Civilization Decline Quotes

“...Fields told himself furiously that the humanists and humanitarians of all casts were undoubtedly the last and most arrogant aristocrats, that they never learned anything and always forgot everything They went into ecstasies over the splendor of nature, refused to be discouraged or to give up, and went on believing in liberty and humanity in spite of the evidence of forced labor camps and nationalistic hatred, of fear and cruelty and betrayal around them. They went on dreaming of freedom and of the rights of man, refusing to face the fact that their disappearance, like the disappearance of the elephants, was an irreversible process, the price paid by mankind for a new, modem and ruthlessly efficient world.”
― Romain Gary, The Roots of Heaven

“Something kills human societies when they get successful. Most likely, it is socializing: humans gather in groups, decide that they dislike reality, and create an alternative reality instead, then enforce it through peer pressure. This is usually a response to the means-over-ends approach of jobs and control which value obedience over reality.

When humans socialize, they converge on the lowest common denominator, namely the desire for each person to be a god in his own little world. He wants his desires to take precedence over the whole of reality. Socializing replaces nature as the environment to which humans adapt, and so individualism becomes accepted as real.”
― Brett Stevens