{"id":61506,"date":"2024-11-21T11:52:44","date_gmt":"2024-11-21T10:52:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/?p=61506"},"modified":"2024-11-21T11:52:49","modified_gmt":"2024-11-21T10:52:49","slug":"real-social-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/real-social-change\/","title":{"rendered":"Real Social Change"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The election campaign has come to an end, but the battle goes on. A reflection on the US elections from the perspective of social threefolding.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Trump is loud. But it\u2019s not just Trump. It\u2019s our feelings about Trump. They\u2019re all shouts of anxiety, hatred, hope, exultation. It makes discussing politics like trying to hold a study group at a heavy metal concert. \u201cExcuse me! Can you turn down the volume just a<\/em> hair<\/em>?\u201d No, that won\u2019t work. We have to turn it down in ourselves. If we do, we might find Trump\u2019s story isn\u2019t all that new. It\u2019s the same one we tell every political season: the system is broken, we need change, we need someone to fix it. (\u201cTrump will fix it\u201d becomes the campaign slogan.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This season, it\u2019s Trump who is the \u201ccandidate of change.\u201d This is the mantle that Obama wore before him (\u201cChange we can believe in\u201d), and really that every president has worn. It\u2019s also the mantle Kamala Harris largely refused. When asked on the daytime talk show The View<\/em>, \u201cWould you have done something differently than President Biden during the last four years?\u201d she famously replied, \u201cThere\u2019s not a thing that comes to mind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Trump\u2019s story isn\u2019t new, the sheer loudness of it is. The fever pitch. How we blast it from all sides\u2014across newspapers, billboards, lawn signs. This is life or death! It\u2019s now or never! We\u2019ll either keep our democracy or lose it! We\u2019ll either elect a tyrant or a savior!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Can We Live Amidst the Simmering Hysteria?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

How can one go on with life the day after? We were told that Harris called and congratulated Trump the day after the election and that \u201cboth leaders agreed on the importance of unifying the country.\u201d But what does that mean? We were told for so long that Trump is a fascist who will destroy America. Is Harris now saying we should unite under a fascist leader?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moving forward, we’re faced with two dangers. One is that our hysteria becomes exhaustion\u2014when the alarms never stop ringing, you might as well go back to sleep. The other is that the hysteria becomes violence\u2014the alarms never stop ringing, people hit the streets, protesters clash with counter-protesters, and the National Guard is called in. Either might lead us down the road to fascism. If they do, the hysteria will have driven us there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are real possibilities under a second Trump presidency. But what\u2019s not<\/em> possible is real change. Why? Because Trump lacks real ideas. He lacks an understanding of what the social and spiritual scientist Rudolf Steiner called \u201carchetypal\u201d ideas\u2014the basic realities, or \u201cprimary matters,\u201d that are the cause of our unrest. As Steiner put it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Something else is connected with the social understanding that we need: our capacity to delve back into fundamental, primary matters and not hang our social insight upon secondary or tertiary things, which are only an after-effect.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

As the old saying goes, Trump is just \u201cmoving deck chairs on the Titanic.\u201d Tariffs and tax breaks won\u2019t make things better. Deporting immigrants won\u2019t heal our sick society. For a moment during his 2016 campaign, Trump did actually stumble upon a real idea. He found that he got a strong response when he talked about the rot<\/em> of Washington\u2014how politicians are captured by big business, how they\u2019re bought and sold by billionaires. And so he railed against it. The call rang out at his rallies: \u201cDrain the swamp!\u201d This is indeed a primary cause of our unrest\u2014we need a clear separation between business and government. It\u2019s something that could have unified the country\u2014it\u2019s something almost all Americans care about. But did Trump do<\/em> anything about it as president? Of course not. And he won\u2019t in his second term, either. Washington will remain a swamp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Can We Do About It?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The culture wars are the white-hot center of all this hysteria, and the culture wars are fundamentally clashes over belief. At this point, the right and left despise<\/em> each other\u2019s beliefs. But how can we de-escalate these wars? How can we soothe this rage? Do we all just have to believe the same thing? That will never happen, but we could end the wars tomorrow if we really understood America\u2019s first and best idea, the one embodied in our First Amendment\u2014the idea of freedom of belief<\/em>. We could end the wars tomorrow if we didn\u2019t try to force our beliefs down our enemy\u2019s throats\u2014if we didn\u2019t tell them what to do with their bodies, what they can say online, what their children will be taught at school. Because all these things are experienced as a visceral attack on the very core of who we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump is not a peacemaker in this war; he\u2019s one of its most belligerent generals. And Harris is no different. Trump and Harris, and those who come after, will never understand such ideas if we don\u2019t understand them ourselves. If we can\u2019t clearly recognize the healthy limits of government, they won\u2019t either. It will never dawn on them that the government shouldn\u2019t have a hand in education, medicine, or academic research. They\u2019ll never see why we need new forms of economic cooperation if we want to meet everyone\u2019s needs while still living within the Earth\u2019s bounds. But there\u2019s hopefully still time for us<\/em> to understand such archetypal ideas. And there are giants like Rudolf Steiner who have gone before and described them to us. It\u2019s time we listened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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More<\/strong> The Whole Social<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image <\/strong>Ella Lapointe, Election<\/em>, 2024<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The election campaign has come to an end, but the battle goes on. A reflection on the US elections from the perspective of social threefolding. Trump is loud. But it\u2019s not just Trump. It\u2019s our feelings about Trump. They\u2019re all shouts of anxiety, hatred, hope, exultation. It makes discussing politics like trying to hold a study group at a heavy metal concert. \u201cExcuse me! Can you turn down the volume just a hair?\u201d No, that won\u2019t work. We have to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12467,"featured_media":61437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8838,8788,8790],"tags":[11584,11585,8814],"class_list":["post-61506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-time-issues","category-essay-en","category-society-en","tag-ausgabe-47-2024-en","tag-english-issue-47-2024","tag-musings"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12467"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}