The economics of consumption has replaced morality in politics, but it is possible to restore consumption-with-tests-of-changes-in-the-state-of-capital possible under commodity money, localized capital, regional markets, and social homogeneity and abandon simple volume of consumption under conditions of paper money, social heterogeneity, world capital, and worldwide markets, thereby ending hyperconsumption, including of genetic, social, institutional, cultural and civilizational capital.
In other words we lost the ability to test the changes in civilizational capital, by failing to measure them as trade moved from regional to national to civilizational to world scope – and in doing so our failure to include measurements of, and tools for measuring, human, cultural, institutional, genetic, etc capital was exposed and exploited, just as was our local tolerance for information stated with european law norm, christian values, and aristotelian reason.
I keep saying this but the problem of the 20th was a failure of our institutions to produce systems of measurement and incentives to defend capital in parallel with the commercial and monetary expansion.
The beauty of the western common law under which the first court finding that resolves a dispute over an innovation in means of irreciprocity, is that it responds the fastest to inventions of irreciprocity forcing us to continually innovate in means of competition under reciprocity.
The problem is that our law failed to modernize particularly in two areas (1) measurement of the very capital that provides our civilizational means of competition (human , informal institutional and formal institutional capital), and (2) expanding our law to cover innovations in deception for the purpose of irreciprocity and obscuring that very capital consumption, made possible by the industrialization of false speech, and the reformation of abrahamic supernaturalism, sophism and denial, into abrahamic pseudoscience sophism and denial: marxism, boazianism, freudianism, feminism, postmodernism, and political correctness: denialism.
We aren’t unique. It destroyed every empire i know of. Because what is accumulated rent seeking other than a failure to measure all capital transformation, and to create new incentives under the law to suppress newly available forms of parasitism that consume rather than produce human capital.
All civilizations collapse because they have exhausted the capital available to use in the reorganization of a pareto distribution of influences, and a nash equilibrium of rewards for preserving that new system of organization, in response to scarcities, shocks, changes in trade routes, conflcit, war (Physical, Ideological, religious, economic), and variations in the environment (drought, climate, water and river changes, continuous quakes, world volcanic activity – which aside from very large asteroids is the most dangerous of all.