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Notes -
A Strong Argument Against Weak Men
I wrote all of this as a reply to @FCfromSSC 's defense against my critique of his critique of Devereaux’s critique of the "Weak Men, Hard Times"/"Fremen Mirage" thesis (try and keep that straight). It got out of hand. I put a lot of effort into it. So top-level post it is, even though it's primarily directed at him. You likely want to follow the link first.
Fair enough, I asked for concrete arguments and you've made an attempt at providing them. Forgive me for saying this, but I find it rather light on detail.
I'll start with "inevitable," because that word is quietly doing the work of three different arguments while dressed as one. You have two options. Either you mean it literally, in which case the counterexamples are immediate and fatal (and I'm going to share them), or you mean something like "tends to produce," in which case welcome to the world of probabilistic claims, where you owe us a measurable prediction: increases the probability of what outcome, by how much, measured how. Right now "inevitable" floats above the empirical fray like a philosophical dirigible, too vague to be shot down, too vague to be useful.
It also helps to be explicit about the three claims that keep getting quietly bundled together. As I see them:
Morale and cohesion matter militarily. Correct, well-attested, Clausewitz built it into the load-bearing structure of his framework under “moral forces,” nobody serious disputes this. It's acknowledged in official US military doctrine.
Culture can shape military performance in meaningful ways. Also largely agreed, also case-specific, also entirely compatible with Devereaux’s thesis.
Hardship reliably produces superior fighters and drives predictable civilizational cycles.
That third claim is the contested claim. That is the meme. Conceding the first two does not move the needle on the third by even one tick, and yet your argument keeps treating “morale matters” as if it's a portal that gets you to “hard times generate conquerors.”
(How exactly do you rule out the possibility that Good Times also generate Strong Men at similar base rates, but those men don't get the opportunity to do much raping, pillaging and conquering because of the restrictions put upon them by a functional society? Or because they're quite happy with how things are going?)
I will admit to a certain sympathy for the "Hard Times" thesis, one that was beaten out of me by reading actual history. It appeals to a very specific, conservation of energy intuition we all seem to share share. It feels like physics applied to sociology. If you put a human being under immense pressure, they should turn into a diamond. If you put a human being in a warm bath with a steady supply of peeled grapes, they should turn into soup. The universe seems requires a trade off between comfort and capability, so it makes sense that a civilization maximizing comfort would bleed capability.
But if you're going to accuse Devereaux of baking absurdity into his arguments, it's desirable to at least check whether the hard-times model actually predicts anything.
If hard times make strong men inevitable, then the places experiencing the hardest times should be the places producing the strongest men, and by the meme’s own implication, the most formidable military actors.
Hard times are not hard to find. Somalia has had a shit time since 1991. North Korea is so chronically deprived that the population is physically shorter than their southern neighbors. Haiti is a recurring disaster. Eastern Europe is literally eating trench warfare again.
Does the hard-times generator produce strong men in the way the meme implies?
It certainly produces tough men. I do not doubt that a survivor of the Somali civil war has a tolerance for pain, a resilience to trauma, and cockroach-adaptability that would shatter the average San Francisco software engineer in 48 hours. If “strong” means “hard to kill individually,” then yes, hard times can produce hard shells.
But the Fremen Mirage is not about individual survival. It's about civilizational competence and military victory. The meme posits that these hard men will inevitably conquer the weak men of the good times.
Yet Somali pirates do not win fights against destroyers, probably not even against a PT boat. Beef-feed American boys grow up playing Halo with an Xbox controller and have no issues using another Xbox controller to turn them into a halo of fine mist. North Korea is unlikely to win any military victories in the foreseeable future (maybe if all the South Koreans end up in retirement homes, but isn't the grind and rigidity of the latter culture itself a form of "strength"? They've got mandatory conscription, how hard is that?). Ukraine is a meatgrinder that turns sunk cost into well-fertilized and mined sunflower fields.
And here is where the model fails to predict the past two thousand years of warfare better than chance (and in fact, worse than chance), and fails even harder in the modern era.
When the soft, decadent, weak United States military engages with forces bred in the hardest of times, the exchange ratio is often lopsided to a degree that defies belief (and draws accusation of war crimes). The hard men die in droves, often without ever seeing the "weak men" who killed them from an air-conditioned control room. The North Korean soldier, bred in the hardest of times, is not a super-soldier. He's a poor bastard with intestinal parasites, brittle bones, and a rifle from the 1960s. In power-projection terms he is not strong.
Look at Venezuela. I strongly suspect that you are rather focused on American affairs, so let's look closer:
Venezuela got clapped. No contest, no lube. It's a historical humiliation of near unprecedented chutzpah, and a military masterstroke. Putin probably believes he's a hard man ruling hard men, and he wishes his 3 day special operation was a tenth as effective. Grit ain't nothing compared to total air superiority.
Going back, there's an even more glaring example in WW2:
The Japanese were the archetypal hard men.
If any modern society ran the Fremen playbook sincerely, it was Japan. Institutionalized martial culture, explicit civilizational contempt for comfort and luxury, bushido as doctrine, genuinely formidable individual bravery. No proxies. The hardness was real, rigorous, and deeply embedded.
Their men expected no quarter, and gave none. Their pilots showed a willingness to convert their planes and bodies into guided missiles without a parachute. They dug in like Alabama ticks and fought like hell till their blood pooled in the mud.
And yet, once again, they got clapped. By the richest and most "decadent" nation around. While the Japs ate thin gruel and Germans were making ersatz-coffee, the US had entire ships dedicated to ice cream for its troops. By virtually any Fremen metric, the United States was the most materially comfortable, consumerist, pluralist fighting force in recorded history. The kind of civilization the meme would predict to crumble at first contact with anything properly hard. Dare I say, the most decadent?
Huh. Funny how that works.
Before you bring up Vietnam or Afghanistan, I will keep it simple: in the past century, the US has not lost a single war that mattered. The safety and comfort of the homeland, the F-35 flybies over college football stadiums? None of that was ever in jeopardy. Your wars were toy-wars, usually fought with one side following gentleman's rules (you). You pissed away the GDP of entire continents on dirt that barely grows poppies and didn't even get dehydrated in the process. Even victory would have, in hindsight, been largely inconsequential.
It is far from obvious that any other force can overturn this, if your closest competitor, China, has any hope of a victory in the medium-term, it'll be on the backs of the industrial capacity to produce a bazillion missiles and drones, not the grit of their soldiers or the genius of their generals. And yet they don't even dream of landing an expeditionary force on the US mainland. A potential victory (emphasis on potential) hinges on industrial capacity, not moral character.
Looking at your claims about “free energy,” which I think has the causality backwards: Good times are not a reduction in the energy available to strong men. Good times are the surplus that makes strength scalable.
Good times, meaning surplus calories, high GDP, technological capacity, lack of immediate existential threat, allow a society to take a percentage of its population and tell them: you don't need to farm. You don't need to hunt. You don't need to worry about where your next meal is coming from. You will spend twelve hours a day lifting, drilling, training, learning complex machinery, building unit cohesion, practicing logistics, rehearsing doctrine.
That is how you build a Roman legionary. That is how you build a US Marine. The hard man from the hills has to spend his energy surviving. He is a part-time warrior because he is a full-time survivor. The soft man from the empire is a full-time professional killer subsidized by the very economic complexity you are sneering at.
Your Cromwell example does not prove as much as you want it to. Yes, moral conviction and ideological zeal can be force multipliers. Asabiyyah is real. Morale matters. Nobody disputes this. I'm not disputing this, Devereaux isn't disputing this.
But Cromwell’s army was effective not because they were ragtag survivors of collapse. They were effective because they were paid, equipped, drilled, and organized according to cutting-edge military science. The New Model Army was a product of high coordination inside a relatively wealthy society. Zeal multiplies competence. It doesn't replace it.
Now, decadence.
You accuse Devereaux of refusing to engage with the semantic content of decadence. That is not quite right. Devereaux engages a specific operationalization: luxury softens bodies, literacy softens minds, complexity demilitarizes populations. Your complaint seems to be that this is too crude and that a richer version is hiding behind it.
Fine. Name it.
I'm serious. What is your definition of decadence, and is it of any use for predicting the course of history?
As I say (because it's true), "all models are false, some models are useful". The better models are differentially useful. They cut reality at the joints and serve as useful compression of complex systems, and more importantly, predict future events. At the very fucking least, they should describe history.
Back to Rome (it's my Roman Empire):
Decadence, as it is usually deployed, is almost always defined tautologically:
Rome fell.
Therefore Rome was decadent.
How do we know Rome was decadent?
Because it fell.
If Rome had repelled the Goths (and then were wiped out by a convenient asteroid so I don't have to write a full alternate history), as they had repelled Germanic tribes for centuries prior, often while being just as wealthy and just as bath-loving and just as bookish, we would currently be writing essays about how civilized discipline triumphed over disordered barbarism.
As I said in my original reply, an empire needs an unbounded number of victories to survive. In the worst case, it only needs a single defeat to crumble.
This is also why the unfalsifiability problem runs like a hairline fracture through your whole framework (or at least the HTHMWTWM theory as popularly understood, which is what Devereaux is dismantling).
Rich state wins? Material advantages masked decadence temporarily. Poor state wins? Fremen thesis confirmed. Rich state loses? Decadence, obviously. Poor state loses? Not hard enough, or the material gap was too vast. Every outcome is accommodable. Every counterexample has an epicycle preloaded. A theory structured this way is not doing historical work. It's a just-so story that could be replaced by a well-decorated rock. At least I can kick a rock.
It's the equivalent of saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Sounds great, doesn't help when you transect your spinal cord in a car crash, or ruin your knees after too much PT. A claim being "inspiring" is very different from it being true.
The more I squint, the more this becomes the Just World Fallacy wearing combat boots. It suggests that suffering has a purpose (to make us strong) and that comfort is a sin (that makes us weak).
The universe is often far more cruel than that. Sometimes hard times just break you. Sometimes suffering is just suffering. Sometimes the "Hard Man" fights the "Soft Man," and the Soft Man presses a button and deletes the Hard Man from existence, because the Soft Man spent his "Good Times" studying physics and engineering instead of learning how to endure hunger.
What's probably true: character matters, organizational culture matters, genuine commitment to a cause produces measurably better outcomes under certain conditions, and a civilization that cannot articulate what it's fighting for faces real disadvantages at the margin. I'd go further and say that the Athenians, the decadent, democratic, philosophizing, play-writing naval-gazers, are actually the better case study than the Spartans here. They bounced back from defeat after defeat because their "Good Times" culture was dynamic enough to reinvent itself. The Spartans, the hardest men in Greece, ossified and collapsed precisely because they were so committed to their own hardness that they couldn't adapt to a changing world. They were too busy attacking their own allies, diddling boys and randomly killing the slaves that tilled their fields. The very quality the meme valorizes became their brittleness.
Miscellaneous thoughts, because I'm tired after studying all night:
It is helpful, and I would say good practice, to operationalize and define terms, especially those in contention. Devereaux does this well, he lays out a specific argument commonly found in the wild, and musters an offensive on every front. You do not do this. You haven't defined terms, at best you wave at your (implicit, unknown to us, or at least me) definition of "decadence", of "weakness" and "strength". A proper debate requires that both sides leave enough rope to hang each other with, and that the loser is sporting enough not to offer shoe-laces instead.
You are making up people to be mad at. At the very least, you are putting words in Devereaux's mouth, and as far as I can see, he never said what you claim he says, nor does he imply what you think he implies. Please, a quote where he even implies that asking such questions is "for dweebs" would go a long way. The man is a military historian focusing on classical history, I'm sure he's on the side of the dweebs and nerds.
To reiterate: he lays out an argument. He shows that the argument is shite. He is attacking a strawman, but unfortunately, the majority of people making that argument have straw for brains. The actual Motte doesn't need defending because it's nigh impregnable. You can't attack a critique of Lizardman conspiracy theorists on the grounds that he hasn't addressed the steelman version: humans and dinosaurs have a common ancestors, at some point before the split between synapsids and diapsids. Nobody disputes that. Nobody cares. A non-negligible number of people adhere to the batshit crazy version.
Devereaux is careful to avoid cherry picking evidence. His analysis spans roughly the entire history of the united Roman Empire, and then its Western successor. That is hardly cherry picked, both because Rome is usually held up as the example of decadence killing a civilization and because that's literally his field of scholarship. That is the breadth and depth of scholarship to aspire to, when discussing something as complicated as grand patterns in world history and the rise and fall of empires. I don't expect you to do that much, but come on.
I recall a lot of blood spilled in the Age of Colonization, over what can loosely be termed as economic zones. It is unclear whether the US would, say, bat for Taiwan in a hot war with China. But it is unclear, and even then, a single sparrow does not a summer make. Devereaux throws a net over the whole swarm, you don't. I'm not aware of a rebuttal that does. Besides, I think China would have words for someone invading Shenzhen or Hainan, and what are those but economic zones? Rather special ones even.
And this is incorrect because? I do not see Devereaux putting numbers on the relative importance of "RNG" versus determinism. Rome might have been very different if Justinian didn't have to face one of the worst plagues in human history, and if Belisarius's wife hadn't been such a hoe. What might the world look like if Barbarossa took swimming lessons? He notes that macroscopic factors like population size, wealth and military metrics matter, he does not claim that nothing else does. I do not see why you consider it an excuse to insert your own interpretation and then get mad at him. My understanding is that he sees those metrics as important, often decisive, which is not the same as what you seem to believe. And randomness only adds variance. Devereaux believes systems (logistics, tax bases, agriculture) determine the probability of victory. It isn't just "luck"; it is that a "decadent" society with a 90% win rate due to logistics will eventually crush a "hard" society that relies on a hero rolling a natural 20 every time. (Numbers my own, and made up).
