I’ve recently been reading A Renegade History of the United States and the same concept keeps coming up, the more lax a culture becomes, the less productive it becomes. One example would be the interviews done with former slaves who lamented being free because they never worked harder then under northern freedom. The New England culture that was dominate at the time forced work, devotion, and working for a purpose versus working to live. This is also echoed in Thomas Sowell. His example of societies that improved off of British trains showed that only the most stringent societies were the ones improving upon the railways. This idea also plays into societal fatigue, where when a culture has no purpose they lose their will to continue.
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In Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quigley (a very intelligent historian), he describes the pattern of empires in the context of Expansion and Conflict.
When civilizations are expanding it is because some sort of "change" has allowed the civilization the ability to grow. This change is often some sort of technological innovation such as in weapons technology or a new economic process or discovery of a new resource etc... This growth and therefore newfound improvement in society is usually well received by the people within the civilization and thus the culture of the civilization is respect by the whole and is reinforced by the whole. You get less degeneracy because the whole of the civilization is working toward its expansion and degeneracy doesn't aid in this quest.
After the expansion finally wears off you get a period of conflict. People start to in-fight and squabble over things like class, race, sex, etc... because they are no longer devoted to the expansion. This type of fighting typically leads to degeneracy. He discusses how during the Age of Conflict, the society begins to redistribute resources away from productive things and toward non-productive things.
Generally speaking in his analysis Quigley suggests that the Age of Conflict always ends with some sort of consolidation of the civilization under a new regime. He calls it the Universal Empire. Usually it's through war but it can also just be through coercion of force and cultural assimilation. Once this Universal Empire is complete, the civilization always decays until death.
If you apply his theories to modern society, essentially the USA's last Age of Expansion was after WWII and we've now entered an Age of Conflict. This conflict is essentially the culture war going on between the right and left. With the left tearing down the very foundation of what Western Society has been based off of. Society is no longer focused on productivity but is focused on non-productive things like "renewable energy" and Social Justice etc...
The universal empire is globalism essentially and how all western countries are trying to usher in a Great Reset whereby they create essentially a New World Order. This is the universal empire. Once established, it is only a matter of time before western civilization completely crumbles.
From Quigley's analysis, it's not the degeneracy that causes society to crumble but rather it's the lack of an Age of Expansion which leads to an Age of Conflict which leads to degeneracy. There truly hasn't been any major breakthroughs in the organization of society and resources to create any real growth in decades. The dot com bubble essentially marked the end of the Age of Growth with the Financial Crisis putting the final nail in the coffin for those who hasn't accepted it yet. It's no surprise degeneracy and conflict went into overdrive during this period.