Social & Anti-Social Instincts: Awakening Responsibility in a World at War

It’s 1918. We are in Basel, Switzerland, experiencing the immediate aftermath of WW1 with all its horrors. Dr Rudolf Steiner is giving a lecture: His pressing theme concerns various social and anti-social forces that work unconsciously in our instinctive nature.

Purveying the devastating five year 1914-1918 World War leaves no doubt that powerful social and anti-social forces are active in our human psyche and culture: Rudolf Steiner attempts to communicate what we are each dealing with in our unconscious nature—being our sympathies and antipathies, our loves and our hates, our good will and our ill-will—stressing the urgent responsibility we have to each face what is active in our unconscious instinctive life and find the moderating remedies.

Rudolf Steiner speaks about the intrinsic ‘social problem’ of seemingly unavoidable egotism, and of how it is that we might each overcome our increasingly narcissistic egocentricity. This includes egoistic self love, particularly concerning the self-sympathy we each have for our own intimate thoughts and viewpoints, and the instinctive, unavoidable antipathy we direct toward persons, thoughts and viewpoints that differ from or oppose our own.

He also points out that a pervasive ‘self-satisfaction’ concerning who and what we think we are, is essentially illusion and delusion, in no way justified by the actual and deeper realities of our predominantly unconscious selves and circumstances.

Concerning our present states of vain self-delusion, of preeminent importance is not who we think we are, or imagine our self to be, but more so, who and what we must in time each become, albeit in the necessarily humbling process of recognising and overcoming our innately anti-social natures where what purports to be love and understanding is often little more than self-aggrandisement, self-love and self-sympathy. In reality, we are usually very much less and very much more than we suppose, and it is therefore our deeper realities to which we must attend.

One such reality is the necessity to correct or adjust our prevailing twofold social organisation and orientation into a threefold approach, recognising that our humanity can only begin to develop our ‘better nature’ when profound polarities that are hiding in our present nature [such as our unconscious sympathies and antipathies] are remedied. One solution for our increasingly polarised condition is to organise our selves and our culture in a threefold manner. For example, in the middle of our dualistic sympathies and antipathies, we can work to establish and strengthen the self-moderating and intrinsically social element of empathy: Steiner leaves no ambiguity in his observation that without such triadic delineations and integrations, no real progress can occur, observing that our present dualistic approaches impose both social and self destructive limits on human cognition and knowledge. Of particular concern is a growing tendency to only entertain political and economic considerations in order to augment our material comforts, rather than engaging and cultivating additional activities by which we can rightly attend to our human purpose.

When our concerns are limited to political and economic spheres, the free spiritual and cultural life is [almost] completely neglected. This neglect obstructs an essential threefold dynamic where freedom of thought, spiritual scientific enquiry, and ethical social sharing play a preeminent role in better informing our human purpose. Without this balance, we remain vulnerable to destructive egoistic tendencies.

We might appreciate that this lecture was not given in comfortable, self-indulgent, post war, philosophical, philanthropic circumstances but was offered in direct response to the painfully destructive, tragic and traumatic events that had just taken place in the World.

We might question the relevance of such a story in present times until we recognise that one hundred years later, humanity is again experiencing a World at war: Certainly, the events of the last five years tick all the boxes, affirming we have indeed more than met the prerequisite conditions for World War, a world at war which has actively distracted, diminished and disintegrated much of our human culture.

How so?

Quite aside from the normalisation of grossly militant uses of power and increasingly gross abuses of power, we might regard the enforcement of covid lockdowns and mass vaccinations as being two primary mechanisms for instigating worldwide hostilities. Most certainly, whether we agree with them or not, both of these impositions bring about the social conditions for war.

Before we begin to each assert our argumentative opinions, let us agree to establish certain facts concerning what typically happens in a war:

People fight.

People are injured.

Extreme losses are experienced while others secure substantial gains.

In every execution of egoistic power, one over another, people live and people die.

And in the aftermath of such prejudicial powers, persuasions, passions and strategic, intellectual opinion, all these antagonistic elements are again roused to demand social justice, each desiring to call to account those who are judged to be responsible for so much suffering. Meanwhile, those who are responsible [being all of us, for it is our war] cling to our reasons and rationales to justify our actions: Either way we have a continuance of intense conflict.

