In many individual cases, or cases of general expansion, erring subjectively on optimism translates to real world benefit. There is a feedback loop that arises: one moves forward with the belief held fast of good things happening, and ignoring and surmounting the bad, a more general prosperity arises as strength is accumulated and past a certain threshold, the good becomes easier to maintain, and the bad is avoided or surmounted. This is the nugget of truth that the mind-over-matter fanatics seize upon: one must think good thoughts, and the rest will follow.
But then what happens when the general conditions for prosperity are steadily eroded universally? You see this kind of thing with empires in particular: there is a relentless ideological optimism that pervades collective activity, and perpetual expansion proceeds on a buoyant cloud of cyclical striving. Cyclical in the sense that one proceeds by the law of diminishing returns, and then seizes upon the next updraft when the current avenue begins to become exhausted.
Something like an empire, which must steadily expand and concentrate power by converting the territory around it into its subordinate subject, eventually runs into a familiar problem. The thermodynamic limits of its expansion eventually become reached, and unable to quickly change its nature, it continues to pursue its expansion simultaneously as those limits bite. In this case then, there arises a contradiction: the necessity of material contraction comes up against the collective psychological need for optimism.
This contradiction is resolved through the course of the bubble, which suggested by the image of the metaphor, is a fragile form of expansion that must annihilate itself at the peak of its growth. You see this expressed throughout Western society in many ways. Boundless optimism is selected for at an institutional level, with "yes" people and adoring sycophants promoted and sustained, and the dour naysayers and skeptics gradually filtered out and ostracized. We are bombarded with relentless marketing pitches, breathless and sunny: technological optimism, foreign adventurism, scientific handwaving, economic and financial chicanery, and we could surely go on and on.
Of course in an expansionary phase, when a given avenue of growth matures and slows, its sustained products validate the optimistic picture and even demand the necessity of its truth. The more advanced the general exhaustion however, and the more a necessity for a generalized contraction emerges, the more each of these avenues of activity appears as a bubble. Bubbles, which rapidly unwind and evaporate at a more unpredictable and unanticipated rate, tend to destroy the capacities and faculties they arise out of, and exhaust the faithful optimism and trust that makes them possible. But the collective optimistic drive proves durable - at the very least it metastasizes into manipulation and desperation, elements which already existed in the first place - and failures in one avenue can be waved away in favor of pursuing an alternative in another field: the differentiated and specialized pathways, expressed in professional politics, economics, warmaking, research, and etc. can be siloed and insulated to various extents.
This is a more turbulent and unpredictable form of contraction. The thing to do would be to adopt a collective resignation and pessimism and pursue a path of managed contraction until a new stable baseline is achieved, after which limits could be re-evaluated and alternate avenues of growth could be considered. But it is difficult for an empire to turn on a dime, and so forward optimistic motion continues against hard limits and contraction is achieved through a procession of exploding bubbles, towards simplification and lower energy usage, and as seen in the pattern of development in high profile cults, a trail of scandal and outrage and social and material destruction is left in its wake.
