[shard]

John Adams wrote:

"I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."

To me that statement is saying that one should first establish power, then achieve prosperity, then one would have time for leisure. This is true on a national level as well as a family level.

[V-2]

Sounds somewhat related to the "tough times create strong men, strong men create easy times, easy times create weak men, weak men create tough times" adage. (Men and women, of course!)

[simiones]

It's important to remind everyone that this common adage is very wrong, looking at history (at least as long as we take "strong men" to mean "powerful armies").

Tough times mean brittle impoverished societies with weak armies that crumble easily. Easy times (prosperous, politically stable societies) are what creates strong armies.

War requires huge investments of resources, so only prosperous societies can have powerful armies. War also requires strong leadership that can't be corrupted or divided - only politically stable societies can ensure their war leaders will not turn cloak or start fighting among themselves.

[scottiebarnes]

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.

[simiones]

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).

[rmellow]

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.

[marcosdumay]

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.

[brutusborn]

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.

[simiones]

> 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.

[mandevil]

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.)

[ChadNauseam]

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".

[watwut]

> 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.

[Izkata]

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

[SamoyedFurFluff]

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.

[scottiebarnes]

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.

[brutusborn]

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

[SamoyedFurFluff]

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.

[watwut]

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.

[V-2]

It's a huge oversimplification, and as such it's borderline useless of course; not much more than a meme of sorts.

Still, "strong men", the way I read it, means "adamantly striving for the increase of power" (not just military power) rather than "being powerful already".

When it comes down to such vague and ambiguous terms, the whole thing becomes as open to interpretation as a horoscope - basically unfalsifiable : )

[dionidium]

I'm not sure why you'd insist on an eccentric interpretation of "strong" in the context of this quote. It's a common English word that means, "having the power to move heavy weights or perform other physically demanding tasks" or "able to withstand great force or pressure."

Synonyms include: powerful, muscular, sturdy, robust, tough, rugged, stalwart, hardy.

In ordinary English these terms can be applied to mental as well as physical fortitude.

The meaning here is not opaque.

[hhjinks]

It's not even an oversimplification, it's axiomatic. We have easy and tough times, and we have people who lead us into easy and tough times. If we define those who lead a nation out of tough times as "strong men," they are necessarily a product of the tough times they lived through, and vice versa. Without saying exactly what kind of person a "strong man" or a "weak man" is, the saying says literally nothing.

[V-2]

Yeah well, of course it's a bit like the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, because if strong men fail to create easy times, you can always say that apparently they weren't truly strong, and so on, circular logic ;)

[simiones]

> Still, "strong men", the way I read it, means "adamantly striving for the increase of power" (not just military power) rather than "being powerful already".

The problem in that case is that I don't think it is true that these types of strong men tend to create easy times - if anything, they tend to create worse times for everyone around them, unless they are actually already extremely powerful. Warmongering leaders (whether we are discussing economic or open war), especially ones leading currently weak countries, tend to create even worse times for their people. Just look at Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, or, perhaps more arguably, Putin right now.

[V-2]

> Warmongering leaders (whether we are discussing economic or open war), especially ones leading currently weak countries, tend to create even worse times for their people. Just look at Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, or, perhaps more arguably, Putin right now.

Yeah - if they fail (or are arguably failing, in Putin's case). Not really the case of, say, Charlemagne or Alexander The Great.

[simiones]

Sure - but there are far more warmongers who failed than those who succeeded - at least out of those who weren't already very powerful (for example, America's recent warmongering has tended to have either almost no effect or a positive effect on itself, since it has been extremely powerful compared to the countries it invaded).

[watwut]

Alexander The Great was leading expansive war, it is pretty much guaranteed that a lot of people had very bad times due to him. Especially since at the time, armies fed themselves entirely from looting - while farming was t subsistence level without much surplus.

Plus, after he died, civil wars broke up, which does not suggest happy people either.

[saiya-jin]

> at least as long as we take "strong men" to mean "powerful armies"

I've never understood it as you do - strong men are just strong men, no need to read between the lines (of 1-liner). If you stick to the original meaning, this saying is as valid now as anytime in the past.

