🚧 Obstacles

To understand why existing efforts to address existential risks are failing we must confront the entrenched barriers that obstruct meaningful progress.  These obstacles are what our strategies must be designed for, as they are often systemic features of our current political, economic, social, and institutional landscapes.¹  The barriers fall into five interconnected categories, each tied directly to degraded Foundational Factors (FFs):

• 🏛️ Political and Geopolitical Resistance: Sovereignty, nationalism, and geopolitical rivalry have been paralyzing global cooperation.
• = Economic and Vested Interests: Short-term profit motives and regulatory capture have undercut foundational resilience.
• 🤝🧠 Social, Cultural, and Psychological Barriers: Polarization, mistrust, and degraded wellbeing have eroded collective action.
• 🏛️ Institutional Inertia and Capacity Limits: Fragmented, under-resourced systems have not adapted fast enough to mitigate accelerating threats.
• 📀🧠🤝 Information Pollution compounds Social, Cultural, and Psychological Barriers

Each barrier both reflects and reinforces weaknesses in the core capacities society needs to survive and thrive. A realistic strategy must begin by understanding these obstacles in full.  Acknowledging and analyzing the realities of the barriers we face allows for the development of more robust and strategically sound pathways to overcoming them. 

In a complex system, many phenomena are both symptoms and causes — what begins as an outcome of systemic fragility may become a self-reinforcing barrier to progress. For example, widespread mental health challenges (🧠) and low social trust (🤝) are not only consequences of converging crises and degraded systems; they also actively inhibit society’s ability to respond, coordinate, or adapt. Similarly, political polarization or economic inequality may be intensified by systemic risk — but once entrenched, they become structural impediments to mitigation.

In this chapter, we treat these dynamics as barriers when they functionally obstruct progress on existential risk mitigation, even if they also originate from deeper systemic decline. This approach recognizes the presence of feedback loops and highlights the need for interventions that can interrupt and overcome vicious cycles, not merely treat surface-level symptoms.

🚧 10.1 Interlocking Barrier Dynamics

The barriers to effective existential risk mitigation are not merely a list of discrete obstacles—they are the emergent properties of a deeply interlinked and degraded system. This section maps the systemic dynamics that give rise to the specific barrier types examined in the rest of the chapter. These dynamics include reinforcing feedback loops between degraded Foundational Factors (🧠🔎🤝🏛️📀=🔌), and they help explain why so many well-intentioned efforts fail or stall. Understanding these interlocking patterns is essential before examining the five dominant barrier categories that follow: political/governance inertia, economic misalignment, social fragmentation, institutional rigidity, and information pollution.

• Economic actors (=) may fund disinformation campaigns (📀), increasing polarization (🤝) and paralyzing governance (🏛️).
• Institutional inertia (🏛️) enables entrenched interests (=) to block reforms, increasing public cynicism (🧠🤝).
• Polarized publics (🤝) amplify political resistance (🏛️), reducing trust in long-term planning (🔎).

Recognizing these interdependencies is critical for effective strategy. Targeted interventions that disrupt these loops—especially those that reinforce multiple Foundational Factors (FFs) simultaneously—represent high-leverage opportunities, as explored in Chapter 11.

🚧 10.2 Political and Geopolitical Resistance (🏛️)

Perhaps the most formidable barriers for reducing existential risks stem from the nature of contemporary politics and international relations. The very structures designed to manage collective affairs often actively obstruct the cooperation, foresight, and decisive action needed to navigate converging existential threats. Key dimensions include:

