self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4hr ago
I see you throwing up a big wall of text, but I don't see you engaging seriously with what I read as the core element of @FCfromSSC's critique. Specifically their addendum to the original thesis "Hard times make strong men inevitable. Good times make weak men inevitable."
Adding "inevitable" only worsens the problem, and also doesn't help the core issue - the theory makes few concrete predictions - and just about anything becomes inevitable over enormous time scales.
I have also engaged at great length (and disastrously for my sleep schedule) with anyone who either came in to support him, the theory, or had their own critiques.
I also specifically complained that FC's response was still so vague that it made it very difficult to engage with.
I did my best. I will present specific responses to all his points which I've already written:
Good times impose reduced consequences on weak men for their weakness, and greatly reduce the amount of free energy by which strong men might exercise their strength. By contrast, bad times impose many consequences on weakness, and often provide an abundance of free energy through which strength might be exercised, not least the general population's desire to organize their collective power and resources to change things for the better.
Looking at your claims about “free energy,” which I think has the causality backwards: Good times are not a reduction in the energy available to strong men. Good times are the surplus that makes strength scalable.
Good times, meaning surplus calories, high GDP, technological capacity, lack of immediate existential threat, allow a society to take a percentage of its population and tell them: you don't need to farm. You don't need to hunt. You don't need to worry about where your next meal is coming from. You will spend twelve hours a day lifting, drilling, training, learning complex machinery, building unit cohesion, practicing logistics, rehearsing doctrine.
But of course, this requires us to take the terms "strong" and "weak", "good" and "bad" seriously. Likewise words like "decadence", which Devereaux seems to believe contain no semantic content of significance, and so declines to even engage with in any meaningful fashion.
You accuse Devereaux of refusing to engage with the semantic content of decadence. That is not quite right. Devereaux engages a specific operationalization: luxury softens bodies, literacy softens minds, complexity demilitarizes populations. Your complaint seems to be that this is too crude and that a richer version is hiding behind it.
I think a culture can build an effective military force, such that they win a disproportionate number of their engagements, not merely through technocratic KPIs (amount of money available, population size, etc), but through specific cultural features and norms. I think such a culture can then replace those cultural features and norms with a new set, and as a consequence begin to lose a disproportionate number of their engagements, even though it now has more money, more population, and a greater share generally of the technocratic KPIs than it did when it was winning. Further, I think this signal is strong enough that predictions can be made in advance.
Morale and cohesion matter militarily. Correct, well-attested, Clausewitz built it into the load-bearing structure of his framework under “moral forces,” nobody serious disputes this. It's acknowledged in official US military doctrine.
Culture can shape military performance in meaningful ways. Also largely agreed, also case-specific, also entirely compatible with Devereaux’s thesis.
"Good times makes weak men, weak men make hard times" is interesting because it warns us that there is no permanent victory, that good times are not stable, that preserving and extending them requires effort and constant vigilance. And this is not a general warning: the hazard is specified, so it can be recognized in advance and action can be taken accordingly.
It's the equivalent of saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Sounds great, doesn't help when you transect your spinal cord in a car crash, or ruin your knees after too much PT. A claim being "inspiring" is very different from it being true.
Most of the rest is directly referenced or quoted in the top-level post. Now, if FC replied, I could engage in further debate. I've done what I can.
Instead, both you and Devereaux seem to be using "macroscopic factors matter" (has anyone here seriously argued that they don't?) as an excuse to dismiss your opponents arguments and observations out of hand.
It seems that FC dislikes it when Devereaux says so:
By contrast, it seems to me that Devereaux aims to convince his readers that military affairs are largely deterministic, with a layer of luck on top. Therefore, empires are born because they got a streak of good RNG hits, and Empires die because they got a streak of bad RNG hits, and human decisions are not really terribly decisive either way.
And this is incorrect because? I do not see Devereaux putting numbers on the relative importance of "RNG" versus determinism. Rome might have been very different if Justinian didn't have to face one of the worst plagues in human history, and if Belisarius's wife hadn't been such a hoe. What might the world look like if Barbarossa took swimming lessons? He notes that macroscopic factors like population size, wealth and military metrics matter, he does not claim that nothing else does. I do not see why you consider it an excuse to insert your own interpretation and then get mad at him. My understanding is that he sees those metrics as important, often decisive, which is not the same as what you seem to believe. And randomness only adds variance. Devereaux believes systems (logistics, tax bases, agriculture) determine the probability of victory. It isn't just "luck"; it is that a "decadent" society with a 90% win rate due to logistics will eventually crush a "hard" society that relies on a hero rolling a natural 20 every time. (Numbers my own, and made up).
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6hr ago
Do you agree that this definition of propaganda makes us all propagandists, including you? If so, I have nothing to add.
Your problem is that you think propaganda is bad. It's not. Propaganda for things I don't like is bad. Propaganda for things I do like is good. That's the point.
You might want to rethink that one my man. I specifically gave two examples of "good" propaganda, namely hand washing advocacy posters and public health messaging in general.
I also note:
Propaganda usually implies a bypass of the critical faculties. It relies on lies, omissions, or raw emotional appeals to trick the audience into a belief they would not hold if they had the full picture.
And:
Propaganda can be both propaganda and true (I do not agree that his approach to the Fremen Mirage constitutes propaganda). You need to demonstrate that it is both misleading and factually incorrect.
If the entire point of @FCfromSSC 's post was that he doesn't like Brett Devereaux, that would be a much less interesting post. Instead, he also specifically defends the hypothesis Brett critiques.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8hr ago
It is impossible to have human society without selection pressures. Even some kind of posthuman society would still have selection pressure on memes and their equivalent of genes.
