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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9652 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.

McNamara's Idiots, sending low Iq people to Vietnam while capable people managed to dodge the draft.

Sending mediocrely talented soldiers to Afghanistan for deployments that last a few months while spending exorbitant amounts of money keeping them comfortable instead of having high quality people spend years in Afghanistan and building relations with the locals.

The fringes of the US empire have been nibbled by a lack of conviction by the American elite class.

The rules of engagement coupled with casualty tolerance in Afghanistan prevented any long term victory.

Different interests latch onto different causes but they are all obviously connected. The occupation failed because Wester troops were garrisoned in bases while the Taliban controlled much of the countryside essentially uninterrupted for the period. Many ‘soldiers’ never left base and most who did did so very infrequently for largely choreographed ‘patrols’ that anyone could avoid if they wanted to. Why? Because troops were terrified of IEDs and ambush attacks, which in turn led to a paranoia that was only reinforced by rare trips out of base (psychologically this creates a fortress mindset in a soldier in which every trip outside base is an expedition into a hostile land). This tied into the broader situation that, because the US DoD and (even moreso) European armies had extremely low casualty tolerance to a degree unheard of in almost any historical or other current conflict, fighting a guerrilla enemy that stationed soldiers in houses and villages and schools was essentially impossible.

There were two possible ways out of this situation.

The coalition could have swallowed much higher casualty rates and stationed soldiers and support personnel in town and villages, forced a larger degree of cultural transformation / imperialism on particularly rural natives, and used a form of summary justice (ie simply executing anyone suspected of assisting the Taliban in any capacity and the entire immediate family or tribe, which would involve plenty of false positives, but that’s wartime) to make cooperation with the enemy much less attractive while making cooperating with the occupying forces much more attractive (since it would no longer be about making a deal with the guys in the military base 10 miles away while you deal with the enemy sympathizers in your village alone).

Or, the coalition could have taken the Israeli approach in Gaza which, while likely still higher in terms of casualty rate than the recent Afghan War (depending on how you calculate it), still involved a relatively low tolerance for soldier deaths on the Israeli side. That would preclude a total victory (Hamas still exists and has many soldiers after all) but - by dropping insane volumes of ordinance on any cultural, communal, religious, social, healthcare, educational and other institutions that might possibly house enemy fighters - you can demoralize a population and slowly reduce both the absolute number of and relative quality of enemy fighters (as more experienced soldiers are killed) even in a high fertility population. This plan would have involved probably the deaths of 5% or so of the civilian population as a direct consequence of the coalition campaign but would, coupled with the targeted killing of all major religious and cultural figures, the reinstatement of the King (not doing this was one of the great failures of the war) and a ban on Afghan civilian government for at least 15 years after the invasion, have had a higher chance of success than the plan that was pursued.

simply executing anyone suspected of assisting the Taliban in any capacity and the entire immediate family or tribe

If 'not assisting the Taliban' doesn't protect you from being murdered by coalition forces for assisting the Taliban, I'm not sure that that would have the desired effect. (cf. how Chen Sheng realised that 'not trying to overthrow the government' wouldn't protect him.)

The Taliban might have had less support if Allied commanders hadn't ordered their troops to ignore the rape of children by Afghan warlords with the 'it's part of their culture' excuse. ("In this house, General Napier is a hero. End of story.")

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