"So long as the young generation is, and continues to be, well brought up, our ship of state will have a fair voyage; otherwise the consequences are better left unspoken."—Plato, Laws

When a civilisation declines it has stopped getting stronger and cleverer, but has started to become sillier and weaker; it has gone into reverse. This waning is the result of a reversal in the nature of authority; instead of authority ruling its charges, its charges rule authority. A change which must be marked by a rebellion where power is forcibly wrested from the traditional rulers and placed in the hands of the agents of 'the occasional will of the people'—Democracy. An act which Toynbee noted in his work 'A Study Of History' as a class war and the inevitable signal of the start of the decline of a civilisation.

Decline is inevitable because the reversal of authority has an immediate and crucial impact on the process by which a community constantly renews itself —the way it rears its children.