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Notes -
A Strong Argument Against Weak Men
I wrote all of this as a reply to @FCfromSSC 's defense against my critique of his critique of Devereaux’s critique of the "Weak Men, Hard Times"/"Fremen Mirage" thesis (try and keep that straight). It got out of hand. I put a lot of effort into it. So top-level post it is, even though it's primarily directed at him. You likely want to follow the link first.
Fair enough, I asked for concrete arguments and you've made an attempt at providing them. Forgive me for saying this, but I find it rather light on detail.
I'll start with "inevitable," because that word is quietly doing the work of three different arguments while dressed as one. You have two options. Either you mean it literally, in which case the counterexamples are immediate and fatal (and I'm going to share them), or you mean something like "tends to produce," in which case welcome to the world of probabilistic claims, where you owe us a measurable prediction: increases the probability of what outcome, by how much, measured how. Right now "inevitable" floats above the empirical fray like a philosophical dirigible, too vague to be shot down, too vague to be useful.
It also helps to be explicit about the three claims that keep getting quietly bundled together. As I see them:
Morale and cohesion matter militarily. Correct, well-attested, Clausewitz built it into the load-bearing structure of his framework under “moral forces,” nobody serious disputes this. It's acknowledged in official US military doctrine.
Culture can shape military performance in meaningful ways. Also largely agreed, also case-specific, also entirely compatible with Devereaux’s thesis.
Hardship reliably produces superior fighters and drives predictable civilizational cycles.
That third claim is the contested claim. That is the meme. Conceding the first two does not move the needle on the third by even one tick, and yet your argument keeps treating “morale matters” as if it's a portal that gets you to “hard times generate conquerors.”
(How exactly do you rule out the possibility that Good Times also generate Strong Men at similar base rates, but those men don't get the opportunity to do much raping, pillaging and conquering because of the restrictions put upon them by a functional society? Or because they're quite happy with how things are going?)
I will admit to a certain sympathy for the "Hard Times" thesis, one that was beaten out of me by reading actual history. It appeals to a very specific, conservation of energy intuition we all seem to share share. It feels like physics applied to sociology. If you put a human being under immense pressure, they should turn into a diamond. If you put a human being in a warm bath with a steady supply of peeled grapes, they should turn into soup. The universe seems requires a trade off between comfort and capability, so it makes sense that a civilization maximizing comfort would bleed capability.
But if you're going to accuse Devereaux of baking absurdity into his arguments, it's desirable to at least check whether the hard-times model actually predicts anything.
If hard times make strong men inevitable, then the places experiencing the hardest times should be the places producing the strongest men, and by the meme’s own implication, the most formidable military actors.
Hard times are not hard to find. Somalia has had a shit time since 1991. North Korea is so chronically deprived that the population is physically shorter than their southern neighbors. Haiti is a recurring disaster. Eastern Europe is literally eating trench warfare again.
Does the hard-times generator produce strong men in the way the meme implies?
It certainly produces tough men. I do not doubt that a survivor of the Somali civil war has a tolerance for pain, a resilience to trauma, and cockroach-adaptability that would shatter the average San Francisco software engineer in 48 hours. If “strong” means “hard to kill individually,” then yes, hard times can produce hard shells.
But the Fremen Mirage is not about individual survival. It's about civilizational competence and military victory. The meme posits that these hard men will inevitably conquer the weak men of the good times.
Yet Somali pirates do not win fights against destroyers, probably not even against a PT boat. Beef-feed American boys grow up playing Halo with an Xbox controller and have no issues using another Xbox controller to turn them into a halo of fine mist. North Korea is unlikely to win any military victories in the foreseeable future (maybe if all the South Koreans end up in retirement homes, but isn't the grind and rigidity of the latter culture itself a form of "strength"? They've got mandatory conscription, how hard is that?). Ukraine is a meatgrinder that turns sunk cost into well-fertilized and mined sunflower fields.
And here is where the model fails to predict the past two thousand years of warfare better than chance (and in fact, worse than chance), and fails even harder in the modern era.
