I. Historical Symptomatology

Historical symptomatology is one of the most important branches of general Anthroposophical methodology. It asserts that all facts and events of world history are to be regarded merely as symptoms of the occurrences on the level of supersensible reality, where the real, purely spiritual subjects have their existence, and where the spiritual impulses of the outer phenomenology of history – their primary phenomena, the ‘ur’-phenomena – come into being, undergo metamorphosis and pass away.

The historian, as also the politician and sociologist, will find solid ground in his quest for knowledge, only if he reaches through to insight into these ‘ur’-phenomena. Such an undertaking is of special importance not only for knowledge, but also for the personal development of the one engaged in the research, with respect to the special character of the consciousness-soul, the full unfolding of which is the most important task of the human being in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

The soul of man is three-membered. The Greeks of antiquity were already aware of this. Aristotle called these higher members orektikon, kinetikon and dianoetikon. In spiritual science Rudolf Steiner refers to them as Sentient soul, Intellectual or Mind-soul and Consciousness-soul. Their development underlies the entire cultural-historical process.

The sentient soul attains its special unfolding as the soul of aesthetics, as was manifested in cultural history with particular splendor, for example, in the Renaissance period, in Italian painting, Italian music. The intellectual soul determines the character of the period of the French Enlightenment. Voltaire and the Encyclopedists drew their works from this source. The consciousness-soul has not yet given rise to its own cultural epoch. It manifests on a large, world-encompassing scale in Anglo-Saxon politics, since it is inborn in the Anglo-Saxon race, or – to express it in the language of bureaucracy – it is high on the agenda of the development of an entire epoch. The Anglo-Saxons have the disposition towards the consciousness-soul implanted in them from the cradle, and this presupposes an extension of the immediate interest of the single individuality to embrace the interests of mankind as a whole. To this extent, everything in the world is of concern to the Anglo-Saxon. But as all that is innate has an instinctual quality, British – or, now, British-American – politics is narrowly-restricted, egoistic in character. If the national egoism of the ruling circles in these countries is not in some way overcome, then it has the tendency towards unlimited expansion. Hence, the striving for world-domination.

In the sentient soul the human being lives primarily in the world of the senses. If its development is not ennobled, a person becomes a marionette of his inclinations, passions, desires. Like waves, they wash away the arguments of his reason, the power of his understanding, and whether such a person appears good or bad outwardly, depends largely not on his personality but on outer circumstances – which include his spontaneous inner moods. As a rule, people whose character is dominated by the sentient soul are today followers of a multitude of different sects; it is from their ranks that those active in politics recruit their “electorate”. They are made use of by world-politics when it come to the inciting of mass rebellion, political protest etc.

The thinking human being lives in the intellectual soul. By devoting himself to a harmonious self-development, such a person does not neglect the education of his sentient soul – its aesthetic and ethical development – and thus frees his intellect from sudden chaotic impulses. In the decisions of his spirit he allows himself to be guided by goodness in his feelings. It can be said of such a person that his reason and his heart are in agreement. But the thinking human being tends to fall a prey to dogmatism and to this extent he is an easy victim of various forms of manipulation; he becomes a blind, uncritical defender of all sorts of ideologies, world-views, political programmes etc. A person of this kind can manipulate the “electorate”, but can himself be very easily led. In the end, all leading politicians in our world belong in this category. The politicians at the beginning of the 20th century were already like this, and this explains how the mighty occult-political powers of the secret societies were able to throw civilization into an appalling chaos. The intellectual soul also risks falling into an excessive abstractness, which dries out the senses, and in this way what emerges is a clever person but, let us say, a human being lacking in humanity.

An ulcerous growth common to all three souls is their egoism, which dismembers them and brings about their downfall. This circumstance is particularly problematic, because on the other hand it is egoism that has allowed the human being to overcome group-consciousness and mold himself as a personality. In the process of unfolding of the three-membered soul, which has already extended across several millennia, as it is founded on the transformation of the three-membered corporeality – of the physical, etheric and astral bodies – the human being has, to begin with, developed his primary individualization, the lower self, which lives by virtue of individualized sense-perceptions and reflections. To achieve this, he had to place himself over against the group-consciousness of his tribe, his clan, his nation and alienate himself from them. He began to set himself individual goals, pursue purely personal interests; he had to learn to stand on his own feet. Still today, those who have failed to achieve this go in search of a group-consciousness which they can join. This explains the fact, for example, that many former members of the Communist Party felt like a fish out of water after the Party’s decline. They were completely unable to stand on their own feet, let alone develop as a free personality. For this reason the Party was partially restored; and even the newer parties have received into their ranks a multitude of what one may rightly call spiritual invalids. And this they remain, even if they subscribe to the so-called Western values of democracy.

