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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   30475 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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The proverb that goes "Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men" is almost entirely wrong.

For the purposes of this chunk I've decided to put into its own top-level post, man has two natures. The survivor nature is concerned with enduring and overcoming threats to one's life and one's society. The thriver nature is concerned with extracting value from life.

The ones that are called "strong men", i.e. those in whom the survivor is dominant - they love hard times. That's their element, that's where they're at advantage, and they go cranky and depressed when the environment is not competitive enough for them. Naturally, hard times create strong men, by incentivizing the survivor nature.

Strong men create hard times. It's what one can observe quite clearly anywhere with an abundance of them. It also follows from the incentives - why would they not reproduce the environment that favors them? Most of the time, there are enough other tribes around that much of hard time-creation is aimed at them. However, strong men love hard times so much that they gladly spare some for their own tribe. When the outer enemies run out of juice, those with the survivor dominance that have trouble adjusting turn their attention fully inward. (Recall that tongue-in-cheek alteration that goes "hard times create strong Slavs, strong Slavs create hard times"?)

Weak men create good times. Weak men love good times, and it is often mentioned as a bad thing. (I disagree.) But it is not the survivor who creates good times. Naturally, there are very few people who are fully of one nature, and strong men do create good times, usually for others and sometimes for themselves. But only to the extent that the thriver is present in them.

The thrivers adjust society to be more suited for thriving, to have more good stuff and more time to enjoy it. They do it when there is space for that indulgence. An overabundance of survivors, particularly the inflexible ones, gets in the way of that as much as it might help such a society endure. A society that's comprised fully of pure survivors is the image of boots stamping on human faces, forever. A society that's comprised fully of pure thrivers will dwindle in a few generations.

As someone who puts value primarily in my individual life, I know which one I'd prefer and which one I'd rather not exist at all.

I think the saying is more meme than fact. And a lot of it is just mean reversion. Pre-Roman empire it was likely that randomly one of the many tribes would get excessively lucky with a group of good leaders. They conquor the med. And in good times after luckily having great leaders mean reversion was likely to average leaders. Also Rome lasted for a thousand years. A simple roll of the dice would eventually lead to a string of bad management at the wrong time.

I forget exactly what was in Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness” but this meme seems to be based on taking meaning from essentially randomness in leader selection.

Now I’m a big believer in psychic history (Foundation series) so while things like Rome existing I believe in I don’t necessarily think it had to be the Rome we know. Maybe Carthage had better leaders and they conquored the med instead.

For mean reversion think about say Shaq’s son or Jordan’s son. Both played basketball and even college ball but neither are as good as their dad. That’s mean reversion. That’s not this meme.

Now I’m a big believer in psychic history (Foundation series)

Psychohistory?

I think there's an extra pole in there. My own model is (and note that these are deliberately twee and modern-vocab terms) Chad, Normie, and Degen. Chads exist as a result of hard times, and are both the stereotypical hard men of the saying, and further them via violence and intra-Chad competition. Normies move hard times to good times as the result of cooperation and coordination. And Degens exploit the social structures of Normies, weakening them to the point where the structure no longer benefits people, and then people either drift away or some combination of environmental pressure and incomnig Chads breaks the organization entirely, you get chaos, the Chads start to thrive, and the cycle begins again. It was noted belowthread that the grand Teutonic war machine lost out to the likes of Audie Murphy and his ilk; that is absolutely the case. It is also the case that, generations later, that ilk lost out utterly to Afgans with AKs and IEDs, both in actual military conflict, and in the battle for hearts and minds.

Basically, you've got a three-pole attractor scenario, a lot like male lizard mating strategies 1. I'm also open to better name suggestions for the three groups, but I feel that the names I picked are evocative enough to justify them.

In this specific type of lizards, you've got monogamous lizards, alpha large-territory-holding lizards, and pass-as-female-to-sneakily-mate-with-the-actual-females lizards. Monogamous lizards get driven out by alphas, alphas get cucked by infiltrators, and infiltrators don't pass well enough to fool monogamous lizards and can't successfully cuck them.

It was noted belowthread that the grand Teutonic war machine lost out to the likes of Audie Murphy and his ilk; that is absolutely the case

The teutonic war machine didn't lose to Audie Murphy and his ilk.

It lost because it was an industrial war and German war making potential would only have approached that of the US had it conquered and fully repaired the entirety of European industry, from Normandy to the Urals.

It lost because Americans were competent fighters enjoying immense material superiority. Something like 5:1 vs tanks on the western front, and 10:1 in planes, probably at least 4:1 in artillery throw weight.

For more information, see e.g. 'Wages of Destruction' by Adam Tooze.

The only path to win for Germany would have involved defeating the USSR.

It is also the case that, generations later, that ilk lost out utterly to Afgans with AKs and IEDs, both in actual military conflict

This is again bullshit. American military in Afghanistan barely ever lost any battle. Taliban and Afghans in general aren't great fighters, and they had barely any equipment.

Taliban won simply by surviving and disrupting the government, that's all they had to do.

America simply had no viable strategy how to turn Afghanistan into a functioning state. It was never willing to send in enough soldiers - you'd probably have needed a million and then keeping them there for thirty years while creating a fair civil administration and so on.

The teutonic war machine didn't lose to Audie Murphy and his ilk.

Except that they very manifestly did...

