Catholicism. It is a completely different world in terms of spiritual outlook. Above all, it is a world that has always tended to combine what emerges in the spiritual life with what is worldly, secular, and state administration. In a certain sense, people wanted to find religious leadership in the state leadership.

This is how the whole relationship between European civilization and the East has been shaped. This is how the questions arose that were really there, not the ones that people dreamed of and about which they had so many illusions. Consider, for example, the continual tendency of the Czech Slavs and the southern Slavs in the east to turn to Russia, which Russia accommodated with what was only a phrase in the external political sphere of power, but which had an enormously seductive effect on the hearts of the Russian people: the liberation of the peoples in the Balkans. Everywhere it is spiritual forces! Into this the other mixed, which in turn are spiritual-national conditions: the antagonism between the Polish-Slavic element and the Russian element. This characterizes the whole situation for Eastern Europe.

And everything that has taken place in the spiritual depends on the overall life of civilization. One cannot talk about the things that take place in the development of humanity in such a way that one only starts from the partial. One simply cannot say that there is a general view of how spiritual, economic and political-legal life should relate to each other, but one can only talk about these questions under certain real given conditions. And the whole way in which the oriental intellectual life transplanted into Europe has worked depends entirely on the fact that Russia is to such an extensive degree an agrarian empire that is still far from having come to an end, that everything there is still such that one can say: nature still provides what actually sets the overall tone of life. The state of mind that has entered European life from the East depends entirely on what is made possible by the external agricultural life in Russia. The individual Russian, regardless of his class, would not have the state of mind he does if his external life were not so intimately connected with nature. For the whole oriental way of life, the economic question, the third link in the threefold social organism, is non-existent.

These three areas of human social life can be found everywhere in the world: spiritual life, state-legal life and economic life. But the state of mind of people under the influence of these three elements is always different, depending on whether humanity is inclined to look at what the land gives, or whether it looks at what the land gives; Je- The further east we come, the more it becomes natural to let nature take its course, to take from it what it gives and to manage it without particularly organizing economic life as such. And what it is about in Russia is that there was no need to organize economic life as such, or at least it was not considered necessary. But that is oriental thinking.

The Oriental way of thinking, if I may say so, goes as little as possible beyond the point of view that another “population” of the earth occupies in this respect. That is namely the animal world. Anyone who believes that this animal world does not also have a spiritual life and even in some respects a state-legal life would be on the completely wrong track. Animal life certainly also has a spiritual world and a kind of legal constitution. But it does not have an economic life. It takes what nature gives it. And of these inhabitants of the earth, the animal kingdom, the Oriental population stands out as having a particularly pronounced spiritual life that is based on the figurative and intuitive, precisely because it takes what nature offers it in its economic life, and does not really discuss this economic life at all. All the social structure that exists is actually based on other foundations than economic conditions, based on power relations, on inheritance relations, but not on economic thinking. This particular state of mind is the prerequisite for being able to give as much as is given in the Orient to the national element.

Now, Europe has been discussing national and social issues for two hundred years. But both have been discussed in such a way that one started from the elements without being based on the reality that was already there. It was simply no longer possible to think about national and social issues in the way that was thought about them in the 19th century, especially in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, after the national element had been given the nuance that was given to it by the fact that an Asian element, the Slav-national, had permeated it in the way that was the case. Thus, national questions were actually discussed anachronistically. The things that were still being discussed had long since been settled.

One should have been aware that one day the big question might simply arise as to whether the Orient could not flood the whole Occident with its way of thinking about the spiritual life. Today the dawn of this is already here. In the Orient, in Asia, they are discussing how to make all the technical-scientific stuff in Europe, with its abstraction, with its exploitation and so on, disappear and how to cover the whole earth with the Asian element of human feeling and sensation, of the soul.

In abstracto, one can of course agree with this. But the fact of the matter is that the spiritual and intellectual life in the Orient is in a state of decadence. This does not prevent there being future forces in the Russian soul. But what was there was completely in a state of decadence. One cannot count on something coming over from the Orient as if it were a form of redemption. You see, the Peace of Nystad in 1721 actually introduced a particular nuance into national thinking throughout Europe, which was imposed on the Slavs. And everything that has emerged from there has, in a sense, infected Europe, really infected it, in that Russia was able to participate in European conditions.

And the experimental country – if one were really concerned about world affairs, not always stopping at the borders of one's own state affairs, one would recognize something like that – the experimental country was Austria. And Austria perished for the reason that one continually discussed questions there that had long since been pushed in a certain direction to a certain extent. Austria was unable to resolve its Slav problem, because it could only have been resolved if it had developed an appreciation of the primary production of the mind, of a spiritual life that comes from its own elements.

Of course, one was not allowed to talk about such a spiritual life at all, for example to the liberals, least of all to them. For they always said to you – and in those countries that are republics, this is still said about them – these liberals always said: Yes, if we hand over the school to a free spiritual life, then Catholicism will take possession of this school, then we are at the mercy of clericalism. That is what people object to! But this objection arises only from the fact that one imagines appealing to a spiritual life as the only possibility, which was productive centuries ago, but is now there as something anachronistic, as something decadent. In the moment when one would become aware that we necessarily have a free-creating spiritual life, one would find it self-evident that this free-creating thinking must naturally be given school life. But because people lack the sense to participate in the creation of civilization with their will, but because they merely want to devote themselves to something - be it the state or an already established economic life - that feeds them, because they lack the sense to imbue their will with something creative, that is why such disheartening things as this occur. The point is that one can free oneself without surrendering the school to something old.

The people who talk as I have just indicated say: We are not producing a new spiritual life, so the old one will overwhelm everything. Of course, it is easy to become a follower of Spengler with his “Decline of the West”. It does not matter whether we do nothing at all or hand everything over to the Catholic Church. But a new spiritual life must be there! It was not wrong for the Church to have once had the school; for everything we have now in the sciences comes, on the one hand, from the old Church. That is not the wrong thing, but this is the wrong thing: if the traditional Church were still to have the school today, when we are faced with the historical necessity of creating a new spiritual life.

So, it was only Europe's impotence in pondering a new spiritual life that brought up the discussion of the national question. It should have been worked from Central Europe to the East in the sense of a productive spiritual life. Then, undoubtedly, what has asserted itself in the Pan-Slavist and Slavophile aspirations would have been frozen out. This spiritual life was there at the beginning. At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, people began to create a free spiritual life, which we call “Goetheanism”. But there was not the courage to hold on to it - that on the one hand.

On the other hand, there is what is discussed in the socio-economic sense. Since 1763, when France had to cede important territories to England and thus the decision was made that America would not be Romance in its north, but Anglo-Saxon, the economic-social question was steered into a very specific channel. In the eighteenth century, important decisions were already in place: in the east, the one of 1721 with the Peace of Nystad, and in the west, the one of 1763 with the Peace of Paris. These two important decisions, which are embedded in the entire intellectual and economic life of Europe, must be considered, because one cannot arrive at a judgment without considering them. And you see, we must not evaluate the things that happen in world history from today's entirely subjective point of view. Sometimes we cannot avoid using certain radical terms: the Orient once had a great, powerful, ancient wisdom. Today, in a sense, the Orient, with its decadent ancient wisdom, has fallen into barbarism. For barbarism is nothing other than when the original human instincts are rationalized, when they are directed by the intellect and by the mere life of the head. But if we call an Oriental a barbarian and speak of barbarism in this Schillerian sense in the case of the Oriental, especially the Russian, then the further we penetrate westward, starting from England and going over to America, the more we must call this western civilization, in the same sense, not civilization, but savagery. This is the opposite of barbarism. The barbarian tyrannizes the heart and mind through the head; the savage tyrannizes the head through what comes from the rest of the organism, through the life of instinct. And that is essentially the Western life, and this Western life is a predisposition to savagery! Basically, if one disregards Europe's smugness, which is found in America, one must ask: what is American culture? It is, radically speaking, savagery. But there is no jingoistic agitation behind this! If you really want to recognize the essence of this American life, you have to say to yourself: actually, it was not the European who inwardly triumphed over the Indians – outwardly, yes! – but inwardly, the European actually imbued himself with Indian life. Instincts have become dominant. And that is the essential thing: the contagion of the European with Indian instincts. For it is not only that the European, when he lives over there for a long time, gets longer arms and the like - that is something that has been anthropologically established - but his state of mind also changes. It does not depend on what ideas and conceptions a person has, but on what kind of constitution he has as a whole person. And here one must say: the further one has penetrated to the West, the more the Anglo-Saxon nature has passed over into savagery.

This savagery is certainly there. And it is based on the fact that, again, the economic question is not really under discussion. In the Orient, the entire social structure becomes absolutist through the special way I have described to you. In the West, it becomes anarchic.

Study what has become established in the West. They relied on the inexhaustibility of economic life by always feeding it from the colonies, by working from the inexhaustibility and not relying on thinking through this economic life. Western economic life is based entirely on getting as much as possible out of the colonies, whether the colonies are inside or outside is irrelevant. It is quite significant when you consider how, in the 1880s and 1890s, more and more areas in America were won over to supply products such as crops, wheat and so on. They drew from nature. There was no need to think about economic life in particular. They were naturally indifferent to what associations mean in economic life, because economic life works from inexhaustibility. But something is happening: an economic structure is forming. England's structure is based on the fact that it has India. In America, a certain economic life is emerging. This has imposed its structure on the whole of Western society. Something has emerged that has only led to economic activity arising out of inexhaustibility.

In the East, the decadent intellectual life, which did not take economic life into account at all, tended towards absolute domination over all areas of social life; in the West, the assimilability of the Anglo-Saxon element led to the development of what I have just characterized. Modern civilization was placed in this contrast between East and West.

It is interesting to contrast two people, for example: Rodbertus, the German political economist, who, despite being a fairly unprejudiced man, could even join the ministry – which means a lot – and, let's say, Karl Marx. A person like Karl Marx was only possible because he first learned to think in Central Europe and then looked at the economic conditions in the West. What Karl Marx did for the proletariat he could never have done if he had remained in Germany. He only achieved it because he learned to think in Germany, because he became familiar with the way one goes about it in France, in Paris, and because he then became familiar with an economic life, with all that goes with it, in England, drawing on an inexhaustible source. And only on this latter could he rely. It is also characteristic - so compare two such people, Rodbertus and Karl Marx - that Rodbertus judges like a Pomeranian landowner who has suddenly become a socialist - that is an exceptional case, of course - like a Pomeranian landowner who has suddenly become a socialist. That is how he judges, and it is interesting, because if you consider two such contrasts as Rodbertus and Karl Marx, a lot of interesting things emerge! But from this starting point, Rodbertus can be understood: a Pomeranian landowner who has suddenly become a socialist! He knows very well that agriculture cannot be dispensed with anywhere; he knows what it means in the national economy. The others talk nonsense, which very easily takes hold of people who, even in their youth, did not learn to distinguish barley from wheat because they lived in the city. But a man like Rodbertus knows that. He also knows what the overburdening of agriculture through mortgages means. If, in addition, he has the socialist airs that he has had, then one thing does not spoil the other too much. Something questionable may come about, but one thing is corrected by the other. And then something half-genius comes out, as it has come out with Rodbertus. So if you compare that with what Karl Marx said, you will say to yourself: the proletarian of today, in the broadest sense of the word, finds that what Karl Marx said makes immediate sense to him. Why does he think so? Because it is thought out from an exclusively economic point of view, and the proletarian is only involved in economic life, and because it is astute, because Karl Marx learned to think in Germany. But the German could not possibly have any idea of the way in which economic life will develop if everything is thought of only in economic terms. He still cannot do so today. He could only do so if he were willing to say: I must create a reality in which it is possible to think only economically. That is possible only within the threefold social organism.

What otherwise emerges, even what is great in Western countries, take Darwinism, take men like Spencer, Huxley or any of the American scientists up to Emerson, Whitman, and so on, everything, everything in the spiritual life is basically such that one must say: the head thinks what the belly hatches. They are instincts that have been transformed and transposed. In fact, thought is only economic. It is only thought in terms of how one eats and drinks. This is the case to the greatest extent and in the most intensive way. Of course, many people in the present do not notice it. And when it is said, they take it as an insult. But it is not meant as an insult. It is something great at the same time; it is the only great thing in the newer, in the most recent civilization, this way of thinking. But that is the way it is. And European civilization has been squeezed between these two extremes since the eighteenth century. Only the people who were excluded from this European civilization, who were only put to the machine, have brought to the surface a way of thinking that seems to have no connection with these conditions, but in reality it has the very deepest connection with them: that is the proletarian world. And it is highly interesting when you look at things realistically.

As I said, Austria was the testing ground. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Austrian state experienced some very strange developments. On the one hand, there was much discussion about the Slav question. Some people referred to it, rather better, as “Austrian federalism”. The whole intellectual life in Austria, this one link in the threefold organism, takes its structure entirely from this discussion of the Slav question. The other thing is that - one finds it in the sidelines of parliamentary speeches much more than one could say it is downright emphasized in the right way - terrible fears arise about the decline of Austrian economic life due to Americanism, due to the Anglo-Saxon economy. One could see everywhere in Austria how exports, for example of grain from Hungary, are affected by what comes from the West. In those days, very perceptive people in Austria said: 'The westward drift, which is flooding our country with mortgages, is gradually ruining agriculture. These were clear indications of symptoms that corresponded to deeper historical foundations, so that in Austria at that time there was much talk of what was shining in on the one hand as the Slav question in spiritual terms, and on the other as the agrarian question in economic terms.

And then, for example, I think it was in 1880, a strange plan emerged in Austria in individual minds, which actually made a strange impression; it has also been discussed in the Austrian parliament: the plan of a League of Nations emerged, a League of Nations, however, in the form that one said: Western European League of Nations. But you can't form an alliance that encompasses the whole world; that's nonsense. The idea that you can bring the whole world together can only arise in the mind of an abstract thinker like Woodrow Wilson. If that were the case, then of course you wouldn't need an alliance anymore. So, as early as the 1880s, this idea of a League of Nations emerged. Here again we see something of which one can say: Yes, in the course of the 19th century the impulses that were actually needed arose quite sporadically; but they were always submerged by the unsuitable solutions that were always put forward, without taking account of the historical reality. Wherever reality shone forth into human contemplation, it was immediately eradicated. For the modern man is, after all, a theorist.

And that is what I would particularly like to recommend to you: if you do not succeed in discarding the theoretical man before you go out now, you will achieve nothing. You must discard the theoretical man, must try to speak out of reality. Whether you are better or worse at it is not the point. But this is the point: to speak from real foundations. That is why I did not want to make any judgments today, but rather to point out the facts to you. I said: look at what emerged from the Peace of Nystad in 1721 and from the Peace of Paris in 1763. You can look at everything that history presents: you have a point of view. You will find it everywhere, still playing a role in intellectual, political, and economic life. I would like to shine a light on just one path. For if you allow your own judgment to inspire his words, you can achieve something – not if you just parrot them.

From the events that are taking place, especially in the present, you will indeed see that today all talk about social affairs is without the right foundation if one does not take into account international relations. That is why I have chosen the path that has already been revealed by yesterday's and today's discussions for these considerations. I would like to start with a brief presentation of certain international conditions, and then, with this foundation, move on to our actual task.

The above remarks will have led you to ask: How should one think in order to arrive at a possible solution to the great questions of world history today and in the near future, how should one think in relation to the West on the one hand and the East on the other?

You can easily see that today everything is, so to speak, unified in the thinking of people. Isn't it true that a person who wants to judge world affairs today thinks in a certain way about a particular issue. He says: In the West, we face the prospect of being confronted for decades to come with efforts to enslave Central Europe. They will force Central Europe into forced labor. And one can only escape what is looming if one, so to speak, takes the orientation, and one means roughly the same orientation that the West is giving us in Central Europe, if one now takes this orientation to the East, that is, establishes economic relations with the East and, so to speak, seeks outlets in the East for what is now being produced in Germany. Since we have become accustomed to looking at everything only from an economic point of view, we now extend this scheme to the East.

This is actually spoken with the exclusion of any realistic consideration. And that is why I wanted to say beforehand how the East and the West are involved in our entire modern civilized life, so that a way might be created for gaining a judgment on this side. The question is: Is it promising on the part of the leading economic people, who integrate themselves into that configuration, which, under the influence of the only blessed economic life, is to take on that which is still called the “German Reich”, is it promising that economic relations to the East, economic relations as such, are now being established directly?

Anyone who looks at the matter in the abstract, according to today's thinking, will say yes! But anyone who considers what the whole intellectual, political and economic life of the 19th century and of the last era in general teaches us will probably come to a different conclusion. For just take the real facts that are at hand: we have ample opportunity to see how devotedly and how gladly the European East absorbs the intellectual life of Central Europe when we look at the circumstances that have unfolded in the 19th century until about its last decades. For if you look into the intellectual life of Russia and ask yourself: how did it actually come about? you will see that in this whole Russian intellectual life two things live.

Firstly, the real Russian intellectual life, in all that has come to us and been absorbed by Central Europe out of a certain sensationalism that arose in the last decades of the 19th century – the reflexes of good Central European thinking live towards us through and through. German thinkers and everything associated with German thought were received in Russia with great willingness, more so than in Germany itself. In fact, in the first half of the 19th century, German personalities were specifically called upon to establish Russian education. Everywhere you can see how the specific thoughts and intentions for institutions in Russia arose under the influence of Central Europe, and specifically of German personalities, and how they came about in the same way as the legendary Rurik rulers, of whom one always hears the words: the Russians have this and that and all sorts of things, but no order; that is why they turn to the three brothers and say that they should give them order. This was more or less the situation throughout the 19th century with regard to everything that was available as intellectual sources of life in relation to Central Europe. Wherever something was needed to take in concrete ideas, people turned to Central Europe or Western Europe. But the reaction to the two areas was quite different. Central European life was absorbed into Russian life with a certain matter-of-factness, without much ado, and it continues to live on. Intellectual life, which was more Western European, was absorbed in such a way that much ado was made about it, that it took on a certain sensational coloration, that it settled in with a certain pomp, with a certain decorative element. This is something that must be taken into account. Take the most important Russian philosopher, Soloviev. Such a philosopher has a completely different significance within Russian life than a philosopher within Central European life. All the thoughts in him are Central European, Hegelian, Kantian or Goethean, and so on. We find only the reflections of our own life everywhere when we devote ourselves to these philosophers in terms of their concrete thoughts. One can even say: What concrete thoughts are present in Wolstoj are Central European or Western European – but with all the differences that I have just discussed. The same applies even to Dostoyevsky, despite his stubbornness in Russian-national chauvinism. All this is one side.

But you can see that I would like to say, with a certain unanimity, that rejection occurs in Russia when Russia is touched by the economic machinations of Central Europe at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Just think of the adoption of certain trade treaty provisions and the like. And think of how the Russian element behaved – apart from the shouting – how the Russian element behaved as a people in its rejection of what asserted itself there as a purely economic invasion or as an economic display of power.

All this should be a guide. All this should show that it would be playing with fire if one were to attempt today to establish a relationship with the East through trade or other economic relations. What is important and what we must achieve despite the great difficulties involved in dealing with the Bolshevik element is, above all, to bring into Russia the spiritual element, insofar as it emanates from productive intellectual life. Everything that emanates from productive intellectual life extends to views and feelings that affect intellectual life itself or state life or economic life. All this will be quite well received by the Russian element.

For the second element to the first, which actually consists only in the adoption of concrete, specifically German thoughts, the second element in Russian intellectual life, that is, how should one put it, an undifferentiated, vague one – this is not meant in any kind of inflammatory way, but again, a terminology – a vague sauce of sentiment and feeling. And that is precisely what can be observed, for example, in the case of a philosopher who is typical of the Russian element, such as Soloviev: his thoughts are quintessentially German. But they appear in a completely different form in Soloviev than they do, for example, in German thinkers. Even Goethe's spirit appears in a completely different form in Soloviev. It is poured over and into it, a certain emotional and sentimental sauce that gives the whole a certain nuance. But this nuance is also the only thing that distinguishes this life. And this nuance is something passive, something receptive. And that is dependent on absorbing Central European intellectual life.

In this interaction between Central European intellectual life and the Russian folk element, something magnificent can develop fruitfully for the future. But one must have a sense of how creative such interaction is. It must take place in the purely spiritual element. It must take place in a certain element that is based on the relationship between human and human. We must win this relationship with the East. And when this is understood, then it will automatically lead to what can be called a self-evident economic community, which arises out of spiritual life. It must not be assumed, otherwise it will be rejected. Anything that economists could do to the East will certainly not help us if it is not built on the basis of what I have just discussed. It is an eminently socially important question that this be faced.

The other thing for us to consider is our relationship with the West. You see, lecturing the West about our Central European intellectual life is an impossibility. And this impossibility should be taken into account, quite apart from the fact that it is extremely difficult just to convey in translation what we in Central Europe think, what we in Central Europe feel, what the East also feels. The whole way of looking at things, when it comes to purely spiritual matters, is thoroughly different between the Central European area on the one hand and the West and America on the other. People were amazed that Wilson understood so little about Europe when he came to Paris. They would have been less amazed if they had looked at a thick book that Wilson had already written in the 1890s, called “The State”. The book was actually written entirely in the style of European scholarship. But just look at what has become of this European scholarship! If you had considered the antecedents that were available, you would not have been surprised that Wilson could not understand anything about Europe. He could not. For insofar as thinking as such comes into consideration, it is in vain to evoke any kind of direct impression. On the other hand, it would be quite significant if one were to imagine the matter in such a way that one says, yes, if one wants to negotiate with the West from nation to nation, for example, one will get nowhere. But if you exclude statesmen and scholars from the negotiations, scholars in all fields and statesmen even more so, if you send no statesmen to the West but only economists, then the Westerners will understand these economists and something beneficial will come of it. Only in the field of economic life will one understand something in direct negotiations in the West. But that does not mean that one should limit oneself in one's dealings with the West only to what is economic life. Oh no, there is no need for that. It is, for example, highly interesting to look at some concert halls, large concert halls, in Western countries and the names of famous composers that are written on them: Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and so on – as a rule, only German names are found. So you can be sure: if you only want to make an impression in Western Europe based on Central European thought, you won't get very far with either the Romance or the Anglo-Saxon element. That doesn't mean that you can't talk to people about what is being thought in Central Europe. Of course one can. But one must speak in a different way from the way one speaks in Central Europe, where the life of ideas and of thinking is primarily taken into account. Take a larger example: even more than what is usually handed down in our Dornach building today, the Western European, and perhaps the American, understands the Dornach building itself, that which emerges from the matter as fact.

Of course, in speaking, one can shape the matter in such a way that one lets the factual emerge from the matter. That was how it was before the war – it may be emphasized again, without being immodest – to the extent that in May 1914 I was able to give a lecture in German in Paris that had to be translated word for word; but I was able to give it in German. And this lecture, I am only stating the fact, had a greater success than any lecture of mine ever had within Germany. We were that far along. But it is necessary to frame what is said in a very specific way, so that it is presented to the people in a way that I would call more façade-like, artistic, and that results in an external effect. To a great extent, it is about the how.

And so it is not unrealistic at all to say: We will make a big impression on the West if we understand our task correctly in this way, if, for example, we really get beyond what we do not and never will succeed at, because we will always lag behind the West, if we get beyond imitating the West. You see, it doesn't matter whether we imitate the West's machines – we don't make them as precisely as the West – or whether we copy false teeth, we don't make them as elegantly as the West, it doesn't matter! If we merely imitate, we will not get along with the West. For it does not need what we produce in the process. But if we grasp what we can do and what the West cannot do, if, for example, we were to permeate technology with art and artistic perception, if we were to truly arrive at what has long been present within our Anthroposophical Society, but which we have not been able to implement due to a lack of personalities who , if we were to artistically shape the locomotive, for example, if we were to artistically shape the station into which it enters, if we were to impress upon what can be grasped of us what is in us, then Westerners will take it, then they will also understand it. And then they will also associate with us. But we must have an idea of how this association should be. Each of us can only do this in his own field, but it must be done. And we must begin by recognizing how the impulse of threefolding arises out of very real conditions.

We need to have a spiritual life that is such that it can have more of an effect on the East in the way just characterized; it can only be a productive spiritual life. With that, we would already outdo all the Zunatshchikis and the others. For in the long run, they would not be able to enslave the Russian people, the Russian soul. Once we have this productive spiritual life, it will happen that it will have an impact on the East. We just have to get the strength to bring this spiritual life into its own. We have to defeat all the vermin that are coming up and want to trample this spiritual life underfoot.

