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Last Friday, Bret Deveraux of ACOUP waded deeper into the Culture War than usual by writing about the anti-ICE protests, and insurgencies and non-violent resistance in general.
What unites both strategies is that the difference in power between the state and the dissidents is very large, so large that both conventional military operations and even a protracted war are not an option for the weaker party.
If you can not face your enemy in the field, and can not even hope to sap his strength through a thousand papercuts until you can face him, what can you do?
As a military theorist, Deveraux naturally uses Clausewitz to identify three factors which can limit the escalation of force and thus be employed by the weaker side to hamper the stronger side.
Friction (the natural tendency of stuff to break, things not going according to plan, your forces not being where you would want them to be) is a bit of a sideshow. If you are able to weaken your enemy sufficiently through friction, you are fighting a protracted war, not a terrorist insurgency.
Will means the emotional backing of the conflict by the politically relevant part of the population, which might be the body of citizens or some elites, depending on the system. This is a prime target in these highly asymetrical conflicts.
The third limiting factor is the political object of the enemy leadership. Unlike the population, which is modelled as being emotional, the leadership is modelled as rational. The idea here is that if you can inflict sufficient costs on the enemy, they might decide that it is no longer worth it to enforce their goal.
Will is the central point to attack for the weaker party:
For terrorist insurgencies, this means that the main goal of their attacks is actually sending signals. So the point is not to weaken the enemy's military by blowing up their troops and materiel, but rather to message audiences on both sides of the conflict (as well as these in between) that their cause is viable. If you could convince everyone that your victory is inevitable, that would be a great boon to your side. In practice, this means that terrorists favor flashy targets to military relevant ones. 9/11 is a prime example.
A key strategy is to bait your enemy into striking against you while you are hiding among the civilian population, thereby causing civilian deaths which result both in local dissatisfaction as well as in winning a propaganda victory -- which is the kind of victory which brings you closer to your objective. The main dilemma for the insurgent is that they need gruesome violence to further their cause, but that such violence may also serve to alienate the local population and strengthen the resolve of the enemy. While 9/11 was great for making Al Qaeda a household name, it was ultimately bad for the Jihadist cause.
Deveraux then contrasts this with a deliberate strategy of nonviolence, which does not have that dilemma. He is actually rather realist about why movements employ non-violence:
Of course, non-violent protest does not mean staying on the sidewalks:
If your protest can be simply ignored, it is likely that it will be ignored, so you do not get the desired escalation and attention. This means that you will have to commit transgressions to goad the enemy into strikes against you which will be terrible PR for them.
Bret talks about the Nashville campaign during the Civil Rights Movement, where Blacks would organize sit-ins on segregated lunch counters. This caused violent repercussions, which eventually eroded popular support of the segregationist side.
He also concedes that there are regimes which are impervious to non-violent protests, where the political relevant parts of the population are very willing to employ and support violence, but argues that societies which are running on violence are very inefficient.
Finally, he talks about the anti-ICE movement, of which he seems sympathetic.
He continues:
He points out that mass media help the protests a lot, as their position has gained massively in popularity over a relatively short time span (compared to the Civil Rights Movement).
I think that the gist is that the median American voter -- like the median Motte poster -- is very willing to vote for Trump's anti-immigrant platform, but unlike the median Motte poster they are totally unwilling to tolerate the Pretti shooting as a natural consequence of enforcement actions. Of course, the Trump administration did not help itself by reflexively claiming that the shooting was justified instead of spinning it as a sad mistake.
Deveraux:
When he was posting this, the decision to pull the DHS forces out of Minneapolis was already made, but it would hardly have been surprising from his point of view. At the end of the day, the only political idea Trump truly believes from the bottom of his heart is that he should be president. Toughness on immigration (spouses excluded) so far was of instrumental value for him because it gained him a lot of support, but if it no longer delivers the votes for him, I expect him to change policy.
I remember acoup guy being a huge smartass and his articles are mostly well acktuallys that let him sound smart. He totally writes like he's talking down to his audience.
I remember his series on ancient greece was getring shared around a lookoong time ago and he had an article mostly about "well acktually spartans sucked, actually" and every other paragraph he would go "look at how bigoted these stupid racist spartans were. Maybe with some more diversity and feminism they wouldn't have sucked so bad!".
But anyways I find his writing extremely hard to take seriously. In a sense he's kind of like the lazerpig of history blogging because he hides his lack of rigor under a veneer of self deprecation ("unmitigated pedantry" - "low tier youtubing") yet will get incredibly defensive and lash out whenever someone criticizes his stream of hot takes.
I remember his "fremen mirage" series, and being left with the strong impression that he was playing word games in an attempt to obfuscate a fundamental reality he found unpalatable. Particularly, his four-part definition in the beginning of the first part more-or-less immediately convinced me that he was not operating in good faith.
