# The Starving Social Organism: Economic Dominance and Spiritual Impoverishment

## GA 190 — 22 March 1919, Dornach

### Lecture II

Today we want to look at the social organism once more, and in such a way that we bring it into parallel with the human natural organism. When such a parallel is made, it must be taken as a means of understanding some things better with reference to the social organism. On the other hand, you must not be too obtrusive to the outside world with such parallels, because the latter today has a strong distrust of such parallels and believes that one wants to play an idle game with analogies. Then people want to reject it. This will be especially necessary for you to consider. From a spiritual-scientific point of view, the parallel, which we have already drawn several times, and which we will pursue today from a certain point of view, definitely leads to the goal, definitely enlightens. It clarifies many a social phenomenon in the present. But I would like to ask you to keep it more in the background until the common prejudices against a parallelization of the human natural organism with the social organism have run their course. I myself use this parallel to the outside world. But I refuse to play an idle analogy game. That is what I did in my Zurich lectures on the social question, and that is what I am doing in the paper that will now appear on the social question. But this caution is not always used by connoisseurs of the anthroposophical worldview. That is why I expressly urge caution. Now, with this restriction, let us once again consider the social organism from a certain point of view today.

We divide the ordinary natural organism into three parts, into the head system, we can also say the nervous-sensory system, into the lung-heart system, we can also say the rhythmic system, and into the metabolic system. All activity of the human organism is exhausted in these three systems. What goes on in the human body can be brought under one of these three categories. It is remarkable that each of these systems has its own connection with the outside world. From this it can be seen that it is not arbitrary to divide the natural human organism into these three systems. The nervous-sensory system is connected with the external world through the senses, the respiratory system through the respiratory organs, the metabolic system through the nutritional organs. Each of these systems stands by itself in a segregated relationship with the external world.

Now, in the same way, we can divide the social organism into three members - into a first, second and third member - so that they are independent. In the social organism we then have to distinguish as the three members the economic system, the state system or legal system and the system of spiritual organization.

I. Head system Economic system

Nervous-sensory system

II. lung-heart system state system  
Rhythmic system

III. metabolic system spiritual organization

I ask you to take into account what I have written on the blackboard, because it is very important. The head of the social organism is the economic system. The rhythmic system, the circulation system, the lung-heart system, that is the state system. And the metabolic system, that is decided in the spiritual organization. That is why I always said: If one wants to imagine the matter correctly, one must imagine, in relation to the human natural organism, that the social organism is upside down. If one plays an idle analogy game, then one will believe that the spiritual organization in man corresponds to the head system. This is not the case. The mental organization corresponds to the metabolic system. We can say that the social organism nourishes itself from what the people in the social organism accomplish spiritually. The social organism has its head endowment in the natural basis. If a certain people lives in a rich area with many ore mines, with rich mineral resources, with fertile soil, the social organism is gifted, to the Genialı it can be gifted. If the soil is barren, if there are few mineral resources, then the social organism is foolish, untalented.

So you don't have to just analogize, but you have to just, when you make the parallel, go to the right thing. You know, one must also go against the mere playing with concepts out of the spiritual-scientific experience and look for the right thing in other fields. If people merely play a game of analogy, they will say, for example: One can compare the waking state of man with summer, the sleeping state with winter. You know that this would be quite wrong. I have repeatedly explained to you that if you draw this parallel, seasons and human life, then you must just the other way round regard the summer as the sleeping state and the winter as the waking state of the earth. Thus you must regard economic life as the head of the social organism. And that which people accomplish spiritually - mind you, in the effect on the social organism - you must regard as the food of the social organism.

This matter is extraordinarily important in order to understand our time in particular. Our time, I emphasized yesterday, basically has a hard time with any solution of the social question, and that is because predominantly antisocial drives are present in the present humanity. Anti-social drives are present in the relationship of individual human being to individual human being. Sometimes, however, the antisocial instincts conceal themselves, hide themselves. For example, today they are hidden behind the national aspirations that are intensively asserting themselves across the earth. With these national aspirations one associates today something which is still taken for granted, whereas the self-evident thing for the real development of man in our time consists in the fact that an international element should begin in the most decisive sense. But there it is still difficult to talk to the people of today. For other nations, all people usually see that the international should begin; only for their own, usually not. If one wants to talk about these things with people today, one encounters what I once encountered in another field many years ago on the floor of the Anthroposophical, then Theosophical Society.

