Arthur Edwards

December 2006

When in 1924 Rudolf Steiner told a British audience: “whether or not your accounts may or may not be to your neighbour’s disadvantage - this is determined by the heart centre” he was challenging head-on the go-it-alone nature of Anglo-Saxon economic egotism. Modern social life is burdened by this. When we celebrate the achievements of a single undertaking, the effect it has had beyond its own parameters must also be included, if we are not to mask the wider concerns that frame economic life or be unwilling to acknowledge that together we make up the body economic. Yet how can we discover our decisive role in this without doing so intentionally, without creating the circumstances that allow people to make their activities visible together and without foreseeing the effects of what we do right down into the financial forms they take?

For Rudolf Steiner it was clear that nothing could be achieved alone, just as one cannot wake up in the middle of the night and know what the time is only by thinking. For this reason, he described the need for people to associate, and for associations to play a role in regulating economic life. We can do this, by “taming” money, which otherwise remains “wild”. Steiner described the need for us to reach with our consciousness into the dynamic processes behind money and for which it stands proxy, when he said “It is necessary above all to grasp the essential nature of money. People fail to grasp it precisely because it is always there before them without their being able to see what it really is. In the social organism “money as such” does not exist; there are only the three kinds of money.”

Although it works in an invisible way, money can be given a conscious nature and thereby be made to serve economic endeavour, rather than to undermine it by systematically seeking its own return. When, naturally enough, we put our own concerns centre stage, focusing on the success of our own ventures, we forget that all economic undertaking is a public endeavour. It is public not just in the sense that through work one meets other people, but because humanity must now reckon with the reality of global economy, which, in terms of finance is everywhere present, though it is veiled by an illusory understanding of the nature of money.

Much is said about the need to do things differently, especially among those who source their leading thoughts in Rudolf Steiner. Yet there seem to be few examples of entrepreneurs in formal association, because, for the most part, in spite of our ideas, which we can readily make sense of, we do not instruct our will. To do so would lead us to face the market and thereby to guide it, rather than, as now, to be led or enslaved by it.

The challenge of creating anything commensurate with Rudolf Steiner’s approach appears awesome: there is little encouragement to do so and much to dissuade people from taking even a first step towards association … yet how else is humanity to embark on the journey, far in the future though its destination may be, towards an economy whose signature is no longer ‘my will be done’?