> "Lots of people are massively fucked up and still have kids anyway, either accidentally or otherwise. And then their kids are put at a massive disadvantage in life and in human relationships."
This is an interesting one, and in direct contradiction to the adage: "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
My life experience agrees, tough times mostly produce emotionally damaged people
This reminds me of a friend who has gone through some bad life experiences. She once told me that "everything happens for a reason" is the kind of garbage only said by people who have never had bad things happen to them.
Yes, dealing with adversity can teach us things and make us stronger. But there are limits, and adversity can also do permanent mental and emotional damage. The latter outcome is way more common than some people would like to believe.
Just as a couple of counter points to that phrase (to people who say and and those who hear it), because I know a lot of people hate hearing it.
People saying it are trying to impart hope on the people that they are saying it to. If you believe that everything happens for a reason, this will be a comforting reminder even though you're going through something awful. It's intended to remind people of the countless stories of individuals and groups of people who have suffered only to find out later that such suffering prepared them to make a difference later in life.
For some, this could mean that a tragedy in your life will leave you prepared to help others who are going through something similar later in life.
It's not intended as a dismissal of your pain. It's only to say that one day, the lessons you learn from this pain may help you to help others or yourself.
Simple examples:
- You lose a loved one to a horrible disease but then organize people to fund research to cure the disease, grow up to become a doctor or help support people coping with it
- You get dumped in a relationship and you're devastated, but on reflection you realize things about yourself that you need to work on, make real changes in yourself and later meet the love of your life
It's not meant to be dismissive.
On the flip side, for people who throw this phrase around you need to know that it gives the impression that God is controlling everything like some type of puppet master without any free will or random occurrences in the world.
The Bible doesn't reflect that perspective at all. It's worth the read to understand it better.
I don't think I would say "everything happens for a reason" to someone who is suffering, but all the same for me and other people of faith it's a simple reality. But for people who disagree or struggle with the premise, it will offer no solace. They would probably feel like it dismisses and trivializes their suffering, and worse, they might attach other, unintended meanings.
History attests to the terrible condition of the world, and the Bible is very clear about that from the earliest parts of Genesis. There is so much pain, as a constant through the vastness of history and before. Saying everything happens for a reason doesn't necessarily deny that. When applied properly, it acknowledges the cruelty and struggle to find meaning, but that the reality is as it stands. Someone who does not believe may very well reject the notion of meaning, and see only the path of improving the situation as the answer. In the end, both types have among them people of goodwill, and we must be charitable to each other.
A sibling comment to yours mentions Candide, which takes "we live in the best of all possible worlds" very cynically. Voltaire disagreed with Leibniz's premises. But of course "best of all possible worlds" has lots of room for argument as to "best" means, and it certainly does not mean the best of all of _your_ possible worlds. As the joke goes, both the optimist and pessimist believe ours is the best possible.
Like you said, it can probably console people that believe in that sort of stuff and probably is meant like that but you gotta be careful with it if you ask me. I can easily be damaging.
If you think about it, the bible and other books/religions were created in really hard and tough times and the belief that somehow in some way "it was meant to be and there's a reason behind this terrible thing happening" was helping them through it. This is all in times in which less was known about how the world around us works (and even nowadays we don't really know but our models are much much better - just think of how medicine knows about bacteria causing illnesses and such vs. the whole Yellow Bile, Black Bile, Phlegm and Blood thing - Hippocrates ~460BC-~370BC).
A merchant in the 1300s coming home to find all of his family had died from the plague might find solace in thinking that all of this happened for a reason if he is a very devout believer in such things. I can't personally fathom how you'd find someone today that would see meaning in having a family member getting infected with Yersinia Pestis, nevermind die from it, but that's just me.
So as you can see, personally I absolutely don't believe in the whole reason and other religious stuff but I can see and appreciate how religion can help stabilize society and keep the population under control in tough times, how it can be a moral compass etc. I don't personally need the rest of it all to know that I shouldn't just go about killing other people. And if something bad happens in the world then - from my relatively safe western vantage point - I can just see that the world is still an ugly place and that there are bad people that just do bad things or that are living in bad enough situations that make them do those things (hey, until we're in those situations ourselves, we don't really know what we'd actually do, best intentions not to or not!) and all I can do is to try as best as I can to avoid those people amd situations altogether. There's not much more to it and I don't need to imagine a devil or some other stuff to explain this somehow.