I had to explain that animals have group souls, and that when the animals die, they enter into the group souls, that they do not have an individual re-embodiment. Then a lady, who had a dog, which she loved very much, replied: With all other animals this may be the case, but for this, her dog, it does not apply, he had already acquired such a decided individual soul that he will experience a personal reincarnation. It was very difficult to approach the lady. But later, when this lady was gone and they were still together for a while, another lady said: She could not understand how such a clever woman could not see that her dog had no individual soul; she had understood that right away! But her parrot, it has an individual soul! That is a completely different matter! - This is a very instructive example of how people judge when things are touched which are directly connected with their personality.

But there are the most different reasons why in the present time certain obstacles arise to what one can reasonably call socialization. If you look over various things that you know from our anthroposophical spiritual science, it will be clear to you that spiritual life has first gone in a descending line within human development. Certainly, people today are proud of their far advanced spiritual development; however, in what they think, what they feel, there is actually no spirit.

Look back only to the third post-Atlantean cultural period to go no further. The source from which people drew at that time may certainly have been atavistic clairvoyance, but out of this atavistic clairvoyance people gained a broad wisdom, a wisdom which was spiritually substantial. Today's people look back with a certain arrogance on what the Chaldeans, what the Egyptians have produced. This arrogance is very, very unjustified. However, what is brought to light philologically and scholastically about the wisdom of the Agyptians and Chaldeans is not very productive. But that is, after all, "the master's own mind". It does not reach the deep insights that the ancient Egyptian priests, the ancient Egyptian mystery leaders, the Chaldean priests, the Chaldean mystery leaders had through their clairvoyant wisdom, which, however, still had atavistic overtones. Even within the Greco-Latin culture there was more wisdom than in what people think and feel today, what flows into their ideas, into their concepts of the spiritual. Basically, today man has become poor in spiritual life. And a particular impoverishment of spiritual life has occurred precisely since the advent of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period, since the middle of the 15th century. A tremendous amount of real spiritual life has been lost.

And more and more the human mind became, so to speak, parched. Therefore it limited itself more and more to creating pictures of the outer sensual life. Man no longer wants to believe in real revelations from the spiritual world, nor does he want to hold on to them. But the spiritual content that man develops in himself has not only a subjective meaning for him. In so far as what man develops inwardly spiritually has a meaning in the life of man to man, in so far what man has in his head, has in himself, is at the same time food for the social organism; the social organism feeds on it. Therefore you will understand that he who speaks of the social organism with understanding must say that this social organism has been starving since the middle of the fifteenth century. The decline of the real spiritual life means a gradual starvation of the social organism, the social organism on all territories. And one may already say: The social organism has become a rather lean personality today and threatens to become even leaner and leaner. If today someone should design a symbol of the social organism, expressed by the human personality, he would have to design a lean personality, not a fat one. A well-fed little monk, for example, should not be painted today as a symbol of the social organism.

If you take this into account, then you will also be able to understand that, on the contrary, while the stomach of our social organism, which we actually fill with our spiritual achievements, is quite empty, today it is precisely the head, namely the economic life of the social organism, that is the one that is particularly active. The social organism today thinks very much, the social organism develops abundant intellectuality. It is perhaps a somewhat dangerous comparison, but it should actually be made. You know, too much malnutrition, when there is a strong intellectuality, at the same time brings this intellectuality somewhat into disorder. Now, one must not believe that our social organism has the tendency to go crazy. But many things that happen today, and for which not only people are responsible, but already that which pulsates through the world as social thinking, shows itself pathologically in this social organism. And it is precisely for this reason that we speak of the necessity of bringing the social organism to health, because we feel how sick it is. But we want to refrain from this for the time being, as I said, even though the comparison has to be used once. The comparison had to be used for the reason that you may see that human development really proceeds in a lawful way, that it is not merely because people subjectively want this or that to happen, but that what happens is subject to a continuous lawfulness, we have once entered the period when the social organism suffers from hunger, and when it thinks too much, when it develops its head system too much.

