All is in fragments and upheaval now as powers of evil siege the planet. Yet the dawn of a new age stirs. Thank you! I subscribed to you Substack and to the vision of the circular economy.
This is a brilliant essay. You are a brilliant writer and thinker. You have eloquently articulated a contemporary version of the principles of Rudolph Steiner’s three- fold social order. In reading this I experienced a hopeful feeling of a new and very early dawning of awareness that culture is the garment- the cloak of humanity, a field and force that unites us in archetypal human consciousness of our potential to shape our world. We do innately long for a utopia that is
100%, Michael. Your statement, "...positive social transformation much more often arises from culture, and from the shared values and actions of the population, than it does from ideologues and politicians" rings absolutely true for me. Laws are fine, but as my husband's grandfather always said, "a contract is just an agreement made between people of good faith." It is the "good faith" part that we are sorely lacking, the "shared values" part. I'm not sure how we remedy that. Although...
...now that I think about it, perhaps that's not something we have any control over. Perhaps we just need to open ourselves to the possibility of an energetic shift toward goodness and truth, and participate in that shift however and whenever we can, trusting that we are instruments of a power far greater than ourselves.
It's taken a while for my thoughts on this to crystallise but here they are in essence (well, some of them, anyway).
I can see the value in Steiner's concept of the three-fold society and I agree that culture includes all the things you list. But I'd say it includes much more than just 'co-ordinated input to the legislative and production functions which serve it'.
I regard a society's framework of laws as the embodiment of its collective values. So, to my mind, all primary legislative activity takes place within the cultural sphere, including fundamental laws of ownership and inheritance, and laws governing the contribution individuals are expected to make to society. My feeling is that, if we can get those laws right, the problems caused by remote ownership would largely disappear and, with the broader distribution of wealth which that would bring, the question of how activities of the cultural sphere should be funded would largely solve itself.
The sphere of government, in my view, includes judicial and law-enforcement activity, along with responsibility for transport and communication networks and a basic welfare system, but only secondary law-making, i.e. establishing detailed rules about how primary legislation is implemented.
From this perspective, it's not that 'governments and giant corporations stitch everything up between them and crush out of existence all possibility of wider participation in society'; what happens, rather, is that a corrupt cultural sphere abdicates some of its own responsibilities and allows the other spheres to operate without some of the constraints that are necessary in a healthy society.
On the question of how long change might take, I think it's worth bearing in mind that, although it takes a long time to climb up a mountain, and a long time to climb down the other side, it's only a single – crucial – step from one side of the watershed to the other. I think that's where we're at now.
P.S. I think there's some overlap in what I've said above with arguments I've been making, for many years, that there is a polarity within the functions of government, and that a properly representative system would allow us to elect two sets of legislators with responsibilities for different areas of law (https://treasonableman.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/roots-of-polarisation.pdf).
I'm a bit skeptical about how any cultural space can develop when the major challenge at present is to separate the commercial space from the indirect control of the state space like we previous separated the state from its control of the cultural space (separation of church and state).
This public acceptance in ESG I think this is the recognition of the absence of this cultural space so an acceptance of this being carved out within the commercial space.
All is in fragments and upheaval now as powers of evil siege the planet. Yet the dawn of a new age stirs. Thank you! I subscribed to you Substack and to the vision of the circular economy.
Whoops... There is an innate longing in every human soul born of God to bear the fruit of a society that reflects our truest and noble nature.
This is a brilliant essay. You are a brilliant writer and thinker. You have eloquently articulated a contemporary version of the principles of Rudolph Steiner’s three- fold social order. In reading this I experienced a hopeful feeling of a new and very early dawning of awareness that culture is the garment- the cloak of humanity, a field and force that unites us in archetypal human consciousness of our potential to shape our world. We do innately long for a utopia that is
100%, Michael. Your statement, "...positive social transformation much more often arises from culture, and from the shared values and actions of the population, than it does from ideologues and politicians" rings absolutely true for me. Laws are fine, but as my husband's grandfather always said, "a contract is just an agreement made between people of good faith." It is the "good faith" part that we are sorely lacking, the "shared values" part. I'm not sure how we remedy that. Although...
...now that I think about it, perhaps that's not something we have any control over. Perhaps we just need to open ourselves to the possibility of an energetic shift toward goodness and truth, and participate in that shift however and whenever we can, trusting that we are instruments of a power far greater than ourselves.
It's taken a while for my thoughts on this to crystallise but here they are in essence (well, some of them, anyway).
I can see the value in Steiner's concept of the three-fold society and I agree that culture includes all the things you list. But I'd say it includes much more than just 'co-ordinated input to the legislative and production functions which serve it'.
I regard a society's framework of laws as the embodiment of its collective values. So, to my mind, all primary legislative activity takes place within the cultural sphere, including fundamental laws of ownership and inheritance, and laws governing the contribution individuals are expected to make to society. My feeling is that, if we can get those laws right, the problems caused by remote ownership would largely disappear and, with the broader distribution of wealth which that would bring, the question of how activities of the cultural sphere should be funded would largely solve itself.
The sphere of government, in my view, includes judicial and law-enforcement activity, along with responsibility for transport and communication networks and a basic welfare system, but only secondary law-making, i.e. establishing detailed rules about how primary legislation is implemented.
From this perspective, it's not that 'governments and giant corporations stitch everything up between them and crush out of existence all possibility of wider participation in society'; what happens, rather, is that a corrupt cultural sphere abdicates some of its own responsibilities and allows the other spheres to operate without some of the constraints that are necessary in a healthy society.
On the question of how long change might take, I think it's worth bearing in mind that, although it takes a long time to climb up a mountain, and a long time to climb down the other side, it's only a single – crucial – step from one side of the watershed to the other. I think that's where we're at now.
P.S. I think there's some overlap in what I've said above with arguments I've been making, for many years, that there is a polarity within the functions of government, and that a properly representative system would allow us to elect two sets of legislators with responsibilities for different areas of law (https://treasonableman.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/roots-of-polarisation.pdf).
I'm a bit skeptical about how any cultural space can develop when the major challenge at present is to separate the commercial space from the indirect control of the state space like we previous separated the state from its control of the cultural space (separation of church and state).
This public acceptance in ESG I think this is the recognition of the absence of this cultural space so an acceptance of this being carved out within the commercial space.