The hostility towards spiritual life has come to such a pitch that I recently had to read out a passage in Dornach that said that now that the spiritual spark has ignited enough in the clash with spiritual science, the real spark must finally take hold of this Dornach building.

So the opposition is taking on the most brutal forms. The point is that it is a necessity: to bring this productive spiritual life, this very concrete, productive spiritual life, to bear regardless of what people sneer at and what they do. For we know that This productive spiritual life that can arise in Central Europe can bring about that great brotherhood that can expand to the East and unite the East with Central Europe, while all brutal economic machinations would only create more and more abysses between Central Europe and the East. It is extremely important to see through such things and to make such things popular. It is particularly important for the very reason that if you can win an audience for such things, then, by getting used to thinking in such ways, people will also come to a completely different way of thinking on other social issues.

But this must be done on a broader basis than has been the case so far. To do this, it is necessary that we now work with all our might to ensure that the things we do are not always a lost cause in a certain sense. For this must indeed be emphasized, my dear friends: today there is plenty of material in our threefolding newspaper, but basically it is still in a state of decay because it is only literature for the time being. It is therefore necessary to keep working on it. But that is an impossibility. What is proposed here and there must actually be processed on a broad basis, by many people. But we must see these things clearly.

We must be quite clear about the fact that we need a free and productive intellectual life and that we must cultivate it in order to be able to enter into a possible relationship with the East.

And in the same way, we must have an economic life in which the state does not interfere, in which the intellectual life does not interfere, in which only economists are active in order to negotiate with the West. These negotiations must be conducted by the economists alone. Only in this way will something come of it. It can be done, and it should be done as long as it is not otherwise possible: to also negotiate with the West from state to state. But nothing beneficial will come of it. Something will only come of it when the statesmen disappear from the economic negotiations on our side, no matter what they shout over there. Let the statesmen negotiate over there! There the statesmen are involved in economic life. But on our side, when the economists become statesmen, they lose their economic perspective; then they become men who think entirely in terms of the state.

What is important is to see through the real necessities of life. We must therefore have a threefold structure of the social organism for the very reason that we can send economists who are uninfluenced by the machinations of the state and intellectual life to the West. And we need a free spiritual life so that we can enter into a possible relationship with the East. Thus international circumstances themselves absolutely demand this of us.

How this is to be realized in detail, each of us must work out for himself. What is given here is only a guide. But it is a guide based on real conditions. And what has been said several times must be taken seriously in the deepest sense. It is not true that today's practitioners really understand anything about practical life. They understand nothing at all about truly practical life – precisely because they are practitioners! Because the practitioners today are in fact the strongest theorists, because they completely immerse themselves in individual thought patterns and theorize in practice. That is precisely what must be thoroughly understood in the deepest sense of the word. And we must base our so-called “agitation” on this: that we work from the real conditions.

You see, above all we must be clear about the fact that modern economic life as such makes this threefold social order necessary: and that is because this economic life today is chaotically mixed up from the impulses of the East, the impulses of the West and the impulses of the middle. And that is how it is: Economic life basically consists of three elements: what nature provides, in the sense that I discussed in the previous lesson; then what human labor creates; and what is achieved through capital. Capital, human labor and what nature provides and what is then continued through production, that is what figures in economic life.

But you see, just as it is with the human three-part organism, that it consists of three parts, but in each of its parts the three-part structure is repeated, so it is also with the social organism. We certainly have an organ in the head that is primarily a nerve-sense organ; but the head is also nourished, it is traversed in a certain way by nutritional organs. Likewise, in what is merely a metabolic organism, in the metabolism, serving the metabolism, we again have something of the nerve-sense organism, the nervus sympathicus. It is the same with regard to the threefold nature of the social organism. The whole is again contained in each of the three parts. But today it is contained in an unorganized way. It is so interwoven that it destroys life, that it does not build up life.

First of all, nature is interwoven, and production is, of course, only a continuation of nature. And to the extent that nature is interwoven, our economic life is still interwoven with a way of feeling that is completely oriental, that is completely from the East. Orientals will not understand how one could somehow include human labor in economic life. And even if we go back to our earlier economic conditions, which were still permeated by oriental conditions, one will never find human labor included in economic life.

It is also impossible for human labor to play a role in economic life. Because, you see, you can add apples and apples together. You can get something out of it mathematically. You can also add apples and pears together as fruits. You will get something out of it mathematically. But I don't know how you would mathematically add apples and glasses, for example, to a common sum. Now, what is contained in a good, in a commodity, is fundamentally different from what, as human labor, has “oozed into the commodity,” as one would say in a Marxist expression. This is nothing more than foolishness, but it has become popular to say that “human labor has oozed into the commodity.” To make human labor and what is in the commodity, the product, into something communal is just as much nonsense as if you wanted to make apples and spectacles into something communal. But modern political economy has done just that. So economic life has achieved the feat of, so to speak, eating spectacles and using apples as weapons for the eyes.

You don't notice it in human life, but you do notice it in the subordinate kingdoms of nature. It sounds paradoxical to say such a thing, but in reality it is done all the time. And in the economic sphere, where wages are the main thing and the wages contain something that should be paid for and is included in the price of the goods, just as it comes from nature, you have in fact added apples and glasses. It is an impossibility. It is inconceivable.

When the three spheres of the social organism, spiritual life, political and legal life, and economic life, were still regulated according to the old conditions, the latter in the oriental manner, when people, without really thinking about it much, but only out of abundance – I said in the previous hour: a little higher than the animal, which also only takes what nature offers – in older times, even in our regions, goods and labor were not added together at all. Labor was regulated in a different way: one was a landowner, a noble landowner, one inherited this social position from one's ancestors. If you didn't have such blood in your veins, you were a serf, a bondsman, a slave. That is, people were in a legal relationship to each other. Whether you had to work or whether you could tend to your belly and watch from the balcony as the others worked was not determined by price or money, but was based on legal relationships. Work was regulated on completely different grounds than the movement of goods. These regulations were completely separate, stemming from old conditions that we can no longer use now. There were two things: goods and human labor in the Orient. It was always thought that the legal working conditions would be established on different grounds than the circulation of goods. Those resulted from these old legal relationships, certainly. But labor was not paid somehow, rather the person was put in a position and then worked, and what he worked on circulated. But human labor did not “flow” into the product.

So you can see that the state-legal aspect is inherent in everything that is produced economically, because labor is involved in it. When we speak of the purely economic in economic life, we must speak of goods, of commodities. Insofar as we speak of developed economic life, of economic life that is based on the division of labor, we must already add a state-legal element, so that the regulation of labor is a state-legal one. It thus spills over into the other link of the social organism. And capital – yes, capital is essentially part of economic life in that it supports economic life spiritually. Capital is what creates the economic centers, what creates the businesses. It is the spiritual element in economic life. It is just that under modern materialism, this spiritual life in economic life has taken on a materialistic character. But the spiritual element is nevertheless in economic life. The capitalist element is the spiritual element in economic life.

This leads us to seek the threefold social order in the economic life itself. That is to say, starting from the actual economic life, in which the production, circulation and consumption of goods take place, what flows into economic life as work is to be brought into connection with the life of rights or the state; and capital, which is the actual spiritual element, is to be brought into connection with spiritual life. This is specifically stated in the “Key Points”, where it is said that the transfer of capital and the circulation of capital must be related to spiritual life in a certain way. That is it: we learn to distinguish these three areas within economic life itself.

But we shall only get a correct picture of what actually exists if, on the one hand, we know that we have to regulate something that Orientals have carelessly ignored: the relationship between human economic life and nature. For the Oriental, this was a matter of course. We have to regulate it. For Westerners, as I explained earlier, the whole of intellectual life has been absorbed into economic life. Even Spencer thinks economically when he claims to think scientifically. Everything is included in economic life. Intellectual life is economic. That is why capitalism as such is materialistic. Capital must be there, as is also stated in the “Key Points”, but the process of capitalizing the spiritual will meet with the strongest resistance in the West, where capitalism, as it is now, corresponds precisely to the Western way of thinking, where everything spiritual is brought into the material. Therefore, basically everything that is now being forced on the middle world by the West, about which so many unjustified words are being said, is basically nothing more than the effect of Western capitalism, which has only taken on large dimensions. So that, while the western states are just capitalized, one believes that one is dealing with the mere state structure. This is not the case. The statesmen are basically economists too, just as the scholars are economists. And so we will have to keep these two things separate, which, on the one hand, we have to think through in our economic life, while the Orient is not accustomed to thinking it through – and which, on the other hand, has to be spiritualized in relation to capitalism, while it does not occur to the West to spiritualize the matter at all. That is the task of the Central European regions. That is why something emerged in these Central European regions that should now be clearly and sharply recognized.

Again and again we meet people – here in Stuttgart and in Switzerland, and our other friends have had similar experiences – who say: Yes, if you agree with the division into a free spiritual life and a free economic life, but then there is nothing left for the state! In fact, the way state life is today, how it has absorbed spiritual life on the one hand, which does not belong in it, and how it absorbs more and more of economic life on the other, the actual state life withers away. The actual life of the state, namely that which should take place between human beings and between all mature human beings, is no longer there at all. That is why people like Stammler can only stammer in such a way that they say: the life of the state consists in giving form to economic life. But that is precisely the essential point: that state life will only come into being, that is, it will embrace everything that takes place between mature human beings purely by virtue of the fact that they are human beings. This includes the whole area of labor regulation, for example, which will only come into being in the right way when the other two areas have been separated out. Only then will it be possible to develop a truly democratic state life. It is not surprising that we do not yet have a proper concept of this state life, because today we do not yet have a proper concept of an independent democracy, because we only think in the abstract and then start defining democracy. You can always define, can't you? Definitions always remind you of the old Greek example, which I have often cited, where someone defined man in a very correct definition: he is a living being that walks on two legs and has no feathers. The next day, the person who had said this was brought a plucked goose and told: “So this is a man, because he walks on two legs and has no feathers.” You can do anything with definitions. But we are not dealing with definitions, but with the discovery of realities.

Take the concept of democracy as it exists today and as it is basically of Western origin - how did it come about? You can follow the development of England. If you follow it through the older English rule, you will find that there is a striving out of bondage. But all this has a religious character. And it takes on a very religious character, especially under Cromwell. From the theocratic-puritanical element, from freedom of faith, something develops that is then detached from theocracy, from faith, and becomes the democratic-political element of freedom. This is what is called the democratic feeling in the West. This is detached from the religiously independent feeling. This is how one arrives at the real concept of democracy. And there will only be a real concept of democracy when there is an organization between the spiritual and the economic organization that is now based on the relationship between human beings and the equality of all mature human beings. Only then will it become clear what the state relationship is.

But you see, it is characteristic that basically the ideas really did arise in Central Europe, without anyone having already come up with this threefold order, that the ideas arose: Yes, how should the state actually come into being? It is extremely interesting how, in the first half of the 19th century, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was even able to become a Prussian minister – that is a remarkable thing – wrote the beautiful essay 'An Attempt to Define the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State', based on certain Schillerian and Goethean concepts. He really wrestled with the possibilities of state building, of real state building. He tried to tease out of the social conditions everything that could be state, political, and legal. Wilhelm von Humboldt certainly did not succeed in an impeccable way, but that is not the point. Such things should have been developed further. And until we get around to creating the real thing for what is state-like, while “the bunglers” always bungle that state life is only the shaping of economic life, we will not get ahead. These things must necessarily be brought before a large audience today, on a large scale and as quickly as possible. For only by introducing healthy thoughts into our contemporary world and spreading these thoughts as quickly as possible can we make progress.

For the opposing forces are strong. They sneer and assert their will to destroy from all corners. And we should have no illusions about the strength of will on that side. Because if the undertaking we are now embarking on is to have any real meaning, then we have to say to ourselves: we have tried to gain a social impulse from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Not true, what is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that has time, that can go slowly, that can also take into account what people can tolerate. Cliques may also form. Because these cliques are only in the physical world; the spiritual movement transcends them. What is really at the core of the pure anthroposophical movement as a life force has a significance, a content in the spiritual world. It does not matter so much whether cliques form, whether there are sectarian traits within them, and so on. These are things that must be combated in our present-day serious times, piece by piece, in the details. But it is not as bad as if the right thing does not happen in the area where the practical, that which is directly called to action, is taken out of the anthroposophical movement, as it is, I would like to say, on our social wing of the anthroposophical movement. There is no time to wait. We cannot set up threefold social order federations that organize themselves in such a way that they are only a reflection of the old anthroposophical branches. We have to be aware that what we work out tomorrow, no matter how good it is, can be worse than what we work out badly today. It is therefore essential that we work hard in the present, in the moment, and that every day it can become too late. And indeed, events show us how things can become too late week after week. That is why this action, which we are now facing, has been initiated and why so much emphasis is placed on it, because it is necessary for things to happen quickly. Europe has no time to lose.

What is needed is to bring about a change in our thinking, to think in such a way that reality plays a role in this thinking. Humanity has been educated in such a way that, basically, an unrealistic way of thinking has also become the norm in practical life. It is an unrealistic way of thinking when people today come forward and say, for example, that one should cultivate the right, one should somehow advance in social life from an ethical point of view. These things are very nice, of course, but they are very abstract. The spiritual has value only when it directly intervenes in material life, when it is really able to carry and conquer the material. Otherwise it has no value. We must not allow ourselves to be captivated by such tirades, as presented to the world today by people like Foerster, for example. These are fine words, but they do not penetrate into material life because those who present them do not understand material life themselves, but believe that today's material world can somehow be advanced by preaching.

And that is the mistake the bourgeoisie has made: they have withdrawn more and more with regard to their spiritual life in an area of luxury. Six days a week they sit in the office. In the cash book at the front, you can read “With God!”. But then it doesn't go very much with God on the following pages; there the “With God!” is very abstract. But then, after working the whole week in the familiar way, on Sunday you go and listen to a sermon about eternal bliss that fills the soul with spiritual delight, and the like. That is, making the spiritual life a luxury and de-spiritualizing the material life! In this respect, the bourgeoisie has come a long way. It has pushed this further and further, so that finally the whole intellectual life has really become ideology.

On the other hand, it is no wonder when the proletariat comes and declares theoretically: Intellectual life is an ideology – and when it now tries to transform the entire economic life by merely considering the mode of production. The two belong together. Really, things are such today that ultimately the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat consists only in how long the one is at the bottom and the other at the top, and vice versa. It is only one struggle. The aim of getting to the bottom of the matter is not to come up with a fruitful way of shaping life. This can only be done if one has a far-reaching impulse that encompasses the human being as such.

But then, if one recognizes this, one must either come to grips with the threefold order or be able to put something better in its place. Everything else that arises today does not take the human being as such into account at all. Therefore, it is necessary that in the very near future, our movement be saved, as it were, from what our opponents have in mind. They plan to make our movement impossible through machinations. And these machinations are indeed very sophisticated. Just consider the sophistication that now lies in the campaign of the “Berliner Tageblatt”. The Berliner Tageblatt has an article fabricated for it in which all kinds of nonsense 'occultists' are mentioned, and in the middle of it stands Anthroposophy, which has nothing to do with it. But people spare themselves the trouble of dealing with Anthroposophy by simply categorizing it as nonsense. Of course, the nonsense that is in there is something that everyone can understand, so there is no need to bother with anthroposophy. It is indeed being spread internationally; you come across it everywhere, in English newspapers, everywhere. But that is only one thing. In the near future – it has already begun, but it will continue – a war of extermination will begin against what our movement is. Therefore, it is necessary today to reflect on what needs to be done. And if something drastic does not happen on a broad basis, then, my dear friends, we would have to say to ourselves: We do have a concept of what could happen in social life based on anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but we do not have the strength to carry it through. In fact, when one sees the consistency with which the opposing side works, sometimes a consistency born of wickedness, one says: It is necessary that we realize, a will must be mustered! They have bad will, why should the same forces not be mustered in the good? Why should it not be possible to say with justification: there was the intention of bringing through something beneficial for humanity; but the opponents, they were different people, they have a consistent will, they also go to the point of realizing this will!

My dear friends, if we do not stand on this ground of going to the point of realizing our will, then it is self-evident that we will not be able to achieve anything for the present moment. In a certain respect, the question in our movement is now one of either/or. That is why this action was initiated. I ask you to bear this in mind. I ask you to take it into your will before we go further in the formation of what we need for this will.

The first theme proposed for your consideration would be: The great questions of the present and the threefold social organism. It is necessary that we choose these topics that you want to address in such a way that there is an opportunity to get to know as precisely as possible, firstly, what the present needs and, secondly, what the impulse for the threefolding of the social organism has to offer with regard to the great questions of the present. always have the opportunity to point out, on the one hand, that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must provide the basis for this kind of social thinking, which is to be brought into the world through the threefold social order, and, on the other hand, that the opportunity should always be offered to advocate for the “day to come” and the like. Its activity will have to extend to our movement as a whole, both to the spiritual side and to practical institutions. On the one hand, you will have to make it plausible to the world that it is necessary in the present time to cultivate a truly productive spiritual life; on the other hand, you will have to take into account the practical side, that we simply, as a intervene as a movement in social and economic life, and that we must therefore be strengthened financially as much as possible, not for our own sake but for the sake of the progress of economic life.

Today, in particular, I would like to raise a few points regarding the necessary topics, to set the scene for our further deliberations. It might be best if we then choose a second topic along the lines of: The free system of education and teaching in its relation to the state and the economy. - And if we then choose the third topic: The economic association system and its relation to the state and to the free spiritual life. - By choosing these three topics, we will have the opportunity to present to the world in the next few weeks what really belongs to our movement as a whole in an effective way.

Now let us first talk about something fundamental regarding the first topic. Above all, it will be about showing people that threefolding is, so to speak, already there as a demand, that one is not doing anything other than shaping what is already there in the right way. There it is, but in a form different from what it should be and will be when it has been fully developed; there it is as a demand of three things, but today they are chaotically intermingled and precisely because of this they fight each other internally fight against each other like some kind of monstrosity, which might have come into being in something like this, as if the head of man were in his stomach and the digestive organs in the heart and the like, if the three systems of the organism were mixed up. So what is actually there, what wants to develop, should be given the right form.

To make this clear, let us start with the third link in the social organism, with economic life. This economic life can be characterized, as it exists today, by following its development over the last few centuries. In the last few centuries, economic life itself has only taken on the forms that exist today and out of which the whole social question has arisen. It has certainly been a somewhat longer process. Even if we go back as far as we want, the economic life that we face today does not go back further than the 14th or 13th century. That was the time when European economic life went through a kind of crisis, one might say a creeping crisis. That was the time when European economic life was thoroughly preparing for a change.

If we go back to earlier times, we find that European economic life was thoroughly influenced by the continental trade and traffic movement from Asia through Central Europe to Western Europe. And we find in those older times everywhere that economic life takes place with a certain matter-of-factness, and that traffic also takes place with a certain matter-of-factness. To a certain extent, economic conditions had not yet developed so intensely that it was necessary to restrict and organize the freedom of trade and commerce. But as the population of Central Europe became more and more dense, as economic life became more and more intense, the necessity arose to organize all kinds of things. And out of the freer economic life of the older times, a much more constrained economic life emerged. The freer economic life of earlier times is characterized by the fact that the individual economies, the individual households, which were more like household economies, were run by their private owners, with the help of servants and a population in bondage, according to the instincts of their private owners, and that an extensive trade, which was certainly conducted across from Asia, did not need to be regulated in any particular way either. It could be carried out quite freely, because economic life was not yet intensive.

But, as I said, with the increase in population, and with the development of other conditions, which we can mention in a moment, the intensity of economic life became greater and greater; and it became necessary to take certain protective measures that were not necessary before, protective measures that all had more or less the character of supporting the consumer. It is a curious fact that at the same time as economic life was going through a kind of creeping crisis, as it did in the 13th and 14th centuries, without much ado, a tendency to protect the consumer in some way emerged everywhere. What is it other than consumer protection when the cities through which trade had to pass, through which the trade routes ran, asserted the so-called staple right, so that the passing tradesman had to stay for a certain number of days and only then was he allowed to pass through with the goods he could not sell in the city during those days and then sell them freely? So it is about consumer protection, everywhere it is about consumer protection.

In particular, although it is not immediately apparent, something else in this period is definitely calculated for the protection of the consumer. I have just delved into this question and finally found out – if you approach it with an open mind, you cannot help but find out – that the establishment and development of the guilds, although they seemingly organized production, were basically undertaken to support the consumption of the products manufactured in the guilds. This was done indirectly by organizing the production system. Although the guilds were formed by combining similar trades, the main focus was not so much on organizing production in some way, but rather on ensuring that those who joined the guilds could sell their products at such a high price that their consumption was secured in the appropriate way. The guilds were in fact a protective device for consumption. If you simply take any manuals from the library and look up the data you can find there, you will be able to say to yourself, when you consider the guidelines I am giving you here, that the economic life of that time is characterized in a certain way by this.

And now this economic life developed under such protective measures for several centuries. But it always had a kind of creeping crisis in itself. It just became more and more intense. And that is the peculiar thing: an economic life that becomes more and more intense in a certain territory also makes more and more restrictions, protective measures, and organizations necessary. An economic life that is open in some way, that has access to inexhaustible sources on some side, namely agriculture, land, does not have the urge to organize itself. An economic life that is enclosed on all sides and becomes more and more intensive has the urge to organize itself.

Now, this European economic life would undoubtedly have faced a decadence of enormous significance over the course of the centuries if an event with which you are all familiar had not occurred. What initially saved us from this decadence was, on the one hand, the opening of sea routes and, on the other, the discovery of America. This opened up economic life again towards the West. It cannot be said, because the opening was too great, that an outlet was opened there. That would have been a very large outlet! But this is what in turn took economic life in a completely different direction. Now, of course, the advent of modern technology coincides with the impact of this path to the west. But this modern technology would never have been possible under any other circumstances than through the opening of the whole of economic life to the West. These things simply gave what gave the newer economic life its basic configuration. The most important political events that I mentioned yesterday then take place within this economic life.

Now, in this European economic life, we have two tendencies. One tendency developed under the compulsion of the intensive economy in the second half of the Middle Ages and even beyond, and subsequently took on the character of a certain economic way of thinking. People learned to think economically under the conditions that developed, say, from the 13th to the 16th, 17th century. That is when people absorbed the ideas of how to run a business. What became the driving economic ideas were developed in trade, and very slowly also in industry, and even in agriculture. They essentially took shape during this time. One could also say that those sections of the population who were primarily called upon to think economically in connection with the European territories have developed their economic ideas under the influence of these events. Such things then become deeply ingrained in people. It is precisely in these matters that human souls become conservative. And what sits within people as conservative ideas essentially stems from this period.

Now, on the other side, economic life opened up as I have described to you. And through this, something came into the whole concept of economic life, but it was not immediately incorporated into the way of thinking, but only gave this way of thinking a special economic impetus. It is the connection with the West, with America, with that which came from the opening of the sea routes. That gave economic life strength.

And so, I would say, on the one hand the concrete content of economic life emerged, and on the other hand the momentum. These facts were so strong that they initially gave the configuration to the newer social life in general, and also gave it its materialistic form. And this modern civilization took on more and more the character that must result from these two factors.

Now we have an economic life that simply predominates by the force of events, that makes a strong impression on people and on human development. This economic life also takes on the character that economic life alone can take on, because it is the case that each of the three areas of the social organism takes on its own legitimacy simply through its nature and essence: in economic life, the commodity and the price become the determining factors.

However, social conditions can be distorted by confusing economic life with the other two areas of the social organism. Then each individual area follows only its own laws in conflict with the others. And so it has come about that because economic life predominated, it drew other areas of life, other social areas, into its system of laws. And the conditions arose that then led to the modern social question.

For if we go back in historical development, the proletarian movement as a specific wage movement, as a movement against slavery of labor, does not exist. I explained yesterday that the division of labor, whether one was master or servant, was shaped in older times according to political considerations. Now economic life has been set up in such a way that everything is drawn into the character of a commodity. Everything became a commodity. And so it was only in this period that human labor power became a commodity. Before that it was service, devoted or forced service. But it only became a commodity in this most recent period. For it was gradually paid for in the same way as a commodity is paid for. And economic life cannot help but make a commodity out of everything that enters into its sphere. And in this sense, I believe we have actually always had the threefold social order. We just have to make it real, we just have to introduce into the world that which exists in a false form in its true form. For in the false form it causes mischief and leads to decline. If we are able to give it its true form, it must become the rising sun.