Passage through the stage of individualization, bound up with an increase in egoism, is an objective necessity, however problematic this may sometimes appear from an ethical point of view. It is simply a necessary transitional phase in the evolution of humanity. From the standpoint of the tasks of development it is preferable today to be one of the egoists rather than be subject to the group morality of some religious sect.

In the past it was the highly-developed leaders, educators of humanity, who helped people through this difficult phase. Even now human beings dream that they will return some day. But it has been for a long time – since the phenomenon of the lower ‘I’ became a mass phenomenon – the task of human beings to take the directing of their life into their own hands, using the support of this lower individualization. In these circumstances the creation of the appropriate social, State structures became a matter of special concern. The quest for these structures began, and in the process of this search Utopians, Marxists, even Fascists emerged.

The human being must fight hard for his individualization, as it calls forth a continuously growing resistance from those cosmic powers which oppose normal evolution. And this is happening at a time when the great leaders of mankind, both hierarchical and human, place their leadership, in view of the individualization process, in the hands of simple individuals. If one is to fulfill this mighty and immensely important task, it is absolutely essential to bring to development the highest soul-member – the consciousness-soul. In its very nature it is the soul of willing, and its will must be oriented towards deeds of goodness. But a human being can only act out of goodness if he becomes a free spirit, reaching through to his higher ‘I’. But this requires development of the new power, that of “judgment in beholding”, which Goethe had mastered and which inaugurates the ascent of consciousness to higher forms.

The consciousness-soul is above all social. Its ethical ideal is the “love thy neighbour as thyself” of the Gospels. It is therefore necessary to will, not instinctively, but freely, and develop an individualized morality which, for its part, demands that one bring the willing into the thinking. Only then will the human being, as Rudolf Steiner showed in the “Philosophy of Freedom”, freely form the motives of his action, drawing them from the world of “moral intuitions”, a world in which are also to be found the ‘ur’-phenomena of the outer, exoteric cultural-historical process.

The goal is attainable in the one sense, on the condition that an upward-striving development of all three soul aspects is taking place.

Here, the sentient soul is in need of ethical education, which must be effected both directly and through aesthetic instruction; the intellectual soul must learn pure thinking, the first stage of which is rigorously logical thinking; on the high level of the consciousness-soul one must not fall back upon a morality of a group or of tradition: one needs to act out of a morality that springs from an understanding, in freedom, of the laws of higher development. The entire world of the higher spirit, to which we strive in our lifetime and which we enter at death, is ethical in the deepest sense. There, ethics is as natural as, let us say, sunlight is natural under the conditions of material existence. In the future, the human being will live only in the spiritual world, and it is time now to prepare for this. The only alternative is complete non-being.

Thanks to the attainment of pure thinking by the intellectual soul (which is not possible without the participation of the senses), the consciousness-soul begins, not to think the thoughts through, but to perceive them directly in the objects of cognition – that is, we think in perceiving, in the beholding. For the human being, this means the attainment of his next stage of evolution, which amounts to an individually engendered metamorphosis of species.

For development of perceptual thinking by means of the power of judgment in beholding, there is no better exercise than the practice of historical symptomatology. This is the most easily accessible form of perceptual thinking. In this sense one can say that as an Anthroposophist you “concern yourself with politics”.

A human being who attains to the higher self begins to understand that humanity is a single whole, and that no-one is entitled to advance in his development if he rides roughshod over the interests and rights of others. It is up to him to become a centre of outstreaming goodness, to effect the good by transforming evil into good – both in himself and also in social life.

The world as a whole moves forward through the conflict and battle between good and evil. But evil must be understood (of course, without condoning it in any way) as an indispensable ferment of development. It became unavoidable from the moment the human being advanced to the stage of development of his individuality.

