Most Americans think the system is broken. Here’s what a new one would look like.
According to a new poll, a majority of Americans think society needs a major overhaul. But where can we find the ideas to accomplish this? In social threefolding.
In a Times/Siena poll last month, 69% of respondents thought American society is in critical condition, with 55% of them believing it needs “major changes” and the other 14% feeling it should be “torn down entirely.”
Let’s just pause and let that sink in. 14% of Americans think the country is beyond repair.1 That nothing we have is worth saving. That it should be “torn down entirely.” That we should simply start over.
But of course that begs the question: If we tear it down, how would we rebuild it differently? Without a clear understanding of what would be better, wouldn’t we just rebuild the same old thing? Of course we would.
Because our social systems are just a product of our thinking. They’re born of our ideas. We built these systems, and if we want to change them in major ways, then we have to change our thinking in major ways. We need new ideas, and they can’t be arbitrary, pie-in-the-sky ideas (“No one should have to work, and everyone should be kind to each other!”), they have to be based in reality — the reality of who we are and what we can accomplish. They have to be doable.
So radical changes, but also practical ones... it’s a tall order.
Luckily, we find such ideas in the social insights of Rudolf Steiner, often referred to as “social threefolding.” What follows is a brief sketch of those insights. Many of them might seem new and strange to readers, and that newness and strangeness will be the greatest hurdle to understanding them. We say we want new ideas, but really we have little patience for anything unfamiliar, for anything we haven’t already thought of ourselves.
But even if the ideas might seem a little strange at first, the goals should be immediately recognizable. Here are some of the major changes that threefolding, and this essay, address:
Ending the culture wars,
Diminishing the gap between the rich and the poor,
Stewarding the earth’s resources responsibly, and
Addressing the dignity (and income) of everyday workers.
Those are big issues, but that’s the task today. We can no longer fool ourselves into thinking everything is fine, that things just need a few minor tweaks here and there. So what’s a vision of society that can actually address such issues? Let’s dive in and find out.
Social Threefolding
First, a word about what’s wrong with society.
People are dissatisfied. Maybe they’re hungry — they simply don’t have enough, and they feel like the system is rigged against them. Or maybe they do have enough, but still, the generally accepted ‘Purpose of Life’ — to work like a dog in the hope of retiring some day — just seems pointless. Is this really what I came here to do? To be a consumer? To sit around watching Netflix until I die? To help maintain the status quo?
On top of that, society seems to be going mad. On the one hand, we’re more lonely than ever. On the other, we’re at each other’s throats. We can’t seem to stand each other. And every issue we care about seems to be getting worse.
Things seem pretty hopeless.
Finding Our Right Place
When it comes to turning things around, the first thing we should recognize is that people need a place in society. We’re all part of this community and we all need to be able to contribute, to find work that’s fulfilling to us, that draws on our capacities and is actually of service to the world.
But we’re also not just workers. Yes, we need meaningful work, but we also need rest and renewal, we need to keep growing and developing ourselves as human beings. And we need to participate in politics, not just by sitting on the sidelines cheering for our side, but by actually taking part in government. After all, democracy is meant to be self-governance.
I’ve just touched on the three realms of society that threefolding describes — we work in the economic realm, we develop and express ourselves in the cultural realm, and we make agreements (laws) about our shared rights and responsibilities in the political realm. And we need to be actively involved in all three.
Not only that though, the actual substance of these realms needs to come out of us — they shouldn’t be top-down but grass-roots. We the people should shape society out of our own activity.
This will look different in different sectors. In political life, everyone should have an equal say. In cultural life, individuals should determine their own developmental path, their own worldview and belief system. And in economic life, groups of people — based on how their work fits into the supply chain — should be working with other groups and associations to meet everyone’s needs.
The society we need, the society our hearts yearn for, is one that needs us back. It’s a society that needs us to have a real say in our government and laws, that needs us to develop our individual capacities and gifts, and that needs us to give those gifts — to work, to serve others.
The society we need is one that needs us to participate fully.
I’d say that’s threefolding in a nutshell. But of course a grass-roots, radically participatory society will sound hopelessly utopian to many. So how do we get there?
