Social Ideas, Social Reality, Social Practice I

GA 337a — 16 June 1920, Stuttgart

6. The Land Question from the Point of View of Threefolding

social order: Dear attendees! I would like to talk today about the threefold social order in such a way that some light can be shed on what has been called the land question in modern times from the point of view of the economic facts that my remarks will deal with. It is a peculiarity of the idea of threefolding that through it we learn to see that certain discussions and agitations in the old style must cease if we are to make any fruitful progress at all — for these discussions and agitations have, after all, developed out of the conditions that led us into decline.

The land question is something that interests broad sections of society because the price, and also the availability and usability of land, is closely related to human destiny and to people's living conditions. Isn't it true that everyone is directly aware of how land prices are factored into what you have to pay for your apartment, and how they are factored into the price of food? One need only reflect a little and one will find that what originates from land has its effects on all other economic conditions. Depending on the land prices one has to pay for one's food, one has to be paid for any occupation one is in, and so on. But it is not only these vital questions, which directly affect people, that are connected with humanity's relationship to land and property, but also many more far-reaching cultural and civilizational conditions. We need only think about how the relationship between the countryside and the city is connected to land and property, and how what then is the difficulty or ease of living conditions in cities is connected to conditions in the countryside. From these, in turn, it will become clear what can develop in the city itself. Depending on how wealth or prosperity is distributed in a city due to a particular relationship between the countryside and the city, what we call our public intellectual life develops in the city — at least under our modern cultural conditions. Of course, you can also become a lonely mystic in the countryside; but in the context of modern science, technical operations, and the art business, you can basically only stand if you have some kind of relationship to city life. This is something that is immediately apparent from even a superficial observation of life. And many other things could be mentioned that would already show how the land question - and with it the question of the relationship between the city and the countryside - cuts deeply into our entire cultural situation. Therefore, the land question must also be connected in some way with what has driven us into the decline of these cultural conditions.

Now, the more recent treatment of the land question is particularly related to the fact that the injustice of the increases in the value or price of land has been noticed by a large number of people. It has simply been noticed how little it has to do with human labor whether one piece of land or another can increase in value over a certain period of time. I know how great an impression a very well-known land reformer repeatedly made when he presented the following to his audience in fundamental lectures: Imagine that someone owns a piece of land that he has bought with the intention of building a factory near it, or that the city will expand towards this piece of land, or that a railroad will be built past it, or something similar. He bought this piece of land with the knowledge that such circumstances would cause its value to increase quite considerably in the next few years. He bought the piece of land at the very moment when he had to live with the foresight that he would spend the next three years in prison. After buying the property, he goes to prison, stays there for three years, and when he comes out, his piece of land is worth five times as much as it was before. The man has done nothing to increase the value of his property by a factor of five except to serve three years in prison. These are things, ladies and gentlemen, which naturally have an extremely strong effect when one wants to make something clear with them. And one cannot even say that these things work unfairly. Here something works that is, quite rightly, easily understood, because it can be exactly so. And then – I would like to say – one can omit many things, then it follows from such insights that, of course, the whole [way of] integrating land value into our economic process is something that cannot continue like this, that it must be subject to reform in some way.

And now the most diverse reforms have been introduced, but they all point in the same direction: Henry George, Adolf Damaschke, and many others in between. What all these reforms have in common is the idea that land, to a greater or lesser extent (the exact form is not so important here), must be something that belongs to the community, so to speak. Not that all land reformers want direct nationalization of land, but they do want a very substantial percentage of the particularly large increases in value to be delivered to the community as a “value increase tax” – a percentage that perhaps almost brings the land back to its former value if it has increased in value without the owner's merit. One can also think of other forms in which the land is, to a certain extent, transferred into a kind of common property. But it is undoubtedly obvious that the person who has harmed his fellow human beings to such an extent that they felt compelled to lock him up in prison can, when he returns after three years, justifiably be required to hand over to the community the increased value of his land.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, Damaschke emphasizes that he is not thinking of extending the same fate that he inflicts on land in this way to any other means of production. He demonstrates how the other means of production increase their value in a completely different way within human property; he proves that increases in the value of the means of production take place in a completely different ratio, which cannot be compared at all with the increases in the value of land, which occur frequently. Now one can say that something like this is certainly plausible and cannot really be treated in any other way than by agreeing in a certain sense.

But, ladies and gentlemen, you have no doubt seen that there are nationalizations today, that is, the transfer of what would otherwise be produced purely by private enterprise and for which the equivalent value is received privately, into the administration of a certain collective. But one cannot say that the experience that humanity has had in such matters in recent years is one that is universally satisfactory. Because I believe – at least some of you will have noticed something about it – that not all people fared as well as they should have done in terms of rationing, that is, in a certain sense of communization, for example, of food and other things. I believe that some people have experienced a certain hoarding during these years, when a great deal was communized.

And the social impulse that is to be given with the threefold order is not at all willing to deceive itself and deceive others, but is willing to give such impulses that do not just remain on paper and serve a certain type of person, while others are able to avoid the things in question, and to do so in abundance. The impulse that is to be given by the threefold social order is meant to be a reality impulse that actually realizes what it intends. Only someone who knows life can truly understand what the impulse for threefolding seriously wants. Anyone who strives to understand life and truly understands life will have no doubt that there can also be hoarding of land value increases if land is communized in the way that land reformers want, who think out of the old ideas. It is quite possible, in both the Leninist and the Damaschkean system, to render ineffective through all kinds of back doors what enters the world as a law. The impulse for the threefolding of the social organism simply cannot, because it wants something real, close itself off from the fundamental insight that social reality truly cannot be made by those laws that arise when the old social and state ways of thinking and imagining are continued. It depends on the people and on that social organization, on that social organism, which alone ensures that people find no means of unfairly or immorally circumventing anything that lies within the scope of that social organism. We must come as close as possible to such a life-affirming approach.

