The Social Question as a Problem of All Humanity

GA 193 — 8 February 1919, Bern

The public lectures in these days have dealt with the social problem, with the social demands of the present, as they arise not only, I would like to say, from observation in thought, but as they occur in the facts, in the events of contemporary world life.

All these things that relate to human life and whose consideration today in the broadest sense and for the broadest circles is absolutely necessary can be further deepened by people with an anthroposophical orientation. For we, who feel we belong to the anthroposophical movement, must never forget that it must be part of our most intimate feeling to view all things of the world in such a way that we penetrate the outer appearances, the outer facts for our own contemplation with the insights that we gain from the spiritual world. Only by thinking about all things as permeated by the spiritual, by that essence which is primarily hidden in the external earthly world but which really also lives in this earthly world, do they take on the right view of reality for us.

When I was last here among you, I gave you some indications, also from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, of the social impulses of human life. We have already tried to consider man as a social being, as a being with social and anti-social instincts. But we must never lose sight of the fact that, by being human beings on this earth, we bring into this earthly existence the effect, the result of what we go through in the time that elapses between death and a new birth. We bring into our earthly life the results of our last spiritual life, our last stay in the purely supersensible world. And we do not consider our earthly life completely if we do not consider how what we do, what happens to us in the world as we live with people, also carries something of what arises as the effects of our life in the spiritual world from which we have emerged through birth, but whose traces, whose forces we take with us into this world.

On the one hand, this is what reaches into the physical world for us humans from the spiritual world. On the other hand, however, we must not forget that things happen in the life we lead here on earth that do not initially fully enter our consciousness, that happen to us, around us, without us taking occasion to grasp them clearly in our consciousness , and that we carry the most important of these experiences, which remain in our subconscious during our earthly life between birth and death, through the gate of death back into the supersensible world, which we in turn experience when we step through death out of the earthly world. Much takes place in our earthly life that is not important for this earthly life, but as a preparation for the after-death life - if I may use this expression “after-death life” in contrast to “prenatal life”.

Now, in particular, such a consideration, of which I spoke yesterday in the public lecture, only emerges with full concrete clarity when one is able to illuminate it from the direction from which the light comes from the supersensible world. And it is in this direction that I would like to deepen our understanding of this topic, which is so relevant to the present day, from an anthroposophical perspective. I would like to consider the social problem today as a problem of humanity as a whole. For us, however, humanity as a whole is not only the sum of the souls that are living together socially on earth at a particular point in time; but also those who are in the supersensible world at this particular time are connected to people by spiritual bonds and belong to what we can call the totality of humanity. Let us first consider what is called human spiritual life in an earthly sense.

In an earthly sense, human spiritual life is not the life of spiritual beings, but rather what people go through in their social lives as a spiritual life. Above all, this spiritual life includes everything that encompasses science, art and religion. But the spiritual life also includes everything that concerns schooling and education. Let us first consider what people experience in their social life as a spiritual cultural life. You know from a communication like the one I gave yesterday that this spiritual life — all schooling, all education, all scientific, artistic, literary life, and so on — must form a separate social structure in itself. For the outside world, this can only be made clear on the basis of the reasons that this outside world admits today. It can become completely clear: common sense must be enough to fully understand these things. But to look at them concretely becomes especially possible for those who engage in anthroposophically oriented observation of the world. For what is called the earthly spiritual life appears to such a person in a very special light.

