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I remember acoup guy being a huge smartass and his articles are mostly well acktuallys that let him sound smart. He totally writes like he's talking down to his audience.
I remember his series on ancient greece was getring shared around a lookoong time ago and he had an article mostly about "well acktually spartans sucked, actually" and every other paragraph he would go "look at how bigoted these stupid racist spartans were. Maybe with some more diversity and feminism they wouldn't have sucked so bad!".
But anyways I find his writing extremely hard to take seriously. In a sense he's kind of like the lazerpig of history blogging because he hides his lack of rigor under a veneer of self deprecation ("unmitigated pedantry" - "low tier youtubing") yet will get incredibly defensive and lash out whenever someone criticizes his stream of hot takes.
I remember his "fremen mirage" series, and being left with the strong impression that he was playing word games in an attempt to obfuscate a fundamental reality he found unpalatable. Particularly, his four-part definition in the beginning of the first part more-or-less immediately convinced me that he was not operating in good faith.
What do you think the fundamental reality he is trying to obfuscate is?
The Fremen mirage series is very clear that it is rejecting the "Hard times make strong men" thesis, and the first two posts present evidence that it false (in post 1, that states usually beat non-state societies, and in post 2 that richer states usually beat poorer ones). Nothing is being obfuscated here - Devereaux might be wrong, but he isn't obfuscating his argument.
Very briefly, central examples of the "Hard Times Make Strong Men" thesis do not claim that non-states usually beat states, or that poorer states generally beat richer ones. Devereaux is attempting to frame the thesis this way because if he can bake absurdity into his audience's understanding of the argument, then it's all over but the sneering, which is pretty clearly what he's primarily interested in doing.
"Hard Times Make Strong Men" exists as a thesis because we can directly observe that rich, powerful states often actually do decline, that states are defeated by non-states, and rich states are beat by poor states. Not all the time, not as the expected result, but often enough that very clearly wealth, population, or whatever other technocratically legible KPI one prefers are not deterministic. Why is this? What causes upsets? What causes the mighty to decline? What injects mortality into the putatively super-mortal? This is a fascinating question, but Devereaux appears mainly interested in cauterizing such interest in anyone he can, and is enthusiastically willing to employ the argumentative dark arts in doing so.
Here are two paragraphs:
...This is propaganda. The person writing it likes you stupid. To the extent that you not of my tribe, the more you listen to him, the better for me.
This does not constitute support for "Hard Times Make Strong Men" or disagreement with Brett Devereaux. I don't think "Hard Times Make Strong Men" has to be parsed as "Hard Times Make Strong Men 100% of the time", but given the rest of the meme it should at least mean "Hard Times Make Strong Men more often than good times." If you agree that states usually beat non-states, and rich states usually beat poor states (as you seem to suggest with "not as the expected result") then you agree with the core factual claim of the Fremen Mirage series. In which case what is it that "Hard Times Make Strong Men" means that you find both true and interesting? "Hard Times sometimes Make Strong Men, even if that isn't the way to bet" is trivially true and uninteresting.
I don't think Devereaux is uninterested in this question - he wrote another long blogpost series on the Fall of Rome. But he doesn't see it as directly in his wheelhouse as a military historian - like most modern historians, he blames the Fall on internal political and economic factors (in his case including climate change) and not on a decline in the quality of Roman soldiers relative to the enemy. The point of the Fremen Mirage series is to debunk a specific theory of imperial decline which is seen as fully general by its more extreme supporters - that empires decline due to "decadence" (i.e. a loss of the martial virtues) brought on reasonably predictably by excessive wealth. He doesn't propose an alternative fully general theory of imperial decline because there isn't one.
You claim that Devereaux is (a) wrong and (b) obfuscating this. You have not stated a concrete point where you disagree with him, or a false belief you think he is trying to insinuate. I think he has a very clear agenda (that the set of views about masculinity and martial virtue he calls the "cult of the badass" is widely held, wrong, and actively harmful in a liberal democracy) and his opponents on this thread are the ones trying to obfuscate the actual disagreement.
I think the more accurate formulation would be "Hard times make strong men inevitable. Good times make weak men inevitable." This formulation not only seems obviously consonant with my understanding of history, but the reasons why it should be so likewise seem obvious: Good times impose reduced consequences on weak men for their weakness, and greatly reduce the amount of free energy by which strong men might exercise their strength. By contrast, bad times impose many consequences on weakness, and often provide an abundance of free energy through which strength might be exercised, not least the general population's desire to organize their collective power and resources to change things for the better.
