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Answers:
Yes.
As @Stefferi states, they would probably have predicted that society would collapse more or less instantly upon the achievement of several prior levels of degeneracy. If they're wrong on every sub prediction, it might be fair to ignore or soften their future predictions.
Try to rank the Roman Emperors. The Biblical Jewish kings. Hell, American Presidents. All of them. The first few slots are bitterly contested, who was a better king Solomon or David? What order do Diocletian, Augustus, Hadrian go on the list? Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln are quite easily seen as GOAT or goat, depending on who is doing the rankings. Do leaders over bigger territories get extra credit over those who lead diminished geographies? But pretty quickly, you realize that none of those lists contains a preponderance of good leaders. Despite three very different polities, choosing their leaders by very different methods, the net result is similar: there are a handful of really great leaders, historically important geniuses who set their country's path for decades, sometimes centuries, to come; who are succeeded by mediocrities and losers, who fritter that momentum away over time. But it takes many mediocrities to lose the path, "There's a lot of ruin in a nation." Rome spent most of its history in "decline." The Old Testament is mostly just a series of kings turning away from the true faith, the modern Jews essentially are still running off the software created by a handful of great leaders between Moses and Solomon. This might just be a result of historiography, but it seems to me that decline and degeneracy are the normal state rather than an exceptional one; collapse comes much, much, much later than degeneracy can first be identified.
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