OH MAN
Steiner Tells What's What,
Clearly
Rudolf Steiner occasionally gave talks to workmen, laborers. In those talks, he tried to present his doctrines as clearly as possible. Transcripts of those talks, then, provide a useful introduction to Steiner’s teachings.*
On this page, we will take a look at some of the remarkable statements collected in the volume THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH AND MAN AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE STARS (Anthroposophic Press, 1987), GA 354, which contains fourteen talks Steiner gave to workmen at the construction site of the Anthroposophical headquarters building. Virtually every one of these statements contains falsehoods or fallacies — or both. Note these errors piling up, one after another — a litany of sophistry, error, and delusion.
Steiner gave these talks in 1924 — the last full year of his life. Although he was simplifying for the workmen, he was also expressing his mature thinking, the ultimate results of his many years of "clairvoyant research."
Few men have ever been more wrong about more subjects — great and small — than Rudolf Steiner.
* Clarity generally eluded Steiner. Even when he evidently wanted to be clear, he usually failed. (And quite often, when addressing relatively sophisticated audiences, he evidently wanted to be mystifying, not clear.) You may find many of the following quotations frustratingly vague and disjointed. But be assured, these remarks reflect Steiner at his most lucid.
[Anthroposophic Press, 1987.]
Steiner jumps around a lot, and not all of
his comments are equally interesting.
To help you browse, I have highlighted key terms
so you can find topics that may hold
particular interest for you.
1. "Unless the earth as a whole had died there could be no human being. Human beings are parasites, as it were, on the present earth. The whole earth was once alive; it could think as you and I now think. But only when it became a corpse could it produce the human race ... Originally there was a living, thinking, cosmic body — a living, thinking, cosmic body!" — Rudolf Steiner, THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH AND MAN AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE STARS, p. 3.
Steiner taught that the Earth was once a giant animal. [See "Neutered Nature".] Here he explains that the Earth has died. But on other occasions Steiner sometimes taught that the Earth is alive now. For instance, giving advice on farming, he said "You should not permeate the living Earth with something absolutely lifeless like the mineral [i.e., inorganic fertilizer]." — Rudolf Steiner, AGRICULTURE COURSE (Bio-Dynamic Agricultural Association, 1958), discussion after lecture 6, GA 327. When studying Steiner, you have to get accustomed to his frequent inconsistencies and self-contradictions.
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2. "What then is actually the original element that makes things solid or fluid or gaseous? It is heat! And unless heat is there in the first place, nothing at all can be solid or fluid. So we can say that heat or fire is what is underlying everything in the beginning." — Rudolf Steiner, THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH AND MAN AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE STARS, p. 5.
Some ancient Greek philosophers said there are four chemical elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Anthroposophists generally hold to this view today. Here Steiner speaks of heat as if it were a chemical: an "original element." Of course, it is not.
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3. "It is not true that the animals were there originally and that man developed out of them. Man was there originally and afterwards the animals evolved out of what could not become man ... Thus the animals are indeed related to man, but they developed only later in the course of world evolution." — Ibid., pp. 7-8.
[THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH AND MAN
AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE STARS, p. 6; color added.]
Steiner taught that the cosmos was created for man, and man was the first new being to exist in this cosmos. Likewise, Steiner taught that animals evolved from man: They are beings who failed to keep evolving, so they branched off from mankind and remained at various lower levels while man continued evolving upward.
According to Steiner, the solar system pulses into and out of existence in long stages of "planetary" evolution. The first stage was Old Saturn, when only man (in a preliminary condition) existed. During the next stage of the solar system's evolution, Old Sun, animals precipitated out of man. During Old Moon, plants came into existence. Now, during Present Earth, all four kingdoms of nature — man, animal, plant, and mineral — exist. But man (us! wonderful us!) came first and remains central.
