“Certain people are over and over proclaiming to the world that democracy must spread to the whole civilised world. Salvation lies in making the whole of humanity democratic; everything will have to be smashed to pieces so that democracy may spread in the world. Well, if people go on to accept ideas presented to them as they are, with wholesale acceptance of the term democracy, for instance, their idea of democracy will be like the definition of a human being which I gave you: 'A human being is a creature with two legs and without feathers: a plucked cockerel’. Concepts are taken for reality, and as a result illusion may take the place of reality where human life is concerned by lulling people to sleep with concepts.”
“It is interesting to note that in 1910 someone (the French economist Francis Delaisi) wrote that large-scale capitalism had succeeded in making democracy into the most effective tool for exploiting the whole population. Financiers were usually imagined to be the enemies of democracy, an individual concerned wrote, but this was a fundamental error. On the contrary, they run democracy and encourage it, for it provides a screen behind which they can hide their method of exploitation, and find it their best defence against any objections which the populace may raise. "
"For once therefore a man woke up and saw that what mattered was not to proclaim democracy but to see the full reality, not to follow slogans, but to see things as they really are. This would be particularly important today, for people would then realize that the events which reign with such blood and terror over the whole of humanity are guided from just a few centres.”
Rudolf Steiner speaking in 1917