And so the anti-social forces prevail, until or unless we awaken a deeper response ability to change or correct our fundamental folly to live, feel and opine in a wholly somnolent state concerning our deeper capacities and purpose.

The danger is that without adopting a threefold approach to understand, optimise and progress our selves and our social structures in a conscious, conscionable and conscientious manner, we are bound to simply oscillate between various dualistic states of revolution. Unfortunately, revolutions cannot guarantee that social evolution or self development actually takes place.  Moreover, Steiner observes that those who speak up for justice and other such ideals, are inevitably tempted to become just as dictatorial [albeit in a revolutionary way] as the guilty predecessors each is seeking to replace. We may consider all sorts of examples here, including the extraordinary group of people Donald Trump has gathered around himself in order to make America great again.

There is a great danger that the revolutionaries themselves, due to completely unconscious anti-social forces, fall back into the default mode of merely deploying essentially egoistic, self-gratifying powers.

We can certainly agree that when we examine what shapes our culture, politics and economics are clearly the foremost primary drivers, each seeking to influence the other to increase, not our human purpose, but our power, privilege and self celebrating comforts. A whole lot of propaganda entrenches the belief that this twofold paradigm is entirely sufficient, and who could argue that egotism is not well served in such a set up.

Meanwhile, the free cultural sphere—wherein we can practice responsible ideation, where new ideas and insightful perspectives can arise, where moral imaginations, inspirations and intuitions can occur—the very domain where thinking itself is a spiritualised activity, is almost completely obscured and abandoned within the cognitive cages of political and economic rhetoric where thinking is anything but free: In fact, it is here we encounter a terrible affliction of fixed ideas and theories.   

Unfortunately, [or fortunately], it is only in and from the spiritual/cultural realm [where we may actually practice cognitive freedom] that our incorrect, errorful, hateful, illusory and deluded world views and all ensuing judgements can be deeply enough confronted that we are sufficiently motivated to adjust ourselves to become more in accord with reality instead of self delusion. Fundamentally, being in love with our self and our own ways of thinking must turn toward a warm and earnest interest in completely different ways and qualities of thinking, in order that we can in reality become more cognisant of our selves, our cultures and our world.

Such cognisance requires threefold mechanisms and methodologies whereby various triadic dynamics can be practiced, developed and integrated: Developing our cognitive, sentient and volitional life is one example of a triadic approach without which democracy as it presently stands has no future.

We can see that whatever our present standpoint [which might include the relatively new revelations of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical spiritual science] the sympathy we each have for our best thoughts always tempts us to believe we can now rest on our laurels, and simply ‘be’, lazily content in our achievements. Gratifying as it is to assert that really nothing more is needed, and that all is well, this is merely a form of masked egotism, which left unabated, fools us with self-congratulation and self-applause.

In the light of reality, we really cannot consider ourselves or our cultures as being ‘finished products’ in any sense: At certain times, we may consider ourselves to be any number of things [including claiming to be a good person or a nice person], but more to the point we are presently at the very beginning of becoming the very things we desire to be [including any fervour to be a nice person, steeped in every imaginable vestige of human wisdom.] [Yeah, right.]

The same principle applies to our present attempts to ‘be human’, or be Christian, or Buddhist, or left or right or centrist, or in my case, being Angus, or being a plumber or a musician or a teacher, a mediator or a meditant: The reality is that in every aspect, for the greater proportion, we are pre-eminently in a process of becoming, and cannot with any honesty claim to be a completed being.

This also concerns our inner states: Are we entirely clear or are we [hopefully] becoming clearer? Are we at peace or must we practice becoming peaceful? Are we perfectly self-realised or are we in reality practicing self-knowledge completely imperfectly in order to become more awake and informed? The list of questions goes on. But the point remains: We are all learning to ‘be’ in the process of becoming more than we are now or have ever before been.

That sounds like some kind of progress.

In summary, the realities of all we must become engages a positivity and optimism which itself becomes grounded in higher realities, rather than resting in delusional, self satisfying vanities. Furthermore, we can begin to see that any pessimistic conclusion that so easily arises when we each encounter yet another indication that “all is not well”, is countered by the optimistic rejoinder that in life’s enwisened purposes and processes, “all will in time become well”. 

This knowledge, when it hits home, will create the right mood in all our further endeavours where sufficient sobriety, honesty and earnestness invites our growing human wisdom to indeed prevail. Thereby, all will be well.

Angus Macdonald