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Speaking of a time in the ancient past when, Steiner said, the Moon and Earth were a single body:
4. "The Moon was there, an entirely female being, and confronting it was not a male being, but all that was still outside its cosmic body at that time. Outside it were many other cosmic bodies that exerted an influence ... So this cosmic body was there and around it the other cosmic bodies, exerting their influence in the most varied ways. Seeds came in from outside and fructified the whole Moon-Earth. And if you could have lived at that time and set foot on this primeval cosmic body, you would not have said when you saw all sorts of drops coming in 'It is raining,' as one says today. At that time you would have said, 'Earth is being fructified.' There were seasons when the fructifying seeds came in from all directions, and other seasons when they matured and no more came in. Thus at that time there was a cosmic fructification. But the human being was not born, only fructified; he was only called forth by conception. The human being came out of the entire Earth-body, or Moon-body, as it was then. In the same way fructification came from the whole cosmic surroundings for animal and plant." — Ibid., p. 11.
In this quotation, Steiner is describing conditions during Old Moon. The Earth and Moon were still a single body at that time, he said. [See, e.g., "Matters of Form".] But astronomers tell us that the Moon did not separate from the Earth; instead, it was created by the collision of the Earth with a planet-sized object. As for cosmic fructification, I blush. Steiner's central point is that mankind, as it has developed in the increasingly materialized condition of the solar system, came forth as the product of a sort of planetary procreation, with the (female) Moon-Earth receiving sperm-like "seeds" raining down from other planets and orbs.
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5. "Since people today on the whole can no longer think properly, they misunderstand what exists on earth as plant, animal, and man. Thus materialistic Darwinism arose, which believed that the animals were there first and that man simply developed out of the animals. It is true that in his external form man is related to the animals, but he existed earlier...." — Ibid., p. 15.
According to Steiner, people used to possess a natural clairvoyance that kept them in touch with the spirit realm, but in modern times we have lost our old clairvoyant powers. During our present phase of evolution, we are estranged from spirit, and our thinking is empty. Modern thinking is dominated by mere intellect, which produces abominations such as Darwinism (the theory that humans evolved from animals). Steiner taught that in order to see the universe clearly, we need to acquire new, higher forms of clairvoyance, and Steiner claimed to point the way toward developing these. This is the central promise of Anthroposophy, the belief system underlying Waldorf education. [See, e.g., "Thinking" and "Everything".]
Aside from this, here we see Steiner denying the truth of Darwinian evolution. But there is a vast body of evidence supporting Darwin, while there is essentially no evidence supporting Steiner's claim that animals evolved downward from humans.
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[THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH AND MAN
AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE STARS, p. 21; color added.]
6. "Now you must picture to yourselves that the earth once looked like this [long, long ago] ... If one could have lived then with the present sense organs, one would have seemed to be inside a world-egg beyond which one could see nothing. And you can imagine how different the earth looked at that time, like a kind of giant egg yolk, a thick fluid, and a thick air environment corresponding to the white of the present-day egg ... [B]eings such as we have today could not have lived at that time ... [A]t that time there was neither walking nor swimming but something in between. These creatures therefore had limbs in which there was something of a thorn-like nature, but also something like joints. They were really quite ingenious joints, and in between, the flesh mass was stretched out like an umbrella." — Ibid., pp. 21-23.
The descriptions Steiner gives of ancient conditions are entertaining but wholly fictitious. There is no factual basis for any of his statements on such matters. He described what he claimed to have seen thanks to his wonderful clairvoyance (which is a delusion — see "Clairvoyance"). Steiner was not clairvoyant. No one is. (Hence, Steiner's descriptions of things he saw through clairvoyance — such as the marvelous world-egg and its odd inhabitants — are null and void.)
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7. "Reproduction was at that time [long, long ago] of a very different nature; it went on in the whole earth-body. The upper world fructified the lower, the lower world fructified the upper. The whole earth-body was alive. One could say that the creatures below and the creatures above were like maggots in a body — where the whole body is alive and the maggots in it are alive too. It was one life, and the various beings lived in a completely living body." — Ibid., p. 25.
This is the sort of comment that may have caught the workmen's attention — fructification. The entire world was a living entity that made love to itself, the upper impregnating the lower, and vice versa. It's an alluring concept, I suppose. (But the bit about the maggots drains some of the romance from it.)