This does not mean that today there is too much economy. There is much too little farming. Mankind would have to produce much more, but this will only happen when the social organism is properly divided into its three parts. But economic life is really thought of as if it were all alone in the world. When I look at the social organism from this point of view, how it unilaterally wants to negotiate everything, everything according to the head of the social organism, according to the economic life, then I always have to think how from a certain confusion of the social organism with the individual human organism the Austrian poet Hermann Rollet - it is now a very long time ago - once expressed to me a great concern about the future of mankind. Hermann Rollet was a very dear man. He compiled that beautiful book about the Goethe portraits. He alone was, as it was fashionable in the seventies, eighties of the last century, a very enlightened man and therefore proud of how far people have come with their head culture today. And he once expressed to me his deep concern about what will become of people if they become more and more clever, if they think more and more. The head will develop more and more at the expense of the other organism. And he meant that the human beings would really have to roll over the earth as mere heads, as spheres, if the earth continues to develop. Thus he expressed a real concern. And this concern does not apply to the individual human being. But it does apply in a certain way, at least for today, to the social organism, which has its head in the economic system, and which threatens to become more and more head.

What I am saying to you is a very, very practical thing for today's life. I have now spoken several times in proletarian circles. The proletarian world itself understands you well, but it is held back for the time being by its leaders. They are not deeply involved in individual thinking, but in what passes over to them from social thinking, from the thinking of the social organism. If one puts forward in these circles what is appropriate and absolutely necessary today, that the social organism must be divided into an economic organization, into a political-legal or state organization, and into a spiritual organization, one can be quite sure that the program will be answered: Yes, but everything must result from the economic system, what is the use of the other links? If the economic life is put on its right basis, then the rights and then also the spiritual life will arise by itself. - People are not aware of the fact that this is not individual thinking, but that this is thinking which rushes through their heads from the social organism. Above all, it thinks too much, that is, it thinks only in terms of economy. It cannot yet decide to develop its heart and lungs, namely a real separate state. He cannot even become clearly aware of his stomach, that is, of the necessity of the intervention of the individual human faculties in the social organism.

I want you to understand that such talk today, which only wants to accept the economic system, is deeply rooted in human development, and that it will therefore take strong forces to bring about a reversal in this way. Think for a moment that it will become necessary for spiritual life to be emancipated, to be turned in on itself, that people will have to understand: From the lowest school up, everything must be separated from the state and be able to develop independently of economic life. Today, neither the bourgeois circles nor the Social Democrats want this. From their point of view, the Social Democrats will rightly point out again and again that healthy economic life in former times was supported by two pillars, by intellectual life and by state life. Popularly, this is expressed by saying that human economic life must be supported, as it has always been, by the throne, state life and the altar, spiritual life. Some say this with 'disgust, those who are still in old ideas say it with enthusiasm: Throne and altar are necessary. In more recent times, the throne has sometimes become a presidential chair, but this makes a difference only in the outer aesthetics; and the altar has sometimes become a Wertheim cash box, but this also makes only an outer difference. It is actually not a profound difference in terms of feeling. Newer people often like the Wertheim cash register as much as older people liked the altar.

Now this still points back to a time which in a certain way had sense and receptivity for the free spiritual life. Think, it is not so very long ago that the free colleges, the universities, were absorbed by the state. The universities used to have their own prestige, their own honor. They were autonomous, autonomous bodies. They have completely lost this autonomy. They educate public servants, good, well-behaved public servants in all fields. On the other hand, there is a hypertrophy of the social head system, the economic life. Everything is thought out by the economic system, and the perspective of office and machine instead of throne and altar is not a perspective that points to things that can make the social organism viable! I have often said to you that the world would become a big bookkeeping, which would be led by a kind of workshop life. The very individual human faculties that form the nourishment for the social organism would atrophy and be paralyzed if the throne and altar were replaced by the office and the factory, the office and the machine.

