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Notes -
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 disagreement
Things that are peripheral to the disagreement
Excellent work, I can imagine going through all of that took a while. You've inspired me to attempt to summarize my own stance (though it should be beyond obvious that I'm pro-D here). Here it goes.
I think the anti-D position is importantly wrong in a way that makes it worse than useless as a predictive instrument, even though the underlying phenomenon it is trying to gesture at is real.
Devereaux's Fremen Mirage thesis is roughly: "hard times make strong men" is empirically false, or at least false in the ways that matter. The people who repeat it as a civilizational warning are not doing history. They're busy writing fanfic about masculinity and finding patterns in tea leaves.
Note that plenty of people here responded with their own versions of the Hard Times theory. My responses to them depend on the specifics of what they're claiming, and I often agree with them to a large extent. And of course, plenty of people went off on tangents, it's the Motte, that's the charm.
Also note that Devereaux attacked a specific form of the Weak Men idea, and chose to describe it as the "Fremen Mirage" to distinguish it from other variants. He was careful to precisely define the problem space and set a scope. Since FCfromSSC attacked Devereaux because of his take on the Fremen Mirage, I chose to defend the same theory.
Unfortunately, that scrupulousness saved neither of us from accusations of strawmanning. Once again, that's the Motte. My take is that it is fine to attack a strawman when you:
a) Acknowledge what it is you're doing.
b) The strawman form is the most popular/virulent version of the meme.
c) The theory itself is so vague that there's scope to read just about anything into it.
My position is more specific than "decadence isn't real." It's that "decadence" functions like a Rorschach test that people try to use as an X-ray. You show it to someone and they see what they already believed about gender, comfort, sexuality, and civilizational virtue. This feels like insight because it comes with historical anecdotes. It does not hold up when you do an exhaustive analysis, as Devereaux attempts.
The core claim, stated as precisely as I can manage
If "good times make weak men" is doing real explanatory work, it needs to cash out into something like: given observable feature X of a society (comfort, or declining warrior ethos, or whatever), we can predict military underperformance at some later date. Not "we can explain past failures by invoking X retroactively." Predict.
At the absolute bare minimum, it should reproduce when applied to other datasets. Historians are not ML researchers, so it's fine to train on the test, if people can pick a specific test and ask why your model does poorly.
The anti-D markers that were listed in the thread (declining warrior values, comfort-seeking elites, reduced corporal punishment, changing sexual mores, non-warrior political influence blah blah) do not survive this test. Losing societies often kept all of these features. Winning societies often lacked them. If the markers can be present without failure, and absent without success, they are not diagnostic markers. I don't think they're particularly suggestive either.
War keeps getting won by boring things. Logistics. Industrial depth. Proper training and readiness drills. Finding smart commanders and firing the idiots. Institutional learning. Ability to absorb and replace losses at scale. These things can fail in rich societies and in poor ones, in gender-traditional societies and gender-nontraditional ones, in societies with brutal military culture and in societies without it.
Objection 1: "You're strawmanning. Nobody means literal poverty makes better soldiers."
Maybe not everyone does. But the meme, and a significant fraction of the people repeating it, slides between three versions without marking the transitions:
The dumb-literal version: poverty and hardship produce better fighters. This is straightforwardly false. Richer societies with better logistics, nutrition, and training win wars against poorer ones at a rate that should embarrass the meme. Devereaux demonstrates this, I bring up the more recent example of the US vs Japan to show it holds in the modern era. US vs Venezuela to show it works like last week, at a time when people are claiming the US is decadent and in decline.
The institutional version: extended peace erodes military readiness and learning, so previously strong militaries can become surprisingly fragile. This is true and interesting and basically what Devereaux argues.
The moral-aesthetic version: comfort makes elites decadent, decadent elites carry moral corruption into the military, and that is the real driver of collapse. This is the one doing the emotional work of the discourse, and it is the one I am skeptical of.
The problem is that people take the credibility established by the true institutional version and use it to launder the unfalsifiable moral-aesthetic version. If you want to argue the institutional version, you should be happy to abandon the vocabulary of decadence entirely, because that vocabulary smuggles in the moral version whether you want it to or not.
