Alexander Fraser Tytler lived at the end of the eighteenth century, but his book The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic sends a chilling warning today. Tytler found that ancient democracies waned under the selfishness of human hearts. He wrote: “The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence:

1. from bondage to spiritual faith;
2. from spiritual faith to great courage;
3. from courage to liberty;
4. from liberty to abundance;
5. from abundance to selfishness;
6. from selfishness to complacency;
7. from complacency to apathy;
8. from apathy to dependency;
9. from dependency back to bondage.