The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I do not want to give a program for solving the social question, but rather speak about observations of life.

It is said that never in the history of mankind have people experienced such terrible things as in this war: but then, to be consistent, one would also have to add: it takes a very special idea to find a solution to today's task. What is given, what people have to absorb, must be completely different now than it has been so far. The Communist Manifesto is not just a theoretical question, but a question of world history, one must understand that. What is called the social question lies deep, deep down in the development of humanity, only one must grasp it.

Thermometer – an indicator of the temperature of a room.

What consciously comes to the surface, the demands, are not the real thing at all. Everything that flares up in the Communist Manifesto of all countries is a historically necessary thing: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” It is not an idea that is being appealed to, but the impulses that arise from a certain life situation, precisely because one is a proletarian, the vague demands that arise from proletarian life, something un-ideological, a force arises. The proletarians do not want ideology, they do not want any ideas. But what comes from the bourgeoisie is and will be built upon. One speaks as if the proletarian programs were something new, but that is not the case. They have been adopted from the bourgeoisie. This will only be recognized later. A gap has opened up between the leading forces and the proletariat. But this is not the case; only the class differences are there; the proletarian world has learned a great deal from the leading circles. But when it saw that their science could not bring it salvation, it lost faith in that science and in those circles. The proletariat recognized the ideology of the intellectual life.

The earlier worldview still had a very different impact; it was still connected to the spiritual world. Today's worldview has no impact; the working of spiritual power is absent. This worldview does not fill people. It is a matter of the head, while the other is a matter of the heart. This difference is expressed in the Protestant confession: understanding everything that the world around us offers with the mind; for the other, faith must suffice. In the bourgeoisie there is still a remnant of the earlier worldview, a kind of connection with the spiritual world. The proletarian is placed in the factory, at the machine. Nothing passes into him, as it did, for example, in the old crafts, when the soul spoke out of the old door handles, for example, and so on. Cut off from any connection that the old craft still had, what spoke out of things and events.

“What am I in the world?” - “I am a highly developed animal organism.” This is the proletariat's perception of what he [the proletarian] has adopted from science. You can be inspired by such ideas, but you can't live with them in the long run. The intellect is convinced that this does not come from the spiritual, but the soul revolts against it. And this is what underlies all social questions. That is the real face. It is thought that everything that lives as art, as science, as custom, law and so on, is ideology, smoke. With such a view, one can think - one cannot live with it.

It is also connected with the fact that economic life has been absorbed by the state in recent centuries.

The municipal administrations have been absorbed and united with the interests of the princes. Intellectual life flows into this state structure. It was bound to happen that the school was wrested from the church and handed over to the state. The state has absorbed the church's “trailing resentment” with regard to schools. The demand for socialism and democracy must lead to the call for the liberation of intellectual life from the state.

Should the dependence of schools and education on the state be further increased? Intellectual life is now being crushed in Russia.

Every person who has come of age should be free to decide on the organization of everything that a person who has come of age has to decide on. In the spiritual life, only those who are knowledgeable and competent in this spiritual life should have a say. Only those who are active in the spiritual life, from the lowest teacher to the highest teacher at the university, should have a say. He must have sufficient time to be able to share in the administration of this life alongside his work in education. Not as it is today, when people who are not practically involved in the profession determine what has to happen.

Then we will have true democracy in the legal life and knowledgeable, efficient leadership in spiritual life.

But the decisions that are made in economic life can only come from knowledgeable and competent and capable individuals or groups of people. It is difficult to form appropriate judgments. The current economic structure of the state is a product of historical development. That is very true. Marx's friend, Engels, explained this very well in his book.

Where expert and professional judgment is needed, the majority cannot decide. One-sided economic thinking cannot lead to a solution of the social question.

In order to properly initiate the transformation of the credit system, it is also necessary that knowledgeable and competent personalities are active. Confidence in persons or groups of persons is creditworthiness.

Not three parliaments, but only one for political life. In the intellectual and economic fields, not the majority, but knowledgeable and competent personalities who lead and guide.

Centralized administration is nothing but the product of politically mature thinking. Economic life will not be depoliticized if it is merely separated from the political parliament and centrally administered alongside it with politically mature thinking. Rather, this administration must be carried out quite differently, as envisaged in the threefold order.

Production should not be for profit, but rather for consumption. The motive for production should not be the entrepreneur's profit, but rather what the people need.

Is there anything underlying this essentially correct demand that can lead us to a proper solution of the social question?

The abolition of the prevailing wage system and the right to vote for all those with equal rights – these are in fact demands that had been raised up to the Eisenach Program. Then came the Erfurt Program: nothing more of these two demands, but something quite different: the abolition of all private property and the transfer of all property, of all means of production, into state administration. The old social order had its good support in throne and altar. But now it no longer has that. Instead, it has the office and the factory, and we no longer have that “good support” from them. Overall accounting instead of church administration, nationalization and so on. This is already being done in the East, and what is being done and what is going on there is terrible. This is the grave of the entire modern civilization. One does not notice this immediately, because there are still spiritual and political forces from the past in the circumstances.

Hypnosis of the spirited Lenin.

Spiritualism of [blank in transcript] Trotsky.

Capital: sum of the means of production and land.

The developmental leap of all humanity in the fifteenth century, as in the individual human life in the sixth [to] seventh and thirteenth [to] fourteenth years. And this developmental leap boils down to the fact that man wants to be seen as a personality - each individual.

And this now leaps out in the social question. In the past, the patriarchal relationship, now industry. What about the means of production now? In the past, land was in the hands of a few people, and others worked on this land, which created a special relationship. Today, the means of production have to be procured with large sums of money and are managed by these owners. But these managers have failed to change the relationship with the workers. If there is damage somewhere, statistics are kept. But ideas for change are not found. People were without ideas. The time must come when ideas may again guide the facts. Today, people who have such ideas are branded as utopians, idealists, impractical people.

Talking about abolishing private property is nothing more than childish. Individual initiative is not anti-social, but social. Capital should be centralized by those who have the ability to do so in the right way through their own initiative. In the intellectual field, ownership passes to those who can best manage it for the general public thirty years after the owner's death. People still look perplexed today when this principle is applied to the economy.

In the Platonic teaching, defense and nurturing classes, we have the exact opposite of what must now be striven for with the threefold social order. A wall is erected in that order, between the classes. In the threefold order, it is precisely the class distinction that will be overcome. That which is outside of the human being is threefolded, while everyone can belong to any of these three realms. Do not approach humanity with abstract programs - works councils and so on - but let knowledgeable people speak from reality. That is the essential thing.

If you were to bring together about 800 such works councils, there would only be 25 to 30 who would really achieve something and have something good to show for it. It will be a great piece of work to achieve something out of today's chaos. But if there is not only debate and parliamentarization, but real work, then what these 25 to 30 can say will be understood by the other 700 to 800. The understanding is already there in the masses.

An economic community must have a very specific size. If it is too large, it becomes too inefficient; if it is too small, it cannot achieve the right level of success. The right size is somewhere in between. This must first be understood and recognized. Rathenau, on the one hand, was highly ingenious, but on the other hand, he was bound by the old, outdated ideas and concepts that must first be overcome today.

The economy does not need laws, but contracts. As soon as a product becomes too expensive, too few people work on it – if it becomes too cheap, too many work on it. If an article becomes too expensive, it shows that the particular article is not produced enough; so it must be contractually ensured that more people turn to this article. If an article becomes too cheap, too much of it is produced, then a factory may have to be closed down. Difficult! It is certainly difficult. If someone just wants to say that it is difficult and not intervene, then they do not want to ensure right relationships. Economic life should be regulated through associations, not through the chance of the market. A federal structure, not a centralized administration, must ensure proper production and circulation.

The impulse for threefolding does not claim to be wiser than other ideas, but it does assume that the wise will be called upon. That is what matters. The language of facts must be spoken. Only very deaf ears have been cultivated against the language of facts. Economic life must be fed from the spiritual life. Only from a self-governing spiritual life can the right things flow into life in all areas. A freely administered spiritual life never releases dreamers; you can never be a real philosopher if you can't chop wood when the time comes, that is, be a whole man.

Merging of blood heritage... [gap in transcript] and educational results,... [gap in transcript] and yet spiritual unity. This is how it is in a threefold state. The spiritual permeates all life, does not remain outside. It cannot be socialized in the sense of a [planned economy] or the like, but conditions can be created in which people can work socially. That is what matters. People must have the opportunity to be social, education must be such that they become social. Realistic ideas must have taken root in a sufficient number of souls.

That is the “how” of this impulse for the threefold social organism.

Roman Boos: Before Dr. Steiner's lecture on the problems of threefolding, I would just like to make the announcement that there will be an opportunity to ask questions after the lecture. I would kindly ask you to make use of this opportunity and ask any questions that arise in relation to these problems of threefolding.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! It is not out of any personal or social arbitrariness that from this Goetheanum, or rather from the spiritual movement, of which this Goetheanum is to be the representative, a stimulus is also going out in the newer time with regard to the social question of the present and the near future. It is an inner necessity that, out of the seriousness with which the spiritual affairs of humanity are to be treated here, suggestions must also flow about the most important, that is, the social problems of the present and the immediate future of humanity.

Now, the suggestions that come from here have often been misunderstood in the strangest way. And by pointing out some of the principles of the social question that arise from here, I would like to take this opportunity to clear up misunderstandings either immediately in the discussions or afterwards, by linking them to questions.

When we look at the social question today, it is basically a misunderstanding that is actually quite old. The fact is that this social question was not seen in its true form during the period when it first began to arise most vehemently and when it developed most intensively. It only really emerged in its true form after the terrible war catastrophe of recent years, or perhaps during it. Before that, people had basically come to terms with it, talking about the social question from a wide range of party standpoints, or from one or other understanding – but mostly very limited understandings – that had been developed for this question, trying out this or that means of providing information, this or that institution, which were supposed to provide a remedy for one or other of the ills that arose in the course of the social movement. But a real, in-depth understanding of what is actually at stake in what we call the social question has not emerged in recent decades; it has not emerged since the middle of the nineteenth century, when it should have emerged. Today it turns out that this social question cannot be tackled without considering it as a human question, as a question of the life of our entire social existence within European and American civilization. And as long as we do not find a way to understand this [social] question as a human question, we will not arrive at views or institutions that can be of any significant help in finding a solution to this question that is as humane as possible.

There has been a lot of talk about the social question for a long time, and it must be said that at present people do not really have any idea of how this question has been in people's minds in the last decades of the nineteenth century, or how it has affected people's lives. It is the case that today people think relatively briefly, that they only see what is immediately in front of them, and that they are not given the opportunity to see larger connections. One does not, my dear audience, come to an understanding of this social question without seeing the larger context.

Now, the deficiency that is being pointed out here is actually present in all our current education. It is also present in the way in which our current education has taken hold of people from the most diverse social classes through the particular development of the civilized world in the second half of the nineteenth century. Spiritual science, as it is to proceed from this building here in Dornach, is not meant to be merely an uplifting of the human soul to spiritual worlds, nor is it meant to be merely the bringing of knowledge related to the spiritual world. Rather, it is meant to permeate all human activity with the fruits that can be obtained from this spiritual science. And now, in public lectures, I have emphasized for two decades that the most important thing in this spiritual science is not what one absorbs in terms of content – it is important, but it is not the most important thing, it is, so to speak, the precondition, but it is not the thing to stop at. It is not the most important thing to absorb the knowledge that the human being consists of these and those physical and spiritual elements, and that, from a spiritual point of view, human life proceeds in such and such a way. Rather, the most important thing is to progress from this spiritual-scientific foundation of human knowledge to something very much alive. That is how one must think of this progress. If one hears about the insights of spiritual science, if one reads about it – one can already read a lot about this spiritual science in numerous works of an authoritative literature – if one reads and hears about what it presents, one is forced to think quite differently from what one has been accustomed to thinking in the last three to four centuries. Everyone must feel that: If you want to understand what is offered here as spiritual science, you have to acquire different ideas, different concepts, from those that have been common today and for some time. But by acquiring these other thoughts, these other concepts, our thinking first becomes much more agile. Because the immobility of thinking is a hallmark of newer education. Thinking becomes much more agile. In order to even begin to grasp the larger contexts presented by anthroposophy, one must absorb more comprehensive concepts and, above all, concepts that do not get stuck in the details. So, to a certain extent, one first trains one's thinking to take in larger life scales. One also makes one's thinking more agile.

That this is so is actually corroborated by an external circumstance, ladies and gentlemen. You can hear time and again, when public anthroposophical lectures are given and the illustrious gentlemen of journalism deign to write something about them, you can always hear again: “In the hall there was mainly a female audience” — whereby the esteemed ladies present are not always paid compliments with regard to their spiritual and other constitutions. But in a sense it is not always untrue that the audience at such lectures is mainly an “audience of women”. But perhaps there is another side to this than is usually meant when this is raised as an accusation against the spiritual science movement; perhaps one could also say what I have often said in response to this statement, which is meant as an accusation: Yes, why are the men not there? They could come just as easily as the ladies, and perhaps it is not exactly because of the humanities that these men are not there, because after all - as you will admit, you usually cannot talk to those who are not there!

Now there is also an inner reason for this, and here I must ask you to really take what I have to say sine ira and without emotion. I am never pleased that – forgive me – the majority of the audience usually consists of ladies. I would very much like it – the ladies may not see this as any kind of allusion to anything – I would very much like it if, so to speak, every lady could have her gentleman at the lecture. But that is not the case, and it is not just an external reason, but there are deeper reasons.

You see, our entire modern education is basically a male education. How long has it been since women were able to participate in a certain way in what the educational means of modern times have to offer? Our entire civilization is more or less a male civilization. This was something I was confronted with very strongly in all the discussions in which I, for example, had to confront people like Gabriele Reuter with the fact that, yes, the women's movement can basically only have any significant impact on the entire social life of modern times if women do not simply enter into what is, after all, only a male education in our time. What would ultimately be the result if women all put on tails, trousers and top hats? They would just be going along with the men's tastelessness. But basically the same thing has happened in the intellectual sphere! Women have not brought what was in them into modern life, but have conformed, they have donned the intellectual trousers, that is, they have become the same kind of doctors as men have become , they have become lawyers or philologists just as men have become lawyers or philologists, and they are now even striving to become theologians just as men have become theologians – they have simply put on the intellectual trousers. It is the case that one must say: the women's movement will only become something when women contribute their special element – I do not mean the feminine at all now, but the special element – to our intellectual civilization, which comes from the fact that – well, I will express myself drastically, although it not always meant to be so drastic — that their brains are not constricted in Spanish boots, which come from the various faculties of the present day as well; for men's brains have been trained in these Spanish boots for centuries. They have become those thoughts that cannot overlook any great connections, that are above all immobile, rigid, and that can only view something like spiritual science, because it demands longer thoughts, as something fantastic. Thus women, protected by their naivety, come to the anthroposophical lectures through the fact that the false boot element of male education has not yet entered their brains. They come because, if I may express myself figuratively, their brains have remained even softer. It can still absorb more than the male brain. This is also a deeper reason. So I do not want to compliment the ladies that they have the better brain; they just have the one that is less deformed. I do not want to pay the ladies a compliment either, that they understand anthroposophy better because they are ladies, but only that they understand it better because they judge from the heart and have learned less of what one has been accustomed to learning in the last four centuries.

Spiritual science consciously opposes the education of the last four centuries and simply demands more comprehensive thoughts, which initially also make the imagination more agile, but from the imagination they make the whole person more agile. So it can be said that someone who has undergone training in spiritual science will more easily see through a reality, including its economic context, than someone who has only emerged from the education of the last few centuries.

I have already pointed out how little this education of the last few centuries was suited to looking at the essentials of the matter. I have pointed out how, in a certain period of the nineteenth century, the gold standard was introduced in place of the previous bimetallism. Those who advocated the gold standard claimed everywhere – you can read about it in the most diverse parliamentary reports – that free trade would be established through the gold standard. The customs barriers of the various countries would fall. Well, there is no doubt that if these tariff barriers had fallen, we would be in a different position today. But not only have the tariff barriers not fallen, anyone crossing borders today knows that many other barriers have been erected. None of the predictions of learned economists and practitioners of life have come true as a result of the gold standard, of monometallism. None of it has materialized; everywhere the opposite has happened: customs barriers have been erected. That means that the esteemed practitioners in all areas of life have been thoroughly mistaken; they have not foreseen anything of how reality works. What has come to light on a large scale – in business life – has come to light on a small scale everywhere and is still coming to light everywhere. What is meant by an overview of circumstances has not been taught to people. What could be learned in the highest schools did not result in an education of the human soul for an overview of the larger contexts of practical life.

But please do not think that I consider all the practitioners or the learned economists who have stated what I have just indicated to be fools. On the contrary, I find that the people who spoke in the European parliaments and wrote in the European newspapers, especially in the 1960s and 1950s, were very clever people. Very clever people predicted the wrong things, because you couldn't predict anything right under the circumstances that existed. Because, my dear attendees, cleverness doesn't help you if you can't gain life experience through that cleverness. And the conditions as they were in industrialism, in commercialism, they just offered only the possibility to see the next; they did not offer the possibility to also tie the most clever thoughts to that which lives in reality. One had become accustomed to seeing through the microscope in science, to magnifying the smallest, so that one would not have to judge something larger. This has trained people to see the smallest relationships. This is only a comparison, an analogy, but the analogy is valid.

Spiritual science, therefore, does not want to consider as important that which can be learned as content, but it wants to consider as most important the education that a person acquires through the thoughts that he must make if he wants to understand spiritual science. And that is why there is an inner necessity for this spiritual science to be applied today in the practical areas of life, because it aims to develop the kind of education that enables people to look clearly and without illusion at the practical areas of life.

And so we can say: because people were not able to look at the social question from such a broader perspective, they have not really seen it for what it is. Today, after the catastrophe of the war, we can actually see: all the discussions that have been held, all the fine theories that have been put forward, they are actually for nothing, they basically lead nowhere; because it is not at all about the wickedness of institutions; it is not at all about that, not in the big picture, of course it is in the details, but not to the extent that the illusionary theories of socialists and anti-socialists would have us believe. We are not dealing with something remotely similar to the antagonism between capital and labor – on which entire broad theories are built. No, we are dealing with something completely different. We are dealing with the fact that feelings and urges have grown in broad masses of the population of civilized humanity that have been ignored for decades and that should be understood. One should humanly understand what is surging up. One should ask oneself: What are the natures of the people who today demand revolution or something else, who today aspire to political power or the like? How did this come about in these human souls? One should look at what is a social question as a human question, then one could gain ideas about how to deal with what is before us. Again and again, the question was not: What are the souls of the broad masses of the proletariat made of? Rather, the question was: What are the living conditions of the broad masses of the proletariat, since the proletarians themselves, under the influence of bourgeois education, formed only concepts that had actually been trained in the economic science of the bourgeoisie. We do not have anything at all in today's general world education that realistically captures the social situation.

It can be said, ladies and gentlemen: The thing that weighs most heavily on the heart of anyone who is truly concerned about the social question today is that so few want to see clearly and distinctly the guilt that the leading circles have incurred in modern times, a real guilt, truly not so much in the sphere of external economic life as in the sphere of educational life, in the sphere of intellectual life. We have seen a whole new class emerge in the last few centuries. We have had this new class alongside us; we have seen how this new class has a completely new language for soul development that we have not looked at. We have continued to speak the old language of tradition in the educational life of the leading circles. No effort was made to bridge the gap between the leading classes and the classes that emerged in the proletariat. No real interest was paid to what was emerging in humanity as a human question. At most, institutions and facilities were set up to provide for the broad masses in the sense of the old-oriented charity, to provide for stomachs, clothing and housing, and so on. But no thought was given to the fact that it had become necessary to achieve a world view in which all people of the modern age could come together in understanding. Today we have the fruits. You read today in the newspapers of the proletariat, full of omissions about everything that has come from the leading, from the formerly leading classes. They read that actually all the thinking about capitalism in earlier times, you read that all that is useless, that a completely different spirit must come, the spirit of the great masses, the spirit that rises out of the great masses like smoke out of a chimney. The most abominable abstraction has become the idol of the broad masses of the proletariat; an indefinite spirit that is supposed to arise from the totality.

Two questions can be asked; one that must be answered from a deeper understanding of history, which says again and again that the spirit, if it is to work in life, must go through personalities, that a spirit never flies around without working through personalities. But the other question - it can be asked very specifically today. First, a practical realization of what can be meant in social terms has gone out from Dornach and from our friends in Stuttgart.

You know that our friends Molt, Unger, Kühn, Leinhas and others have joined forces in Stuttgart to translate into practical life what can come from Dornach in social terms. We then – I will of course omit the details – we then began to work in about April 1919. Of course, such work – where one is not dealing with wax figures but with the living humanity of the present – can only be done step by step, with exact consideration of the real conditions. And it may be said that, in particular, in the first 14 days of our work at that time, everything actually went quite well. To a certain extent, what had to be achieved was achieved: winning broader sections of the proletariat over to reasonable social ideas. If something else had been achieved at the time, namely to win broader circles of the bourgeoisie, the leading class, for these ideas, namely to win over those who were then leading, then something that could have been fruitful would certainly have happened. But the broader circles of the bourgeoisie basically failed at first because they did not know that they were dealing with a human issue. At the time, I said to many people in Stuttgart who could have been in a position to understand such things: Yes, you see, the fact that you and I are talking about social theories can certainly have a good theoretical and later also a practical value, but that is not what matters now. What matters is that we can do something, that we can bring together people who can really do something together. To do that, it is necessary, for example, to speak to the workers in a way that they can understand, so that you first have the workers. I even said: if you don't like some of the things that have to be said in the language of the proletariat to the proletariat, it doesn't matter at first, but what matters is that you bring people together. Just have the patience to bring people together.

There was really very little understanding of the fact that the modern social question is a human question. And so it could happen that one day the so-called leaders of the proletariat noticed – it is always the worst when the leaders of any party or class or religious community notice that followers are being acquired among their flock; that is always the most dangerous thing, actually. They are not very interested in things if you talk cabbage and don't win any followers. But when people realized: Yes, something is happening here, they appeared on the scene, and it soon became clear that through all the foolish warming up of old socialist theories and Marxism that could be done, it was done, people were persuaded that one did not mean well by them, but that one was also something of a disguised capitalist or at least a capitalist servant. In short, a few leading personalities appeared on the scene, and the masses quickly evaporated. This is something that teaches in a very concrete sense that the spirit is not something that comes out of the masses and flies around, but by showing us that the Stuttgart workers are more Catholic in their method of obeying than have ever been Roman Catholics, one could see that all this is a fuss, a phrase about the “spirit” that comes “from the masses,” that even today the masses, as they have always done, follow a few bellwethers. Not only does history teach this, but experience also teaches it. Because it would have been [therefore] a matter of undermining the ground - I say it quite sincerely - undermining the ground of the leaders. Until one admits to oneself that nothing can get better if the leaders do not get away from this leadership of the broad masses, who have emerged from the circumstances of the last decades, things will not get better. That is the crux of the matter. Therefore, one had to – and in this respect we too have made mistakes – one had to approach the masses directly, leaving out everything that the leaders did. It is a question of humanity, and it has basically arisen as a question of humanity, and it has been noticed here and there: it is not a matter of achieving individual institutions, but of achieving a world view and conception of life through which a bridge can be created between the people who emerged as the leading class from the old world order and those who are digging so wildly in the proletariat. But that is the strangest thing: those people who have seen something have always been like preachers in the wilderness. One can indeed make the strangest experiences through appropriate retrospectives.

When I wrote my first appeal, which was then published as an appendix to my “Key Points of the Social Question” and which so many people signed, some people were furious about it because I pointed out how the last decades, especially in Germany, were not at all suitable for setting and solving realistic tasks; and even today I still receive angry letters from “well-meaning” people about this first appeal. And yet, these people are all unaware of the facts. Facts are only reflected in something like the following.

V[iktor] Alim&] Huber wrote the following in a magazine in 1869 – I ask you to take note of the year, I choose this year and this quote quite deliberately because what was written here predates the reestablishment of the German Reich – Huber wrote the following in a magazine published in Stuttgart in 1869, for example, by first pointing out how the labor question arose , how the social question shines in through the windows; after he has explained how one should try, as he calls it, to create some alleviation of the contradictions that are bound to arise through the “corporation route”, through the route of appropriate union; after he – in 1869, my esteemed audience – after he has said: If the spirit that has been developed so far in view of the social question is further developed, the time will come when the military state will reveal this question in a terrible way as “to be or not to be”. These words appeared in a Stuttgart newspaper in 1869! I would like to know how many people have thought about this, now or after the so-called German revolution, where the words “to be or not to be” were used again and again, how many people have considered that a somewhat more clairvoyant person had already written this in 1869, at a time when people were confronted with completely different facts than they are today. The man wrote, after he had dealt with such things:

Here, too, we are ultimately referred to a reform, strengthening and multiplication of all institutions and means of social education of the people at all, but here in particular at the higher levels, as an indispensable condition of social reforms.

The man realized that it is a matter of spreading a particular intellectual life, which, however, did not yet exist at the time. But an understanding of intellectual life could have grown out of such foundations if people had listened to such people at all in the frenzy of the following decades. And this man spoke even more precisely in 1869:

It goes without saying that this cannot be the case without a fundamental change in the spirit of our universities, and all the more so the less one

— namely at the universities —

have any inkling or even understanding of this need and this profession.

Now, my dear attendees, while the man said in 1869: It must begin at the universities, something else must be introduced into the lecture halls, because it is far removed from the spirit must take hold in humanity if improvement is to occur –; while the man said this in 1869, today the people who “mean well” come and say: So we are founding adult education centers! That is to say, we take what has been concocted at the universities, cook it in somewhat more favorable preparations that it may benefit the masses, and administer the same stuff in smaller doses. What does that really mean? What it really means is that what was no good when the leading classes did it, now carried into the broad masses, should be good. The issue is not that we carry what has been taught further into the broad masses, but that we replace what has been taught and has brought us into the catastrophe with what is emphasized here, what is taken as a starting point here: we must first find the kind of spiritual culture that leads to the adult education center. We will not find this if we do not make an effort to find our way out of materialistic science and into spiritual science. What comes from the old science is what the leaders of the proletarians have learned, what the Trotskys, Lenins and so on have learned. This has led to what these people preach to the proletarians, what they set up. That, that is sufficiently widespread. That is the kind of thing you can't do anything with. What we need is what comes from spiritual science. It is not something that tells people, for example in the social sphere: let us set it up like this and like that, militarize work, and then a paradise will arise on earth! You will not find such a sentence in the 'Key Points of the Social Question'. In the 'Key Points of the Social Question' you will find this as a starting point: We want to have a possible social and viable social organism, that is, we do not want an earthly paradise, such a thing is perhaps quite impossible. It is not at all a question of whether one should strive for this or that, because of course people strive for something higher when they are offered something; because what one has once striven for as the highest is immediately the lowest in the next moment. What is important is not to promise people heaven on earth, but to study how the social organism becomes viable, how it can best be brought to life. Then it may turn out that not all of people's wishes can be fulfilled, but an especially ingenious person might say – I have known such people, I have met many a freeloader in my long life – it might occur to people, for example, could occur to people to say: It is a highly inappropriate arrangement that beings move on two legs, it could all be arranged differently; this physical human organism, there is so much that is inappropriate, and so on, and so on. There could well be specially designed heads that could imagine the human organism very differently from how it is. Of course, the imagination would not be a realistic one. But there are people like that, I have met them. Of course, there are also people who promise others paradise on earth. But that is no proof that it is possible to realize what people promise and in which they find understanding, because, of course, you only have to promise people what they want and desire, then you will find understanding in broad circles more easily than if you only talk about what is possible, if you only talk about what the social question can really achieve. That is what the “key issues of the social question” are all about.

That is why, because only this can be spoken of, we have arrived at the threefold social organism, which seems utopian only to those who look at it superficially, because wherever you look at life, if you are not blinded by preconceived theories, you will see that the main structure of our present-day intellectual life, so-called intellectual life, has been built up and promoted by the fact that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state, certainly under the compulsion of confessional necessities – at the time when it happened – has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has has been promoted by the fact that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state, certainly under the compulsion of confessional necessities – at the time when it happened, it was a necessity, today we can go beyond it – that the unified state has shaped this intellectual life by taking over the schools. It educates its people as it needs them. It educates theologians as it needs them, it educates lawyers, doctors, as it needs them. Switzerland, for example, needs doctors who have only been educated in Switzerland, at Swiss faculties, because a doctor educated a few hours away cannot practice medicine in Switzerland; and it is the same with philologists, it is the same with everyone. The state, when it has control of education, must of course impose its point of view.

Now imagine, instead of such a state education, an education system that is completely self-governing, an education system that, from the lowest to the highest schools, has as administrators those who are actively involved in this spiritual — the teacher teaching only enough to have free some hours in which he can devote himself to the administration of the educational system; no one else is involved in this administration of the educational system except those who are actively involved. No corporate body has a say in it, no parliament; for what is to be said regarding the training for intellectual life requires specialized training and expertise, requires certain abilities and could only be trained if intellectual life stands on its own ground. As soon as something that arises from majority opinion or from the average view is decreed as law and then passes over into the administrative sphere, the sphere of spiritual education must wither away. And there is an inner connection between the materialistic type of our modern spiritual life and the nationalization of that spiritual life.

You see, you can experience special things there. People cannot always see immediately if they are not familiar with spiritual science, which shows itself through itself, through its entire being: what must be striven for through it can only be striven for in free spiritual life ; it can only be striven for if it comes solely from the personalities, if it is only as good and as bad as the personalities of an age can make it, if one does not succumb to the illusion that There are laws that prescribe how teaching should be done. What use are laws! It depends on the teachers, on the real, concrete teaching personalities; it depends on the people who are involved in teaching, in the spiritual realm, that they also manage this at the same time. If we were to hypothetically assume the sad case that in an age, in a generation, there were only stupid teachers, then this generation would have to be educated in a stupid way. That would still be better than having good laws for the teaching system, and these good laws being treated even worse than when stupidity springs from within the human being. In the spiritual sphere it is necessary that what happens should come out of the abilities of the human being, for in this way it will always be the best conceivable for a given age. That is what matters. That is why it is not immediately apparent that this freedom, this emancipation of spiritual life as one of the links in the social organism, is a necessity. It may happen that very well-meaning, very clever people raise the objection – it comes up again and again – let us say, for example, it is someone, I will say now, in State X – so as not to offend anyone – it is someone in State X, and they are told that it is necessary, the threefold social order, the freedom of spiritual life. He will perhaps say the following: Yes, in the other state Y, Z and so on, it is already as you say, but with us in X, there, there we notice nothing of the dependence of teaching on the government, on the state powers; with us, the education system is not disturbed by the state powers.

Yes, my dear attendees, I would like to say: That is precisely the problem, that people say so, because by saying so, they no longer realize how dependent they are. They are so dependent that their dependence appears to them as freedom. Only dependence goes through their heads. They approve of everything that is put into their heads, and because they obediently follow the state's orders as a matter of course, they do not feel in the least confused by them. They do not even realize what the matter is. That is perhaps the very worst of all, that especially in the intellectual field, but especially in the educational field, it has already come to such a pass that people no longer feel at all how they are dependent, that they glorify this dependence as freedom. Of course, if someone thinks like the pastor who had just preached a sermon and in which he explained that, according to the wisdom of the world, man is best built, a hunchback was waiting for him at the church exit and asked the pastor: “Yes, Reverend, can you tell me that I am also best built?” He replied: “For a hunchback, you are built very well indeed.” Yes, you see, when we speak of freedom of thought to people who perceive dependency as freedom, they tell us: “Yes, we have complete freedom!” That is the one link in the threefold social organism, the free spiritual life.

Just as little as spiritual life can tolerate the schematic classification of the democratic state, in the least because democracy can only lead to the manifestation of average opinions, and average opinions are most intolerable in the free development of intellectual life, just as little as intellectual life tolerates the schematic principle of the state, just as little does economic life. Economic life can only be based on real conditions, just as intellectual life can only be based on human abilities. Spiritual life must work in the way that is possible from the talents of the people of an age; economic life must work in such a way that it can develop fully in this economic life, with expertise, professional competence and involvement in a branch of economic life, so that others who have to do with this branch of the economy can have confidence in those who are involved in it. This means that economic life is only possible if it is built on associative lines, if it is built in such a way that what belongs together in economic life joins together, that economic circles - be they professional circles or circles that face each other, such as production circles, consumption circles, and so on - join together in such a way that they are associated.

Of course, not every circle can be associated in every circle; but it is possible for the whole economic life to be associated in an indirect way. But because the individual economic circles are associated with each other in this way [see blackboard drawing, p. 596], the person who is in any association stands [opposite another] and can gain from the circumstances he faces, through contracts or similar, what is necessary to have the basis for a proper economy. You can never organize economic life, but only associate it. You cannot organize how the individual professions should work and so on from a central location, as Lenin and Trotsky wanted to do, but you can only, by having the professional associations, try to bring them into such economic associations that one supports the other, that one gains trust for one's work from what one learns from the other.

To look at the circumstances realistically is so terribly far from the people of the present. Oh, what irony of facts we are experiencing in our time! We have seen, my dear ladies and gentlemen, that in certain states the blessing of militarism has been pronounced by parliaments, that no one but at most smaller parties has raised objections. It is decades behind us. We have seen, especially during this war, that those who have the least understanding of the situation have once again let loose their decrees out of anti-militarism!

It does not matter at all whether one was right or not, but rather that one knows why one can be right, that one knows the circumstances. And we have seen that today in socialist Germany, for example, a thunderstorm is brewing over militarism, and we see a man who now, in a legislative assembly, says, “Militarism has not only had dark sides, but militarism has brought great benefits to humanity. We have seen how those who went to war learned how to organize; and when they came back, we found that the people who had gone through the school of this war were the best people to organize work in the factories in a military sense. We have experienced that we have obtained a correct hierarchy of people through the training of this war, in that the people of this war have learned to work systematically and to subordinate themselves. We have come to understand the victory of the military order for social life.” – And just a few weeks ago, this man continued in this vein! Who was it? Trotsky in Moscow, justifying the militarization of Russian labor!

Yes, one would like to ask in the face of such things: Is there really no spark of alertness left in humanity today, when it does not look at this stark contradiction of life? Should life go on when these stark contradictions are part of this life? The point is really that, for example, in these 'key points of the social question', nothing else is striven for than that which can arise – it is clearly emphasized at one point in detail – which can arise precisely out of the present institutions. If the people who are involved in these current institutions only begin to set themselves the goal of what the meaning of threefolding is, then one can work in the spirit of threefolding everywhere, if one sets oneself the goal of threefolding, if you know that it can only be a matter of achieving, on the one hand, a free spiritual life, as I have characterized it, and, on the other hand, an economic life that works only out of economic necessities.

You see, it has even become possible to have people together in Stuttgart for a few weeks with whom one could talk about the next requirements of a non-state, free economic life. Not just once, but many times, I said to the people there: Those who will now be called upon to work on this free organization of economic life will soon, when the going gets tough, see that they cannot stop at socialist phrases, at Marxism and so on, but that they will have to work from the specific demands of economic life, and each in his own place; the plant manager, the labor manager, as well as the proletarian, they will have to work, each from his own place, from the point of view of economic life itself. This will bring to light completely different questions than those that are usually raised today, and especially those raised by practice. Just now, people were beginning to realize that, among many other things, it is necessary, for example, to figure out how a certain article in a certain economic area must have a very specific price, a very specific price range, and that the institutions must be set up in such a way that a certain price range is available. I showed people how to achieve these price ranges through arrangements, not through things like, for example, the monetary theorists with their statistics, with their state office, which is all utopian, but how to achieve it through the actual social structure, through what arises from the interaction of the associations. What is the practice today? Today it is practice that something becomes more expensive due to certain circumstances. More pay is demanded, or there is a strike. Because more pay is demanded, other things become more expensive, of course, and then more pay is demanded again. And so what is most important must be taken into account: a certain price level, that which is considered the most trivial by our social circumstances. Today, most people view any price increase with indifference, even if it is ruinous for our lives as human beings.

We were just about to enter into the practicalities, and we cannot make any further progress, ladies and gentlemen, unless as many people as possible develop an understanding of the specific issues. What do you expect to achieve with people who understand nothing of what needs to be done, who only understand what their agitators tell them? Do you think you can bring about a new economic order with them? You can only bring about a new economic order with those who have first gained an understanding of the demands of life itself. Everything else that the “key points of the social question” for a free economic life demand is already contained in this. For what individuals have spoken of, where it has been recognized – and after all, it must be said: the idea of threefolding, a part of it, is recognized – that is even made into an objection by theorists; people always come to me and say: Yes, what you are saying is already wanted here and there! I can only say to people: I would love it most of all if everything I say were already wanted. I am not at all striving to say something new, but rather what follows reasonably from the circumstances!

