Hard times do not make strong men, and they certainly do not make great men. Fucking hell, find one soldier who doesn’t come back from war fucked up.
There was a big study that was conducted by the military on how to make better soldiers after WW2. It found, abysmally, that only 5% of front line soldiers actually shot at the enemy and only 2% shot with the intent to kill the enemy. 95% of soldiers pretended to fight because killing people is very difficult. Over the years billions of dollars from “easy times” United States went into producing a psychological method whereby they could reverse that statistic. They were able to brainwash 95% of soldiers to kill on instinct without thinking about it and determined that the remaining 5% cannot be made to kill under any circumstances.
“Easy Times” United States, when it had the greatest economy and the highest standard of living in the history of the world, created the most effective soldiers the world has ever seen. And it turns out that brainwashing people to kill is very harmful (just like sticking people to rot in prison for nonviolent crimes) because it makes returning to civilian life difficult, if not impossible in some instances. That’s why lots of veterans end up homeless, because these methods of creating super soldiers produces irreparable psychological damage.
Going back to WW2 again we saw how the hard, tough, manly, warlike Germans and Japanese - the supermen - were defeated by the weak, effeminate, decadent everymen in America who had no stomach for war.
And again we see in places like Vietnam and Afghanistan that had been at war for decades, generation after generation fighting wars their grandparents or great-grandparents had started, areas polluted with poison gas, jet fuel, depleted uranium, and other toxic chemicals, living in the “hardest times” ever, have produced jack shit. They’re not the masters of the world. The Vietnamese fought the French, Japanese, French again, other Vietnamese, Americans, Cambodians who were funded by Americans, and the Chinese from when, the 1920s until 1990, and for all these “hard times” they still live in a poor, backward country. A century of “hard times” failed to produce a great nation.
The same is true in the Balkans, which had seen endless fighting for over a millennium. 1000 years of “hard times” still hasn’t made the region great and the “strong men” there have high rates of drug use and suicide and the Balkan nations have some of the fastest declining populations in the world.
It’s a pernicious lie like Afghanistan being the “graveyard of empires” that in reality had been the very geographic heart of empires for 3000 years. Alexander the Great conquered the region that is today’s Afghanistan in 3 years and there were still parts of the country that spoke a dialect of Greek and practiced Greek paganism until the 20th century (a region known as “Kafiristan” by the Durranis who build the modern Afghan nation). If that’s defeat I can’t even conceive of what victory would look like.
Hard times produce men who just barely struggle to stay alive. They are sick constantly, severely psychologically stunted and damaged from constant privation, never reach the higher tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. They live lives that are nasty, brutish, and short, and crank out babies by the barrel because most die in infancy and those who do survive are bequeathed a hellish life that no one should ever have to endure. If being “strong” means chronic malnutrition, higher rates of cancer, repeated injury, and dying at a young age then who the fuck wants that? And under what metric is that “great”?
And “easy times” in post-WW2 America have produced soldiers who are stronger, faster, taller, smarter, more resourceful, and better at killing than any group of soldiers ever in the history of the world. There are a lot of benefits of living in “easy times”, like adequate nutrition and ample money to spend on more training and equipment.
The Spartans certainly knew this. The Spartans had the best fighting force in Greece during their heyday BECAUSE they had good times created off the backs of a huge population of slaves. Spartans didn’t have to work because the Helots worked for them, allowing Spartans unlimited time to spend on training for war. Sure, being in the military is no cakewalk, but it’s a lot easier to produce good soldiers when they can be well-fed and well-equipped and they don’t have to spend all their time in the fields growing their own crops or forging their own arms and armor like the other Greek city-states had to do. When all your bottom-tier needs are met because you don’t have to work for a living you can focus on achieving your top-tier needs.
Isn’t it any wonder that most of the great people throughout all of history, while they may have lived during harder times than today, were mostly upper-class people who lived far easier lives than the vast majority of people of their day? The Founding Fathers were all independently wealthy. Even the self-made Ben Franklin, who left home with a single Dutch Guilder, was already an established printer from years of working for his brother and forming a network of connections. He retired at age 41 a multi-millionaire (perhaps even a billionaire) from plagiarizing other people’s work (which was encouraged at the time). Even though they were living in harder times than today, they were all super rich and had much easier lives than the average person. Everyone in America did, in fact. The average American was taller, stronger, healthier, and lived longer lives than the average person in Europe, and two British invasions failed to defeat the easy-living Americans.
Most of the famous scientists, with few exceptions, were also independently wealthy, which allowed them the kind of unlimited free time necessary to pursue frivolous, unnecessary leisure activities like science. Scientists today have their research and equipment paid for by rich corporations or academic institutions, providing them with much easier lives than the wage slaves, because being under the constant stress of survival doesn’t allow for the mental flights of fancy necessary to come up with new ideas.
And the fall of Rome? Decadent, effeminate, “easy times” Rome? Actually fell after being weakened by decades of plague, civil war, and bankrupting their treasury fighting the Persians. Rome was sacked during the hard times, not the decadent times of the first and second centuries. And the “hard times” manly barbarians who finally sacked Rome were allowed to migrate across the border en masse (800,000 of them, their entire population) and were living off welfare. They were employed as mercenaries in the Roman army, given free weapons and training, and their leader was raised in the easy life of a Roman aristocrat and saw an opportunity to start a war and steal power for himself as Roman aristocrats had done for generations. Of all the barbarians the Romans had crushed it was the ones living the easiest lives off the Roman dole who finally sacked the eternal city, not the countless tribes who were butchered by their millions if official records are to be believed.
And modern Islamist terrorists today? All their leaders are Western trained. They grew up in easy times and took advantage of decadence to become stronger, better leaders, better warriors. Would the Mujaheddin have survived as long as it had if not for all the Western money, training, and weapons they were being funneled? Or for the fact that the Soviet Union at the time was severely weakened by two oil crises that knocked the bottom out of their economy? The “easy times” Soviet Union was actually living in the most difficult time since WW2 and the “hard times” Mujaheddin were being bankrolled by the United States.
And that pattern plays out again, and again, and again throughout history. There are always exceptions, but they are few and far between. 99 times out of 100 the people with the money and time to spare on developing better soldiers and technology win.
