(Long, kinda ranty and rambling)
If any particular global system fails it will produce a series of cascading failures.
For example running out of water in the west United States will produce a mass migration, resource shortages in the area people move to, food shortages, collapse in real estate prices, destabilization of the the real economy and markets, collapse in government revenues, disruption of a wide array of services produced by businesses and factories in the impacted zone, and perhaps some sort of mega environmental catastrophe similar to the “dust bowl” (mega wildfires, firestorms etc.) it will also likely cause the rule of law to deteriorate and nation state boundaries to become blurry
The system will collapse down to its next viable stable state - and that’s just one example.
Other items coming to a boil at the same time are and these are happening right now:
collapse of global fisheries
global concurrent droughts due to climate change
depletion of vital resources that enable our industrial / technological society
resource competition escalating into conflict
destabilization of currencies / high inflation
internal national conflicts such as socialism vs authoritarianism, and class conflict (haves vs have nots)
corporate news networks disrupting the public will to organize collective responses to escalating crises (in favor of preserving capital interests)
Rising anti-intellectualism/ dis-empowerment of expert minds in favor of capital interests
failure to control digital propaganda efforts which misinform the public
we will likely see a widespread regression from analytical thinking, denial of actual circumstances and leaning into religious mythology and moral arguments that force deconstruction of stable systems - we are seeing it already.
overloading the public with debt ensuring an unmanageably massive economic crisis
Some types of systemic failures will produce localized collapse, some will produce global collapse, some will produce a cascading collapse.
Some have called this period we are in “the long emergency”
things will happen in fits and starts - sometimes things will appear to degrade rapidly and widely, sometimes slowly - we will convince ourselves we time to manage the system, that we are in control - but we are wrong.
Nature will stabilize the system on our behalf at the pace of its choosing.