But that is the essential thing, that the details are demanded here or there, but that it is a matter of summarizing these very details. It is the big picture that is at stake. That is why spiritual science must intervene, because it educates in the big lines. It is right that here and there understanding arises for this or that, but then one must have the opportunity to bring it to bear. And so it also becomes clear to individuals how nonsensical it is when, for example, a judgment is to be made about an issue that should interest industry. Now, in the branches that have been nationalized, judgments are made by the state central representation or the like. That is, a majority of people make judgments that can, under certain circumstances, overrule that small minority who actually understand something about the matter; apart from everything else that is being developed in terms of reciprocity and so on, about which individual, namely western states, provide wonderful opportunities for study, as do southern states. Therefore, some have suggested: Well, we must have parliament, we must have the unified state; so at least for economic life we need industrial committees, professional representations in parliament. Yes, but what matters is that these professional representatives in parliament can first of all really assert for themselves what can then be decided from professional association to professional association, what is necessary; not that everything is mixed up again in one parliament, so that perhaps what is to be decided for this group is decided by the others, who have no say in it. Sometimes one has experienced very strange things in relation to majorities, for example in Austria, which is of course the “model state” for the downfall of the state. Because this Austrian state, one has seen it perish – I lived there for three decades – one has seen it perish if one has seen with open eyes what was actually going on there. In this Austrian state, there was a time when they wanted to revise the existing school law. They wanted to replace the existing school law with a reactionary one. This school law would have been rejected by a minority if conditions had been normal. The only way to achieve a majority was to get the Poles to vote with the other people in favor of this reactionary school law. The Poles had to form a majority with the other reactionaries. The Poles said at the time: “All right, we'll form a majority with you, we'll make the bad school law with you, but our Galicia must be exempted from this bad school law!” So the people came together in the common parliament. There was one community, the Polish delegation, that worked with the others to give the countries of the others, those who did not want it, a school law from which they exempted their own country. Krass stood out in particular at the time. But how could this not be the case in many other areas in a parliament like the Austrian one, which actually only had economic representatives? Because, you see, when a minister in Austria, Giskra, said at about the same time as Huber [in Stuttgart] set out his views: “There are no social issues, they stop at Bodenbach” – this has been discussed several times – people in this country were dreaming of a new era. Dreams came that a new era was needed and that a parliament had to be set up. So they set up the parliament based on four curiae: the curia of the large landowners, the curia of the cities, markets and industrial centers, the curia of the rural communities and the curia of the chambers of commerce – which, due to their special nature, were all economic cooperatives, all economic communities. They then formed the parliament, which made Austrian laws, fabricated rights. It is quite natural that a majority could not be formed by the representatives of the chambers of commerce and the large landowners, and that they made laws that were in their interests, not laws that would have emerged from what has been dawning more and more in humanity in modern times from the feeling of democracy. It is precisely those who take democracy seriously who must separate economic life and intellectual life, which cannot be based on democracy at all, but which arise from factual and specialized knowledge. They must separate economic life and intellectual life must separate economic life and intellectual life from what is legal life in the broadest sense, which can only develop when the mature human being opposes the other mature human being as an equal in parliament. But then only that which concerns every mature human being in relation to every other mature human being as an equal may be decided in this parliament. And the question must always be: it cannot be a matter of professional committees being formed in a democratic parliament and then the decisions being brought about by majority vote, but rather that what is the future action in economic life should emerge from negotiations, from the direct negotiations of economic associations, that which develops out of the essence of economic life itself.

What appears as the threefold social order is not a theory at all, it is not a program at all. I have experienced enough programs. In the 1880s, I used to drink my black coffee after dinner at the Viennese writers' café, the so-called Café Griensteidl. In addition to writers and authors of all sizes, poets, painters and sculptors – each was a great talent, which everyone else denied – social reformers and Marxists also met there. Viktor Adler was always there too. There you could experience the programs at noon and in the evening and at midnight in the most diverse forms. Everyone always knew what was best, and everyone thought the world would become a paradise when their social program was implemented. The opposite of all this program-making is what is striven for by the threefold social organism. Put in a simple formula — what does it actually mean? It means that there are three distinct and separate spheres of interest in the social life of humanity. One of these is the spiritual life. No one has the right to claim that they know how this spiritual life can best be administered; no one has the right to say: I prescribe a program for this spiritual life. If you are grounded in reality, as you are in spiritual science, you will not say this. But one does say: Let this spiritual life be administered by the people who are called to do so, who are actively involved in it, then you can spare yourself your program; then the right thing will come about through what life brings forth. The point is not to set out programs for the threefold social order, but to point out how people must find themselves in life so that from week to week, from year to year, the best arises in life itself. And in the same way, it is a matter of giving economic life a form such that, through economic activity, that which must arise again and again arises. For you see, the most absurd thing of all is to draw up social programs that are supposed to apply forever. Because the social question arises once and for all, but it cannot be solved overnight. The social question is a certain kind of living condition, it is a human question, and the only way to solve it is to organize life in such a way that it is continuously resolved, so that from week to week, from year to year, from decade to decade, there are always people who can bring about what can solve the social questions. The social question cannot be solved all at once, but must be solved continually throughout life. But for this it is necessary that this life should be such that the people who are called to solve it develop out of this life.

Apart from economic and spiritual questions, there are still those that simply arise between people who have come of age. These are decided democratically. They are the legal questions in the broadest sense. That is what life itself demands: that is, we must not formulate a program or develop a theory, but we must reflect on how people should live together so that life can be shaped. Today we cannot discuss whether it is already too late for European civilization, or whether there is still time for people to come together in this way. But we should keep saying to ourselves: the social question has not been grasped in its true form because the essential thing has never been expressed at all, because it was always believed that programs had to be found or institutions had to be devised, whereas it would have been necessary to communicate in such a way that humanity would have formed common interests where life demands common interests. If economic life is, of course, to stand on its own feet today – we cannot demand that tomorrow the people who are inside, who are now full of liberal, socialist or conservative ideas, should judge from the point of view of economic requirements. In the 1950s and 1960s, this would have been possible to a high degree. Today, far too much confused stuff has entered people's heads. But that is not for us to decide; instead, we muster the will to ensure that the right thing happens even today. But we should keep an eye on how, by diverting attention to completely different areas instead of coming together in the face of aligned interests, we have to divert things to completely different areas. Let us assume, hypothetically at first – which, of course, is a hypothesis today – that people, regardless of whether they are supervisors or employees, are fully involved in economic life and have been accustomed to deciding economic issues based on economic facts for some time. Then, even if it took a generation, a commonality of interests would have formed, which must exist, for example, when those who are producers have to work together. The worker and the foreman both have the same interest, if only the same interests are cultivated. The worker and the foreman do not have different interests with regard to, for example, remuneration; they have the same interests. But in order for their feelings to be fulfilled by these same interests, they have to oversee economic life. You can only oversee it if you can learn about one association by having something to do with the next association, which in turn has something to do with the next one [and so on], so that a network of relationships of trust is formed. You can only learn what the true interest is in this way. Instead, true interests are carried out of all this. The people who are work managers stand there [in the blackboard drawing: filled circles ), the employees stand there [in the blackboard drawing: open circles ). The foremen will stand there, the employees will stand there, and so on, and so on. And just as the party forms itself in parliament – what is together here in real work stands together, separated by party lines, fighting each other – an unnatural relationship, a nonsensical relationship when considered in terms of life! Why? Because economic life is not separate, does not live in its independence, but those who work in it organize themselves into parties according to completely different aspects, into parliamentary parties. If life here has nothing to do with anything other than what concerns all people of legal age as equals, which has nothing to do with what arises within economic life itself, then it is impossible for that which wants to develop into our time.

These things are found difficult to understand. Those who find them difficult to understand say: Yes, it is not clear. Yes, my dear audience, this is just life, and what is from life requires that those who want to understand it look at life. But today people no longer look at life, today they look at their prejudices. One person has acquired his prejudices from Marx, another from the liberal or social-democratic leaders, a third from the pastor, and so on and so forth. Today they only look at what is theory, what they only call practice. And so today one senses something of what individual people have actually felt for a long time.

You see, something strange happened to me. I gave a lecture in Stuttgart and also here in various places in Switzerland, in which I said, based on the matter: Today, instead of an original spiritual life, we have a phrase that is very close to the lie; instead of a real legal life, we have only convention. Something similar could perhaps still happen in relation to these things. But now I have spoken about the third area, about the economic, and I have said: in the economic sphere we do not have a real practice of life, not that which grows out of economic conditions, but mere routine. Now you think that is what I said, and today I read – namely, only today I read this Huber, really, I am not trying to pin something on you that is not true, I really read him today – and there I read in this Huber – he has invented certain corporate interests, I read in this Huber: “But where in our empire?” — says the 1869 in Stuttgart —, “where are the men who can make these arrangements?” And then he continues and says: “Least of all do we find them among practitioners, among those who call themselves practitioners, because today nothing but routine prevails there.” And – he says – we would need at least ten [men]. “But when I look around,” he says, “I want to exempt his majesty right away (he is, as people were then, loyal, a very loyal gentleman), but since he is out of the question anyway, not only are there not ten, but around the steps of the throne and everywhere outside there is not even one.”

I don't know, I couldn't quickly examine the extent to which the man was right for the year [18]69; but in our present circumstances, one has every reason to seek out those who at least have a heart and mind for studying and responding to the real circumstances. That is what is at stake today. We need people who recognize that a renewal of intellectual life and a reorganization of economic life on its own foundations are absolutely necessary. We need this because we have to relieve the state, which then forms the third link of the threefold social organism with its legal and related relationships. Everything in more detail can be found in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question”. We need this third link, which throws the others to the left and right; in short, we need the structure of the social organism from which a structure of the human being can emerge that is suited to the difficult, extraordinarily complicated and difficult conditions of the present, which will become even more complicated and difficult in the near future.

That is why I wanted to draw attention to this again today: that an impulse in the social sphere does not come from Dornach here with a spiritual-scientific movement through an arbitrary act, not through the arbitrariness of an individual [person] and not through the arbitrariness of the Anthroposophical Society, because it is actually true what individual people have repeatedly and repeatedly come to realize in recent decades: Things can only improve if we undertake a fundamental transformation of our entire spiritual life. But this transformation must not remain a mere theoretical demand, it must not be expressed only in idealistic terms, it must not shrink back from really presenting to the world a spirit such as has not been known before. Many people today can talk about the spirit. But it is not a matter of talking about the spirit, but of giving positive, concrete spirit. Positive, concrete spirit must be creative, creatively also in economic life. The time must be considered over when people said: Economic life is external, the spiritual world is not involved in it, it is found precisely when one departs from economic life, when one leaves the coarse material, when one ascends to the spiritual in higher regions. The time when people spoke in this way, that is the time that brought about rivers of blood in Europe. And the people who still speak from their pulpits today: 'Return to the old Christianity!' — to them we must say again and again: If we return to you, we can indeed start again — with the things that finally led us to 1914. It is a matter of having the courage to really present the new spirit to people. But then we must also be serious about it. Today, people approach us and say, 'So, what is being done in Dornach in the economic sphere?' Let us say, for example, that someone who is involved in economic life in America says, 'It's all very well to be working on the economy in Dornach; if they know how to do it, they should tell us.' This would imply that we are demanding a program. But here we are not working with programs, with things that are alien to life, but here we are seeking to create life. Therefore, no one can demand of us that we find a program to be implemented by this or that American bank, but here it is a matter of creating a center of life that is a real, living center around which people must organize themselves. Therefore, the American bankers must be told: It does not depend on you working out your program through your bank, which is given to you from here; but it depends on you centering what you do around Dornach, that you seek union with Dornach. Because it is not about issuing lifeless programs, but about creating a real center that must create as such. Here one cannot merely study; from here one should work.

The essential thing is that everything that comes from here is seen as life, not as theory, not as thought, not as idea. Therefore, those who go to Dornach or to the Waldorf School to see how things are done, how they themselves can do it, will not get it right. Rather, those who understand: Here a beginning has been made, here a start has been made. One must work together with that with which the start has been made, not with a theory but with life. In working together, ladies and gentlemen, we can find ourselves with all the people of the civilized world today - but in living together.

We must once and for all make it clear that the spirit does not live in empty thoughts, not in abstractions. And because we want to assert here that the spirit does not live in abstractions, that the spirit is a living thing, we cannot satisfy the person who only wanted to seek out what abstract thoughts are, which could now be realized in any way , but we can only satisfy those who understand that we must work together in the sense in which it is characterized, as it is suggested - but not programmatized - in the “Key Points of the Social Question” and the next issue of “The Future”. Not just lecturing from here that the mind is a living thing, but the living mind should be sought. We will see whether there is enough understanding in the world for the fact that the living spirit, not the abstract spirit, must be sought, that we must seek for an improvement of the future, for a true construction not just any abstract idea, but [that we must seek] the living spirit. (Lively applause.)

Discussion

Rudolf Steiner: Ladies and Gentlemen, is there perhaps someone here who has a question to ask orally or something to say? Two questions have been submitted in writing (about the “threefold state”; question of whether a school association should have a say in the free spiritual life of the “threefold state”).

Now, esteemed attendees, sometimes it is necessary for me to become a terrible pedant, which I otherwise abhor, for the sake of the matter! The state is conceived of as one of the three limbs of the threefold social organism, and it is actually impossible to say: the threefold state. It can be tolerated for the sake of expediency, but attention must also be drawn to such things from time to time. I am saying this because the question here explicitly mentions “the threefold state”.

Now, questions are understandably asked from the present consciousness, and that is ultimately quite right. But if you want to look at life, you have to realize that life is a process of becoming, and that some things that are desirable may only happen after a long time, but that, if the courage is there, they may also happen relatively quickly. And so one must also consider the questions a little, must consider that questions are asked from the circumstances of the present, perhaps even from the very close circumstances of the future, but in a form that can no longer be asked. Not this question, in particular. Because, believe me, it will be a matter of the spiritual life being administered by those who are alive in it. Those who are truly alive in it will naturally have to ensure that all that can in any way be favorable to their decisions is fully incorporated into them. Now imagine that I am a primary school teacher and a child enters the first class at the Waldorf School. It would be perfectly natural for the school to proceed in the same way as a sensible doctor would, who, when a case of illness arises, does not make a snap judgment but familiarizes himself with the biography of the patient. You have to get to know and read the biography when you get a schoolchild in order to know what the child has been through so far. The best way to get to know the child is, of course, to talk to the mother, although the father should not be left out completely. But here only the mothers are asked. Take just one small point from what I said today about the free spiritual life. Take seriously the fact that this free spiritual life will bring to fruition all those factors that make this free spiritual life possible. What follows from this? It follows inevitably that mothers will be drawn into it. This is self-evident! But we should not want to transfer to the free spiritual life what has so terribly emerged bit by bit in the old spiritual life. When something occurred somewhere, no matter how trivial, you could hear everywhere: Yes, a law should be made. People had nothing else on their minds but: a law should be made. A law should be made for everything! So I took the liberty of saying in a lecture in Nuremberg: What is the ideal of the modern person? And I characterized this there in such a way that I said: Man actually only wishes nowadays that he is always accompanied in his life by a policeman on his left and a doctor on his right; so that he has the doctor for the time of illness, and the policeman or another faculty takes care of the other half of life. That is precisely what we want to achieve with such a social organism: to enable people to take care of themselves, to produce, as a matter of course, what is needed for the laws that the philistines want everywhere. I know that today people usually say in such a case: Yes, but people are not yet mature enough for that. For me, this and many other things are precisely the reason why, when someone tells me: People are not yet mature enough for that, I answer that two things result from this; firstly, that he considers himself mature, and secondly, that he is certainly not mature when he thinks that he understands this, but that the others are not yet mature for it, that he is therefore judging from a subconscious self-knowledge that is not alive in his consciousness. It is not a matter of waiting for people to mature, because we can wait until the end of the days on earth, but rather of seizing the moment and then waiting to see what happens under the circumstances. When people mature, some questions simply resolve themselves out of the circumstances.

The other question that has been asked here is: “Can any of the forms of association that are common today, a labor cooperative or an individual company, be considered particularly suitable as a starting point for the associative form?”

Now, my dear attendees, consider life in its becoming again. Consider it in such a way that it is constantly transforming itself, just like the organism itself, until a certain degree of stationarity is initially achieved in one area or another, then remains for a period of time, and then dies off. You will find it already hinted at in the 'Key Points of the Social Question'. What we have today should initially be the starting point. It cannot be any different. Today we have joint-stock companies; indeed, we even set them up. We have set one up in Stuttgart. So we set them up ourselves, are in the process of setting one up here, as humanities scholars. We are building everywhere on what already exists. We are not talking about some utopian fantasy, but want to build on what already exists. Then we might have all sorts of associations emerging from what already exists: cooperatives, joint-stock companies, I don't know what all, and we are only looking for the associations. [See blackboard drawing, p. 597]

But the fact that these associations enter associative life means that they change again, and that the joint-stock companies will take on a different form when associative life awakens. The cooperatives will also take on a different form. It does not matter - suppose there were a corporation here that was abominable, it would also associate. By itself it is abominable; but by being placed in the network of association, it is constantly influenced, gradually carried along by what arises from associating, and in time becomes something quite different, or perishes. For us, it is not a matter of abolishing something, but of accepting things as they are. And if something is bad, then it naturally perishes. But to abolish something through laws can never be the issue.

That is what weighs most today, that healthy thoughts must first enter human souls! You see, I would like to say this, although it was already hinted at in the lecture: the fact is that what hurts most today is that for a long time no effort has been made to build the bridge across the gulf between the classes. What concern did they have for the fate of the proletariat during the long decades of the second half of the nineteenth century? Basically, they watched what was happening; they didn't care much about it, except that they sometimes heard in larger cities that people said: There's a house again where they're having thicker shutters made because they're afraid something will break out soon! – At most, people were concerned about such things in this way. But no one sought to create a vibrant life that would have been the basis for understanding.

In my “Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and Future,” you will find an indication of how the worker in each factory should actually be led through the entire process of production, introduced to the knowledge of the raw products, and made familiar with the path the product takes, so that he has a common interest with the plant manager and takes an interest in it. Today, of course, this is still very difficult, and even if it is aspired to, it cannot be achieved overnight! It is still very difficult today for the very reason that you can experience being in a company and getting along very well with one or two workers; you get along very well with them. But when it comes to making a decision, they say to you: Yes, but I can't have the same opinion, I have to have the opinion that my union dictates to me. That's just how people are today. But why have they become like that? They have become like that because in the leading circles, where leadership should have remained, there was no desire to get to know the world. Yes, they said they wanted to get to know it, they gradually did something out of their ideas. But the one who has gotten to know it knows even more about the things.

From the years when I was a teacher at the Workers' Education School, which was basically a Social Democratic institution, I could see how the plant managers knew absolutely nothing about what was going on among the workers, and I could see how they were not interested in it either. What I am saying now may be seen as an exaggeration, because one is in the same case as the one who says that laws should... [illegible in shorthand] and so on, and so on. The states may want to stifle intellectual life, but here in X we feel no such oppression. Just as they closed their eyes there, closed for decades to what was actually coming! At most, they locked people up. But what matters is that a person really gets to know life. And that is still missing today to the utmost degree. That is one thing I would like to say in response to such questions.

From what is said, one can tell everywhere that people only know a small circle. That will change. Just consider what I said in response to...; the people were not stupid at all: here he comes and asks, and the arguments that were put forward were very clever; but they could not know anything about what is explained when one is inside a factory. Through the associations that arise more and more, where one is in a lively exchange, where one does not have to check first, but where one knows how far trust can be placed in things, one's own experience teaches what can be learned. That is what you need for your judgment. Until now, you could only judge according to prejudices and therefore judged by the by. And economic experience is given by those principles of association that I spoke of in my “key points”. That is what matters.

Does anyone still have a question?

Emil Molt, Stuttgart: I don't know whether it is allowed, whether there is still time to ask a few questions, because I don't know whether here in Dornach there is a rule that when social questions are discussed there is neither time nor clocks; but for us in Stuttgart it is the case that we can really talk without time. I would now like to tie in with what has just been said.

Especially if you are a working person involved in the threefold order, then it weighs heavily on your soul, especially in recent times, that you have had so few points of attack to implement the threefold order in reality. Last year, as has also been mentioned this evening, we tried to to put the threefolding into practice through the proletariat, and in doing so, we did not, however, disregard the fact that bourgeois circles, above all among these circles, should also become acquainted with the matter. The success has been described this evening. The parties have withdrawn their sheep, and the employers have rejected us from the start. Our work continued. Something left over from working with the proletariat is always like this: the proletarian side in particular is still showing us the judgments that, for example, all the meetings that have now been held by associations, parties and so on are so terribly boring and full of empty phrases. We are told this by the proletariat in particular, that it was a different time, when Dr. Steiner in Stuttgart still had something to tell us about the issues, about the social issues.

But we do find that the proletariat in general is not sufficiently mature to fully grasp the core issues. And we find, on the other hand, that the business community simply makes it impossible by dismissing anyone who works intensively in this direction as a Spartacist or Bolshevik.

We always ask ourselves: What can be done, especially now, not only to get the threefold order into people's heads, but above all to introduce it into practice? And here I would like to, because the question is actually always coming up again and again, especially now that in Germany [...] is such a way that employers would rather cling to big capitalism than to implement social progress, and on the other hand, the trend is so strongly to the right that we have to take that into account. They have a completely different view of things. In these times, people who dedicate their entire being to the threefold order are repeatedly shaken by the question: What has to happen to implement the threefold order of the social organism before it is too late, before it is impossible, before civil wars and economic chaos occur? In this regard, the one who is asking the question feels a particularly heavy burden on his soul from posing this question, and he would be grateful for an answer.

Rudolf Steiner: If I have understood the question correctly, it is this: How is it possible today to introduce anything practical at all into the world in the field of threefolding, given the resistance that is ultimately brought from all sides to the threefolding of the social organism?

This question is, of course, the one that weighs on one. But on the other hand, this question is based on a completely different one that must not be ignored. That is precisely the question: how do you approach something in a truly living way? And I have basically already hinted at something in answer to this question very quietly between the lines in the lecture, by saying: Of course we have also made mistakes. And that is true. We have not yet grown out of the child's shoes in the practice of the threefold social organism. For example, I want to draw attention to the following.

If you want to have a living effect, if you want to promote something in life, then it is important to really work out of life and try to understand life. Now, the situation today is that when one speaks before a proletarian assembly, one has the choice of either speaking in the language of the proletarians about what is ultimately for the good of the proletarians, developing it out of the ideas that the proletarians have. And I have always tried to do that. Or you can do the other: you talk from a general theory, you say this and that must happen – then you are thrown out the door! Because the proletariat today is very quick to make its decision.

Now, that actually never happened in Stuttgart, that we were thrown out the door; but something else happened. You see, I naturally spoke in such a way everywhere that I was not thrown out the door, because I would not have considered it very beneficial – I don't just mean because of the small abrasions that can happen, but because then you can't achieve anything, right, you can't achieve anything from outside the door! I didn't speak in such a way that you were thrown out the door. But then it is known that I said this or that in this or that meeting. Then I spoke to someone who was even a minister, and to him I said in all my innocence: Just wait and see what comes of it. It's not about throwing things in people's faces that make them angry, but about getting people to work with you.

So we wait until we are ready to work together. Then what must be the arithmetic mean of one opinion and the other, will perhaps emerge, or the others will be converted to your opinion, and so on. But we have to work from life.

And I was inclined to do that too! So you just face things like that. You get angry when you hear that something has been said somewhere that only differs in form from what you are used to hearing; and in this regard, you see, we really have made mistakes. For example, I gave a lecture to the workers at the Daimler factory that could only have had a favorable effect if it had been understood in this way – it was spoken for the workers at the Daimler factory, it was spoken in their language.

Well, unfortunately it is the custom in our circles that it is always demanded, and it cannot be resisted, that everything that is spoken in front of any audience should now be printed with skin and hair and should also be readable for everyone else out of context.

Yes, my dear attendees, that is simply not on! And you should realize that it is not on. It is not possible for something like that to happen. We should refrain from broadcasting what I say to a particular audience to the whole world lock, stock and barrel, because it can only be understood in context. Therefore, I understand very well that I received a letter from Nuremberg from a bourgeois pastor who, of course, could not think the way a worker at the Daimler factory can think now, for example. It may happen that people come together when they really work. But it is quite natural that he was angry about the lecture at the Daimler factory, that it is so and must be so! But it is really not about me giving a lecture to excite the delight of a Nuremberg bourgeois pastor, but about working in a lively way, about bringing the proletariat to where it should be for its own good, in cooperation with the other circles, someday.

That is what we want to put into practice. It must be clearly understood that we are not speaking theoretically here, but as life demands, never taking anything for granted that misses the truth, but saying what life demands.

But now, I would say, everything of this kind must not be schematized. It would also be wrong to schematize it. Suppose I were to give a lecture here on Thomism, on Thomas Aquinas, and a socialist were to come who had never heard of the context. Well, he would naturally be furious about it. There is no way to prevent him from becoming angry at the public lecture. But the practical work must nevertheless be done differently than we have done it so far. One has to understand that there is differentiation in life. And so it is important that we first really agree on this preliminary question: How do we get together a number, a sufficiently large number of people – we don't have that yet – who really show that things have now reached the point where it can be seen that people no longer even speak a language that can be understood by each other, and that one must rise above what is spoken on the one side and on the other side on the party sides. Above all, we must work to spread our views, and only when we have a sufficiently large number of people will we be in a position to introduce our views further into contemporary universal life.

It is the same with all things that depend on willpower. You can see that life can only give you opportunities to become pessimistic from day to day. But one must will optimistically; one must will in such a way that what one sets out to do will happen. After all, free human will does not consist of always saying, “This cannot happen and that cannot happen”; rather, it is a matter of knowing what one wills and working in the direction of that will. And that is the only thing we can really do in the first instance, each in our own place. Then an extraordinary amount will happen; there is an objective difficulty in putting the threefold order into practice as a whole.

You see, my “Key Points of the Social Question” have grown out of decades of observation of European life in all its aspects. They have grown entirely out of practical life. And I am convinced that if the practitioners were to take them up, it would be best to reach an understanding. The reason why no agreement can be reached is not that the practitioners have not got into the habit of checking what is said on the basis of practice, but because they say: reform ideas in a book! Books contain theories, so it is a theory. People do not read the book. If they read and study it, they would see that it is different from other books. So this objective difficulty is a factor. Unlike all other similar books, this book, 'The Core of the Social Question', is a book of life. It is the product of decades of observation; there is nothing invented in it. Therefore, it does not come across in such a way that one could say it is easy to understand, like a newspaper article. But I would never want to admit that this book, for example, cannot be made understandable to everyone in serious work. I think it is also the case with this book that I found that theater directors always said: Yes, we won't get an audience with this play, we have to give other plays - which they imagined should get an audience. I have had the most extraordinary experiences there. For example, I met a theater director who was talked into a play; he gave it a try, and he was completely convinced, he only did it out of complaisance. And one evening he did it – and it was a failure. He bet his wife, who had a different opinion, he bet her the entire royalties that were coming to him. The wife bet him that if the play went well, she would get the royalties. Well, the man lost his bet, the play became one of the best-visited plays. So he said in his theater language: At the theater, you can fake everything, you can fake criticism, you can fake approval, you can fake everything, just not the box office. You can't fake the box office. At least it doesn't help if you fake the box office.

This is basically how it is when you say that something cannot be made understandable. It can be made understandable if you just find the right way of doing it. And I can't really go into the question of why it was said in Stuttgart that the evenings were interesting back then when I was there and then they became boring; but I would like to bring this matter into what I would call a direction of will. It is really not a matter of brooding over why things are the way they are, but of trying to find ways and means to make things understandable, to make things popular, and above all, not to harbor illusions. It is no different than that we first need a sufficiently large number of people who understand our ideas; then it will work. But we must never sit back and do nothing; we just have to work. And I believe we will find understanding if we do not shut the door on ourselves too easily by acting not out of life but out of our prejudices. We must not throw every theory in everyone's face, but we must speak to everyone in their language; not because we think they are more stupid than we are, but because it is sometimes difficult for us to speak in their language when they are cleverer than we are; but even then we should try to speak in their language, even if they are much cleverer than we are in their field.

Perhaps it is necessary for us to develop and maintain a real life practice for the promotion of the threefold social organism.

Emil Molt: Perhaps I can correct something about the boring evenings that were party meetings. The proletarians have learned to see that party meetings in particular are full of the most outrageous nonsense, and that it was different in the old days at the trade union building than it is now, when we still organized lectures for the public.

Rudolf Steiner: I just wanted to say that I understood that the evenings back then were interesting and that afterwards the party line was followed, of course not by our people. That's not what I meant, but what I meant was that it doesn't help us if people realize that they have got to know something better. It does speak well for the people when they realize this, but it does not help us if they do not follow us. We only have an influence on them if they put into practice what they have decided. Don't you agree, you see, with us the meetings were interesting. But they don't go to us, but to the others. This just goes to show that, above all, it must be considered how people are like a flock of sheep, how they simply follow their leaders, no matter whether they talk boring stuff or not. They also vote for their leaders when it comes to something, and they follow the training. And we have no illusions about this. It is no use just holding interesting meetings for the people; it only helps if we manage to throw out the leaders and lead the people. That is the experience. Of course, it takes time, and many other things are needed; but here too we have made mistakes, we have negotiated too much with the leaders. We should not have done that. Because we should have been clear about it from the very beginning: the people do not want to understand us and cannot understand us. And so it is in many different ways that we should and want to first acquire the full practice of life.

So I beg you not to think that I meant that our meetings have become boring; rather, I meant that this judgment is of no help to us. What good does it do to enter into a discussion about a judgment that is unfruitful in people? It doesn't help at all.

You see, I knew a Catholic priest very well. He often walked with me – I was still at school – for almost an hour, the way I had to make from school to home. In that place, there were often Jesuit sermons. And the pastor talked with me, even though I was still quite young, actually quite sincerely. I said to him at the time, out of all naivety: Yes, Reverend, how is it that you don't preach the sermons yourself? You only need to do that for the same community every Sunday. Why do you bring the Jesuits over for that? That's not necessary. - He replied: That's right, but it is necessary to talk the cabbage into people; only in this way are they good. And I won't talk it into them myself, they can't ask me to!

So what use is it for a person to understand something if they act differently because of the social structure in which they live! That is precisely what we have to come to, to understand life without illusion, completely soberly, even though we aspire to the highest heights of spiritual life. - I don't know if I have answered the question exhaustively.

Emil Molt: Certainly, Doctor.

Rudolf Steiner: Is there anything else that needs to be asked? Emil Molt: I have already pointed out that in Stuttgart it was not the custom to go home so soon after meeting someone.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, here there seems to be a tendency to

go home and go to bed. So I bid you all good night.

Distinguished attendees! There is no doubt that, under the influence of the war catastrophe that has touched humanity so deeply, and the outcome of which is by no means already clear, many circles have already come to the conclusion that the tasks that have arisen from the development of humanity can by no means be solved with small means; above all, it cannot be solved with the means by which one believed, in the various fields of public life, one could cope before this catastrophe, which devastated civilization so much.

Among the victors, however, there still prevails today, I might say, an understandable mood that does not make it seem necessary to move from old habits of thought, from old feelings and will impulses to new ones. And basically there are very few personalities, especially in the victorious countries, who are already somehow willing to depart from the old habits of thinking and feeling about the public affairs of humanity. One would like to say, like a white raven, the man who was present at these important negotiations for part of the time during the negotiations in Versailles, John Maynard Keynes. This John Maynard Keynes has just gained an impression from the negotiations in Versailles that no possible outcome for the shaping of the present civilized world can emerge from the attitudes and schools of thought that prevailed there.

In his introduction today, I would like to mention a very vivid picture painted by John Maynard Keynes of the personalities who were so decisive for the fate of Europe at that time. He points to the one who has long been regarded as a kind of political savior by a large part of the world, whose abstract, unrealistic 14 points were recognized for a short time in Germany as a basis for peace. Keynes points out how this man, when he arrived in Versailles, under triumph that was actually meant for the image that had been made of him, proved to be completely out of touch with the current situation in Europe, as he had absolutely no capacity to engage with what was put to him. It is fair to say – and this is entirely fitting for Keynes's comments, who after all witnessed it all – that he allowed himself to be taken in by those who were so significant for the future of Europe at the time, by Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Woodrow Wilson was seen as a savior of the world. John Maynard Keynes, who left the negotiations in Versailles early despite being an English member of parliament because of the hopelessness of the negotiations, characterizes Wilson as a man whose intentions were not at all suited to providing any kind of impetus for reality. He characterizes Clemenceau as a man who had actually overslept the whole of more recent developments since 1871, who was only still filled with the moods that one had in France at the time, and who, with a wild rage, did everything he could to shape Europe as he had to imagine it according to his old habits of thought, actually national habits.

And Keynes characterized Lloyd George, his own Prime Minister, as follows: Despite his ability to intuitively perceive the thoughts of others, he was only looking for results with which he could shine for a few weeks in England, in London.

Then Keynes wrote his book about the economic consequences of this ill-fated peace treaty. And this book seems to me to be a remarkable symptom of the state of mind, the whole way of thinking and feeling, that is present in our current public life. For this book, if you have carefully gone through it, you get the feeling that it should actually be twice as thick as it is, because the most important thing is only pointed out on the last page, and basically, any elaboration is missing for these references.

John Maynard Keynes is an economic politician. He is well aware that the design of Europe - and this is certainly proven by current events - that the design of Europe, which one imagined in Versailles to be able to achieve, is not lasting at all. He calculates this, so to speak, from the economic measures that were taken in Versailles. And it is remarkable, ladies and gentlemen, that he calculates all this as an Englishman, as an English-thinking person. And then he says something very strange at the end: All signs indicate that if a broad reflection does not occur, we will be led into barbarism within the modern European civilized world. And he says nothing less than this: The affairs of the near future will not be determined by the actions of statesmen, but by currents of thought and feeling and will beneath the surface of what is usually called “public life.” Yes, he says much more. He says: If we do not develop completely new powers of perception and, as he puts it, imagination with regard to public affairs – he means visualizing certain images that we need to shape the future – we cannot move forward. This is how this manifesto of a significant statesman and thinker of the present day concludes. And yet one has to ask the question: Yes, but how is humanity supposed to develop within these intimate currents hinted at by Keynes? Where are they supposed to come from? Where are new forces of knowledge, where are new forces of imagination about the shaping of our economic conditions supposed to come from?

This book concludes with a huge question mark regarding the great tasks of the present day, but so do all the negotiations that have been conducted so far after the provisional outcome of the great world catastrophe in 1918. And only because it has taken on a different form are people calming down a little about it for the time being.

You see, my esteemed audience, the great questions of the present will naturally have to arise in those areas that were actually the basic areas of all public and community life for humanity. They will have to arise in the areas of intellectual life, of state and legal life, and in the area of economic life. Admittedly, we have to say that a large number of people today only see the great tasks of the time in the area of economic life. But anyone who, I might say, with the same objective but somewhat deeper than Keynes, is able to see through public affairs, cannot help but say to himself: the great tasks of the time are not being solved today with what one has been accustomed to thinking, which has led to the catastrophe. Completely new impulses are needed. And these new impulses, where must they come from?

I believe, esteemed attendees, that we will not arrive at an answer to this question if we do not look at it from a certain point of view, which I would like to suggest here, if we do not observe how thinking and feeling and looking at the world has developed in recent times, since the last three to four centuries, especially within Europe, but also within its offshoot, America. We must look at human thinking. Most people in the present still do not want to think about this, that ultimately everything in the state and ultimately everything in economic conditions ultimately comes from human thinking.

If we look a little deeper again, without prejudice, and look at the European situation in particular, we clearly see a kind of declining life, and on the other hand a kind of rising life. The declining life, viewed spiritually, is actually still a kind of inheritance from ancient human cultures. In Europe, we have impulses of world view that express themselves in philosophies, religious beliefs and other things. Today, however, we do not ask ourselves thoroughly enough where these ideological impulses actually come from. We will think more freely about these ideological impulses, which are also present in our economic life, when we are clear about what has actually only been clearly drawn from Western culture into this ancient oriental heritage of a world view culture since the last three to four centuries. Has it not been emphasized often enough – and from a certain point of view one is quite right to do so – that the greatest source of pride in modern times should be the spirit of science that has emerged in the last three to four centuries? Of course, old beliefs and the like are still deeply ingrained in a large part of the population of the civilized world today. These should not be spoken of in a critical way; their value should be fully recognized. But what could be called the greatest authority in the life of thought, feeling and perception in modern times is indisputably that which has emerged as the spirit of science.

When speaking of this scientific spirit, one must not only look at what lives in an upper class, where science as such is practised. The scientific spirit can also mean something else. Today, in an age when popular literature and newspapers reach even the seemingly uneducated, one can speak of the fact that perhaps not the scientific results and insights as such, but their offshoots, that which arises from them as a way of feeling, penetrates into the widest circles. Today, one can be a good Catholic or a good Protestant in one's inner life and in terms of one's religious confession; but when it comes to judging what is immediate reality, what surrounds one in life, then one regards the modern spirit of science as the actual authority. And this spirit of science is, after all, what we can follow in the social views of the present. We can trace it in the social views that have gradually developed among the proletariat throughout Europe since the mid-nineteenth century. Within this social view, people have always been proud of the fact that what they imagined as a social organization should be carried by the spirit of modern “unbiased science”. And to this day, one will find that even such destroyers of public life as appear in Eastern Europe, that even Trotsky and Lenin, when they want to talk about the foundations of their social thinking, then assert this spirit of science. So that one can say: in these social utopias, which, however, gain a very unfortunate reality, this spirit of science wants to be shaped.

