How true that political decline mirrors the individual and social erosion of a people. It begins as men draw away from the traditions, icons, and virtues that symbolically set a people in motion. Since unaided Human Reason cannot account for the superiority of one value over another, that which is reverenced by the City succumbs to the eventual unraveling of its moral tapestry. Culture and the newly emancipated and unencumbered soul then begin their symbiotic dance: reflecting inflamed passion and desire for the new and uncharted regions of Being--morphing and mutating in a downward spiral of chaotic expression and viral incubation.

 After the first generation has thrown off the insufferable shackles of moral constraint, each succeeding cohort diminishes into luxury and barbarism like a copy of a copy--growing more blurred and faint. It is here that the descent into voluptuousness and the Spirit of Narcissism proves corrosive to self-sustenance. The upending of the old regime portends the destruction of the possibility of Wisdom as the Cult of Youth and its irresponsible spirit of Eros and abandon runs roughshod through civil society--mocking piety and moderation, dissolving the bonds of filial piety, and leveling the hierarchies of taste that once characterized the high from the low. Self Love soon replaces duty and sacrifice and the orgasm becomes the sole secular sacrament of a people increasingly infatuated with their own mirror image.

 Inexorably, the character of politics soon becomes epidermal and the satiation of desire with the material becomes the greatest and highest political aspiration. It is here that the individual, spiritual, and political consciousness of a people becomes wholly debased---How else can we explain the galactic level of debt mounted so self-righteously on the backs of our children to satisfy the rapacious appetite of the tyrannical "Now?"

 With such a descent into the abyss of self-absorption, the possibility of politics and the Good Life vaporizes. Passion trumps Reason, Desire and Carnality strike down Wisdom, and a people of the disheveled soul each goes to his own house in a spirit of unreflective abandon-leaving in their wake the rusted hulk of what had once been a great and proud people.