Learning from Eastern Europe
What we see in the West now is the kind of collective stigmatization that we saw in the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 20th century and in Eastern and Central Europe after World War II.
In 1989, the West rejected its own renewal and as a result nothing new, nothing spiritual could develop. Now we are watching as the spiritual freedom arising from Western culture is falling apart and how everything needed for building a community is disappearing.
Threefolding as an antidote
We in the East were seen as the losers. But we have learned all kinds of things, first from communism, then from capitalism. Sadly, many of our brothers and sisters in the West decided not to learn lessons from Eastern Europe’s experiences of communism. Not much has been done to support social threefolding, for instance, which, according to Rudolf Steiner, was the only alternative to Bolshevism (GA 199, lecture of 7 August 1920).
Today we witness minorities striving to monopolize public opinion, forcing others to withdraw or even bow down. Everything that shares the same roots, the same pride, the same cultural values, is rejected. Rudolf Steiner was describing this tendency from the perspective of his time, when he said, “Not long after the year 2000 […] a kind of prohibition of thinking will come from America, a law that will aim at suppressing individual thinking. We see the beginning of this today in a purely materialistic medicine that has no place for an active soul and where, based on external experiments, the human being is treated as a machine” (GA 167, Lecture of 4 April 1916).
Excluded
What we see now is that Western Europe and the USA are losing their prestige, at the spiritual level, too. Hate speech and racism dominate the social media and are displayed openly by public figures. Facebook and Twitter put restrictions on views they deem not to be politically correct. People may lose their jobs for expressing views that are considered ‘bad’ by these media, even in retrospect, often years after they were posted. It looks as if the West is paying now for the lessons it refused to learn from experiences with communist oppression. How awake are we in the anthroposophical movement and Society in our perception and judgement of current developments?