Steiner's name for the social end state, total egoism and vanished social instinct, that unchecked head materialism was breeding for the close of the twentieth century.
The War Of All Against All in Anthroposophy is the social end state Rudolf Steiner foresaw for the close of the twentieth century if the materialism of the head continued unchecked. In The Remedy for Our Diseased Civilisation (GA 206, Dornach, 6 August 1921), Steiner explains the mechanism: modern civilisation engages only the thinking third of the human being, while feeling dreams and the will sleeps. The spirituality that withdraws into the sleeping will does not vanish; seized by ahrimanic powers, it drives the instincts toward total egoism. The result is a humanity devoid of social instinct that talks all the more about social questions. Steiner took the phrase from Thomas Hobbes, bellum omnium contra omnes, and had already placed a cosmic War of All Against All at the close of the seventh post-Atlantean epoch in his 1908 Apocalypse lectures (GA 104). The term now names the diagnosis behind every Anthroposophical social initiative: heal the will, or the talking continues while community dies.
Steiner rarely speaks in warnings, but The War Of All Against All is one. It names what happens when a civilisation trains only the head: the will keeps its spirituality, yet that spirituality falls to ahrimanic powers and inflames the instincts into pure claim and demand. Everyone speaks about social questions; no one carries a social instinct. The phrase marks the cliff edge Steiner saw at the end of the twentieth century.
In Steiner's Own Words
If we allow things to take their course, in the manner in which they have taken their course under the influence of the world-conception which has arisen in the nineteenth century and in the form in which we can understand it, if we allow things to take this course, we shall face the war of all against all, at the end of the twentieth century. No matter what beautiful speeches may be held, no matter how much science may progress, we would inevitably have to face this war of all against all. We would see the gradual development of a type of humanity devoid of every kind of social instinct, but which would talk all the more of social questions.
What it Means Today
Steiner's timeline invites a test: did anything resembling a war of all against all surface as the twentieth century closed? The Harvard political scientist Robert D. Putnam gave those closing decades their most famous social audit in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000), expanded from his 1995 essay of the same name. Putnam tracked league bowling, parent-teacher associations, union membership, club meetings, and dinners with friends across decades of American survey data, and found each in steep decline from roughly the mid-1960s onward: the very period Steiner named, measured in the very currency Steiner specified, social instinct. Putnam even documents the irony GA 206 predicts, that talk about community boomed while the practice of community withered.
Putnam's remedy is civic reinvestment. Steiner's diagnosis reaches one layer deeper, locating the decay not in television schedules or commuting times but in the will's unconscious spirituality falling to ahrimanic seizure and turning instinct from social to egoistic. Thalira synthesis: Bowling Alone reads as the statistical shadow of GA 206; Putnam counts the empty bowling leagues, Steiner names the power that emptied them, and the conscious spiritual schooling of the will is the one remedy no survey or subsidy can supply.
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