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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.
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: "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 of collapse.
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.
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