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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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