Sometimes I think in corny analogies - but the other night, my wife made a great dinner, so I cleaned up the kitchen and as I watched the soap bubbles form and burst in the sink as I worked, I thought about how various bubbles form in society, why they exist, how they react and what are the consequences that result.
Ergo, Mike's Theory of Bubbles was born.
Prosperity creates a bubble that protects the general society from the harshest consequences of natural law - but even then, those defenses are fragile and typically no more than one step away from natural savagery (for example, we replace war with politics and hunting/gathering with work and trade).
When a prosperity bubble lasts long enough, smaller bubbles form within the larger bubble that shield smaller groups from even the milder aspects of the natural world, allowing them to create worlds in which absurd and fantastical belief systems can exist. Normally, these bubbles are formed by the wealthy, the fantasy prone and those convinced the natural state of man can be permanently altered.
These are the "woke" bubbles.
These smaller woke bubbles take significant energy to create, defend and maintain (resources like money, power, influence) and as a result, these bubbles form a hard and prickly shell, the better to ward off attacks and challenges.
The problem is that these woke bubbles can exist only as long as their members can sustain them through the use of their resources, which are never unlimited. While they usually situate themselves in the center of the larger prosperity bubble, the better to absorb resources from all directions, but it often happens that the woke begin to draw resources from single sources and are drawn from the center toward the side of the prosperity bubble where the resources exist.
When they are simply drawn too near the edge where their spikes penetrate the outer bubble, this results in bursting the prosperity bubble for the entire society. The woke bubble's hard shell protects those inside it and they survive until the next prosperity bubble grows (think about how the "too big to fail" banks not only survived, but profited, from the mortgage bubble bursting).
But there is a way around the bursting.
While the woke bubble is in the center, it can be starved of resources if society recognizes how dangerous it is. That will either cause it to shrink or break apart far enough away from the wall of the prosperity bubble that it cannot pop the bubble for everyone else.
Not a real theory, per se, more of a thought exercise, but there she blows (pun intended).
I've got a similar notion about the stones we choose to carry. sharing the load can make it lighter, but some choose to carry their burdens solo, where others insist on others taking some of their load. Again, not so much a theory, as a thought exercise.