The following essay was originally published by the online German magazine Fassadenkratzer (“Façade Scratcher”). Many thanks to Hellequin GB for the translation. The translator’s comments are in square brackets:

The theocratic rule structure in democracy

States are still permeated by pyramidal power and administrative structures through which, as in the theocracy of ancient Egypt, individuals or a few can rule over the great masses of people and impose their own will on them. Today we only notice this in totalitarian dictatorships. But even the democracy movement has not fundamentally changed this. The fundamental democratic right of self-determination of the citizen is politically exhausted in the election of his rulers, for which he casts his vote in both senses of the word for years and has to follow their all-round laws and regulations, which are increasingly turning against him. A step forward is urgently needed.

The “Egypt problem” in Russia

In his highly recommended book about the Ukraine War and its long history, Valentin Wember points out how the communist dictatorship of the Soviet Union practically created a copy of the ancient Egyptian pyramid of power and also took over the embalming of the rulers of the time after their death.

“When Lenin and Stalin died, their bodies were elaborately mummified. Both were laid out in the mausoleum, a stepped pyramid on Red Square in Moscow. There is hardly a more fitting symbol of what happened in Russia during the Bolshevism period between 1918 and 1989: a 4,000-year-old, no longer contemporary system of rule was imposed on the Russian state.

“In the ancient Egyptian social order, the pharaoh was at the top and the working people were at the bottom. Above the people were the overseers, above the overseers were their overseers, above them were the overseers of the overseers of the overseers, and so on and on up to the top of the social pyramid.”

The Egyptian overseers were replaced in the Soviet Union by the KGB secret service, which monitored everything. There were departments that controlled the intellectuals, others that controlled the state media, and still others that monitored the churches, sports, science and research — a ghostly revival of ancient Egypt.

“But what was historically justified 4,000 years ago and represented not just a local but a global cultural epoch became murderous madness in Russia in the 20th century — and not only there.

“The Pharaoh was replaced by the great leaders of one party, first Lenin, then Stalin. Khrushchev was no longer considered a great leader and was therefore not embalmed, but the popular red commander Grigory Kotovsky was given this honor.

“Lenin, Kotovsky and Stalin were fake Pharaohs… All three were the antithesis of a Pharaoh. They were criminals and mass murderers.

“In the greatest possible contrast to this, the pharaoh was originally a high spiritual initiate. ‘He was two-thirds human and one-third god’ is what the Epic of Gilgamesh says of the Mesopotamian ruler Gilgamesh, and that probably also applied to the Egyptian pharaohs of the early period. As a high initiate, the pharaoh was a real spiritual force that could influence the people.

“Lenin and Stalin were not pharaohs. But they were obsessed with an ancient Egyptian principle, as if the spirit of ancient Egypt had been wandering around Russia like a zombie and wreaking catastrophic havoc there.”

Modern man no longer wants to function like an ant or an ancient Egyptian 4,000 years ago. But that is exactly what Lenin and Stalin demanded.

The leadership of the Communist Party claimed to know better what was good for the people than the people themselves.

For Stalin, the people were the ants. The individual ant did not count. If 10 million of 150 million ants were to die, there would still be 140 million left.

What is created by a completely misguided, outdated concept of rule is not only wrong, but it becomes evil. It creates a spiritual vacuum that sucks in evil so that it is filled from within. Leninism and Stalinism in Russia were basically a ghost of a completely outdated Egyptian spirit, disguised in the modern intellectual garb of Marxism.

A ghost not yet overcome

But the Egyptian ghost, Valentin Wember continued, has not yet been overcome. Vladimir Putin may distance himself from Stalin and his crimes, but after the chaotic freedoms of the Yeltsin years he immediately set up a centralized system with the so-called “vertical of power” and, above all, filled important posts with secret service agents, as if Russia were still ancient Egypt.

This cannot be excused by the fact that Putin is standing in the way of an American takeover of Russia, nor by the fact that the problems that Putin found after the catastrophe of the Yeltsin era were hyper-complex.

In my opinion, this judgment does not sufficiently take into account that in this chaos, the restoration of order and independence in Russia could not have been achieved in any other way. But it is true that Putin could then gradually have begun to decentralize and shift decision-making authority in all areas of life to the people themselves, leading to a real people’s rule. Instead, he further consolidated his central position of power as an authoritarian ruler and maintained the verticality of power.

But on the other hand: where in the world could he have had a model for real popular rule? — Nowhere.

The “Egypt problem” in the West

In the West, too, copies of the ancient Egyptian pyramid of power had been formed in Fascism and National Socialism, parallel to the Soviet Union. And in the subsequent democracies, the verticality of power has not been abandoned either, as V. Wember also stresses, but rather it permeates the state structures from top to bottom.

