Guest Post by K. D. Koratsky – Originally published at Living With Evolution. Due to its academic nature, this version has been edited, revised and serialized with permission from the author.
Societal Regress
What happens in families after one successful generation often leads to a collapse over several generations meaning that what was achieved is lost and hardship returns.
This occurs generally for societies and empires too.
This is what is happening in America today.
As nations rise in rank by performing at a very high standard, the wealth and opportunity created by previous generation(s) is increasingly taken for granted.
Then a false sense of situational permanence, entitlement and invincibility set in. We see this happening in America with the self-esteem generation.
And correspondingly, dysfunctional decision-making and cultural mutations increase to the degree that a population begins to perceive itself as impervious to surrounding threats, assuming such threats are acknowledged at all.
The result is that ideas without regard for functionality and adaptivity lead to policies that at best lack functionality and adaptivity and at worse produce entirely self-destructive trends—noting policies that even allow the competition to gain an edge will almost certainly prove self-destructive somewhere down the line, likely when the next time of scarcity comes along.
Return to Escaping the Trap – Part 3 or go to Escaping the Trap – Part 5
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K. D. Koratsky is the author of Living With Evolution or Dying Without it: A Guide to Understanding Humanity’s Past, Present and Future. Koratsky also writes a Blog on this subject at Living With Evolution.
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