Finally, you accuse him of being a propagandist. On what basis? What basis in fact? Do your facts weigh up to his? He's got plenty. I've got plenty. Propaganda can be both propaganda and true (I do not agree that his approach to the Fremen Mirage constitutes propaganda). You need to demonstrate that it is both misleading and factually incorrect.
(Posters advising people to wash their hands are propaganda posters, but you're better off doing as they say)
If you insist on treating your arguments as soldiers facing off against Devereaux while declaring him an enemy propagandist, you had better hope your arguments are good soldiers. I remain unconvinced that they are.
I think I have put enough effort into concrete disagreement to risk slightly uncharitable psychoanalysis: you disagree with his thesis because it goes against your values, and this is more the cause of your discontent and disdain than its actual bearing on the truth. I suspect you are deeply unhappy with the status quo, and see bloodshed, strife and suffering as necessary for a phase transition to your ideal sociopolitical system, and that it helps to imagine that that suffering is inherently or terminally good in of itself. I hope to be proven wrong.
TLDR:
If decadence is defined as the cultural conditions that cause military decline, then the Fremen thesis becomes true by definition and empty of predictive content. For it to be a real historical claim, decadence needs to be identifiable independently of military outcomes, and then shown to strongly correlate with them. I do not believe this has been demonstrated, and I strongly doubt it can be demonstrated (because it's not true).
I think the "strong men versus weak men" argument works when it's the steppe nomads versus farmers. When it's "hard men on the ground with rifles versus soft men controlling drone bombers" then it doesn't. Two forces facing off across a battlefield in the early Iron Age, yeah the tough fighters will win against the soft-handed city fathers - so long as the city fathers have run out of money to pay their mercenaries.
Even in the Middle and Early Modern Ages, it wasn't Hard Men fighting the battles for Italian city-states, it was paid condottieri who treated it like a trade and would swap paymasters turning on a sixpence. Men like Sir John Hawkwood, who definitely were Hard Men, but not the Tough Bronze Age Barbarians that the saying valorises.
Well, slightly tangential point, but, before the Italian Wars (i.e. before expensive gunpowder warfare), Italian city-states generally fought using their own citizens, and pound-for-pound tended to beat knightly forces coming down from Germany. Barbarossa's defeat at Legnano is perhaps the most famous. I find the difference in standards between the Italian city forces and their aristocratic opponents telling of, well, a difference in standards - knights had banners, which could easily signal a rapid charge or a galloping retreat, but the Italians carried heavy war-carts which could not easily retreat and so had to be defended to the death.
It's hard for us to see it now, but in the Middle Ages, the urban merchants were the hard men. Sure, the successful ones ended up sitting in fortified towers, but for the most part commerce between cities or regions was a dangerous occupation that demanded the constant capacity for self-defense anywhere outside the walls of your city (and inside, if there was a feud going on). Nobles may have spent much more time training for wars, jousting, etc., but they actually faced significantly less danger than merchants. They would train a lot, charge valiantly, and if the battle turned, they could either ride away or surrender for ransom. And since pitched battles were rare in the Middle Ages, more often they were burning peasant villages or sitting around during a siege. As the saying goes, an armoured knight was an F-15 on a medieval battlefield - well-equipped, well-maintained, very expensive, and very difficult to kill - but the burghers and their urban militias were something more like Toyota Hiluxes, and those win wars too.
Not just in the Middle Ages. The New Model Army (i.e. Cromwell's army in and after the English Civil War) was mostly recruited from the towns loyal to Parliament.
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Isnt the whole point of the original article, and then the defence of it here, that this isn't true? It's not just a post desert storm phenomenon.
The Romans are the soft handed city people and they dominated.
To get more vague and go back further, we can clearly see that agricultural "soft" civilizations out competed the nomadic or otherwise "hard" civilizations. As we now live in a society (lol) descended largely from agricultural civilizations.
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I think there's a motte and a bailey involved, here. Yes the Japanese lost to the Americans despite relative hardness vs. softness. In many ways the hardness of their society made them brittle, like how their army and navy were constantly lying to each other. Hard societies tend to infight with higher stakes than soft societies, with resultant consequences. However, the flipside of this is that it's pretty undeniable that pound-for-pound the Japanese got more value out of their limited resources than the Americans did. A theoretical Japan that had all of America's advantages (like sources of oil deep inside their own territory and a massive industrial output) could quite possibly have won that war.
The core concept of the Fremen 'mirage' is that a poor society can conceal deep reserves of human capital and a highly militarized society with great asabiyyah can punch far above its weight class. If anything the Japanese are a bad example; they were not poor but quite rich, not underdeveloped but the most developed of the Asian nations, and their asabiyyah was inconsistent at best.
The core example is the Arabs. They swept out of their desert, conquered the Middle East and North Africa, and pushed into Europe before ultimately being pushed back. Their apparent lack of wealth and technology belied the fact that their lifestyle had instilled them with immense martial prowess. Their horses were among the best in the world, and the Western European powers would later go out of their way to import Arabian horses to breed at home. Most of all they had such great asabiyyah that asabiyyah is, in fact, an Arabic word.
Dune is based on Lawrence of Arabia, which is a story about a British army officer supporting the Arabic revolt against the Ottoman Turks. He talks about 'desert power' as an analogy to sea power, and this same metaphor is used in Dune to compare Caladan (a water planet, like how Britain is an island) to Arrakis (a desert planet, like how Arabia is a desert). The Ottoman Sultan was called the Padishah, which is why the Emperor in Dune is called the Padishah Emperor (and why his name is Shaddam).
This is not meant to be subtle. The first point of comparison for the Fremen should be the Arabs.
But when the Arabs built their empire they did it by steamrolling the (Eastern) Romans and the Persians who had a plenty of martial prowess and whose troops were well battle-hardened, precisely because they had spent hundreds of years butting heads against each other.
The Arabs were highly united and driven when doing their conquests, but that's because they had just been united by a fresh new mission-oriented religion, not any inherent "desertness". Before Mohammed, and during the early parts of his career, the Arabs were notably disunited and prone to clannish infighting.
Also, the Fremen are Chechens.
They also did it in the wake of a plague, when the Romans and Persians were both exhausted by an extensive war and the rest of Europe/Mediterranean was in the midst of the worst political upheaval since the bronze age collapse.
I agree that noone was weak or "lazy" here. I don't think "hardness" played much of a role if any.
A better example would probably be the Mongols conquest of China.
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Of course, all else being equal, a richer, more powerful society is going to defeat a poorer, less powerful society.
But there's more to decadence than just individual softness. Take the Roman Empire. In a way you can say that the root cause of its demise was infighting. By the year 200, they were so used to being top dog that they no longer took external threats seriously. After all, they hadn't needed to for a long time.
Civilization was not in immediate danger if generals started jockeying for power individually, at the cost of the empire as a whole, so they did. And they got away with it. That is a real position of strength for a society to be in, the 'good times' if there are any. It didn't end civilization all at once, but things got worse. Then they started bringing barbarians in as mercenaries. First as individuals serving in Roman auxiliary troops, but then also as whole tribes, keeping the tribal structure intact and creating competing political/ethnic power centers (foederati). And that too did not immediately end civilization, but things got worse.
By the time the Roman elite as a whole kind of woke up to the situation, due to the Gothic invasion, it was the late 300s and things had gotten quite bad. Only then did they try to do something, but it was far too late. The point of no return had passed.
We say the Roman Empire fell in 476 AD, when Odoacer ousted the emperor and formally took power. But Rome had already been sacked in 410 and 455 by Germanic tribes. The empire had been steadily shrinking and getting poorer for centuries by then; by 476 it was basically just Italy - and even that was questionable - and Odoacer's new kingdom held on to that territory. Before his coup, Odoacer already was leader of the foederati in Italy, who by that point basically were what was left of the military. He was already in charge in all but name. And the Roman Senate, which was still around, recognized him. Who, living in 476, would have really noticed much? For most of the people living inside what had been the Roman Empire at its height, by 476 the Romans had been long gone, perhaps for generations.
This didn't happen because individual Romans were taking too many hot baths while the Germans were washing themselves in the Danube in winter like real tough men. But it did happen because individual Romans thought they had (because for a while they did in fact have) the luxury of ignoring external threats while jockeying amongst themselves, and that is also decadence.
The real conquest was that of the Tough Barbarians by the Empire. They tried to emulate the society they had conquered, they set up as emperors themselves, not tribal chieftains. They were quite happy to inherit baths and togas (as they understood them) rather than pulling down the marble halls to live in mud huts like their forebears.
EDIT: Time for some Cavafy!
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
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Whenever we think about super-broad generalizations about nation-scale or civilization scale events, we should think of them as being one approximate model, that is one part of a big stack of different models being superimposed over each other. "The Sun has enormous gravity that pulls all objects into the solar system toward it" is a true generalization. But then you notice Jupiter doesn't appear to be being pulled into the sun, the moon rotates around the Earth rather than being pulled in toward the sun, etc. And the answer is, they are being pulled in, but inertia, momentum, and other forces are more powerful at the moment and thus obscuring the particular model.
So "strong men create good times, good times create weak men" is a pattern in history, but it does not always happen, and other forces are at play as well. I think it is basically true with the Rome and the Goths, but it took centuries of good times before the inertial power of the Roman Empire had slowed down enough. And when comparing African versus European races, northern Europeans are still benefiting from thousands of years of being bred to survive the harsh northern climates and a thunderdome of martial competition at the crossroads of empires. A few decades of chaos in Somalia is not yet enough to counteract this.
There are also lots of exceptions and caveats. Certain kinds of hard times just produce even weaker men, particularly I think times of disease and of total anarchy. Hard times can be so hard they just kill everyone off.
America 1600 to 1900 is interesting in that it has "good times" in the sense of so much resource wealth, lumber, soil, navigable rivers, etc, but those things required a lot of work in order to turn into wealth. It wasn't like the "good times" of a late-stage imperial capital where you eat imported bread and wine and go watch shows all day long. And "strong men" bred by centuries of competition in the harsh conditions of Europe were able to take advantage of this great resource bounty and create the most powerful empire in history. America also had a healthy dose of hard times in the form of the threat of Indian Wars, but the Indians were never strong enough to just wipe out the settlers entirely or be so hostile so as to prevent them from developing, as arguable, was the case in Europe where the areas under greater threat from Mongol invasion developed the least, because those invasions could be so destructive.
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As I said in the previous thread, that's not the meme, it's an strawman of the meme.
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".
The meme is obviously tangentially related to military, but ain't nobody ever said that hard times necessarily come at the hands of defeat by the enemy. Ain't nobody said that weak mean means weak on the battlefield.
The meme refers to a cyclical "boom-bust" cycle, rather than competition between peer nations. A country of weak men creating hard times can be more powerful militarily than a country of strong men creating good times
The cyclical boom bust cycle is highly relative. Out in the african jungle, there can be tribes going through the cycle of good times and hard times while beating each other with sticks, while at the same time modern industrial states are going through the same cycle of good times and hard times while blowing each other with ballistic missiles. But again military conflict is not necessary for a cycle of good times and hard times to happen.
Of course if the strong men in an african tribal village leading their ascendant tribe encounter the forces of a heavily declining industrial state, of course they're going to get absolutely destroyed. But if they don't encounter each other, the tribe can still be on its way to good times, and the industrial state on its way to bad times.
History has shown that the decline of eminent powers is inevitable. In nearly all cases of that, it's due to the top dog screwing themselves over royally.
Hard times don't immediately create strong men, and good times don't immediately great weak men. They're breeding grounds for the next generation
You can say that there's nowhere to go but up from rock bottom, and there's nowhere to go but down from being top dog, but I don't fully buy it. I don't think it's simply brownian motion that causes this, but rather that it's actually a cyclical cycle of some sort.
The decline of many eminent corporations in the past is kind of a microcosm of the same phenomenon. Megacorporations have all the advantages: more information, better ip banked up, connections, and money to invest, yet there are many such cases where they've ended up in the dumpster. Being top dog often results in a loss of the dna that made a corporation ascendant in the first place.
Do you really want me to go digging up examples on Twitter? Very well.
https://x.com/ashukla09/status/1513940563917041664?s=20
https://x.com/MarkOrmrod/status/1941804527914537373?s=20
https://x.com/AntonKreil/status/1969104105894183202?s=20
https://x.com/romanhelmetguy/status/1684935042554843137?s=20 (Spartan glazing, in the context of an ACOUP post)
https://x.com/infantrydort/status/2023174525714645445?s=20 (More Sparta glazing)
https://x.com/demos_network/status/2019499416156098933?s=20 (It's even got a gif from 300!)
https://x.com/bitcoinzay/status/1488910846063484930?s=20 (Bruh)
Happy? You want more of this slop? My point was that it exists in the wild.
If you collapse the course of a civilization into "hard times" and "good times" then I would interested to see how you didn't get a cycle out of it.
You acknowledge that the "cycle" is variable, and grossly so depending on context. Great, does that offer any predictive value? Can you pinpoint the threshold of "decadence" where the odds of collapse skyrocket, or the degree of character-building hardship that ensures a society moves onto the good stuff?
If you can't, then the theory is borderline useless. It only beats one alternative, which is that literally nothing ever happens.
That is a phase shift, it should preserve the overall pattern.
Corporations are not nations. More importantly, you have omitted what I think is most necessary to have this actually be a supportive argument: that corporations or companies that go through bad times tend to emerge stronger, and that that bad times breed better companies. It's good that you don't say that, because it's not true. A far more common result is that they go bust too. Unfortunately that means you're selectively paying attention to one side of the argument.
How do any of those tweets reference military victory at all? They don't.
ok...
ok...
ok...
Has nothing to do with the good times / hard times meme at all
Also has nothing to do with the good times / hard times meme at all
This is the closest you get, but this tweet would work equally well with any gif of a badass looking guy
This uses the meme, but it has no connection between strong/weak men and military victory.
So it seems like your collection of slop tweets exactly proves my point. 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".