That was really my point. In the Bible, you see God directly intervening in certain situations but you don’t see Him actively controlling everything. Moses even argues with Him at one point.
There’s a couple of verses that people have strained to apply that meaning to it, but reading the entire Bible to put things in context you don’t see “everything” happening for a reason. You see some things.
It’s one of the reasons that I try to make this point a lot. I don’t know how many people realize how much that phrase leads non-believers to demonize God by attaching every awful thing that happens to a reason, which then makes those things His doing.
This comes more from the early Catholic theology dogmas of an all-knowing, all-powerful benevolent god, which creates a contradiction.
If God is not actively controlling everything, then you have to either admit that He can't control everything (but that clashes with the all-knowing, all-powerful aspect that the church really wants to preserve), or that He can intervene but chooses not to, in which case He is responsible for every awful thing that He lets happen, and you either need to assert that "it's all for a good reason in the end" and letting these awful things happen is not a bad thing, or give up the presumption of benevolence.
So the tricky thing is that you have to give up something of these assumptions; you can keep any of them, but if you want to keep all of them, then there's a contradiction - and the discussion becomes very different depending on which assumption you give up; if you keep omnipotence, then you have to "demonize God"; if you keep both omnipotence and benevolence, then you have to ignore any awful thing in our reality that does not have a plausible good reason justifying the awfulness; if you want to keep benevolence and a common-sense look on our reality, then you get (perhaps, I hope I'm not misinterpreting you) something like your approach - which, IMHO, is quite reasonable, but essentially surrenders omnipotence and thus strongly goes against dogma of many churches that do assert a God that actively intervenes all the time.
I'm intrigued by the "non-believers to demonize God" though. As a thought experiment, replace God by any deity of any religion, such that you would also be a non-believer (I assume you are a believer in the Christian god), which should help with the objective distance.
How about human sacrifices, say Vikings or Aztecs. What are your thoughts on human sacrifice? Would you go as far as to demonize the Aztec god(s) that required a human sacrifice?
(I'm not the person you're replying to) A bit of a tangent: I don't know that much about the Aztec gods but AFAICT, the Vikings didn't really deny that their gods can be pretty terrible. There are a lot of Norse myths that basically describe a really dysfunctional and bitter family, but with superpowers. Betrayal, infidelity, pettiness, arrogance, and stupid mistakes are all reflected in stories about their gods. They might as well be demons but they weren't as bad as other things so you'd worship them all the same.
Christianity in particular is significantly different in that their god is canonically benevolent while also being omnipotent. It's a pretty fundamental aspect of Christianity, I don't think I've heard any Christian that believes their god is actually kind of a dick. I would imagine that even though "why do bad things happen?" is a classic foundational challenge to Christianity, it's probably irrelevant to Vikings. Christianity isn't really comparable to old school faiths like Vikings/Aztecs.
Also fair enough :) and to add to your tangent AFAICT though Viking human sacrifices are described it seems like they weren't the common place standard type of sacrifice.
I don't necessarily think that it matters much for the question though. I'm not sure I can find a different benevolent omnipotent (or close enough) deity to make a straight comparison to that doesn't have a current (large) following that would drag the discussion into geopolitical/georeligious territory. If you do know one I'm all up for a substitution.
I don't know with the parent I was replying to, he seems reasonable, but usually religious discussions "never end well" because of the belief involved. Bringing the discussion to a different non-current religion levels the playing field to both sides discussing something they don't believe in. The "fun part" is where the believer in a current deity knows that "obviously Odin doesn't actually exist, there are no Norse gods". Well that's how I feel about their deity, sorry. But I don't mind that they believe in it as long as they leave me be and don't try to convert me or negatively affect me because of their beliefs.
The Bible often talks about not honoring other gods, avoiding idols, etc. Even Solomon built many shrines to other gods for his wives.
Some people interpret it to affirm the existence of other gods. In reading, there’s never a point where another god directly intervenes in the lives of men. There are plenty of occurrences of men creating idols to worship of other gods or falling to temptations offered by the gods of other cultures. Asherah poles are the most often called out.
