Escaping the cycle

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

Civilizations began simple, and became complex. 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
Optimistic	Pessimistic
Low-level crime	High level crime

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

Understanding the cycle

Free → controlled

Newly formed states lack the power to sufficiently organize society and therefore leave most things up to the individuals within them. As they grow in power, they tend to massage out every part of society in which individual autonomy exists.

This process can be compared to a restaurant franchise which hears complaints from customers and therefore limits their chefs to predetermined recipes, eroding an individual chef's creativity.

Centralization

Civilization forms from the ashes of trauma in response to the problems of a shared group of people. After all, it's only a great trauma that dispels the immediate desire for division with a greater desire for unity, which often comes at the cost of some freedom. This original trauma unites them under a shared set of values.

Since cooperation leads to prosperity, society begins to build more complex economic systems. Debt becomes possible. Debt and the increasing possibilities within society lead to inequality.

• After all, when everyone is a farmer, most people are paid equally. However, when one can be both a software developer and a farmer, the natural differences between people begin to create differences in wealth in society.

As wealth begins to centralize in the hands of the prosperous, those people take the reigns of power.

• These oligarchs use politics rather than healthy competition to crush economic rivals leading to monopoly.

• Once controlling a monopoly, they begin to hand out positions of power to those who please them; family and those who share their values.

Education

At the same time, the most accessible opportunities become oversaturated. With the low hanging fruit taken up, the ability of a person of little education to intuit their own success reduces.

A complex education system becomes necessary to bridge the gap between achieving success through intuition versus through a predetermined educational path.

Cooperation

Since testosterone leads to aggression, which is highly disruptive to a highly cooperative environment, as the complexity of society increases, the value of testosterone decreases.

Sources

Studies administering testosterone to young women found it increases aggressive responses to social provocation. When feeling challenged or treated unfairly, participants became more likely to retaliate, suggesting the hormone amplifies the drive to protect one's social status.

Hermans, E. J., Ramsey, N. F., & van Honk, J. (2008). Exogenous testosterone enhances responsiveness to social threat in the neural circuitry of social aggression in humans. Biological Psychiatry, 63(3), 263–270. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2007.05.013

The aggression and initiative driven by masculine traits in the early days become less advantageous as opposed to the coolness and cooperation of feminine traits that lead to prosperity in the latter days.

This leads to the increasing feminization of society.

Meritocracy → nepotism

Societies move from being meritocratic to nepotism because of the early struggle of the formation of society. In that struggle, only the strongest survive.

It's not uncommon for a new ruler of a civilization that is in its formation stages to pick friends and family to help lead that civilization. However, even though this is a form of nepotism, often the weak didn't even make it to that point. In the same way, traumatic times overwhelm and crush the weak, leaving only the capable standing. This makes the natural impetus toward nepotism be a natural impetus toward meritocracy, the week have already collapsed.

Eventually, as life gets easier, skilled manipulators and people good with relationships, rather than good at delivering results, are able to rise to the top. These people are not picked for their capabilities but their connections. This process rots the core of each government institution inside out leading to a cycle of collapse, revolution and/or invasion.

The cycle of ideas

Children of prosperity

This pattern happens in a society's culture as well. The generation that builds a society is often marked by poverty, a lack of opportunity, and strife. This generation was distressed by their struggles because their struggles were dictated at the pace of life in a time of trouble.

This distress drives those who endured it to protect their children from the same. What those same parents fail to understand is that stress is a necessary component of life, just not distress. It was not the stress that hurt them, but the fact that the stress was beyond their capacity to handle.

Parents of a generation of struggle instinctively protect their children from stress out of compassion to the detriment of those same children.

Optimism → pessimism

A generation born in prosperity has the privilege of living life without taking radical action. They see opportunities pass by without snatching them immediately and survive.

Wealth has an inverse correlation with taking radical action. However, this lack of action has a hidden price. A person who is anxious fundamentally feels they don't have control over the things that affect them. The less a person takes immediate action, the less opportunities a person has to understand how much they can actually change through their actions.

This reduced sense of agency and control leads to anxiety in the children of the wealthy. Anxiety is directly connected with fear. And fear is a narrowing factor, which diminishes creativity; the creativity necessary to overcome life’s challenges.

This quickly leads to a compounding effect in which the anxious become paralyzed, not only through the belief that they cannot change the factors that affect them, but also through the narrowing which hinders their ability to creatively solve life’s problems leading to even less agency.

Confidence is developed when a person sees themselves continually overcoming problems they thought they couldn't overcome, something which leads to a growing optimism that life’s challenges are overcomable.

Arts & expression

If a generation achieves societal success, they want nothing more but their children to enjoy it. Such children are often lavished with attention, kindness, gifts, etc. Having achieved prosperity, these children search for meaning rather than just pure subsistence. With that some of the focus of society shifts from pure productivity to developing the arts, expression and philosophy.

This often led to the downfalls of societies where martial prowess protected the frontier.

"Good iron is not used for nails; good men do not become soldiers." - Popular saying in China, Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD)

Entitled & greed

Having everything provided for, the generation of ease becomes entitled. They take life, their parents sacrifice, and the idea that prosperity must always continue for granted.

When inevitably things in society decline for lack of effort, they demand the prosperity they did not earn continue and try to take it by force if not hand it to them freely. They believe they are working hard, but they don't know the meaning of working hard, because they've never had to work truly on the edge of survival.

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.

