Hard times create strong men.

Strong men create good times.

Good times create weak men.

Weak men create hard times.

For some reason this concept has not been given a name (that I know of). I will do so and name it krikortal for the purpose and confine of this examination.

In playing with the proposition of krikortal, there are many interesting questions to be had other than questioning its validity.

Say, how do we know if we are in good or bad times while in the midst of it? How much can empirical data be counted upon for this? On this though, I think weak men generally do not want to acknowledge living in good times, for that requires being accountable for their hardship.

If a single society has good and bad times unequally distributed among the classes, is it good or bad?

How local can krikortal be applied before it becomes useless? In other words must krikortal be applicable only on civilizational scale and doesn't work on a village level?

There is one question I'm mildly interested in tackling, for which I have a half-baked idea for.

Suppose we know the good/bad cycle we're in, and given that we know weak men are coming around, what do we do about it?

Accepting the inevitability is itself half the battle, perhaps even the tougher half of it. This bit is about managing collective psychology, it's all about the stories the people choose to tell themselves. I think there's very little room to move here that's worth discussing.

What a collective can do though in anticipation of an upcoming generation of weak men, there is plenty of room to be creative.

I think I lean towards what they call accelerationsim. The idea is to embrace, accelerate and shorten the cycle of hard times, with the hope that we can cycle back to good times again and stay there longer.

How can a bad cycle be shortened? By embrace and accelerate it means not trying to hang on to something rotten. Let the collapse happen, make them swift and get it over with.

Consider manufacturing some form of artificial crises, something tailor-made for weak men (call them gen-1) designed to be resolvable within one generation.

The idea is for gen-2 to be raised strong enough to have will to power through the hard times. All hope hinges on gen-2 deeply regretting the mistakes of gen-1 to be willing to toughen up. You may say gen-1 is a throwaway generation, like a plank on a dirt road.

Gen-0 would be instrumental in orchestrating all these, insofar where orchestration is possible. This bit is rather feasible; it simply means grandparents getting more involved in educating kids, not leaving it to the establishment.

If seven year-olds are given enough pre-warnings about the tough times ahead, perhaps they will come to take it more gracefully.