But it is not only that labor power has been turned into a commodity; materialistic intellectual life has also been turned into a commodity in the form of capital. Please take a look at the capital market and the utilization and application of capital in modern times and compare it with the utilization of capital in ancient Greece, for all I care! In ancient Greece, the person who was politically powerful was the one who had the power to carry out something; he had the power to build this or that. For political reasons, he found those who did the work, and his capital consisted simply of the fact that he was the master through his hereditary circumstances and could command a number of people. That was capital in ancient Greece. In the more recent times that we are now considering, essentially what leads to enterprises also becomes a commodity. What is it, after all, that you do when you buy or sell securities on the stock exchange? What are you trading in? You are basically trading in entrepreneurial spirit. What entrepreneurial spirit is essentially becomes a commodity on the stock exchange. You don't even have the specific, the particular entrepreneurial spirit in front of you, you don't even know what you are buying or selling; but in reality you are buying or selling entrepreneurial spirit. You can observe this particularly in the capital market environment. In short, everything becomes commoditized where economic life becomes predominant. Everything becomes a commodity: labor power becomes a commodity, intellect becomes a commodity. That has been the course of recent development.

Now, at the same time, something else is happening. The modern state is emerging for political reasons. First of all, we see, doesn't it, how this modern state is formed from certain earlier freer relationships of the surrounding rural population to the existing cities, which have emerged from ecclesiastical centers or the like in Italy, from a slightly different way of thinking in France and England. So what states are, that is what is emerging.

While the actual concept of the state is already emerging in the West, in Central and Eastern Europe we actually still see different conditions that are freer in this respect. We see how it arises from the old conditions that the former town, which had arisen for some ecclesiastical or similar reasons, becomes the center of the market. And as the old towns become markets, new towns arise in turn. It is interesting to see how cities really do arise under the influence of economic life in the 13th, 12th, 11th century. First of all, the cities arise in such a way that in today's southern Germany and in the west of Europe they arise at distances of five to six hours' travel. In the north and east, they arise at distances of seven to eight hours' travel. In older times, this is something that is taken for granted. Why? Because the farmers who work the surrounding land can get there and back with their products in a day. This arises out of inner necessity. But when something like this arises in history, then later, under the influence of the principle of imitation, something arises that is not connected with such necessity. At first there is the necessity to have towns that are five to six hours' journey apart, or seven to eight. Then the others realize that something can be done and imitate it. And so something arises that is not historically necessary. This affects the healthy thinking of some people about these things. The historians treat the one cities in the same way as the others, that is, those that did not arise out of economic necessity in the same way as the others that arose out of economic necessity. Then everything is mixed up and confused. But the right way to look at such things is to have a sense of distinction. People can very knowledgeably prove to you that this is not true, that this or that city arose out of economic necessity. Of course that is sometimes not true. Because this city did not arise out of economic necessity, but under the influence of the later principle of imitation. But the general truth is nevertheless correct. The development of cities as markets took much longer in Eastern Europe than in the West, where unified states were formed that then sought to incorporate everything into their framework.

Now, basically, historically speaking, as unpleasant as it may sometimes seem today, it is the case that in Italy, out of the spirit of a certain patriarchal togetherness between the peasant population and the urban population, the peculiar territorial areas arose and a certain federalist state system emerged, while another emerged in Spain, France and England. And even if, as I said, it is unpleasant for some to think about, it is nevertheless the case that, more towards Central Europe and the East, the formation of states, like the formation of cities in the past, even came about through imitation. And here we come to something that you cannot tell people today, because otherwise you would not be divided into three, but even into four. But the truth still exists because of that. It was, of course, an economic necessity, but it also came about because of the character of the peoples that the western states emerged as unified states. But the Central European states and the Eastern states actually only came into being through imitation. There was no historical necessity for them. Basically, Austria and the German Reich ultimately perished because there was no historical necessity for their internal centralization, but rather that it was actually an imitation. And the unified state of Italy is an imitation of the same principle, which came into being at about the same time as the unified German state. And North America is another purely external imitation, without having really arrived at the inner reality of what the Central European states are. It is completely dependent on flowing into economic association. Incidentally, anyone who properly considers the economic conditions of North America will be able to predict the course of events.

Now, you see, alongside all that had emerged, so to speak, from the original economy, the new configuration of trade then arose under such conditions as I have just described. And that was where the fusion of political and economic life first arose, not in the field of industry, but actually in the field of trade. The trades were only involved. It is fair to dispute what I am saying now. Because people just need to say: the trades must come first, and then you can act. But that is not the point. Even today, take very developed industries, they often have not grown beyond the commercial sphere. People only create their own products for the trade they do. We are not yet so far advanced that we have already made the transition from the primary production, which is based on nature and is integrated through trade into industry, to the point where industry would now set the tone. Because the moment industry starts to set the tone, association becomes a necessity. The structure of today's business life is still determined by the principles of commercial life; industry, too, is based on the principle of commerce. Basically, manufacturers are traders who merely create opportunities for themselves to trade. They also set up their industrial establishments according to commercial considerations; these are the decisive factors. Because the moment the industrial reaches into the commercial, then association becomes a necessity. The fusion of the state with economic life has actually happened indirectly through the commercial.

And on the other hand, each of the three limbs of the social organism has its own laws and fights against the other limb if it is not detached in the right way. You see, in fact the field of constitutional law has been fighting against the economic field in economic legislation, old-age insurance and so on, for a long time. What does this mean other than that they foolishly want to separate the worker from economic life? It would be sensible to separate them thoroughly right now! But the states are definitely on the march – if I may use the word, which, as you know, has been misused by Wissel – on the march to an independent legal existence. By creating labor protection legislation, old-age insurance legislation, and so on, they are bringing the organization of labor, the regulation of the type and time of labor, out of economic life anyway. Now we see that the second link of the social organism is also on the way to emancipation from economic life.

Now, the matter of intellectual life is somewhat more confused. All real intellectual life has grown out of the old theocracies in its inner essence. Please, you only need to study university life in the 12th and 13th centuries. This is entirely developed out of the ecclesiastical being. And this was an emancipated intellectual life. It only gradually grows into state life. A large part of the European struggles consists of nothing more than the transition of ecclesiastical institutions into the state. And for these ancient times, it must be said that the freedom of educational institutions was much greater in the old ecclesiastical system than it was in the later state system or than it is today. For things develop out of spiritual life with full consciousness. For example, in the year 869 at the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople, the Church consciously abolished the spirit, that is, it was elevated to a dogma that man does not consist of body, soul and spirit, but only of body and soul, and that the soul has some spiritual qualities. In those days, this was made conscious. Nowadays, philosophy professors preach that man consists of body and soul and do not know that they are only the executors of an ecclesiastical dogma. What we call philosophy has definitely grown out of the old ecclesiastical life, and Mr. Wundt in Leipzig is definitely only an offshoot of the old ecclesiastical dogmas, even if it no longer appears so in the way he presents it. But it is the same with the other things that have grown out of the old theocratic type of spiritual life. The theological faculties, well, look at them, they have grown out of the former spiritual life to such an extent that today they only present a kind of caricature, and the same applies to the law faculties. If you want to see, you will find the same old theocratic essence in modern civilization everywhere. I will not speak of medicine. It is quite obvious that it has outgrown other affiliations with the old intellectual life, which developed in an ecclesiastical, religious way. We have a current, a branch of intellectual life, that has completely outgrown the ecclesiastical life, which was free in relation to the state and which was the only intellectual life for the older times. Alongside this, I would say, not outgrowing it but standing alongside it, has come what modern science and technology is. There, spiritual life has arisen on its own soil and has only resembled that which grew out of the church in the past. That is why it looks so strange, what has been organized, I would say, spasmodically, in imitation of the old institutions. One after the other, technical colleges, commercial schools, agricultural schools and so on were built. All of this has been spasmodically shaped somewhat similar to what grew out of the earlier church life. And so we have the quite unnatural structure of our higher education system. On the one hand, something that is in many ways old-fashioned, the actual university system; after all, it carries its ancient ecclesiastical heritage with it. On the other hand, there is the modern agricultural school, the technical school, the mining academy and so on, which has been humorously added to the system, which has sought a similarity, even in the outward appearance, in the title system and the like, with the universities.

On the one hand, we have intellectual life as it arises from the old, free ecclesiastical life and is gradually absorbed by the state; and on the other hand, we have the pushing in, I would like to say, again out of a certain freedom, because the mind must indeed be free; the state cannot produce genius, of that intellectual life that in turn places itself in state life. It would have been in keeping with the ideal of many people to educate real artists at the art schools as well. But as you know, the teaching program does not yet exist by which one can educate genius or the real artist, although many people would like it to. So we see how the spiritual life is absorbed with inadequate means. Basically, only the outer form is absorbed. The content must always, if I may say so, creep away on the sly, most certainly creep away. Because, if someone is in the uncomfortable position of having some intellect at all, then, as far as possible, they have to get it through the terrible ordeals of exams and so on with as much secrecy as possible, so that it doesn't freeze during the whole procedure and so that they can still develop it afterwards. Yes, you have to secretly smuggle what the actual intellectual life is. That is just the way it is. And basically, this is nothing more than a kind of emancipation of intellectual life, a latent emancipation.

Here, too, we are facing a looming crisis. The ultimate consequence of the nationalization system is, of course, Marxism, and, radically, Bolshevism. Everything is nationalized; the entire state is turned into a large industrial establishment, into a giant enterprise, at least that is the initial ideal. Now, if you do that, then it is necessary to organize all the technical knowledge into this whole menagerie, machinery I wanted to say, of course, to organize all the machinery into this whole machinery, because without this technical knowledge you cannot make any progress. Modern technology is necessary. But all the Bolshevism and all the ways of introducing the Marxist principle into reality will lead to nothing but plundering in this area. That is, for a time, the technically gifted can be enslaved. But they will gradually disappear if we do not move on to an independent, emancipated, free, productive intellectual life. This is the crisis we face wherever the nationalization of intellectual life is making radical progress. For just as the other two limbs of the social organism have their own laws, the legal-political and the economic life, just as the economic life turns everything into a commodity, just as the state-legal life, after all, brings that which does not fit into the economic life under its organization and subject it to its laws, so too must intellectual life, following its own laws, emancipate itself from the other two.

These three spheres of the social organism are clearly defined: the spiritual, the juridical-political and the economic. Therefore, these are also the three great issues of the present day. The three great issues of the present day are precisely the issues of the proper shaping of spiritual life, the proper shaping of state-political life, and the proper shaping of economic life.

And this is evident wherever today's amateurish attempts arise. Look, for example, at what is happening within Central Europe, within Germany, in terms of religious denominations. In the attempts at a Protestant unity, in the Young Catholic efforts and so on, one tries to galvanize the old, to squeeze something viable out of the old in order to have some kind of spiritual life, because one does not have the courage to be productive in the spiritual life. Everywhere you look, you see amateurish attempts to give birth to a new spiritual life. Of course, the attempt to squeeze something out of the old lemon cannot lead to real spiritual creativity. Only the turn towards a productive spiritual life can lead to this. But we see amateurish attempts everywhere. We see how Americans appear to revive ancient Christianity because they believe that humanity cannot recover from the old principles of the state. But nowhere is there the insight that a spiritual life must be produced anew from its original sources. Everywhere, people are muddling through with what is already there. This shows that people are instinctively on the right path, but that they have not found the courage to really establish an independent spiritual life in its purity.

On the other hand, we see how the old principle of the state, which has developed in Europe since the 15th and 16th centuries, is dying away. For what else is it, what has been taking place since Brest-Litovsk and Versailles in the monsters called peace treaties and the like, what is it but a dying state principle that can no longer create something fruitful out of itself, that creates structures that cannot exist? Czechoslovakia, for example, will not be able to exist because it does not have what it needs to have. The Polish state structure, on the other hand, is to be re-established. It cannot be re-established, and so on. It is only possible for state life to recover if it is built on the democratic principle of equal human beings, that is, if it encompasses the affairs that are the affairs of each person who has come of age.

As long as today's life is chaotically thrown together, we will not get any further. There we see how, in fact, state life is withering away on the one hand, but on the other hand has already shown how it must take up the regulation of work. We see how it takes on new tasks. And then we can say: So we have the spiritual question, which is manifested in the faltering attempts that are expressed in the Protestant unification efforts and in the Young Catholic efforts; we have the constitutional question, which is evident, for example, in the peace treaties; but we also have economic life, which stands as the third great question of the present, from which, after all, the great war broke out towards the West, and which is discharging itself in the form of revolutionary and similar impulses.

This must be treated from the most diverse sides. Among the lectures I have given here, you will find one that deals with these matters. It is from this point of view of the three great contemporary issues that we must approach our first topic. We must show that the great questions are there today: the spiritual question, the constitutional-legal question and the economic question; that therefore the threefold social order is not something that has been invented, but that it is derived from the three great questions of our time; and that on the other hand, what has been prepared as anthroposophical spiritual science is precisely a foundation for a truly productive spiritual life.

What existed as a spiritual life from ancient times in the denominations, of which the university sciences of the present are only a branch, has lived itself out; the other has not yet been able to begin to live as a spiritual life, that is, that which has grown out of science and technology. It has not yet been able to spiritualize itself. It must be driven upwards with the same way of thinking from which the old spiritual life arose. Spiritual science will again be as productive as the earlier one was, which then came into decadence in the religions.

That is what gives spiritual life its content, its momentum. And then, when you see things in this way, when you realize that you can answer the question, “Yes, where should the free spiritual life come from?” with complete conviction: Yes, we not only have to talk about the demand for a free spiritual life, but we also have something that can be placed within the framework of the free spiritual life, that produces the spirit, that is living spirit. You will then be able to point to the anthroposophical source that belongs to it. You can develop something that, if you want to bring it to people, must be brought to them with a certain enthusiasm, so that, in a sense, the inner turns outwards, so that what you are as human beings, what you have grown together with, really goes out to the audience. That must be the one tone that you strike in your lectures. You must be clear about the fact that anthroposophy provides the content, the nourishment, for the free spiritual life.

On the other hand, you will find the other tone when you thoroughly feel that economic life turns everything into a commodity, that what must not be a commodity must be taken out of economic life. Then you will find the dry tone of sober reflection that must pervade your lectures when you speak of economic life. Because there you can speak soberly, dryly, there you must speak as if you had to do arithmetic.

And so you will find the two nuances you need for your lectures, and they will indeed be different from one another: the dry, sober tone of the dry economic commentator and the enthusiastic tone of the person who not only speaks of a political ideal as the free spiritual life, but speaks in such a way that he knows what wants to be included in it.

And then, moving rhythmically back and forth between the two, you will find the third tone, the tone you need for the treatment of the state-legal aspect.

But it is necessary that you, so to speak, are intensively threefolded in your own moods, so that you recognize correctly, that you relate to spiritual life in one way, to state-political life in another way, and to economic life in yet another way. One speaks about spiritual life out of inner strength and conviction; one speaks in such a way that one actually knows: every human being is a rightful participant in the harmonious spiritual life of humanity, in the harmony of the spiritual life of humanity. One speaks about the life of the state in such a way that one lets one's soul swing from one side of the scales to the other: duties - rights, duties - rights! One speaks with a certain cool superiority, which does not necessarily have to be the superior mendacity of the old statesmen; but it is done with a certain superiority, in that one allows one's right to be done to the other in the life of the state and in the life of the law. And one speaks about economic life as if one did not have one's own purse to manage; that leads to nothing sensible, but one speaks to the feeling as if one actually held the purses of other people in one's pocket and had to manage them. One speaks from feeling in this case, that one must proceed as cautiously as possible, that many things can turn out differently than one expects. The secure feeling one has about spiritual life – if one has grasped it correctly, nothing can ever go wrong in spiritual life – one cannot have this secure feeling about economic life. Something can go wrong there. That must also be in the tone with which you speak about the matter. That is why you will find it in the “key points”: intellectual life is spoken of with absolute certainty and certainty; economic conditions are only mentioned by way of example, so that one has the feeling that it could also be different.

This is what will give your speeches a certain inner strength: if you are inwardly intensely threefolded. And that is what I recommend to you, to take it to heart a little, so that you may perhaps strike this note. Since most of you are young, if your attention is drawn to this threefoldness of the human orator, it will be something like a kind of power source for your work.

It will be well to insert some formalities now, so that we can then move on to some factual considerations.

I have already indicated that by putting oneself in the place of one or other of the three constituent parts of the social organism and trying to grasp the full meaning and essence of the matter, one can, as it were, find the right tone. This comes naturally if one has a true understanding of the matter.

Now I would like to present you with a few more ideas in this regard. But I would like to note in advance that, of course, when it comes to practical advice, things can always be a little different, that one can only talk about such things as examples, yes, that one can handle the matter in one way in one case and differently in another. But if I imagine what might be appropriate for your speaking effect in the coming weeks, I would first like to point out that a very specific inner attitude is of great importance for the speaker in every single case.

You see, the worst thing you could do would undoubtedly be to take a subject such as, let us say, “The great questions of the present time in relation to the threefold social order of the social organism, and, since you will be giving a number of speeches at various places during the week, would now repeatedly present this topic, so to speak, with a mastery of the individual formulations from memory. For intrinsic reasons, this is probably the worst method to choose for such a matter. You can only develop a responsible and well-founded manner of speaking if every speech you give is, so to speak, subjective and personal. It is therefore necessary, even if in the way I will describe in a moment, even if you give the same speech thirty times, or, let's assume the somewhat rare case, a hundred times in a row, to still feel it as something new each time and to always have the same great respect for the content of this speech, to let it come to mind again and again in its basic nuance - pay attention to what I am saying - to let it come to mind again and again before you give it, not so much in the individual structure and in the individual formulations, but in the basic nuances, to relive the thoughts in it again and again. How you can adjust to this depends on your relationship to the material. I knew actors and actresses of the highest caliber who assured me that they only really felt they had played a role well when they had played it about a hundred times. Now, of course, in a sense there is a kind of illusion in that; they also had it at the forty-ninth, fiftieth time, but only in relation to the previous times. In any case, however, there is a way to have the same respect for the content of the speech, no matter how often you give it. And basically, only giving the speech with the necessary freshness will keep you feeling as though you never get enough of the material in question, even if it is repeated almost entirely the same.

Anyone who feels that they are already bored by a speech they are supposed to give, or who is bored of giving the speech because they have given it so often with the same content, strikes me as someone who if he has eaten for a whole month and on the first of the next month says: I am now bored of eating, because it is just a repetition of eating from the previous thirty days; I don't want to do that again. Basically, the organism does the same thing every day in a monotonous way with regard to its most important functions, at most varying the order of the food a little. But in the same way, one can also nuance the thoughts of a lecture so that there is a change, just as there is a change in the food on consecutive days. But essentially, for the organism, it remains a monotonous being hungry – being satiated, being thirsty – drinking and so on, and basically it never gets boring.

Our intellect, our soul life in general, deviates from these in a certain way, in that it comes into decadence compared to the living growth of the natural as well as spiritual elementary forces; it deviates in that it wants to have everything only once, and then it just “has” it. In the process of progressing in soul development, one comes back again to what nature and the original spiritual elementary forces have: rhythm, the repetition of the same. And to this return to what is close to the original creative forces, closer than our decadent intellectual and soul life, to this return we must come when we work in the spiritual world, in the sphere of the spiritual. Religions have already taken this into consideration. They do not have new prayers said every morning and every evening, but always the same ones. And they assume that it is not boring, that it is really related to the whole psychological development of the human being, as eating and drinking is to the organic development of the human being. And we can prepare ourselves for our work in the spiritual, especially in a field such as oratory, so that, even if we repeat the same thing countless times, we always go through the content inwardly with the same interest before we present the matter. Only when we go through the content internally, even if it is only for a few minutes at a time, will we develop the right relationship to what we want to express. Only in this way will we develop the right sense of responsibility.

And we need this sense of responsibility when we are in a situation like the one you will be in over the next few weeks. You must be aware that with your speeches you are not just saying something to the people, but that we are at a world-historical moment, and that your speeches have a meaning for this world-historical moment. You must be very clear about the significance of what you are doing. You must say to yourself: I have something to teach people that, when it strikes them, will truly be the only means of bringing the world to ascent, while all around us are the forces of decline.

And if you are committed to this cause, then you will also appreciate in the right way what is asserting itself from all corners as the opposition to our cause and lurking everywhere on the sides of the paths you now want to enter. The opposition is ignored within our movement, even by most of our members. They do not like to concern themselves with it, and that is just a lack of interest in contemporary history. But out of an interest in contemporary history, we must talk and we must act. Only by acting on it can our words carry real weight. We must not take this opposition lightly. Sometimes, especially within our movement, it is almost enough to make us despair when we see how people within our movement remain quite apathetic in the face of the terrible accusations that are being made against anthroposophy, against threefolding, and now also against 'The Coming Day' and so on. In this respect, if one may say so, our opponents are quite different. Sometimes they are quite ruthless crooks. But they have tremendous zeal as the content of their crookedness. And they often, or even usually, find words out of a certain enthusiasm, an enthusiasm born of evil, or out of an enthusiasm born of incompetence that fights back because it cannot assert itself against what is being asserted. But in a sense there is drive in it; there is drive even in the ranting. You can't find the right words if you try too hard. But you can find the right words if you can find them from the overall mood towards the matter. This is what we have to focus on, both in writing and in speech. We must not shrink from allowing the strongest rebuffs to be experienced by those who assert themselves in such a shameless way against anthroposophy, against threefolding and so on. And we must be aware that in this way, basically, the positive also acquires its shade.

The factual also includes the things that we present to our opponents in the midst of our positive speeches, in which we take as little care as possible to defend ourselves. Because, you see, of course, one has to defend oneself sometimes, I have said it before, but what does a defense actually mean against such individuals as Max Dessoirs and the like? On the other hand, it means a lot to characterize what a disgrace it is for German educational and university life to have such people as lecturers. We must find the right words and word nuances to put this general cultural phenomenon in its proper light. And there it is good to describe things, I would say, in a certain colorful way. Then you have to try to find the inks and colors from your life experiences to describe it in color. There is a karma if you only pay attention to it in the right way. This karma already carries the nuances.

You see, in my “Soul Mysteries” I have mentioned the peculiar fact that Max Dessoir is one of those people to whom it is imposed by inner soul destiny to sometimes have to stop in the train of thought, to be unable to continue; that it can even happen to him during lectures that he is suddenly so filled with the full power of what he has to express that, he does not say so, his mind stands still, but it is something similar to his mind standing still. I emphasized this in my “Soul Mysteries”. A few weeks ago I received a letter from a friend who had just attended the lectures in Berlin by Dessoir during which it actually happened that Dessoir's mind stood still. The students called this peculiar university piece of furniture the “beautiful Max” because he had the habit - as this friend writes - of putting on a different colored waistcoat every week and presenting it. It's only an imitation, you see. Greater minds than Max Dessoir's had such a weakness. For example, it once happened with the great philosopher Kuno Fischer that a young student came to the barber who was vis-4-vis the university building in Heidelberg. And this barber was of course very interested in the university and its disciples. And so he also got into conversation with this keen fox, who was about to start college with Kuno Fischer. He told him that he wanted to go to Kuno Fischer. “Today he's writing something on the blackboard,” said the barber. “How do you know that?” asked the young student in astonishment. ‘He was here just now getting a haircut at the back; when he does that, he always writes something on the board; that's when he turns around.’ Well, ‘beautiful Max’ was in a situation one day where his thoughts suddenly escaped him. He started to go wild, of course in the appropriate weekly vest. There sat a man in front of him who had a newspaper in his hand. He lunged at the man and berated him terribly, saying it was his fault because he had read in the newspaper that his thoughts had escaped. After five minutes, he had his thoughts again. - This really happened and can be documented!

You can add nuances to such things. And you will very often find that you can apply some inks when you want to describe the peculiar education system in our present day, as it is rampant at universities. In addition to its harmful, annoying and destructive aspects, it also has its comical aspects. I myself knew, if I may mention it, a chemist; he was a professor of chemistry and technology of organic substances. He said every year once in his lecture: Yes, there are actually only three great chemists: one is Liebig, the second is a more recent one, Gorup-Besanez, and modesty forbids me to name the third.