This spirit of science has its clearest form in all that has emerged in recent times in the Western, more materialistic way of thinking and looking at things. It is not so much rooted in the Central European way of thinking, because, my dear attendees, if you take such characteristic personalities of Central Europe as Herder, Goethe, Fichte, Schiller, and also the German philosophers, you will find something quite different in their way of thinking from that of an Adam Smith or an English philosopher like Spencer or Darwin. On the other hand, it can be said that the spirit of science, which spread across the civilized world from the west, gradually engulfed the very different ideas that the personalities just mentioned sought to assert in Central Europe. And if we want to grasp what has asserted itself as modern science, then we have to juxtapose this scientific approach with the greatest question that exists for human beings, the greatest question that arises from our desire for knowledge as well as from his longing to gain enlightenment about his place in the world, to gain impetus for his social action, yes, which is also the most significant question when it is about the origin of the noblest in community life, about the activity of love among people. And the most important question is that concerning the essence of the human being itself. Recognizing the human being, understanding the human being, getting along with the human being, being able to live together with people – that is ultimately what all human thought must tend towards if the human being is not to lose the ground from under his feet.

And just look at how little, in the field of knowledge, what can be called the modern spirit of science has actually come to terms with.

It is not at all the intention of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to belittle what the spirit of natural science or any other scientific spirit has achieved in modern times. No, my dear ladies and gentlemen, with regard to the recognition of the great triumphs and the full significance of modern science for life, I am at least in full agreement with all the eulogists of this spirit of science. That much should be acknowledged from the outset, and I agree from the outset with all those who speak of the importance of this spirit of science. But something else must be said if the highest goal of human beings, as just characterized – knowledge of the human being, insight into the human essence, seeing through to the very foundations of love – if that is to be placed alongside this spirit of science.

Let us take the field of knowledge first. Here we see – let me pick out an example that is well known in the widest circles – here we see how magnificently this science was able to pursue, out of the Darwinian-Spencerian spirit, which was then perfected in a somewhat different way by the German Haeckel, how this scientific spirit was able to follow the whole series of organisms in their development. To follow how that which appears to us as perfect emerges from the imperfect and how, at the pinnacle of this development, humans stand as physical beings. But one should just try to gain an unbiased view of what is actually presented.

How do we understand the human being from this point of view? Well, we follow everything that is found in the human being, in his organization, even in his soul life, through the entire series of animals. Again, with a certain right from one point of view, and by having become acquainted with everything that is organization, with everything that is the condition of organic life, by having become acquainted with this through the series of animals up to man, one understands him as a more perfect animal, but one must actually stop at that. By applying everything we have learned about the non-human world to humans, we can say that humans are at the top of the animal kingdom, but we only characterize them based on what we have learned about the world outside of humans, and we are left powerless in the face of the big question: What is a human being? One is satisfied with this, because one cannot recognize the human being from the human being, but only from the extra-human.

Whoever visualizes the full tragedy of this modern scientific spirit, which by its very nature must stop at nothing, will understand how perhaps today in the subconscious depths of the soul of the majority of humanity, precisely the question of the nature of the human being is gnawing away, and how it works as a longing for something other than what this modern scientific spirit can give.

How do we see this scientific spirit at work, my dear audience, in the field of knowledge? How do we see it at work within social feeling? Within the view of social conditions?

We have to go back a little further, because what is still alive in the present is actually, in this respect, the result of what has developed over a long period of time within the European world. We must bear in mind that our European state structures, which are now crumbling, emerged from the remnants of what I would call “the ancient oriental heritage” in terms of world view. The spirit of science that asserted itself in the West is entirely different from the oriental spirit, which still asserts itself in the Christian creeds – not in Christianity, I will come back to that in a moment.

For this oriental spirit, the question of the essence of man is at the forefront. He does not know the same extent as the Western world, what I just mentioned before as the extra-human. This oriental spirit, which we find today in the Orient only in decadence, in decline, which in older times developed into its special greatness, it thought little of external experience. He did not think much of what we today rightly know as observation of nature and methodically base our world view on. He drew what he wanted to know about man, what he also wanted to implant in social life, from inner human enlightenment, from inner human imagination. If we want to characterize the difference between this oriental spirit and the spirit of western science, we have to say: this oriental spirit actually has a worldview through direct human intuition without science. That is the remarkable thing, and it can still be observed today in the Christian faiths. In later centuries, in medieval centuries, people no longer understood in the right way how the ancient oriental people came to this worldview without a spirit of science; but they took its content, the content they gave to the world, the content of enlightenment, of inner imagination. It has become grafted into European spiritual life. It could not be recognized as coming from there because the spiritual abilities that existed in the ancient Orient were no longer present.

And so the following came about as a development of humanity: let us look at what, for the spiritual researcher, is at the center of all of humanity's development on earth; let us look at the event of Golgotha, at the founding of Christianity. It arose out of spiritual foundations. I will only hint at this today, as I have discussed it in numerous writings, especially in the book 'Christianity as a Mystical Fact'. But the event of Golgotha is one thing as a fact, as something that happened; the way in which this event of Golgotha was understood at the time it happened and in the centuries immediately following is something else. It was understood through what had been handed down from ancient Oriental wisdom, without any spirit of science, from Asia through Greece and Rome. Understanding the mystery of Golgotha is, after all, different from the event of Golgotha itself. People wanted to understand the event of Golgotha with ancient Oriental worldviews, and they understood it for a long time.

And in the Middle Ages, what came into effect then? We see a strange clash between the ancient oriental in the human disposition and that which is already emerging as the dawn of the modern age. We see two powers established in the human soul in the Middle Ages, precisely in the Catholic spirit. We see references to the Revelation, which is said to come to man from transcendental heights, without seeking a human origin for it. And on the other hand, we see what human reason, human experience itself, is supposed to encompass. Both are given equal validity in this period. As newer human development emerges, that which is called revelation, but which is actually only the inheritance of the old, oriental spirit of world view, is increasingly being undermined. This no longer applies to actual public thinking and feeling [as an authority], even if it still asserts its authority within certain limits. And the other authority, which was to some extent only placed alongside the authority of revelation in the Middle Ages, namely the authority of reason, develops into the modern spirit of science. This modern spirit of science – what has it not yet achieved today?

Well, we have seen in the field of knowledge: it fails when it comes from the extra-human to the human. It knows nothing to counter the human yearning for knowledge of the human being. But it also knew nothing of the essence of the human being to bring into human vision in the social field. This development of European science without a worldview, it is basically extremely interesting. It presents itself in such a way that one sees: As the final product of that which basically comes from the ancient Orient, via the detour through the Arabs, and other detours, what then remains as something certain, as something authoritative, which also has an oriental origin , such as the creeds based on revelation, but which are not recognized as such, but are instead attributed to the character of science - what is that?

Dear attendees, that is the content of all mathematics. Just as its confession, the European human being has received his mathematics and the mechanical thinking related to it, which then lived out in the materialism of science, from the Orient, albeit very filtered. And in Europe, that which is, so to speak, the final product of the ancient oriental worldview, that which can arise out of the human being alone, for mathematics cannot be experienced externally, it must arise out of the human being, just like the ancient oriental worldview. And what has come to the European people is recognized by Galileo, by Newton, by the whole Western scientific spirit. It is one wing of the being that flies through the development of modern humanity, carrying the spirit of science to its highest heights. We see the mathematical spirit emerging, penetrating even the atoms with mathematics. The mathematical spirit is one side of modern science. And the other side, the other wing of this creature, which I have symbolically indicated, is what we can call the observation of the external world, the external observation of man himself.

This faithful observation of the external world was unknown to the Oriental. It is therefore not preserved in what remains of the old oriental world view, nor in the creeds. But it was revived within the European spirit of science. It is the other side of this spirit of science. This spirit of science grows out of two things: out of what arises from within the human being as mathematical thinking and observing, and out of what comes from observation. That which has been drawn into the soul of the European human being, especially the Western human being, has now also become decisive for social thinking. Anyone who, for example, can follow Adam Smith, Ricardo, all social thinkers up to Marx, up to the present ones, with an unprejudiced mind, will see that these two elements, which first entered into the scientific spirit, continue to be effective in social thinking as well. One need only survey with an unbiased mind what Adam Smith, and later Marx and others, have expounded, and one will find the thinking of Newton on the one hand, and the thinking of a mind like Spencer on the other, everywhere. And that which inspired Darwin to his theory of evolution can be found everywhere. But just as this spirit of science stopped in its tracks when it came to knowledge, and could not become a worldview in the field of knowledge, it could not become world-shaping in the social field. And so we see how this spirit, which has only been realized in these outstanding personalities, but which is basically inherent in all of European humanity, moves into a practical life that is increasingly becoming a true reflection of this spirit. Just as knowledge stops at the human being, so too does social life, in principle, stop at the human being.

What has this modern scientific spirit, which has educated and trained the leading minds, actually been able to achieve? Well, my dear audience, it has been able to achieve the magnificent modern technology. On the one hand, it introduced mathematical thinking into machines, into modern industrialism, into the modern monetary system, and even into the social organization of modern humanity. In this, this spirit has been great.

We can say that everything that is numerically recorded in the books of modern industry, of modern practice in general, is an image of this spirit that has become technology out of mathematics.

By contrast, little of the other, which is only just beginning to emerge, has been able to penetrate into the human being himself: observation, which is only now taking place on a large scale in the natural sciences. The fact that it has not been possible to penetrate to the human being with knowledge shows that it has not been possible to develop the strength to approach the human being in such a way as to understand the innermost part of the human being. What exists as a mere spirit of science in Adam Smith, in Ricardo and others, is evident in the whole of modern thinking, in that practice has become uninspired, that it has become a mere routine, that great in it is only the technique ; that great in it is everything that can come to the foothills of this technique, that can be great only in the work on the machine, but stops there, like knowledge before the human being, before all practical life, before social life. On the one hand, it stops short of man in knowledge; on the other hand, it stops short of man in social life. A person who today manages a factory, who is involved in a commercial enterprise or some other branch of modern practical life, cannot receive any education from what our scientific spirit in the West is, other than one that allows him to think right down to the very fibers of the technical, but which stops him as a foreman in front of the one who does the work.

It stops before man. It is terribly painful to follow this halting with inner understanding. Whoever looks into the human fabric of the present day sees how the leading and guiding circles, for whom the spirit of science has become authority, stop at nothing. They can enter everything that comes from the mathematical wing into their books, but how the education that comes from it as a people's education, as an education of the spirit, leaves no understanding for the human being as such. And so there is a boundary between people and people. And this boundary has become the terrible fate of modern civilization. Because that which could not be written in any head or cash book, where only the technical outflows are written, right down to the treatment of people, that arose in modern times with the demands of a humane existence, with other demands. And basically, even today there is no understanding to be found for the language that another class speaks in each case, for one class. People have lost their understanding for one another when they are in different classes, because the deeper understanding for the human being with the knowledge-understanding, also with the understanding, with the interest in practical life, has been lost. Today, the practitioner is a routinier, he is not informed by ideas. Why? Because the education that the modern spirit of science has brought with it does not allow him to bring ideas into actual social life at all, but has to stop at technical life.

This, ladies and gentlemen, points to one of the greatest tasks of the present day, because if nothing could be contributed to the solution of this greatest task, then such a fate would have to be fulfilled by modern humanity, as Oswald Spengler, with an ingenious eye but an all the more ingenious error, developed from an insight into almost all of the sciences of the present day. It is painful enough that today we not only see this decline happening, but also that there are brilliant scholars, but also brilliant aberrations, who prove with the same rigorous scientific method that the development will lead to barbarism, just as any historical or scientific thing is rigorously proven today.

My dear attendees, it was the insight into these circumstances that led to what I have been calling for two decades “anthroposophically oriented spiritual science” receiving its special tasks from the catastrophic events of recent times, which have grown together with the great tasks of the present. I may refer to a few specific examples.

In the last few weeks of September and the first of October, we were able to hold a series of university courses at the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach. Thirty lecturers were involved in these university courses, thirty people who have emerged from modern specialized science. Lecturers who worked in the fields of mathematics, linguistics, history, law, psychology, philosophy, economics, practical life – I could list many more areas – and also in the most important areas of medicine, healing and so on. What should these university courses, which differ radically from everything else that is currently presented to the world as intellectual life, seek to demonstrate?

Yes, let us start from what many well-meaning people today have already formed as their view. They think it necessary to renew modern human consciousness out of the spirit; we cannot try to do it with economic and state matters alone. We must take hold of the thinking of humanity, we must take hold of the world view.

Yes, but what do they actually want? They want to take what has been cultivated in modern educational institutions, through popular educational institutions, through adult education centers, and through popular educational associations, and bring it to the broadest sections of the population. They want to be progressive in almost all areas, while remaining conservative in the actual field of ideas. For it is believed that what we have as a modern scientific spirit is good enough. But anyone who looks impartially at modern life must say to themselves: the circles in which this life, this modern scientific spirit, with all its results, even for the practical routine – for that is what it has become under its influence – has affected, they have also sailed into the modern world catastrophe. Do we believe that that which it did not protect from this catastrophe should now be blessed by spreading it throughout the world? The same spirit that caused harm, that was bound to cause harm among a few, would cause even greater harm among many. Therefore, in Dornach, within the spirit of this School of Spiritual Science, on an anthroposophical basis, we do not stand on the conservative ground that the spiritual life that exists in our educational institutions should simply be carried out into the world, but that out of a new spirit, out of a renewal of the spiritual life, the necessary spirit, the spirit of the future, should first be carried into the educational institutions themselves – only then will it be able to take hold of the people.

Now I can well understand how one can be skeptical about what underlies this consideration, what underlay the Dornach college courses: anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. But I believe that a large proportion of those who listened – and there were very many of them, especially from the German student body – that those who listened got the impression: This anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not something that floats in a cloud cuckoo land of abstract ideas, but something that can have an effect on all branches of scientific, but also on all branches of practical life, which can transform the routine precisely in the field of practical life into reality imbued with ideas. One wants practical spirit in the spiritual life that is at stake.

Now it may seem absurd to modern people – I can understand that quite well, that it seems absurd to the old way of thinking – that something as intimate as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which I will describe in its basic features in a moment, should improve the impracticality of more recent times. People have simply become too accustomed to being caught up in routine, in uninspired practice. And they have become accustomed to letting theory be theory, because they basically only knew this theory as a sum of abstractions, and because they could not bring much more into practical life from what remained of the old Oriente as a worldview life than the first page in the account books, where it says “with God”. Whether there is a great deal of this attitude on the other pages, I leave to my contemporaries to judge more precisely.

What is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? My dear attendees, first of all, it should be mentioned that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not want to abandon the strictly scientific spirit that has asserted itself within modern civilization, but that, on the contrary, it wants to fully develop it. It is no coincidence that the name of the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach is the Goetheanum. The Goethean attitude is to be cultivated, developed, formed further. Goethe already had many elements of this modern anthroposophical spirit. However, he had a feeling that whatever he asserted in the field of science, that everything one says and scientifically means about living beings, for example, must be justifiable before the strictest mathematical spirit; only someone who can conscientiously justify himself before the strictest mathematician can be considered a scientist. That is precisely what this spiritual science wants. But it wants to let that which otherwise only comes to light in mathematics as the last remnant of the ancient oriental world view arise from the human being in a more lively way. There are methods – you can find more details in my “Occult Science”, in “How to Know Higher Worlds” and other writings – there are methods by which the inner human soul life can be treated in such a way that it develops. I would like to illustrate this with the following:

Let us turn our attention to a child who is still imperfect, to a five-year-old child. We put a volume of lyrical poems by Goethe in front of this child. What will he do with it? It will probably tear up the booklet if it is a healthy child. It will have no relationship to what the little book actually means. Ten years later or fifteen years later, the child will already have a different relationship; it will be able to immerse itself in what the little book actually means. It is the same with people in later years of life. However, one must penetrate to an intellectual modesty if one wants to approach anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Intellectual modesty recognizes that, however old a person has become, they came to methodically develop their inner soul abilities. As I said, I have described the methods in the books mentioned and would just like to indicate that one can, through a particular deepening of the life of the imagination, through such a deepening of the life of the imagination, which, above all, arises from the will in the soul through meditation, that through such a treatment of the life of imagination, which I cannot describe in detail here, one can come to deepen certain forces in the human being that can otherwise be developed through ordinary education. And what I mean by intellectual modesty leads one to the conclusion that through what one develops simply through ordinary education, the world of one's surroundings and the world of the human being itself lies before one, as the Goethe book lies before the five-year-old child. One must develop the inner soul power to a higher level, then one learns to read the book of nature in a different way. Then one approaches this book of nature with different powers of the human soul.

What are these human soul abilities that one develops? In ordinary consciousness, as everyone knows, what we call memory plays an enormous role. We need this ability to remember. If it becomes even slightly ill, if only a small part of what we have in our memory is erased in the human soul, if there is a discontinuity of memory, then the soul suffers shipwreck. The illnesses that can occur as a result of this memory disorder are terrible. Memory is a force for normal theoretical and practical human life, but it can be further developed.

What is it, then, in our ordinary consciousness that makes us who we are in the present moment, in our very soul? After all, we are fundamentally what we are in every age of our lives through our memory. What we have experienced in life since childhood, what has settled in our innermost being, sometimes in the subconscious of our soul life, is what actually makes up our being in the present moment. And we look at this being by looking back from what we are at the present time, remembering what we have experienced since childhood. It is precisely this power, ladies and gentlemen, that can be developed to a higher level of knowledge.

Even today, very few people believe this. In this field, it is just as it was at the time of Copernicus, for example, when very few people believed what Copernicus said about world phenomena. Today, very few people still believe that by immersing oneself in certain ideas through meditation, by not surrendering, as is usually the case in the outer life, to the ordinary course of ideas, but by immersing oneself in ideas that one has first formed or that one has transmitted from a teacher, to remain absorbed in such ideas for years through strict, inwardly regulated exercises, exercises that are regulated like the laws of calculation, mathematics, geometry – few people believe that this can be achieved by strictly scientific methods, just as strictly scientific as work in a chemical laboratory. But it is possible that we can further develop the human capacity for memory through this; develop it in such a way that not only our present mental life appears to us as a result of our experiences and what we have experienced since our birth, but that our whole being appears to us, how it stands with its physical body in the world, how he has entered it through heredity with his physical body at birth, or rather at conception, into this physical world, is the result of events that preceded his conception, not only in the merely human, but within the whole cosmos. Just as one looks back through one's ordinary memory to one's life since childhood, so one learns to look back to something that lies outside this life between birth or conception and death. One learns to look back on what the human being was spiritually before he became physical. One gets to know the reality of spiritual life. One gets to know what the human being still carries within him today as something eternal, from which his cognitive, community and social life radiates, in his experience of a life before birth or conception. And one learns to answer a significant question: Why does such an insight into prenatal life, into the life of a human being in the spirit, appear so absurd to today's Western humanity? And one learns to recognize that the eternal part of the human being has only been cultivated on the other side through centuries, even millennia.

This was not the case during the heyday of worldviews in the Orient. This is how it became in the West. People wanted to speak to the soul life with human selfishness. And human egoism also influenced what was developed as a view of the eternal in man. As a result, no belief, no knowledge, no insight into the eternal was gained, because only the end of life that passes through the gate of death was considered. This is even expressed in outward appearances. We have a word “immortality”, we use it to point to what lies beyond death. But in our present language we have no word that expresses that this eternal was there before birth or conception, we have no word, such as unbirthliness, being unborn or the like as an ordinary word. We have no word that corresponds to the word immortality as the other side of life.

But then, when we use strict methods to develop that which in ordinary life only lives as memory into a [higher] faculty of knowledge, then knowledge becomes not mere belief, but insight, that which the human being has experienced before he was taken up into the hereditary stream of physical life through conception. This will one day become true science, as the Copernican and Keplerian worldviews became true science. But it will become science; it will not be mere belief. For belief arose precisely because people only looked at the afterlife, not at the prenatal life.

In order to be able to look at the prenatal, one cannot remain with the soul life as before; one must develop other powers. Knowledge of the higher worlds is not given as a grace; it is only attained through inner effort. But then what has been discovered about the eternal nature of man spreads like a light, and also to the natural world around us. Then all the laws of nature that we learn about will be imbued with spirit. Then we will no longer speak of a materialistic world of atoms, but of a spirit that also underlies nature and from which we are born.

So you see, in the field of knowledge, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science opens up a perspective on the question: What is the human being? It does not stop at the human being. It goes right to the heart of what is man's deepest yearning for knowledge in relation to his own nature. And that which has been drawn into the modern world as an observing spirit must, so to speak, deepen of its own accord when a person undergoes such inner soul exercises. When a person truly develops within themselves a higher faculty of knowledge that can look beyond birth into the spiritual world, their approach to external observation becomes quite different from that of mere natural science. In this natural science, we are proud, and I emphasize again: with full justification, to observe that in which we have as little human part as possible, where the human interior is not involved. But, my dear audience, anyone who, through the power of imagination, works on their soul in such a way that their ability to remember reaches a higher level, will also be directly encouraged to further develop the other powers of the soul, especially the will. If he does this, if he also develops the will higher under the constant onslaught of the cognitive faculty, as I have just shown in its higher development, then the relationship that we otherwise have to external nature becomes one of inner devotion. Then one does not remain on the surface and merely state material atoms that one invents and that are not found, but one grows together with what is inside things. Only now do we begin to understand Goethe's view, which he wanted to express when he used the words against Haller, which you are well aware of. Haller had said:

No created spirit can penetrate into the innermost part of nature.

Happy he to whom she only shows the outer shell.

And Goethe replied:

“Into the innermost part of nature” - Oh, you philistines —
“No created spirit can penetrate,"
you may mention such a word
only not to me and my brothers and sisters
. We think: place by place
we are within.
“Happy the one who sees
only the outer shell!"
I hear that repeated for sixty years,
I curse it, but furtively,
Tell me a thousand, a thousand times:
She gives everything abundantly and gladly,
Nature has neither core nor
Shell,
She is everything at once;
She only tests you, most of all,
Whether you are core or shell.

This does not come naturally to man either. He must develop his will to a higher level. He must, so to speak, develop in his inner soul being that which is otherwise expressed as will emotions in his outer life. I can express myself in the following way: Our knowledge, namely our knowledge of nature, usually remains what we call objective, impersonal. But when we are in the midst of our ordinary lives, when we are with our friends, when we are dealing with our own destiny, with what we have to do in life, then we are bound to our surroundings with interest. Then our personal life wells up within us. Then we experience joy and pain, pleasure and suffering; in exaltation and in what we feel as depression, as despair, we experience something inwardly. On a higher level, just as objectively as anything else becomes objective in science, one can, if one [develops the will] through the methods I have described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, delve into the essence of things. With the innermost human being, one is, as it were, immersed in the interior of natural things. One does not, however, discover atoms, but spiritual realities, that which underlies natural phenomena as a spiritual, humanly related supporting force. And one now makes a special discovery in relation to cognition and willful penetration into nature. If one has trained one's memory to look at prenatal life, one notices that everything becomes dark and silent, unclear and uncomfortable if one does not stand on the same strict spirit of science as the external science.

My dear attendees, with mystical ramblings, with all that is expressed in popular theosophy, with all this enthusiasm and all this fantasy, one does not get along with what true spiritual research is. All this rambling mysticism only descends into ambiguity. With the spirit that one has first been educated in modern science, one must seek this development of the soul, as I have indicated. Only then does one understand how science continues into the human being.

But then, when one wants to enter into the inner being of nature through the development of willpower, one then realizes what one is missing if one does not develop it ever further and further. What is so very beautiful in ordinary life, but is influenced by selfishness, must be had; it must be had in the fullest sense if one wants to immerse oneself in the beings of the world through willpower. One must have love for all the beings around one. Anyone who cannot develop love, completely selfless love, the only passion of the human being that is free of selfishness – many a great mind has expressed itself precisely in relation to love – anyone who does not have this true love in their personality will notice how darkness and coldness confront them when they want to immerse themselves, to give themselves to the outer world, to outer nature, when they want to find the spirit in the external world. In this way, through the cultivation of the will, observation can be fathomed, which, due to the modern spirit of science, only remains on the surface. And when one fathoms observation by penetrating into what is to be observed, one learns to recognize yet another.

In the same way that the spirit of knowledge allows us to look at prenatal life, we now learn to look with a new spirit at what has developed since birth as our soul life. At first it takes on abstract forms, just as it appears to ordinary introspection, self-knowledge. But when we develop what I have characterized as immersion in the external world, as a deepened sense of observation, then we come to know what we are in every moment of our lives, what we are at the present moment, as the spiritual soul germ of the future. Then belief in immortality is transformed into the realization of immortality.

But what must be brought to the people if he is to develop this kind of knowledge? I have said that on the one hand, on the side of knowledge, the right spirit of science must be developed. But it does not stop, it does not stop at the human being. This spirit of science becomes a worldview. And we have to establish a science for the future that can be a worldview, just as the old orientalism had a worldview that was free of science. And we have to grasp anew from this science, which can be a worldview again, an experienced worldview, what the mystery of Golgotha, the mystery of Christianity, is. (This mystery of Golgotha is a fact.) It is a calumny when it is said here or there that anthroposophical spiritual science disregards Christianity. No, it is precisely cowardice when one wants to claim that Christianity has something to lose when a new spiritual stage of human development approaches this Christianity, approaches the facts of Christianity. Christianity is so great that it can endure all discoveries in the material and spiritual realms until the end of earthly days. And just as it was once believed that the Copernican spirit could put an end to Christianity, and just as they wanted to eradicate it, so too is this spiritual science being treated today. It is being vilified and they want to wipe it out. But it will not contribute to the belittlement of Christianity, but to its exaltation, in that it will make Christianity, the Mystery of Golgotha, comprehensible again to the modern spirit, to modern striving, as a spiritual event that gives meaning to the evolution of the earth. - That according to the side of knowledge.

And on the practical side of life, if we want to penetrate into observation that does not merely want to remain an observation of nature, we must develop the spirit of love. If we do not have love, it is not possible to deepen our external observation. We educate our scientific spirit by educating ourselves at the same time to become a spirit of love. This, however, gives us the opportunity to connect with things. That was the terribly tragic thing about the modern development of humanity: that in the modern spirit of science, man lived alienated from humanity on abstract heights, that he could not penetrate into practical life because he was also far removed from the spirit of nature itself. By penetrating into the spirit of nature and combining with scientific knowledge in the field of cognition, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science prepares for the coexistence with the reality of outer human life, the human community: the spiritual life of humanity, the legal or state life of humanity, the economic life of humanity. From the way we live with the objects of science, we learn to approach even the most practical external things, right down to the dexterity of the hand. From the routine workers, who only had the spirit of the educational institutions alongside them, which could not be practical because the modern spirit of science was just as I have explained it, a spirit-filled life practice will develop from this kind of modern routine. Then people will no longer say that spiritual life can only be an ideology, a construction based on economic processes, but will recognize how man has always been and must be, who also carries his spiritual life into his social community, who can only shape economic life if he has first educated himself in his spiritual life in such a way that he knows how to live together with reality.

This is what will be recognized more and more: that spiritual science is practical because it helps people to grow together with reality. Therefore, as a practitioner, as an economic practitioner, he will be immersed in reality. Just as one should not stop in the sense of this spiritual science before recognizing the human being, so too should one not, with this attitude, which cannot develop without spiritual science, stand before humanity as a labor leader or as a laborer in social life if one only understands the fundamentals.

People like Keynes demand that we do more than merely carry out the actions of statesmen. On the last pages of his book, this man, despairing of the present, says: What do we have to do in the near future? Spread the truth, destroy illusions, disperse hatred, educate people to live together. - Yes, my dear attendees, how do we do that? But this question cannot be answered by external measures, but only by pointing to the foundation of human life itself and its transformation in the present. What thoughts should we spread? Not those that led to the catastrophe. We should spread those thoughts that do not stop at the human being in the life of knowledge and in the social life. We will not destroy illusions if people [believe] that they can prove these illusions, especially those of social life, from the spirit of modern science. How are we to destroy the illusion that we are sailing into barbarism when someone like Spengler, who is truly brilliant, wants to prove that humanity will inevitably sail into barbarism in the third millennium? How are we to [disperse] hatred if we do not create the bridge, create the bridge in love between person and person, between all people, but in a love that is not preached but that is educated by the intellectual forces?

If science is only cold sobriety, only a cold spirit of science, and love is not also educated, then it will not be able to penetrate public life through any socialist theories, which are only the children of this spirit of science.

The fact that this modern anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not want to stop at what is theory is shown, first of all, in the one area where the great question of the time, the great task of the present, confronts us: in the field of education. The independent Waldorf School in Stuttgart was founded in response to an impulse from Mr. Emil Molt, and is based on the spirit of anthroposophical spiritual science. It was founded not so much in order that the spirit of some abstract worldview might bring a new religious belief into this school, so that children might be educated in anthroposophy, as it were. Not at all. But something else is the case. Those who take up anthroposophy as a living reality in their soul life develop from it the practical tools of education and teaching; they develop a pedagogical art that is no longer connected with what led us into the catastrophe, but with what is longed for as the spirit of the future.

In the field of intellectual life, thanks to Emil Molt's creation, you have something that wants to develop the art of education out of the human being; out of that knowledge of the human being that can only flow from the soil of such a science, which does not stop short of recognizing and willing before the human being. In this way, what grows in the child from week to week can be developed in such a way that the human being presents himself as a being who can truly shape social life in love in practice, that routine is eradicated; that spirit-filled reality and spirit-filled practice are substituted for routine.

And, my dear attendees, when we see today what even well-meaning people intend to do in public life in the face of the great challenges of the time, well, on the one hand there is the revival of parliamentary life – this is not meant as a criticism of parliamentary life, which has its justification – but of that which has borne such fruit, of that economic life which has basically emerged only from the malformation of modern times. We see today how labor participation is introduced in the formation of large trusts, but this will lead to nothing different than national education would lead if it only came from today's educational institutions, where what is left of the old is proclaimed as a new gospel.

Just as I was driving to this lecture, I was given an essay by an English educator who had recently visited the Waldorf School in Stuttgart and become acquainted with what it aims to achieve. Strangely enough, he says: This Waldorf School does not present in its educational system the results of what has been called modern education up to now, but it presents a completely new educational art to the world. Through direct observation, this writer, who is himself an English lecturer, gained the following insight: he says: What is lived out in spiritual science, not in theories but through the art of education itself, shows that this spiritual science is not a confluence of abstract “pathways” — as he puts it — but it is that which, as a living thing, can flow into the shaping of humanity, into direct practical life.

Thus, with our Waldorf School, we have sought to achieve something practical in the spiritual realm, the one realm of the threefold social organism we are striving for, based on the spirit of anthroposophical spiritual science. And what has been achieved in one year, because the Waldorf School has only existed for so long, can of course only be a beginning. But you see, one recognizes in this beginning a new educational spirit, an educational spirit of the future.

Starting from this, this same man says: What is the essential thing here? The essential thing in this Waldorf School is that one cannot say - and he says that the teachers themselves, with whom he has spoken, admit this - that this is an ideal for all time that one only has to imitate. No, what comes from there can only come from spiritual science; it must always flow out of spiritual science in practical ways. And the man looked around further. He saw what other practical things had been dealt with. And it is a lot when it is said from this side of the world: spiritual science gives so many impulses that practical people can be educated for a very practical life in the future.

Spiritual science does not want to go crazy in some unrealistic cloud cuckoo land, but the great tasks of the present are such that they directly approach our most ordinary life. But spiritual science can also deal with this most ordinary life practice, even though it rises to the highest spiritual heights. And we may cherish the hope that what is already being seen in the spiritual realm by those who want to see it will also prove valid in some practical areas, and can prove valid more and more.

That is why the courses at the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach were held on the subject of reforming all of scientific life, because a transformation of thinking, of the whole world view, must be the starting point for anything that can contribute to solving the great questions posed by the present day.

And one will admit from the example that I have just given, but which could be multiplied by numerous others, that it means something when something is recognized by this spirit from abroad in today's world that we are doing in the middle of Germany.

My dear attendees, we must not forget the memory, the living and active memory of that which lived in Goethe and Schiller, the great Germans. We must develop it further. It was with this in mind that we built the Goetheanum in this border area that opens up to the West, to the victors in Switzerland, because we wanted to express the spirit in which even the most practical things should be created. And if we imbibe this attitude, then there will be more examples of the recognition of our achievements from the old German spirit, despite the spirit of the present civilization lying outside of Germany. Outwardly, we could be defeated. But what we will achieve if we remain true to the German spirit, to what is greatest in the German people, will be recognized. And spiritual science can already point to examples of how what is brought before the world today out of the truly German spirit is, after all, recognized.

In this way, spiritual science can also play a practical role in the recovery of national and international life, because it wants to be realistic in relation to all areas and therefore practical in the truest sense of life; it wants to be practical because it does not develop a practice that denies the spirit, does not strive for a spirit that is alien to reality, but because it strives for a true, genuine, eternal spirit, which, however, is not there merely for theoretical or confessional contemplation, but which is able to have an active influence on matter. A material life that does not deny the spirit, a spirit that does not feel too proud to conquer material life - that is what is connected with the great tasks of the present and the future. Thus we will have to solve the great tasks of the present and the near future in the sense of reconciling the true spirit with the material, also with the practical, with the economic life.

Dear attendees,

What arose out of anthroposophical spiritual science as the impulse for the threefold social order needs to be explained, not defended, time and again in the face of the view that the threefold social order is utopian. Anyone who really delves into my essay 'The Key Points of the Social Question' or into the wealth of literature that has since been written on it can see the fundamental difference between what is intended here, precisely on the basis of anthroposophy, and what is usually associated with utopias, utopian ideas in social, economic or other respects.

Otherwise, it is pointed out, and it is even taken for granted that it should be pointed out, how one or other institutions must be set up in order to lead to this or that satisfactory result or condition for humanity. The view of life that underlies the impulse for the threefold social order knows that, in the face of today's conditions, the assertion of any utopian ideas would be quite meaningless. Yes, I have stated in the new edition of my 'Key Points of the Social Question', which is just being published, in the rewritten preface, that I would not expect anything from any purely theoretical descriptions, however it should be in the future, even if these descriptions were to be written with the greatest of spirit. For today it is not at all a matter of expressing any ready-made, ingenious ideas about social institutions, but rather, today, in the face of humanity proud of its maturity, it is a matter of pointing out the opportunities under which, through social cooperation, people can bring about what is desirable. Thus, the impulse for the threefold social organism is not meant to characterize how the world should look, but how this social organism itself should bring people into certain mutual relationships so that people, according to their respective abilities and needs, create the conditions in which they can live in the future.

The idea is that the social organism should be structured not into three classes, but into three particular social entities, in each of which every person has a share. This structure should be into a free spiritual life, a state or political life and an independent economic life. And at the root of this lies the view that if people shape their circumstances through such a threefold social organism, then what is socially viable must come from the people themselves. So it is not a matter of presenting something utopian, but rather of characterizing opportunities under which people themselves, each individual, one might say, can gain influence over the social shaping of life that is commensurate with their abilities and needs and that must carry the necessary weight to bring about conditions that are conducive to life.

This is the fundamental difference between the impulse for the threefold social organism and, one might say, everything else that has understandably sprung up in our time out of the deep need of this time. But precisely this necessity, this basic principle, of peeling the social organism, which has become abstractly unified, into its three natural parts so that they can in turn work together all the more intimately, is still little understood in wider circles today. And that, my dear ladies and gentlemen, can on the one hand be found quite understandable, on the other hand it must be deeply regretted, because today we really do not have unlimited time to get out of the crisis and out of the decline, but because we need to get to the real spirit in spiritual, political and economic terms as soon as possible. But I said it is understandable. And one must consider the way in which it is understandable, in order to perhaps also find the way to improvement from it.

I would like to take as my starting point a judgment that has been made recently, not because it appears in a book by an economist, but because it is characteristic, despite being expressed by an individual here, of the way of thinking of the broadest circles - of the way of thinking that is precisely the sharpest obstacle to the intervention of such an impulse as that of threefolding.

It may be said that the economist and Jena professor Fritz Terhalle has written a very readable book about free and controlled price formation. The problem of price formation is, after all, the one that must be at the center of economic thinking. Terhalle sharply criticizes the price formation processes that took place during the war. It may be said that much of this writing is downright brilliantly illuminating what is actually present in current economic thinking. Terhalle asks what the benefits and effects were of the various price regulations that were issued by the state during the war. And I am allowed to share with you his four points, in which he summarizes his judgment. After he has presented in detail how the effects have shown, after again and again official bodies have issued price regulations, laws about prices – after he has examined these effects, carefully examined them, he summarizes his overall judgment in the following four points:

[First: Most of the time, the interested and relevant circles had a false conception of what should be striven for. Second: The uncertainty caused by this, as well as by the application to practice and by the practice of thoroughly opposing theoretical constructions, as well as, finally, by the most diverse jurisprudence, brought the participating circles of buyers into very undesirable confusion and agitation. Thirdly: The fight against price gouging was almost unsuccessful in some areas, particularly in primary production, and only partially successful in others, and often to an excessive extent, especially in some branches of retail trade.

