There are people who still maintain a human level in their interactions and behave on social media as they would in life. No matter what they post, whichever photo, or whatever they appear to do, you feel you know them, because you have sufficient strength of I not to be overwhelmed by the digital images and the being of the technology we know is simply like a window. Now there is also a whole spectrum of experience that comes through social media that shows the opposite inclination, where the context of social media is not held upright enough with the I, and the ego instead twists it. Ask yourself this, which happens so often on social media that we overlook it: How would it be if I were to meet a person in real life, in a park for example, and that person would immediately call you a name and run away and hide behind a tree?
Trolls don’t like bridges. In social media, the action of a “troll”; if we transpose it back into reality, gives us the impression that this is the behavior of a human child. A naughty boy. Or a wayward girl. But the term troll cleverly reminds us of elemental beings. Social media simply creates a new marketplace for valuing, devaluing, and pricing each other, much like bourgeois life used to assess the ladies and gentlemen promenading – but now with an added spiritual element. Or, consider this: when social media becomes spamming and unsolicited advances, we might picture a member of a gang of boys in a park, for example, seeking to intimidate people. Boys hanging around, seeking a cheap thrill from being rude or threatening passers-by. Or if it is an individual targeting us, are they actually wanting to speak to other human beings, but shy to engage in conversation, like emotionally eight years old, hiding behind their mother or father’s legs?
We know these impressions from real life. These are just imaginative pictures of what many adults do on social media. Reality is slowly splitting, fragmenting; borders and thresholds are becoming porous; and this has been going on for more than a while.
When this place we write and display and perform upon is our marketplace to trade, to present ideas, and to awaken interest, does it unduly surprise us to call these economic considerations?
In relation to money and economics, John Maynard Keynes’ brings our attention to the illusory aspect of any assertion that economics be a strict or disciplined science. Without understanding that economics is inextricably linked to social psychology and its esoteric drivers, we overlook what lies somewhat unconsciously in the soul, like a huge sea (which is why the Greek Poseidon, we can now intuit as a former reflection on Ahriman, shapeshifting and powerful). Keynes called the aspects of ourselves we need to learn to recognize in relation to economics our gut feelings or “animal spirits”, our motivations or drives that manifest socially. With words and gestures, written or symbolic, we signal where we are at in terms of a certain kind of energy; a relation to a wider economic sea of unconsciousness.
“This means, unfortunately, not only that slumps and depressions are exaggerated in degree, but that economic prosperity is excessively dependent on a political and social atmosphere which is congenial to the average business man. (…) In estimating the prospects of investment, we must have regard, therefore, to the nerves and hysteria and even the digestions and reactions to the weather of those upon whose spontaneous activity it largely depends. (…) We are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectation, since the basis for making such calculations does not exist; and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance.” John Maynard Keynes (2012) [1936], The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Snowball Publishing, p.161-3.
Rudolf Steiner spoke positively about economist John Maynard Keynes in 1920, specifically praising Keynes’s book The Economic Consequences of the Peace for its realistic critique of the Treaty of Versailles; which engineered the consequence that a second world war would arise out of the first. Not least, one senses between them, one in Germany one in Great Britain, a shared appreciation of the soul and its implications for the root of historical change in economics. The “sentiment,” Keynes speaks of, is also the shared sentiment that most people in public life of the time were not thinking of much at all: besides business as usual, and they were servants of materialism, or as Steiner famously stated, people of responsibility unable to exercise any responsible steering of humanity because they “sleepwalked” through world historical events.
Perhaps the only two of their time to publicly and professionally attempt to draw the necessary media attention to a relation to the consequences of decadent relations to money?
Animal Spirits and Elemental Instincts
Most of the time, we use the name Ahriman, and we do so by habit. Ahriman and Angra Mainyu are the exact same figure. Angra Mainyu is the original name in the ancient Avestan language, while Ahriman is the later form of that same name in Middle Persian (Pahlavi). But taste the letters and read their meaning, and you will discover something. In the earliest Zoroastrian scriptures, like the Avesta, Angra Mainyu means destructive or evil mind. The name evolves into Ahriman through its use and pronunciation over time.
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