What's most striking to me in this article is how perfectly this sums up the ongoing collapse of America's political system and civil society:

"In the paper Basic Patterns in How Adaptive Systems Fail, the researchers David Woods and Matthieu Branlat note that brittle systems tend to suffer from the following three patterns:

- Decompensation: exhausting capacity to adapt as challenges cascade

- Working at cross-purposes: behavior that is locally adaptive but globally maladaptive

- Getting stuck in outdated behaviors: the world changes but the system remains stuck in what were previously adaptive strategies (over-relying on past successes)"

Painfully apt.