IV. The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life In the Present and the Future

When we look at this fact, then we must really take a good look at precisely what was unconscious in the proletarian's soul as a result of what has been mentioned. The bourgeois – take hold of your heart, try to recognize it through true self-reflection, if you are a bourgeois or your ancestors were bourgeois – the bourgeois has very different feelings as a legacy of earlier times. The modern proletarian, after his way of life, after he was called to the desolate machine, to desolate capitalism, rejected these old traditions. His soul was supposed to fill this newer worldview, but it could not. And no matter how enthusiastically the proletarian professed what this worldview said, he felt desolate in his soul, he felt a longing for a different spiritual life. For this intellectual life, the fruit of newer spirituality, has no power to answer the great soul-questions of mankind. This intellectual life says nothing about the connection of man with what every man feels in his heart as his higher humanity. That had a desolating effect. It had such an effect on the soul of the proletarian that he longed for something indefinite. This is what then masked itself in all kinds of demands and came to light in all kinds of forms. We will not understand this masking, these forms, if we cannot decide to look at the matter in its full depth from the point of view of a real world-view question. This newer spiritual life had no momentum for matters of world view, no momentum for the universally human. When the leading strata of newer humanity sought such momentum, sought something in spiritual life that would support the soul, they turned to the old religious ideas, to the old artistic, aesthetic, ethical or other views. But what they had to offer the proletarian, and what only the proletarian could understand, was not soul-nurturing, and to this day it is not soul-nurturing. We must ask: where does it come from? We must not ask the theorists, we must truly build no gray theories. We must immerse ourselves in a real life practice if we want to see clearly. Of course, I can only sketch the world-bearing facts today, but they can be fully proven. With the advent of modern times, with their technology and their capitalism, something was left over from an earlier development that, to the connoisseur, only remotely resembles what we call the state today, insofar as this state is truly worshipped and revered by enough people, one might say, almost like an idol. The classes of people who were the leading ones at the beginning of the modern era, when technology and capitalism emerged, used the framework of the state to bring into this framework everything that they felt comfortable bringing in. And we see it as justified, at least understandable from the point of view of that time, when one had to fight against the church and many other powers, as since the dawn of modern intellectual life, of historical life in general, intellectual life has been more and more incorporated into the sphere of the state. The school and other branches of spiritual life were increasingly drawn into the sphere of the state. This was seen as a great step forward in modern times. That is why it is so difficult today to fight against the general prejudice in this area and to say that it is precisely in this area that a retreat must be made, certainly not into a dark Middle Ages, but into the liberation of spiritual life in all areas from the state. . That is what one will have to realize today, that it is necessary if one wants to participate, even to a small extent, in the process of emerging from the terrible situation into which humanity has brought itself. It was considered a step forward to gradually place everything that belonged to intellectual life under the supervision of the state. Only a few artistic fields, some things that were considered unimportant for life, were still left free in the intellectual field.