What We Carry When the System Cracks

Helpers, healers, and the heartbroken: This is our call to act, not just to bear witness to collapse, but to create spaces for truth, dignity, and repair.

Jul 23, 2025

Have you felt it? That slow, quiet unraveling of the structures we depend on, the hospitals, government offices, and compensation pathways meant to support us.

Psychiatrists are leaving public hospitals, worn down by relentless pressure and inadequate budgets to do their jobs caring for the unwell. Public servants face soaring psychological injuries. Injured workers navigate mazes that retraumatize rather than restore. Families being fractured.

These aren’t isolated failures. They’re fractures in the very foundations holding us together.

Complexity Without Compassion

Our communities are woven from countless connections, rules, services, policies, and people, all meant to work together. But as these layers grow, without care and humanity at their core, they can become traps.

This is where Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies offers a critical lens. He explains that societies become more complex as they attempt to solve problems, developing numerous specialized roles, elaborate bureaucracies, and classes dedicated to managing information rather than producing resources. This complexity demands an enormous “energy subsidy” a huge investment of resources and wealth to sustain itself.

When this complexity outpaces the energy and resources available, structures begin to buckle under their own weight.

Lessons From Rome

Tainter illustrates this with the example of the Western Roman Empire. As agricultural output declined and population grew, the Romans faced shrinking per-capita energy availability. Their solution? Conquer neighbors to access new energy surpluses, grain, metals, slaves.

But as the Empire expanded, the costs of maintaining far-flung armies, communications, and governance grew exponentially. Eventually, these upkeep costs became too great to manage alongside new challenges like invasions and crop failures.

Efforts by emperors like Domitian and Constantine to tighten control only added strain. The Empire split, with the wealthy Eastern half surviving longer while the Western half fragmented. For many local populations, this “collapse” was not catastrophe but relief—barbarian conquerors were often seen as liberators from an overbearing and failing system.

Synchronous Failures and Today’s Cracks

Much like the Roman Empire’s complexity outstripped its resources, today our networks of care, finance, and governance are overloaded. Thomas Homer-Dixon describes synchronous failure, when multiple pillars falter together, magnifying damage and deepening fractures.

Psychiatrists leaving hospitals, rising psychological injury in public servants, and workers trapped in retraumatizing compensation systems are all part of this cascade.

Why Fixing From Within Isn’t Enough

Governments rush to patch cracks with laws and policies. But the old blueprints weren’t made to hold this weight. Fixes within these frameworks often delay collapse or deepen fractures.

We need a new way forward, a way to rethink the very foundations of care, justice, and support.

With our immense wealth and technological sophistication, however, we need not face such dreadful prospects. Instead of stumbling blindly toward the cliff, we can engage in a controlled, gradual, and partial process of social simplification and decentralization.
In other words, we can make the central problem we face the author of its own solution. Capitalism is struggling because it has raised expectations it can’t meet for most people. And it’s frustrating expectations precisely because of its phenomenal productivity, which, by freeing technological progress from dependence on large contributions of manual and clerical labor, has consigned ordinary workers to marginal economic importance and social status. But if high productivity is the culprit here, it can also be the way out. Since most people aren’t flourishing within the confines of the system, we need to redirect some of our resources and innovative capacity toward helping people achieve greater social and economic independence from the system. We need to reorient the pursuit of happiness so that more of it occurs without reliance on the market or the state. - “The Permanent Problem” is an ongoing series of essay about the challenges of capitalist mass affluence as well as the solutions to them.

The Courage of Diplomatic Defiance

Take Back The Frame is a weekly rebellion for helpers, healers, and the heartbroken healing moral injury.

True change demands diplomatic defiance the courage to say no to what harms us, to set boundaries, and refuse to play by rules that break people down.

It’s about building self-skills resilience, clarity, and tenderness that allow us to act with integrity and vision even when the path is unclear.

Holding Space to Heal Deep Wounds

When the harm is caused by vast, tangled structures, explaining it can feel impossible. Moral injury is a deep wound inflicted when trusted foundations betray us.

Research by Dr. Brett Litz and colleagues shows moral injury is more than psychological distress it ruptures trust, meaning, and self-worth. Healing requires safe, compassionate spaces where stories can be told, and agency restored.

Without this space, wounds deepen in silence and invisibility. At Take Back The Frame, we create this sacred space because before change can happen, healing must begin.

Radical Care and the Power of Renewal

Real transformation isn’t just tearing down it’s rebuilding with care, truth, and tenderness.

Here, we share stories that matter, practice embodied self-care beyond the surface, and support each other in reclaiming power to remake the world on our terms.

You Are Not Alone

If you carry the weight of fractured foundations, if you’re weary of patchwork fixes, this space is for you.

Together, we take back the frame.

Subscribe to join the rebellion. Share your story. Let’s heal, learn, and build together.

References

Tainter, Joseph A. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. Knopf Canada, 2006.
Litz, Brett T., et al. “Moral Injury and Moral Repair in War Veterans: A Preliminary Model and Intervention Strategy.” Clinical Psychology Review, vol. 29, no. 8, 2009, pp. 695–706.
The Permanent Problem (2022–). Ongoing essay series on capitalist affluence and social alternatives. Available via The Point Magazine or similar publication.
Didion, Joan. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968.