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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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An attempt to summarise the decadence discourse

This has been the most interesting debate on the Motte for several months, possibly because it is only tangentially related to the main thrust of the US culture war. Given the messy debate across multiple top-level posts with various allegations of strawmanning, I thought it was worth trying to isolate what we still disagreed on.

Given that this started with a discussion of Brett Devereaux's Fremen Mirage thread I am going to call the sides broadly in favour and broadly against Devereaux's thesis pro-D and anti-D for brevity's sake. I am decidedly pro-D, but my goal in this post is to identify consensus and disagreement, not to engage in the debate.

Things both sides appear to agree on

(At least within the local Overton window)

  • The most literal, stupid interpretation of "hard times make strong men" - i.e. that growing up in material poverty makes you a better soldier, is straightforwardly false. Richer societies normally (but not always) produce better soldiers than poorer ones. We don't agree how many people posting versions of "hard times make strong men" on Twitter believe this literal, stupid, wrong interpretation - the pro-D side suspect large numbers of them do, the anti-D side think that the pro-Ds are strawmanning.
  • Civilisations don't last for ever. Eventually good times are replaced by hard times, and hegemons cease to be hegemons. Thus any prediction of the form "good times make X, X makes hard times" is likely to come true eventually - including the instant case where X is "weak men".
  • It is possible for states to become militarily ineffective in a way that is not immediately obvious. States which this has happened to will collapse surprisingly quickly if attacked by a determined (if not particularly strong) enemy. The states most at risk of this phenomenon are powerful states that have enjoyed an extended period of peace. When it happens, it looks like good times making weak men in the ex-hegemon and hard times making strong men in the periphery.
  • Moral factors and human capital matter in war, and one of the way militarily ineffective societies sometimes lose wars is by producing large, expensively-equipped armies which then can't or won't fight.
  • The process where this happens is gradual, over timescales of at least a generation and sometimes longer.
  • It is very hard for a state which has become militarily ineffective in this way to recover, but it can take a long time for the collapse to come if the state was sufficiently hegemonic before it became militarily ineffective.
  • This is roughly the popular meaning of the term "decadence". (And "decadence" doesn't have a technical meaning distinct from the popular one).
  • This may have already happened to the United States of America. It has almost certainly already happened to the countries of Western Europe.
  • The trope maker for this process is the Roman Empire (and later the Western Roman Empire after Diocletian splits the Empire), which was militarily ineffective by 410AD at the latest and ceased to exist as a result in 476AD.
The disagreement
  • Pro-D think that "decadence" is a word like "dormitive virtue" which people use to sound sophisticated while obfuscating their lack of understanding of the phenomenon they are talking about. Anti-D think that the popular meaning of "decadence" describes a well-understood process and the connotations of the word accurately reflect what is going on in a decadent society.
  • Pro-D think that the way societies become "decadent" is complex and multifaceted, and is sufficiently different in each case that trying to define a single overarching model is fruitless, but it probably has something to do with the decay of institutions. Anti-D think that the process is sufficiently simple and sufficiently consistent over space and time that something like Kipling's Gods of the Copybook Headings serves as a timeless warning comprehensible to normies, and the primary driver is moral decay of individuals (and particularly the individuals who are supposed to be warrior elites).
  • Anti-D think that decadence has specific visible markers:
  1. Decline in "warrior values" or "warrior ethos"
  2. Increased emphasis on physical comfort among elite-class males
  3. Decreased willingness to inflict physical pain, including reduced use of harsh training and corporal punishment
  4. Decline in sexual morality and/or traditional gender roles
  5. Increasing willingness of people who are not battle-tested warrior elites (including priests, merchants, politicians, women, REMFs etc.) to interfere with military decision making
  6. Left-wing politics more generally, including increased wealth redistribution. (I'm not sure what fraction of anti-Ds would include this)
  • Pro-D think this is a bunch of hooey, and that militarily ineffective societies can and frequently do maintain the outward appearance of warrior ethos and traditional masculinity right up to the point where they lose on the battlefield.
  • Anti-D think that material wealth is at least somewhat causative of a decline into decadence such that "Good times make weak men" is a useful way of thinking about the process. Pro-D think decadence is associated with wealth because we call military weakness in rich societies decadence and military weakness in poor societies something else.
  • Devereaux argues in another thread that Rome declines as a result of the 3rd century Crisis and that all earlier decadence-callouts in the Latin literature, including Cato the Elder's call for austerity and Augustus' bachelor tax, are therefore wrong. Anti-D think that the early decadence-callouts are accurate early warnings of a long-term negative trend. There hasn't been much discussion of Rome specifically on the Motte.
Things that are peripheral to the disagreement
  • The subthread about Sparta. Devereaux thinks Sparta is Stupid Evil, most but not all anti-Ds think there is something to learn from Sparta about cultivating martial virtue.
  • @SecureSignals digression about dysgenics.
  • An argument about whether the Somali fraud ring in Minnesota should be counted as a successful invasion.

One funny part of this whole discussion is that the weak man/skinny nerd archetype (that Anti-Ds claim have been overproduced as a consequence of America's "good times" and will be responsible for America falling into its next "hard times") probably make up the majority of people employed at LockheedMartin, Raytheon et al. designing and building the advanced weapons, aircraft and warships that are actually largely responsible for the overwhelming nature of America's global military superiority today.

This is part of why I object to Hegesthism - modern warfare requires a lot of competent people, only a few of which need to be high-testosterone "lethality"-focussed "warfighters". When Hegseth gave that speech, you could see the admirals and Air Force generals thinking "will I have to get into a ship/plane where critical maintenance has been done by a sailor/airman who skipped sleep to do the extra PT and range time this clown has just called for"

Lockheed is juicing their numbers when they say that 20% of their workforce "has a direct connection to the military" but you should assume that former DoD personnel are overrepresented there. If I had to guess, they're probably more and more overrepresented there the further up you go, simply because getting a security clearance is a hassle and DoD personnel often have one already, even if you don't account for the 4-star-to-defense-industry pipeline. And relevant to this discussion, those security screenings will weed out people who are decadent (people with drug or alcohol habits, a lot of personal debt, even things like overseas travel can be a red flag.) There are LOTS of nerds in the defense industry (and in the armed forces) but I think the ones working on classified programs are much more likely to present as someone who is traditionally masculine - in the sense of "married weekly churchgoer with kids" - than the, uh, nerd population at large.

Now, I'm on the record saying that it's okay for skinny nerds to exist and, as someone who's been to an army boot camp graduation ceremony in the past decade or so, I'll be the first to tell you that the actual army itself has a lot fewer six-foot-two bodybuilder bros and a lot more short women than you might expect. But I don't think the idea that a bunch of nerds in the basement of Raytheon build all the weapons for the knuckle-draggers in the DoD and two are kept as separate as the peas and mashed potatoes on the plate of your toddler is really accurate.

Lockheed is juicing their numbers when they say that 20% of their workforce "has a direct connection to the military" but you should assume that former DoD personnel are overrepresented there.

Definitely. It's been a long time but when I was in the industry we had quite a few retired military. Some were doing a second career in nerding and nerd-wrangling, others had always been nerds (e.g. one had also been a NASA mission control specialist) and were now on the civilian side. I've run into far fewer since I got out of defense.

others had always been nerds (e.g. one had also been a NASA mission control specialist)

Man, the word "control" there really changes the significance of this sentence.

Yeah, a "mission specialist" is an astronaut. I didn't work with any astronauts. He was one of the guys you see sitting behind desks in the old NASA launch videos.

Fair enough, that' an interesting perspective.

The difficulty of obtaining a security clearance is overblown. I lived with a former sailor for ten years. During that time, he failed to file his taxes for half a decade, got a DUI, and was charged with assault for beating his elderly mother with a belt. He kept his clearance despite not reporting any of this.

There are a few hard disqualifiers. A felony conviction is one. Using illegal drugs in the past year is another (Reddit loves to complain about that one). But clearance holders aren’t squeaky clean.

Depends on the level. The military gives out Secret clearances like candy. Getting a Top Secret or higher (which is what defense contractors usually need to work on the DoD projects) is a lot more selective. (And not reporting an arrest or conviction is pretty much an automatic loss of clearance if they find out. Your sailor friend may have just gotten lucky.)

The "weak men" aren't skinny nerds designing weapons. Skinny nerds designing Juiceros maybe; skinny nerd NEETs playing videogames definitely.

I'm not sure about skinny nerds, but "Chubby nerds are the kind of weak men we don't want in the military, even if they can design weapons" isn't a strawman - the Secretary of Defense (d/b/a Secretary of War) publicly espouses it.

Hegseth is a weak man. In the other sense of the term. But the weapons designers mostly aren't in the military; they're civilians at defense contractors.

The nerds building war machines are also the nerds playing Magic the Gathering or Pokémon in their 30s. I will agree that nerds in the defense industry tend to be more conservative than in the tech industry, which is where Motte users seem to spend most of their time.

Maybe I just missed it, but I'm a bit surprised that nobody seems to have mentioned the demographic collapse of Sparta, which was a significant driving force behind her demise.

https://spartareconsidered.blogspot.com/2014/05/missing-mothers-cause-of-spartas-decline.html

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/c3qsil/did_the_spartans_suffer_from_demographic_decline/

https://heartiste.org/2014/01/09/the-want-of-men-was-their-ruin/

...

The linked article said that a history of ethnic conflict made more effectively warlike societies, not material poverty. So it doesn't advance the simplistic version of "hard times make strong men" that Devereaux claims to refute and which both sides of the Motte debate agreed was wrong.

The open question is to what extent "material poverty makes strong men" is a strawman, or whether it is a problematic false belief held by large numbers of dumber decadence theorists (including online Sparta bros like Roman Helmet Guy) even if Motteposting decadence theorists are too smart for it.

I don't think anyone disagrees with "extensive experience of battle makes strong men" - we can see it happening in real time in Ukraine.

...

Okay, you know what? That's enough. Your record is long and terrible. Over and over the mod notes say "Escalate and/or permaban next time." Yet each new infraction comes just long enough from the last one and is just low-level enough to make us hesitate to press the permaban button. At this point, I think it's calculated and you're playing us for chumps.

Get lost.

...

Brett Devereaux, as usual, is correct but simply doesn't address the claims of his opponents, and claims that his- entirely correct but also entirely separate- argument leaves them vanquished.

Rome fell due to the crisis of the third century, high-GDP states beat weaker ones 90+% of the time, and Sparta really was stupid evil. However, the crisis of the third century was not due to the collapse of democracy(which after all, took place three centuries before). 'Decadence' resulting in instability in the Roman army that leads to the crisis of the third century, and as a contributing factor to the Roman fiscal woes which made it so difficult to recover from, is entirely compatible with his argument.

Excellent work, I can imagine going through all of that took a while. You've inspired me to attempt to summarize my own stance (though it should be beyond obvious that I'm pro-D here). Here it goes.

I think the anti-D position is importantly wrong in a way that makes it worse than useless as a predictive instrument, even though the underlying phenomenon it is trying to gesture at is real.

Devereaux's Fremen Mirage thesis is roughly: "hard times make strong men" is empirically false, or at least false in the ways that matter. The people who repeat it as a civilizational warning are not doing history. They're busy writing fanfic about masculinity and finding patterns in tea leaves.

Note that plenty of people here responded with their own versions of the Hard Times theory. My responses to them depend on the specifics of what they're claiming, and I often agree with them to a large extent. And of course, plenty of people went off on tangents, it's the Motte, that's the charm.

Also note that Devereaux attacked a specific form of the Weak Men idea, and chose to describe it as the "Fremen Mirage" to distinguish it from other variants. He was careful to precisely define the problem space and set a scope. Since FCfromSSC attacked Devereaux because of his take on the Fremen Mirage, I chose to defend the same theory.

