If, looking for the reasons behind selfishness, we ask ourselves: Why have the gods, the good gods, implanted what in the opinion of many is so horrible into mankind? The answer given by spiritual science is that selfishness offers a very strong protection against what people would face without it.
If one wanted to practice black magic, he would normally find it relatively easy to gather apprentices and teach them about certain machinations that are terribly damaging to the world. But why do most people avoid becoming pupils of black magic? The answer is simple: they are afraid of the potential harm to their own personality.
Selfish fear offers the best protection against the use of very evil forces, like black magic. It drives people away from utilising such forces, and that is an excellent thing.
- Rudolf Steiner – GA 101 – Mythen und Sagen Okkulte Zeichen und Symbole – Berlin, October 21, 1907 (page 119-120)
The common essential feature of all evil is none other than selfishness.—
Basically, all human evil comes forth from what we call selfishness. We shall go and follow through from the smallest details, which we regard as human slip-ups, to the strongest crimes, that are human imperfections and human evil, regardless of whether they are portrayed to us as apparently arising more from the soul or apparently more from the bodily: the common essential feature, that comes from selfishness is universally present. We find the true meaning of evil, when we think of it as bound up with human selfishness; and we find all striving outwards and over imperfections and evil, when we see this striving upwards in the struggle against what we call selfishness. A great deal of careful thinking has been done over some ethical principle or another, over some moral basis or another; but the deeper we plunge into ethical principles and moral foundations, precisely this shows us that selfishness is the common root of all human evil. And so we might say: the more a human being works him/herself free of evil here in the physical world, the more he/she overcomes selfishness.
-Rudolf Steiner
