"The sense for reality living in the idea of the threefold social organism will not be found by comparing it with what traditional education and habits have taught people to think. The reason for our present confusions in government and society is that these traditions have led to habits of thought that life itself has outgrown...

The threefold social order is founded upon the idea that a belief in the old impulses is the worst obstacle to healthy and progressive steps, taking into account our present stage of evolution. The impossibility of continuing the old impulses should be clear from the fact that they have lost their power as an incentive to productive labour. The old economic motives of capital returns and wage earnings maintained their power as long as enough of the old treasured objects remained that could arouse people's inclination and love. These treasures have plainly become exhausted in the age that has just ended. Ever more numerous were the people who no longer knew why they were amassing capital; ever more numerous too, were wage earners who did not know why they were working.

The exhaustion of the impulses that kept together the nexus of the state is shown in that many people have come to regard the state as an end in itself, and to forget that the state exists for the sake of human beings. Regarding the state as an end in itself is possible only when one has so much lost the ability assert one's inner human individuality that one no longer expects from the state the kind of institutions this self-assertion would demand. Then, contrary to its proper task, more is put into the institutions of the state than is needed for the self-assertion of the people who compose it. Yet every such more in the state evidences less in the human beings who bear the burden of the state.

In cultural life the sterility of the old impulses is displayed in the mistrust with which people look on the spirit. What proceeds from life's unspiritual concerns arouses people's interest; they form views and concepts of it. What originates in spiritual productivity is regarded as a private affair and people are inclined to hinder rather than help if it tries to find a place in public life. One of the most widespread characteristics of our contemporaries is that they remain closed to the individual spiritual achievements of their fellows. ...

A split has come about in the constituition of the human soul. In the instinctive, unconscious impulses of human nature something new is stirring. In conscious thought the old ideas refuse to follow these instinctive stirrings. However, when the best instinctive promptings are not illuminated by corresponding thoughts, they became barbaric, animalistic. Modern humanity is rushing into a dangerous situation through this animalization of the instincts. Salvation can be found only in striving for new thoughts to meet a new world situation.

-- Rudolf Steiner. Essay written in 1920 and published as "What is Needed" in the book The Renewal of the Social Organism.