What would that even look like? No disease? Everyone lives forever, or has 2.1 kids with identical genes? No class mobility? No economic pressure?
There is also the issue of too much selection pressure being detrimental. As an example here notes, you can induce antibiotic resistance by exposing a bacterial colony on a petri dish to a gradient of antibiotic density. You can't make bacteria immune to anything by tossing them into the sun. You can't improve human society or the biosphere as a whole by exposing us to a gamma ray burst, or even something tamer like regularly showering the surface with cobalt bombs.
There is a massive gap between " some selection pressure exists and is useful" to "the degree of selection pressure present is optimal". It takes a lot of work to bridge the gap.
The collapse of Rome set back living standards in Europe by a thousand years. I sincerely doubt that whatever eugenic benefits came out of it (if any) were worth that much lost growth potential.
War can improve civilizational fitness, and also ruin it. WW2 possibly caused a tech-boom, WW3 might regress human civilization by a hundred years.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8hr ago
Uh... If we accept your taken on what constitutes "propaganda" and "The Dark Arts," then we have effectively defined "writing a persuasive essay" out of existence. You just took the standard curriculum of Rhetoric 101, which has been taught since Aristotle was walking around the Lyceum telling people not to mumble, and then went ahead and relabeled it as psychological warfare.
Look at the specific "sins" Devereaux admits to in the passages you quoted.
He admits to "practicing argumentation." He admits to "reasoning soundly." He admits to "writing well." He explicitly states his goal is to "build a base of knowledge" so that the reader understands the context before he delivers his conclusion. Duh? He's not writing as a historian for other historians, though I presume he does that at some point. This is a public blog that caters to a much broader audience of nerds interested in history.
If all of this is propaganda, then what's the alternative? Is the only "honest" non-propagandist mode of communication to scream incoherent, context-free conclusions at a stranger while making no effort to be understood? A maths textbook? I imagine that most historical treaties would count as "propaganda" using such a counter-productive and indiscriminate definition.
If you continue insisting on that counting as “propaganda,” then you have ruled in basically every public intellectual worth reading, including the ones people here cite approvingly when they are on their side. It certainly rules in nearly all political writers, most historians who write for a general audience, and basically every one who wants to be read by someone other than their dissertation committee.
It rules me in, it rules you in, and it rules in everyone involved in this thread, probably everyone who ever posted on the internet. If that's a crime, you're going to need a prison the size of the internet too, and isolation rooms for us argumentative wordcels.
We are all here on The Motte. We are all selecting specific arguments to support our priors. We are all trying to frame our words to be palatable to the community so we are not downvoted into oblivion. We are all "building a ledger" of credibility so that people will listen when we have something controversial to say. If Devereaux is a propagandist for organizing his essays to be persuasive, then you are a propagandist for organizing your comment to persuade me that he is one. My dog is a propagandist for whining and making puppy eyes at me when he's hungry.
There is also an irony in quoting him explaining that public engagement should not be confused with activism, and then immediately calling him a propagandist. Devereaux explicitly telling you “I am trying to communicate expertise to a broad audience, and I am aware of the difference between explaining and campaigning,” and you are responding “aha, you admit to explaining things persuasively, therefore you are campaigning.” That is not a gotcha. You're playing a linguistic shell game and expanding definitions so you can say someone you dislike is a criminal because he littered once.
Your reasoning appears to be:
-
He admits to using persuasive techniques.
-
Persuasive techniques are propaganda.
-
Therefore, his conclusions are suspect.
I feel like you broke something in step 2.
There is a distinction to be made between "propaganda" and "pedagogy," or between "manipulation" and "persuasion."
Propaganda usually implies a bypass of the critical faculties. It relies on lies, omissions, or raw emotional appeals to trick the audience into a belief they would not hold if they had the full picture.
(And I've already given an example of what is technically propaganda, yet still good: public health advice)
That is an empirical charge. It requires examples from the contested posts, not a quote where he says “tone matters” and “don’t be condescending.”
I await examples, if they exist.
Right now, all you've presented is: “this guy is persuasive and self-aware about being persuasive.” Fine. So is every effective writer. Including the writers you like. Including you, right now, trying to get me and others to see him as a sinister propagandist/Culture Warrior rather than a historian making arguments.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Fair enough, I recognize that as a valid possibility, even if I think that reunification is more likely than not. The last civil war didn't end up with two separate independent cores, for whatever that's worth.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I apologize. I misread:
I already cited the genetic trajectory of Rome (genetic decline -> civilizational decline), granted that bakes in the assumption that population replacement from North Africa was dysgenic, and the subsequent correction towards Northern Europe was eugenic. But it did happen that way.
My intent was to demonstrate examples of the phrase in the wild, the connotations seem clear to me, even when they're not strictly military.
This uses the meme, but it has no connection between strong/weak men and military victory.
Huh? Did you miss:
Hard Times Create Strong Men 1920s - 1940 (Depression, WW)
There are two implication is that the Great Depression was a hard time, which created the strong men who fought in WW2. Alternatively, both count as hard times, and created a generation of strong men who produced the good times from the 1940s to 1970. Since it references a literal world war, what else do you want?I can only apologize for the poor quality tweets, but Ywitter's indexing sucks. I went to the bother of finding at least one robust example:
https://x.com/OrdainedPrepper/status/2018394819597660297?s=20
Another world war would fix all this nonsense. This is what happens when humans have extended periods of peace. Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times and bad times create strong men … and round and round we go. Humans NEVER learn because we have insignificantly short memories.
Please try and guess the context first. It's a reply to
I'm sure there are more out there, but I'm calling it a night.
So it seems like your collection of slop tweets exactly proves my point. Ain't nobody saying that because they think "weak men" can't swing a sword, shoot a gun, or push a button just as well as "strong men".