And the fourth point, in which this economist sums up his judgment, is particularly characteristic. He says:

All these factors combined to damage the real business in favor of profiteering.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is how a man expresses himself who expressly wants to be scientific, who wants to scientifically examine the corresponding phenomena. And this is his scientific judgment of what the state did to regulate prices during the time of need.

But there is something else: the fact that this economist, from his scientific point of view, which he calls the national economic point of view – and one should believe that it is self-evident that economic demands must be judged from the national economic point of view – he states that from his scientific, national economic point of view, this way of the state influencing economic life is to be condemned. So he names these phenomena, which have come to light as a result of these state interventions, as those that he must fight from his scientific point of view. And then he says something quite extraordinarily characteristic. He says:

Yes, that is the [economic] judgment, but perhaps this [economic] judgment is one that must not be decisive, perhaps something more important, something more significant comes into question much, much more. And as such a more important, more significant factor, he cites the economic policy points of view, behind which what must be asserted from the economic point of view must recede.

So we are told that one can know that something is economically justified, but the economist must keep quiet, because anything that may come from one side or the other that is harmful from the point of view of economic policy must be put in its place.

Well, my dear attendees, one cannot resign more clearly from economic thinking than in this way. It cannot be stated more clearly that economic thinking cannot come into its own within the unified social organism of the state if those who feel professionally called to make this judgment say: This is our honest scientific conviction, but it must take a back seat to the state's economic policy measures. These are more important in the given case.

Do we not have a clear indication from the facts of life: economic life must be placed on its own ground; it is necessary that within the social organism this economic life be detached from that which it must damage when it places itself above it.

Those who today judge such things not from theoretical considerations but from full life practice, who in particular from life practice overlook the helplessness of people in these matters, can grasp with their hands how necessary it is to place economic life on its own healthy basis. And that this is only possible if, on the other hand, spiritual life is placed on its own basis, I have often stated here, and I will have to touch on it again in the further course of today's lecture. But I would still like to start from a remark that is made precisely by the side that I have characterized.

After the helplessness of economic thinking in the face of current social conditions has been admitted in this way, the emphasis is on what will actually matter in the future. And there Terhalle says:

In the future, it will be more important than ever to educate the masses about economic necessities so that they are able to think in economic terms.

It is remarkable that on the one hand the old unitary state is invoked as the higher authority, and then the demand is made not for some beautiful economic institutions – that is quite clever of Terhalle – but the demand is made that the people be taught about economic interrelations. And if you read on, this knowledge that the people should acquire about economic interrelationships extends even to the constitution of the market and market conditions. It is demanded that the people be enlightened in order to place themselves in the economic organism under the influence of this enlightenment in such a way that this economic organism can flourish. On the one hand, then, a remarkable judgment on economic policy, on the other hand, an appeal to the economic education of the people. And it is clearly recognized that it is precisely here, as a necessity, for the economic politician, the economist, that the economic actions themselves, that the whole economic behavior should change, so that people no longer how prices are determined, with a complete lack of knowledge about the structure of the market, about other economic relationships, but that each individual acts with economic enlightenment, and brings this economic enlightenment into the immediate economic activity itself. In abstracto, a very, very reasonable demand! But an important question arises from this whole context, my dear attendees, and that is this: where should this enlightenment about economic necessities come from in the future?

It is interesting that Terhalle quotes the socialist Richard Calwer with reference to a thought that the same expresses. He once said:

You need sufficient, well-founded knowledge of the goods in stock in order to be able to operate the economic supply in an appropriate manner; in other words, to arrive at appropriate economic pricing. You need knowledge of the goods in stock.

Yes, but how can this be applied? Where can it come from? And how can one educate the people with such knowledge of the supply of goods – and of course a lot of other things are necessary to educate the people about economic necessities – how can one educate the people with such knowledge?

You see, certain people, I might say, chew and chew on certain questions and get nowhere. These are the questions that the impulse for the threefold social order has envisaged in a concrete, appropriate, practical way. He started from the knowledge that a certain realization, a certain insight into economic conditions, into economic activity itself, must penetrate. But he does not declaim that such an enlightenment must be created, regardless of who is to create it. Nor does he declare that it should be created by the old unitary state. He also knows that this education must not be of a very specific kind, because an education of a certain kind, which such people probably always think of, would not be of any use at all. Because let us assume that the “clever” idea - I say “clever” in quotation marks, of course - of setting up state commissioners, state councils or whatever they are called, somehow expert councils, which, according to the known methods of today, by means of all kinds of statistics or the like, would gain knowledge of the constitution of economic conditions, and they would then, in the ways that are popular today, go among the people and create enlightenment, so that the people would then do business under the influence of this enlightenment - what would be achieved? Exactly the same would be achieved, my dear attendees, which in numerous places Terhalle criticizes with regard to the education that has always been created by the authorities during the war. There are many passages in his very interesting book in which he points out how all possible explanations, more as a sedative, were quickly thrown behind the people in rapid succession from all possible sources in the agitated times. But he states this not only for the reason, which was indeed also present, that people were so inundated with such explanations that they did not take them into account at all, but also for the other reason that such things have no effect at all when they are brought to the people in this way. Why don't they work? For the simple reason that such explanations only speak to the human mind, only speak to the human intellect, because such explanations have to be grasped with the head. And then, after what one has found reasonable, one would have to act accordingly. One would always have to say to oneself: “You must do what is reasonable!”

That is not the way to spread economic enlightenment. Oh no. This is how economic enlightenment is spread by abstract theorists who judge not by life but by their ideas about life; one could also say, by their illusions about life. Those who know what life is like have a different kind of enlightenment: an enlightenment built on the trust between the one who enlightens and the one who is to be enlightened. An enlightenment that does not speak in general terms, but in the individual, concrete terms that are currently present according to economic needs or economic circumstances, and that has an enlightening effect at the same time as action is taken. In other words, those who work together must be united in such a way that simply by meeting in economic action, one has an enlightening effect on the other. One is more familiar with the conditions of consumption in one area, the other with the conditions of production in another, depending on which branch of economic life he is more familiar with. If you know from life that he is in there, if you have other concrete connections with him in life, then you trust him and believe what he says. And in turn, he accommodates you with regard to what you yourself say, which he cannot know. And while you are communicating in this way, the economic actions are taking place. Economic enlightenment and economic activity do not fall apart, but by negotiating in a circle of trust, where producers and consumers, depending on the different circumstances, are drawn together, by negotiating in such a circle of trust, one clarifies oneself economically. One clarifies oneself within this circle. One clarifies oneself from the facts. Enlightenment is drawn into life. Enlightenment is not treated as something that is poured into the people from the outside. Because, my dear attendees, there can also be a social ethos in economic activity, because what is negotiated from person to person and is done in the negotiation is based on mutual trust, on such a trust that, in its potentization, may already be mentioned as real economic fraternity.

And this, my dear attendees, is the associative principle. The associative principle consists of nothing other than people who have some kind of economic interaction with each other joining together, associating, and the associations associating further. In this way, what is necessary for the maintenance of the economy comes about. In this way, what is effective in the economy itself comes about through direct knowledge of economic life.

Everywhere you can see that what underlies the threefold order is drawn from life itself. Only that this life is not looked at in terms of familiar illusions and illusionist theories, but in such a way that one looks at people, at people's perceptions and feelings, and above all, one asks oneself: how do people gain trust in each other? Imagine what it would mean if price regulations were to arise out of such a relationship of trust, instead of being dictated from outside. It should therefore not be said in any way that in order to arrive at a fair price, it must be done in such and such a way. Rather, it should be pointed out that if such associations exist and deal with pricing, then the corresponding prices will emerge from such a real economic life. It is not said that one should do it this way or that, but rather it is said: in this way people should join together, so that out of this union the things necessary arise, and so the other economic institutions, the other economic measures.

That is the reality of thinking about the threefold social organism. And I have often pointed this out, and I would just like to repeat it here briefly, that economic life has its own laws. The size of the associations arises automatically from the economic conditions of a territory. Associations that are too small would work too expensively, and associations that are too large would be unwieldy. I have explained this in more detail in the new preface to my “Key Points”. All the objections that are currently being raised against the associative principle disintegrate into nothing when one considers the real conditions. This associative principle alone will be able to meet the world-historical demands of social life in an appropriate way and to fulfill them. And how are these world-historical demands of social life expressed?

Now, my dear audience, the economic part of social life has actually only in the second half of the nineteenth century become what it is today. It is only from what became of the economic body of civilized humanity in the second half of the nineteenth century and has remained until our days, only from that could arise that which is nevertheless the main basis of our world war catastrophe, the economic confusion of the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century. How did it come about? We can say that if we take the immediately preceding signature of the economy of civilized humanity, then what we can call the world trade principle has gradually emerged from earlier forms of human coexistence. We can already speak of a world trade principle in the eighteenth century, and even more so in the first half of the nineteenth century. But what then emerged from the world trade principle in economic life is the world economy. And the world economy is something other than mere world trade and what it encompasses. A world economy is only present at the moment when different states exchange their production in such a way that what one obtains as raw products, the other processes in industry; that an economic production community arises between different state territories. Before that, it was essentially – always essentially, of course – the case that the states had closed national economies, that they traded their surpluses externally, and obtained from outside what they could not produce themselves. But the fact that a common working practice, as it was particularly brought about by the cotton industry – the characteristic example of what the world economy has created – spread across the whole of civilized humanity, is actually only a result of the very latest times. And one should not believe that what can be characterized as a world economy and what has established a far-reaching dependency of the individual national economies on each other, that this just hangs over humanity like a cloud.

No, dear attendees, what is happening in the world economy is affecting every single household. Every single person is finally under the influence of this world economy. But for this world economy, the earlier communities, which were aimed at something quite different, the unit states, were simply too small. They were also constituted in such a way that they were not geared to this mutual interdependence in the world economy. In short, the associations that existed in the past, which emerged from the household economy into the city economy, then into the state economy, became too small. Economic life went beyond what these associations could achieve. And finally, anyone who does not look at the surface of the phenomena, but who studies with all thoroughness the causes of the war between Central Europe and the western regions of the civilized world, knows that they arose from the breaking down of national borders by the world economy. And if you look at it that way, you have to seriously raise the question: How can we heal what the world economy, which is simply an historical necessity because of the spread of transport conditions and the possibilities it offers, has made unhealthy? The only way is to recognize that This economy and its institutions, which have arisen out of it, that one also asks about the state of mind, the whole ethos of the people who work within this world economy, how one can come out of this world economy itself to a shaping of economic life. The impulse for the threefold social order provides the answer: the kind of cooperation within the world economy that follows from it itself, not from the old institutions, is the associative principle in economic life. Now that the old associations, which came from something else and which coped with the old form of economic life, have been reduced to absurdity, the economy itself must give itself its associations. And these associations, as I have described them today more ethically, otherwise more economically, as they are also clearly characterized in my book “The Core Issues of the Social Question”, these associations, as they arise out of economic life itself, are demanded by the idea of the threefold social organism. And these associations can be created at any moment, without resorting to utopian dreams, if people in the economic sphere simply turn to themselves and thereby bring about the emancipation of economic life. When associations arise, they will initially only be able to do what the outside world allows them to do, but they will prove themselves in what they do, and then they will have to be allowed to exist, because they will prove fruitful for the economy.

But, my dear attendees, when you look at how the necessity for associations arises from the modern organization of the global economy, then on the other hand you have to ask yourself: how can that be brought about which must work in people who associate? Those people who want to work in associations that are built on trust must be able to inspire trust. This means that people must be able to place themselves in the world in such a way that this trust can work within the associations simply out of the whole human soul mood, out of the whole human soul condition. In other words, we need not only economically oriented associations; we need people in the associations who work socially, people whose social work is permeated by moral principles, by spiritual perspectives. That is why it is impossible to imagine any improvement in economic life without a simultaneous metamorphosis of intellectual life itself. For why, one might ask, do people today think, in a perfectly understandable way, that you can educate the people by simply pouring some kind of enlightenment from above down onto them? Why do people think this way? Because, under the spiritual development of the last few centuries, they have gradually become accustomed to the idea that everything that is reasonably thought must only have an effect on the intellect of the human being, must only take hold of the intellect of the human being. In order to show the right thing in this point, I have just pointed out in the lectures that preceded this one, in this week's lecture, but also in earlier lectures, what the most significant characteristic of spiritual science is.

The most significant characteristic of the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here is that it is drawn from such deep sources of human nature and being that, in turn, as it spreads, it must have an effect on the whole person, if this whole person is educated in such a way that he or she opens up to it. Spiritual science is characterized by its effect on the whole human being and its effect from the whole human being. And this is what we need on the other side. We cannot bring economic life up if we do not have people who stand firmly with both feet on this earth and who also receive the soul nourishment from spiritual life that allows them to stand with both feet on this earth. It is a commonly held opinion today that this spiritual nourishment can be obtained simply by spreading the kind of education that is cultivated under the roofs of our schools, in adult education associations, in public libraries and adult education colleges.

But let us look at an example – we must always look at things in concrete terms – of how today's intellectual education works precisely where it is supposed to have an effect on the human mind, where it seeks to take hold of the moral and spiritual content of the human being above all. Anthroposophy is thoroughly explored by the recently mentioned theologian Kurt Leese, who is a pastor; it says so on the title page. I don't know the man, I only know the book. So he is a pastor. He is one of those personalities of whom one would have to assume, within a healthy social organism, that when he speaks, something will resonate from his words that will pour into souls in such a way that the souls will feel within themselves the moral, spiritual and soul impulses that are within them. That people who receive this spiritual life become aware of what a human being actually is to them, what a human being is within the cosmic order that they see around them in the stars, the clouds, in lightning and thunder, in the succession of earthly and world-historical events. Just think what it means for human feeling, for the human soul, when one can say to oneself, from within the spiritual life, I am not only a forsaken child in a physical body, but I am something that has been born out of the whole physical and spiritual and spiritual universe. I belong to the universe in so far as this universe is eternal. Feel what happens in the soul when a person feels at home in the cosmos. This goes as far as the forces of the blood, which gives one the strength to act in life; this permeates and spiritualizes the will when one knows what one is as a human being in the universe. But this should come to him through the cultivation of spiritual life. Anthroposophy tries to give people such a spiritual life. But what does the pastor, licentiate of theology Kurt Leese, say? He says:

What is all this talk about the service of knowledge, about the riddles of life and their solution? What is all this surge of knowledge into the depths of the primeval world and into the distance when anthroposophy

- here it says: “theosophy” -

cannot say why it is better to be an ego than a non-ego. And why, in fact, are seven world ages necessary?

And then this pastor and licentiate in theology says: the anthroposophist knows just as little about this as we do, so he also adheres to mere facticity.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, here we have the representative of the present-day spiritual life, and it is not just one person speaking, the individual can only be cited as one example, thousands and thousands are speaking, and they speak in the name of the spiritual life. They say: one cannot arrive at this, at this why it is better to be an I than a non-I, that is, to be in the eternal unconsciousness of the external natural existence.

In contrast to this, anthroposophical spiritual science emphasizes – this may emerge as a result of many lectures I have given here – anthroposophical spiritual science emphasizes what it means to become aware of how one stands in this universe. Let us just take our starting point for comparison from everyday life. We human beings in our everyday lives have gone through certain experiences since the time when we can remember back to our earliest childhood. We feel connected to these experiences. These experiences emerge in our memory as either friendly or painful. But what we bring up here is basically ourselves. We feel merged with what we have gone through in suffering and joy and what we can remember. We are aware that we are what has passed through us as pain and joy and then, through this passing, has been drawn into our soul. In our ordinary lives, we only become aware of something as a small human being by connecting with that which we have been connected with since our birth, that which has approached us and, in a sense, belongs to us. What does anthroposophy do? It expands, as it were, this sense of belonging together of the human being with the environment to the whole world, which can enter into his consciousness. As otherwise the human being only feels as one with his personal experiences, anthroposophy draws his attention to how he is connected in his being with the whole being of the world that can be perceived and experienced by him. The small consciousness of the personality expands into world consciousness. Together we grow with all the historical development of humanity, in that we recognize how we are always and again involved in it. We become one with the world. And in the same measure in which this consciousness of the world expands, this consciousness, which we otherwise have through our natural development with our experiences in suffering and joy, this consciousness, through which we also become participants in the suffering and joy of the whole world, by feeling ourselves as a human being as a member of the whole world, in the same measure in which this consciousness expands, in the same measure our consciousness of our humanity grows, and to the same extent we become stronger in this consciousness, our inner moral strength grows, because we know - although, and this is right, our sense of responsibility also grows - something grows in us through which we know that we are human within the world; through which we know what it means to be an I and not a non-I.

This awareness of what the human being is, of what he is in relation to the world and to all existence, this awareness, which, as we see and as we have tangible examples of, has been lost to the world in present-day spiritual life, this awareness is what spiritual science wants to bring back to people. And in the same measure that this consciousness, arising out of the knowledge of the spirit, which is to be imparted not as abstract knowledge but as knowledge that has been experienced, wells up out of the whole human being, in the same measure will our moral and spiritual strength grow. And what grows in us will find its way into the economic associations and assert itself as the basis for human interaction and the trust we need.

This, my dear audience, must be said if one is to describe how spiritual knowledge must take its place alongside economic demands. For the spiritual knowledge that we have today is expressed in such a way that it is indifferent whether one knows why one is an ego or a non-ego. We need a renewal in the field of spiritual knowledge. And this renewal will lead us to something quite different, which has already been hinted at in these or those lectures that I have given, which always seems bold when it is spoken out loud, but which is absolutely a result of this spiritual science, as surely as any scientific result can be.

Let us take what follows from the world view that is customary today. We look back into the distant past of our world system, when something arose out of some cosmic nebula and became what the world is in which we live. The sun and planets emerged from this nebula in a certain way, according to external natural forces. We live on this earth as lonely human beings, who feel the moral ideals sprouting up in their souls, which also signify the ultimate impulses of their social actions. They stand there with their moral ideals, which basically constitute their actual mental nervous strength as human beings; they stand there with them, and they know that without them they cannot be human in the full sense of the word.

But then again he looks up at what, according to the conventional world view, may be the end of this planetary system with our sun and our earth. What happens in our external world does not ask about our ideals, our moral and spiritual impulses. It proceeds according to external natural laws and arrives at a final state that signifies a kind of solidification, whether solidification into warmth or cold, it does not matter; it is then the charnel house at the same time, the great cemetery for all They emerged as illusions in the midst of this world-becoming, they gave man an illusory sense of his human dignity, and they will be carried to the grave with the planetary system itself.

The fact that many people do not admit to themselves that it is so does not change the fact that the present world view unconsciously flows into their feelings. And basically, it is also a saying like that one could never understand why it is better to be a self than a non-self, which arises from the desolate feeling that one must have when one sees this natural course of world events, with the spiritual and moral illusions of humanity right in the middle, giving people an illusory sense of their human dignity, but which they will one day have to carry to the grave with all of humanity.

This is countered, even if so many prejudices still speak against it today, by the view of spiritual science. I have often explained it here individually and will only describe it briefly today. Spiritual science also looks at the external world events from which the human being has emerged as a physical being. But then it recognizes that these world events, which are subject to natural laws, are in the whole, to our universe, the relative universe itself, as the plant, which sprouts in leaves, becomes a flower, develops the fruit casing to the germ inside. That which arises in the plant until the germ develops, what is the covering, passes away; the germ passes over, and the new plant life arises from it. The old covering must pass away so that the new plant life can arise from the germ.

Anthroposophy shows that everything that is physical in us, as belonging to the external physical world, belongs to such a transient part of the universe, but that a germ lives. That a germ lives in the human being, that is the spiritual, the moral of the impulses that live within. These are our moral ideals, they are a still young world. Just as the sheaths around the plant germ dry up and fall away, so will the visible stars, the visible external objects of the three natural kingdoms, fall away. They fall away. That which is the germ of the future lies in our moral soul content. The world of the future arises from this. What we do today, what we want today, becomes a real, outwardly perceptible world-forming force.

However, the sense of responsibility grows when one becomes aware that what we have in our moral intentions today will one day become as perceptible to the world as the stars are perceptible to us today. But many a word that has been said in religious documents only makes sense when one is aware of what flows from a real knowledge of the spirit. One must always remember with elevated feelings that it was once said in a particularly paradigmatic way that what lives in man as ideals and pours out into words is the creative [germ] for future worlds, to which those who are now present as external nature will not be added; they will no longer be there when new worlds have arisen from our moral ideals. “Heaven and Earth will pass away,” said the founder of Christianity, ‘but my words will not pass away.’ That means: They will be worlds when the world of heaven and earth, which one now sees with eyes, will have passed away.

This is the anticipation of a spiritual scientific truth, my dear attendees. And if we are so connected with the becoming of the world through our moral ideals, then our consciousness of our true nature as human beings also grows. In turn, we have to draw from spiritual science itself moral forces, which then become social forces.

Spiritual science does not merely theorize, spiritual science does not merely present abstract teachings, spiritual science presents something into the world that becomes strength in the human soul. And strength, ladies and gentlemen, is what we need if we want to become social human beings. For strong, morally social people must place themselves in the associations. That is what it is about.

In what I have just said, however, there is something that may appear to today's scientists to be somewhat lay and very amateurish. That is why I was also taught, when I recently expressed the same thing in Zurich, by a Zurich private lecturer, that I “reify” my ideas in this and other areas, as he said. Now, he speaks of this reification as if I were speaking of ideas as realities. Of course, he has no idea how the things are meant. He speaks of this reification very dismissively and says that I would even have claimed:

In his two lectures, Steiner literally says:

- he says explicitly, and now he wants to quote words because this seems to him to be something outrageous - I would have taken it so far in reifying that I would have said:

“Anthroposophical spiritual science recognizes the moral as being just as real as the physical. In our moral life, it recognizes indestructible seeds for emerging later worlds.”

You see, this ruler of contemporary science makes the logical mistake of reifying ideas when, from the basis of real spiritual research, he presents the truth that, not through logical error but through the great, very promising world processes for humanity, the moral ideas that we carry within us become reified, become things, become realities. Today, you are already criticized if you dare to claim - then it is put in quotation marks - that anthroposophical spiritual science recognizes the moral life as an indestructible germ for future worlds, for everything physical. You are not allowed to do that from the point of view of today's, correct university philosophies, because you are scolded as someone who understands nothing about the world.

Because the one who understands something about the world, in the opinion of these people, cannot judge otherwise than that the world has arisen out of a fog according to real laws, that it runs according to mere external physical laws and falls back into the sun as slag, while the non-reified moral impulses, which resemble mere ideas, must be buried in the same world churchyard.

But, my dear attendees, if economic life is to recover, if economic demands are to be taken seriously, then this cannot happen without

at the same time the spiritual knowledge, which places the moral and thus also the religious life alongside the economic. For the economic associations will give rise to the living insight that others also demand, but do not know where to get. And from that which is spiritual knowledge will come the social ethos, the socio-ethical power to bring these insights into reality. This is what we must bear in mind when we speak of economic demands today. We cannot seriously speak of them without at the same time pointing out what can give people the strength to fulfill these economic demands.

But, esteemed attendees, how did it come about that people in the spiritual life are already saying that one cannot know why it is better to be an I than a non-I? Even if it is unpleasant to say so, it must be said: the one who gets the drive for his spiritual work only from what the economy alone, what the state can give, which puts the individual in a certain place, the one who must succumb to this drive because it has become has become a vital necessity, he, no matter how strongly he may be an idealist as an individual, may even be a spiritualist, but he is increasingly coming to regard the spirit as no more than a mere appendage of life. Then the final consequence is this, which has become a ruling one in the broadest circles of our socialists, that the spiritual life is only an ideology, something that arises as if out of a haze and fog from the only reality, the external, material, economic reality.

That this view prevails today in broader socialist circles, that this view also dominates feelings, emotions and impulses in these circles, is only because the ruling, leading circles, through centuries, have lost direct contact with the real spiritual world; with that spiritual world in which we speak not only of the spirit as a sum of abstract concepts, but as a reality, as we speak of the physical-sensory reality. This spiritual life, which recognizes the spirit in its reality, must unfold freely and independently, emancipated from state and economic life; it must be left to its own devices. For the longer the spiritual life is dependent on any external factors, the more the consciousness of the substantial, independent spirit that weaves and pulses and works and lives through the world is lost. Spiritual knowledge can only exist within a free spiritual life. And this free spiritual life will also be the source of real spiritual knowledge. From this real spiritual knowledge, the strength will flow into the economic interrelations that we need to make progress in economic life as well.

So, my dear attendees, everything that is contained in the impulse for the threefold social order flows from a truly real contemplation of life. So everything is meant to be directly practical, but in such a way that by the practical view we do not just mean the narrow view that looks at the machines and at the length of the working day, but at the whole human being, who wants to and will give us head and heart and mind and feelings, and that will bring them to us when we approach them in such economic and spiritual contexts that trust is the element of life and brotherly love as the highest effect of this connection is the atmosphere of life in these contexts.

This must be emphasized again and again, especially in the face of the numerous misrepresentations that are made today about anthroposophical spiritual science as it is meant here. It must not be said of this spiritual science that it has no place in practical life. On the contrary, it is the science that can be said, as I said here a few days ago, to be that which does not seek to elevate the soul to a mystical, unworldly existence, to a mystical cloud-cuckoo-land. Rather, it is that which is intended to fill the soul with spirit in such a way that this spirit feels strong enough to carry spiritual substance into material life. The mystic should not become unworldly in an egoistic way, seeking refuge somewhere where the world is not to be found. He should be imbued with the spirit so that he can carry this spirit into the world around him, which is a free spiritual world, a democratically equal world, an economic world built on trust, an outwardly material world. It is precisely through spiritual science that the realization must penetrate that it is the most blatant, most sophisticated selfishness to take refuge in a world-unrelated mysticism, to cry out for asceticism, while a truly spiritual penetration should precisely give the strength for life. This strength for life, it alone can lead us out of the impending decline, out of the terrible distress and misery, towards a task.

Then in the middle is the actual state life, which will develop when, on the one hand, the free economic life and, on the other, the free spiritual life are established.

In this way, the threefold social order will be created.

Then, in the middle, there will be the actual life of the state, which will develop when, on the one hand, free economic life and, on the other, free spiritual life are separated.

In this way, the threefold social organism will be able to shape the necessary social order of the future in a way that is full of life.

Sometimes today one hears the judgment, at least ten times, and that always only reminds me of how widespread it is: What will become of the state, of legal life in the middle, if intellectual life and economic life are separated? A famous Swiss legal scholar, the most important legal teacher in Switzerland and at the present time, said this himself when he became acquainted with the threefold social order. He said that he found the threefold order appealing, but he could not understand what would then remain for the state between economic life and the life of the humanities.

Now, my dear attendees, it will be shown that a great deal will remain for a powerful and vigorous state life and that those who judge things according to today's conditions just do not see what will remain remain, because, to a certain extent, what is supposed to be there in the life of the state, built on the same democratic foundations, has been consumed on the one hand by economic life, and it wants to consume it even more where the last consequences are to be drawn from this principle. People who say that the economic-political is a higher point of view than the actual economic one do not usually see this. They do not see that the final consequence of such views is the terrible, world-murdering Bolshevism that follows from them. They will see this gradually, if they do not force themselves to form a reasonable view.

In this way, the life of the state and of the law will stand in the middle, and economic life will be built up on its own forces, while spiritual life will stand free and independent. It is as a social shaping of these forces that the impulse for threefolding wants to work. For he must say, not in some programmatic way, not out of abstract thoughts, but out of a thorough penetration of the real necessities of the present, that only on the foundations, which he can perhaps still only express in an imperfect way today - I fully admit this - but which must be further developed through the collaboration, the very necessary collaboration of a great many knowledgeable personalities. In this qualification, however, those who today feel they are the bearers of this impulse for the threefold social organism are convinced: if social life with its longings for a future design is studied and observed in this thorough way, and if these longings are met with the appropriate measures, then what makes the social organism possible must arise. For in such a social organism there will be the basis for the possibility of life; there will be a truly invigorating and fruitful spiritual life that will bring forth a healthy economic life built on brotherhood. There will be in such a social structure a truly free spirit in an economic order built on trust as the only possible social economic force.

It is quite conceivable that some people find a topic like the one to be discussed today fruitless and perhaps even impossible to discuss because they believe that nothing fruitful can be created from such foundations, from foundations of social knowledge and social insight, in the face of facts.

Now, my dear attendees, the great catastrophe that befell our entire civilized world in the second decade of the twentieth century could well teach people the necessity of facing the latest development of civilization in order to perhaps come to a different insight than the one I have just characterized in my introduction. What has taken place in the civilized world during the last decades, the last 70 to 80 years, is precisely the failure to take into account the emerging social situation of humanity. If you look back over this period, you will find that precisely those personalities who belonged to the leading classes have, as fate has brought them, entered into some situation, into some professional or creative situation, and that they have worked in this situation in the way that circumstances have dictated for a long time, without taking into account whether it is necessary was necessary to look into these conditions, to intervene in these conditions themselves, one accepted what was offered without much ado, which then resulted in the great and powerful progress and triumph of modern civilization, and one left it to the broad masses of the working population, the proletariat, to criticize out of one-sidedness what had emerged from social conditions. The inconvenience of having to intervene gave rise in the leading classes to a certain desire to basically let things go as they were going under the influence of the rapidly developing production conditions, and those who exercised criticism were caught up in the wheels of social conditions; their unfruitfulness was evident in many areas. If we reflect on how we have failed, for a long time, to maintain an overview of what actually needs to be done, and on how circumstances today demand a different way of thinking, a different way of feeling about people than in the past, then one will surely come to the realization that now, when the time of the terrible catastrophe has come, that now one must begin with such a rethinking, such a re-sensing; that should be clear to anyone who is unbiased. At least in the West, the circumstances that caused 12 to 15 million people to go mad and as many to become cripples arose from impossible economic conditions. This is undoubtedly the case in the West, but in the East we have completely different civilization conditions, where psychological factors have played a greater role. It should be clear to everyone that this whole chaos, the state of war and the current crisis, has arisen from the sins of omission of the last decades.

We have the peace treaties. But ultimately, is the peace that has been made a real peace? It could only be a peace of significance if it offered the prospect of the old civilization of humanity being rebuilt. But let us look at the actual circumstances and see if they support this. In England, it dawned on people first, and in a very significant way. English thinkers have said many things about the bleakness of the current situation and what is needed to improve it.

Then, in October [1920], at the Second National Economic Conference, we heard it said that what had emerged from the war catastrophe was alarming and that it must be replaced by something else if the misery was not to grow ever greater. There were many men there who realized what the situation was really like.

We in our civilization today are like a person who takes comfort in the fact that he still has a coat that is just starting to get shabby, and so on. [Lücke in der Mitschrift?] So steht [es] mit demjenigen, was man als die Besserung ansieht. Es ist durchaus diese Besserung nur scheinbar, denn dasjenige, was geblieben ist aus der Zivilisation der Vorkriegsepoche, ist in einer gewissen Beziehung abgetragen, muss in furchtbare Zustände hineinführen, wenn nicht beizeiten daran gedacht wird, wirkliche Besserung zu schaffen.

A significant word rings in one's ears when one hears how a conscientious person has described the present situation, with the words: “Within the present conditions of European civilization, a great crime of an incomparable kind is being committed and we are all participants in this crime.” The word has been spoken in England, and one may say that such a word sounds in one's ears as something that seems quite true. Those people who reflect on the present conditions are struck first by the economic conditions, and one thinks, this gentleman will become master. One believes that one can master them in this or that way, and then it will spread to all other areas of civilization. However, within the economic conditions there are circumstances that easily, very easily show how, basically, it is not managed from some reasonable foundations, but from chaos, from a situation riddled with decay. Can it be called rationing at all when, for example, Switzerland, which needed a million tons of coal in the first half of 1920, obtained 4,000 tons of that million tons from America? One need only consider that Switzerland is surrounded by coal-producing countries and that it is an impossible way to manage the world when things are supplied as expensively as possible. Hundreds of such examples could be cited today; one could see the impulse from which economic efficiency actually flows. - About 4500 million pounds sterling are needed for reparations, etc. [gap in the transcript?]

All of this provides a horrifying overview, and one should not believe that any area, such as Switzerland, can be exempted from the consequences. It is now definitely the time, even if one resists it, in which the progress of civilization makes the world economy necessary.

If we also consider that these Central European countries, if they are to have any chance of working at all, need at least 100 million pounds sterling in credit, then the prospect before us will be a very sad one indeed. The economic situation is before our eyes; [from the same side] from which the economic situation is already clearly emphasized, something else also emerges. One could hear it in the conference of October 1920. Basically, it could not have turned out differently, because those who were gathered were diplomats, they were politicians all together, they all understood nothing of a national economy; it is necessary that economists offer their hand out of the economic conditions to improve them, to intervene in the improvement. Today it is admitted that the politicians, those who are only politically trained - and unfortunately they are poorly trained politically enough - are not at all in a position to intervene in the economic situation in any way that would improve it.

You see, my esteemed audience, the views that are finally being imposed by the necessities of the times on the few today, are the ones that want to put the threefold social organism into the world as an impulse to lead to ascent. It wants to take civilization as a whole, it wants to see how the various factors, the various elements of civilized life interact. We cannot look at economic life in isolation; we can only look at the whole, but then it shows us very clearly how radically different the individual areas are, and it is on this radical difference between the three areas of civilization that the threefold order of the social organism focuses, and from there it tries to contribute to the recovery of human development. These three areas are spiritual life on the one hand, economic life on the other, and in the middle of them we find what we can call state, legal or, in fact, political life.

When the newer life of civilization began, it was quite natural, indeed historically necessary, that what had developed out of the modern state should gradually take hold not only of political and legal life, but also of intellectual life, of education, teaching and the whole intellectual life. But today we are in an age where this has fulfilled its task and must make way for something different. It is absolutely the case that the forms of civilization are first young, then mature, and then grow old and decay. So the deepest cause of our current plight is actually that we do not realize that we are living in an abstract unitary state, that this is actually heading towards its [doom] period, and that something new must be born to take its place.

The goal is to carve out intellectual life and economic life from state life, so that three elements take the place of the abstract unitary state, which has confused everything: an independent state life with its own legal system, an independent intellectual life, and an independent economic life, which must and can grow and flourish under these conditions. The nature of an independent spiritual life must be such that the greatest possible development can take place of that which man brings with him into physical existence through his birth, whether it be spiritual or mental. That which is to be developed must be introduced into the other areas of life with the greatest strength, and it must be allowed to unfold completely freely.

In more recent times, the state has taken control of education and teaching; it has done its part – what has come of it? Those who are supposed to develop human abilities in teaching and education have found themselves dependent on what the state prescribed for them; in a sense, they were what the state needed for its enrichment, for fertility. But because the actual life in education and teaching was guided from outside, the content of teaching became alienated to what we see today – especially viewed by certain personalities – to an abstract scientificity, to an abstract intellectual life. These educators of humanity were unable to administer the teaching and education from their own hearts at the same time; so they had no choice but to live in an abstractness. The fact that many people do not want to admit this is the cause of our present misery.

What can help is spiritual life. The most important component of spiritual life is independence, spiritual self-reliance. May this come into its own administration, and into the power of those who are directly involved in education and teaching. Here we must strive to ensure that they can also administer this educational system freely and autonomously in their corporations and in their cooperation, so that we need not fear anything that arises from the educational system itself. Forced authorities are fought against. Anyone who is familiar with the conditions of intellectual life knows that a specialist naturally has the greatest influence because others need him in order to learn from him. Independence is what matters. Of course, the establishment of intellectual life is developed out of economic life. But in terms of the spiritual, this intellectual field must be completely independent of any other influence.

For millions of people, intellectual life has become an ideology. But you can't come to such a view if you experience that the spirit is not just something you have thought about, but something you have experienced; from this living life flows the state of the heart as it actually is. One hears quite justified statements that in recent times intellectual life has in a sense brought itself into a state of decadence, even brutalized, because it has striven for pure intellectualism, while the soul, the heart, has actually withered.

It is easy to say such things, but it is more difficult to see how one can follow suit. One can demand that the atmosphere of emotional education should be abandoned, etc. [gap in the transcript?] But one cannot simply draw a line under what has gone before. Modern life has its techniques, it has cultivated the intellect, the development of the mind, one-sided cleverness. The task is to direct the serious, profound question to the destiny of the human being: What brings harmony with the development of the heart and soul? ... (reference to spiritual science).

Such a science cannot be like it used to be, considering that the great task that one wants to set oneself there is to come to the spirit, to the true spirit; not to spiritualism, to theosophy, etc., but to a spirit that can permeate the whole human being, that can reconcile spirit with feeling. This is what has been seen in reality, and what now wants to happen from within, to enliven this spiritual life from the Goetheanum in Dornach. However, this does give rise to many annoyances for Dornach, because it has to take a stand on other contemporary endeavors that may come from good intentions but prove to be unfruitful. What do people strive for most in our time to strengthen the life of the mind, the life of morality, the deepening of religion? What is being striven for there? One wants to spread what one has acquired intellectually through all kinds of enterprises, such as public libraries, etc. — Dornach cannot go along with this because it recognizes the futility.