If "racial homogeneity" and "supererior aryan genetics" really are the be-all end-all of success how was it that the "hopelessly miscenginated" and "distinctly lacking in Nordic warrior spirit" US was able to out produce the Reich not just in absolute terms but in per-capita terms as well?

...Likewise, for all that Anime and World of Warships fans swoon over the IJNS Yamato, the simple truth is that in the one time she actually fought an enemy ship in a gun-on-gun surface action she and he accompanying task-force got absolutely trashed by a detachment of 4 escort ships commanded by a half-breed Cherokee and who individually weighed less than half as much as one of Yamato's gun turrets. As I keep saying. These sorts of things don't happen in a sane world run by math and autistic notions of genetic destiny. As such the only reasonable conclusion is that we do not live in such a world.

If "racial homogeneity" and "supererior aryan genetics" really are the be-all end-all of success how was it that the "hopelessly miscenginated" and "distinctly lacking in Nordic warrior spirit" US was able to out produce the Reich not just in absolute terms but in per-capita terms as well?

Why do you keep repeating this nonsense? The Anglo-Saxons are a Germanic people, English is of the Germanic language family! They were every bit as Aryan as Germany even by the standards of Hitler- the Nazis regarded the term "Aryan" as a pan-European designation, even including Italians and Poles under the umbrella according to the racial laws of the time, the "Aryan means blonde hair and blue eyes" is purely post-war propaganda meant to straw man what was a pan-European racial concept (one that has been vindicated by modern genetic analysis).

The diaspora and colonizers of the British Empire lacked the "Nordic warrior spirit", that is just so hilariously backwards. You know they conquered the continent right? They were the greatest examples of such a spirit, leaving civilization to conquer savages, tame the wilderness, and build a new civilization...

You openly deny and despise what were their greatest qualities.

If "racial homogeneity" and "supererior aryan genetics" really are the be-all end-all of success how

Whose strawman are you attacking now?

Is biodeterminism biodeterministic or not?

It'd determine almost everything were we beings who did not need mineral resources or foodstuffs to exert their will.

We do need these things.

And in any case you'd be hard-pressed to find any non-drooling racist who'd tell you that he believes anglo-saxons are inferior to Germans.

So I'm really not sure what you're aiming at here.

It'd determine almost everything were we beings who did not need mineral resources or foodstuffs to exert their will.

Why doesn't it determine the acquisition of material resources and foodstuffs?

I honestly don't think I'm being uncharitable or an ass to ask this. The term is "biodeterminism", but now we're talking about resources and food, presumably tied to arable land. That ain't genes any more, is it? We can soften the theory to say that superior genes give a considerable advantage that tells in the long-term, but then there's the problem that the only long term we can test this against is the past, which we already know the results of, and we're not actually going to be around to see a similar stretch of the "long-term" future, are we?

It's typically relevant when talking about outcomes for individuals sharing a culture.

Like you said, if you want to talk about outcomes for nations, there's too many variables.

It is. What of it?

Okay, what's the determined outcome that we should expect, given the evident bio?

There was a passage you posted once, that talked about how if you stepped through the last few hundred years in fifty-year increments, reasonable predictions would be completely blown out every time. I can imagine reasons why that sort of pattern might not continue, since there's good reasons to think the last few hundred years have been unusually prone to chaos... but why would one be sure the chaos has concluded?

You talk about Anglos devouring the light-cone, an eventuality that, accounting to translation, I think I agree would be less than preferable. Are they going to devour the light-cone because their biology determines it?

Okay, what's the determined outcome that we should expect, given the evident bio?

For the most part, SAT scores and the like – the distribution of individual human traits.

It also explains how North Koreans can have a functional, technologically sophisticated, orderly society in a situation that would have caused any African nation to implode in months.

It goes without saying that HBD is a skeleton key to a lion's share of American political enigmas.

But you probably understand the intellectually serious version of HBD at this point anyway; this flirtation with Hlynka's «Aryans of pure blood r superiors und prevail» Hitlerist gibberish is not something I need to knock down once again. And, of course, Nazis are less prominent in this school of thought than Jews.

HBD is a powerful framework for intra-social analysis; it allows us to ponder questions like these and its answers gracefully stand the test of time, while their rejection is a festering wound of academic culture.

I concede this is far removed from predicting international events, because the way people with different traits are assembled into a society is not trivially determined by those traits. It would have been interesting to discuss whether there is an inherent biological – or any other – reason explaining why, say, Ukrainians can have meritocratic leadership, while closely related (despite certain protestations) Russians are ruled by back alley thugs such as Zolotov and produce headlines like «“Russian Elon Musk” died from rape and torture in jail». And the OG Elon Musk's own biological potential did nothing for South Africa. Von Neumann, too, did relatively little for Hungary and Germany. I dabbled in theorizing about slots for qualitatively different expressions of human potential that some stable societies have and others lack. But it's a difficult topic.

I don't think Anglos (who are «basically mid», again) will devour the light cone; I'm no Cecil Rhodes who explicitly aspired to that nor someone who takes his racist delusions seriously. I'd guess that Musk is a mutt in Hlynka's terms, and Von Neumann's case is obvious enough. Those are the sort of people you need to come up with the idea of tiling the universe in self-replicating probes and the logistics to bootstrap this process.

The thing is, at least one of Anglo-derived societies had assembled the full stack of necessary slots. And it sure looks like their biology, which molds their moral instinct, played a role in making that possible.

Is biodeterminism biodeterministic or not?