When the soft, decadent, weak United States military engages with forces bred in the hardest of times, the exchange ratio is often lopsided to a degree that defies belief (and draws accusation of war crimes). The hard men die in droves, often without ever seeing the "weak men" who killed them from an air-conditioned control room. The North Korean soldier, bred in the hardest of times, is not a super-soldier. He's a poor bastard with intestinal parasites, brittle bones, and a rifle from the 1960s. In power-projection terms he is not strong.
Look at Venezuela. I strongly suspect that you are rather focused on American affairs, so let's look closer:
Venezuela got clapped. No contest, no lube. It's a historical humiliation of near unprecedented chutzpah, and a military masterstroke. Putin probably believes he's a hard man ruling hard men, and he wishes his 3 day special operation was a tenth as effective. Grit ain't nothing compared to total air superiority.
Going back, there's an even more glaring example in WW2:
The Japanese were the archetypal hard men.
If any modern society ran the Fremen playbook sincerely, it was Japan. Institutionalized martial culture, explicit civilizational contempt for comfort and luxury, bushido as doctrine, genuinely formidable individual bravery. No proxies. The hardness was real, rigorous, and deeply embedded.
Their men expected no quarter, and gave none. Their pilots showed a willingness to convert their planes and bodies into guided missiles without a parachute. They dug in like Alabama ticks and fought like hell till their blood pooled in the mud.
And yet, once again, they got clapped. By the richest and most "decadent" nation around. While the Japs ate thin gruel and Germans were making ersatz-coffee, the US had entire ships dedicated to ice cream for its troops. By virtually any Fremen metric, the United States was the most materially comfortable, consumerist, pluralist fighting force in recorded history. The kind of civilization the meme would predict to crumble at first contact with anything properly hard. Dare I say, the most decadent?
Huh. Funny how that works.
Before you bring up Vietnam or Afghanistan, I will keep it simple: in the past century, the US has not lost a single war that mattered. The safety and comfort of the homeland, the F-35 flybies over college football stadiums? None of that was ever in jeopardy. Your wars were toy-wars, usually fought with one side following gentleman's rules (you). You pissed away the GDP of entire continents on dirt that barely grows poppies and didn't even get dehydrated in the process. Even victory would have, in hindsight, been largely inconsequential.
It is far from obvious that any other force can overturn this, if your closest competitor, China, has any hope of a victory in the medium-term, it'll be on the backs of the industrial capacity to produce a bazillion missiles and drones, not the grit of their soldiers or the genius of their generals. And yet they don't even dream of landing an expeditionary force on the US mainland. A potential victory (emphasis on potential) hinges on industrial capacity, not moral character.
Looking at your claims about “free energy,” which I think has the causality backwards: Good times are not a reduction in the energy available to strong men. Good times are the surplus that makes strength scalable.
Good times, meaning surplus calories, high GDP, technological capacity, lack of immediate existential threat, allow a society to take a percentage of its population and tell them: you don't need to farm. You don't need to hunt. You don't need to worry about where your next meal is coming from. You will spend twelve hours a day lifting, drilling, training, learning complex machinery, building unit cohesion, practicing logistics, rehearsing doctrine.
That is how you build a Roman legionary. That is how you build a US Marine. The hard man from the hills has to spend his energy surviving. He is a part-time warrior because he is a full-time survivor. The soft man from the empire is a full-time professional killer subsidized by the very economic complexity you are sneering at.
Your Cromwell example does not prove as much as you want it to. Yes, moral conviction and ideological zeal can be force multipliers. Asabiyyah is real. Morale matters. Nobody disputes this. I'm not disputing this, Devereaux isn't disputing this.
But Cromwell’s army was effective not because they were ragtag survivors of collapse. They were effective because they were paid, equipped, drilled, and organized according to cutting-edge military science. The New Model Army was a product of high coordination inside a relatively wealthy society. Zeal multiplies competence. It doesn't replace it.
Now, decadence.
You accuse Devereaux of refusing to engage with the semantic content of decadence. That is not quite right. Devereaux engages a specific operationalization: luxury softens bodies, literacy softens minds, complexity demilitarizes populations. Your complaint seems to be that this is too crude and that a richer version is hiding behind it.