One must ask oneself: Did those who were leaders not see and know what the schools had achieved, did they not possess precisely what is taught at the universities? But did that prevent them from sailing headlong into the catastrophe of the twentieth century? And if those who were in possession of this education were not protected from it, but were also driven into it, can one hope that it will lead to something different when it is spread further? Do we want to deliver that to the millions as well, so that it will bear fruit to an even more devastating extent? This is what is being seen through in the field in Dornach, in order to carry it out to the people from there. First of all, it must be carried into the educational institutions, so that something different can come of it.

I just wanted to mention the reasons why this understanding of the necessity for the liberation of spiritual life can arise. It is precisely from this that the demand for a free spiritual life arises. Teachers from the lowest to the highest classes have to administer this spiritual life themselves; they themselves will have to set up the practical teaching institutions that exist; they will not be told what to teach, because it is said that they themselves must administer what is to be used in spiritual life. But then they are also forced to immerse themselves in practical life, to teach and educate, because they do not have to teach an abstract science, but rather that which really sustains life.

The free spiritual life must stand on one wing of the social organism. On this one wing of the social organism, it will be necessary to judge things for ourselves by putting ourselves in the place of the spirit. This will cause difficulties because people are unaccustomed to grasping such a spiritual life correctly; they only have a mere thinking about the spirit. But we cannot make a decision about whether to leave it or improve it; it must be understood that in this way life is fertilized in the right way from the spiritual side - it must become independent. That is on the one wing.

On the other wing is economic life. I would like to show you, by means of an external comparison, the difference between the living conditions in economic life and in spiritual life. (Example) In the economic sphere, the freedom that we have in spiritual life is not possible. In economic life, we are all, without exception, dependent on each other. In economic life, it is a matter of gradually acquiring what one has acquired through economic experience, through being connected to an economic sector. In the field of economic life, it is impossible to start from freedom. It can be strictly proved that it is impossible. (Example: the negotiations that have been conducted regarding the introduction of the gold standard.)

The opposite of what the clever people preached has occurred. What has emerged on a large scale in the global economy is now emerging on a small scale in the present day. As a rule, they will have the opposite effect on the economy as a whole and thus on economic life in general. In this regard, we need to take a somewhat unbiased look.

In earlier [decades and] years, we have the emergence of the social question. In this regard, quite clever people have also had strange thoughts. (Austrian minister M.) In the 80s, I had many a conversation with people from the business world. It was precisely in this area that people were the last to notice the pressure and the social unrest that had brought such misery and hardship. But those who were involved in the conversation said: We are powerless to intervene productively in economic life, etc. These things were simply accepted as an uncertain fate. Today, these things must be thought about on a large scale.

In the field of economic life, the most important thing is the price; because only when prices are such that people can exchange their things, then social life is truly present in a human way. Now it is very easy to say, with mathematical certainty, what must be the case with regard to [a] determination of prices, the original cell of economic life, and that is called: The person who produces something must receive so much for this production that he can maintain himself and those who belong to him, himself and his own, until he can produce the same product again (example: boots). This is, as I said, expressed in the abstract. It must be obvious; it is only a question of how this can be achieved in the reality of life. What must intervene here, and this must be taken very seriously, is that the individual human being can come to an economic judgment. The aim is for everyone to be able to work productively in a single field. Therefore, something must arise that leads to active participation in economic life and sets the living in motion. What I have called the “core of the social question” must come into being: the principle of association in economic life. (By way of explanation, an example from my own life.) Books are written, etc., sent to the printers, typeset, printed and shipped, with a great deal going to waste. Consider what that means! It means nothing other than that so many hands have been involved in producing the paper, typesetting, printing and so on. That is unnecessary work. (Example: publishing house, consumer economy.) Such examples point to what I have described in terms of my core points under the principle of association. The point is that those who participate in economic life – and that includes all people – join together, and that in itself results in an association. The individuals join together according to production and this with the consumer circles. Consuming, producing, if you take all this into account, you get very specific groups of this association. (World Economic Federation.) Within this economic association, negotiations take place from person to person, and that is where it comes about that people contribute everything they can; what they cannot do is supplemented by others.

If it is considered that price conditions are the decisive factor, it must be possible to intervene in this pricing; this cannot be done by theoretical decrees. The point is that it must be started from the other side. It cannot be regulated by decrees, but only by the living life, it can only be achieved by the associative economic life, which should be based on sound economic experience.

Neither in the intellectual nor in the economic life can parliamentarization be imposed, because only those who are knowledgeable and competent in both fields can act. Therefore, it must be negotiated from person to person, from corporation to corporation, so that the one who has experience is placed in the relevant position because he has experience, not because he is placed in a party that he does not represent, so that expertise and professional competence can be brought to bear.

There will be many objections. But these objections are overcome when one considers that, for example, only those who need a mild amount of freedom to pursue their profession might feel harassed by the associations. But when the matter is put into practice, it is no more difficult than exchanging money. (Bureaucracy removed.) These things are treated in a lively way, and so they can also be handled in a lively way. But what is meant by the associations would precisely free the human being, and then the other liberations in other areas would follow. (Applied in Stuttgart.)

One might object: on the one hand we have the spiritual life and on the other the economic life, so there is nothing left in the middle. We just have to wait and see what happens in the middle; there is a large, larger area there; humanity demands from its essence the decision from itself, from this middle. (Unification of people who have come of age, standardization of goods, time, and measure.) These things, which affect people themselves and for which people must stand up with their person – they must not become commodities. In economic life, one must accept what nature offers and manage accordingly; therefore, it must be independent of the state.

Much else will belong to it; we shall see what living right is. That which ought to arise there is not really there; the actual legal life has been corrupted. That which ought to be right, which only flows from people who have come of age, has withered away. People must have the opportunity to find an area where they can determine what lies in the judgment of mature people; one must not be afraid of it. (Quotation of an article from a newspaper.) Such a man cannot imagine that precisely because it is justified in the right way, these three limbs of the social organism come together to form a unity. It is the same in man; the unity, the living unity in man also consists of a threefold structure, and so it must be in the social organism. A man once objected: Yes, life must be a unity, and you cannot think of it differently, as a unified state; everything must go together. (Example: rural economy, women, servants, children, a number of carts working together in unity.) The unity comes about precisely because everyone does their part. We have seen that very enlightened people say: the people who put together this seemingly new form were politicians who understood nothing about economic life.

We just don't have the courage to face up to what people long for, to develop the impulse of will. We have to relearn. The great significant ideals, freedom, equality and fraternity, have so far not been able to lead people out of the chaos of the times. Very clever people have proved again and again how freedom and equality can exist, and how fraternity is affected by both. Freedom can be attained in the realm of spiritual life; equality will arise out of state life; and fraternity can be developed in economic life, genuine, practical fraternity. Thus one will have to say: by recognizing how these three great, significant ideals must flow into life, humanity will be led out of the terrible chaos through the threefold social order, if it is understood in the right way. Based on the feeling of the bitter need of the time and on decades of experience, it can be said that this threefold social order aims to lead humanity out of chaos by not forcing anything together, but by introducing these three ideals into their proper possessions, into a large social organism. And this viable organism will bring together what can arise: freedom in spiritual life, equality in legal life, fraternity in economic life.

Dear attendees! When I published my “Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and the Near Future” in the spring of 1919, the public life of the West was somewhat different from what it is today. It should actually be made perfectly clear how fast the pace of current events is. We should realize how much the configuration of Western civilization has changed again in the last two years. In the spring of 1919, there was sufficient reason to hope that a sufficiently large number of people would unite in the belief that spiritual impulses could counteract the forces of social decline. The terrible experiences of the war years lay behind the Western world's humanity. These terrible experiences, which at the time many people felt were incomparable in the historical life of humanity. And from these terrible experiences had emerged the opinion that something very drastic had to be done, something that had to be brought about from the depths of intellectual life, so that the forces of decline could be paralyzed in an appropriate way and humanity could be brought out of the rising forces through work.

One would like to say: After only a few months, one could see that this opinion, which was very much present in the broadest circles, had actually receded considerably. Therefore, in February, March, April and May of 1919, one could have believed that by asserting such ideas, as they were presented in my “Key Points of the Social Question” and as they were summarized in my appeal “To the German People and to the World of Culture,” one could have believed that by putting forward such ideas one could reach those people who held the opinion just characterized. It was not necessary to cherish the arrogant opinion that the right ideas had been hit upon if they were put forward in this way. It was enough to believe that the ideas had been honestly drawn from the depths of existence, from the legitimate depths of of existence, such ideas had been brought up, and then one could believe that from the experiences that had just arisen, a sufficiently large number of people would be found to support the whole ductus, the whole will of such ideas, with understanding and energy.

One could see how very soon people again believed that humanity would be helped by first gluing together these or those old impulses that had been torn apart. One could see how the energy that had been noticeable for a while back then was gradually paralyzed and so on. At that time, in the spring of 1919, what I called “The Threefold Social Organism” had to be thrown into the situation, as it were. As I said, it might need to be corrected, as always, but it had to be thrown into the situation because it arose out of two presuppositions.

The first prerequisite is an historical one, a spiritual-historical one, one that is gained from observing the course of human development as it emerges from the spiritual-historical observation that is carried out here as anthroposophical.

The other prerequisite arose from decades of observation of the impulses that were striving from the undergrounds of spiritual, state-political and economic life everywhere towards the surface. The second prerequisite arose from the observation of what actually wanted to be realized, to which one should only help to realize, from this observation, from the directly practical observation of the three different formations of life. The first premise was not theoretical either. The purpose of spiritual science, as it is here, is to lead to full reality. Therefore, all its considerations, including those on the development of humanity, are imbued with a sense of reality. Who could not recognize the democratic principle by an unbiased observation of that which has asserted itself more and more intensely in the emergence of modern humanity?

I do not need to define this democratic principle. Of course, one person understands one thing by it and another person something else. But in general, one has a sense of what has been emerging in recent history as the democratic principle, the principle that man, simply by being man, must assert within the social community, that as much as the judgment of the individual human being is worth, this judgment must also mean in social events. This urge for democracy had been there for a long time, expressed through the most diverse movements and convulsions of the newer historical life of Western humanity, with its American offshoot.

But on the other hand, it could be seen that this democratic life cannot actually be realized in all respects. And it becomes apparent to the unbiased observer of human society that there is only one area of social life that can truly become democratic, and that is the political-state area. But the political-state area, if it wants to become democratic, can only include those matters on which every person who has come of age is capable of judgment. And if you think practically, you can clearly define the area of social life that can be subject to the judgment of every person who has come of age. On the other hand, there are two areas that simply cannot be democratized because they can only develop if they develop in terms of the expertise and specialist knowledge of the people, of the individual human individuality. This is, on the one hand, the entire area of intellectual life, namely that area of intellectual life that is actually public, the area of teaching and education, and, on the other hand, that of economic life.

Spiritual life and its main component, the system of teaching and education, can only develop properly if it arises from the professional judgment and expertise of the individuals active in this field and is also administered, administered in complete independence. Not every person who has come of age can judge in this area. Therefore, in this area there can be no such thing as a democratic constitution and democratic administration. Nor can there be democratic constitution and democratic administration in the field of economic life.

In this connection I should like to call attention to a fact which may be multiplied a hundredfold or a thousandfold by the experiences of life, a fact which has taken place in modern times. About the middle of the nineteenth century and towards the last third of it, the question of the gold standard, the actual gold standard, became particularly pressing, I might say. And one can make a very interesting observation if one considers everything that was said for and against the gold standard by very clever people in parliaments, trading companies, associations of entrepreneurs, industrial associations of entrepreneurs, and so on, up to the second half of the nineteenth century and towards the last third of it. I do not mean any irony when I say that in those days a huge amount of cleverness was raised for and against the gold standard. And in particular, a conclusion-type played a major role back then, namely that if one really came to this unified gold currency, then the pursuit of free trade and the realization of free trade would prevail everywhere. Free trade will finally triumph.

You can tell, my dear audience, when you read what was said at the time, what was said at the time, it is really clever, it was not said by stupid people, but it was said by extraordinarily clever people. But reality soon said the opposite. Reality has shown that everywhere the gold standard has led to efforts to establish protective tariff systems and to close the individual national borders. That is to say, the cleverest people, those people who, out of their industrial cleverness, said the most sensible things, had to be taught by reality that, in line with reality, the opposite should have been said! As I said, I am not being ironic when I speak of “cleverness”; I mean it quite seriously. For this fact - and it could be multiplied a hundredfold - points us in many directions. What does it point us to? That in the economic field the individual cannot be decisive at all, that he can only be decisive if his judgment coincides with that of others who, in turn, are experienced and skilled in another area of economic life, that is to say, that the individual with his judgment has only one value within the association.

And so we have two areas: the spiritual area of teaching and education, which must be placed in the power of the individual human individuality; and the economic area, which must be placed in the power of the association, the association of the appropriate cooperation of the individual economic sectors, of production, consumption, and the circulation of goods. The proper form of interaction that results from all of this, from the judgment within the associations, must shape economic life. So that we have three links, not parts; by speaking of the tripartite division of the social organism, one has given rise to many misunderstandings; one cannot speak of the three-part human being either, one cannot divide the human being into head, trunk, limbs and metabolism, whereas the human being really consists of these three parts; so one cannot speak of the three of the social organism, but only of the threefold social organism, because these three members should not go their own way, as it were, the head, the circulation system - the rhythmic one - and the metabolism system can go their own way, but precisely because of their relative independence, they also work together in the most economical and rational way. If you take this threefold social order seriously, you can be honest as a democrat, because then you can really implement democracy in the area where it should be implemented, in the area of state and political affairs, where the mature human being faces the mature human being, and where only that which can be judged by a mature human being is decided and administered. It is entirely possible to find the detailed, concrete form of how to work towards this threefold social organism.

However, you see, conditions have become so unnatural in this respect that sometimes, even back in the spring of 1919, when the threefold social organism was taken much more seriously than it is today, sometimes you had to give strange answers. In one country, for example, where a so-called Ministry of Labor had been set up, I was asked by the Minister of Labor: “Yes, but if the social organism is to be threefolded, where do I actually belong?” He meant as Minister of Labor. Well, if you think about the necessities very concretely, the Ministry of Labor is a hybrid between economic life and political life. That is why I said to the minister in question: Yes, unfortunately for you, you have to be cut in half. - Like the brave Swabian who was not afraid and cut the Turk in half, so a half labor minister should have fallen out of our unnatural present circumstances on both the left and the right. But it is precisely these things that prove how things are, and how everything is mixed up, confounded.

And so we have to say: the necessity of the threefold social order arose out of the historical, spiritual-scientific observation of the emergence of democracy. If we observe the quite radical change that occurred in the second decade of the twentieth century, we can also see that that experiences are now possible that could lead people to take such a thing seriously and understand it. One could also say that it was basically only the final consequence of what had already emerged at the end of the eighteenth century in the call for liberty, equality and fraternity. This appeal for liberty, equality and fraternity, which emerged from the French Revolution, is such that it cuts deep into the hearts of all unbiased people, that it must be taken for granted, that it must be striven for. But anyone who is even slightly familiar with the cultural-political literature of the nineteenth century knows how much has been said – and again not by stupid people, but by very clever ones – against these three ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity.

Just read the extraordinary multi-volume work of the very talented Magyar [Eötvös] from the 1850s, and you will see how it is proved in a very subtle philosophical that the idea of equality cannot be realized alongside [the idea of] freedom, and that, in turn, the idea of fraternity cannot be realized alongside the idea of absolute equality, and so on. It must be said: what is being put forward here is clever. One sees at last that these very ideas, in the course of the historical development of mankind, well up from the underground to the surface as something quite justified, but that nevertheless the whole of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century were still under the sway of the suggestion of the unitary state. This suggestion of the unitary state was so great that people worked more and more, especially in Central Europe and also over Western Europe, with the exception of England, to shape the unitary state more and more intensively in terms of its agents. One was under the suggestion of the omnipotence of the unitary state, which had to extend over everything. And into that one could not then fit the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity.

If we recognize that this unified state is striving towards threefold order, then we also very soon realize that spiritual life is striving towards freedom, state and political life towards equality of all mature human beings, and economic life towards true brotherhood in associations, and from there out into all of life.

As soon as one has the idea of threefolding, one also has the agent for realizing freedom, equality and fraternity. Now, of course, there have been many people, my dear audience, who, when they heard something like the threefolding of the social organism, spoke of utopia. But it is not utopian. Just as it emerged from a spiritual-scientific-historical observation, on the other hand, it emerged from a practical observation of life itself, and it is simply not true that this threefold social order would be about imposing over humanity, which has become somewhat chaotic, but rather it is a matter of the fact that for the person who understands this threefold social order, it can be tackled from every single point of life. You can start anywhere, and then the individual beginnings will flow together into a whole by themselves. This is how we started with the threefold social order in the realm of spiritual life.

We started at our Stuttgart Waldorf School, because it is just a school like any other, but a school that has been created out of a truly free spiritual life, I want to mention it first. However, it is difficult to get through today, especially with views on the school system. In this regard, one also experiences strange things. I recently read an article in a magazine that was somewhat critical of the 'National Assembly' that took place in the city of Goethe and Schiller, Weimar, after the so-called German Revolution; of course I have nothing against criticizing this National Assembly, because basically one can say: it is really hardly an exaggeration to describe this national chatter – parliamentarism always has something to do with a chattering association or talkativeness, doesn't it, the special way of talking together! I have nothing against holding up a proper image of this National Assembly. But something strange was said. It was said that this Weimar National Assembly had actually only caused havoc in all areas of public life – with the exception of a single area where it had delivered something useful, namely in the area of schools, through the creation of the so-called primary school, the so-called unified school, and so on.

Now, this essay is based on nothing more than the fact that it is easier to see what nonsense the “Weimar National Assembly” has inaugurated in other areas of life than in the field of education, where everyone can prattle on for a very long time before the nonsense is noticed.

Now, when our “Freie Waldorfschule” was founded in Stuttgart, it was important that the spiritual life itself should be the foundation and soil with its own requirements, from which teaching and education are derived here. Of course, anthroposophical spiritual science is the source of the pedagogy and didactics of the Waldorf School. I gave the seminar course for the teachers of this Waldorf School based on anthroposophical spiritual science before the opening of the Waldorf School. But this Waldorf School was not misused to instill dogmatic anthroposophy into children in a school of world view. The founding of the Waldorf School was quite the opposite of this. The aim of the Waldorf School was to apply a pedagogy and didactics in which anthroposophical spiritual science can be practically demonstrated right down to the skill of the fingers; from the application of pedagogy and didactics and from what one did, one wanted to show the fruits of anthroposophical feeling and thinking, not by instilling any dogmas. That is why they almost, I would even say radically, refrained from making the Waldorf school a school of world view. That is why religious education was separated from the other subjects. Religious education for Catholic children was entrusted to the Catholic priest, and for Protestant children to the Protestant pastor.

And then, in the course of the school's effectiveness, it became apparent that there was a large number of children, dissident children, who did not attend any lessons, neither Catholic nor Protestant. What should be done with these children?

Initially, the children's group at the Waldorf School was made up of the children of workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory; after all, it was our friend Emil Molt in Stuttgart who founded this Waldorf School, and initially the children were “the children of workers” at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory. Now, there were a great many parents who did not want to send their children to any of the religious lessons; but they felt that their children should not grow up without religion, without being introduced to spiritual things. And so we were obliged to set up a kind of anthroposophical free religious education alongside the other lessons, which we then also developed in terms of pedagogy and didactics, and which now stands as a third one, on an equal footing with the other two.

The Protestant religion teachers in particular had to state that they feared that the children would run away from them and run over to the anthroposophical religious education, didn't they? But as I said, it was precisely in this treatment of the religious education questions that it should be shown how far the Waldorf School is from wanting to be a school of world view.

On the other hand, anthroposophical spiritual science is able to answer the question: What are the forces that have taken on physical form in the child after it has descended from the spiritual world, and what are the forces that are particularly active in the child up to the year in which the teeth change, around the age of seven?

They are mainly powers of imitation, and everything that is to be brought to the child at this age must be achieved through a certain study of these childlike powers of imitation.

Other powers then emerge from the background of the child's mind around the seventh year. One has to take these powers into account. One then sees how one has to approach reading, writing and so on; from what one knew from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, a pedagogy and didactics were formed, a real art of education that works towards not introducing reading and writing to children in an abstract way, but in such a way that reading and writing are brought out of a certain artistic, holistic humanity.

Between the ages of six, seven and nine, teaching is such that nothing abstract, nothing that engages the mere head, the mere intellect, is presented to the child. Our mere numbers and letter signs engage the mere intellect if they are not taken from the full activity of the human being. And so it was particularly important for this childhood age to have a great deal of light shed on it through anthroposophical observation of human development. The corresponding pedagogy and didactics were based on this.

Between the ages of nine and ten, there is an important point in a child's development that must be taken into account by educators and teachers. Something occurs that usually goes unnoticed. Before that, the child hardly differs from his or her surroundings. It is best to teach the child in a way that appeals as little as possible to its sense of self. But between the ages of nine and ten, something breaks into the child's mind, the main development of which lasts only a short time. One must be grown to observe what is happening in the child's development, because sometimes it depends on a few days to find the right words, the right encouragement for the child, to bring the right thing forward in the right way.

And so it is important to know what human nature wants every year, every week. And so you bring the child up, and we have developed this pedagogy and didactics to bring the child up to the age of 13, 14, 15, where something completely different occurs in child development.

Eight days ago, I was obliged to ensure in an evening course for teachers that our so-called tenth class could now be opened in the appropriate way. This is the class that children enter when they have reached sexual maturity, or, as we say in anthroposophical spiritual science, at the age when the childlike astrality, the astral body, as we say, the actual spiritual-soul body, is born. This requires a very special deepening into this important age. And in opening this class, the pedagogical-didactic maxim had to be found again to guide young people into this age.

You see, you have to feel the full weight of the age on your soul in a certain way if you really want to practice contemporary pedagogy and didactics in this way. Because you have seen it: in the last few decades – I would say it is an international affair – the so-called youth movement has emerged in the most diverse forms. What did this youth movement mean? The young suddenly demanded something completely new and were aware that the old could not give them what they were demanding. The wanderer instinct and so on, as they are all called, have become known to people.

Now this youth movement has clearly shown that the old were no longer able to be the right authority for the young. The young no longer expected what had previously been expected of the young by the old, and a terrible yearning went through the young. I would like to say: In this yearning, however mistaken and nebulous it was in certain respects, the call for a new pedagogy and didactics is clearly expressed. There is no need to [see] whether something that comes up with such elementary power from the depths of life, whether it is more or less right or wrong, but you only have to look at it in its actuality, then it can already prove this or that to you. In particular, anyone who has seen the latest phase of these youth movements, which have only emerged in recent years, must admit that this youth movement first expressed itself in such a way that the nebulous, chaotic urge of one person to join another emerged. I would like to say – the young lived out their lives in packs, in cliques. Then suddenly a strange turn occurred, only in the last few years and especially among the best members of this youth movement a colossal turn occurred. They got tired of connecting one to the other in small cliques. And those who had previously had a strong urge to join one another in small cliques began to feel a kind of disgust for being together. A certain hermit-like behavior asserted itself, youthful hermit-like behavior. They closed themselves off, they encapsulated themselves, the young people. A complete turnaround has taken place. This is also deeply significant. And again, it is not a Central European, but an international issue that has taken hold of all possible youth groups in the civilized world today. It is a matter of the necessity today to provide for spiritual life from the very depths of all of life.

Something like this should be created by the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which, I would like to say, was also created out of social circumstances. All the blustering about the unified school, which arises from all kinds of enmity and antipathy and sympathy, is of course immediately lost in the objective when one teaches and educates out of the nature of the human being. There, of course, people are taught and educated uniformly. But the matter is brought into being appropriately, not out of political proposals or antipathies and ranklings and räsonnements. The fruitful further development of humanity depends on this, that out of the factual the factual be founded.

But to achieve something like this, to really have teachers who can approach young people in such a way with such a pedagogy and didactics, you need a free spiritual life, because you have to be able to use the full power of the teachers. My dear attendees, many a person has thought for a long time, especially in times of liberal ideas, when freedom has been so greatly undermined, many a person has thought: we need programs, we need comprehensive ideas. Many programs have been devised about the best way to teach, especially about curricula.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, when you put five, six, twelve not particularly clever people together – forgive this somewhat delicate or undelicate allusion – when so and so many people sit down and let their abstract minds , then they come up with the most ideal programs, all of it perfect; Clause I, the teacher has to teach this in class, Clause II, the teacher has to treat the students in such and such a way, Clause III, this or that has to happen. For the eighth year, this is how it has to be done, and so on. In the greatest perfection, paragraph I to x, everything can be presented in this way, and you can get an ideal program out of it, with the average intellectual predisposition of the twelve people who sat down together. Not much is needed to define anything in abstracto. Only because these people have the urge to disagree, we have received not one, but many programs. There are programs and cleverness buzzing through the world. When would there have been more programs and cleverness – whereby the word “cleverness” is not even used ironically – buzzing through the world than precisely in the nineteenth century.

But you see, that is not what matters, what matters is what happens in reality. What matters is real, practical life. Well, we have indeed gradually entered into strange realms of abstraction. Today, people even think about very strange theories in theory. For example, they think about the fact that if they travel from point A to point B at ordinary speed, and a cannon is fired at point A and another cannon is fired at point B, they will hear the cannon that was fired later than the one that was fired earlier. But if they move faster and faster, the interval changes; and then they work out that if they move at the speed of sound, they even hear the one cannon that is fired later at the same time. And if they move faster than the speed of sound, they even hear the cannon that is fired later earlier than the one that is fired earlier!

Now, you see, that may seem quite correct in theory, and there is nothing to be said against it. But someone who thinks in a spiritual sense, thinks realistically, not just logically, has something to object to, because that is only one way to get to the truth, and he wants to think realistically, and then he also has to imagine what such a person would look like who would now move faster than sound. Einstein even calculated what a clock would look like if it were to fly out into space at the speed of light and then come back again. Theoretically, all this can be done, and of course it is all theoretically correct. It has been much admired. But just imagine what the clock would look like when it comes back, or what a person would look like if he were to move at the speed of sound! One thing is certain: one would not be able to judge the differences in the speed of sound, because the human being would have to become sound himself. This would lead one to the conclusion that one cannot help but let concrete reality flow into one's soul, not abstract theory. Only then are we on the right path to truth. But then we also realize that a dozen people can work out very beautiful programs. But a dozen teachers can only realize what lies within the power of these teachers. And the most beautiful ideals have no value at all compared to what really lives in people. Therefore, what is to be achieved must be taken from the reality of the human being. You simply have to create this school republic out of the individual personalities of the teachers, you must not want more than the teachers can achieve, who you can put in their place. You have to take the specific teachers into account, and the school program emerges from this specific teaching staff. But this is only possible in a free spiritual life, in a spiritual life such as is striven for in the threefold social organism, where the individual human being is actually directly confronted with the spiritual world, and feels responsible for what he has to achieve in the field of spiritual life, directly responsible to the spiritual world, not to the school inspector, or through him to the minister of education and so on, but directly to the powers of the spiritual world. For an education and training system such as I have just described can only be developed if one does not merely have an abstract, intellectual spiritual life, but a real spiritual life, when it is the spirit itself that reigns on earth through the deeds of men, when one appeals to the living spirit, not merely to concepts and ideas, not merely to the intellectual and the intellectualizing. But you can only bring it out, bring it forth, this living spiritual life, this active spirit, from the individual human personalities themselves. From the teacher of the lowest elementary school class up to the teacher of the highest school system, each one is integrated into the independent spiritual organism, so that each one can only follow himself, and has so much teaching to do that he still has time to perform administrative tasks, so that everything that is administered is done by those who are still teaching, who really still teach, not by those who have retired or been taken out of the school system. The administration of the school system is the responsibility of those who are still actively teaching. There would be no authority, people say. No, that is precisely where the true authority of spiritual life would be found, namely, the self-evident authority. In no other field can authority arise except that which arises of its own accord. I would like to know how authority can fail to arise when someone really has the will to do something beneficial and knows that someone else can give them advice, then it will come, and then the one who can give the advice will have the self-evident authority.

I have the task of running the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Each teacher is independent in his or her class. The person who does something in class does so on his or her own initiative. The opinion has never been expressed that I have ever ordered anyone to do anything at the Waldorf School. On the other hand, everyone seeks advice on all kinds of matters, and there is a unified spirit in this Waldorf School. The authority is there, as a matter of course. And one could see it grow, this self-evident authority, on the spirit of the Waldorf School in the last two years since this Waldorf School has existed. One could start in this school, which started two years ago with not quite 200 children, which now has over 500 children, who are once again facing difficulties because they do not want to increase the size of the classes, the lower four classes, there should only be as many children admitted as were there before the Elementary School Law was passed. Recently, however, it has become clear that parents will not put up with this. Now, [in] this Waldorf School, there is a place where you can actually realize in a certain area what you can know from the free spiritual life. Sometimes one has strange experiences there, which I perhaps, for easily understandable reasons, in so far as they arise from the interaction, in the social interaction that we do not, however, let into the teaching, with the official life, about which I I prefer not to make any comments on now; but it is already possible to see how the individual things that lie in this threefolding of the social organism can be tackled from the practical, concrete point of view, and how one does not have to deal with some utopia.

Likewise, this can be done in other areas of spiritual life. And in fact, the anthroposophical worldview will not impose itself dogmatically, but will prove its right to exist through its viability. Because, my dear audience, one should not believe at all that someone who writes something like 'The Key Points of the Social Question' from such a basis, from a realistic basis, is thinking of anything utopian. There is no question of that, not even in the choice of expressions: threefold social order. In recent years, when many people have made the threefold order into a sect, which of course it was certainly not meant to be by me, I have had to experience it again and again, especially in Germany: how is it to be organized? How this, how that? It is really quite bad when, even in the post-war period, you are always confronted with the word “organize,” and especially when you call something you would like to see realized an organism, and you still hear the words: “organize, organize”; you organize where there is something mechanical; an organism is precisely there so that you cannot organize it. You cannot organize the organic. That must appear as an organism. Where you want to organize something, you only have the [inorganic] at hand. You cannot organize an organism. You have to let it become.

You can see the thoroughly misunderstood nature of things when such things occur. And so the threefold structure of the social organism is based on the fact that things must form, that one only has to develop the formative forces, that the threefold social organism must arise. Therefore, it cannot be described in the abstract. Especially those who have spoken of utopia would actually always like to have utopias. When speaking of such things, one can hear it asked, well: what then will be the position regarding ownership of a sewing machine in the threefolded social organism? This question has been asked here at this place, and so on.

Now, my dear attendees, a free spiritual life is only possible under the condition of a real spiritual life. Once, when I was talking about such things in a Swiss city, a university teacher replied to me: Yes, but we already have the freedom of the spiritual life, because in all state constitutions it says: Science and its teaching are free. But, ladies and gentlemen, the point is that science, which is free, should only be there as a free science. If, from the outset, science is raised in such a way that people are trained who are suitable for this or that office, and who are taught the program of their office, then you can safely decree that science and its teaching are free. If science itself is enslaved, then enslaved science naturally feels very free when it is allowed to develop as a slave.

And so it was often replied: In such and such a country, the state does not interfere in schools at all. That is the worst thing to say, because then you no longer notice it, and that is much worse than when you notice it and rebel against it, than when you no longer even notice how what flows in is only based on state principles arising without factual or specialized knowledge from the incorrect democratic, when one no longer even notices what should arise from the abilities for each new generation, what the human being still brings with him from the spiritual world by entering into physical existence through birth. We simply need teachers and educators who stand with holy reverence before the child and say to themselves: something from the spiritual world has been entrusted to me in this child, which I have to fathom and solve as a mystery. I must inquire what message from the spiritual world they have given him. Knowledge of the spiritual world must be alive in teaching and education; this spiritual world must be real in teaching and education. When the coming generation is tyrannized by that which is already there, by the living generation, then the spiritual life is made unfree. And to a large extent, the question of teaching and education in a free spiritual life is a question of teachers, the question of finding the right teachers, those who stand before the growing children as I have just characterized it.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, I wanted to use a few strokes, which of course must always remain fragmentary, to point out how the free spiritual life is to be thought of in the threefold social organism. As I said at the beginning of my talk, today we are actually facing a different time from that in the spring, in the spring of 1919. At that time one could believe that there would really be a sufficiently large number of people who would support the realization of the threefold social order. Today one would be out of touch with the times if one had the same faith as one had then. Threefolding must not become a sect either, something that one can believe in and advocate everywhere and at all times, theoretically as one's opinion. Today it is quite clear, however heavy-heartedly one has to admit it, that within European civilization the people who actually do the economic work have no sense of progress, no insight into real needs, that one is preaching to deaf ears if one wants to work into economic life with reasonable foundations. Today it is clear that one can present individual productive examples to the world, as we tried to do in “The Coming Day” and “Futurum”. These examples will exist as individual white ravens, they will be careful to survive, and they will fulfill the expectations placed on them, at least as individuals. But today we cannot speak of the fact that one comes across an insight in general economic life in order to be able to grasp such things with such ideas, as one could still believe in the first urge of human experiences and results in 1919. In the meantime, people have become accustomed to glossing over the old declining forces. They are still downward forces, after all, and the collapse is still coming. They have only decided to delay the collapse a little, to let everything slide, so that they do not have to expend the energy to move forward to new ideas. And humanity is largely asleep and does not notice how the downward forces are actually raging, and how, with each quarter, civilized humanity is drawing closer to this decline. People would much rather face the convulsions and terrible upheavals that lie in wait for the future in the present if they cannot warm to ideas in the immediate present that could be properly extracted from reality in a calm development, which will nevertheless be needed in the future.

And so we can say that there is little hope to be placed in economic life today. People will have to be forced to take up the new ideas, through their own need, through the effect of the forces of decline. But in the spiritual life we must work unstintingly to develop the free spiritual life as a member of the threefold organism. This is what must not flag, what must be cultivated unconditionally, because the time in which we live is such that people's souls are becoming emptier and emptier, more and more desolate. They are too lazy to admit this to themselves today, but we are heading for terrible times in terms of people's mental state, which will also be reflected in their physical condition.

I have spoken of this often, including in public lectures. The spiritual life must save us through to the times when reasonable people will also see something on the economic front. It is necessary that this spiritual life be cultivated in its freedom wherever it can be cultivated. Anthroposophical soil is the best soil imaginable for this, because then work must be done out of complete freedom. For what needs to be worked out is not yet there. And since it is spirit, it can only be worked out through freedom. And so, especially in the near future, anthroposophical striving and true social striving will increasingly coincide. And we will have to face the souls with the fact that the economic will have to lag behind, that the spiritual simply has to go ahead today.

This is also shown by the qualities of our opponents; in Central Europe, a strange, well-organized opposition is now asserting itself. This well-organized opposition had already worked its way up to the point that at the time, on printed slips of paper distributed to all the people in this packed, largest Stuttgart hall, it was written, not only in allusions, but quite clearly, that it was actually my fault that the Battle of Marnesch was lost in 1914, and that Minister Simons in England has done poorly in recent times. It was not just in innuendo, but it was written on the slips of paper in a very crude way! You could see how it is here with widely extended parties that do not want to admit what has actually happened, that need scapegoats because it no longer works to say that the stab in the back, with which one first wanted to cover up a really eminently lost war, a war that was lost by every trick in the book, they wanted to cover that up with the 'stab in the back'; now they wanted to cover up the absolute incompetence of anyone who has ever led an army, of Ludendorffism, that's what they want to cover up. Today they want to make great geniuses out of people who are quite incapable. A cultural life steeped in lies is a cultural life in decline.

And the situation is no different in the West, no different in America. There, everything is a little more pronounced, where defeat makes things stand out more sharply. Everywhere we need to extract a real, a true, a free spiritual life from the corruption of humanity, which is suffocating in lies and untruthfulness today. For this is identical with truth, and this is at the same time identical with a striving that is in keeping with reality. Therefore, even if there is little prospect of success today, we may still believe that a sufficiently large number of people can warm to a full understanding of the idea of threefolding. Those who can muster the necessary enthusiasm and courage for a free spiritual life will help the threefold social organism to get back on its feet. Then a truly free spiritual life will become a reality. If it becomes a reality in people's hearts, in their powers and in their actions, then the threefold social organism will most certainly follow of its own accord out of the necessity, out of the need of the time. (Lively applause!)

Discussion

Question: How can an ordinary person, who has no influence on public institutions, work in the spirit of threefolding? Rudolf Steiner: The question that was asked here first is: How can an ordinary person, who has no influence on public institutions, work in the spirit of threefolding? Well, firstly, it is not quite clear to me how someone can be without influence on public institutions. Unless he is in prison or in some other place where he can hardly move, he is actually always subject to a certain influence on public institutions. The outside world ensures that one is never completely without influence on public institutions; one has to pay taxes and so on, so one always has some influence on public institutions. So the question cannot really be put that way.