One sometimes hears people living in our times say the following: “I don’t want a higher development; it requires a huge amount of effort; I just want to live.” But the fact is, that no one is in a position to “just live”. The way a person lives is a matter of interest to literally legions of the most varied spiritual beings. And it is, as the expression goes, their “burning interest”, because their existence, too, depends upon the way a human being lives – upon whether he is progressing or, in contrast, falling back in his development. And so every human being has of necessity to decide for himself which are the spirits on whose side he would like to be. “To just live”, “to live in just the way I fancy” is equivalent to a free fall, where one is saying to oneself: Why should I want to be saved by a parachute? I love falling – what a fascinating sensation!

Everything is subject to a development, and development occurs in stages. Anyone who, at the end of such a stage, is not ready to move on to the next has no choice but to stay behind. Somewhere there, far down below, at the final stage of his lagging behind, this soul or that will experience and hear, so to speak, the “cosmic crash landing” of his existence. But on the way there, what awaits him is a steady, ongoing dissolution and group-consciousness, in which all that is individual gradually disappears. At a given stage, one will have to live with the consciousness of an animal of today, in order at some point to form part of a kind of “keynote” out of which the mighty cosmic beings opposed to the God of rightful evolution wish to fashion an evolution of their own. What this will be like, no one can foresee at present. One thing is already clear: the human beings who have developed themselves fully in our cycle of evolution will not be there. All this should be borne in mind before one decides to carry on “just living”.

Such are the perspectives of the future, which are able without question to instill fear into the human being, and become a threat to him when, in the battle between the lower and higher, good and evil, the lower and evil gains the upper hand. On a global scale this will never happen, but this is not relevant to the desires of the individual human being, which he is able to turn in any direction he wishes. Understanding of this fact should not alarm us – as the feeling of fear is itself a mark of decline, of degradation, of the fact that a human being is coming increasingly under the control of Ahriman. On the contrary, it should encourage us to relate to our own life in a serious way.

In the process of cultural-historical development, the battle is waged in the spiritual and social realms, in the political or everyday – indeed in every sphere of human life – between past and present, between narrow-minded egoism which has already passed its time, and germinal, true spiritual love. This battle is so universal in scope and intensity, that one cannot say whether the world as we know it today will still be here tomorrow. Development has a large number of very different alternatives. It is like flowing water – if it is blocked at a certain place, then it creates for itself another path. But not all paths are equally good for the human being. He needs the best paths, and these have to be fought for. And the better the path, and the more rapid the development it offers, the greater the effort that it requires of us. If this battle is to be a rightful one and is to succeed, then the very first thing that is needed is a reliable understanding of events. It is out of understanding, and not out of group inspirations – seductive as they may be at times – that the impulses for work for the true good of humanity must grow. And thus, the capacity really to understand what is happening in the different realms of life – be it the historical, the social, the political – any realm in fact – is the fundamental requirement of the human being in the epoch of the development of consciousness-soul. And this understanding must be acquired with the help of spiritual science, because the single, unitary reality is sensible-supersensible in nature.

Anyone who is prepared to attain knowledge of the truth and is actually ready to battle for it, is given by Anthroposophy the task of renouncing in this activity all sympathy and antipathy. As a quality of the sentient soul, sympathy and antipathy are necessary, at least in the initial phases of its development; later, however, they become a serious hindrance, a source of error, because truth, when bathed in the light of sympathy and antipathy, is no longer true but becomes a personal opinion.

Spiritual-scientific knowledge of historical symptomatology should be cultivated without prejudice and with equanimity. All the more so, considering that everything that happens externally has in itself, to begin with, very little ability to speak to us. It is always the form of expression of something entirely different. The course of history has the nature of allegory or symbol. The external world is indeed comparable to a great theatre. Of primary significance in the life of society, of politics, is what we can call the “script” according to which a social-political drama is staged. The world powers compete fiercely for the right to be the authors of such “scripts”: the occult political powers on the physical plane and the spiritual powers on the supersensible. And even when events take on a genuinely tragic character, one should even then not lose sight of the fact that they have deeper-lying causes, transcending the fleeting moment of their occurrence. Causes such as: the sleep of the understanding faculty extended irresponsibly over a long period; karma of the individual, of the group, of the epoch, of the nation etc.

