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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).
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.
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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