Here's why the world feels like its falling apart.
In 1895, a French psychologist named Gustave Le Bon mapped out how civilizations are built and how they fall apart.
He called it the lifecycle. Here's how it works:
Scattered people find a shared ideal.
Typically a religion, mission, or vision of order, and it pulls them together into something greater than themselves.
That ideal builds institutions, culture, law, economies, and art. The civilization rises, and for a while, it works.
Then the ideal fades across generations.
The shared purpose that held everything together quietly drains out, and what replaces it is barbaric self-interest.
People stop asking what they owe the whole and start asking what they can take from it. Duty gives way to entitlement.
The institutions remain standing, but they’re running on fumes — coasting on the reputation of a past they had no part in building.
That’s where it gets dangerous. Because from the outside, nothing looks broken.
The buildings still stand, the summits are still scheduled, and the flags still fly.
But the load-bearing structure underneath (the ideal that bound the whole thing together) has rotted out.
Over a century ago, Le Bon watched this pattern devour every civilization he studied. Read it today and it feels like a diary entry.