This article was first published in New View magazine Issue 99 April-June 2021

“We’re living in a world where things just happen, don’t they?” These were words I overheard from a conversation between two women in our local park recently. They were talking about the so-called ‘COVID crisis’ and expressed the view that events these days just seem to occur ‘out of the blue’ as it were, out of nowhere. 9/11, the crash of 2008, the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, the emergence of ISIS in 2014, Donald Trump, the ‘COVID crisis’ itself, the recent military coup in Myanmar, to cite just a few events in recent times – for many people who depend on the mainstream media for their view of what’s going on in the world all these events “just happen”; they seemed to come out of nowhere. People feel they can’t make sense of them, especially those that happen far away, and rightly so, because the mainstream media rarely put them in their proper context to help people understand the deeper issues. Of course, they try to give what is called “background” to an event like the coup in Myanmar; there is the occasional documentary, long article or panel discussion, but after a week or so, or perhaps only a few days, the news cycle, always hungry for new stories, moves on and explanations remain more or less superficial.

After I overheard that woman in the park, I walked on and only a moment later, I overheard a man asking someone on his mobile phone: “are you where you need to be going?” A pregnant question. Are we where we need to be going? It assumes we know where we need to be going, and let’s face it, many of us don’t, individually. From day to day, or over a period of weeks, months or a year perhaps we do. But over the course of our lives? By which I mean: do we know around, say, the age of 21, where we need to be going in our lives? Why are we here? What is the purpose of our general human and individual existence? Has our upbringing, our education up to that point, helped us to gain some clarity on such questions? The same applies to a nation and to humanity as a whole in the 21st century.

In the Middle Ages a person’s destiny would usually be determined by the status of his or her parents. In modern times this has decreasingly been the case. But what, beyond a modern young person’s interests and hobbies, determines for him or her choices about the course of life on leaving the parental home, or even before it? In Japan in the period 1950-90, a young person’s lifepath was largely set at the age of 18 by the juken jigoku (‘examination hell’); this determined whether they would go to a university and thus on to an upwardly mobile career with a major company or public service that would guarantee lifetime employment, or whether they would enter the world of work at a lower or middle-ranking position, where they would probably remain. There was only one gate of opportunity – at 18. If you missed it, your life’s chances were also missed, as multiple doors slammed shut for you. At least, that was the propaganda. That was what the culture continually drummed into the minds of young people for some 40 years.

But of course, that was not the situation for 40 years because it had “just happened”, and when that situation began to break down in the early 1990s, as Japan’s economy nosedived into stagflation, following the bursting of the property bubble and the collapse of the Japanese stock market in 1990, that did not “just happen” either. Both developments – the lifetime employment system and the juken jigoku which underpinned it, and then the gradual collapse of that same lifetime employment system, happened not because the people of the supposedly democratic state of Japan had wanted those things to happen, but because a very small number of people – Bank of Japan and Finance Ministry senior managers and their political allies – had made determinations as to what was in their own best interests, which they also took to be the best interests of Japan.(1) Under the circumstances of the modern global economy since the end of the Second World War in 1945, the ordinary people of any country, i.e. everyone who is not very rich, rarely have the time or resources to think about large-scale themes such as the overall direction their country, let alone the world, should take. Ordinary families are busy enough just trying to make ends meet and make things a bit better for their children.

But at the top of their societies, whether in Japan or Britain, China, the USA, India or Germany, there have always been a few people who have identified their own interests with those of the country and have been busy identifying where the country (or indeed the world) ‘needs to be going’. They have determined that a certain major change should occur in the society at a certain point in history, that a ‘new order’ should continue for a certain period and systems be put in place to support this continuation throughout that period, and then similar people determine that the circumstances have changed and that a new direction is necessary to adapt the country and its population to those changes. Of course, the populations themselves play little or no part in these determinations even though they believe they live in democratic societies, which are supposed to reflect the will of (the majority of) the people. The populations observe the determinations of the elites as presented to them by the media and are expected to go along with the new direction.