Through the modern development, however, this spiritual life, which under the influence of the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals of the bourgeoisie, has degenerated into a mere ideology, which the proletarians have therefore adopted in their world view as a mere ideology, and which encompasses the branches that I have discussed, is not something that arises from economic life alone. This is approximately how the proletarian world view presents itself today: Everything that is religious conviction and religious thought, everything that is artistic achievement, everything that is legal and moral belief, that is, as the proletarian worldview says, a superstructure, something that rises like a cloud of smoke from the only true reality, the economic reality. This earthly spiritual life becomes an ideology, something that is merely imagined. For those who are familiar with the foundations of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, however, what encompasses people as a cultural life of the spirit is a gift from spiritual beings themselves. For them, it does not rise up from the economic undercurrents, but flows down from the life of the spiritual hierarchies. This is the radical difference between what is expressed by the bourgeois world view and its legacy in the proletarian world view – that basically, for that which has developed in humanity since the 15th or 16th century, the spiritual world is ideological, a mere haze that rises from the economic harmonies and disharmonies — and the world view that must come, the only one that can bring salvation, which leads out of the present chaos, for which what is flowing down is streaming from the real spiritual life of the world, to which we belong as much as we belong to the physical-earthly world through our senses, through our minds. But now that we have arrived in the fifth post-Atlantean period, we, as social beings, can only find our way into the social human organism with this spiritual life if we are prepared for this earthly spiritual life by those relationships that we enter into with other spiritual beings of the hierarchies before we are born, when we have not yet descended to earthly existence, as we have often mentioned. This is what spiritual research reveals as an important fact of life.

We enter into a twofold relationship with people when we come into existence through birth. Distinguish precisely these two relationships in which we come into contact with people. The one relationship that we enter into with people, that we have to enter into with people, is the fateful one. We come into a fateful relationship with one or other person, or with a greater or lesser number of people. We enter into a particular family through our birth into earthly existence. We come into a fateful relationship with our father and mother, our brothers and sisters, and our extended family.

We come into fateful relationships with other people, as an individual human being in relation to an individual human being. We live out our karma as individuals in relation to other people. How does this karma come about? How do these fateful relationships come about? They come about because they have been prepared by this or that life fact of previous earthly lives. So please take this in: when you enter into existence through birth, you come into a fateful connection with other people, as an individual human being with an individual human being, in accordance with what you have lived with this person in past lives. That is one way in which you enter into relationships with other people: by fate.

But you also enter into other relationships with people. As a member of a nation, you belong to a group of people with whom you are not connected by fate in the way just described. You are born into a nation, as into a specific territory. On the one hand, this is certainly connected with your karma, but as a result you are, so to speak, forged together in the social organism with many people with whom you do not belong by destiny. In a religious community you may have the same religious feelings as a number of other people with whom you are not at all bound by destiny. Spiritual and earthly-spiritual life brings about the most diverse social and societal connections among people, not all of which are based on fate. These connections are not all prepared in previous earthly lives, but in the time you live through between death and a new birth. Particularly when you are in the second half of this life between death and a new birth, you enter into a relationship with the beings, especially the higher hierarchies, through which you are so influenced by the forces of these hierarchies that you are spiritually welded together with different groups of people. What you experience as spiritual life in religion, in art, in the context of a people, in a mere language community, for example, what you experience through a very specifically directed education and so on, all this is already prepared outside of pure karmic currents in prenatal life. You bring into your physical and earthly existence what you have already experienced in your prenatal life. And what you experience in your prenatal life is reflected, albeit in a completely different way, in what intellectual life and spiritual cultural life is in the earthly.

Now, for someone who is able to take such a fact of the spiritual world completely seriously, a very specific question arises: How can we do justice to this earthly spiritual life in the higher sense, when we know that this earthly spiritual life is a reflection of what we have already experienced in the true, concrete spiritual life before birth? We can only do justice to this earthly spiritual life if we do not look at it as an ideology, but if we know that the spiritual world lives in it. And we can only relate to this earthly spiritual life in the right way if we realize that the forces of the spiritual world itself can be found everywhere in it. Imagine hypothetically: what the beings — be they the beings of the higher hierarchies, who never take on an earthly body, or be they even the not yet born human beings, human beings who have not yet entered earthly life through the portal of birth — what these beings belonging to the supersensible world think, what they experience in their soul life, that lives; that lives in a kind of dream-like image in the earthly-spiritual cultural world. So that we can justifiably always ask the question when any artistic, any religious, any educational fact of life comes to us: What lives in it? Not only what people have done here on earth, but what flows in from the forces, from the thoughts, from the impulses, from the whole soul life of the higher hierarchies, that lives in it. We will never see the world in its entirety if we deny these thoughts of spiritual beings that are not embodied on this earth, either not embodied at all or not embodied at this moment, which are, as it were, reflected in our spiritual-earthly culture. If we can acquire, I would like to say, this sacred contemplation of the spiritual world around us in a way that we can hold this spiritual world for what the spiritual beings themselves give us, with what the spiritual beings surround us, then we will be able to be truly grateful for this gift of the supersensible world, which we experience as an earthly-spiritual cultural world. In this way, this spiritual cultural world necessarily enters the entire social structure of humanity as something independent, as the continued effect of what we partake of in the spiritual world before birth. When social life is illuminated with the light of spiritual knowledge, it becomes a matter of course to assume a separate, independent reality in this spiritual life.