The communist or fascist leader, who orders and directs everything, has been replaced by the president or chancellor, elected every few years, who, together with his comrades, largely controls all areas of people’s lives through laws.

The laws practically also originate from him himself, since the party he leads also dominates the legislature by a majority, and their enforcement is in principle guaranteed by a judiciary that is also appointed and monitored by the executive, or in the highest courts is determined by party politics.

In the quest to transform the sole rule of one or a few individuals into the rule of all individuals, it was believed that after the French Revolution it was not possible to renounce the exercise of power; it was only to be given legitimacy, which now came from below, by the election of all. So old hierarchical power structures remained, now occupied by legitimate rulers.

But this did not eliminate the rule of people over people, which abolished their freedom and self-determination. The specter of Egypt still reigns.

“In a dictatorship you are oppressed and have no choice. In a democracy you can choose who oppresses you,” is the way cabaret artist Erwin Pelzig summed up the minimal difference.

On the history of rule and power

The exercise of power by individuals over others has essentially gone through three phases of development in the history of mankind. In the oriental empires of the Assyrians, Babylonians and Egyptians in the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC, as already described above, people experienced the power of the ruler as a divine power. The priest-king or pharaoh was a god who appeared on earth, a son of heaven, whose power did not mean external force, but consisted of the superior divine wisdom and goodness through which he ordered and guided people’s lives for their salvation, something they themselves were not yet capable of. The ruler and his ministers were experienced as something higher than ordinary people; gods and sub-gods spoke and worked through them.

In the further development, which began in Greece and Rome and was characterized by an awakening of conceptual thinking and the associated greater independence of the individual, a split occurred into a more secular and an ecclesiastical power.

The ruler was no longer experienced as the god himself, but as someone commissioned and inspired by God, as the ruler, the monarch by the grace of God. He was a human being like all others, but raised above them by the nobility of his soul, which enabled the god to inspire him for his leading tasks, which people still needed in a certain way.

With the modern era, a huge change in consciousness began again, in which the individual began to place himself more and more at the top of his own personality in order to shape his own life based on his own knowledge. The ruler was no longer seen as a messenger from God who was entitled to guide others through higher knowledge. Everyone felt capable and entitled to gain the knowledge he needed. The old social pyramid had lost its inner justification and had spiritually collapsed into a horizontal surface on which everyone was legally equal. The claim of “divine right” had become hollow, but remained on the throne for a long time. What had previously worked as an inner power with self-evident authority now became, spiritually emptied, an external power that could only be enforced and maintained through violence.

The absolutism of Louis XIV reached a high point in this backward-looking arrogance. All areas of life — political, administrative, military, economic and cultural — were seized from a single center and welded together into a tight, militant unity that was dominated by one spirit. And everything served the king. A hierarchical, bureaucratic state machine was created in which the individual was helplessly integrated. The king at the top and his officials sat at the control points of this huge ruling apparatus, which was a perfect instrument for him to subjugate all other people to his personal lust for power with inevitable violence.

But the development of the state under Louis XIV was only a particularly extreme example of a dynamic hostile to individuality that prevailed in all states of princely absolutism at that time. This absolutist unitary state was to shape the entire modern era. And the liberal democracies that followed the French Revolution not only took over the unitary state power apparatus from absolutism, but also expanded it further.

Thus the liberal impulse for freedom sought to assert a personal space of freedom for the individual against the omnipotent unitary state, but this only penetrated to a very limited extent and in the economy, as economic liberalism, led to the excess of egoism in capitalism.

Emergence of freedom and self-determination

With the ability to think conceptually, which emerged in Greece, a growing self-confidence arose in people, which was based on being able to recognize the truth in their own thoughts and act accordingly, without having to rely on the authority of rulers and priests. In this respect, all people became equal: they were able to determine their own actions based on their own knowledge and thereby freely develop their personality. This is ultimately what constitutes human dignity.

Every claim by one of the equals to dictate how others think and act is the hollow presumption that they are not equal to them, but are superior to them. It is a return to times past, an egoistic clinging to hierarchical power structures that is hostile to human development. It is a fundamental violation of equality and freedom, of the dignity of other people.

It was a long road to dethrone the usurpers of power, which culminated in the French Revolution. But freedom was only understood as freedom from the yoke of royal and noble rule, and in its place came the “rule of the people” or the rule of an elected majority of people’s representatives. This meant that the liberation of mankind has remained stuck halfway, to this day. Because it is about “to transform the sole rule of one individual into the rule of all individuals, that is, the right of self-determination of the individual citizen should replace the absolute claim to power in general.”

It is not a question of “replacing the power state in the hands of an individual and a social upper class with the power state in the hands of a ‘democratic’ majority, but of completely eliminating the power of people over people.” (Heinz Hartmut Vogel)

The community that in ancient times was superior to the individual, which under the leadership of the ruler provided him with comprehensive economic support, spiritual guidance and state protection, has lost its omnipotent legitimacy with the emancipation of the individual. However, even in “democracy” today it is largely continued in a bureaucratically perfected form. However, the organized community as a state can only have the task of enabling and protecting the freedom and self-determination of people based on equality.

