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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Pioneer societies have no time to mess around, and no time for nonsense. Humans have infested almost every corner of the globe, and have no more room for expansion, because Antarctica isn't melting fast enough, and the space folks dragged their feet for too many years after Apollo for either option to act as a release valve. So the only thing to do is collapse and die back for a while; the survivors will be tougher, no-nonsense sorts. The problem is, the higher the technology, the harder the fall. But it's not "degeneracy" that's the symptom of a problem, it's the proliferation of separatist movements. And the weirdo cults and the like are their own kind of separatists, who might strike out to found their own land if they could find land that wasn't owned already ......
Hell, the best things to happen to the poor European were the Black Death and the discovery of new lands ...