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8. "[T]he moon, which has around it [i.e., on its surface] what we have in the interior of the earth, produced a thickish, horny mass on the outside. This is what we see when we look up [i.e., when we look at the moon]. It is not like our mineral kingdom, but it is as if our mineral kingdom had become horn-like and turned into glass. It is extraordinarily hard, harder than anything horn-like that we have on earth, but it is not quite mineral. Hence the peculiar shape of the moon mountains; they actually all look like horns that have been fastened on." — Ibid., p. 27.
Steiner wrote and spoke at a time when no space probes or astronauts had travelled to the Moon. He evidently did not anticipate that his statements about the Moon would soon be subject to verification or disproof. (Steiner died in 1925. The first lunar probes were launched in 1958. Men first walked on the Moon in 1969.) The surface of the Moon does not consist of a glassy, horn-like substance; it consists of ordinary rocks and dust. And the mountains of the Moon are quite ordinary; they bear no resemblance to "horns that have been fastened on." Steiner's statements about other celestial phenomena are similarly false, as we will see. In general, Steiner's descriptions of the natural world, the planets, and the cosmos are wrong, undercutting his claim that he possessed a reliable, exact form of far-seeing perception, what he called "exact clairvoyance." [See, e.g., "Steiner's Blunders" and "Exactly".]
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9. "[M]an was there first [i.e., man was the first earthly form of life]. But he lived...purely as soul and spirit...not as a physical being. He was there in a very fine [i.e., nonphysical] body in which he could support himself ... And neither he nor the higher mammals were visible as yet; only the heavy creatures [primitive crawling beasts] and the bird-like air-creatures [primitive flying creatures] were visible. That is what must be distinguished when one says that man was already there. He was first of all, before even the air was there, but he was invisible ... The moon had first to separate from the earth, then man could deposit mineral elements in himself, could form a mineral bony system, could develop such substances as protein, and so forth, in his muscles. At that time such substances did not as yet exist. Nevertheless, man has completely preserved in his present corporeal nature the legacy of those earlier times." — Ibid., p. 31.
Steiner's descriptions of life "on" Saturn, Sun, Moon, and early Earth (i.e., life during Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, and the first epochs of Present Earth) are essentially science fiction, but he expects us to take them seriously. This strains the credulity even of his admirers, such as Gary Lachman: "I wouldn't be surprised if the last few pages have taxed some readers' capacity for giving Steiner the benefit of the doubt and left them wondering who could possibly believe this science fiction story. Yet this cosmic history is the backbone of Steiner's work." — Gary Lachman, RUDOLF STEINER (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2007), p. 147.
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10. "People today do not think about things as we have done here in the last two lectures ... Modern science goes into [these topics] very little." — Rudolf Steiner, THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH AND MAN AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE STARS, pp. 34-41.
Steiner claimed that his teachings constitute "spiritual science" — they are the objective, scientific observations he made through the use of clairvoyance. He also claimed, sometimes, that there is no real contradiction between his teachings and the findings of natural science. But, in fact, "spiritual science" is not at all scientific, and it is contradicted by real science at almost every turn. Steiner sometimes acknowledged his disagreements with real science, arguing that scientists in general do not comprehend the deep truths he perceived through his superior consciousness. [See, e.g., "Science".] The reality that he and his followers have failed to acknowledge is that real science knocks "spiritual science" for a loop. To the extent that Steiner's teachings can be tested, they fail the test. People today usually "do not think about things as we have done" for a very good reason. The way Steiner and his followers think is, by and large, just plain wrong.
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[THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH AND MAN
AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE STARS, p. 34; color added.]
Steiner speaks to the workers about geology and the strata of the Earth. He says that the strata are jumbled, so reading the history of evolution is difficult, but in general older things lie deeper. This is true enough. Then Steiner says that sometimes, when people dig down, they find pagan temples beneath Christian churches.
11. "If you think back to what I said just now — that below the earth there could be pagan temples and above Christian churches — you will see that the Christian churches are related to the pagan temples just as the upper strata to the lower, only that in one case we have to do with nature, in the other with culture. But one will not understand how the Christian element evolved if one does not observe that it evolved out of paganism as its foundation. In culture too we have to consider these strata." — Ibid., p. 41.
