The Tytler Cycle theorizes that all civilizations go through eight stages. This is how it goes:
“The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.”
What better test of the theory than the journey the American colonists embarked upon as they launched our country.
In hard times people have turned to religion. The sufferings and injustices inflicted upon them by their culture, bring them to wisdom and encourages discipline. Believing that God is on their side, discipline and courage grow in them. And so you have pilgrims undertaking a harrowing trip across an enormous ocean to start a new life on an unexplored continent.
Our founding fathers understood that their newly hatched civilization could not flourish while the British were insisting that enormous amounts of their wealth be shipped back to the mother country. They fought and won the independence that allowed them to pursue the establishment of a country with “liberty and justice for all.”
In spite of shortcomings in the practice of the “for all” aspects, the country flourished. It can be argued that the values of sacrifice and hard work were still very much in play as the United States prospered and became wealthy.
However, with their country in a position as world leader, Americans became complacent. The values of sacrifice and hard work began to diminish in importance.
Complacency can morph into apathy with more and more people losing self-sufficiency and the determination to thrive on their own. This encourages dependency on the government and discourages seeking for solutions from other sources, which might, after all, require some personal or local sacrifices. (Should we all give up eating beef to decrease global warming?)
As dependency on central government increases, the government grows and becomes more intrusive into the lives of its citizens. (It might even start dictating what size soda you may buy!) This starts to become a form of bondage like the one the pilgrims were attempting to escape. And thus the cycle of resistance to government strictures begins all over.