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Notes -
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.
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.
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.
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