This is remarkable sophistry. Christianity may have evolved from earlier religions, even pagan religions (although this idea would offend most Christians), but the existence of pagan ruins below Christian churches, if they exist, does not prove what Steiner claims. A spaceport may be built above a graveyard, but this does not mean that space flight evolved from funerals. The accepted history of Christianity is that it developed from Judaism, not paganism. (Jesus was a Jew; he was not a pagan.)
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Steiner returns to differences between his views and the views of modern science.
12. "I am always saying that if people could really travel to a star, they would be amazed to find it different from the modern ideas about it determined by their life on earth. They imagine that it contains a glowing gas. But that is not at all what is found out there. Actually, where the star is, there is empty space, empty space that would immediately suck one up. Suction forces are there. They would suck you up instantly, split you to pieces. If people would work with the same consistent research and the same unprejudiced thinking as we do here, they would also come to see with intricate spectroscopes that there are not gases out there, but negative suctional space." — Ibid., p. 46.
Steiner's descriptions of natural phenomena are almost invariably wrong. His knowledge of stars and planets was as faulty as his knowledge of most other subjects. Saying that stars are "empty space" or "negative suctional space" is preposterous. Denying that stars consist of gases is equally preposterous. Here is how the word "star" is defined by the ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA: "star, any massive self-luminous celestial body of gas that shines by radiation derived from its internal energy sources."
(Steiner contradicted himself a lot, but he was also quite consistent in pushing his fantasies. Here is another instance in which Steiner says a star, in this case our sun, is a vacuum: “[M]aterialistic physicists would be immensely astonished if they went up into space expecting to find the sun as they describe it in their science. Their descriptions are nonsense. If by some convenient transport the physicists could reach the sun, they would be amazed to find no gas whatsoever. They would find hollow space, a real vacuum. This vacuum radiates light.” — Rudolf Steiner, THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH AND MAN AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE STARS (Anthroposophic Press, 1987), pp. 143-144. This description is nonsense. A vacuum cannot radiate light.)
If Steiner's teachings were somewhat plausible in his own day, they are less and less so today. Believing Steiner requires the rejection of modern knowledge. It is a retreat from truth.
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13. "There was once a large expanse of land [Atlantis] where today there is the Atlantic Ocean ... In that earlier time there was not yet such a solid bony skeleton [i.e., we did not have bony skeletons]. Human beings could have had only soft cartilage, like sharks. Also they could not have breathed through lungs as we do today. At that time they had to have a kind of swimming bladder and a kind of gills, so that the human being who lived then was in his external form half man and half fish. We cannot escape the fact that man then looked quite different — half man and half fish ... The more imperfect of these fish-men became [i.e., evolved to become] kangaroos, those a little more advanced became deer and cattle, and the most perfect became apes or men. You see from this that man did not descend from apes: man was there, and all the mammals really descended from him, from these human forms in which man remained imperfect. So we must say that the ape descended from man, not that man descended from the ape. That is so, and we must be quite clear about it." — Ibid., pp. 54-55.
Steiner taught that during our currently evolutionary stage on the Earth, we have passed through various epochs: the Polarian Age, the Hyperborean Age, the Lemurian Age (when we lived on the lost continent of Lemuria), and the Atlantean Age (when we lived on the lost continent of Atlantis). We are now in the Post-Atlantean period (the epoch after Atlantis sank). [See the entries for such terms in The Brief Waldorf / Steiner Encyclopedia.] But, in reality, Atlantis never existed. [See "Atlantis and the Aryans".] The other prehistorical periods Steiner posited are equally fictitious, as are the sorts of bodies he says we had (or didn't have) along the way. And, of course, the idea that animals evolved from us, instead of vice versa, is completely baseless. Steiner was a fountainhead of misinformation.