Unfortunately, that scrupulousness saved neither of us from accusations of strawmanning. Once again, that's the Motte. My take is that it is fine to attack a strawman when you:

a) Acknowledge what it is you're doing.

b) The strawman form is the most popular/virulent version of the meme.

c) The theory itself is so vague that there's scope to read just about anything into it.

My position is more specific than "decadence isn't real." It's that "decadence" functions like a Rorschach test that people try to use as an X-ray. You show it to someone and they see what they already believed about gender, comfort, sexuality, and civilizational virtue. This feels like insight because it comes with historical anecdotes. It does not hold up when you do an exhaustive analysis, as Devereaux attempts.

The core claim, stated as precisely as I can manage

If "good times make weak men" is doing real explanatory work, it needs to cash out into something like: given observable feature X of a society (comfort, or declining warrior ethos, or whatever), we can predict military underperformance at some later date. Not "we can explain past failures by invoking X retroactively." Predict.

At the absolute bare minimum, it should reproduce when applied to other datasets. Historians are not ML researchers, so it's fine to train on the test, if people can pick a specific test and ask why your model does poorly.

The anti-D markers that were listed in the thread (declining warrior values, comfort-seeking elites, reduced corporal punishment, changing sexual mores, non-warrior political influence blah blah) do not survive this test. Losing societies often kept all of these features. Winning societies often lacked them. If the markers can be present without failure, and absent without success, they are not diagnostic markers. I don't think they're particularly suggestive either.

War keeps getting won by boring things. Logistics. Industrial depth. Proper training and readiness drills. Finding smart commanders and firing the idiots. Institutional learning. Ability to absorb and replace losses at scale. These things can fail in rich societies and in poor ones, in gender-traditional societies and gender-nontraditional ones, in societies with brutal military culture and in societies without it.

Objection 1: "You're strawmanning. Nobody means literal poverty makes better soldiers."

Maybe not everyone does. But the meme, and a significant fraction of the people repeating it, slides between three versions without marking the transitions:

The dumb-literal version: poverty and hardship produce better fighters. This is straightforwardly false. Richer societies with better logistics, nutrition, and training win wars against poorer ones at a rate that should embarrass the meme. Devereaux demonstrates this, I bring up the more recent example of the US vs Japan to show it holds in the modern era. US vs Venezuela to show it works like last week, at a time when people are claiming the US is decadent and in decline.

The institutional version: extended peace erodes military readiness and learning, so previously strong militaries can become surprisingly fragile. This is true and interesting and basically what Devereaux argues.

The moral-aesthetic version: comfort makes elites decadent, decadent elites carry moral corruption into the military, and that is the real driver of collapse. This is the one doing the emotional work of the discourse, and it is the one I am skeptical of.

The problem is that people take the credibility established by the true institutional version and use it to launder the unfalsifiable moral-aesthetic version. If you want to argue the institutional version, you should be happy to abandon the vocabulary of decadence entirely, because that vocabulary smuggles in the moral version whether you want it to or not.

Objection 2: "You're ignoring morale and willingness to fight."

I am not ignoring it. I am refusing to let it carry more weight than it should.

Yes, armies that won't fight lose even when well-equipped. That's real, just look at the ANA. The question is what explains that unwillingness. Anti-D has a tidy answer: moral decay, comfort, the wrong values. I think that answer is usually backwards. Institutions rot first. Training becomes unrealistic because realistic training is politically difficult and expensive. Leadership selection becomes adversarial to competence because political loyalty is safer to reward. Legitimacy erodes because the wars being fought stop being obviously necessary. Morale is one of the downstream casualties of that process, not the initiating cause.

The best way to arbitrate is: if we gave you a society with "good warrior values" but the institutional rot I am describing, would it fight well? I think the answer is mostly no. Which means warrior values are not the load-bearing variable.

Objection 3: "But the markers are real."

The list of decadence markers (warrior ethos, harsh training, sexual morality, non-warrior interference, comfort-seeking elites) is an aesthetic inventory, not a diagnostic instrument. To make it one, you need to show that these markers appear reliably before military failure and not in cases of military success.

I am not aware of evidence for this. What I observe is:

Plenty of militarily failed societies maintained harsh masculine culture until very close to collapse. Late Byzantine military culture did not look like a gender-studies seminar. Neither did the Confederacy. Neither, for that matter, did Imperial Japan.

Plenty of successful military powers have had what anti-D would call decadent features in their civilian life. The markers are not reliably predictive. This means they are not markers.

The deeper issue is that "warrior ethos" is cheap to fake and cargo cult. A military can look exactly like what anti-D admires, in terms of culture, aesthetics, and rhetoric, while the institutional substance has hollowed out. See the typical Banana Republic, Eastern European nations, the typical African tinpot dictatorship.

Conversely, a military that looks soft by anti-D metrics can be highly effective because it has realistic training, good logistics, and functional command. Focusing on the aesthetic is actively misleading.

Objection 4: "Rome proves the point."

Rome is the trope-maker and also a trap.

The Latin moralists were calling decadence in essentially every period of Roman history, including during peak Roman military effectiveness. Cato the Elder was alarmed. Augustus passed bachelor taxes. Moralists in every era found evidence of softening. This should make us deeply suspicious of treating moral alarm as a calibrated early-warning instrument. If your instrument fires regardless of whether the thing it is detecting is present, it is not detecting the thing. I can't imagine anyone better placed than the literate elite of the time for gauging "decadence", if they do a piss poor job, you're probably doing the same.

Devereaux's narrower claim is that Rome's real military turning point comes after the third century crisis and its institutional consequences, not from moral decay radiating outward from elite bathing habits. I find this more plausible because it has an actual mechanism: fiscal crisis, political instability, and the breakdown of the legionary training and command system. That is what turns a world-conquering military into one that cannot defend Italy.

Anti-D wants the early moralizing to be accurate early warnings. But "accurate early warning" requires that the warning not fire constantly independent of whether the thing occurs. Continuous false positives are not warnings. They are a genre, and the genre is "old men complaining that young men are not what they were." I believe you can also call it "crying wolf", including when you see a sheepdog. Why yes, seeing beasts with sharp teeth and four legs correlates to sheep going missing, but you're losing something important if you don't care to interrogate further.

Objection 5: "You're dismissing the moral dimension entirely."

I'm not dismissing it, I'm discounting it. I am trying to give it the correct causal weight, which I think is "downstream of institutions, not upstream."

The distinction matters for policy and diagnosis. If moral decay is primary, then the intervention is cultural: restore warrior values, punish softness, reform gender norms. If institutional decay is primary, then the intervention is structural: fix training pipelines, improve logistics, reform command selection, rebuild industrial capacity. These point in very different directions.

The reason I am hostile to "decadence" as a frame is that it tends to direct energy toward the cultural intervention while the structural problems remain unaddressed. You end up with a military that looks and talks like what the moralists wanted, while the logistics are still broken.

Where the disagreement actually lives

I think anti-D wants a warning that normies can act on: "good times make weak men" is memorable, it is emotionally resonant, it gives people something they can picture and a villain they can name (the soft, comfort-seeking elite who has lost the warrior spirit). I understand the appeal.

My objection is that this appeal is precisely why it is dangerous. It compresses messy institutional failure into a story about moral character, and moral character stories are the enemy of structural diagnosis. Bad takes on history inform bad takes on the present. You can't fix a training pipeline by convincing people that softness is sinful. You cannot fix a logistics system by shaming elites for enjoying hot baths. The story feels true but does not help. Sometimes, it harms outright, if people feel inspired to advocate for shock therapy.

"Decadence" is not a cause. It is a post-hoc aesthetic wrapper we apply to certain kinds of state failure, selected specifically because it flatters the person applying it and lets them feel they saw it coming. If you must, break it down into components like the level of corruption, birth rates, enlistment, political turmoil etc etc. Decadence as a blanket term only muddles the picture.

What I think is actually true

Great powers can become militarily fragile in ways that are non-obvious from the outside, and this fragility can persist for a long time before it is tested.

Human factors matter in war, but they are mostly downstream of institutional competence, incentives, and legitimacy rather than upstream of them.

The most common error in this discourse is treating what looks martial and masculine as equivalent to what actually produces combat power. These can diverge dramatically.

If anti-D wants to change my mind, I would ask them to do one thing: state the decadence model in a form that could be falsified, then tell me what evidence would make them update. Historical examples for large empires works just fine, but you need arguments for which it doesn't hold for counterexamples too. If the answer is "nothing, because the cycle always turns eventually," then we are not doing history anymore dawg. Telling someone they're going to die eventually is true, but not helpful as medical advice. Sensitivity and specificity matters.

Also note that Devereaux attacked a specific form of the Weak Men idea, and chose to describe it as the "Fremen Mirage" to distinguish it from other variants. He was careful to precisely define the problem space and set a scope. Since FCfromSSC attacked Devereaux because of his take on the Fremen Mirage, I chose to defend the same theory.
Unfortunately, that scrupulousness saved neither of us from accusations of strawmanning. Once again, that's the Motte. My take is that it is fine to attack a strawman when you:
a) Acknowledge what it is you're doing.
b) The strawman form is the most popular/virulent version of the meme.
c) The theory itself is so vague that there's scope to read just about anything into it.

As at least one of the people who accused you of straw-manning I have to say that I do not share your positive evaluation of Devereaux's "scrupulosity", and that it is my opinion that if you are going to build your thesis around attacking a strawman, it is only fair for those you are arguing against to dispute it on that basis regardless of how you may have justified it to yourself.

The distinction matters for policy and diagnosis. If moral decay is primary, then the intervention is cultural: restore warrior values, punish softness, reform gender norms. If institutional decay is primary, then the intervention is structural: fix training pipelines, improve logistics, reform command selection, rebuild industrial capacity. These point in very different directions.

But why are there issues with training pipelines, why was industrial capacity lost, why are there all these crap commanders who deflect responsibility?

In the US, training pipelines are inevitably going to be recruiting lower quality leaders since Americans are getting increasingly less interested in military service (hence a shortfall of recruits). The military is an inherently dangerous, demanding, stressful role. Lives are at stake. You don't get paid that much either compared to civilian jobs. There's a shortage of patriotism and dedication to ideals that gets high quality recruits to join and stay in the military for a long time. Soldiers fight best when they believe in something beyond dental plans and a free education.

There's also a culture issue in selecting commanders. It's a very bureaucratic, boxticking process which selects for suck-ups and master blame dodgers. Not necessarily people who know how to take risks and fight well:

See here: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018/july/mission-command-and-zero-error-tolerance-cannot-coexist

Industrial capacity - this was jettisoned by greedy executives looking for higher margins and opportunistic cost-cutting by Pentagon officials. Around the 1970s and 80s there was a shift in corporate culture towards short-termism and a lack of capital investment in boring industries like steel and shells. Optimistic planners assumed there would be no need to fight slow, attritional wars with large quantities of munitions (despite these being the most important kind of war).

The defence contractors are themselves decadent and slack internally. I watched this long video from a guy who worked there: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FIONXPbIkVo?list=LL

The TLDR of it is that management at Lockheed and NASA was toxic and grossly incompetent, they'd basically treat contractors like fourth-rate 'citizens', make them do all the work and then take credit for it, they'd do absolutely retarded nonsense like try and scale up tech from the Apollo era launchers, they'd lie about what was tested when and by who to keep the flow of money coming in, they'd say that every little change (from the idiots at NASA) required them to start over... Idiot managers would scream at the technical employees for asking questions to cover up their own worthlessness. If you knew what you were doing and tried to obey the rules you were the enemy. DEI made everything a lot worse. The reporting/whistleblowing system was wholly ineffective. This guy sure is disgruntled (and perhaps presents himself as too holier than thou) but, considering the ridiculous stretch of time it took to develop Orion, I'm inclined to believe him.

Institutions are downstream from culture. It isn't neccessarily that a decadent state must be effeminate and wimpy (they can just be addicted to civil wars like Byzantium) but a dysfunctional, short-termist, self-interested culture will naturally degrade key institutions needed for military power. Effeminacy is only one failure mode.

