History is replete with instances of the rise and fall of great civilisations. It is organic nature that a tiny seed grows into a mighty tree, only to start decaying and disintegrating. What leads a civilisation to grow? It is the strength of the people collectively. Later what leads to its dismal failure and decay? People who earlier showed robust attributes and qualities, diminish to selfish and meaner behaviour of life. It is the inner conflict that throttles and kills civilisation and not external factors.

The following are a few extracts from the book "The Study of our Decline" by Philip Atkinson, wherein he expounds "A Theory of Civilisation". Mr.Atkinson postulates the growth and decay of great civilisations of the world, as comprising the phases of "waxing civilisation" and "Waning civilisation". He further analyses the inner causes and conflicts that bring about such growth and later their decay. Mr.Atkinson's thoughts, replete with a high perception and keenness of analysis of the subject are reproduced below with his kind permission.

1. A civilization is the tangible creations of a single community.

2. A group of people become a community when they share the same morality, which in turn allows them to develop a collective intelligence, which reveals itself through a single shared language.

3. he collective, or communal, intelligence of the community is superior to the individual intelligence because it is more than the sum of its citizens efforts.

4. The character of a community is that induced by the founding morality of its understanding .

5. The wisdom of a community is the accumulated experience of its understanding .

6. A community reinforces itself by recording its wisdom through

   • Tradition

   • Custom

   • Manners

   • Laws

7. A community recreates itself by each successive generation being imbued by the previous generation with the founding set of values clarified by wisdom.

8. A community exists in one of two modes; it is either waxing or waning.

9. The mode of a community is a result of the majority mode of their citizens, who themselves exist in one of two separate modes. A citizen is either

   1. unselfish and prepared to sacrifice private interest for the common good.

   2. selfish and prepared to sacrifice the common good for private interest.

10. The community waxes when the majority are unselfish, it wanes when the majority are selfish.

11. The majority persecute the minority mode. The majority will always treat the minority as outcasts, forcing them to become isolated and alienated. In the vital mode the immoral win social stigma, in the dissolute mode the moral are viewed as simpletons.

12. A community fails when its citizens no longer imbue the founding morality into their off-spring. This is because the majority of parents are either

    1. Selfish and so:

       • Have no fixed morality. So cannot imbue the traditional morality of the community. So any offspring who are not taught to be selfish have an unpredictable set of values

       • Find it difficult to resist the biological urge to indulge their own off-spring, which is teaching them to be selfish, and so creates more citizens like themselves.

    2. Unselfish but lacking the founding morality of the community because of a failure in their upbringing.

13. When A Community fails it enters into an irreversible decline where:

    1. It becomes progressively sillier and weaker, though officially there is no change. Under the inevitable influence of selfish citizens who can only impoverish and confuse, the inadequate are promoted while the most capable are alienated. Governments misgovern, the courts promote injustice, schools foster delusion and the bureaucracy becomes a giant parasite impoverishing the community. The paradise fashioned by intellect becomes a hell inspired by delusion, because lies replace truth.

    2. An explosion of legislation marks the change because the order won by morality is lost. So the dissolving society attempts to halt the collapse with legislation. An imbued sense of morality is what restrains citizens immediate physical desires, allowing public harmony and cooperation; this is the essential cement of any group. Once it is discarded by the self-seekers so does order, and anarchy prevails; the trickle of social disruption unleashed by abandoning traditional morality grows into a torrent that eventually undermines all social order.

    3. The bureaucracy becomes a tyranny. Imposing a set of arbitrary rules by force is tyranny, which is the inevitable position of government in the face of growing anarchy resulting from the discarding of morality. And the situation is made much worse by laws framed by delusion, and the self-serving nature of the administration.

14. A group of communities cannot create a collective intelligence because they do not share the same basic morality, which makes their separate understandings irreconcilable. So one community will dominate the others

15. Once a community declines it is only a matter of time before it becomes to feeble to resist the demands of other communities who will overrun and extinguish the dissolving community.

When a civilization declines it goes into reverse with all the wealth, power and wisdom realised by its rise being discarded at an ever increasing rate until dissolution.

The people will discover that

1. the quality of goods and services falls as the cost increases; and this corruption extends into every aspect of their existence, from the faltering quality of bread to the growing inconstancy of love.

2. the essential requirements of Peace will be disturbed by increasing interruptions of

   • Noise.

   • Indecency

   • Violence.

3. Order will be increasingly eroded.

Tyranny and injustice will reign as delusion triumphs and the community dissolves into impotence.

But this will never be generally recognized because the source of the disease is the waning of citizen's comprehension. A decay made palpable by the disappearance of plain speaking.

Such a society is no longer engaged in creating a human heaven on earth, but is earnestly constructing the very opposite where:

• The worst people get rewarded while the best get penalised

• The education system can only spread delusion

• The bureaucracy becomes a liability instead of an asset.

• The courts must promote injustic

however this will always be denied because truth will be vanquished by lies.

When a civilization declines it has stopped getting stronger and cleverer, but has started to become sillier and weaker; it has gone into reverse. This overall effect is the result of a reversal in the process by which a community constantly renews itself - the way it rears its children.