The second area of the social structure is what could be called the external rule of law, political life in the narrower sense, that which relates to the ordering of the legal relationships between people, that in which all people should be equal before the law. This is the actual life of the state. And the actual state life should basically be nothing other than this. Certainly, on the basis of pure, healthy human understanding, one can again see the necessity that this state life, this life of public law, this life that refers to the equality of all people before the law, to the equality of people in general, that this link of the social organism must stand independently for itself. But if we look at the matter again with the eyes sharpened by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, something quite different becomes apparent.

This life, the actual life of the state, is the only one within the social organs that has nothing to do with the prenatal or the afterlife. It is only in the world that man lives through between birth and death that it finds its order, its orientation. The state is only a self-contained whole with its primordial existence when it does not extend to anything that reaches into the supersensible world, whether on the side of birth or on the side of death. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.” But, one must add, not in prayer, but in deed, render unto God the things that are God's, and unto Caesar the things that are God's. He will reject it!

The things must be clearly distinguished, like the individual system structures in the human natural organism. Everything that can be included in the life of the State, that can be discussed or decided upon by the State, has to do only with the life between man and man. That is the essential thing. In all ages, the more deeply religious natures have felt this. But other men, who were not deeply religious natures, did not even allow people to speak freely, honestly, and sincerely about these things. For a conception has become fixed in the deeper religious natures about these things. These deeper religious natures said to themselves: State, it encompasses life, which, as far as humanity is concerned, has to do only with everything that lies between birth and death, that which relates to the mere earthly. It is bad when that which relates only to the earthly wants to extend its rule to the supernatural, to the supersensible, to that which lies beyond birth and death. But earthly spiritual life goes beyond birth and death, because it contains the shadows of the soul experiences of the supersensible beings. When that which pulses in mere state life takes hold of the life of earthly spirituality, then deeper religious natures call this: the power exercised by the unlawful prince of this world. Behind the expression “the unlawful prince of this world” lies what I have just hinted at. This is also the reason why in those circles that have an interest in confusing the three members of the social organism, this unlawful prince of this world is not spoken of gladly, it is even frowned upon to speak of it.

The situation is somewhat different with regard to the thinking, feeling and impulses of the soul that develop in a person because of their belonging to the economic part of the social organism. This is something highly idiosyncratic. However, you will already have become accustomed to the fact that, through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, you must expect some things that initially appear paradoxical in your views. When we speak today of the economic aspect of the social organism, we must be clear about the fact that the way we are speaking now is precisely a peculiarity of the fifth post-Atlantic period. In earlier epochs of human development, these things were different. Therefore, what I have to say in this regard applies particularly to our present and to the future. But with regard to our present and future, it must be said that In earlier times, man instinctively immersed himself in economic life. Now, however, this immersion must become ever more conscious and aware. Just as man learns the multiplication table in school, as he learns other things in school, so in the future he must learn things in school that relate to life in the social organism, to economic life. Man must be able to feel that he is a member of the economic organism. Of course, for some people it will be uncomfortable because other habits of thought and feeling have already taken root, which must undergo drastic changes. It is not true that if today someone did not know how much three times nine is, he would be considered an uneducated person. In some circles, someone is already considered an uneducated person if he does not know who Raphael or Leonardo was. But in general, in certain circles today, you are not considered uneducated if you cannot provide a proper explanation of what capital is, what production, what consumption is in its various forms, what the credit system is, and so on, not to mention the fact that very few people have a clear idea of what a Lombard transaction is and the like.