All that is to say, we don’t have any historical context of other gods directly intervening in people’s lives.
What we do know is that if we were to claim to know when God will intervene we would be wrong. We can’t possibly. I have seen in my own life and heard testimony from others which gives me a little bit of a pattern to draw from and gain better understanding to help make some sense of it…but I’m still just guessing.
What we do see in the Bible is that even the biblical heroes are all very flawed and fall in and out of favor with God. Noah, Moses, David, Solomon, etc. The only one who doesn’t is Jesus, but even Jesus became frustrated at times. There’s a story where Jesus curses a fig tree because he’s hungry and there’s no fruit on it. I always thought it was funny because it shows more of his human side…he got hangry.
Interesting. In two ways, you brought the discussion back to the Christian god instead of coming onto the "we both don't believe in those gods" playing field.
I appreciate the civil discussion nevertheless and there's the second interesting point.
You never actually say it directly but between the lines I read that you think to have at least an inkling of a pattern that confirms the direct interference of the Christian god in this world. I don't know why that would be relevant to be honest.
In any case, I would bet that the same could be said of people in ancient times for their gods (or even right now people that have different religions might for their god(s)). They probably thought to see patterns as well and attributed them to the gods. Without thinking about any specific religion: if they made a specific sacrifice every year at a specific time to gain favourable weather for example, they probably had a pretty good chance of success by pure luck and pattern observation and any unlucky weather anomalies could easily be attributed to mistakes with making the sacrifice (maybe it was the wrong goat or whatever) for example.
Repeating annoying phrases that casually dismiss suffering seem to be human nature. It likely irritated Voltaire so much he wrote the tragic novel Candide in 1759. In that book the phrase is "everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds" is thoughtlessly repeated during times of unspeakable cruelty and horror.
After reading "The Fremen Mirage Collection" [0], I can't read that adage/meme without feeling snarky.
While I believe that, in an individual scale, harsh times can help develop toughness and resilience, most times it seems to lead to resentment, anger and frustration.
I've been estranged from my family since my teens due to an unpleasant childhood and young adulthood.
Eventually, the flames of the furnace of life reaches all of us; some younger than others; some more acutely than others. In skillful hands, it can temper us to become purer, higher quality versions of ourselves. In unskilled hands, it can damage us. All of us acquire wounds, it is a part of being human, being unskilled, and being alive.
Strength is just another word for empathy, love, and kindness. Everyone is capable of that, regardless of their pain. That's what makes humanity beautiful.
That's survivor bias. If you throw a million 8 year olds into the ocean, you'll create hundreds of swimmers.
The "good times create weak men" I have less of a story for, but it's perhaps something like this:
If you throw a million 8 year olds into the ocean while wearing life-preservers, you will end up depriving some of them the chance to learn to swim, and wrongly teach many of them that there's nothing dangerous about the ocean.
There was a discussion of this in Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness, where he was critiquing the "crucible experiences" chapter of Jim Collin's Good to Great.
Taleb's whole point was that this is an illusion caused by selection bias. Hard times don't create strong men. Hard times kill everyone who is weak. Hard times make everybody weaker, but they cause those who are weak to begin with to drop out of sample pool, leaving only those who were strong to begin with.
I mean, that adage about hard times, while entertaining, has zero truth to it. It's not something supported by history. It just sounds cool to say is all.
I disagree. I think the reason combat veterans often feel like their squad is a second family and rich country club members often feel like the other members are competitors is the difference in the adversity of each situation.
However, I think the type of “bad times” conducive to building strength is fairly particular; it only creates strong people if the problems being faced are external and require cooperation to solve, and the people facing adversity are capable of overcoming their own problems when adversity forces them to face them.
If interpersonal problems are the main source of adversity, and there is nothing external to force cooperation, that’s often demoralizing and more conducive to antagonistic forms of competition rather than camaraderie and self improvement.
Arguably, "hard times" are pretty much defined by serious external or environmental problems threatening normal life, and only in good times you're left with interpersonal problems as the main source of adversity.
I'm not sure it is contradiction, both the strong and weak alike can be emotionally damaged. Many see dictators, or want to be dictators as strong men, yet they are often obviously damaged people.
Surely this is a contradiction in terms? A strong boxer who is missing a leg is a weak boxer.