We can look at what we call the threefold social order from a variety of perspectives. We can consider the points that I initially set out in the Key Points, so to speak, to provide a first impetus. One can also characterize the necessity for threefolding from other sides, as I and a few others have been doing for more than a year here in Stuttgart. One can, for example, also assert the following points of view; one can say: In the course of the development of modern humanity, we have come to the point where we simply can no longer bear certain institutions because of the way we think today, and our entire human state of mind demands other institutions. The fact that we have such chaos throughout the world arises precisely from the fact that certain conditions that have arisen from the development of humanity in recent centuries can no longer be tolerated by people of the present. One person feels vaguely that the conditions can no longer be borne; he hears Damaschke speak and hears that an enormous amount of injustice depends on the fact that a convict can quintuple his land ownership in three years without earning anything. Another is presented with Marxist theories and accepts them. A third is told: if we do not protect the old institutions and the old so-called nobility, then the whole world will descend into chaos, so we must protect it.

But basically, the reasons why people are dissatisfied with the current situation lie deep within the human being; and today it is already the case that what is developed as programs are basically only dreams, only illusions that people delude themselves with. They do not even come up with what they actually want. And so one person makes some theory or other out of their previous habits, which he calls logical. It is already the case today that basically it depends only on whether a person lives in the proletariat or was born in a Prussian Junker house, whether he is a Marxist out of the old habits of life or a conservative in the sense of Mr. von Heydebrand and the Lasa. These programs, which are made from left and right, actually have nothing to do with reality today. And one can say: If something like a Reichstag election takes place today, what is said on this occasion is about the same as if an evil world demon were dreaming and these dreams were transferred into the consciousness of people, party members and party leaders, and people were talking about something that basically has nothing to do with what is supposed to happen. Because humanity today is moving towards a very specific goal. It is just unclear about this goal.

First of all, humanity feels that things cannot go on as they have done so far with spiritual matters, with the order of spiritual matters. This is simply because, despite all materialism - which is very, very much in the style that I also discussed in yesterday's public lecture - filtered spirituality is present in the abstractions to which people devote themselves today, the proletariat, for example, most of all. Although this proletariat seems to be most concerned with “realities”, “production conditions” and the like, it surrenders to spiritual abstractions and can never arrive at any institutions that grasp reality. People feel that they must hold on to something spiritual, and the spiritual must also be there to intervene in social life, to form the social structure of the social organism that is, after all, inhabited by people. What, then, has basically been shaping the structure of our social organism to this day? The spirit? No, I think it is not the spirit. If, for example, I inherit a large country estate from my father, it is something other than spirit; it is a natural connection, it is blood. And blood is the thing that, together with all kinds of other circumstances that have become attached to it, can still bring a person into a certain position today. And the spiritual position of the person depends on this position. He can absorb certain educational content purely by being placed in a certain social position as a result of old circumstances, which in turn are largely based on blood ties. Basically, humanity initially feels this as something that can no longer be tolerated in the spiritual life. Instinctively, humanity feels that instead of everything being determined by blood, as it has been since time immemorial, the spirit must have a say in social institutions in the future. True, in order to be a companion of that which has developed [in this way in the past] and which can no longer be tolerated today, the Church has indeed submitted to that council decision, which was made at the eighth ecumenical council in the year 869 in Constantinople, where, as it were, the spirit was abolished, where it was decreed that the human soul may indeed have individual spiritual qualities, but that man consists only of body and soul, not of body, soul and spirit. Under this world view, which spread throughout the civilized world, the demands of the spirit were suppressed, and in the whole activity of spiritual life that which is not determined by the spirit could develop.

And today, from the bottom of their hearts, people want the spirit to have a say in determining the social structure. But this can only happen if the spiritual life no longer remains an appendage of the state that emerged from old blood conquests, but if the spiritual life is placed on its own, if the spiritual life works only according to the impulses that lie within it. Then we can assume that the leading figures in this spiritual life will do what is incumbent upon them — we will talk about some more of what is incumbent upon them in a moment; after all, the “Key Points” mention many things — namely, to guide people into the social structure according to their abilities, their diligence and so on, and that they will do so purely through the knowledge of natural conditions, without laws, purely through the knowledge of natural conditions. And one will have to say: In the field of spiritual life, which will stand on its own and work from its own impulses, it is the knowledge of the actual that will be the determining factor. Let us say, then, briefly: spiritual life, the spiritual part of the social organism, demands as its right knowledge [of the actual forces], but this knowledge must be the knowledge of the power of action.

Let us now turn to the second part of the social organism, the legal or state part. Here we come upon something that is not so subject to the external as is spiritual life. My dear audience, our entire social organism, insofar as the spiritual works in it, is bound to what appears with each new generation, yes, what leads new forces into the social organism from indeterminate depths with each new human being. Take the present moment. Are you in any way allowed, on the basis of the conditions of the present time, to set up any kind of organization that determines the way people live together in a very specific way? No, you are not allowed to do that! For with each individual human being, new forces are born out of unknown depths; we have to educate them, and we have to wait to see what they bring into life. We must not tyrannize what is brought into life through the spiritual gifts by existing laws or an existing organization; we must receive what is brought to us from spiritual worlds with an open mind, we must not tyrannize and dogmatize it with what is already there. Therefore, we need such a link in the social organism that works entirely out of freedom, out of the freedom of human potentialities that are constantly being reborn into humanity.