Now, under the influence of social transformation, these concepts will certainly change, and in the future people will be better placed to seek and want appropriate information about these things. Today, people are quite at a loss when they want to get rational information about these things. For what would be more natural than for someone to take a textbook on political economy by a famous political economist in order to find out what capital actually is? If you take three different textbooks on political economy today, you will find three different definitions of what capital actually is. Just think what a peculiar view you would have of geometry if you were to take three works on geometry by three different authors and find the Pythagorean theorem presented in each of them in a different way, with a different meaning in each case. These are the facts of the matter, and it is true that even the authorities in the field of economics are unable to provide much real insight into these matters. So it is not to be held against the general public if they do not seek such an explanation. But it will have to be sought, it will have to happen. Man will have to build the bridge from himself to the structure of the social organism, especially the economic structure. He will have to consciously integrate himself as a subject into the economy, into the social organism. There he will learn to think about how he relates to other people simply by managing a wide range of economic affairs with them in a particular territory. This thinking, which is developed there and into which the whole relationship between the natural order and man flows, is a completely different thinking from that which develops, for example, in the world of spiritual culture. In the world of spiritual culture, you experience what the beings of the higher hierarchies think, what you yourself have experienced in your prenatal life. In the thinking that you develop as a member of the social economic struggle, another human being in you is always thinking along with you, a deeper human being in you, as paradoxical as that may seem to you. Precisely when you feel like a member of an economic body, a deeper human being in you is thinking along with you. You are instructed to use your thinking to bring together external factors of life. You must think: What will be the price of this or that? How do I get one product, how do I get another product, and so on? In a sense, your thoughts flit over external facts; there is no spirituality in your thinking, only externals and material things. Precisely because externals and material things live in your thinking, because you have to experience things mentally, not just instinctively like an animal, what goes on in economic life, that is why another, deeper human being is constantly thinking about these things within you; he is the one who first continues the thoughts, he is the one who first forms the thoughts in such a way that they have an end, a context. And this is precisely the human being who plays a significant role in all that you carry with you into the supersensible world through death. However paradoxical it may appear to some, it is precisely the reflection on material things here in the world, to which man is forced, that arouses in him, because it is never finished, because it is never something closed, another inner spiritual life, which he carries through death into the supersensible world. Thus the feelings and impulses that we develop in economic life are more closely connected with our afterlife than people realize. To some people this may seem strange and paradoxical today; but it is, only transformed into consciousness, what developed in people in atavistic times of human evolution, precisely because the spiritual world entered into human instincts at that time. I would like to draw your attention to the following.