The Planners

We have seen this process unfolding once again since 2019. Since the Swedish teenage ‘climate change’ campaigner Greta Thunberg spoke at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, in January that year, urging us all to “follow ‘the’ science”, i.e. follow the lead set by those scientists who cooperate with those at the top of societies, the profile of the WEF has grown ever more prominent, and we have seen how the WEF and other such groups and think tanks and the mainstream media who echo them all regard ‘climate change’ and COVID-19 as being combined phenomena that represent a major historical change with which we are all expected and continually ‘nudged’ to comply. This change has been given various names by those advocating it: The Great Reset, The Fourth Industrial Revolution, The Green New Deal, The New Economy, The Age of Biotech, The Fourth Turning etc.

For some years now, certain aspects of this ‘new era’ have been presented ad nauseam as something for which ‘there is no alternative’, something inevitable: the massive application of artificial intelligence (AI) and biotechnologies, human life extension, the Internet of Things, whereby all products will be able to transmit communications, digital currencies (the end of cash), digital identities, the end of physical shopping, universal basic income for all, agribusiness and the end of traditional farming, global geoengineering projects, human travel to Mars, robot soldiers and robot weapons systems, etc. These have often been regarded by the mainstream media as things which are simply ‘progress’, technological or otherwise and, as such, the media mostly welcome them. In other words, they have been seen as developments that have ‘just happened’. But of course, this is not the case at all. All scientific and technological developments in modern times require considerable financial investment; choices have to be made, often on the basis of long-term calculations or considerations, such as: “where we need to be going…”, as determined by the people making those calculations.

But to these developments, consciously selected and promoted by people in the business, scientific, political, academic and media elites, the COVID-19 ‘crisis’ has added a new element, for which no really suitable word or concept has yet been devised. It might perhaps be called ‘total oligarchical surveillance and control’. It has suddenly and drastically imposed a level of social control and inhuman behaviour across many countries around the world that few, in the western democracies at least, would have thought possible or would have even imagined before 2020 – unless, for example, they were participants at the “Event 201” conference in October 2019 at Johns Hopkins University in the USA, an event sponsored by the WEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and devised to ‘game’ a global scenario for a response to the outbreak of a worldwide coronavirus and respiratory illness pandemic. One of the key recommendations of the participants was for the total control of information during the coming pandemic. The phrase used at Event 201 was the need “to flood the zone” with the same messages all round the world, so that populations would receive no alternative message and would be compliant and do what they were told. This “flooding of the zone” would be essential to maintain public support both for official restrictive measures during the pandemic and for the vaccines that would eventually be introduced to deal with the virus.(2) The concept of “flooding the zone” worldwide points up the key propaganda role of the mainstream media throughout the crisis so far. This total information control, which has since extended to the exclusion and banning of alternative views from both mainstream and social media, even those of medical experts and scientists who disagree with or oppose governments’ measures, and also the sheer extent of the totalitarian social restrictions and curtailing of liberties and rights, not to mention the wilful vandalism carried out against entire economies, has led some people to use more brusque language to describe what has happened: “scientific tyranny”, “medical tyranny” “scientific/medical fascism”, “hygienic fascism”, “neo-fascism”.

Fascism?

It might seem to some that use of the word ‘fascism’ or ‘neo-fascism’ is definitely overexaggerated here, but is it? Why is ‘communism’ or ‘neo-communism’ not a more suitable term for what has happened over the past year? This second question is easier to answer. It is because communism is a monist or monopolistic system i.e. both the cultural life and the economic life are subservient to the political state; they are not autonomous – politics, i.e. the State rules. Actually, it is not even politics, as there is no debate allowed. A party oligarchy controls the State and through it, everything else. All three spheres of society (culture, politics and economy) are subsumed in one. Communist systems are thus similar in a way to the theocracies of old (Egypt, Babylon, ancient China); they are all systems dominated by a single philosophical or religious ideology identified with the government. In communist states this is a kind of pseudo-religious, materialist economic philosophy. Although those ancient systems allowed private farming and small businesses to exist (as Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” also briefly did in the early 1920s), there was no sense in which the economic sphere or the political sphere existed in their own right as they do today, or did until 2020. Communism was and is a system in which the cultural sphere, in this case, an economic ideology, in effect, rules over the other two spheres of society – law/politics and economy – through State power. More rigid forms of Communism have abolished all forms of private enterprise altogether as well as all alternative ideologies and philosophies in what communists like to call “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. Fascist states do not do this; they allow private enterprise of most kinds to exist, as well as most forms of religious belief, as long as these sectors do not challenge the dominant Fascist ideology of the government. Indeed, they are required to support and show allegiance to the governing Fascist ideology. If they do not, they are suppressed.

