However—and this must be emphasized—progress is not the purpose of the saeculum. If the saeculum has a purpose, it is rather to push a society that always anticipates something better into phases of creative self-adjustment where it must, from time to time, confront something worse. It is to steer a people resolved to avoid cycles into participating in a cycle that will spare it from dissolution or stasis and therefore from social death. The saeculum contributes to long-term progress only to the extent that it keeps society alive and adaptive. In this sense, its purpose resembles that of
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