It's hardly my fault that the tweets are slop when the topic is slop and the search functionality is trash. I think it's rather clear that unironic admiration of the Spartans as superlative warriors is relevant to the thesis, though they used spears rather than swords for the most part. It'll have to do for now.
I never said it was a particularly useful or thought provoking theory, just one that's quite a bit more useful than the strawman you make it out to be.
I disagree that you have demonstrated this.
It actually beats a quite significant theory though, that is: "the winners keep winning, forever." Simple models, such as those in chess, 4x games, etc, show that once one side has a decisive advantage, it's already game over. But civilizations in real life don't follow the same pattern.
Is anyone making that claim? Very well, your approach beats the two maximally degenerate models.
In some sense you might say it's stating the obvious. But why is that a problem? Tons of memes state the obvious, that's what makes them accessible. That doesn't make them wrong.
The obvious is the Motte. The bailey is all the additional extensions heapened on it. Devereaux does not contest that nations rise and fall, because that is obviously true. Neither do I. We both claim that the version he specified is immensely useless. The more you steelman the idea, the more it becomes something mundane. Add enough caveats, and you're describing standard history.
I also note that you haven't addressed my point about corporations, as of the time of this edit.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I understand what you're trying to say. I've noted the points of agreement and disagreement. The most specific is the claim that the change in population after the collapse of Rome was dysgenic, and that the specific adaptation to the Plague was a net positive after the plague subsided. That might be true, but definitely needs more evidence to be more than a possibility. The selection pressure wasn't so high that the protective allele became predominant, and that's despite Bubonic plague being a recurring problem.
My gripe is with the claim made (by others) that the cultural consequences of "hard times" are positive on net. It is also true that selection pressure strong enough to overcome genetic drift will produce adaptations that might be eugenic, depending on the context. For example, the protection provided by the mutant ERPA2 is probably dysgenic now, since we don't really have to worry about the plague but can't cure Crohn's.
More importantly, the advocates for the Hard Times thesis often want to intentionally cause suffering and hardship, because they think that's good. Even if it's debatably eugenic, the juice is clearly not worth the squeeze.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
The Vatican military/Swiss Guard is a tiny paramilitary force. It has no hope of holding up against anything much larger than a terrorist attack. It doesn't need to, because of good relations with their neighbors, and because it's in the middle of Italy.
Notice that you have changed the standard of what constitutes a group from nation states to an entire religion and all its adherents. I think that says something, and strays from the original point of contention (and when I gave specific examples of softness, I chose smaller groups because I think it's a shitty standard at the level of nation states). The Papal Enclave doesn't recruit primarily from within the Vatican, as far as I'm aware. That is a form of outsourcing. I might as well argue that the late Roman Empire was recruiting from itself, because the barbarian tribes at the borders had partially or strongly Romanized.
Ok, hold up. If there is such a thing as ambient cultural softness, that can be applied to entire societies, then surely being unable to recruit your defense from your own people is as close to a definition as we can probably get.
That is an incomplete definition at best.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Are you aware those genes don't simply convey resistance to the Black Plague, they provide more generalized resistance against lethal infectious diseases?
That is not information conveyed in the article you linked. The primary protection is against Y. Pestis, I went to the trouble of looking and I find no evidence of significant protection from other pathogens, at least for the ERAP2 variant in question.
As the article confirms:
However, the protection against plague conferred by these variants appears to have come at a cost. The protective ERAP2 variant is also a known risk factor for Crohn’s disease. Another protective variant has been associated with an increased risk of two autoimmune diseases. Thus, the Black Death and other past pandemics may have shaped humans’ immune systems in ways both good and bad. While we acquired better protection against infections, we became more susceptible to autoimmune diseases.
Yeah. It's a tradeoff. What would you rather have, a genetic resistance to Y. Pestis that is far from perfect, and obsolete with the age of antibiotics, or elevated risk of Crohn's disease, which is chronic and lifelong?
And recall the Native Americans were devastated by diseases for which Europeans had developed immunity. It provided a strong genetic advantage.
They were doing just fine before being exposed to alien pathogens. And the Europeans probably picked up syphilis in the process. I don't see how this improved things for anyone.
The Black Plague certainly impacted all classes of people, but the poor masses were hit harder, which yes would be another selection effect suggesting eugenic pressure. Higher immunity among higher social classes is observed even today.
That is much more likely to be a consequence of improved nutrition and sanitation. The wealthy also had the luxury of flight in the face of the plague. They also, yes, probably have better genes for physical and mental health overall, but probably not to that drastic an extent.
Scholars cite the pressures created by the Black Plague on the Catholic Church as being decisive in the Protestant Reformation in Europe, and in the breakdown of feudalism in England towards the manorial economic system which then gave way to the market system.
That's fine.
I already cited the genetic trajectory of Rome (genetic decline -> civilizational decline), granted that bakes in the assumption that population replacement from North Africa was dysgenic, and the subsequent correction towards Northern Europe was eugenic. But it did happen that way.
Yes, and you need to justify that assumption better. North African Berber populations are not the same as the people further south, the Sahara Desert is remarkably inconvenient. There has been a great deal of population admixture over 1.5 thousand years, so a naive extrapolation from current IQ figures is fraught.
If you took away war, starvation, and apocalyptic disease from our evolutionary timeline we would be devolved and unrecognizable and not human. Not saying I support all those things, but the eugenic effects of these sorts of pressures: war, disease, etc. lends credence to the "hard times create strong men" meme, but it's not always true. The pressure has to be eugenic in nature to ring true. Somalis living in a shithole isn't going to make better Somalis unless there's a eugenic selection effect. "Hard times" that are also dysgenic do not make good men.
