The Whole Social: Recent Episodes
Seth Jordan
A project dedicated to exploring the integral nature of society. With every article we try to take current events and drop below their surface to the deeper, more fundamental dynamics of social life.
thewholesocial.substack.com
Earlier this year, the Trump administration removed exhibits on slavery from George Washington’s former home in Philadelphia. The removal was part of a nation-wide effort to rewrite history, which sounds bad, but they did it in the name of “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” which sounds good. So: was it bad or good?
In February, federal judge Cynthia M. Rufe ruled that the exhibits must be immediately restored, citing the dystopian novel 1984 to make clear that the administration’s actions were very bad indeed. But her understanding of 1984 was flawed. That book does clearly illuminate this case, but no one (including Judge Rufe) seems to understand its deeper meaning. Do you?
This is a recording of an article from February 21st, 2026. You can find the written version of the article here.
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The 20th century spiritual researcher Rudolf Steiner is known for his work in many fields — education, agriculture, medicine, economics, religion, etc. — but his work in the field of organizational development is almost entirely unknown. In this talk (given at Harvard Divinity School on December 15, 2025), Seth Jordan shares an overview of those ideas, bringing together the advice that Steiner gave to individual institutions with Steiner’s social ideas more broadly.
You can find a written version of this talk (though by no means an exact transcript) here and a video version here.
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Seth Jordan, Nathaniel Williams, and Omri Elaad discuss how Rudolf Steiner’s social threefolding insights pertain to organizations. They look specifically at two texts that can be found here: https://thewholesocial.substack.com/p/possible-to-threefold-an-organization
At the end of WWI, Steiner worked tirelessly to wake people up to the threefold nature of society, to the fact that it has distinct realms — political, economic, and cultural — and that each require independence in order for society to be healthy. But in all his books and lectures, he rarely spoke about the threefold nature of organizations, even though, as he said, “we can only work and act as modern people through and within organizations,” and even though, as he also said, every organization is itself threefold:
“We divide social life into these three parts best when we comprehend that all of life’s institutions implicitly contain a threefold nature, and when we understand how to organize individual things so that the threefold impulse underlies them.”
But how should we organize our initiatives so their threefold nature can express itself in a healthy way? Over the years, some anthroposophists have tried to threefold organizations by distinguishing and dividing up governmental, economic, and cultural activities (often in the form of committees overseeing agreements/bylaws, work, and learning/inspiration). But Steiner himself never suggested this to the organizations he worked with, in fact he ridiculed it when members of the Anthroposophical Society brought it up. So how should we think about it?
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This is a recording of an article from July 12th, 2025 (you can find the written version of the article here, and a brief description of the article here). Pictures from the original article, which are referred to in the audio article, are below.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
On April 22nd, 2025, the nine justices of the Supreme Court discussed a number of children’s picturebooks being taught in the nation’s schools and asked, What concepts are age-appropriate? What’s content neutral and what’s pushing a certain agenda? The justices felt responsible to answer such questions — even though they have exactly no expertise in this area — because of a fundamental and widespread misunderstanding of the constitution’s first amendment.
This is a recording of an article from April 30th, 2025. You can find the written version of the article here.
Yes, writers have to eat, but paywalls just punish low-income people, and why shouldn’t they have access to the writing and ideas they want?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
More and more it feels like our political life is driving us to the breaking point. But if we look a little more closely, then the illness can point us towards its cure — specifically, to the two constitutional changes we need to turn things around.
This is a recording of an article from April 4th, 2025. You can find the written version of the article here.
Yes, writers have to eat, but paywalls just punish low-income people, and why shouldn’t they have access to the writing and ideas they want?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
The recent hit podcast The Telepathy Tapes gives a fascinating description of what appear to be telepathic abilities in non-speaking autistic children. How to understand this phenomenon is a vital question, but unfortunately, one that most mainstream scientists and journalists will likely never ask. Instead, most will ignore it while a few will dismiss it, which is what we saw in early March with the publication of “The Telepathy Trap” in The Atlantic.
But such dismissals are still incredibly important. They are a form of engagement, and they demonstrate just how confused, how lost at sea, the mainstream scientific community is when it comes to such questions. But not only that — the flaws in their logic can be doorways for our own thinking, bringing us deeper into the phenomenon and, in the process, helping us to better understand it.
This is a recording of an article from March 15th, 2025. You can find the written version of the article here.
