"How Do You Know When Society Is About to Fall Apart?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/magazine/societal-collapse.html

"For an overwhelming majority of the time since the evolution of Homo sapiens, Tainter contends, we organized ourselves in small and relatively egalitarian kinship-based communities."

"Only complexity, Tainter argues, provides an explanation that applies in every instance of collapse.

"We go about our lives, addressing problems as they arise.

"Complexity builds and builds, usually incrementally, without anyone noticing how brittle it has all become.

"Then some little push arrives, and the society begins to fracture. The result is a 'rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity.’

"In human terms, that means central governments disintegrating and empires fracturing into 'small, petty states,' often in conflict with one another.”
 
But wait: for most of human history, we’ve organized ourselves in "small and relatively egalitarian kinship-based communities."

So, instead of “fracturing into ‘small, petty states,’” what if we consciously self-organized into small, smart bioregions that collaborate w/other bioregions?

ie, instead of continuing to increase fragile complexity, what if we developed scale-appropriate complexity?

Whatta ya think @cognitivepolicy?