One could of course object: Even if I know that what is happening is a theatrical performance, I can’t help hating the “directors” of these cruel, inhuman dramas. Such an opinion, such feelings are not hard to understand, but they bear witness to an insufficiently deep grasp of the laws of karma – of the fact that each individual and every group of individuals are, together, the creators of all that happens to them in their earthly existence. Besides, hatred, and even excessive indignation, cloud the consciousness, blur one’s clear perception of things; they simply call up the impulse to answer violence with violence. This is where the theories of justified or unjustified use of force comes into play, but we will not include them in our discussion. For us, something else is important, namely, that when we act without having understood, or with the wrong understanding, we are often serving, not the good, but evil. When this happens, evil always comes out the victor.

This, on the one hand. But on the other, the question regarding the world-wide antagonism of good and evil, the mystery of evil, is one of the most unfathomable, most hidden, “inexpressible” mysteries, difficult for the earthly understanding to grasp. One is led to a penetration of this mystery on the path of initiation. The consciousness of an initiate is one or several stages of evolution beyond that of ordinary human consciousness of today; such a human being perceives that much of what is revealed to him is simply not to be grasped in modern language. The intellectual soul needs to recognize this, and develop a mood of basic humility.

And finally, a third point: As early as the 4th century A.D. the great initiate Mani brought to expression in connection with the Christ-impulse the fundamental principle of how evil is dealt with by the human being. He said that everything that exists in the world has its origin in God and cannot be banished from this world. This includes evil, which was not there from the beginning, but arose within the process of evolution and for the good of this process. Evil can only be metamorphosed into good, and thereby overcome. And this is intended as a main task of consciousness-soul activity.

This is how some of the principles of knowledge of historical symptomology appear to a researcher on the basis of spiritual science, whose approach is founded on its general methodology. The human being must acquire his knowledge as a methodologist, and not as a collector of single facts.

The objective practical use of this approach can only be understood by one who has become aware of the dual character of single, unitary reality. He will then have no doubt that knowing constitutes a real power. For, the world of the Divine hierarchies is in its essential being a world of thinking, not of the kind that copies reality, but real, creative thinking. When the hierarchies think, they will and create at the same time. A human being who thinks in the material world and acquires knowledge, contributes to their thinking, while they include and make use of him in their creation of the trends of development. Regardless of their immense power, they can enter into the material world, which is not real for them. It is sufficiently real for the human being, however, who develops himself within it, and thereby contributes to the development of the world as a whole.

Luciferic, Ahrimanic and Asuric beings are also involved in the development of the world. It is these beings who create the evil in the world through the human being, by corrupting him with regard to their one-sided interests. Without knowledge of these beings, we are in no position to understand ourselves or the world, nor what happens in the world and to the human being. Rudolf Steiner gives many descriptions of the essential nature, the character, the qualities, the mode of activity of these beings, their relation to the evolution of world and man. Two such descriptions, which seem to us to introduce the reader to the subject in a clear and comprehensible way, and facilitate our task of discussing themes of political science on an esoteric basis, will now be quoted. In one of his lectures he says: “[...] the primary interest of the Luciferic beings in the cosmos, is to sever the world, in particular the human world, from those spiritual beings whom we must regard as the actual creators of man. [...] It is not so much that the primary intention of Luciferic beings is to take possession of the world. [...] this is not the main intention of Luciferic beings; their principal aim is: to disconnect the world from what the human being can experience to be his actual Divine beings, to make the world independent of them [...]

The Ahrimanic beings [...] have the definite intention to draw into the sphere of their power the human realm in particular, but with it the rest of the earth [...]

Thus there is actually in our cosmos with which we are interwoven an ongoing battle between the beings who continually strive for freedom, for universal freedom, and the Ahrimanic beings who strive for ever- lasting power and force. This battle, within which we stand, is all-pervading.” We ourselves are positioned in the centre of the state of balance. Thus a triad arises.

“Now you can well imagine that it is very much in the interest of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers that this mystery of the number three should be concealed. For, a right penetration of this mystery of the three enables humanity to bring about the state of balance between Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. [...] The most normal spiritual state of the human being is when he places himself in the right way in this trinity of the world, this structure of the world insofar as it has underlying it the number three” (GA 194, 21.11.1919).

