Degenerate

There is probably no single policy contributing to the destruction of a society than the institution of Legal charity by a nation.
James Madison knew that, “Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”
Rome could not sustain itself as a viable republic once the free society sustained itself with the free bread of its public religion. Greek and Roman Historians like Polybius and Plutarch saw the covetous practices of legal charity by the State was not a War on Poverty but a war on liberty that created a culture that established a place of sin that weakened the people and a safe place where tyrants thrived.
You will not long have liberty wherever legal charity is allowed to erode the very fabric of a free society.
Like moths dining in the dark they digest a man's coat in the summer so that he freezes when the winter winds do blow.
It has been well known for centuries that any social safety net instituted through the exercising authority of government. The character and virtue of the masses will diminish wherever fervent charity is neglected. New Deals are the old deal of Cain and Nimrod, Sumer and Egypt. People have criticized "the poor laws" because they divided the family and today the welfare state is the driving force that has removed fathers from the family which has always been the foundation of all free societies.
If the institution of the legal charity of the welfare state destroyed the black community which was targeted by LBJ and activists like Cloward and Piven, then that is the source of the degeneration of liberty today.

Degenerate

According to the theories of societal degeneration, we will find a host of individual and social pathologies forming in a finite network of diseases, disorders, and moral habits.

The primary symptoms of degeneration would include a weakening of natural forces and willpower of society. Men and women would display less and less of the common natural male and female virtues distinguishing them within rising successful cultures. There would be more self-destructive behavior, more alcohol abuse, more use of drugs, both legal and illegal, and more self-abuse of their bodies including denial of any proper dietary concerns. This would include as both cause and effect more depression, less sense of a personal purpose, and more physical abuse or neglect of themselves and others, including murder, abortion and suicides. Both their life and others would seem of little value.

A wide range of social and physical deviations from sound social and natural behaviors would become common and accepted, including crime, violence, alcoholism, prostitution, gambling, and pornography, would be excused as merely a biological defect within the individual, part of an evolutionary process. Personal responsibility and conscious choices and a rejection of virtue would be ignored and the idea of a Divine Design or any sort of Divine Will or a God would be treated as superstition.

Religion, which had been the performance of a duty to your fellowman according to Natural Law would also degenerate into a mere superstition with ritual songs and chants, magic phrases and saying, irrational doctrines conjured up through senseless rituals and ceremonies perpetrated by intellectuals and a religious elite upon emotional and self-deceived people requiring philosophical justification for their personal depravity. The original purpose of Religion which had once provided actual care and life-giving provision for the true needy of a moral society would become an opiate of the people. That opiate would always prove to be insufficient and would cycle people mentally into more and more radical faith in the doctrines and images of the superstition, or they would seek stronger drugs or distractions.

The idea that religion had once been the desired performance of a duty to care for the life of others through voluntary sacrifice which in turn had created and maintained the social bonds of a free society would be replaced with a sense of self-righteousness and entitlement at the expense of your fellowman and the searing of the conscience to maintain this cognitive dissonance as moral would lead to more and more vulnerability to other strong delusions.

Amongst the people of a seared conscience there will be only their truth. There can be no God of Truth. Contradictory opinions must be banned and condemned until there is a contempt for free speech, Freedom of Religion and any freedom except for them.

Those afflicted with degeneration were thought to represent a return to an earlier evolutionary stage before the invention of God. They worship their image of nature, denying the very cause and effect of the Law of Nature. Soon, good is evil and evil is good, right is wrong, and slavery is freedom.

Preachers and worshippers of Doom

Paul Urlick who made lots of many with his book The Population Bomb is still at spreading his fear that people are the problem. That might be partly true but not for the reason he claims.

The problem is not quantity of people but the quality of people. What social practices or political policies have been known to degenerate people individually and as nations for thousands of years? Why are people today in such uniform denial of this basic truth evident throughout the history of mankind? What are the basic changes easily pursued and embraced individually and as communities that would reverse the elements that creep into what had been historically recognized as successful societies and civilizations? What has historically ushered in that internal degeneration and self destruction people could not see at the time but has been observed before those nations and cultures went through their own decline and fall?

Machiavellianism

What feeds the Machiavellian nature in men but positions of power and many weak and vulnerable people?

Machiavellianism is a personality trait describing a manipulative individual who deceives and tricks others to achieve his or her selfish goals. The trait may be scaled as related to cold selfishness and pure instrumentality where those high on the trait were assumed to pursue their motives in duplicitous ways. Psychologists try to assert that there is a genetic predisposition towards callous, selfish, and manipulative personality traits but this is not an ancient gene that haunts man but more likely an influence of a genetic memory passed down for a few generations requiring reinstitution of a the selfish cycle common amongst those with a seared conscience. We know that an early parental influences and home life or a lack of it is probably a much greater deciding factor.

We know "that the surest way to create a psychopath is to cycle a child through half a dozen foster homes from birth to age 11."

The same is true of Psychopathy common when parasitical predators mingle unchecked in societies where callousness and a lack of empathy and covetous of what is others has become acceptable culturally. Narcissism followed by a descent into Sadism will become common within society with few capable of countering or even recognizing its presence, even the victims of it. In fact, being a victim will become a desired status and even a badge of pride.