Fine. Name it.
I'm serious. What is your definition of decadence, and is it of any use for predicting the course of history?
As I say (because it's true), "all models are false, some models are useful". The better models are differentially useful. They cut reality at the joints and serve as useful compression of complex systems, and more importantly, predict future events. At the very fucking least, they should describe history.
Back to Rome (it's my Roman Empire):
Decadence, as it is usually deployed, is almost always defined tautologically:
Rome fell.
Therefore Rome was decadent.
How do we know Rome was decadent?
Because it fell.
If Rome had repelled the Goths (and then were wiped out by a convenient asteroid so I don't have to write a full alternate history), as they had repelled Germanic tribes for centuries prior, often while being just as wealthy and just as bath-loving and just as bookish, we would currently be writing essays about how civilized discipline triumphed over disordered barbarism.
As I said in my original reply, an empire needs an unbounded number of victories to survive. In the worst case, it only needs a single defeat to crumble.
This is also why the unfalsifiability problem runs like a hairline fracture through your whole framework (or at least the HTHMWTWM theory as popularly understood, which is what Devereaux is dismantling).
Rich state wins? Material advantages masked decadence temporarily. Poor state wins? Fremen thesis confirmed. Rich state loses? Decadence, obviously. Poor state loses? Not hard enough, or the material gap was too vast. Every outcome is accommodable. Every counterexample has an epicycle preloaded. A theory structured this way is not doing historical work. It's a just-so story that could be replaced by a well-decorated rock. At least I can kick a rock.
It's the equivalent of saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Sounds great, doesn't help when you transect your spinal cord in a car crash, or ruin your knees after too much PT. A claim being "inspiring" is very different from it being true.
The more I squint, the more this becomes the Just World Fallacy wearing combat boots. It suggests that suffering has a purpose (to make us strong) and that comfort is a sin (that makes us weak).
The universe is often far more cruel than that. Sometimes hard times just break you. Sometimes suffering is just suffering. Sometimes the "Hard Man" fights the "Soft Man," and the Soft Man presses a button and deletes the Hard Man from existence, because the Soft Man spent his "Good Times" studying physics and engineering instead of learning how to endure hunger.
What's probably true: character matters, organizational culture matters, genuine commitment to a cause produces measurably better outcomes under certain conditions, and a civilization that cannot articulate what it's fighting for faces real disadvantages at the margin. I'd go further and say that the Athenians, the decadent, democratic, philosophizing, play-writing naval-gazers, are actually the better case study than the Spartans here. They bounced back from defeat after defeat because their "Good Times" culture was dynamic enough to reinvent itself. The Spartans, the hardest men in Greece, ossified and collapsed precisely because they were so committed to their own hardness that they couldn't adapt to a changing world. They were too busy attacking their own allies, diddling boys and randomly killing the slaves that tilled their fields. The very quality the meme valorizes became their brittleness.
Miscellaneous thoughts, because I'm tired after studying all night:
It is helpful, and I would say good practice, to operationalize and define terms, especially those in contention. Devereaux does this well, he lays out a specific argument commonly found in the wild, and musters an offensive on every front. You do not do this. You haven't defined terms, at best you wave at your (implicit, unknown to us, or at least me) definition of "decadence", of "weakness" and "strength". A proper debate requires that both sides leave enough rope to hang each other with, and that the loser is sporting enough not to offer shoe-laces instead.
You are making up people to be mad at. At the very least, you are putting words in Devereaux's mouth, and as far as I can see, he never said what you claim he says, nor does he imply what you think he implies. Please, a quote where he even implies that asking such questions is "for dweebs" would go a long way. The man is a military historian focusing on classical history, I'm sure he's on the side of the dweebs and nerds.
To reiterate: he lays out an argument. He shows that the argument is shite. He is attacking a strawman, but unfortunately, the majority of people making that argument have straw for brains. The actual Motte doesn't need defending because it's nigh impregnable. You can't attack a critique of Lizardman conspiracy theorists on the grounds that he hasn't addressed the steelman version: humans and dinosaurs have a common ancestors, at some point before the split between synapsids and diapsids. Nobody disputes that. Nobody cares. A non-negligible number of people adhere to the batshit crazy version.