I think divorcing "institutional effectiveness" from "morality" is a wrong choice. While it's true that part of institutional effectiveness is just the process of learning to do hard things, an institution with poor moral values will be a less effective one. Look at China - or for that matter look at the procurement/sustainment scandals in Western countries. Men without virtue are not the only thing that makes a military weak. But they do make it weaker.

Your monograph here acts as if for a theory to be correct, it has to be the only explanation for something. So if someone says "decadence is bad for military readiness and societal cohesion" you say "no, look at This Example!" Now, if someone is claiming that a lack of decadence is the only factor in military defeat, then it's fair to raise that objection (and that person is being silly). But the operative question, at least for people who understand that not everything is monocausal is really "would This Example perform better or worse if they were decadent/lacked certain virtues/were soft men/etc.

state the decadence model in a form that could be falsified, then tell me what evidence would make them update.

Sure. I proposed a sort of modification of the Hard Times Cycle suggesting it made more sense if you conceived of the cycle as telling a story about virtue rather than strength (or, if you prefer, suggesting a different, more nuanced understanding of strength), and using Kipling as a brief example of how we might conceive of the traits that virtue requires.

My theory is that virtue is better for a society, including a military. Militaries will perform worse if their ranks are full of the corrupt; so will societies. What evidence would make me update would be evidence that organizations and societies full of cowardly, lazy, lying people performed just as well or better as societies full of brave, hard-working, honest people.

I think anti-D wants a warning that normies can act on: "good times make weak men" is memorable, it is emotionally resonant, it gives people something they can picture and a villain they can name (the soft, comfort-seeking elite who has lost the warrior spirit). I understand the appeal.

My objection is that this appeal is precisely why it is dangerous. It compresses messy institutional failure into a story about moral character, and moral character stories are the enemy of structural diagnosis. Bad takes on history inform bad takes on the present. You can't fix a training pipeline by convincing people that softness is sinful. You cannot fix a logistics system by shaming elites for enjoying hot baths. The story feels true but does not help. Sometimes, it harms outright, if people feel inspired to advocate for shock therapy.

"Decadence" is not a cause. It is a post-hoc aesthetic wrapper we apply to certain kinds of state failure, selected specifically because it flatters the person applying it and lets them feel they saw it coming. If you must, break it down into components like the level of corruption, birth rates, enlistment, political turmoil etc etc. Decadence as a blanket term only muddles the picture.

On the one hand, I concede that there's a risk of using the Hard Times Cycle to "fix the wrong problem." On the other hand, fingering "decadence" is a problem is good in part because it is so actionable. Behaving in decadent ways is bad for you and while most people have little to no control over what their military apparatus is doing, they do have some control over what they are doing. And I would argue that advantage of fingering virtue as something that elevates a society and makes it more fit is that not only is it true, but it's actionable at all levels, both the institutional and the individual.

And, as @FiveHourMarathon points out, the historical method of creating virtue is intentionally creating a sort of limited Hard Times even amongst a society living in Good Times. That's also how the military creates institutional effectiveness: boot camp is supposed to be hard. Which, if you look at it from that lens makes your concerns (you specifically mention a lack of training!) and the concerns of the anti-decadence people the same thing - although I should hasten to clarify that I do not think that hard times in and of themselves create effective training - here I would diverge from the simplistic version of the meme. But I do think that effective training often requires hard times.

And, as @FiveHourMarathon points out, the historical method of creating virtue is intentionally creating a sort of limited Hard Times even amongst a society living in Good Times.

I tend to think that the problem with the Good Time/Hard Times/Decadence memeplex is that the unit of analysis is typically wrong. The luxury or thrift of the majority of people don't matter, for the purposes typically considered. What matters is really the leadership class of a society, both as aspiration and model for the lower classes and as the most important engine of society. We're concerned about the actions of the Patricians, not the Plebs.

A society experiencing "hard times" can still have an elite focused on creature comforts, a society experiencing "good times" can still have an elite that focuses on The Strenuous Life. The concept of decadence within the western tradition has always been a warning against the former, normally coded in terms of oriental despotism, and towards the latter.

I think divorcing "institutional effectiveness" from "morality" is a wrong choice. While it's true that part of institutional effectiveness is just the process of learning to do hard things, an institution with poor moral values will be a less effective one. Look at China - or for that matter look at the procurement/sustainment scandals in Western countries. Men without virtue are not the only thing that makes a military weak. But they do make it weaker.

I do not dispute this claim. My claim is that "decadence" is a very bad term for the specific "moral" failings that lead to bad performance: corruption, fief-building etc. I gave the example of the US having literal ships dedicated to the storage and production as ice cream. Giving your soldiers ice cream in the middle of the warm is "decadent", so is flying out super-star actors and singers to entertain them. Even Tier-1 operators do not operate like 40k Space Marines: asking them to be ascetic monks is neither necessary nor helpful.

My theory is that virtue is better for a society, including a military. Militaries will perform worse if their ranks are full of the corrupt; so will societies. What evidence would make me update would be evidence that organizations and societies full of cowardly, lazy, lying people performed just as well or better as societies full of brave, hard-working, honest people.

Why would I disagree? All else being equal, a military and nation that are less corrupt will tend to beat one that's more corrupt. That is not the crux of the matter, since all else is never equal.

And, as @FiveHourMarathon points out, the historical method of creating virtue is intentionally creating a sort of limited Hard Times even amongst a society living in Good Times. That's also how the military creates institutional effectiveness: boot camp is supposed to be hard. Which, if you look at it from that lens makes your concerns (you specifically mention a lack of training!) and the concerns of the anti-decadence people the same thing - although I should hasten to clarify that I do not think that hard times in and of themselves create effective training - here I would diverge from the simplistic version of the meme. But I do think that effective training often requires hard times.

If anyone can demonstrate examples of militaries that somehow don't have harsh bootcamps but do well, I'd be surprised. But the Fremen Mirage claims that it is civilizational softness that is the primary factor, producing military softness as a consequence (though that is also important).

On the one hand, I concede that there's a risk of using the Hard Times Cycle to "fix the wrong problem." On the other hand, fingering "decadence" is a problem is good in part because it is so actionable.

I stand by precisely the opposite claim. Decadence is defined as:

moral or cultural decline as characterized by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury

If the US military works just fine when the soldiers have plenty of "pleasure" and "luxury", as long as they're actually locking in and fighting when they need to fight, then you need more specific terms for the actual problem(s).

Making your men suffer needlessly doesn't make them a better fighting force. Beatings, hazings, being starved on the field do not improve their fighting capabilities, or else vatniks would conquer the world. US drill sergeants aren't allowed to beat up their men anymore, and nothing of consequence was lost (cleaning toilets with toothbrushes is still effective punishment). If they're suffering purposefully during boot camp or in training, that is a whole different story. I don't think soldiers shouldn't need to do demanding physical training or military drills that require shivering in the cold.

But the Fremen Mirage claims that it is civilizational softness that is the primary factor, producing military softness as a consequence

There's something salvageable here, I think.

Simo Häyhä -- the White Death, the deadliest sniper ever -- was an avid hunter all his life. It wasn't his profession, per se; he was a farmer's son. But surely it was in part the desire for meat to supplement a farmer's diet that prompted his hunting and the hunting culture of rural Finland more generally. From there, it turned into a hobby; during his compulsory term in the militia -- which, importantly, does not train snipers -- he won a number of marksmanship competitions. I think it's fair to say that by the time he eventually did receive formal training as a sniper a decade later, he was already an exceptionally skilled shooter. And while he was the best, he was far from the only: Finnish snipers were unusually effective all through the war.

But would that have been the case had Finland not had a hunting culture? It still does to this day, but one could imagine a number of ways it might not: concerns over gun violence, ecological worries, meat getting cheap while other hobbies got more tempting.

Perhaps a more pointed example: Britain's success in the Napoleonic Wars largely came down to its navy, and its navy's success came down to the competence of its sailors. Officers' commissions were bought and sold in the British army of the period, but not so in the Navy: in that branch, they wanted competent officers. To have any chance of achieving the rank of captain, you were expected to start at the age of 12, and there were multiple stages of reportedly quite difficult exams (in that many failed, including boys from very privileged backgrounds) to rise in the ranks. It was by all accounts a fairly miserable and dangerous experience, and one that lasted not the thirteen weeks of bootcamp but thirteen years before one might be offered command over a small sloop. Why did English gentlemen -- and it was generally gentlemen -- subject their sons to that?

And, naturally, it was worse for the seamen, very difficult, high-skill labor for terrible wages (often as not months late) under brutal discipline and with all the dangers of combat. How did they train these men? This was not an easy job. Well, they largely didn't; they just conscripted civilian sailors. The 'merchant navy' was broadly acknowledged as the source of Britain's naval dominance, the core of their national security strategy despite being a civilian institution.

There are other examples I could mention -- English longbowmen, or the horse archers that have already come up a couple times -- but I think the point is clear: not every skill of military relevance can be learned in a few months at the outbreak of war. A society that encourages the development of those skills in civilians have a real advantage in acquiring competent soldiers. Not an unbeatable edge, but there's no such thing; it's substantial enough to consider, at least.

Of course, these skills include things like literacy and math, not central examples of martial virtue. These days, it might well include video games skills as preparation for drone piloting. But other ones are: declines in gun culture, fitness, self-reliance, patience, wilderness survival, persevering in the face of adversity despite bad food and little sleep, and so on are just the sort of thing grouchy old veterans are talking about when they say society has gotten soft.

To stake out the boundaries of this motte: soldiers often have to perform difficult tasks in harsh conditions, some with very high skill ceilings, and if a nation has a well of civilians who've spent years and years performing similar tasks in similarly harsh conditions to draw on, they've got a leg up on nations that don't. This is much narrower than (some) claims about the corrosive effects of ill-defined decadence (not even going to try to steelman the focus on sexual morality; I wouldn't know where to start), but I think the core concept is preserved. It's not 'any and all privation is good, because it makes people tougher,' but it's also not as trivial as 'fighting makes people better fighters.' There's a region where, demonstrably, improving (some) people's circumstances would make them worse soldiers.

If anyone can demonstrate examples of militaries that somehow don't have harsh bootcamps but do well,

It doesn't refute the argument because the myth of Ghurkas is that they are forged by their harsh mountain enviroment before they reach bootcamp, and the reality is that they go through a tough selection process (particularly British Ghurkas given how few we now recruit and how much of a standard-of-living bump it is compared to rural Nepal), but Ghurka bootcamp notoriously involves no striking of recruits by instructors and minimal yelling.

*It is very hard for a state which has become militarily ineffective in this way to recover, but it can take a long time for the collapse to come if the state was sufficiently hegemonic before it became militarily ineffective. [...] *This may have already happened to the United States of America. It has almost certainly already happened to the countries of Western Europe.

As a fellow pro-D, I would take a bit of issue with that framing.

In 1700, Europe contained the most advanced military forces of the planet. While there is some debate over why they had such an advantage over other continents, it seems rather clear why most polities within Europe participated in the military race: the ones were conquered in very short order, interstate anarchy and all that.

But in two world wars, we did learn that the winning move in industrial warfare is not to play if you can avoid it, and have had the most prosperous eighty years ever when we decided not to reneg on the border between France and Germany once every generation or two using artillery and poison gas.

Sure, the fraction of our GDP we invest in the military is pitiful and would make the Prussians of old rotate in their graves, but that is because we do not anticipate a huge ROI from it, neither do we want to conquer nor do we anticipate having to defend ourselves against conquerors -- what Putin gained as a threat with his ambition for territorial conquest he lost as a threat by not being able to defeat Ukraine. Modern Russia simply is not going to conquer Europe in the way people thought the USSR might, nor does it seem likely that the US or China would want to invade.