Twofold, threefold, onefold

In modern democracies up to 2020, there was no real threefold society, in which all three sectors – culture, politics, economy – are autonomous but also interrelating, like the three physiological systems in the human body (metabolism, circulatory system and nervous system), as Rudolf Steiner called for publicly with his movement for a Threefold Social Organism in 1919.(3) What existed in modern democracies until 2020 was a twofold system in which politics and economy struggled for power and influence between them. Usually, economic interests dominated politics, but these societies – being nominally ‘democratic’ – paid lip service to the pretended supremacy of politics and government, ‘the rule of law’, etc. Societies in the European Middle Ages (c.800-1600) were also dualistic, but then the duopoly was a struggle between the cultural sphere (the Church) and the political sphere (the monarch or, in Central Europe, the Free City); there was still no autonomous economic sphere. In the period 1600-1900 one duopoly faded and was replaced by another, that is, the power of the Church declined and was replaced by that of the economy (business interests), as a materialist philosophical ideology gradually replaced the former religious ideology of the Church and sought to assert its own interests against those of the State. The 20th century was thus dominated by the duopoly of politics vs business. Socialists, representing the economic interests of workers, looked to big government to defend workers and the poor against the economic interests of business circles, whose political allies were first liberal and then later, conservative parties. Most of the latter had shifted their allegiance over time from the older, now largely spent forces of ‘throne and altar’ to the new power of business.

Mediaeval society failed to resolve its dualism. It could not harmonise the powers of the Church and the State, or the Pope and the Emperor (or king), respectively. In those these two powers were frequently identified by contemporary thinkers and writers with “the two lights” – the Sun and the Moon. The anthroposophical historian Karl Heyer wrote:

“The Sun and Moon did not find each other. They remained in conflict. Precisely because the two powers were too similar to each other, they could not arrive at a harmonious collaboration. Both were too Roman, …. both sought external domination over the other. The great cosmic image of sun and moon was mostly interpreted in a very unspiritual way.”(4)

The two could not collaborate because the Church had drifted away from its original spiritual purpose, which had been to christianise and civilise the impulses of the Germanic elites and their populations after the barbarian migrations from the 4th to the 10th centuries. Instead, the Church, especially from the reigns of Popes Gregory VII (1073-1085) to Boniface VIII (1294-1303) sought increasingly to wield worldly power over all temporal rulers. The Roman Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor became rivals for power and territory in this world. In the end, a new force emerged in the 15th century in the towns and cities, that of the freethinking individual and, with it, the economic force of commerce among the merchant and artisan classes, and with John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, Martin Luther and other religious reformers, they demanded personal religious liberty, a demand which was soon extended to political liberty; freedom from the control of both Pope and Emperor. It was the beginning of the modern age of individualism. The assertion of personal liberty and autonomy soon spread to the economy, and by the end of the 17th century, this third sphere of society, with its new entities – its shareholder-owned companies, its stock exchanges, global trading networks, central banks and systems of commercial law – had established itself as an autonomous force, vying for power and influence against both Church and State.

Over the century since Steiner introduced the ideas of the Threefold Social Organism, in which he sought to establish autonomy and interrelationship for all three spheres of society and prevent any one being dominated by either of the others, we moderns too have failed, as the people of the Middle Ages failed, to resolve our social dualism, the struggle between the worlds of politics and economy. But whereas the failure of the mediaeval duopoly did in the end lead to the emergence of the third sphere, that of the economy, and as such, this represented a forward movement, albeit one that has been very fraught to say the least, our modern failure to comprehend and realise the threefold social organism over the past century and the consequent failure of our modern duopoly – because a social structure that is built on the tension between two elements, on the number two, the number of division, cannot ultimately stand – has meant that we are now about to proceed backwards to a monopolistic or monist order. This regression was not inevitable, but we have caused it through our cumulative social failures over the past 100 years.