It is a very good thing we have options these days, like gene therapy as I've mentioned previously. We do not need war and disease to trim the herd, it's a horribly crude solution at best.
Even in the absence of civilizational collapse, selection pressures were still present. In the absence of modern medicine, disease was rampant. Wars still killed people, albeit at a lower background rate. I wouldn't accept the trade of setting back living standards and tech levels so hard it took a thousand years to recover, during the late Enlightenment or early Industrial Revolution.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
It is true that South was the better combatant, but all the stuff you've said about how the South lost its war suggests to me that you didn't really read my comment - their loss is precisely what you would expect to create Strong Men (in the Strong Man cycle theory) and thus them losing the war is evidence for the theory, not against it, as you seem to think.
As you note, the South already had a strong martial culture. What exactly changed after their loss in the civil war to strengthen it? Is there evidence that they became more likely to sign up for military service on a per-capita basis? They weren't a bunch of pacifists who got beaten up and decided to enlist as a trauma reaction. It is very weak evidence at best, if used to support the Hard Times theory.
(I used an LLM to check, and it claims that 37% of white Americans come from Confederate States, but make up about 40-45% of active duty personnel who are white, and thats roughly a quarter of all active duty personnel considering all races. I haven't double checked the figures, since I've been awake for 36 hours now, so I'm open to evidence otherwise)
There are all kinds of martial cultures that are greatly divorced from hard times, especially when you compare how bad things were to what to they have now. The Gurkhas. The Sikhs. The latter fought (and often lost) a whole bunch of wars, but made a name for themselves, creating a self-identity that persisted. They were already "strong men" when times are hard, they are debatably still so, even if they mostly drive taxis in Canada. The standard is awfully wooly.
Really? Which ones do you have in mind? I think the Russians were impressive at Hostomel. I actually suspect this is an area where the Chinese severely lag. The UK and France, I think, have good trigger-pullers but not a lot of mass...who else?
Israel. Their special forces punch way above their weight class, but then again the entire country does too. Korea (the southern one, though NK SF did pretty well in Ukraine).
Loss of faith (probably religious but possibly also in a shared national project)
Loss of reliance on reason
I disagree with Kipling on many things, but I find this mildly funny. I suspect that an increased reliance on "reason" is responsible for a lot of the loss of (religious) faith. Intelligence and education negatively correlate with religiosity.
I agree that Europe stagnated because of poor economic choices, including excessive redistribution and deindustrialization. I do not see how that is strong evidence for the argument in question. One would assume that going through WW2 would put them in prime position to become stronger men, while the Americans, having had it easy for centuries, would be the ones in decline.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
As I said in the previous thread, that's not the meme, it's an strawman of the meme.
Ain't nobody saying that because they think "weak men" can't swing a sword, shoot a gun, or push a button just as well as "strong men".
Do you really want me to go digging up examples on Twitter? Very well.
https://x.com/ashukla09/status/1513940563917041664?s=20
https://x.com/MarkOrmrod/status/1941804527914537373?s=20
https://x.com/AntonKreil/status/1969104105894183202?s=20
https://x.com/romanhelmetguy/status/1684935042554843137?s=20 (Spartan glazing, in the context of an ACOUP post)
https://x.com/infantrydort/status/2023174525714645445?s=20 (More Sparta glazing)
https://x.com/demos_network/status/2019499416156098933?s=20 (It's even got a gif from 300!)
https://x.com/bitcoinzay/status/1488910846063484930?s=20 (Bruh)
Happy? You want more of this slop? My point was that it exists in the wild.
The meme refers to a cyclical "boom-bust" cycle, rather than competition between peer nations. A country of weak men creating hard times can be more powerful militarily than a country of strong men creating good times
If you collapse the course of a civilization into "hard times" and "good times" then I would interested to see how you didn't get a cycle out of it.
You acknowledge that the "cycle" is variable, and grossly so depending on context. Great, does that offer any predictive value? Can you pinpoint the threshold of "decadence" where the odds of collapse skyrocket, or the degree of character-building hardship that ensures a society moves onto the good stuff?
If you can't, then the theory is borderline useless. It only beats one alternative, which is that literally nothing ever happens.
Hard times don't immediately create strong men, and good times don't immediately great weak men. They're breeding grounds for the next generation
That is a phase shift, it should preserve the overall pattern.
The decline of many eminent corporations in the past is kind of a microcosm of the same phenomenon. Megacorporations have all the advantages: more information, better ip banked up, connections, and money to invest, yet there are many such cases where they've ended up in the dumpster. Being top dog often results in a loss of the dna that made a corporation ascendant in the first place.
Corporations are not nations. More importantly, you have omitted what I think is most necessary to have this actually be a supportive argument: that corporations or companies that go through bad times tend to emerge stronger, and that that bad times breed better companies. It's good that you don't say that, because it's not true. A far more common result is that they go bust too. Unfortunately that means you're selectively paying attention to one side of the argument.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
My brother in $Deity, if the cost of eugenics is painfully killing off 30% of the population with pestilence and plague, I'm not sure I want to take up that offer. That's coming from someone who is sympathetic to the cause of eugenics, done sensibly. We can do it with much less societal disruption by far more genteel approaches such as germline gene editing. No need to cause civilizational collapse, civilization is kinda nice, most of the time.
The Black Death, the high mortality during the Middle Ages, the violent organization of the early Roman Republic all served eugenic functions- even the collapse of the Roman Empire served an important eugenic function. "Hard times create strong men" is a nod to the eugenic function of growth and the dysgenic effects upon realization, stagnation, and ultimate decline. Goethe
You can see the full "Hard times create good men, good men create week men" cycle in the genetic evolution of the Roman Empire, with the collapse of the Roman Empire forming an important eugenic function reversing the dysgenic effects of late Roman decadence.
