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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10438 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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I see you throwing up a big wall of text, but I don't see you engaging seriously with what I read as the core element of @FCfromSSC's critique. Specifically their addendum to the original thesis "Hard times make strong men inevitable. Good times make weak men inevitable."

Adding "inevitable" only worsens the problem, and also doesn't help the core issue - the theory makes few concrete predictions - and just about anything becomes inevitable over enormous time scales.

I have also engaged at great length (and disastrously for my sleep schedule) with anyone who either came in to support him, the theory, or had their own critiques.

I also specifically complained that FC's response was still so vague that it made it very difficult to engage with.

I did my best. I will present specific responses to all his points which I've already written:

Good times impose reduced consequences on weak men for their weakness, and greatly reduce the amount of free energy by which strong men might exercise their strength. By contrast, bad times impose many consequences on weakness, and often provide an abundance of free energy through which strength might be exercised, not least the general population's desire to organize their collective power and resources to change things for the better.

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.

But of course, this requires us to take the terms "strong" and "weak", "good" and "bad" seriously. Likewise words like "decadence", which Devereaux seems to believe contain no semantic content of significance, and so declines to even engage with in any meaningful fashion.

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.

I think a culture can build an effective military force, such that they win a disproportionate number of their engagements, not merely through technocratic KPIs (amount of money available, population size, etc), but through specific cultural features and norms. I think such a culture can then replace those cultural features and norms with a new set, and as a consequence begin to lose a disproportionate number of their engagements, even though it now has more money, more population, and a greater share generally of the technocratic KPIs than it did when it was winning. Further, I think this signal is strong enough that predictions can be made in advance.

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.

"Good times makes weak men, weak men make hard times" is interesting because it warns us that there is no permanent victory, that good times are not stable, that preserving and extending them requires effort and constant vigilance. And this is not a general warning: the hazard is specified, so it can be recognized in advance and action can be taken accordingly.

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.

Most of the rest is directly referenced or quoted in the top-level post. Now, if FC replied, I could engage in further debate. I've done what I can.

Instead, both you and Devereaux seem to be using "macroscopic factors matter" (has anyone here seriously argued that they don't?) as an excuse to dismiss your opponents arguments and observations out of hand.

It seems that FC dislikes it when Devereaux says so:

By contrast, it seems to me that Devereaux aims to convince his readers that military affairs are largely deterministic, with a layer of luck on top. Therefore, empires are born because they got a streak of good RNG hits, and Empires die because they got a streak of bad RNG hits, and human decisions are not really terribly decisive either way.

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).

Adding "inevitable" only worsens the problem,

I disagree, I would argue that by adding the word inevitable and positing a specific mechanism @FCfromSSC is both narrowing the scope of the original thesis and providing a valuable clarification as to the shape of the disagreement.

Likewise I have read your response to FC and reiterate my opinion that you are not engaging seriously with his points.

FC calls out Devereaux's rhetorical slight-of-hand conflating "literacy" with "decadence" and your reply was essentially to point out that Devereaux's slight-of-hand is in service of the desired conclusion. My reply to your reply is "yes, clearly". That doesn't invalidate FC's objection, nor does it absolve Devereaux of responsibility.

I feel like the rest of your reply follows a similar pattern. You either set up a straw/weakman to knock down. For instance you say things like "A claim being "inspiring" is very different from it being true." but if FC made the claim that something being "inspiring" was the same as it being "true" I must have missed it. Or (much like Devereaux) you try to redirect the objection by making it about something else as you did just now.

Instead, both you and Devereaux seem to be using "macroscopic factors matter" (has anyone here seriously argued that they don't?) as an excuse to dismiss your opponents arguments and observations out of hand.

It seems that FC dislikes it when Devereaux says so:

Of course the superb irony in all this is that not only is Devereaux's whole thesis predicated on an image of the Fremen that bears little resemblance to Frank Herbert's, but that a major theme of the book is the dissonance between what people know, what people think they know, and the ground-level truth. The Great Houses of the Landsraad know that the Fremen are a bunch of primitive screwheads because that's what all the reports say, but "knowing" something does not make it so.