It is, indeed, not easy for the political scientist of today to recognize through the dust cloud of political struggle in the world, such intentions of those supersensible beings who oppose the will of the Gods of rightful development. This difficulty is added to by the fact that in the content of culture and religion, in the whole code of moral principles adhered to for many centuries, there prevails a completely incorrect conception of God and the Devil. In the world of culture and the practice of religion one is only willing to recognize a duality – that of God and Devil; but with this says Rudolf Steiner, “[...] nothing less is done, in reality, than to remove what is genuinely Divine from consciousness and attach the name of God to the Luciferic element, [...] and to attribute Luciferic qualities to the Ahrimanic [...]

While people believe that, with the kind of content that is found in Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ and Klopstock’s ‘Messias’, one has to do with the Divine and the Hellish element, one has to do, in reality, with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic element. [...] This more recent consciousness of humanity has been infected with the lunacy of the number two, and the truth of the number three has been ignored. [...]All that works in this lunacy is, in the end, a creation of Ahrimanic influences, those influences which will someday be concentrated in the incarnation of Ahriman. [...]

[...] And if a “Paradise Lost” is written, then what is described there is in reality the expulsion of man from the realm of Lucifer into the realm of Ahriman, and one is describing the longing of human beings not for the Divine, one is describing the longing of human beings for the lost paradise – which is to say, the realm of Lucifer.” (ibid.)

A person who is politically active or who is simply concerned with politics is unthinkable outside the context of general human culture. This, however, insofar as it does not absorb into itself spiritual knowledge, knowledge of the single sensible-supersensible reality, is steered by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings in a direction where what awaits it is barrenness and decay. This is one of the basic theses of Anthroposophical methodology in the realm of research into culture and politics. A further thesis involves the recognition of the reality of human thinking. Particularly in our present time, when the human being is standing at the threshold to attainment of individual freedom, the higher spiritual beings develop the evolutionary goals on the basis of how and what earthly human beings think. The spiritual hierarchical beings of the retarded variety also harvest the fruits of man’s thinking and cognition, but primarily the false ones, in order to set them in opposition to the intentions of the hierarchical beings of normal development. This activity of theirs is extremely effective. If, said Rudolf Steiner, all human beings were to decide that they did not want higher development, then this development would come to an end.

Especially in our time, when, in social life everywhere, the different forms of evil battle with one another and each one wishes to persuade us that it is the genuinely good, the fight against evil has grown enormously difficult; and thus people often decide with unpardonable ease what they wish to regard as the good. But this leads also to the illusion that one can eliminate evil without effecting its metamorphosis. This illusion is so strong that it is not unusual for people to refuse to let go of it. To illustrate this, let us take a recent example from the events in Russia – the annexing of Crimea to Russian territory. In one of the mass demonstrations which took place in Crimea just prior to the event, in the town of Simferopol – it could be followed in the media – there was an old woman with a portrait of Stalin in her hands. She stood directly in front of the television cameras and no-one – neither the organizers of the demonstration nor the participants in it – asked her to take the portrait away. In addition, one sees everywhere Soviet flags with hammer and sickle; attempts to destroy Lenin memorials were described as Russophobia etc. In this way one tries to instill into the consciousness of the masses, that annexation of Crimea – indeed, of the Ukraine as a whole – to Russian territory means a return to the “all-rescuing” Stalinist system, and there is no other way to a glorious future. And we now ask the question: Where do we find, there, the good that fights against evil?

***

Anthroposophical historical symptomatology can be viewed as political science – though only under the condition that the political science is striving to include both sides of reality; but even in this case, political science will imply a certain narrowing of the concept of “historical symptomatology”. However, one can accept this for the sake of the practical goals of cognition. Political science is one of the projections of symptomatology, and has the possibility of making the path to it easier. In today’s world there are two directions or kinds, two types of political science. On the one hand there is the radically exoteric kind, external political science par excellence, which daily fills the pages of thousands of newspapers, magazines and the programmes of television channels. It is directed to the reader and viewer belonging to the masses, who receives it by means of abstract thinking, steered by elementary sympathies and antipathies which, in their turn, are instilled into him by this political science. Everything in it appeals to the emotions, the predilections. Its aim is not to inform; its aim is to manipulate the consciousness and to conceal the true course of events and their meaning. It is no exaggeration to say that all the mass-media in the world are engaged in an endless exercise of total brainwashing and represent an effective means of consolidating the power of small groups over the masses of the population on the broadest scale. These are simply facts and, in stating them, we are not indulging in political criticism, we are merely characterizing the phenomenon in question.