Objection 2: "You're ignoring morale and willingness to fight."
I am not ignoring it. I am refusing to let it carry more weight than it should.
Yes, armies that won't fight lose even when well-equipped. That's real, just look at the ANA. The question is what explains that unwillingness. Anti-D has a tidy answer: moral decay, comfort, the wrong values. I think that answer is usually backwards. Institutions rot first. Training becomes unrealistic because realistic training is politically difficult and expensive. Leadership selection becomes adversarial to competence because political loyalty is safer to reward. Legitimacy erodes because the wars being fought stop being obviously necessary. Morale is one of the downstream casualties of that process, not the initiating cause.
The best way to arbitrate is: if we gave you a society with "good warrior values" but the institutional rot I am describing, would it fight well? I think the answer is mostly no. Which means warrior values are not the load-bearing variable.
Objection 3: "But the markers are real."
The list of decadence markers (warrior ethos, harsh training, sexual morality, non-warrior interference, comfort-seeking elites) is an aesthetic inventory, not a diagnostic instrument. To make it one, you need to show that these markers appear reliably before military failure and not in cases of military success.
I am not aware of evidence for this. What I observe is:
Plenty of militarily failed societies maintained harsh masculine culture until very close to collapse. Late Byzantine military culture did not look like a gender-studies seminar. Neither did the Confederacy. Neither, for that matter, did Imperial Japan.
Plenty of successful military powers have had what anti-D would call decadent features in their civilian life. The markers are not reliably predictive. This means they are not markers.
The deeper issue is that "warrior ethos" is cheap to fake and cargo cult. A military can look exactly like what anti-D admires, in terms of culture, aesthetics, and rhetoric, while the institutional substance has hollowed out. See the typical Banana Republic, Eastern European nations, the typical African tinpot dictatorship.
Conversely, a military that looks soft by anti-D metrics can be highly effective because it has realistic training, good logistics, and functional command. Focusing on the aesthetic is actively misleading.
Objection 4: "Rome proves the point."
Rome is the trope-maker and also a trap.
The Latin moralists were calling decadence in essentially every period of Roman history, including during peak Roman military effectiveness. Cato the Elder was alarmed. Augustus passed bachelor taxes. Moralists in every era found evidence of softening. This should make us deeply suspicious of treating moral alarm as a calibrated early-warning instrument. If your instrument fires regardless of whether the thing it is detecting is present, it is not detecting the thing. I can't imagine anyone better placed than the literate elite of the time for gauging "decadence", if they do a piss poor job, you're probably doing the same.
Devereaux's narrower claim is that Rome's real military turning point comes after the third century crisis and its institutional consequences, not from moral decay radiating outward from elite bathing habits. I find this more plausible because it has an actual mechanism: fiscal crisis, political instability, and the breakdown of the legionary training and command system. That is what turns a world-conquering military into one that cannot defend Italy.
Anti-D wants the early moralizing to be accurate early warnings. But "accurate early warning" requires that the warning not fire constantly independent of whether the thing occurs. Continuous false positives are not warnings. They are a genre, and the genre is "old men complaining that young men are not what they were." I believe you can also call it "crying wolf", including when you see a sheepdog. Why yes, seeing beasts with sharp teeth and four legs correlates to sheep going missing, but you're losing something important if you don't care to interrogate further.
Objection 5: "You're dismissing the moral dimension entirely."
I'm not dismissing it, I'm discounting it. I am trying to give it the correct causal weight, which I think is "downstream of institutions, not upstream."
The distinction matters for policy and diagnosis. If moral decay is primary, then the intervention is cultural: restore warrior values, punish softness, reform gender norms. If institutional decay is primary, then the intervention is structural: fix training pipelines, improve logistics, reform command selection, rebuild industrial capacity. These point in very different directions.
The reason I am hostile to "decadence" as a frame is that it tends to direct energy toward the cultural intervention while the structural problems remain unaddressed. You end up with a military that looks and talks like what the moralists wanted, while the logistics are still broken.
