Collapse happens.
What society must do is to prepare for it so that when the collapse wipes the slate clean, it would function like a jubilee and beget joy rather than increase injustice and isolation and beget bitterness.
The Puritans begat the 'corrosive community' where the public arena was evacuated and as much as possible was swept into the private domain, privatizing what was hitherto public civic life. Humor was lost. Things became subject to the solemn dictates of productivity and efficiency. Puritans in 17th century New England punished those who celebrated Christmas. Today we witness
"a widespread distrust of the life of unpoliced crowds, manifested in urban and particularly suburban design in the United States, in the bans by dictatorships on public gatherings, in the writings of Le Bon and the plans for disaster." (A Paradise Built In Hell, Rebecca Solnit, 2009; page 173)
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