I don't think dictators are a good example, you only see the PR spin, it's not like you get a chance to meet Putin in person to realise he is actually clueless about whats happening in his own government.
I always thought that saying applied more to economics and politics than personal relationships. Look at the leaders who came of age during the Great Depression, then took the US through WW2 and the subsequent postwar boom. Many of them were massively fucked up in their private lives but still managed to perform well in public.
Even then, I'm not sure it holds. The US's situation then was the worst by 20th/21st century American standards, but by global or historic standards it was really not that bad.
Germany or Russia had much harder times around then and that produced some of the most horrific leaders the world has ever seen. Hitler and Stalin weren't the result of easy times.
There is truth in the original saying. Adversity creates the conditions and provides the motivation that spur people to develop strength they would not have needed otherwise. However, adversity is a very blunt instrument, and it is also a matter of degree. People don't always respond positively to adversity. And if the hardship is too great, it doesn't lead to opportunities for growth, just trauma.
That's one of the reasons we need safety nets, to dull the hardship to the point where we can grow through it and not be crushed under it.
That statement comes with the implication that strength is something intrinsic and static. That's not true - you get strong when you train, but you have to train gently and gradually enough to not get injured. You train yourself to be physically fit, but if you push too hard you will sprain tendons and break bones. You can also train yourself to be gentle, and if you push it too hard, you'll be taken advantage of. You can train yourself to be assertive, but if you push too hard you'll end up being aggressive and alienating people. That's part of growth.
Saying that adversity filters out weakness - no, adversity pushes people too hard before they're ready to handle it, then they fail. Sometimes they try again, sometimes the damage is too great and they give up. That's not a moral failing though. It just means they were pushed too hard.
i.e. they were too weak. strength/weakness in this sense has little to do with morality. someone who can't rise to the occasion or hasn't grown enough isn't a bad person or anything, just unprepared or ill suited.
e.g. a natural selection even doesn't care if an organism was still growing and learning. They either survive (strong) or die (weak). And that's the same definition of strong being used here.
It's called hormesis. Yes, there is a range beyond which further stress causes permanent and serious damage, but within the hormetic range "adversity" is basically the proximate cause of growth.
Stress impact also varies per individual biological differences.
According to Sapolsky's lecture on depression [1], a stressful childhood experience is 30x more likely to cause depression in individuals with a particular serotonin-related gene variant.
No. [1] The context of the whole conversation is traumatic relationships. If anything you are talking about eustress - and traumatic relationships are not beneficial and do not "make you stronger" [2].
> This is an interesting one, and in direct contradiction to the adage: "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
"Strong" in this context means ability to survive, not the ability to thrive. A society of "strong" men and women often results in "good times" of material progress, which masks the negatives in society. Unmasking all the ugliness cause society to lose cohesion, resulting in breakdown via internal or external factors and hence resulting in "hard times".
I don't see the contradiction there, it's pretty much the thing that saying is talking about.
A community full of emotionally damaged, unhappy people is also generally full of tough, no-nonsense people who know the dangers from personal experience, know how to avoid or eliminate them, do what needs to be done, no matter the cost and then afterwards perhaps drink themselves to death while abusing their family, but many of them also ensuring that their kids have a much better life than they did - slowly creating the good times.
And a few generations later a community of happy, emotionally well-adjusted people haven't had horror in their childhood, and they don't know how to handle real adversity and recognize abusive evil because they don't have the skill and experience for that, and spend their struggle/effort over meaningless trifles and status games; are emotionally principled and don't let ends justify the means - so when eventually push comes to shove (often due to some external circumstance or an interaction with another, exploitative community) they are unwilling or unable to take decisive action and sacrifices (including moral sacrifices) to prevent someone much more violent and unprincipled from taking over and causing hard times for you (and perhaps better times for themselves at your expense).
It's essentially about a cyclic change in the tradeoff between the qualities required to be happy, satisfied and cooperative versus the (very different and often incompatible) qualities required to be effective in the face of brutal adversity. Warrior mindset is harmful in peacetime, and pacifist mindset is ineffective in wartime. And perhaps it makes sense to raise "weak" men - friendly, open-minded, forgiving, sharing, optimistic and perhaps just naively expecting the best in others - whenever we can afford to, because it's just better and more sane, and we raise disproportionally strong, brutal, ruthless, efficient (and also damaged and abusive) men and women when we're forced to by circumstances that would just grind down people like those described in the previous sentence; damaging them until they either become "strong" or just break down.
