“There are periods in the life of humanity, which generally coincide with the beginning of the fall of cultures and civilizations, when the masses irretrievably lose their reason and begin to destroy everything that has been created by centuries and millenniums of culture. Such periods of mass madness, often coinciding with geological cataclysms, climatic changes, and similar phenomena of a planetary character, release a very great quantity of the matter of knowledge. This, in its turn, necessitates the work of collecting this matter of knowledge which would otherwise be lost. Thus the work of collecting scattered matter of knowledge frequently coincides with the beginning of the destruction and fall of cultures and civilizations.”

— P.D. Ouspensky,  In Search Of The Miraculous

ED: If such can happen to civilizations and cultures, I see no reason why a community would be immune. I also find this an attractive explanation of the ultimate self destruction of East Ridge. See The Decline and Fall of East Ridge.

Charles Williams in speaking of the Inquisition (1233) . 

“….it is clear also that new temptations of the greatest energy were now assailing the organization [The Church]. There has never yet been found any method of driving out one devil—except by pure love—which does not allow the entrance of seven, as Messias had long ago pointed out. With the establishment of the Inquisition in 1233, every kind of effort was made to drive out the one. The duty of delation was encouraged everywhere. “A boy of fourteen or a girl of twelve” were old enough to bear testimony. Not to do so was itself heresy, just as to complain of the Inquisition was heresy. The whole Inquisitorial Service was given a job by which the Means Test of to-day grows pale. It was a job in which they could hardly ever go-wrong, and in which the accused were always at an incredible disadvantage. Convolutions of doctrine were far more dangerous than difficulties of fact. A man accused of heresy had generally been guilty of heresy. “Brother accused brother, wife husband.” The Church committed herself, on the highest possible principles, to a breach of the highest possible principles. She did not merely execute; she caused to her prisoners, and she handed her prisoners over to, deliberate and prolonged torture, mental or physical or both. She approved the prolongation of that torture to its extreme point; she made any protest a matter of heresy. One would think that the phrase of Lord Acton (that “it cannot really be held that in Rome sixteen centuries after Christ men did not know that murder was wrong”) might be held to apply; it cannot be that men did not think such methods doubtfully holy. It was not so. Deep, deeper than we believe, lie the roots of sin; it is in the good that they exist; it is in the good that they thrive and send up sap and produce the black fruit of hell. The peacock fans of holy and austere popes drove the ashes of burning men over Christendom. The torch that had set light to the crosses in the Vatican gardens of Nero did not now pass into helpless or hesitating hands.” *

* Charles Williams,   Descent of the Dove

ED: Editor repeats for the sake of emphasis and explanatory excuse:

“Deep, deeper than we believe, lie the roots of sin; it is in the good that they exist; it is in the good that they thrive and send up sap and produce the black fruit of hell.”