Fatalism and apathy are attitudes that forestall disappointment from power.

Evidence

We must now deal briefly with the question of compatible attitudes, because virtually nothing is known about this subject. It is an important area of research for political psychology. There are attitudes such as fatalism or apathy which serve particularly to forestall disappointments. Concerning other attitudes, it can be expected that in cases of high contingency and limited opportunity for the realization of evident possibilities, a different reorientation takes place – for instance a shift from internal to external attribution, with consequences in the area of motivating performance. Further possibilities for adaptation do not lie in socialization processes but in selection processes, which move people with dispositions compatible with problem settings into decision-making positions. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 759

Categorization

• XREF: Stevens’s apathy toward Lord Darlington’s moral failings is precisely an attitude that forestalls disappointment — directly usable for the reader’s comparative argument as the psychological mechanism of ethical abdication.
• QUESTION: Stevens seems to perform both fatalism AND internal attribution (blaming himself for Darlington’s mistakes). Worth checking whether Luhmann predicts these as mutually exclusive responses.