"If we ask who stirs up nations against each other, who raises issues that control and direct humanity today, the answer is Ahriman and the ahrimanic deception which plays into human life. And in this sphere people very easily succumb to deception. They are not willing to descend to the lowest strata where reality is to be found. For, you see, Ahriman skillfully prepares his goal beforehand; ever since the Reformation and the Renaissance, the economist has been emerging in modern civilization as the representative governing type. That is an actual historical fact. If you go back to ancient times, even to those that I described today as luciferic, who were the governing types then? Initiates. The Egyptian Pharaohs, the Babylonian rulers, the Asiatic rulers-- they were initiates. Then the priest-type emerged as ruler and really remained so right up to the Reformation and the Renaissance. Since that time the economist has had the upper hand. Rulers are in fact merely the henchmen and enforcers of the economists. One must not imagine that the rulers of modern times are anything but the economists' agents. And all that has been enshrined as law and justice is, if one scrutinizes it carefully, simply a consequence of a thinking dictated by economics. In the nineteenth century economics was, for the first time, replaced by a thinking based on finance and banking; and in the nineteenth century was created for the first time the whole financial system which swamps every other relationship. One must only be able to examine these things and follow them up empirically and practically."
Taken from Rudolf Steiner's lecture in Zurich, October 27th, 1919
