By: Richard C. Cook
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was an Austrian philosopher and esotericist and founder of one of the key modern spiritual movements in the West. He is best known for his books and lectures before and after World War I, when he founded the Anthroposophical Society with its present-day headquarters in Dornach, Switzerland. After World War I, Steiner and his work were criticized viciously by right-wing nationalists in Germany, which caused him to give up his residence in Berlin. Among the critics was Adolf Hitler, who attacked him in print as a traitor to Germany for his efforts to promote peace.
The work of prophetic thinkers like Rudolf Steiner makes clear that the history of humanity proceeds through the evolution of consciousness, where changes take place in the psyche of people well in advance of their outward manifestations. Thus an understanding of what is happening before our eyes is never simple, nor can it be taken at face value. Discernment requires a level of knowledge that can only be achieved through study and insight.
But only an approach that penetrates deeply into human nature allows us to see the real inner causes of events. Such causes can be positive or negative, constructive or destructive. It is the genius and dilemma of man that we can choose which influences we serve. As Steiner prophesied almost a century ago, we appear today to be at a pivotal point where how we make such choices can determine the fate of the world.
It is perfectly clear that we are living in an era of technological achievement that, historically speaking, began just a short time ago. Steiner said what today is accepted as a truism: that the present era arose from discoveries in the 15th century that marked the beginning of the Renaissance, when the intellect of Western man became able systematically to apply the scientific method to phenomena of motion and matter.
The invention that made all else possible was operational by the 1450s: the printing press, first made practical by Johannes Gutenberg of Germany. Over the next four-and-a-half centuries, until the dawn of the 20th, technology surged in every field, but exploded with the near-simultaneous harnessing of electricity and the widespread exploitation of fossil fuels.
The latest phase took place long after Steiner's death: the use of electrical impulses for high-speed data processing, such that computers are rapidly taking over the human workload. With only slight exaggeration, it can be said that humans are needed less all the time, except to program the computers and keep them humming or to carry out the leftover menial labor that machines cannot yet perform.
The unsolved problem lies in the fact that no one knows how, with declining need for employment, to continue to deliver purchasing power to the jobless masses that businesses require for them to purchase the products which machines can increasingly manufacture on their own. Until now, such purchasing power was delivered through debt-based money creation—consumer lending, mortgages against inflated home prices, etc. The collapse of this system is the cause of the current global recession and has set the stage for the huge disruptions that may come next.
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The new revelation shows up wherever people are aspiring to assure that what is produced in the area of economics does not belong just to the money-masters but to all people.
It would show itself when the world of law and government minds its own business except to assure equal rights for all, along with fairness and competition in the marketplace.
It manifests through spiritual, intellectual, and cultural striving, where the highest goal is unfettered individual expression of Self- and God-consciousness.
Again, according to Steiner, it is the spiritual sector that should give guidance to the economic and legal ones. Someday it will. A sign this is happening is the rapid growth of instantaneous communication through the internet. Whether spiritual revelation can prevent more disasters from taking place remains to be seen and may depend on how many individuals eschew despair and choose to respond to the signs of the times in new and positive ways.
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