Martin Luther was the most prominent public face of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. One of the key factors that set this movement apart from previous religious movements was the use of information and communication as a means to undermine and weaken the incumbent power, the Catholic Church. He used information and  ideas to force a Christian endeavor, corrupted by the selling of indulgences, to cede ground and after 1000 years of hegemony the authority of the Catholic Church became an anathema in many countries.

In 1517, Luther published his Ninety-Five Theses, a list of criticisms and objections to the practices of the Catholic Church, and he nailed them to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany. This act of public defiance was a direct challenge to the Church’s authority, and it was a clear statement that Luther intended to start a public discussion about the issues he saw with the Church. I wonder where might serve as a modern day Wittenberg.

Luther’s ideas quickly spread across Europe, thanks in large part to the new technology of the printing press. He and his followers produced a vast number of books, pamphlets, and broadsheets that carried his message to a wide audience. In this way, Luther was able to reach people who were previously unable to access information and ideas about the Church and its practices.

New technologies give us the possibility to awaken a larger segment of the population to the non-democratic and corrupt forces that have become increasingly powerful and more blatant in their attempts to crush society.  Whilst the evidence for this perversion of power has always existed it has over the past 2-3 years  become more pronounced than many people imagined would be possible. Regulatory capture, failure of journalism, psyops against citizens and censorship have all contributed to the current state of the information war.  Rudolf Steiner warned of the increasing threat of a medical papacy in several lectures. In lecture 8 of Disease, Karma, and Healing, GA 107: Spiritual-Scientific Inquiries into the Nature of the Human Being we can find:

People usually only concern themselves with disease, or at least with one or other forms of disease, when they fall ill in some way; and then they are mostly only interested in their recovery, in the fact of being cured. How they are cured is usually of very little interest to them, and it is even very agreeable to them not to have to concern themselves further with the nature of this recovery. Most of our contemporaries are happy to delegate the task of curing them to the people appointed to do so. In fact, a far more pervasive faith in authority holds sway in this field in our era than has ever held sway in the sphere of religion. Medical papacy, irrespective of what form it assumes in one place or another, has today become extremely prevalent and will go on taking stronger hold in future. Lay people are not in the least at fault for this state of affairs and its future increase. You see, people don’t give it any thought, don’t concern themselves with such things — not, at least, until they have first-hand experience of it, suffer an acute illness and need a cure. And for this reason a great majority of the population looks on with complete indifference as the medical papacy assumes ever greater proportions, worming its way into the most diverse fields — for instance, intervening extensively in children’s education, in school life, and staking a claim here to a certain form of therapy. People do not worry about the deeper underlying factors at work here. They stand by and watch as public ordinances are given some kind of legislative form. They have no real wish to gain insight into such things. By contrast there will always be those who, finding themselves in difficulty and discovering that ordinary, materialistic medicine — whose foundations they have no interest in — does not answer their needs, will seek help from practitioners who draw on an esoteric foundation.

What is the nature of this beast and how do we blunt its forces?