Any civilization has an amount of goodness/kindness and evil/malice. They are not quite opposite quantities in that a single society can have an abundance of both-they don’t negate each other, but an absence of kindness can have much the same effect as an abundance of malice. Goodness is best thought of as a positive quantity

There is an upper limit on goodness in a society which, if exceeded, the people of the civilization will reorder their civilization into a new civil structure. I think a good name for this process would be regeneration. There is also a limit on malice, below which a civilization will degenerate. While passing the limit of goodness is a deliberate process of reorganizing and people deciding (even intuitively) to make the lives of others better, degeneration is much less likely to be deliberate overall and is better characterized as implosion or self-cannibalism as the society consumes itself.

A regenerated society will have higher limits in terms of malice and and kindness. The actual changes will be influenced by the cleverness of its people: they might focus on building a society that enables incredible levels of kindness but is vulnerable to malice, or they might focus on preventing malice and degeneration. Greater cleverness will see those goals better met. A degenerating society can be benefited by cleverness, but it is also more likely that cleverness will worsen its decay. Cleverness often loses value before and during degeneration and may be held in the hands of increasingly narrow factions (some factions may seek to control it while disinterest will prevent other factions from spreading understanding). Now, a regenerated or degenerated society might be more or less sophisticated, complex, ordered, intuitive, or otherwise than its predecessor. For instance, fascism is a degenerate mode of civilization, but is highly structured in many aspects. There is almost always a seductive force to degeneration that drives many people to simultaneously make choices that drive degeneration forward. Structure, superficial peace, and lack of restraint are some of the appeals of low-kindness/high-malice societies.

Signs of degeneration manifest when more and more people’s lives are consumed. Consumption is when a person is objectified, used as a tool, or otherwise eaten up and lose contact with kindness. People who want to do good cannot and suffer moral distress. Excessive social demands, overcomplexity, power structures insensitive to human emotion, trauma and suffering, exhaustion, addictions, illness, perversity, hypersexuality, and the like are both symptoms and causes of degeneration. Degeneration can only be combatted by choosing to use energy for kindness, so degeneration will push for decreasing the free energy and the willpower to do good. It needs to be a self-sustaining cycle for degeneration to complete, so stripping people of discretion to do what is right is essential (e.g., requiring judges to rule according to law rather than what is good [noting that precedent influences what is right, but cannot be morally conclusive]).

It becomes very important to distribute the burdens of governing society between many people. If rulers degenerate, they will degenerate those under their rule and, famously, monarchs have the greatest access to addiction and excesses, they are subject to burdens far beyond what any human can carry, and so on. In civilization design, it’s good to watch for any positions that have these traits-it’s not just monarchs. I would suggest doctors, lawyers, and presidents are examples of people with excessive burdens in our society-which often burns them out and turns these professions that should be about helping people into cold, unfeeling industries.

When we look to falls of past civilizations, we look to disease, climate change, warfare, and other environmental causes. What these phenomena represent is a pressure that consumes people’s lives and makes it harder for individuals to recognize what is kind and choose it for themselves and others. When kindness abounds, the effects of any of these are mitigated and do not destroy a civilization. To blame the environment is to miss the point. These things happen to people and make their lives harder, but they ultimately choose whether they are kind, cruel, or unfeeling.

Regeneration comes when people are not consumed and choose to be kind with the energy that is free. Where degeneration drains people of the capacity to resist, regeneration is most likely to happen as kindness becomes more and more intuitive. Being kind takes energy, so a rich understanding of kindness makes doing good easier and more effective. That requires education, benevolence, and good faith discussion of virtue and good. The goodness that results from isolated individuals reasoning for themselves what is good is too costly. Regeneration only happens when many people choose to be interested in moral discussion and are willing to correct and be corrected. Without cleverness within kindness and systems to help people understand kindness on a deeper, more functional level, the upper limit of good will not be reached. It is not enough to say, I am kind or I wish to be kind. It is necessary to ask: what is kindness, and what does kindness look like within my life, what is the kindness that my neighbor needs.

Some notes: empathy is related to kindness but is not it. Empathy is also quite capable of cruelty. Empathy must be tempered by goodwill and must be extended to all people. Selective empathy aids factionalism instead. I think our society is full of degenerative signs, in particular, an unwillingness to discuss morality and religion (religion being one of the only institutions seriously concerned with questions of kindness). Amorality is not real: it is callousness and disinterest in the welfare of others, which is a degenerative impulse. We need more doctors, lawyers, engineers and the like-any profession where the risks are big, we need more people so that caseloads are kept small. We don’t need people losing their sense of self under the pressure that people will die because they don’t have the resources to do everything they need to.