137. Third section. We have here a number of human beings whose main interest is the condition of the community and the affairs of State. This interest can be of any nature ranging from dominating egoism, which indeed may sometimes even be criminal, to outstanding altruism and idealism. This kind of interest is known in daily life as "politics" and its practitioners as "politicians". The more primitive the faculty of feeling of these politicians is in relation to their faculty of intelligence, the more ignoble and egoistic will their politics appear, while the opposite will increasingly be the case as they come nearer to a development of a consciousness in which feeling begins to balance their highly developed intelligence. In the former case these people simply become fanatical adherents of nationalism, war and methods of force, of capitalism and of ruthless measures of exploitation, and of opposition towards all benefits for the sick, the elderly and others in need (see Section 95 on "blind politicians"). In the latter case, on the other hand, those people eagerly uphold internationalism, the abolition of war, the development of schools and education, support from the State for all who are sick and for all old people - in short, they are unselfish advocates of every possible development of a bright and happy existence for all individuals in the community, and therefore they become true idealists. As the terrestrial community consists of individuals from many different occupations and walks of life, each having an influence on the government by virtue of their so-called "right to vote", then, according to the primitiveness of their faculty of feeling, those individuals from all these different branches of occupation are interested in using their right to vote - their power - only for the advantage of their own particular occupation, which means stimulating to action whichever form of government is especially able to provide that kind of protection. As those walks of life represent many different grades - from the lowest and poorest workers to the financially superior and well-to-do capitalists, each of them only interested in maintaining a form of government which will protect favourable conditions just for themselves - then it is obvious that we will find politicians of the most varied types, politicians who appear as absolute contrasts to each other. So the capitalists fight for their own advantages in the constitution and the workers fight for theirs. The consequences are the so-called "political battles" which do not always take place without bloodshed or revolution.
      As the new world impulse will guide development (described in the preceding chapter) towards unification of all countries in the world under one democratic World Government, towards an abolition of the upper and lower classes, towards a transfer to the World Government of all employment allocation and so forth, then it will appear disadvantageous for any policy aiming in the opposite direction, and the representatives of those policies will therefore become opponents. And here we should refer once more to Section 95 on "blind politicians".
      In addition to this kind of resistance, the new world impulse will also meet a certain amount of opposition from people who are in reality its own supporters. In fact, there are those who are receptive to a large extent to the new materialistic ideas coming from that impulse, although they have not yet been able to make contact with the spiritual forces and religious background on which these ideas are based. That these new materialistic ideas have been able to gain access to a number of terrestrial people, in spite of their lack of receptivity to the new spiritual forces, is due to the fact that they have all had quite a highly developed intelligence, advanced enough to undermine their beliefs in the old traditional spiritual concept of life as a whole. At the same time the faculty of feeling outgrew the old religious basis, without, however, reaching the new spiritual foundation in any way; but nevertheless it made these people capable of seeing, and therefore accepting, the idealism behind the new materialistic concepts. The consequence of this had to be that all these people became protagonists and propagators of a reformation based on these new materialistic ideas without having reached the spiritual and religious stage of that reformation. And as, on account of their increased intelligence, they have been able to see the various drawbacks of the old religious ideology and concepts, but not able to obtain any new knowledge in the religious field, while those old concepts could sometimes be restrictive for their activities in spreading the new materialistic ideas, then a real antipathy to all religion arose in their minds. They became anti-religious. Following from this came a persecution of the still existing, and still necessary, ecclesiastic affairs and administration, whilst the anti-religious attitude of those people also indicated that the spreading of new materialistic ideas was based on a far too ignoble kind of dictatorship and, to a certain degree, also on policies of violence, murder, manslaughter and bodily mutilation. But this will bring about the situation that instead of creating a kingdom of freedom they will actually be in the process of creating a new system of coercion, another kind of war-dictatorship or despotism, in other words the basis for a new revolution.
      But as terrestrial humanity has already advanced so far in development that millions of its people are in actual fact only receptive to materialistic reforms resting on life's most unshakeable foundation, that is on a completely spiritual basis, then no political enterprise of any kind will ever attain a complete victory or make headway in the world until it, too, stands on that divine foundation. Thus the reformative, materialistic ideas from the new divine world impulse which have already begun to make disturbances in the world - although in a more or less diluted form, without religious basis and therefore of a revolutionary nature - will prove unable to achieve further propagation except to those areas of the terrestrial community where people are comparatively primitive and without any highly developed religious or spiritual culture, as long as that propogation still rests solely on materialism, power and dictatorship.
      Those people who have more or less become protagonists of the materialistic ideas from the new world impulse without making any contact with the underlying religious and cosmic forces behind the ideas, and who therefore fight them - being themselves anti-religious - are in reality at one and the same time both protagonists and opponents of the world reformation. They oppose its spiritual but promote its materialistic energies. But, as nothing can exist without spiritual energy and power, they will therefore, without knowing it, be neutralizing their own project. And, as their anti-religious attitude is really just due to the lack of an intellectual explanation of cosmic laws, that anti-religion will crumble away to the same degree as these people - who are idealists at heart - come into contact with an analysis of those laws which satisfies their intelligence. And their policies will then become of a pure nature, like a clear spring gushing forth to create oases and fertility where at the moment there exists only burning desert, drought and death.