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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.
I can take credit for the phrase, but not the idea; as noted, the idea is from Zvi (that sentence is essentially a summary of this post in that sequence).
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