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Notes -
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.
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