The second link in the social organism, the state-legal life, is already somewhat less dependent on what comes in from spiritual worlds. For, as we know, it is people who have come of age who are active in the field of the legal life, the life of the state. And, ladies and gentlemen, when we come of age, we have actually already been seized by a great deal of mediocrity. In a sense, the levelling of the philistines has hit us in the neck. And in so far as we are all equal as mature human beings, we are already - and this is not meant in a bad sense - in a sense a little caught up in the schoolbooks of philistinism. We are caught up in that which can be regulated by laws.

But you will say: Yes, we cannot make all intellectual life dependent on children; but there must also be intellectual ability and intellectual diligence beyond the age of majority. Not really, however paradoxical it may sound. For our abilities that go beyond the average, when we have passed our twenties, are based precisely on the fact that we have retained what we had in childhood as a disposition and so on. And the greatest genius is the person who carries the powers of childlikeness the most into their thirties, forties and fifties. One then only exercises these powers of childlikeness with the mature organism, the mature soul and the mature spirituality, but they are the powers of childlikeness. Unfortunately, our culture has the peculiarity of trying to kill these powers of childlikeness through education, so that in the smallest possible number of people, childish peculiarities remain into old age, and people become un-philistine. Because actually, all non-philistinism is based on the fact that the preserved childhood powers precisely un-philistinize, that they break through the later philistinism.

But because something is emerging that does not have to be continually renewed in relation to the present needs of humanity's consciousness, in modern times the conditions of legal and state life can only be regulated by laws on a democratic basis. Laws are not insights. With insights, we must always confront reality, and from reality we must receive the impulse for what we are to do through insights. This applies to education and to everything else, as I have shown in the “Key Points”, that it must proceed from the spiritual member of the social organism. But how is it with laws? Laws are given so that state-political life, legal life, can exist. But one must wait until someone needs to act in the sense of a law, only then must one concern oneself with this law. Or you have to wait to apply the law until someone breaks it. In short, there is always something there, the law, but only in the event of something possibly occurring. The essence of eventuality is always present, the casus eventualis. This is something that must always underlie the law. You have to wait until you can do something with the law. The law can be there; if it does not affect my sphere, then I am not interested in the law. There are many people today who believe that they are interested in the law in general, but it is as I have just indicated – if one is honest, one must admit this. So: the law is something that is there, but that must work towards eventuality. This is what must now underlie the legal, state and political aspects of the threefold organism.

With the economic aspect, we cannot get by with law alone, because it is not enough to merely issue laws about whether this or that should be supplied in a certain way from these or those circumstances. You cannot work for eventualities. A third element comes into play alongside knowledge and the law: it is the contract, the specific contract that is concluded between those who do business – the corporations and associations – which does not work towards the eventuality as the law does, but towards the very specific fulfillment. Just as knowledge must prevail in intellectual life and as the law must prevail in political and legal life, so must the contract prevail in economic life, in all its ramifications. The system of contracts, which is not based on contingency but on commitment, is what must bring about everything you find described in the “Key Points” as the third link in the social organism.

We can therefore say that we have three illustrative points of view from which we can understand what these three elements must be like in essence. Everything in life that is subject to knowledge must be administered in the free domain of the spiritual element. Everything in life that can be harnessed into laws belongs to the state. Everything that is subject to binding contracts must be incorporated into economic life.

Dear attendees, if people believe that what has been explained in the “key points” is a few crazy ideas, they are very much mistaken. What is expressed in the “key points” can be discussed from the most diverse points of view, because it is taken from life. And you can describe life as it is in a tree that you photograph: from one side you have this aspect, from a second side you have a different one, from a third, fourth side there is yet another image and so on. That is the peculiar thing: When something comes from life, when it is not just a complicated utopia or a complicated idea, but really comes from life, then you can always find new aspects, because life is manifoldly rich in its content. [Threefolding takes this diversity of life into account.] Basically, you can never stop learning to see the necessities of the threefolding of the social organism [everywhere in this diversity]. But it is not something vague and nebulous, but something that can be grasped in the sharpest terms, as I showed you today with reference to knowledge, law and contract.

Now the point is to say to oneself: one must work in the direction of threefolding, and one can work from the ordinary real conditions today in the direction that is given by finally breaking down this social organism into three interacting administrative sub-organisms. And we must finally recognize that all the answers we give ourselves, based on old conditions and which actually only lead to a reorganization of the old conditions, are outdated today. Therefore, when the land reformers say that those whose land ownership has increased in value without their merit, without their work, must deliver such and such a large portion to the state as a tax, they are counting on the old form of the state. They do not consider that this state, too, must be reformed. They do not consider that it can only be one link in the social organism. That is the strange thing, that even the most radical reformers of the present time cannot imagine that something must be newly created out of the depths of the social conditions of humanity. And they cannot conceive that everything that must be achieved today cannot be achieved if, on the other hand, what is at stake is forced into the old forms. The state remains, even if it puts into its coffers what it takes from the real estate speculators, and perhaps lets it flow back to them or to other people in ways that are still possible. But examine what follows from the idea of threefolding for the establishment of the social organism: if you seriously take up the idea of threefolding, if you seriously apply what threefolding is based on, then you will find that everything that is in that direction becomes impossible, that you just pour the old nonsense into a different form.