But then, if perhaps what is meant is: How can one work in the sense of the threefold social order, when one perhaps does not have the opportunity to speak, to speak freely somehow, when one does not have the opportunity to be, let's say, a member of parliament or something similar, how can one work in the sense of the threefold social order of the social organism? Then you have to say: Well, this impulse for threefolding is something very concrete. And that is why you can actually only talk about it in concrete examples. You see, I want to say the following, for example. There are institutions everywhere in the sense of nationalization, partial or more or less extensive nationalization - let's say, of medical matters, of nursing. Now, it has happened time and again that good people – who, in their own opinion, are “good” followers of our philosophy – come and say that they would like to have this or that remedy, and so on! So they would actually like to encourage quackery and to violate the law! They can be won over for that, those people! They don't need to have any influence on public institutions, but when they lack something, they don't recognize - perhaps with more or less justification - the state-recognized doctor and want to cure somehow from behind. I have even known ministers who appeared in public parliament to speak out against quackery and for the protection of the medical profession by law, and afterwards, when they themselves became ill, or anyone else became ill, they turned to someone who was not a state-recognized doctor! It is terribly difficult to persuade people to really join those movements that simply correspond to the introduction of such institutions, which are necessary if one wants to have a free spiritual life, or in general, if one wants that which one professes! Many such examples could be cited, where everyone, in their place, by not being afraid to speak out wherever it is possible for them, takes a stand against what they recognize as evil. If you recognize the state protection of medicine as an absurdity, then speak up for it! Or, ladies and gentlemen, is it not an absurdity that over there, across the border, at Leopoldshöhe, there must be a different art of healing than here just a few steps away? But a doctor who is licensed over there is not allowed to help here. If you give in to reason, you will immediately see the matter as an absurdity. But if, let us say, for example, you are a member of the Federal Council or something similar, then you do not see this absurdity! And if you do see it, then you do not find it opportune to represent it. But if one person finds another, there will eventually be enough people to really come to reason. And instead of asking: How can an ordinary person, who has no part in public affairs, become active in the spirit of threefolding, do what one finds in every step and turn of life, in order to carry it out in the spirit of threefolding. Then one will see that every hour, every day, one finds opportunities to become active in the spirit of threefolding.

Question: In Holland, the constitutional ban on official Catholic processions is now to be lifted, which is causing quite a stir. Would this actually be a question of the free spiritual life or also of the public legal life? Rudolf Steiner: With some questions it is so with the threefold social organism, although the idea is quite right, of course: How does the blood of the chest or the head come to play this or that role in the migraine? The blood simply circulates, and so one cannot say that the blood of the chest organism is different from the blood of the head, but one can only speak of the blood in general. And so it is not easy to categorize things again. The threefold social organism is precisely manifested in the fact that things cannot be categorized. However, one does experience very strange things. In recent years I have always had to speak of the three-part human organism, the sensory organism, the rhythmic organism and the metabolic-limb organism, and in recent years a great deal has been done by myself and our medical and scientific friends to develop this idea of the three-part human being. But recently a book was written by someone called Kurt Leese, I believe. He has now, because I said that things should not be put together in boxes, but that the whole human being is head, nevertheless the human being is mainly head in the head, the whole human being is head. Things go into each other. The head is also taken care of and dependent on the limbs. Things all go into each other. Kurt Leese can no longer think this. He can only think of three if it is nicely next to each other, but he cannot think it when it goes into each other. He says: It's a shocking idea.

But we will have to get used to such shocks, even in the tripartite social organism, if we are to imagine, through the effect of abstractions, what a clock looks like when it flies away at the speed of sunlight and returns after years, is difficult to verify for a variety of reasons: firstly, because of the nature of the clock; secondly, because of the person who would then have to check it when the clock returns, and so on. So the present is not shocked at all by such ideas of the abstract. But it is shocked when something that is in line with reality is placed before it. So it is necessary not to press things so much that one now asks: Is this a matter of the free spiritual life or of the legal life? One can say: If one begins to prohibit any expressions or revelations of the spiritual life at all, to make legal provisions about it, then one is on a slippery slope with regard to the spiritual life. I must say, you see, with regard to those institutions, that I once showed you here – those who were there – a peculiar document, the document that was once issued as a patent in 1847, I believe, in Switzerland, where it says: It was through the power of the Almighty that the brave Swiss general Dufour succeeded in expelling the Jesuits from the country. Then it is explained in more detail. Today, in free Switzerland, it seems a little strange that the eradication of the Jesuits is attributed to the grace of God and the power that God has given! But it is preserved that way; I had the document photographed because it is so beautiful. I will show the photograph again on occasion. It is, after all, quite good to occasionally bring things home to people face to face. But even with regard to Jesuitism, I am not in favor of combating it by law. Those who want to fight it should fight it with intellectual weapons. One should not spare oneself the inconvenience of having to fight against everything intellectual with intellectual weapons, not by making laws. Laws can be made with majority decisions. One does not need to say that the majority is always nonsense, because then reality, social reality, would always be nonsense. Now, as I said, one does not need to go that far, but in any case one cannot say that the majority is always wisdom. And laws can be made in a democratic state, especially with majority decisions. But certain things just cannot be done by majority vote. They have to live out. And so everything that is regarded as the erring spiritual must also live out. Therefore, one must say: It is a matter of freedom and not of compulsion when efforts are made to reintroduce the banned Catholic processions and to lift the bans against Catholic processions. The only remedy is to show that these processions are not reasonable, and to educate people to this effect, so that they do not take part in them; then they will stop of their own accord! This is the only remedy in spiritual life, just as one can teach a person good taste and he will do the right thing of his own accord, but not by passing laws against it.

That is what a free spiritual life must demand. The one who has to resort to laws in the spiritual realm is on the path that I once described in Nuremberg in 1908 in a lecture cycle, where I said - it is not said without significance, using strong inks, but these strong inks should characterize adequately – I said at the time: Actually, today's humanity no longer strives to go out on the street without a doctor on the right and a police officer on the left, the doctor for physical protection, the police officer, well, for protection in materialistic times, yes, for physicality too! That has gradually become the ideal. I have heard many things in my life, but time and again I had to shrink back a little inside when I heard, with increasing frequency, over and over again: “That should be prohibited by law.” That had gradually become an awfully common saying – instead of taking the trouble to teach people good taste themselves, so that these things would stop of themselves – 'it should be banned by law', 'by majority decision' or something like that should be done. That is the one thing that must be asserted in principle. Therefore, all prohibitions against processions and the like should be lifted, and things should be allowed to run their course. Then spiritual life will also be able to express itself freely

It is absolutely essential that stupidity, folly and evil be conquered by cleverness and kindness, that ugliness be conquered by beauty, and that nothing be legally eradicated in the realm of spiritual life.

Question of the youth movement: The speaker explains that the individual members of the youth movements want and need to experience truth and reality; the economic sphere seems to them to be the area where everyone has a say, where everyone should be active and engaged. Later, the individual often withdraws again to reflect or simply to get away from society. It is almost impossible to reach a solution. Soon it is the economic that provides a value system; there is no recognition of the state or the political, but everything is conditioned by the economic. Individuals are diverted from their spiritual nature by economic life - or they withdraw into solitude].

Rudolf Steiner: In essence, the Lord has characterized what I have already said in the lecture: the phenomena of the youth movements of recent decades. But it would not be entirely correct to stop at this phenomenon of the youth movement. I have already found some understanding among members of this youth movement when I have struck what lives in the deeper foundations of the whole development of time. I had to say to some members of the youth movement, to which you yourself seem to belong and know very well: Yes, the year 1899, for example, is an extraordinarily important one for the development of humanity as a whole, and in particular for the development of Western civilization. And anyone who has an eye for such things knows how fundamentally different those people are who either lived through their childhood before 1899 was around, so they were a few years or ten years old, or those people who, let's say, were even born later, so they are hardly in their twenties now, and those people who were born before 90 and so on. At the bottom of their souls, very important things were going on, I would say, from the very source of existence, and that is connected with the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century, gates to the supersensible world were opened for the first time in the Western world. It was no longer possible, let us say, in the 1880s, to lead a different life, even with a powerful urge for the spiritual life; the Nietzschean life is more or less that life, which one must present as one that has become ill from the decline of Western culture because it could not find what it was looking for: the spiritual basis in everything phenomenal, in everything external, in everything sensual. The life of Nietzsche is therefore extraordinarily interesting to study from this point of view. He participates in Schopenhauerism, becomes ill from Schopenhauerism; he participates in historicism, becomes ill from historicism; he participates in Wagnerism, becomes ill from Wagnerism. He participates in naturalism, in positivism, becomes ill from it. He participates in the Darwinian molding of the idea of humanity, becomes ill from it, and so on, and so on. Instead of the idea of repeated earthly lives, he comes to the idea of the return of the same, becomes ill from it. Nietzsche could not help but fall ill from his urge for the supernatural world. It was simply not possible to achieve this directly and fundamentally at the end of the nineteenth century or before the end of the nineteenth century. The gates have opened, and today we cannot help but turn to the revelations of the spiritual world if we want to achieve an inwardly satisfied existence. Speaking of nature in the way that was justified in the 1880s is no longer justified today. Today we can point out how there was a current of opinion favoring an 'ignorabimus', how a naturalist, Du Bois-Reymond, spoke of 'ignorabimus', how Ranke, the historian, by seeking to present history as an event with the exception of the Christ event; that this comes from the primal forces, that history does not belong there - so 'ignorabimus'. Today we cannot do that. Today we are on the threshold of the supersensible world wanting to enter, and it is only the dull reluctance that is still bracing itself against the acceptance of a spiritual world view. And what is rumbling in the youth, that is the deeper thing, that is rumbling inside. And therefore, no matter how much individual members of the youth movement may say, “We do not want the abstract, we want the emotional,” they will still have to realize: What spiritual science in anthroposophy wants to be is precisely not something abstract, it is the full human being, it is what comes out of the whole human being, it is what expresses itself as art and as religion and as science, and it is the point at which the whole, full human being can come to his inner realization. And today we are only suffering from the fact that economic routine does not want to take leave of economic reason and that we must first begin to work on the recovery of spiritual life, until the unreasonableness of economic life must follow through necessity. And I am convinced that something good and right will come out of the youth movement, just as I do not despair when people keep saying, for my sake, that they cannot distinguish between expressionism and a windmill, a towel just pulled out of the water and hung up to dry, or a human portrait, say, for example, a boot heel. Of course, sometimes you can't distinguish that with the expressionists, but nevertheless, there are approaches to something in it, which, if it is refined in the most diverse places where it appears, will lead to that in which spiritual science, as it is represented here, only wants to be a guide and a leader and to work from the very most elementary.

But of course, sometimes you experience the fact that, despite the fact that you mean it to be so concrete, the opposite is held against you. I just want to say that last as a joke. The day before yesterday I had a lecture in Zurich. I spoke with slides about this building here. Then afterwards, one of the audience stood up and said: Yes, why do we need such a building, why do we need a Christ's head and Christ at all, why do we need it today? I was walking on the street this afternoon, there was a very drunk person, I followed him, and I joined him. This is a temple of God, this is a real temple and we do not need built temples. — On this occasion, I only regretted that no friendly spirit was found to find the right door with the person in question. But in view of the unnatural conditions of the present time, one may meet people who do not mean, as I say, that we should not build temples, but who mean that we should follow drunkards. They really want to work from the elementary, and they deserve, so to speak, to have spiritual science brought to their full understanding, because they can understand it. For the youth movement is connected with a very great change that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century and that is actually based not only on superficial historical forces but on profound cosmic forces.

Emil Molt: I have the honor of welcoming you this evening and thanking you for the large attendance, which shows us that our invitation has fallen on fertile ground. The “Federation for the Threefold Social Organism” has seen fit to invite a number of prominent figures here this evening to put all the questions that the individual members of the audience have on their minds - questions that have arisen, for example, from the lectures - so that these questions can be clarified by Dr. Steiner himself. We believe that the lectures that have been held here in Stuttgart for four to six weeks are not only given to bring something interesting to the listeners, but above all to allow something to mature in the listeners that can be turned into action. We also believe that in order to bring such a movement into being, it is not enough to have only a few people as the driving force; rather, we need collaborators from all walks of life.

Now I ask you to take the floor, and I ask Dr. Steiner to answer any questions that arise.

Dr. Schmucker: I would like to make it clear from the start that I am asking purely as a private person. The resolution that has been formulated from the various lectures calls upon the government to appoint Dr. Steiner to implement the threefold social order that he has been advocating as quickly as possible. Now I must honestly confess that I have not yet had enough time to delve into his book and follow all the lectures. So I apologize if my question reveals that I don't know whether Dr. Steiner has perhaps already commented on the matter that is close to my heart. My question is this: Let us assume that one day the government takes the position that we want to work together with Dr. Steiner. Let us assume that Dr. Steiner comes to some ministry, for example the Ministry of Labor. He is seated in a room that is full of government papers and commentaries. He finds all the codes of law that deal with the solution of the social question, for example the Workers' Protection Act, the Law on Employee Insurance and so on, but above all the many laws that were brought to light by the new government after the great upheaval, and which all point in the same direction, namely, to satisfy as much as possible the social aspirations of the workers and employees. How does Dr. Steiner envision this work – the transition from the current mode of governance to the future one? What should happen to the current popular representations, to the provincial assemblies, to the National Assembly?

Rudolf Steiner: You have approached the question from a certain perspective, from the government perspective. Therefore, I can only answer it from this perspective. And the answer is that, of course, at the first act of government, one would have to foresee a great deal that could happen as a result of this first act of government.

As a first act of government, I would have something to think about – isn't that right, we are of course talking quite openly here – which of course has little to do with the question of what I would do if, for my sake, I were placed in the Ministry of Labor, found law books and the like in there and now had to continue working there. I would just like to formally state in advance that I had absolutely nothing to do with the wording of the resolution you are talking about. I would not be able to accept this interpretation of the resolution, but only be able to characterize my position on this question.

For example, I would first have to state that I do not belong in a labor ministry at all, that I have nothing to do there, for the simple reason that there can be no labor ministry within the unified state community in the near future. That is why I recently said in a lecture that the first act of government should be to take the initiative on various matters, in order to create a basis for further action.

First of all, it must be understood that a present-day government is, to a certain extent, the continuation of what has emerged as a government from previous conditions. However, only part of this government lies in the straightforward continuation of previous conditions, namely that which would include the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of the Interior - for Internal Security - and the Ministry of Hygiene. These things would lie in the continuation of what has arisen from previous government maxims. In all other respects, such a government would have to take the initiative to become a liquidation ministry, that is, a ministry that takes the initiative to the right and to the left in order to create the conditions for a free spiritual life that would be based on its own administration and constitution and would have to organize itself once the transition from the present to the following conditions has been overcome. This administration would also have a corresponding representation, which of course could not be shaped like today's popular representations, but would have to grow out of the special conditions of intellectual life. This would have to be formed purely out of the self-administration of intellectual life; in this context, the system of education and culture is particularly important. On the one hand, it would have to be handed over to the self-administration of intellectual life.

On the other hand, a liquidation ministry would have to hand over to the autonomous economic life everything that is, for example, traffic and trade; the Ministry of Labor would also have to find its administration in organizations that would develop out of economic life. These would, of course, be very radical things, but from this point of view they can only be radical things. Only then would a basis be created for any kind of treatment of specific questions.

What I have dealt with now does not change anything with regard to what has been built from below. It only indicates the path by which something new can be created out of what already exists. Only when those organizations have been created out of economic life that would continue what is in the codes of law you mentioned, only then could [further] be tackled. That would only be a step that could come later. I am not thinking of a program, but of a sequence of steps, all of which are real actions, real processes. All I say in my books and lectures are not indications of how to do it, but how to create the conditions for people to enter into the possible interrelationships in order to do the things. Economic laws can only grow out of economic life itself, and only if all those corporations are expressed in their impulses in economic life that can contribute something to the shaping of this economic life from the individual concrete circumstances of economic life.

So, on the part of the government, I would consider that as the first step: to understand that it must be a liquidation government.

I am happy to go into further specific issues that arise from this.

Dr. Schmucker: Suppose you were to get some kind of self-government to regulate economic life. Could the works councils, which are now to be introduced for individual companies under the Reich bill, serve as a means of achieving this self-administration if – which is at least the intention – the works councils were expanded upwards, for example by combining the Württemberg works councils into a state workers' council or state works council and, at the highest level, into a Reich works council or Reich economic council? The bill uses the term “works council” for a representation that would become a pure workers' representation in which employers would not be included. Just as the works council works together with the employer, so too could employers and employees sit together at the higher state level, and then not only employees but also employers would be represented in a Reich Economic Council, so that here too there would be equal representation. Could Dr. Steiner see the possibility that such an organization would fulfill some of the wishes of economic life and that these economic self-governing corporations would be assigned all further tasks that Dr. Steiner believes should be performed by economic corporations as self-governing corporations?

Rudolf Steiner: I would ask you not to take the few introductory sentences I am about to say as abstractions, but as a summary of experiences. These can only be summarized in just such sentences.

The way in which the structure of economic life has developed means that this economic life suffers from the fact that harmonization of interests is not possible within the existing structure. I will only hint at some of it. For example, under the development of our economic life, the worker is not interested in production - I am ignoring the really foolish interest, for example, in profit sharing, which I consider impractical. The worker is interested in economic life, as things stand today, only as a consumer, while the capitalist, in turn, is basically only interested in economic life as a producer, and again only as a producer from the point of view of profit - that is his point of view, economically speaking, it cannot be otherwise. So today we have no way of organizing a real harmonization of consumer and producer interests; it is not part of our economic structure.

What we must achieve is that we actually make those people who are involved in shaping the economic structure equally interested in consumption and production, so that no one who intervenes in a formative way – not only through judgment but also through action – has a one-sided interest in production or consumption, but rather that through the organization itself there is an equal interest in both. This can only be achieved if we are able to gradually let people form small corporations out of economic life itself, and out of all forms of economic life, which then naturally continue to grow. They must be corporations because trust must be established. This is only possible if larger corporations are gradually built up uniformly from smaller ones, that is, only if we have personalities with their judgments and also with their influence based on the economic foundation, who work in all areas of social life through their aptitude for managing economic life as such. If we want to socialize, we cannot socialize economic life through institutions, but only by being able to interest people in the institutions in the way described and by having them participate in them continuously.

Therefore, I consider it most necessary today that we do not create laws by which works councils are established, but that we have the possibility to create works councils from all forms of economic life – so that they are initially there – and to let a works council emerge from these works councils, which only has a true meaning when it forms the mediation between the individual branches of production. A works council that only exists for individual branches is of little significance. It is only when the activities of the works councils unfold primarily between the branches of production that are in interaction that they have a meaning.

I therefore said: the individual works council actually only has a purpose in the company if it has an informational significance. What must be done with this idea of works councils in economic life can actually only be done by the works councils as a whole, because it can only result in a blessing for the individual companies in the future if the works councils emerge from the structure of the whole economic life. So I think that the real focus is on the works council as a whole, in other words, on what is negotiated between the works councils of the individual factories, and not on what happens only in the individual factories.

But then I can only expect this institution to be a blessing if these works councils – which, of course, have to be set up on the basis of existing conditions, which must not arise from blue-sky hopes but from what exists today – if they are elected, for example, from all those who are somehow involved in the company. I do not want to speak of “employers” and “employees”, but of people from the circle of all those who are really involved in the business, either intellectually or physically. So all those who participate in the business would form the basis for such councils to develop out of themselves. If the matter were approached from this economic angle, the reasonable employers to date would naturally be included in their capacity as spiritual leaders, and we would have a works council that would at least not initially have elected representatives from all [areas] – that would only be the case after some time – but which could represent the interests of the most diverse people involved in economic life. However, I could only imagine that such a workers' council would nevertheless focus its main attention on the conditions of production, so I actually cannot imagine that a mere workers' council would be anything meaningful. I can only imagine that in addition to the workers' council – not overlooking the objection that one might say: Where will work still be done if all this is to be done in practice? I can only imagine that the workers' councils will be supplemented by transport councils and economic councils, because the workers' council will primarily deal with production, but the economic council with consumption in the broadest sense. For example, consumption would also have to include everything that we consume from abroad, everything that is imported; everything that is imported would be subject to the economic council. I am not saying that everything is exemplary today, but these are the three most important [types of] workers' councils that must be established first: the workers' council, the transport council, and the economic council. To do this, only one wing of the government would have to take the initiative, but it would have no laws to create, but would only have to see to it that these workers' councils are set up. These councils would then have to begin to create their own constitution, that is, to create what flows from independent economic life, what they have experienced in it. The constitution of the three councils would arise entirely from the circumstances themselves. This is what I would consider the first step: the creation of workers' councils out of the circumstances. Only then would these have to give themselves their constitution. That, in practice, is what I would call breaking up the economy in a given area. As long as there is the idea that laws concerning workers' councils are issued by a central government, I consider that to be something that has nothing to do with what should happen. Taking the first step first – that is what the time demands of us.

Dr. Schmucker: In my opinion, this work, which the participants themselves should carry out in order to form and manage organizations, requires a highly developed workforce. However, the experiences we have had with the workforce during the war and with the labor force in recent months make me hesitant to assume that the majority of the workforce – or at least the vast majority – is up to this great task. When you have experiences like the ones we have had recently, where the workers of a company come and demand under threat of violence: You have made so much profit now. You may be doing badly now, but the state will take a large part of what you have earned if you do not share it. We are now demanding cost-of-living allowances! This whole process is well known to everyone, this continued increase in wages, food prices and so on, one thing becoming more expensive as a result of another. These experiences cast doubt on whether workers and employees are at this high level of development to fulfill the task that is required of them here.

Rudolf Steiner: If we start from the principle that we always want to do the best we can possibly imagine or that we can envision in any ideal way, then we will never carry out in practice what really needs to be done. I naturally admit that a great deal of what you have just said is absolutely right. But I would ask you to consider the following: in the last few weeks and months, I have had the opportunity to talk to a great many workers, and I have found that when you really speak to them in their language, they come up with things that really have a real basis. I have found that he then proves to be inwardly receptive and realizes that what is to be done can only be something that does not undermine economic life or cause it to die, but builds it up. It is extremely easy to make the worker understand what needs to be done if you address what he himself has experienced. And from there he will easily grasp certain interrelations in economic life. Of course, there is still a great deal that he cannot grasp, for the simple reason that the circumstances never allowed him to see into certain interrelations, into which one simply cannot see when one stands at the machine from morning till night. I already know that too.

But now, of course, there is the added factor that even our most experienced principals do not delve very deeply into the real conditions of economic life. I would like to quote Rathenau not as an economist [oriented towards the whole], but almost as a principal, because his writings actually reveal on every page that he really speaks from the standpoint of the principal, the industrial entrepreneur. Now, basically, from this point of view, there are no absolute objections to be made against these statements, because basically all the facts are correct. I would like to mention just one thing: Rathenau calculates the actual meaning of surplus value. Of course, today it is very easy to prove that the concept of surplus value as it existed some time ago is now obsolete. Rathenau also does this calculation very nicely in detail, and comes to the quite correct conclusion that basically none of the surplus value can be claimed. Because if the worker gets it, he would have to give it back, because the institutions make it necessary for it to be used as a reserve. This calculation is, of course, simply correct. The question is whether it is possible to escape the result of this calculation, whether it is economically possible to find a way to escape the result of this calculation. The point is that there is no way to escape Rathenau's calculation other than to realize what I have given as an answer in my book: that the moment any given sum of means of production is completed, it can no longer be sold, that is, it no longer has any purchase value. Then the whole calculation collapses, because the Rathenau calculation is only possible if the means of production can be sold again at any time for a very specific value. So the right prerequisite is missing for the actual conclusion, for which the principal is not yet available today. They would first have to understand that we will get nowhere because we are at an impasse if we do not make major changes. And it would be immediately apparent if we were to find common ground, but on ground where the only interest is in continuing economic life and not in serving the interests of the individual; we would see that the principals know something, but that they have one-sided knowledge that can be supplemented by the others.

I believe I can say, with reference to everything that an individual can produce intellectually in the way of beautiful ideals: “One is a human being, two are people, more than two are beasts.” As soon as we come to the kind of thinking that is supposed to be realized in the social order, the opposite principle applies: “One alone is nothing, several are a little something, and many are those who can then do it.” Because when twelve people from the most diverse party-political directions sit together with the goodwill to summarize their individual experiences as partial experiences, we not only have a sum of twelve different opinions, but by these opinions really taking action, a potentiation of these twelve impulses arises. Thus a quite tremendous sum of economic experience is formed simply by our socializing human opinion in this way. That is the important thing. Well, I must say, I believe that what you say is right, so long as you are dealing with a class of workers who demand simply from their standpoint as consumers. Because the fact that they have demands will of course not lead to anything that can lead to any kind of socialization. This is the only way to dismantle the economy. We must not imagine that we will achieve ideal conditions the day after tomorrow, but a condition that is possible to live in if we do things this way. At this point in particular, we should think: What is possible to live in? – and not: Are people smart enough? Let us take people as they are and do the best we can with them, and not speculate about whether people are highly developed, because ultimately something must always happen. We simply cannot do nothing; something must happen from some quarter. I do not see why, if we take people out of economic life, they should be less highly developed than, for example, the government people and the members of the former German Reichstag in all the years in which what happened then had terrible effects. There, too, only what was possible happened. The point is that we do what is possible with the majority of people who are there. I do not imagine that an ideal state could be created, but an organism that is possible to live in.

Dr. Riebensam: I would like to address the question of the works councils. What still gives us the opportunity to talk to the workers? The situation is now escalating to the point where we need to find a lightning rod. I want to get to the practical point and ask: Why do you want to put a car on the road without a steering wheel? In my opinion, such a machine is our workforce. I have spoken to many of them about this and expressed my view that I consider it impossible to come to any kind of cooperation with a large workforce in this way. For the moment a committee of workers makes itself the representative of a certain opinion, every member of the committee will be stoned by the workers. You assume goodwill on the part of the workers. I have tried everything, and not without success at first, because I have the trust of the workers, ever since I have been able to speak to them and they have been able to hear me. But the people who do not come are in the majority. I can perhaps talk to two thousand, the others do not have the good will. From experience, I know that the great multitude is capable of confusing those who are initially convinced. The wisest of the workers' committees, with whom I have spoken privately and who expressed positive views, are now back to the point where I ask myself: has all the work I have done for six months been in vain? I have made certain proposals to the government with the intention that they be implemented in such a way as to satisfy the workers. If these proposals are issued as decrees by the government, all this work will be in vain. But I think it is useless to establish works councils without any tax; the craziest things happen then. Since you yourself say that we have to start at some point, we would have to start in such a way that it could be implemented.

Rudolf Steiner: All that you have said actually amounts to the fact that it is basically not possible at present for the management of the companies to cope with the workforce. This has of course not come about without preconditions, it has of course only gradually become so. I believe that you misjudge the situation if you rely too much on the goodwill of the workforce. Because the workers will demand goodwill from you, for the reason that they have learned through agitation - to a certain extent justifiably - that nothing will come of it. The workers will say: We can have this goodwill, but the entrepreneur will not have it. This mistrust is already too great today. Therefore, there is no other way than to gain as much trust as possible. The moment someone is found who really knows something about social objectives that the workers can understand, and not just based on good will but on insight, even for two thousand workers – or for eight thousand, for that matter – the situation changes. Of course, if you talk to two thousand workers, they in turn may be confused by the other side, but the situation will still turn out like this: If you really talk to the workers about what they understand, you are not just talking to two thousand people who are confused by the people they last talked to, but these will in turn have an effect on the others.

But if we ask ourselves whether this path has even been taken yet, we have to say that basically it has not been taken at all. And everything is done to make this path unattractive over and over again. Naturally, when the worker sees that works councils are decreed from above by law, this is a complete denial of trust. So let something come from the central authorities today in a truly audible way, something that makes sense, so that the worker can see that it makes sense. But nothing like that is happening. And that is why the movement for the threefold social order actually exists, because something is to be created that really constitutes a conceivable goal. You will not reach the worker by just talking about concrete institutions, because he has been pushed out into a mere consumer position. This is not explained to the worker by anyone. Everything that is being done is moving in exactly the opposite direction. Let the institutions arise on their own initiative today. If this works council is really to be constituted, just let it come, perhaps only in the form of proposals - after all, many proposals can be put forward here -; not just one single type of bill. That is, of course, the best way to have the entire working class against the works councils. Today there is no way to make any headway in this way. Today we can only succeed if we want something other than to use force against force, namely to confront personalities with personalities, to gain personal trust. That is what the worker can do. The one who understands how to talk to the worker in his language in such a way that the worker realizes that nothing will come of it if he only ever pushes up the wage scale, and he also sees that there is a will to finally move in this [new] direction, then he will go along with it and work as well. He will not work with you if you just make legislative proposals, but he wants to see that the personalities in the government actually have the will to move in a certain direction.

This is what the current government is also being criticized for; people have the idea that they want to do something, but what is happening is all moving along the same tracks as before. There is nothing new in it anywhere. On the other hand, when people are involved, it is not a matter of somehow setting a car in motion and not giving it a steering wheel. It really must have a steering wheel if it is to be able to move. We cannot help but say: either we try to move forward and go as far as we can, or we are heading for chaos. There is no other way to do it.

Dr. Riebensam: I agree with all that. I go along with the idea that the worker should be shown this goal to begin with, but not be led down the same old paths. I think it's possible that today you will see that the workers in a factory are throwing a great deal together. But perhaps it would be possible to find a way for the workers to play a fruitful role. We are willing to take the workers into account, but they must also take our point of view into consideration if they do not want all faith in a possibility of understanding to disappear. Somehow we have to find a way. [But it's not that easy.] When the workers come to set up works councils and we tell them we want to sit down together and do the right thing, then that is basically an abstract template; they don't meet our advice at all. I was at a workers' meeting the other day when the workers demanded too much. They said that we should not approach the matter with narrow-minded thinking; it would no longer be useful to make any arrangements; they wanted to decide everything themselves in the future. This realization must be the basis for my future actions. However, I could imagine a works council that meets every eight days and with which I discuss everything before tensions arise. But we should also tell the workers: we cannot simply create a works council on our own.

Rudolf Steiner: You see, in these matters it is important to take systematic experiences, not unsystematic ones. We have had a whole series of workers' meetings, almost every day, because we had no other option. One thing emerged again and again in these workers' meetings. It was very noticeable that, as an extreme, the workers themselves said: Yes, if we are alone, how are we supposed to cope in the future? Of course we need those who can lead; we need the spiritual worker. This matter does not arise from dictating, but only from really working with people. That is why I considered the fact (Molt will be able to confirm this) that from the very beginning, when he came with other friends to put this matter into effect, I told him: the first requirement is that honest trust be acquired, but not in the usual way of: I am the principal and you are the worker, but rather from person to person, so that the worker is really initiated step by step into the management of the whole business and also gets an idea of when the business ceases to be economically viable. That is something that is indispensable, and I openly ask the question: where has it happened? Where is it being done? — Nowadays, a lot of things are done in government by individual commissions getting together and thinking about the best way of doing this or that. In this case, forgive the harsh word, the horse is being put before the cart. It is impossible to make progress with that. Today it is necessary to create a living link between those who work with their hands and those who can understand it. It is much more necessary than holding ministerial meetings for individual men to go among the people and talk from person to person. That is the ground on which one must begin first. One must not be put out if success does not come at the first attempt; it is bound to come by the fourth or fifth time. So, wouldn't it be true that if only some kind of beginning had been made in what is actually practical today, one would be able to see [that something is emerging]; but there is no beginning, people are opposed to it.

Emil Molt: A start has been made. May I point out to those gentlemen who are interested that we have been introducing this kind of works council for weeks. Even though I am well aware that the matter is still in its infancy, it has been shown that we have already gained the trust while we are negotiating here on how to gain that trust. This is essential because we set out to make fewer cigarettes and more people. We have used the factory to make people. Making cigarettes is only a means to an end. We set out to really get in touch with people and to do this during working hours. You just have to take that time. It's about realizing things from the bottom up. If things are like this elsewhere now - a lot has been missed in the last six to eight weeks. If we had started earlier, a lot could have been avoided.

The situation now is as follows: the people who are in the factory not only want to work, they also want to know. We must be clear about this: the more we give in to this urge and are not afraid to steer this power current into the right channels, the more this power can be utilized again. Therefore, we should not be afraid to tell every factory owner to lay out his business like an open book, because that is where trust begins to be put into practice. As long as we only talk about what we should do, we will not win the trust of the people. We must provide insight and show them: Today we have nothing more to hide. In the past, the factory owner had more to hide. Now the worker can see at most that nothing is being earned. Only if he comes to it himself will he believe it – he will not believe it from the factory owner. When people demand higher wages, they are driven only by a desire for knowledge; they want to gain insight. But if you yourself are the helmsman and provide insight into the production process, you will see that people will concern themselves with issues other than wages. I would ask you to bear in mind that we [from Waldorf-Astoria] are not speaking as theorists; we have experience, we have proof of this. Even if not all our ideals have been realized so far, we are on the way to doing so. And the difficulties that other companies are now facing – we will never have them.

Yesterday I spoke to a large workforce from another company. I saw the enthusiasm with which people received my report as soon as things were viewed from a comprehensive point of view. I heard from my workforce today that the news of this meeting is spreading like wildfire among the workforce. People see for themselves that if it were like this everywhere, the conditions would be quite different. For days we have had continuous visits from the workers' committees of all the major plants, and they say: Yes, if only we had that! There is a great failure on the part of the bourgeoisie; if you really talk to our colleagues, you will encounter blinkers and narrow-mindedness everywhere.

Dr. Schmucker: I had imagined the government's bill to be dreadful, but not so dreadful; it is a real monstrosity. If you study the matter, you can see that the law-makers in Berlin do not know the situation; they do not even know what it is about. Now they want to abolish the employee and worker committees and set up works councils of 40 to 80 people who are incapable of working.

Mr. Geyer: There is no one present who is not touched by Dr. Steiner's proposals. But I must openly admit that I deal with the question every day of why we always face new problems when I think we have overcome them. We are in the midst of a spiritual revolution. People are becoming more and more concerned with the spiritual side of the social structure than has been the case so far, when the interest of the individual in general was only directed towards an economic revolution. But I must say that this spiritual revolution, in my opinion, is not moving in the right direction. The worker and many employees are by no means aware of what is at stake today. Their consumer interests keep them so firmly in their grip that they do not allow other people who do not work with their hands to be considered alongside them. It is true when Dr. Steiner says that social policy cannot be driven from above. But we must come to a point where the human being enters into a closer relationship with other human beings. Unfortunately, however, we are already so one-sided in the culture and in the state organism and in the world organism that a return to the original culture, to the original state, is necessary – not in the spiritual sense, but in relation to the relationship between human beings. There is no longer any control that stands above the human being. All people should enter into relationship with each other, forming small circles, a kind of crystal, which combine to form larger units. This forming of crystals should then continue until we have reached the summit, where the liquidation of the state organism has come to its end. I believe that this is how Dr. Steiner imagines the process of developing threefolding until it is complete. But a considerable time will pass before that [and a problem will arise]: councils will be formed, but these councils will change very often, just as people now often change their jobs, so that chaos will ensue. There will not only be friction between the small organizations, but also collisions within the liquidation ministry. This can lead to the whole tower, which is to be built from below, collapsing. I believe that our general education of the people as a prerequisite [for this reform work] does not yet make it possible to hope for the development of genuine trust between people. I believe that a general education of the people should start first, although I readily admit that this general education of the people will also face obstacles from above and below. The one who is supposed to be educated, the worker, regards not only the employer as an enemy, but everyone who is intellectually superior, because he fears that he will have to persuade him to do something that is contrary to his interests. This is an experience that is made many times. I do not believe that even if Molt has had good experiences with the works councils in his company, it will always remain so. Man is man, and since I have known man in his ten-thousand-year development, I must say: Man is not a mere earthly creature, but a being that once reaches the point of culture where one can truly say that now man is culturally so educated that his earthly existence will be a happy one. To bring this about, however, a person would have to come along who has superhuman spiritual powers to capture the souls of people.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say that all of this could actually be used to present a view of the value of the human being. But for those who are thinking practically about what can be done in these chaotic times, it is not at all a matter of whether a person is sufficiently culturally educated or can be educated, but only of making what can be made out of people. And above all, when we speak of the social organism, we should abandon the notion from the outset that we want to somehow establish happiness in the social organism or bring happiness to people through social institutions. The aim of social transformation is therefore not to create happy people, but to get to know the living conditions of the social organism, that is, to create a viable social organism. The fact that we cannot make progress with popular education as it is today has led to the demand for total emancipation from the other limbs for popular education, for the impulses of the threefold order.

Now, if you really want to know people, you cannot speak of tens or thousands of years, but of what is really manageable. If you consider the development of public education in the last few centuries – three to four centuries is all you need to take if you want to get to the bottom of today's problems – you can see that the ever-increasing nationalization of the entire education system has led to the public ignorance that we have today. We have gradually created an education in our leading circles that leads to nothing but false concepts. Consider that the leading circles have driven the worker into mere economic life. Because what you throw at him in the way of popular education, he does not understand. I was a teacher at the Workers' Education School and I know what the worker can understand and what is done incorrectly. I know that he can only understand something that is not taken from bourgeois education, but from the general human existence. You said that the worker regards everyone as an enemy who is spiritually superior. Of course, he regards everyone as an enemy who merely represents a spiritual life that is conditioned by the social structure of a small number of castes and classes. He senses this very well in his instinct. As soon as he is confronted with the spiritual life that is drawn from the whole human being, there is no question of him being an enemy of the spiritually superior; there can be no question of that; on the contrary, he realizes very well that this is his best friend. We must find a way to achieve a truly social education for the people through the emancipation of spiritual life. We must not be afraid of a certain radicalism. We must have an inkling of how concepts, ideas, the whole essence of what our education is today has rubbed off on people, to put it trivially. There has been much discussion about the grammar school system. What is this grammar school system? We have established it by staging a kind of paradox. The spiritual life is, after all, a whole. The Greeks absorbed the spiritual life from everything, because it was the spiritual life that adapted to the circumstances. We do not teach anything in school that is in the world, but rather what was in the world for the Greeks, that is imagined by our culture. From this paradox we now demand: We want to offer people enlightenment. We can only offer it to them if we go back to ourselves in this area, if we approach man as a human being. There should be no return to a speculative original state; only what the times demand can be considered. Today it is necessary that we really learn from such things. When I taught my students - and I can say that there were a great many of them - what I could not get from any branch of grammar school knowledge or education, but what had to be built up from scratch, they learned eagerly. Of course, because they also absorb the judgment of the educated, which [actually comes from high school knowledge], so they knew exactly that this is a cultural lie; of course they don't want to learn anything about that.

