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Comment by scottiebarnes | Hacker News Reader

I'm not familiar with the context of the quote but I've never taken the "strong men" part to mean "powerful armies".

Rather, hard times (economic depression, warfare, disease, etc.) creating strong men meant creating toughness, resilience, patience and conservatism in society. The endurance of these events would eventually (somehow) allow the next generation to have its progress and luxuries; peace, economic prosperity, education. But easy times create comfort, arrogance, impatience, over-leverage; spoiled people don't know how good they have it, and so they think it'll last forever. It gets taken away from them, and they fight amongst each other about whose fault it is that everything is slipping away (blame immigrants, blame opposing parties, blame foreign powers, general polarization and divisiveness; them vs us).

Everything goes to shit, and the cycle is renewed.

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I'm not sure what the original meaning is supposed to be either.

Still, even taking it the way you say, the quote is false. Poor and weakened societies tend to get lost in vicious cycles, and tend to create damaged people who struggle for the rest of their lives with the effects of the shock - ill, relying on vices, corrupt etc. It takes huge luck and hard work to transition back to a successful, prosperous and healthy society.

Conversely, societies that become wealthy and successful tend to continue that way for a very long time, and they create healthy and ethical people much more readily.

This can be easily seen in recent history by looking at post-USSR states vs Western Europe & the USA. By any measure, people living in Western Europe for example in 1989 were living much easier times than those behind the Iron Curtain. Still, even today, 33 years later, Western Europe is vastly more wealthy, culturally active, healthy, more powerful militarily and in every conceivable way than former Soviet bloc countries - especially the former USSR ones.

One of the most important wounds that hard times leave in a society is an extreme form of screw-you-got-mine individualism. This leads to people who are willing to do anything to succeed and grow above others - especially manifested as corruption and nepotism at every level. When you have lived through times you either take what you can or die of hunger, you can't afford to care for rules or others' well-being (except your own family).

The phrase describes a model. "All models are wrong, but some are useful".

What I think is useful from this quote is that across generations, people forget the horror of war. They forget what it actually means to push through hard work & living with mass dysfunction. They feel entitled to much and unwilling to take on dirty, unglorified but necessary work.

And the discussion is whether any of your conclusions actually happen on reality.

Personally, I strongly suspect anybody that talks about mass entitlement. That's a phenomenon that I simply could not see on the real world. (Yet, many people keep saying it's there.)

Personal entitlement surely exist, but it never seems to extend over a population.

I agree with your idea, that society has an inertia so it is hard to make progress once in a rut, but I don't think it is mutually exclusive with the quote.

Just think on longer timescales; with your example of the US and Western Europe, I would argue that they are in the process of weak men making hard times. The soviet countries are the opposite, strong men are now improving things. It's only been 30 years since the USSR collapsed. It took Rome centuries to fall from it's peak, why would the west be any different?

Another issue is that in modern times the richest people in poor countries tend to move to rich countries eventually. Immigrants are often the hardest workers and the most entrepreneurial.

> It took Rome centuries to fall from it's peak, why would the west be any different?

I think the case of Rome is exactly one of the ones where people get history extremely mixed up. The Roman empire was powerful and prosperous for hundreds of years - more than any other empire in Europe in history. The vast majority of people of those prosperous times created more prosperous times, again and again for those hundreds of years. Rome only fell because of an extraordinary amount of bad things happening at the same time, not because "easy times create weak men, and weak men create hard times".

Basically, by the model of the quote, we shouldn't expect any prosperous society to exist for anything more than 1-2 generations.

Even looking at the times after the fall of Rome, it took many more hundreds of years to get back to the prosperity of the earlier times - so the "hard times create strong men, strong men create easy times" part of the quote is also false.

Edit: As a complete aside, there is a particularly hilarious take on the history of Rome that made some splashes in right-wing circles, by a ridiculous self-proclaimed intellectual named Stephen Molyneux. Among many other historical inaccuracies, he was taking quotes from Cicero about the moral decay of Roman society to show how that "moral decay" led to the fall of the Roman empire - of course, Cicero didn't even live to actually see the Roman empire or its peak, nevermind its fall some 500 years later. If anything, Cicero's "moral decay" could be said to have led to the rise of the Roman empire.

You are interpreting the quote as being about intergenerational change whereas I interpret the quote as multigenerational, societal change.

I wouldn't expect Rome to bounce back in a generation.

