I'm torn on this. I think it's good to police flagrant fear-mongering and all other forms of predation on our worst qualities. But we also got here by people an

I'm torn on this. I think it's good to police flagrant fear-mongering and all other forms of predation on our worst qualities. But we also got here by people and systems preying on other bad qualities like complacency, laziness, helplessness, and blindness to shifting baselines. Perhaps more to the point: our world is stuffed to the rafters with complex adaptive systems--both man-made and natural--themselves threaded together by positive and negative feedback loops, punctuated equilibria, and participants trained on making decisions under these conditions. We don't know which threads will snap, nor when, nor where. We don't know how the other systems and participants will react to the ripples. We don't know if, how long it will take, or where disrupted systems will settle into new equilibria. In the face of uncertainty on this scale, I think there is some value to catastrophizing. We do this with uncertainty all the time. We imagine threats (both banal and catastrophic) to our systems and game them out. We make plans and run exercises. I'm not sure it's a bad idea, per se, to be gaming out dead-end scenarios.