A good perspective, but I think one thing you overlook is that those in power today wield far more of it than those from 80 years ago. While teetering on the brink probably plays into their hand well (what do people with power want after all?), actually allowing our civilization to fall over the edge would likely prove counterproductive, otherwise they'd have pushed it over long ago. The threat is almost always much worse than the reality, so I don't ever expect a full on collapse, but several limited crises are quite likely, similar to what we've experienced over my lifetime so far, each seeming to escalate the risk, but really only exacerbating our burden just a little bit more than the previous one.

I cite this most recent calamity avoidance effort as just the sort of thing we can continue to expect. The media whips up an ever increasing cacaphony of urgency that our economy is getting ready to go feet up, then suddenly the feds decide to reduce the interest rate by a relatively significant amount, in reality changing nothing, but effectively saving the day as the markets rally up and suddenly all is well again, the threat having been thwarted, with nothing actually really being done. On the surface, it seems as though we averted an economical killer asteroid yet again, but the reality is nothing about how the vast majority of us run our lives changed any from before this miraculous rescue to after.

We are digging a rather deep hole for ourselves, or rather we are allowing the hole under us to continue to deepen, and I doubt we will ever get out of it again, but I also doubt we will get to the bottom of the hole any time soon either. For all our problems, we still have a far superior armed force to wield around this world. If we got truly desperate, don't you think we would use all the resources available to us to try and recover? If we wanted to take over all the oil fields in the middle east, I have no doubt the US flag would be flying over the entire region in a matter of two weeks or less. It might be a big ethical problem, and the rest of the world might hate us, but not so many would be that willing I think to challenge a desperate giant. Maybe not a plausible option at the moment, but not inconceivable.