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14. "[Atlantis] was preceded by a thinner [i.e., less densely physical] condition when there was only a culture and civilization that men made in signs that disappeared at once [i.e., the artifacts of this ancient period — Lemuria — quickly evaporated, because they were so "thin" or scarcely physical]. So we must imagine that these men shaped everything once upon a time, but nothing lasted; it was there in very delicate matter [i.e., it was made of substances that were virtually immaterial] ... [W]hen men had their whole culture and civilization in only a sort of dense air, they had joy in making something even if it vanished at once ... [In our studies] we have gone very far back and have found human beings who really consisted only of dense air. Imagine it like this: there is a man [made] of dense air, who has the appearance of a cloud, only not so irregularly formed, for he has what definitely looks like a face, a head, and limbs. But it is something very spiritual; it is almost a ghost! If you met something like it today, you would take it for a ghost, and indeed a very peculiar ghost. It would look somewhat like a fish — and then again somewhat like a man. We were once like that. So now we have already arrived at a stage when [long ago] man was really quite spiritual. And the farther we go back, the more we find that man as spirit dominates matter. We present human beings [i.e., humans today] can do this only with the softest elements of matter. If we take a piece of bread into our mouth, we can bite it and make it liquid — for all food has to become liquid if it is to pass into the human body. Just think! You make bread liquid...." — Ibid., p. 60.
Steiner claimed that before humanity inhabited Atlantis, we lived on another continent, Lemuria. There is no evidence that either continent ever existed, but Steiner said this is at least partially explained by the softness of stuff way back when: Earthly conditions had not yet hardened sufficiently for an enduring record to be created. The soft substances of the early times dissipated, leaving no trace. In this, as in so much else, Steiner's arguments are often singularly unimpressive (Just think! You make bread liquid!). Steiner claimed that his own knowledge of the ancient Earth — like his knowledge of everything else — came primarily from his clairvoyance, so he was able to tell us about things for which no solid evidence exists. Of course, postulating that no evidence could possibly exist for the things he described might be seen as a clever evasion. We can't prove Steiner wrong if looking for evidence would be a fool's errand. On the other hand, the lack of evidence leaves Steiner's statements entirely unfounded. Lack of evidence is not evidence. If we have no evidence for something, then we have no evidence, and we should admit it. But Steiner effectively argued that lack of evidence is evidence (There can be no evidence for the existence of Lemuria, and we have no evidence; therefore Lemuria existed!). To the extent that he claimed to have evidence, Steiner said he was able to pull invisible evidence out of thin air. Why in the world would anyone believe him? [For more on such matters, see "Early Earth", "Atlantis and the Aryans", "Lemuria", and "Exactly".]
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15. "[T]he Chinese in their old culture did not include anything that can be called religion. The Chinese culture was devoid of religion ... [T]hey did not know the meaning of prayer ... Originally the Chinese had no gods of any kind." — Ibid., pp. 67-69.
Having discussed the early evolution of Earth and mankind, Steiner turns his attention of historical times. But his observations about nations and cultures are generally as wrong as his observations about other matters. Here are two of the references in the ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA to ancient Chinese religion and its gods. (The current Chinese government generally discourages religion, but ancient religious beliefs and practices persist in many Chinese communities.) • “T’u-ti Kung, in Chinese religion, [is] a god whose deification and functions are determined by local residents ... In all cases, a Tudi Gong is subservient to the Cheng Huang, the City God or spiritual magistrate.” • "Sheji, (Chinese: 'Soil and Grain')...in ancient Chinese religion, a compound patron deity of the soil and harvests." The Chinese of yesteryear certainly had religion, and they had gods, and they prayed to their gods.
Steiner's admirers are impressed that he spoke and wrote about such a wide array of subjects. What they often overlook is that he was very often wrong about this wide array of subjects.
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16. “[T]he idea that the population of the earth increases is just superstition on the part of modern science, which always makes its calculations from data to suit itself. The truth is that even in the most ancient times there was a vast population in China, also in South America and North America. There too in those ancient times the land reached out to the Pacific Ocean. If that is taken into account the population of the earth cannot be said to have grown." — Rudolf Steiner, THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH AND MAN AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE STARS, p. 68.
Because of his teachings about reincarnation, Steiner claimed that the human population is the same as ever — there are roughly as many incarnated souls now as there were in the past. (The total population must remain essentially stable, because each person alive now is the reincarnation of a person who lived previously.) In this, however, Steiner was blatantly wrong. The human population of the Earth today is far greater than at any time in the past.
