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Notes -
Yeah people making this their Twitter motto do seem kinda silly to me. It’s just that I read a fair bit of ancient history, and the hard times narrative just seems straightforwardly true for most of human history, especially when there are wide open spaces with lots of grass nearby. It’s pretty lazy of me to be posting without reading why this isn’t supposed to be true for the Romans. I do think they don’t make as good an example as the Chinese, but if I remember my Gibbon it certainly seems to fit the pattern fairly well at least starting with the crisis of the 3rd century. I’ll have to read it in more depth though.
Basically, it just seems like opponents want to act like this never had any explanatory power, instead of taking the much more defensible line that it just doesn’t anymore.
Also, the Brishish empires collapse (and decolonization in general) seems like an example of this playing out in relatively modern times. Europeans empires retreated to their metropoles in the face of previously conquered and much poorer people who were just willing to suffer a lot more. Of this winds up being true in the modern era it will probably look like that, not Cambodia sudden fielding a 7th generation fighter and spanking the USAF.
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