For what actually is land? You see, land is obviously a means of production. We produce with land. But it is a means of production of a different kind from the other means of production. We must first prepare the other means of production through human labor, and land, at least in the main, is there without being prepared by people first. Therefore, one can say: the means of production initially take the path of the commodity; then, when they are finished, when they are handed over for their task, they are no longer a commodity. We have emphasized this repeatedly – I myself have emphasized it from this platform on many occasions –: means of production may only be commodities in the economic circulation process until they are finished and handed over to the national economic life. What are they then afterwards? Then they are something that is subject to political or state life, to democracy, and that with reference to the work that people have to do through these means of production, in that they must get along with each other as responsible human beings. The means of production are something that is subject to state life, in that they pass from one person to another, so that it is always the person who needs the means of production who really has them. But they are also something that is subject to the institutions of spiritual work. For it is not out of old inheritance relationships, but out of the institutions of spiritual life that, through knowledge - as modern consciousness alone can bear it - it must now be determined how, when one no longer works with the means of production, it passes to those who, through their abilities and talents, can continue to use the means of production. Thus we can say: If threefolding underlies life, the means of production are commodities only as long as they are being produced. Then they cease to be commodities and are subject to laws and insights. Through laws and insights they fit into the social structure.

Land cannot be produced; it is therefore not a commodity from the outset. It is therefore never subject to the principle of the commodity, which is the subject of contracts. Land is therefore not at all concerned with what is contracted for. It must be gradually introduced into the social structure in such a way that, first of all, the distribution of land with a view to human cultivation is a democratic matter for the political state, and that the transition from one to the other is a matter for the intellectual link of the social organism. The living relationship in the democratic state decides who works on a piece of land for the benefit of the people. Land is never a commodity. From the very beginning, it is something that cannot be bought and sold.

What we must strive for first is not to buy and sell the land, but to ensure that what transforms the land into the sphere of human activity, legal and spiritual conditions, legal and spiritual impulses. Only someone who does not think clearly about these matters can think there is anything utopian about this. For basically it is only a change in the way something is done today: today we pay for land with money that comes from the sale of goods; that is not the truth, it is a social lie. Money used as an equivalent for land is, in the economic process, something different from money used as an equivalent for a commodity. And you see, that is something that is so difficult to see through in the present social chaos. Suppose you buy cherries, you give money for them. You buy any manor, you also give money for it. Now, when the two people who have received money, one for cherries – a sufficient amount of money, of course, it does not depend on whether it is possible in this direction – and the other for his manor, and when they mix up their money, you cannot distinguish which money was paid for the cherries and which for the manor. But precisely because one cannot distinguish between them, one is led into a pernicious and terrible illusion. Because, you see, if I draw crosses here and then small circles and were to mix them up, I would still be able to distinguish them.

But if I had no sense of the difference between crosses and little rings, then I would no longer be able to distinguish what one is and what the other is. In other words, if I were to make the crosses and little rings in such a way that I turn the crosses into semicircles and the little rings into semicircles and draw both, then it would no longer be possible to distinguish between them. But what about in reality? You see, let's say I get the cherry money and the manor money. If I mix them up, I can no longer distinguish which money comes from the manor and which money comes from the cherries. You might think: money is money. But that is the terrible illusion. It is not true. In the economic process, the little rings that come from the manor house have a different effect on the whole of human life than the little crosses that come from the cherries. It is not the money that really matters, but the after-effect of where the money comes from. And a veil is simply drawn over this; it is no longer there for human observation. And so money is the living abstraction. Everything gets mixed up without differentiation. Man is no longer capable of being with what he belongs to, what he produces with, what he works on. Everything gets mixed up through money, just as everything flows together in the unclear mystics and becomes a few abstract concepts. And just as these abstract concepts [of the mystics] are useless in our process of knowledge, so too is what people imagine about money, because it is also just an abstraction, something beside reality, and thus nothing that can be used in life.

When you think about something like this, you realize the tremendous practical importance of land in people's lives. You realize that it should never depend on whether I am the owner of the land without any interest in it, or whether I only receive my pension from the land, but am indifferent to everything else. Anyone who has a proper grasp of the national economy knows what that means: I live off the land, but basically it makes no difference to me whether I live off the land or off the proceeds, let's say, from a CriCri or poker game; basically it's all the same to me, all that matters to me is acquiring a sum of money. The fact that one is indifferent as to how one acquires a sum of money is not so important when it comes to the fact that one really only earns this sum of money. But when you receive it from something that is connected with the weal and woe, with the fate of human beings, indeed with the whole cultural configuration, as land is, when you think about it, then it is not possible to transform this land into indifferent, abstract money. For it is precisely land that makes it necessary for the person who works it, who has something to do with it and who transfers what depends on the land into the economic process – that is not the money he brings in, but the fruit that thrives on it – that he is [really completely] involved in it.

Dear attendees, land within its territory cannot be administered according to the economic categories that have emerged in modern times. Just try to calculate when someone fertilizes his land with the manure that is produced by his cattle – try to figure out how to arrive at a value statement for this manure, how to determine the market value of the fertilizer, for example, what the fertilizer would be worth if it contaminated any of the markets in the cities. This is just a drastic example. If you follow the train of thought to its conclusion, you will find that there is a huge difference in the way in which what is produced on a property fits into the economic process. Compare the way in which a property functions that is subject to so-called self-management, that is, where the person who, on the property, whether it be a small or large property, actually considers the provision of the property from his abilities , and compare it with the way a community functions and must function that is organized only to maximize its monetary yield, to get as much as it can out of it. But as we stand in public life today, things must even out, that is, the one who is a self-manager cannot help but adapt to the one who leases the estate and only draws the rent from it. Thus, through adaptation, what emerges from the concrete – and in the case of land, how the individual products must relate to each other, how one must support the other; this is the self-management out of very different motives than if the things were only brought to the money market – so little by little what emerges from the concrete, the self-management, becomes dependent on what are quite abstract monetary conditions. This has already happened, which is why we have unnatural conditions today. Land that cannot be a commodity is being commodified; this introduces a real lie into life. It is not only what is said that is false, but also what happens. As soon as land is regarded as a commodity, that is, as soon as it can be bought and sold, one lies by one's actions.