Among individual so-called primitive peoples, there are striking institutions. Now, we must not have the nonsensical and foolish idea of primitive peoples that today's ethnology, today's anthropology, has. Today's anthropology thinks: there are such primitive peoples, for example the indigenous Australians, who are at the most primitive stage of humanity, and today's civilized peoples were once like these primitive peoples today. — That is nonsense! The fact of the matter is that what we call primitive peoples today have descended into decadence; they have sunk from a higher level. It is just that today's primitive peoples have preserved within them the earlier times, which have become masked in the so-called civilized peoples. That is why there is still much to be studied in the so-called primitive peoples that existed in a different form in the times of ancient atavistic clairvoyance. And so there were, for example, the following institutions: in one tribe, the members of this tribe were divided into smaller groups; each of these smaller groups had a specific name that was borrowed from a plant or an animal that occurred within the area in which this group lived. The following was associated with this naming of smaller groups within larger contexts: for example, a group – now we use modern names just to make ourselves understood – a group that bore the name “Rye” had to ensure that rye was properly cultivated on that terrain so that the other people who did not have the name “Rye” could be supplied with rye. These people, who bore the name “Rye,” were responsible for overseeing the cultivation and distribution of rye. And the others, who had different names, assumed that they would be supplied with rye by this one group. Another group, for example, had the name “cattle”: they had the task of practicing cattle farming and providing the others with cattle and everything that went with it. These groups not only had the task of providing for the others, but at the same time the others were forbidden to cultivate the plant or animal in question, which was a right of the one totem, as it was said. This is the economic sense of the totem, which in the area where this totem prevailed was at the same time a mystery culture. Mystery culture, which, contrary to the dreams of modern man, is not only in higher regions, but which, precisely because of the conclusions of the gods, which could be researched by the members of the mysteries, ordered this human life down to the last detail. They organized the tribe according to totemic figures and totemic groups, and in so doing brought about a corresponding economic organization, in addition to revealing to people in a certain way how the spiritual world is constituted and how the spiritual world penetrates into earthly spiritual life, just as it was right for the times in question. In their way they took care of the legal life, which has only an earthly character, and in this way they prepared people here on earth through the order of economic life so that through death people could then enter into another world in which they had to develop connections that they could only prepare here on earth through their dealings with the extra-human beings of the other natural kingdoms. Under the guidance of their initiates, these people of old learned to place a true economic link in their cosmic life.

Later on, although it is not too difficult, this more or less became confused, even into Greek culture, and even into medieval culture, the instinctive threefoldness of the social organism can be demonstrated, demonstrated from this point of view, which I have now given, as the rudiments can still be found at least until the 18th century. Oh, this modern man is so comfortable with his thinking, he wants everything, everything to be presented as superficially as possible before his thinking! If one were to study the life of earlier times, not according to what is called history today and which is often a fable convenue, but according to how it really was, then one would see: There was an instinctive threefold structure; only in the one limb, in the spiritual life, did everything emanate from the spiritual center and thereby separate itself from mere state life.

When the Catholic Church was at its height, it already formed an independent link, and in turn organized the other earthly spiritual life as an independent link, founded schools, organized the education system, also founded the first universities, made the earthly spiritual life independent, and ensured that the state life was not permeated by the unlawful prince of this world. And in economic life, even in later times, there was at least a feeling that if fraternity was developed among people in economic life, something was being prepared that would continue in the life after death. That brotherliness among men is rewarded after death is indeed a selfish reinterpretation of the higher conceptions that were held in totemism, but at least there is still an awareness that brotherly life in human economic activity finds a spiritual continuation in the afterlife. Even the excesses in this field must be judged from this point of view. That excesses occur is human nature. The selling of indulgences is certainly one of the most monstrous excesses in this field. But it arose, even if only as an excess, from the realization that what man brings here in physical life in economic sacrifices has a significance for his after-death life. Even if it is a caricature of what really is, it arose as a caricature of the correct view of the significance of what we experience here by entering into a relationship with the beings of the other realms of the earth, the minerals, the plants, the animals. By entering into a relationship with other beings, we acquire something that only comes to full development in the after-death life. It is true that, with regard to what we are after death, we are still related to the lower, to animals, plants and minerals; but it is precisely through this experience of the non-human that we prepare something that is only to grow into the human after death. If you turn the idea around, you will understand it more easily, and you will more easily see how it is quite natural that what we experience with animals, plants and minerals is lived out in something on earth that unites human beings, that surrounds them like a spiritual air, a spiritual atmosphere in the earthly. What human beings experience among themselves only founds a pure etheric between birth and death.

What human beings experience in the subhuman, in economic life, only becomes human, only rises to the level of the humanly earthly, when we have passed through death.

