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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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