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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.
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.
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.
That seems to be the core of the issue, then. You can't have a meaningful debate about a specific thing being caused by "ambient cultural softness", if you think the very concept is incoherent.
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