Only when it is convenient to the woke Bay-Aryan's current argument for it to be so, otherwise it's an uncharitable strawman. ;-)

I think you know as well as I do.

The sort of person who uses words like "racial homogeneity" and "Hajnal line" without a hint of irony.

'Hajnal line' is a real thing. People from inside of it are kind of peculiar. I'm not one of them, as far as I know.

As to racial homogeneity.. do you really think we have any people who're very much in favor of that here ?

As to racial homogeneity. do you really think we have any people who're very much in favor of that here ?

Yes. Absolutely.

Not that this is any better, but it tracks with the Geeks, MoPs, and Sociopaths framework.

If you're looking for alternate descriptors, I'd use Leaders/Founders/Builders, Followers, and Parasites. Basically one small class of people who can catalyze change, the vast majority of people who follow the first group and by doing so produce surplus value, and third group that does not produce value but instead consumes it.

My own model is (and note that these are deliberately twee and modern-vocab terms) Chad, Normie, and Degen. Chads exist as a result of hard times, and are both the stereotypical hard men of the saying, and further them via violence and intra-Chad competition. Normies move hard times to good times as the result of cooperation and coordination. And Degens exploit the social structures of Normies, weakening them to the point where the structure no longer benefits people, and then people either drift away or some combination of environmental pressure and incomnig Chads breaks the organization entirely, you get chaos, the Chads start to thrive, and the cycle begins again.

This sounds pretty similar to the dicks/pussies/assholes trichotomy popularized by Team America: World Police.

I vaguely recall reading about a simulation of an iterated trembling-hand Prisoner's Dilemma game set that evolved like this. You'd expect "Tit-for-tat" (let's call it "Copycat", because Nicky Case is awesome) strategy to be the natural winner. But once it's naturally won, in a world full of Copycat players of trembling-hand games it pays to be "Cooperator" instead, because unlike Copycat the always-cooperate strategy doesn't get into nearly-interminable feuds when it or its partner makes a mistake. But when the world then starts to fill up with Cooperator players, it only takes a single always-defect "Cheater" mutant to sweep through the population, so Cheater takes over next. And finally, when the world is full of Cheaters, even a single pair of Copycat has enough of an advantage via mutual cooperation to take over again, and the cycle repeats.

Although, I don't recall that simulation showing any equivalent of the "Copykitten" strategy, which you'd think might be able to short-circuit the Cooperator takeover. I'm not sure whether that's because it just never managed to take over or because the simulated agents didn't have that strategy as an option.

grand Teutonic war machine lost out to the likes of Audie Murphy and his ilk; that is absolutely the case

Seeing this repeated is too much for me. If 'Teutonic war machine' lost to anything American, it was the 1/3rd+ of global industrial output and a continent worth of resources supporting the Europeans - and it was these Europeans that Germans lost out to. List Americans responsible for the massively successful industry, if anyone.

List Americans responsible for the massively successful industry, if anyone.

Rockefeller, Ford, Vanderbilt, Edison, Dow, Carnegie... of all the things to imply America was short on, you picked titans of industry?

EDIT: wait, I think I misread what you were saying. Nevermind...

I did not say America was short on them, I implied the opposite - by 'if anyone' I meant, if you're going to list any individual to represent the forces that were of foremost importance in US success in the two wars.

Hard times are darwinistic and kill off weak men. Hard times require group oriented people. Under difficult conditions individual self expression is valued less than the survival of the group.

Group oriented people with strong genetic health create good societies.

Strong socieites allow for more individualism and self centered people. People start avoiding military service, become atheistic, marriage is no longer sacred, immigration increases.

Self centered people create chaos. Andrew Tate-types, Tribes such as the vandals or Mexican drug cartels flurish in this environment. These people party their civilization into hard times.

This reminds me of Ronald Inglehart's Cultural Evolution thesis. He argues that people's social values evolve and are shaped as a function of the extent to which their survival has been established and secured.

One argument essentially takes the position that the values of creativity and self-expression (traditionally associated with liberalism and the left) trump the values of self-preservation and group consensus, only at the point that the group's survival becomes taken for granted. I think that's true. But it's even more instructive for what doesn't get said about that observation. Once you've reached the point where you've taken your survival for granted, you've already made a crucial, civilizational error in your habit of thinking. It reminds me of Lenin's axiom (I'll call it): "Every civilization is three meals away from anarchy." And I think he articulated something that conservatives have known all along. That no matter how technologically advanced, or sophisticated, or well defended your society is, you're never all that far away from the precipice.

And that's where it really illustrates the fundamental flaw in prioritizing creative self-expression, and independent thinking over group-oriented consensus. The latter which has always been necessary historically, to withstand the rigors of intergroup conflict and external threats. Just ask yourself how pathetic it is when questions about transrights (even if you think they're important) have become a top-shelf item of importance, as far as our cultural discussion goes, in the west today. And then just ask yourself, do you think objectively, that issue will (or should) 'ever' become a top-shelf, issue of importance? This is why I think issues and conversations like this are worth spending virtually no social or political capital one. Because they're so unimportant and inconsequential to bigger issues that'll never go away. No matter how much you think you've secured your place in the world.

Strong men create hard times. It's what one can observe quite clearly anywhere with an abundance of them.

What, the Rome of 200 BC was less functional than the Rome of 300 AD? When Rome was run by really tough, martially inclined men like Scipio Africanus, Marius, Sulla, Pompey and Julius Caesar, they had more than their fair share of wars and civil wars. But they pulled on through! Rome reached the peak of its power, destroyed its peers, grew faster than ever before. They routinely thrashed barbarian migrations - they were the ones 'migrating' into Gaul and elsewhere.