Becoming Inspired by Humanity’s True Nature
At the beginning of this essay, I said that any useful ideas for a healthy society will have to be based on the reality of who we are and what we can accomplish. But the last part of that (what we can accomplish), actually depends on the first part (who we are).
Many social scientists follow Adam Smith’s lead in claiming that human beings are primarily self-interested — “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Our social systems, they reason, should be based on the reality of self-interest — what they consider the bedrock of human nature — and not on some idea of how people should be.
And it’s true that we are self-interested, just as it’s true that we’re exploitative, jealous, and resentful. But it’s also true that we’re not only those things. We’re also generous, joyful, and intelligent. We’re obviously many things — human nature is multifaceted. And some of those things we’re trying to grow out of (our lower nature), and some of those things we’re trying to grow into (our ideals).
So why would we base any of our social systems on our lower nature? We don’t do this anywhere else in society — no one argues for creating social systems that foster authoritarianism or conformity of belief (even though our lower nature would love nothing more than to dominate others and force them to think like us). Instead we strive to create systems that foster equality and freedom of thought. These are ideals that burn in our hearts, and they too, are a part of our nature — what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” — but we have to strive to realize them. And this is what’s most important about human nature: Fundamentally human beings are striving beings.
So, again, why would we create an economic system that encourages selfishness? Shouldn’t we create an economy that encourages solidarity, just as we strive for political and cultural systems that encourage equality and freedom?
These three ideals — freedom, equality, and solidarity — have burned in human hearts for a long time. But if we truly want major changes, they’ll have to burn far brighter.
Because that’s the only thing that will transform society — the strength of our ideals. It’s how dictators have been overthrown and democracies formed. People became inspired, fired up by some ideal. If they hadn’t — if they’d just sat around watching the corn grow (or watching Netflix) — then nothing would have changed.
So we can only hope to accomplish radical change if we base it on a much more dynamic and realistic understanding of human nature, one that includes our “better angels” — that which we’re striving to be. To think that real change could happen in any other way is a joke.
We’ve already covered a lot, so let’s take a moment to recap.
A big part of our discontent is the lack of meaning in our lives.
For our own health and society’s health, we need to participate much more fully.
Society has three basic realms, or functions: cultural, political, and economic.
And there are three core ideals that live in human hearts: freedom, equality, and solidarity.
One of Steiner’s major insights was that these three core ideals are actually connected to the three realms: Freedom is the main ideal for our cultural life (freedom of thought and expression), equality is the main ideal for our political life, and solidarity is the main ideal for our economic life.
In a way, it’s quite strange that we’ve never thought about these things, that we’ve never asked, “What are the basic functions of society?” (even though some of our most renowned anthropologists have recognized them), and then come to see that economic life has a very different purpose than political life (the life of laws and rights), and that both again are different from the cultural life (the life of the mind, of identity and ethnicity, of spiritual growth and development). It’s strange that we’ve never asked how these three functions should function together — how they should balance and harmonize each other, and what their rightful tasks and domains might be.
But the fact that we’re trying to build society without knowing these things is like trying to construct a bridge without knowing the laws of engineering. Chaos is the inevitable result.
The Culture Wars
When we begin to orient ourselves to the three realms of society, and recognize how humanity’s core ideals relate to them, then things start to make more sense and we can begin to discern a path forward.
For instance: the culture wars.
If the ideal of freedom was fully alive in our hearts, then we’d feel the need for people to follow their own conscience, their own beliefs. We’d want freedom not just for our ideas, but even for the ideas we hate. We wouldn’t want pro-vax or anti-vax views to be censored, nor pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian voices to be silenced. We’d still believe in our own ideas completely, but we’d also believe in the sanctity and dignity of others. We’d believe that others need to follow their own path, that we can perhaps persuade them of our beliefs over time, but we can’t force them to believe what we believe.
You see, the culture wars are just ideological wars — they’re born out of the desire to force others to think like us — and we fight them through our institutions. Our institutions are the battleground, and that’s the problem.
Liberals and conservatives fight over what’s real or fake news, what’s taught in the schools, what books are in the libraries, what medicines we can take, what scientific research is valid. And that would all be fine if we were just trying to persuade each other. It wouldn’t be a war at all.
