The Culture of Selflessness

In a lecture eight weeks before the outbreak of World War I, Rudolf Steiner, conscious of developments to come, coined the phrase "culture of selflessness" to describe the culture that would develop in the future. The far-reaching social implications of his primarily Christological lectures on the Fifth Gospel, given in 1913/14 under the same political circumstances, were foreign to many of Steiners contemporary audiences, who largely failed to understand his dramatic accounts drawn from the Fifth Gospel (or that gospel itself) as a "source of comfort" for the future, or (as Rudolf Steiner said of them) as "needed" for future work.