In contrast, the later Roman Empire was run by weak men who totally lacked the Cannae spirit of 'ban weeping, field new armies, fight on to victory' and they got obliterated. They resorted to paying tribute to barbarians, hiring barbarians to do their fighting for them and hiding behind the (admittedly strong) walls of Constantinople. They were passive, reactive not proactive.

Hard times come after weak men take control. Take Russia - was Gorbachev a strong man? No, he was weak. He wasn't in control of the transformation he tried to undertake. Thus the disaster of the 1990s and disintegration of the USSR (which blows anything Putin's done out of the water). Likewise with Nicholas II for that matter. If Nicholas were a strong man, Stalin would've been executed, not given tiny prison sentences. The guy was a revolutionary, a rioter who organized deadly prison breaks and violent bank robberies!

Now, this is not to say that strong men only bring good things. Hitler and Napoleon were about as far on the 'strong' axis as you can get. Things did not go so well for France and Germany under their rule. Yet there's a wider range of outcomes you can get under strong men than weak men. You can have great success as well as great failure. Under weak men, all you get is decline and eventually disaster.

Too many weak men create space for disaster, but who brings it and perpetuates it? You said it yourself: the barbarians or Stalin do.

The barbarians didn't bring disaster to themselves, it was great being a Frank or a Goth or a Vandal, as opposed to being a Roman. Likewise, you did not want to be a Gaul when Julius Caesar was running around.

Stalin is mixed. On the one hand his economic management and wartime leadership leave much to be desired. But on the other hand, he did win and Russia became a superpower. Could Gorbachev have built such a powerful war machine from the mess that Stalin inherited? Or would he have disintegrated the Union and let Germany eat it for breakfast?

That eventually in your last sentence is load bearing.

Rome's decadence and decline took roughly the entire period we think of as modernity, longer in parts of the East. Gorbachev of course came out of the hard times, even moreso Andropov and Brezhnev.

Without a predictable period to the cycle, the gag just becomes Reversion towards the mean: the musical.

Well, disaster is really contingent on external forces and on how resilient the system is. Rome didn't face many strong external threats until the great migrations of the 5th century because they'd already destroyed Carthage, Pontus, Macedonia, Gaul and only had to deal with Parthia. Plus Constantinople is incredibly defensible.

Under Brezhnev, the USSR was stable. Brezhnev didn't hesitate to use force either, he was definitely a strong man: send dissidents to mental institutions, send tanks into Czechoslovakia. The economic problems with the Soviet Union under Brezhnev and afterwards were definitely solvable with some judiciously executed reforms, as we see from China. Reducing the military budget below 15% of GDP would've been a good start!

All I'm saying is 'Strong men cause a range of outcomes, weak men cause hard times', which is pretty intuitive. I don't even have anything to say about cycles, just that, contra OP, strong men aren't necessarily bad but weak men are.

It strikes me that "society attempts to engineer strong men to create/maintain good times" would be an interesting fiction writing prompt. It seems plausible that this could encounter all sorts of pitfalls and ironic outcomes. But I'm sure some authors have already considered this idea ("service guarantees citizenship"), if not head-on. Artificially inducing hard times seems ethically fraught, and seems likely to backfire when discovered. But I'm not much of a fiction writer.

EDIT: I guess Ender's Game largely fits this description, as well.

The Dune series is essentially an extended argument for this position. In fact, Dune makes a stronger point: without war, humanity would go extinct. Too much order (read: good times) lead to decay and death.

Starship Troopers is literally that.

That was the source of the "service guarantees citizenship" quote. :)

Speculation, but I find it suggestive: Strong men increase variation, weak men reduce it. ("Strong men explore, weak men exploit"?) So when things are going bad, you want a certain level of strong men to have a chance to hit a fix; when things are going about as good as can be expected, you want to reduce your strongman:weakman ratio to avoid breaking things. Such a model would also result in the observed men/times cycle if you selected for successful countries.

Phrased like that it sounds suspiciously like "thrive vs survive", which would fit with the "right = strong, left = weak" framing.

Is the reason America is so successful that it's got good strongman selection mechanisms via the presidency?

Of course, if you consider the president whose reign probably most contributed to America's status as the undisputed global champion - FDR - he was a polio-ridden college boy who, at least according to various sources I've seen, was considered bit of an unserious airhead by many "serious" politicians and other types around him - ie. FDR. The only reason why he would be considered a "strong man" was that he succeeded, which means that the cause and effect get mixed up.

Czar Nicholas II is remembered as a weak leader, but if the chips had fallen slightly differently at the start of WW1, he might be remembered as the man who crushed Germany and Austria, took over Constantinople and was one of the greatest Czars ever.

Is the reason America is so successful that it's got good strongman selection mechanisms

Possibly. Our success is mostly due to economic output (compare the different nations' military production during WW2, for example), and though our "may the best man win" economy isn't perfect, it's a lot better than "may the best man be chosen by the Ministry of Best Man Allocation and carefully follow the List of Best Man Best Practices".

via the presidency?

Not possibly. Have you seen our presidents?

Up to and including bush senior the majority were extraordinary men. After that the weak men entered the stage.

Obama's considered a great President by a good number of people, despite being a fairly 'weak' leader. Hard to tell how history will look back on him a century from now.

