I want to point to one of Nate Hagens' "Great Simplification" essays I found interesting. Hagens lays out eight distinct "lenses" through which people assign blame for civilizational crisis — political, religious, class, technological, community, animist, overshoot, and thermodynamic — each pairing a villain with a satisfying task for fixing things. (This eight-lens carving is Hagins' own construction, there could be different slicings.) The last two lenses, overshoot and thermodynamics, implicate everyone rather than a villain and offer no simple fix, which makes them logically the strongest candidates but psychologically the least persuasive. He argues that durable solutions need to work across several lenses simultaneously. The article provides a taxonomy or map of why different ideological camps talk past each other on existential-scale problems, tied to a psychological explanation (villain-seeking) rather than a policy argument.
And to add on even more cheerful reading to this post, I pass on John Walter's "The 5 Places In America You DON’T Want To Be When Society Begins To Collapse". Five places stand out: 1. The Washington DC to Boston corridor: 50 million American in 2% of the nation's land mass trapped by interdependence. 2, California's Agricultural Mirage: Los Angeles and the Central valley when the water stops. 3. Florida's Sinking Peninsula: The Physics of Water and Salt. 4. The Desert Southwest: Phoenix and the Thermodynamic Ceiling. 5. The Industrial Midwest: Municipal failures when the pensions run dry (as in Chicago).