We will never have the opportunity to actually move forward if we are unable to make the radical initial decision to implement this threefold order, that is, to really wrest spiritual life and economic life from state life. I am convinced that today a great many people say that they do not understand this threefold order. They say this because it is too radical for them, because they have no courage to really study the matter in detail and carry it out. That is not the case, it is really a matter of the fact that we are not dealing with supermen, but with human beings as they really are, and doing what can be done with them. Then you can do a great deal if you do not want to start from this or that prejudice. You really ought to put the education system on its own basis and let those who are in it manage it. But people can hardly imagine what that is, while it is actually a thing that, if you want to imagine it, already exists.

So, the school system must first be thought of as completely separate from the state system. It is out of the question for us to make any progress if we do not embrace this radical thinking of bringing the school, indeed the whole education system, out of the state.

Dr. Riebensam: I want to get back to the real issue, to what we are trying to achieve. I would like to speak very personally and reply to Mr. Molt that I consider his view – although he experienced it in his factory – to be somewhat unrealistic. It is based on experiences in a small circle. Twenty years ago, I implemented principles in a small factory that no one else was thinking of at the time. I openly showed what I did in the factory. We had the Taylor system, which seems good. I then tried the same in a much larger factory – the people went with me. I then tried the same here – there was a lack of trust. Because of these circumstances, I have expressed my concerns, and I must stick to them. Let us return to what we want. The question was asked: How should we begin? I will assume that we call together the workers with the aim of founding works councils. How do we do that? It is possible that you, Dr. Steiner, will tell me that we could even give the workers self-management. I am not yet convinced that this is possible. I would like to see a concrete example of a works council being formed in a large factory.

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say in advance that everything that can be done in detail within a company today can really only be a preparation for what the works council means. I would just like to say, because Dr. Riebensam started from this point, that experiences such as those in the small group described by Mr. Molt should not be celebrated too soon as a victory. But let us not be deceived: what these experiences can prove in the first instance is that trust can be established within a certain group. And that is what Mr. Molt primarily meant. It cannot be a victory because, when a systematic socialization is considered, a victory cannot be achieved in a single company. The victory of a single company, even if it were to increase the standard of living of its workforce, could only be achieved at the expense of the general public if a single company were to achieve it unilaterally.

Dr. Riebensam: I did not want to speak in detail about the Taylor system.

Rudolf Steiner: I only meant that this Taylor system could lead to something positive under certain circumstances, if it were applied under different conditions; but under our present system it would only increase all the system's damage.

Regarding the specific question of how we deal with works councils, let us not forget that we only want to make demands. We must observe the demands and distinguish the essential from the inessential. The system of councils is actually a given reality today, that is, perhaps it only exists in embryo, but anyone who properly observes the social forces at work in our social organism will understand this. So it is with the idea of councils in this particular case: works councils, transport councils and economic councils will assert themselves of their own accord. Now, to begin with, we only have a presentiment of the working class. The real issue is that the social constitution of the works council is to emerge, that general principles cannot be established for it. In fact, the issue is that we finally get used to making initiatives possible, and such initiatives will arise the moment they are unleashed. They need do nothing at all except popularize the idea of works councils – and that is very important today. Then the question will surely have to be answered in the most diverse concrete enterprises in the most diverse ways: How do we do it? – It can be done in one enterprise in one way and in another way, depending on the goals and people. We must come to the possibility that a workers' council is constituted from within the enterprises, that a workers' council separates itself from the enterprises and acts between the enterprises. That is where the work of the council actually begins. The question of how to do it would have to be resolved by you in each individual case. We just have to understand the idea in general and implement it in each individual case.

The general tenor that we have heard here today, our experience, we are not gaining any trust -: I believe that if one were to examine each individual case, one would come to see that the matter would have to be approached differently after all. First of all, we would have to really embrace the full necessity of putting economic life on its own feet. Just think, if you do that, then it is only goods and the production of goods; you no longer have anything to do with wages. Of course, this cannot be done overnight. But the worker understands that when you tell him: you cannot abolish the wage system overnight. But if the tendency exists to abolish the wage system, to transfer the worker's labor power to the constitutional state, so that it is decided there - because it does not belong in economic life - then there is only a contract between management and workers regarding distribution. That is a concrete thing, that must first of all become real, it must be carried into every single company; then one can make progress with the people. Unfortunately, however, there is no will to do this. For example, there is no understanding [among employers] that the wage system can be replaced. This is regarded as a conditio sine qua non of economic life.

Dr. Riebensam: I say that the workers do have works councils in mind, but they do not take them into account in their [fundamental] goal. [This would have to be shown to them]. You do this here by giving lectures.

Rudolf Steiner: Not with the leaders [of the workers], who think in the old ways, who think in bourgeois terms.

Dr. Riebensam: Of course we have to tell the workers all these things, but first I have to be clear about them myself, I have to think about these thoughts. Then I can also try to talk to the workers and influence them. But I would like to ask you if you also know the works councils in the other factories?

Rudolf Steiner: I only know the Molt system, which was introduced on the basis of this idea [about the works council].

Emil Molt: One fine day, we saw that there was a need, we convened the people, discussed the aim and purpose and then said: the most capable can join the works council, but they must know that they still have to learn. Those who come in must learn from day one, but under supervision. They must learn what is necessary to run a business. Confidence comes, people then see that it is not as easy to run a business as people now realize that it is not so easy to govern. People then understand that the director is the first works councilor in his business because he is the only one who knows the business from the bottom up. Then you work through fundamental questions with the people so that they feel the imponderables.

Dr. Riebensam: How many people do you have in your company?

Emil Molt: Seven hundred.

Dr. Riebensam: Who should I sit down with?

Emil Molt: They will come to me.

Dr. Carl Unger: I could contribute some experiences, even if they are only specific ones, because my company has metalworkers who have a slightly different mentality than the other workers. My experiences go in the direction that we have set up a program that is not a program in and of itself, but it is only about working out the basic features for a works council before the government comes, because otherwise nothing will come of it. You said that you consider it essential for the works council to seek contact with the outside world and to get in touch with other works councils. The prerequisite was the call that appeared at the time and was circulated in our company. In all the possible questions that have now been discussed here, the point of view of threefolding was always sought. [In our company, however, we were forced] to do it the old way — but that doesn't really belong here. The whole matter of the workers' councils must be approached from the legal point of view. It is actually a good thing when people ask about the threefold order, because in this way they are instructed and pass on their knowledge in their circle, because the threefold order idea is something that must work from man to man.

Dr. Fritz Elsas: Dr. Schmucker first asked Dr. Steiner what he would do if he were now appointed to the government in accordance with the workers' resolution. I would like to speak purely personally, not politically, because from a political point of view, I do not consider this demand to be a good one, and that is because it would mean nothing less than asking the government to dismiss itself. Because such a government will not, without disavowing itself, appoint the representative of modern ideas without resigning. Since that would be irresponsible and since such a significant movement should not arise with something that has no chance of success, I have never hidden these concerns and regret that such a resolution was passed at all. However, that should not prevent us from extracting what is useful from this unreasonable demand. As far as I know, Dr. Schmucker is in the Ministry of Labor. We have had ministers during the war and afterwards who were not there before; these are signs that the old state of civil servants, the old state of lackeys, has not mastered this tremendous economy that has been emerging for 60 years and which must seek other forms, whether we like it or not, because these forms have now actually suffered a fiasco. The states themselves have shown that it is impossible for them to build themselves up into economic states in this way. That is the meaning of this catastrophe.

Now all the gentlemen, especially Dr. Riebensam, have rightly assumed that we are in an extremely difficult situation in which the whole building can collapse. We are in a transitional stage and must first remain in the area that is of current interest and that must be tackled immediately. These are not spiritual questions, but economic ones. Mr. Molt has earned the trust of his workers; but they are not from the metalworkers' structure. They have in fact, as we hear, already arrived at the point of nihilism, which will bring about the sharpest dangers for Württemberg. One of these dangers, Dr. Riebensam, lies in the fact that you view the matter too sharply from a purely industrial point of view, because you forget that the state of Württemberg does not only have 8,000 [Daimler] and 5,000 Bosch workers, but also farmers. And if they come, we will have a civil war. What will happen then, I do not know.

The question arises: if the workers demand the impossible without reason, not only the workers but also the bureaucracy, if they take the mere consumer point of view, [what happens then]? We would have to try and say to the workers in the sense of threefolding: You metalworkers – and that means all companies – get together, form a production cooperative – this is something completely new – you bring all the assets of your company, your labor, and a new organization will be created. I do not want to say that this is necessary, but I can imagine that the worker can be persuaded to advocate the abolition of wages as the equivalent of labor without having to make a final decision, because a single state can hardly abolish wages. If these enterprises, which are important in Württemberg, were to set up such a production cooperative and thereby reassure the workers, we would have gained time for the implementation of Dr. Steiner's ideas. This merger would be an organized merger that manifests itself in some legal form. This could be organized differently for you, Dr. Riebensam, than for small businesses.

And now the other question: Can a small or medium-sized state like Württemberg, which belongs to a closed economic area [with its own money], even form such a structure for itself? Will foreign countries supply raw materials to such cooperatives? The danger is that foreign countries, which are much larger and stronger “capital countries” than Germany at the moment, will decide not to enter into economic relations with such a structure. But we cannot feed ourselves. So the question must be considered: where do we start with these organizations?

Rudolf Steiner: It would perhaps be going too far if I were to go into the details of the previous summaries; I would rather go into the questions.

It would not yet be possible to regard it as a particular realization of what is meant by threefolding if, for my sake, all metalworkers in Württemberg were treated in the way you have described, although it could be formally implemented. But when I speak of the threefold social order, I must expressly emphasize that I regard a one-sided separation of economic life from state life, with the spiritual life remaining with the state life, as the opposite of what is sought, because I consider a two-way division to be just as harmful as a three-way division is necessary. If a single branch of the economy were to be separated out in this way, I would not regard it as being in line with the threefold order. However, it could formally take place in a social organism that is working towards threefold order. Well, it would also be a fundamental test of the principle if such things were to be considered.

As a detail, I would just like to note that the abolition of wages, consistently thought through, does not at all lead to the view that a single state cannot abolish wages because the relationship of the economy in such a state, which abolishes wages, to the entire economic outside world, does not need to change at all. Whether the worker receives his income internally in the sense of economic liberalism or whether he receives it in some other form, for example from the proceeds of what he produces, for which he is already a partner with the manager, does not change the other economic relations with the outside world. It is therefore not true that a single state cannot abolish wages. But it is equally untenable to claim that a small or large state cannot implement this on its own. On the contrary, in a small or large state you certainly cannot socialize in the sense that the old socialists had in mind. I believe, in fact, that socialization in the sense of the old socialists can lead to nothing more than the absolute strangulation and constriction of a single economic area. If you draw the ultimate consequences from the old socialization, then basically a single economic area is nothing more than what is dominated by a single ledger. You can never come to a positive trade balance with that, but only to a gradual, complete devaluation of the money. Then you can abolish the money. Then the possibility of an external connection ceases altogether.

So all these things have been the basis for thinking of this threefold order, because it is the only way that each individual area, the economic, the legal and the spiritual, can carry it out. The external relationships will not change in any other way than that it will no longer be possible, for example, for political measures to disrupt the economy. The economic sphere will have an external impact, and it will no longer be possible for things to happen, as in the case of the Baghdad Railway problem, where all three interests became entangled, with the result that the Baghdad Railway problem became one of the most important causes of the war. There you see these three things tied together.

I would like to point out once again that the tripartite division is intended for foreign policy, that is, it has been conceived to offer the possibility of conducting economic life according to purely economic aspects, beyond political boundaries, so that political life can never interfere with it. This means that in the areas where the threefold order is not implemented, the damage would be there, but there would be no real reason for the [separate] economic life not to get involved abroad if the economic situation is profitable for the foreign country. It will depend on this alone, even if an economic area is not independent, if it is entirely impulsed by the political; for all these things that affect other countries are not affected by the threefold social order.

Today there is great concern: let us take a specific case. Let us assume that Bavaria would now carry out its socialization, then with such a bureaucratically and centrally conceived socialization, a whole range of free connections between domestic companies and foreign industry would be made impossible and undermined. On the other hand, through the threefold social order, the labor force is removed from the economic sphere, which thus gives the worker the opportunity to face the work manager as a free partner. But this is how the worker comes to be able to really have the share that arises within the economic sphere when everything is no longer mixed up. Today, we no longer have objective prices, but rather the wage relationship in economic life. If you take this out, you have, on the one hand, eliminated the disquiet caused by the workers. And if you now take out the capital relationship, you have, on the other hand, the intellectual organism that always has to take care of the abilities of those who are supposed to be there to run the businesses. So you have removed the two main stumbling blocks from the economic body, and yet you have not touched on something that takes place in economic relations with foreign countries. Therefore, there is no reason for foreign countries to be hostile, because they lose nothing and can conduct economic life exactly as before.

This reorganization [through the works council] is intended precisely with economic life in mind. If we think of Germany, a whole host of fine threads that exist with foreign countries will organize themselves in one fell swoop, from all companies. There is really nothing else to be done but to reorganize social life in such a way that in the future, goods will actually regulate themselves through goods, so that there will be a precise index around which goods group in terms of their value. This will create the possibility that what the individual produces has the value that all products must have in order to meet his needs. In our organism, which is based on the division of labor, all socialization must ultimately result in what the individual person produces in the course of a year equaling what he needs to sustain his life. If we throw out the wage and capital relationship, then we get the pure commodity relationship. However, this is something that one must decide to think through completely. At that moment, one will find that it is quite easy.

Dr. Fritz Elsas: I am not opposed to the spiritual organism administering itself; I am just saying that it will take longer and is not urgent.

Rudolf Steiner: It is urgent because we have the necessity to create a basis for the education of spiritual workers, which we do not produce with our current state spiritual life. That is the terrible thing today, that our state-stamped spiritual life is very far removed from real practical life. Even at the universities, people are trained in such a way – they are not trained practically, but only theoretically – that they are not rooted in life. Isn't it true that I imagine, for example, this school system in the future in such a way that the practitioner, who works in the factory, will be particularly suited as a teacher, and possibly, I think, these [teachers] will continually change [between school and factory]?

Dr. Stadler: I came here today by chance, and I would like to take the liberty of expressing my opinion as a guest. What you are doing here is currently being done in a similar way in many parts of Germany. What I am currently experiencing in Berlin is an unprecedented intellectual struggle of the German people with the problems of the revolution. In Berlin, there are masses of circles, organizations, associations, loose groups, all of which meet in a similar way to you this evening and discuss these matters. For we are not only experiencing the political and economic collapse in Germany, but also the intellectual disintegration of the entire old system. And in this collapse, the German people are once again so far along that they are trying to go their own way. The practitioners are causing difficulties for the theorists and thwarting their goals with their practical questions. They are also right, because they live in practice. The difficulty lies in the fact that in the whole of Germany long-term goals are being set that would take one or two generations to achieve, while we are in the midst of an actual collapse. If, in contrast to Rudolf Steiner and others, I state that Dr. Steiner has actually thought up an idea that a large proportion of those present can emotionally agree with, but that pure practitioners cannot be satisfied with - I say practitioners because one of them is a government councilor [Dr. Schmucker] and the other a top entrepreneur [Dr. Riebensam] —, because they have to ask themselves: What is the way forward tomorrow, because we are not getting anywhere with this? The solution will not be found [so easily]; it is so extraordinarily complicated that with a system of thought one remains in the unreal and it is no longer suitable for solving real questions. All these action programs repeatedly encounter resistance from industrialists, politicians and lawyers. In Germany, we are fortunate that thought and research are being done at all, unlike in Russia, where there has been no real thought during the entire revolutionary period. Thus, Russia is indeed doomed - both as a state and economically. I suspect that the same thing will happen to us in Germany, despite all our intellectual efforts, because the way things are going it is impossible for us to arrive at a political synthesis in time. There are theorists who cling to some system or other, while there are practical people who put the brakes on; so it can only happen by force, because between the two extremes German politics is now only drifting and letting everything happen. Our party politicians have no idea about the spiritual. I have the honor of knowing leading statesmen personally. I leave with the sad belief that they have nothing of the spirit of the times in them, that they have no faith in the future and only think about how to hold on to the rudder from today to tomorrow.

But you should consider whether there are possibilities for quickly linking what you are trying to achieve here with similar efforts being made throughout Germany, so that you do not feel isolated. It would be right for you to be aware that Germany is not the small circle that is currently gathered here. If you do not succeed in forming a phalanx, this attempt is doomed to failure because it can only be a local one. You cannot shape something in Württemberg, carry out the threefold order, when the whole of Germany is going to the devil. You cannot introduce works councils if the entire political system does not go along with it. Either you join together in a spiritual renewal movement and refrain from engaging in the realpolitik of the day – in which case you have to accept ruin and chaos – or you not only want to strive for renewal, but also to work practically and realpolitically for today and tomorrow, then you have to form a phalanx with all the similarly minded forces of the German people and make concessions to the realities of life. That means, for example, you must begin to work out a very concrete system of workers' councils and make specific foreign policy proposals. Please excuse me for criticizing as an outsider, but I mean well by you and the German people, whose preservation is important to me.

Mr. Jaeger: I would like to be brief. I have gained the impression in the discussion that the question tends to be asked quite generally: How do we initially tread the path that leads to the goal that Dr. Steiner presents to us? This question concerns us all. If the creation of the works councils, as Dr. Steiner demands, is proving so difficult, we must not forget that this is only a very small beginning. To shape economic life, we need not only works councils for the factories, but a whole system of councils in general. But when we talk about it today, we must be clear about the fact that no council system exists at all yet, because what has been practiced by the councils in our country so far is not yet a system at all; it is a lack of system. We would first have to discuss individual questions and make an effort to get started and begin with these councils.

And now a specific question: the representative of Daimler-Werke spoke at length about the works council there and about the relationship with the workers. Dr. Riebensam asked how he should proceed in order to properly get in touch with the workers at Daimler and gain the trust of the workforce. I believe that if you want to achieve a big goal, you first have to look at the small things by taking a practical step like Mr. Molt. [So I would like to ask]: Is it not possible for Dr. Steiner, together with the gentlemen who want this suggestion, to work with the workers at the Daimler factory themselves, in order to inspire others by achieving this goal? We need not only the trust of the workers, but also the cooperation of the industrialists, the factory managers, who are opposed to [such things at first.

Rudolf Steiner: This question can only be answered if this practical experiment could actually be carried out – it could certainly be carried out – but I would like to think that one would first have to be inside the Daimler works.

A speaker: Once you are inside, the problem is a lack of trust. Leading personalities find it difficult to gain trust. Those who are elected by the workers are opposed when they come to an understanding with the management. The point is to explain to the workers: Through this threefold structure we can achieve practical goals; we only want to be the link to bring you together and show you the way.

Rudolf Steiner: The only way to do this is to win over the workers, for example, to an understanding of a common goal that can be achieved outside the walls of the company concerned. If one wanted to go further — and that is what would give it a purpose in the first place; it would have to be possible to lead the workers to this goal — one would have to try to achieve something oneself, somehow. That would only lead to the management of the Daimler-Werke throwing me out. I was told that it was highly peculiar that I had gained the trust of the workers, and that I would actually do things quite differently from the way they were usually done. This different way of doing things is based on the fact that I basically do not promise the workers anything, but only explain the processes to them and such like. That is the big difference: in fact, I don't promise anything – I can really do the same with the workers at the Daimler factory as I am doing now – I can't promise anything because I know for sure that if I make promises to the management I will be thrown out. We must not forget that today it is not about some nebulous abstractions such as “all of Germany” or “what is collapsing,” but rather that it is about actually bringing understanding to the individual point and working from that individual point. If a true understanding of the demands inherent in the really real conditions and their satisfaction were to be awakened in a single point, then the prejudice would not always arise again: This is some kind of general idealism that has nothing to do with practice. If people would take the trouble to study the actually practical impetus of this not thought- but life-principle, then we would make progress. What harms us today is that this so-called system, which is not a system at all, but really something else that is rooted in real life, is taken everywhere merely as a system of thoughts. I can only do what is based on real circumstances. But the right impetus to win over the entire workforce of the Daimler factory would be based on that today. The next step, however, would have to be to come to an agreement with the management. But that would get them fired. And that makes it impossible for someone on the outside to implement anything. It is important that we work on bringing these things to real understanding. Then it will move forward. But I don't think we will make progress with mere abstractions. It is also an abstraction to say that a practical attempt should be made when there is no basis for it.

Mr. Jaeger: I must insist that once the workers' understanding is won, the management would not throw the personality out, but once the personality has gained the trust, then these proposals would be taken up by both sides. It is not a matter of promises here, but only of the works council first reaching an agreement among the management and an understanding between the management and the workers.

Rudolf Steiner: The whole matter is hopeless if there is no understanding of the real threefold social order. This understanding is generally found today among the working class, because these people do not cling to anything that comes from old conditions, but own nothing but themselves and their labor. This understanding is still lacking, however, among the other [people] today; perhaps only when they come to grief will they be forced to let go of what consists only in clinging to the old conditions. Today, they actually find widespread support for the threefold order among the working class, even though the leaders of the working class are not at all able to think in terms of progressive thinking, but basically think much more bourgeois than the bourgeoisie.

When people say that these things cannot be understood because they are too outlandish, it is because they have forgotten how to understand things based on life. When it comes to things that arise in life, people must respond with experiences of life. Today, they only respond with what they have based on party judgments and concepts. But if someone has nothing of that, but only what comes from the whole breadth of life, then one says: that is impractical, that does not answer individual questions, one would have liked to have answered individual concrete questions. My “key points” were not written to steer [the social question] into the theoretical or philosophical, but to start somewhere. When you start, you will see that it continues.

Dr. Riebensam: I do not think that Dr. Steiner would be thrown out by me – I am the one who decides, but the commercial management also has something to say – but the current workers' committee would probably throw Dr. Steiner out. It appears as if I wanted to thwart Dr. Steiner's ideas with my real concerns. That was not the aim or the intention of my explanation. I just wanted to discuss the whole matter here. My view is that today we need some way to avoid a struggle with the workers if possible. Now it is a fact that Dr. Steiner has won the trust of a large number of workers today. And that should be enough in Stuttgart to take further steps. This could also pave the way for a way forward that might not require a fight for a while. The workforce is willing to go along with this, even with the plant managers. It would be a great mistake not to pursue such a path. That is my personal opinion.

Mr. Reitz: How can this be done?

Emil Molt: To answer that, we have come together. After Dr. Riebensam has said an important word, after the way is clearly laid out, how two classes come together to form one human race, after these clear ways are laid out here, it is now up to each individual to actually follow the way. The death in all these things is always that there is much more talk than action. Dr. Stadler is right when he says that if we only come together and talk without taking action, then time will rush by so quickly that events will sweep over us. We all agree that the great collapse will come in three to four weeks, when we must be ready to take action to realize the New. For this we need every single person, so that thoughts can be put into action hourly and every minute in daily life. Therefore, in the interest of the people, of humanity, we ask you not only to ask, what does Dr. Steiner think about it, but that each individual is very clear about the fact that the path lies within himself and he must tread it. The old Germany perished because of this non-treading and the present Germany will perish. I believe that when we go home today, we should do so with the firm resolution to move from mere deliberation to action, even if it cannot be perfect – imperfect action is still better than clever thinking, with which we only remain on the surface again and do not reshape things in reality, because reshaping things is what it is all about today.

Perhaps there is still a need to comment on the cultural side of the problems. We would like to create an opportunity for this soon; perhaps individual areas could be worked on separately or together. I would like to hear your opinion on this so that we can go home with a result.

Dr. Weiss: I am very much in favor of continuing the discussion along these lines. However, I think it would be better not to work on the individual areas separately; it is important for us, who are neither entrepreneurs nor tradesmen, to look at all the issues. The opportunity should be created to work on all the issues together, even at the risk of thinning out the ranks. We should not only speak, but also try to work through the press. We should have a very loosely organized press committee that comments in the various party organs, not to fuel polemics. There should also be a special organ of the federation for threefolding to check the manuscripts before sending them to the relevant editorial office, so that the subsequent procedure is not complicated. The Federation for Threefolding should not, of course, restrict freedom of expression, but we must organize ourselves in such a way that everyone uses their contacts with the press to comment on the issues in question, but the articles should be sent in beforehand so that we can proceed in a concentrated manner.

Emil Molt: That is precisely what we are aiming for; we should actually be commenting every day.

A speaker: We came here today for a discussion. It would be desirable if a number of industrialists, as representatives of the owners, and plant managers, and employees, as representatives of the employee committees, came together to talk.

Emil Molt: In my opinion, this should really be attempted; it would be the first step in preparing a functioning works council.

Dr. Riebensam: I think the approach should be somewhat different; your works councils should invite our workers' committees.

Emil Molt: You can do both; the workers would have to see that the initiative comes from the factory owners.

Dr. Riebensam: It should come from the workers' committees, not from the factory owners.

Emil Molt: But otherwise the factory owners would not come; but it would be best to discuss this afterwards.

A speaker: Couldn't we, so to speak, issue certain guidelines to give the factory owners something to work on? That way, the management of the large companies could process the matter and discuss it with the workers' committees. Perhaps this would be a way to shorten the whole thing.

In response to the question of whether they would like to meet again next Thursday, it was decided to meet again at 7 p.m. that day.

Wilhelm von Blume: Dear attendees, on behalf of the Federation for the Threefolding of the Social Organism, I would like to welcome you again today. We have planned an evening on which questions are to be answered that have been or may be asked from the floor, and I would first like to ask Dr. Steiner to make a few introductory remarks.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees, this evening is primarily intended to answer questions that have arisen from the esteemed audience in connection with the impulse given by the idea of social threefolding. Tomorrow I will deal with one of the main objections in a lecture to be held here, the objection that the impulse of the threefold social organism is only some kind of sophisticated idea, some kind of ideology or utopia, and tomorrow I will try to prove that it is really the most practical matter in our present time. Today, allow me just to say a few words to introduce the answering of questions that makes up the content of today's agenda.

It has, in fact, been little noticed, my dear attendees, that the impulse for the threefold social organism is intended to point out the most significant task that has been set for humanity in modern times as a result of developmental conditions. It is truly not out of exaggerated pessimism when one expresses the view today that all too little – truly all too little – of the great seriousness of the time, of the great seriousness of the demands of the time, is recognized in the broadest circles. We are indeed faced with a task that is almost gigantic. For the whole development of modern humanity has come to a head in such a way that this task has arisen at last, and it has arisen out of the momentous events of this world war catastrophe. But the extraordinary significance of this task is by no means understood in the broadest circles today, and one would like to believe that it is itself a task to make the people of the present age fully aware of the seriousness of this task. The task first emerges in the phenomena, in the facts of the time. People from the most diverse classes, from the most diverse social circles and also from the most diverse parties take their stand on these phenomena, on these facts of the time. From all that has emerged from such statements to date, two things stand out. I would like to characterize these two things in these few introductory words; I will go into more detail tomorrow. I would like to characterize this in the introduction because, however desirable it may be to discuss more individual, concrete, practical questions in today's question, But today it is necessary for people to look again and again at the big, comprehensive picture of the task, if only to awaken in people their sense of responsibility towards the great issues of the times.

There are two things that can be observed when considering the opinions of the most diverse circles on this great task today. One can say: One group of people is primarily interested in restoring in some way, in some form - in a form that is acceptable - what has been destroyed by the significant world war catastrophe. And the other type of person, coming from a completely different background, is primarily interested in doing everything differently than it was before the world war catastrophe - partly with the aim of ensuring that such terrible things never happen to humanity again, partly also out of the feeling and conviction that we cannot move forward on the basis of the old economic, state and spiritual order, that a new construction must be tackled very seriously. If we want to call one type of people – in the face of the completely new demands – more the conservative people, then our gaze is directed to all those circles that more or less belong to the old social worldviews, which are somehow intertwined with what the old worldviews have brought to humanity, especially in terms of economic orders. On the other hand, we see the forward-rushing parties, which are made up mainly of the proletariat, and there we see that which takes a completely different approach to the great task and which takes such a different approach that one type of people no longer understands the other. If we look for the reasons for this lack of understanding – I will only sketch them out today – if we look for the reasons for this lack of understanding, we will find that on the one hand the representatives of the old, who in some way want to continue to be associated with this old, have lost an actual cultural goal in the course of recent history and have retained an old cultural practice in which they have continued to work. These people, dear assembled presenters, have a practice, but this practice is no longer imbued with purposeful impulses. This practice always expresses itself in such a way that when you ask these people: How do you actually want to move forward now that the big tasks are coming? they somehow answer with what only means a continuation of the old; but they do not answer with any great goal either; basically, they only answer with what has emerged from the routine of their previous practice. They have a practice without a goal. On the other side stands the proletariat. It has a goal, a goal that can be expressed in the most diverse ways, but it is a goal. But this proletariat has no practice; this proletariat lacks any practical possibility of realizing what it somehow defines as its goals. So on the one hand there is traditional practice without a goal, on the other hand there is a new goal without practice. The proletariat has been kept away from practice, only summoned to the machine, only harnessed to the factory and to capitalism. From this, its goal has emerged, in that it, I would like to say, is rushing against what it has experienced, but it is never connected with the management, with the leadership of the economic forms themselves. Today it demands new forms of life; but it knows nothing of practice. Where does this gap come from?

This gap arises from the fact that we are faced with the greatest problem of modern times, and this greatest problem of modern times has arisen precisely in the age that has brought industrialism to its highest flowering. This problem is hidden at first in the economic sphere, but it extends its various branches to the other forms of life. This problem is so momentous that even a keen mind such as Walter Rathenau's has at most touched on it, but has not come to any clear understanding of this far-reaching problem of the present, this problem from which we all suffer, this problem that imperiously demands its solution. At least the impulse for the threefolding of the social organism would like to consider this problem without prejudice and full of life. And if I am to hint at it in a few words, so to speak as an introduction to tomorrow's lecture, which is to deal with it in its specific forms, then I must say: this problem, it had to slowly arise in humanity, had to, so to speak, rise to its highest development in the time of ever-expanding industrialism and modern technology, and now stands before us, questioning and threatening. It consists in the fact that all industrialism works with a deficit in the national economy – that is the case, there is no other way. The national economy must be attuned to this, knowing that all industrialism, insofar as it develops further and further through its means of production, works with a deficit in relation to what the national economy is for humanity. Insofar as industrialism works with a deficit, what is missing in the human national economy must be replaced from another source. That is the great problem of the present time, that all industrialism works with a deficit and that the question cannot be asked by me or others as to whether this deficit will be covered, but life is constantly being asked to cover the deficit of industrialism. Where does it come from? It is covered only by the soil, my dear audience, only by what the soil produces. In the modern economy, we are constantly involved in this exchange process [between industry and land production], which is covered up by secondary processes – in that the deficit of industry has to be covered by the surplus of land production in the broadest sense. Everything that is involved in the question of wages, the question of capital, and the question of prices in modern life is due solely to the fact that the surplus in the production of land must migrate into the deficit in industry.

But this, dear ladies and gentlemen, is linked to something else. It is linked to the fact that, on the one hand, everything in man that is connected with the soil tends towards a certain conservatism. This can be strictly proven, but today I will only hint at it in my introduction. If only the land and its products were available, we would have to remain more or less in a primitive state in terms of culture. The progress of humanity stems from the fact that industry, with its extensive division of labor, favors this progress. But at the same time, industry becomes the basis for progress in the most diverse fields, first of liberalism, then of socialism. Thus, what is expressed in the significant, I would even say bookish, contrast between land and industrial means of production is transferred to human sentiment. And as human sentiments clash with one another in life, this conflict is intimately connected with what underlies it: the opposing economic interests of land and industrial means of production. But in modern times this whole problem has intensified in yet another way. Not only that in parliaments liberal and socialist sit opposite the conservative, stemming simply from the assets and liabilities of the entire world economy; not only that in modern times the conservative and progressive element has crept into the people's assemblies of humanity , but economic interests have also crept in, with everything connected with the land, on the one hand, working for what remains stationary, and everything connected with industry, on the other hand, working for what is progressing. And so it has come about that, on the one hand, man's spiritual progress and, on the other, man's economic interests have been chaotically thrown together in our modern unitary state system.

This is the great problem that confronts people today, I would even say it is a gigantic one. People on the left and the right are fiddling around with this problem. Because it is so huge, that is why it is so difficult to reach an understanding. People on the one hand only want to consider the most immediate issues and only call that practical, while the times demand that we find some solution to the great accounting disparity between the land products and industrial products, from which humanity feeds, clothes and satisfies other needs, in the more recent development of humanity. I would say that everything that has occurred can ultimately be traced back, almost in terms of numbers, to the accounting result mentioned. But it takes real goodwill to engage with the fundamental forces of real practical life, even if you just want to see the task. We are at the point today where we have to see this task, that what is chaotically mixed up must be properly separated again. The impulse for a threefold social organism wants to face up to this task, which wants to place a healthy social organism on its healthy three legs in the right way: on the spiritual, the legal and the economic. This problem has arisen simply from what is inherent in this development of modern times. And even if, for my sake, people still find the next results, to which the impulse for the threefold social organism has come, disputable, one comes, without asking about these three areas of life in such a way that for their proper organization in the future, one does not come any closer to the greatest problem that has been set for us; one does not come any closer to what alone can lead out of the threatening chaos and confusion.

I wished to say this by way of introduction for the simple reason that, on the one hand, it should be seen how the impulse for the threefold social organism is really connected with the highest that is set before humanity as a great historical and because, on the other hand, the answer to the question will show how much can already be said today, based on a real observation of life, about what can arise in detail from the questions posed today.

I will now begin by answering the questions that have been put to me.

Wilhelm von Blume: So we will now begin to answer the questions that have been put to us in writing.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees, I will try to answer the questions that were handed to me in writing in a not too long form, for the simple reason that I believe that perhaps afterwards numerous questions from the esteemed audience may still be asked orally or in writing.

The first bundle of questions that I have before me is headed “On Threefolding”. The first question:

In what way are individuals, associations and enterprises placed under the three different organizations? Individual borderline cases are, for example, the newspaper publisher, public health institutions, theaters and cinema enterprises.

Now, esteemed attendees, I would like to focus on the newspaper industry in particular from this first question. Because it is precisely something like the newspaper industry that will make it possible to see how, on the one hand, the threefold social organism can actually lead to a complete transformation of the current situation, but in an organic way, and how, on the other hand, it can result in the unity of life not being disturbed at all. Basically, it will also be possible to show that what people say about the incomprehensibility of the three-part social organism is actually based on the fact that, out of old habits of thinking, they do not want to engage in the present with what is necessary. But they will have to decide to come to terms with this necessity.

As you can see, dear attendees, in the newspaper business, all three aspects of human life basically come together. In the newspaper business, on the one hand, we have the publisher, the person who has to ensure that the newspaper is printed, that it is distributed in the appropriate manner, and so on – this is a purely economic task. On the other hand, we have those who write the newspaper. I believe that today, many people are already comfortable enough in our strange circumstances to come to the conclusion that newspapers should be written differently than they are often written. You see, something beneficial for humanity can only come out of writing a newspaper if what is written arises solely from the interests and needs of the spiritual life of humanity and from the needs that arise from the fact that the spiritual life also looks at the various other branches of life. The newspaper writer and everything that belongs to the editorial staff belongs to the spiritual life. And since we are dealing on both sides, both in the economic part of the newspaper business and in the spiritual part of the newspaper business, with people who, in turn, as human beings, are in relationships not only with their subscribers, but also with the whole of the general public, we are dealing with relationships that take place from person to person, that is, with legal relationships. The issue at hand, esteemed attendees, is that in the future, especially in a business such as the newspaper industry, the economic, the legal and the intellectual, cultural aspects will not mesh for the detriment of humanity, otherwise, in the culmination of the disaster, we will end up with things as we are experiencing them in the present, for example. Recently, a strange advertisement appeared in the so-called press. It called for the world of big industry and the world of capitalists in particular to join forces to create a new newspaper. So it is advertising for a new newspaper, especially among capitalists and big industry. The purpose of this newspaper is to fight with all spiritual means against the socialization of the means of production. So, dear attendees, the interest of capitalists and big industrialists is supposed to enslave everything that should actually educate humanity from the judgment that comes from impulses of the spiritual world. Those who have some experience in life will know how, especially in the newspaper industry, these things have increasingly merged in recent times and have developed in a particularly grotesque way under the present circumstances.

