In an effort to try to shape society in a way that they hope will be healing, Seth Jordan and a group of friends recently founded an inspiring new organization called Think OutWord. Loosely based around Rudolf Steiner’s ideas on the threefold social order, Think OutWord is a peer-led training in social threefolding.
Until he went to college, Seth believed that education was a search for Truth. He’d graduated from the Green Meadow Waldorf School with high ideals, and was hoping to create a life that in some way implemented at least some of these. In college he took some courses on Marxism and the history of political thought, but most of what he read concerning the structure of society seemed threadbare.
“I’ve never been to a rally or protested anything,” he explains. “So in that way I’m not an activist. I was a philosophy major and I stayed with the humanities. I didn’t see a way of getting engaged in business or government. I had no idea what healthy social forms looked like and whether they were even possible. After going through Waldorf education I had strong pictures of Michael and the dragon and all those stories of the hero’s journey, but they were never really directed at society and transforming the world in concrete ways. In college I was looking for Truth with a capital but quickly found the educational system dead and oppressive. Afterwards, like many of my peers, I decided to go into manual labor. I wanted to do ‘honest work,’ meet real needs, and knew I wanted to stay from what I saw as “dishonest work”: business and government. I feel like this is the plight of a number of my anthroposophically-inspired peers, we don’t think about engaging the world at the societal level because we don’t have many examples of people working in this realm in meaningful and really healthy ways.”
Seth might have spent the rest of his life in manual labor, but his continued interest in social change led him to attend a workshop at the Rudolf Steiner Institute led by Nicanor Perlas. Nicanor introduced him to some of Rudolf Steiner’s social thinking, and this revealed to him entirely new possibilities of both making a living and living a purposeful life.
“I think of Nicanor Perlas as ‘the little Buddha of anthroposophy,’” says Seth. “I read his book, and he opened my mind to Civil Society, and the developments of the last twenty years. Activism is not really what it’s about. It’s more about working with social forms that strive to integrate economic, political, and cultural elements in a healthy way.”
The premise of the growing civil society is that it is a third cultural sector of society, distinct from government and business. It refers essentially to professional associations, religious groups, labor unions, citizen advocacy organizations, education, and the arts. The Institute for Social Renewal is another organization that has inspired Seth and his friends and made them wonder whether they could create a place to train people in social entrepreneurships.
“Are we doing what we came here to do?” Seth asks. Even for him, it’s a difficult question to answer. He explains: “Working with the thought that ‘what we need is here,’ and that what we are meant to do in the world can be understood as what is in need of doing, then we can begin to get an answer. And right now that answer is no: we’re not really doing what we came here to do.”
Simply put, for Seth that means working to change society so that it is premised on the ideal of human goodness.
“My understanding is that young people bring with them the spiritual impulses that are needed on the earth today, and everyone needs to live their destiny, to draw that out of them. I imagine that means working for good. There’s a lot of powerful and innovative ideas out there, but not enough people know about them.”