This should be of the greatest interest and importance, especially for the anthroposophically oriented mind, for those who seek a deepening of life through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science: to recognize that this threefold social organism is concretely based simply on the fact that the human being is also a threefold being, in that, when he grows into the physical world as a child, he still bears something of what he experienced before birth, in that he bears something in himself that only has meaning between birth and death, and in that he, as it were, prepares under the veil of ordinary physical life here what in turn has supersensible meaning after death. What appears here as the lowest life, the life in the physical economy, here for the earth, is seemingly lower than the legal life, but this living through of the lower life compensates us at the same time by the fact that we gain time for our deeper human being, while we are in the lower economy, to prepare for the post-mortal life. By belonging with our soul to the life of art, religious life, educational life, or other spiritual life, we draw on the inheritance that we carry with us through birth into physical-earthly existence. But by degrading ourselves, as it were, to the subhuman through economic life, to the thinking that does not reach so high, we are compensated by preparing in our deepest inner being that which only after death reaches up into the human. This may sound paradoxical to modern man, because he likes to look at things one-sidedly and does not really want to have any idea that every thing unfolds its essence in life in two ways. What is high on one side is low on the other, what is low on one side is high on the other. In real life, I could also say in the reality of life, every thing always has its other side. Man would gain a better understanding of himself and the world if he were aware that every thing always has its other side. Sometimes it is unpleasant to be fully aware of this, it imposes various duties on us. For example, with regard to certain things we have to be wise, but we cannot develop this wisdom in relation to certain things without developing an equal amount of stupidity on another side. One always requires the other. And we should never consider a person to be completely stupid, even if he appears stupid to us in his outer life, without our being aware of it: in his subconscious there may be a deep wisdom that is only veiled to us. Reality is only revealed when this two-sidedness of everything real is done justice. And so it is: on the one hand, the life of spiritual culture appears to us as the highest; at the same time, it is the one in which we actually always overexploit, where we always live off what we bring in through our birth into physical existence. Economic life appears to us as the lowest link: it is only because it shows us the lowest aspect between birth and death. It gives us time to unconsciously develop that which is the spiritual side of economic life and which we carry into the supersensible world through death. This sense of belonging together in brotherhood with other people is what I mainly understand by the spiritual part of economic life.

Now, humanity urgently needs an understanding of these things if it wants to escape certain calamities that have arisen precisely because these things have not been taken into account. Within the intellectual leading personalities of the ruling classes, something has emerged — I spoke of it the day before yesterday — that has no power to radiate into the everyday. To acquire the right understanding of this point is especially important for the modern man. You see, the intellectual circles of the ruling classes have developed a certain moral worldview, a certain religious outlook. But this moral, this religious worldview is always to be held in a one-sided, idealistic way. It is not supposed to have the impact to penetrate into everyday life. In practice, this becomes apparent to you in that you can visit the familiar churches Sunday after Sunday and even more often: sermons will be preached to you, but they will continually fail to address the most pressing duties of the time. You will be told all sorts of things about what you should do out of a religious worldview, but these will lack any momentum. For when you leave the church and enter into everyday life, you cannot apply all that is preached there about love from person to person, what one should do, what the person who has just preached wants to experience. Where do you find an understanding, a connection between what the preacher, the moral teacher, says to his students and what happens in everyday life?

It was different in the times to which the totem cult refers: there, the initiates organized everyday life according to the will of the gods. It is an unhealthy state of affairs that today nothing is heard from the pulpits about the necessary organization of economic life. What is preached there is really like – I have often used this comparison – standing in front of a stove and saying: You stove, you stand here in the room. The way you are arranged in relation to the other objects in the room is your sacred duty to warm the room. So fulfill your sacred duty and warm the room. You can preach to the stove like this for a long time, but it won't warm the room! But you don't need to preach at all; instead, you can put wood or coal in and light it, and that way you will warm the room. So you can omit all moral teachings that merely talk about what a person should do for the sake of eternal bliss or for the sake of other things that belong to mere belief. So you can omit the sermons, which today mostly form the content of the pulpit speeches, but you cannot omit what is today real knowledge of the social organism. That would be the duty of those who want to educate the people, to build the bridge in practice from what lives and weaves through the world spiritually to what happens in everyday life. For God, the Divine, lives not only in what man dreams in the heights of the clouds, but in the most trivial everyday things. When you take the salt pot on the table, when you take a spoonful of soup to your mouth, when you buy something from your fellow human being for five pfennigs, the Divine lives in all things. And when one surrenders oneself to faith, on the one hand there is the coarse material, concrete, that which is of a lower nature, and on the other hand there is the divine-spiritual, which one should indeed keep quite far from the coarse material, concrete , because the one is sacred and the other profane, because the one is high and the other low, then one contradicts the innermost sense of a realistic world view: the impact of the highest, the sacred, down to the most mundane experiences of human beings.