The mass-media have exercised this role since the end of the 19th century, when a strengthening of self-consciousness became evident in the civilized part of humanity and certain forces were compelled to under- take something in order to maintain their power over them. We know from Anthroposophy that in 1879 the epoch of the rulership of Michael began and that at the same time legions of Ahrimanic beings, cast down by Michael from the heights of the spiritual world onto the earth, emerged in the midst of earthly human beings. In order to falsify human development in favour of Ahrimanic ideas, they “bridled” the Press, so to speak. Thus, Rudolf Steiner began in the first quarter of the 20th century to refer to the “black magic of journalism”. Journalism set out to distort all human social relations in a merciless fashion.

Today, in our time this process exceeds all bounds. And people are fully aware of the fact. Testimony to this is, for example, the frequent absence of all empathy when a journalist is killed during an armed conflict.

In its fundamental nature exoteric political science is materialistic through and through. It persuades human beings that everything in their lives is exclusively “this-worldly”, meaning that in the conflicts taking place throughout the world there are no lawful patterns at work, that it is all a matter of chance, and depends upon the character of individual people, their subjective motivation, their ambition, their striving for wealth and power etc. Everything boils down to what is immediately given. For example, so we are assured by Mayakovsky – “in the wastes of Simbirsk the ordinary boy Lenin is born”, he grows up, recognizes very quickly the social injustice prevailing in Russia, and he says: Power “is a wall, but if it is rotten – just push it with your finger, and it will fall down”; so he pushed it and it fell down. That’s all! – and there are no questions to be asked, least of all about the background to the October revolution! Yes, of course, there is something like the dialectic of development, when one class becomes the antagonist of another to the point of lethal conflict; but all that is only for “theorists” and any- way – these discussions are a thing of the past.

Another example: How can one explain the turmoil stirred up in the world today by the U.S.A.? “Cherchez petroleum”, advises the historian Nikolai Starikov, and you will understand everything that happens in the contemporary world. The hunt for sources of energy explains all the machinations of greedy capitalism! – This is not just an ordinary key, it is a skeleton key for an understanding of world politics. In this example we already have the beginnings of conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy theory is the second type of political science. It is half exoteric. In it one seeks, in the attempt to explain the nature of the outer events of political life, to reach through to the essence of what is hidden behind the scenes. One finds there conspiracies of the most varied political, economic and other groupings. There is nothing unusual about this political science. Knowledge of secret diplomacy is widespread and has existed for a long time. But if this is real, why should there not be secret intrigues of certain groups? And to the extent that their interests do not coincide, they are naturally forced to fight one another. These conflicts are most successful when they are fought away from the eyes of the public, in the manner of the wars in Mafia circles etc.

Conspiracy theory seeks in part to express itself in the spirit of – no, not historical, but purely political symptomatology. So, if one can derive no knowledge of the meaning of world events from exoteric political science, it is certainly the case that something or other can be drawn from the statements of conspiracy theory. Of course, conspiracy theory, too, is a means of manipulation of consciousness – and even more dangerous than the first kind of political science. To “call the elect”, as it says in the Gospel – that is their aim. We will give an example of the way this is done. The first type of political science maintains that there is in the world no manipulation of consciousness, at least the “democratic” Press is not engaged in it. But now the well-known and unquestionably perspicacious conspiracy theorist Sergei Kara-Murza publishes a comprehensive work with the title “The Manipulation of Consciousness”. In it he describes and exposes – as the poet says, in a way that “sears and splits hairs” – the most varied methods and forms of manipulation of the consciousness of the masses, which are applied in the real world and made use of by certain forces there. And he stresses that he wrote the book as a preventive measure to show people how to shield themselves from the manipulations. But it becomes clear as one reads it that he is doing so for the one and only purpose of manipulating the consciousness of the reader in the spirit of his own ideology; this is pro-Soviet, he sympathizes with the renewal of Stalinism!