Now, as I said, the point for us is not to place the main emphasis on the defense, which can of course be incorporated; rather, it is important to present the cultural phenomena as such in all their harmfulness. That we therefore prove ourselves powerful enough to pass judgment on so-called intellectual currents of the present. We can let this flow in everywhere in the positive presentation and will perhaps best get it into the souls that way. For if we want to get through, we must absolutely be able to create in the souls of our contemporaries a repugnance for certain contemporary phenomena. We must be able to plant a correct judgment about the terrible things that are actually rampant among us through the incompetence and especially through the mendacity that is among us. In order to do this in the right way, we must train ourselves to keep a sharp eye on people and not let them get away with anything. We must emphasize the symptoms, the characteristic features. In our time, and we shall always find it, there is a terrible mendacity, especially in the field of so-called science. And this mendacity, which actually becomes all the stronger the more we come from the natural science faculties, the philosophical faculties, to the medical, to certain other provinces, this mendacity, we must not fail to present it to our contemporaries again and again, characterizing it with individual examples. This is of great, of tremendous importance. For today one does not really have a strong sense of what such dishonesty actually means, how corrupting it is in the mind, when the person who is otherwise a scientist is at the same time consumed by a certain dishonesty in his work. And we will even achieve quite a lot in the long run, even if not immediately, if we succeed in making our contemporaries aware of the hypocrisy of our current educational system. But we will find the right oratorical nuance for this if we speak from the kind of attitude towards the matter that I have characterized.

Then, you see, when you are in the situation you will be in over the next few weeks, one thing seems important: that you are fully immersed in the material of what you want to present, that you are, so to speak, constantly struggling with the material, that one's preparation should be such that one can visualize the matter in one's mind in terms of intentions and thoughts, but not in terms of wording, because one must actually fight for the wording before the audience. Therefore, it is good not to prepare a lecture right down to the wording, but only up to certain key sentences. Depending on your subjective nature, you can write down key sentences. Not buzzwords! That is something that usually misleads you. But key sentences, so to speak, the topics of the individual paragraphs. So you write down, for example: “Economic life has its own laws; it turns everything into a commodity.” And then you discuss this, not taking it as a starting point, but as the topic of a paragraph, as something around which everything else crystallizes. You speak in reference to such a key sentence. Then you move on to the next key sentence.

You can only have the first five or six sentences of the lecture literally, but even then not literally in memory, but in mind. Having the rest literally is never good, because it impairs the inner living relationship in a very strong way. But it is necessary to have formulated the first five or six and the last five or six sentences fairly precisely. Because, as a rule, if the person addressing the audience is a human being and not a speaking machine, they will have stage fright for the first five to six sentences. It is the case precisely when they are human and not a speaking machine. This stage fright is a thoroughly good thing. It can take on the most diverse nuances. It can be that the inner liveliness is there through this stage fright during the first five or six sentences, if they are well formulated, but that this formulation gives us a certain inner relationship to it, whereas if we have not formulated the sentences, it can all too easily happen that nothing occurs to us and the like, doesn't it. For example, I knew an otherwise excellent man who usually read his lectures. But once, as if it were still before me, I remember it so well, he wanted to at least present the first sentences, the first sentence, from memory, but it did not occur to him. He had to read the first sentence, the first word, so accustomed was he to the manuscript. So it's good to live completely inside it, right up to the formulation, in the first five or six sentences.

With the last sentences, on the other hand, when you get to the end, if you are just a human being and not a speaking machine, you are under the impression of your whole lecture, and that's how a certain liveliness comes about at the end, and one would not be able to find the right wording in every case so as not to detract from the end if one had not prepared well, especially for the end, for the last five or six sentences.

So that for such “occasional speeches” in the best sense, as you have to give them, especially given the current situation, it is undoubtedly best for such speeches if you bring the first five to six sentences with you, then the key sentences, and again the last five to six sentences. But if I may give you a piece of advice, which I ask you not to take as if it must always be followed under all circumstances and you are obliged to carry out what I have just said with regard to the note that you take with you, then the advice would be: make a note on which you formulate the first five to six sentences, then the striking sentences, then the last sentences. Stick to it. And then – burn it! The next day or for the next lecture, do the same. And burn it again. Do this fifty times rather than allow yourself to keep the note through all fifty lectures.

This is an essential part of the inner vitalization of a person's relationship to his subject matter. One must have come to terms with the living element of the lecture one has given in a certain way, as one came to terms on February 14 with what one ate on the 13th. This is something that can certainly be considered a rule.

For you see, in certain fields of work it is a matter of finding our way back to the elementary conditions of life. Only in this way can we tear spiritual work out of the mildewed nature that is due to the fact that in abstract intellectual life there is something like: one wants to experience something only once; if one has already experienced something, it no longer exercises any sensation, and the like. It is absolutely the case that if one acquires the habit of what I have just characterized, one gradually comes to receive one's spiritual products from much deeper regions than from the highly questionable regions that are located highest in the human being in terms of spatial expansion. And it is tremendously important that precisely the most exalted spiritual things do not come from this main region. For this region is colorless, is sober, is actually such that, however paradoxical it may sound, it actually concerns no one but ourselves. What the intellect can gain in clarity actually concerns only the person who is the bearer of that intellect.

What we have to say to the world is based not on what we understand, but on what we feel and live through, through which we have suffered pain and suffering and happiness and overcoming. And, my dear friends, the content of what you have to say to the world in the coming weeks will be revealed to you anew each day as you go through it in your soul, as overcoming and suffering, and in a certain way, when you feel what is to be, as happiness too, as redemption. Above all, however, you will be able to feel a strong sense of responsibility. All this can be experienced every day. And that is a much better preparation than all the arrangements and everything that is given in some rhetoric. This living inner relationship to the matter is what really prepares us so that those imponderables develop that exist between us and our audience, no matter how large it is.

In general, it is precisely in this area that we have become abstract and theoretical people. I once listened to a lecture that Hermann Helmboltz gave at a large gathering. He took out his manuscript and read the entire lecture from the first to the last word. After this procedure with the audience was over, a theater director, who was a friend of mine, came up to me and said: What was the point of that? The lecture is already printed, it could easily be handed to each of the listeners. And if Helmholtz, who is so esteemed and honored, were to go around and shake each person's hand, it would be a much greater pleasure than having someone read to you for an hour what you can read yourself when it is printed.

We really must keep this in mind: that what is printed, and thus also everything that can be read, that which has already been written down, is something quite different from the spoken word. And even if it happens often enough – for reasons other than purely artistic ones and the like – that the spoken word is written down, that this Ahrimanic art is practised and that it is then read again, one must not deny that this whole procedure is basically nonsense in the higher sense. It must be practised, this nonsense, for certain reasons. But it remains nonsense. For those who take these things artistically, what is spoken is not something that can be printed or written at the same time. So I couldn't help but feel deeply when the director told me that it would have been wiser for Helmholtz to have shaken everyone's hand and distributed his lecture.

These are things that one must keep in mind, because they are basically rhetoric, while what is in the rhetoric is usually such that one cannot actually fulfill it. Because basically it is a thicket, threshed straw, with which one cannot actually do anything if one wants to be alive in one's cause.

Well, you see, these are formalities that can only contain advice, but which, I would not say, have been thought through, but which you could feel through. And if you feel through them, then you will be able to prepare yourself in the best possible way for your profession in the coming weeks. For from the feelings you develop in response to such advice, you will gain an insight into what you should actually do with the material you will be processing in the coming weeks. And what else can be said in this regard is something like the following:

In speeches such as the one you are about to give, even if the topics are chosen as I have indicated, it is nevertheless good to start at the beginning with something that belongs to the day, some current event that is symptomatic of the whole period. We live in a time in which such events actually occur daily. We need only follow contemporary history a little, and we will notice symptomatic events everywhere. We can then start from there. This immediately creates a common atmosphere between us and the listener. For the listener then knows the matter, we know it, and we create a kind of communication, which is of very special significance in lectures on contemporary history, or rather, in those that are to have an effect on the development of the time.

Or one can also relate a more remote symptom. It is often particularly suitable to concentrate attention in the right way if you tell something that seems to have no connection at all with the topic, but which has a much stronger inner connection, and the listener is initially touched by it in a somewhat paradoxical way, not knowing why you are telling it; and then you try to find the transition from something remote to what you actually want to develop.

Another piece of advice is that in certain cases it is extremely good to come back to the beginning at the end. The best way to achieve this is to formulate something at the beginning, which is either presented as a question, or not pedantically as a question, but in a question-like way. Then the lecture is the execution according to the question posed; and at the end one actually comes to the answer, so that the whole thing closes in a certain way. This often has a very, very good influence on the soul of the listener. He retains it more easily than usual.

In certain matters it may even be very good to have a kind of leitmotif, which one returns to after certain paragraphs, even if in a varied form. You will not have a good effect by always putting it in more or less the same words, but if you return to it in a varied form, you may well have a good effect.

Then we will also have to have a reforming effect on the audience through the form of our speech; I could also say “educational” if it did not offend people to use the word “educational”. You can also have a reforming effect through the formality of speech. You see, people today demand that you define as much as possible. Now we want to resist any defining. We always want to characterize. We want to characterize many things from two or more sides, in order to evoke the idea that every thing has different sides from which one can characterize it. We do not want to make this concession, nor any other concession in speech, but this is the least of them: giving people pedantic definitions. We must create the impression that what comes from the spiritual world, what comes from spiritual science, must, even in its form, present itself differently to our contemporaries than what arises from materialism. Whatever comes out of materialism will be materialistic, even if it is permeated, for example, by something apparently religious; it will speak in nouns, even if it is religiously colored. What comes out of the spirit cannot speak well in nouns. For the spirit does not work in a noun way. It is in constant motion. The spirit is entirely verbal. It dissolves nouns. It forms a subordinate clause rather than a noun. In this way it avoids treating the entities like pieces of wood, placing them next to each other like pieces of wood, or like pegs. This placing of things like pegs is materialistic. What is grasped in the spirit dissolves the nouns. And it is important that we make no concessions in this respect to our materialistically inclined present. However, in this case you will not come; the poet in the present more easily; not so much the one who has to speak, what you have to speak - however, if anything is immersed in the visionary or only in the imaginative, then the nouns can also occur. Because then the imaginations are forms. Every style has its own character for its particular field. But what is needed in a certain relationship to bring something new to one's fellow human beings as a teaching, as a view, will, if it comes from the spirit, not feel inwardly compelled to put one noun next to the other.

Then it would also be good for you, I would like to say, to really carry out something moral. When we started our anthroposophical movement, people were almost proud when they could say: I have presented theosophical or anthroposophical views here or there, without saying where they come from and without using the words theosophy or anthroposophy. This denial of the ground on which one actually stands, this not wanting to clearly profess one's commitment to something, has become a real nuisance, especially in anthroposophical circles. Well, I would like to say to you that those people who have been won over in this way, by avoiding speaking clearly and distinctly about the matter, are either not really won over at all or, if they are won over, are not worth anything. Only that which has been won in full truth and in absolute honesty has value for our cause. And if we make this our guiding principle, we may perhaps suffer failures here and there. But where we achieve success, it will be a good success. Under no circumstances should we avoid making people aware of the spiritual-scientific, anthroposophical background. Even if it acts like a red rag to a bull for a large number of people at first! The problem with such things is not the red cloth, but the bull.

These things are what must be part of the moral nuance of our zeal for the cause in the coming weeks. And we need zeal for the cause. We do not need to feel that we are martyrs for a cause. But we should have a sense of great responsibility. We should definitely have the feeling that we are speaking out of the development of the times, out of contemporary history. The more we have this, the better it is.

Perhaps today I may remind you again of what I have said many times before. Once I wanted to make clear to two Catholic priests how wrong they were with their particular demand, which they made after a lecture I gave. I had given a lecture in a southern German city, which is no longer a southern German city today, about the wisdom of Christianity. Two Catholic priests were also present. It was a long time ago, in the days when the order to fight anthroposophy intensely, as is the case today, had not yet been so intensively carried into the circles of Catholic clergy. And so these two priests were there. After the lecture they came to me. Now, it is not the case with Anthroposophy that one can talk objectively about a subject for a long time, even if a Catholic priest is listening. If he is not set from the outset to fight against everything that does not belong to the constitutionally soldered church, he will not notice that he can bring anything against it. What the Catholic Church has to say against it must come from areas other than the area of truth. So the priests came to me and said: Yes, we have nothing to say against the content of your lecture – at that time the slogan had not yet been issued from Rome – but the way you speak is not acceptable. Because we speak in such a way that all people understand, but you only speak to a certain circle that is prepared. I said that I always have the feeling that in outer life one does not become dishonest when addressing people as is usual in outer life; I say “Herr” to every court official, I say “Reverend” to every Catholic priest. So I said, “Reverend, it does not matter whether you or I think something is for all people. It is self-evident that you and I think subjectively in this way. That is not the point. The point is whether something is entrusted to us out of the impulses of the time, whether it is to be presented or not, regardless of our subjective state. And so I ask you now, assuming this good, subjective conscience, whether all people who want to know about the Christ still come to you in church today? If all people come to church to you, then you speak for all people. I ask you quite objectively: Do all people come to church to you? You couldn't say yes, it wasn't possible. Then I said: Well, you see, I speak to those who no longer come to church to you and who still want to hear something about the Christ. That is objective. We can believe subjectively, you and I, we speak for everyone. That is not the point. The point is that we acquire the sense of learning from the facts as they are, how we should do it. Of course, that did not occur to the two reverend gentlemen, of course, but it is right nonetheless.

So, these are the things that I wanted to tell you today, as a kind of formality. They are not rules, nor are they advice meant to be dogmatic. I myself said at the beginning of my reflections that they are meant more in the sense of examples. They can be varied in many ways. You may be obliged to follow different guidelines in a different situation. But I have considered what those personalities sitting in front of me might need to think about, especially in the situation you may find yourselves in over the next few weeks, and how you might approach your audience in the right way to address your audience in the right way, and above all to face the matter at hand in the right way, regardless of whether you achieve it or not, and to face the matter you have to represent in the right way. And that's when I came to have to tell you what I just said in a formal way.

Everything will depend on whether the whole attitude of the lectures that you now want to present to the public is different from the one that usually underlies the discussions that have been common up to now. The attitude that you will have to take will be particularly determined by the fact that you will have to point out everywhere the importance of the human being in all of social life.

Today you will find social judgments everywhere that start from something other than the human being as such. You will find social judgments that are based on the concept of capital, on the function of capital and so on within the social order. You will then find that capitalism is spoken of as if it were some kind of power that goes around the world, and that in all this talk of “capitalism” there is actually little basis in consideration of the essence of man as such.

You will then hear talk again about work, about the social significance of work. Here too you will be able to sense that, by talking about work, one already takes the human being as a starting point, because he is, after all, the one who works. But one also talks about work as such in isolation from the human being, namely from humanity, and from “work itself”.

Then, thirdly, you will find that people talk about the product. This may have its good meaning within economic life; but it only leads to errors and distorted social conceptions if one does not take into account the essence of man as such in all areas.

Certainly, especially when one sets out on the threefold social order, one must distinguish sharply between what, I would say, must be a field of human activity to express itself in the spiritual realm, and what must express itself in the legal-political realm, and finally what must express itself in the economic realm. But these ideas, which must be so one-sidedly conceived about human activity, cannot be properly formed unless one can turn one's gaze to the essence of man as a whole human being. It is precisely this turning of the gaze to the essence of man as a whole human being that reveals to us the necessity for the external social order to be structured into the three areas characterized by the corresponding writings.

Now, however, man has gradually been eliminated from consideration in modern world view life. You will find everywhere that man as such has actually been eliminated. You will find this first of all in the narrowest spiritual field, that of science. Science considers the kingdoms of nature, the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, then looks at the development of the animal kingdom up to man and presents man as a more complicated, transformed, metamorphosed animal. But it does not set out to consider man himself. It presents man only as the end point of the animal series. This has long been the aim of science. But this is only one symptom of the fact that feeling and thinking have been expelled from the essence of man. If in modern times there had been a strong feeling for the purely human in the most diverse areas of life, then it would not have been possible to expel man from so-called science, to treat him only as a final point.

But you can also see how man is excluded from the institutions that are now being laid down for spiritual life. He is, as far as possible, harnessed to regulations that do not come from himself; or he is harnessed to the effect of forces that come from economic life; but very, very little attention is paid to what man is as a human being in social life. And so they start coming up with definitions of everything possible, of capital, of labor, of goods; but the human being is completely left out of the equation.

In the life of the state itself, it is very strange how, especially in Central European countries, the feeling has been lost in the very latest times that everything that is state or other commonality is actually there for the sake of the human being , not man for the sake of the state; that all institutions originating in these communities must ultimately aim to develop the human being into a full human being, into a full individuality, as far as possible.

How often, especially in recent times, has it been repeated that man must sacrifice everything for the sake of community! Yes, my dear friends, if what at first seems to sound right were to be put into practice, that man must sacrifice everything for the sake of community, it would gradually lead to the most severe atrophy of community life. For nothing establishes community life better than when, within this community life, individual human personalities can develop in the fullest sense of the word. Those who think the opposite usually do not take the main point into account.

The person who develops as a whole human being, who can bring their human individuality to bear in all respects, is, because of this development, dependent on contributing as much as possible to community life; they already establish community life in the very best way through what is within them. What can be developed in the human being, if it is guided and directed in the right way, is by no means based on selfishness. Selfishness in the human being is actually generated from the outside, not from the inside. Selfishness is often generated precisely by community life. This is far too little considered in the treatment of social issues. And so it has also become apparent that in recent times there has been a real imbalance between the self-evident lack of selfishness and generosity in spiritual matters and the selfishness and greed in all material things. In terms of what people produce spiritually, they are not exactly stingy by nature; they would like to share as much of this as possible with every human being. A person who is only a lyricist would like to give what he produces as a lyricist to all people, most generously and without selfishness, not keep it to himself. People today do it differently with regard to external, material goods; they want to keep them to themselves. But these never come to us from within, but are conditioned by what surrounds us. And the social art would consist in gradually transforming that which surrounds us externally so that we can treat it like that which is our own from within, like that which springs entirely from our individuality. But for this to happen, it is necessary that people incorporate into their minds a way of thinking such as I have now indicated in a few abstract sentences. They will never be able to do this within the present spiritual life, because this present spiritual life harnesses the human being to the external state or economic order and does not aim to develop what is in the human being from within. In education, it remains an abstract principle to say that everything that is taught and taught must be brought out of the human being. This abstract principle is of no help at all. And those who preach it the most are also the ones who usually sin against it the most in practice, for example.

What fills one with such an attitude, which is focused on the human as such, can only be anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For it leads in every direction to the recognition of the essence of the human being itself. It places the human being at the center of all consideration. Take, for example, you can just as easily take something else, my “Secret Science”: there the stages of earthly development are traced through pre-earthly conditions, the names of which do not matter, through the state of Saturn, the state of the sun, the state of the moon, and so on. But not one of these states is followed in the way that it is followed in the hypotheses of modern science. What did they have in this modern science? At first they had some nebulous state in very distant times; there was nothing in it of the human being. And for a long time to come, in the stages of development that arose from the thoughts of science, there was nothing of the human being in it. Then man suddenly appears, after all the other creatures had gathered together. Then he will later pass away again, and the earth and everything will pass away with him. And ultimately, the whole development is heading towards a field of corpses. What we think about the world, about the cosmos, is dehumanizing. And if one were not compelled to do so – because one has this two-legged animal on earth after all and because this two-legged animal at least does the insignificant thing of thinking at all – one would be compelled to swindle man into a position after all, one would put him aside altogether, because there would then be no necessity at all to swindle man into it.

But consider my “occult science”: from the first installations, man is in it. Nothing in the cosmos is considered without man being in it. Everything only makes sense and at the same time provides a basis for knowledge by being considered in relation to man. Nowhere is man excluded. This anthroposophically oriented spiritual science leads our world view back to a consideration of the human being.

I am suggesting some thoughts that are important for you when you go out to give your lectures, because they should give you cause to pursue the idea of putting the human at the center of the social process; and you will, I would say, color your speech in such a way that you place the human being at the center and avoid leaving the human being out of this center.

You see, the theoretical approach of recent years has already left the human being out at the starting point, it actually regards him only as a kind of luxury object for knowledge. But the national economic considerations of recent times have also taken a similar path. Go back to the source, and you will find that Marxist and other schools of thought also go back to it – go back to Adam Smith. You will see that two things have been placed at the center of attention: firstly, economic freedom and secondly, private property. Man is not really the main focus anywhere. He is occasionally considered, of course, but he is not the main focus, he is not placed at the center.

But humans as such cannot have economic freedom! For economic freedom is not something that one has as a human being, but as the owner of certain goods. It is as the owner of certain goods that one moves within the social process, and by possessing these goods one can, in a sense, have what Adam Smith calls freedom. But you don't move as a human being; instead, you set goods in motion, you trigger processes in the goods. And these processes – the plowing, the harvesting, if you are the owner of a good, or what you do in industry – these are free, independent; but the human being as such is not taken into account at all when one speaks of economic freedom.

And private property? Well, one must remember that this must somehow have been acquired, whether by robbery, conquest, inheritance or otherwise; so somehow it must have had to do with man. But Smith does not look at it in terms of how man originally formed a relationship to property; instead, he regards it as something absolutely given. This is how people view private property in general: man is just like a herd of pigs. They only consider man by not focusing on him, the human being, but on property as such. The national economic point of view has thrown out the human being.

But this is no longer merely the result of a lack of knowledge or a lack of insight, one would like to say, but it has arisen because, basically, economic life itself has taken on this form. Under the influence of the newer, more abstract way of thinking, economic life has automatically developed itself. Man has gradually withdrawn from it, leaving it to what has been shaped outside of human beings. Basically, you could easily make the following observation:

Take, say, a stately home and, with the exception of what external forces have brought about through technology and so on, follow it purely in relation to the human element, which has been through a series of generations; go up from the owner at the end of the 19th century to the owner in the middle of the 19th century, to the owner at the beginning of the 19th century and so on. You can actually follow how the process took place, how the estates intervened in the economic process, without worrying too much about the estate owner at the end of the 19th century, the estate owner in the middle of the 19th century, or the estate owner at the beginning of the 19th century. They go for walks on their estates, do what follows from the matter itself and intervene there; but it is indifferent, one cannot distinguish whether it is the owner of the end of the 19th century or of the middle or the beginning of the 19th century. What matters is the extra-human process. So, the objective has already developed in such a way that the human being has been excluded.

But he has only been excluded on the one hand, but that is the basis of our catastrophic conditions. He has not been excluded with regard to a certain area of intellectual life: the technical-scientific. There he intervened, but the two things did not go together. One only pushed itself into the other. Man has, however, intervened in many other ways, in that, as a result of ignoring the human being, more and more people have become proletarianized. What had become proletarianized, which was actually nothing other than the human being, asserted itself again. And so, in the more recent development, what man meant in the whole economic process, in the whole social process, was absolutely not developed together, but the individual areas had an inorganic effect on each other. One simply pushed its way mechanically into the other. Nowhere, it can be said, did technology develop in such a way that those who owned the goods would have had technology in their hands, but rather, technology, I might say, pushed its way into the administration of the goods from the side. Of course, nothing organic came of this, but rather something that ultimately had to be fought fiercely. Everything that is being fought in our time basically stems from these facts.

But this has had the effect – and you must now present this to humanity from the opposite perspective in your lectures – that we have increasingly lost sight of the context of the entire economic process and have focused more and more more and more on partial processes, that is, on the way capital is created and functions, how labor fits into the national economic process, how goods are produced, how they circulate, and so on. But the view of what belongs together has not been developed at all. Because, you see, if you look at the interrelated process, the process of social life, as a whole, you cannot help but place the human being at the center, relating everything to the human being.

But only a correct spiritual science can give us the right attitude, because it puts the human being at the center of everything. In the “Key Points of the Social Question”, I therefore did not have to ask: From which production conditions did modern social life arise? That is the question Marx and similar thinkers ask, and that is also the question Rodbertus asks. Instead, I had to ask: How did the modern proletarian come into being? How did the impulses in the modern proletariat arise? That is the subject of the first chapter of the Kernpunkte: how did this important fact, that the proletarian regards all intellectual, moral, scientific, religious, and artistic life as an ideology, how did that come to be in the proletariat? Man is placed in the center here. And so you will find it in the following chapters.