Strong men know what they want and need and are not afraid to go for it, and most often also obtain it. Being able to defend oneself is another meaning. In opposite to weak men, who are unsure of themselves, don't know what they want out of life, expecting things to be handled to them and life figured out.

I don't know in which part of society you do exist, but anytime in my past and present both of those groups are/were well represented, and successful life is definitely a domain of the strong folks.

[simiones]

I've usually seen this quote as a meme applied to military power, usually accompanied by imagery of roman legionnaires or such. As far as I understand, the original quote is coming from a post-apocalyptic novel, so I doubt the context is supposed to be everyday life.

Even so, regardless of other context, the general reality is that wealth and power beget wealth and power. Poor people (or societies) have a much much smaller chance of becoming wealthy than people who start wealthy have of maintaining their wealth.

I would agree that it those extraordinarily few people who manage to ascend the social latter are probably universally very strong people. But there are many times more people who could be considered weak that nevertheless preserve their wealth and status than there are strong people who improve their own. This applies both at an individual level as well as a group and societal level.

[pfraze]

That adage is honestly just a way to call somebody soft.

[BitwiseFool]

>"Tough times mean brittle impoverished societies with weak armies that crumble easily. Easy times (prosperous, politically stable societies) are what creates strong armies."

I believe a counterpoint to this are armies such as the Viet Cong, and especially the Taliban.

[simiones]

I don't necessarily agree even there.

The Viet Cong was a well supplied and well organized army, with significant logistical support from North Vietnam, and would likely had failed miserably if North Vietnam hadn't waited to consolidate its power and accrue supplies (and international support) after the revolution and previous civil war.

In the USSR invasion of Afghanistan, the taliban received ample support from the USA, including training, arms and logistics; again, they would have very likely failed in the absence of this support. In the NATO invasion of Afghanistan, the taliban quickly lost the military war, but ultimately retained their cultural advantage; the regime that the USA tried to install was simply unpopular, and instantly folded the moment it stopped being propped up. Either way, the last few decades of war have not led to some flourishing of Afghanistan as the theory predicts: it remains poor and by all likelihood will remain poor for the forseeable future, as all other war zones do.

Also, in both cases, the advantage of fighting in their own territory was a significant part of what ultimately defeated their opponents.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

I don’t think it is related. John Adam’s is describing a goal where one’s standard of living (in terms of ability to dedicate time to recreation) strictly increases per generation. This quote actually implies a completely different speculation, where aiming to create strictly better lifestyles for one’s future generations actually leads to worse outcomes.

[Kon-Peki]

John Adams is stuck in Paris, writing a letter to his wife, lamenting that there is so much amazing culture and beauty and he would love to visit it all and write a description for his wife, but his duty prevents him from enjoying his surroundings. He recognizes that a nation needs stability, then prosperity, and finally culture and that (at that time) the United States doesn't even have stability.

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-03-02-0258

> Since my Arrival this time I have driven about Paris, more than I did before. The rural Scenes around this Town are charming. The public Walks, Gardens, &c. are extreamly beautifull. The Gardens of the Palais Royal, the Gardens of the Tuilleries, are very fine. The Place de Louis 15, the Place Vendome or Place de Louis 14, the Place victoire, the Place royal, are fine Squares, ornamented with very magnificent statues. I wish I had time to describe these objects to you in a manner, that I should have done, 25 Years ago, but my Head is too full of Schemes and my Heart of Anxiety to use Expressions borrowed from you know whom.

>To take a Walk in the Gardens of the Palace of the Tuilleries, and describe the Statues there, all in marble, in which the ancient Divinities and Heroes are represented with exquisite Art, would be a very pleasant Amusement, and instructive Entertainment, improving in History, Mythology, Poetry, as well as in Statuary. Another Walk in the Gardens of Versailles, would be usefull and agreable.—But to observe these Objects with Taste and describe them so as to be understood, would require more time and thought than I can possibly Spare. It is not indeed the fine Arts, which our Country requires. The Usefull, the mechanic Arts, are those which We have occasion for in a young Country, as yet simple and not far advanced in Luxury, altho perhaps much too far for her Age and Character.

