The end game that is feared is the fall of civilization mirroring the collapse of the western roman empire, and it’s quite possible in a thousand years people will peg the collapse of our civilization as having started around 1950 or so.

With global climate disasters and large chunks of the population prone to tribal superstition looming, nearly everyone being spoonfed technology they don’t begin to understand much less have any ability to replicate, and the government of the global hegemon inches away from collapse into autocracy, people are afraid of dark ages, but most of them can’t quite articulate it.

Rome fell and a big part of europe and the mediterranean lost the ability to maintain cities many of which dumped 90% of their populations to the countryside. Specialization gone, most people were just doing subsistence agriculture. Literacy plummeted to almost no one outside a very very few people in monasteries.

This whole religious adherence to party aligned mythology about everyday things (say, vaccines) is pervasive in the western world, and it is not some surface defect, it’s a rot that goes through to the core.

But things have been pretty nice as long as almost everybody has been alive so the belief that everything will continue to be fine is about all that holds things together.

People don’t appreciate how precarious civilization is.