I’ve recently been reading A Renegade History of the United States and the same concept keeps coming up, the more lax a culture becomes, the less productive it becomes. One example would be the interviews done with former slaves who lamented being free because they never worked harder then under northern freedom. The New England culture that was dominate at the time forced work, devotion, and working for a purpose versus working to live. This is also echoed in Thomas Sowell. His example of societies that improved off of British trains showed that only the most stringent societies were the ones improving upon the railways. This idea also plays into societal fatigue, where when a culture has no purpose they lose their will to continue.
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Not all degeneracy is sexual. I think extreme vanity would qualify. Reproduction should never be conflated with degeneracy, though.
But rats aren't a great analogue to human behavior. Tradition, history, religion and culture help give us purpose. Part of the problem of degeneracy is in subverting and vilifying ancient unifiers of purpose. Part of the problem of liberty is that it gives space for socially destructive ideas to grow. The marketplace of ideas is a great concept, but without some greater authority, such as Judeo-Christian morality, guiding it, it doesn't work.
I don't like the idea of the state being the moral authority, but without Catholicism, and later Anglicism, the strong morality found in the people of the colonies would never have occurred, and liberty would have been a recipe for disaster.