A community waxes when children are taught to value the community ahead of themselves;

a community wanes when children are taught to value themselves ahead of their community

The community will wax as the energy and determination driving the society is fuelled by the voluntary self-sacrifice of citizens, which is a stance that must be imbued by childhood. Children are taught to be unselfish from birth by learning to love, honour and obey their parents, with this awed respect insensibly transferring from their childhood, to their adult, guardians - the community and its administrators. Hence

1. Rule by Obligation to Others:
   The community is ruled by a notion of obligation to others, which itself is controlled by a mechanism of reason that is

   • founded upon an unquestioned morality

   • supported by a revered tradition.

2. Growth Of Wisdom:
   Wisdom is the accumulation of understanding gained by experience. This invaluable asset depends upon two critical supports

   • The constancy of the morality supporting the understanding, for once the morality varies the understanding varies and wisdom cannot be accumulated.

   • An ability to remember decisions, which a community achieves by precedent; that is not just the establishment of legal rulings, but by the creation of tradition, customs and manners.

3. Increasing Order:
   The stability and accumulating wisdom allow increasing refinement of

   • Social Organisation

   • Laws

   • Manners

   • Customs

   • Use Of Technology

4. Which obtains increased confidence in authority and pride in citizenship.

5. Increasing Power:
   The improved organisation and use of technology inevitably bestow increasing power on the society which ultimately translates into increasing ease and plenty for all citizens.

The community will wane as the source of vitality is reversed because self-sacrifice is replaced by self-seeking, which can only dissipate the wealth and wisdom of the community. Progeny are taught to be selfish by learning to exploit and disobey their parent's authority in order to achieve their own ends, which itself is teaching contempt.

Hence

1. Rule By Selfishness:
   The inevitable result being a community of citizens concerned only in indulging their immediate private desires, that is one ruled by the sense only of an obligation to self, which is the tyranny of emotion restrained only by convenience.

2. Erosion Of Wisdom:
   And this misrule realises a community losing wisdom as it is undermined by

   • Loss of morality -that is the ability to recognise right from wrong, which is continually being eroded by the selfishness of citizens (see the example of political correctness).

   • Loss of memory, as legal precedent is over-turned, and tradition is discarded.

   • Growth Of Disorder:
     The loss of wisdom reverses the refinement of

     • Social Organisation

     • Laws

     • Manners

     • Customs

     • Use Of Technology

     And inevitably obtains increasing contempt for authority, disregard for the duties of citizenship and communal confusion.

   • Loss Of Power:
     Communal confusion confounds the society's ability to sensibly employ, or even continue to develop, its technology, resulting in communal impotence and growing poverty.

Social dissolution is a degenerative condition; as we slide into chaos everything deteriorates so that today's woes will become trivial when viewed in the light of future ordeals. After present failures have provided their own fruit the symptoms listed here will seem naught, but this inevitable dilution of impact in no way reduces the significance of the following 1999 signs of social decay:

1. A Creeping Paralysis

2. Technology Making it Worse

3. Law - Protector to Persecutor

4. The Retreat From Reason

5. The Crumbling Of Order

Decline may be diagnosed by applying any of the following methods:

1. Determining if the community has become Matrist in nature by invoking the rules outlined in "Sex In History" by G.R. Taylor.

2. Using Arnold Toynbee's method outlined in "A Study Of History" which claimed that the first eruption of an internal social war ( the French Revolution in our case) marked the onset of decline.

3. Apply the pattern revealed by Edward Gibbon in his work "The History Of The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire" which indicated the decline of the Roman empire was paralleled by a decline in the morality of its citizens

4. Determining if the general use of language is losing discipline,
   for this can only mean the general use of thought is also losing discipline, which is a decay of understanding. Such a result is indicated by the disappearance of plain speaking from citizen's sentiments. An undeniable symptom of the malaise is the deliberate use of more words than necessary, such as invoking "at this moment in time" instead of "now", or "the state of the art" instead of "latest". And the addition of surplus words such as converting a "riot" into a "riot situation" and "opportunity" into "a window of opportunity". The dilution of language is the dilution of thought, which is a self-sustaining cycle of increasing weakness of understanding, for as George Orwell put it:

   "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

   Politics And The English Language , 1946

   And it is the indisputable hallmark of a declining civilization.

5. By considering the community's general attitude to truth; a civilization rises because it pursues truth, it falls when it suppresses truth. Our stance is revealed by the existence of popular delusions, whose absurdity has not prevented them from being adopted as truth by governments. The list of popular delusions include:

   • Global Warming is a threat to human existence.

   • AIDS. is a sexually transmitted disease caused by the HIV virus.

   • Multiculturalism

   • Native Title

   • Political Correctness

   • Jobs for all are essential for economic prosperity

   • Democracy is good government

   • Corpulence is the result of eating too much.

6. By considering the attitude of children towards their parents. When a civilization is waxing progeny revere their parents whom they dare not disobey, but when a civilization is waning it is the parents who revere their children whom they fear to upset - see the law of reverse civilization.

The article marks a blunt-worded warning to society. Things may not immediately swift to such extremes as Mr.Atkinson has warned, because, "selfishness" does not turn to be an universal trait. At any time there always also remain quite a few "unselfish", though they remain inconspicuous and low-profile. The article of Mr.Atkinson also brings home the truth that "purity" and "integrity" is fundamental to social living and to foster progress and prosperity. The Indian Civilisation is ageless, but it has its 'ups' and 'downs'. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru discusses the the glory and the agony of indian civilisation in his book "Discovery of India" in near terms portraying the effect of the 'inner conflict" for the downfall, whenever it happened.