But only by placing the human being at the center can the concepts of goods, capital, and labor attain their true meaning, just as scientific concepts also attain their true meaning when the human being is placed at the center of the entire cosmic evolution. Your lectures must be imbued with this idea, so that you always have the human being at the center of your thoughts and feelings and also evoke in your listeners the feeling that it is the human being that matters and not capital and commodities.

I would like to talk about this nuance of your lecture: in a certain way, you must be very familiar with the terms that you find in the usual handbooks and manuals of economics. You should know them. But it is not that difficult to know them. You are just too impressed by too much of what you are brought up with. Just take a look at the small collections that have appeared in recent years, such as “Natur und Geisteswelt” or the Göschen collection and other collections, and you will see that you can simply get hold of the tables of contents. If you want to get to know, say, political economy and are not completely up in the clouds upstairs, but have an ability to grasp concepts as they have developed, then you really don't need to distinguish much between one collection and another. You can choose either. If you want to learn economics, take the little books from the Göschen collection – but it is not necessary that it should be these particular books, you can just as easily take another collection, it makes no difference at all. They do not differ much internally. Everything is uniformed. Not only have the soldiers been drawn into the uniform, but basically all the scientific books have also been uniformed. The only ones that have internal life, albeit precarious internal life, are those collections that come from publishers such as the Herdersche Bookstore in Freiburg im Breisgau. There is still something of the old, corrupting intellectual life of today in them, namely, of original Catholicism; there are concepts in them that at least differ from the others and that have a certain inner momentum, albeit momentum in a direction that we do not want to go. In the end, it is the same phenomenon as when you take a Goethe biography that originated within the new spiritual life. It does not matter so much whether you pick up one or the other, whether Heinemann or Bielschowsky or Meyer. People tell different stories, of course: Heinemann like a schoolmaster, Bielschowsky like a bad journalist, and Meyer like a collector of notes. Gundolf, I believe, is the name of one who, on the other hand, tells how, let's say, a somewhat flirtatious cultural Gigerl; but you won't learn anything new from it that isn't in the other biographies. Not even Emil Ludwig, I believe, will tell you anything seriously new, although he differs considerably from the others in that the others tell like philistines who grew up in rooms, and he tells like a street urchin. But that doesn't make up for the actual lack of substance either. In contrast, take a book as inwardly solid as that by the Jesuit priest Baumgartner about Goethe, who indeed grumbles about Goethe, but in whose book there is spirit, spirit of course, which we wouldn't wish any impact!

And so we can say: You do indeed have to familiarize yourself with what is being produced in today's world. You need to know how people think about work, about capital, and so on. But you have to be aware that you have to reverse the whole thing everywhere and put people at the center of your considerations.

You may say: This is rather daunting. We are soon to go out and give speeches and do everything that is said here! But it is not like that! It depends on our attitude and not on our sitting down and thinking long and hard about how we put people at the center. Now we must immediately do what is indicated here. And so it is important that you go out with the attitude that is characterized here and try to achieve what you can according to the state of your development so far. But I must still present things as they are, for my sake, let us say, ideally. And you can deduce from this what you can actually apply.

Now, if you gear everything to the human being, if you proceed anthroposophically in this sense, if you also occasionally incorporate what comes to you straight from anthroposophy, without because you don't need to insert the structure of the human being into a treatise on economic life physical body, etheric body, astral body, I, because then modern man cannot follow it at all. One must try to put things in the language of modern man. If, therefore, anthroposophical life is not only in the background of your own life, but also in the way you present and in your references, which is only found in anthroposophy, then you will be able to evoke a certain impression, but you will also be in a position to do so, not from one-sidedness, because you will not just take the examples from anthroposophy, but you will also take the insights into social life that you have gained from them. ophy the examples, that is, the ones you use to illustrate the actual insights of social life, you will be able to create a certain impression, but you will also be in a position to work from the one-sidedness of the concepts.

I will give you an example of how work is done from the one-sidedness of concepts in current social thinking. I have already indicated how, for example, the Marxists speak about labor and the commodity. They say: In the product that appears on the market, we have that into which labor has, as it were, congealed; when we pay for the product that has come onto the market, we pay for “coagulated labor.” Attention is also drawn to the time that is invested in it; but that is not what matters. The worker works. This is how the product comes about, and this is how the product is “clotted labor”. The raw product that nature provides has no intrinsic value in human intercourse. Labor “runs into” it, and basically it is a matter of determining how much a commodity object is worth in that a certain amount of labor has “run into” it. This quantity of labor that has been “incorporated” is imagined to mean the wear and tear of human muscle power, which in turn must be replaced. This is achieved indirectly through wages, so that people must be paid in such a way that the wages replace what they have lost through labor, what has been “incorporated” into the product. This is an extremely plausible idea if you only look at the worker and his relationship to the product from one perspective, especially in the area where real physical labor is involved. So you could say, if you look at this area one-sidedly: a product that appears on the market is worth as much as the labor that has gone into it. Of course, this is something that is indisputable from a certain point of view, which can be proven strictly logically, from a certain point of view.

But look, take a different point of view. Take a worker who, let's say, has been working for the production of certain products. Through some economic relationship, one side is inclined to give him more for the work he has done than he used to get, because, due to economic cycles and so on, one side can give him more. He will be inclined to give his labor to the one who now gives him more. So in the following moment he gets more goods for his labor than he used to get. But as a result, the goods now acquire a different value for him, a significantly different value. He ceases to consider the only point of view of labor flowing into the commodity. The opposite point of view becomes decisive for him. He begins to evaluate the goods in such a way that he says: A good is all the more valuable to me the more labor I save, the less labor flows into the good, the less I need to work. And if you consider that you can also acquire a good in other ways than through work: you can rob it, you can find it, you can also acquire it in a way that the terms “rob” and “find” are then only figurative, but in terms of economics mean something similar, then this way of looking at things is the most common one! For, having such a commodity, what does it mean for one? It means that one can give it away, and the other performs work for one. One has not worked for it, but one can give it away. The other, in our economic context, performs work for one; one can have so and so many people work for one. There you have the saving of labor expressed in the value of the commodity in the most eminent sense. And in the final analysis it goes so far that certain goods are produced entirely from this point of view, to save labor, to avoid doing it. If I paint a picture and sell it, the economic value lies in the fact that I no longer need to make my own boots, sweep my own room or do many other things, but that I save all this work. In this case, the value measure goes straight to what labor is saved. There you have to measure the value according to the labor saved.

And so I can say: there are two points of view from which one can define the relationship between labor and goods, or at least the value of them. One can say that a commodity is worth as much as labor has gone into it. But one can also say that a good is worth as much as one saves labor with it, as one does not need to put labor into anything. And the former definition, that of congealed labor, will be all the more valid the more we are dealing with purely physical goods or goods produced by physical labor. But the other definition will be all the more valid the more we are dealing with goods to which thinking, speculation, or other more valuable intellectual powers are applied. Both apply to the whole of life, one as much as the other.

But the point is not to be deceived by the fact that one definition is correct for certain cases, because then one can argue with the other. In life, there are two opposing views for everything. Therefore, one should not approach life from the conceptual point of view. Because no matter how correct a concept is, if one aims at life with it, one will only ever find part of life. But if one starts from life, then one finds that one can always characterize things in opposite ways, just as one can photograph a person from the front and back, from the right and left. Proper contemplation of knowledge is no different from artistic representation. And we must replace the theorizing views that have been brought to people in recent times with a view of life.

But when people have views, they act accordingly. And for three, four, five centuries, people have adopted views that start from the concept, and they have organized social life accordingly. People make social life! And so today we not only have one-sided ideas in human terms, but we also have one-sided institutions in life itself, which then do not correspond. For example, in the proletariat we have a mode of labor in which the relation between labor and commodity is such that the commodity represents congealed labor; but when we look at the capitalist side, we have the essence of the value of a commodity in that this value is determined by the labor power that is saved.

Thus, in the real process, we have something that cannot be compared. The capitalist acts differently than the proletarian. The proletarian not only thinks, but acts in such a way that values arise out of his actions according to the labor incorporated into the commodity; the capitalist acts in such a way that values arise according to the principle of labor saving. So one must waste labor to create commodities, the other economizes on labor. And these two processes clash. And the social evils of the present time arise from this antagonism. And there is no other remedy than to really look at the real processes, to know life as such, to actually admit to oneself: It is necessary in the social process that there are people in it - you see, that's where you come the human being – that there are people in it who work in such a way that their work runs into the product, and people who work in such a way – the work of others cannot be done at all without following this principle – that work can be spared. Because you can't manage without following this principle: to spare labor.

It follows that it is not at all acceptable to introduce the regulation of labor into the economic process, but that the regulation of labor must take place in the social sphere, which is the sphere of state and legal life.

If you follow such trains of thought, you will see what is at stake. It is important, because the world today is full of unclear, nebulous concepts, especially in the practical sphere, to correct these concepts so that people can bring what is right into the institutions again. If we lack the courage to proclaim: You must not continue to think as you have thought up to now, for you are ruining the outer world with your thinking; you must place the human being at the center and not goods or capital and so on; — if we lack the courage to proclaim this in the face of the errors of the present, then we will not make a single step forward. This must be done precisely where people otherwise speak entirely from the old ideas, especially in economics.

From the nature of the arguments that I give, you can see how you have to take into account the cases of life everywhere. They are not taken into account in the usual economic literature, so that you can easily be recommended one or the other book of it. It does no harm whether you get the Göschensche book on economics or the one from “Natur und Geisteswelt”. For you will find in them all what you need and the opportunity to educate yourself in the way one must not think. And everywhere you need to counter this with a way of looking at things that penetrates and proceeds from the human being. But one can only educate oneself and educate people to this through something like anthroposophical spiritual science. Therefore, it should not be misunderstood that a recovery of the outer social life is only possible if a recovery of one of the threefold social organism, the spiritual link, occurs in education and teaching and so on, in order to then be able to visualize how a productive spiritual life can come about, that is, one that completely fulfills the human being.

In this regard, it is so difficult to be understood, but at least those who are sitting here now should understand such things quite well. You see, again and again, from a wide variety of sources, we are told that schools should be set up along the lines of the Waldorf School. Some people say to us, “We can set up such schools as soon as we have the money.” I always ask them, “Yes, how do you want to do that afterwards?” They answer: We want to ask you which teachers we should take. I tell them: I will only be partially considered in the choice of teachers, because there are legal requirements that only those teachers may be used who have passed the state examinations and been certified. So it does not come out at all, what should come out, if Waldorf schools are to be established. One would have to start from the assumption that one has a completely free choice of teachers, which does not exclude the possibility that a state-approved teacher may be needed. But there should not be the necessity that only such teachers may be used, because otherwise we do not stand in the threefold order.

What is important is not to found schools within the present system in which teaching surrogates are created simply because one believes that one can follow the course I have given. What is important is to pursue the principle in this area: freedom in spiritual life. Then such a school would mark the beginning of the threefold social order. So do not create false ideas in people's minds by teaching them to believe that they can remain obediently within the old structures and still found Waldorf schools. Instead, create the idea that there is truly free spiritual life in the school in Stuttgart. For there is no program and no curriculum there, but there is the teacher with his real ability, not with the decree of how much he should know. You are dealing with the real, real teacher. It is still better to envisage a poor real teacher than to envisage one who is simply part of the decree and who is not real. And when you teach, you are dealing with the students and with the things that fill the six walls of the classroom, not with what is called teaching material, teaching method and so on in the regulations. And that is what you have to point out: that you should deal with realities.

If it comes down to programmatic institutions, then, as far as I'm concerned, twelve people can sit down together – it could also be more or less. I give you my assurance: if these twelve people are only a little disciplined among themselves, they will think terribly cleverly, will be able to draw up reform plans; what they think will be terribly clever, terribly reasonable. One will be able to say: this must happen, that so and so on. In regard to such things one could even claim that there are numerous people who could very well say how some field of science should ideally be treated or how a journal should ideally be organized. But that is not the point. The point is that one works out of reality.

What use are school regulations, no matter how well formulated, when teachers are provided with material that is far removed from their abilities? Such regulations only serve to delude people, whereas the truth is served by using the material that is available. One must reckon with realities and beware of reckoning in any way with paragraphs and programs when it comes to creating anything.

This is so difficult to understand in our time, and that is why it is necessary for humanity to be made keenly aware of this point. For by working with programs in the broadest sphere of life in recent times, one has thoroughly corrupted life.

If you take, for example, the development of Social Democracy from the Eisenach Program to the Gotha Program, you see a flattening out. It is at its worst in the Erfurt Program. It says how everything should be organized, for example, the socialization of the means of production. But it was created with the exclusion of any view of life. And then someone came along who more or less took as his starting point the principle: What do I care about life? – I am only concerned with the Marxist program! Let life perish if only the Marxist program is fulfilled! For my sake thousands and thousands of people can be hanged in a day if only the Marxist program is fulfilled! This man is Lenin. He would be willing to have thousands of people hanged every day if only the Marxist program were fulfilled.

Of course, these are all radical statements, but they still characterize the situation correctly. And what does the man come to? You see, this man's unrealistic view of life stems from something that basically only brilliant people say. Of course, Lenin is a brilliant man again, albeit stubbornly brilliant, bullishly brilliant, but brilliant nonetheless. In his writing 'State and Revolution' you can find something like this: Yes, the fulfillment of what is to come does not follow from my Marxist program. But my Marxist program will ruin everything that is there now. But then a new humanity will be bred. It will not have a Marxist program, but will live according to the program: Each according to his abilities and needs. But first a new humanity must be bred!

So our life today has become so divorced from reality that a man, with the help of his accomplices, can organize an entire great empire not according to life but according to programs. He admits, however, that this organization is basically hopeless, because healthy conditions will only arise when the people who are there now are no longer there, but when other people have taken their place. I would like to say: it is obvious what the particular world of ideas and feelings of the present has come to. Such things should not be underestimated, but must be faced squarely.

I have already emphasized that the human being must be placed at the center of the considerations that will be incumbent upon you in the near future. If this is done to the fullest extent, many things can be put right in the views of the present, which, as I showed again in the last lecture, must inevitably lead to catastrophes. Now it is a matter of saying a few words, by way of example, to illustrate the things that are connected with this assertion: the human being must now be placed at the center of social considerations and social action.

We have a whole range of buzzwords, phrases, and so on among us. What many people assert before their fellow human beings has gradually become almost exclusively a phrase. We live in an age of phrases. And a reality that is guided and directed by phrases must obviously disintegrate into itself. This is connected with the fundamental phenomena of our present-day development.

Let us take something out of the whole sum of what is present in social life, and let us look at it as it is very often discussed today. Today, we hear from some who want to have a say in social matters that it is important, for example, for the proletarian movement to rise up against the unemployed income, against the unemployed acquisition. - Well, of course, there is always something real behind the assertion of such claims. But mostly something quite different from what the people who very often make such an assertion mean. For it must be clear that only by observing social processes, and not through abstractions, can we discover what is actually meant by “unemployed income” or “unemployed acquisition”. People have expressed themselves about these things in the most diverse ways. There are people, even Bismarck was one of them, who expressed themselves differently – they spoke of “productive classes”, but actually meant working classes – but who were of the opinion that, for example, farmers, tradesmen who work with their hands, and representatives of similar occupations were “productive people”, but that, for example, teachers, doctors and the like were not “productive people”. That what emanates from the teacher is not “productive work”.

Perhaps you know that Karl Marx made an economic discovery which has been much discussed, precisely in order to put the “productive work” that people meant into perspective. This discovery of Karl Marx is the well-known “Indian bookkeeper”. He was the person who, somewhere in a small Indian village, where the other people worked with their hands, sowing, harvesting, picking fruit from the trees and the like, was employed to keep records of these things. And Karl Marx decided that all the other people in this village did “productive work,” but that the hapless bookkeeper did “unproductive work,” and that he lived his unproductive life on the “surplus value” that was deducted from the labor income of the others. And from this unfortunate Indian accountant, a great many deductions are made, which have recently become common in a certain field of economic observation.

Of course, the work of a teacher can be integrated into the social process in exactly the same way as the “unproductive labor” that Karl Marx said the unfortunate Indian accountant performed. But let's look at it this way: a teacher is a skilled person, skilled as a fully human person. He teaches and educates very young children, elementary school children. And for the sake of simplicity, let us assume – the theory is not affected by this – that all the children the teacher educates and teaches become cobblers. And through his skill, by developing abilities in his children through teaching, through which they think wisely, wisely engage in life with their profession as cobblers, and through his practical guidance with all kinds of educational means, he makes his children more skillful; and they now become cobblers who, let's say, make as many boots every ten days as others make in fifteen days. Now, what exactly is going on here? Surely, according to genuine Marxist doctrine, all these shoemakers who have been created are engaged in 'productive labor'. If it had not been for the teacher and his skill, if he had been an unskillful teacher, they would have performed the same productive labor in fifteen days instead of ten. Now, if you add up all the shoes that will be made by these children after they have grown up, in the five days that have been saved by having a skilled teacher, you can say: this skilled teacher has basically made all these boots made, and at least in the economic process, in all that belongs to this economic process, that is, in everything that flows out of it for the maintenance of people and so on, in all this, the teacher was the actual producer. His being actually lives on in the boots made in the five days!

The point is that here one can apply a narrow-minded way of looking at such a thing, and then one will come to call only the cobbler's work “productive work”, and “unproductive work”, that is, work that maintains itself from the surplus value, but the teacher's work. But one distorts all reality with such a way of looking at things.

We can take a different approach that does not tend to one side or the other, but rather looks at the whole process of social life. But if we think in economic terms, purely economic terms, then we have to ask: what exactly is it that the teacher draws for his physical maintenance? Is it different in an economic sense, in other words, is it different in an economic sense from any other form of income? Is it different from anything else that, to use a Marxist term, is 'withdrawn' from purely physical work and, I would add, handed over to another person? In economic terms, it is no different at all! The reason for this is as follows.

Let us assume that what is known as “added value” is used for teachers, then it flows productively into the whole economic process in the way I have just characterized it. Let us assume that it is handed over to a financier, a person who is really called a pensioner and who actually does nothing but what is usually called “cutting coupons”. But does the fact that he cuts coupons exhaust the economic process? Of course not, the man eats and drinks and dresses and so on. He cannot live on the “added value” of what is delivered to him. He lives off what other people produce for him. He is merely a switchboard for labor, for the economic process.

And if you look at the matter quite objectively, you can only say the following: such a person, who lives somewhere as a financing pensioner, through whom the economic processes are switched, is in social life roughly the same as the resting point of a scale, of a balance beam. The resting point of a balance beam must also be there. All the other points move; the one point of rest of the balance beam does not move. But it must be there. Because there has to be a switchover. In other words, this issue cannot be decided at the national economic level. At most, one could say that if the number of these points of rest, these pensioners “cutting coupons”, became too large, then the others would have to work substantially more, work longer. But in reality it is nowhere like that, because the number of pensioners in relation to any total population never comes into consideration at all in this way, and because, in the first place, as we have the social process today, hardly anything would come of it if we were to change it from our present circumstances.

So you can't think about the whole thing like that at all. And if you go through the Marxist literature, you will see that precisely because of the compulsion to blame someone for all the ills of social life, as in the so-called unemployed acquisition, you will see that all the conclusions are inconclusive. Because they don't actually mean anything. They would only mean something if the economic process were to change significantly, if the pensioners did not receive their pensions. But that would not be the case at all. So with this way of thinking, you don't get anywhere near the matter.

Rather, it is a matter of focusing attention on the fact that such resting points are necessary for switching, for turnover in economic life. For there is an added value that corresponds exactly to all of Karl Marx's definitions of added value, and which, in all its functions, corresponds to the functions of Marx's added value, insofar as one thinks only economically: that is the tax burden. In terms of its nature and function, the tax is exactly the same as Karl Marx's surplus value. And the various socialist governments have not exactly proved, where they have appeared, that they have become particularly combative against surplus value in the form of tax payments! But it is precisely in such things that the absurdity of theories is revealed.

The absurdity of theories is never revealed by logic, but always by reality. This must be said by someone who strives to judge from this reality in all situations. As long as one remains in the economic sphere, it is impossible to associate any kind of reasonable meaning with the concept of “surplus value”. As long as we remain within the economic sphere, we are concerned with the realization of economic processes. And these can only be realized if there are control points. Whether these are in the hands of the state or of individual rentiers is only a secondary difference, from a purely economic point of view. Therefore, it is necessary to point out that everything associated with such a concept as “unemployed income” or “unemployed acquisition” is not based on economic thinking at all, but merely on resentment: on looking at the person who has such an “unemployed income” and who is basically regarded as someone who is lazy, who does not work. A legal or even moral concept is simply smuggled into economic thinking. That is the fundamental phenomenon of this matter.

In reality, it is something quite different with these things, namely, that our human life process, our civilization process, could not be maintained at all if, for example, what some people are striving for were to be realized, inventing the phrase “the right to the full yield of labor”. For there is no way to speak of a “full labor yield” when you consider that if I become a cobbler and work more skillfully than I would have worked if I had not had a skilled teacher, any possibility of me vindicating the right to the “full labor yield” is eliminated. For from what does it flow? Not even from the totality of the present! The teacher who taught me may have died long ago. The past is linked to the present, and the present in turn flows over into the future. It is absurd to want to overlook such things with narrow-minded concepts, and to see how the individual achievements of a person fit into the whole economic process.

But something else immediately emerges when one says to oneself: Well, in purely economic terms, there can be no question of a person somehow receiving a “full yield of labor,” because one cannot even grasp the concept. One cannot narrow it down, contour it. It does not exist. It is impossible. But something immediately emerges when one looks at reality. In reality, there are such transition points, such people, to whom the proceeds of others who work physically flow to some extent. Now, let us assume that the person to whom it flows is a teacher, then he does a very productive job in the sense that I characterized it earlier. But let us assume that he is not a teacher, but really a coupon-cutter. Let's start with not one coupon cutter, but two. One of them cuts his coupons in the morning, then lights a few cigarettes after breakfast, reads his morning paper, then goes for a walk, then he eats lunch, then he sits down in his rocking chair and rocks a little, then he goes to the club and plays whist or poker and so on, and so he spends his day. Now let's take another fellow who also clippeds his coupons in the morning, but let's say that then he occupied himself with, well, let's say, setting up a scientific institute, who therefore devoted his thoughts to setting up a scientific institute, which would never come into existence if he couldn't cut coupons, because if it were set up by the people who are there to do the work of cutting his coupons, it would certainly never be set up. He arranges it. And in this scientific institute, perhaps after ten years, perhaps after twenty years, an extraordinarily important discovery or invention is made. Through this discovery or invention, productive work is done in a similar way, but perhaps even more extensively, than the teacher was able to do with his children who became shoemakers. Then there is a certain difference between coupon-cutter A and coupon-cutter B – a difference that is extremely important from an economic point of view. And we have to say: the whole process of coupon-cutting was extraordinarily productive in the context of human life.

The question cannot be decided at all in purely economic terms. It can only be decided if there is something else besides economic life, something that, apart from economic life, separate from economic life, causes people, when they draw their sustenance from the community in whatever way, to give back through their own nature what they ; if, therefore, there is a free spiritual life that inspires people not to become financiers, but to apply their spiritual strength in some way, just as they have it, or to apply their physical strength, just as they have it.

When one looks at things as they really are in real life, one is led to the necessity of the threefold social organism. And above all, such insight into life makes us aware that all the stuff that is often put forward in terms of political economy, even by practitioners, is basically unusable, that something else must finally be put into people's heads, namely a holistic view of life. And it is this holistic view of life that ultimately leads to the threefold social order.

We must therefore endeavor to spread such ideas ever further and further. We must not disdain to point out how short-sighted the practical life of the present day is. We must combine these two activities: on the one hand, present the positive side of the threefold order, and on the other hand, be the harshest critics of what so often exists today as spiritual currents. We must get to know these schools of thought and become harsh critics of them. Only by holding up the absurdities that exist today to people as if in a mirror image will we be able to make progress and get through to them. And what we teach people in this way must at the same time be presented in such a way that they feel how we work with real concepts.

You see, a person who produces boots is most certainly a productive person. But in Marxist terms, a person who, say, produces beauty spots is just as productive. Because if you just look at the performance of physical labor, it is just as much physical labor as the other. What matters is to consider the whole process and to get an idea of how what someone does is shaped into the process of social life. People need to get a sense of these things. It cannot be done any other way.