Perhaps a bit related is the issue of parenting styles. Maximizing potential of kids is often quite abusive and results in unhappy and perhaps "damaged" kids; when looking at biographies of e.g. olympic champions it often (but not always - there certainly are exceptions) seems clear that they would have been much more emotionally healthy without as much early age pressure; but they also wouldn't be champions then, they would be outcompeted by someone just as lucky in the genetic lottery but willing (or, more likely, pressured) to sacrifice more and live a less balanced life.
In your entire paragraph the only way you were able to characterise strength is by associating it with cruelty and voilence. You have not come up with any other characteristic, where we could pick a random person and test how strong they are.
It is not obvious that being more cruel improves your chances of survival, it might, but maybe it's an abberation.
It was never the strongest guy that was in charge if the tribe of cavemen - becauae the two weaker guys could always gang up on him and kill him. There was always a degree of cooperation and politics involved. Of building a group and austracising your enemies
Yes, sure, that's why "strong" and "weak" pretty much need to be in airquotes as that's a narrow and niche aspect of that word, as there are many quite different and better aspects of strength - but those don't apply to that quote. Perhaps that sentence would be more accurately phrased as "Hard times create hard people, hard people create good times, good times create soft people, soft people create hard times" or something like that.
What I have in mind regarding this saying is what I see (both in relatives, acquaitances, life stories of those who passed away, and general culture) in the generation that were kids during WW2 who had the frontlines pass over them and the disruptions to their families caused by mass conscriptions and ubiquitous violence towards civilians as well. They are very different from their kids and grandkids. It's overwhelmingly a generation of hard, strong people - also clearly a generation of people who afterwards built better times through their attitude towards hardship, in ways that the following generations simply won't tolerate. And at the same time, overwhelmingly a generation of severely emotionally damaged people in many ways.
Most emotional damage that I've seen comes in the good times phase. That's when genx's parents were born. In the good times everyone is free to do as they please and have to find their own meaning, this creates weak men. Weak men create hard times. We're entering the really hard times now.
When things really go to shit, you'll find your purpose and have to rely on others. That creates strength and good times, eventually.
Think about most hostile places, in the midst of civil war- do they produce the greatest people?
In all times, the great philosophers, engineers, generals, scientists, etc. Were never made up of peoppe that suffered greaters hardship, that starved in the childhood. They were always elites, people with best education or at least middle class.
We've run this experiment, there is zero evidence for it.
That's not a particularly impressive list, Steven Hawking was born in the 40's, Bill Gates was born in the 50,s, Bezos in the 60's. I am not seeing how 30's was a particularly 'strong' decade.
This is super obvious but I'll say it anyway. We have been living in the good times phase for many decennia now, so it's no surprise that you don't see emotional damage from the bad times phase.
We've had perpetual war for the last 20 years. We've had increasing inequality. The temperature is rising, wages are stagnating, riots in major urban areas are becoming more common.
These are not the good times. We have plenty to eat and too much technology but these are not what make the good times.
I am not sure that is true. As an outside observer of the US I see a lot of highly trained, potentially dangerous veterans who came home to a pile of broken promises with broken psyches and sometimes broken bodies. There are now decades worth of these guys milling around in a society awash with firearms and blitzed with misinformation. It's a powderkeg that might just go off unexpectedly. Of course there are side effects to those middle east adventures.
I don't think the quote was meant to describe individual experiences, but rather society. Similar to the saying "only the strong survive". Hard times are also a defining function as to what a "strong" person is, and of course the saying says nothing about a "strong" persons emotional troubles.
It seems that there are specific kinds of difficult experiences that promote growth and others that inhibit it. There are certain kinds of widely felt hardships like economic downturn that can unite communities and help bring out the best in people. There is a definite silver lining. There's no upside to shitty parenting.
We are still reeling from WW2 that wiped out massive numbers of (mostly) men who were then missing fathers. All the down-stream effects of that are fascinating.
This is an interesting one, and in direct contradiction to the adage: "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
My life experience agrees, tough times mostly produce emotionally damaged people