If, however, you have the threefold social order, you cannot buy and sell land. The [legal] circumstances by which land passes from one person to another are subject to state laws, which have nothing to do with the buying and selling of goods. The question of how land is transferred from one person to another is subject to the spiritual aspect of the social organism, which has nothing to do with inheritance and blood relationship, but with such things as I have described in the “Key Points”. So you see, you only need to understand what threefolding is, and if you move in that direction, you are on the way to solving the social question.

What does Damaschke want? He takes the land question, he thinks about it, and the land question is to be solved through reflection. My dear audience, real things are not solved through reflection. I would just like to know how you intend to crush sugar, chop wood or the like, or how you intend to eat, through reflection. Just as you cannot crush sugar or eat out of contemplation, you cannot solve the land question out of contemplation. One can only say: land is today part of certain human circumstances. If we now consider what people do to the best of their ability in the social organism, incorporating the impulses of the threefold social order, then the facts that arise from devoting oneself to this threefold social order solve the land question not only in thought, but [in a practical way] just as the knife breaks the sugar, as the hoe chops the wood. Likewise, the threefold social order solves the land question by the fact that the land will simply be integrated into the threefold organism in such a way that it will no longer be treated as a commodity, as it is today. It will no longer continue in an unjustified way in consanguinity, but will be subject only to what man today feels to be the only tenable thing: that the transfer of land from one person to another occurs out of spiritual knowledge, that is, out of the impulse of the spiritual member of the social organism.

You see, the land question should be solved by threefolding not through programs, not through some abstract or utopian concepts, that is, not in a similar way to how Damaschke deals with the land question, but in such a way that one says: however tricky today's land conditions may be, devote yourselves to threefolding, introduce the facts of threefolding into social life, [take up] the things that lie in the direction of this threefolding; what then happens leads the land into conditions that are beneficial for people — as far as anything on earth can be beneficial at all. Threefolding does not want to solve the burning questions through ideas but through facts. People will place themselves in these facts if they devote themselves to such ideas that depend on themselves, and not to such ideas that continue to work with old traditions. It is one thing to say that one is trying to work in the direction of threefolding, and quite another to say that the state is a good person that can do everything and does everything right. Threefolding solves the land question by divesting the land of the character of a commodity, into which it has been swept; the state does not prevent [the unjust distribution of land], it It is he who appoints the officials who fill the housing vacancies, it is he who determines how much each person is allowed to have, it is he who prevents hoarding – this must no longer be the case!

You might say that it is all right if people think the way Morgenstern [in a poem] has suggested. Someone is run over by a car. He is taken home sick. Palmström – that's the man's name – wraps himself in wet cloths, he is suffering, but he does not give in to his pain because he is a good believer in the state. He consults the law books and finds: There, at the place where I was run over, no car is allowed to drive; so no car could have driven there, because that would contradict the laws, and since it contradicts the laws, I was not run over, because: what cannot be, must not have happened. You see, it is something like this when one wants to reform something rooted in reality by saying: if the value of land increases in an unspecified way, it will be handed over to the state, which will then know how to prevent hoarding – because hoarding does not occur when the state has spoken. It is forbidden, so it does not exist.

Now, dear attendees, from this example you can see how different the whole method is, the whole way of looking at life is, into which the threefold social order brings all social life. It is not a matter of merely thinking that external institutions can be changed by taking the money of those who have too much through an institution and giving it to the state. They find this very difficult, and they have no desire to do so. If you proceed from a sense of reality and from the principles set forth in The Essential Social Questions, you will see that the point is to base the associations everywhere are supported by those who are intimately connected with what they produce or consume – the latter will be less in evidence, but the former will be in evidence.

Now, you see, above all, all circumstances are obscured, veiled, by the fact that we live in the abstraction of the money economy, as I have indicated here today and also last time on such an evening. For example, one does not observe in a proper way what the relationship is between larger goods and smaller goods. Because today one wants to have everything conveniently, one will agitate against large goods or for small goods or vice versa. But everything is led into a certain monism of abstract thinking: either only large goods are good, or only small goods are good for the national economy. But that does not correspond to reality. What is important is that, in certain circumstances, it is precisely the interaction of small and large goods, of large economies with small economies, that is the right thing to do. However, this only comes about through the associative, which is characterized as the essential in economic life in the “key points”. Large economies work together with small ones and thereby achieve the best for the national economy. It is not a matter of treating everything the same, but of ensuring that large and small goods interact according to certain conditions. Do you think it is not in line with certain real conditions that the Prussian manors, with regard to beet alone, produced 54.8% of the total production – that is, over half of the production – while in relation to the small estates they produced less than half, under 50%, of all the other things? All this is based on real conditions. It can only have a fruitful effect on the real economic process if the people who are involved in the management of the goods establish associations based on these real conditions. Then it becomes clear how the one must support the other, because then one does not work from the abstract, but from reality. And then one can determine by contracts how to balance what is now an increase in production on one side with the other, and so on. That is why it was justified for me to say [at the beginning]: I want to speak to you about the conditions in the threefold order in such a way that they can shed light on the land question. I did not want to speak about the land question in the usual way, but rather I wanted to show how any question of social life must be approached when one is grounded in the threefold social order. And you can approach this question very concretely, while you can never approach this question in an orderly way from the old conditions.

