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
Matt Segall:
"Steiner left behind numerous initiatives, including social threefolding, rooted in his idea of the threefold human being. He proposed that the human soul could be understood in terms of thinking, feeling, and willing, with social problems stemming from disorders in these capacities. Steiner applied this threefold understanding of the healthy human being to the social organism, suggesting an analogy between the human organism and society, though with important differences.
The three spheres of the social organism—economic, political, and cultural—can be compared to the thinking, feeling, and willing capacities of the human being. However, Steiner noted that the analogy is not straightforward. While we might initially think that culture corresponds to thinking, politics to feeling, and economics to willing, Steiner reversed this analogy. He argued that the economic sphere is actually the head of the social organism, comparable to the intellect, while the cultural sphere corresponds to the metabolism, or the digestive system, of the social organism.
Steiner rejected the Marxist view of historical materialism, which suggests that material conditions and economic life are the primary drivers of history. Instead, he argued that economic life is actually the source of decay and death in society, with cultural and political life counterbalancing this by bringing in life and renewal. In this view, healthy economic life arises from cultural and spiritual life, not the other way around.
Steiner concluded that the element of death in economic life must be counterbalanced by what the cultural organism produces. He emphasized that the cultural and spiritual sphere is where human freedom is cultivated, and that while competition might be healthy in the cultural sphere, economic life should be based on cooperation, and political life on equality and fairness.
To illustrate threefolding in practice, we can take the example of education. In the United States, the public school system is controlled by the government, with standardized tests and a curriculum imposed by the state. Steiner believed that this top-down control stifles creativity and freedom in education. Instead, he proposed a system where education is a right (funded by gift money or taxes), but private schools are run by teachers, not the state, allowing for a diversity of educational approaches.
Steiner also addressed the issue of wage labor, which he saw as a form of wage slavery. He argued that workers should not be paid based on the time they work, but on the value of the products they produce, with fair salaries determined by need. This idea challenges the conventional wage system, which makes it difficult to implement due to state regulations.
Despite the challenges, Steiner’s ideas continue to be relevant today, particularly in the context of the social problems we face, such as the rise of nationalism, climate catastrophe, and a meaning crisis caused by materialism and nihilism. Steiner’s vision offers an alternative to liberalism, communism, and fascism—a vision that respects the autonomy of each of the three spheres of society.
Although Steiner’s threefolding movement faced opposition from all sides, he was not defeated. He believed that even if only a small group of people kept the flame of threefolding alive, the Earth would still radiate spiritual light into the cosmos. Steiner’s emphasis on awakening individual human beings to their spiritual and social responsibilities continues to inspire movements like Waldorf education, which embody his ideals of freedom, fairness, and fellowship in cultural life, the life of rights, and economic life.
While Steiner’s threefolding movement did not succeed on a large scale during his lifetime, the ideas he seeded continue to live on, waiting for a time when individuals may be ready to embrace them more fully. Steiner’s work reminds us that change begins with individuals and their associations, and that the future of society depends on our ability to cultivate a deeper understanding of the human being as a spiritual and not just a material being."
(https://footnotes2plato.substack.com/p/rudolf-steiners-threefold-social)
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)
More information
- For a detailed review of the threefold initiative in Germany, see Schmelzer, The Threefolding Movement. See also Boos, Michael gegen Michel.
* Article: THE URGENCY OF SOCIAL THREEFOLDING IN A WORLD STILL AT WAR WITH ITSELF. Matthew David Segall. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 19, no. 1, 2023
URL = https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1069/1723
"Rudolf Steiner’s proposal for the threefolding of society is introduced and applied to the present. It is argued that a conscious differentiation (not division) of economic, political, and cultural domains brings clarity to the healthy impulses seeking expression in each domain. The hope is that such a clarification facilitates the cultivation of the collective will and moral imagination required for addressing the thicket of social conflicts dividing humanity at both local and planetary scales."