Go

yes.

It is a big fat meme for stormfags, yes
>Does it has merit
Anything can have merit, user. But does that mean it's an accurate evaluation for everything? Absolutely not.

>-en

Like most people in this thread have already told you it's mostly meme.
Personally I'd say
>90% meme
>5% merit

>sandniggers have peaceful times yet still act hypermasculine
Persian and arabs dynasties have fallen to decadence and invasion of harder men on horses.

Yeah looking for easy meme explanations of human histories is a sign of a massive brainlet.

It's honestly a very old philosphy that shows up in ancient sources from Europe (Romans lamenting luxury) to China (the dynastic cycles).

But it's too simplified of an idea to be anything but a meme answer to historical events: theres always more pressing and concrete factors we can point to causing the declines of states that isn't ""decadence"", and thats even if one acknowledges ""decadence"" in the first place.

There are no stupid questions, only stupid people

I hope that snail fucks him up.

No, don't be retarded.

>who is Ibn Khaldun
>what is the Muqaddimah
>what is town vs desert cycle of decadent settled states and barbarian nomad conquerors

It is the traditional narrative of historiography.

New dynasties wrote histories that legitimized their own rule. So they usually wrote that the previous dynasty used to be great, but the last rulers had been down right awful, and that the new dynasty brought back the good times before the last rulers of the old dynasty.

In most old history writing all over the world this theme can be found, and usually in repetition as countries usually have many dynasties through the ages.

In modern historiography one needs to watch out for the Marxist materialist narrative, which try to fit everything into the modes of slavery, feudalism and capitalism, and make societies determined by their means of production.

Also, one also need to watch out for Austrian economists pretending to be historians by blaming the downfall of every civilization on inflation or the growth of bureaucracy.

in a broad and general sense, yes, there is a certain flow to history like this.

Listen you idiots. Rome fell because of massive economic problems from the Crisis of the Third Century, diseases, military defeats and being a logistical nightmare to effectively run. It did not fall because they "Grew Soft”, they were fighting just as hard at their end as they were at their beginning. It did not fall because they had "cultural exhaustion" or "moral decline”, unless you want to count a growing disparity of wealth as such. The Romans partied harder during their rise than they ever did during their decline.

A shit edit of a better quote.
>Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters. - Victor Hugo

Its meme used to expose psueds in acedemic circles

societies do have up and downs and the constant exchange in the dominant culture follows their rise and decline in similar cycles.

do weak men really create the hard times, or are they weak because of hard times? it doesn't always match.

Deep but in a good way.

No, just look at history, pretty universally, all hard times were caused by strong men. Weak men generally just maintain the status quo.

In the end, any extreme is bad.

It's not a coincidence that homosexuality appears mostly in highly urban, very wealthy and prosperous societies. That's not just a modern trend, you can observe the exact same pattern in the antiquity. The only exception to this rule is Afghanistan where a form of homosexual pederasty persists (but still it's mostly rich and powerful people doing it there).

Who said anything about homos? Gays have been some of the strongest men of all time. Hell, the "effeminate gay" is almost an entirely modern invention, and it used to be that only they were looked down upon, while ultra-manly gays were fine, if not indeed in demand, and in many such societies, love between men was considered more real than heterosexual love.

Or is this just some roundabout way of calling OP a faggot?

Machiavel talked about something similar.

>growing disparity of wealth
This is just as much a politicized meme as "moral decline". The latifundiae of the late republic made patrician land owners astronomically wealthier than the plebs and proletarii. And despite many of the aristocracy dying and having property confiscated during the civil wars, the trend of extremely wealthy agriculturalist land-owners and poor urbanites and provincials continued on to during the Pax Romana.

Basically, narratives of historiography always fall apart under scrutiny.

>stormfront
It's an Iron-March meme, isn't it?

>It is the traditional narrative of historiography.
Exactly the opposite. Anyone described as a "strongman" in history is bad news more often than not.

Post, please.

Prosperity is shit. All people should be poor or live in hardship.

It's a shitty paraphrasing of the last section of Herodotus, probably drafted by someone who also read classical texts like Plato's Republic where it's suggested that society undergoes cyclical change.

* Herodotus 9.122

"...This Artayctes who was crucified was the grandson of that Artembares who instructed the Persians in a design which they took from him and laid before Cyrus; this was its purport:

“Seeing that Zeus grants lordship to the Persian people, and to you, Cyrus, among them, let us, after reducing Astyages, depart from the little and rugged land which we possess and occupy one that is better. There are many such lands on our borders, and many further distant. If we take one of these, we will all have more reasons for renown. It is only reasonable that a ruling people should act in this way, for when will we have a better opportunity than now, when we are lords of so many men and of all Asia?”

