Undesirable circumstances almost always result from war: sadness, misery, and afflictions suffered by someone; however, war can also turn people toward God. Then peace allows the Church to grow. Nonetheless, the cycle of apostasy seems to set in quickly among those who are unstable: peace brings prosperity, which brings pride, which brings division, and so on. See this cycle depicted in the commentary at Ether 9–11 (in vol. 2 of this work).
The problem of very costly apparel does not seem to go away. Do we have this problem? Do we really promote, as we have been encouraged by the prophets, a “style of our own”? This is thought-provoking language: the people were lifted up in “the pride of their eyes”; what their eyes saw, their hearts desired.