Yes, writers have to eat, but paywalls just punish low-income people, and why shouldn’t they have access to the writing and ideas they want?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
On Tuesday, March 18th, I sat down to discuss The Telepathy Tapes and Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy with three longtime teachers — Gleice da Silva, Jan Göschel, and Becky Rutherford — all of whom have worked extensively with children with developmental disabilities.
We had a delightful, wide-ranging conversation where we explored some of the possible reasons why the children described in this podcast are reporting such extraordinary experiences, and also how many of these experiences are actually much more common amongst “neurotypical” individuals than is normally thought. I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did!
Some relevant resources:
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A look at some of the controversy around The Telepathy Tapes: https://thewholesocial.substack.com/p/telepathy-tapes-telepathy-trap
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The Camphill Academy, which offers adult training in anthroposophic Inclusive Social Development, and where Gleice, Jan, and Becky all currently teach: https://camphill.edu
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The Camphill School, where Gleice, Jan, and Becky all taught in the past:
https://camphillschool.org
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The Section for Inclusive Social Development at the Goetheanum in Switzerland: https://inclusivesocial.org/en
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Larry Bisonette (mentioned at 16:04): https://www.wretchesandjabberers.org/bios/larry-bissonnette
Yes, writers have to eat, but paywalls just punish low-income people, and why shouldn’t they have access to the writing and ideas they want?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
John Steinbeck was one of the great novelists of the 20th century, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. His works are multifaceted — one can find scathing social critiques, rich humor, and gentle humanity between their covers. But I wasn’t aware of his spiritual leanings until reading one of his earliest works, In Dubious Battle (1936), where he speaks about the reality of spiritual possession, as well as a kind of ‘group soul’ that emerges whenever a mass of men are gathered.
This is a recording of an article from January 7th, 2025. You can find the written version of the article here.
Yes, writers have to eat, but paywalls just punish low-income people, and why shouldn’t they have access to the writing and ideas they want?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
If we want to bring about real social change, then we need to understand society — we need to learn to see it whole. This is the task of social threefolding. But developing a new understanding won’t automatically bring about change, we need to find ways to enact it. So what have threefolders done over the last 100 years, and what ways of working can we imagine in the future?
This is a recording of an article from October 19th, 2024. You can find the written version of the article here.
Yes, writers have to eat, but paywalls just punish low-income people, and why shouldn’t they have access to the writing and ideas they want?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
The US presidential elections are less than a month away. Most Americans think the country is in desperate need of change — radical, systemic change — but who has any actual ideas that could change the system?
Instead the candidates are busy trying to lure voters through tax cuts and social programs, and to paint their opposition as the antichrist and this election as the last stop before Armageddon (from the lips of Elon Musk: “this will be the last election in America if you don’t vote”). But if Armageddon comes, it will be because the American people have been so riled up that they resort to violence.
What we need are real ideas for systemic change. We need to get to the roots of what’s making society sick.
This is a recording of an article from June 30th, 2024. You can find the written version of the article here.
Yes, writers have to eat, but paywalls just punish low-income people, and why shouldn’t they have access to the writing and ideas they want?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
Polyamory — the practice of having multiple romantic partners at the same time — is having a moment right now. But is it just a moment, or is it part of a deeper trend in the evolution of relationships? And how should we work with relationships in the future if we want to bring them to health?
This is a recording of an article from April 28th, 2024. You can find the written version of the article here.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
I want to share one of the most interesting books I’ve read recently. On the surface, it’s a history of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, that describes an amazing life of high adventure lived between the courts of British royalty and the wilderness of 17th century America. But really it’s the history of an idea — the idea of freedom of thought, freedom of conscience — and how that idea shaped America, and the world, in the centuries that followed.
Most importantly, this book illustrates the evolution of the human soul — the evolution of consciousness — that’s essential to understand if we care about the work of social change. What ideas are right for our time and how do we introduce them? To answer this, we have to develop a sense for where we’ve come from and where we’re going, which I try to describe a bit in this podcast.
I refer to a couple articles in this podcast. One on the state’s overreach into the realm of disinformation and truth…
…and the other on the separation of nation and state.
And a quick tip: If you prefer listening to books instead of reading them, you can get audio books for free through your local library and an app called Libby. I’ve found it to be a fantastic resource.
Hope you enjoy!