Where the disagreement actually lives
I think anti-D wants a warning that normies can act on: "good times make weak men" is memorable, it is emotionally resonant, it gives people something they can picture and a villain they can name (the soft, comfort-seeking elite who has lost the warrior spirit). I understand the appeal.
My objection is that this appeal is precisely why it is dangerous. It compresses messy institutional failure into a story about moral character, and moral character stories are the enemy of structural diagnosis. Bad takes on history inform bad takes on the present. You can't fix a training pipeline by convincing people that softness is sinful. You cannot fix a logistics system by shaming elites for enjoying hot baths. The story feels true but does not help. Sometimes, it harms outright, if people feel inspired to advocate for shock therapy.
"Decadence" is not a cause. It is a post-hoc aesthetic wrapper we apply to certain kinds of state failure, selected specifically because it flatters the person applying it and lets them feel they saw it coming. If you must, break it down into components like the level of corruption, birth rates, enlistment, political turmoil etc etc. Decadence as a blanket term only muddles the picture.
What I think is actually true
Great powers can become militarily fragile in ways that are non-obvious from the outside, and this fragility can persist for a long time before it is tested.
Human factors matter in war, but they are mostly downstream of institutional competence, incentives, and legitimacy rather than upstream of them.
The most common error in this discourse is treating what looks martial and masculine as equivalent to what actually produces combat power. These can diverge dramatically.
If anti-D wants to change my mind, I would ask them to do one thing: state the decadence model in a form that could be falsified, then tell me what evidence would make them update. Historical examples for large empires works just fine, but you need arguments for which it doesn't hold for counterexamples too. If the answer is "nothing, because the cycle always turns eventually," then we are not doing history anymore dawg. Telling someone they're going to die eventually is true, but not helpful as medical advice. Sensitivity and specificity matters.
I think divorcing "institutional effectiveness" from "morality" is a wrong choice. While it's true that part of institutional effectiveness is just the process of learning to do hard things, an institution with poor moral values will be a less effective one. Look at China - or for that matter look at the procurement/sustainment scandals in Western countries. Men without virtue are not the only thing that makes a military weak. But they do make it weaker.
Your monograph here acts as if for a theory to be correct, it has to be the only explanation for something. So if someone says "decadence is bad for military readiness and societal cohesion" you say "no, look at This Example!" Now, if someone is claiming that a lack of decadence is the only factor in military defeat, then it's fair to raise that objection (and that person is being silly). But the operative question, at least for people who understand that not everything is monocausal is really "would This Example perform better or worse if they were decadent/lacked certain virtues/were soft men/etc.
Sure. I proposed a sort of modification of the Hard Times Cycle suggesting it made more sense if you conceived of the cycle as telling a story about virtue rather than strength (or, if you prefer, suggesting a different, more nuanced understanding of strength), and using Kipling as a brief example of how we might conceive of the traits that virtue requires.
My theory is that virtue is better for a society, including a military. Militaries will perform worse if their ranks are full of the corrupt; so will societies. What evidence would make me update would be evidence that organizations and societies full of cowardly, lazy, lying people performed just as well or better as societies full of brave, hard-working, honest people.
On the one hand, I concede that there's a risk of using the Hard Times Cycle to "fix the wrong problem." On the other hand, fingering "decadence" is a problem is good in part because it is so actionable. Behaving in decadent ways is bad for you and while most people have little to no control over what their military apparatus is doing, they do have some control over what they are doing. And I would argue that advantage of fingering virtue as something that elevates a society and makes it more fit is that not only is it true, but it's actionable at all levels, both the institutional and the individual.
And, as @FiveHourMarathon points out, the historical method of creating virtue is intentionally creating a sort of limited Hard Times even amongst a society living in Good Times. That's also how the military creates institutional effectiveness: boot camp is supposed to be hard. Which, if you look at it from that lens makes your concerns (you specifically mention a lack of training!) and the concerns of the anti-decadence people the same thing - although I should hasten to clarify that I do not think that hard times in and of themselves create effective training - here I would diverge from the simplistic version of the meme. But I do think that effective training often requires hard times.
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