Social Threefolding
Description
Integrated Emergence:
"Social threefolding refers to the idea that the three fundamental domains of social life—economic, cultural, and political—should be structured, organized, and orchestrated so that they obtain the best possible relationship between them (where ‘best possible’ means that all of these aspects of human life are oriented toward the overall thriving of humanity and earth, inclusive of everything. The orienting generalization is that there is a general and holistic ideal we’re striving for, collectively. I will refer to this ideal as ‘right relationship’). According to this line of thought, which was offered initially by Rudolf Steiner in the early 20th century, right relationship between these spheres entails a thoughtful and conscious separation and distinction between them. Economics should not overly dictate or constrain either culture or government; politics should not impede the abundance of economic relations or stifle culture; cultural trends should not dictate fluctuations in the arrangements of economic relations or the rules and principles of government, etc."
For Steiner:
- "In the free [cultural] life of the mind and spirit everyone plays a part according to his particular capacities; in the economic sphere everyone takes his place in a way that arises naturally from his associative relationships. In the political and legal sphere, each individual has an equal voice simply through being a human being, quite independently of the capacities with which he shares in the free life of the spirit or of the economic value of the goods he produces in the associative, economic sphere" (Towards Social Renewal, p. 11-12).
(https://integratedemergence.substack.com/p/decentralized-threefolding)
Discussion
The Separation of Church/Education/Money and State
Integrated Emergence:
"The foundations of social threefolding are already well-established in the founding principles and documents of modern democracies such as the USA. The widely accepted and respected separation of church and state is emblematic of the underlying importance of and reasons for such separations and distinctions. We learned through practice that having state control of religion is problematic. This is important and widely acknowledged, and yet we have not collectively comprehended the implications. As Seth Jordan helpfully points out, the same principle does and should apply to education, i.e., the state should not have control over our education for the same reason it should not have control over our religion—both are meaningfully understood as being within the domain of culture. And as our court system has fleshed out over time, the separation of culture and state is important, in part, “to create an independent ‘sphere of intellect and spirit’ that ensures that one has ‘autonomous control over the development of one’s intellect and personality.’ In short, it [ensures] the right to be ourselves and to fully develop ourselves as we see fit, without the state interfering.” (para 12).
This significant insight turns the familiar tensions and arguments about public vs private schooling on their head. It is easy to support and defend public education because it is free; but it is actually much harder, and much less justified or necessary, to defend public schools on the grounds that they should be government controlled. We’ve sacrificed the freedom to educate our children for the price of free state-sponsored indoctrination. That is not a sentence I ever thought I’d write, but after two decades of working in both public and private schools, it now strikes me as a rather clear description of both our current state and what is at stake. It helps to study the history of public education, from its origins in the Prussian military; and it helps to actually work in public district and charter schools in several major American cities, as I have. But even without that direct experience, it is possible to see and understand that the dichotomy between free public school for the people and elite private schools for the wealthy is a misleading and counterproductive one. The questions are: How should we educate our children? Who should decide? And how should we pay for it?
I have a lot to say about the first question, but generally speaking, as a parent and as a longtime educator and school leader, it is clear to me that there are many different ways to educate children and that I should have a say in how my child is educated. It is also quite clear that we could create a system that offered free education to all children while allowing for more freedom of choice for families, if that was our collective aim (which it currently is not, in part because of the confusion we have about how freedom of choice in the domain of education and culture relates to the state’s provision of free education). Without going too far down the path of explaining the pros and cons of different education systems and approaches, the point here is that we have good reason to think about the relationship between school and state similarly to how we think about the relationship between church and state, and this insight from the view of social threefolding could be tremendously helpful as we work to evolve our system of education to meet the needs of a diverse and dynamic global population. And even more to the point for this essay: a similar principle holds true for our understanding of the relationship between the economics of money and the centralized control of the state.
For Steiner, and potentially for anyone, economics refers to the realm of association whereby people exchange wealth, work, and value with each other. I would argue that overall, Steiner’s ideas about economics are way ahead of their time (and/or unrealistic; time will tell), and the ideals of social threefolding, which include an aspiration to create a truly transmonetary society, are not actually attainable in my lifetime, so I do not want to spend time explaining or defending his views, or how economics could look in an ideal world.2 But I do want to describe some important connections and implications related to the central insight that right relationship between economics and government entails right separation between the two domains. In short, we don’t want a state government in full control of our money system or supply, for various reasons. The emerging field of decentralized finance, or DeFi, in contrast to Traditional Finance, or TradFi, is pointing to the importance of these distinctions in new ways, and it is important for more people to understand what this portends."
(https://integratedemergence.substack.com/p/decentralized-threefolding)