You almost have to be like Pastor Planck when you think: social organism, threefold order — these are three triangles next to each other, and nothing goes from one into the other. No, the threefold social organism is really an organism, and one always plays into the other, so that in each of the three members there is something of the other two. In the human organism it is the same: not only the nervous-sensory system is at work in the head, but rhythm and digestion also take place in it. Thus, in economic life, public life also plays a role, it only has its own center of administration, and so in economic life the spiritual also plays a role, precisely in the transition of the means of production from one to the other.

But we see this interplay in much more everyday things. Take, for example, an aspect of public life where three things flow into one: that is, social intercourse. On the one hand, social intercourse is connected with land and property because it needs the street. But because the traffic area, streets and so on, cannot be privately owned, it can also not be a commodity, it can be seen that we have to get out of the commodity, that at least this part of land and soil cannot be considered a commodity. But our whole culture is also connected with the traffic system. Actually, all traffic is subject to three aspects. [We can ask:] What is subject to traffic? Firstly, goods; secondly, people; thirdly, messages. You can place everything that is subject to traffic in any of the three categories: messages, people, goods. You see, because goods are included in traffic, what relates to the movement of goods must be regulated according to contracts, according to the impulses of economic life. What relates to people is regulated by state life, these are the legal relationships. The movement of people must also be regulated according to legal relationships. Communication is subject to spiritual life; it is spiritual life in intercourse. And you will find how the three sides of the threefolded system of intercourse must be administered, something that the old institutions have not achieved. Calculate for yourself what an absurdity it is that in our country goods and messages are still handled in the same way by the same institution, that postal packages and messages are delivered, which do not belong together at all and for which there is no necessity in the external institutions. But the old state institutions were unable to separate the parcel service from the postal service, so that one interferes with the other. If you take a look at the postal rates, you will see what a waste of money it is that the postal service is used for both messages and goods.

Especially where life must begin to be practical, especially where life today has become too narrow for us because it is no longer practical – in every nook and cranny, impracticality sits – there threefolding is called upon to restore the practical. Only one thing belongs to this threefolding: a little courage. However, anyone who does not dare to take away the postal packages from the postal service and hand them over to the ordinary railway service, anyone who always raises objections and does not do the actual math to see what one or the other means, will never understand the threefold social order. For threefolding is based precisely not on holding on to old institutions, not on holding on to ideas of old human vignettes, of old state vignettes and so on, but this idea of threefolding is based precisely on the consideration of real conditions.

For, ladies and gentlemen, one cannot expect the threefold social order impulse to deal with reality and practice in such a way that it now indicates how a Privy Councillor or a government councilor will position himself in the threefold social order organism. Yes, that is more or less the kind of question that is asked. This is just one of the grotesque questions. One cannot say how a privy councillor and a government councillor will fit into it, but it is not necessary to state this. The spiritual, legal and economic relationships between people will be clearly regulated according to knowledge, law and contract, but within these three areas, some things that were previously highly valued will no longer exist. But, my dear audience, must we not admit that in the old regime, people sometimes paid more attention to whether someone was a privy councillor than to what he achieved and what he did for the social organism? But in reality, it is not important whether someone is a privy councillor or not, but what they achieve for the social organism. Therefore, the idea of threefolding must look beyond what still comes from the old days as a vignette, if we do not want to face the complete downfall of the Occident. It must look at what must arise in the new era as the fruit of the work that a person accomplishes in some form in the service of the threefolded, but entire social organism.

After Rudolf Steiner's speech, various personalities asked questions:

Walter Johannes Stein: Land is a finite totality. So there is only a certain amount of land. A certain number of people live on it. Therefore, one can calculate how much land there is for each individual. Now I would like to ask whether such a calculation has any real value, that is, whether it provides a measure that can be used for economic purposes. Or is it just idle statistics?

Hans Kaltenbach: Dr. Steiner has not presented all the findings of the

German land reformers; in his remarks he only mentioned the tax on the increase in the value of land. But this would only account for a small part of the proposed land reform. The introduction of a land rent tax is clear proof that the land reformers do not want laws in the sense of the old state system. What they have in mind is a contractual development that has nothing to do with old lawmaking. It is based on the idea that everyone must pay a land-rent tax for the use of the land, because the rent that he receives from the use of the land should be donated to the community. This procedure does not involve parliamentary laws or laws in the old sense at all, but many individual contracts.

A participant in the discussion: But in the end it is the state that collects the land rent tax.

Another participant in the discussion: No matter how you look at it, without land reform there can be no progress; it must be there as the basis for the further development of our society.

Walter Johannes Stein: Dr. Steiner has often described the threefold social order to us as a functional threefold order and not as a threefold order of areas. However, many people are mistaken; they think of each area separately and with a corporation at the top. This is therefore a misconception. I would like to ask what such a falsely structured social organism would actually look like.

Hermann Heisler: How does one come by a dwelling, and how does an exchange of dwellings take place? How is a house built? The land is a means of production; it is made available by the spiritual organism. When the house is finished, is it no longer a means of production? Most people would like to have a small garden. How is that to be done, since there is not so much land available? What role does the legal sphere play in the administration of land and property?

