Timothy Snyder calls this pattern of motivated thinking "politics of inevitability". At first you think everything's fine so you don't have to do anything. The

Timothy Snyder calls this pattern of motivated thinking "politics of inevitability". At first you think everything's fine so you don't have to do anything. Then when it's no longer possible to lie to yourself about that you immediately switch to "can't do anything anyway" so you can continue doing nothing. His main example was the "end of history" when dealing with autocracies around the world. At first we thought they will solve itself because we're on the winning side of the history. Then we immediately switched to "nothing can be done". Anything to avoid taking responsibility.