But all this is connected with the fact that the present human life together, i.e. the individual life, triggers in man above all a thinking which is oriented towards the economic life, which has only sense and interest for the economic life. This has come about in more recent times because modern technology has taken hold, and with modern technology the modern type of capitalism. First of all, the leading circles became dependent on what one could call the social mind oriented only to the economic system. I have pointed out again and again how man has been absorbed, so to speak, by the objective social mind, by the flooding by the mere head system with which the social organism around us thinks. We are caught up in this thinking today.

You know, I have often pointed out to you, how the human personality with its own thinking has been gradually eliminated even in capital life. Today the objective capital is the one which works over the earth. The human personality has actually been eliminated where capital is operating properly. Soon one is at the bottom, soon at the top, soon everything is lost, soon everything is gained again, and the shares work for themselves, work more and more for themselves. I usually use a sym'ptom as an example. In the first half of the 19th century and into the last third, the individual bankers were the decisive ones. But then, for the big companies, it became more the corporations. America, which is somewhat lagging behind in its development, has just now made the transition, will now make the transition from far-reaching individuality to the objective effect of capital, and will probably show this phenomenon to a quite outstanding degree. But the individual banker was so powerful that one already hits his position in social life well if one pays attention - I think it was in the forties, I have already told it here once - how the finance minister of the King of France went to Rothschild to - well, what does a finance minister do? -to pump him for the state of France. Rothschild was just busy with a cobbler or a carpenter, and this business was as important to him as the finance minister of the King of France, perhaps even more important. The finance minister lets himself be announced. The servant goes in, comes back and says: "Mr. Rothschild asks you to wait a little, there is a carpenter in there. - What, a carpenter? I am the Minister of Finance of the King of France! - The servant replied: Mr. Rothschild says you would like to wait. - But the minister tears open the door and rushes in: "I am the finance minister of the King of France! - Please, take a chair, I have to deal with the gentleman here first. - But, I am the Finance Minister of the King of France! - Well, please, take two chairs!

Through something like this you can see, although it is only a symptom, the personal power. Personal initiative has more or less ceased in this form and was in the process of ceasing before the catastrophe of the war broke out in the field of economic life. That which thinks in the economic life itself, the social intelligence, got the supremacy over the individual intelligence of the single people. At first, this social intelligence, this social mind born out of economic life, out of the hypertrophy of economic life, is very sober. And that is just what should strike the connoisseur of social life from a higher point of view, how sober today the thinking born out of economic life has become. First of all, a kind of new groupthink appears among people. But this groupthink is uncommonly sober. It was born out of the bourgeoisie during the capitalist period, has developed into philistinism, has spread widely as philistinism, and has now taken hold of socialist thinking as its most sober product.

On this point, my dear friends, there is something very, very remarkable to be said. The circumstances that have taken place have brought it about that the largest part of the proletarian masses is free-spirited, unbelieving. The number of people leaving the church in these circles is very, very large. Those who do not leave often do so only because they do not consider the matter very important. But one often hears something else. One often hears it emphasized that the proletarian's substitute for the old religions is precisely the socialist doctrine. This is possible only out of a certain enthusiasm, not out of a true enthusiasm; for, of course, socialist teaching, thinking only from the standpoint of economic life, is something terribly sober and cannot somehow assume a religious character.

But from this you will see that the seriousness which I have often spoken to you in these lectures is also really, one might say, a sacred commandment of world history. If, on the one hand, we follow the human development since the age of the consciousness soul by means of spiritual-scientific observation, and if, on the other hand, we take into consideration what we encounter precisely within socialist thinking, proving the anthroposophical view, then we say that a tremendously important phenomenon of the social organism is its gradual starvation. It 'starves to death, if real spiritual life does not come into people, if spiritual life does not take hold of people! Just as the individual man must starve if he does not have food to enjoy, so must a social organism starve if men do not come to spiritual life. It is really upside down, the social organism. The individual man needs food in order to live; the social organism needs human talents, human gifts, human inner revelations, so that from these gifts, from these inner revelations, may come forth that which alone can make the social organism healthy!

