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Comment by MereInterest | Hacker News Reader

As a counterpoint to this entire line of thought, I'd recommend reading "The Fremen Mirage", a series of blog posts linked to below. It does a fantastic job of going through the history of the idea of "decadence" as what destroys society, and of the idea of "hard times" as the crucible to form strong fighters. The long and the short of it is that there is no historical evidence for this idea, that the "decadent" groups had massive advantages over everyone else, and that the original idea of "decadence" tended to be created for internal political reasons, rather than any true comparison with outside groups.

https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

(My description is summarizing to the point of uselessness, and I highly, highly recommend reading the series.)

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I thought decadence equated to a corrupt and inefficient ruling class, where decline is inevitable if power is handed over to whoever has the biggest bag of coin to offer or highest number of spears.

A propos, there was a review on slatestarcodex for "Secular Cycles" effectively tracking the rise and fall of civilizations if I remember correctly. The argument is societies start to destabilize and stagnate once wealth concentrates to a certain point, after which war and strife levels the playing field once more. Except, we don't much expect that same sort of upheaval to happen today in Western society.

All of which to say, you could liken periods of high wealth concentration as lending to decadence, though I'm not sure how useful that would be as the same argument could be made of golden ages. Decadence itself doesn't seem suspect but I would expect it to be around before things go awry.

edit: here - https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/08/12/book-review-secular-cy...

That correlation might be reversed, though. The author of The Great Leveler makes the argument that in peaceful times, inequality almost always rises to the maximum level that society can bear. It remains that way until a destabilizing event occurs (plagues, state collapse, destructive revolution, mass-mobilization warfare) which decreases inequality (mostly through wealth destruction - the wealthy have the most to lose).

So it's possible that rather than high inequality leading to destabilization, it's the opposite: destabilization leads to decreased inequality.

Why "rather"? They don't contradict each other. The aforementioned argument I linked to suggests it's both.

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