That seems entirely dependent on the trajectory our culture takes from now until then.

Does progressivism continue? Then he'll be considered great.

Do we collapse and rebuild? He'll be on the level of James Buchanan.

How muc( of that is geography though? We live in a very stable part of the globe, protected by oceans and friendly neighbors in Canada and Mexico. Americans live in a fortress so long as her navy and air force can keep people from actually landing on our shores.

I wouldn't say they're bad per se, rather that they're a stabilizing agent. If there were only strong men, there would be no society at all, as there wouldn't be enough of the type who mindlessly upholds status quo. Too many however, and no necessary advancement and adaptation can occur.

They're the stabilizing rods of the great nuclear reaction we call society. Too few and it explodes, too many and you choke out the necessary chain reactions.

Why can't strong men uphold the status quo? See pic related. Notwithstanding spelling errors or stereotypes, surely it paints a picture of a tough, patriotic, disciplined, brave man (a strong man). In contrast we have a lazy, timid, pacifist (a weak man). Now these are just archetypes, yet there are surely people who more or less match them. I'm willing to bet the Romans who made Rome great were more like the former, Caesar, Marius and so on, leading from the front, risking all for glory and victory. The Romans who made Rome weak were probably more like the latter - the Empire somehow stopped being able to field huge armies, they had to pay for foreigners to fight for them.

There could well be a status quo that revolves around strength, a status quo that rewards bravery and great deeds. Strong men would fit fine in that.

/images/16886265479896488.webp

Well strong men 'do' uphold the status quo. At least for a given time. Will Durant had a useful heuristic of historical thinking, when he said that, "A nation is born Stoic and dies Epicurean." Good conditions have an inherent quality sewn into the environment that allows idiots and weak men to proliferate, at times it seems, with no end in sight. Until eventually the load becomes too heavy, the pendulum swings back and a historical reversion to the mean takes place. And that's usually how it's been, throughout history.

Civilizations tend not to make course corrections. When they're caught in a negative feedback loop/death spiral, history hasn't suggested that they find themselves a way out of it. They die, and they die hard. Going against the weight of that is no task for mere mortals. Which is the 'why' I'd suggest to you, as to why they can't uphold the status quo indefinitely. One thing Jared Diamond suggested in his historical/geographic determinist view of history that I think is highly relevant, was the question he raised about whether or not societies can change their values. If you want a relevant example where that question becomes important, just look at declining fertility rates all across the world.

I just came across this thread today on Reddit. Which is a great exemplar of this problem. The article isn't as relevant as the comment section, if you can notice how many people are politically blocked (evidenced by Reddit's overwhelming leftist userbase) from noticing the elephant in the corner. If you keep scrolling, a few people noticed it, about midway to the bottom of the thread, and some of them got jumped on for their 'right'-leaning suggestions of an explanation; and why the typical economic explanations are bunk. The reflexive tendency to jump on and attack and dismiss the 'real' source of the problem, are why civilizations broadly speaking, don't recover. And it's why strong men can't uphold them or reverse direction. Because the people overwhelmingly are not allowed to think about the problem, in a way that will allow a correction. And the longer the problem goes on, the worse it gets. And the worse it gets, the more extreme the solutions become. And the more extreme the solutions become, the more unacceptable they are to the population. And then you die.

Good post, agree. I hope people will realize we've been doing things wrong when it becomes more obvious, as economies fail and wars are lost. Like they said about the Soviet Union, 'it was forever, until it was no more'. If not, death is also an automatic stabilizer, the future will belong to those who do things correctly.

Do you have examples of societies where strong men created hard times? And an explanation of how good times somehow emerged from the perpetual cycle of hard times -> strong men -> hard times?

Stalin was an example of who I described as survivor-dominant type, and by all accounts times under him were pretty hard both in the heart of USSR and its periphery, only exceeded by even harder times Hitler decided to bring east.

Fortunately, strongman leaders tend to croak, and that is how the cycle can weaken.

I think it’s somewhat true that hard times create stronger people. The problem is that in order for human brains to mature properly, they need to have challenges to be met. The thrivers tend toward immaturity, they would rather play games and put forth minimal effort toward useful things.

I mean sure, but on the other hand in some sense the immaturity (play etc.) is a valid purpose of humanity. What else are we striving for with the term "good times" if not a reduction in demand for useful things, leaving more overhead for playing games?

Well, in my view, you do need a balance of both, but if you end up creating a completely “playful” culture, a lot of things don’t happen simply because those things that need to happen are hard and boring. This is a problem both personally and in wider society.

On a personal level, things like getting a job and doing it, cooking and cleaning for yourself are not exactly fun. And things like gaming, internet scrolling, partying and so on are fun. So a lot of people choose the latter. They take minimal jobs if they take one at all and spend the rest of their time playing. They accomplish very little and end up less happy because they haven’t accomplished much. (https://youtube.com/watch?v=DSYjCgXKOXE)

On a more societal level, building things, fixing things and getting along with everyone else is necessary to keep society humming along. Those things are boring. Who wants to pay taxes to fix roads? That’s not very sexy. Who wants to do the hard work of learning advanced math so they can invent and build important things to make society better? Sitting around discussing literature is much more fun. And self control is not as much fun as doing whatever you want and whenever you want to. It just doesn’t work because unless people know what the rules are and that you’ll mostly go along with them, they can’t really cooperate as they’d have to to make society work.