I am sure that when the first amphibians crawled to the land, there were naysayer fishes who thought it was a terrible idea, that the one constant in life was water, and that their useful fins would give way to useless feet and eventually even the webbing of their feet would atrophy, and eventually there would be a flood and all the foolish animals who had left the water behind would drown. As a land-dwelling animal, I am not convinced by them. Sure, the oceans might rise and we might have to retreat, some of us might drown, but simply embracing the oceans and growing fins would not work out for us. (While the cetaceans are doing fine (Problematic sexual behavior aside), they also did not get around to building an industrial civilization yet, and I do not like fish.)

So when I hear people proclaim that Europe is doomed because in its decadence it decided not to keep top-notch armies, I can not help but think of them as the priests of the Goddess of Cancer chanting "KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER". The Goddess of Everything Else has shown us how to live with our neighbors without sacrificing millions to Cancer in the trenches every few decades, and we will not go back to the Old Ways of doing things.

Europe had such an advantage because of its technological worldview stemming from the influence of Western Christianity. There's a historical pattern where technology gets invented in China or the middle east or somewhere, gets used marginally, and then is brought back to Europe by Italian traders, where the guildsmen perfect it and Europeans adopt it en masse. Your link talks about firearms, and fair, they're an immediately militarily relevant example. But it also applies to the printing press(literally perfected mostly due to the Roman Catholic Church's habit of buying every copy of relevant books they could get their hands on leading to a supply crunch- the printing press only makes sense as a technology when large clients are placing bulk orders), spinning wheels, and clocks. Spinning wheels in particular is worth paying attention to because it was work done by low-status women who weren't willing to do sex work, the cheapest labour in any society that has ever existed, including ours. Europeans just really liked new technology and mechanization.

Isn't it also that when you've got a ton of different kingdoms and principalities and duchies and fiefs and city-states, that it's a lot easier to find someone willing to take a chance on a new technology (and then once adopted, it'll spread) than convincing a single strong ruler choosing to adopt and spread a new and potentially destabilizing technology?

The pattern was well established before India and thé Islamic world became consolidated, and east Asia also went through significant fragmentation during the era.

I feel like Scott must have intended the Straussian reading that The Goddess of Everything Else is just the Goddess of Cancer but better at her job.

Given that this started with a discussion of Brett Devereaux's Fremen Mirage thread I am going to call the sides broadly in favour and broadly against Devereaux's thesis pro-D and anti-D for brevity's sake.

This whole comment is very confusing because Deveraux himself is the contra of the original point being debated, so the anti-D side is the pro Hard Times side etc.

I thought that D means Decadence [causing the fall of empires] here, not Devereaux.

Huh. Maybe I'm the idiot.

Devereaux argues in another thread that Rome declines as a result of the 3rd century Crisis

"This led to the debasement of currency and a breakdown in both trade networks and economic productivity"

I'm surprised you didn't mention the incredible debasement of the currency, especially since it fits into one of our other decadence examples: Weimar Germany.

It doesn't figure in the "material prosperity makes men soft" version of the decadence critique because that is specifically about a loss of martial virtue and not commercial virtue. But in the pro-D model of "decadence" - i.e. progressive institutional rot masked by the rewards of past success - both commercial and martial virtues decline in parallel and government deficits financed by money-printing and the resulting rapid inflation are often among the symptoms.

The cynical reason why people who understand economics don't include this on a list of symptoms of civilisational decline is that it turns out that the optimum inflation rate in economies where most people are wage-earners living in mortgaged houses is slightly greater than zero, and we don't want to give ammunition to the goldbugs who insist that 2-5% annual inflation compounded over 50+ years is a civilisational catastrophe.

Eventually good times are replaced by hard times, and hegemons cease to be hegemons. Thus any prediction of the form "good times make X, X makes hard times" is likely to come true eventually - including the instant case where X is "weak men".

This isn't valid logic. We can infer (after adding an unstated but natural assumption or two) that at least one prediction of that form is (at least sometimes) true, but not that any prediction of that form is sometimes true.

Consider the counterexample: "good times make carnivorous bunny rabbits, carnivorous bunny rabbits make hard times". Not obviously forever false, but not likely (I think - what's Colossal Biosciences working on these days?) to become true, and definitely not entailed by the premises.

Good point. The logic only stands up if X is something vague that is only identified in the rear view mirror, like "weak men" or "decadence". The post has been up for long enough that I won't correct it.

I don't understand this focus on "warrior ethos" in the modern world, it seems badly misguided.

"Warrior" seems like a better description for gang members than professional soldiers.

Ever since WWI wars between governments have been all about long range capabilities, like aircraft and artillery (and ICBMs in the Cold war). You don't want your artillery man to have a warrior ethos. You want him to be a mix of gym bro, accountant, and auto mechanic.

When governments are fighting insurgencies, or just groups of people, the importance of artillery declines a lot. But I'm still not sure "warriors" are a good description of the type of soldier you need. You need a mix of police officer and diplomat. A "warrior" sounds like a soldier that will rile up the population even more with misdirected acts of violence.

Can anyone charitably explain this "warrior" obsession?

Can anyone charitably explain this "warrior" obsession?

My civilian understanding:

"Soldier" is centered on process, regulation, drill, standardization, War as science/industry.

"Warrior" is centered on prowess, performance, results, war as, for lack of a better term, art, an anti-inductive, chaotic process that cannot adequately be codified.

Soldiers typically generate success by consistently stacking small advantages and snowballing them into an insurmountable advantage.

Soldiers typically generate failure by following the process in situations where the process is a bad fit, or at their worst following a process that is just straightforwardly bad.

Warriors typically generate failure by taking high-risk gambles and losing, and at their worst doing so with "high risk gambles" that are just straightforwardly a bad idea that process would have warned them against taking.

Warriors typically generate success by disrupting the enemy's process, creating out-of-context problems and then capitalizing on the enemy's failure to efficiently manage them.

Look at the American Military over the last few decades, both how it fights and how it sustains itself. Would you say that its biggest problems are coming from following process too loosely, or too tightly? With the caveat that the problem is very complicated, I'd argue the latter. The Navy's current woes seem pretty clearly to arise from a widening gap between process and reality. The Afghanistan/GWOT failure seems pretty clearly to have been a process failure through and through. Failure to anticipate and keep in step with the drone revolution seems to have likewise been a process failure.

This shows up in other fields as well. Take NASA and SpaceX. Which is the better performer? Which fits more easily into "Warrior", and which into "Soldier"?

The people obsessed with "warriors" think we have too much process, past diminishing returns and into straightforward loss, and we need more performance.

I think much more simply, the conception is that "soldier" is an occupation, and "warrior" is a social class. A soldier's execution of his duty is because of the contractual and occupational obligations foisted upon him. A warrior fights because it his nature.

I think this is a fair-enough way to divide "soldier" and "warrior", but a lot of people who are using the term and see value in the term are not using it in this way. Particularly, I think the people arguing that a "warrior ethos" is needed are arguing based on something pretty close to the logic above, and not on occupation or social class. Likewise, it seems to me that they often argue that warrior ethos should be taught/acculturated, not merely located.

I was composing a response while you posted this, but I think its still relevant for your comment:

https://www.themotte.org/post/3564/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/413729?context=8#context

Perhaps because of the long range capabilities you describe, governments have ended up fighting insurgents an awful lot. (Obviously insurgencies go back centuries, I am not claiming they are a new innovation caused by the invention of missiles.) Even in Ukraine (a very artillery-heavy war between one of the top #3 military powers and probably one of the top #10 military powers) point-blank combat with firearms is still very relevant. I can't vouch for it, but I was just reading the other day that (despite all the drones, bombs, and shells) about 5% of casualties in Ukraine were caused by small arms fire. That 5% isn't insignificant, it's the last-mile violence that's achieving the political ends of the states in question.

In either context, elan is going to be extremely helpful. The US just got a big geopolitical W in Venezuela because, basically, a bunch of dudes were willing to fly at night in helicopters to seize the leader of a country who knew they were coming in his own army base. Russia might have gotten a massive W at Hostomel due to the elan of the VDV - they were foiled in part by fancy technology (the US SIGINT apparatus, as I understand it) but, at the last mile, the guts of the Ukrainian defenders who were willing to attempt to push them out of the airport, which may have scrapped plans to establish an airbridge, and the failure of the Russian ground troops to link up with the VDV at the airport (which might reflect poorly on their "warrior ethos" or what have you, I am not sure of the details there.)

Either way, troop quality makes a big difference. You could describe that troop quality by referencing the "warrior ethos," I think, but I am not convinced that is the best way to describe it. I think there's a lot of very good and valid criticism of the "cult of special forces" in the United States, but at the end of the day having a bunch of guys who are acculturated to violence is pretty helpful. Whether or not "warrior" is the correct way to describe them, I suppose, is a semantics question - the word doesn't give me the vibe you describe, but I will cop to being leery of the idea of professionalized soldiery.

I had quite a few responses talking about the definition of soldier vs warrior. So I'm responding to @Shrike, but this is also relevant to nearly everyone that responded to me: @gog, @Mantergeistmann, @PokerPirate, @Grant_us_eyes, @coffee_enjoyer, and @MadMonzer

I think the distinction between warrior and soldiers in my mind is where their capacity for violence comes from.

For a soldier the capacity for violence comes from without. They are trained and drilled repeatedly to enact violence. They are trained to obey orders to a fault, and when the order comes to enact violence they will obey. They'll need an ideology that allows for their violence to be righteous and correct. They will also form tight social bonds with those around them, and protecting them will also allow them to enact violence. When the war ends and they go home their problem will be PTSD. They may be haunted by the violence they enacted, or the violent situations they were placed in. But they can also put the war and the fighting behind them and live normal lives.

PokerPirate quotes a US military thing that I think perfectly describes a soldier's ethos, despite it being called a warrior ethos.

The United States Military Academy at Westpoint has literally been training artillery men to have a "warrior ethos" since forever. They define it as

I will always place the mission first.

I will never accept defeat.

I will never quit.

I will never leave a fallen comrade.

They will obey orders, regardless of how difficult, and they will maintain the group loyalty that allows an easy path to violence.

For a warrior the capacity for violence comes from within. Through either repeated exposure or personality compatibility they are fully capable of enacting interpersonal violence on others. When the war ends and they come home, their problem will be that they miss the excuse for violence. They will seek other excuses for violence. They will have trouble living normal lives, because the desire for interpersonal violence will spill out far more often.

I think within a modern military there is definitely a contingent of "warriors". You definitely want such men in special forces, or in any groups that see heavy close range combat repeatedly. But I still think that mainly what you want is men with a soldier's ethos. After all, a soldier's violence will always be pointed where you want it. A warrior's violence can be pointed anywhere they wish including up the command chain, or at civilians.

Too many warriors in a society is a bad thing. They end up as gang riddled or honor culture hell holes. Where young men are inculcated into violence and warriordom as soon as they get out of puberty. They'll fight each other for sure, but they'll also beat the snot out of all the women and kids around them as well.

I think these are useful and helpful definitions that point to clusters of ideas. It seems necessary to me to center the definitions around capacity for violence. Masculinity is its own thing, and women seem attracted to both soldiers and warriors. Being willing to enact change seems like the wrong definition for warrior, because I think its the tools that matter. The tool of a warrior is violence, the tools of a propagandist are ideas, both are willing to enact change but calling them both warriors seems to darken rather than enlighten.

PokerPirate's quote makes me think this is all just a semantic misunderstanding. If the US military and Pete Hegseth mean what I think of as "soldier" when they say they want a "warrior" ethos then I withdraw any objections. Words are important and I hate euphemism treadmills, but I've learned to stop arguing over such things.

PokerPirate's quote makes me think this is all just a semantic misunderstanding.

Everything about this Pro-D/Anti-D nonsense is definitely semantic misunderstanding and we're all wasting our energy on the right dressing for this stupid word salad. Let's get back to more interesting material.