• Sovereignty Concerns and Nationalism: The principle of national sovereignty remains paramount.² While essential, it frequently clashes with the need for globally coordinated action on transnational threats like climate change 🔥, pandemics ☣️, or AI safety 🤖.³ Nations are often reluctant to cede authority to international bodies or agree to binding commitments perceived as infringing on national interests or Economic (=) competitiveness. This manifests as resistance to strong international treaties (hindering effective global Governance (🏛️))⁴, inadequate implementation of agreed goals (like climate NDCs or IHR core capacities),⁵ “vaccine nationalism” during pandemics (fueled by low Social Trust (🤝)),⁶ or prioritization of national security advantage over shared safety risks in domains like AI development or biosecurity ☣️.⁷
• Geopolitical Rivalry and Lack of Trust (🤝): The current era is characterized by intensifying competition and deep mistrust between major powers (e.g., US, China, Russia),⁸ severely degrading international Social Trust (🤝). ⁹This geopolitical climate poisons the well for international cooperation across virtually all X-Risk domains. Arms control treaties ☢️ are dismantled due to perceived threats (a failure reflecting low Strategic Literacy (🔎));¹⁰ climate negotiations 🔥 become hostage to broader rivalries; data sharing crucial for pandemic surveillance ☣️ or AI safety research 🤖 is hampered by security concerns (a failure of Governance (🏛️) driven by low Trust (🤝)); and blame-shifting further erodes trust.¹¹ This lack of trust makes verification difficult and paralyzes progress on issues requiring shared action, crippling effective global Governance (🏛️).¹²
• Domestic Political Polarization and Gridlock: Within many key nations, deep political polarization creates legislative gridlock and policy instability, undermining domestic Governance (🏛️) capacity.¹³ This is fueled by low internal Social Trust ( ) and often amplified by a polluted Information Environment (📀).¹⁴ Climate policy , pandemic response measures ☣️, and potential AI regulation 🤖 become highly partisan, preventing coherent long-term strategies. This internal division leads to policy volatility (e.g., repeated US withdrawals from global agreements),¹⁵ making nations unreliable partners and further damaging international Trust (🤝). Short electoral cycles incentivize focus on immediate issues over long-term existential threats, a failure of Strategic Literacy (🔎) embedded within governance systems.¹⁶

🚧 Case Study: The Failure of Pandemic Treaty Negotiations (2021–2024)

The World Health Organization’s attempt to establish a global pandemic preparedness treaty following COVID-19 illustrates how multiple systemic barriers converge to block action even in the face of widespread consensus about risk. Political fragmentation and nationalism (10.1 🏛️), lobbying from pharmaceutical and surveillance technology interests (10.2 =), public distrust rooted in misinformation and polarization (10.3 🤝📀), and bureaucratic inertia (10.4 🏛️) combined to stall or water down provisions on data sharing, equitable vaccine access, and biosafety safeguards.

Despite years of warnings and a catastrophic global event fresh in memory, no binding agreement was reached by 2024. This failure highlights how existential risks can remain unaddressed even after they have materialized—and underscores why targeted interventions in trust, governance, and the info ecosystem must precede or accompany any high-level coordination effort.

Overcoming these forms of inertia will require new structures that reduce dependency on centralized political consensus and instead emphasize distributed legitimacy and bottom-up coordination—approaches outlined in Chapter 11.  It will cover rebuilding functional trust (🤝) and demonstrating the value of decentralized resilience efforts can create new cooperation pathways even in polarized environments.  

🚧 10.3 Economic and Vested Interests (=)

Beyond politics, the structure and incentives of our current global economic system (=) represent profound barriers, deeply interconnected with governance failures and societal factors.

• Dominance of Short-Term Profit Motives (=): Prevailing Economic (=) models prioritize short-term growth over long-term sustainability and resilience.¹⁷ Investments in public goods like pandemic preparedness ☣️, foundational AI safety research 🤖, robust cybersecurity 🤖, climate adaptation 🔥, or ecosystem restoration 🌍 are often underfunded because their returns are long-term, diffuse, or hard to quantify (=).¹⁸ This reflects weak Governance (🏛️) unable to mandate long-term perspectives and poor Strategic Literacy (🔎) regarding the ultimate costs of inaction.¹⁹ This dynamic actively disincentivizes investment in Infrastructure Resilience (🔌).²⁰
• Vested Interests & Regulatory Capture (=, 🏛️): Powerful industries benefiting from activities driving X-Risks (e.g., fossil fuels 🔥; potentially aspects of AI development 🤖; intensive agriculture 🌍) actively resist mitigation policies.²¹ They wield significant Economic (=) power to influence Governance (🏛️) through lobbying and campaign finance,²² often shaping public narratives via the Information Environment (📀) (e.g., funding climate denial).²³ This “regulatory capture” means Governance (🏛️) structures fail to protect the public interest over concentrated private interests.²⁴
• Externalized Costs (=, 🧠, 🤝, 🔌): The current Economic (=) system fundamentally fails to price in the true long-term costs of activities that generate existential risk. The costs of climate change 🔥, biodiversity loss 🌍, pollution 🌍, or technological catastrophes (🤖, ☣️) are borne by society, future generations, and vulnerable populations (=), not fully by the actors generating the risk.²⁵ This lack of internalization, a failure of both Economic (=) design and Governance (🏛️) oversight, incentivizes continued risk-taking and hinders Fundamental Equity (=).²⁶
• Underfunding Public Goods & Foundational Resilience (=, ☣️, 🔌): Many aspects of existential safety are public goods systematically underfunded by market mechanisms.²⁷ Weak Governance (🏛️), often constrained by Economic (=) pressures (e.g., austerity, debt), fails to secure adequate public funding for critical areas like pandemic preparedness infrastructure (☣️, 🔌), basic scientific research, public health systems (🔌), or cybersecurity 🤖 for critical infrastructure (🔌).²⁸ This chronic underinvestment leaves foundational capacities weak.