I mean, I agree, but you could imagine a society that was all work, zero play, 16 hours a day until you die. Any money you are paid for your labor is only reinvested to make you a more effective employee. Children are still raised (16 hours of schooling and training per day, enter the labor force at 12), but they refund their parents the cost of raising them and thus are merely another labor-raising device. All fun that one has is optimized for perfect recovery to maximize socially useful labor. I think if we look at why such a society was bad, we find what the proper role of fun is: this society doesn't seem to be for anything aside from itself. Is society for man or is man for society? Whereas from the "fun" perspective, or rather the "human values" perspective, we find that we don't need to justify labor: a life with a balance of meaningful challenges, self-actualization and silly fun seems more preferred, even on its own merits, than a life of only one of them. So there are two arguments for labor: first, a society with only fun quickly runs out of fun overhead. This is an argument that even fun-maximalists will embrace, but it doesn't give you meaning in a post-singularity setting where the amount of labor strictly required for fun maximization is zero. The other is that meaningful labor is fun. (At least, if we stretch the meaning of fun somewhat, to mean "fulfilling".) This offers a blueprint for a post-singularity world of voluntarist labor. And in that model, we may imagine that some people genuinely are most satisfied by a life filled entirely with vapid fun, and so what? Their fun does not diminish mine.

I mean, I agree, but you could imagine a society that was all work, zero play, 16 hours a day until you die.

For most of human history, this has been the case. And the demand for this kind of work hasn't gone away either, just because we live in the modern world. Someone, somewhere, has to do the work. Maybe the work's become more dispersed and technological abstractions have made managing the load easier, but the work itself hasn't disappeared. And a lack of respect for that burden, encouraging people to ignore addressing problems at the expense of their leisure, is only going to exacerbate the problem in the long-run.

Society may not be for anything aside from itself. But for most people, that seems to be good enough when you look at the ways people live their lives. I tend to have much more of a collective view of humanity more than I do an individual one. I struggled with the paradox of thinking through this for a long time. And I still do. Thinking of oneself as an individual is important but it's not paramount, IMO. People live embedded in communities. They live within a context of other human beings that you can never completely and permanently isolate themselves from. Despite being individuals, human beings aren't 'only' individuals. And being an individual may not even be the most important part of being human.

But I don't think this post-singularity world is ever going to come. Everyone on Planet Earth is living on borrowed time that's going to eventually come due.

For most of human history, this has been the case.

Sure, but what's their concept of heaven? More labor? No, a rest from having to do labor all the time. "Not enjoying it and wishing it would stop" is pretty much the defining difference between labor and fun. I don't think anybody's ever invented a wageslave heaven. (Maybe the Chinese...?)

I'm not saying the work shouldn't be done. I'm just drawing a difference between work as an instrumental and terminal goal: in fact, "instrumental goal" is also a pretty good synonym of labor.

People live embedded in communities. They live within a context of other human beings that you can never completely and permanently isolate themselves from.

I mean, I don't think constructing social necessity is particularly hard. If we find we want, terminally, for there to be socially useful labor (even aside how we're pretty alienated from the fruits of our labor in our current society, something something letterbombs), I don't think that's going to be hard to arrange even in the absence of any true environmentally-imposed scarcity. But note that now we're looking at labor as a terminal goal. So that's what I'd argue: all non-terminal labor should be abolished - not in the sense of just not doing it, but in the sense of not having to do it.

For most of human history, this has been the case.

I see no rational basis for believing this to be true. Current hunter-gatherers are not a 1/1 replica of our paleolithic ancestors, but they seem a reasonable approximation and do not lack for play or leisure. From all available evidence, farming and herding, even the primitive varieties, include a considerable amount of play and leisure. Quite a few slaves in Rome enjoyed some level of play and leisure; slaves who did not, mine and galley slaves for instance, stand out as famous exceptions.

Just a raw evolutionary argument should nix this: if all previous generations had actually operated in this fashion, wouldn't you be fairly-well adapted to handle such circumstances with equanimity?

As someone who puts value primarily in my individual life, I know which one I'd prefer and which one I'd rather not exist at all.

This is an interesting philosophy, but here's where you lose me. Do you want society to dwindle? Because that's what you think happens when strong men don't exist at all.

Is this something you came up with on your own? I have never heard society explained this way before, so I assume it is, but it does feel like it has some value as a perspective, and I have a really strong sense of deja vu about it. Or it's more like it feels like an unstated assumption underpinning many aspects of modern society.

To clarify: if having to choose between two extremes, I'd prefer no future rather than boot future.

Is this something you came up with on your own?

I'll resist the urge to ask "does anyone really come up with anything on their own" and say this isn't directly based on me analysing some philosophical movement or author. I've had an argument on the motte and wanted to solidify my objections into a separate post.

In the course of deconstructing the argument, you have thrown out whatever meaning there was to its constituent words.

At the risk of sounding pedantic, I believe the original thesis refers to some combination of Darwinism and Turchin's overproduction of elites. It entirely embraces your claim that weak men love to have a good time. Surprise, everyone does. And your «strong men» of the bodybuilders-on-horseback mold are a bugbear, a mirage, a nightmare of confused Hollywood producers and Bay Area rationalists and wannabe "dark elves" – they do not matter and do not last, they are but foam cresting waves of history.

