Towards Social Renewal

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been reading Rudolf Steiner’s book Basic Issues of the Social Question. Published in 1919, it was written just after the calamity of the First World War, and that catastrophe weighs heavy upon it. That is the same year in which W.B. Yeats’ penned his ominous poem The Second Coming.

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Trickle-Up

Have you ever wondered how the billionaire Russian oligarchs and plutocrats managed to emerge so quickly from the ruins of the USSR? Why 1% of Chinese now control 50% of “communist China’s” total wealth and assets? Why the middle class in the US is dramatically shrinking? Why Canadians are going into debt just to keep abreast of the cost of living? Why austerity budgets are being implemented everywhere at a time of unprecedented global wealth? And why there is such growing outrage at the political and economic domination of the 1% over the 99%?

Have you considered that it is deliberate neo-liberal policy criminally and fraudulently sold to the public under false pretenses, and not because of the “virtuous circle” of free-market economics?

Anders Behring Breivik

Is Anders Behring Breivik insane? In a clinical sense, no. Yet, from another perspective, no one (in their right mind that is) could possibly confuse Breivik with being sanus — sound, healthy.

“Blinded by hate” is not just a figure of speech. Hate makes insane. An all-consuming hate casts a thick fog over the senses, until one perceives nothing clearly through the pall it casts over everything, even oneself. Truth and falsehood become irrelevant because no longer accessible. Everything becomes subordinated to a dualism of love and hate.

In that sense, Breivik is demonic and willingly embraced the demonic. But it is a convention of the wisdom tradition that to become demonic in that way is to enter into insanity and into the lowest circles of Hell.