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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.

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.

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.

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.

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