These barriers are not experienced equally across regions. In many parts of the Global South, the political and economic constraints are compounded by the lingering legacies of colonialism, extractive economic systems, and asymmetric power structures in global governance. Calls for action on existential risks can be perceived as hypocritical or externally imposed when they fail to acknowledge these histories. Moreover, countries already experiencing the brunt of climate impacts (🔥), biodiversity loss (🌍), or pandemic fallout (☣️) often lack the fiscal space or institutional autonomy to respond effectively — despite having contributed least to the underlying causes. Any effective implementation strategy must therefore grapple with these deep asymmetries, and explicitly center justice, inclusion, and global solidarity (=, 🤝). 

On the other hand, targeted investment in resilience dividends — such as infrastructure that reduces disaster recovery costs — can realign incentives over time, as Chapter 11 outlines.  There we will discuss transforming these incentive structures demands both novel economic tools and alternative legitimacy mechanisms capable of rewarding resilience and long-term public goods.

🚧 10.4 Social, Cultural, and Psychological Barriers (🤝, 🧠)

Deeply ingrained norms, values, biases, and the state of collective wellbeing create significant hurdles.

• Pervasive Misinformation & Epistemic Pollution (📀, 🤝): The polluted Information Environment (📀) hinders shared understanding. Deliberate disinformation targeting climate science 🔥, vaccine safety ☣️, AI risks 🤖, and geopolitical narratives ☢️ fuels polarization, erodes Social Trust (🤝) in expertise and institutions (🏛️), and paralyzes public discourse.²⁹ AI-generated content🤖 threatens to dramatically exacerbate this degradation of Informational Quality (📀), further hindering the development of shared understanding needed for strategic literacy (🔎) and increasing background anxiety impacting wellbeing (🧠).³⁰
• Cognitive Biases & Strategic Illiteracy (🧠, 🔎): Human psychology struggles with low-probability, high-impact, long-term threats. Cognitive biases (normalcy, optimism, scope neglect, availability heuristic) distort risk perception.³¹ These inherent biases represent a fundamental challenge to achieving adequate Strategic Literacy (🔎) regarding existential risks.  Deficits in Strategic Literacy (🔎) regarding complex systems hinder effective individual and institutional responses. These factors contribute to under-preparation and reactive decision-making, harming Mental Wellbeing (🧠) through the resulting anxieties and emotional overload.³²  
• Erosion of Social Trust & Cohesion (🤝): Declining Social Trust (🤝) within and between societies makes collective action extraordinarily difficult.³³ Polarization prevents consensus. Lack of trust in Governance (🏛️) hinders compliance (e.g., public health mandates ☣️);³⁴ lack of trust in science hinders acceptance of evidence (📀);³⁵ lack of international trust prevents cooperation on global threats (🔥, 🌍, 🤖, ☢️, ☣️, 🦢,💀).³⁶
• Cultural Norms & Values: Deep-seated cultural values (consumerism (=), individualism, short-termism) can conflict with the behavioral shifts needed for long-term sustainability (relevant to 🌍, 🔥, 🔌, 🤖).³⁷ Shifting these requires slow cultural change, interacting with Economic (=) drivers and Mental Wellbeing (🧠).³⁸
• Psychological Stress & Maladaptation (🧠): The “polycrisis” environment degrades collective Mental Wellbeing (🧠).³⁹ Widespread anxiety, grief, and despair can lead not to action, but to maladaptive responses like denial, apathy, or escapism, further undermining the capacity for sustained effort (linking poor 🧠 to poor 🔎 and inaction) and vulnerability to manipulation (via poor 📀).  Beyond specific anxieties, widespread issues like burnout, depression, trauma, and substance misuse degrade the collective cognitive and emotional resources needed for sustained, complex problem-solving. This directly impacts individual and institutional capacity for strategic thought (🔎) and effective cooperation (🤝).

