One of the important realisations about this topic for me was that humans didn't really evolve a lot during recorded history and a lot of our progress that actually made a difference is based on knowledge and hands-on experience that doesn't get recorded in written form.

Ancient philosophers already had many profound ideas about the world, experts in ancient egypt fixed teeth with tools comparable to those of a today's dentist, engineers had enough experience and insight to build bridges that endured longer than many nations.

It took one ship to block an important canal, one power outage in Texas to take out multiple factories for months, one pandemic(which was not unforeseeable) to completely shift the rules on how many things are done. I don't think it would even take a loss of electricity to see a lot of systems implode. We joked about the toilet paper shortage last year, but it was only funny because it was a relatively unimportant, long-lasting and easy to produce product. It could have been a lot worse.

I think we get to see a much slower one. With each protest, each natural disaster, each fabricated media outrage, each shift from pragmatism to luxury beliefs, each openly corrupt politician getting away with a slap in the wrist, each case of the justice system working to protect criminals at the expensive of victims, each case of institutions practicing racism under the guise of anti-racism, each open manipulation of fiat currency for the purposes of enriching politicians and government, each bill where only 20% of the money goes to the people and the other 80% is pork, each virtue signal at the cost of reality - every one slowly erodes our organizational capacity as a society to react and meet the contractual obligations of governance.

Our unconscious notices, even if our conscious choses to rationalize or woke it away.

The fuse is lit.

Makes me wonder if structuring the school curriculum in a way that'll teach everyone to rebuild the technological civilisation from scratch to a fairly advanced level is a good idea.

I think that would be incredibly difficult, but it would heavily depend on the level of "bootstrapping" we would want to target and the degree of communication and coordination assumed. Modern civilization is a product of increasingly specialized and finely coordinated effort. The system is more powerful, yet more fragile.

Yes, and the scary thing (as the covid handling in a lot of countries proved) most governments are incompetent to deal with such a disaster. The collapse of civilization, especially in the very integrated and inter-dependent world of today is way closer than most people think, and most government prepared. Ironically it’s countries which doesn’t do too well now but are too dependent one other that might survive better to such even. Also it’s not a if but a when.