I never said it was a particularly useful or thought provoking theory, just one that's quite a bit more useful than the strawman you make it out to be.
It actually beats a quite significant theory though, that is: "the winners keep winning, forever." Simple models, such as those in chess, 4x games, etc, show that once one side has a decisive advantage, it's already game over. But civilizations in real life don't follow the same pattern.
In some sense you might say it's stating the obvious. But why is that a problem? Tons of memes state the obvious, that's what makes them accessible. That doesn't make them wrong.
My intent was to demonstrate examples of the phrase in the wild, the connotations seem clear to me, even when they're not strictly military.
Huh? Did you miss:
There are two implication is that the Great Depression was a hard time, which created the strong men who fought in WW2. Alternatively, both count as hard times, and created a generation of strong men who produced the good times from the 1940s to 1970. Since it references a literal world war, what else do you want?I can only apologize for the poor quality tweets, but Ywitter's indexing sucks. I went to the bother of finding at least one robust example:
https://x.com/OrdainedPrepper/status/2018394819597660297?s=20
Please try and guess the context first. It's a reply toa woman complaining about working 9-5s .
I'm sure there are more out there, but I'm calling it a night.
It's hardly my fault that the tweets are slop when the topic is slop and the search functionality is trash. I think it's rather clear that unironic admiration of the Spartans as superlative warriors is relevant to the thesis, though they used spears rather than swords for the most part. It'll have to do for now.
I disagree that you have demonstrated this.
Is anyone making that claim? Very well, your approach beats the two maximally degenerate models.
The obvious is the Motte. The bailey is all the additional extensions heapened on it. Devereaux does not contest that nations rise and fall, because that is obviously true. Neither do I. We both claim that the version he specified is immensely useless. The more you steelman the idea, the more it becomes something mundane. Add enough caveats, and you're describing standard history.
I also note that you haven't addressed my point about corporations, as of the time of this edit.
Both of these tweets unambiguously point to the war itself as being the bad times. And the good times are built by the strong men that came out of it.
None of the tweets make any connection with strong men = winning wars. That's exactly the insane strawman you and acoup guy are trying to make.
I disagree that you have demonstrated this.
Certainly acoup guy's interpretation of the meme is useless. But exactly what I'm saying is that it's a strawman.
If you can give me some actual examples where people claim that hard times -> strong men = military prowess, then I will be inclined to believe that it's not a strawman.
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But if the meme was true, you would expect basically every society to see a cycle of uprisings from the lower class that overtake the complacent upper class folks. The new rulers would then get complacent over time, and their descendants who only knew good times would be overthrown by the underclass created by their parents. You would expect a good deal of social mobility where rich kids rot while the poor amass power until the positions are reversed.
Yet that does not happen. The poor stay poor, the rich get richer. Money flows towards wealth, and power creates more power. The same families stay well-off for generations and usually your parent's social position is a strong predictor for how your life will turn out. This is the opposite of the meme. Even in countries like the US where your rights are (mostly) not dictated by your social standing, people who break out of poverty are incredibly rare.
I think appeal stems from the idea that people grow in the face of adversity and get complacent when everything is handed to them. I think this much is true. But it does not at all follow that hard times create strong men. Humans need the right amount of adversity to grow - too much will damage you - along with good role models, food, and shelter. You need some amount of abundance for this. Good times, in other words. So unless you actually mean to say "complacency creates weak men" (which is so trivially true as to be uninteresting), I also do not believe it holds up.
I literally said that it's a description of cycles, not of relative power. The poors during good times may be weaker than the rich during bad times.
It's even in the words of the meme "good times" and "bad times". Simply being in a slum doesn't subject you to bad times.
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This definitely is not an inevitable historical constant, otherwise we would be ruled by Sumerian priest-kings or something.
Which tbf is a pretty fun conspiracy theory.
Given enough time, random chance ensures that things will change. But in general terms it seems to be true. If someone is born rich, odds are they will stay rich. Someone born to a poor alcoholic will likely stay in the underclass. Even then, exceptional people prevail and rise above what you would expect. But it is more common to stay in the class you were born in, and to my knowledge, this has always been the case.
If there was an iron law of history that every four generations like clockwork the meritorious in the lower classes would rise up and take the place of the decrepit in the upper classes, this would still be true. It's quite possible for there to be both a cycle of uprisings from the lower class that overtake the complacent upper class folks and for most people to stay in the same social class as their parents.
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If you don't count lost wars because they don't matter, you have to not count won wars that don't matter either, which leaves out almost every otherwise relevant US war.
I think his flippant dismissal of those two wars was perhaps poorly worded, but the point stands.
The USA could have obliterated Vietnam or Afghanistan if it had wanted. In many ways, it did! You can do a whole "yadda yadda soft people didn't have the guts to glass vietnam so they lost haha" but it's not a very useful lesson.
The USA lost the war due to politics and modern beliefs about the justification around ultra-violence. A USA where the people had the morals of Ghengis Khan would have won Vietnam.
And saying the USA are "weak men" because they "lost" Vietnam or didn't have the balls to genocide them (technical victory) or whatever is pointless, because the American Army could still absolutely demolish any other army on the planet easily. So "haha USA loses wars" has literally 0 predictive power as to whether or not the USA can kick your ass.
America's Imperial wars of the past 100 years are best compared against various efforts to control uncontrollable hinterlands which were a constant feature of imperial history among the ancients. The Persians tried to subdue the Scythians, Varus tried to conquer the Germans, Pharaohs seemed to send an army to disappear into the south periodically, a powerful Chinese emperor would try to subdue the steppe. It's always part of the imperial rhythm to try to control economically marginal hinterlands, with mixed success.
I'm sure there's a term in military theory for what I'm talking about, but we're stuck in a thinking about wars that is primarily about peer wars, and we've lost concepts like the raid and the punitive expedition, which were much more common throughout most of history.
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Sure. That's not an issue at all. What was the last war where the continental US faced an existential threat? The Civil War? The War of 1812? The country would probably have survived a defeat in WW1 and 2 back-to-back and everything that came since, it's the perks of being an island fortress the size of a continent with enormous natural resources.
The fact that WW2, a conflict that killed somewhere between 75-80 million people still had no chance of causing serious catastrophe at home is probably the greatest testament to American superiority around. You can't blockade America, you can't starve America, you can't even cut off oil supplies because you make enough to get by, albeit with austerity measures. The only thing that can put a dent in you are nukes, and you have nukes of your own.
I struggle to identify another historical Great Power with that kind of domestic security and free license to do whatever the fuck they want abroad without it following them home. Even Britain at its peak had to seriously worry about neighbors in Europe, for good reason.
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Decadence is the cultural conditions enabled by prosperity that cause dysgenics. Hard times can be, but are not always, eugenic. The Black Death, the high mortality during the Middle Ages, the violent organization of the early Roman Republic all served eugenic functions- even the collapse of the Roman Empire served an important eugenic function. "Hard times create strong men" is a nod to the eugenic function of growth and the dysgenic effects upon realization, stagnation, and ultimate decline. Goethe:
You can see the full "Hard times create good men, good men create week men" cycle in the genetic evolution of the Roman Empire, with the collapse of the Roman Empire forming an important eugenic function reversing the dysgenic effects of late Roman decadence.
Quite apart from the thread below, where @self_made_human is right and you are wrong, the thesis that the "Hard times create strong men" works off genetics doesn't make sense, because biological evolution is too slow. The conventional version of the meme is that hard times create strong men within 1-2 generations - to get an appreciable eugenic effect that quickly you have to kill off so many people that the population goes through a genetic bottleneck.
I also don't see why good times are dysgenic in the pre-modern world. Good times equals population expansion, but these societies don't break out of the Malthusian trap so even as the population expands the reproduction of the lower classes is food-limited. Add even a little bit of soft polygyny and good times equals all classes growing but the higher classes growing faster, which is presumptively eugenic.
What really is dysgenic is the kind of war that preferentially kills off the warrior elite, like the English Wars of the Roses or World War One. The genetic and moral effect of WW1 on western Europe is the leading example of hard times making weak men, counter to the meme.
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My brother in $Deity, if the cost of eugenics is painfully killing off 30% of the population with pestilence and plague, I'm not sure I want to take up that offer. That's coming from someone who is sympathetic to the cause of eugenics, done sensibly. We can do it with much less societal disruption by far more genteel approaches such as germline gene editing. No need to cause civilizational collapse, civilization is kinda nice, most of the time.
Citations desperately needed. I've never needed them more, because your claims warrant them. What fucking eugenics? Are you aware of the fact that the same genes that convey resistance to the Black Plague also cause increased risk of autoimmune disease? War, starvation and apocalyptic disease are terrible ways to go about it. All you've done is attach a chart that shows some kind of distributional shift of what I can only assume is some allele or haplotype. I find it incredibly funny that you chose to provide citations for the one thing you claim that least needs it.
Are you aware those genes don't simply convey resistance to the Black Plague, they provide more generalized resistance against lethal infectious diseases?:
And recall the Native Americans were devastated by diseases for which Europeans had developed immunity. It provided a strong genetic advantage.
The Black Plague certainly impacted all classes of people, but the poor masses were hit harder, which yes would be another selection effect suggesting eugenic pressure. Higher immunity among higher social classes is observed even today.
Scholars cite the pressures created by the Black Plague on the Catholic Church as being decisive in the Protestant Reformation in Europe, and in the breakdown of feudalism in England towards the manorial economic system which then gave way to the market system.
I already cited the genetic trajectory of Rome (genetic decline -> civilizational decline), granted that bakes in the assumption that population replacement from North Africa was dysgenic, and the subsequent correction towards Northern Europe was eugenic. But it did happen that way.
If you took away war, starvation, and apocalyptic disease from our evolutionary timeline we would be devolved and unrecognizable and not human. Not saying I support all those things, but the eugenic effects of these sorts of pressures: war, disease, etc. lends credence to the "hard times create strong men" meme, but it's not always true. The pressure has to be eugenic in nature to ring true. Somalis living in a shithole isn't going to make better Somalis unless there's a eugenic selection effect. "Hard times" that are also dysgenic do not make good men.
That is not information conveyed in the article you linked. The primary protection is against Y. Pestis, I went to the trouble of looking and I find no evidence of significant protection from other pathogens, at least for the ERAP2 variant in question.
As the article confirms:
Yeah. It's a tradeoff. What would you rather have, a genetic resistance to Y. Pestis that is far from perfect, and obsolete with the age of antibiotics, or elevated risk of Crohn's disease, which is chronic and lifelong?
They were doing just fine before being exposed to alien pathogens. And the Europeans probably picked up syphilis in the process. I don't see how this improved things for anyone.
That is much more likely to be a consequence of improved nutrition and sanitation. The wealthy also had the luxury of flight in the face of the plague. They also, yes, probably have better genes for physical and mental health overall, but probably not to that drastic an extent.
That's fine.
Yes, and you need to justify that assumption better. North African Berber populations are not the same as the people further south, the Sahara Desert is remarkably inconvenient. There has been a great deal of population admixture over 1.5 thousand years, so a naive extrapolation from current IQ figures is fraught.
It is a very good thing we have options these days, like gene therapy as I've mentioned previously. We do not need war and disease to trim the herd, it's a horribly crude solution at best.
Even in the absence of civilizational collapse, selection pressures were still present. In the absence of modern medicine, disease was rampant. Wars still killed people, albeit at a lower background rate. I wouldn't accept the trade of setting back living standards and tech levels so hard it took a thousand years to recover, during the late Enlightenment or early Industrial Revolution.
The question is what would I have preferred my ancestor to have had who was actually living in that time and place? Obviously I'm still here, meaning all my ancestors survived all that war and disease to reproduce. If they did not have that variant there's a higher likelihood I am not here.
They were doing just fine until.... they met other people. That's a great evolutionary strategy. They didn't have to survive those apocalyptic diseases like Europeans did, and they melted on first contact with the outside world.
Yes they did, and I am saying that was a selection pressure, as ugly as it is to say. The overall quality of the survivors is higher than the population before the event. That is the definition of eugenic.
I feel like you are refusing to understand what I am trying to say. I am not trying to say "war and apocalyptic diseases are good options today to improve society." I'm saying very real selection effects from these high-mortality events lend credence to the "hard times create strong men" meme and "good times create weak men" adage, but do not guarantee that a people living in a miserable situation will always become better for it. "Hard times" are often, but not always, associated with major historical genetic changes. In the case with Rome the genetic changes follow the cycle well from end-to-end: Latin tribal upstarts raise hell on the Italian peninsula, create strong imperial genetic stock and Civilization. Civilizational success leads to decadence: importing slaves from all over the world, population replacement, decay of Noble status and lineage. Decadence creates stagnation and decline. Decline creates a genetic cleansing event that creates the modern European/Italian and progresses to the Middle Ages, where these cycles of pressure continue until we are here today.
I understand what you're trying to say. I've noted the points of agreement and disagreement. The most specific is the claim that the change in population after the collapse of Rome was dysgenic, and that the specific adaptation to the Plague was a net positive after the plague subsided. That might be true, but definitely needs more evidence to be more than a possibility. The selection pressure wasn't so high that the protective allele became predominant, and that's despite Bubonic plague being a recurring problem.
My gripe is with the claim made (by others) that the cultural consequences of "hard times" are positive on net. It is also true that selection pressure strong enough to overcome genetic drift will produce adaptations that might be eugenic, depending on the context. For example, the protection provided by the mutant ERPA2 is probably dysgenic now, since we don't really have to worry about the plague but can't cure Crohn's.
More importantly, the advocates for the Hard Times thesis often want to intentionally cause suffering and hardship, because they think that's good. Even if it's debatably eugenic, the juice is clearly not worth the squeeze.
I do not lightly agree with SecureSignals about anything, but I think he has a point that you'd misunderstood his claim: while it may be true that some advocates for the meme want to intentionally cause Hard Times, Signals had bee fairly clear that he wasn't making that point, merely the retrospective claim that historically, as a matter of fact, Hard Times have produced Strong Men via eugenics - whether or no that was "worth it" and whether or not that would or should still work today.
