4. The Threefold Social Order and Educational Freedom

In my book, Toward Social Renewal, I have taken pains to show that the world view adopted by the leaders among party socialists is in all essentials simply a continuance (carried to a certain extreme) of the bourgeois world view of the last three or four centuries. The socialists cherish the illusion that their ideas represent a complete break with this world view. They do not represent a break, but rather only a peculiar coloring of the bourgeois world view with working-class feelings and sentiments. This is shown very markedly by the attitude these socialist leaders adopt toward cultural life and its place in the social organism. Owing to the predominance of economics in bourgeois society during the last few centuries, the spiritual and cultural life has fallen into great dependence on economic life. The consciousness of a self-sustaining spiritual-cultural life, in which the human soul partakes, has been lost. Industrialism and our view of nature have collaborated to bring about this loss. Linked to this loss is the particular way the schools were incorporated into the social organism in recent times. To make the human being serviceable for external life in state and industry—that became the main thing. That man is above all a being with a soul who therefore should be filled with the consciousness of his connection with a spiritual order of things, and that it is through his consciousness that he imparts sense to the state and economic system in which he lives—all this was considered less and less. Minds were directed ever less toward the spiritual order of the world, and ever more toward the conditions of economic production. In the middle class this became a manner of feeling, an instinctive psychological tendency. Working class leaders made it into a philosophy of life—or rather, into a dogma.