Hard Times = Strong Men

By Leo Gray

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Hard times create strong men and good times create weak men.

Disagree with me on that? Look at our ancestors from just the past hundred or so years. They fought two World Wars and the entire cold war without batting an eye as they rose to the challenge. You are crying over pronouns and things called microaggressions because someone didn’t like rap music.

I know this idea and theory circle around traditionalist and enlightenment thinkers and believers, which hey if the shoe fits wear it and I do.

Jordan Peterson and a bunch of other enlightenment philosophers and thinkers have talked about this before, and it is the idea that society follows a cycle: hard times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, and weak men make hard times.

Anyone who I’m friends with or if they ask me about my views pretty much on anything it always relates back to this theory, and I don’t know why but I find it to be so rooted in our history as humans and you can break up all of history into one of those four categories.

Take the United States for an Example in the first half of the 20th century.

Hard times: World War One

Which created good times: The Roading 20s

Which in return caused hard times: Great Depression and WW2

Which then created strong men: winning WW2 and the spark of the Civil Rights Movement

I can keep going on through the history of the US and also with the nations of the world, past, and present.

Right now, I believe we truly are weak men (and I use men as a general term to include everyone) because we’ve had easy times. Especially my generation.

Me and many of my friends were either born right before or right after 9/11. We were too young to understand the war on terror, and things were pretty calm for more of our lives. We have equal rights, not the best economy but better than it has been in the past during some administrations, education and health services are as easy as ever to access. Getting a job is easier than it has been in a long time. If we fall into hard times, the government gives us money to survive until we get back on our feet. Communication, information, and travel are at the tip of a finger and can be done for cheap prices.

What have we fought for?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

My generation and the millennials haven’t had anything yet. We haven’t had our Normandy, or Great Depression, or Civil Rights. We’ve had nothing, and I think that is why so many people my age are obsessing over things that do not matter, and with this whole covid thing, they are obsessing over virtue signaling their mask and vaccine and looking for pats on the head to praise them for ‘saving lives.’

We are a weak generation. We don’t know what it means to struggle, and I think that is why we are at the back half of the cycle.

We were raised in good times, so that has made us weak, and bad times have already started and will only get worse. I just hope our hard times can make us stronger. I rather hard times be in my time so that I can become strong enough to raise strong kids so that they aren’t weak during their good times.