Remember, as I have often emphasized: You cannot build something like the Gotthard tunnel today if you do not know differential and integral calculus as the director of such a construction. But it comes from Leibniz, the English say: from Newton; well, they may say it. But whether it is one or the other: Not only the one who puts the stones on top of each other built the Gotthard tunnel, but Leibniz or Newton helped to build it. This is only one example of how out of the spiritual life also the most all-material really comes into being. If you eliminate the spiritual individual abilities, you also destroy the economic life. It can never be a question of establishing a world bureaucracy, by which quite certainly the free initiative of the spiritual faculties is eliminated! This world bureaucracy, which is the ideal of Trotsky and Lenin, would of course starve the social organism.

Just who honestly means it with the social question in the present, must emphasize again and again: What is necessary above all is a free development of intellectual science. This is not somehow the introduction of something impractical into the present life, but it is the most practical thing of all, because it is directly, really necessary. Precisely because the individual abilities of people have been suppressed for so long, precisely because of this, the objective events in 1914 hit people over the heads. There was nothing in the heads but sometimes even great ideas. The objective events hit people over the heads. Individual abilities had declined. People could not master the external life. Their concepts, their ideas, their imaginations were too narrow. They could not extend themselves over the objective events. And there was not the slightest bit of mutual understanding left. So these last four and a half years had to be the great disciplinarian of mankind, teaching them that it was necessary that spiritual life really flow into the social organism as food.

These connections are understood when one is able to really consider the social organism in this respect as a tripartite system. One must learn to understand that in the social organism the economic life must independently cultivate its external relations, that state body must enter into connection with state body and spiritual life with spiritual life. One unified state system should not negotiate with another unified state system. It must be like in the human organism, where each of the three systems develops its special relations with the outside world. By regulating the international relations of the people in such a way that, as it were, one member only ever enters into correspondence with the other member, the best way is to work against such conflicts as, for example, broke out in 1914. Just think how much more complicated it will be when two territories come into conflict, because initially the conflict can only arise between state system and state system. It cannot be fought out, because the spiritual organization and the economic system, if they are freely centralized in themselves, still have to have their say.

One must only be clear about how differently life will be organized when this threefold structure comes into being. On the other hand, however, we must be clear about how thoroughly people today are prejudiced against such rethinking and relearning. If one wants to raise the question again and again: Why is there so much resistance to spiritual science? - It is not the difficulty of comprehension, as we have often emphasized, but only the inability of people to make the decision to change their habits of thought, as these habits of thought have gradually formed in the last decades, even centuries. It is much more comfortable for people to muddle along in a straight line. It is therefore no wonder that at present people are again thinking of the expression coined in Bern to found a "superstate", the League of Nations with a superparliament. Not true, the old states have worked so favorably, have shown what they can achieve in the last four and a half years! Now, to establish "supra-states", "supra-parliaments", that is quite a sign that people do not want to slip out of the old thinking nets, that they want to stay inside in these old thinking nets. While the individual state must be broken down into its three members, people want the opposite. They want to weld the whole earth - with the exception of those who are now excluded for the time being - into one big state. They want the opposite of what is founded in the forces of development of the time. For this reason, those who are involved in spiritual science should really understand and also incorporate it into their will that a strong push is necessary against that which is still going in the completely opposite direction today. This onslaught is necessary. This must be said again and again. And since we must get used to looking at things inwardly, it will be good to try quite often to experience the social from this point of view, which I have characterized again today, meditating inwardly, because this can stimulate our will.

We will continue to talk about this tomorrow. Tomorrow at five o'clock there will be the public eurythmy performance here, and I think that at half past seven or a quarter to eight I will continue this lecture.