Now, however, we will be obliged to respect the thought habits of today's people. But they must be clear about one thing: if you go out and talk to people for an hour and a quarter about such things as I am putting before you now, they will start to yawn and they will eventually leave the room, glad that it has stopped, because they are longing for a healthy nap. You think that is difficult, much too difficult! For people have completely lost the habit of following thoughts that are borne by reality. The fact that people have only ever followed abstractions, that they have been accustomed to following abstractions since they were schoolchildren, has made humanity lazy in its thinking. Humanity is terribly lazy in its thinking in the present day. And we have to take this into account, but in a useful way.

That is why we incorporate stories into our lectures about what has already been developed from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Maybe we tell people fewer anecdotes! It is very useful for today's lazy humanity to interrupt a difficult lecture with anecdotes from time to time, but we can spend our time better than that. In the meantime, let us tell you about our Waldorf school, about eurythmy, about our college courses, about the coming day, by inserting this in the necessary way into the course of our thoughts. This is something that breaks up the train of thought, which is initially a pleasant change for people - they then need to think less. Because, isn't it true, the essence of the matter can then follow. We can describe for a while how the Waldorf School came about, how it is organized; we can describe how thirty lecturers in Dornach have tried to fertilize the sciences from the perspective of spiritual science in the university courses. When you tell people that science should be fertilized, they don't need to think about how that happens in chemistry, in botany and so on, but they can stick with generally hazy ideas while you talk about it. And then they have time to slip into the thought bed between the thoughts that are put forward. We have again gained the opportunity to talk about some more difficult things in the next five minutes. But the other things are still extremely useful. For example, when we tell people how we created school reports in the Waldorf school, how we tried not to write “almost satisfactory”, “hardly sufficient” - which you can't distinguish at all whether someone has “hardly” or “almost sufficient” - but where we gave each child something like a small biography and a life verse. The people don't need to think much about how difficult it is, that is, they can think about how difficult it is to find a life verse for each child; but if you just say the result, it is painless to accept. So we can tell them what has been practically developed there. And in this way we can also tell people something about the facilities at the Waldorf School, how the building gradually became too small, how we had to build barracks because we didn't have the money to build a proper building. It is useful for people to hear sometimes that we don't have enough money; this can have very pleasant consequences. If we include such things in our reflections, it will be very objective, because it is objective, and will be very justified; but it can also create a pleasant change for the listeners.

Then we can tell about the university courses in Dornach, in Stuttgart. We can weave in that all of this still has to be done today for the most part by the poor Waldorf teachers, that so few people have come together who are really doing something in the sense of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Because the fact that Waldorf teachers are overburdened three times over is something that people are quite happy to accept, isn't it. Everyone then imagines that they too are overburdened. Well, and in this way we can, by actually speaking of what is already on the outside, show people something at the same time that they may like to hear again and again in between, but what they should also know, what they also need to know.

And then we also talk to them by name about the Day to Come. We try to give them a picture of how this Day to Come is set up. You can see from the brochures that have been distributed how it is set up. We teach people about the Coming Day with the help of the brochures that have been distributed and we tell them: Of course you will find that this Coming Day does not yet fully correspond to the associations about associations – we will talk about this tomorrow – and that it is still very much based on the present economy. But at the same time we say to people: we know that anyway, but it just shows how necessary it is for this economy to change, because no matter how hard we try, we cannot shape the ideal of an association out of the current economic system.

But it is necessary that you see our movement as a whole in your lectures. You should not be embarrassed, on the one hand, to present the spiritual side, the anthroposophical orientation to the people, but on the other hand, to also go into the practical things of the coming day and present all of this to the people. In your lecture, you do not need to make a direct appeal for money; that – I say it in parentheses – can be done by the other person, who is traveling with you and will approach the people only after the lecture; it is better that way. But although I put it in parentheses, that is how it should be done. As I said, you do not need to do it directly in the lecture, to promote the cause. But you can certainly let it be known that, without any selfish purpose behind it, in order to promote what is actually intended by the threefold order, you need, firstly, money, secondly, money, thirdly, money. And depending on which of you, according to the situation, finds this right, you can emphasize the first word money more strongly and then drop the tone or rise with the second tone. This is something that can somehow contribute to the inner formation of the matter.

I am not telling you this to imply anything more than that you have to be considerate of the way something is said. In a sense, when you walk into a room, you should sense whether you have to speak one way or the other. You can sense that, especially when you are among complete strangers. So you will have to take such things into account. If you want to achieve what is to be achieved now, you will not be able to go before the people with a finished concept, but you will have to adapt completely to the circumstances. You will only be able to do that if you approach the design and delivery of your lectures in the way I characterized yesterday. But we must not forget to keep referring back to what we have already achieved in the establishment of the school system, including practical institutions. After all, it is already the case in the present that people need this. And you would do well, especially when describing the threefolded social organism, to use the establishment of the Waldorf school for illustration, and likewise when describing the other economic life, to exemplify again and again what is intended by the coming day. I would like you to remember that the world must be pointed out very sharply to our various institutions, precisely through your lectures.

And behind all this there must be the awareness that from all corners and ends - as I have already said several times in these lectures - the opposition is there and more is to come, and that we do not have much longer time to bring to bear what we want to bring to bear and what must be brought to bear, but that we must tackle things sharply in the near future.

We must not take as an example – and I say this for those who have been in the anthroposophical movement for a long time – the way the anthroposophical movement as such has developed, because it is developing in such a way that its members are all too little interested in what is actually going on in the world. Now is the time to develop a keen interest in what is going on in the world. And we must be quite explicit and also critical of ourselves with regard to what is currently going on in the world today. Therefore, we must take an interest in these events. We must seek to explain the necessity of our movement on the basis of these events. We must repeatedly emphasize how these events are likely to lead modern civilization into decline. For people must learn to understand that if things continue as they usually do today, the decline of modern civilization will certainly result, and that the countries of Europe would at least have to go through terrible times if a foundation for a new beginning is not laid out of a truly active spiritual life and an actively grasped state and economic life.

We must also take away the phrases that are repeatedly uttered in the following way: Yes, all this may be very nice with the threefold order, but to introduce something like that, it would take not decades but perhaps centuries. - It is an objection that is made frequently. But there is no more absurd objection than this. For what is to arise in humanity, especially in the way of social institutions, depends on what people want and what strength and courage they put into their will. And what can naturally take centuries with carelessness and inertia can take the shortest possible time when active forces are applied. But for this it is necessary that we bring into more and more minds what can come from our spiritual science and be derived from observing our other institutions. Do not forget to point out such things as are to be created here in Stuttgart, for instance in the Medical-Therapeutic Institute. For it is also the case that it is precisely from such institutions that people can best learn to understand the fruitfulness of spiritual science, at least for the time being.

And if one can make such a thing plausible to people, there is also the consideration that it would actually be of no use at all for the further development of humanity if, in addition to the old Catholic religion, , the old Protestant creed, and the Jewish, Turkish creed, and so on, and in addition to many a sectarian creed, now also to establish a world view that would be “the anthroposophical” That would certainly have a meaning for people who meet every week, or twice a week, to indulge in such worldviews. It would have a subjective meaning for these people. But it would have no meaning for the world. For the world, only a worldview and outlook on life that directly engages practical questions has meaning. And that is why we find it all too often now that people are quite willing to be told something about the eternal in human nature, about life after death. One can also speak to a larger number of people without them scratching out one's eyes just because one says it, about repeated lives on earth, about the law of karma and so on. But today it is even more useful and important to teach people that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can contribute something to medicine, for example, to therapy, so that it can be seen how truly for the material world that which one conquers in the spiritual has a certain unique significance. For it is not enough just to rise to the spirit in its abstractness, but it is important to rise in such a way that this is the living spirit, which then has enough strength and power to have an effect on the material.

You should present this thought, this placing of the spirit in material life in the most diverse variations, to people again and again in the eyes of your soul. For the spirit wants to rule matter, not flee from matter. Therefore it is in a certain respect downright nefarious when people like Bruhm, who wrote the little book Theosophy and Anthroposophy, reproach Anthroposophy for wanting to draw into the everyday life what should hover in the heights of heaven, above reality, what should not be drawn down into material reality. One can hardly imagine a greater annoyance for human life than such teachers of the people, who need the lecterns and the universities to teach such stuff to the people. But that is happening today in all, all variants.

And what is particularly on the agenda today is that people say: Yes, anthroposophy may be an attempt to deepen the individual sciences, but anthroposophy has nothing to do with religion, anthroposophy has nothing to do with Christianity. And then people come and want to prove why anthroposophy has nothing to do with religion and Christianity. Then they come up with completely arbitrary concepts that they have of religion and Christianity. And they make it clear that these concepts, which they have of religion and Christianity, must not be challenged!

If only people would at least be truthful! Then one would be able to be a little more lenient with them. If people would come and say: Anthroposophy is now emerging; it speaks from different sources than I have spoken from so far at the theological faculty or in the pulpit. I now only have the choice of either giving up my job, but then I have nothing to eat, that's a fatal thing, or I'd rather stick to my job and reject anthroposophy! One would not exactly take such people very seriously for the cultural life of humanity, but they would speak the truth, just as the Graz law teacher spoke the truth, who proved the freedom of the human will every year before his students by saying: “People have free will!” Because if people had no free will, then they would have no responsibility for their actions. And if they had no responsibility for their actions, then there would be no punishments and no criminal law. But I am a teacher of criminal law. So I would not be teaching criminal law. But now I have to. And because there has to be a me at this university, there has to be a criminal law, so there must also be punishments, and thus there must also be a responsibility of people, and consequently also a free will of people. This is roughly how the Graz law professor taught his students about the freedom of the human will years ago. What he presented was not much different.

And theologians and other people would also act according to this scheme if they said what was true. They could also still cite the other side of the matter, they would then be equally true, and one would then be more lenient, they could still say: I could perhaps also take on the inconvenience of re-founding religion and Christianity. In the case of university professors, it could then happen that they would then have to migrate from the theological faculties, perhaps if they were in a larger number, to the philosophical faculty. If they are already professors, then it is easier than if they want to get into the university. But even if the life food were to be retained, it would still be difficult. But they do not want to go to the trouble and inconvenience of re-establishing the things. But if they just wanted to say these things, then at least they would be honest. Instead, they put forward all sorts of arguments that do not correspond to reality, but are only decorative, intended to cover up reality. We, however, must not be lenient in any way on these points, but must seek out untruthfulness and mendacity everywhere in these points and ruthlessly expose it before the world.

And we must not fail to point out the sloppiness in the thinking of some people, who simply express it by not taking certain assertions with all their moral depth. Not so long ago, someone heard me publicly characterize the mendacity of Frohnmeyer, who simply described something for Dornach in a lying, tendentious way that looks quite different from the way he described it in a tendentious way. And this person said: Well, Frohnmeyer just believed that it looked like that. - That's not what matters to me, to point out precisely that Frohnmeyer is saying something untrue in this case, but rather that Frohnmeyer shows that he makes assertions about something in Dornach that fly in the face of the truth. Anyone who does this in one respect also does it in other respects. He is a theologian. He lectures at Basel University. Theology draws from sources that are claimed to be sources of truth. Anyone who bears witness in this way, as Frohnmeyer does, who describes the statue of Christ as he has described it, shows that he has no concept of how to research the truth from the sources. If it were not for the fact that it is written in the history books when Napoleon was born and died, he could also tell lies about these things if he had to research them. What matters to me is that such people are described in all their corrupting effect on contemporary history, that it is shown that they do not fit into the situation into which they have been placed by the chaotic conditions of the times. On this point, we must be in no way lenient.

That is one of the formalities of your work in the coming weeks.

In this lecture I would like to speak about certain colorations regarding the characteristics of the present spiritual life, which our lecture work will have to assume. We must not limit ourselves to focusing our speech merely on understanding the intellectual side of social issues, but we must work to make the world aware of how, with regard to certain things, people must feel differently from the way they currently feel, especially in the supposedly influential circles. For what lives outwardly in institutions, what happens outwardly in people's social actions, depends entirely on the way people think, feel and will. That is why I have emphasized so strongly that the human being as such must be placed at the center of the social as well as the whole view of life and the world. But we ourselves must develop a sense of how misguided and lost the life of feeling has become in the present day. We must have a keen sense that it is precisely through this often quite perverse life of feeling that the civilized world has come to its present situation. We should make such things clear to ourselves by means of examples. And we should also make them clear by means of examples from the world. We can easily find such examples if we just discuss the treatment that the anthroposophical movement is receiving in our time, with a certain objective sense.

When discussing social issues, the moral aspect must always be emphasized. This consists in the fact that the leading people of the immediate past have allowed events of the time to unfold in a rather irresponsible manner. Is it not the case that the leading circles were only concerned with the staging of the course of the world in the sense in which modern technology and the forms of materialism that have emerged in recent times support the course of the world, and how the course of the world is supported by them? And it is quite clear: no attention has been paid to the influence that this course of the world must have on the countless people who, as the proletariat, have been formed precisely by this course of the world. All this has really been allowed to happen with a carelessness that now, of course, appears tragic, but which must be clearly recognized if any improvement is to occur.

A glaring example of this carelessness is, of course, this, which I have mentioned several times before: at the end of the 1960s, Austria had a Minister of Police, Giskra. Even then, there were some people who pointed out that a social question was looming on the horizon of modern civilization. And when certain questions were put to him about the social question, this police minister replied: “Austria knows no social question. That stops at Bodenbach!”

Now, this burying one's head in the sand, this ostrich-like policy, has been pursued to the greatest extent by the leading circles in modern times. And this, my dear friends, must be seen through, it must be sharply brought to the present. For one can say: Unscrupulousness has gradually moved out of the external world and into thinking itself, and there it asserts itself, unfortunately unnoticed by very many people. This results in a coarsening of thinking, and this coarsening of thinking is usually denied, especially by today's intellectual people. I would like to illustrate what I have just said with a recent example.

You see, a certain Count Hermann Keyserling, who founded a so-called “School of Wisdom” in Darmstadt, is still a plant from the circles that have operated with the greatest carelessness and unconcern for the course of world events. His bookshop advertises this “School of Wisdom”. And a booklet has just been published that bears, as you may admit yourself, the rather pretentious title 'The Path to Perfection'. This booklet needed to be advertised by the bookstore. The following is added to this advertisement on the outside of the so-called belly band: 'Responding to Rudolf Steiner's attacks'. The bookshop then adds in its announcement: 'Count Keyserling's position on Theosophy in general and on Steiner's Theosophy in particular is communicated in the 14th chapter of his last book 'Philosophy as Art' under the title 'For and against Theosophy'. Rudolf Steiner found it necessary to respond to these entirely objective statements, which proclaimed the truth, with personal insults.” This is the kind of advertising that the bookstore writes for this ‘school of wisdom’! Now it is really necessary, if a social recovery is to occur in the present, to keep an eye on people like this Count Hermann Keyserling and to really say openly and frankly to the world what has been discovered by looking at them. For the pests of contemporary civilization must be exposed.

What this Count Keyserling's inner and intellectual dishonesty is, may be seen from the way in which he proceeds in this writing, which, incidentally, contains the beautiful sentence: “Only the members of the student community are entitled to longer personal discussions with Count Keyserling outside of the general members' meetings. For them, he is available to speak to, by prior appointment and with the exception of Saturdays and Sundays, if he is not traveling, every afternoon between 3 and 5 o'clock in the school premises at Paradeplatz 2, entrance from Zeughausstraße. Should anyone, without being a student, wish to take advantage of the headmaster's time in matters of wisdom, the management reserves the right to charge special consultation fees for the benefit of the school in such cases."

My dear friends, it is certainly justified to laugh at such things; but the things are not ridiculous. It is precisely in these things that the original damage to our social life lies. For you will find the following sentence on page 47: You know that I have, with a certain ruthlessness, but it is necessary in such cases and is well considered, characterized the dishonesty of Count Hermann Keyserling with regard to my dependence on Haeckel, which he has maintained, here in a public lecture, in due form characterized the untruthfulness of Count Hermann Keyserling with regard to my dependence on Haeckel. In response to this characterization, he writes the following sentence: “.... and instead of correcting a possible error on my part, which I would gladly accept, because I did not have time for special Steiner source research... Steiner simply accuses me of lying...” So, this man has the nerve to suggest that anyone can write any untruth and get no other kind of a rap on the knuckles for it than to have it corrected! Just imagine this intellectual laxity, almost working towards it: you can write anything, and the other person is obliged to correct it. If we were to work in this way, we would end up in the social mire. And to write in such a way: “I have no time for too much specialized research into Steiner's sources...” what does that really mean? It really means: I am not taking the time to check exactly what I am writing. And such a man claims that as his good right!

My dear friends, we must have a sense of the perverse intellectualistic sentiments of the present. If we do not acquire this sense, we cannot confront the present with the exposure of this swamp, and then all the rest of our talk is in vain. I must keep repeating that mere defense is of no use. We must take what is used as an attack against us only as a symptom, in order to characterize the intellectual decay that exists. For humanity must know how it is actually being led spiritually today.

This is in contrast to the beautiful denunciation carried out by a Basel university professor who always pops out of the woodwork like a brownie in the night and is perhaps called Professor Heinzelmann for this reason. Dr. Boos has indeed struck out in a somewhat sharp manner in a reply to certain attacks. It was claimed in Swiss newspapers that anthroposophy was borrowed from various ancient writings; something was said about the Indian Vedic and Vedanta literature, the Bhagavad Gita was mentioned, and among the things that were mentioned was also the Akasha Chronicle! Now, you see, Dr. Boos was probably right when he said: to claim something like that is to provide proof that one is telling a deliberate untruth; because the person who says something like that must know that if he goes to the bookcase, he cannot take out the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita and then the Akasha Chronicle one after the other. That was how the matter was presented. So they must know that they are writing a falsehood. That “Brownie” from Basel now writes, after I have characterized it accordingly, that my characterization is a “completely new definition of knowing untruthfulness”; I would have provided the definition on page so and so much, an objective untruthfulness is present where one incorrectly asserts something that one should actually know; this contradicts the previously familiar definition of “knowing untruth,” which consists in asserting something “against better knowledge.”

So this university professor writes that there is a definition on that page. But there is no definition at all! I only said that what he says about the Akasha Chronicle is really asserted against better knowledge. So, it is simply lied that there is a definition on that page. People are being hoodwinked by being distracted from the real issue: that it is precisely the assertion against better knowledge that matters.

You see, these are seemingly pedanticities. In reality they are not, but they are what is most necessary today in the moral relationship: that we assert the point of view to the leading personalities, how morally marshy thinking has actually become. And this moral marshmallow is basically spread over the whole of intellectual life today.

Now it is true that this moral decay comes from two sources: firstly from scientific life itself, and secondly from journalism. But that cannot prevent us from seeking out these things wherever they assert themselves and bringing them to people's attention again and again.

And if we want to make it clear, especially to the people of the present day, who are so difficult to understand, how necessary it is for intellectual life to become independent, we will be able to do so by pointing out what has become of intellectual life under the leadership of the state and the economy. It is quite natural for us to present these things in a purely descriptive way, without becoming polemical, and I might say with the same tone with which we endeavor to present any other objective fact. This does, of course, presuppose that we care about such things. And we must be able to have that in general: a clear, open view of what is happening, of what is going on around us. I have already emphasized this from other points of view.

It will not be difficult to show the harmfulness of much of what is found in this brochure by Count Keyserling. Because, isn't it true, in this brochure, where the talk is of that blissful atmosphere into which those who devote themselves to the School of Wisdom in Darmstadt are welcomed, sentences of this caliber can be found: “This” - the atmosphere - “will soon mean such a factor of power that the mere stay in its rooms will be enough for the receptive novice to grasp emotionally what is striven for in it.” Then further: “But the creation of a certain cultural atmosphere does not mean the main intention underlying the School of Wisdom. The atmosphere is the basic prerequisite for achieving more important things. This, however, consists in promoting the called individual not only through the involuntary unconscious influence of a certain lifestyle and the level of being of the leading personalities, but also through intensive private treatment.” And again: “He may hold any world view, adhere to any political program, believe in any faith, pursue any interest; he may be young or old, man or woman: in the School of Wisdom he will learn to relate any ‘being’ to a deeper ‘being’.” At another point, it is emphasized how beautiful the School of Wisdom is because it does not concern itself with whether, for example, people who speak of free money are right or not, or whether other directions are right or not; the School of Wisdom in Darmstadt considers it a small matter whether anyone is right or not in any direction. Rather, all these directions should come together on the ground of the Darmstadt parquet! Because all these arbitrary interests, arbitrary beliefs, arbitrary human conditions are caused there to “refer an arbitrary existence back to a deeper being.”

You see, basically this is only the dark side of something that cannot really get any better unless spiritual life is placed on a completely new and free foundation. For anyone who wants to talk about the recovery of social conditions today must be fully aware that we are at an important moment in the development of humanity in world history, that certain things are simply being sought by working them out of the depths of the human soul. And one of the most important impulses to work out of the depths of the human soul is to overcome the old compulsions in the relationship between people.

Please note this formula: overcoming the old compulsions in the relationship between people. We look back at the social conditions of humanity. We find that in ancient times there existed the institution of effecting social stratification on the basis of mere blood; by virtue of being born of this or that tribe, of this or that family, one was lord, the other servant, one the commanding, the other the dependent. The further back we go in the development of mankind, the more we find that social life was built on such blood and hereditary relationships. They have partly been preserved in the consciousness of the people. What still exists today as the class consciousness of the nobility ultimately stems from ancient times and is essentially a continuation of those social demands that were based on blood in ancient times.

Now, in more recent times, another stratification has been superimposed on this social stratification. And this other one is based on economic power. The social stratification that arose from blood ties has been joined by another stratification that arose from modern economic conditions: the stratification that arises from economic power. Those who are economically powerful belong to a different class from those who have nothing, who are economically powerless. This has been superimposed on the old. Basically, much of our present social conditions are still based on the survival of the old constraints. Today's human consciousness is rising up against this. And basically, a large part of what we call the social questions is based on this democratic rebellion against the old constraints. Therefore, the question arises: how should we act in this regard?

And here we must realize that without the emancipation of the free spiritual life from the other members of the social organism on the ground that I have just characterized, a lasting social state cannot be created. If the spiritual life is really placed on its own ground, then there can be no social coercion in this spiritual life, but only the relationship of free recognition. And this free recognition will arise of its own accord within social life. To put it crudely: You would hardly hire someone as a music teacher who had never played a musical instrument in their life, and democratic sentiment will never demand that absolute equality should prevail among all people with regard to appointing a music teacher. Rather, in completely independent free recognition, someone will be appointed as a music teacher who knows and is able to do the things that are necessary to be a music teacher. And one will not be able to deny recognition to the one who knows and is able to do the things, when there is nowhere something that is practiced by force; recognition will arise all by itself.

In a free spiritual life, there will be a great deal of things that are similar to building on authority. But it will be a building on self-evident authority everywhere. For what is the rebellion of countless people in the present time against all authority based on? This rebellion is based on nothing other than the fact that people perceive that economic conditions impose forced subordination on us, and we do not recognize that economic conditions impose forced subordination on us. Nor do people recognize that forced subordination is imposed by political or blood relations. And this is opposed by the historical element, which I have characterized as the democratic feeling that is now emerging from the depths of humanity. And since, of course, the broad masses have learned from intellectuals and spiritual leaders not accuracy but superficialities, they take history to mean that they reject all authority in economic life. And now the third, intellectual life, is also taken into the bargain, because it does not appear before the soul-eyes of men in its own particular essence. It can only do so when it stands actually in direct free self-administration. The necessity for the liberation of intellectual life must be made clear to people from the most diverse backgrounds.

And we must also emphasize the following: there must be a sphere in which people can truly feel equal. This is not the case today because, on the one hand, the state has absorbed spiritual life and, on the other hand, economic life draws it in, so that it draws the authoritative from both sides into its being and there is actually no ground on which people who have come of age can feel completely equal. If the ground is there on which people who have come of age can feel completely equal, can someone really feel: I am equal to every other human being as a human being. - Then he will also recognize authority in the area where he cannot feel it because it is an absurdity, or he will recognize associative judgment.

