That’s the worrying part. Mathematicians have a bunch of ideas about this — they call it“Catastrophe theory” — not so much because it’s about catastrophic events in history, but about anything that can flip from one state to another based on tiny changes. So, for example, if you have a glass of water sitting on your desk and you knock something against it — most of the time, it’ll just rock a little bit and settle back down again — but with a slightly greater amount of force, it reaches that tipping point, when it tips over and floods your desk. The difference between tipping and not tipping is an infinitely small step — but the outcome is drastically different.

As we pile on more and more of these destabilizing decisions, we push the system closer and closer to that tipping point. One single bad decision can’t cause the system to flip — but enough bad ones will. No one single decision will flip the world into a major disaster — but we’re seeing a bunch of somewhat-interconnected decisions that could easily do it. We won’t be able to point to which decision caused the problem — but one of them will doubtless be blamed.