According to Steiner, we are now living through the first third (1413-2133) of the fifth Post-Atlantean Epoch (1413-3573), and this fifth epoch has a deep resonance with the third Post-Atlantean Epoch (2907-747 BC). This is in line with the sevenfold nature of time and historical development which proceeds rather like a musical octave (do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do) in which the notes do, re and mi are mirrored by ti, la and so respectively, around the central axis of the note fa. One can also think of this as a lemniscate, a figure of eight on its side, with the note fa as the crossover point in the middle. Accordingly, the first Post-Atlantean Epoch corresponds to the seventh epoch, the second to the sixth, and the third to the fifth – all around the fourth epoch (fa), which has no mirror image. Of course, this does not mean that the third and fifth epochs mirror each other exactly, otherwise we’d be living again in a world of pharaonic demigods, pyramids and mummification, but nevertheless there are numerous resonances between the two epochs.(5) Some of the cultural resonances are perhaps understandable, but we should not allow our epoch to become a repetition of the third epoch, because this fifth epoch has its own historical developmental task, namely, the elaboration of what Steiner called the ‘Consciousness Soul’ –- the autonomous, spiritually aware, human individual. An important aspect of developing this is the understanding of the problem of good and evil, whereas the moral task of the third epoch, according to Steiner, was to understand ethics in terms of inner/outer beauty and ugliness, and the task of the 4th (Greco-Roman-mediaeval) epoch was to comprehend the relationship of truth and untruth. The third epoch, that of Babylon, Egypt and the other Near Eastern cultures, was one in which, as mentioned above, the principle of oneness, onefoldness was dominant – the rule of the State by the priesthood through demigod kings. Unless we awaken to what is happening today, the form of society approaching in our time will not be a twofold society let alone a threefold one, but a onefold society in which a pseudo-religious ideology – that of Baconian natural science – will, through the instrument of the State subjected to it, utterly dominate our world through the tyranny of medical, ‘environmental’ and technocratic experts – our new priesthood upon whom we will have allowed all aspects of our culture and society to become dependent. Business, the arts, scientific research, politics – all are now increasingly dependent on A.I. and those who supposedly steer it but who are themselves increasingly steered by it. In his book New Atlantis (1627), published the year after his death, Francis Bacon laid out his vision of what we today might call a technocratic society, hierarchically ordered rather like a beehive in which everyone had their place and function. In From Gondhishapur to Silicon Valley (2000), Paul Emberson showed how the guiding college of Bacon’s imaginary island of Bensalem – a college (research institute) which Bacon called “Salomon’s House” – bore comparison to both a “human computer” and “the hierarchical structures of the mystery centres of antiquity”; in Bacon’s book we find the island governed by scientific experts who subtly both informed and controlled the rest of the society and who were served by them. Moreover, Bacon was himself the deviser of the binary thinking that is at the very base of all computer technology; this is clear from his book The Advancement of Learning (1623), where, amongst other things, he sought to reduce all thoughts and thinking processes to a series of a’s and b’s.(6) (in our time with modern computing – zeros and ones.)

Already by the beginning of this century, contemporaries were recognising how far Bacon’s vision had become reality: “At the dawn of the 21st century, scientific dogmatism is more firmly entrenched than ever. The scientist has become the high priest of the industrial world, certifying both the academic training of new users and the relevance of types and means of production. In all areas of human discourse, scientific reasoning has the force of law. What was once a theocracy is now a ‘scientocracy.”(7) We could also call this a technocracy.

The view had already become widespread by the First World War that power had shifted from the powerful men of the 19th century, the industrialists, to the bankers. But as we have seen in the history of a company like IBM, in today’s world, business and finance have come to be utterly dependent on computer technology and on the people who understand and operate it. The same has become true even in many areas of the arts, and no modern government or health and welfare bureaucracy could function today without complex computer systems. Many aspects of our society were already being drawn into the online world by the year 2000; how much more is that the case now, since COVID-19, when so much of our lives has been forced to move online – not by any virus but as a consequence of government action – and most people will not even notice that gradually, incrementally, we are approaching ever nearer to something like China’s hi-tech total surveillance system of Social Credit? Vaccination passes and digital ID systems incorporating iris-scanning technology, subcutaneous inserts etc. will be but the thin end of the wedge. Meanwhile the ‘sustainable’ world of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and the ‘Green New Deal’, both much hyped in the media, promises to be even more hi-tech and dehumanised than the present.