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You have that backwards.
Latin warlords conquer Italian Peninsula: "Hard Times" that create good men (From frame A towards B, essentially genetic replacement of Early European Farmers with Indo European colonizers).
Genetic Changes during Imperial Rome: "Good times" that create weak men (From From B to Frame C). Decadence, dysgenic cultural practices enabled by prosperity: fertility decline, population replacement, decay of noble status and lineage. Huge genetic shift in the population.
Late Antiquity: "Weak mean create hard times" - From Frame C to D and onwards, imperial Rome collapsing and being genetically cleansed by the barbarians.
Medieval and Early Modern: "Hard times create good men": Genetic changes from Imperial Rome are reversed, genetic foundation for the next phases of European culture.
I apologize. I misread:
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Your post repeatedly lauds the US military (and American strength more broadly) without stepping back and asking, e.g., where all of the trigger-pullers in the Maduro raid came from. It's sort of glossed over but the US has a region that has both a history of Hard Times (from losing a war) and of Strong Men (from a long military tradition). I'm speaking, of course, of the former Confederate states, most of which are more likely to enlist their men in US wars than wealthy American states such as California or New York. Hawaii - which (contrary to its public image) is very much a Hard Times state - is the most over-represented, although some of that might be military kids joining the military.
I think that the the Strong Men Good Times cycle makes more sense historically if you take a Victorian understanding of Strong Men as being men who are virtuous. I don't take it as inevitable that a society facing hard times will create virtuous men, or that a society flourishing from the effects of virtue will create weak and bad men (at least - not in any given timeframe). But I do think there's some truth to a more nuanced version of the theory, as demonstrated precisely by the United States.
You take it for granted that the US of A is living in Good Times due to its power and material wealth. But if we understand Good Times to be in a sense derisive, we can quickly understand that that it's not power and wealth themselves that are Good Times; rather it's (for example)
You'll see that the Gods of the Copybook Headings have been much more respected (although unevenly) in the United States than in Europe - and often precisely due to the influence of the Hard Times states.
Russia is in many ways a shadow of what could have been, I think, far further down the civilizational decline speedrun than the US is, but they at least understood Kipling's admonition that disarmament would result in being sold and delivered bound to your foe. Similarly the US never believed this (just look at the Ottawa Treaty and the Convention on Cluster Munitions) and various attempts to introduce Americans to the Fuller Life have kicked off massive internal resistance in the form of the culture wars.
Perhaps it's not coincidence, but rather virtue, that has seen the US pull ahead of the European economy while maintaining a truly ludicrous edge in military prowess and birth rates despite a much smaller population. After the Hard Times (the Cold War) ended, Europe decided to embrace the Hopes that our World is built on and now they are paying the price.
Once one gets into nuances like that, it just becomes a question of creating virtuous men. How do we do it? One of the historical methods is by artificially creating hard times fo those experiencing good times in a society. The battle of Waterloo, after all, was won on the playing fields of Eton. We used to call such activities character building.
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The Civil War was 160 years ago. The South's period as a cultural and economic backwater was largely over by the time most of the current enlistees were born. Are you seriously trying to make the argument that "generational trauma" or whatever is a thing? I guess that would also explain why blacks have disproportionately high enlistment rates.
The south was poor into the late twentieth century. Not subsistence farming poor, that was over by the seventies, but still poor.
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Another way of putting this is "your grandparents probably grew up around people who remembered the Civil War."
You could call it that if you wanted, I guess. I just think culture is very powerful. As you say, the South is no longer a cultural and economic backwater, but during the time that it was I think it formed a lot of habits that endured. However, I don't think the "hard times" are the ONLY reason for those habits - Southern marital culture, for instance, predated the Civil War. I do wonder if they helped preserve them.
IIRC Native Americans are the MOST over-represented group in the Armed Forces. Not to start up the oppression Olympics, but they have seen a lot of hard times. I suspect that "poor => military opportunity" is probably more relevant here than "tough => warrior spirit" but I imagine there's room for both, along with a hearty helping of family warrior tradition.
I feel like you need to be in your 50s(?) for that to be true. My grandmother was born ~1940 so it would be hard for her to interact with an adult with meaningful memories of 1865.
I am not yet 35 and one of my grandparents was born before 1930 and I think they were all born before 1940...but perhaps this is unusual!
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Martial or marital culture? I'm presuming from context that you meant martial as in military. Otherwise, I'm quite curious about the intricacies of the continued culture surrounding marriage from before the Civil War.
Martial, my fat-fingers!
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I'm aware that the South and rural states are over represented in the US military.
I don't dispute the data. But what exactly does this prove for the Fremen thesis? The South lost its war. Spectacularly. If Hard Times produce the strongest military culture, and the South has been steeped in both literal defeat and the mythology of that defeat for 160 years, shouldn't we expect that culture to translate into superior military outcomes, not just higher enlistment rates?
Sure, they put up a good fight, but their martial culture didn't beat raw industrial output. Consider what that implies for the Fremen hypothesis.
What we actually observe is that Southern enlistment feeds into a military machine whose effectiveness derives overwhelmingly from the economic complexity, technological sophistication, and logistical infrastructure that the "Good Times" coastal states disproportionately fund and staff with engineers and contractors. The trigger-pullers matter.
The people designing the triggers, the targeting software, the satellite constellation feeding the operator's goggles, and the supply chain keeping him fed and fueled also matter, perhaps more. Modern militaries have really fat, technologically dependent tails. After all, plenty of other countries have top-notch special forces without relying on beef-fed Scots-Irish borderers. You can't separate the Marine from the apparatus that makes him effective, and that apparatus is very much a product of "decadent", bookish, economically complex society.
Man. This is the epicycle problem I flagged in my original post, and I don't think you can escape it just by invoking the Victorians.
You claim that Good Times could/should be understood "derisively" and that it's not power and wealth per se that constitute them. Fine, I'll grant it for the sake of argument. But then what does constitute them, in terms specific enough to generate predictions?
If the US has avoided True Good Times because of the influence of Hard Times states (despite being, by any material metric, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in human history) then the definition of Good Times is quietly doing the same unfalsifiable jig I described: the US wins, therefore it isn't really decadent; Europe stagnates, therefore it is. Where's the independent variable? What would I have to observe to falsify the claim that the US has been protected from Good Times?
In other words, what elevates this from being just another just-so story, if it's my turn to bring Kipling into the court?
Their 'martial culture' (which was not really a thing) didn't even produce qualitatively superior troops, which is an even worse indicator for the thesis. And while Southerners are over-represented in the current US military, it is really specifically Floridans, Texans, and Georgians. People from the Southwest and mountain states are also overrepresented, but no one says Nevada has a martial culture. And 'over-represented' is not the same thing as 'dominant'.
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My suggestion is precisely that Hard Times (the South's defeat) led to Strong Men (the US military prowess you mention). I don't think there's a straight line there - I agree with you that the US' technology and such is also very important - but...yes, the South's contributions to the US military have been associated with US military victory. If I had to guess, I suspect this has more to do with Southern martial culture than the economic situation, but if I had to guess, those are at least somewhat intertwined.
It is true that South was the better combatant, but all the stuff you've said about how the South lost its war suggests to me that you didn't really read my comment - their loss is precisely what you would expect to create Strong Men (in the Strong Man cycle theory) and thus them losing the war is evidence for the theory, not against it, as you seem to think.
Now, let me be the first person to say that I think the true picture of what is going on is much more complicated and that I don't exactly believe in the Strong Man cycle theory, at least not unless you interpret it as I suggest, in which case I would not consider it to be the only factor at play.
Really? Which ones do you have in mind? I think the Russians were impressive at Hostomel. I actually suspect this is an area where the Chinese severely lag. The UK and France, I think, have good trigger-pullers but not a lot of mass...who else?
The thing is that having the top-notch tech by itself actually isn't enough to have a top-notch SOF apparatus - the US SOF apparatus is as good as it is because of the combination of the beef-fed borderers, the top-tier tech, relentless training, and years of actual implementation. The hardest part of those sorts of ops is operating "jointly" as a bureaucratic apparatus and that's where I think the Chinese, specifically, are likely the lag. One might even posit that the US SOF guys are as good as they are specifically because of what one might term Hard Times.
Anyway, a rabbit trail, but my point here is that, yes, the fat tail and the tech matter, a lot, but the difference between the US and everyone else is practice. I think it's fine to argue, as you suggest, that wealth plays a role in enabling this.
Kipling identifies a few things in his poem that are connected with what he would term a lack of virtue (or a mistaken idea about reality), I think:
We can see how Europe and the US of A compare, with the massive caveat that we're doing a horribly broad generalization, particularly given how diverse Europe is. We can throw in Russia as a bonus.
I'd say on balance, with N=3, Kipling's little poem - which is very far from being a complete theory of Kipling's politics, to say nothing of mine - is doing pretty good. I wouldn't say it's a freestanding argument for how the world works. But I wouldn't say it has no descriptive power, either.
Now, the counter-argument here is to find some place where everything is terrible and religious belief or TFR or landmine manufacturing is really high and hold it up and say "why aren't they like the United States?" To which I say - the best way to find out if a theory has predictive power is to test it where other things are close to equal. Let's say for the sake of argument that Ethiopia decided to dedicate itself to Kipling's principles AND that Kipling's principles were the entire secret sauce for a society - that's still not going to make them a world-class power overnight, nor will it magically protect them from, e.g., nuclear weapons. But the US and Europe are interesting comparison points because despite their many differences they also have a great many similarities.
It is probably worth noting that, contra Kipling, the first modern welfare state was set up by notorious effeminate pacifist Otto von Bismarck with the explicit goal of creating an urban working class that were able and willing to fight industrial-age wars, and the British dramatically expanded our welfare state after WW1 when it became clear that too may men were unfit for military service due to preventable diseases of poverty.
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As you note, the South already had a strong martial culture. What exactly changed after their loss in the civil war to strengthen it? Is there evidence that they became more likely to sign up for military service on a per-capita basis? They weren't a bunch of pacifists who got beaten up and decided to enlist as a trauma reaction. It is very weak evidence at best, if used to support the Hard Times theory.
(I used an LLM to check, and it claims that 37% of white Americans come from Confederate States, but make up about 40-45% of active duty personnel who are white, and thats roughly a quarter of all active duty personnel considering all races. I haven't double checked the figures, since I've been awake for 36 hours now, so I'm open to evidence otherwise)
There are all kinds of martial cultures that are greatly divorced from hard times, especially when you compare how bad things were to what to they have now. The Gurkhas. The Sikhs. The latter fought (and often lost) a whole bunch of wars, but made a name for themselves, creating a self-identity that persisted. They were already "strong men" when times are hard, they are debatably still so, even if they mostly drive taxis in Canada. The standard is awfully wooly.
Israel. Their special forces punch way above their weight class, but then again the entire country does too. Korea (the southern one, though NK SF did pretty well in Ukraine).
I disagree with Kipling on many things, but I find this mildly funny. I suspect that an increased reliance on "reason" is responsible for a lot of the loss of (religious) faith. Intelligence and education negatively correlate with religiosity.
I agree that Europe stagnated because of poor economic choices, including excessive redistribution and deindustrialization. I do not see how that is strong evidence for the argument in question. One would assume that going through WW2 would put them in prime position to become stronger men, while the Americans, having had it easy for centuries, would be the ones in decline.
Yes - I think the strong martial culture => strong martial culture is a better predictor than hard times => strong martial culture (in this case); however, in the specific context of the United States, I suspect the combination of strong martial culture + hard times cooperated (since military service is a reliable route out of poverty, though of course not just for Southern Americans.)
I've heard anecdotes that the opposite was actually true for some time, as signing up in the services was viewed as going over to the enemy. I haven't seen that addressed statistically one way or the other, though.
Yeah, agree with this for sure.
Not true, at least in the United States, where graduate education is correlated with religiosity (although people with graduate degrees are slightly more likely to be atheists as well).
Perhaps you would even say they are less reasonable than Americans?
You're wandering back around again to the version of the meme you described instead of what I am suggesting has some descriptive power: that a lack of virtue (for a certain value of virtue) creates (let's say) bad times.
It seems to me that you agree with me and Kipling that robbing the collective Peter to pay the collective Paul has put them in danger of being sold and delivered bound to their foe. You're going to object here that the insight is trivial: doing dumb stuff leads to bad results. Well, Kipling called them the Gods of the Copybook Headings for a reason - they seem like pretty basic stuff, and people fumble them anyway.
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There's many forms of strength. Pressure, competition and necessity makes one (people and systems alike) stronger in the domain in which it matters. At first, physical power was important. Then intellectual power was important. Today, soft power is important. Big muscles won't get you far in life if you have an IQ of 80, and an IQ of 140 won't get you far in life if you can't make friends. If ones goal is to defeat enemies, one should optimize for that. The Buddha was a great person in some ways, but I could probably beat him in a boxing match. If the Japanese had focused more on technology than on self-improvement, they could have won. Japan optimized for a local fitness, America for a more global fitness.
From what I see, your conversation could be titled "was Nietzsche correct or not?". He was right about great people in a biological as well as aesthetic sense. However, the inhuman is stronger than the human, by far. The strongest technology wins. Morality, taste, wisdom, spirituality, resiliance, etc. can influence the strength of humans as a multiplier, but the strength of people barely matters any. A gun is worth more than 20 years of martial arts training.
You're correct because the utility of technology is exponential, and because of something which has to do with statistical laws, asymptotic limits, and game theory. Suffering is important for greatness when only humanity matters. Spoiler: The ultimate victor will be some kind of grey goo, and the particulars of that grey goo won't matter.
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The throughpoint I notice in a lot of these conversations against western ideas like markets, democracy, or decadence is that none of them can explain why the west keeps winning if that is so bad.