What do you think the fundamental reality he is trying to obfuscate is?
The Fremen mirage series is very clear that it is rejecting the "Hard times make strong men" thesis, and the first two posts present evidence that it false (in post 1, that states usually beat non-state societies, and in post 2 that richer states usually beat poorer ones). Nothing is being obfuscated here - Devereaux might be wrong, but he isn't obfuscating his argument.
Very briefly, central examples of the "Hard Times Make Strong Men" thesis do not claim that non-states usually beat states, or that poorer states generally beat richer ones. Devereaux is attempting to frame the thesis this way because if he can bake absurdity into his audience's understanding of the argument, then it's all over but the sneering, which is pretty clearly what he's primarily interested in doing.
"Hard Times Make Strong Men" exists as a thesis because we can directly observe that rich, powerful states often actually do decline, that states are defeated by non-states, and rich states are beat by poor states. Not all the time, not as the expected result, but often enough that very clearly wealth, population, or whatever other technocratically legible KPI one prefers are not deterministic. Why is this? What causes upsets? What causes the mighty to decline? What injects mortality into the putatively super-mortal? This is a fascinating question, but Devereaux appears mainly interested in cauterizing such interest in anyone he can, and is enthusiastically willing to employ the argumentative dark arts in doing so.
Here are two paragraphs:
...This is propaganda. The person writing it likes you stupid. To the extent that you not of my tribe, the more you listen to him, the better for me.
This does not constitute support for "Hard Times Make Strong Men" or disagreement with Brett Devereaux. I don't think "Hard Times Make Strong Men" has to be parsed as "Hard Times Make Strong Men 100% of the time", but given the rest of the meme it should at least mean "Hard Times Make Strong Men more often than good times." If you agree that states usually beat non-states, and rich states usually beat poor states (as you seem to suggest with "not as the expected result") then you agree with the core factual claim of the Fremen Mirage series. In which case what is it that "Hard Times Make Strong Men" means that you find both true and interesting? "Hard Times sometimes Make Strong Men, even if that isn't the way to bet" is trivially true and uninteresting.
I don't think Devereaux is uninterested in this question - he wrote another long blogpost series on the Fall of Rome. But he doesn't see it as directly in his wheelhouse as a military historian - like most modern historians, he blames the Fall on internal political and economic factors (in his case including climate change) and not on a decline in the quality of Roman soldiers relative to the enemy. The point of the Fremen Mirage series is to debunk a specific theory of imperial decline which is seen as fully general by its more extreme supporters - that empires decline due to "decadence" (i.e. a loss of the martial virtues) brought on reasonably predictably by excessive wealth. He doesn't propose an alternative fully general theory of imperial decline because there isn't one.
You claim that Devereaux is (a) wrong and (b) obfuscating this. You have not stated a concrete point where you disagree with him, or a false belief you think he is trying to insinuate. I think he has a very clear agenda (that the set of views about masculinity and martial virtue he calls the "cult of the badass" is widely held, wrong, and actively harmful in a liberal democracy) and his opponents on this thread are the ones trying to obfuscate the actual disagreement.
I think the more accurate formulation would be "Hard times make strong men inevitable. Good times make weak men inevitable." This formulation not only seems obviously consonant with my understanding of history, but the reasons why it should be so likewise seem obvious: Good times impose reduced consequences on weak men for their weakness, and greatly reduce the amount of free energy by which strong men might exercise their strength. By contrast, bad times impose many consequences on weakness, and often provide an abundance of free energy through which strength might be exercised, not least the general population's desire to organize their collective power and resources to change things for the better.
But of course, this requires us to take the terms "strong" and "weak", "good" and "bad" seriously. Likewise words like "decadence", which Devereaux seems to believe contain no semantic content of significance, and so declines to even engage with in any meaningful fashion.
I think a culture can build an effective military force, such that they win a disproportionate number of their engagements, not merely through technocratic KPIs (amount of money available, population size, etc), but through specific cultural features and norms. I think such a culture can then replace those cultural features and norms with a new set, and as a consequence begin to lose a disproportionate number of their engagements, even though it now has more money, more population, and a greater share generally of the technocratic KPIs than it did when it was winning. Further, I think this signal is strong enough that predictions can be made in advance.
By contrast, it seems to me that Devereaux aims to convince his readers that military affairs are largely deterministic, with a layer of luck on top. Therefore, empires are born because they got a streak of good RNG hits, and Empires die because they got a streak of bad RNG hits, and human decisions are not really terribly decisive either way.
"Hard Times make strong men, strong men make good times" is interesting because it provides a firm historical basis for hope. The problems we face are not inevitable, insurmountable. Things can change. Often the hardships we face can shape us to better change them.
