Manly P Hall on Atlantis. What can we learn from this story?

The destruction of Atlantis can be interpreted politically as the breaking up of the ideal pattern of government.
So complete was this destruction, than men forgot there is a better way of life, and since have accepted the evils of war and crime and poverty as inevitable. The world lost too all sense of its own unity; each man's hand was thereafter raised against his neighbor. The perfect state disappeared under a deluge of politics; the priests of Poseidon gave away to the priesthood of Mammon.
Plato's political vision was for the restoration of the Empire of the Golden Age. The old ways of the gods must be restored, he was convinced, if human beings are to be preserved from the corruptions which they have brought upon themselves. Plato sought this end when he established a university at Athens - the first school of formal education in history. Here men taught the great truths of religion, philosophy, science, and politics, to restore to them the vision of the perfect State.
The old Atlantis was gone, dissolved in a sea of human doubts. But the philosophical empire would come again, as a democracy of wise men. Two thousand years later Lord Bacon restated this vision in his New Atlantis.

Manly P Hall

Read also https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/francis-bacons-god