Yes, writers have to eat, but paywalls just punish low-income people, and why shouldn’t they have access to the writing and ideas they want?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
It’s not easy to work together. There’s a tension in it: Sometimes we want to be together — we find it inspiring and easier to get things done — but sometimes we want to be left alone — we want freedom. So which side is right?
Of course both sides are right, but also neither of them, because what we’re really looking for is something we won’t find with a few superficial changes: There is no perfect hybrid model. In reality, the whole nature of working together in organizations has to be understood at a much deeper level. The social insights of the 20th century social reformer, Rudolf Steiner, are invaluable for understanding this.
This is a recording of an article from February 12th, 2024. You can find the written version of the article here.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
I was recently teaching a course up in Toronto, and was invited by Eli Will of the Threefolding substack to give a public talk entitled “What will it take to bring health to society — the present-day challenges and prospects of working with Rudolf Steiner’s insights into a healthy threefold society.”
The talk was video recorded and I’ve also turned it into a podcast for those who prefer to listen. If you have any thoughts, please do share them in the comments.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
Many people have chronicled the history of violence — the actions and reactions, attacks and retaliations — that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the structural, systemic causes of the conflict have gotten far less attention, even though they’re far more significant. The most important cause of the conflict is the internationally-celebrated idea of the nation-state — “national self-determination” — from which the Zionist project for a “Jewish state” was born.
But the nation-state idea is an absurdity in today’s multi-ethnic, multicultural world, an absurdity that inevitably leads to violence. As Robert Lansing, the secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson, described it: the principle of national self-determination is “a principle loaded with dynamite.” To understand why, listen to this article (and you can also find other articles on this topic here and here).
This is a recording of an article from December 19th, 2023. You can find the written version of the article here.
Yes, writers have to eat, but paywalls just punish low-income people, and why shouldn’t they have access to the writing and ideas they want?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
As more and more US states create programs that give parents choice in education — including money to send their kids to private and religious schools — critics claim it violates the separation of church and state. But a closer reading of the first amendment shows it’s actually the opposite: Public schools are the ones trampling the constitution.
The first amendment is about freedom of thought; it declares that government should have no role in telling us what to think and believe. But now we have government schools shaping the minds of our youth. How does that make sense?
This is a recording of an article from November 5th, 2023. You can find the written version of the article here.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
As the culture wars continue to rage, there’s almost no one looking at the question of peace: How could a lasting peace come about? What are the principles by which we could live together? So I was incredibly surprised to discover the political commentator Andrew Sullivan discussing such principles in a recent article, and was even more surprised to find that I generally agreed with him.
This is a recording of an article from July 23rd, 2023. You can find the written version of the article here.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
This past spring, the publisher of the New York Times, A.G. Sulzberger, wrote a major essay defending the ideal of independent journalism. At least, that’s what it claimed to be. In reality, it was an essay defending the ideal of objectivity, and attacking independence… which is all incredibly strange. I untangle this mess in the above article. This is a recording of an article from May 30th, 2023. You can find the written version of the article here.
Yes, writers have to eat, but paywalls just punish low-income people. And why shouldn’t they have access to the knowledge they want?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
While MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropic approach of “no-strings-attached giving” is a step in the right direction, it’s still part of the much larger problem of Big Philanthropy — the fact that billionaires play such an outsized role in the development of our cultural and political life. This has to change. People need an equal voice in their politics and need to be free to direct their own cultural life. To do this, we’ll need “community-supported culture.” This article gives a number of concrete suggestions for how we can get there. This is a recording of an article from April 28th, 2023. You can find the written version of the article here.
Yes, writers have to eat, but paywalls just punish low-income people. And why shouldn’t they have access to the knowledge they want?
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
It seems like our relation to work is crumbling. In recent years we’ve seen the Great Resignation followed by the phenomenon of “quiet quitting” — people staying in their jobs, but doing the least amount of work possible. If the work isn’t fulfilling, why should they go the extra mile? But is this just the reality of labor, or are things somehow being distorted? Decisive insights into these questions can be found in the work of the 20th century philosopher Rudolf Steiner. This is a recording of an article from March 28th, 2023. You can find the written version of the article here.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
Who should own the resources we all depend on — the land, factories, and machines — was a question that was once at the heart of the debate between capitalism and communism. We know their basic arguments — communists put all their faith in the state, and capitalists want private individuals to run everything — but are those really our only two options? No. Both are partially right, and both are terribly flawed. The healthy solution isn’t impossible to see, it just requires us taking up this question anew and being willing to think a little more dynamically about it.