"Good times makes weak men, weak men make hard times" is interesting because it warns us that there is no permanent victory, that good times are not stable, that preserving and extending them requires effort and constant vigilance. And this is not a general warning: the hazard is specified, so it can be recognized in advance and action can be taken accordingly.
Here are two paragraphs:
A brief search confirms that this "moment" covers two centuries, and the entire point of the meme is that cultures change over time. It's possible that there's a valid argument to be made here, but he's pretty clearly chosen not to make it.
Is self-sufficiency and flexibility a bad thing? Is there such a thing as overspecialization or excessive complexity as legible cultural problems? Are the average men in societies, populations, or tribes more or less capable of becoming soldiers en masse, due to the culture they've been shaped by? Does this problem show up even from the perspective of men who appear to, in fact, be quite strong? Fuck that noise, questions are for dweebs! Let's round it to "all men in the society are warriors", that sounds way less complicated.
"Literate". Why portray "literate" and "intellectually decadent" as synonyms? Could it be that arguing against "intellectual decadence" is a hell of a lot harder than arguing for the merits of literacy, and so he finds it most convenient to substitute the former for the later? Can we wait two more sentences to find out?
...And there's your answer.
"moral virtue does not always lead to battlefield success". What a disgusting example of intellectual cowardice.
Nothing always leads to battlefield success, so it's good to see that he's really putting himself out there with the bold claims.
And yet, character, of both leaders and followers, very obviously matters immensely in leadership, and leadership matters immensely in all domains of large-scale human conflict. I am pretty sure that "moral purity", in the sense that he very clearly is framing the term, would not be a very good way of describing the phenomenon, which is why I find his framing choices so execrable. But in actual fact it is obvious that Morale and Morals/virtue/character are pretty clearly linked, and that even central examples of Moral Purity in the sense he frames it have in fact been used historically to build winning armies. Discipline is incredibly important in all forms of military affairs. Commitment. Loyalty. Determination. "The moral is to the physical as three to one." We know what amoral armies look like; there is a reason people don't want to rely on them. And yet, even that last link opens up a whole vista on how morality or its absence change war, how morals/character/virtue cannot be done without, the lengths leaders must go to in generating makeshift analogues in their absence, all in the context of a problem that, by itself, greatly illustrates the reality of decadence as a sociopolitical force.
More recently, we have the truism that "no one is going to fight a war on behalf of an economic zone." While we haven't tested this principle hard yet, I know which way I'd bet.
I reiterate: This is propaganda, and worse it is stupid propaganda. You should not trust him to describe or diagnose "cults" of any description, and you should re-evaluate whatever lessons you have drawn from his writings.
I think perhaps instead of weak men, it would be more correct to say bad men, as you seem to run with later in your post. I think a more central way to look at it is the one Zvi identified in his Immoral Mazes Sequence; good times allow and to some degree require intermediation of reality by social systems, enabling negative-sum extractive enterprises exploiting the mismatch between what's legible and what's true, which (may) eventually consume more than all of the societal surplus leading to collapse (which then resets the maze level, as mazes are not viable in unintermediated reality).
Agree with your characterisaion of Devereaux, though.
I love this.
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Notice the caveats, that you wrote yourself. Notice that ACOUP argues against the typical way in which the "hard men" theory is presented. The dudes with Greek statue profile pictures aren't doing nuanced historiography, they actually want to camp out in the bailey. They want to claim that moral rigidity/orthodoxy, avoidance of "luxuries" and a focus on martial prowess uber alles is an easy short-cut to civilizational dominance. Setting the bailey on fire, as Devereaux does, means there's little Motte left to defend.
His points are, broadly:
Hell, I'll give up on summarizing it, and focus on his own definition:
First: That people from less settled or ‘civilized’ societies – what we would have once called ‘barbarians,’ but will, for the sake of simplicity and clarity generally call here the Fremen after the example of the trope found in Dune – are made inherently ‘tougher’ (or more morally ‘pure’ – we’ll come back to this in the third post) by those hard conditions.
Second: Consequently, people from these less settled societies are better fighters and more militarily capable than their settled or wealthier neighboring societies.
Third: That, consequently the poorer, harder people will inevitably overrun and subjugate the richer, more prosperous communities around them.
Fourth: That the consequence of the previous three things is that history supposedly could be understood as an inevitable cycle, where peoples in harder, poorer places conquer their richer neighbors, become rich and ‘decadent’ themselves, lose their fighting capacity and are conquered in their turn. Or, as the common meme puts it:
That is what he's arguing against. That is actually how people use the phrase.