Devereaux is careful to avoid cherry picking evidence. His analysis spans roughly the entire history of the united Roman Empire, and then its Western successor. That is hardly cherry picked, both because Rome is usually held up as the example of decadence killing a civilization and because that's literally his field of scholarship. That is the breadth and depth of scholarship to aspire to, when discussing something as complicated as grand patterns in world history and the rise and fall of empires. I don't expect you to do that much, but come on.
I recall a lot of blood spilled in the Age of Colonization, over what can loosely be termed as economic zones. It is unclear whether the US would, say, bat for Taiwan in a hot war with China. But it is unclear, and even then, a single sparrow does not a summer make. Devereaux throws a net over the whole swarm, you don't. I'm not aware of a rebuttal that does. Besides, I think China would have words for someone invading Shenzhen or Hainan, and what are those but economic zones? Rather special ones even.
And this is incorrect because? I do not see Devereaux putting numbers on the relative importance of "RNG" versus determinism. Rome might have been very different if Justinian didn't have to face one of the worst plagues in human history, and if Belisarius's wife hadn't been such a hoe. What might the world look like if Barbarossa took swimming lessons? He notes that macroscopic factors like population size, wealth and military metrics matter, he does not claim that nothing else does. I do not see why you consider it an excuse to insert your own interpretation and then get mad at him. My understanding is that he sees those metrics as important, often decisive, which is not the same as what you seem to believe. And randomness only adds variance. Devereaux believes systems (logistics, tax bases, agriculture) determine the probability of victory. It isn't just "luck"; it is that a "decadent" society with a 90% win rate due to logistics will eventually crush a "hard" society that relies on a hero rolling a natural 20 every time. (Numbers my own, and made up).
Finally, you accuse him of being a propagandist. On what basis? What basis in fact? Do your facts weigh up to his? He's got plenty. I've got plenty. Propaganda can be both propaganda and true (I do not agree that his approach to the Fremen Mirage constitutes propaganda). You need to demonstrate that it is both misleading and factually incorrect.
(Posters advising people to wash their hands are propaganda posters, but you're better off doing as they say)
If you insist on treating your arguments as soldiers facing off against Devereaux while declaring him an enemy propagandist, you had better hope your arguments are good soldiers. I remain unconvinced that they are.
I think I have put enough effort into concrete disagreement to risk slightly uncharitable psychoanalysis: you disagree with his thesis because it goes against your values, and this is more the cause of your discontent and disdain than its actual bearing on the truth. I suspect you are deeply unhappy with the status quo, and see bloodshed, strife and suffering as necessary for a phase transition to your ideal sociopolitical system, and that it helps to imagine that that suffering is inherently or terminally good in of itself. I hope to be proven wrong.
TLDR:
If decadence is defined as the cultural conditions that cause military decline, then the Fremen thesis becomes true by definition and empty of predictive content. For it to be a real historical claim, decadence needs to be identifiable independently of military outcomes, and then shown to strongly correlate with them. I do not believe this has been demonstrated, and I strongly doubt it can be demonstrated (because it's not true).
As a separate point:
We know Bret Devereaux is a propagandist because he publically boasts about his skill at it. I haven't read his whole blog, so he may have mentioned it elsewhere as well, but the two obvious admissions I've read are The Practical Case on Why We Need the Humanities and especially On Public Scholarship.
Relevant excerpts from the former:
And the latter:
This guy is proud of his skill with the Dark Arts. He thinks they're valuable and awesome. Whether his writing makes heavy use of them is settled in the affirmative. It is true that ad hominem is a fallacy, and that points Devereaux raises may in fact be correct. But to call him a propagandist is no accusation; it's just stating a fact.
Uh... If we accept your taken on what constitutes "propaganda" and "The Dark Arts," then we have effectively defined "writing a persuasive essay" out of existence. You just took the standard curriculum of Rhetoric 101, which has been taught since Aristotle was walking around the Lyceum telling people not to mumble, and then went ahead and relabeled it as psychological warfare.