Building local communities of practice, like the Steward Scouts, can foster agency, emotional support, and shared meaning — countering despair and catalyzing engagement.  In chapter 11, we explore ways to rebuild shared identity and collective efficacy by strengthening relational infrastructure, supporting wellbeing, and catalyzing emotionally resonant forms of engagement.

🚧 10.5 Institutional Inertia and Capacity Limits (🏛️)

Even when political will exists, many institutions are structurally unfit to navigate the complex, fast-moving, and interdependent challenges of the 21st century. These limitations are not merely ideological or partisan; they are architectural. Institutional inertia stems from bureaucratic complexity, rigid hierarchies, legacy systems, and outdated mandates poorly matched to dynamic risks. Capacity limits — including staffing shortages, obsolete tools, and fragmented jurisdiction — further degrade the ability to coordinate across domains or adapt proactively. These constraints are especially severe during compounding crises, when demands on institutions surge just as their ability to respond is most impaired.

• Pace Mismatch & Lack of Adaptability (🔎, 🏛️): Traditional Governance (🏛️) structures struggle to adapt to the speed of technological risks (🤖, ☣️) and non-linear environmental changes (🔥, 🌍).⁴⁰ Regulatory processes lag; international negotiations are slow. This reflects a deficit in adaptive capacity and Foresight (🔎) integration within institutions (🏛️).⁴¹
• Fragmentation and Silos (🔎, 🏛️): Responsibilities are fragmented across agencies and levels of Governance (🏛️), hindering systemic understanding (🔎) and coordinated action.⁴² This leads to duplication, gaps, and conflicting policies, wasting Economic (=) resources.
• Insufficient Resources and Technical Capacity (=, 🏛️, 🔌): Many key institutions lack funding (=), personnel, technical expertise, and Infrastructure (🔌) to fulfill mandates. This capacity gap, particularly affecting Governance (🏛️) bodies in developing nations, limits implementation and enforcement globally.⁴³
• Weak Global Enforcement Mechanisms (🏛️): International agreements often lack binding enforcement, relying on national interest, peer pressure, and Social Trust (🤝) – all currently weak.⁴⁴ This fundamentally limits the effectiveness of global Governance (🏛️) for shared threats (🔥, 🌍, 🤖, ☢️, ☣️, 🦢,💀).
• Lack of Dedicated Systemic Risk Institutions (🏛️): The absence of institutions specifically designed to analyze and manage aggregate existential risk and complex interactions reflects a critical gap in global Governance (🏛️) and Strategic Literacy (🔎) concerning the nature of converging threats.⁴⁵

As described in Chapter 11, one key leverage point involves cultivating adaptive governance structures that embed foresight (🔎) and resilience into everyday operations.  It also proposes transitional governance strategies and hybrid models that can operate in parallel with legacy systems while accelerating institutional learning and adaptation.

🚧 10.6 Information Pollution as a Structural Barrier to Action (📀🧠🤝)

The degradation of the informational environment (📀) is not just a complicating factor—it is a structural barrier to existential risk mitigation in its own right. Epistemic pollution, including algorithmically amplified misinformation, state-sponsored disinformation, and commercially incentivized distraction, corrodes the very cognitive and social foundations necessary for meaningful action.

A society unable to agree on basic facts cannot coordinate solutions. This undermines Strategic Literacy & Risk Perception (🔎), erodes Social Trust (🤝), and fuels political fragmentation that blocks Governance (🏛️). Moreover, many powerful actors benefit from epistemic chaos, using doubt and confusion to delay regulation, prevent consensus, or reinforce economic status quos (=).

Countering these epistemic threats requires not only factual correction, but also the construction of resilient cognitive infrastructure: new norms, incentive architectures, credibility systems, and trust-building mechanisms. These strategies—detailed in Chapter 11—must be treated as core pillars of systemic resilience, not auxiliary concerns. Without them, no barrier can be effectively overcome, and no coordinated action can endure.

