I’ve recently been reading A Renegade History of the United States and the same concept keeps coming up, the more lax a culture becomes, the less productive it becomes. One example would be the interviews done with former slaves who lamented being free because they never worked harder then under northern freedom. The New England culture that was dominate at the time forced work, devotion, and working for a purpose versus working to live. This is also echoed in Thomas Sowell. His example of societies that improved off of British trains showed that only the most stringent societies were the ones improving upon the railways. This idea also plays into societal fatigue, where when a culture has no purpose they lose their will to continue.
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This is your brain on tradcuckery.
He doesn't care about anyone but himself
Civilizations having incredible revolutions in medicine often see declines in birth rate. It may not be a causality that way but it’s an example of a declining birth rate during a time of improvement
That is often repeated but I don’t believe it to be true. Look at Africa with modern medicine. The problems in the Western world are cultural and diet related imo.
It's regressive culture. Like Kreia says, a Culture's teachings find definition in conflict, to constantly improve and build upon. Because post-modernism means nothing matters and American culture is so fixated on people's junk so that it isn't even about improving the lives of it's citizens but instead the oligarchs that control the country, a slow inevitable decline is what you get.
I have to wonder if this is the natural result of all Democracies, a slow decline into obscurity.
hard times create strong men, strong men create weak times, weak times create weak men, weak men create hard times
and you could go in your examples all the way to birth of nation called Rome and its fall (and if you find documentation, there should be ton of similar cases in northern africa or asian region)
You can see it happen in Greece too.
-Polybius
I think there's a false, but understandable, equivalency going on there.
You're blending degeneracy with libertarianism, when what you mean to compare is authoritarianism to libertarianism.
I don't think there's many libertarians out there who say that being free is easy, simple, or even sustainable. The phrases "constant struggle" and "continuous vigilance" are often used. What purpose do you have? None. You must make your own purpose, you must prove that you have value. Meanwhile, authoritarianism is actually quite easy: Do what you are told. If you're told to dig a pit, you dig. If you're told to die in it, you die. No need to think, no need to feel, your overall effort doesn't matter either because you're unimportant, a statistic waiting to happen.
The slaves didn't work hard because, well, they were slaves. It's well known it's a poor labor source. But when they needed to compete for labor, obviously, they had to work harder. They needed to prove their worth.
If some horrific degeneracy was made mandated, say "every adult upon turning 18 is strung up naked in the town square for a day to be whipped by anyone who feels like it", and it was backed by the authoritarian fist and a passable excuse ("everyone in the community is bound by their own leather straps to each other" or something pithy like that), there would be no "lax" in the culture. There would be no weakening of the system, for the system enforces the degeneracy.
Meanwhile a system that has no degeneracy and is well known for not having it would be the Rat Utopia. At the end of it, no sex was taking place. No reproduction. The beautiful ones groomed, the fighters clewed each other, and they all just died. Full lack of purpose and cultural fatigue, but zero degeneracy, no sexual act at all in fact. The rats could make their own purpose... And they did, either fighting or grooming, but they needed that tiniest of baseline degeneracy of "mating == good" to continue their society and they simply couldn't.
Not all degeneracy is sexual. I think extreme vanity would qualify. Reproduction should never be conflated with degeneracy, though.
But rats aren't a great analogue to human behavior. Tradition, history, religion and culture help give us purpose. Part of the problem of degeneracy is in subverting and vilifying ancient unifiers of purpose. Part of the problem of liberty is that it gives space for socially destructive ideas to grow. The marketplace of ideas is a great concept, but without some greater authority, such as Judeo-Christian morality, guiding it, it doesn't work.
I don't like the idea of the state being the moral authority, but without Catholicism, and later Anglicism, the strong morality found in the people of the colonies would never have occurred, and liberty would have been a recipe for disaster.
They're intrinsically linked. Live and let live, the basic idea behind libertarianism, works. But only if everyone involved agrees to abide by it, and those who don't are punished, expelled, or killed.
Libertarianism as a philosophy however, is completely unprepared for, and incapable of dealing with bad faith actors. It is a philosophy that cannot defend a nation against degeneracy.
You don't even have to think about it bro
In Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley (a very intelligent historian), he describes the pattern of empires in the context of Expansion and Conflict.
When civilizations are expanding it is because some sort of "change" has allowed the civilization the ability to grow. This change is often some sort of technological innovation such as in weapons technology or a new economic process or discovery of a new resource etc... This growth and therefore newfound improvement in society is usually well received by the people within the civilization and thus the culture of the civilization is respect by the whole and is reinforced by the whole. You get less degeneracy because the whole of the civilization is working toward its expansion and degeneracy doesn't aid in this quest.
After the expansion finally wears off you get a period of conflict. People start to in-fight and squabble over things like class, race, sex, etc... because they are no longer devoted to the expansion. This type of fighting typically leads to degeneracy. He discusses how during the Age of Conflict, the society begins to redistribute resources away from productive things and toward non-productive things.
Generally speaking in his analysis Quigley suggests that the Age of Conflict always ends with some sort of consolidation of the civilization under a new regime. He calls it the Universal Empire. Usually it's through war but it can also just be through coercion of force and cultural assimilation. Once this Universal Empire is complete, the civilization always decays until death.
If you apply his theories to modern society, essentially the USA's last Age of Expansion was after WWII and we've now entered an Age of Conflict. This conflict is essentially the culture war going on between the right and left. With the left tearing down the very foundation of what Western Society has been based off of. Society is no longer focused on productivity but is focused on non-productive things like "renewable energy" and Social Justice etc...
The universal empire is globalism essentially and how all western countries are trying to usher in a Great Reset whereby they create essentially a New World Order. This is the universal empire. Once established, it is only a matter of time before western civilization completely crumbles.
From Quigley's analysis, it's not the degeneracy that causes society to crumble but rather it's the lack of an Age of Expansion which leads to an Age of Conflict which leads to degeneracy. There truly hasn't been any major breakthroughs in the organization of society and resources to create any real growth in decades. The dot com bubble essentially marked the end of the Age of Growth with the Financial Crisis putting the final nail in the coffin for those who hasn't accepted it yet. It's no surprise degeneracy and conflict went into overdrive during this period.
Pioneer societies have no time to mess around, and no time for nonsense. Humans have infested almost every corner of the globe, and have no more room for expansion, because Antarctica isn't melting fast enough, and the space folks dragged their feet for too many years after Apollo for either option to act as a release valve. So the only thing to do is collapse and die back for a while; the survivors will be tougher, no-nonsense sorts. The problem is, the higher the technology, the harder the fall. But it's not "degeneracy" that's the symptom of a problem, it's the proliferation of separatist movements. And the weirdo cults and the like are their own kind of separatists, who might strike out to found their own land if they could find land that wasn't owned already ......
Hell, the best things to happen to the poor European were the Black Death and the discovery of new lands ...
Or normalisation of degeneracy is a sign of societal collapse.
What groups and organizations are pushing to normalizing degeneracy and who runs them? Who funds them?