“Warrior” in western countries connotes bearded SOF soldier with plate carrier and suppressed M4 - manly men. I think that’s actually what all this is about. The Fremen debate is not about history, it is a valorization of traditional masculinity in a society where tradmasc is fading, and Devereaux (posts cat pics, plays vidya, skinny nerd, spent his life reading and it didn’t pan out) wants it to be true that masculinity is not advantageous to society (and by extension, to individual men). People here are taking the bait like they would if someone wrote a big article about how akshually curves are hot and therefore fat women shouldn’t lose weight. The argument is really over competing visions of masculinity- it has nothing to do with Rome or Somalia.

I dunno if this is true, but if it is, it's a bad motivation.

While I do think that at its core masculinity implies a responsibility to be willing to use force to defend the good if necessary - and thus all men have a certain responsibility to embrace the capacity for violence - it's a big world and it's okay if some guys are skinny nerds who read a lot.

Perhaps due to cultural fragmentation fights over these sorts of things will increase or at least run relatively high until there's a decisive cultural break or one side "wins."

While I do think that at its core masculinity implies a responsibility to be willing to use force to defend the good if necessary - and thus all men have a certain responsibility to embrace the capacity for violence - it's a big world and it's okay if some guys are skinny nerds who read a lot.

I mean, it's a big world and fat chicks get laid all the time too. I don't know that it's irrational for them to want to improve their status despite that fact.

It's also okay to be a skinny nerd iff the situation isn't so bad as to justify the deployment of force at scale and the entire point of the meme is that the growth in the number of such men will make it necessary. He has reason to strike back.

Yeah this is fair.

It's also okay to be a skinny nerd iff the situation isn't so bad as to justify the deployment of force at scale and the entire point of the meme is that the proliferation of such men will make it necessary.

I guess what grinds my gears is that (as many people in the pro-Devereaux camp have pointed out) the military isn't just comprised of "bearded SOF soldiers" even though the bearded SOF soldiers are an important part of winning the war. I think the correct response (if you're a skinny nerd facing Hard Times) isn't to tear down the bearded SOF guys, it's to go "hey how can I chip in?" That might look like becoming a bearded SOF dude, but it might look very different, and that's okay.

Not everyone can be a 6-foot-2 god of war, but in truly desperate times pretty much everyone can do something. During World War Two they even put teens and seniors in Civil Air Patrol aircraft to spot submarines. This might not be as glamorous as being a fighter pilot, but it is fundamentally an honorable thing to do.

Granted, Devereaux doesn't live in Hard Times. At least not yet. (Admittedly, I am interacting with the Devereaux in Gog's imagination, who might be different from the real deal.) But just because you're a comparatively soft guy living in comparatively easy times doesn't mean you must inevitably tear down hard guys. In fact, if anything, you ought to want them to be harder and tougher to protect your comfort. Which is in fact the way that prosperous nations often go, shifting away from citizen-soldiers to professionalized armed forces, which I think has a lot of practical benefits but potentially also some drawbacks.

Sure, but just as you wouldn’t start quoting cholesterol studies to a woman claiming that skinny girls are akshually unattractive, because you’d grok what she was actually talking about, all this drone-Rome-Ireadhistory debating is missing the point entirely. That’s not what any of this is about. It’s nerds-vs-jocks all the way down.

You don't want your artillery man to have a warrior ethos. You want him to be a mix of gym bro, accountant, and auto mechanic

You also need him to be willing to man his gun even when outgunned, to keep fighting when those around him are being blown to bits. Now, maybe the soldier mentality and sense of discipline will be enough, like for AD Wintle:

On his first night a shell burst near him, splashing over him the entrails of his sergeant (to whom he had just been introduced). Wintle later admitted to being petrified. As the bombardment continued, he dealt with his fear by standing at attention and saluting. As he later wrote, "Within thirty seconds I was able to become again an Englishman of action and to carry out calmly the duties I had been trained to perform".

Sure, I'd much rather that sort of "soldier" than a warrior! But you're not necessarily going to get that sort of person in the US Army, and certainly not easily and in large numbers. You're much more likely to be able to get guys who'll want to fight for the sake of fighting, even when they're losing.

There's a follow-up here on cameraderie, and where that comes into play, but it's been ages since I've read McPherson, so I'm not the guy to get into it.

You don't want your artillery man to have a warrior ethos.

The United States Military Academy at Westpoint has literally been training artillery men to have a "warrior ethos" since forever. They define it as

I will always place the mission first.

I will never accept defeat.

I will never quit.

I will never leave a fallen comrade.

I graduated from USNA and I can testify that the Navy/Marines very much try to instill a warrior ethos as well in their officers.

I will always place the mission first.

I will never accept defeat.

I will never quit.

I will never leave a fallen comrade.

If that's the warrior ethos, then I've had several team leads and CEOs who tried to instill a "warrior ethos" in us software devs. No offense, but it's fairly clearly a warrior ethos in name only, and has little to do with anything that would historically be recognized as such.

Maybe the problem is your conception of the term?

What I observe in this thread:

A - "people wanting a 'Warrior Ethos' is stupid. Why would people want it? Warriors are violent and dangerous, we want less of them."

B - "Because Warrior Ethos is not primarily about being violent and dangerous. It's a term for an approach to handling unbounded chaos that is generally useful in all manners of high-stakes, high-demand endeavors. War is just one of the most high-stakes, high-demand endeavors, so it's the trope-namer."

A - "If it isn't about being violent and dangerous, then warrior is a bad name for it."

See here, also.

In the US, we have a common trope of the C-suite executives hiring "leadership training" from former Navy SEALs. So it doesn't surprise me that you've had them trying to instill warrior ethos in software devs.

And to say that the US Army's idea of a warrior ethos "has little to do with anything that would historically be recognized as such" seems ridiculous to me.

Also the ubiquity of business books claiming inspiration from Sun Tzu.

If you've got fallen comrades in software development

  1. Probably you need better electricians or

  2. Maybe you actually ARE warriors.

We don't, but I guess that American Artillerymen haven't had any in quite a while either. Doesn't matter though, because we still do regular drills for what to do in case someone keels over.

Does carrying a mate, who's had a few too many, count as not leaving behind a fallen comrade?

...

Depends how you define the term 'warrior'.

Wikipedia: 'A warrior is a guardian specializing in combat or warfare, especially within the context of a tribal or clan-based warrior culture society that recognizes a separate warrior aristocracy, class, or caste.'

Okay, fine. When you think of the term 'warrior', one figure that comes to mind is the Samurai; landed lords, skilled in warfare, but also educated in politics as well as more intellectual pursuits. Knights, in the European tradition, were likely similar.

(And, yes, I'm sure there's people more educated in this that could correct me. I'm not going for historical accuracy; I'm going for modern perception.)

So when people say they want a Warrior when it comes to killing, they're saying they want their killers smart, intelligent, with a broad depth of education and eclectic skill.

To use a more immediate, modern example, Mike Vining comes across as pretty smart cookie, and if you called him a warrior, I doubt many would argue.

Okay, fine. When you think of the term 'warrior', one figure that comes to mind is the Samurai; landed lords, skilled in warfare, but also educated in politics as well as more intellectual pursuits. Knights, in the European tradition, were likely similar.

The issue is that a modal modern soldier is a bit more like a squire, or a wakashu/kosho in the Samurai tradition, than a person of eclectic skill. The most important thing for many is that they keep their equipment in running order, follow SOPs diligently and keep accurate records.

Of course, you have fighter pilots and SOF that exercise the kind of unstructured problem solving your referencing. But even that makes the point -- we need 25 aircraft squires support crew for each plane. And for them, it's more about being a virtuous mechanic than being a warrior.

Maybe one way to square the circle is that the goal of the organization and the virtues that make it possible are not always the same. The tip of the spear accomplishes the goal, but the determinants of success are in creating, fielding, maintaining and supplying it.

Well, yes.

But there's an arguement to be made that even the common grunt wants to be a Warrior, despite not being one. It's an aspirational goal.

A minor example thereof, from what I've heard, is that the special forces operationg during the GWOT had relaxed grooming standards to better fit in with the locals(long beards and whatnot). And the common grunts bitched about it cause they wanted to look like the high speed low drag guys, and people in charge gradually relented.

So, yeah. You're going to have the bulk of your army/military be common grunts. But that doesn't mean they don't want to be a Warrior as opposed to said grunt.

Aspirationally sure.

But even then, maybe they valorize the warrior types, the determinant of the overall mission success is their ethos as soldiers.

I guess i don’t object to the claim about what they want, i object to the implication it has on what makes a successful/lethal military.

Can anyone charitably explain this "warrior" obsession?

To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go

To right the unrightable wrong
To love, pure and chaste, from afar
To try, when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star

This is my quest, to follow that star
No matter how hopeless, no matter how far
To fight for the right without question or pause
To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause

What is dreaming the possible dream?

Eat, shit, sleep, die.

The steelman, in my view, is that a “warrior personality” is required to make positive changes in a nation which result in more wellbeing, especially longterm positive changes involving non-intuitive and complex moving parts. Trivial examples are “courage to tell gay men to stop having sex early in the aids epidemic”, “courage to tell people not go to Chinatown early in the coronavirus epidemic”, “courage to research the social contagion model of transgenderism”, “courage to tell the teachers’ union that the phonics approach is superior” —all of these trivial changes require an aggressive man who can bear social reputational costs, ie a warrior. But there are even greater and more important social changes, with issues pertaining to IQ, TFR, and genetics. Someone with a non-warrior personality will never even ask these questions, whereas we need men who will ask the questions and then follow-up with an aggressive campaign to conquer all the relevant organizations so that the truth actually prevails against sweet but poisonous lies and errors.

The non-warriors will waste trillions of dollars in educational funding if the alternative is shamefully insisting that IQ is real. They would be fine seeing 10% of youth cut off their genitals if the other option means promoting a novel etiology and answer to gender dysphoria. They would be fine with American TFR going down to 0 and literally no descendants of Americans left if they otherwise have to question feminism and women’s rights. So it is very beneficial for a society to find a way to produce “warriors”.

I very much agree with you - see Brett Devereaux and the Angry Staff Officer on why modern America, or basically any civilised society (going back to Athens and Rome) needs soldiers and not warriors.

Interesting military history question - who were the last warriors not to get their arses kicked by soldiers?

People who talk about "warriors" either aren't aware of the warrior/soldier distinction, or are hinting at the cluster of wrong ideas that come when you think of yourself as a Spartiate and your political opponents as upjumped women and/or helots. Devereaux calls this cluster the "cult of the badass" which is why I have occasionally used the term "badass" snarkily in the thread.

Can anyone charitably explain this "warrior" obsession?

I expect that in the US context it began with not wanting to use "soldier" to describe someone who fights land battles for pay in the organised service of the state of which they are a citizen because it annoyed the Marine Corps.

As I think about it more some of the confusion with the warrior/soldier distinction might be that soldier is a legal term and warrior is not. And almost no one is careful with their language.

who were the last warriors not to get their arses kicked by soldiers?

Probably the Mapudungu, who maintained independence from modernizing Latin American states on the pampas slightly longer than the Sioux or Commanche did vs the USA.

I expect that in the US context it began with not wanting to use "soldier" to describe someone who fights land battles for pay in the organised service of the state of which they are a citizen because it annoyed the Marine Corps.

I personally blame Dave Grossman, who created the wolf-sheep-sheepdog paradigm. Okay, that might be giving him, specifically, too much credit, but it seems like in the GWoT era, the Army and Marines both started to absorb the idea that military personnel, and especially combat arms, and especially especially Special Ops Dudes were an inherently separate and special class of people. This probably felt justified to a degree, given the way you had an all-volunteer military fighting a permanent war while the civilian population was completely tuned out. Easy enough to buy into the idea of a special martial elite when you come home and there's no visible expression of the nation being at war.

