Bruce Charlton has a post called "Why Rudolf Steiner? (despite everything)" where he discusses the importance of Rudolf Steiner and ends with this excellent summing up:
"I completely agree with Steiner's core teaching, which is that our primary urgent task - here and now in 2020 - is to choose consciously to live by-and-from the spiritual (including to discover what that means for us, as individuals).
This should be what we think about when we awaken each morning, and when we look back on our day each evening, and as we settle to sleep at night.
This should be a focus of our meditations and prayers.
Nothing is more important than this: here, now; for you - and for me."
In this post, I will write about the reasons I have found Rudolf Steiner helpful.
One reason is that Steiner is one of the few "countercurrents." One of the most harmful ideas that has been believed by human beings over the past two centuries is that the materialistic developments of these centuries and their dramatic acceleration in the second half of the 20th century and continuing into the 21st were inevitable. In particular, I mean intrusion of machines and mechanistic thinking into all aspects of life, bureaucratization of jobs and thinking. Many, many people believe all these things are right, good, and inevitable.
Some people who lived during those two centuries tried to manipulate these developments for their own benefit. The vast majority viewed them as the backdrop of life; they neither tried to help nor fight against them. Steiner is one of the few people (the Inklings are others) who not only acknowledged that these things were not right and good, but tried to fight against them. To accept materialism and mechanization as inevitable is to surrender without a fight. So if we want to get past these things, we must try to look for something else; some other possibility. Whether one agrees with Steiner's proposed answers or not, the very fact that he was one of the few people to even try to do this makes him worth looking into.
Another reason relates to levels of analysis of society. People can analyze society at many levels from day to day interactions to historical trends or even the metaphysical level. However, there is a trap that is very easy to fall into. It is easy to take the historical trends as a given and simply explain how they came about rather than look at any deeper cause. Many of Steiner's discussions of societal questions take place on a neglected level which is between the macro-societal/historical and metaphysical. I am not sure of a good name for it, perhaps the epochal or macro-historical level.
Let me give an example to make this more clear. Even though I do not necessarily agree with the numerological aspects of his articles, often after reading Terry Boardman's articles or listening to his lectures, I have gained understanding. Many historical or sociological analyses do not really provide understanding. They report many facts and events and explain how one series of events led to the next, but they do not explain why just such and such a series of events and not some other led to a certain result. There is no deeper pattern to fit the facts into and one is left with a description (often highly detailed) but there is something missing.
What Steiner did and what he provided those how use his concepts with is an ability to think about world events and changes in society from a perspective that can elucidate meaningful patterns rather than merely describe events. And in order to get past the trap of thinking what we see around us is inevitable, we have to analyze on this level.
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