Is all this “just happening”? No, it isn’t. Are we going where we need to be going? No, we are not, for where we need to be going is towards a threefold society that affirms the autonomy and interrelationship of the freethinking human individual, but apparently, we are where we need to be going as determined by the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates and Klaus Schwab of the WEF. The degree of public compliance with the will of our scientific and political masters which most of the population have obeyed so meekly over the past year, a single will that brooks no alternative opinions and is reinforced daily by mainstream media propaganda that excludes any such dissident opinions that challenge the ‘Big State’ or “Big Brother” – all this suggests that we are indeed heading in a monistic, neo-fascist direction. Obedience due to fear, is one key aspect of life in a (neo-)fascist State. A single dominant ideology, reinforced repeatedly with simplistic slogans and images, and endless bombastic assertions about the nation’s achievements in “defeating the deadly enemy” are other such features of a (neo-) fascist State.

The New Order

On 19 February the licence-payer-funded BBC, in recent years very much a supporter of Bill Gates and his twin causes celebres, climate change and vaccines, began a series of radio programmes, broadcast every morning for a week, in which extracts from Gates’ new book How To Avoid a Climate Disaster were read out over the week. An hour later on the same day and on the same channel, BBC Radio 4, another new short series began: “Britain’s Fascist Thread” tracing the history of fascism in Britain over the last 100 years. As we can see from the United States, a tendency is emerging from western governments and the media to lump Trump supporters, anti-lockdown protestors, vaccine refusers and those who disagree with the global warming agenda with the Far Right (and/or ‘fascists’) and with “domestic terrorists”. We see this same tendency in the propaganda put out by the WEF with its affirmation of the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement(8) which also argues for such things as ‘defunding the police’ and ‘decolonising academic curricula”.

Such activist organisations focus on accusing and blaming entire ethnic or racial groups in the name of ‘racial justice’, rather than on reconciliation and harmony, and the result is more racial division, hatred and antipathy. Another key element in 20th century fascism was the stirring up of such ethnic hatreds and antipathies: the extreme insistence on ethnic and racial difference as against the universal human being. 20th century fascism thus affirmed ethnic sameness and ‘purity’ within cultures while radically asserting the difference of its own ethnos vis-à-vis those of other societies. By contrast, the ‘neo-fascism’ of the 21st century is not interested in extreme difference. If anything, it seeks to forge a uniformity of values and practice while at the same time hypocritically urging the importance of ‘diversity’. It affirms diversity in outer, personal lifestyles and ethnicities in a society, but demands uniformity of opinions and values within that same society. The BBC and the American alphabet media companies (ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN et al), for example, may pretend to cater to a large variety of lifestyles, ethnic and otherwise, but the political, economic and philosophical opinions and values which such corporations affirm are constrained within a very narrow span that tends to uniformity and will not challenge the values and interests of the emergent 21st century form of global capitalist oligarchy.

This emergent, 21st century form of ‘soft fascism’, with its links with global corporate interests and NGOs, as evidenced in the intolerant, censorious and manipulative actions of ‘Big Tech’ companies and repressive and vandalistic, COVID-19-obsessed governments, claims to be multicultural, cosmopolitan and globalised, but it actually undermines social values and social harmony by insisting on its one inevitable vision of the future with which all, in the whole world, must comply. Whether by forcing or ‘nudging’, the effort to get everyone to submit to this vision of an inevitable future is bound to cause social acrimony and stress.

This emergent ‘soft’ fascism or ‘soft’ totalitarianism makes out that it is merely a continuation of ‘liberal democracy’ and the heir to the values of ‘The Enlightenment’, but actually, global corporations, and the globalised media and national governments that are aligned with the financial, scientific and technological, environmental and ‘medical’ (pharmacological) interests of those corporations are shaping a society that is moving further and further away from anything that is genuinely ‘liberal’ or ‘democratic’. On the contrary, they are actively engaged in imposing a uniform mode of anti-liberal oligarchy upon the world, with media organisations such as the BBC, ITV, Sky and the American ‘alphabet’ TV stations functioning as propaganda injection systems for these global corporate interests.

