Fatalistic complacency and the Economy-as-God

I think the Alt-Right obsession with historical cycles, aside from rationalizing a fatalism which justifies a pose of complacent superiority (i.e. “poolside”), stems from their extant materialist (but religious) devotion to the Economy-as-God. Rightists have yet to escape the Marxist paradigm of “scientific” history. Therefore, their assumption is that people’s economic behavior will eventually, when they’re hurting enough, reflect a central tendency toward “results”, or the demand to satisfy natural desires. But real history, not of the Marxist variety, tells us that people in declining empires do not reacquire an interest in getting results. Not even to save their own lives, much less those of their children.

XXI Civil dissensions
Another remarkable and unexpected symptom of national decline is the intensification of internal political hatreds. One would have expected that, when the survival of the nation became precarious, political factions would drop their rivalry and stand shoulder-to-shoulder to save their country. In the fourteenth century, the weakening empire of Byzantium was threatened, and indeed dominated, by the Ottoman Turks. The situation was so serious that one would have expected every subject of Byzantium to abandon his personal interests and to stand with his compatriots in a last desperate attempt to save the country. The reverse occurred. The Byzantines spent the last fifty years of their history in fighting one another in repeated civil wars, until the Ottomans moved in and administered the coup de grâce.

Sir John Glubb
The Fate of Empires

This is the most important lesson of the modern workplace. Boomer self-help advice, even from guys I otherwise respect like Brian Tracy, take it as gospel that people who get results will tend to get what they deserve via Efficient Markets Hypothesis. But when you actually have a job, you learn that working people are not interested in results. They are only interested in enabling their pre-existing pathologies. This is the rule. Innovators and go-getters are punished because they threaten the established pyramid, upon which so many pathologies depend for their continued existence.

Those dedicated to the propagation of the organization itself at the expense of its original purpose will be strongly inclined to seek out and socially punish activities which serve that original purpose, because the greatest threat to their institutional power is the possibility that high performers will wield the prestige which naturally accrues to them as influence on behalf of the organization’s original purpose.

Corollary to the Iron Law of Bureaucracy