John Adams said something similar, though he meant it in the opposite way: "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."
Relatedly, Michael Hopf: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times."
I have a rebuttal on the quote, as it applies to the Romans in particular. Where the author goes into how people in "hard times" still get stomped by the Romans more often than not.
And people use that myth as a way to make political arguments about decadence. I'm not doing it justice, just take a look.
I think of it as resiliance to adversity. If someone has had a comparatively easy life, they'll probably have a harder time dealing with difficult situations. The problem is that everything is relative, so people may not see their life as easy, even if it is compared to most people. For example, I used to work with someone who was raised by wealthy parents, went to super exclusive private schools, and had multiple college degrees paid for by their parents. They didn't think they had an easy life though, because their parents only had a couple million dollars in the bank, and his classmates were mostly old money with 10s or 100s of millions in the bank, so they wouldn't hang out with him because he was "poor".
The good thing is that resliance is like a muscle and can be strengthened, people just need to leave their comfort zone occasionally.
people just need to leave their comfort zone occasionally
It would be nice if that happened, though. You tell your students, 75 % of whom have no grasp of 8th-grade math, that they have been cheated out of an education and that consequently they now need to work twice as hard. But instead of knuckling down they all march off to the Dean to complain. Of course the Dean enables the underperformance.
You can't frame "easy life" only in terms of money, "easy life" also means coasting through an underperforming school and never having to face reality.
> Ok, easy, I've seen this statement used several times to criticize younger generations because things were harder "back in my day".
Except for some very specific times in history, it is almost universally true that the older generation had harder times. Human progress is -- in the grand scheme of things -- a march towards much easier lives.
I was referring to places with war and right after war. Places where ISIS can still come back and places that were either destabilized or had attempts at democratic revolutions suppressed. Historically, wars and revolutions are not some rare exceptions. It gets very very bad then better, then it starts failing and then again very very bad.
Overall trend may be positive, but there are enough local downfalls to make the "universally true that the older generation had harder times" not really true. It any given moment it can go either way. The whole first half of 20century was one massive downfall after another.
In particular with economy, you have years where it is easy to get a job for anyone who breathe and then downfall when it is hard for everyone.
Whole economies went down and unemployment rates went up. All that produces plenty of young people who have it harder then their parents.
I personally got a job easily. It is quite possible that my kids won't.
> Later, the weak men couldn't properly finish a war. Vietnam was winnable, but that didn't happen by choice. The weak men were unwilling to sacrifice even mere comfort for their own nation, so they did things like outsourcing to cut costs.
This ignores some complex geopolitics of not drawing a nuclear superpower in to open conflict with us.
This quote is often used as a dog whistle by far right groups. In their definition, “weak” is caring about others, providing services to citizens like healthcare and education etc. “Strong” is then the Trumpian ideal of a successful self made business man who takes no nonsense from no one and gets things done regardless of their snowflake feelings (sic).
So? I find the quote very compelling as someone from a family of immigrants. My cousins left Bangladesh as children. Their parents left professional jobs to take service jobs (“hard times”). But the kids worked hard, majored in engineering, science, business, medicine, and accounting (“strong men and women”), and secured professional jobs for themselves (“good times”). I see the next generation being bombarded with ideas to make them weak. Culture that emphasizes personal fulfillment, pernicious individualism, hedonism, rebelling against authority, etc. And I’m profoundly afraid of the “weak men and women” that might follow in the next generation.
Quotations, like any other meme, do not exist in a vacuum, and are sometimes taken up by ideologies to justify different agendas. It's fine to like a quote for the value it resonates with oneself, but you can't ignore that it also exists within a larger culture- http://tiny.cc/pinojz
Yes, you can. Those who get hysterical about which other people might believe the same things are actively ceding control of that message to them (the "Hitler was a vegetarian!!" problem)
Relatedly, Michael Hopf: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times."