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17. "[T]he Chinese were unable to think out any legal system." — Ibid., p. 70.
Wrong. ("The initial imperial Chinese legal code, that of the Qin dynasty (221–206 bce), was crafted under the aegis of the celebrated autocratic ruler Qin Shihuangdi..." — "Chinese Law", ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA.)
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18. "[T]he European sort of invention is impossible for either the Chinese or the Japanese ... [T]he Indians [i.e., residents of India] in those very ancient times...had tremendous powers of imagination. The Chinese had none at all ... The Chinese lack imagination whereas the Indians have been full of it from the beginning." — Rudolf Steiner, THE EVOLUTION OF THE EARTH AND MAN AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE STARS, pp. 77-79.
One of Steiner's less endearing characteristics was his racial chauvinism. His descriptions of various races and nations are almost always marred by racial prejudice. [See, e.g., "Races" and "Differences".]
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19. "[T]he Chinese were a prosaic people interested in the outer world, a people who did not live from within. The Indians were a people who looked entirely inward." — Ibid., p. 82.
Note how Steiner makes sweeping statements about entire peoples, as if all Chinese were one way, and all Indians were another. [For more of Steiner's teachings about various races and nationalities, see, e.g., "Steiner's Racism".]
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Having spoken of cosmology, geology, prehistory, and cultural anthropology, Steiner turns his attention to medicine.
20. "[I]f — for instance — a child is becoming weak in his head — inattentive, hyperactive — he will usually have a corresponding symptom: worms in his intestines. Worms develop easily in the intestines if the head forces are too weak, because the head does not then work down strongly enough into the rest of the body. Worms find no lodging in a human body if the head forces are working down strongly into the intestines. You can see how magnificently the human body is arranged! — everything is related. And if one's child has worms, one should realize the child has become weak in his head. Also — whoever wants to be a teacher has to know these things — if there are persons who at a later age are weak-minded, one can be sure they have had worms when they were young." — Ibid., p. 90.
Note that Steiner implies that Waldorf teachers should subscribe to his quack medical views ("whoever wants to be a teacher has to know these things"). This is chilling. [For more of Steiner's teachings about medical matters and nutrition, see, e.g., "Steiner's Quackery", "What We're Made Of", and "Biodynamics".]
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21. "The potato takes little care of lung and heart. It reaches the head, but only, as I said, the lower head, not the upper head. It does go into the lower head, where one thinks and exercises critical faculties. Therefore, you can see, in earlier times there were fewer journalists. There was no printing industry yet. Think of the amount of thought expended daily in this world in our time, just to bring the newspapers out! All that thinking, it is much too much, it is not at all necessary — and we have to thank the potato diet for that! Because a person who eats potatoes is constantly stimulated to think. He can't do anything but think. That's why his lungs and his heart become weak. Tuberculosis, lung tuberculosis, did not become widespread until the potato diet was introduced. And the weakest human beings are those living in regions where almost nothing else is grown but potatoes, where the people live on potatoes." — Ibid., p. 111.
I'll bet you didn't know these things before Steiner set you straight, did you? I didn't. In fact, I still don't. Steiner was clearly talking through his hat. He was, in brief, making a fool of himself.
He made a fool of himself when he stuck to his story and also when he contradicted his story. Here is another statement Steiner made about potatoes: "People who eat too many potatoes...tend to be weak in the head ... It is actually due to the fact that potatoes have come to be widely eaten in recent times that materialism has developed...." — Rudolf Steiner, FROM ELEPHANTS TO EINSTEIN (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1998), p. 44.
More important than his nonsense about a tuber, however, is Steiner's nonsense about thinking. "All that thinking, it is much too much, it is not at all necessary." Steiner devalued the brain and thinking; he told his employees and his followers not to think too much. Can you imagine why? If you were trying to convince people to believe twaddle, would you urge them to think hard about what you are saying, or would you urge them not to think hard about what you are saying? [For Steiner's views on thinking, see "Thinking" and "Steiner's Specific".])
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Use this link to go to the second part of
"Oh Man".
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