But instead we use our institutions to censor and ban each other. We beg those in charge — government officials, university admins, corporate execs — to muzzle our enemies, to remove their posts from social media and take down their signs on university campuses. So we don’t just wield the power of our ideas against each other. We use force.
That force has to be taken away. But how?
One thing is to make changes to the government so it can’t be used as a weapon. The First Amendment ensures that the state doesn’t meddle in religion, which means you don’t hear politicians arguing over what’s preached in churches, or calling religious leaders to congressional hearings to explain their doctrines. They don’t meddle in these things, because the structure of government simply won’t allow it. Now we need similar amendments to ensure the government won’t meddle in education, science, or medicine. Because culture and state have to be separated completely if we want to keep culture from dominating politics, and politics from dominating culture. Politicians should have nothing to say on cultural matters — they shouldn’t oppose or support any cultural position.
But then there’s still the question of how culture should be supported, and here an economic question comes into play. In order to be “free,” culture has to be freely created, but it should also be freely received — it should only be created if people want it, which means it needs to rely on the support of those who recognize its value. A free culture is a grassroots culture that springs out of the people and speaks to the people. But this means that everyone needs the money to support it. And for this to happen, people need to receive enough money from what they produce so they can meet all their needs — not just their material needs (so they don’t starve) but also their cultural needs (so they thrive). Such an income is what Steiner refers to as receiving a “true price” for one’s goods or services.
And such an income would enable us to make our own cultural choices — to support the journalism, arts, and science that speak to us. Most importantly, it would allow us to send our kids to the schools we want, leveling the playing field between the rich and the poor so that everyone starts out with the same basic opportunities, the same basic choices.
But until this happens — until we sort out our issues around money and income distribution (which I’ll touch on momentarily) — a political solution will still be necessary. It’s certainly not ideal, but it is possible to do a lot through government vouchers. In some states there are already voucher systems that allow parents to send their kids to the school of their choosing. The same could be done for journalism (see Robert McChesney’s “Citizen News Vouchers”), medicine, art, and all the other fields of culture.
A truly free cultural life would mean not using the instruments of business and government to manipulate what others think and believe. When we accomplish that, the culture wars will be over.
The Gap Between the Rich and the Poor
(…and Stewarding the Earth’s Resources Responsibly)
First of all, this gap isn’t completely wrong. There’s reason to argue that entrepreneurs deserve a bigger piece of the pie — they’ve taken an initiative on everyone’s behalf, an initiative that requires inspiration, hard work, and risk.
But there are all sorts of things that distort this picture and lead them to getting far too large a piece of the pie.
One is that it ‘takes money to make money’ (or as Ben Franklin put it: “after getting the first hundred pounds, it is more easy to get the second”). To start a business you need access to capital and resources, which rich people have and poor people don’t.
But why? Why should rich people have greater access to capital and resources? Are they better-suited to direct our economy because they were born into money? Of course not. If we were serious that the economy should meet everyone’s needs (which is its whole purpose) and therefore run as efficiently as possible, then we’d always look for the most capable entrepreneurs to take initiative. Period.
To really do so, we’d have to change our current ownership laws. Of course that will immediately throw up red flags for some people (“he’s a communist!”), but if we try to stick to actual ideas, and not lose our minds, then we’d see that ownership laws are just that — laws: shared agreements that we make about our lives together, including how we want to collectively work with our shared resources. Our current ownership laws are not set in stone. God never decreed that over 50% of England’s land should be owned by less than 1% of its population, as I’ve written about previously.
If we were serious about creating a healthy economy, then we’d make ownership laws that put resources into the hands of the most productive people, then takes those resources back again when they’re are no longer productive. Rudolf Steiner called this form of ownership “circulating ownership” because it circulates resources “from the capable to the capable.”
If we then ask — What would be the mechanism for determining who’s capable? — it would have to be people, actual people who themselves can recognize capacity. This does not mean the government. The government’s role is to make just laws and then police them. They’re not meant to direct our activities but only to ensure that our activities accord with the laws they’ve made. So we need stewarding bodies to manage and conserve our resources — nonprofits consisting of people knowledgeable in the relevant fields.