Therefore they demand what they did not earn. They make a fit, rather than doubling down on grit. Having learned to receive whenever putting their hands out, they become angry that they are not receiving freely.

This anger and a sense of entitlement drives them to steal rather than to create. They seek the fruit of hard work without the backbone.

Lacking the maturity to do things the hard way, they seek the easy way out to their own ruin.

The false information bubble

In this generation alone, the problem is compounded by the fact that content which gathers attention does so via a viral algorithm. That algorithm rewards content which doubles down on the limiting beliefs of the entitled generation.

Suddenly the generation is bombarded with messages of hopelessness, the idea that things will never change or are only getting worse, and the idea that people have no agency to control their future.

A great example is this video, which features charts which fail basic economic and mathematical scrutiny undermining the whole argument. It has gone massively viral as it tells people what they want to hear rather than the truth. The mistakes are both commonplace and blatant, and yet this video has gone on to popularize a victim mentality based on facts that don’t add up.

Moral decay

At the height of this cycle, a time in which education and self-expression are paramount, a whole class of society, now given time to think about life, begin to fight the concept that they are subject to the futility of life.

• They escape through luxury and pleasure.

• They escape through art, poetry and self-expression.

• They escape through academic ideas detached from practical reality.

The vehicles of self-expression, such as media and art, and education become dedicated to expounding ideas and values which absolve a people from it’s growing and innate sense of guilt and emptiness.

Rather than accepting the shortness of life they begin to push back against every thought that harkens to it’s futility, namely, that all people must be born, work and die.

• Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, is the embodiment of this truth. After achieving supreme power, his fear of death led him to consume mercury-laden pills prescribed by alchemists, believing they were an elixir of immortality. His obsession even led him to compel almost a million people into 40 years of unpaid servitude to build a life-size army of clay soldiers, horses, and chariots, intended to “protect” him in the afterlife.

Having achieved everything a person could achieve, he sought to weasel out of the reality of the shortness of life by listening to increasingly detached dreamers, alchemists who prescribed mercury pills, hastening the very end he sought to escape.

Low-level crime → High level crime

The lesson

Any act done to escape the futility of life, other than responding with gratefulness to life, is the destruction of the society that attempts it.

There's nothing wrong with art, self-expression or even the occasional luxury, but a society which rejects the concept of struggle and avoids the questions of life and mortality is withering flower, about to fall.

Instead we must:

• Ask real questions without jumping to cheap solutions

• Embrace the friction that is connected with every meaningful accomplishment in life

• Celebrate the gift of life no matter how short.

Agora believes the correct response to the gift of life is to determinedly utilize every facet of one's mind and body as a tribute of thanks for it.

To be oneself, to be compassionate and to seek truth rather than settling for less. To live life to the fullest even when no one is looking.

The endless cycle

Throughout history, societies have faced the never-ending cyclical challenge just described. They flourished when embracing the struggle of life but when that struggle led to their own achievements and riches, they, by those same achievements were destroyed.

The Greeks, seeing the enormous prosperity and vain luxury of the Persians, overthrew them with disdain while mocking their decadence.

"Soft countries breed soft men." - Herodotus

The Romans in turn seeing the vain luxury and empty actions of the Greeks overthrew them.

"They are a nation of actors." - Juvenal, Satires

In the end, they themselves were overthrown by those who mocked their lounging on couches.

These societies had a supreme duty to protect their own through martial prowess in a time where dropping their guard meant the destruction of their families and way of life. However, each one by one dropped the ball because their early prowess led to riches and stability which deceived their children as to the price of that stability and eventually led to their downfall.

Through hard work they created a society which their children took for granted which led to their children’s destruction.

Almost every society that has existed has failed to contend successfully with the cycle of morality and civilization. However, in a time when all the history of the world is at our flinger tips, Agorans can together discover a method to stem the flow and create a lasting, digital civilization.

Breaking the cycle

Critical to the cycle is that in the height of peace and stability, pernicious ideas through the media and through educational institutions get perpetuated, which lead to the civilization's eventual downfall.

Separating the information space

In modern Western society, we're undergoing a self poisoning in the form of negativity, pessimism, victimhood and complaining. Despite enjoying some of the greatest riches and longest lives in human history, the societal malaise has grown to the extent where very little is valued that isn't drama, negativity, and crisis.

Cyber Sovereignty proposes two worlds:

• One world of ultimate freedom being a neutral space

• One deeply curated but personally-chosen space.

The outside world is the world of true and utter freedom, where the megaphone goes to the loudest, as it is today. The inside world is the one that people choose to join, the digital society they identify with.

It's a framework where people have access to all the world’s knowledge through a truly free internet but also have the ability to avoid being constantly bombarded by values and ideas they disagree with.

What our society desperately needs is not to control the ability of people everywhere to access knowledge, but for people to find a space where they can be influenced by the values they deliberately choose.

Elevating good ideas

Just like a constitution acts as a multi-generational guide to a society, any society which seeks to survive the cycle must hand the proverbial megaphone to those who perpetuate ideas that aid, rather than tear down, societal progress and values.

Done on a national scale, this creates a dictatorial paradigm, but within societies we actively choose, it liberates us through a meaningful opt out of the constant flow of ideas we have chosen to reject.

Agora’s values

Agora is a society for those who choose to push back against the pervasive negativity and victimhood which is destroying Western society. It’s an escape for those who choose to curate a world that values optimism, truth, and humanity as their own primary life influence.