Citations desperately needed. I've never needed them more, because your claims warrant them. What fucking eugenics? Are you aware of the fact that the same genes that convey resistance to the Black Plague also cause increased risk of autoimmune disease? War, starvation and apocalyptic disease are terrible ways to go about it. All you've done is attach a chart that shows some kind of distributional shift of what I can only assume is some allele or haplotype. I find it incredibly funny that you chose to provide citations for the one thing you claim that least needs it.
Sure. That's not an issue at all. What was the last war where the continental US faced an existential threat? The Civil War? The War of 1812? The country would probably have survived a defeat in WW1 and 2 back-to-back and everything that came since, it's the perks of being an island fortress the size of a continent with enormous natural resources.
The fact that WW2, a conflict that killed somewhere between 75-80 million people still had no chance of causing serious catastrophe at home is probably the greatest testament to American superiority around. You can't blockade America, you can't starve America, you can't even cut off oil supplies because you make enough to get by, albeit with austerity measures. The only thing that can put a dent in you are nukes, and you have nukes of your own.
I struggle to identify another historical Great Power with that kind of domestic security and free license to do whatever the fuck they want abroad without it following them home. Even Britain at its peak had to seriously worry about neighbors in Europe, for good reason.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
How is that a bad example? The Papal Enclave exists as a nominally independent state. It preaches Christian charity and forbearance, and I believe it's probably at least 500 years since a Pope had to crack skulls with a mace (and that too was probably another pope). There is no major nation that can get away with that kind of nominal pacifism, barring those that have military alliances with stronger powers, which is just another form of outsourcing all the nasty brutish threat of violence.
Please, by all means share your definition of cultural softness. If I know what you mean, then we can move to productive debate.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
The Motte is that there are dozens of factors at play, many of them heavily contextual and localized, requiring exhaustive research. I'm describing history.
I do not have to be a historian to observe that a historical "theory" is implausible, and I largely defer to Devereaux in this particular topic. If you have any concrete examples of him being incorrect, especially here, I'm all ears.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
What if it's trained to wriggle around a prostate? Given how many worms there are, that's the polycule to end all polycules.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
It's sort of glossed over but the US has a region that has both a history of Hard Times (from losing a war) and of Strong Men (from a long military tradition). I'm speaking, of course, of the former Confederate states, most of which are more likely to enlist their men in US wars than wealthy American states such as California or New York. Hawaii - which (contrary to its public image) is very much a Hard Times state - is the most over-represented, although some of that might be military kids joining the military.
I'm aware that the South and rural states are over represented in the US military.
I don't dispute the data. But what exactly does this prove for the Fremen thesis? The South lost its war. Spectacularly. If Hard Times produce the strongest military culture, and the South has been steeped in both literal defeat and the mythology of that defeat for 160 years, shouldn't we expect that culture to translate into superior military outcomes, not just higher enlistment rates?
Sure, they put up a good fight, but their martial culture didn't beat raw industrial output. Consider what that implies for the Fremen hypothesis.
What we actually observe is that Southern enlistment feeds into a military machine whose effectiveness derives overwhelmingly from the economic complexity, technological sophistication, and logistical infrastructure that the "Good Times" coastal states disproportionately fund and staff with engineers and contractors. The trigger-pullers matter.
The people designing the triggers, the targeting software, the satellite constellation feeding the operator's goggles, and the supply chain keeping him fed and fueled also matter, perhaps more. Modern militaries have really fat, technologically dependent tails. After all, plenty of other countries have top-notch special forces without relying on beef-fed Scots-Irish borderers. You can't separate the Marine from the apparatus that makes him effective, and that apparatus is very much a product of "decadent", bookish, economically complex society.
You take it for granted that the US of A is living in Good Times due to its power and material wealth. But if we understand Good Times to be in a sense derisive, we can quickly understand that that it's not power and wealth themselves that are Good Times; rather it's (for example)
You'll see that the Gods of the Copybook Headings have been much more respected (although unevenly) in the United States than in Europe - and often precisely due to the influence of the Hard Times states.
Perhaps it's not coincidence, but rather virtue, that has seen the US pull ahead of the European economy while maintaining a truly ludicrous edge in military prowess and birth rates despite a much smaller population. After the Hard Times (the Cold War) ended, Europe decided to embrace the Hopes that our World is built on and now they are paying the price.
Man. This is the epicycle problem I flagged in my original post, and I don't think you can escape it just by invoking the Victorians.
You claim that Good Times could/should be understood "derisively" and that it's not power and wealth per se that constitute them. Fine, I'll grant it for the sake of argument. But then what does constitute them, in terms specific enough to generate predictions?
If the US has avoided True Good Times because of the influence of Hard Times states (despite being, by any material metric, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in human history) then the definition of Good Times is quietly doing the same unfalsifiable jig I described: the US wins, therefore it isn't really decadent; Europe stagnates, therefore it is. Where's the independent variable? What would I have to observe to falsify the claim that the US has been protected from Good Times?
In other words, what elevates this from being just another just-so story, if it's my turn to bring Kipling into the court?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I can imagine "ambient cultural softness". I gave two examples above, I can probably come up with more if I had to. A vegan group house that eschews violence and practices non-violent communication is soft. The Papal Enclave is soft.
I simply don't think it's a useful metric for gauging or predicting the life cycle of a civilization. The Pope has bodyguards with rifles, who are willing to use violence so he can keep his hands clean.
A concept can be entirely coherent and entirely useless. I'd react the same way if someone claimed that it's the coolness of the hairstyles in fashion that predict the rise and fall of civilization. Extending moral softness to the scale of civilization is about as useful.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Haha, your situation is too tragic for Scotland. I hope you manage to visit America someday.
