How Can We Work for the Impulse of the Threefold Social Order?

GA 338 — 13 February 1921, Stuttgart

Third Lecture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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