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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8003 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.

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.

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.

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).

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