In the future, the aim must be for the newspaper publisher and printer to be a mere economist, subordinate to the administration of the economic part of the social organism. He will be part of the economic organism with all the interests he can develop within his newspaper business. The editorial staff will not be part of the economic organism, but will be entirely subject to the self-administration of intellectual life, along with the other branches of intellectual life. The editorial staff will form a unit with all that is teaching, art or the like, which are other branches of intellectual life. How a particular newspaper publisher can come to be a particular editor depends on the contract that can be concluded between the newspaper publisher and the editor, whereby the editor, because he belongs to the self-government of the spiritual organism, is independent of the newspaper publisher with regard to his entire material life. The editor will merely have an interest in being able to pursue his profession at all. If he did not pursue this interest in practicing his profession, he would be without a livelihood. But the moment he succeeds in concluding a contract with some administration, he will not receive compensation for this profession from the interests of that administration, but from the interests of the self-governing intellectual life. If any matters arise through which one or other part of the newspaper violates the law, this violation of rights will be subject to the laws of the constitutional state. In the future, therefore, it will be desirable for such a branch of production to be influenced by the three great administrative branches of intellectual, legal and economic life. In the most diverse branches of production, those interests that are administered from the most diverse directions will converge. And it will come about in the cooperation of people that these interests - which otherwise, when they are confounded, when they are mixed together into a tangle, only interfere with each other - that these interests will precisely moralize, ethicalize, and support each other. The one who really has a practical mind will say to himself: There is no doubt that such a division of a single trade can really be carried out in practice. And by this structuring of the entire social organism, which reaches into the individual circumstances, we then have the recovery of the whole of social life. It is just that people today are not accustomed to thinking about what leads to such a recovery. They are also unaccustomed to it because they have to let go of many things that they consider almost indispensable from certain old ways of life. Today it is considered essential that the person who takes the economic risk for a newspaper also makes the person employed by the newspaper on the editorial staff his writer. He will not be able to do that in the future. From this will arise a great independence of the writer from the economic interests of the newspaper publisher in the newspaper industry, and precisely in this branch will come a recovery that we truly need and must admit that we need if we want to address the living conditions of a healthy social organism.

The second question put to me is:

Will the municipal administration, with its enterprises that break through the tripartite division, be maintained in the areas of the three organizations – for example, schools, gasworks, and jurisdiction?

Now, dear attendees, it is not the intention, in this transitional period – in which we are not even in it yet, but are only striving for it – to talk about the size of the individual spiritual, legal and economic areas, which I talked about in the last lecture here. In regard to the external structure of social life, not much needs to change at all if there is to be a genuine socialization of all human life. But what I have just explained for a single trade can just as easily be carried out by any state, an empire or a single local authority. Schools, gasworks, courts of law, they will have their various aspects, partly on the legal side, partly on the economic side – and in the case of schools, also on the spiritual side – and what emanates from the three organizations and their administrations will play a role in the individual enterprise, be it spiritual or more or less merely material, economic. The third question:

Who decides on the respective affiliation to one of the three organisms?

This question, dear attendees, actually arises – forgive the harsh word – from a certain prejudice that everything must come from an authority. In what is striven for as a healthy social organism for the future, the affiliation arises from the matter itself. We have just seen in our discussion of the newspaper industry how this affiliation arises from the matter at hand. From this affiliation, a much more comprehensive answer will be given than is currently thought. And a question like this one - it will be recognized as one that actually flows from the present-day mood of obedience to authority, and not from a truly factual basis. The fourth question:

Is there, in addition to or above the special representatives of the three members, any thought of a parliament consisting of their top leadership or an elected parliament (for the individual states? for the empire?)?

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it must first be stated that, of course, as I have explained in my book on the social question, the question of what is the administration or representation in the individual of the three parts of the social organism is that it must belong to the others in some way and that a mutual exchange must take place through people. But in this respect, too, people often think far too stereotypically. For example, it is stated — and this is not in this question — in a long document that was sent to me a few days ago that threefolding actually makes three different parliaments necessary: a cultural parliament, a state parliament and an economic parliament. Now, I am of the opinion that if three parliaments with three ministries were to sit side by side in such a stereotyped way, then the only consequence that could arise would be that all three would sabotage each other. And this is precisely what follows from a true understanding of the actual situation: that parliamentarism – and only a democratic parliamentarism is a true parliamentarism – can only be based on that which can be established between human beings by virtue of the fact that the human being is simply an adult, a mature human being. Everyone must be able to participate in democratic parliamentary life who is an adult, a mature human being. For everything that comes to a head in the legal sphere can be based on what a normal, healthy, adult, mature human being is, on what he can know, think, feel and want. But economic life has become mixed up with this legal life, which is therefore not only based on the feelings and thoughts of the adult, mature person, but which is based, firstly, on economic experience, which one can only acquire in a specific area can only be acquired in a specific, concrete area, secondly on the actual foundations, I would like to say on credit in the broadest sense. I do not mean monetary credit, but credit in the broadest sense, which is generated in a group of people by the fact that this group of people is involved in a particular branch of production. Because everything in economic life must develop from actual experience and the actual administrative basis of the specific individual branch, the organizational structure that exists in economic life can only arise on such a basis. That is to say, only an appropriate administration can develop in economic life from economic experience and economic facts. There will be no parliamentary representation at the top, but rather a structure of associations, coalitions, cooperatives from the professional classes, from the grouping of production and consumption and so on, which organize themselves and can manage themselves. And this structure will also develop a certain leadership, I would say a central council. But this cannot be the same structure that is expressed in what must be independently separated as the legal basis. On the contrary, it is precisely that which is to have an effect on economic life as law that will have the right effect as law, because it can now arise purely, without being contaminated by economic interests, on the legal basis of the community of all people who have come of age. And just as little as economic life can be administered in a stereotyped, parliamentary way, just as little can spiritual life be administered in this way. Spiritual life, in turn, must develop an organization based on its own laws, which will be quite different from that of economic life, because of its special circumstances. That which arises at the very apex of intellectual life, together with all that which stands in the middle, on the legal ground, what is administered by parliament and by ministers, and with that which arises as a kind of central council in economic life, will be able to order the common affairs. I know that there are many people who cannot imagine such a thing; but in practice it will be simpler, above all more fruitful, than all that stands in its place today.

The second set of questions is entitled “On Economic Life”. First:

What will happen to the existing property of the wealthy, in particular agricultural and urban property?

The question is clearly explained in my book on the Social Question. That which has led us into the individual crises of economic life and now into the great crisis - for such is the present world catastrophe - is that form of modern economic life which I have tried to highlight in my book 'The Crux of the Social Question'. In this book, the question is answered as to how, in the future, on the one hand, the means of production, which consists of land, and, on the other hand, the industrial means of production, must be viewed differently. The industrial means of production may only suck capital out of the economic body until they are finished; when they are finished, their sucking of capital out of the economic body is also finished. In other words, industrial means of production can only cost something while they are being worked on until they are completed; then they have to be transferred to the circulation process for means of production; then they have to be what is generally owned. But the land, which is not manufactured but is already there, can never cost anything.

You see, dear ladies and gentlemen, if you think in a healthy way, it already arises in a certain way today, but only in the individual cases where you think economically in a healthy way. We have built a structure in Dornach as a School of Spiritual Science that is not yet finished, which has been affected in its completion by the catastrophe of the world wars. We have, of course, built it out of the present economic conditions, but the question can be raised about this building: when we are all dead, when we are no longer there when the building is finished, who will own this building, who will be able to sell it to someone else? This question answers itself for our building. It will not belong to anyone; it naturally belongs to the general public. For it is built on the sound foundation that it will one day [in the future] be able to pass as the common property of all humanity to whoever can manage it in turn. One only has to have come up with such a thing in practice. In the present economic system, one can only come close to this, but one will see that what is written in my book “The Crux of the Social Question” about the fact that every purchase relationship ceases with a means of production when it is completed, and that this means of production, which can no longer be bought in other forms, then passes into the administration of society. And one will see that there is something eminently practical in this.

The second question:

How should small-scale crafts and trades be organized?

It is to be organized in no different way than large-scale industry and trade, for the simple reason that it will follow from the laws of economic life itself - from the laws that I explained in the lecture the other day - that a trade or business that is too large harms and starves those who are outside of it, and that a trade or business that is too small harms those who are within it. Size will be determined by the future economic situation.

The third question:

Should trade, in particular wholesale trade in import and export, be stopped?

That would, of course, be completely absurd if it were to stop. Anyone who really thinks through with a practical mind what is explained in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question” will see that the actual conditions at the boundaries of the economic, legal and intellectual spheres will by no means change. Not even the initiative of the individual will change as a result, which is of course necessary, especially in the external world. What is changed are only the social conditions within. In fact, only things that have nothing to do with what is happening on the borders will be changed, except that on these borders, what has previously had such a disturbing effect and has come to a head in the terrible explosions of war, will harmonize with each other. The fact that economic conditions at the borders have a harmonizing effect on international legal and spiritual conditions – for example, also at language borders – is precisely why the threefold social organism in its international relationship, as I explained in my book, will have its greatest significance. It will no longer be possible for what develops on the one hand from the economic and on the other from the legal or from the spiritual, to which the national also belongs, to mix in a colorful way with imports and exports. The absurdity of a “national economy” will, however, come to an end, for the simple reason that only economic conditions will be decisive for export and import across borders and because there will no longer be the possibility of such world conflicts being caused by the intertwining of economic and political interests. A great deal of what led to the present world war catastrophe lies in such a tangle of political, cultural and economic issues, as has emerged, for example, in the Sandschak question or the Dardanelles question in the southeast of the European continent or in the Baghdad railway problem.

The fourth question:

Will the economy of exchange by 'wages' be replaced by a natural economy?

In my book and in many lectures I have explained that the concept of wages will no longer have any real meaning in the future, because a kind of socialization will occur between manual laborers and intellectual workers. So there can be no question of a return to a purely natural economy. But money will — even if the leading commercial state of England adheres to the gold standard — at least initially in domestic trade — take on a different significance. What adheres to money today — that it is a commodity — will fall away. What will be present in the monetary system will be only a kind of changing accounting of the exchange of goods between the people belonging to the economic area. A kind of written credit will be kept in what is used as a monetary record. And a deduction of these credits will take place when one acquires anything one needs. A kind of bookkeeping, walking bookkeeping, will be the monetary system. Money, which is a commodity today and its equivalent, gold, which is only a sham commodity, will no longer be a commodity in the future.

The fifth question:

Is compulsory labor envisaged?

Now, dear readers, anyone who delves into the spirit of my book “The Key Points of the Social Question” will see that what must seem to every humanely thinking person - I say quite bluntly here - must appear as the most abominable, a bureaucratically ordered compulsion to work, that in the future [in a threefold social organism] can be eliminated. Of course, everyone is forced to work by their social circumstances, and one has only the choice of either starving or working. There cannot be any compulsion to work other than that which arises from the circumstances in this way [in a social order] in which the freedom of the human being is a basic condition.

The sixth question:

Is the abolition of inheritance law planned?

Inheritance law, to the extent that parts of it remain, will at most be based on the fact that in a transitional period some kind of reckoning must be made with feelings of piety and the like. But inheritance law [in the sense of the previous inheritance law] will no longer be talked about in the future for the simple reason that, on the one hand, it can no longer be the case that something that cannot actually be sold, that is not for sale, still has value for someone. On the other hand, inheritance will no longer be needed, because under the institutions of a healthy social organism, people will be able to provide for the future of those who belong to them in a completely different way than is the case today under the purely materialistic law of inheritance. I have stated this in my book.

The third set of questions is headed: “On practical feasibility”. The first question:

Does not the accidental nature of personal talent (often not factual content, but individual ability such as skill, oratory and the like) create an upper class with the danger of abuse of the power entrusted to it, as well as corruption, and towards which envy and resentment of the lower class persists?

Now, dear attendees, anyone who does not want this formation will never be able to contribute anything to any fruitful shaping of the social organism if it does not correspond to the absolutely ideal state. The greatest enemy of all social impulses is when, through these social impulses, one wants to establish, so to speak, the happiness of humanity. I would like to use a comparison here. You see, dear ladies and gentlemen, let us take the human organism, let us assume that it is a so-called healthy organism. You don't feel it at all, and precisely because you don't feel anything in your organism, it is a healthy organism. Joy, harmony, and inner soul culture must first arise on the basis of such a healthy organism. You cannot expect the doctor to give you soul joy or inner soul culture in addition to health, but you can only expect him to make your organism healthy. It is only on the basis of a healthy organism that inner soul culture can arise. But if the organism is sick, then the soul shares in the sickness, then its inner life is dependent on this sickness. It is the same in the social organism. The sick social organism makes people unhappy; but the healthy social organism cannot yet make people happy, but only creates the conditions for human happiness, which can arise when the social organism is healthy. Therefore, the impulse for the tripartite social organism is to seek the living conditions of a healthy social organism. Of course, corruption or the like can also arise there – that cannot be denied – but such corruptions can be improved by countermeasures, and the greatest prospect of improving them when they occur lies precisely in the health of the social organism itself. I am firmly convinced that if the social organism is healthy, then the professional windbags with their gift of the gab will simply drive people away; they will not have much support. At present, due to our social circumstances, this is not yet the case. Particularly in those spheres where intellectual life is supposed to flourish, it sometimes happens that the audience of some professional babbler in a professorial chair takes to its heels, but they have to pay their college fees and may also take their exams. And professional babbling with its corruption has no particular effect on real life, on the living conditions of the social organism. Such things will naturally fall away in the future when man is instructed in the spiritual life to rely on the fact that he must gain the trust of his fellow human beings and that, for example, only on this trust of his fellow human beings can his achievements be based.

The second question, and this is the last question that has been put to me in this bundle of questions:

What evidence is there that communism, which does not strive for the equality of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie but for the rule of the proletariat, and which believes that the bourgeoisie will not voluntarily renounce its present position, will renounce its program of power in favor of threefolding and see an accommodation on the part of the propertied classes not only as an advance payment?

This question cannot be answered simply on the basis of the structure of the threefold organism. Rather, it must be said that the gulf that has arisen between the proletariat, on the one hand, and the non-proletariat, on the other, is essentially the fault of the leading circles , that is, the non-proletariat, and that the next task of these leading circles would be to really understand the demands of the proletariat and to be able to respond to them; for the proletariat will need, above all, the strength of intellectual workers. It is not in some impossible demands from one side or the other that one should see a danger, but only in the lack of goodwill to build any kind of bridge across the abyss.

There are now a few other written questions, for example the question:

In the three-part social organism, human labor will lose the character of a commodity. There will no longer be a wage in the traditional sense. The workers of a company will receive a contractually agreed portion of the total revenue of the company in question, while another portion will belong to the employees and the manager. How will it be ensured that the worker is guaranteed a kind of subsistence minimum, for example if a single company has a low earning capacity?

This question is dealt with in my book, and I will only note here that the question in the most eminent sense, when the three members of the healthy social organism really exist, is an economic question, and that the socialization of economic life will give rise to a major practical question for those administrations that will be active within the economic body. In essence, I would say that this question boils down to the following: what is today called the minimum subsistence level is still conceived in terms of the wage relationship. This kind of thinking will not be able to take place in the same way in the case of independent economic activity. There, the question will have to be posed purely and simply from the point of view of economic life. This question will then arise in such a way that a person, by performing some kind of service, by producing something, will receive in exchange as many other human services as he needs to satisfy his needs and those of those who belong to him, until he has produced a new, similar product. In doing so, only what the person has to do for his family in terms of work and the like must be taken into account. Then one will find a certain, I would say original cell of economic life. And that which will make this original cell of economic life what will make people satisfy their needs until they produce a similar new product, that applies to all branches of spiritual and material life. It will have to be organized in such a way that the associations, the coalitions, the cooperatives of the kind I have described earlier will have to ensure that this primal cell of economic life can exist. That is to say, that each product, in comparison with other products, has a value equal to the other products needed to satisfy needs until a new, similar product is produced. The fact that this original cell of economic life does not yet exist today is precisely because labor, goods and rights converge in the supply and demand of today's market and that these three areas must be separated in the future in the tripartite, healthy social organism.

Then the following question was asked:

How does Dr. Steiner envision an improved future for the status of private teachers and teachers of similar professions whose necessary income depends on the number of hours they personally work? How will it be possible in the future to strip their labor of its character as a commodity?

Well, that takes care of itself, because anyone who works as a teacher in the spiritual life will, when they are no longer tied into the state machine, actually be more or less free, but then in a healthy way, like any spiritual cultural activity in the threefold organism. That is about all that can be said on the matter. Simply, such persons as are meant here will be equated with those who today have monopolies, in that they are, in the field of the spiritual, combined in their position with purely state affairs.

I think I will now take a break in answering the questions submitted in writing so that any questions that may arise from the honored audience are not affected. The questions that I answered first have been on my mind for quite some time, and I wanted to answer them first today because I believe that they could be really significant for a larger circle. If we are unable to answer all the questions today, we can do so at a later date. I think it would be a good idea to let the questions that may arise from the audience approach us now.

Wilhelm von Blume: So I ask the esteemed attendees, if you have any questions on your mind, to speak up now and submit them in writing as far as possible. But you are also welcome to ask questions orally. We would just ask you to come here and ask the question from here so that we can hear you all.

Perhaps I may in the meantime answer the one question that was raised earlier with a word that I would like to add to what Dr. Steiner said, because this question has occasionally arisen for me myself and I therefore well understood that it was asked. It is the question of the position of the municipalities in the future threefold social organism. Perhaps the questioner would like to know more about what the situation of the municipalities will actually be in the future threefold social organism. The question has been asked: What will happen to the municipal schools, what will happen to the gasworks and so on? Behind this is the question: what will become of the community in the future, if, as there is no doubt, the gasworks, as an event in economic life, must be integrated into the overall organization of economic life, and can no longer be considered a special municipal institution? The questioner did not mention anything else, but the question of housing is at least as important. Who will be responsible for the construction of housing in the future? The construction of housing is, to put it bluntly, an economic process, since it involves 'production'. And there can be no doubt that the allocation of housing for use can also be regarded as an economic process. In the future, this matter will have to be dealt with by the special economic organization. One might think that the community will lose all or at least almost all of the tasks it has had until today – so what will actually become of the community? And yet: the community remains, and the community will continue to play an extremely important role in the future, just as the state remains and will continue to have tasks to perform in the future. I think everyone will immediately feel that the transfer of the gasworks from pure municipal administration to a special economic administration also has its very, very good sides, when they consider that the price of gas, which is charged by the community today, is not set with the aim of enabling as many people as possible to have this gas at a price that reflects the cost of production, but rather because the gasworks is a municipal institution that generates income and [through the surplus] municipal finances are maintained. The same applies to the power stations, the trams and so on. This means that these institutions, which are actually supposed to pursue very specific economic purposes, must also serve the financial purposes of the community, and often enough in such a way that the actual purpose of providing the community's residents with these extremely important goods is severely compromised. So it is certainly an advantage if, in the future, the community can no longer use such institutions for its financial purposes, but if they are only used for purely economic purposes. But the community remains the organization subordinate to the state in all matters of law and administration, that is, in particular, the police and the so-called welfare work - the welfare work insofar as it relates to the maintenance of the strength of the individual. That will be the task of the community, and that is where it has its most important task, as it does today. The community has only taken on economic activity because no one else has properly addressed this task, and it is fortunate, I believe, for a proper community life if in the future the purely economic is no longer the concern of the community. It is fortunate that in the future the municipal administration will no longer be organized in such a way that selfish interests prevail, but will be organized in such a way that every individual can effectively come to his or her rights.

As for spiritual life, what applies in general to the separation of this spiritual life from the influence of the state must also apply to the community. It is clear that today the communities have achieved a great deal of good in this area, but the disadvantages of economic interests interfering in cultural matters, which keep cropping up, can be felt clearly enough in the area of community life. But nevertheless, the community still has the very large area that it had before it took over such community institutions. So the fear that the community would become completely superfluous is just as unjustified as the other fear that the state would actually be finished off by this threefold order. It is not.

No further questions have been asked from the audience so far. Dr. Steiner will now answer the questions submitted in writing.

Rudolf Steiner: There is still the question:

The Steinerian economic order will have to submit to a certain government policy in broad outline, such as the nationality principle, the militaristic or pacifistic world order. Will the burden on the economy (apart from the current war debts and war reparations) be any different according to these guiding principles? Will not, for example, a nationalist policy, conceived in the old way, again burden the economy above all else and undermine the general welfare?

Now, dear attendees, the question arises from a not yet complete penetration of what the essence of the threefold social organism actually is. You see, the damage caused by the unitary state arises from the fact that, let us say, in the legal sphere, and thus to the greatest extent in politics, economic interests interfere, for example, when farmers form an alliance and assert themselves in the state parliament as the “Alliance of Farmers” and there, based on their interests, influence the legal system. On the other hand, harm can come about when a corporation that pursues purely spiritual interests – let us say, for example, the Catholic-organized “center” – in turn sits in the state parliament and there makes the legal interests, I would say, into reshaped spiritual interests. Now you will say: Well, in the future the three elements will exist separately: the spiritual organism, which is completely self-governing from the spiritual principles; the legal organism, which will form the continuation of the present state organism, but which will not have the spiritual and economic life within itself, but only the legal and political life; the economic organism, the cycle of economic life. But, you will say, the three areas do have certain things, certain interests in common, and they are connected through the individual himself; the individual is involved in some kind of business in which the three independent administrative areas play a role. You will ask: Yes, could not some club or the like assert itself in the future for the parliament of the legal ground, which carries the economic interests into the legal ground and asserts its interests in the state parliament , as for example, in the unified state, the farmers' union wants to make rights out of economic interests, or as the center wants to make rights out of religious, confessional interests, that is, out of spiritual life, through coalitions with other parties?

Now, dear attendees, the essence of the threefold social organism, which is still so little understood today, is that in the realm of the economic plane, only economic measures can be taken, not legal measures and not measures that have anything to do with the development of human abilities, which are to be administered in the realm of spiritual life; in the realm of the legal life, only legal issues will have to be developed at all. Let us assume, then, that a club with economic interests were to be found in the parliament of the legal sphere, in the state parliament. It would never be able to take measures that somehow influence economic life, since only legal issues relating to the equality of all people are ever discussed in this parliament. They cannot be conceived in terms of economic life. Economic life is out of the question in the Parliament of Right. It is impossible for anyone, no matter how much economic interest he may have, to assert his economic interests in the Parliament of Right, because nothing of an economic character can take place on the basis of the life of right; that can only take place on the basis of economic life. The point is that it is not a question of dividing men into classes, but of dividing the social organism itself. Thus the present unified state breaks down into three areas, and the interests of each area cannot be asserted in any way in the other two, because such assertion would have no effect in these areas. It is precisely this consistency that will bring about the future healing of the social organism; it is also the reason why this tripartite social organism is a social necessity.

I believe that most of those who have already familiarized themselves with the impulse of the tripartite organism consider what is meant by it to be much too sophisticated, something beyond practical application, something that someone has thought about and come up with: The unified organism did not work out well, so let's make three of them. That is not the point. What is important is the recognition of real life and real necessities, which lead to the tripartite social organism as a consequence. Today, we often hear people say: “We don't understand what is actually wanted.” They don't understand what is actually being sought. Today, so many people say to such an impulse: “We don't understand that.” Why is that? You see, that comes from something that is supposed to be different and better through the threefold social organism. Today, when people are called upon to judge something, what is missing above all is the connection with life. When someone speaks today from a theory, from something that can be explained with a few general principles, which are ultimately comprehensible to every normal person when they come of age, then people understand it. But when we speak today of something that cannot be grasped in this way, but for which a true connection with life is necessary, where one must appeal to life experience, then people come and say they do not understand it. Where does this come from? It comes from the unitary state that we have had for four centuries; through this unitary state, people have been thrown into a life in which they are involved in a particular area of life and have acquired a certain routine in it. They call this routine their practice. They know what they have through this routine. Otherwise, they are educated by the state from the lowest school level. What will play a role in the future is not part of their education, real life is not part of their education, but decrees, laws and so on are part of their education. The abstract nature of the decree and the law flows into human thinking [from the lowest school level], so that today people only have the routine of some individual branch, which they handle quite mechanically. Anyone who disagrees with them on this point, based on a broader experience of life, is called a fool or an impractical person. And on top of that, they have a head full of abstractions because they have only been educated from decrees, laws, teaching objectives and so on, which are not taken from life, but merely from some abstract way of thinking, which has sole authority on the legal ground, but on no other ground of life. In the legal sphere, it has legitimacy because, in the legal sphere, anything that any normal person of legal age can spin out of themselves simply by being of age can be claimed as a human right over against all other people. But what cannot be spun out of the ground is what must flow into the administration of economic life and into the development of intellectual life. Therefore, because we have lacked the freedom of intellectual life, the self-reliance of intellectual life, we have today this strange phenomenon that people can only grasp what they have been thinking for a long time.

Recently, I spoke in a neighboring town about the same issues that I am talking about here now. Afterwards, someone came forward to join the discussion who put forward something from which one could see that he had only taken up and even heard from my remarks what he had been used to for decades, even down to the sentence structure. But what had not been in his brain box for decades, that man did not even hear, it passed him by so strangely that he did not even hear it, that he denied it altogether in the discussion. This is because something like the impulse for a tripartite social organism must appeal not to what we have been educated to through abstract decrees, laws, teaching objectives, courses and so on, but must appeal to what people understand from life itself. That is why such a gulf has opened up today, when one speaks not out of utopian and ideological thinking, but precisely out of life. The more practical one's words are today, the more impractical people call one, because people do not have a real life practice, but only life routine and abstractions in their heads. That is also what leads to the fear that in the future, in the tripartite social organism, there could somehow be a tyranny from one side or the other. This cannot happen because, as I have explained, such a tyranny cannot even assert itself. No matter how many laws are passed in the right-wing parliament, they would not affect economic life, because even what would be dangerous for the interests of economic life could not affect economic life, since it is independently administered.

Another question:

On the other hand, how are the requirements of social policy, for example support for war invalids, orphans, the weak, and so on, regulated? In particular, on what scale? How are the results of the economy used? Couldn't a suitable government configuration render Dr. Steiner's social policy illusory? Even if the main excesses of capitalism, the rent economy, were eliminated, can't the distribution of the burdens still be one-sided?

The last part of the question has already been answered with what I have just said. But the fact that a truly self-reliant economic life can take even better care of widows and orphans, etc., is explained in more detail in my book “The Crux of the Social Question”. I have already indicated that the economic unit must take into account what each person has to contribute as a quota to what widows and orphans, and other people who are unable to work, receive, as explained in my book, and also for children for whom I claim the right to educate. The standard for this will be derived simply from the living expenses of the other persons. Since the economic unit provides a standard for the living expenses of a person according to the existing overall economic prosperity, this also makes it possible to create a standard for the living expenses of those who really cannot work.

The next question:

Could the dangers of the so-called bourgeois government not continue to exist? Are these not further strengthened by the fact that, depending on the composition of the leading political direction, the distribution of offices can take place in such a way that, despite all the good words, the leadership and the occupation of the factories, cooperatives and so on happens through cronyism? In a backward ruling society, that is, in parliament, who guarantees the removal of the incompetent and the lazy from a leading or independent position? Can't a clique economy quickly destroy the advantages of Steiner's system?

Basically, the answer to this question also follows from what I have already said. Because, dear attendees, it is really not a matter of devising some ideal state in which it can no longer happen that one or the other eats up something, but rather it is a matter of finding the best possible state adapted to some specific human society. What is here called the “cousin's” way and the like, that would, if you only really think about things - but think about them practically, according to reality - become quite impossible. For just consider that in this threefold social organism the circulation of the means of production takes place on the widest possible scale, and that, furthermore, the cooperation of the manual workers with the intellectual workers is based on a completely free contract regarding their respective services. So there are much greater safeguards than anywhere else. If you consider, for example, what can arise from corruption and informers in a large economic cooperative that has become a tyrannical state, then I would like to know how that compares with what can arise in the threefold social organism due to a flaw in human nature in the individual, certainly here and there, but which will of course soon be corrected. The greatest safeguard against the spread of damage that is inherent in human nature is offered by the very liveliness that takes place in the threefold social organism, because the three limbs of the social organism themselves control each other. A unified organism, especially one that is built on the purely material economic life, carries within itself the dangers that are characterized by this question. And because these dangers can be foreseen, the question has arisen – again out of a practical necessity – how to remove the possibility of these damages arising from a unified economic body. By taking out the legal life, thus creating a correction for what can arise as injustice. How do you remove the damage to the spiritual realm caused by the economic system of production? By the spiritual realm governing itself; it must be based on trust in one's fellow human beings, and the unfit must withdraw from the spiritual life and become manual laborers or the like. All this arises directly from the threefold social organism, because this threefold structure also provides the possibility of correction for damage that occurs in one or the other area.

Another question is asked here:

How do you envision the self-administration of the spiritual realm and which organizations will support it?

Now, dear attendees, to characterize this complicated self-administration of the spiritual realm in detail would take a long, long time. I can only hint that it will be a matter of only those people being involved in the self-administration of the spiritual realm who are also active in this spiritual realm themselves. Thus, for example, in the field of education, nothing but that which the pedagogue, as pedagogue, must properly exert as influence, will enter into the self-administration. The selection of personalities for certain posts will not be based on examinations, decrees and the like, but on the actual pedagogical knowledge of abilities and so on, so that the question of where I stand in the spiritual organism will depend, let us say in the specific field of schooling, on pedagogical considerations alone, that is, on inner considerations. Never will any other body, the economic or state body, be able to organize the schools according to its own needs. The schools will be organized solely on the basis of human needs up to the age of fifteen, and from the age of fifteen on, according to the needs of the social organism, according to the needs of the life of this social organism. But this means that what is administration depends precisely on the same points of view as teaching itself in educational institutions. In the future, the human being must not be placed in one place by a state and then also have to follow the state's decrees; rather, everything that is active in the spiritual life is placed only in an administration that has arisen from the point of view of this spiritual life itself.

The question then arises:

Has the Federation for Threefolding already considered the establishment of a cultural council for the spiritual realm? If not, then the assembly should take the initiative to do so.

Now, esteemed attendees, it is of no use today if we do not speak openly and honestly about the great tasks that present us with the present, Economic life has taken on forms that have led the proletariat to vigorously defend its economic interests. It is well known, through a wide variety of circumstances, that today the proletariat suffers greatly from the fact that it has more or less a theoretical goal but no practice. Nevertheless, what lives in the proletariat is a definite will, which is also the result of a very definite political education that has gone through decades. From this will, something like a works council or a council of intellectual and physical workers can be formed today. This will not be easy, especially since if it does not happen quickly, it could be too late.

But, I would like to say, today it is a struggle with obstacles that are less and less formidable than those of the creation of a cultural council, because the most diverse [obstacles] confront one. For example, there are party leaders today who believe they think socialist, completely socialist, no longer in the sense of the old intellectual culture of the privileged classes, and yet they have adopted nothing but that intellectual culture. Nothing but the ultimate consequence of this intellectual culture lives in their heads. This intellectual culture of the leading and ruling circles can be characterized by the fact that, over the past four centuries, it has increasingly merged with economic life to such an extent that intellectual life is now actually only a consequence of economic life, a kind of superstructure over economic life. From this experience of the last three to four centuries, the proletariat, or rather proletarian theory, has now formed the view that intellectual life may only be something that arises from economic life. The moment you put this into practice, the moment you say that intellectual life may only arise from economic life, you lay the foundation for the complete destruction of intellectual life, for the complete destruction of culture. The bourgeoisie cannot now demand that the proletariat should take a different view and expect everything from economic life, because the bourgeoisie itself has brought everything to the point where ultimately everything of a spiritual nature is somehow dependent on economic life.

The course of development was such that, in the beginning, historical development overcame those damages that arose for man within human society from the aristocratic order. From this aristocratic order, legal damages arose; the bourgeoisie fought for rights against what used to be the aristocratic order. Then, in the course of historical development, the antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, that is, between the propertied and the propertyless, emerged as a further consequence. The great struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is aimed at no longer allowing labor power to be a commodity. As things stand today, the proletariat is vigorously demanding – and this is not only a proletarian demand, but an historical one – that in the future physical labor should no longer be a commodity. The bourgeoisie demanded liberalism because it no longer wanted the old aristocratic privileges, because it no longer wanted to make the law a thing to be conquered and bought. The proletariat demands the emancipation of labor from the character of a commodity. If we do not want to leave something behind that would plunge all of Central and Eastern Europe into a state of barbarism, we must recognize something else today. If the proletariat were not to demand cooperation with intellectual labor in a spirit of understanding, the proletariat would succeed in divesting physical labor of its commercial character. However, the consequence of this would be that in the future a state would arise in which all intellectual human labor would become a commodity. This state must not be allowed to come about, must not be brought about. The seriousness of the task must be grasped in such a way that at the same time as physical labor, spiritual, truly spiritual labor, also comes into its own. The old aristocracy brought about the lack of rights of the people, the old bourgeoisie brought about the lack of property of the proletariat. If the purely materialistic-economic view of the proletarian question remained, the dehumanization of intellectual life would remain. We are facing this danger if those who have a heart and mind for cultural life do not take the initiative to liberate this intellectual life themselves. And this intellectual life can only be liberated if we break away from the dependence of intellectual life, which I have characterized in so many different ways, and really bring about a reorganization of intellectual life through a serious cultural council. But today we must speak honestly and openly: interest in this area is unfortunately still far too low. The most pressing task at hand is to recognize that this is an urgent issue. A cultural council must be formed.

The attempts we have made, including a meeting yesterday, have not been very promising, because people do not yet realize what is at stake today if we do not manage to put intellectual work on its own feet and not let it be a slave of economic or state life. It is therefore an urgent necessity that in the very near future hearts and minds be stirred precisely for a cultural council. The apolitical nature of our Central European people, which has unfortunately manifested itself in such a dreadful way in the last four to five years, is what should lead to self-knowledge precisely in the spiritual realm. This is what should open people's spiritual eyes and hearts to the fact that our spiritual life has so far been the spiritual life of a small clique, calculated on the basis that it would develop on the soil of broad masses of people who could not participate in this spiritual life, and that today we must create a spiritual life in which every human being can find a dignified existence not only physically but also spiritually and soulfully. Dearly beloved, if one looked into the damage to this spiritual life, especially in the years that have proven to be the decades of preparation for the current world catastrophe, one could truly be seized by cultural concerns.

Then the question was:

What is the best way to educate our children?

In the time when people were so proud of the fact that they did not want to pay homage to any authority, children were still being educated in such a way that the blindest belief in the authority of the established was the most authoritative of all, and the connection between this established order and life could no longer be judged at all. They had neither the heart nor the mind to appreciate that, for example, the habits of thought that a person absorbs in the last years of youth permeate his entire being and constitute his entire being. Do we, as members of the intellectual elite, really absorb anything vital for the present day?

Interjection: Very true!

Oh, this spiritual life needs a thorough transformation, and it is very difficult to find an open ear among people in this field today. But until this open ear is found, there will be no salvation. There is no one-sided solution to the social question, only a three-pronged one. It is essential to stand on the ground of a spiritual life that really arises out of life. This requires goodwill, not the unconscious evil will of the pigtails. Therefore, it is urgently necessary that precisely in this area, something arises that can be called a cultural council. I can only say that a cultural council seems to me to be an absolutely essential requirement, because it must develop an activity that saves us from the commercialization of intellectual work in the external life.

This question seems to be related to the other question that was asked:

If we can expect the transformation of economic life in the sense of the separation from the unitary state through the organization of the works council to take place quickly, how then can intellectual life quickly be made independent and its reconstruction tackled?

Precisely by forming a cultural council and exploring the requirements within this cultural council that are necessary for the rebuilding of our intellectual life. That is what I have to say in response to these questions.

Lively applause and hand clapping.

Dr. Carl Unger: Dear attendees, a whole series of further questions have been received, which we will probably – and I hope you will agree – postpone answering until a later evening.

However, it is extremely important to us to really take to heart the last words of the esteemed speaker. Right now, a challenge is circulating among us that truly bears the mummification of the bankrupt intellectual life: the question of the galvanization and preservation of the humanistic grammar schools in the old sense. We have heard in which direction we have to look when we look at the dire consequences of contemporary life, and we have heard where we have to attack in the intellectual life. And just in these days we have also noticed how the impulse of a new spiritual, a new artistic life has been met with the greatest philiserosicäs. Dear attendees, we must allow strong impulses to arise within us from the words we have just heard, which work to release forces and strong, even revolutionary willpower for the spiritual life in us in the direction of preparing to found or form a genuine cultural council. But this can only be founded on freedom, on the own initiative of individual personalities who, from whatever situation in the spiritual life, are willing and able to contribute to a real new development of spiritual life. The purpose of my present words is to trigger this initiative and to work towards promoting this idea and the threefold social order among those present. We are prepared, first of all, to accept addresses – and indeed as early as this evening – from personalities who are willing to take on the heavy task that our esteemed speaker has set us. I ask to be allowed to approach you with this request, and I would like to ask you in particular to let the impulses for the rebuilding of intellectual life take effect in you in the strongest possible way and also to bring them to bear in other personalities.

With that, allow me to close today's meeting.