My perception is definitely things went down after the start of the pandemic, not only referring to this thread.
Most definitely covid had something to do with it. The pandemic caused a lot of conspiracy-prone inhabitants of this thread to fly totally off the chain, never to return to a state of mental balance...
sadly... many of the conspiracies became reality and we are not through that yet.
So who is to blame...
Not only conspiracies, there was a social shockwave going around the planet.
(i should not sound too dramatic, though)
This crisis has put our nerves and viewpoints to the test, not to mention the numerous facepalm events, that still make me feel like they left a slight groove on my forehead...
A good outlook how much we would fail in face of a real crisis of bigger magnitudes, and they definitely are already building up slowly.
Not to sound too negative, but humanity is very far from being able to "control" anything on this planet. Pretty risky for a "we shall address this later, let's just keep calm and continue observing". From an tech enthusiast's view like me, it's like looking at a historically overgrown piece of proprietary software, which every programmer is afraid to touch in fear of breaking things.
Imaginary developer: "Let's just let this thing run, it always worked in the past, so it will probably work forever. The smoke coming out of the vents should be nothing to worry about, right?"
Humans had always have to deal with crises and were never in control. It's always been that way.
So far... we have come very far. We were dying in our 30s not long time ago. Humanity is a huge success story in terms of development, if you ask me.
And if humanity doesn't make it, so bei it. I'm sure we are not the only life in the universe.
Like you said, it's all very complex. And we sure know that central planning is not the way to go in society. We all are the "programmers" you mention but not one of us has the perfect plan. It's a process taking thousands of years. I'm not even sure that you or I could even evaluate that realistically within our 100 years lifetime....
... we can just individually rely on our intellect, intuition and feelings and guess what is best... we are just a kind of animal moving around and not the designer of it all ...that would be nature or how you wanna call it