This also characterizes what religious development has neglected up to our time, which only ever preaches to the stove that it should be warm, and which frowns upon entering into real, concrete spiritual knowledge. If only people everywhere would freely say what has been neglected by those who feel called to lead the spiritual life, then that alone would be a significant step towards what has to happen.

How often do we speak today of salvation, of grace, of that which is the object of faith? We speak in such a way as to make it extremely convenient for people: there are people with their human feelings. Christ Jesus once died at Golgotha and - the advanced theologians no longer believe in it today - rose again. But He does all this for Himself; people need do nothing but believe in it. — This is what many believe today, and they consider it a disturbance to their circles when people think differently. But it must be learned to think differently! A radical change must take place precisely in this area.

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One is tempted to say: Today we hear again the admonition of Christ or even that of John the Baptist: Change your minds, for the time of crisis is near. — People have become accustomed to assuming that there is a spiritual world somewhere, somewhere that takes care of them; to have religious preachers tell them that there is such a spiritual world, which is characterized as little as possible. People do not want to make an effort in their thoughts to also know something about the spiritual world, but just to believe in it. The time is past when that is allowed! The time must begin when people must know: Not just: I think – I also think perhaps about the supernatural – but: I must grant admission to the divine-spiritual powers in my thinking, in my feeling. The spiritual world must live in me, my thoughts themselves must be of a divine nature. I must give the God the opportunity to express Himself through me. — Then the spiritual life will no longer be mere ideology. That is the great sin of modern times, that the spiritual life has become lame ideology. And ideology is already today the theology, ideology is not only the proletarian, socialist world view. But people must recover from this ideology. The spiritual world must become real to them. And they must know that the spiritual world lives as a reality in one link of the social organism, as the inheritance from prenatal life, from the so-called spirit world; and that a spiritual element is preparing itself while we apparently submerge among people in economic life. It is precisely there, as compensation for this submergence, that which is to lead us back into the life that we enter by entering the spiritual world through death, if we live through it correctly, into more human, fraternal science here on earth.

A realistic view of life — that is what must come again. And he who consciously realizes that the things that must enter humanity today can be deepened for him by not merely developing anthroposophy as something that is only science, but by having it as something that penetrates all his perceptions, which permeates his whole perception of life, transforms it too, makes it so that he can enter as a worthy member into that which must begin with the present and which alone can become a salvation for the future of humanity.

These things are what is necessary for humanity, but also what has been neglected by humanity. Only by fearlessly and courageously putting ourselves in the place of those who have been neglected and in the place of those who are in need can anything beneficial be brought about for the present and the near future. That is why I wanted to add to what can be said publicly about the social problem today, here where we are among ourselves, what can be said from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science; where we can include what protrudes from the immortal, from the supersensible life of the disembodied human being into this earthly life.

