In the Bronze Age Collapse several tripwires conspired to happen at one. Trade, information networks collapsed. Bad roll of the dice.
Same thing happened after the Fall of Rome. Rome was a single point of failure, It was the glue to everything.
The Bronze Age trading networks and the Roman Empire were systems that collapsed.
I think Global Free Trade is the latest system to collapse.
In the other two cases collapse lead to a poorer, less informed, less creative culture for about 500 years. But things are accelerating so I expect the coming collapse to only last about 100 years.
