LIFE CYCLE FOR CIVILIZATIONS...

1. Bondage develops spiritual faith.
2. Spiritual faith develops courage.
3. Courage leads to liberty.
4. Liberty leads to abundance.
5. Abundance relieves stress and promotes selfishness.
6. Selfishness leads to complacency.
7. Complacency leads to apathy.
8. Apathy refuses responsibility and accepts dependency.
9. Dependency soon becomes bondage.
The average time from bondage to liberty and back to bondage has been about 200 years for most civilizations, but the time in bondage before sufficient spiritual faith develops may run into many generations.
The United States is 244 years old. Where are we in this cycle?
"What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." -- Georg Willheim Friederich Hegel