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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6811 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.

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.

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.

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’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.

"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?

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