The two opposed currents in every human encounter: a social force that falls asleep into the other, and an antisocial force that asserts self-consciousness.
Social and Antisocial Forces in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of the twofold current at work in every human encounter. In The Challenge of the Times (GA 186, 1918), Steiner shows that meeting another person sets two opposed forces in motion. A social force draws us to fall asleep into the other, building the bridge of community. An antisocial force makes us assert self-consciousness, defending our thinking against being lulled. Steiner locates the social pole in sleep and the antisocial pole in waking thought, sympathy, and self-love. He teaches that the fifth post-Atlantean consciousness-soul age structurally intensifies the antisocial, since the age cultivates independent thinking. Healthy life requires hovering between the two like a pendulum, schooling oneself toward the social through deliberate self-discipline.
In Steiner's Own Words
Human beings hover, as it were, between the social and the antisocial, just as they hover between waking and sleeping (one could also say that sleeping is social and waking is antisocial), and just as they must hover between waking and sleeping in order to live a healthy life, so must they hover between the social and the antisocial. But this is precisely what is extremely important for human life. For it enables human beings to lean more or less toward one or the other, just as one can lean more or less toward sleeping or waking. In this way, humans can also cultivate more social or more antisocial impulses within themselves.
What it Means Today
Steiner's twofold force found an unexpected echo in moral psychology. In The Righteous Mind (Pantheon, 2012), the New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that human beings are, in his phrase, "ninety percent chimp and ten percent bee." Most of the time we are selfish primates competing for status, yet under the right conditions a "hive switch" flips and we lose ourselves in the group, merging with something larger. Haidt grounds this in research on collective effervescence, awe, and the muscular synchrony of marching, singing, and dancing together. The parallel with Steiner is close. Where Haidt sees a groupish overlay on a selfish ape, Steiner sees a social force that draws us to sleep into the other riding alongside an antisocial force that wakes us into separate self-consciousness. Both deny the comfortable claim that humans are simply social by nature.
The two accounts diverge where Steiner reaches further. Haidt treats the hive switch as an evolved adaptation; Steiner treats the social and antisocial as a spiritual law of incarnation that the consciousness-soul age deliberately tips toward separation, so that freedom can be won. Thalira synthesis: the loneliness epidemic that public-health bodies now name is not a malfunction of the social instinct but the predictable shadow of an age engineered to strengthen the antisocial pole, which is why community today must be practised as a discipline rather than awaited as a feeling. Steiner's counsel is practical, lead a life of expectation toward others, correct the first image the subconscious forms, and school the social force back into a culture built to amplify its opposite.
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