[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.