Is Putin a weak man? Are folks on Rublyovka weak, or their children in Western capitals? They've delivered a pretty hard time for everyone, but they sure love to live large. And what about the self-satisfied rich of the developing world, that @2rafa discusses? Are they dedicated to making the whole system more amenable to thriving, or do they find it easy to insulate their kin from the wretched masses and keep having a good time, for their time?

The adage is almost nonsense, but so is your perspective.

I'd say that good men create good times. Good men like the memorable LKY. Good in that they care at all about what happens outside their circle of immediate concern, and strong enough to make hard decisions; which some mistake for them being bad.

In good times, this error becomes more pervasive, as social mobility reaches certain sophistication and a subclass of (some would say, overproduced) elites discovers the utility of playing up those decisions' costs.

Something like this.

You're absolutely right that the body-builder on horseback/Chad Squarejaw meme is a mirage. That is not a strong man, that is a weak man's caricature of a strong man. The strongest and most terrifying of men often come across as unassuming precisely because they are sufficiently self-possessed and confident in themselves, that they don't feel a need to actively project that image.

And yes good men create good times. But good men are rarely reasonable because having principals and caring about people/things outside one's circle of immediate concern is utterly irrational in the conventional sense of the word.

Building on this, I saw no recognition by the OP of the distinctions between types of strength, or even the distinction between power and strength. Weak leaders can have much power, and use the power of their position / context / brute force to paper over their weaknesses against those with less power.

Moreover, the 'strong men are where the survivors are dominant' easily misses that Darwinian selection doesn't select for strength, it selects for survival. Survival only correlates with strength when the selection force is targetting weakness- but it often doesn't. Wars will kill the brave and the selfless first, while cowards who flee live. Purges will select for those with the strength of the (wrong) conviction, but spare the sophists or the deceitful. Darwinian survival isn't survival of the best, it's the propagation of those most likely to multiply. Calling those features 'fitness' is assuming the conclusion.

I think an underestimated component of this is that physical strength/survivability is often down-stream of mental strength/survivability. As the old saw goes, a lot of guys want to be swole, but few have the discipline to eat right, lift weights, and do so with consistency.

Physical strength isn't much good to a doormat, and mental fortitude/astuteness can absolve numerous physical faults, the old Dashiel Hammet bit about how "Guzman didn't move fast, but then then again Guzman never needed to move all that fast because he'd seen you coming from six blocks away" comes to mind.

Agreed, and perhaps a simpler illustration is: why isn't everyone 7ft tall? Sometimes it pays off to be the small guy who just doesn't need to eat very much.

Why do people who insist on criticizing the idea of cyclical history always go for the short political slogan version instead of the longform nuanced theories that inspire those political slogans?

A lot of this post seems to stem from arbitrary definitions being held onto a very incomplete understanding of this theory, which is a shame given that people have taken decades to write compelling and detailed explanations of how and why the cycles happen, what they look like, how transition between them look like, and what the quality of the people at any given point of a cycle are.

To boil it all down to strong and weak is appropriate for a political slogan, it is not appropriate for anything beyond that, and certainly not any actual theory of history. If you want to disagree that history is cyclical you can make arguments as to that, and I believe there are strong arguments against (though I am ultimately not moved by them), but argue against Spengler or Khaldun, not some strawman naive palingeneticism even they would deride.

I even think you have a compelling insight in trying to map the survive-thrive axis to Spirit, Asabiyyah, Nomos of whatever quality of organization cyclical theorists use, but actually do that please, don't just map it to some naive (mis)understanding.

Why do people who insist on criticizing the idea of cyclical history always go for the short political slogan version instead of the longform nuanced theories that inspire those political slogans?

but argue against Spengler or Khaldun

Well, I admit - I haven't read those guys, but I've read enough iterations of the political slogan and what were essentially its naive expansions. So I argue against the slogan.

I think this sort of argument almost always becomes a debate over what exactly the terms "strong men," "good times," etc. mean, but I wanted to bring up one of the better meditations I've read on the topic that agrees with your perspective, namely Bred Devereaux's four part series of posts on what he calls the "Fremen Mirage."

Personally, I'm a bit closer to Ibn Khaldun, in that I've observed degeneration at all scales of biology as soon as selective pressure is released, from yeast in a test tube losing whatever useful (to us) gene you try to insert in them whenever it stops being necessary to survive, to 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants losing the work ethic and conscientiousness that their parents or grandparents honed while toiling away to escape grinding poverty in Asia.

I tend to think of it like a spring that can be coiled and released i.e. all the valuable work comes from the release, not the compression, but it also resets you back to the initial conditions or worse after you let it go. What would be truly great is if we could achieve the advantages of so-called "hard times" or what I call "compression" without actual hardship, whether that's through some sort of mental conditioning, strong enough cultural memes, or direct genetic engineering.

I was going to link Devereaux myself, but I felt OP's post was too crap to bother with haha. Using such vague terminology and just-so stories is akin to calling over all your Motte buddies to look at Rorschach blots, and any useful commentary is despite such a thing.

Your spring metaphor reminds me of a fair amount of literature on athletic performance: everyone agrees that training makes you stronger, but not immediately. Asking folks who just finished a marathon to run another immediately -- but faster now because they've trained more -- is not going to go well. You actually get stronger when resting after training. But rest too long and you start to lose form.

Sports science has figured out all sorts of (imperfect) models for human performance. Generally best results come from periodizing training and recovery to optimize fitness in competition, rather than year-round.

