That’s your opinion, but like I said it’s not valid to imply that it is the normal view and those not agreeing are biased. Instead of trying to hear understand and challenge what historians have to say you flee intellectually, which is ironic given your take on strong men.

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.

You're doing the same assuming "good times = comfort = weakness" as a thing you already think, which is what the long reply I linked is debunking. What you said implies an opposite, something like: scarcity and famine strengthens the social fabric by encouraging long-term thinking over short-term maintenance. Actually it doesn't, scarcity leads to dog-eat-dog short-term survival tactics anything from stealing from neighbours, eating next year's seeds, up to eating the farm dog or selling the farm machinery or cannibalism, and leads to squalor, disease, and fire risks because nobody has time or energy or resources to spare on anything but the most urgent survival.

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?

Everything you've said about comfort and complacency is equally if not more true of scarcity though. Scarcity leads directly to short-term thinking because there's no future to plan for or maintain. Erosion of social bonds happens as desperation increases and people turn to grifting and taking advantage of each other. The original quote is a little too tidy, an oversimplification that fails to grasp a complex reality and seems to have its own agenda/bias. Which you presumably agree with or you would have caught it. The truth is that there are varying levels of easy and hard times, and either one can "create" either kind of man. (And I'm ignoring masculinity as an issue; everybody knows whether they're a man or not.)

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.