Meditation
The article: On the Altar of Love
Chapter 5
The worshipping of idols and Armageddon
Since not all people are equally competent money-hunters, we see here the rare thing that some beings have acquired such gigantic proceeds from the hunt that they are about to be choked by superabundance, while others are equipped with a talent for hunting so poor that they can take almost no part at all in the vital and sometimes brutal and bloody hunt for money.
In the worst cases they have to live in poverty and hunger, by begging and in degradation.
This is completed and emphasized by the fact that the most competent hunters have already long since conquered the hunting-grounds themselves, so that millions of people have no direct access to any hunting-ground.
They can then gain only indirect access to the hunting-grounds, an access that is very much reduced or impaired by the conditions that the owners of the hunting-grounds feel justified in demanding be fulfilled by those to whom they give access to their areas.
But there are also many people the world over who have no access at all to the vital hunting-grounds.
They must therefore languish to death in degradation and ruin, since they can get neither physical nor mental nourishment.
The modern culture of today, with its owners of the hunting-grounds (the employers or the possessing class) and those who have merely an indirect and reduced access to the hunting-grounds (the workers), together with those who have no access at all to the hunting-grounds (the unemployed), is thus in reality in the social area still not raised up to a stage where the name "culture" is totally or one hundred per cent justified.
True human culture is not a social order where the clever and strong steal the vital necessities from the less clever and the less strong, and live according to the principle "Every man for himself".
For a social order within which it is possible to live in excess, gluttony and wastefulness, while others perish in need and misery because they have no access to earning their daily bread, the term "culture" can only be an ironic description.
The social morality of modern culture has consequently given rise to world history's greatest and most deadly and bloody wars in all fields.
Everyone is at war with everyone else.
Everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, seeks consciously or unconsciously, openly or covertly, to plunder or use everyone else.
This holds true between the states as well as between man and man.
As a safeguard against this there have gradually arisen various forms of "war defence", "standing armies" on all fronts.
Firstly, there is thus the usual deadly military alert on land, on sea and in the air.
Then there are such organisations as trade unions, insurance companies, health insurance societies and the like.
What are these institutions other than more or less effective defence institutions against the evils to which the struggle for the financial hunting-grounds gives rise, institutions for those who cannot keep up with the struggle?
The primary structure of modern culture is thus a cult of money, a downright worship of the golden calf.
And as long as this worship of idols is controlling the majority of the earth's population, dictating politics and national government, determining success, position, honour and esteem, and enslaving people's sympathies and antipathies, then the Armageddon, death-cries, invalidity, illness, death by starvation, degradation and the oppression of war cannot possibly cease.