The Tytler Cycle Part 5

John Eberhard

I have written four articles previously on what is known as the Tytler Cycle. This is a repeating cycle of events in history that is attributed by most to Scottish historian Alexander Tytler. The quote goes like this:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."

“The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

• From bondage to spiritual faith;
• From spiritual faith to great courage;
• From courage to liberty;
• From liberty to abundance;
• From abundance to complacency;
• From complacency to apathy;
• From apathy to dependence;
• From dependence back into bondage”

I created a graphic to show this:

The Apathy Stage

In my previous articles I commented on what this means to our times and this article will continue in that vein. My opinion at this time is that America is firmly in the apathy stage of this cycle. (It is possible that we are even in the dependence stage.) I don’t mean by that that people are all apathetic about everything in their lives (though some are). I mean that on the subject of their country and their government, they are apathetic.

Here are some points that back up that theory:

• Surveys show that the approval rating for members of Congress is at an all-time low. Yet, in the face of that, in every election, incumbents are overwhelmingly re-elected in high percentages. How could that be? They’re unhappy with their representatives, but they re-elect them. The only explanation is that people are disgusted with the way the government is going, but they just don’t care enough about it to even elect a new candidate, or to study who the opposition candidates are. In other words, they are so apathetic that they just vote for the guy they’ve heard of before, i.e. the incumbent.

• Before the 2012 Presidential election, I naively thought that President Obama didn’t have a chance. Why? Because I had been keeping up with various news items about things that Obama was doing in office, with various scandals such as Benghazi (September 2012), Fast and Furious (2011), Eric Holder being held in contempt of Congress (June 2012), etc. All before the 2012 election mind you. Not to mention the passing of Obamacare in April 2010, (with 100% Democratic votes and zero Republican votes), which was then and still is opposed by a majority of Americans.Yet Obama was re-elected, which proved several things to me: 1) The information sources that I use to get my news are not used or known about by the vast majority of Americans, 2) most Americans didn’t know about any of these scandals, 3) since these information sources are readily available, apparently most Americans just don’t care enough to become truly informed.

• The mainstream media are in lock-step with the radical liberal element which controls the Democratic Party. Although the mainstream media doesn’t have the lock on the public’s information flow like they did 20-30 years ago, still the majority of Americans get their news from the network TV news stations, from CNN, and from the almost all far-left major daily newspapers like the New York Times and the LA Times. All of these news sources are reeling from reduced readership and viewership, and I believe that is at least partly because they are so liberally biased, and it does not fit with the views of a majority of the population (by survey liberals are and have been less than 25% at every point in the last 50 years). But despite the flagging viewership, the vast majority of Americans still get their news from what Rush Limbaugh calls the drive-by media. And the dominance of the far left mainstream news media distorts every aspect of the political process.So why do people even tolerate a situation like this? They can closely follow the latest reality TV show, and know what Taylor Swift or the Kardashians are doing, but they don’t care enough to get their news from a balanced source. Again, it is an apathy about the country or the government.

• Have you ever seen those bits on TV where they go out and interview people and ask them basic questions about the US government, or about US history?  Like who did the US fight in World War II? Or in what century was the Civil War fought? Or who is the Vice President of the United States? Or can you name any of the Justices on the US Supreme Court? Every time I see some stupid girl in her twenties say “I don’t know,” and laugh, thinking it’s funny, I die inside a little. Now granted, the point of those things is to show how stupid people are, so they’re generally not going to show you the people who could answer every question right. But still, it’s scary that those people can’t answer any of the questions right. Questions that should matter to them.

The Dependence Stage

You could also make a case for the idea that America is now in the dependence stage of the cycle.

Several years ago we learned that 49% of American households were receiving some kind of government welfare assistance. That’s a staggering figure. Nearly half. How can that be a sustaining situation? How can half of the population support the other half, and why should they have to? Of course the financial impact of that situation is lessened somewhat by the insane fact that the government borrows huge sums every year, to pay for all this nonsense. Theoretically all that money will have to be paid back someday, on the backs of just half the population. But irresponsible politicians act as if it will never have to be paid back, like a credit card with no limit, and no minimum payments.

According to the Food Research and Action Center, in March 2015, there were 45.6 million people on food stamps. That represents a 62% increase since 2009, when there were 28.2 million people on food stamps, and a 163% increase since 2001 when Bush took office, when there were 17.3 million.