If you stretch the quote for a long enough time, it becomes trivially true and completely not interesting: any society that falls was by definition in "good times"; and every society that rises was, by definition, in "hard times".

The quote implies though that there is a deterministic process: good times can't help but create weak men, and weak men can't help but create hard times. This implies a rather limited time frame - if generation after generation of people living in good times keep creating good times, then it's hard to take the concept seriously. Similarly, if generation after generation living in hard times keep creating more hard times, the other part of the concept fails as well.

Even worse, while it seems to be true that every successful society eventually falls, it is demonstrably false that every failed society eventually rises. There are numerous peoples who have been utterly destroyed without ever rising up; and there are regions of the world that have never been prosperous, or at least not for hundreds of years now.

Because Romans complaining about how decadent the current generations are, and how they were weaker than their ancestors, goes back at least as far as Roman literature does, a generation or two before the Battle of Zama and the end of the Second Punic War? If Rome was truly decedent then, they had another 350 years of growth in power and magnificence until their actual zenith. This suggests that the two factors were completely unrelated: Rome rose and fell for reasons totally unrelated to it's supposed cultural decadence, the toughness of its people, etc.

(Cue Peter Heather's argument that the fall of Rome was actually related to its inability to attract immigrants any more: for generations Rome survived and triumphed over other cultures because of its unparalleled ability to make new Romans- from other people's in Italy, from Gaul, from Egypt, from Germans, they could make everyone's sons into real, classically educated Romans, and that meant that their state and armies were sufficient. Then, for various reasons that he describes in his 2005 book _The Fall of the Roman Empire_, they lost that ability, and that was what doomed the Western Roman Empire.)

Thanks for the detailed reply, this one convinced me that I'm probably wrong thinking about this in terms of society as a whole. I've added the book to my reading list, looking forward to it!

In that case, you might just be getting confused by regression to the mean. Over a long enough timescale, it's inevitable that outlier societies will regress back to being average. That would look like especially prosperous societies and especially poor societies becoming average, which you could mistakenly interpret as "they became average because they were weak from decadence/strong from adversity".

> I would argue that they are in the process of weak men making hard times. The soviet countries are the opposite, strong men are now improving things.

Like Belarus, Russia and Chechenya are improving ... what exactly?

Edit: since this is downvoted - Russia had worst issues after fall of communism then countries currently in EU. So did Chechnya- they had two wars with Russia and lost. Belarus was not exactly paradise on word for quite a long time either. Thise countries are the ones starting the was and supporting it the most.

GP has the right understanding, it's the meme version of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generat...

We know statistically that economic depression, warfare, and disease don’t create toughness, resilience, etc. in society. The most economically depressed, war-torn, disease-ravaged countries are not known for being particularly resilient nor are they known for producing particularly wealthy subsequent generations.

How do we measure toughness, resilience, etc.? Is wealth the only metric of success?

Anecdotally, in my experience through athletics, I would describe groups of athletes from certain countries to be certainly tougher. They train harder, they endure more, they have less access to quality nutrition, medicine, equipment, etc. And yet they accomplish more despite having less. You can't phase or intimidate them because they've already endured far worse.

Ex: Dagestani wrestlers, Thai kick boxers.

So while this is a hyper-granular examination, the rewards are going to those "strong men" who endured "hard times". Of course there's a lot of selection bias going on here as well.

Can you clarify? I don't think you can say "we know statistically" about economic history. I'd call that epistemological arrogance.

I mean, empirical evidence exists as it is now. We can look at the most wealthy countries and determine if they were the most impoverished ones a generation ago. We can look at the most impoverished nations and look if they were the wealthiest ones a generation ago.

Ah I see our point of difference, you are thinking of intergenerational change whereas I interpret the quote as multigenerational, societal change.

If we look multigenerationally, the longest-living nations are still the nations that can maintain a high quality of life the longest. It is frankly nonsensical to say that nations fall because they reached a high point; of course they can only fall if they have someplace to fall from.

The background of the quote is fictional books. In reality, generations that grew in tough times have more issues in general. They drink more, commit more crimes, more violence, have more mental health issues, you name it. Wars dont make people better. They make people desperate, resentful, hateful due to all the suffering and inability to get help.

Notably, WWII was started by generation that went though WWI. Generation after WWI had more terrorist acts. Oh, and war in Ukraine was started by Russia - country that average person is far from living in luxury or economic prosperity.

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