“No more and no less than the passage from good to evil” – This is the answer given by the spirit summoned by Lessing’s Faust when Faust asks him how fast he is.
Evil and speed – an insightful thought on Lessing’s part!
The world is in fact in a state of feverish acceleration, if not to say acceleration madness. On all the billboards across Switzerland, against a background of large construction sites, cities or beautiful lakeland landscapes, is emblazoned the new ultimate buzzword known as 5G. It comes as a Christmas present yet to be opened, accompanied by the happy message trumpeted from the rooftops that it is good news for everyone. What is its merit? To be faster than anything before it. A DVD can now be downloaded in seconds, to say nothing of its other much-vaunted advantages. Health concerns are dismissed as “unscientific”. And behind such concerns, as William J. Broad informed us on 14 May in the renowned New York Times, astonishingly, – are the Russians! In all seriousness, the news channel RT America was held responsible for the resistance against the ultra-fast introduction of the super-fast 5G after the broadcaster, indeed all of Putin’s Russia, had already been blamed for Hillary Clinton’s electoral defeat. Or maybe the NYT was not so serious? After all, it is in business with Verizon, the US I.T. giant, all under one roof. All clear? Thus has one of the most prestigious US newspapers mutated in the shortest time into an advertising sheet for economic and surveillance interests.
That Broad’s article was treated with respect in the Swiss press was no less grotesque. The headline of the free newspaper 20 Minutes was:
“This is why Russia wants us to be afraid of 5G.” Fear is the reverse side of the excessive addiction to speed. Fear of missing the connection, fear that Switzerland will lose out as a place to do business. But what is this crazy whirling dance actually?
On 13 May RT America featured a perceptive, sometimes amusing analysis of this farce, presented by Rick Sanchez. Following the irresponsibly forced introduction of 5G technology, the international situation could become so acute – for example, in view of the narrow-minded warmongering stance by NATO and the USA towards Iran – that something might have to happen that Rudolf Steiner referred to after the rejection of the German peace offer during the First World War: an intervention by the spiritual world and its powers through natural or other disasters. Or in the words of the Spirit of the Elements in the fourth scene of Steiner’s First Mystery Drama:
“Spirits would have to break worlds
Before your actions within the course of time
Bring devastation and death to the eternities.”
What a contrast: evil occurs daily at a hellish speed.
What is spiritual and good advances only at a snail’s pace. But it goes on for millennia!
T.H. Meyer