This form of ownership also addresses the question of how we can end the extravagant waste that is the hallmark of our current treatment of the earth, but it’s not some grand panacea that will solve all our problems. There are still problems galore. I will mention only one other that’s closely related: the question of labor, and with it, the question of money and income.
Addressing the dignity (and income) of everyday workers
The problem with our ownership laws is that we’re treating resources as a commodity when they’re not. Land is a right (or more accurately, a “bundle of rights” — the right to exclude others, to build, to exploit minerals, etc., etc). A commodity is something that human beings have worked on — it is land that has been transformed into potato chips or microchips, and which can then be brought to market.
And we have this same confusion when it comes to labor. We’ve commodified people’s labor, but it’s clearly not a commodity. The work I put into growing potatoes is not the same as the potatoes themselves, but we treat them the same in society. And then we wonder why our systems don’t function so well…
One of the worst effects of this confusion is the power differential that arises between employers and employees. Here’s how we usually see the situation: The employer “buys” the employee’s labor, and although the employee has some government protections, almost all of the power is in the employer’s hands. They decide what they’ll pay their employees and what they’ll pay themselves.
But now let’s try to see it differently. If labor isn’t actually a commodity, then what’s actually taking place? — All that’s really happening is that the employee and employer are two people creating and selling a product together, and afterwards they’re dividing up the profits of that sale. But because they don’t see the situation clearly, the employer thinks he’s really the one creating the product, and he’s just buying his employee’s labor as a commodity, in the same way he buys any other materials needed for the production process.
Both of these scenarios describe the exact same situation, but they see it differently. And that perception matters; it determines our actions. Can you imagine how differently we’d treat labor if we saw it in this new way, the true way? (— Because again, labor isn’t actually a commodity.) Can you imagine how the worker would experience themselves differently, would experience their own dignity differently if they saw themselves as co-producers with their employers, and not as mere appendages to their commodified labor?
Such a system would allow every worker to negotiate with one another in order to find a “true price” for their share of the product — a price, an income, that allows them (and their dependents) to live well and meet all of their material and cultural needs. And that brings us back to free culture...
There’s obviously more to say on this topic, but let’s leave it there for now. If you’re interested, you can read other essays of mine on this topic here and here.
I imagine these ideas might have made your head spin a little by now, but that shouldn’t be a reason to call them utopian. As I’ve tried to make clear, they’re actually entirely realistic, far more realistic than what currently exists. Because the reality is that people are not only self-interested — we have ideals in our hearts, and we’ve always striven to form our systems out of those ideals. To pretend otherwise is nonsense. And the reality is that society is threefold — culture is simply a part of it, it’s a function of society that’s just as significant as the functions of business and government. And the reality is that the culture wars will never end unless we can keep them from spilling into our institutional life, into politics and business. And the reality is that land, labor, and capital are not commodities. They’re simply not.
We can of course ignore these realities — we can twist and distort our social life, manipulate it so it serves me and my group — but we do so at our own peril.
The last thing I want to point out is how all these realities are tied together. Society truly is a “social organism.” If we don’t learn to see it whole — if we don’t try to understand how the different parts relate to one another but instead try to solve our issues in isolation — then we’ll always be working with partial, and therefore misguided ideas. We have to become courageous enough to deal with society’s complexity.
It is a difficult task, but a necessary one. And when we begin to walk this path, when we begin to catch a glimpse of the whole social organism (as I’ve tried to portray in this essay), then we’ll start to see its interconnections, its harmonies and symmetries, and we’ll begin to fall in love with it in a whole new way.
When that happens, the task of social change will still be difficult, but it will no longer be so heavy. Because the work becomes light when it’s not just about tearing things down, but instead about building something necessary, something useful, something beautiful.
Yes, writers have to eat, but paywalls just punish low-income people, and why shouldn’t they have access to the writing and ideas they want?
The survey isn’t totally representative as it doesn’t include all the states, but only the swing states that are most important to the presidential election in November.
"The First Amendment ensures that the state doesn’t meddle in religion, which means you don’t hear politicians arguing over what’s preached in churches, or calling religious leaders to congressional hearings to explain their doctrines. They don’t meddle in these things, because the structure of government simply won’t allow it. "
--- Project 2025 will end all that.
This has been much easier for me to understand. Thank you