Variously referred to as the Fatal Sequence and Why Democracies Fail, the passages that follow (which I discovered years ago in an Ann Landers column) deserve a close, make that penetrating, look, in these trying times.
The thinking goes that the world’s great civilizations will average a 200-year cycle, and that societies progress through this sequence:
- From bondage to spiritual faith.
- From spiritual faith to great courage.
- From great courage to liberty.
- From liberty to abundance.
- From abundance to selfishness.
- From selfishness to complacency.
- From complacency to apathy.
- From apathy to dependency.
- From dependency back again into bondage.
(Some versions add: From apathy to Fear, Fear to Dependency, etc.)
This has been attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler (sometimes spelled Tyler) and so sometimes called the Tytler Cycle; and, earlier, to the Armstrong Cork Company’s Henning Webb Prentice Jr., from an address to the 250th meeting of the World Conference Board at the Waldorf Astoria, March 18, 1943.
That it needs to be mentioned at all is because: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy." - Elmer T. Peterson, quoted by the Daily Oklahoman in 1951 as having been written two centuries earlier.