We keep hearing more and more about people who just don’t ever get a job, because they can live quite well on the public assistance they’re getting. Democrats have even been promoting the idea in the last year that a job is a burden, and it’s unfair that people should have to work.

What Turns the Cycle?

So the next question we might want to look at, is what turns the cycle? What causes it to move from spiritual faith, to courage, to liberty, to abundance, to selfishness, to complacency, to apathy, to dependence, to bondage?

One of things that turns the cycle, is success. In other words, success in creating an abundance. James Quinn, whom I quote in one of my earlier articles on Tytler, thought that the abundance phase of this cycle came to an end around the time Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. So think about the post-World War II generation and period and the abundance that came out of that.

But abundance unfortunately seems to have the effect of making everyone complacent, and making them forget 1) the amount of focus and hard work that it took to create that abundance, and 2) that there was ever a time or set of circumstances where there was NOT an abundance. In other words, people who have seen an abundance in America for their entire lives, don’t think there could ever be a situation where there wasn’t an abundance.

So they do not see hard work as a necessity, they become lazy, and they don’t bother to follow what’s happening in the government with their elected officials. That’s where you get teenage girls being interviewed on the beach who can’t name the century in which the Civil war was fought, or who the two sides were. You wouldn’t have seen that kind of ignorance or carelessness 200 years ago.

In my view, the second thing that turns the cycle, is a group of people who want to be overlords to a populace in bondage.

This comes down to confronting evil. Most people don’t want to, or find it very difficult to confront evil. Some don’t care, and some just want to think happy thoughts. Once, a woman who was a friend of mine on Facebook got mad at me for posting several things in a row on Facebook that she considered negative or “not happy.” I don’t want to infer that most people are like that, but it is difficult for most people to understand and confront the fact that some people are just evil.

I think that there is a group of people who have gotten themselves into the federal government, who want us all in bondage. These are actions that will lead inevitably towards a state of the American public being under the thumb of a dictatorial class:

• Encouraging people to get on public assistance, to the point that they are dependent on the government.
• Taking away guns
• Evolving a situation where political correctness eventually takes away our freedom of speech. The way this is done is to equate disagreement with something as “hate,” then to demonize hate, outlaw “hate speech,” until we reach a point where disagreement is outlawed. This is already happening in other countries, notably in Canada where it is illegal to publicly express disagreement with gay marriage for instance.
• Encouraging racial tension until we get to the point of riots. This then makes such actions as martial law, and federal takeover of all local police in the country, acceptable. If that sounds ridiculous, take a look at the race riots in the last year, and the fact the federal government just took over the police in the DC area. Al Sharpton has called for the nationalization of all the nation’s police forces.
• The crash of the economy in 2008, which according to the book “Crisis by Design” by John Truman Wolfe, was engineered and caused on purpose by a series of actions. The crash caused a massive loss of wealth for individuals worldwide. Obviously if people lose a substantial amount of their wealth, it reduces their freedom.
• Passing Obamacare, so you lose control of your health care and lose choices in whether you get insurance and what type of insurance you get.

I could go on but I think you get the idea, and you can probably think of other examples where we are losing our freedoms bit by bit like the proverbial frog in the boiling pot.

The Fatal Cycle of Democracy

Some call the Tytler cycle the “Fatal Cycle of Democracy,” and some even characterize Tytler as a cynic. That’s probably not much of a stretch.

So what does it all mean. Are we all just heading down the drain?

I won’t lie and say I haven’t been extremely concerned and frustrated about the direction of the country. I think President Obama has accelerated the move towards taking away our freedoms. And you can say that Republicans are a lot better (which they are) but they sure haven’t done much to stop Obama, even with a majority in both houses of Congress.

Here’s what it means: Things don’t look good. It’s vital that we don’t allow a Democrat to be elected to the White House in 2016. But even more basic and fundamental than that, it is vital that we don’t allow ourselves to be apathetic about our government. We have to continue to care. We have to be passionate. We have to make time to do what we can to stop this destruction of our country.

The founding fathers gave us a system of government that was superior to anything ever devised on this planet. And this system has made America the most prosperous country in the history of the world.

But history shows us that the freedoms we have enjoyed in America have been the exception, not the rule, on planet Earth. And unfortunately, the evil, would-be overlords want to take those freedoms away. It’s time to stop trying to figure how these politicians could be so stupid (they’re really not, they know exactly what they’re doing), or so incompetent (they’re not, they are being extremely effective at what they want to do). It’s time to actually see that these people are evil, that they want power over our lives, and they want to take our freedoms away. It’s time to fight them.