I think your idea generalizes "strong" here to include more than athletic feats. But even accepting that model doesn't make it easy: motivation for self-improvement purely for stoic self-actualization -- thanks, Maslow! -- doesn't in my experience work that well. I try (and do okay, I think) but my greatest efforts and successes in life have had non-actualization driving factors.

Even if we assume it would work -- of which I'm not certain -- it's unclear to me how we'd encourage this at a population level. There have been plenty of pop culture books that have tried, but getting people to clean their room, or even exercise modestly and eat healthier, seems to prove quite difficult for the average human wealthy enough to have a choice in the matter.

I don't think I agree with your implicit definition of "Strength".

When is Achilles displaying more strength? When he kills Hector and abuses his corpse, or when he accedes to King Priam's request for leave to bury his son? Is a man who can defeat any challenger but cannot rule himself, who remains a slave to his passions truly "Strong"?

You assert that "thrivers" "adjust society" toward thrive conditions. You assert that "weak" men like good times, which seems fair enough. How does their "weakness" contribute to good times, specifically, beyond creating a demand that the less-weak can fill?

You're trading off between "strong/weak" and "thrive/survive" as though they're synonyms. They aren't, and further "thrive" and "survive" seems on a much weaker foundation than "strong" and "weak". The latter we can observe from objective results. The former, from what I've seen, is a model built on the present, and thus assumes its own conclusion, that what we see around us is in fact "thriving", a self-sustaining flowering that can run under its own power in the long-term.

I am not using "strong" here as a positive adjective.

obviously. Likewise, I can assert that "sick" is actually better than "well", but there's no obvious reason why others should take that assertion seriously. See the edits above for more detail.

The "weak" and "strong" for the purposes of this model relate specifically to the ability to do what is required for base survival. Many men that might be called weak are not useless just because their current skillset would be useless in a harder time. It's also important to note that the ratio of survivor/thriver in a man is not fixed for life.

The "weak" and "strong" for the purposes of this model relate specifically to the ability to do what is required for base survival.

Yes, but that is an interpretation you are importing from "thrive/survive". That is not the understanding of the person who coined the phrase, nor of the people who repeat it, and you haven't demonstrated why they should, only asserted that they should.

You are claiming that "strength" is nothing but raw animalistic survival potential, and that "weakness" is everything else, and then announce that there are many good things other than raw animalistic survival potential, and so therefore "weakness" is better than "strength". This is obviously true, for what it's worth, but I doubt anyone worth listening to has ever argued otherwise. The question remains of whether "survive/strength" reduces down to nothing more than raw animalistic survival (it certainly does not) and whether "thriving" can actually self-sustain such that "survive" is no longer necessary and can be discarded. Is "thrive" simply a rebranding of "eat your seed corn"? Aesop's grasshoppers "thrived" for a time, and a number of human polities have as well, up until they neglected a few too many things and then died screaming. History strongly indicates that there's no free lunch, that sooner or later the constraints of material reality must be accounted with. The fact that the Thrivers themselves have more or less wholesale begun adopting Survive tools like censorship and enforced conformity kinda paints a bleak picture for the future of Thrive, but hey, as every sucker ever proclaimed: maybe this time really is different!

and whether "thriving" can actually self-sustain such that "survive" is no longer necessary and can be discarded. Is "thrive" simply a rebranding of "eat your seed corn"?

I thought I was rather clear that both extremes are not ideal. Eating your seed corn is the extreme of what I call thrive here.

Life is hard. Some people are shielded from this but just by looking at nature, we can see how savage it can be.

I'd never want to the ones that I love through the hardships I went through. This can create a generation that underestimates how hard life can be.

Weak men create good times. Weak men love good times ...

Strong men like good times too. Here's the thing, there are times when life gets hard, that someone has to act. Weak men tend to fail here. This makes for bad times.

Go to a construction site, how many weak men do you see?

Strong men like good times too.

As I said, pretty much no one embodies the pure archetype. But from what I observe, the more someone valorizes being able to act when life is hard, the more they valorize shunning pleasures, sometimes to the extent of fetishizing suffering. Not a 1:1 correlation, but certainly not orthogonal.

The failure mode of tough construction site man is "I had/have it hard so y'all should too". This is what I'm attempting to expose and warn against in my post.

But from what I observe, the more someone valorizes being able to act when life is hard, the more they valorize shunning pleasures, sometimes to the extent of fetishizing suffering.

You should examine your biases.

The failure mode of tough construction site man ...

You misunderstood me. Please, go work on a construction site for a few months. Learn what it takes to actually build something. Learn what that strength actually means because judging from your observations, you're rather ignorant.

The failure mode of tough construction site man is "I had/have it hard so y'all should too".

Whether this is a failure mode or not depends on the specific details of "having it hard." Making your children exercise every day is being harder on them than letting them lounge around on the couch watching cartoons, but the outcome is better; making your children exercise until they throw up or pass out from heatstroke is being too hard on them. There can't be any universal rules at this level of abstraction because people's definitions of hardness are conditional and based on their own experiences; some tiger parents need to be told to take it easy and some parents who are spoiling their kids should be encouraged to be more strict.

As an aside, for an example of a culture whose members took shunning pleasures to the extreme but was nevertheless quite successful, look no further than Puritan New England, which banned everything from music to sports but also produced an outsized number of great scientific and literary figures. I've even heard it speculated that New Englanders had a longer life expectancy than all their colonial neighbors because their food was so bland that people inadvertently practiced the sort of calorie restriction that leads to longevity in laboratory mice.

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