More importantly, I did not get the impression that:
And I've read the whole series. Devereaux does excellent scholarship, studies a variety of different cases, and provides citations. Rome is typically used as an example in "favor" of the HTWM theory, and luckily for us, he's a classical historian. He covers several hundred years of Roman history:
He uses shipwreck archaeology, ice core analysis of atmospheric lead, and epigraphic evidence to track Roman wealth over time. He outlines a clear pattern (supported, as far as I know, by other period experts): a period of rising affluence in Italy in the Middle and Late Republic, followed by a long period of prosperity in the early empire, disrupted by the Crisis of the Third Century, with another period of economic stability (but at a lower level of prosperity) in the fourth century.
Guess what? : no part of Roman military 'decline' follows this patternz. Rome's military power was greatest when it was getting wealthier and more urban was growing, and began to decline in a period where the empire seems to have become somewhat more rural and poorer.
Even better: Romans were complaining about decadence the entire time! Polybius, Cato the Elder, Sallust, Tacitus, all moaned and bitched about declining Roman virtue.
(Sallust wrote about decadence two centuries before the peak of Roman power under the Nerva-Antonine emperors.)
Over eight centuries, Rome fights dozens of "Fremen" peoples. The Samnites fought three wars with Rome all of which were tough and in many cases the Romans lost battles and struggled, but Rome ended up winning each war.
The Gauls in Cisalpine Gaul? Crushed at Telamon, then systematically smashed one by one after Hannibal's defeat. Caesar had a great fucking time up there. The Celtiberians in Spain? Three wars, all Roman victories. The Germanic Cimbri (Marius stomped) and Teutones? Effectively annihilated. The Helvetii? Near-total genocide. All we've got left of them is a font, the poor bastards.
The successful "Fremen" invaders at the end of the Western Empire make a relatively short list: Senones, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Franks, Angles/Saxons/Jutes, Alamanni. That's seven successes against dozens of failures. Most of them were Romanized too!
If it's not obvious, to survive, an empire must continue winning indefinitely. To lose, it can take as little as one war. It's the KDR that counts dawg, if you live long enough, common cold, cancer or a car will end any winning streak, and we've got several thousands of years of history to measure the life expectancy of empire.
The quotes you picked do not demonstrate Devereaux “baking in absurdity.” They are him accurately describing the common version of the claim, including the decadence framing, then openly mocking one specific implication (virtue leads to battlefield performance).
He then does the opposite of propaganda: he tells you to watch out for selection effects and to ask about win-rates, not vibes. And he summarizes his conclusions in a way that is falsifiable: if the “Fremen” were systematically superior, you should see them winning more often, not losing more often than they won.
That destroys the bailey and salts the fields. If there's a more sophisticated version hiding in the Motte (one that merely says "states can decline for complex reasons including but not limited to overextension, internal political dysfunction, and occasional bad luck") then congratulations, you've described basic history. And that version doesn't need the "hard men" framing at all.
If you disagree with his central thesis, then I welcome actual arguments.
Here you go. My children's bedtime interrupted my furious attempts to edit them into the original post. I left them out of the initial post because I thought they were honestly too obvious to need elaboration, but that's never a good bet.
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Devereaux is excellent at finding some idiotic thesis a couple guys (he would say "bros") on Twitter hold, claiming it's the bailey to a sensible motte, burning down the bailey, and claiming he's destroyed the motte.
You know who's actually really good on this particular historical topic?Deleuze
I promise you that it's more than "a couple of guys". My Twitter is schizophrenic enough that I find myself looking at their posts more often than I consider ideal. Oh well, it's good ethnography if nothing else. They're thriving out there, posting inspirational quotes and bad history takes when they aren't recovering from parasitosis after the consumption of raw meat.
You'll find plenty of examples on this very forum, if you use the search functionality.
The thing is, there is no Motte! Or rather, there is no interesting Motte. Empires rising and falling because {many reasons} is the boring yet correct explanation.
I do not blame Devereaux for targeting the version found in the wild, the meme tuned for maximum virulence. If there is a counter-thesis of comparable scholarship arguing in favor, well, I haven't found it yet. Sometimes, one side of a debate really does have a disproportionate number of idiots alongside little factual merit, see the Flat Earth community for an existence proof.
They're preparing a padded cell for me already, I've booked one with good wifi reception.
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He's insanely strawmanning the idea of "good times create weak men" and "hard times create strong men"
Ain't nobody saying that because they think "weak men" can't swing a sword, shoot a gun, or push a button just as well as "strong men".
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That article is just ... wow. He's purposely avoiding the point of a bunch of things just to construct his made up term.
Anyways there's no such thing as the "fremen mirage" as a trope. Anything that might fit that label also fits into the trope of "scrappy inderdog team takes on the powerful big bad and wins through the power of friendship, hijinks, gorilla warfare, ingenuity, and just dumb luck. You can rattle off tons of movies that fit this: the matrix, red dawn, zootopia 2, ready player 1, star wars, terminator, etc. 1% of the stories in this category might fit into acoup guy's "fremen dawn" idea but that's basically just a coincidence.
Anyways fuck that guy.
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