I disagree, I would argue that by adding the word inevitable and positing a specific mechanism @FCfromSSC is both narrowing the scope of the original thesis and providing a valuable clarification as to the shape of the disagreement.

Huh? "Good times make weak men, weak men make hard times, hard times make strong men, strong men make good times" can't be made stronger as a claim by virtue of adding "inevitable" as a qualifier. It weakens it, because inevitable quite literally means it'll happen at some point. When? Idk, presumably by at least the Heat Death of the universe.

It's the difference between "don't run with scissors (because you might hurt yourself" and "running with scissors will inevitably hurt you".

The real problem with "inevitable" in the original context is that it drains the claim of predictive content by removing any time horizon. A claim that something will definitely happen eventually is weaker than a claim that it tends to happen, because the latter can actually be falsified on a human timescale.

"Inevitable" is the word you add when you want to sound certain while committing to nothing. It's the rhetorical equivalent of predicting rain "eventually." The original aphorism at least implies a cycle with some regularity. "Inevitable" just means "sometime before the sun explodes."

It doesn't clarify mechanisms, it obscures them, by letting the speaker off the hook for when and how often the cycle actually turns.

FC calls out Devereaux's rhetorical slight-of-hand conflating "literacy" with "decadence" and your reply was essentially to point out that Devereaux's slight-of-hand is in service of the desired conclusion. My reply to your reply is "yes, clearly". That doesn't invalidate FC's objection, nor does it absolve Devereaux of responsibility.

You know what? On re-reading the ACOUP article, it's more clear to me that Devereaux doesn't even do what FC accuses him of doing.

Devereaux doesn't offer a single definition of "decadence". Rather, his argument is precisely that the concept lacks a coherent definition, which is part of what he's critiquing. He treats decadence as the structural opposite of "Fremeness" in the Fremen Mirage: the idea that wealthy, complex, settled societies become soft, morally corrupt, and militarily weak as a result of their comfort and prosperity ("good times create soft men"). This is the popular notion (associated especially with Gibbon's account of Rome) that moral decay leads to military decline.

But Devereaux's whole point is that "decadence" as used in this framework is intellectually bankrupt. It's defined essentially as losing, making the argument circular and unfalsifiable: Fremen win because they're not decadent, and we know they're not decadent because they win. He's less interested in defining decadence than in showing that the concept, however loosely understood as "moral/cultural softness resulting from wealth and complexity," doesn't actually explain Roman military history when you look at the evidence carefully.

I feel like the rest of your reply follows a similar pattern. You either set up a straw/weakman to knock down. For instance you say things like "A claim being "inspiring" is very different from it being true." but if FC made the claim that something being "inspiring" was the same as it being "true" I must have missed it. Or (much like Devereaux) you try to redirect the objection by making it about something else as you did just now.

Hardly. FC posits that it's an inspiring claim. Telling a child that he's Spiderman is inspiring, but it might lead to him jumping off a building (a friend of mine did exactly that as a kid, thankfully he landed in a bush).

Of course the superb irony in all this is that not only is Devereaux's whole thesis predicated on an image of the Fremen that bears little resemblance to Frank Herbert's, but that a major theme of the book is the dissonance between what people know, what people think they know, and the ground-level truth. The Great Houses of the Landsraad know that the Fremen are a bunch of primitive screwheads because that's what all the reports say, but "knowing" something does not make it so.

In the main series, Devereaux is pretty explicit that “Fremen” is a label for a trope and for outsiders’ perceptions, not a claim that the referenced societies really are “barbarian primitives.” He even repeats the point that when he calls a culture “Fremen,” he’s talking about how it’s perceived within the trope, not “tagging them” as uncivilized.

He also leans hard into the exact “Irulan problem” you’re gesturing at: the story of the Fremen (in-universe and in real-world reception) is largely told by settled elites, and those portrayals are often about the elites themselves rather than accurate ethnography of the “Fremen.”

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