Updated Foreword by the Translator to the 1st Dutch Edition from 2009

 

UPDATED FOREWORD BY THE TRANSLATOR/PUBLISHER

TO THE DUTCH EDITION FROM 2009

As the motto for the German edition that appeared in 1995, the publisher Götz Rehn chose a passage from the beginning of the second treatise in this booklet: “In view of the great changes we are facing, one cannot develop enough imagination in designing new models of thinking, which WE may be in urgent need of only too soon.”

                It should now have become abundantly clear to anyone who has followed the world situation in recent times even but little, that this predicted need for new models of thinking has been there for some time. The burning question, however, is not only whether there are people to be found who, in addition to the necessary acumen, can also muster the will to think hard and deep enough to fathom and create the thinking models listed below, but also whether they will succeed at all in communicating these new thinking models in such a way that potentially interested parties can connect with them. After all, the previous publication in this context, The Just Price - World Economy as Social Organics from 1994, which was also presented in English  in Canada, America and Canada, was a rather dismal failure in that regard.

                In order to change this for the better, the Willehalm Institute has now decided to launch this present publication and The Just Price, together with How the Grail Sites Were Found – Wolfram von Eschenbach as a Historian  by Werner Greub and The Golden Tip – The Entanglement of the Upper and Underworld by Slobodan Mitric for the celebration of St. Willehalms Day on May 28, 2009 in the Amstel Church in Amsterdam as a new civilizational  offensive and to do so under the banner of: "The New Defense Position of Amsterdam" (The old Defense Position of Amsterdam is a ring of some 40 fortification built at great cost and manpower around the Dutch capital in the late 19^th and early 20^th century, which quite soon after became outdated and obsolete due to the invention of the airplane and modern warfare. See Appendix 1 and 2). In the Postscript to my afterword "The New Kingship - Contribution to the Modernization of the Monarchy" in Werner Greub's aforementioned book on the Grail Sites, it was explained that through the exercise of a new royal art, this New Defense Position  can be constructed on the four cornerstones, or "basic elements of social dynamics", first formulated by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) and first systematically described, to a certain extent, by the late Amsterdam professor Prof. Dr. Brüll in his book The Mysteries of Social Encounter. To a certain extent, because namely the fourth basic element in Dr. Brüll's otherwise valuable chronological presentation is not complete. As he himself writes in the introduction, he did not get around to dealing with the concept of social organism. As a result, he did not include the fourth phase of development in the new way of thinking and language that Rudolf Steiner, according to his own words, developed for the threefold  order of the social organism in his course on World Economy (1922), nor did he elaborate on the universal, social-organic significance (despite the necessary teething problems) of the re-founding of the Anthroposophical Society and its R&D center the Goetheanum, Free School of Spiritual Science by Rudolf Steiner and his associates at the Christmas Conference 1923 in Dornach, Switzerland. (Update: On the four developmental phases of the history of the threefold movement from 1917- 1923, see my article, Rudolf Steiner’s Idea of Social Organics -  A New Constitutional Principle  of Civilization.)