Absorption in conspiracy theory is like walking a minefield where at any spot in the landscape covered with fresh grass and thicket, at any time an ideological landmine can explode, destroying the germinal, healthy human understanding. And yet it is only from the deliberations of the conspiracy theorists that one can grasp something of the background of political life in the world, where events take place that are of significance for the destiny of entire peoples and, indeed, of the world as a whole.

The exoteric press wages a relentless battle against conspiracy theory – and for the precise reason that it not infrequently lifts the veil behind which the relentless battle of the “lions” is taking place. They claim that a “conspiracy theory” is due to a “persecution complex”, is a product of the “paranoia” of its creators. This word is repeated again and again like a magic spell, to deter people from even picking up the works of conspiracy theorists, if not to discredit and intimidate the authors themselves. And this is very effective. Many of these authors swear a thousand oaths that they are not conspiracy theorists before they say a single word.

In our opinion “conspiracy theory” is not a fiction and is definitely not a product of persecution mania. But even among its exponents it is narrowed down, dogmatized to an extraordinary degree. What is more: when there is a conspiracy theory, its theory has simply not been developed yet, there is merely the description of facts, single manifestations of antagonism, often of the joint working of two world-forces – politicized Catholicism led by the Jesuit order, and World Freemasonry. Where the source of this antagonism lies, why these forces not infrequently work together, what – aside from the striving for power – their essential nature is, indeed, where this remorseless struggle for power originates, of all this, one will learn nothing from the conspiracy theorists.

This knowledge can only be drawn from spiritual science, as it reveals the global, cosmic antagonism between that part of the hierarchy which has remained behind and seeks at man’s expense to make up for what it has missed, and the Divine hierarchies. And it is Anthroposophy, which explains why, for what purpose, the one part remained behind.

It is that original opposition which is projected onto the plane of historical, social, political – indeed, all – the relations of earthly humanity. The human being himself, however, is an immensely important element of that opposition. This cosmic battle is waged over the human being and for the sake of the human being. These are the fundamentals underlying true “conspiracy theory”.

We have already dealt with this theme in earlier works, in “Crisis of Civilization”, in the third volume of “Macrocosm and Microcosm”. To repeat those discussions here would have little sense. We recommend that the interested reader should consult those works (while the reader with no interest is of no concern to us).

In conclusion, we would remark that in the centres of the earthly world powers there is a core made up of human beings who are more or less conscious of a relation to those supersensible forces which work in op- position to the normal course of evolution. For this reason, world politics on a large scale is occult in its essential nature. It draws many of its insights and forces from the supersensible – and mostly from the sub-physical, sub-sensible – world. It is of course an impossible undertaking to reveal this to the broad masses of people who have been brought up in the spirit of materialism or of Luciferized religious faith. When conspiracy theorists attempt to do this all the same, then the voice one tends to hear is that of a Church-like obscurantism.

If, on the other hand, Anthroposophy speaks of the occult-political centres of power, then it precedes this description with the great teaching of supersensible reality, of the connection between earthly phenomenology and spiritual cosmos, and much more besides. Knowledge of this is an indispensable precondition for anyone wishing to apply the methodology of Anthroposophy, the mastery of which is one of the fundamental tasks of the human being of the consciousness-soul epoch.

When Anthroposophy imparts the teaching of the dual, sensible-supersensible character of the unitary reality, it includes within it also the methodological foundations of political science. Once these are mastered, then one is able as a wakeful observer of the phenomena, to recognize by means of its symptoms that activity whose aim is to lead human evolution off the rightful path. This activity, wherever in the world it is taking place, has the power to influence the destiny of humanity as a whole and, thereby, of each individual.

The consciousness-soul, which urges the human being to lift his own interest to embrace the interest of all mankind, awakens in him the striving to know in what direction the world-forces – above all, the supersensible forces – are guiding the course of development. To attain knowledge of this kind is the duty of the human being, and in order to rise to this task it is necessary to raise oneself resolutely above petty inclinations, egoism, sympathies and antipathies, ingrained opinions, ambition etc.

In political science, the Anthroposophist reaches through to no more than a characterization of events, without wishing to attach a moral judgement to them. His aim is to gain knowledge in as objective a way as possible. He seeks, not conflict but the truth; not revolution, but evolution.