[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.

[brutusborn]

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.

[simiones]

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.

[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.)

[brutusborn]

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!

[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.