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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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