Truer words have never been spoken.
I don't have anything tacticool yet. Actually, Illinois is probably passing another law, this one called the RIFL Act, so that gun manufacturers need to pay a bunch of money to Illinois to get a license to sell in the state, and if they don't, then FFLs can't even sell those manufacturers' products or they get fined. So I might have to pick up something marginally more tacticool soon, or I will have to drive to Missouri to buy anything (actually, that's not so bad anyway...).
My condolences, that sounds like a pain. I seem to recall that transporting a gun across state borders is also a major pain, but I'm sure you know better than I would.
I don't know if my guns would be as tacticool as you like. I probably wouldn't bother with foregrips; just a red dot and a light, and maybe a magnifier for the red dot. Oh, and maybe a suppressor.
That sounds plenty tacticool to me! Now that you mention it, my dream gun absolutely has to have a suppressor, even if the licensing is a ball ache.
I would recommend making a friend who owns an MP5 clone or similar. AP5 or Stribog, something roller delayed. I'm interested in them, myself. Apparently 9mm has more recoil than .223, which was shocking news to me. But if it's roller delayed, then it's less recoil.
How does one specifically look for friends with MP5 clones? I imagine that involves lurking on gun boards, but I'd be laughed out of the room when they learn of my cursed place of residence haha.
Hmm.. A quick Google says you're right on the recoil. I imagine that both platforms are mild enough that it's not an issue!
You also need to visit a range that lets you rent full auto guns. You also need to shoot a full magazine out of a semi-automatic shotgun. You also need to shoot an AK or an SKS. You also need to shoot USSR pistols. You also need to shoot a lever action. Please, plan accordingly.
I have been a good boy and saved most of my salary. I can start to see why I bothered. I'm sure my girlfriend will understand the paper-mache engagement ring. I can probably pass of a necklace made of spent brass as a particularly avant garde American invention. Pray that ammunition prices recover, and that the range passes it on to poor tourists like me.
USSR pistols? Do you mean an actual Soviet handgun? I don't see anything else online! What do they offer that a Western handgun doesn't?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I do not agree that there is anything usefully described as "ambient cultural softness", unless you're talking about a Quaker colony or a Buddhist retreat.
If demographic decline and poor economics making it impossible to maintain an overextended empire count, then you might as well accuse most nations with decline fertility rates of being on that road, since they'll be there eventually. That is pretty much every single developed country and most of the developing ones. More importantly, Rome used substantial numbers of auxiliary forces for most of its history, including when its reach barely left the peninsula. It only failed them after several hundreds of years of pronounced success, after a host of other factors weakened the empire.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
Firstly I'm not actually American but Australian
My apologies. That slipped my mind.
What good has it achieved for America? The US military beat Saddam and derailed their modernization plans in Iraq. China bought up the oil wells and started to catch up. The US military 'secured' the Middle East, so that China could import their oil safely and creep forward in the South China Sea unmolested. The US blew up Libya and caused a serious political crisis in their European allies. The US tried to bomb Yemen, failed to reopen the Red Sea to traffic, then made a deal with the Houthis.
The primary purpose of any army is the defense of its nation, usually from other countries and their armies. I think the US is doing excellent on that front. As I've said, even if recent efforts to project power abroad have been less than effective, the continental USA is at no risk of invasion. Chinese paratroopers aren't going to land in LA no matter how bad the war in Taiwan goes. The US is too far, it is too geographically blessed. There's no power on Earth that can threaten it on its home turf, and that's before we even consider the nukes.
Could the US have been more sensible? Of course. I agree 100%. But the fact that it can hop on one leg while trying to kick itself in the balls and still be the world power means that the pressure to be smart is less than crushing.
What if the dollars that went to Somalia were invested in hypersonic missiles or just producing artillery shells?
I really don't think that even ten billion dollars would make a noticeable difference to the military budget. That's 0.5% of the F-35 program. Of course, that is because procurement is busted and everything is overpriced, but that's still the way it is. The US war machine is not starved for cash, it's suffering from lack of an effective way to convert the ridiculous amount of money it has into useful materiel. I can't blame the Somalians for that.
A thousand cuts? Fatal to small mammals. A whale might not even notice. It could hemorrhage a liter of blood a day and draw every shark in the Pacific and few would have the balls to bite it (cloaca? Idk). The fact remains that even if the USA isn't acting maximally rationally, it's still doing pretty damn well overall. It's fine to grade on a curve when nobody is going to bomb their homes.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I appreciate the nuance. It is unclear to me that a US military doctrine used to styling on poorly fed goat herders and third world militaries will remain unchanged if/when forced into a war of attrition against a peer-power. I don't think setting up Burger Kings will be a priority during the invasion of Taiwan. But it looks increasingly like the quality of manpower or the equipment of infantry will become less and less relevant with time. Drones do not care about PT.
The implications for modern politics are straightforward: Civilization falls to barbarians when the existing power structure cannot enforce the laws, finance the military, make political decisions and foster a functioning economy. The danger is not in the hinterland, geographical or social. It is in our own government, our social divisions and our political animosities. We've mostly solved the plagues and famines that used to destabilize organized societies. We're never going to solve the political problem.
To perhaps interpret your point too literally: where are the barbarians? That's a serious question. The closest you can get to "uncivilized" is the more godforsaken parts of Africa and the Middle East. Most of the world has air conditioning and wifi. Going with your definition of "barbarian" as a particular social class or ethnicity within existing society, is there any meaningful risk of them seizing power? Foreign barbarians are impotent. The "local" ones are part of the underclass because of certain... deficits. Neither are a meaningful threat.
