"Fingers of Instability"

"To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, soothing, gratifying and gives moreover a feeling of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown – the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing states. First principle: any explanation is better than none... The cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited by the feeling of fear..." Friedrich Nietzsche

Here's a good piece entitled "Fingers of Instability".
It's worth a read.  Here's a section of it, followed by another on how all this might pertain to us today.

"In this simplified setting of the sand pile, the power law also points to something else: the surprising conclusion that even the greatest of events have no special or exceptional causes. After all, every avalanche large or small starts out the same way, when a single grain falls and makes the pile just slightly too steep at one point. What makes one avalanche much larger than another has nothing to do with its original cause, and nothing to do with some special situation in the pile just before it starts. Rather, it has to do with the perpetually unstable organization of the critical state, which makes it always possible for the next grain to trigger an avalanche of any size."

Money quote, as it pertains to our society?  These, in my opinion:

There is a truism that goes a little like, "If something can't happen, then it won't." Let me make a prediction. We won't have a trillion-dollar deficit in ten years. Why? Because it can't happen. The market will simply not allow it.

...

That investor in St. Louis, or China or (????) will decide not to buy government debt at such low rates. The avalanche will start. And everyone will be surprised at the ferocity of the crisis. Except you, gentle reader. You have been warned.

In a society that is built almost completely on materialism and money, it is natural that a collapse will take the shape as being one that is primarily financial in nature.

Here's where I disagree with a lot of people.  Our economic sickness is not the disease.  It is a symptom.

Remember the three-year-old's question and ultimate problem solving tool...The incessant and relentless use of the word "Why?"

The financial catastrophe that I believe is coming to America -and Western civilization in general- is only a symptom of her greater sickness.  Money, economic, and financial collapse is only the mucus and vomit by which the sickness in our society might be expelled.

If it is not expelled -or maybe even if it is- this sickness will be terminal.