The Rudolf Steiner Archive

11. Cultivation of the Spirit and Economic Life

[ 1 ] Many people today speak of "socialization" as if it could mean a sum of external institutions in the state or in social coexistence, through which certain demands of modern humanity are to be fulfilled. It is imagined that these institutions are not yet in place, which is why social discontent and confusion prevail. Once they are in place, then an orderly social coexistence and cooperation of people must occur. The fact that many people, more or less consciously, indulge in such an opinion is the reason why many harmful ideas about the "social question" develop. For one cannot design external institutions in such a way that these by themselves enable people to lead a socially satisfying life. Such institutions will be technically good if goods can be produced through them in the most appropriate way and put to human use. But they only become socially good when socially-minded people manage the goods produced in them in the service of the community. Whatever the institutions may be, it is always conceivable that people or groups of people will work in an anti-social way.

[ 2 ] We should not succumb to the illusion that a socially satisfactory state of life can be brought about without "socially minded" people, for such an illusion is an obstacle to truly practical social ideas. The idea of the threefold organization of the social organism strives for complete freedom from such an illusion. It is therefore understandable that it is fiercely opposed by all those who today still live in the cloudy mist of this illusion. In the one of the three members of the social organism, this idea strives for a cooperation of human beings that is based entirely on free intercourse and the free socialization of individuality to individuality. Individuals are not forced into any predetermined institution. The way in which they support and promote each other should merely result from what one can be to the other through his abilities and achievements. It is not at all surprising that many people at present cannot imagine anything else than that with such a free organization of human relations in the spiritual member of the social organism only anarchic conditions would have to result within it. Those who think in this way do not know what forces of the innermost human nature are prevented from unfolding by the fact that man is developed into the templates that shape him from state or economic life. Such powers of the innermost human nature cannot be unfolded through institutions, but only through the fact that human being acts upon human being in complete freedom. And what is unfolded there is not antisocial, but social. The socially effective, human inner being is only stunted when instincts are inherited or brought up that stem from state privilege or economic superiority.

[ 3 ] The tripartite social organism will continually expose sources of social impulses through its spiritual member. These will imbue the legal relations of men, which are to find their regulation in the democratic state, with a social spirit, and they will also carry this spirit into the management of economic life.

[ 4 ] In the economic cycle, the tendency towards the anti-social cannot be prevented by the forms of life of modern times. For the community is best served when the individual can apply his ability to the prosperity of this community without restraint. For this, however, it is necessary that this individual should accumulate capital, and that he should also be able to unite freely with others for the economic utilization of this capital. Socialist illusion has believed that these increasingly accumulated masses of capital could ultimately simply pass from their private owners to the community and that a socialist social order would thereby have to be realized. In truth, the economic fertility of capital would have to be lost through such a transfer, for this is based on the individual abilities of the individual. It should be admitted without reserve: The economic cycle will be at its most vigorous if the tendency to anti-socialism in its own sphere is not taken away from it; but instead forces are continually supplied to it from another sphere, the spiritual member of the social organism, which bring the anti-socialism that arises back to the social.

[ 5 ] In my "Key Points of the Social Question" I have tried to show that a truly social way of thinking cannot strive for the transformation of the administration of capital by the individual or by the group of people into that by the community; but that, on the contrary, the individual must have the opportunity to place his abilities at the service of the community without restraint through the utilization of capital, and that if this individual is no longer willing or able to apply his abilities to the utilization of capital, this must be transferred to another who has the same abilities. This transfer is not to be effected by state favoritism or economic power, but by the identification of the most suitable successor from the social point of view, acquired through education in free intellectual life.

[ 6 ] He who speaks in this way of the healing of our social conditions sees in his mind the scorn of all those who today regard themselves as practitioners of life. He must bear this mockery at first, although he knows that the attitude of those who mock has brought about the terrible human catastrophe of recent years. This mockery will continue for some time. But then even the most stubborn people of this kind will no longer be able to stand up to the teaching of social facts. The phrase will then have to fall silent that proposals such as that of the threefold structure may be well-intentioned, but that the "people are not there" to implement them. However, the originators of this phrase are not "there for that". So let them withdraw and not use their brutal power to hinder the fruitful work of those who would like to ensure that people's social instincts can unfold in a free intellectual life.