Stability vs. Perceived Instability.

My question is this:

Why do so many people perceive that society is so fragile and ready to break at any time when all of the evidence says otherwise? Yes there are outlier cases, but they are vanishingly small. Open societies have proven to be incredibly resilient compared to closed ones.

Murphy's Law #9 (???) is the answer to your question. The more complex something is, the more likely that the $0.25 part is to fail at the most critical time and it will bring the entire machine or thing to a complete screeching halt!!!

Martin,

I agree with you. I'm sure there are a lot of well thought out, informed, scientific studies that support the premise as well. But since I don't happen to have any sitting around let me just propose something off the cuff. While it's pretty simple to eliminate one human being, intentionally or not, it's really very hard to get us all. Nature (and sociopaths) has been trying to kill off the human population (or some specific segment of it) for a long time and has failed every time.

Diversity is the key, whether it be in the genetic make up of humans that thwarts the pandemics, or the diversity of an open society that can improvise, adapt and overcome because of the inherent freedoms of thought and action. It's just really hard to hit the moving target humans and their societies prsent hard enough to wipe them out.

It's easier with monocultures. Just ask the Dodo bird or the Mayans (about that end of the world prediction, what's up with that?). But all of us? Completely? In an instant?

Ain't gonna happen unless our sun goes super nova a lot sooner than expected.

Martin, I've gone beyond your original post a bit but I share your non-pessimism about the world as we know it. Living thru the Philles meltdown of 1964, or Joe Kuharich as the football coach of both the Eagles and my alma mater, Notre Dame, and still retain a sense of optimism about the world means that something in our nature as humans makes us run towards the abyss believing that by the time we get there someone will have built a really nice bridge...

Potential explanations:
1.It is a lot more fun to prepare for zombie apocalypse than to confront the inevitable decline into senility culminating in cardiac or respiratory death.

2.We have fabulously safe streets and fabulously safe water but spend billions on bottled water and firearms: victims of marketing.

3. The sample you have selected follow the ETS website: the rest of the world is better adjusted.

4. All doomsayers are wrong except for the last one.

5. Pessimists are always pleasantly surprised; optimists are always unpleasantly surprised.

6. A forum of people discussing the assertion that everything will work out for the best, no worries, would be very tedious.

My answer is the complexity of a lot of necessary systems - water, food, electricity, transportation.

I think that the fact that more breakdowns don't occur is a tribute to engineers who keep the system running with chewing gum and baling wire fixes.

Maybe they watch too many "black Friday" videos on youtube of people assaulting eachother for $5 toasters. Or the panic buying of water and food before hurricanes, etc. It seems fairly common that when people perceive a shortage of something, whether real or imagined, they tend to go bonkers. Of course mass media sensationalism has a lot to do with encouraging that irrational behavior.

"For Want of a Nail ..."

That rhyme is over 500 years old.

It's all about Chaos theory, which makes my head hurt: when do small changes in the initial conditions of a system lead to large differences in results? I don't think a civilization qualifies as a chaotic system in a mathematical sense, even if "common sense" suggests otherwise. But if control is sufficiently centralized such that changes in one particle (the dictator) affect every other particle, maybe it can be mathematically chaotic.

PS. This weekend I had to fix a 150 terabyte storage system that shut down when a $0.50 fan failed. I think that's what Wildman was referring to.

Yes I was James, but also how that could apply to a civilization as well.

From my understanding, "Chaos Theory" applies more to equations and simulations rather than to real-world systems.

Most real-world systems are much more robust than we imagine, otherwise we'd all be long gone.

See Michael Crichton's novels-Jurassic Park, Next, State of Fear for illustration by a smart guy of chaos theory applied to practical science, and power structure interests in maintaining a frightened electorate.

All it takes is the temporary, local failure of one small part of the system your survival happens to depend on to ruin your day. This is not a doomsday scenario, except perhaps for you. That is what this community ponders.

Chrichton is entertainment media, not science and facts. In fact, it's often the opposite of science. I enjoy his fictions as much as the next guy.

But evidence...evidence is all that matters, and I look to every instance in the last 50 years where we had riots, blackouts, natural disasters, man-made disasters - and the top gets whacked, but it spins back up.

Crichton's fiction is often heavily researched and factually foot-noted, and his science credentials-Harvard MD-are not shoddy. And, he agrees with your position, as do I. Our society in particular, and biology in general, is incredibly adaptive.

My theory is that the Internet exposes people to worries they may not have been aware of before and allows immersion into every facet of it (such as EMP and solar storms).

Prior to the mid-1990s, most people had many fewer information resources than today. For me growing up, my information sources were (aside from school teachers, friends and family) a daily monopoly newspaper (The Oregonian), three television networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) and a small town library that was 20 miles from my house. And the occasional Time or Newsweek magazine.

The years since 2000 have also been quite tumultuous -- from Y2K to a disputed presidential election to 9/11, anthrax, wars, economic crash (that we're still not recovered from), etcetera.

History is replete with societal resilience (such as, we survived the aforementioned decade) but we are also an increasingly technology-dependent just-in-time society and many people are mindful that major disruption is just a power outage away....

A no-tech dog walk in the woods always helps soothe the worrier in me.

Well said Dagny; ivory tower folks concur:

NPR talk of the nation today; researchers suggest war and violence on the decline in modern times here .

Basic thought: Retail violence was much more prevalent in previous centuries, much rarer now.

I don't wish to start a flame war, but Martin is right. Chrichton wrote fiction. A Harvard MD certainly makes him qualified to write about medical topics. It does not automatically mean he knows anyting about any other area of science. Regarding his footnotes, several of the prominent scientists he cited have publicly stated that Chrichton totally misunderstood their work and/or took them grossly out of context.

Enjoy his books as science fiction. Do not presume that they have any significance beyond that.

Gosh, a lot of the MDeities that I have worked with believe that a medical degree grants expertise in politics, economics, and social commentary, but perhaps you are right. I promise never to refer to Crichton as an authority again.

I enjoy his books,dont write too much else into the equation though,just good entertainment,works for me.

I think the great quantity of information available tends to make folks lock themselves into "cultural ghettos". My term for those who limit their information gathering to one particular worldview. Soon it appears that everything they see confirms that worldview.

I try very hard to seek views that are not like mine. This becomes even more difficult when search engines return results filtered based on your past selections.

At the very least, planning my escape from my own self created cultural ghetto provides me with insight to how others see the world. And I become more confident that my decisions are bases on a more accurate assessment.

Nomad