I’ve noticed that Steiner uses several very clever techniques, verbal sleight-of-hand tricks if you will, to convince his audience that his arguments are reasonable and valid. One of those techniques is to elaborately embrace and acknowledge the common sense or practical view of an issue, convincing his audience that he too, is reasonable and uses common sense in delivering his lectures. Steiner then uses an analogy to deflect attention from that common sense pretext and goes slowly in the exact opposite direction and delivers information which is unreasonable and defies common sense.
In the following rather long quote you will see Steiner bash modern agriculture and science, setting the stage for his new theories, and then give a seemingly reasonable discourse on who is entitled (or not) to give opinions on the subject of agriculture; “… the only ones entitled …. (are those whose) judgment derives directly from the field, the forest, and the stable” reinforcing the belief that Steiner is both qualified to speak on this subject and has the answers to their questions. Then he begins his diversion from the logical path of qualifications and launches into a rather meaningless analogy about a compass and then slides into his ridiculous comments about agriculture and the cosmos.
On June 7, 1924 Steiner is giving his first lecture on agriculture and very early in the lecture is the following:
“In order that we may speak in concrete terms and not in generalities, let me answer using agriculture as an example. Nowadays there are all kinds of books and lecture courses available on economics, and they all include chapters on agronomy. There are even whole books on how agriculture should be organized according to various socio-economic principles. All of this, all of these books and lecture courses on economics, are nothing more than blatant nonsense. But blatant nonsense is promulgated everywhere nowadays. It ought to be clear to anyone that people have no right to talk about agriculture, including its social and organizational aspects, unless they have a sound basis in agriculture, and really know what it means to grow grain or potatoes or beets. Without this, you cannot talk about economic principles involved. These things have been derived from real life and not merely from theoretical considerations. Of course, if you say this to people who have taken a few courses in agricultural economics at the university, they all think it is absurd, because to them everything seems so cut-and-dried. But in actual fact, the only ones entitled to an opinion on agriculture are the people whose judgment derives directly from the field, the forest, and the stable. All discussion of economics that is not derived from the things themselves should simply stop. Until people realize that economic discussions that float above the things are mere talk, the outlook for agriculture or anything else will remain pretty dim.”
“The reason that all kinds of people think they are entitled to talk about agriculture, even when they don’t know anything about it, is that they cannot get down to fundamentals even in their own fields of endeavor. Of course, we can all describe a beet, and say whether it is hard or easy to slice, what color it is, or whether it has these or those constituents. But with this we are still very far from any understanding of the beet, and even further from any understanding of how the beet interacts with the soil, and with the season when it is ready to harvest, and so on. What we must come to understand, is the following.”
“I have often used a comparison to make this point clear with regard to other areas of life. If you look at the needle of a compass, you discover that one end always points more or less towards the north, while the other end points south. If you want to explain this, you don’t look to the needle but rather to the whole Earth: you hypothesize that there is a magnetic north pole at one end of the Earth and a magnetic south pole at the other. It would be ridiculous to try to explain the behavior of the compass needle by looking for the cause in the needle itself. The position of the needle cannot be understood unless you know the needle’s relationship to the whole Earth.”
“To many people, however, what is nonsense with regard to a compass needle makes perfect sense in relation to other things. For example, take a beet growing in the ground. It makes no sense to restrict our attention to the narrow confines of the physical beet, if its growth actually depends on countless conditions present not only on the Earth but also in the cosmos….” (Underlining and italicized added)
Here is a clever and successful attempt to deflect the fact that he knows little about real agriculture, and creatively uses his imaginary tools of “intuition,” “perception” and “Spiritual Science” to formulate his theories of fantasy. Steiner clearly acknowledges that he knows the qualifications that prohibits “people have no right to talk about agriculture” and “the only ones entitled” to speak on the subject of agriculture. But Steiner was not a farmer and had never been a farmer; he did not have those qualifications, yet undaunted, he plows forward with his theories by giving eight lectures and four discussions. His theories on agriculture and the nine preparations are so outlandish that I suppose it is possible that he started to believe his own fantasies and sort of deluded himself with his own lies.
It’s important to remember that the contents of Steiner’s lectures were utterly unique: no one had ever heard of these theories before and no one had ever farmed using these theories. I believe that Steiner was smart, clever and imaginative and created a ruse intended to deceive and was thus a fraud, but you can judge for yourself. What are your thoughts?