The Immortality of Living Beings
The article: The Necessity of Spiritual Science
Chapter 16
Mankind's salvation is not a problem of goods or money but a psychic problem
Is it not glaringly wrong to maintain an administration of state within which intellectual people, who in many respects are already geniuses, should be chased around like a flock of dumb animals, like a flock of sheep or geese, by a dominant slave-driver or a group of slave-drivers who, through their mental structure and behaviour, reveal themselves as intellectual or spiritual nonentities?
Beings who publicly, by word or action, reveal that they "would rather live one day as a lion than a hundred days as a lamb", have unshakably revealed themselves as mental nonentities or retarded people on a plane where one creates humanity, culture, peace and happiness.
Is it not a fact that such a being belongs among the wild scalp- or head-hunters?
That intellectual mankind has sunk, in certain cases, to allowing such scalp- and head-hunters, either as individual dictators or as dictatorial power-groups, to do as they like with its life, soul and spirit, must invariably lead to a culturally destructive epoch of death like that under which the same mankind of today in wide areas, moans, sighs and groans.
Does one not think that it is about time one began to understand the necessity of getting to know mental or spiritual life, getting to know the mental structure of living beings, learning to realise how one should think, how one should use one's will or learning to understand what the relationship between ourselves and other living beings means?
Must the sphere of death become more drastic or glaring?
Have we not seen how the first conspicuous countries dictated by scalp- and head-hunters have fared?
Must the otherwise so sensible and democratically advanced countries now go the same way, allow themselves to be encapsulated in a ring of secret police, censorship and deprivation of liberty, concentration camps, gas chambers and slavery for the benefit of an insane or sadistic scalp- and head-hunting mentality?
Indeed, do not these countries already sigh and groan under the first preparatory work of the dictatorship, the first offensive whiffs of its strangling of freedom?
What are restrictions, control of currency and goods, tariff-barriers, passports, visas and so on?
They are the causes which, under the mask of necessity and innocence, now everywhere force dictatorship to the fore in the popular consciousness, quite regardless of the type of government in power.
They are the same restrictions that promote the superstition that the democratic form of government has gone bankrupt and that dictatorship alone is to be preferred.
One thus thinks that only a "strong man" can remedy misery, put the nation back on its feet and give personal freedom and well-being to everyone.
One then pays homage to the "strong man".
And then begins not the liberation of people but an enormous hunt for scalps and heads, a hunt for everyone who dares to have an opinion or thought other than that of the dictator.
That the road now invariably leads to concentration camps, torture, slavery, invalidity, death and downfall for the state, for the people and for the dictator is only what has already become a fact for the world through all the totalitarian states that are today mere heaps of ruins and mental chaos.
Is it not also a fact that those states that are furthest advanced in the totalitarian system have even greater and more profound areas of deprivation of personal liberty than those countries or states that are still to a certain degree led by sound and incorrupt democratic principles, even if these principles are admittedly slipping or crumbling?
This in turn means that no national system of government whatsoever capable of saving the world really exists.
The salvation of the world is not a question of an increase in national power.
It is not a problem of goods or money, but a psychic problem.