>I could fill Volumes with Descriptions of Temples and Palaces, Paintings, Sculptures, Tapestry, Porcelaine, &c. &c. &c.—if I could have time. But I could not do this without neglecting my duty.—The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts.—I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

[oblio]

> "tough times create strong men, strong men create easy times, easy times create weak men, weak men create tough times"

I always have a problem with this quote. What are "strong men/women"?

(Really) tough times generally create broken people that dig themselves an early grave with alcohol, more than anything.

[michaelrpeskin]

This is why I love HN. This thread including sibling comments gave me a new way to to think about this quote. The way I always read it was that "strong men" are your "protectors" the kind of folks who run into the burning building, who risk themselves for others and the greater good. When you have a lot of those types in society, society will prosper. I think of it as literally a "strong" person, physically and psychologically.

As the strong people make the world better we have good times and end up not paying attention to building (or valuing) strength which makes people weaker, things get crappy and then we need to build more strong people to pull us out.

Think of the early 20th century. In the lead-up to the depression, the 20s were all about partying and buying stuff of on credit and watching the market boom (at least at the broad scale narrative that we're taught, I'm sure there are nuances about it). Then we get the depression and WWII which required men to become strong and fight which lead to the post war boom. I'm sure there were many smaller cycles in history too, but I'm not really a scholar of history.

I look at today, we have an epidemic of weakness around us. Everyone needs a safe space, needs the government to take care of them and provide them with things, everyone gets offended by everyone else and has to go lie in bed because they "just can't even". At least that's what the grand narrative on social media is. And even from that, I see the cycle beginning. We're entering a tough time with famine and such, and people who decide to get strong and face the challenge are the ones who will do well and provide the next round of good times (The irony is that they probably won't be participating in the good times).

Long rant, sorry. But one of my mental models that I've been refining is that problems are caused by weakness and fear. If you are strong and confident, you are more likely fixing problems or taking care of people, not causing problems.

[devonkim]

"Weakness" is a matter of dimensionalities and nuance and isn't a binary state of any sort. For example, many men with horrible self esteem issues make up for their inferiority complexes through exercise and then project onto those that those who don't work out must be like their former selves. Being able to withstand bullies including from social media pressures and peer groups is a double edged sword - there's a fine line between being completely obtuse or bigoted and having a backbone about one's principles.

We can perhaps use more descriptive or objective terms such as resilience and still find differences and subtleties. Are military veterans with several tours of duty that are going through PTSD "less resilient" than the civilian population? Are people that are bullied for their sexual orientation or their country of origin for decades resilient, as well? The way I see it we're all vulnerable somehow and find different means to try to protect ourselves mentally and physically, most of the time not very productive nor efficacious due to our own self deficiencies in the first place.

As such, to me the "weak" are those that cannot join coalitions of others readily and find ways to contribute in some manner or refuse. We are social animals and have survived for better or worse through making up for our own individual deficits with the strengths of others. As such the anti-social (doesn't matter what the political orientation is BTW) are the weak in society, and in that respect I think we can both agree that there is a trend toward weakness globally at least among economically developed societies.

[bradjohnson]

>Everyone needs a safe space, needs the government to take care of them and provide them with things

This take has been in circulation by shallow-minded regressives for about 20+ years. It's getting moldy.

[watwut]

> the 20s were all about partying and buying stuff of on credit and watching the market boom

World war 1 ended in 1918. The 20s were literally created by tough times. Notably, in Germany, they were tough too.

> Then we get the depression and WWII which required men to become strong and fight which lead to the post war boom.

WWII was started by men who fought in WWI. Nazi leadership, including Hitler, were former soldiers for whom WWI experience was formative. These men were followed by younger men raised to be strong - German nazi were big on masculinity and big on being strong. Collectively all those tough men committed genocide.

> We're entering a tough time with famine and such, and people who decide to get strong and face the challenge are the ones who will do well and provide the next round of good times

That famine is created by politicians who pride themselves and being stronger then weak west. That famine did not just randomly happened. It was created by men who grew up in USSR, worked for secret service and then seen whole their world crumble in 1990.

