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It would be great if we had some quotes from contemporary Macedonian elders to compare it to then, eh? But the point should be obvious: just because the Greeks were complaining about the youth being corrupted doesn't mean they were wrong. And given that right around the time those youth would have been old enough to become the elders ruling Athens, they were conquered by a presumably less "corrupt" society.
A complaint can be valid in ancient history and modern times, unless you believe in Whig history or Fukuyama style end of history. Weak men create hard times, etc.
You make a fair point that theoretically, the previous generations can actually be right that the youth relative to them are corrupt, weak, and shitty and then that trend reverses itself a generation or two after.
My point was that given the ancient Greeks were complaining that their youth sucked, and I've now seen two generations of older people say their youth sucked (boomers/Gen X > millenials & everyone > Gen Z), it seems very likely that every generation likes to think the ones after them suck. Given that it's not really possible for every generation to be worse than the preceding one and to have a functional civilization, this complaint should be taken with a few pounds of salt.
One of my favorite variants of this: Hard times create strong Slavs, strong Slavs create hard times
I think it's easy to theorize an asymmetry here, where if things have gotten worse you wax lyrically about the glorious past (in writing), whereas when things get better you don't dwell on the past much at all, thus creating a bias towards accounts of worsening in the historic record that can easily coexist with the present being much better than the past. In this model, the reports of worsening could well have been completely accurate.
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I can't help but notice that we aren't currently living under the hegemony of Greece.
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It is true that this trend is obviously inconsistent with a civilisation that remains functional indefinitely. However, Western civilisation has not remained functional indefinitely. It has remained functional during current trends for ~75 years (NB: the 1950 date I'm using here seems to be relatively bipartisan and static; SJers and their foes both seem to talk about the 50s as the paradigm current trends have moved away from, despite their diametrically-opposed views on the value of that paradigm and the trends since, and haven't started talking about the 70s instead as time has gone on). It is possible that the trend is slow enough that the chickens merely haven't come home to roost yet; "there's a lot of ruin in a nation". Indeed, most of the people pushing this claim at any given time are specifically worried that we might stop having a functional civilisation at some point, and this is something that has happened before albeit rarely (e.g. the Fall of Rome, the collapse of Qing China into warlordism).
I can't help but notice that the USA and significant chunks of Western Europe are not in a good way at the moment. Germany's been talking for a while about banning the party that is now #1 in their polls. The USA has significant groups of people on both sides of the political aisle who literally support murdering their political opposition (citations: this board, and the Blue Tribe Internet following Charlie Kirk). Suicide is a non-negligible cause of death. We have cost disease, one of the causes of which is regulatory sclerosis of productive activity. The USA can't pass laws much anymore, to the point that it's become standard for the President to govern by executive order. It would seem that our civilisation is indeed somewhat less functional (at a nuts-and-bolts level) than it was 75 years ago, which is not in contradiction with the hypothesis you're attacking.
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