20 Aug The Passing of Nicanor Perlas
From the Goetheanum News…
Nicanor Perlas –
A Friend and Great Advocate of Social Threefolding Crossed the Threshold
January 10, 1950 – August 14, 2025
Crossing thresholds and boundaries was part of his constant practice. He never ran away from the powerful manifestations of evil in our world, teetering as it is on the edge of the abyss. Rather, he explored them, wrestled with them, confronted them, set himself against them—always with the determined effort to stand for the good and to keep open the paths of freedom, justice, and social life. In doing so, he crossed many boundaries—of countries, of habits, of modes of thought, of disciplines, of power claims, of what was permitted by the powerful, and of what was customary. In this way he became an encourager, pioneer, and role model for many throughout the world.
Nicanor studied agricultural science and fought against nuclear power plants, pesticides, and the gradual destruction of earth and humanity through chemicalized and industrialized agriculture. Born on January 10, 1950, he was forced at the age of 28 to leave the Philippines—his homeland, which was under the control of the totalitarian dictator Ferdinand Marcos—for an indefinite time. He was only able to return after Marcos’s death. Then he began to organize, in the long term, resistance to the destruction of the foundations of life and to work for viable alternatives for society as a whole. Thus he founded the Center for Alternative Development Initiatives (CADI), dedicated to ecologically oriented agriculture and sustainable development, as well as a banking system (Lifebank) designed to secure the survival of small farmers. Another important step was the development of the tri-sectoral partnership, a round table bringing together civil society, the state, and the business community.
In the last decade of his life, it was above all the forces behind the digitization of the world and behind the (wrongly so-called) “Artificial Intelligence” that Nicanor resolved to penetrate as deeply as possible and to oppose their takeover of human life. For this he lived and researched for long periods in the USA, expecially in Silicon Valley. Nicanor was particularly occupied with the question of what human qualities we can develop and set against the forces of the machine, so that we may master them and not be mastered by them (see: Nicanor Perlas: Humanity’s Last Stand: The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence, A Spiritual-Scientific Response).
Nicanor soon became perhaps the most important environmental activist in the Philippines and a key global figure in the effort to shape globalization participatively on all levels of society. His lectures attracted worldwide interest, his books found readers in many countries. For as long as it was possible, he was active around the globe. Thus we also met through our shared commitment to a fundamental social transformation in the sense of Social Threefolding, and I last invited him, in the name of the Section for Social Sciences, to the major Future Congress in 2019 on the occasion of “100 Years of Threefolding.” We saw each other only at greater intervals, but in those times we knew ourselves to be all the more connected spiritually. Nicanor and all his work were deeply imbued with the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner and his idea of the Threefold Social Organism.
I would like to connect this remembrance of Nicanor with an acknowledgment of one central thought in his own approach to Social Threefolding. Nicanor stood for a global, modern, dynamic, and integrative understanding of threefolding. He saw the decisive agent of change today in civil society, which has been locally and globally networked only since the last third of the 20th century. Nicanor: “This civil society (is) the most important social innovation of the 20th century. It is of equal importance to the establishment of nation-states at the beginning of the 17th century or the emergence of modern market economies in the 18th century.” As its practices and norms, he named association, self-organization, and organized communication. Only through this balancing third force in relation to state and market, he said, can a process toward a social threefolding of politics, culture, and economy arise; otherwise, under the influence of neoliberal globalization, they become one-sided and distorted, granting the market predominance and enslaving the other spheres.
Nicanor considered broad reflection and conscious articulation of this new threefolding to be necessary, so that civil society could become aware of its influence and its independent role as a cultural social force. To the extent that this takes place, conscious threefolding arises, which becomes advanced threefolding when civil society develops and presents its societal alternatives.
In recent years, Nicanor increasingly strove to regard globalization also as a spiritual task. His impulses were taken up worldwide and provided orientation for many people and initiatives.
Again and again, Nicanor was recognized for his work around the globe. He was a member of the Club of Budapest and served as an adviser on sustainable development at the UN. In 2003 he received the Right Livelihood Award (the so-called “Alternative Nobel Prize”) for his “outstanding contributions to raising civil society’s awareness of the consequences of globalization and for how alternatives to it can be realized.”
Nicanor Perlas has already crossed many thresholds for us. Last Thursday morning (local time) in Bulacan (Philippines), he crossed the threshold into the spiritual world. Thank you, Nicanor, for your work and your being on earth! Our good thoughts and wishes accompany your great soul on its further journey.
In heartfelt remembrance,