In the middle of the twentieth century, the universal historian Arnold J. Toynbee implicitly used Integral Relational Logic to classify around twenty major civilizations that have existed since the dawn of history during the patriarchal epoch, most of which have died, in conformity with the fundamental law of the Universe.

Toynbee presented his studies in a monumental 12-volume A Study of History, occupying half a metre of shelf space in the Stockholm University Library when I went there in the 1990s, while working at IBM’s Nordic Software Development Laboratory.

Despite their many differences, Toynbee saw similar patterns within all civilizations, as they pass through genesis, creative growth, a time of troubles, a universal state, and disintegration. Here is a timeline of the lifespans of those that Toynbee identified, as they have followed the universal birth, growth, decay, and death framework of the Cosmogonic Cycle.

Toynbee summarized the reason for the death of civilizations in this simple way:

The nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority [the leaders who brought the civilization into being], an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

It is crystal clear that this diagnosis applies to the entire patriarchal epoch, which has treated women as second-class citizens for thousands of years. In particular, Western civilization, which dominates the world through the global economy and materialistic science, needs to die in the collective psyche if we humans are to have any chance of cocreating a system of governance for the benefit of us all.