Look at the specific "sins" Devereaux admits to in the passages you quoted.
He admits to "practicing argumentation." He admits to "reasoning soundly." He admits to "writing well." He explicitly states his goal is to "build a base of knowledge" so that the reader understands the context before he delivers his conclusion. Duh? He's not writing as a historian for other historians, though I presume he does that at some point. This is a public blog that caters to a much broader audience of nerds interested in history.
If all of this is propaganda, then what's the alternative? Is the only "honest" non-propagandist mode of communication to scream incoherent, context-free conclusions at a stranger while making no effort to be understood? A maths textbook? I imagine that most historical treaties would count as "propaganda" using such a counter-productive and indiscriminate definition.
If you continue insisting on that counting as “propaganda,” then you have ruled in basically every public intellectual worth reading, including the ones people here cite approvingly when they are on their side. It certainly rules in nearly all political writers, most historians who write for a general audience, and basically every one who wants to be read by someone other than their dissertation committee.
It rules me in, it rules you in, and it rules in everyone involved in this thread, probably everyone who ever posted on the internet. If that's a crime, you're going to need a prison the size of the internet too, and isolation rooms for us argumentative wordcels.
We are all here on The Motte. We are all selecting specific arguments to support our priors. We are all trying to frame our words to be palatable to the community so we are not downvoted into oblivion. We are all "building a ledger" of credibility so that people will listen when we have something controversial to say. If Devereaux is a propagandist for organizing his essays to be persuasive, then you are a propagandist for organizing your comment to persuade me that he is one. My dog is a propagandist for whining and making puppy eyes at me when he's hungry.
There is also an irony in quoting him explaining that public engagement should not be confused with activism, and then immediately calling him a propagandist. Devereaux explicitly telling you “I am trying to communicate expertise to a broad audience, and I am aware of the difference between explaining and campaigning,” and you are responding “aha, you admit to explaining things persuasively, therefore you are campaigning.” That is not a gotcha. You're playing a linguistic shell game and expanding definitions so you can say someone you dislike is a criminal because he littered once.
Your reasoning appears to be:
He admits to using persuasive techniques.
Persuasive techniques are propaganda.
Therefore, his conclusions are suspect.
I feel like you broke something in step 2.
There is a distinction to be made between "propaganda" and "pedagogy," or between "manipulation" and "persuasion."
Propaganda usually implies a bypass of the critical faculties. It relies on lies, omissions, or raw emotional appeals to trick the audience into a belief they would not hold if they had the full picture.
(And I've already given an example of what is technically propaganda, yet still good: public health advice)
That is an empirical charge. It requires examples from the contested posts, not a quote where he says “tone matters” and “don’t be condescending.”
I await examples, if they exist.
Right now, all you've presented is: “this guy is persuasive and self-aware about being persuasive.” Fine. So is every effective writer. Including the writers you like. Including you, right now, trying to get me and others to see him as a sinister propagandist/Culture Warrior rather than a historian making arguments.
Yes, except it's not us who's done it, it's Bernays. Or even Devereaux himself:
Edward could not have said it better.
A persuasive essay is, by definition, propaganda. It is intentionally propagating its perspective. Your problem is that you think propaganda is bad. It's not. Propaganda for things I don't like is bad. Propaganda for things I do like is good. That's the point.
In other words, you forgot to attach the yes_chad.jpeg.
Do you agree that this definition of propaganda makes us all propagandists, including you? If so, I have nothing to add.
You might want to rethink that one my man. I specifically gave two examples of "good" propaganda, namely hand washing advocacy posters and public health messaging in general.
I also note:
And:
If the entire point of @FCfromSSC 's post was that he doesn't like Brett Devereaux, that would be a much less interesting post. Instead, he also specifically defends the hypothesis Brett critiques.
Yes, most people are propagandists for the things they care about, myself included.
The differences are in what you care about, and how aware you are of the propaganda of others. When those people are cashing in their ledger, are you aware of it? Do you notice? And if you do, do you ever say, you money's no good here?
I like reading about ironworking and Tolkein and Rome, but for Bret, that credibility simply won't spend with me when it counts, when he wants it to.
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