The Necessity of Being Shaken

The Necessity of Being Shaken to Shape Up or Riding the Bull Instead of Making it into a Gazelle

1. Forces at the Periphery

The giants of our time: Palantir, Thiel, Carp — these are operations stretched out to the periphery of thought and force. They’re not just “data companies”; they are working with the same gesture that Steiner’s consciousness worked with: uniting with the periphery, moving out into the cosmic horizon.

But where Steiner filled that gesture with spiritual perception, they fill it with abstract computation, predictive analytics, surveillance. It’s the same direction, the same movement, but without the corresponding form-consciousness. Which makes it dangerous, but also undeniably powerful.

2. The Necessity of Being Shaken

These forces may seem to run ahead, but what if the times namely the people were lagging behind? Therefore the point has to be made about humanity needing to be shaped by these forces may well be uncomfortable but true. Steiner spoke about the shock of mechanization, of the ahrimanic double, as something humanity must pass through to awaken. If people remain soft, indolent, comfort-addicted, they cannot rise to meet the Michaelic task.

So the tsunami of innovation, financial abstraction, algorithmic intelligence, is in some sense the world’s metabolic push — the blood driving up into the head, demanding a new form of thinking and willing. Humanity needs the jolt, otherwise it sleeps.

That’s why, as we could say, it is perhaps wrong to frame these actors only as “evil.” Evil lies more in humanity not rising to the challenge.

3. America as the Soil of Innovation

To frame these giants arising in the technological age, a certain remark about the American soil is here important. Europe (especially Germany) tends to brood, conceptualize, critique. America absorbs, transforms, builds. For someone like Thiel (formed in German intellectual gravity, transplanted into American entrepreneurial dynamism), there’s an almost visceral frustration:

“Come on world, catch up. The forces are here. Ride them.”

It’s not simply greed or control — it’s also a desperate cry for the rest of humanity to accelerate. And when that call isn’t met, it comes out in distorted forms: surveillance capitalism, seasteads, city-states.

4. The Task: Form That Does Not Tame

So the corrective cannot be about “humanizing” in the sentimental sense (making the bull into a gazelle). That would only weaken the very forces that need to remain world-shaping.

Instead, the task is:

• To recognize the bull as bull.
• To ride it, not break it.
• To find forms that can carry force without crushing it.

In Goethean terms: not pruning the plant back into a bonsai, but letting it metamorphose lawfully, so the inner gesture carries through all stages without distortion.