If communism is better than capitalism, why did the USSR fall and not the US? Why is China the poorest per capita of the Chinese majority countries (who have embraced capitalism) and only making up for it by sheer numbers?
If democracy is so bad and monarchy/empires are so good, then why are pretty much all the dictatorships shitholes while the democracies are rich and powerful? The only meaningful counter example is Singapore and that's more of a blend between dictatorship and democracy. A single mixed winner out of dozens and dozens of failures is not a good strategy. It's also so much an obvious good thing that North Korea and Russia and China even hold fake elections. Why do they dress up as democracies while democracies don't often dress up as them?
And if decadence and "good times" was so bad, then like you point out, why do nations like North Korea continue to suck so much while the US has such untouchable supreme power? And yes we failed in Vietnam and Afghanistan, but name other nations that are even able to do wars like that. Name another nation that can do multiple massive wars abroad against a coalition of multiple countries pushing back trying to regime change them while barely even lifting much of a finger back home. You can't, because even with our failures we're still one of the only nations with that ability. The dictators and "hard men" are struggling to even handle their own nations too much to be involved in what happens halfway around the world.
This isn't a theoretical discussion, we have a real trial right there in the real world. And the west, with its markets, democracy and "weak men" decadence are the winners over and over again.
City states and micro states (and frequently, Ireland) should always be ignored when discussing macroeconomics or other society level human trends
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The only contemporary counter example. Both the German Empire and Imperial Japan performed respectably in the late 18th and early 19th century, both economically and militarily.
The German Empire doubled GDP per capita between 1870 and 1914, surpassing (democratic) France and slowly closing the gap towards both the (also democratic) British Empire and the US - and they did that without having access to a vast colonial empire or an entire continent absolutely full of natural resources, respectively. The details are a bit more complicated, of course, because the Emperor was kept in check by a democratically elected parliament, but they really didn't have all that much power (mostly some fiscal control, but the Emperor chose the Chancellor and could disband parliament at any time, which he frequently threatened). Also, Wilhelm II was a
bumbling idiotmostly ineffective ruler.Imperial Japan went through the Meiji Restoration during the same period, industrializing even faster than Germany and successfully using its new industrial might to absolutely crush China and Russia on the battlefield. Again, a centralized monarchy with power concentrated mostly in the Emperor, but some checks (council of elder statesmen doing some heavy advising - but nobody said a dictator couldn't have some competent experts to make some decisions). And yes, both monarchies extensively relied on market economies - with a lot of guiding industrial policy from their Emperors.
Would have been interesting how far those centralized monarchies could have taken their people (in absentia of a catastrophic loss in a World War they started putting an end to the experiment) - or if the monarchy would have been abolished/disempowered/constitutionalized by the people anyway, even without the wars.
Why is there only one good contemporary example? If it's such a great and effective strategy, we should see it more. It's like with evolution, we don't have to theorize about what works in nature, we can simply see what exists and know that must be pretty good by the very fact it exists and is succeeding.
There might be some imperial niches that work fine, but they do seem to be a niche.
Exactly, they lost. There was a real world test and they lost it. The empires flunked the exam. Maybe the allies didn't get an A+, but they did get a passing grade.
It's more complicated than that, right? By that logic, you could pick 1985 and argue that communism was better for Eastern Germany than centralized monarchy and market economy. Which is wrong, in my opinion - even a bumbling idiot as the King of Prussia would have done his people better than the commies ever did. Same for Belgian Congo - just because they don't have a King and his Governor anymore doesn't mean that... whatever the fuck it is they are doing there today is better for the Congolese than monarchy was (not saying that the monarchy was working out particularly well for the Congolese, either, but life was certainly better in the '50s than it is today). Just because you can destroy something doesn't mean what comes after is actually necessarily working better. And sure, eventually the commies failed in Eastern Germany and something more effective took over. But that doesn't just happen automatically.
I'm not a fan of single shot experiments. Wilhelm II was an idiot. Run the story again with Bismark as emperor, and western civilization might be speaking German for the next 400 years. And of course, democracy doesn't automatically select for the most effective leaders for the majority of voters. American voters elected and reelected G.W. Bush, which arguably was both unnecessary and a strict loss for the majority of Americans.
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Perhaps it's a little bit more complicated than this, given how many of the successful Western European states are literal monarchies?
In a technical sense sure, but it's hard to say countries like Sweden or Canada or the UK now are meaningfully a monarchy. Just like with the dictatorships, that the most successful examples are drastically different from the archetype is not a coincidence.
Isn't this also true of democracies?
Not that I am a fan of dictatorships or monarchies. But there is a lot of bad governance out there to go around, and the fact that democracies eclipsed monarchies once doesn't, in my mind, assume that the question is settled forever for all time (my own sense is that democracies and monarchies decay in different ways and thus can feed into each other.) The fact that a lot of those democracies are still functioning monarchies in at least a nominal sense can definitely be interpreted as a L for monarchies...but I think it could also be taken as a W.
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All of them are liberal constitutional democracies, however.
Does that make them not a monarchy? (Does a democracy that is not liberal become not a democracy?)
If the first goal of a state is to perpetuate itself, then perhaps monarchies are more successful than commonly believed.
The unreasonable success of constitutional monarchies is under-studied - probably because increasingly many of the people who might study it are either Americans or trying to get jobs in American universities, where it is taken for granted that the American system is superior because it produced America.
[FWIW, America is an outlier and parliamentary democracy has a much better track record than presidential democracy. I suspect the overperformance of constitutional monarchies is driven by them all being parliamentary]
Yeah I've been noodling on that a bit - I don't have a ranking of all countries best to worst, but it seems to me you could argue that constitutional monarchies outperform the average democracy, at least in certain respects, which would be interesting.
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Germany performed respectably during the war and lost because it was facing multiple peer adversaries simultaneously+the British naval blockade.
There are also multiple contemporary examples; aside from Singapore there's Liechtenstein(the only country in the world to vote to go back to an absolute monarchy, outcomes very similar to neighboring Switzerland), the gulf monarchies(and if you insist on saying resource wealth is cheating, I will point out that the UAE does not make most of its money from oil), and partially Andorra(which is technically a Catholic theocracy, although in practice that mostly comes into play in setting its abortion policy). Monarchies generally are places to live that are pretty average for their neighborhood; life in Morocco is a lot like life in Algeria. They hate each other, but that's also pretty normal for the neighborhood. In the recent past there were a number of other examples, most notably South Korea.
Ah so one notable disadvantage here is the tendency to make multiple enemies.
So they're not particularly stand out compared to the other shit systems in their local area. Like aside from Singapore, would you want to live in Andorra or the Gulf monachies, or would you want Germany/France/Nordic Countries/US/Canada etc?
That the immigration issue is towards the West and not from the west is a pretty big sign of what people's preference is.
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I think you are ignoring a large part of war competency if your definition excludes the lead up to wars such as the when, how, who, and why you are starting a war. A competent country does not start wars against multiple peers at opposite ends of its country at the same time. Same reason I wouldn't consider someone a great fighter if they keep picking fights with opponents that outnumber or outmatch them then get thrashed. Doesn't matter if they can throw a perfect right hook, they are not good fighters.
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Why did Germany end up facing multiple peer adversaries, including the world's greatest naval and industrial powers?
I don't think you can shrug it off as mere coincidence. The German approach to diplomacy in the decades leading up to WWI was aggressive and confrontational, they very much set this strategic situation up for themselves.
I think this is a more general pattern. I would, only slightly snarkily, say that the greatest weakness of countries ran entirely by warriors is that they have a persistent tendency to underestimate the threat posed by Anglosphere countries and start wars of choice in which we have no choice but to wipe the floor with them.
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You could ask these sort of questions about Rome, and every other empire, right up until the point of it's collapse. The one about democracy could be, and was, asked in reverse right up until the 20th century.
Unless you're actively saying America is not in decline, and will not collapse if it stays on it's current trajectory, you're not even addressing the issue with these questions.
It's better to think about concepts like democracy and capitalism as a form of technology in and of themselves, they're an idealogical technology that people had to bring about and work to optimize. But like the car beat the horse, the free market beat the mercantalists and central economic control, and democracy beat the dictators.
We're on the cutting edge of creating a machine god, if anything we're on the upswing for decades to come. Unless AI does turn out to be a bubble, but it sure seems like we're getting something major at least even if not full AGI. Or I suppose the machine god destroys us all, sure that would be a failure state then.
I have no idea how this addresses my response.
Welp, I guess that leaves us at "agree to disagree". You're not. You're not anywhere close. We might get some fairly radical changes out of it, like a total surveillance state, but nothing like "machine god" from rationalist fanfics.
Because saying "well what about pre car history, horses won then" as a pro horse argument against cars is silly. The same way, talking about history before the modern western ideas took hold doesn't really work out.
Look I don't know what we're gonna get but even if it's not AGI it does seem to be some sort of radical surge in productivity at the very least. Scientists and companies are already exploring AI's potential to improve research and market output, and progress doesn't seem to be slowing down much.
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Singapore, Liechtenstein, and the UAE are not democracies and all outpace neighboring countries in being nice places to live. Notably they have more civil freedom than a typical dictatorship, but they’re still not democracies. Andorra is arguably a partial example as well.
And the typical monarchy is pretty average for its neighborhood; they do, however, seem to avoid the dumbest mistakes very reliably, like communism or retarded foreign policy. Notably thé monarchy/dictatorship distinction is pretty core to the definition of both; you can reject the distinction, but it does seem to predict real trends in the real world. You can find past examples of benevolent dictatorships, if you look. You have to do a similar degree of looking to find terrible monarchs.
Singapore is the interesting mix that I already mentioned, I don't know anything about Liechtenstein so no comment but the UAE borders Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Oman is a monarchy, Qatar is a monarchy and so is SA, so any success you can attribute to the UAE there relative to the neighbors is not from having a monarchy, the neighbors do too!
Yeah, in the same way that China notably has a more open market than the traditional communist state and not a coincidence is better off than most of them (even if not at the Singapore/Taiwan/Hong Kong per capita levels). It's also not a coincidence that the more successful dictatorships and monarcies tend to be the weaker examples of the archetype!
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman are also very nice places for citizens to live, by global standards, Nevermind Arab or middle eastern ones.
As far as civil freedom goes, people don’t like horrendous oppression. It makes places a less nice place to live, and enlightened despots were seen as excellent rulers for it in their own day- but the history of enlightened despotism indicates that this is not an impossible concept(there’s currently four examples- the UAE, Singapore, Andorra, and Liechtenstein. To explain the paucity I would point to the tendency to democratize being very pronounced). It is also difficult to achieve a high income economy without economic freedom, which is in turn very difficult to maintain without economic freedom.
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It is very telling that all your leading examples are contemporary. An important part of this debate is that things changed when machine guns and airplanes were invented. For most of human history, the horse was the most powerful weapon on the plains, so people who loved by wandering around hanging out with horses and practicing their archery were a major menace to settled society. The modern era has not lasted as long as the Han dynasty, so we should give more time for the thesis to play out, but it seems pretty likely that the whole cycles of history thing was true for most of human history, but now it might not be.
I don’t think the broader historical record supports that, either, but it’s certainly more defensible than the pure Fremen version.
On the other hand, the machine gun and airplane are here to stay. Any reactionary with a profile picture of Roman statuary has to explain why a model which might have gone out of fashion with WWI should apply today.
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My leading examples are, in fact, actually trailing. I recapitulated the case for the Roman Empire as presented by Devereaux in a comment in the thread I linked to. In short, the Hard Times argument didn't hold much water there either.
Note that you're pivoting from some combination of moral pulchritude and harsh lifestyle to the claim that the peoples of the plain had advantages in terms of access to horses and the ability to evade more sedentary great powers, you're on much firmer soil. Steppe nomads were a menace, Scott takes S-risk very seriously. Jokes aside, that is not the same argument as the one Devereaux made, or my defense on his behalf.
I imagine that the people who actually believe in the Hard Times theory would be rather miffed to hear that. The main reason they're attached to it is because of the implications on the conduct and prognosis of modern civilization. It's no good to say that, hey, it worked in the past, but we're past such things. You can be as gay and irreligious as you like, as long as you've got fighter jets and nuclear weapons isn't an appealing message to them.
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There's a parallel theory that, for example, American soldiers in WWII were comfortable with mechanics because farms were more mechanized in America at the time. They were used to fiddling with engines on tractors and trucks, and were better at performing tasks like that during the war.
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Just some random thoughts on aspects of this:
At a grunt's-eye view, it's pretty undeniable that it's a big advantage for your actual front-line troops to be habituated to physical hardship, and this is difficult to teach people as adults.
But, of course, exactly how hard they have to be depends on how hard their actual combat environment is. If the country can afford to provide them with Pizza Hut in the field, the necessity of non-picky eaters may have been overcome with brute finance and logistics, to take a wacky modern example. A country willing and able to keep their troops mostly in armored, air conditioned vehicles and willing to accept the resulting loss of presence and intel at a tactical level can adjust many of the physical requirements.
As a second-order effect, this pushes more and more of the remaining light tactical work to more and more specialized units, which means massive cost in training and equipment, but a really lopsided frontline capability. What it lacks is the ability to scale beyond special-forces sized engagements. And those guys in the high-speed units now have to be even tougher.
So you still need a feeder population of "hard men", a farm team winnowed by competition and training into a warrior elite. And you might not want to let those guys be drawn from populations that vastly differ in culture and political loyalty to the civilian leadership. Which in turn means any long-term social organization needs an internal military culture that habituates some portion of its young men to the physical necessities of their brand of combat. What that is depends greatly on technology, organization and finance.