This is a recording of an article from November 28th, 2022. You can find the written version of the article here.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
Students of Goethe’s color theory will know a simple, yet amazing experiment where the same color is placed against two differently colored backgrounds, with the result that it appears dramatically different in the two settings. Here’s one version of the experiment, a silkscreen by the artist Josef Albers (the brown squares on either side are the same color).
We can see from this experiment how radically different things can appear when they’re in a different context. But do they just appear different or are they actually different? (There is, after all, no such thing as an isolated color, every color is always in relationship to others.)
We can explore this question for ourselves through our experience of our own identity. We often think of ourselves as one thing, but if we pay attention to how our identity changes according to our social context — how our temperament and ways of being change as we’re around different people — we find something similar to the above color experiment.
This observation — that each person draws out different aspects of who we are — continues to surprise me as I come into new relationships. What I thought was a onesidedness or entrenched pattern in myself, suddenly looks different when I’m around someone new; and so the work of self-knowledge constantly changes as the social context shifts.
This observation is also what’s explored in more depth in the article “Being mirrors for each other” (originally published December 18th, 2021). The above recording is a narrated version of that article. You can find the written version here.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
Over the last couple years it seems like we’ve all become obsessed with crypto. Talking with people about it, I’ve been struck over and over by the fact that, behind all the excitement, everyone’s just trying to get something for nothing. While economists say such self-interest runs the economy, when you look more closely at crypto (which is just a big pyramid scheme based on pure self-interest) it tells a very different story.
I decided to write about it when I came across a couple amazing stories from the art world: one about the “Mona Lisa of NFTs,” and the other about how the sale of “invisible art” back in the 60s continues to make waves today. On the surface, these things seem like perhaps they’re also just a form of gambling for imaginary values… but are they? Or is something different going on? How does the value of the imagination differ from the imaginary value of crypto?
This is a recording of an article from May 5th, 2022. You can find the written version of the article here.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
A large part of the difficulty surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict comes from how we think about it — specifically, the fact that there’s a fundamental confusion about what it means to be a nation-state, and how oppression of minorities is built into the very idea. In a recent talk by Amnesty International USA director Paul O’Brien, as well as in the reactions by the media, this confusion was on full display.
This is a recording of an article from March 30th, 2022. You can find the written version of the article here.
(For further discussion of the idea of separating nation and state, read the article “To end all wars” about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict).
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
This is a recording of an article from March 4th, 2022. It looks at the war in Ukraine and beyond it to the deeper causes of war in general, especially the central role that ethnic nationalism plays in engendering hostilities. The article then looks at a solution that Rudolf Steiner proposed a century ago, which is likely the only solution that can bring an end to war and hold humanity back from the path of nuclear destruction.
You can find the written version of the article here.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
This is a recording of an article from November 7th, 2021. The topic of the Great Resignation might sound a bit dated to some, but the social phenomenon it describes — the “wage-price spiral” — is always with us and is one of the most significant social phenomena to grasp.
The article explains how the main tool of economic justice — fighting for higher wages — isn’t actually effective. If our goal is to truly ensure everyone has what they need — not just enough to survive, but to live well and with dignity — then we need to start thinking in terms of the whole economy, the whole of society. The article ends by offering some models that are working in the right direction.
You can find the written version of the article here.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
This is a recording of an article from December 8, 2021. It looks at the increasing pressure to force people to vaccinate, some reasons why people might not trust the government, scientific, and medical communities, and how such trust can be restored. The article asks whether the trade-off of medical freedom (people’s freedom over their own bodies) for public safety is a true necessity.
You can find the written version of the article here.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
This is a recording of the August 3, 2021, article that explored how society has its own nature and lawfulness — a fact borne out by the observations of social scientists, but still almost entirely misunderstood (to the detriment of us all). This lawfulness was described most recently by the French economist Thomas Piketty and most clearly by the early 20th century philosopher Rudolf Steiner.
You can find the written version of the article here. (It has a number of images that illustrate the content of the article so, if you listen to it, you might want to go back afterwards and look at the images.)
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com
This is a recording of the September 2, 2021, article that explored the nature of paid work and gave “a brief look at the dehumanizing labor market that has Americans refusing to return to work and many of China’s young people choosing to ‘lie flat.’”
You can find the written version of the article here.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thewholesocial.substack.com