But of course, this requires us to take the terms "strong" and "weak", "good" and "bad" seriously. Likewise words like "decadence", which Devereaux seems to believe contain no semantic content of significance, and so declines to even engage with in any meaningful fashion.
I think a culture can build an effective military force, such that they win a disproportionate number of their engagements, not merely through technocratic KPIs (amount of money available, population size, etc), but through specific cultural features and norms. I think such a culture can then replace those cultural features and norms with a new set, and as a consequence begin to lose a disproportionate number of their engagements, even though it now has more money, more population, and a greater share generally of the technocratic KPIs than it did when it was winning. Further, I think this signal is strong enough that predictions can be made in advance.
By contrast, it seems to me that Devereaux aims to convince his readers that military affairs are largely deterministic, with a layer of luck on top. Therefore, empires are born because they got a streak of good RNG hits, and Empires die because they got a streak of bad RNG hits, and human decisions are not really terribly decisive either way.
"Hard Times make strong men, strong men make good times" is interesting because it provides a firm historical basis for hope. The problems we face are not inevitable, insurmountable. Things can change. Often the hardships we face can shape us to better change them.
"Good times makes weak men, weak men make hard times" is interesting because it warns us that there is no permanent victory, that good times are not stable, that preserving and extending them requires effort and constant vigilance. And this is not a general warning: the hazard is specified, so it can be recognized in advance and action can be taken accordingly.
Here are two paragraphs:
A brief search confirms that this "moment" covers two centuries, and the entire point of the meme is that cultures change over time. It's possible that there's a valid argument to be made here, but he's pretty clearly chosen not to make it.
Is self-sufficiency and flexibility a bad thing? Is there such a thing as overspecialization or excessive complexity as legible cultural problems? Are the average men in societies, populations, or tribes more or less capable of becoming soldiers en masse, due to the culture they've been shaped by? Does this problem show up even from the perspective of men who appear to, in fact, be quite strong? Fuck that noise, questions are for dweebs! Let's round it to "all men in the society are warriors", that sounds way less complicated.
"Literate". Why portray "literate" and "intellectually decadent" as synonyms? Could it be that arguing against "intellectual decadence" is a hell of a lot harder than arguing for the merits of literacy, and so he finds it most convenient to substitute the former for the later? Can we wait two more sentences to find out?
...And there's your answer.
"moral virtue does not always lead to battlefield success". What a disgusting example of intellectual cowardice.
Nothing always leads to battlefield success, so it's good to see that he's really putting himself out there with the bold claims.
And yet, character, of both leaders and followers, very obviously matters immensely in leadership, and leadership matters immensely in all domains of large-scale human conflict. I am pretty sure that "moral purity", in the sense that he very clearly is framing the term, would not be a very good way of describing the phenomenon, which is why I find his framing choices so execrable. But in actual fact it is obvious that Morale and Morals/virtue/character are pretty clearly linked, and that even central examples of Moral Purity in the sense he frames it have in fact been used historically to build winning armies. Discipline is incredibly important in all forms of military affairs. Commitment. Loyalty. Determination. "The moral is to the physical as three to one." We know what amoral armies look like; there is a reason people don't want to rely on them. And yet, even that last link opens up a whole vista on how morality or its absence change war, how morals/character/virtue cannot be done without, the lengths leaders must go to in generating makeshift analogues in their absence, all in the context of a problem that, by itself, greatly illustrates the reality of decadence as a sociopolitical force.
More recently, we have the truism that "no one is going to fight a war on behalf of an economic zone." While we haven't tested this principle hard yet, I know which way I'd bet.
I reiterate: This is propaganda, and worse it is stupid propaganda. You should not trust him to describe or diagnose "cults" of any description, and you should re-evaluate whatever lessons you have drawn from his writings.
I think perhaps instead of weak men, it would be more correct to say bad men, as you seem to run with later in your post. I think a more central way to look at it is the one Zvi identified in his Immoral Mazes Sequence; good times allow and to some degree require intermediation of reality by social systems, enabling negative-sum extractive enterprises exploiting the mismatch between what's legible and what's true, which (may) eventually consume more than all of the societal surplus leading to collapse (which then resets the maze level, as mazes are not viable in unintermediated reality).
Agree with your characterisaion of Devereaux, though.
I love this.
I can take credit for the phrase, but not the idea; as noted, the idea is from Zvi (that sentence is essentially a summary of this post in that sequence).
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