Unfolding Three-folding: The Fourfold Nature of the Threefold Social Order

First Tuesday Talk - monthly series
September 1, 2020
7:00pm MDT

Location: online via Zoom

Thank you for your enthusiastic response. This event reached full capacity.

The Unfolding Three-folding talk recording can be viewed here.

This was a free talk. However, if you wish, you may make a donation here.

Presenter: Charles Burkam, JD

The global pandemic has underlined the ineffectiveness of the current social systems and revealed how grossly inequitable and unjust are elements of those systems. Calls for transformation abound, but it appears the current economic and political systems (and cultural discourse) are trending towards even greater dysfunction.

Such was the state of affairs 100 years ago after the devastation of WW1, when Rudolf Steiner provided his thoughts on a three-fold organization of social life that could renew the “social organism.” Perhaps this is a moment when the ideas of three independent, but interrelated systems, as envisioned by Rudolf Steiner, could enter the dialogue.

Steiner stated that this form of organization would provide for the general wellbeing of collective humanity because it was in alignment with the structure and developmental needs of the individual human being. And, as such, it would need to be in continuous development as well!

We will review the essential elements and underlying principles he set forth and consider the current dynamics and attitudes that are not in alignment with such a re-organization/re-orientation. Lastly, we will explore questions about the fourth aspect of this threefold system: What would be needed to weave independently organized economic, rights and cultural systems together harmoniously?

About Charles Burkam

Charles Burkam attended his first conference on Three-folding in 1984, although it was his experience in the painting workshop there that lead him to abandon his legal career, his position as Mayor, and move his family to England to attend Emerson College. Thereafter, he spent 13 years in the UK helping manage Anthroposophical organizations attempting to work out of Steiner’s Threefold principles, as further elaborated in World Economy, including serving as President of the Mercury Provident Ethical Pension Fund.

He has been connected with Waldorf education for over 40 years; has served in administration and as an advisor in both private and public schools; has taught Economics and Government in High School; and has served in leadership positions in the Alliance for Public Waldorf Education for the past 6 years.

He obtained his B.A. in Economics at Princeton University, his Juris Doctor at Harvard Law School, and spent a decade as an advocate for equal justice within Community Legal Services. However, all that he had learned previously paled in comparison with the wisdom he found, and continues to find, in Rudolf Steiner’s writings.

He lives in the White Mountains of Arizona, where he and his late wife had established a Biodynamic small holding, and gazes with wonder at the stars and planets.