This was hardly universal - I know plenty of current and former military who make fun of this mindset - but it definitely caught on with a lot of people.

(as an aside, while I agree with the sentiment and the overall point, the ASO article is pretty sloppy on some historical details, e.g. longbows did not materially contribute to the decline of armored knights on the battlefield)

This is the common motte-move of just setting the definitions of the terms as an "I win" in advance, in this case by taking everything modern society likes about the military and putting it in the "soldier" bucket and taking everything we dislike and putting it in the "warrior" bucket. I'm comfortable throwing out Devereaux definition (which quickly gets bogged down in epicycles, as when he has to introduce the "mercenary" as a third type one paragraph later) and using ordinary language. Realistically, if you look at how people use the words, and look at successful modern soldiers, they're someone who can be a soldier when things are going smoothly and a warrior when the chips are down - when you're in the Ardennes surrounded by krauts, you want a "warrior mentality". Any combat vet who is not a lib blogger will tell you something similar, that's just what the words mean. /u/coffee_enjoyer is largely correct about what people mean by a "warrior mentality" politically, but it's also worth noting that a lot of the actual tip of the spear guys sign up in hopes they will get their warrior moments (and often end up having unpleasant encounters with reality/the VA).

Interesting military history question - who were the last warriors not to get their arses kicked by soldiers?

Happens commonly in Africa, not unrelated to their low quality of soldiering. Otherwise, the Arab Revolt is a good example, given its centrality to all this Fremen stuff.

Interesting military history question - who were the last warriors not to get their arses kicked by soldiers?

The Taliban.

My read is that Pushtunwali was a warrior ethos and the OG Taliban were soldiers (they were recruited from seminaries, and 1990's-era Taliban propaganda claimed they were theology students first and fighters second) beating on warriors when they conquered Afghanistan the first time. But a good candidate answer - clearly the Taliban had become less soldierly and more warrioresque by 2021.

It is possible for states to become militarily ineffective in a way that is not immediately obvious. States which this has happened to will collapse surprisingly quickly if attacked by a determined (if not particularly strong) enemy. The states most at risk of this phenomenon are powerful states that have enjoyed an extended period of peace.

I disagree with this framing. Can you (or someone anti-D) name a single example? The Roman Empire? The Eastern Roman Empire? The Holy Roman Empire? Song China? Ming China? All of them spent centuries in a gradual and violent decline. Saying hardcore barbarians destroyed them would be like saying pneumocystis jirovecii was the reason so many gays died in the US in the early 90s.

Aztecs and Incas? While the Spanish were super hard men, it feels a bit like cheating to call them virtuous barbarians, given that their opponents were literally Stone Age civilizations. If an alien fleet with vaguely cruciform ships attacked Earth tomorrow, kidnapped Trump with a tractor beam and then shot down 999 ICBMs and tanked the thousandth one, I certainly wouldn't say the problem lay in our moral decadence.

McNamara's Idiots, sending low Iq people to Vietnam while capable people managed to dodge the draft.

Sending mediocrely talented soldiers to Afghanistan for deployments that last a few months while spending exorbitant amounts of money keeping them comfortable instead of having high quality people spend years in Afghanistan and building relations with the locals.

The fringes of the US empire have been nibbled by a lack of conviction by the American elite class.

The rules of engagement coupled with casualty tolerance in Afghanistan prevented any long term victory.

Different interests latch onto different causes but they are all obviously connected. The occupation failed because Wester troops were garrisoned in bases while the Taliban controlled much of the countryside essentially uninterrupted for the period. Many ‘soldiers’ never left base and most who did did so very infrequently for largely choreographed ‘patrols’ that anyone could avoid if they wanted to. Why? Because troops were terrified of IEDs and ambush attacks, which in turn led to a paranoia that was only reinforced by rare trips out of base (psychologically this creates a fortress mindset in a soldier in which every trip outside base is an expedition into a hostile land). This tied into the broader situation that, because the US DoD and (even moreso) European armies had extremely low casualty tolerance to a degree unheard of in almost any historical or other current conflict, fighting a guerrilla enemy that stationed soldiers in houses and villages and schools was essentially impossible.

There were two possible ways out of this situation.

The coalition could have swallowed much higher casualty rates and stationed soldiers and support personnel in town and villages, forced a larger degree of cultural transformation / imperialism on particularly rural natives, and used a form of summary justice (ie simply executing anyone suspected of assisting the Taliban in any capacity and the entire immediate family or tribe, which would involve plenty of false positives, but that’s wartime) to make cooperation with the enemy much less attractive while making cooperating with the occupying forces much more attractive (since it would no longer be about making a deal with the guys in the military base 10 miles away while you deal with the enemy sympathizers in your village alone).

Or, the coalition could have taken the Israeli approach in Gaza which, while likely still higher in terms of casualty rate than the recent Afghan War (depending on how you calculate it), still involved a relatively low tolerance for soldier deaths on the Israeli side. That would preclude a total victory (Hamas still exists and has many soldiers after all) but - by dropping insane volumes of ordinance on any cultural, communal, religious, social, healthcare, educational and other institutions that might possibly house enemy fighters - you can demoralize a population and slowly reduce both the absolute number of and relative quality of enemy fighters (as more experienced soldiers are killed) even in a high fertility population. This plan would have involved probably the deaths of 5% or so of the civilian population as a direct consequence of the coalition campaign but would, coupled with the targeted killing of all major religious and cultural figures, the reinstatement of the King (not doing this was one of the great failures of the war) and a ban on Afghan civilian government for at least 15 years after the invasion, have had a higher chance of success than the plan that was pursued.

I don't know that Gaza is the example you want to bring up here. I'm not even going to get into why it isn't comparable because it's not exactly a rousing success, even when compared to Afghanistan. The US was able to defeat the Taliban militarily in a matter of weeks, and their resurgence was slow and geographically limited. The problem was political not in the sense that the US was too squeamish about inflicting or taking casualties, but that the administration had no idea what to do when it got there and got distracted with attempts to gin up a war in Iraq. Bush wasn't much of a military guy and relied on Cheney and Rumsfeld for his strategy, which unfortunately meant that they were both overly aggressive when it came to starting wars and overly cautious when it came to executing them. Rumsfeld, in particular, wanted to do things as nimbly as possible. This makes sense when you consider that he was never a high ranking military officer and that most of his early experience in dealing with high level military affairs came on on the political side during the Vietnam and post-Vietnam eras, when public opposition to simply throwing troops at the problem developed. Meanwhile, more recent military operations in the 80s and 90s showed that public support would remain high with quick operations with minimal personnel and few casualties.

What he failed to realize is that 9/11 basically gave him a blank check. Political support was nearly unanimous (and Barbara Lee said she would have voted for the resolution had it been limited to Afghanistan), nation-building wasn't yet a dirty word, and he could have sent a half million troops in to garrison the place and nobody would have cared. Then they compounded the error by excluding the Taliban from participation in any future government and by neglecting to rebuild the Afghan military, similar to what they would do in Iraq. While it seems stupid to give defeated terrorists a seat at the table, the political reality is that they ruled the country for years and had some level of popular support. If they were truly popular enough to control the Afghan government, you'd find that out quickly and be able to act accordingly. If there support was low but they were operating on strength and fear, you could rest assured that the legitimate government could keep them under control. If they had just enough support to be a factor in government then they would have an escape valve. By blackballing them entirely, they ensured that the level of support would never be known and that the only way their supporters could influence government would be through armed rebellion, setting up the perfect conditions for an insurgency that they couldn't control.

And they'd still have had a chance at success if they had simply sent enough troops to patrol the countryside and stop Taliban reformation before it started, largely by just having enough of a presence to form relationships with the locals. Instead, they sat on their bases while everyone's attention turned to Iraq and the Taliban slowly gained traction in large parts of the country. When they figured this out they tried to stamp it out, but at this point they were being reactive rather than proactive, and they were slowly increasing troop counts Vietnam-style. By the time Obama took office Iraq had become so unpopular that Afghanistan had become the Good War and he increased troop counts to 100,000, but by this time the situation was out of control.

I'm not saying any of this would have necessarily worked, just that it had a better chance of working than your proposal that they just needed to kill more people and take more casualties. People seem to forget that things were relatively quiet in Afghanistan for a few years after the initial invasion, and it looked like a stable government might form. All the while, though, the Taliban was reforming under the Coalition's noses, because they simply didn't have the necessary coverage. Whether this kind of coverage was even possible is an open question. This is like trying to patrol Texas if the biggest city is Houston minus a couple million people and the second-biggest city is El Paso, and everyone from Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio, plus the 2 million taken from Houston, are scattered across the rural parts of the state. And the groups I described comprise half the population. If they're truly determined to resist your rule, then there's nothing you can do to stop them. I don't even know what kinds of numbers would be involved for this. I remembered Rumsfeld nearly having a heart attack after one of the generals told congress it would take over 400,000 troops to occupy Iraq, but Iraq is significantly more urbanized than Afghanistan, so I'd expect it to take quite a few more than that.

There seems to be a theme among conservatives here—and I'm not accusing you of this personally, since I can't tell if you're actually advocating for the options you proposed—of calling out the alleged "squeamishness" of the American public in terms of inflicting casualties on foreigners, taking casualties ourselves, and engaging in behavior that would generally be classified as atrocities. The upshot of this is that they blame American military and foreign policy failures on such a squeamishness. But there's another kind of political squeamishness that they don't talk about, which is when the policies required to win would be ones they themselves oppose on principle. Were we too squeamish about allowing Islamic terrorists a seat at the table, even if doing so may have served as a litmus test of their popular support and offered a relief valve for their political aims? Were we too squeamish in our reluctance to spend money? If Bush had said at the outset that he expected a minimum of 500,000 troops would be stationed across Afghanistan for the next 20 years minimum and would be slowly drawn down over the following 30, that all troops serving in Afghanistan would be expected to learn the local language of the area where they were serving, and that we would send hundreds of billions of dollars in economic development funds annually with absolutely no expectation of there being any kind of payoff, because this afforded Afghanistan the best chance of stability, what do you think the raction would have been? Even in the wake of 9/11, this would have been too much. But would it have meant we were too squeamish to want to win?

the reinstatement of the King (not doing this was one of the great failures of the war)

I'll never understand why people think monarchical restorations are a good idea. I can't think of any examples of this ever working, and it gets worse the closer you get in history. The Stuart Restoration is probably the most successful, but it only lasted 28 years, and they had only been out of power for about a decade. The Bourbon Restoration lasted 15 years. And honestly those are the only two examples I can think of because the rest aren't true restorations of exiled kings returning. I don't see how a guy who was nearly 90 and hadn't set foot in the country in 30 years was going to be the man of the hour to save Afghanistan from the Taliban. Yes, he was well-liked among all ethnic groups. This is what happens when half the population can't remember your being in power and the other half is looking through nostalgia-tinted glasses. That kind of goodwill is burned quickly when you're actually in power and have to make real decisions, and you haven't done anything remotely resembling statecraft in decades. It also would have seriously pissed off Pakistan to the point that it would have jeopardized the US's ability to use the land corridor, which would have made matters significantly worse than having Karzai, who was also popular at the time of his election.

nation-building wasn't yet a dirty word

Even before 9/11, "nation building" was enough of a dirty word that popular opposition to that exact phrase helped give the Presidency to ... checks notes ... George W. Bush.

