Steiner's name for the way the institutions of a declining civilization act as a real selective force, carrying incapable people upward into the leading positions.
What is the Selection of the Unfit?
The Selection of the Unfit in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's diagnosis that the institutions of a declining civilization work as a real selective force, lifting incapable people into leading positions instead of filtering them out. He named it in the first lecture of the Training Course for Upper Silesians, given at Stuttgart on 12 February 1921 and collected as GA 338, where the German reads Auswahl der Untüchtigen, the selection of the incapable. Steiner treats the effect as structural rather than moral: because spiritual life has been harnessed to the state and to the economy, its own productivity goes unrecognised, and posts are filled by state service and economic interest rather than demonstrated capacity. He also states the reverse. The impulse of the threefold social organism, once carried into humanity, works with equal reality in the opposite direction, bringing about a selection of the able and pushing the unfit down from their pedestal.
The Selection of the Unfit is Steiner's blunt reading of why leadership in a declining civilization so often lands on the wrong shoulders. He does not blame individuals. He blames an arrangement in which spiritual life, the faculties and the schools and the churches, has been made an appendage of state and economy, so the qualities that rise are the ones it rewards.
In Steiner's Own Words
But we shall only find the opportunity to speak to these people if we first rid ourselves of any illusions about two things. The first is the fact that at present there is, to a great extent, no sense of the productivity of intellectual life. The silliness with which, not so long ago, the phrase “the road to success is open to the brave” was coined – not the word, but the way the word was coined – was a silliness that should be thoroughly eradicated from people's minds in view of the facts that prevail in today's civilization. For the facts of today's civilization are such that they, by their very nature, always carry a selection, a selection of the unfit, to the top.
What it Means Today
The clearest modern statement of the same observation carries a different name. In 1969 the Canadian-born educator Laurence J. Peter, writing with Raymond Hull, published The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, whose thesis is that inside a hierarchy people tend to be promoted until they reach the rank at which they are no longer competent. In 2010 three physicists at the University of Catania, Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda and Cesare Garofalo, modelled promotion inside an agent-based hierarchy and found the principle holds wherever competence is assumed to transfer upward. Their paper ran in Physica A and took that year's Ig Nobel Prize in Management.
Thalira synthesis: Peter describes the symptom from inside the ladder, and Steiner describes the building the ladder is bolted to. The Peter Principle needs only a promotion rule to produce its result. Steiner's selection of the unfit needs a whole civilization in which spiritual life has no recognised productivity of its own, so that theological faculties train serviceable officials, jurisprudence teaches state custom instead of the essence of law, and no institution is left whose business is to notice capacity. Correct the promotion rule and the sorting slows. Free spiritual life from the state and the economy, Steiner argues in Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage, and the sorting runs in the other direction.
Where to Read More
- How Can We Work for the Impulse of the Threefold Social Order?, GA 338
- Find Towards Social Renewal at SteinerBooks
- How to Meditate with Crystals: Placement, Technique, and Selection
- The Chaldean Oracles: Ancient Theurgy and the Fire of the Gods
- Theseus: The Athenian Hero, the Labyrinth, and the Civilising of Chaos