The technocratic ‘new order of scientocracy’ that we have seen emerge in the COVID-19 so-called ‘crisis’, in which governments claim to be acting only with the guidance of a priestly cadre of scientists, will not abolish private economic activity, although it has already severely damaged small business interests, many of which have been driven to closure or bankruptcy – not “by COVID” but by government actions in response to the ‘crisis’. Nor did fascist states in the 20th century abolish private industry and business, unlike communist states. Fascist states in the past allowed privilege, luxuries and hedonism for those with money and connections and permitted private business, both great and small, to exist. The same is true today in our emerging ‘new order’. As mentioned above, a fascist State or society today does not need to be one based on racism or other ethnic considerations. But it will be authoritarian, even if ‘softly’ so; it will brook no real opposition. It will censor, block, de-platform, and castigate opinions deemed to be hostile to government policy on key issues, as has increasingly been happening in recent years in various western countries, where, for example, we see Big Tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter collaborating with governments to suppress even professional scientific and medical opinions that do not go along with the government or WHO line on COVID-19 or global warming (a.k.a. ‘climate change’). And whereas the fascist regimes in the past enforced social conformity by creating inequality (a second-class citizenry) in a society on an ethnic basis, ultimately our new mode of fascism will also enforce social conformity by creating inequality and second-class citizens with restricted rights and liberties – the unvaccinated, for example, or those who refuse so-called ‘smart’ technology. These will be – indeed, already are being – labelled “Luddites”, “conspiracy theorists”, “Far Right”, “fascists” and “domestic terrorists”.(9)

The very word ‘fascism’ conjures up, amongst other things, images of authority, paternalism and punishment; it comes from the ancient Roman ‘fasces’, a bundle of tall, bound rods carried by the lictors, a corps of men who guarded Rome’s magistrates as they walked around the city. These ‘fasces’ symbolised the authority of the State to punish wrongdoers either by corporal punishment, if the crime was committed within the inner precincts of Rome, or capital punishment if a serious crime was committed in the outer precincts, in which case an axe was added to the bundle of rods carried by the lictors when they were in the outer precincts.

The Incarnation of Ahriman

All of the changes that are taking place in our so-called liberal democracies as we watch them morph before our eyes into something quite different are not “just happening”, nor are they inevitable. They are happening, in the view of this writer, because of a spiritual event that has been taking place behind the scenes of modern life – the incarnation in human form of the being known in spiritual science as Ahriman, the inspirer of materialism, fear and untruth. In the winter of 1919(10) Steiner indicated how this being would appear in human form very early in the third millennium and hinted that it would be “in the West”, which many Anthroposophers have plausibly taken to mean America.

I have argued elsewhere that Ahriman incarnated in the year 2000, and that since May 2020, he has therefore been in his 21st year of life as a human being.(11) According to Rudolf Steiner, his incarnation comes as the third of the three great incarnations of mighty spiritual beings that have shaped or framed human development since the end of the 4th millennium BC. The two previous incarnations were those of the being traditionally known as Lucifer (not Satan) in a priest in China c.3000 BC, and that of the solar Logos (Christ) in Jesus 2000 years ago in Israel. Ahriman will thus be manifesting as a human adult – and Steiner emphasised that the incarnation would be, like the previous two, in fleshly human form i.e. not in some mechanical form or in the form of the Internet etc – 2000 years after the Incarnation, ministry, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We can notice the emphasis laid upon the year 2030 and the decade of the 2030s by the advocates of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Green New Deal lobby, the UN, the WEF, the climate change campaigners, the government of Saudi Arabia and many others. We can recall the terrible events of the 1930s. We can feel how events appear to be approaching a climax – economically, as the system that has been operated since the Second World War totters; politically, in the rapidly worsening relations between ‘the West’ and Russia/China, and the failure of the West to resolve the problems of its tired, broken and often corrupt political system; culturally, as relations between social groups, ethnicities, generations and individuals appear to be disintegrating and a mood of dystopia and despair has been spreading, or rather, has been spread, through our cultural life. All of this points towards a continuous, crisis-ridden situation in which uncomprehending, desperate millions will eagerly welcome the ideas of a saviour, a Messiah, a great dictator-figure or perhaps philosopher-scientist-businessman who will claim to be able to put the world to rights, rather like Obama and Trump claimed they would do for the USA, and millions believed them. These ideas will either be put forward by the individual himself or by proxies acting on his behalf. A similar scenario was sketched out by the Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev at the end of the 19th century in his A Short Story of the Anti-Christ. What the world got instead in the years that followed was two very hot world wars, one cold world war, and numerous dreadful genocides. What Soloviev likely correctly pointed to was that most of humanity would fall for the temptation of his Anti-Christ figure but that a minority would not and that through them, humanity would survive and go on.