Something will arise again – it is not yet opportune to tell people this today, but I am telling you – something will arise that is like what played a certain role in ancient times from different circumstances. Take a village in ancient times: the pastor was a kind of deity in the truest sense of the word. But there were occasions when the pastor appeared purely as a human being among other human beings. They valued this very much. If we now have, on the one hand, spiritual life with the recognition, the free recognition of self-evident authority, and on the other hand, economic life with group judgment, which is based on the confluence of the judgments of associated human beings, and in between a place where people meet without distinction of the rest of the authoritative - and that would be the case if the threefold social organism were there - then it would actually have a real effect in the very deepest sense on solving the social question. But in the deepest sense it must be the case that the teacher, the spiritual person - I mean this symbolically now - takes off his toga when he appears on the ground of the social state life, and that the worker can take off his blouse when he the ground of the social life of the state, so that in fact people meet from both sides in the same uniform, which need not be a uniform in the ordinary sense, but can be equivalent when it is based on the legal-state.

We must attach great importance to the fact that such, I would say, moral impulses, which also live externally, really do come back into human society. For savagery and barbarism would undoubtedly occur if what a true Marxist regards as the ideal social order were to be realized. On the other hand, we can be quite certain of one thing: if the broad masses of the people, after the experiences they have had in Europe in the last few months, listen in the right way, unperturbed by their leaders, long enough, to what the meaning of the threefold social organism is, then a light must finally dawn on them.

But at the same time as this action is being taken, something else must be done: the moral decline, as I have just characterized it, must be brought to consciousness in the judgment of the present. We must prove quite palpably where people simply fall out of morality in their judgments, as is the case with Count Hermann Keyserling. For the man is to a high degree a sand-in-the-eyes-scatterer, and one must only place such a specimen of a human being in front of the contemporaries in the right way. Then one has done something extraordinary morally.

You see, after Count Hermann Keyserling had done, or had done through his bookstore, all that I have mentioned to you, he then accomplished the following. He says: “I only touch on the case in order to make it quite clear by his example how carefully one must distinguish between ‘being’ and ‘knowing’. I cannot possibly have a favorable impression of Steiner's being; noblesse oblige – by this he means: noblesse oblige one not to call a liar a liar – “... but as an expert I still find him very remarkable and advise every critical mind with a psychic disposition to take advantage of the rare opportunity of the existence of such a specialist to learn from and with him. I am familiar not only with his most important accessible writings but also with his cycles, and from them I have gained the impression that Steiner is not only extraordinarily gifted but actually has unusual sources of knowledge at his disposal. He lacks any finer organ for the sense, and therefore must find all wisdom abstract and empty that does not relate to phenomena; but what he presents about such phenomena deserves serious examination, however absurd some of it may sound at first and his style as a revealer of his essence inspires so little confidence, which is why I deeply regret that his action against me, which came as a complete surprise to me, deprives me of the opportunity to make personal contact with him. For it remains true, as I wrote in the same essay that provoked Steiner's anger in defense against his opponents, that an important person should be judged solely by his best qualities; interest in his knowledge and abilities must not be affected by his infirmities and faults. On the same day that I received Steiner's diatribe, I recommended to a student of mine the serious study of his writings and even joining his society, since this seemed to me to be his path and I did not consider contact with the questionable aspects associated with Steiner to be dangerous in his case. One should never forget that every being is multifaceted, that no bad quality devalues the good; and that the character of a society depends entirely on the spirit of its predominant members. The Anthroposophical Society can still have a future if it abandons dogma and sectarianism, if it gives up its dirty agitation and truly becomes what it is supposed to be according to its statutes.

So, as you can see, for those who, unfortunately, are also numerous in the Anthroposophical Society, there is plenty of opportunity to say: Yes, what does Steiner want? Keyserling praises him to the skies! But for me it is not about whether he praises me, but whether he is a pest of civilization or not. Because it seems to me that everything Keyserling says in the end is such that I can only characterize it by saying: This man tries to cover up everything that his superficiality inflicts on the world behind what I can't call it otherwise in this case, adulation. I say this simply because I am fully convinced that Count Keyserling does not have the slightest organ for understanding the things he praises here.

And this must be much more important to us: to go into this objectively, to show the world in our lectures – I have only cited Count Keyserling as an example today – what superficiality and unjustified aspirations there are today. If the world realizes what kind of people are leading it, then it will gain an understanding for the liberation of the spiritual life. For it will be impossible for such heroes to emerge from a free spiritual life. Quite certainly, my dear friends, the earthly life that man spends between birth and death will never produce anything but angels. And only someone like Professor Rein in Jena can make the strange claim that anthroposophical morality is actually meant for angels, as he once did in an article. But even if there are bound to be all kinds of strange eccentrics in the free spiritual life, the majority will not be able to do so, but the majority will be educated differently, precisely because of the inner strength and impulsiveness of the spiritual life. Of course, it is easy to give the world the kind of empty thoughts that Count Keyserling gives, if one has acquired one's social position through old blood ties, as Count Keyserling has, and if one perhaps receives some support from other quarters, which need not be mentioned here, for the establishment of such “schools of wisdom”. But such folly will never be able to arise in a free spiritual life. Because there will certainly be enough people who reject such ideas.

You see, what was important to me in that lecture was to point out the emptiness and abstractness of Keyserling's arguments, the lack of reality in them. And anyone who remembers well will know that I first characterized this emptiness and abstractness, this insubstantiality, this empty verbiage, and then added: Anyone who indulges in empty abstractions and empty verbiage is then compelled, when he encounters something of substantial content, to resort to untruth. That was the context. And at that time, it was the context that was essential. And what has been made of it now? It would be interesting to hear what a man who has been accused of suffering from emptiness, from intellectual and spiritual shortness of breath, has to say in his defense. But the count has the following to say in his journal “The Way to Perfection,” “Communications from the Society for Free Philosophy,” “School of Wisdom.” He says, and he means me, that he finds my wisdom bloodless, abstract and empty and claims that he can always say in advance what people of my ilk might bring forward; the essence of my philosophy is “spiritual shortness of breath, an inner gasping for air,” and I “don't have a clue about anthroposophy, not even a blue one.” So you see, the way I have given this characteristic characterizes Count Keyserling himself. But in this respect he is really only an example. It is precisely that which is contained in the present spiritual life as the main tone that ultimately leads back to such things.

The development of abstract intellectual life in recent centuries has indeed given us the opportunity to see outstanding scholars in various fields who, when it comes down to it, are unable to formulate a single correct and meaningful thought. A good example of this is the excellent biologist Oscar Hertwig from the University of Berlin. When you read his book criticizing Darwinism, you cannot help but say: This is a person who must be considered completely significant in his field. And the book 'The Development of Organisms', it is said, is a good book. But one needs nothing to write such a good book as to be immersed in the mechanism of thoughtless experimental research, to be diligent, to be promoted a little - he was indeed pushed into a certain clique as a Haeckel student - and can be a very important person there if the circumstances are favorable. He is so important that he was even chosen to add something to the wisdom of the former German Emperor Wilhelm II in Berlin, and he was allowed to present him with particularly sensational findings from research into lower organisms! Now, soon after the book on Darwinism by Hertwig was published, which is an excellent book in its field, Hertwig also published a book on social issues. This is nothing more than a compilation of pure nonsense, line after line. Why? Well, you see, with the book 'The Becoming of Organisms' you didn't need to think. One was completely immersed in the mechanism of modern scientific endeavor. But to make a sound judgment in the social sphere, it is necessary to begin thinking for oneself. So it turned out that the great scholar cannot think in the simplest, most primitive way.

We have to grasp the fact that we live in a so-called scientific and intellectual life that can basically be conducted to the exclusion of any real independent thinking. And as such a spiritual life became more and more prevalent, real thinking, meaningful, substantial thinking, increasingly disappeared.

And then we experienced the strange phenomenon that people wanted to test children's abilities with experimental psychology, by incorporating some nonsense words into their memory in order to determine this memory, or similar gimmicks that are passed off as “exactly scientific”. These are even more rampant in America than in Europe, but they have already come up quite high in Germany. By introducing this into school life, it means nothing more than that we have so strongly emphasized the human being out of social life that the teacher no longer has a relationship with the child, that he no longer comes from the child, but that he has to determine through apparatus what the person in question is capable of. And if Bolshevism continues in Russia for a long time, this method will perhaps be used in Russia to a very considerable extent instead of examinations. Children will be tested like machines to see if they are good for anything in life. This is one of Lunacharsky's ideals.

These things must be characterized impartially, then perhaps, little by little, we will evoke in the people of the present day a feeling that so palpably shows how we need a renewal, a fertilization of intellectual life, and how this renewal, this fertilization, can take place on the basis of the isolation of the intellectual from the other social elements. We must try to illustrate these things in terms of contemporary phenomena, which we present in all their starkness.

On the one hand, it is necessary to show people the necessity of the separation and free organization of spiritual life by looking at the threads of spiritual life in the present. On the other hand, it is necessary to show everything that ultimately shows how economic life must be based on the associative principle.

Above all, a sure judgment must be called for in order to prevent the individual from doing anything in economic life that cannot be fruitfully integrated into that economic life. In the spiritual life, it is the case that the judgment must always ultimately come from the individual person; therefore, through a free spiritual life, the individual person must be able to fully come into his or her own; the state must be brought about in which each person can individually come into his or her own according to his or her abilities. In economic life, this would be of no use at all. On the contrary, it would be harmful because the economic judgment of an individual person has no value at all. It can never be rooted in reality.

Anyone familiar with anthroposophy will readily understand this. For what constitutes spiritual life ultimately flows from within the human being. A person must shape what he brings with him through birth out of himself. Admittedly, he shapes it through interaction with his environment. He also acquires experience, be it external, be it internal, be it physical, be it spiritual experience. But the process that unfolds must come from his very individual abilities. Now, if we want to intervene in economic life, we have nothing in our humanity that could be as decisive for social life as the individual abilities of the individual.

These individual abilities enrich the general life of humanity when they are applied by the human being. If he simply applies them, community life is enriched. In economic life as such, that is, insofar as one is dealing with the exchange and valuation of goods, nothing is present from the human being other than his needs. Man, as it were, knows nothing about economic life and its necessities as an individual through anything other than his needs; he knows that he has to eat and drink to a certain extent, he has individual needs. But these individual needs are only important to himself, only to himself,

What a person produces intellectually has significance for everyone else; what he produces intellectually is, in fact, a priori socially significant. The needs that a person has, and for the sake of which he must desire that there be an economic life, have significance only for himself. Economically, he can only know how to provide for himself. But this in no way provides a social yardstick, nowhere the basis for a social judgment. For it simply excludes what is to be effective in the social life if one has only one yardstick for what one needs oneself. Therefore, a social judgment can never be built on that knowledge, which is taken from one's own needs. The individual has no basis for social judgment. If he acts from what he is as an individual, that is, simply takes his needs into account, then applies his intellect and abilities, not to produce something for the general public, as in intellectual life, but to satisfy his needs, then he acts under all circumstances as an anti-social being.

That is why all cleverness is of no help when it comes to economic judgments. I must again and again cite the example of the defense of the gold standard in the course of the 19th century. If you read the parliamentary reports and other things that, for example, also originated from practitioners in defense of the gold standard in individual countries, you can actually find a great deal of individual acumen everywhere. What was said was actually completely clever, one might say. One gains respect for human capacity when one still reads the speeches that were held about the gold standard today. But just what the cleverest people said always culminated in the fact that the gold standard would contribute significantly to promoting free trade in the world. And the reasons that were put forward to support this judgment, that free trade would result from the gold standard, are actually indisputable. But the opposite has happened everywhere! Everywhere in the wake of the gold standard, the need for protective tariffs and the like has arisen. Everywhere, free trade has been restricted. And this example shows to an eminent degree that individual human cleverness is of no help when it comes to economic questions, even if it is as prominent as it was in the 19th century. It is a mistake for individuals to want to act economically on the basis of individual judgments.

The necessity of associations follows with apodictic certainty. Only when people who are active in the most diverse branches and elements associate with each other, and what one person knows in one field is supplemented and expanded by what another knows, only then does a common judgment arise that can then be transformed into economic action and lead to social recovery. There is no way to escape the necessity of association, if one simply points out this basic fact. Furthermore, what happens to economic life as such under the influence of threefolding? What do we actually have in economic life? We have three factors.

The first is that which arises from expertise in the production of this or that. Whether you want to mine coal, grow grain, raise livestock or supply some industry, you have to be an expert in the field.

The second thing is that, in our present economic life, the movement of goods, of the necessities of life, must be properly directed. Trade must be conducted in the right way. Goods must be transported to the places where they are needed. For only there do they have their real value. Otherwise they are not commodities, but only objects. One must distinguish between them. Something, even food, can, when it is in any place, be merely an object and not a commodity. For if there is an enormous amount of food of a certain quality in any place, without people needing it, there are only as many goods as people can use up. The others are merely objects, and they only become commodities when they come to the places where they can be used. Without trade, no object is a commodity. This is the second point. But this second point is intimately connected with human labor. For the transformation of natural and other objects from objects into commodities occurs precisely through human labor. If you think about it, you will find that this transformation of objects into commodities is actually quite equivalent to the expenditure of human labor. The labor begins with what we take from nature. It is always possible to trace it back to the object's character, and if you can trace it back to that, then you cannot speak of any economic character of the object. It only becomes economic when it comes into circulation. Only then does it become something that has significance for the economy as a whole. But this is connected with the overall structure and development of human labor, with the type and time and so on of human labor.

The third thing in the economy is that you know what is needed. Because only by knowing what is needed over a certain territory can you produce in a reasonable way. An item that is produced too much will inevitably become cheap; and an item that is produced too little will inevitably become expensive. The price depends on how many people are involved in the production of an item. That is the fundamental and vital question of economics, that it starts from the satisfaction of needs, and from the free satisfaction of needs. What is at issue here cannot be determined by statistics because it is part of a living process. It can only be determined by people associated with a particular territory simply becoming humanly acquainted with those who have this or that need, know the sum of the needs humanly and can negotiate from a purely human, living point of view, not from a statistical point of view, how many people are needed to produce an item. So that in the life of the association, one has first of all those people who set out to educate themselves about the existing needs in a given area, which of course arises from economic foundations, and develop the will to initiate negotiations about how many people in any economic sector must produce so that the needs can be satisfied. All this must be linked to having a sense of the freedom of needs. In no way should any opinion prevail among those who have the task just described, whether any need is justified or not, but it must be merely a matter of objectively establishing a need.

Combating senseless needs, luxurious, harmful needs, is not the responsibility of the economic life of the association, but only of the influence of the spiritual life. Meaningless and harmful needs must be eliminated by educating people in spiritual life to refine their desires and perceptions. A free spiritual life will certainly be able to do this. To put it bluntly: cinemas must not be banned by the police, but people must be educated in such a way that they do not acquire a taste for them. That is the only healthy way to combat harmful influences in social life. The moment needs as such are assessed by the economy or the state, we no longer have a threefold social order, but a chaotic mixture of spiritual, economic and other interests. The threefold social order must be taken seriously down to its innermost fibers. Spiritual life must be truly placed on its own footing. It is not free when some kind of censorship authority exists, when this or that can be forbidden in the sphere of human needs. No matter how fanatical you are, you can rail against cinemas; that does not affect the free spiritual life. The moment you call for the police, the moment you shout: That should be forbidden, you impair the free spiritual life. This must be remembered, and one must not shrink from a certain radicalism.

So initially, the associations will have to deal with people who inform themselves about the needs within a certain territory and then initiate negotiations, not make laws, about the necessary production.

So you see, you can characterize the matter somewhat differently, then perhaps it will even, I would say, seem somewhat more mundane. But finally, by way of illustration, it can also be said that initially the associations will need objectified agencies and agents who are not only interested in ensuring that the person for whom they work sells as much as possible, but who also ask themselves: What needs are there? – and who are then experts in how to produce in order to satisfy these needs.

Thus we have, I might say, the first link of the associations. The second link is taken from the series of those who have to supply the market, who, therefore, when a product is manufactured somewhere, have to arrange for its transportation, or initiate negotiations for it to be transported to the place where it is needed. So we find, so to speak, experts in consumption, experts in trade and, thirdly, experts in production. However, these are taken from the free spiritual life, because this includes everything that flows from the spiritual into productive life through abilities.

You see, representatives of all three limbs of the social organism will be present in the economic associations; only the associations themselves will belong only to the economic link and will only deal with economic matters: with the consumption, circulation and production of goods and the pricing that results from this. Therefore, in the threefold social organism, there are corporations that have sole competence within the respective link. In the economic associations, nothing but economic issues are discussed; but in the associations, of course, the people who have their abilities and competencies for the negotiations come from the free spiritual life and the legal-state. It is therefore not a matter of placing the three elements of the social organism schematically next to each other, but of having administrations and corporations with expertise in the individual matters. That is what it is about.

The details will be clear to you from the “key points”. First of all, it is a matter of always appealing to the intellectual life with regard to capital, by saying: the person who has brought together the means of production through his abilities remains in the business as long as these abilities are present. Determining this is a matter for the intellectual life. Then it still attributes so much judgment to him that he can determine his successor. That also belongs to the free spiritual life. And if he cannot or will not do it himself, the free corporation of the free spiritual life decides. You see, everything that is a function of abstract capitalism passes over into the work of the free spiritual life within economic life. It is exactly the same as in the human organism. The blood is connected with the circulatory system, but it passes into the head and pulses through it. It is exactly the same with the real social organism. Therefore it is, in a sense, fatal that, especially abroad, particularly in Nordic countries, there has been such a strong tendency to speak of a “tripartite division” of the social organism instead of “tripartition”. This “tripartite” social organism naturally gives rise to terrible misunderstandings. It is a division that is not a division. The individual members must interact with each other. We must create a clear understanding of this.

And we can hope that the reasonable bourgeois, like the proletarians, will gradually come to understand the matter. We already had the beginnings of this in Stuttgart in 1919; elsewhere, a start may have been made here or there. But the opposition from all sides has become so active that we, with our few people, have not been able to hold out for the time being. Therefore, we have now called upon your strong forces so that a kind of strengthening of our advocacy for the threefold social organism can occur. It is now absolutely necessary, I would even say urgent, that a strong push be made for everything that emerges from anthroposophical spiritual science and what threefolding of the social organism is. Because in a certain respect, it is still a matter of our temporary existence or non-existence. We should not deceive ourselves about this.

But we must work towards great clarity in everything. That is why I have tried again to give as clear an idea as possible of associative life. If anyone wants to know more about associations, we can do that this evening by answering all kinds of questions. It must be a constant feature of our lectures that we strive for clarity and that we try to evoke an understanding of how lack of clarity in our public and social affairs has brought about our present situation. I will give you an example of this.

When you are asked about this or that today, people come to you with schematic questions. They ask you: what about capital, what about small businesses, what about land and so on? Well, with regard to healthy social conditions, the land question is settled in my “Key Points”, although it seems to have only been touched on in a subordinate clause. But everything that is otherwise discussed today stems from the fact that land is involved in our social life in an incredibly convoluted way.

When the newer economic life arose and imposed the character of a commodity on everything, for example, labor, so that everything can be bought, then land also became a commodity. You could buy and sell it. But what is actually involved in this buying and selling of land? If we want to understand this, we have to go back to very primitive conditions, in which the feudal lord had acquired a certain piece of land either by conquest or in some other way, and gave it to those who were to work it, who then, in kind or in other forms of payment, gave him a certain quota in return, which initially meant the origin of land rent. But why did the people give this rent to him, to the feudal lord or to the church, to the monastery? Why did they give it to him? What made it plausible for them to make such payments? Nothing else made it more plausible for them than if they, as small owners, worked on their land and soil to till and harvest it, since anyone could come along and chase them away. Being able to work the land requires protection of the land and soil. Now, in most cases, the feudal lords themselves had an army, which they maintained from the tributes, and that was for the protection of the land. And the land rent was paid not for the right to work the land, but for the protection of the land. The right to work the land had arisen entirely out of necessity, since the landowner himself could not work all the land. This had nothing to do with any other circumstances. But the land had to be protected. And that is what the dues were paid for. In the same way, the dues were paid to the monasteries. The monasteries themselves maintained armies with which they protected the land, or they were bound by some kind of treaty here or there in such a way that the land was secured by some other power relationship. If you trace the origin of the land rent, you have to see it as a tax for the protection of the land and soil. If we consider this original meaning of the land rent, we see that it refers to times when very primitive conditions prevailed, when, in economic terms, sovereign feudal lords or monasteries ruled who obeyed no one.

These conditions ceased, first in the West and only later in Central Europe, in that certain rights that the individual had - in certain areas of Germany they ceased to be individual rights at the very latest - were gradually transferred to individual princes, which was by no means an economic but a political process. The rights were transferred. With the transfer of the rights, the protection of the land was also transferred. It then became necessary for the prince to maintain the armies. For this he naturally had to demand a levy. Gradually, the systematization of the tax system came about, which weighs so heavily on us today. This was added to the other, but curiously the other remained! It lost its meaning, because the one who was now the landowner no longer needed to spend anything on the protection of land and property; the territorial prince or the state was now there for that. But the land rent remained. And with the new economic life, it gradually passed into the ordinary circulation of goods. The fact that the connection between land rent and land lost its meaning meant that land rent could be turned into a profit-making object. It is pure nonsense that has become reality. There is something in the process of circulation of values that has basically completely lost its meaning, but which is still treated today as a commodity.

Such things can be found everywhere in our economic life. They have arisen from some justified things. Something else has taken the place of these justified things. But the old has remained. And some new process has taken it up and introduced the senseless into social life.

If you now simply take economic life as it is – if you are a professor of economics and thus have the task of thinking as little as possible in the sense I have characterized it before – then you define the land rent as it is written in the books today. And as something so senseless, it also figures in life today. So you can see how much work there is to be done to make people understand that we not only have nonsense in our system of thought, but also everywhere in economic life. And when the individual sighs under economic life, it is actually from such undergrounds. What is needed today is to arrive at a more thorough, unprejudiced, comprehensive thinking than that which can be developed by sitting in today's educational institutions.

For ultimately, what kind of thinking is being developed there today? The thinking that is perhaps characterized by mathematics is being developed. But it is being developed in such a way that it stands apart from all reality. Then they develop the kind of thinking that can be learned through experimentation, that can be learned through systematics. They develop the kind of thinking that has finally become a mere formality in the hands of people like Poincare, Mach and so on, something that they merely call “summarizing external reality.” In short, they do not develop any kind of thinking at all! And because they do not develop any thinking, they cannot do anything in economics at all.

Indeed, a method of economics has gradually emerged – Lujo Brentano handled it particularly cleverly – that develops out of understandable needs the theory that one should not think at all about what economic life should be, but only observe it correctly. Well, one should imagine how one is somehow to arrive at a science of economic life by mere observation! It would be like advising the pedagogue to just observe the children. It would never be possible to develop an activity from it. That is why our economic theorists are so terribly sterile, because they have the method of passively confronting external reality.

And the other side of the coin becomes apparent when people really do start to intervene in economic life. On the one hand, they developed a science that only observes. But when war came to Central Europe, they were suddenly supposed to intervene in economic life, even to the point of influencing price formation. What was the result? The economist Terhalle summarized the results: First, he said, and he cites countless scientific proofs in his book on “Free or Fixed Pricing?” First: things have been done in such a way that you can see that the people who did it didn't know what was important at all. Secondly, they are based on theoretical schematisms that have so little to do with reality that, by applying them, they ruin reality. Thirdly, in influencing the formation of prices, it has come about that individual trades have not been helped but harmed; and fourthly, honest craftsmanship and trade have been harmed in favor of profiteering! Just imagine what it means for an official economist to have to judge the political and governmental economic activity of recent years on the basis of economic research: that it has favored profiteering at the expense of honest trade and craftsmanship! One has only to sense what this actually means. These things must be said to people, as clearly as possible, so that one can see how powerless our civilization has become in the face of reality.

If we do not clarify such things as I have just told you with regard to land rent, we will not be able to show people the necessity of the associations; because just imagine the associations installed in the most makeshift way: immediately, experience reveals how damagingly all the unnatural things in economic life affect the formation of prices. This cannot come to light, of course, if economic life is organized in such a way that the agents go out into the countryside and do business for the individual enterprises. There they cannot be confronted with the connection between production and consumption. They do not have the interest to focus on how much should be produced. For them, only the one self-evident “truth” applies, that their master can produce as much as possible. This interest in the master's production being as strong as possible must be replaced by the positive knowledge: how many producers must there be, because we have seen that there is such and such a demand for an article, so that it must be ensured that not too many and not too few work on the territory in question for this purpose? The objective interest must take the place of the interest in the individual entrepreneur. That is what matters in the association.