Of the social organism, only one part, the part that relates to the external state organization, is purely earthly. The other two parts are connected to the supermundane in two different ways. On the one hand, we are granted an earthly spiritual life that can be lived by us, I would say, in abundance, because it is, as it were, pressed out of the prenatal, supermundane spiritual life. And on the other hand, as physical human beings, we have to immerse ourselves in mere economic life, whereby we are connected with the animal world of the earth. But because we are not merely physical human beings, but because the soul is preparing for the next earthly lives and for the following supersensible lives in this body, that part of us that is not yet fully human here is also prepared through economic life, which leads the human being who must be involved in economic life upwards into humanity: the human being who must be involved in economic life. We have something of the superhuman in us, in that we can move within a social context that permeates earthly spiritual life. We have something of the mere human being in us by becoming citizens. We have something in us that compels us to descend below both, but we are at the same time compensated by the supersensible world in that what appears as the lowest link in social experience already prepares what in turn leads us up, in turn integrating us into the supersensible.

Reality is certainly not as superficial as one would sometimes like it to be, nor as easy to grasp. But on the other hand, it shows how human life goes through the most diverse phases, but how each phase brings new moments, new ingredients, new impulses into human life, which can only be given in these particular fields where they are given. Thus we see how the threads of the life we live here between birth and death intertwine with those threads that we draw by living life between death and a new birth. And everything fits together in the highest degree of meaning in this entire human life. What we do here in earthly life from human individual to human individual, what we do for a person here by giving him joy, by causing him suffering, by enriching his thoughts or impoverishing his thoughts, by teaching him this or that, - that is what our karmic, our fateful life prepares for the next earthly existence.

But we have to distinguish between what we need to prepare for the life that we develop immediately after death as a supersensible one. We are brought together here in certain social communities. We need to be led out of them again. We will be led out of it by something emerging from our mere economic life, from mere economics, that will guide us through the gate of death into the spiritual world, so that we do not remain in the social community in which we have settled here, but can be accepted into another one in the next life. In this way, the karmic threads intertwine meaningfully with those threads that place us in the general life of the world.

What can be gained from spiritual science through the connection of the supersensible with physical-earthly life for this threefold social organism seems to substantially deepen what must become the esoteric content of the threefold social organism. It seems to substantially deepen it. Of course, it is difficult for outsiders to understand this; no help is possible today. But anyone who is part of the anthroposophical movement should always absorb everything that can be established here on earth, and at the same time everything that connects us to the sphere into which we enter after our death, from which we came through our birth, and in which we have to seek those who have gone before us out of this world and to whom we have certain relationships. For it will be the most beautiful human achievement of all, precisely of anthroposophical deepening, that it teaches us to see through the two great mysteries of earthly life, birth and death, creating a bridge between the sensual and the supersensible, between the so-called living and the so-called dead, so that the dead becomes among us like the living and we can say of the living: Nothing but an other form of existence is that life which in the supersensible was ours before birth and which will be ours after death. It is dead here in the sense world, as the sense world is dead, in that we live through the supersensible. The things in the world are relative in relation to each other. And only when we see through these two sides of every reality do we penetrate into reality itself.

This is what I wanted to give you today as a supplement, a more esoteric supplement to the questions that are now so urgently needed to be discussed publicly, and in which discussion those who are close to the anthroposophical movement should particularly take part.

In response to a question that was not received, Rudolf Steiner remarked:

These things are such that one can truly say: this view of the social organism is a firm basis. And one has only to examine how it is incorporated into life in each individual case.

If you are familiar with the Pythagorean theorem, you will not ask: how does it justify itself in every detail? — You know, if you know it: it will be correct everywhere it can be applied, just as three times ten is thirty, everywhere you apply it: you will not have to ask whether it is correct and prove it. You have to see these things within yourself. So you will also find that in this view of social life, one starts from a certain basis that simply proves to be right; the other things that come then follow on from it correctly. The tax system, the property system, everything follows as a consequence. All this will become clear when you grasp the living social organism. And so it turns out that people, for example, will not be willing to send their children to the Free School. On the contrary, they will want to send them because they will have an interest in doing so.

And again, in the area where a relationship develops between each person and every person: It is necessary to be able to judge in the field of legal life, and no one would be elected to the representative body of the second link in the social organism who was not capable of judgment. Of course, something like this must then be examined: what relates from person to person, this taking an interest, this conscious standing within life, is maintained all by itself in the free organism, which will already become healthy.