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! It is true that land and property are not made of rubber and cannot be expanded at will, and it is therefore also true that there must be a certain connection between a self-contained area of land and the people living on it. Now the thing that plays here as an ideal-real relationship is that, in fact, simply by being born, a person effectively, so to speak, occupies a piece of land – this corresponds to the total available land area, divided by the number of previous inhabitants of the land, plus one. In fact, at birth, each person ideally and actually claims the piece of land that falls to them, and a real relationship is simply formed between the available land area and what the newborn person claims in this way. That is a real relationship. But it is not true, in fact, in this social reality, not everything goes according to plan. The laws – I now mean natural laws, not state laws – are there, but they are only approximations. If, for example, different plants live in a certain area and one type of plant develops particularly strongly, it displaces the other type of plant; it can no longer grow. If it is essentially the case that this one piece of land, which I have been talking about, becomes much too small for a newborn human, then, so to speak, the valve is opened and emigration, colonization and so on occurs of its own accord. When the population increases in a particular area, it is possible to check whether more fruitfulness can be drawn from the soil than in earlier times. This has essentially been the case, for example, with the soil of former Germany.

So there is a relationship between the human being and a certain piece of land, as Dr. Stein indicated. We must be clear, however, that this relationship is an ideal-real one, which, however, when threefolding becomes reality, is always decided by contracts, insofar as goods are produced on the land. The land is administered by people, and the people who administer the land must enter into a relationship with each other simply because they do not all produce the same products. They must conclude contracts, and once they have concluded contracts, there must be something to ensure that they carry them out. So what happens in the mutual dealings of the people who cultivate the soil is subject to the legal, political and state relationships. But what happens when a single area of land passes from one person to another is subject to the spiritual law, which is formed in an independent, emancipated spiritual life and flows into the administration of the land. The legal relationships intervene in the interactions of the people who manage the land; these are relationships that can only be regulated by law. When the threefold social order intervenes in this way, it becomes really apparent whether the land is still sufficient or not, or whether colonization relationships are somehow being created — but not by mere instinct, but by an instinct guided by reason.

On the whole, however, it can be seen that something strange is happening. There is something in the most ordinary, everyday life that regulates itself beautifully, although, of course, only approximately. It regulates itself quite well, although people can do nothing about it through state laws or anything else: namely, the ratio of the number of women to the number of men on earth. It has not yet been possible – and it will not be possible in the way the Schencks dream – to regulate by any state laws or anything else that there are approximately as many men as women on earth. Imagine what it would be like if there were only 1/5 women and 4/5 men or vice versa.

It is better to leave it to the laws, which work together as harmoniously as the laws of nature. Once the threefold social order is really in operation, what arises will also adapt to the circumstances. For example, not all people will pursue scholarly occupations and see this as something special. Circumstances will now develop that will, for example, bring a suitable number of people to a certain area of land, so that the fertility of the area that ideally corresponds to the individual corresponds to the existence of that individual. Even if, in a figurative sense, five or a hundred such areas are managed by a single person who has the special ability to do so, what is cultivated on these areas still benefits the others.

Now, I did not understand the second question from Dr. Stein. It seems to me that he asked what would happen if the three areas of the social organism were wrongly structured.

I have already mentioned that today people take great pleasure in engaging in all kinds of “Traubism”. They accuse anthroposophically oriented spiritual science of borrowing from Gnosticism, of borrowing from Indianism, of borrowing from the Egyptian Isis mysteries. One writer has even discovered that a very old book, said to come from the Atlantic regions, contains what spiritual science copies and so on. This is gradually becoming a technique, so to speak, [to make such claims], although they are actually blatant untruths, and in many cases outright lies. Because it is of course quite simply like this: if I write a mathematics textbook today and it contains the Pythagorean theorem, and I am counting on readers who have not studied it, then I will write what they need to know. But if something is added after the Pythagorean theorem that Pythagoras did not have, the reader must not say that the whole thing is borrowed just because I was obliged to say what was already there. The point is always to tie in with the known and then add the unknown. It is dishonest when the Traubists then come and say that it is borrowed from Gnosticism and so on. One must know what a blatant untruthfulness is being practiced on this very page. You see, if you are an official representative of a modern confession, you are already very, very much inclined not to tell the truth. As a professor, you are also in a strange position in relation to the real truth. But if you are both and then write a book - I will not develop the idea any further.

But you see, the same story will also start with the threefold order. Since I am not claiming that I have discovered the number three, nor that the number three has not already been applied in the most diverse ways to any physical circumstances, for example to the human being, people can also come and say: Yes, in old Arabic books there is also a threefold structure of the human being, there one has already divided the human being into three parts. But what our threefold division is about, you will find in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Soul Mysteries), where I start from functional concepts. I do not say: the human being consists of three tracts. I say: there is a nervous-sensory area, there is an air and blood area, and there is a digestive area. But I say explicitly: digestion is in the whole human being; the three areas are in the whole human being. I distinguish according to the functions; there I speak of a nerve-sense activity, not of some area, and I distinguish from it the function of rhythmic activity and, thirdly, the function of metabolism. That is the human being, structured according to functions. You see how I have strictly characterized all of this as functions in the book “Von Seelenrätseln”.

