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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14140 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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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.

I do not dispute this claim. My claim is that "decadence" is a very bad term for the specific "moral" failings that lead to bad performance: corruption, fief-building etc. I gave the example of the US having literal ships dedicated to the storage and production as ice cream. Giving your soldiers ice cream in the middle of the warm is "decadent", so is flying out super-star actors and singers to entertain them. Even Tier-1 operators do not operate like 40k Space Marines: asking them to be ascetic monks is neither necessary nor helpful.

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.

Why would I disagree? All else being equal, a military and nation that are less corrupt will tend to beat one that's more corrupt. That is not the crux of the matter, since all else is never equal.

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.

If anyone can demonstrate examples of militaries that somehow don't have harsh bootcamps but do well, I'd be surprised. But the Fremen Mirage claims that it is civilizational softness that is the primary factor, producing military softness as a consequence (though that is also important).

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.

I stand by precisely the opposite claim. Decadence is defined as:

moral or cultural decline as characterized by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury

If the US military works just fine when the soldiers have plenty of "pleasure" and "luxury", as long as they're actually locking in and fighting when they need to fight, then you need more specific terms for the actual problem(s).

Making your men suffer needlessly doesn't make them a better fighting force. Beatings, hazings, being starved on the field do not improve their fighting capabilities, or else vatniks would conquer the world. US drill sergeants aren't allowed to beat up their men anymore, and nothing of consequence was lost (cleaning toilets with toothbrushes is still effective punishment). If they're suffering purposefully during boot camp or in training, that is a whole different story. I don't think soldiers shouldn't need to do demanding physical training or military drills that require shivering in the cold.

If anyone can demonstrate examples of militaries that somehow don't have harsh bootcamps but do well,

It doesn't refute the argument because the myth of Ghurkas is that they are forged by their harsh mountain enviroment before they reach bootcamp, and the reality is that they go through a tough selection process (particularly British Ghurkas given how few we now recruit and how much of a standard-of-living bump it is compared to rural Nepal), but Ghurka bootcamp notoriously involves no striking of recruits by instructors and minimal yelling.

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