There are no safe spaces in Russia or Chechnya. Instead you get beaten for being gay (Russia) or tortured and killed (Chechnya).

[oblio]

> At least that's what the grand narrative on social media is.

The grand narrative is not reality, though.

We're building more and better stuff than at any time in history.

Including the "strong stuff", if you're into that, think of military stuff.

Our problems are a lot more complex than in the past, and we're working on them.

It's just not glamorous or in the news daily.

[yodon]

> "tough times create strong men, strong men create easy times, easy times create weak men, weak men create tough times"

The quote is intended to apply at the national level, not at the personal level. Think WWII and the way the US came together in what is called the greatest generation, or the way England came together in what Churchill called it's finest hour. Then think of the arc in which the unified actions of those generations led to prosperity, and then to challenges, and to failures and division.

[SketchySeaBeast]

But the United States was so strong in WW2 because it was isolated from the war - the initial hit it took to bring it into the war didn't affect its production capacity. It was able to turn itself into a giant war machine because it wasn't a tough time for North America - it had been spared the destruction of WW1. Sure society came together and sacrificed for those few years, but it was so insulated from the actual conflict it had people arguing to be isolationist.

[simiones]

WWII was a time of plenty for the USA (well, for the civilian population). At the very end of the war, the USA controlled more than half of all the money in the world. There has never been a time in history when a single country was as wealthy as the USA was at the end of WWII compared to its contemporaries *. And yes - all that huge wealth and power led to the USA growing ever more wealthy (in absolute terms) and ever more powerful. So no, this quote doesn't apply to the USA after WWII.

The UK after WWII, or in fact France and Western Germany, are better examples, though I think that the huge amounts of money that the USA decided to pour into them through the Marshall Plan were much more responsible for that then "strong men" forged in the war were.

* The USSR had just lost 20 million people - about 10% of its population. Germany, Poland, the UK, Austria and other European countries had been bombed into oblivion, as was Japan. Most of Africa was still recovering from European colonialism, as was India and most of SE Asia. China was still in the midst of its civil war, and had suffered some heavy losses because of Japan.

[dionidium]

Synonyms include: powerful, muscular, sturdy, robust, tough, rugged, stalwart, hardy.

In ordinary English these terms can be applied to mental as well as physical fortitude. I'm a bit nonplussed by the confusion.

[HWR_14]

Only superficially. Adams is a standard "I want my kids to have the opportunities I never had". The other one is, well, there's a whole lot of other responses that go more into what the other one is.

[czhu12]

I use every opportunity I can find to shill for Bret Devereaux's blog, I think its one of the most wonderful things on the internet. He discussed and challenged that common adage that is often portrayed in films.

https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

[rawgabbit]

My guess is the quote is a variant of Friedrich Nietzsche's "What doesn't kill you" quote. I also believe Nietzsche is wrong. What doesn't kill you, leaves you traumatized and incapable of making objective decisions because the trauma will taint your thinking from now on.

[steveylang]

Can we just all be universally lukewarm from here on out?

[DecayingOrganic]

This advice of "make money first, then you can have time for your real passion" definitely reminded me of this blog post I read: https://siliconvict.com/articles/1-choose-money-first

[naravara]

The downside is, the types of skills and mindsets you have to cultivate to make a lot of money might actually be deleterious to being able to succeed or thrive in other fields.

I think of a lot of people who came up in the management consulting meat grinder and left. Even though they almost all hated the work style and cultures of the firms they left, they often cannot help but replicate the dysfunctional cultural tendencies and management styles that contributed to their burnout in every other place they go. There's a lot you have to unlearn before you can really pivot, but when you've been trained early on that certain inputs are your ticket to praise and promotion it's hard to think any other way.

[bitxbitxbitcoin]

Curious that that coincides with three generations. “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.”

[gmadsen]

shouldn't a society ideally all of those at once? maybe the allocation percentages change in line with generation changes in the quote, but politics and war will always be needed, at a minimum to prevent historical mistakes