Now we have to show people how economic life, because it has so many absurd elements in it – because in addition to the land rent, there are many others – is already pushing for integration. The cartel system, with the quota allocation of profit, demand, sales and so on, the merging, the amalgamation – what does it arise from? In Europe it takes more the form of a cartel, in America more that of a trust. It arises from the fact that the individual can no longer produce due to the many absurd elements that are in economic life. Just think how different it is today, when everything is pushing towards large-scale enterprise, than it was when the sole trader or small business owner was part of economic life. What can a person ask today if they want to start their own business? They can only ask how the market for a particular product is doing, whether there is demand for a particular product. A product that is in demand seems promising, a product that is not in demand does not seem promising.

In the past, when the number of entrepreneurs was small, it did not matter much; only when there were too many did the individual ones perish. But suppose that everything tends towards large-scale enterprise, when it is noticed that a particular article is needed and that something can be earned from it. By setting up the large-scale enterprise, you abolish the very thing from which you concluded that it was necessary to set up the large-scale enterprise! Because everything tends towards large-scale enterprise, what used to be decisive for the individual small entrepreneur is no longer decisive. This is why the necessity for mergers arises. And so we have cartels, trusts and so on, because the leading circles were quite careless with regard to consumption. Because they did not care about it, these mergers arise only out of the interests of the producers. Consumption is not taken into account.

The essential thing is that it is shown: You can no longer get by in economic life without association. Therefore, the one-sided associations of cartels and trusts, which, however, arise from mere production interests, must be supplemented by being based on an understanding of consumption, on an insight into the needs of a particular territory. Thus the trusts and cartels, by being caricatures of what should arise, show how necessary it is to move in a certain direction, in the direction of association. One has only to look at what kind of associations should now be created.

Characterization must be based on real life in all cases. Then perhaps we shall be able to make people understand how necessary associations are for economic life. And so it will actually be a matter of giving the lectures you now want to give in terms that are as clear as possible. The prerequisite must be that what is given in the “key points” is basically a kind of axiom of modern social life. It is never necessary to prove the Pythagorean theorem in all its individual objects. But it must prove itself in all its individual objects. Just as little is it necessary to prove the insight into social conditions, as it is gained, in detail; it is proved as such by its content, like the Pythagorean theorem. And one has only to show how things must be integrated into life. This must be taken into account.

And I would like to say this: Let us really consider our activity in such a way that it connects with what has already been done. That is why I said yesterday: It is necessary to look at our movement as a whole and not to be embarrassed to present what has been done to the people and to tell them that it is there. We have an experience again and again, in fact in a truly alarming way: When I go somewhere to give a lecture, there is a table of books at the entrance of the hall. It is only looked at if I do not mention any of the books. If I do mention one, it is bought. Usually there are not enough of them available. The others are passed over. Well, I always regret that there are so many books. You can't mention them all in a single lecture. Therefore, we must also face the present with a sense of reality. I recommend that you do not disdain any opportunity to recommend the Dreigliederungszeitung where you can, because we must reach the stage where the Dreigliederungszeitung becomes a daily newspaper. But we will not reach that stage unless we make it more popular than it is. So, we must face reality to that extent. But don't forget to recommend something else as well! Otherwise the other things will be returned unpurchased in huge numbers. It may look strange to say such things in serious lectures, but if we don't say them, they are very often not done either. And we have come together to agree on the things that should be done. Because we want to do something in the near future.

If you look around in the somewhat more experienced economic literature, you will at least notice in many cases that a certain remark can be found somewhere among the authors, which goes something like this: the economist should not concern himself with how the people are educated or what is good for the people with regard to their needs. From another point of view, I have already pointed this out, he should leave that to the ethicist, the hygienist and so on.

If you take such a remark seriously, then it actually means nothing less than proof of the necessity for the threefold social organism. For what is being said? It is being said: If you think in terms of economics, nothing comes of it that could somehow aim at ethics, at hygiene, but what should aim at ethics, at hygiene, must come from another side.

If we now think of such a remark, which until today was actually only meant theoretically, exploited practically, it is said that it is necessary that economically real judged, that is, that the economy be designed so that only only those things that are purely economic, that disregard all ethics, all hygiene and so on, and that, alongside them, there are real administrations that are there for the ethical permeation, for the hygienic development of social life. These will lie in the free spiritual life.

And for you it will be an important pedagogical-didactic point of view to show that the foundations for this are present everywhere and that, if used in the right way, they lead to conclusions regarding the threefold social order. One can say that economists, if they really think economically, cannot think differently from the way it should be thought in the associative member of the social organism. But the things that are thought in this way do not remain in books; there are instances that also transfer them cleanly into reality.

I mention this today, when I want to point out more methodological things, precisely in a methodological way, to make you aware that wherever the threefold order is mentioned, one can start from things that people have already thought of somehow. Only today no one has the courage to draw the consequences from them. The essential thing for us is to draw the necessary consequences for social life.

Likewise, you will have to deal with other questions if you want to focus on social issues. If you familiarize yourself with the development of economic thought, you will find that a whole series of utopian ideas have emerged in recent times. We need only go back to the eighteenth century to find such utopian ideas, perhaps because the older ones are less relevant to the present day. But since the eighteenth century a whole series of social utopias have been conceived. Why did such utopias arise? This is important for you to know so that you can incorporate it into the overall attitude of your lectures.

You see, the following is available for intellectual life. Basically, it leads back to ancient wisdom and the customs associated with it. Take, for example, what we have in Europe today as a completely decadent intellectual life: on the one hand, Catholicism and, on the other, the highly filtered modern educational life, which is also still fed by ancient religious ideas; they are everywhere. You can follow them right into the materialistic parts of medicine; and they are in philology, these offshoots of theocratic or theological thinking. So if you consider how all modern thinking is thoroughly impregnated with this element that leads back to ancient wisdom, you will understand that in the whole way in which intellectual life, I should now say, administers itself - for it has already has become anarchic in that it has not been drawn into the tight fetters of state life, you will notice that the threads can also be seen in the administrations, which were in the constitution of the territories where ancient wisdom held sway. In the church you see it in the structure of the hierarchies. This leads back to the views of ancient wisdom. In jurisprudence, you may only see it in the struggle that is the struggle of materialism against spiritualism in the external life, in the struggle waged by lawyers and judges against the wearing of robes in court proceedings. In the robes you have the remnants of the old way of thinking; in the fight against the robes you have the modern materialistic way of thinking. And that has a much greater significance than one might think. And if you consider all the formal aspects of the doctoral degrees at some of our universities, you will easily be able to trace the threads back to the old theocratic element. In this respect we have something in it all that people have lost sight of, but which points back to the past, to the fact that people once knew how to manage spiritual life. Even if we no longer have this spiritual life in our present time, we have the forms in it; and I might add, we are even still stuck in them like discarded clothes. We need new forms everywhere. These will be found in the free spiritual life.

The other point is this. In England, for example, the political-democratic element developed out of the church-democratic element. This came about simply because the ecclesiastical background was stripped away and the democratic form of thinking was revealed. But in fact the political-legal element has gradually emerged everywhere from the theocratic-ecclesiastical element. It is just that it is no longer noticed so clearly in other places. For example, there is a secret connection between the entire system of civil servants, at the top of which one can imagine the absolute ruler “by the grace of God”, which latter reveals the origin from the theocratic-ecclesiastical element, because only the one who was appointed by spiritual authorities was “by the grace of God”. The entire body of civil servants is simply the ecclesiastical hierarchy that has become secularized. But the other side, which basically also developed out of the theocratic-ecclesiastical element, is the military. This is perceived as paradoxical by people today. But the military is only that which, like the shadow of an illuminated object, follows the whole organization of the state. And so, I might say, a certain way of handling the state has gradually emerged during the separation of the secular element from the theocratic-ecclesiastical element. This can be seen in all its details when we consider the transition of the forms of administration, as they were still clearly manifested in their theocratic-hierarchical form in those times when Charlemagne attached importance to being crowned by the Pope in Rome, how ecclesiastical life then passed over into the profane, how, as a latecomer to this transition, for example, the first state posts in France were filled by cardinals. If you consider this, you will be able to grasp everywhere the emergence of this modern political-legal element in the handling of the theocratic-ecclesiastical element and the independence of its administration. One could handle these things independently.

Now modern economic life is pushing its way into this, which has indeed produced instinctive practices, but so far not something that has been as internally permeated as the old hierarchical-ecclesiastical and state-militaristic elements. These two elements have brought the world to a tight uniform. By contrast, it was only in recent times that the urge arose to consciously penetrate what has become the predominant feature of modern life, namely the complex economic life, which in older times did not need to be thought about because it was drawn from inexhaustible sources. It is true that the necessity has arisen to find a certain way of handling economic life. But this way of handling has not yet been found.

And basically, the first attempt to bring something into economic life that can be paralleled to the state and the church element, is the associative principle. It is the first attempt to really found something organically in economic life. Because that has not happened before. And the most diverse theoretical attempts to develop a way of thinking, to organize economic life as such, these are the utopian theories, which were always infected by what had been inherited from the past. People still thought: If you organize, you have to organize in the same way as it is in the ecclesiastical-hierarchical or state element - after all, people were not aware of this.

And the practical expression of this in the outer world is the appearance of economic liberalism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Why did this economic liberalism appear? What is it? It is an appeal to the efficiency of individual economic personalities. It was the same in the theocratic-hierarchical element. Before an organization could be found, it was necessary to appeal to the leading individuals. The same applied to the state element. Before passing over to a parliamentary system, it was necessary to appeal to those who had the ability to administer the affairs of the state. Economic liberalism is nothing more than this appeal to the individual efficiency of the personality in the economic field. It is only because things in the world have developed more rapidly that it has become necessary to find something that really paralyzes the harmful effects of the absolutist individual.

Surely you only need to study the constitution of the Catholic Church to see that in this Catholic Church, which simply preserves an ancient administration of spiritual life, you will find everywhere that the institutions and organizations are aimed at banishing the harmfulness of individuality. It is precisely through this that individuality can come into its own in a certain way.

I once attended a conversation in Vienna in which a professor at the Viennese theological faculty, who had somewhat liberal tendencies, but only indulged them in the most cautious way, complained that Rome was choking him completely and not allowing him to express anything from the lectern. It was discussed at length why, for example, in Innsbruck, where the same subject was taught by a Jesuit, he was allowed to express himself on the same topics in the freest manner. And those who were experienced in such matters said to themselves: Yes, it does not matter to the Catholic Church, for example, that exegesis is not also freely taught at the university, but rather that the individuals within it give an absolute assurance that, despite their liberal views, they are firmly within the organization, and of course the Jesuit is particularly good at achieving this, firmly within the organization. Then he is also allowed to take his special liberties. For the organization does not destroy individuality. It is not destroyed at all. The individual personality is free to a high degree in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Catholicism. But those who take things similar to Protestantism are choked, who take things so that they take dogmatics seriously; the Catholic only takes symbolism seriously. For them, there is always the danger of throwing off the robe. But that must not be. Within the church, anything can happen; outside the church, no one may place himself.

Of course, something like this cannot be imitated. But it can be cited as a characteristic example of what has been found on the other side: older times appeal to individuality, but have such an organization that individuality cannot be harmful. In the life of the state, the time has also passed when it was realized that these two sides must be present.

In economic life, it is a matter of finding the transition from economic liberalism to the principle of association. We are only in the middle of what needs to be done. This is what the world-historical moment actually reveals to us in this respect: the principle of association in economic life means nothing other than what must necessarily come about in the face of the degenerations of economic liberalism. And in modern times, precisely because thinking is inactive in a certain sense, people have not yet found the courage to move on to action, to move from liberalist thinking to active thinking. But the attempt has been made everywhere. If you pay attention, you can see some interesting experiences.

Recently I picked up the little economics book from the Göschenschen collection. It talks about economic liberalism and says: “It became necessary to move from an individualistic economic system to a kind of social economic system.” And so it was necessary to transfer more and more of the individualistically established to the state administrations: state socialism! So no trace of an understanding of the necessity of the association principle, but: state socialism! And in another part of this little book by Göschenen, which was also written by a fox, but not such a bad one, I found the following sentence: And the World War has shown us how right this way of thinking was; he means: to gradually transfer what individuals have achieved to the state. I said to myself: Now I have to turn to the title page. In which year is it still possible for a person to write that? I found: 1918! It was the last date when one could write this without being called a fool. [Interjection: Excuse me, Doctor: 1920! - Mr. Blume shows the latest edition]. It is questionable whether it is still in the latest edition. This is marked “reprint.” If it is still in there, it is because things would have remained in their folly even in 1920. Indeed! He did not feel the need to correct the matter after two years! They are not clever, these foxes. I opened to the title page, “1918,” and said: Could conditions still be such that one could believe that the transfer of what emerged from the old system as a world economy into a state economy or even into a city economy - I would like to remind you that the municipalities in particular are on the verge of ruin and will all collapse soon - was absolutely right?

What I am trying to suggest is that modern thinking has not yet found the real, correct transition from liberalist economics to associative economics.

Perhaps it will not be possible at all for anyone to grasp the associative principle correctly if they do not at the same time fully embrace the threefold social order. For in the unified state, what works properly in the threefold social organism will actually have a harmful effect. And this must be emphasized, at least in the nuance that you give to your lectures, that, for example, anyone who comes and says, “Yes, we want to leave spiritual life to the state. We don't want threefolding.” But twofolding – something similar was even proposed in the Weimar National Assembly – yes, but twofolding! It is possible to separate economic life! But it is not possible for the reason that a separated economic life, organized associatively, would in fact contain within the associations people who are completely dependent on the state and who have not grown out of the free spiritual life, and these people would then influence economic life in the state's interest. Thus the whole of economic life would take on the state mentality.

Likewise, we would never establish truly independent schools like the Waldorf School if we admitted that teachers were taken from state institutions, that the state license of the teachers would have to be taken along with the teachers. If one says that we could establish an independent school but could only achieve it if we found state-approved teachers, then that shows that one does not understand the matter. For that means nothing other than this, that one sticks to the old and just spruces it up in the modern sense, thus throwing dust in people's eyes. And the times are too serious for that. What should be advocated in terms of threefolding is what the real threefolding holds, even at the risk that the practical arrangements cannot be made immediately because of people's resistance. The most important thing today is to get the idea of threefolding into as many minds as possible. This is the quickest way to bring it into practical realization.

And now a few words about the method by which you cannot present the idea of threefolding without taking as a basis, in a tactful and didactically correct way, spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy. This can be clearly seen from the development of thinking in the social life of modern times.

There have been all kinds of utopian ideas, and the system that has become popular in the broadest sense among the proletarian population has developed: the Marxist system. Of course, this Marxist system has taken many forms. Revisionism on the one hand, Leninism on the other. This is a kind of radicalism that says: We know full well that Marxism does not solve the social question, but it works towards the radical destruction of everything that exists, and then another humanity will come along to rebuild it. But the Marxist system is at the root of all this. Karl Marx knew how to find his way into the souls of the modern proletarian world. And that is why it is also possible for the leaders of the proletarian world to influence the proletarian world with Marxist ideas. In a sense, it must even be said that this Marxism – not so much as it lived as a theory with Karl Marx, but rather as it lives in the views of the broadest proletarian masses – is, in terms of its form, the most modern social conception of life in terms of world view. The others, regardless of whether they are advocated by practitioners or university professors, are actually always somewhat backward.

Precisely because Marxism is the most modern form, it must also be sharply envisaged by those who now want something really radical. Today, one cannot simply speak to the masses without having a clear, at least intuitive, understanding of what Marxism means. The essential thing about it is that Marxism is the Weltanschhauung and outlook on life which best corresponds to the whole social situation of the modern proletarian. It is simply adapted to the whole social outlook on life of the modern proletarian. And if you fight Marxism purely theoretically, you are actually doing something that does not correspond to reality. They fight against Marxism without realizing that they have allowed the reality to develop in such a way that the modern proletarian has become what he is. This can be traced back to the carelessness of the rest of the population. But by allowing him to become what he has, he could do nothing but take Marxism as his world view and outlook on life. For this Marxism contains within itself, for the proletariat's conception, the threefold order of human social life. By becoming a Marxist, the worker has, from Marxism, his view of the threefold order of social life, which is appropriate for his class. That's what he has in there.

For you see, in modern times it has become more and more the custom to distract from consumption and its understanding and to look at mere acquisition. In doing so, one only had to let enough of this acquisition go so that the social organism could still be administered. One was only interested, whether aristocrat or bourgeois, in as much of the proceeds of the acquisition as one got and had to give up so that the whole thing could be held together at all. How did this work out for people who, through old privileges or other circumstances, were inside the real social organism? They tried to get as much as possible out of their earnings. They did not care about consumption and only grudgingly paid the taxes necessary for the cohesion of the whole. What did the modern proletarian do? He just stood at the machine and was outside of capitalism. He categorically refused to pay certain taxes if they were not knocked down. For he had no interest in the reality of the old social organism; he was only interested in what remained from the acquisition. Since he was not involved in the administration of capital, this only became the subject of a critique of what he calls surplus value. The proletarian's relationship to surplus value, criticizing it, is the same as the bourgeois's, when he grudgingly approves the taxes. By approving the tax, the bourgeois has not progressed to what lies behind it. The proletarian has not progressed either. But he has practiced critique. He has looked the surplus value in the eye and practiced critique. This shows, then, that the point is to add the positive to critique. That would, of course, be the associative principle. But it is in the theory of surplus value that which, within a worldview and conception of life, embodies the economic element for the proletarian.

The second thing that lives in Marxist theory, insofar as it is the proletarian's conception of life and worldview, is the class struggle, which, in his view, must be. That is the political and legal element. Through the class struggle, he wants to fight for his rights, he wants to organize labor, and so on. So the second area of social life is included. It is only the flip side of what it is like for the bourgeois and the aristocrats. They cannot get out of their class. They do not have the talent to go from the class-based to the general human. The worker does this consciously, but of course he takes his class with him. So in Marxism we also have what has developed in modern life as the political and legal element, which has not yet found the transition to the truly democratic element, which has not been carried out anywhere, but to which we must come, where, on the basis of the state-legal sphere of the social organism, all people who have come of age are equal before the law. That is more or less what the classes concerned have always meant until now. When, say, before the French Revolution, there was essentially an aristocratic element, this was quite democratic among itself, but below its class, the human being simply ceased to exist, he was no longer a human being in the fullest sense of the word. Then the bourgeoisie came along. That, too, was quite democratic among itself. But below that, the human being ceased to exist. What everything tends towards in modern times is general democracy. The one who stood outside the social organism, like the proletarian, constituted his own class against the others in the place of the general human, which can be defined in such a way that in all that is to be democratically parliamentarized, all people, whatever they may represent, all people who have come of age, face each other as equals. Thus, I would say, we also have in the class struggle that which we must characterize something like this: the proletarian knows that something completely different must come, he is modern in this respect, something must come that is quite different from what has existed so far. But he has not learned the general human. Therefore, he starts from his class instead of from the general human.

And within the Marxist philosophy and outlook on life, the proletarian also has a place for the spiritual. This is the materialistic view of history. In the materialistic age and in the whole education of the modern proletarian, who only comes into contact with the mechanism of life and not with the psyche and the spirit, this spiritual life quite naturally became the materialistic conception of history in the proletarian's view. But this represents the spiritual element in the world and in life.

So, in proletarian Marxism, you have the ultimate radical expression of what modern humanity actually wants and in which it does not know how to help itself. And you have to counter this with something that is just as well-founded as proletarian Marxism is for the proletariat. What is the essence of this proletarian Marxism as a worldview? The essence of proletarian Marxism as a worldview is disbelief in man.

This disbelief in man was justified in the times of the original wisdom of mankind, for then it was divine powers that sat within the human being and guided him. People knew they were dependent on what they unconsciously recognized from the depths of their souls as the revelations of the gods as guiding forces for life. Then there was disbelief in man and faith in the gods. When the state-administrative and the official-military elements had been separated out from the old theocratic-ecclesiastical element, this unbelief in man still existed. For then arose the belief that man as such cannot direct the destinies after all, the state must do that. The state became an idol, a fetish. And this led man, who was now harnessed into the state system, to disbelief in man, to belief in the external fetish. Of course, as soon as God comes down, he becomes more and more of a fetish. Proletarian Marxism is the third and final stage of disbelief in man. For the proletarian says to himself in his materialistic philosophy of history: it is not man who directs fate, but “the forces of production” that direct him. We stand there powerless as human beings with our ideology. The course of history is determined by the course of the production processes. And what human beings are within these forces of production is only the result of the forces of production themselves. Disbelief in man and real belief in the tangible fetish! There is no fundamental difference between the African savage, who has reached decadence in a different way, worshipping an external block of wood, making it into a fetish, or the European proletarian, who regards the means and processes of production as directing history. In principle, there is no difference in logic; it is our magic superstition! And we must look at this sufficiently. In various ways, people have come into decadence. In Africa, there was also an original wisdom. Then it deteriorated in administration; we see this in Egypt. Then it decays. Fetishism is not what stands at the starting point, but what occurs in decadence. At the starting point, pure belief in the gods is everywhere, and only in the decline does fetishism arise. Within the civilized areas, instead of worshipping external wooden blocks, the “forces of production” were worshipped. The prayers were, of course, also arranged differently. But “the forces of production” and “production processes” were made into idols. It is the last phase of unbelief in man, the phase of economically superstitious thinking. There is no difference in principle between an African savage who goes to his idol with a magic spell and a modern proletarian gathering to thrash out Marxist phrases. The prayer sounds different, but one must be clear about what the inner essence of the matter is.

This must be contrasted with what is now not unbelief in man, but faith in man. And ultimately it is essential that faith in man be found, the faith that the directing forces for life reveal themselves within man. Man must come to himself, to full self-awareness. He must find the possibility to say to himself: All externals are superstition. Only the directing forces within oneself are to intervene in life!

But for this, courage is needed to go beyond mere passive prayer and to have an active prayer in the grasp of the divine in the will. This transition to active prayer, to inner activity in general, this transition from disbelief in humanity to faith in humanity, is what must be present in your hearts and souls as enthusiasm. You must feel that you are at the turning point in history, where people must be led from disbelief in humanity to faith in humanity.

You don't need to tell people, but you must go on the podiums with this awareness, with the awareness that you have to teach humanity that the guiding forces of life must be actively grasped within, that life in the future must be organized in such a way that people say to themselves: I must be the one to do things.

It was the last superstition of civilization that people did not have faith in themselves, but that they had faith in “the forces of production” arranging life. And from this superstition arose the terrible worship of the rear in the East, where an attempt was made to imbue with willpower that which is not determined by willpower. The personality that ideally unites two unrelated things, inner passivity in conviction and activity in action, whereby one destroys the other, is Lenin. Lenin is the personality that most purely crystallizes in new times that which comes from ancient times. He most purely crystallizes what the real impossibility, the real destructive urge, the real ruinous urge has become.

What leads to construction, what leads to the re-imbibition of real life forces into social life, is, if we can find the possibility, to create in man out of disbelief in man, belief in man, a belief that ultimately expresses itself as follows: Whatever I experience as luck or misfortune, or as social institution, or as something in the outer life, I myself will make!

You cannot instill this in people without at the same time steeling them with your words. You have to bring people to have confidence, to have faith in their own being. And that is what you must strive for, at least in your heart. How you do it may depend on your abilities today. But if you devote yourself to the matter with good will, it will soon no longer depend on these abilities, but the necessity of the time will take hold of your abilities. And you will rise above yourself precisely in bringing this belief to people, so that in the place of unbelief in people, faith in people must come.

That is what I wanted to say to you before you go out to give your lectures. Feel the strength that can lie in saying to yourself: I have to bring about the conviction that the last doubt and disbelief in man in relation to man will be transformed into faith in man, into the inner activity of the human being! Because this is what matters when striving for real progress. Everything else will only lead to the propagation of that which is decadent. Do not uphold what is destructive, but rather apply Nietzsche's words to me: Let it still be pushed so that it perishes more quickly! But love what is not of yesterday and today, but what is of tomorrow!

I want you, my dear friends, to go out as people of tomorrow and to shape your words in the coming weeks from the consciousness of the people of tomorrow.