Broadly speaking, I think Devereaux has a good point. Civilizations do generally trump barbarians, and we remember the exceptions much more than the many failures of various tribal groups to dent their better organized empires. Rome defeated, co-opted, romanized and absorbed probably thousands of patriarchal, feudally organized semi-nomadic tribes over their run as a society. Similarly, Persia, India and China absorbed successive groups of tribal peoples, with the exceptions becoming the ruling dynasties of those societies. To peer myopically at the warriors who were able to exploit times of political, social or public health upheavals to seize power after the failures of a settled society is to miss the other 90% of the time.
Of course, history may be a limited guide here. For pre-modern history civilization was a very limited thing in cities and their immediate hinterlands. The days of nomadic pastoralists are gone. The seas, deserts and grasslands are no longer untracked wilderness. The modern barbarians live in a society, on a social fringe rather than a geographical one. And like the barbarians of old, they have to adapt to the higher technology of civilized peoples in order to be effective. Which means paralleling their social and political organization as well, adapting to the culture they predate and parasitize.
The implications for modern politics are straightforward: Civilization falls to barbarians when the existing power structure cannot enforce the laws, finance the military, make political decisions and foster a functioning economy. The danger is not in the hinterland, geographical or social. It is in our own government, our social divisions and our political animosities. We've mostly solved the plagues and famines that used to destabilize organized societies. We're never going to solve the political problem.
I appreciate the nuance. It is unclear to me that a US military doctrine used to styling on poorly fed goat herders and third world militaries will remain unchanged if/when forced into a war of attrition against a peer-power. I don't think setting up Burger Kings will be a priority during the invasion of Taiwan. But it looks increasingly like the quality of manpower or the equipment of infantry will become less and less relevant with time. Drones do not care about PT.
To perhaps interpret your point too literally: where are the barbarians? That's a serious question. The closest you can get to "uncivilized" is the more godforsaken parts of Africa and the Middle East. Most of the world has air conditioning and wifi. Going with your definition of "barbarian" as a particular social class or ethnicity within existing society, is there any meaningful risk of them seizing power? Foreign barbarians are impotent. The "local" ones are part of the underclass because of certain... deficits. Neither are a meaningful threat.
In this day and age (and for several hundred years) the primary threat to a nation state is either civil war or occupation by a foreign power of comparable sophistication. Rome survived multiple civil wars. The US survived a serious one already. That's pretty lindy. In case of civilizational breakdown, who's doing the invading or occupying? Canada? Mexico? China? For the foreseeable future (studiously ignoring AI), the most likely outcome of another American civil war would be the eventual reconstitution of the republic, perhaps under new management. That's not the end of a civilization, for the same reason we consider China or Rome as continuous for hundreds or thousands of years. In those cases, the new ruling class were rarely barbarians, they were most commonly another flavor of local elite.
Of course, once we consider AI, it all becomes rather moot.
The most likely end of a new American civil war is balkanization, not reconstitution. US terrain and human geography pushes towards this strongly(it's basically impossible to conquer a peer opponent over the rockies, the US defeated some primitives and religious fanatics with substantial local assistance after the territory was ceded to them by treaty ending a war fought mostly in a different theater). We have multiple imperial cores and a serious war is going to wind up with them not wanting to share power.
There is no American Civil War that can result in balkanization. America has been too unified for too long.
If that is the inevitable result, it will be after decades, if not centuries, of civil wars, plural, which eventually massacre enough people to create clean stable lines.
Isn't that what they say about China? "The country long united must divide. The country long divided must unite." America is still comparatively young.
In terms of scenarios, what do you think about the odds of having two self-proclaimed 'America's, both of which consider themselves to be the true one and the other to be a rump state that for one reason or another can't yet be brought back into the fold?
I just don't think you can make a map that really works. There's too many baptists in NYC, too many liberal arts colleges in Indiana. The cultural capital of the country is too mixed up. Texas is the only region that maybe has a strong enough identity to secede, but that would depend (oddly) on future Texan leaders moderating their red tribe culture warring significantly enough to get buy in from the 40% of the state the votes blue. The reverse in California or New England may also work, if they could moderate, but they are far behind Texas in regional identity.
I live in Pennsylvania. If I drive half an hour north or west I'm definitely in Appalachia, if I drive an hour south or two hours east I'm in the heart of the megalopolis. There's no clean line where people would feel happy drawing that line and letting "them" have the rest.
I guess what I'm getting around to is that I don't think there is a future where Red or Blue America can balkanize successfully, rather a future balkanized America would require stronger regional identities which moderate between Blue and Red. The populations are too mixed, and the ambitions that underly the culture war movement are too universal. Red Texas or Blue New England cannot secede, Purple Texas and Purple New England might be able to.
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Fair enough, I recognize that as a valid possibility, even if I think that reunification is more likely than not. The last civil war didn't end up with two separate independent cores, for whatever that's worth.
The last civil war was fought on a north south axis(across mostly flat), with a single imperial core(NYC running into the Great Lakes region and lower New England). The planter class was defeated due to overwhelming material and manpower superiority on the part of the northern elite; although the planter class was politically influential and individually wealthy, it didn’t hold a candle to the northeast and Great Lakes.
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I applaud your efforts at cohesive argument.
To have this debate honestly, we need to start by defining a pile of terms before we even start.
What constitutes Good Times? What constitutes Hard Times? What is the expected period over which the cycle should occur?
Then what are Strong Men? What are Weak Men? Hell, what do we mean by "men" exactly? Do we mean the whole testicled population of the state, do we mean "freeborn" or "citizen" men, or do we mean an elite subset of leadership? Because those three groups can all be at different layers of the cycle at the same time, the dynamic can occur internally as well as externally.
But most importantly I think the missing assumption in all this is: how long should an empire last? What is the expected period that can be lengthened or shortened by cultural practices?
A lot of the arguments here hinge on defining terms differently. If we can communicate what we're saying, we can probably reach a consensus. Which ultimately comes more to something like Strong Cultural Practices Produce Strong People, Weak Cultural Practices Produce Weak People.
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Your Honor, even if my client is in fact guilty of the acts he is accused of, the rules of this court make it such that my client's guilt cannot be proven!
I would suggest that this kind of argument raises even more problems than it solves.
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If you would prefer a stronger but less-poetic version:
Times that are hard enough to kill the uncautious and unprepared (the Mongolian steppe, the American colonial frontier) select for men capable of mastering the environment. These men have the potential to build a culture that enshrines the virtues that they have been selected for; if they do so, then they can master their environment even more, and what's more, they will outcompete less-selected men and cultures, and if they can keep their culture while claiming the bounty of less-hard lands, they will do extremely well. But eventually, said bounty will remove the selection pressure, and the people will only keep their advantage for as long as their culture endures.
It's far more concrete and makes testable predictions, for which I'm grateful. I still wouldn't agree with it.
We do have evidence of genetic selection pressures due to the environment: the best example that comes to mind is East Asians accumulating traits that increased conscientiousness and reduced neuroticism. That's fine, depending on how far you stretch things.
The issue is that hundreds of years pass between anything of note happening. Steppe raiders come and go, the concentration of wealth and population, and thus power hugs the same locations it always does.
Those are big ifs. Group selection is real, and cultural selection is faster than genes can dream of. It is fine to model things as better adapted communities/tribes/civilizations overrunning their less adept peers. The problem is when you're asked to show robust evidence that degree of environmental hardship correlates with wealth or military success. Wealthy, stable empires built around breadbaskets beat hardy frontier folk nine times out of ten. Devereaux’s blog has no end of specific examples, I've already recapitulated the evidence as pertains to Rome.
The US colonists only won against Britain by virtue of immense distance and logistical difficulties, and by the late 19th and early 20th century, they'd gone from being frontiersmen to living in a country with a comparable level to development to the best Europe had to offer, and then eclipsing them entirely shortly after. It is an open question if America has lost its edge, as of the time of writing it's the strongest nation on Earth. China is limited to projecting power in its own coastal waters, America rules the waves, and thus the world. There are no objective measures of decline, at least nothing with real stakes (I mean military stakes or dysfunction that can pluasibly lead to either foreign conquest or internal dissolution, not just growth disease or cultural stagnation. Rome survived multiple civil wars.)
But the crux of the issue is that you have to fit the model to historical events, and then show that it has predictive value (without training on the test). That is a high bar, and it is much easier to falsify than it is to prove. But it is also easy to postulate superficially plausible explanations for many things, the hard part is showing the relation to reality. You win some, you lose some.
I believe that Devereaux did a good job dissecting the specific flavor he dubbed Fremen Mirage, the version you propose makes fewer bold claims. That is an improvement, don't get me wrong, but you still need to demonstrate accuracy and predictive power. History is messy. It resists convenient narratives.
Respectfully, my version isn't making any kind of grand sweeping claims. We know what will happen if we leave a culture of bacteria on an petri dish with ample food and a zone of penicillin; the bacteria will eventually mutate into antibiotic resistance. This tells us nothing about what will happen on the scale of any individual bacteria.
I'd also point out that the original claim isn't that Weak Men Immediately With No Lead Time And Uniformly Make Hard Times, only that they do eventually. You can consider either the weak or strong aphorisms to lack sufficient predictive power to engage with, but vague isn't wrong, and my model doesn't try to claim what either you or Devereaux seem to expect it to.
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"Even war, that most quintessential of masculine activities, is probably a thing of the past. For war you need a large supply of young men. With the great demographic collapse of modern times, that supply is drying up. Soft, feminized, over-civilized, under-militarized societies of the past were likely to be jolted back into vigor, or just overrun, by warriors from the wild places. Now there are no more wild places. While one should never be complacent about these things, and it is possible that a starship fleet of unwashed plunderers, cutlasses in their teeth and knives in their boots, is on its way from Alpha Centauri even as I write, the odds are good that the human race ain't gonna study war no more." - John Derbyshire, 2001
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I agree with a lot of your points, it is indeed true that just being a tougher warrior is not sufficient to win in a war. Imperial Japan fought very hard, man for man I'd argue they were better fighters than American or Australian troops. But it's not just man for man but shell for shell, plane for plane, actually having supplies. The outcome was decided by materiel factors like you say.
But...
Who's stronger, Somalia or America? No contest. The United States with its thousands of H-bombs is vastly weaker than Somalia.
The loot goes from the US to Somalia. We had a huge episode of that unearthed just recently, Somalis milking the US government for billions. They speak openly about how they're working for Somalia, they're advancing Somali interests not US interests. The ex-PM of Somalia openly speaks to Somalis about how Ilhan Omar isn't for America, she's for Somalia: https://x.com/AFpost/status/1807495759056470057 (I see no community notes so I assume this is accurate)
There are Somalis running and robbing US cities, how many Americans are running and robbing Somali cities? What is that if not strength? That is what strength is for, moving the loot around.
Somalia doesn't even need to beat America in warfare, their superiority is so vast that warfare is irrelevant. Somalia crushes! Somalis literally conduct humiliation rituals like having their puppet governor change the Minnesota flag to make it look like a Somali flag. The Somalian economy is largely based on remittances, 25-50%. A large chunk of that is loot from America.
I don't mean that in a triumphalist or insulting sense, I think it's massively retarded and deeply unnatural that Somalia is beating America like a pinata for loot. It's not a glorious, proof-of-work type strength like a ground campaign. Nobody thinks that Somalia's military excellence, based on organizational superiority translates into a superior culture. The most well-known cultural innovation of Somalia is female genital mutilation. Nobody is ever going to sing songs about the heroism of the fraudsters at the Quality Learing Centre because they're reprobates. But these are people demonstrably worsening life in the heartland of the US, basically robbing taxpayers, subverting US governance. I consider that a defeat.
What is that if not an example of degeneracy and decadence, where this nuclear superpower is getting humiliated by a shithole country? I accept that I'm using emotional language here but I think it's very important to recalibrate how we conceive of strength and power. I think that the narrative of 'jets, tanks, logistics, training, numbers and technology' is genuinely true enough to be convincing but limited enough to be dangerous. Watching the F-35 or B-2 flyby over the Big Game lulls Americans into a comfortable sleep - and then they get beaten like a pinata for loot by some of the ugliest countries on the map.
There isn't just the military strength of America and Somalia, that's lopsided. There is political strength, will, cameraderie. That is where Somalia and Afghanistan and many other shitholes have their advantage. The power of group solidarity is a force greater than any technological terror created (thus far). It is overwhelmingly superior to the hydrogen bomb, the carrier group, anything America can put into the field.
I know about the argument that 'oh it's an internal struggle between different factions of US elites' but I don't think it holds. When Byzantium has its 600th civil war and loses provinces to Bulgaria or the Arabs, that's a real defeat for the Byzantines. When Korean court intrigues result in them letting their army rot and constantly imprisoning their best generals, that's genuine military failure. When Polish elected monarchy fails by letting foreign powers bribe their nobles into vetoing everything and then carve up the whole country (Poland-Lithuania: terror of the Turks, the Saviour of Vienna!) with barely a struggle, you better believe that's a real defeat. Letting other nations infest and parasitize your politics is just as bad as being humiliated on the battlefield, in so far as the results are the same. War is about politics, about dominance, about the distribution of loot. Payment of tribute is an ancient custom of defeated nations.
The logic is reversed here. The US is so rich and powerful that we barely even notice such massive amounts of waste and fraud (because they're a tiny tiny tiny portion of what we spend every year) while that amount makes up a substantial portion of Somalian's wealth and power. We are so fucking strong that everyone is trying to steal the crumbs off our plates and the US barely cares because they're just crumbs, we're focused on the main course.
It's like saying a mouse is better off than the home owner because the mouse sometimes gets in the cupboards.
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I think this is orthogonal to my point. I find the Somali fraud situation to be somewhere between ludicrous, shameful and funny. Given that I have no skin in that game, I have the luxury of finding it more funny than infuriating.
But that's neither here nor there. The reason Somalis can leech off what seems like staggering amounts of wealth in absolute terms is because America is so wealthy that it's not particularly impactful in relative terms. They're a mosquito treating an elephant as a buffet, at some point they might get swatted for the inconvenience, but they aren't debilitating.
