Why Civilizations Self-Destruct by Elmer Pendell

Giant intellects like Gibbon, Spengler and Toynbee have given us complex and tortuous reasons for the decline of civilizations. Dr. Pendell presents us with a simple one. Civilizations fall because the less capable slice of the population regularly outbreeds the more capable.

In precivilized times nature weeds out the unfit and eventually produces a superior variety of men whose intelligence and industriousness are channeled into constructing an advanced social order that defeats nature’s best-laid plans by protecting instead of eliminating the unfit.