Now someone discovers in an old book that in Arabia, the human being is divided into three parts, three tracts. He could then also say: There speaks someone of the threefold nature of the human organism; he has borrowed the important thing, the number three, from ancient traditions; that is not original. And furthermore, this old book is also divided according to analogies – this is something that I have just applied to a certain interpretation; read what the 'Key Points' say about analogies – in this book, the external state system is divided according to analogies; a distinction is made between areas, and at the head of each area is a prince. There are three princes at the top, so in this case too there is nothing but the number three. Well, princes – if that should ever come about, then you can take a stand on it yourselves. It does not depend on three princes; but the inner spirit is something quite different in the social threefold order, [there it depends on the functional aspect]. If one does not look at the functional aspect, the error would arise that one could have two or three parliaments side by side, as a Tübingen professor once wrote in the Tribüne. The point of the threefold order is precisely that there will not be three parliaments alongside each other, nor three princes, but only one parliament in the democratic state structure. For in spiritual life there will be no parliamentarization, but an appropriate administration will be active out of the matter, as well as in the economic sphere. So, one can allow people to have their fun looking up the threefold order in old books. But if we are to work fruitfully with the idea of threefolding, then we really must go back to the description in The Core Points.

Now to Pastor Heisler's questions: How do you get a flat? — and so on.

These kinds of questions are just too rigid. I'm not saying they're not important, they're extremely important. There is such a severe housing shortage in the world that people try to get housing in the most grotesque ways. It has even happened that someone has got married in order to find a flat so as not to be on the street. It is extremely important to know how to find a flat, but one should not color one's whole conception of threefolding with something that still thinks too much in the style of what must be overcome.

Imagine the threefold social order realized – one need not think abstractly, for when it is a question of how something should be thought, then one must look to this realization of the threefold order, however far away it may be; not everything can be answered merely in terms of goals. In the threefold organism, the human being will not only have a dwelling to look for, but will also do something else. He will be something or other, a factory director or a carpenter or something else. By being a factory director or a carpenter, one can live; for this one is remunerated. In the threefolded social organism, however, this bringing together of the human being with his work must gradually be transferred to the administration of the spiritual part of the organism: getting a home then belongs to the remuneration; that is combined. So you must not think: I am a human being and must get a place to live, but you must start from the assumption: I am not just a human being, but I also have something to do in a place, and among the things that I receive as remuneration for this — if normal social conditions prevail — is also a place to live. It is not just a matter of asking the abstract question: How do I get a place to live? but one must ask: What happens when the threefold social order is in place? - Then, at some place or other, a person, if they are a person - and that is usually the case unless they are an angel who is everywhere - receives their salary as well as a home, and that is subject to what comes from the organization of spiritual life. Or, if it is a matter of not being transferred to a new area but otherwise working in a different context, then it is subject to the state or the political sphere. But such questions cannot be posed in the abstract.

We will have to wait and see what conditions arise from the threefold order, or we will have to use our imagination to picture how conditions will develop. Then we will really be able to answer the question of how to negotiate when taking up a position somewhere, i.e. doing a job, so that we can also have a small garden and the like. These are really things that do not get to the nerve of threefolding. You can be sure that they will be regulated in such a way that you can truly have your little garden in front of the house, once the conditions are in place that are brought about by threefolding.

Likewise, the question of how houses are built needs to be addressed. What is it? It is connected with the land question. But if the land question is no longer a question of the commodity, but a question of the law and of the spiritual life, then the question of how houses are built is also a question that is connected with the whole cultural development of humanity. It is self-evident that houses are built out of the same impulses that lead a person to enter into their work. So the point is not to ask these questions in the abstract, not to ask them in such a way that the human being is torn out of their whole concreteness as an abstract being. In a living, threefold social organism, it is not the case that one is only confronted with the question of how to get a home, but one is confronted with the question in the whole concreteness of life, and there everything depends on treating these things realistically.

Mr. Kaltenbach has already said something correct [when he pointed out the importance of land rent]. Of course, I have only picked out one example, the capital gains tax. But I would have had to say exactly the same thing with regard to the taxation of land rent. But, ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to know whether the question that was raised has not already been answered? Because for me it was not important whether it was a land rent or an increase in value, but rather that in principle a tax is given to the state; Mr. Kaltenbach clearly said “tax,” and by that he means something that is given to the state. What kind of tax it is that is to be given to the state is not important. But what is important is that the state be restricted to a single link in the social organism, not the structure in which it is today. One cannot say that the land reformers do not want laws in the sense of the old state system. They do want that. They want to build something on the old state that they believe the old state could do. It never can. Of course I know what role it plays when someone has become immersed in an idea; they cannot let go of it. But I think that everything that has been said about the land tax is already answered by the spirit of what was said about capital gains.

One would like so much that the old does not reappear. One would not want just one person to come and say: I do not want the secret government councils to be just like the old secret government councils, but I want the threefold organism to produce new government councils. — [It comes out the same] whether one says this or whether one says: Yes, the land reformers do not want to give anything to the state. — But they do want to give taxes, and taxes can only be paid to the state in their present form. This gets you stuck in the question: Who should you pay tax to? And if we are talking about contracts, then, you see, no state allows itself to be bound by a contract about taxes. The situation between the state and the individual when taxes are to be paid is quite different; it is truly not a matter of contracts.

It is a matter of trying to take in a living way how the idea of the threefold social organism wants us to rethink. But this is precisely what stands in the way – even if one often admits with good will that one should and must rethink – that when one then tries to rethink, one sticks to the word, for example to the word “law”. Yes, I have already been asked the question: How should the state introduce the threefold order? That's it: we have to get out of our habitual ways of thinking and speaking. We have to come to sharply defined thoughts, otherwise the impulse of the threefold order of the social organism will not be understood.