Khaldunian cycle
“Hard times create strong men;
strong men create good times;
good times create weak men;
weak men create hard times.”
named after the great 14thC Arab statesman and polymath Ibn Khaldun
https://unherd.com/2021/07/the-west-will-never-understand-syria
Nomadic cultures like the Bedouin, hardened by the harsh facts of existence in the inhospitable desert, evolve a close cultural solidarity or group feeling— asabiyya— providing them with an evolutionary advantage over the soft and decadent cultures of the cities.
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Since the Second World War, a myth — perhaps one of the founding myths of postwar liberalism — has evolved to dominance, which asserts that individual feeling and morality predominates in the modern world, and group feeling, or asabiyya, is merely a relic of the past.