In these increasingly surrealistic times, public discourse is highly focused on trying to discern which political leaders, public figures, influencers and billionaires are Good and which ones are Bad. To this problem, the well-known teacher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) offered a practical solution. Steiner warned against thinking in terms of Good and Bad, and that instead it is necessary to think in terms of Good, Bad #1 and Bad #2. Bad #1 and Bad #2 are often each other’s enemies, like rival gang members. The Good, the powers that create good actions and which he named ‘The Christ Impulse’, is constantly caught in the crossfire.(1)
Hence, for the powers of The Good, life is a daily balancing act; a constant walking in between two tempting mirages: Ahrimanic powers trying to control free will – to influence decisions – and Luciferic powers trying to make people focus on themselves, promoting self-interest.
Ahrimanic powers include, for instance, the suppression of information and mind control through subliminal messages on screens. A Luciferic example are social networks tempting you to share more and more of yourself publicly.
With two forces of evil and one force of good, Steiner’s worldview points at a trinity instead of a duality. One could open up a newspaper and encircle all the control-powers with a black pencil and all the self-interest-powers with a red colored pencil. Is Trump Good and Harris Bad? Or the other way around? Or are they on different teams of Bad? What about Musk or Zuckerberg? Is fighting the Bad automatically Good? Not in Steiner’s worldview.
Steiner is often ridiculed and dismissed because his teachings clash with materialistic, physicalist, mechanistic science, but scientists like Donald Hoffman have recently provided mathematical evidence that much of Steiner’s information is correct, that the unseen world is indeed much larger than the seen world, and that the seen world is a manifestation of the unseen world.(2)
The not so trivial consequence of Hoffman’s discovery is that materialistic, physicalist and mechanistic thought is proven to fall short in explaining reality. Humanity can not progress without adjusting to a new worldview in which spacetime and the material are considered contextual, limited and, in Hoffman’s own words, ‘trivial’. It is therefore essential to revisit old knowledge of the many slandered, censored and suppressed researchers who already proclaimed this worldview long before Hoffman, from Jakob von Uexküll to Carl Gustav Jung to Wilhelm Reich.
(1) Steiner, Rudolf. Michael’s Mission, Revealing the Essential Secrets of Human Nature. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1919.
(2) Hoffman, Donald. The Case Against Reality, How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. Penguin Books, London, 2019.