They stole a few billion dollars (I don't know the actual figure, I'm erring on the side of being generous to their talents at welfare fraud)? No big deal. The SF to LA rail line was originally budgeted at $35B and that ballooned to $128B with no projected date of completion. I don't know how much of that money was actually spent, so consider the F-35 program: started off at around 244B, and is now estimated to now have lifetime costs of 2 Trillion dollars. The humble James Webb went from a sticker price to a single billion to a cool ten of the same.
That is a lot of money. That is probably a lot of waste and graft. Yet it didn't collapse the country. A big strong healthy nation has proportionately bigger parasites, and can tolerate those parasites for far longer before it decides it needs that blood for better things. Before it is forced to tighten belts and actually check the accounts for the month.
So you have the equivalent of spare change from a not particularly important government program funding an entire civil war involving millions, without anyone taking action for years. The harm to the average Minnesotan, while real, was mostly invisible because how goddamn rich you lot are. Most countries would kill to have billions stolen from trillions, if that meant they had trillions in the first place.
I mean, what did the Somalians in Somalia do? They aren't on the autism payroll. Your ire should be directed at their compatriots in your country, who I am told mostly hold full citizenship. Bend them over an electric rail, I have no objections. But I think it is a mistake to claim that this is some sign of imminent collapse (assuming that is what you meant, you might have raised it as a single illustrative example).
For all your corruption, graft, poor budgeting and cost overruns, the US military is still the best in the world. The F-35s might have an eye-watering price, but they're good fighter jets sir. The telescope does telescope things which I read about on Quanta. Californian HSR? Now that I can't really defend. Anyway. Your hegemony is only now being challenged, with no clear victor, and only in a very constrained geopolitical theater. While a few carrier groups might be very unhappy in the Pacific should the missiles fly, the average American doesn't need to really worry unless some of those missiles are nuclear tipped. At which point we're all kinda screwed, if that's any consolation. I think it's comforting, in a grim way, that the only way to make life significantly worse for you in absolute terms is to potentially kill a quarter of the planet. Otherwise a decisive Chinese victory at Taiwan means you're looking at something like going from 2026 GDP figures to 2005. That's really not the end of the world. It's probably not even the end of America.
Humiliating? Yes. Annoying? Yes. Bad optics? Yes. Lethal? No. Somali fraud or minor ethnic bickering and identity politics won't bring down the American empire. It won't even make Minnesota flip away from being a Blue state. The Weak Men Hard Times theory focuses on civilizational trajectories as a whole and their failure modes, as does my critique, this isn't quite on the same level of concern.
Firstly I'm not actually American but Australian, I guess maybe I was unclear with the 'we', I meant that the motte and the world at large only recently stumbled on this matter.
Secondly, I think there's an important distinction between internal disputes, corruption and resource reallocation and foreigners coming in to take resources. It's like crime vs warfare. Criminals get punished, enemies get killed. Ingroup outgroup distinction.
I guess you might say I'm being too vague about what decadence really is, I think it's like a magnet with domains all jumbled up, not pointing in one direction. Adam wants cheap labour, Bert wants loyal voter blocs, Charlie wants to stuff his face with food and not care about politics, Derek wants kickbacks from rich foreigners, Emma wants those poor people overseas to have human rights, Frank wants tax cuts without spending cuts... (Flavius wants to be emperor, Julius wants to be emperor, Octavius wants to be emperor,, Antonius wants to hire those cheap Gothic warriors since Romans these days don't want to fight) Anyway, Americans are not all aligned with advancing US interests, making America and Americans strong. They got complacent and stopped pushing forwards, then get ensnared by foreign interests and growing reliance on foreigners. Decadence starts slow but it gets worse and worse over time.
The Somalis who are constantly crowing about their love of and loyalty to Somalia (and sending huge amounts of money to Somalia) aren't real Americans, in my opinion. I'm not American so I guess I can't be too authoritative about this but I feel like I'm on pretty strong ground here. They show no loyalty to America. They make obnoxious tiktoks about how they're coming to take over America: https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1997759022666297662
OK, it's just one guy there, Ilhan Omar and the ex-PM of Somalia over here, a few billion dollars over some years (10s of billions? More?)... Even a few billion dollars is worth caring about. How many lifetimes worth of labour have Minnesotans done only for some Somali to take it? The British didn't let the Chinese get away with disrespecting their merchants selling drugs in China, they fucked China up for that slight. That's real vigour and will.
A few hundred thousand Somalis haven't collapsed America. But they do way more damage than they should be doing, it's as if they have a 10,000x multiplier on their effectiveness against Americans that they're extracting wealth from a much stronger power. It's this effect that is the root cause of US woes. Just being united and nationalist/tribalist is an incredible source of strength. The American auto-immune system is broken, any strong leader would've gotten rid of these people or never let them in but Trump can't seem to manage it, he announces and threatens but can't seem to get rid of them because some judge nobody ever heard of will block him while Will Stancil's people will shriek and blow airhorns and get shot dead defending them... Decadence.
China does the same kind of sneaky subversion, that's how they got so powerful and menacing. They stole a tonne of IP from the US and elsewhere, they make the Somalis look like complete failures in their fraud. Anything Somalis can do, China can do better after all. They bewitched the US into cooperating with their exploitation, they bewitched the US into not stomping China when they had complete military dominance.
What good has it achieved for America? The US military beat Saddam and derailed their modernization plans in Iraq. China bought up the oil wells and started to catch up. The US military 'secured' the Middle East, so that China could import their oil safely and creep forward in the South China Sea unmolested. The US blew up Libya and caused a serious political crisis in their European allies. The US tried to bomb Yemen, failed to reopen the Red Sea to traffic, then made a deal with the Houthis.
American leaders are floating around in never never land talking about vibes like 'freedom' or 'democracy' or 'human rights' or 'freedom of the seas' and the Chinese are saying whatever magic words help them in the moment to advance their true goals, doing whatever advances Chinese national strength.
The US kidnapped Maduro. That's a show of power, albeit against a country so incompetent they can't even maintain their own oil industry. But what was the point of the flex? Trump's stated objective seemed to be to secure the oil - only nobody wants to invest in Venezuela, still ruled by the commies, still with a weak oil industry, given current oil prices are low. It was another fundamentally misguided military intervention.
There is an Iran war coming up which will probably be a complete shitshow. We were told the US completely destroyed the Fordow nuclear facility, a devastating blow. It didn't even last six months, apparently they need to go in again to stop the Iranian nuclear program which has been six months away from a nuke for the last 30 years. Woolly thinking in US leaders, deceived, constantly misdirected, ever trusting, paying the price for the gains of others.
The US is simultaneously trying to confront Russia in Ukraine, Iran in the Middle East and China in the Pacific. The US didn't trounce China back when China was weak, they let China walk all over them. All these little cuts and tapeworms are wearing down US power.
Decadence is when you're trying to do too much with too little, a kind of complacency about sustaining one's own strength, a lack of wisdom and good judgement. Imagine how strong and rich America would be without those trillions squandered in the Middle East, with realpolitik instead of random blundering, no DEI officers in the military, not letting IP be stolen without punishment, not corroding patriotic ideals that are the basis of military recruitment... What if the dollars that went to Somalia were invested in hypersonic missiles or just producing artillery shells?
China would be prey, not predator.
My apologies. That slipped my mind.
The primary purpose of any army is the defense of its nation, usually from other countries and their armies. I think the US is doing excellent on that front. As I've said, even if recent efforts to project power abroad have been less than effective, the continental USA is at no risk of invasion. Chinese paratroopers aren't going to land in LA no matter how bad the war in Taiwan goes. The US is too far, it is too geographically blessed. There's no power on Earth that can threaten it on its home turf, and that's before we even consider the nukes.
Could the US have been more sensible? Of course. I agree 100%. But the fact that it can hop on one leg while trying to kick itself in the balls and still be the world power means that the pressure to be smart is less than crushing.
I really don't think that even ten billion dollars would make a noticeable difference to the military budget. That's 0.5% of the F-35 program. Of course, that is because procurement is busted and everything is overpriced, but that's still the way it is. The US war machine is not starved for cash, it's suffering from lack of an effective way to convert the ridiculous amount of money it has into useful materiel. I can't blame the Somalians for that.
A thousand cuts? Fatal to small mammals. A whale might not even notice. It could hemorrhage a liter of blood a day and draw every shark in the Pacific and few would have the balls to bite it (cloaca? Idk). The fact remains that even if the USA isn't acting maximally rationally, it's still doing pretty damn well overall. It's fine to grade on a curve when nobody is going to bomb their homes.
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Is a human humiliated by his tapeworm?
You may call him stupid for not taking deworming medicine. But humiliated?
He goes to all this effort getting food. And then the tapeworm eats it, not him, so he has to get more food for his own needs. That's pretty humiliating, especially since it's a literal worm.
Having a tapeworm is the ultimate and final cuck. Think about it logically.
What if it's trained to wriggle around a prostate? Given how many worms there are, that's the polycule to end all polycules.
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If someone somehow convinced himself that tapeworms are actually totally fine and symbiotic with humans and that deworming is evil for hurting these beautiful creatures, and then later ends up in hospital over it, that does seem pretty humiliating. Though YMMV over how much this allegory applies to the somali fraud situation.
I mean, considering how dependent the entire African continent is on western aid, particularly medicinal aid, the complete extension of "deworming" rounds off to TND. The left understands this, even if only implicitly.
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I disagree. Humiliation requires that the humiliated person is painfully aware that he's being walked all over. To the extent "humiliation" applies, it only applies to the right-wingers who hate the Somalis, not the left-wingers who love them.
This seems quite far from the colloquial definition. Usually it's considered sufficient if most people around them consider it humiliating. If you make a terrible joke and everyone around you laughs about you instead of about the joke, that is humiliation. If anything, not even noticing the difference makes it extra-humiliating.
Also, enough people on the left are clearly in the kind of damage control mode about the scandal that implies at least some level of awareness, even if it doesn't rise to the level of changing their entire view. Like the tapeworm guy admitting that, well, this particular tapeworm was bad, but we shouldn't hurt them unnecessarily and dewormer is still evil in general. Also, did you know there is lots of other parasites? Singling out tapeworms like that seems pretty problematic, you know.
Having to admit that you did get taken advantage of in precisely the way others predicted beforehand but you brushed them off is humiliating, even if you try to spin it to make it sound less bad.
Only humiliating after you a) realize they were laughing at you, not with you, b) decide that you care.
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Being a midwit here, this all seems like a lot of effort and verbiage for very little gain.
Obviously bad times create hard men. Obviously good times create soft men. Sometimes bad times create wrecks instead, and sometimes good times let men flourish. We can witness this on the individual level in real-time, and there are enough historical examples for this to be easily confirmed. And often enough, the poor but hardened barbarians did overthrow the decadent and softened empire. Persia, Rome, Byzantium, Granada, China. And equally obviously, these are relative strengths and weaknesses, two factors among many in any contest, and on their own they do not suffice to predict the course of history. This hardened/decadent distinction matters in near-peer conflicts; obviously the discrepancy can be overcome by greater economic, technological or military advantages. It all just seems...obvious, and simple, and I don't get how such a lengthy discussion about the fundamental truth or falsehood of it can take place.
Motte: obviously environment affects toughness…
Bailey: in the specific ways that let a state control its environment
That last one is where the arguments happen, because it’s where people like to make predictions about Current Thing. It is an explicitly cyclical argument where “decadence” signals that those in power must be on their way out. Surely the U.S. is too decadent to handle the Germans/the Soviets/the Islamists/the Chinese?
Devereaux’s post illustrated that poor, hardened barbarians actually had a pretty poor track record against Rome. Even (especially?) when it was at its most luxurious. Turns out that having enough wealth to throw stupid parties correlates pretty well with maintaining roads, armories and fleets.
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This seems to be saying nothing in the end
Bad times can create both hard men and wrecked men. Good times can create both soft men and flourishing men. So if we wanted to predict what a man will be like, the 'goodness' of the period is irrelevant?
No. Bad times do not create soft men, where softness is a dependency on civilizational luxuries. Good times do not create hard men used to deprivation and personal, physical risk-taking. (As a rule. Of course there are exceptions. Ungern-Sternberg, etc.) The nature of the times facilitate the spread of attributes that are adaptive to those times. It's not random, even if it's not 100% predictable either.
I see. The obvious next question, then, is what the difference is between a "soft man" and a "wrecked man", at least as far as predicting the arc of history goes?
smh addressed this exact point in his original post, that a Somalian used to deprivation and pain is still going to get absolutely swept aside by a soft American soldier.
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This is like saying natural selection is irrelevant to the course of evolution.
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This not at all obvious to me. Do good times not make hard men? Did Caesar not rise from a Roman society that was doing pretty damn well for itself, all things considered? Do bad times not breed no end of weak men who make things worse or limp along maintaining the status quo? Do Strong Men not defeat other Strong Men?
It's mostly selection and availability bias, as well as (unconsciously) motivated stopping. You only count the phase shifts and ignore the status quo, even though that's just as important. You should read the original ACOUP series, if you haven't already. It's great stuff.
The first question you have to ask about any cyclical theory of history is: what breaks the cycle?
If hard times reliably create strong men and good times reliably create weak men, you would expect history to look like a perfect sine wave. Rome gets hard, Rome gets strong, Rome conquers everyone, Rome gets soft, Rome falls, barbarians have hard times, barbarians get strong, barbarians become the new Rome, repeat until the sun explodes. Clean. Elegant. A little depressing, but hey, at least it has narrative structure.
But this is not what history looks like. History looks like someone handed a child a pen and said "draw a graph of everything." Some civilizations collapse and stay collapsed. Some have good times that somehow produce further good times. The Mongols had extraordinarily hard times for generations and produced a brutal conquering empire that then also had hard times and collapsed without producing anything the theory would recognize as "good times" at all. The Dutch Republic had comfortable mercantile prosperity for most of its peak period and somehow found the strength to fight Spain, England, and France more or less simultaneously. The theory predicts that comfortable merchants should have produced feeble grandchildren who surrendered immediately. Instead, the comfortable merchants were the people fighting Spain.