Cyrus heard them, and found nothing to marvel at in their design; “Go ahead and do this,” he said; “but if you do so, be prepared no longer to be rulers but rather subjects. Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors grow not from the same soil.”

The Persians now realized that Cyrus reasoned better than they, and they departed, choosing rather to be rulers on a barren mountain side than dwelling in tilled valleys to be slaves to others."

>It is the traditional narrative of historiography.
>Strong man theory
>The traditional narrative
>Functionalists laughing.jpg

It's so fucking dumb.

There are dozens of counterexamples (and not a whole lot of examples), several of which anons have already pointed out, but for people with a mild, passive interest in history, probably the most prominent & easy to grasp counterexample would be Stalin.

Was Stalin a weak man? People call him a lot of horrible things, but weak isn't usually one of them. So maybe he was a strong man who created good times. Hm, I seem to recall something about him causing a bunch of famines, that doesn't make sense. He must have been a weak man after all. So what were the good times that created him? The good times of ... late 19th century Tsarist Russia? Where he was the son of an impoverished drunk?

It makes for a memorable quote, but it just doesn't hold up.

Wealth distribution isn't a meme. Its been attributed to the Bronze age collapse, the Egyptian 4.2k BP event, the Classic Maya collapse, the English Bronze age collapse, the collapse of the Mocha, and the collapse of the urban anasazi for decades before the modern meme.

Its saying when times become peaceful men become pussies and soft, when times are hard men remain strong and on edge.

The full quote is:
>1. Hard times create strong men.
>2. Strong men create good times.
>3. Good times create weak men.
>4. Weak men create hard times.

Let's review:

>1. Hard times create strong men.
1. Is semi-true, in that hard times allow strong men to rise to power, as they make most men weaker and desperate, and open avenues to corruption that strong men would normally be barred from exploiting in a stable and prosperous society.

>2. Strong men create good times.
2. Is absolute bullshit. Strong men almost universally lead to hard times. Shit gets worse before it gets better - if it gets better. They tend to flip over the table and spawn chaos with narrowly blind rage, leading their people fervently to destruction.

>3. Good times create weak men.
3. Is kinda true at the individual level, but they conversely make for a stronger and more technologically and economically powerful societies and cultures. Generally, a society doesn't reach a peak of good times and then immediately collapse as a result - there's a long, slow, downhill ride of progressively hard times, allowing room for strong thugs to operate, accelerate the process, and hamper any recovery.

>4. Weak men create hard times.
4. Isn't true, unless by "weak" you mean gluttonous strong men without discipline who abandon long term gain for short term ego stroking, and/or put themselves before their people. Weak men, generally, don't rock the boat.

But weak men also don't row very well, so what you really are men with both humility and vision. As with most things, any extreme is bad, and the sweet spot tends to be in a hybrid of middle grounds.

You have to be either stupid or autistic to take this as something you can refute with counter examples

Obviously you can get someone like Stalin from any type of period in history but the point is what happens to society as a whole, in general

Those counter examples are the norm. Make a list of the top 100 strong men of history - you'll find at least three quarters of them generated abject misery, murdering their way to fame and burning the world down around them.

It is a bit screwy though, as it depends on what you define as "weak" and "strong". Here we tend to think metrosexual and man-bear, C3PO vs. Conan, but elsewhere it could be goodie-two-shoes and ambitious-beast-man, Jesus vs. Solomon, etc. Does "strong" mean the ability to resist temptation or the ability to get what you want? Does "weak" mean humility and supplication, or just following random impulses? Is wise caution an attribute of the strong or the weak? Intelligence? Caring? It's easy enough to fit properties inside the definitions of such broad terms that flip their positive and negative traits on their heads. So, ultimately, it's a pretty meaningless piece of prose - though I'd still argue, wrong from more perspectives than not.

>You have to be either stupid or autistic to take this as something you can refute with counter examples
When there are literally dozens (hell, probably hundreds) of notable counterexamples, you absolutely can refute it with them. When there's that fucking many, IT'S NOT ACTUALLY A PATTERN. People only bring up Stalin because he's perhaps the single most famous one and virtually everybody, even people with no interest in history, knows enough about him to follow the example.