It is clear from what Steiner said about the incarnation of Ahriman that it cannot be prevented and will occur; it is a colossal event prescribed in evolution. It challenges us to comprehend it, to see through it, even to learn from it where we can, to resist the dehumanising temptation it represents in its technological enticements and thus to enable the human spirit and heart to go on, to suffer this event and come out the other side of it with our spirit and heart intact, capable of creating a new society with new, threefold ideas on the basis of where we truly need to be going in this fifth epoch. Whilst humanity, despite immense suffering, passed through the tribulations of 1914-45, it was unable to find its way to the ideas that truly correspond to the needs of our modern epoch and, instead, either continued old ideas of culture, politics and economy or else was distracted by ‘new’ delusions. In the next two decades, at least one sizeable section of humanity will have to pass through the tribulation that Ahriman brings, come out the other side, and, free of all delusions, be ready to build a human society that the children of the 21st century really need. To prepare for this, to prepare for the 2040s and beyond, and to get through the cascade of crises that will be coming in the next two decades, in order that things do not “just happen” to us, those of us who see through what is happening will need above all to create links with others – community and fellowship for mutual support, not with all and sundry, but with those who are clear-eyed and committed. “Only connect”, wrote E.M. Forster in his great novel Howard’s End not long before the First World War. But we will not have time to connect with all comers. Aware of our errors in the past, we will need to avoid those who drain our energies, who are fanatical and fanciful; we will need to connect with clarity and commitment.

Notes

1 See the documentary “Princes of the Yen” at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2gE4knl2Ac

2 For the manipulation of communications and “flooding the zone”, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBuP40H4Tko

3 See his book The Core Points of the Social Question (Collected Works GA 23), published in English as Towards Social Renewal (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1999).

4 Karl Heyer, ‘Social Impulses of the Middle Ages and their Transformation in the Threefolding of the Social Organism’, first published in Das Goetheanum, Vol VI, No. 27, 28, 37, 38, July and September 1927, pp. 213-214, 218-221, 294/295, 303/304 and in Karl Heyer, Wer ist der deutsche Volksgeist? (Perseus Verlag, 1990) pp. 30-32.

5 For example: massive impersonal architecture, pyramidal hierarchical structures, cryonics, mass ritual spectacles, cryonic preservation, materialism in general.

6 Francis Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623). See Paul Emberson, From Gondhishapur to Silicon Valley (Etheric Dimensions Press, 2000, pp.50-59).

7 Bernard Boudreau, (1999). “Pursuit of science, New social factors“. In Canadian Family Physician Vol. 45: 1134–1136, 1141–1136. Boudreau is a Canadian lawyer, politician, and a critic of ‘scientocracy’. 

8 See video ‘A Short History of Black Lives Matter’ on this page: https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/10/trained-marxist-and-blm-co-founder-patrisse-cullors-signs-warner-bros-tv-deal/

9 Opinion piece in The Washington Post (28.2.2021): ‘Anti-vaccine extremism is akin to domestic terrorism’: https://web.archive.org/web/20210301015135if_/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/anti-vaccine-extremism-is-akin-to-domestic-terrorism/2021/02/26/736aee22-787e-11eb-8115-9ad5e9c02117_story.html and Nick Cohen in The Guardian (27.2.2021): ‘It is only a matter of time before we turn on the unvaccinated’: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/27/it-is-only-a-matter-of-time-before-we-turn-on-the-unvaccinated?fbclid=IwAR3wE1EoRSaWHL_Aj_q9ii3cWs3OUBPuPtRLbBLM-sR6CV01mit8Is8YxU4 

10 Lectures by Rudolf Steiner, 1,2,4,9,15 Nov. 1919 in Collected Works GA 191. Lecture of 4 Nov in GA 193.

11 The Present Age magazine Vol. 5 Nos. 7/8, Oct/Nov 2019 and Vol. 5, Nos. 9/10, May/June 2020 Also at: http://threeman.org/?p=2905