It is no longer their concern to direct or determine the economic provision and the intellectual-cultural or health development of the people in any way, since under the leadership of the now “democratic” rulers, the freedom and self-determination of the people is thereby eliminated “from above”. There can no longer be an “above” in equality. It always brings with it a “below” that is subordinate to it, subject to it, in which equality is abolished. Power makes subjects.

Freedom and equality are not rights granted by the state, but conditions and human constitutions that have emerged and been achieved through historical development. They belong to the mental and spiritual nature of man, are born with him, so to speak. They are his natural rights, and precede every human institution, such as the state. The state simply finds them, must presuppose them and reckon with this fact from the outset.

The roots of today’s illegitimate power of the state lie in the fact that historically outdated social structures of the former theocratic total welfare state are being maintained in an outdated manner. State power has been usurped; it is the illegal appropriation of an instrument of violence by a few in order to illegally rule over others.

Today’s state power, insofar as it goes beyond pure law, is, in its omnipotence, unlawful in the face of the well-understood basic rights of the Basic Law. It has no inherent justification, it is hollow, an impertinence, it violates and debases human dignity. Whoever exercises it is historically backward, has not yet reached the true height of Western intellectual development of humanity and is hostile to it. In this respect, state power has socially pathological traits.

The social order of free people allows the individual only one “claim to power”: power over himself. The powerful person avoids this. Instead of controlling himself and becoming a free person, he controls others with the violent means of the state.

Self-determination requires new social forms

With democracy, the justified demand of individuals not to have laws dictated from above, but to participate in the creation of the law, was asserted. However, to the extent that in democracy the legal organization, the state, claimed universal jurisdiction over all areas of life and regulated them through laws, the law incorporated the substantive structures of life that are the concern of the people themselves who are knowledgeable in economic life and in the cultural, educational and health sectors. This meant that the impulse for self-determination could still be articulated in the debate, but was eliminated at the moment of voting, because everyone was then equally bound to the substantive regulations that resulted from them and had to act according to them — determined from outside.

Parliamentarism, which arose from the individual’s striving for self-determination and co-determination, leads to its destruction in the voting process. It “arises from the assertion of personality and concludes with the extinction of personality.” Rudolf Steiner drew attention to this in 1918.

In intellectual and economic life there can be no legislative bodies that regulate “from above,” but only horizontal advisory and cooperative bodies of free citizens who are oriented toward one another in solidarity. Rudolf Steiner developed this in a groundbreaking way in writings, essays and numerous lectures as the “threefold division of the social organism.”

Parliamentarism is only justified in the area of law itself, because questions of fair behavior among each other, of protecting internal and external peace, cannot be solved by individuals, but only by rules agreed upon by all. It is these that make the formation of a community as a state necessary in the first place and are its constitutive basis. Here, too, every adult is capable of making a judgment.

The vote does not lead to a leveling of personality, because the law that applies equally to everyone is precisely the desired goal. If the laws limit themselves to forming the legal framework for the substantive activities of people in intellectual and economic life, they do not eliminate freedom and self-determination, but rather enable them. And the monopoly of violence granted to the judiciary and police does not serve to give people power over them, but to protect them from those who violently interfere with the physical or mental integrity of others.

Conclusion

The abolition of the theocratic rule structure of the all-powerful state by dividing society into three relatively independent areas of life is becoming more urgent every day. The pseudo-pharaohs who have plundered the state as an instrument of power are deliberately leading their helpless subjects into ever new crises, catastrophes and apocalyptic wars — for the benefit of a few and to the detriment of humanity. The state crime of the staged corona pandemic, in which countless people have lost their economic existence, suffered serious health damage or died, would not have been possible without the theocratic rule structure.

It is time to take away their instrument of power and send them where they belong. [Across the Styx and without a coin to pay the ferryman.]

See the original article for the end notes (in German).

Afterword from the translator:

Personally I resent being called a criminal or terrorist by the most corrupt and pitiless criminals and terrorists alive, who call themselves “government”. None of us deserve to be treated as tools of self-serving men and women whose only care is the pursuit of power.

They pay scant regard to principles or the idea thereof. They are unlikely to be impressed with the stand we’re taking against their aims and wishes. They take it as an act of defiance, and one thing I’ve learned about such people is that they do not tolerate defiance. To be seen to do so would imply weakness and therefore an example has to be made — as we’ve seen in the UK — to all others who might be tempted to similar acts.

But not to do so is submission into slavery.

Do not bow to tyrants, because everyone that lives on their knees dies eventually in a welter of regrets.