Escaping the cycle: cultural decline

As the article in “Statecraft: Escaping the cycle” says so eloquently:

“Since the first seeds of civilization were laid by ancient empires, a pattern began to develop that few understood.

Civilizations that began one way ended another.

Began	Ended
Free, wild, decentralized	Controlled, rigid, centralized
Driven by values	Driven by greed
In poverty	In prosperity
Debt free	In debt
Equal	Unequal
A meritocracy	In nepotism
United with shared vision and purpose	Bickering, divided

Their failure to understand the cycle led to its inevitable repetition.”

Understanding the cycle: culture

This pattern happens in a society's culture as well. Enormous effort and sacrifice go into building a society. If a generation achieves societal success, they want nothing more but their children to enjoy it. They are driven by their instincts to shelter their children from the same traumas and difficulties they themselves faced. Such children are often lavished with attention, kindness, gifts, etc.

This leads to the mistraining of their children. Such children are lulled into a misunderstanding about the grit necessary to maintain prosperity. Luxury leads them to entitlement and comfort to a lack of discipline. They forget that their parents sacrificed their dreams so that their children could accomplish dreams. They forget the hard, often-physical labor their parents and grandparents endured to provide them a better life.

What the parents fail to understand is that success is not a material state alone, but a learning of mental strength without which prosperity cannot be maintained.

William Strauss and Neil Howe explain in The Fourth Turning that safety inevitably creates weakness. They argue that "the very success" of a society triggers its own decline. Children raised in peace view safety as a guarantee rather than a fragile luxury.

A love of weakness

There are ample signs of this weakness in the present Western generation.

• Victimhood-as-status: Suffering, rather than overcoming, confers status discouraging accomplishment.

• Participation trophies: The drive for inclusion has snuffed out striving for achievement.

• Safety-as-sacred: Discomfort is equated to “trauma” instead of the necessary friction for growth and accomplishment.

• Feelings-as-truth: Emotional comfort has become the benchmark of “truth”. Criticism, uncomfortable truths and diversity of thought are labeled as offensive.

• Shifting responsibility: Self-discipline is dismissed with “I can’t help it” as fault is externalized.

• Entitlement: “I deserve better than this” is replacing “I can do better than this,” allowing expectations to rise faster than work ethic.

• Diagnosis-as-identity: If normal struggle is clinically labeled and rewarded as vulnerability then problems fester rather than being resolved. Being “unwell” is used to explain away responsibility.

• Cynicism as sophistication: If building is “complicity,” then tearing down looks intelligent.

• Contempt for history: To put the people of history on trial with purity tests without a deeper understanding of their context leads to self-congratulation, not instruction.

Historian John Glubb observed that as wealth grows, a population abandons duty for entitlement and risk for defensiveness; having never known the struggle that built their society, citizens come to believe safety is a natural right, leaving the civilization psychologically too soft to survive.

Compassion without compromise

Many of these points are often brought up by the political right. However, Agora has no alignment with the political right or left. Instead, it seeks a different path forward. A path of compassion without compromise.

In terms of our compassion, and how our compassion is applied to society, the Agora believes that great positive gains have been made alongside a few excesses. The problem is not the pursuit of compassion, inclusion, or safety, the problem is when these detach from reality, responsibility, and standards.

The ideal is to maintain the positive wins while discarding selfishness.

• Equal opportunity: Going the extra mile to ensure nobody is left behind without hindering those already ahead allows diverse talents to impact society.

• Truth contextualized: If, rather than sacrificing truth on the altar of sensitivity, we package it in the most palatable form for its acceptance, we will maximize its impact.

• Moral sensitivity: If injustice is confronted with humility and hard work rather than empty slogans and identity-driven mob dynamics, then real reforms happen.

• Correction with comfort: To commit to speaking correctively to others about problems in full honesty for their benefit through the filter of compassion.

• Second chances: Creating paths toward redemption without unlabeling evil as evil.

• Empathic listening: Rather than pushing an agenda, allowing others to be truly heard and then responding fully, honestly and inquisitively.

• Intergenerational sensitivity: If the past is studied with context, then gratitude grows and applicable lessons are derived.

• Civility in speech: Using free speech to build others up rather than to shock, knowing that offense kills communication.

On politics

There are those that will interpret this article as being in support of left or right. There are those who thrive on forcing others to conform to life’s present paradigms and when one stands definitively outside that paradigm they fail to understand it.

This article has no alignment with either political paradigm. It asks the question, who do we want to become as a society? What will lead us to the greatest positive impact?

Agora’s values

Agora values the maximization of human life and freedom. To build a society of impact, we commit to the extra effort required to care for others, creating room for them, without:

• compromising the truth

• shifting responsibility away from people to protect them

• letting others live below their true potential.

Proposing a solution

One of the core solutions to this problem is for educational institutions to teach grit and gratitude as much as mental ability. Teaching younger people how hard it is to build functioning society is critical to keeping that society going. Teaching the next generation to use what they are given wisely is the most important challenge facing a society which seeks to endure.