In this day and age (and for several hundred years) the primary threat to a nation state is either civil war or occupation by a foreign power of comparable sophistication. Rome survived multiple civil wars. The US survived a serious one already. That's pretty lindy. In case of civilizational breakdown, who's doing the invading or occupying? Canada? Mexico? China? For the foreseeable future (studiously ignoring AI), the most likely outcome of another American civil war would be the eventual reconstitution of the republic, perhaps under new management. That's not the end of a civilization, for the same reason we consider China or Rome as continuous for hundreds or thousands of years. In those cases, the new ruling class were rarely barbarians, they were most commonly another flavor of local elite.
Of course, once we consider AI, it all becomes rather moot.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
My leading examples are, in fact, actually trailing. I recapitulated the case for the Roman Empire as presented by Devereaux in a comment in the thread I linked to. In short, the Hard Times argument didn't hold much water there either.
Note that you're pivoting from some combination of moral pulchritude and harsh lifestyle to the claim that the peoples of the plain had advantages in terms of access to horses and the ability to evade more sedentary great powers, you're on much firmer soil. Steppe nomads were a menace, Scott takes S-risk very seriously. Jokes aside, that is not the same argument as the one Devereaux made, or my defense on his behalf.
The modern era has not lasted as long as the Han dynasty, so we should give more time for the thesis to play out, but it seems pretty likely that the whole cycles of history thing was true for most of human history, but now it might not be.
I imagine that the people who actually believe in the Hard Times theory would be rather miffed to hear that. The main reason they're attached to it is because of the implications on the conduct and prognosis of modern civilization. It's no good to say that, hey, it worked in the past, but we're past such things. You can be as gay and irreligious as you like, as long as you've got fighter jets and nuclear weapons isn't an appealing message to them.
Excellent work, I can imagine going through all of that took a while. You've inspired me to attempt to summarize my own stance (though it should be beyond obvious that I'm pro-D here). Here it goes.
I think the anti-D position is importantly wrong in a way that makes it worse than useless as a predictive instrument, even though the underlying phenomenon it is trying to gesture at is real.
Devereaux's Fremen Mirage thesis is roughly: "hard times make strong men" is empirically false, or at least false in the ways that matter. The people who repeat it as a civilizational warning are not doing history. They're busy writing fanfic about masculinity and finding patterns in tea leaves.
Note that plenty of people here responded with their own versions of the Hard Times theory. My responses to them depend on the specifics of what they're claiming, and I often agree with them to a large extent. And of course, plenty of people went off on tangents, it's the Motte, that's the charm.
Also note that Devereaux attacked a specific form of the Weak Men idea, and chose to describe it as the "Fremen Mirage" to distinguish it from other variants. He was careful to precisely define the problem space and set a scope. Since FCfromSSC attacked Devereaux because of his take on the Fremen Mirage, I chose to defend the same theory.
Unfortunately, that scrupulousness saved neither of us from accusations of strawmanning. Once again, that's the Motte. My take is that it is fine to attack a strawman when you:
a) Acknowledge what it is you're doing.
b) The strawman form is the most popular/virulent version of the meme.
c) The theory itself is so vague that there's scope to read just about anything into it.
My position is more specific than "decadence isn't real." It's that "decadence" functions like a Rorschach test that people try to use as an X-ray. You show it to someone and they see what they already believed about gender, comfort, sexuality, and civilizational virtue. This feels like insight because it comes with historical anecdotes. It does not hold up when you do an exhaustive analysis, as Devereaux attempts.
The core claim, stated as precisely as I can manage
If "good times make weak men" is doing real explanatory work, it needs to cash out into something like: given observable feature X of a society (comfort, or declining warrior ethos, or whatever), we can predict military underperformance at some later date. Not "we can explain past failures by invoking X retroactively." Predict.
At the absolute bare minimum, it should reproduce when applied to other datasets. Historians are not ML researchers, so it's fine to train on the test, if people can pick a specific test and ask why your model does poorly.
The anti-D markers that were listed in the thread (declining warrior values, comfort-seeking elites, reduced corporal punishment, changing sexual mores, non-warrior political influence blah blah) do not survive this test. Losing societies often kept all of these features. Winning societies often lacked them. If the markers can be present without failure, and absent without success, they are not diagnostic markers. I don't think they're particularly suggestive either.
War keeps getting won by boring things. Logistics. Industrial depth. Proper training and readiness drills. Finding smart commanders and firing the idiots. Institutional learning. Ability to absorb and replace losses at scale. These things can fail in rich societies and in poor ones, in gender-traditional societies and gender-nontraditional ones, in societies with brutal military culture and in societies without it.
Objection 1: "You're strawmanning. Nobody means literal poverty makes better soldiers."
Maybe not everyone does. But the meme, and a significant fraction of the people repeating it, slides between three versions without marking the transitions:
The dumb-literal version: poverty and hardship produce better fighters. This is straightforwardly false. Richer societies with better logistics, nutrition, and training win wars against poorer ones at a rate that should embarrass the meme. Devereaux demonstrates this, I bring up the more recent example of the US vs Japan to show it holds in the modern era. US vs Venezuela to show it works like last week, at a time when people are claiming the US is decadent and in decline.
The institutional version: extended peace erodes military readiness and learning, so previously strong militaries can become surprisingly fragile. This is true and interesting and basically what Devereaux argues.
The moral-aesthetic version: comfort makes elites decadent, decadent elites carry moral corruption into the military, and that is the real driver of collapse. This is the one doing the emotional work of the discourse, and it is the one I am skeptical of.
The problem is that people take the credibility established by the true institutional version and use it to launder the unfalsifiable moral-aesthetic version. If you want to argue the institutional version, you should be happy to abandon the vocabulary of decadence entirely, because that vocabulary smuggles in the moral version whether you want it to or not.
Objection 2: "You're ignoring morale and willingness to fight."