The adherent of the theory can always reply that I'm missing the true scale at which the cycle operates, or the true definition of "strong," or the true timing of when good times become corrupting. This is the theory's second line of defense: it is unfalsifiable in a way that wears the costume of historical wisdom. If someone was strong, they must have had hard times, and if they had hard times, they must have become strong. The apparent exceptions are just cycles we haven't identified yet. The theory is so elastic it can absorb any data point, which should cause us to wonder whether it is a theory about history or simply a template we are laying over history after the fact, the way you can find a face in any cloud if you want to. Hardship made the Mongols, someone says. Well, the Inuit have it even worse but they haven't overrun civilization yet. What's that? A lack of pasture, a nomadic lifestyle in a marginal climate that buffers them from more centralized states? Horses? Wait, where does the moral character come into the picture again?
But let's say the theory is directionally true. Let's say, all else equal, some adversity produces some useful capacities in some people. This seems plausible. People who struggle with things sometimes learn from the struggle. There's probably a study.
The theory's problem is that it treats "strong" and "weak" as unitary properties that civilizations have or lack, when they are in fact thousands of orthogonal variables pointing in different directions! A generation raised in agricultural famine might become extraordinarily good at food preservation and resource management. They will almost certainly be shorter and have worse teeth. They will likely have high rates of anxiety, intergenerational trauma, and various diseases caused by malnutrition. They will maybe, if the theory is right, have a certain toughness of spirit. That's a strong maybe and a big if.
Are they "strong men"? By what metric? Note that half the reason I'm annoyed by FC's thread is that he handwaves these definitional problems away. Compared to the generation that grows up with antibiotics and universities and compulsory education, they will be worse at almost every measurable thing except some vague spiritual fortitude that we mostly admire in retrospect because we've romanticized it. The people on X with Greek statue profile pictures romanticize it, but they're usually idiots. FC probably romanticizes it too, for what I can only hope are better reasons. I just do not see them.
Consider: the populations that by any historical measure have had the hardest times in the last two centuries have not subsequently had the best outcomes. The populations that have had relatively good times, with strong institutions and widespread education and reliable food and medicine, have been the ones generating technological progress and stable governance. "Hard times" in the form of poverty, war, famine, and institutional collapse tend to produce more poverty, war, famine, and institutional collapse. The sociologists call this "path dependence." The supplement-seller calls this "weakness," but only when it's happening somewhere he has already decided was weak. You bet your ass those same Greek statues are going to shill supplements when they can get away with it.
If good times create weakness, and you want strength, then the policy implication is either that you should create hard times, or that hard times are secretly fine, or both. You occasionally hear this stated openly. A certain kind of person says that softies and their participation trophies are producing a generation that won't be able to handle difficulty, and the proof is that they can't handle difficulty, which we know because they are soft, which we know because they have participation trophies.
But if you actually believe this, consistently, you should be in favor of allowing preventable suffering to occur, because it will produce strong men who will produce good times. You should oppose medicine that reduces childhood hardship, because hardship builds character. You should be suspicious of social safety nets, not just for economic reasons but for civilizational-strength reasons, because cushioning people from consequences will produce people who cannot handle the world.
What it actually produces, reliably, in the present tense, is a feeling: that your discomfort is cosmically significant, that comfortable people are building toward their own doom, and that you are the hero of the next cycle. This feeling is available to everyone simultaneously, which should tell you something.
I suspect that this is the actual psychological drive behind people advocating for such a prediction-free Theory of Everything. Unfortunately, it's closer to astrology for Manly Men than it is anything remotely actionable or interesting. Yeah, empires collapsed because of:
No shit. There's a bunch of other stuff, like plagues, ecological collapse, famine or a supervolcano going off in Indonesia. What does that theory offer in terms of actionable insights? Nothing. You can look at a switch flicking between two binary states based on a gazillion different factors, and make up all the stories you want about some grand cycle. But you can't predict when it'll flip or how long each state stays stable, and when you actually try to analyze the past with historical rigor, you'll find that a whole bunch of other things matter more than the general "hardness of the times". There's no Napoleon coming out of Somalia because the country sucks. The US is not doomed to collapse because the country has become a collective of godless hedonist commies who don't salute the flag enough and don't beat their children.
Once again, I strongly suggest reading the original blog. It covers at least the Roman case in exhaustive detail, and notes most of the others. You say "often enough", the Strong Men say all the time, and Devereaux shows that the big cushy empires win an overwhelming amount of times, until they don't.
(It's not like I want to be having this argument, I've just been nerd-sniped by people Being Wrong On The Internet. Happens to the best of us.)
I'm...no offense, please, but I'm not going to read all that. I wouldn't have the time even if I wanted to, at least not right now. Maybe later, apologies. My whole point was that it's all terribly simple, and not worthy of lengthy discussion.
All times make men adapted to those times. Ceasar was well-adapted to the society, politics and organized warfare of his era. But was he hard, in the physical, "barbarian" sense? I don't know. But his legionaries sure were. Not because they were born into "bad times" in prosperous Roma, but because their military service put them into "hard times" in the Roman military. What was it, twenty years of eating porridge, lugging around your whole kit and then some, and most likely getting clubbed to death in an ambush by some barbarian Gauls? That's not the decadent life - and if their organizational and technological advantages let them remain a little softer than their opponents, then well, they had those exact advantages to more than bridge the gap.
I did read it, but it's been a while, and I can't repeat the exercise right now. And yes, of course they do. As I said, this uncivilized "hardness" is one factor among many, and on its own it's not enough to win if the decadent empire still retains sufficient advantages otherwise. That this leaves the whole concept with little predictive power I readily concede, but I wouldn't even try to construct a predictive model here. History is messy and all-too-often comes down to the particulars. All I'm saying is this - cushyness softens, and hardship hardens, and that much should be beyond debate.
I'll keep it short (and I'm the person with ADHD):
"Hard times create strong men" is the historical equivalent of saying that forests must need more fires, because the trees that survive fires are so strong.
That is the bailey, where many frolic happily. When pushed, they point out the fact that pyrophytes are a thing, and use that to justify a much stronger statement. Unfortunately, if you put that into practice, you end up deforesting the Amazon, ending up with nothing but eucalyptus groves in California, and make the local conservationists mad/sad for no good reason.
I wasn't aware that Lamarack (somehow) returned. Welcome back, there's a lot to catch you up on. Look, it's obvious to anyone that the typical human is "adapted" to their environment. The problem is with describing their environment with something as reductive as "hard times" and "good times". The nuance is important.
As you correctly note, hard and soft are relative. Yet the whole Fremen Mirage wasn't focused on the austerity and discipline of the kind of military drills standing armies performed, it focuses mainly on the civilization as a whole because that's a major focus for the Strong Men types. The typical Roman citizen had it good compared to the barbarians on the frontier. In the meantime, their soldiers, who lived rough out of both necessity and for training, beat the snot out of the tough barbarian folk for centuries; and only then were beaten by Romanized barbarians who adopted their tactics and equipment to a large degree.
Similarly, in a modern context, it doesn't matter if the average American has it easy compared to the North Koreans, the Chinese or the average Russian vatnik. Boot camp and ozempic are both helluva drugs. And the physical fitness of an individual soldier isn't particularly important or decisive compared to logistics, state capacity and industrial output. The US is at some risk from China because of the latter factors, not because its populace has it too easy to win a serious/existential fight.
The Strong Men advocates tend to want the Hard Times for everyone, no matter how pointless that might be.
Neither I nor Devereaux dispute that, as far as I'm aware. It simply doesn't matter very much on the scale of civilizations, and it's piss-poor at predicting anything except in hindsight.
This is imo a pretty major misrepresentation of history, and an instructive one for the distinction here. A more correct framing in my view would be that Rome was reliably growing back when its armies were staffed by capital-R Romans. After having grown substantially, they improved their military success even further by using auxilia allied barbarian troops alongside their regular legions. This was a great invention and worked for a long time, growing Rome even further. Having overextended so far that it was simply not feasible to fight all conflicts with enough roman legions, barbarian mercenaries increasingly got hired to stuff more and more holes, until at some point the entire distinction between "proper" legions and the auxilia got eradicated.
Paying people to fight for you actually can also work, especially if you're rich and have a technology level far beyond them. But even back then the Romans already commented on the hardiness of their allies compared to the softness of the Romans. Both sides gained: The barbarians gained access to gear and technology that would otherwise be beyond them and allowed them to beat and conquer tribes further outward, while Rome stays safe and has troops. Btw, even the Roman elite changed their ethnic composition around this time, since they didn't have enough kids and had a tendency to adopt successful military commanders.
Everything looks mostly fine if you look at it from a super eagle-eyes view, but under the hood the barbarians already substantially got into control of all the important structures. This also changed the loyalty that many people in important positions felt to Rome itself, with predictable consequences. Romanizing barbarians is a two-way street, which by mainstream historians always gets ignored. Legions would just blackmail politicians when they felt they didn't get enough, or even just because they could get away with it. Later roman leaders frequently blatantly side with their own heritage over romans. Soldiers would abandon the army on a whim and, since they would just go back to their barbarian tribes, Rome could do absolutely nothing against it. Unlike asin the past, where desertion was punished with death. In fact, they would frequently outright change sides. All of this would have been unthinkable with capital-R Roman legions fighting barbarians.
The actual sack of rome is less a glorious victory from the now-improved german barbarians against still-tough roman soldiers, and more a wimper from a dying empire whose troops by that point simply were also germans, and who had little problem with abandoning the losers once the writing on the wall was clear.
If you're getting so decadent that you can't fight for yourself anymore, you don't necessarily lose instantly. Especially if you're adaptable and find a way to get the others to fight for you. But pretending that decadence/softness or vice versa hardiness doesn't matter makes about as little sense as pretending that money, landownership or technology doesn't matter.
I appreciate the context but I'm going to have to push back here.
You're essentially conceding the core of my argument while framing it as a rebuttal. Consider what the conceded version actually says: Rome's military decline tracked with its institutional decay, loyalty structures, economic capacity to maintain professional armies, and political dysfunction, not with some ambient cultural "softness" that sapped the virtue of Roman men.
I don't blame you, because decadence is both a loaded and vague term with multiple connotations.
My understanding is that the legions didn't stop being effective because Roman citizens got too comfortable. They stopped being effective because Rome progressively couldn't afford to staff them with Romans due to demographic decline, fiscal stress, and political fragmentation. That's a story about state capacity, not moral character. It actually supports the thesis that material and institutional factors dominate over vague civilizational hardness.
Devereaux takes pains to note that perception of decadence is effectively decoupled from the promised dire consequences:
You can achieve success and fame by predicting all 25 of 1 recession, as long as you ignore the failures. This forum has its share of people who believe that the West has become decadent and is thus destined to fall (at the hands of less decadent competitors). This includes both tangible things like state capacity, industry and so on, alongside normative claims about morality.
Is there an objective way to track moral decline? Church attendance? Single parenthood rates? Drug use? Maybe, assuming you agree with them on what constitutes moral decline. I don't.
My primary objection is to people pushing the "strong" version of the Hard Times theory. I do not claim empires cannot become senile or overextended. If you want to call that "decadence", be my guest, as long as we're all on the same page regarding the definitions in use.
Ok, hold up. If there is such a thing as ambient cultural softness, that can be applied to entire societies, then surely being unable to recruit your defense from your own people is as close to a definition as we can probably get.
There’s a difference between unable and unwilling.
Even if Roman men were champing at the bit, if the state couldn’t pay them enough to support a family, that’s a sign of state capacity, not cultural softness. Same goes for steppe nomads. All their tough-as-nails culture doesn’t give their band the capacity to threaten Rome. It’s not softness if there’s no rational choice.
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I do not agree that there is anything usefully described as "ambient cultural softness", unless you're talking about a Quaker colony or a Buddhist retreat.
If demographic decline and poor economics making it impossible to maintain an overextended empire count, then you might as well accuse most nations with decline fertility rates of being on that road, since they'll be there eventually. That is pretty much every single developed country and most of the developing ones. More importantly, Rome used substantial numbers of auxiliary forces for most of its history, including when its reach barely left the peninsula. It only failed them after several hundreds of years of pronounced success, after a host of other factors weakened the empire.
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Yeah, sorry. I'm just reading and writing while Maven does its thing, so I only have a few minutes per post.
I'm not talking genetics. The nature of the times allows men with specific traits to rise to prominence and become characteristic of their civilization, whereas people of a different temperament are marginalized.
As for hard times/good times, I thought we were operating on some sort of group consensus of what we're talking about there, since it's in the context of complex, wealthy civilizations VS simpler, poorer ones.
I'm not particularly disputing the definition of "good" or "hard" times. I'm saying that they're highly reductive ways of describing something as large and complex as a whole civilization. Reductive doesn't necessarily mean useless, but there are better frameworks. It's not the point of contention, what we started off debating was what happens as a consequence of the goodness of the times (or lack thereof).
Given the population of the globe today, I think it's entirely possible that there are generals of the caliber of Napoleon or Caesar around, without an opportunity to demonstrate their tactical acumen. They've got better things to do, they're probably CEOs, or like an actual descendant of Napoleon, making millions at a hedge fund. They probably play HOI4 in their free time.
I think this is good. I think it's great! I'd rather they make billions as quants instead of launching invasions into Egypt. I think that talent is general and finds a way to manifest in both good and bad times alike, it just tends to be more... violent in the latter case. That does not mean that the times create the men, the men were always there, talents intact, they just went about applying it differently. I do not know if we actually disagree about that.
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Also frankly any big empire the 'Barbarian' only has to win once and/or doesn't as much need to 'win' insomuch as they get unlimited crackers at being a 'causatory factor' of a big collapse.
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