@lawfare so... This quote stood out to me, because it has a simple answer:

"""
Perhaps this unified field theory of why everything seems to be falling apart just about now would also explain why all of this stress accumulates just as society achieves unprecedented wealth, scientific knowhow, and human capacity for well-being.
"""

First, as an aside, the article fails to mention several aspects in the "meanwhile" category that seem equally salient to the ones it does: the conflict in Sudan (or also in the Democratic Republic of Congo). The ongoing epidemic of racism in the US that Biden's presidency absolutely failed to address. The crisis of patriarchy exposed by MeToo and the Epstein files which likewise had been largely ignored. Oh, and the quite possibly existential threat of climate change?

So who might have a "unified field theory of why everything seems to be falling apart?" bell hooks might, to name just one author. She might even have written dozens of books about the underlying causes of these very problems, going back decades. This isn't some deep unponderable mystery, unless you really want it to be. Unless you're invested in not learning certain lessons from history that threaten your comfortable world-view which imagines that before AI and the Ukraine war, things were great, and that US military dominance was a beneficial & peaceful influence on the world as long as it was being used "responsibly". There are dozens of other feminists, anarchists, critical race theorists, queer scholars, and others who have developed entire literatures explaining exactly why we might be in a bad place right now (and how AI is just a symptom, not really a cause).

But let's examine the rest of that quote too. "Society" achieves unprecedented wealth? "Society" achieves scientific knowhow? "Society" achieves human capacity for well-being? Who actually observes these benefits? A handful of wealthy white men, plus a few more people who only fit into one or two of those categories. Why only them? Because they achieve these things by *stealing from the rest of us.* How do they get away with that? Systems of oppression baked deep into children's books, legal precedent, founding documents, and school curricula which turn the rest of us against each other according to race, gender, wealth, class, caste, religion, etc.

It's no wonder that crisis strikes just as the privileged few achieve unprecedented wealth: they got that by making everyone else poor. It's no wonder that crisis strikes just as the privileged few achieve unprecedented scientific knowledge: they make sure most people can't even tell science from pseudoscience in order to maintain their grip on power. It's no wonder that crisis strikes as the privileged few achieve unrivalled capacity for their own well-being: the millionaires partying in Dubai buy their luxury with money they got from the sale of weapons to the RSF militias in Sudan.

In fact, the crisis of fascism that has liberals so worried, is really just a reaction by those privileged few to the growing threat of revolution. "Democracy" is outliving its ability to keep the proletariat in check, so the people who had a stranglehold on democracy have decided to dispense with it and try more authoritarian forms of government that they believe can continue to protect their interests while they continue to make money from burning down the world.

TL;DR: the problem is the concentration of power and the reification of this concentration through the teaching of oppressive social systems, and reading any one of dozens of well-known scholars would have told you that.