I am not ignoring it. I am refusing to let it carry more weight than it should.
Yes, armies that won't fight lose even when well-equipped. That's real, just look at the ANA. The question is what explains that unwillingness. Anti-D has a tidy answer: moral decay, comfort, the wrong values. I think that answer is usually backwards. Institutions rot first. Training becomes unrealistic because realistic training is politically difficult and expensive. Leadership selection becomes adversarial to competence because political loyalty is safer to reward. Legitimacy erodes because the wars being fought stop being obviously necessary. Morale is one of the downstream casualties of that process, not the initiating cause.
The best way to arbitrate is: if we gave you a society with "good warrior values" but the institutional rot I am describing, would it fight well? I think the answer is mostly no. Which means warrior values are not the load-bearing variable.
Objection 3: "But the markers are real."
The list of decadence markers (warrior ethos, harsh training, sexual morality, non-warrior interference, comfort-seeking elites) is an aesthetic inventory, not a diagnostic instrument. To make it one, you need to show that these markers appear reliably before military failure and not in cases of military success.
I am not aware of evidence for this. What I observe is:
Plenty of militarily failed societies maintained harsh masculine culture until very close to collapse. Late Byzantine military culture did not look like a gender-studies seminar. Neither did the Confederacy. Neither, for that matter, did Imperial Japan.
Plenty of successful military powers have had what anti-D would call decadent features in their civilian life. The markers are not reliably predictive. This means they are not markers.
The deeper issue is that "warrior ethos" is cheap to fake and cargo cult. A military can look exactly like what anti-D admires, in terms of culture, aesthetics, and rhetoric, while the institutional substance has hollowed out. See the typical Banana Republic, Eastern European nations, the typical African tinpot dictatorship.
Conversely, a military that looks soft by anti-D metrics can be highly effective because it has realistic training, good logistics, and functional command. Focusing on the aesthetic is actively misleading.
Objection 4: "Rome proves the point."
Rome is the trope-maker and also a trap.
The Latin moralists were calling decadence in essentially every period of Roman history, including during peak Roman military effectiveness. Cato the Elder was alarmed. Augustus passed bachelor taxes. Moralists in every era found evidence of softening. This should make us deeply suspicious of treating moral alarm as a calibrated early-warning instrument. If your instrument fires regardless of whether the thing it is detecting is present, it is not detecting the thing. I can't imagine anyone better placed than the literate elite of the time for gauging "decadence", if they do a piss poor job, you're probably doing the same.
Devereaux's narrower claim is that Rome's real military turning point comes after the third century crisis and its institutional consequences, not from moral decay radiating outward from elite bathing habits. I find this more plausible because it has an actual mechanism: fiscal crisis, political instability, and the breakdown of the legionary training and command system. That is what turns a world-conquering military into one that cannot defend Italy.
Anti-D wants the early moralizing to be accurate early warnings. But "accurate early warning" requires that the warning not fire constantly independent of whether the thing occurs. Continuous false positives are not warnings. They are a genre, and the genre is "old men complaining that young men are not what they were." I believe you can also call it "crying wolf", including when you see a sheepdog. Why yes, seeing beasts with sharp teeth and four legs correlates to sheep going missing, but you're losing something important if you don't care to interrogate further.
Objection 5: "You're dismissing the moral dimension entirely."
I'm not dismissing it, I'm discounting it. I am trying to give it the correct causal weight, which I think is "downstream of institutions, not upstream."
The distinction matters for policy and diagnosis. If moral decay is primary, then the intervention is cultural: restore warrior values, punish softness, reform gender norms. If institutional decay is primary, then the intervention is structural: fix training pipelines, improve logistics, reform command selection, rebuild industrial capacity. These point in very different directions.
The reason I am hostile to "decadence" as a frame is that it tends to direct energy toward the cultural intervention while the structural problems remain unaddressed. You end up with a military that looks and talks like what the moralists wanted, while the logistics are still broken.
Where the disagreement actually lives
I think anti-D wants a warning that normies can act on: "good times make weak men" is memorable, it is emotionally resonant, it gives people something they can picture and a villain they can name (the soft, comfort-seeking elite who has lost the warrior spirit). I understand the appeal.
My objection is that this appeal is precisely why it is dangerous. It compresses messy institutional failure into a story about moral character, and moral character stories are the enemy of structural diagnosis. Bad takes on history inform bad takes on the present. You can't fix a training pipeline by convincing people that softness is sinful. You cannot fix a logistics system by shaming elites for enjoying hot baths. The story feels true but does not help. Sometimes, it harms outright, if people feel inspired to advocate for shock therapy.
"Decadence" is not a cause. It is a post-hoc aesthetic wrapper we apply to certain kinds of state failure, selected specifically because it flatters the person applying it and lets them feel they saw it coming. If you must, break it down into components like the level of corruption, birth rates, enlistment, political turmoil etc etc. Decadence as a blanket term only muddles the picture.
What I think is actually true
Great powers can become militarily fragile in ways that are non-obvious from the outside, and this fragility can persist for a long time before it is tested.
Human factors matter in war, but they are mostly downstream of institutional competence, incentives, and legitimacy rather than upstream of them.
The most common error in this discourse is treating what looks martial and masculine as equivalent to what actually produces combat power. These can diverge dramatically.
If anti-D wants to change my mind, I would ask them to do one thing: state the decadence model in a form that could be falsified, then tell me what evidence would make them update. Historical examples for large empires works just fine, but you need arguments for which it doesn't hold for counterexamples too. If the answer is "nothing, because the cycle always turns eventually," then we are not doing history anymore dawg. Telling someone they're going to die eventually is true, but not helpful as medical advice. Sensitivity and specificity matters.
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