I think Bush did realize that 9/11 gave him ... not a blank check, but a ton of latitude ... but he also realized that he was cashing in that latitude just by reversing his campaign's attitude and launching major foreign wars, and so he was naturally (if mistakenly) reluctant to go all the way and admit that any such war wouldn't actually be worthwhile unless and until we built a non-hostile nation in place of the one the war knocked over. We instead just prayed that the Northern Alliance would step right into the power vacuum and develop such a nation for us, and so instead of sending in your 500,000 troops to rebuild we just sent in ... 5,500? Roughly one person for every 3,500 Afghan people? That sounds like such a tiny force that I'm tempted to look through the wiki history for vandalism, but in any case it was enough to handle the "knocked over" phase of the war admirably; it was only afterward that we should have either left entirely or gone in on rebuilding en masse rather than hoping to get away with the "advisory" gambit alone this time.

simply executing anyone suspected of assisting the Taliban in any capacity and the entire immediate family or tribe

If 'not assisting the Taliban' doesn't protect you from being murdered by coalition forces for assisting the Taliban, I'm not sure that that would have the desired effect. (cf. how Chen Sheng realised that 'not trying to overthrow the government' wouldn't protect him.)

The Taliban might have had less support if Allied commanders hadn't ordered their troops to ignore the rape of children by Afghan warlords with the 'it's part of their culture' excuse. ("In this house, General Napier is a hero. End of story.")

I think there is schoolboy history going on which suggests that the collapses are faster than they actually were - I foolishly thought that the Manchu conquest of Ming China was much faster than it was, and the traditional British schoolboy thought that Rome fell suddenly in 410AD because both the first sack of Rome and the loss of Britain happened that year. If you pointed out Romulus Augustulus and 476AD he would say that the Western Roman Empire fell suddenly in 410AD and the Emperors between 410 and 476 were local warlords with ideas above their station.

Note that this is a general problem of dating the fall of former hegemonic empires - the imperial title gets assumed by the warlord who happens to control the old imperial capital (and possibly several pretenders as well) so it can look like the empire continued existing for a while after it functionally fell. When did the Western Roman Empire as Diocletian and Constantine understood it cease to exist? mu.

But the canonical examples of declining "decadent" empires are indeed the Western Roman Empire after the 3rd century crisis, the Song before the Mongol conquest, the Ming before the Manchu conquest, and the Ottoman Empire after about 1800. Another obvious example is the Achaemenid Empire before the conquest by Alexander the Great - the events of the Anabasis prove that Achaemenid Persia was already militarily ineffective 70 years before Gaugamela. That one is an example where the collapse is sudden and surprising.

Qing Dynasty China in the first Opium war is a good example. The Manchus were archetypal hard men when they swept past the Ming Dynasty to take control, and even by the time of the Opium War there was still a great emphasis placed on martial prowess by the Manchu minority.

The empire was still massive and they considered themselves without peer. By the time of the war there was no doubt that the technological gap between Europe and China was becoming large; this was not a case of there being a massive technological gap. China had no trouble obtaining modern materiel through trade nor was there any sense in which they could be outnumbered. The trigger for the war was essentially part of the superiority complex of the Middle Kingdom and both Britain and China likely viewed them as the greater empire at the time. Britain's small expeditionary force probably had no ideals of gaining territory or forcing terms upon China. They merely wanted redress for the initial insults and to gain fairer terms for future trade.

Yet once the sides met, there was only ever one winner. There was not a question of the Chinese fighting poorly. And while the gap between the two navies was a big factor, it still seems likely that China could have repelled Britain's attack had they had they any kind of competent strategy or been able to bring enough of their force to bear.

So there we have it: two empires, alike in size and strength, both very much in their decadence phases, with none at the time believing the Brits would be so thoroughly victorious.

So there we have it: two empires, alike in size and strength, both very much in their decadence phases, with none at the time believing the Brits would be so thoroughly victorious.

Two empires, both alike in decadence,

In fair Hong Kong, where we lay our scene,

From recent grudge break to new mutiny,

Where foreign blood makes foreign hands unclean.

both very much in their decadence phases

Lolwut? The first Opium war was 1839-1842. Decadence critiques of the British Empire don't really get going until the Crimean War in the 1850's, and are not particularly convincing until much later. As late as 1897, Kipling writes Recessional as a warning against future decadence, not a critique of present decadence.

The decline and fall of the British Empire is not one where the Roman-style decadence theory makes sense. The British Empire is still vigorous and expanding up to and through World War One*, and is militarily effective in a way decadent empires are not during World War Two. The Empire is abandoned, mostly voluntarily, before the classic signs of decadence appear at home.

* Getting into a stalemate when fighting a peer competitor is not a sign of decadence or military incompetence. Gallipoli was a mistake, but not the kind of mistake a decadent empire would make. WW1 Britain invented tanks and anti-submarine warfare, and General Allenby and Lawrence of Arabia's operations against the Ottomans were dashing British imperialism of the old school.

I would say that the decline is classically dated to begin in 1873 with the start of the long agricultural recession, during which the American economy rapidly overtook the British within a period of perhaps fifteen years after the Civil War. The height of the empire in terms of landmass was in the mid-1920s, yes, but this has a lot to do with the outcome of WW1 in erstwhile Ottoman lands, the distribution of some German colonies and US isolationism than it does imperial expansion; America had been wealthier per capita for 30 years and more populous for 50 years by then.

I'm taking decadence as being 'population are relatively wealthy with few material concerns'. I guess it would be more accurate to state that both countries were very much not in the 'hard times'.

I'm taking decadence as being 'population are relatively wealthy with few material concerns'.

That's "good times". Decadence, in the meme, follows that.

Yes. The point I am making is that it is hard to find the point at which the British become "weak men" until after the Empire collapses. Indeed, the Falklands War demonstrates (to the surprise of the American elite at the time) that the British could still field enough strong men to achieve spectacular military success as late as 1982.

When we French out of Helmand province in 2014 (seven years before the Americans French out of the rest of Afghanistan) you can make a decent case that it is the first war the British lost in a century (the previous defeats being the post-WW1 interventions in Russia and Turkey).

If you look for "Fremen" and end up with the British Empire in 1839, the country that lorded over literally one fifth of the world at the time, then I doubt you can find a good central example at all.

Maybe England in 1587 is a better example of a plucky underdog dealing a surprising defeat to the hegemonic power, but it took Spain 200 more years to fade into irrelevance as a great power.

You really ought to check the disparity in force in the first Opium War.

So I think this parallels Pareto's Foxes and Lions theory / metaphor. Lions can take bold action. Foxes are clever and can see ahead. To function institutions need a mix of both. Over time Foxes push out the Lions using clever tricks. Eventually the Foxes face a problem where clever tricks don't work and it becomes a major crisis.

My own thinking is that people who are too physically comfortable tend to become purely socially focussed. This leads to things like "I choose the bear" where they haven't really absorbed that bears are real and can kill them.

Colder climates used to have a check with weather. The winter kept people aware that too many wrong moves could lead to their death. Technology has mostly solved that for people living in cities.

California is a good example. They decided to abandon their long term plans to expand the reservoir system as the population grew. Victor Davis Hanson talks about this frequently. There's not really a counter argument to the point that "more people need more reservoirs". But that involves giving money to the wrong sort of people to do the wrong sort of work. So they always seem to start screaming about how it's pointless due to climate change.

I don't really think the change needed is a deep shift to something like a warrior ethos. However something much smaller like a major grid failure that cut off power to Sacramento for two weeks would teach some important lessons about keeping institutions functional to all the government workers.

I think this is an important point that touches on a difference between two theories of "decadence" which sometimes have very different policy implications but which e.g. Gods of the Copybook Headings tries to merge. Pro-Devereaux would cite this as proof that decadence is an incoherent concept, from an anti-Devereaux perspective it is an interesting sub-debate.

@DradisPing is setting out an idea of decadence where a society loses the ability to build and fight at the same time, with the inability to build generally becoming visible first. The Sparta bros have a different idea of decadence where a decadent society is one that focusses too much on building at the expense of fighting.

I've been pushing basically the same line, although I didn't remember (may not have heard, though it rings a bell) the Foxes and Lions metaphor.

Yes, decadence as I see it is not so much about warrior values as about antisociality becoming in fashion, with the obvious results that negative-sum behaviour on a large enough scale results in a negative total. To take Babylon 5's obvious example of decadence (the Centauri), what is decadent about them is that they're largely run by people like Refa and Cartagia who are focused on their own power at the expense of planetary security. If the Centauri all behaved more like Londo, who on two occasions straight-up asks someone to kill him for his planet's good, then they wouldn't be decadent - they'd just be opulent - and they wouldn't be in decline.

To go through your list:

  1. Decline in "warrior values" or "warrior ethos" - yes insofar as "ask what you can do for your country", no insofar as "everyone should train every day", and the "ask what your country can do for you" side is a problem in the economy too
  2. Increased emphasis on physical comfort among elite-class males - mostly no
  3. Decreased willingness to inflict physical pain, including reduced use of harsh training and corporal punishment - this is kind of a symptom insofar as it might demonstrate sufficient social intermediation to somewhat lose track of reality, but it's not causative IMO
  4. Decline in sexual morality and/or traditional gender roles - here I'd distinguish between stuff that affects birth rate, stuff that blows up society in specific ways, and other shit. Birth rate is causative; you (for the moment) need people to keep the lights on and you can't get them all from immigration without assimilation failure and the resulting disunity. Sexual practices that don't touch birth rate can still have specific failure modes - polygyny, for one, because it winds up with the majority of men having "revolt" as the only plausible way to get a wife, and if there's HIV around it's probably not a good idea to have everyone attend unprotected gay orgies, for another. Outside of this, doesn't matter, and there have been a wide variety of sexual morals throughout history (note here that gay sex doesn't directly affect birth rate as long as people are having straight sex as well).
  5. Increasing willingness of people who are not battle-tested warrior elites (including priests, merchants, politicians, women, REMFs etc.) to interfere with military decision making - no, not this specific case, although as noted there are issues with antisocial people getting power in general
  6. Left-wing politics more generally, including increased wealth redistribution. (I'm not sure what fraction of anti-Ds would include this) - the left is a big tent, and there are a lot of things under it. The salad bowl and grievance politics are a catastrophe. Protest culture isn't quite a catastrophe but is a problem (essentially, protests belong in the "cost" column and not the "benefit" column due to their confrontational nature; they can be worthwhile, but protesting shouldn't be done for its own sake as a fashion statement). Normalisation of exploitation is a catastrophe but is not really specific to the left (there are forms of it the left sometimes enables, and forms of it the right sometimes enables - social media, for instance, is far more prosocial in China than the West precisely because of the much-greater state control of the economy).

This leads to things like "I choose the bear" where they haven't really absorbed that bears are real and can kill them.

Exactly at a certain point the overly financialized/abstractified economy becomes totally unmoored from anything resembling reality, thus decisions are made with a worldview that doesn't conceive of violence being a possibility and runs on 'The meat is made at the back of Costco' logic.

California is a good example. They decided to abandon their long term plans to expand the reservoir system as the population grew.

It's got nothing to do with giving money to the wrong sort of people (??) and everything to do with there not being any worthwhile places left to dam. There's 1400 dams in the state already.

Define "worthwhile". If you get around the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, you could dam several major northern rivers: Klamath, Trinity, Smith, and Eel each could support several reservoirs (there are old plans to build "dam ladders" up those rivers). But that's unpopular, for ecological, indigenous and financial reasons.

You could also just add capacity to existing reservoirs by upgrading the dams. There's many candidates. Again, expensive and unpopular.

Another possibility is that you could desalinate a small fraction of the literal ocean of water sitting next to California; however, this requires a lot of energy, the methods of obtaining which are unpopular.

Yeah, I can see it for municipal water supply. For farming the central valley? Never going to be economical.

Speaking of economical, building reservoirs would certainly be cheaper than building desalination facilities and the power infrastructure they require. But desalination works even when the reservoirs don't get refilled much anymore because of climate change, so maybe they're the right choice anyway.

It doesn't matter, because the reason you can't build reservoirs is the same reason you can't build desalination plants: environmentalists.

Just a question of energy pricing. Zero liquid discharge is possible for desalination plants, it just takes more energy and more CAPEX. And really, all the environmentalist want is that concentrated brine isn't dumped into the ecosystem.

