The professional military build-up has frequently usurped the
state power and became king-maker by virtue of its monopoly of weapons,
organization, and its highly trained personnel of professional
destroyers and killers.
Upset by one or another of these disturbing and disruptive forces,
civilized populations have panicked and retreated from their
collectiveness toward more localized, more fragmented, less social and
more individual life patterns. Such a retreat rounds out the later
phases of a cycle of civilization--the phases of decline and final
dissolution.
Civilizations perish in the first instance because of internal
contradictions and conflicts, the struggle to grab, monopolize, and keep
wealth, status, power.
They perish because of the division of the nucleus and its associates
and dependencies between those who work for a living, those who have an
unearned income and those parasites who scrounge for a living. They
perish because of the hard class and caste lines that grow out of
economic contradictions; because of the development of a social
pyramid, layer above layer, until the summit is reached where there is
standing room for only a few. Competent, talented persons may rise from
level to level in this pyramid. A political and social bureaucracy
develops which feeds at the public trough. Then comes a bitter struggle
to get both feet in the trough and keep them there side by side with an
equally determined effort to exclude outsiders and other intruders.
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