Stalin brought the Soviet Union up with the rest of the world and broke the back of a continental super power that eventually ushered an age of expansion and prosperity for a Russia that had been in one conflict or another nearly every year since WW1

He was a hard man, and while he died towards the begining of it he did in fact bring the USSR into a prosperous time

Addendum: the prev. post also makes a good point that it's frankly impossible to quantify "strength" and "weakness" in a way everybody (or even most people) will agree with. Which makes it worse - it kinda reaches the level of "not even wrong." But I'd bet that 99% of the people who post that image tend to think of metrosexuals vs. man-bears, or alternately, I suppose, "soy boys" vs [insert soldier or general from their favorite period of history], so that's how I'm using the terms as well.

There are themes in history of decadent empires being taken over by "barbarians" of minimalistic means.
But there's no hard evidence directly connecting the ease of life in peak empires with their downfall. Probably just one of many factors

I can scientifically prove that good times create weak men through the concept of a behavioral sink. But the opposite point, that strong men create good times, has much less legitimacy.

cabinetmagazine.org/issues/42/wiles.php

It's called a behavioral sink, and we can turn animals into Social Justice Warriors with a kind of scientific reliability greater than any even measuring intelligence.

Now it seems like "wealth-distribution" sounds like a stand-in for systems collapsing due to natural disaster and unexpected external pressures. From what we understand, a whole string of natural disasters and violent forces resulted in the decline in inter-civilizational trade of the Bronze Age Collapse. The advanced societies of the era were just as stratified socially and economically during their rise as the collapse. Hell, Egypt was characteristically stratified in almost all dynastic periods, even during Persian and Ptolemaic rule.
As for the New-World cultures, we know too little to cast weeping judgements of how they fell but what we can understand is that, at least in the case of the Maya and the Anasazi, urban centers declined so quickly that some sort of traumatic event is implied.

>But there's no hard evidence directly connecting the ease of life in peak empires with their downfall. Probably just one of many factors

That's the point I just made. We have scientific proof, reproduced in animals, where we can actually cause of ease of life to create

>Enfemmente Males
>Feminist females
>Decline of Offspring.

So the idea that Good Times create weak men is absolutely true, but the inverse, strong men create good times, is much less tenuous.

He industrialized the USSR, yes - a process that was already well underway when he assumed leadership, so while it was successful, it's not reasonable to give him full credit for it. It wasn't necessary to kill 5-10 million of his own citizens to do that, and it certainly wasn't necessary to purge the military the way he did, seriously weakening it. He was also an inept military leader himself.

I am not saying Stalin was an unmitigated disaster for Russia as a country - it did emerge after all the shit he put it through in a position of strength - but you're really fucking stretching if you think he created "good times" for the majority of its people.

I don't think you understand science

Shame that all efforts to reproduce that experiment have failed, and Jonathan Freedman tried the similar experiments with humans, and everyone was fine.

Maybe Calhoun was fucking his rats.

Not that I don't doubt sufficient overcrowding will debilitate a population enough to create to enough desperation and corruption to rally around a strong man and burn the city down.

On the plus side, one thing that has found to be reproducible in such rat utopias, is that rats in large healthy social groups don't abuse drugs when given the option - seems only lone rats will choose to drink heroin laced water until they die.

Well, good news for lab rats - maybe not for Veeky Forums.

>rats in large healthy social groups don't abuse drugs when given the option - seems only lone rats will choose to drink heroin laced water until they die
Think the key thing in those experiments was that the rats that didn't abuse, in addition to having social networks, and near unlimited room to roam about - while the rats that drank themselves to death were in small cages. So, population density may lead to more drug overdoses. (Not that you can make such a leap directly, but it certainly makes drugs easier to distribute.)

On the other hand, feral city rats taken from large social groups (read: thousands) perform several times better in all intelligence puzzle tests than forest dwelling rats that spend most of their time alone or with small families.

Being in the city is rough, but all that social interaction keeps the old noggin stimulated.

Granted, a major difference there is that people, unlike rats, are entirely capable of remaining isolated, even in a crowded city.

>Not that I don't doubt sufficient overcrowding will debilitate a population enough to create to enough desperation and corruption to rally around a strong man and burn the city down.
Apparently it's a level of population density we've yet to achieve:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

Most densely populated place ever, and didn't die until the outside government bulldozed it. True, ultimately run by strong men, but if you look at the interviews, populated by a lot of weak ones, and times there were not as hard as you'd think - especially given how simple it was to leave.

What is the other 5%?