The Rudolf Steiner Archive

15. The Fundamental Error in Social Thinking

[ 1 ] Many people will repeatedly object to an idea such as that of the threefold organization of the social organism: the social movement strives to overcome the economic inequalities of people; how is this to be achieved through the changes that occur in spiritual life and in the legal system if these have independent administrations compared to the economic cycle?

[ 2 ] This objection is made by those who see that economic inequalities exist, but not how they are brought about by the people who live together in the social organism. It is seen that the economic order of society is expressed in people's attitude to life. One strives to ensure that for many people the possibility of a way of life that seems more worthy to them arises. And it is believed that this possibility will be there when certain changes in the economic order, which are envisaged, have occurred.

[ 3 ] A person who looks more deeply into human living conditions must see the main reason for the social ills of the present day in the fact that the conception just described has become the prevailing one. For many people, the economic order of life is too far removed from their ideas about the spiritual and legal life to be able to see how the one relates to the other in the human context. The economic situation of men is a result of how they relate to one another through their spiritual faculties and through the legal system existing among them. Anyone who understands this will not believe that he can find an economic system that can bring the people living in it into attitudes of life that seem worthy to them. Whether one finds within an economic system the consideration necessary for such an attitude to life depends on how the people in it are spiritually attuned and how they organize their relations to one another out of their consciousness of right.

[ 4 ] In the last three to four centuries, civilized mankind has developed out of impulses that make it extremely difficult to see through the true relationship between economic life and spiritual life. Man has been woven into contexts of life which, through the achievements of technology in the economic field, have taken on a character that no longer corresponds to what he has formed from previous periods of development as the cultivation of the spirit and ideas of justice. We have become accustomed to look upon the intellectual progress of recent times with undivided appreciation. However, one overlooks the fact that these intellectual advances have mainly been made in areas that are directly related to technical and economic life. Certainly, science has enormous achievements to show, but its achievements are greatest where they have been challenged by the demands of technical-economic life.

[ 5 ] Under the influence of such intellectual progress, a habit of thought has developed in the leading circles of mankind to judge all living conditions on the basis of economic data. In most cases they are not aware of this way of judging. They practise it unconsciously. They believe they are living out of all kinds of ethical, aesthetic drives; but they unconsciously follow their judgment determined by the technical-economic economy of life. They think economically, while they believe they are living aesthetically, religiously, ethically.

[ 6 ] This habit of thought among the leading classes has now become dogma among socialist thinkers in recent times. They think that all life is economically conditioned, because those from whom they have inherited their opinions have made the economic way of thinking their largely unconscious habit. And so these socialist thinkers want to transform the economic order from a point of view that has brought about the very thing they consider to be in urgent need of transformation. They do not realize that they would bring about what they do not want to an aggravated degree if they acted under the influence of ideas from which the thing to be transformed has arisen. This stems from the fact that people want to hold on to their ideas and habits of thought much more tenaciously than to external institutions.

[ 7 ] Now, however, human development has reached a point where its very nature demands progress not only in institutions but also in thoughts and views. Whether this demand, which the history of mankind makes, is felt or not, depends on the fate of the social movement. As strange as it may still sound to many people today, it is true that modern life has taken on a form that can no longer be mastered with the old ways of thinking.

[ 8 ] Many people rightly say: the social question must be approached differently than St. Simon, Owen and Fourier, for example, did. With their intellectual impulses one could not transform economic life. But such people draw the conclusion from this that spiritual impulses can have no changing influence at all on the social conditions of life. The truth of the matter is that the aforementioned thinkers formed their ideas out of a spiritual life which, by its very nature, is no longer suited to modern economic life. Instead of now professing a healthy understanding: Therefore a renewal of spiritual life - and of legal life - is needed, one has come to the opinion that the longed-for social conditions must arise of their own accord from economic life. But they will not arise, but only economic confusion, if the further development does not take place out of the progress of intellectual and legal life demanded by modern times.

[ 9 ] What is to happen in the social sphere in the present and in the near future will have to be borne by the desire for this progress in the cultivation of the spirit and the legal order. What is not created out of this courage may be well-intentioned, but it will not lead to sustainable conditions. Therefore, the most important thing in this field today is to raise awareness in the widest circles that the new cultivation of the spirit is the basis for the prosperous further development of civilized humanity. The fruits of this cultivation of the spirit will be absorbed into the economic order; an economic life that seeks to reshape itself will only perpetuate - in an aggravated form - its old defects. As long as one demands of economic life that it should make of people what is inherent in them, new damages will be added to the old ones; only when one comes to the realization that man must give economic life what it needs from his spirit will one be able to consciously strive for what one unconsciously demands.