No, what the environmentalists want is for none of this to happen. Whatever means you come up with, they will find a reason to object.

I had some comments I wanted to make in the previous discussion but waved-off because properly addressing the issue was going to be a 1000+ word task and I had other obligations vying for my time.

The short version is that Devereaux seems to have either badly misread Dune or is intentionally misrepresenting it. The simplest and most obvious example of this being that the Fremen of Frank Herbert's Dune are neither "poor", nor are they "unsophisticated". There's a whole sub-plot about them being far more populous and industrialized than the Landsraad initially realize because the Fremen have been bribing the Spacers Guild to keep their settlements on the southern continent from showing up on satellite surveillance for the better part of a century.

I'm also generally skeptical of the idea that Devereaux (or anyone here for that matter) has a sufficiently coherent and intelligent idea of what makes "a good soldier", or what "strong" and "weak" mean in this context to be of any real use.

I think this misreading of Dune is very common, and probably intentional on Herbert's part if Dune is meant to be Lawrence of Arabia in space (the real WW1-era Arabs did not have a secret industrial base, but positing one fixes the plothole caused by Paul Atreides not having the British Empire as backup). The reader doesn't see the material wealth of southern Fremen society (apart from the high-quality stillsuits) in the first book (and, on advice from trustworthy friends, I haven't read the others). Unless you do a word-by-word close reading, you will come away with the idea that there are more Fremen in the south than expected, but that they are just as "Fremen" (in the Brett Devereaux sense) as the northern Fremen.

Incidentally, one of the Spartan royal families claimed descent from the semi-mythical Mycenean House Atreides, so Herbert is also invoking Sparta as part of the trope.

I think this misreading is a product of the adaptations more than anything else. The reader gets to see it, but the movies/TV series tend to either ignore it or reduce it to a couple of throw-away lines.

FWIW I think the first 3 books Dune, Messiah, and Children of Dune are excellent and tell a reasonably coherent and self-contained story about the rise and fall of Paul Atreides, it is after that initial trilogy that things kind of go off the rails. Meanwhile, Brian Herbert's sequels and spin-offs make for decent space-opera, but are really their own thing.

Herbert also deliberately makes the case that "hostile environments create the best fighting men" via his comparisons of Arrakis and Salusa Secondis. Unless we're meant to assume that everyone in-universe who comes to that conclusion is barking up the wrong tree.

To somewhat ludicrous extremes, when the Sardaukur (the supposed uber-warriors) are taking 3-to-1 casualties fighting the Fremen women and children.

Yes, but that's not what ultimately matters. The Fremen victory in Dune is not secured by fighting men in the field, it's secured by long term plans and a superior understanding of the ecology (Paul realising that the Fremen held the spice cycle hostage with the water they had been stockpiling all that time). The fighting men only had to win until Paul could expose their actual victory to all the other actors. Without that, the long-term prospects of the Fremen are dim, even if they can keep winning fights in the desert.

Growing up in a hostile environment is not the same thing as being poor and unsophisticated, and there is a very real sense in which "hostile environments breed the best fighting men" is trivially true. You need to push your limits if you're going to expand them.

It's not as if Hebert limits this to fighting, either. One of the consistent themes in Dune is that humans need explicit pressure of one kind or another to excel beyond their limits. 'Do not create a machine in the image of a man's mind' is no different an aphorism than 'God made Arrakis to train the faithful'.

Like I said, You need to push your limits if you're going to expand them.

I’ve always though “hard men make strong times” Ibn Khaldun Fremen thesis G. Michael Hopf was a bit of a truism. If you plotted a graph with time on one axis and “hard times / good times” on the other, it would be fairly obvious. If the line is continuous, if you can only ever go toward “good times” or “bad times,” then the thesis says nothing. If the line goes up, you’re in good times, and when the line goes down, poof, presto, it created bad times just like we predicted. All it really means is that nothing lasts forever.

Anti-D think that decadence has specific visible markers:

Now, we can check the ur-example of decadence, the example all this debate is about, late Roman Empire how well it check these boxes.

Decline in "warrior values" or "warrior ethos"

5th century Rome was less martial than Republican Rome at its peak, but I do not see less "warrior values" than in Principate when Rome was at its greatest power. (warrior skills and ability are another matter)

Increased emphasis on physical comfort among elite-class males

Ditto. In 5th century, you do not see extravagant luxurious life of the first century.

Decreased willingness to inflict physical pain, including reduced use of harsh training and corporal punishment

If anything, the opposite. In classical Rome, corporal punishment was reserved for slaves and provincials, Roman citizens (about 10-15% of population) were extempt. In late Rome, everyone except tiny elite of "honestiores" legally belonged to the "torturable" class.

Decline in sexual morality and/or traditional gender roles

Sort of - unlike in classical Rome, late Roman women had option to leave their family authority to stay celibate and dedicate themselves to religious life. If you want to make case that nuns (tiny percentage of population) destroyed Rome, do it.

Increasing willingness of people who are not battle-tested warrior elites (including priests, merchants, politicians, women, REMFs etc.) to interfere with military decision making

Again, no evidence of it. In first century, Caligula could divert the army to build bridge over Bay of Naples. No such wild tales from the fifth century.

Left-wing politics more generally, including increased wealth redistribution. (I'm not sure what fraction of anti-Ds would include this)

"Wealth redistribution" in late Rome was from the bottom for benefit of top oligarch class. This is period when free grain supply for city of Rome stopped for good.

Left-wing politics more generally, including increased wealth redistribution. (I'm not sure what fraction of anti-Ds would include this)

This comes from 1980's GOP talking points ("dO yOU kNOw Roman Empire was destroyed by GOMMUNISM?").

Traditionally, virtuous society was seen as egalitarian republic of small self sufficient farmers, and society where handful of oligarchs owns everything and the bottom 99% are mass of dispossessed serfs was seen as degraded and decadent society ripe for picking. No one before Ayn Rand said that Roman Empire fell because it was not grinding down the peasants hard enough.

The Sparta bros are implicitly disagreeing and saying that the virtuous society is one (like Sparta) where there is no limit on the ability of warrior elites to extract the resources they need from their inferiors. Given the overlap between Sparta bros and lost causers in American right-wing politics, and the overlap between Sparta bros and manosphere guys advocating an extractive model of male-female relationships in Zoomer Twitter, I think they might mean this.

I think the idea that a virtuous society is one which supports a warrior elite is old, and the innovation of Christian chivalry is that elite class women and priests are now explicitly protected from warrior elite predation in a way peasants are not. Whether "virtue = share of resources commanded by the warrior elite" or "virtue = egalitarian culture capable of arming and feeding a large militia" depends on whether the military technology in a given society favours a few expensive units or a lot of cheap ones.

"Hard" and "weak" are simply so vague as to make the theory virtually unfalsifiable. And there are so many other factors going into military prowess and conflict that make the connection extremely weak at best. Did the hard times of Vietnam and the 70s make the US better at kicking Saddam's ass, or were the two wars too different for any comparison? Something like the Schlesinger liberal-conservative cycle lays out somewhat clearer parameters.

I didn't read the prior thread, unfortunately, but I'm surprised to see this whole summary without any mention of Douthat's The Decadent Society. Douthat's been the foremost person articulating a criticism of Western or American decadence at the moment, I would have thought, and his definition of decadence is something more like an absence of creative ambition or drive. His short definition is a combination of "economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development".

Thus for him, a decadent society may still be rich, productive, or militarily powerful, but it lacks drive. It lacks a goal or ambition beyond merely continuing on in its current state. In that sense he thinks that a society can be decadent long-term, even on the scale of centuries. With this approach in mind, military weakness can be a sign of decadence, but is not guaranteed to be, and for that matter military strength can be an enabler of decadence. It is possible to be militarily decadent, if one is powerful, devoted to maintaining a strong military and warrior ethos, and yet nonetheless in a kind of cultural stasis.

I find this a more useful, well-rounded concept of decadence than one that just seems like it's based on a vague mental image of wealthy Romans getting drunk and having orgies while the barbarians ravage the frontiers. That may be an uncharitable description, but I think something roughly in that area is what the "weak men make hard times" meme is gesturing at.

Thus for him, a decadent society may still be rich, productive, or militarily powerful, but it lacks drive. It lacks a goal or ambition beyond merely continuing on in its current state.

Then it is another point against counting late Roman empire as "decadent". Late Romans had enormous ambition and drive - to be Christians, to be the correct kind of Christians. People who DNGAF do not spend enormous resources on building churches, and would not bother with ceaseless religious strife and persecution.

I don't make a claim about the fall of the Roman Empire.

My take on the full meme - strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make hard times, hard times make strong men - is mostly just that it's stupid.

That is, taken at face value it is obviously false. Even if you operationalise strong/weak men and good/hard times sufficiently as to apply it to specific historical situations, it fails to bear out predictively. If you try to use it to predict the rise and fall of particular civilisations - say, Chinese or Indian dynasties - it's just not accurate enough.

You can try to nuance the meme enough to make it useful, but it's all epicycles and retroactive interpretation. If an empire fell, per the meme it must have been full of 'weak men', and if one rose or enjoyed good times, it must have been 'strong men', and if you shift around your definitions of strength and weakness enough you can sort of retrofit it into any given situation, but the same definitions usually won't apply to other situations. Alternatively you can retreat into generalities, but these are useless and without insight. It's good when people have a sense of civic duty, or are prepared to endure hardship? It's bad when elites are feckless and irresponsible? That's not particularly insightful.

I do think that decadence is a useful concept and one that we can validly talk about. I also think that it makes sense to talk about common factors that contribute to the downfall of a civilisation, and I think that things like moral or civic character, popular legitimacy or faith in a system/ideal, or irresponsibility or waste on the part of elites, are probably among those factors. I broadly think that asabiyyah is real and important, though I don't endorse Ibn Khaldun's entire theory surrounding it. Anyway, I think it is both meaningful and true to say, for instance, "the United States as of 2026 is decadent".

But I see no need to defend the weak men/hard times meme to establish all that. It's just an oversimplifying, unhelpful internet meme. It's dumb. That's all I really have to say about it.

Left-wing politics more generally, including increased wealth redistribution.

Curious about the anti-D response here: in the 60s and 70s, the USA strikes me as clearly more decadent than the USSR, while the USSR was much more left wing. Are those statements accurate? And yet in the USSR case, bad economics trumped any edge in resistance to decadence. How does someone reconcile this tension?

What does decadence mean? I mean that unironically; nobody in this thread bothers to define it.

In the hundreds of comments on this topic, I'm surprised that no one has mentioned this book: From Dawn to Decadence. Barzun defined decadence thusly:

All that is meant by Decadence is "falling off." It implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility. The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

It's a marketing term, typically employed by sellers of ice cream and other desserts.

In all seriousness, the reason nobody bothers is that they believe it's self-defining. I suggest the actual meaning is something more along the lines of 'taking the material conditions for granted becomes the rational move' for X% of society, finding X being an exercise for the reader.

This lines up with the people most likely to [feel they] be in charge of providing those material conditions, which is why claims of 'decadence' tend to just be grievances from male instinct, lightly laundered. (Hence why "physical strength decoupled from material wealth" is decadence, why "women don't have to submit to men" is decadence, why "peepee in the but" [translation: men not having to compete with each other for sex with women] is decadence, etc.)

This also allows the US being able to afford to get its soldiers ice cream on the front lines in WW2 to not be decadence, but the expectation of such every day in peacetime might be. It depends on the cultural attitude towards how and why the ice cream got there.

Just because a thing is commonplace doesn't mean it is not itself miraculous (compare 'manna'), but the importance is the remembrance of those who maintain and sustain that miracle (and how well they are paid/treated/valued).

Perhaps one could argue that decadence is when the working of miracles in a society is so common that they, and hence those that provide them, become sufficiently devalued that they begin to be despised? Even the Israelites reacted that way.

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