I’m not sure what you mean. I don’t see a bias here, the point is plainly stated: the notion of weak men is dubious. You might not agree, but then engage with something substantial.
Abundance allows comfort, comfort enables complacency, and complacency can weaken the social fabric by encouraging short-term gratification over long-term maintenance.
People worry about masculinity because masculinity requires structured, pro-social outlets to not be toxic. A aimless or misdirected male population is an incredibly corrosive and/or dangerous thing. It can rot out a society from within, or make a society susceptible to subversion from without.
Societies use rhetoric about strength because if a society does not maintain systems that cultivate competence, responsibility, purpose, and pro-social ambition (especially in its most impulsive members), it becomes brittle.
Abundance, by contrast, allows seed saving, food storage for winter, spare resources to use on washing and hygiene and medicine and recovering from illness, rule of law and enforcement, time away from subsistence farming and scavenging for food to enable things like developing metalworking skills, inventing, practicing archery, spending time on other society-building rituals like building churches and going to church.
> "A aimless or misdirected male population is an incredibly corrosive and/or dangerous thing"
If they are "incredibly dangerous" does that not make them "strong"? These are supposed to be the "weak men" created by "good times", aren't they? Are they strong men created by weak times who are themselves creating weak times by rotting society? Or are they strong because they are men, independent of the times? Does this fit into the saying at all?
Famine is not isomorphic to “hard times”, and particularly not what the aphorism is referring to: self-created hard times, wherein a society’s ability to self-sustain and compete externally is needlessly curtailed.
> If they are "incredibly dangerous" does that not make them "strong"?
I said corrosive and/or dangerous, and weakness can be both corrosive and dangerous.
What you linked to was not a debunking. It was a political viewpoint. Reasonable arguments exist for a different one.
Nobody claimed it was
> "particularly not what the aphorism is referring to"
The aphorism does not say what it is referring to, you are making this up so it says what you want it to say (which is bias). This wouldn't be a problem if you used that to make a point and argue your point, but it is a problem when you just go "I imagine that it means something else, so you're wrong". Self-created hard times such as ... what? If laziness in farming doesn't create famine in winter... what hard times are more relevant than that for a society in 0 AD? "Needlessly curtailed" by who or what effect?
> "I said corrosive and/or dangerous, and weakness can be both corrosive and dangerous."
Can it. Is there any way to measure this weakness? Is it actually a thing?
In which case it makes no falsifiable claims. If “hard times,” “weak men,” and “strong men” have no stable meaning, the cycle can’t explain anything and can be retrofitted to any narrative. There would be nothing to argue for or against.
That isn’t the case. “Hard times” in this context means the cumulative internal consequences of institutional decay, complacency, and short-termism. Not natural disasters. That’s why your famine example is irrelevant.
> Is there any way to measure this weakness? Is it actually a thing?
Sociological concepts are evaluated by their broad effects, not by a single scalar value. Declining institutional competence, eroded norms, reduced accountability, and loss of collective purpose are both observable and historically recurrent.
I’m not historian but for example I could challenge the idea that a rhetoric about strength and keeping a masculine ideal for the young male population was non existent in European feodality where only nobility had the privilege of fighting, and 90% of the population were farmers. Or that 2000 years ago Jesus already challenged the idea that men needed to be strong in the traditional sense, and that real courage was loving and forgiving among others. I could go on with fashion and clothes but maybe just look at a West European king painting to reevaluate what masculinity is supposed to look like traditionally.
My understanding is that your rhetoric appears only recently (and is therefore not traditional) coinciding with nationalism rise and the need for bodies to throw in the total war (another modern invention) meat grinder.
You can disagree, and I’m open to hearing your counter arguments, because I’m not dismissing you as biased.
One self-described historian. On a Reddit post. Let’s not pretend this is the unified or authoritative voice of the discipline.
> I could go on with fashion and clothes but maybe just look at a West European king painting to reevaluate what masculinity is supposed to look like traditionally.
You’re conflating aesthetic masculinity with functional masculinity, and that’s a category error. The aphorism isn’t about how men dressed in the 17th century or how they signaled status — it’s about what kind of men can sustain a civilization.
In this context, “strong men” refers to individuals who demonstrate the discipline, competence, long-term responsibility, and willingness to bear risk that are required to build, maintain, and defend the institutions that keep a society stable — especially when conditions are difficult. It’s a sociological concept, not an aesthetic one, and it has nothing to do with your personal distaste (or favor) for particular cultural aesthetic expressions of masculinity.
Or I can reframe it one more way: If good times create weak men, then all the rich people currently running things corruptly and soaking up whatever 90% of the wealth, are weak, and all the discipline and virtue in society are among the rest of us. Cultivate competence, responsibility, purpose and pro-social ambition in the super-rich and you might have something there.