We shall develop these graphs step by step, displaying the developing graph at the bottom of each page, with the newly added elements from that page highlighted in red. Any or all of the four completed graphs can be examined at any point in the analysis by clicking the yellow "Complete Graphs" box, which appears on each page. Because the sectors include many overlapping influences, their developmental patterns are closely interrelated. We will not attempt to identify explicitly all the causal cross-relations among them, but it should become evident as we proceed that the patterns described for each sector tend to reinforce the patterns in the other sectors.

Since individual human beings have free will, not all of them will necessarily act in the ways described below. Rather, our analysis targets general trends across the whole society, trends which affect ever greater numbers of people, so that even relatively principled individuals find themselves increasingly less capable of resisting the tide of change. As our graphs develop, some of them will begin to resemble a tangle of arrows, because many of the causal influences reinforce each other, adding cumulative strength to the positive-feedback loops and other trends they trace. Although cultural inhibitions may slow those trends in some countries, such inhibitions will eventually be eroded, unless the trends are reversed by a major philosophical and political commitment to new and clear principles and to social reorganization.