A cheery thought - the Tytler Cycle

This came up in conversation -- there is a good description at Common Sense Government:

The Tytler Cycle
Last year my wife, who home-schools our kids, attended several seminars on home-schooling that were put on by George Wythe College in Salt Lake City.

Dr. Shannon Brooks of the college gave a lecture on politics at the seminar called "The Liber" which my wife bought me on CD. "Liber" by the way means one who is educated for freedom, and comes from the same root as the words "library" and "liberty".

In the lecture, Dr. Brooks described the work of a man named Alexander Tytler, a Scottish historian who lived at the same time as the American Founding Fathers, who described a repeating cycle in history. He had found that societies went through this same cycle again and again, and that the cycle lasted roughly 200 years each time.

Tytler said the cycle starts out with a society in bondage. Then it goes in this sequence:

Bondage
Spiritual Faith
Courage
Liberty
Abundance
Selfishness
Complacency
Apathy
Dependence
Then starting over with Bondage

Tytler organized these items in a circle:

So to give a little more on the sequence above, a society starts out in bondage, meaning no or very limited freedoms. Now faced with a very difficult situation (bondage), they turn to religion and religious faith. Through this they achieve the courage they need to fight for and win their freedom. Next, through the benefits of freedom, they achieve an abundance in material things.

Now we start into the other side of the circle/cycle. We get selfishness and laziness setting in. Then we get apathy and finally dependence. Then we arrive back up at the top with bondage again.

I was intrigued. I looked for information on Tytler on the Internet, could find none, and finally wrote to Dr. Brooks. He told first how to spell Tytler's name, and told me that most of Tytler's work has been completely lost. On further online search I found a number of sites with limited information on Tytler, but little more than what Brooks had said in his lecture.

I found this cycle to be very interesting in relation to where we are in the United States today. Dr. Brooks said he has asked the question of where the U.S. is in this cycle, in every one of these lectures he has given, to over 10,000 people to date. No one so far has said that we are on the right side of the cycle (spiritual faith, courage, liberty, abundance). Everyone has said we are somewhere on the left side of the circle (selfishness, complacency, apathy, dependence).

Let's talk about selfishness for a second. We have a situation in America today where many people are trying to get whatever they can out of the "system," with no concern of how this hurts the overall group of the United States of America.

Just wonderful. The dystopia can be planned for but still... This thesis has been revisited here: The Tytler Cycle Revisited Wikipedia has a basic post on Alexander Fraser Tytler