The good life exclusively in materialist terms

If having is all that's important, and being, doing and interacting are merely subsets of welfare measured exclusively in terms of outcomes and final allocations, then the resource curse takes on a cruel logic of its own. 

Suppose a society's primary source of national income were some resource pool like oil. If the allocation of that resource were ill served by market mechanisms, then it would make sense for the society to be managed by some benevolent dictator who would organize the domestic oil industry to maximize national income, and then distribute the income to the population according to some equitable formula. That the people would remain servile in their civic duties would be irrelevant to the social calculus because the entire national welfare is in the first place measured only in terms of material goods being distributeed in some sort of final allocation. Hence the Russian model of a strongman ruler maximizing national wealth and honor becomes the logical outcome for the new world order where crony capitalism of an autocracy superintending a heavily compromised free market is the economic system of choice. 

The neo-Conservative, Reaganite position propounded by Jeanne Kirk Fitzpatrick, where she defended the right-wing takeover of South American societies (a la Chile) by authoritarian rulers who installed free market economies, is one such political outcome that's made acceptable by this sort of political philosophy. The strongman rule in the Middle East is another. 

The politics of distraction, be it by mass media re-framing the image of the good life exclusively in materialist terms or the strongman rulers paying off the populace with the necessary minumum standard of living while fomenting distraction through the systematic villification of some national scapegoat, becomes a natural expression of a common wealth defined entirely in quantitative, materialist terms through the acquisition of final allocations. And all that before we even get to the problem of allocation under abundance.