The table below summarizes the five core structural barriers and their most directly affected Foundational Factors, illustrating the systemic nature of the challenges outlined in this chapter.

Barrier Category	Primary FFs Affected or Reinforced
🏛️ Political and Geopolitical Inertia	🏛️ Governance, 🤝 Social Trust, 🔎 Strategic Literacy
= Economic Incentive Misalignment	= Economic Stability, 🔌 Infrastructure, 📀 Information
🤝🧠 Social Fragmentation & Psychological Strain	🤝 Social Trust, 🧠 Mental Wellbeing, 📀 Information
🏛️ Institutional Rigidity and Legacy Systems	🏛️ Governance, 🔌 Infrastructure, 🔎 Strategic Literacy
📀 Information Pollution	📀 Information Quality, 🤝 Trust, 🧠 Wellbeing, 🔎 Strateguc Literacy

🚧 Conclusion for Chapter 10

As this chapter has shown, the path to effective action is obstructed not by a single failing, but by a dense web of mutually reinforcing barriers:

• 🏛️ Political/geopolitical fragmentation undermines coordination across borders and timelines.
• = Economic incentives favor risk creation over long-term resilience.
• 🤝🧠 Social and psychological strain impedes trust, motivation, and strategic literacy.
• 🏛️ Institutional constraints prevent coherent, adaptive, or systemic responses.
• 📀🧠🤝 Information pollution compounds social and psychological strain

These barriers are not isolated obstacles—they are symptoms of deeper systemic dysfunction and, in many cases, active reinforcers of the very fragilities they obstruct us from resolving. As we have seen, each is tied to one or more degraded Foundational Factors (🧠🔎🤝🏛️📀=🔌), and together they form a dense web of self-reinforcing dysfunction. Overcoming these barriers will not be achieved through single-point fixes or siloed reform efforts.⁴⁶ Instead, it requires coordinated, multi-FF interventions that address structural drivers and unlock systemic leverage points. The next chapter outlines precisely such strategies—turning this diagnostic map of barriers into a practical, principled path toward action and transformation.

Chapter 11 turns toward these opportunities. It identifies high-leverage points where targeted, principled action can disrupt vicious cycles, reinforce resilience, and convert systemic fragility into adaptive capacity. By focusing on the most strategic interventions—those that weaken barriers while strengthening multiple FFs—we chart a realistic path from paralysis to possibility.

Next: ↗️ Leverage Points

Previous: ⚜️ The Steward Scouts

1. See Ortwin Renn et al., “Systemic Risks: The Challenge of Dealing with Complexity, Uncertainty and Ambiguity,” Risk Analysis 40, no. 11 (2020): 2156–70. [Discusses systemic features of risk landscapes]. ↩︎
2. Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 4th ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). [Classic text on state sovereignty in international relations]. ↩︎
3. See Chapter 1, Section 1.2 “Overview of Primary Existential Risks” (page 7) for the list of risks requiring transnational action. ↩︎
4. See discussion of challenges facing the Paris Agreement or the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). Example: Union of Concerned Scientists, “The Paris Agreement on Climate Change,” accessed April 23, 2025, https://www.ucsusa.org/climate/paris-agreement. ↩︎
5. World Health Organization (WHO), “International Health Regulations (2005),” accessed April 23, 2025, https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241580410[IHR Core Capacities monitoring often shows implementation gaps]. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), “Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs),” accessed April 23, 2025, https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/nationally-determined-contributions-ndcs[Analyses often show NDC ambition/implementation gaps]. ↩︎
6. See reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic, e.g., PATH, “Vaccine Equity,” accessed April 23, 2025, https://www.path.org/programs/vaccine-equity/. See also Edelman, 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer: Global Report (Edelman, January 2025) [Use latest version; links trust deficits to nationalism]. ↩︎
7. Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), various reports on AI and national security competition, accessed April 23, 2025, https://cset.georgetown.edu/; Filippa Lentzos, ed., Biological Threats in the 21st Century (London: Imperial College Press, 2016). ↩︎
8. Edelman, 2025 Trust Barometer. ↩︎
9. SIPRI, Yearbook 2024, Chapter on World Nuclear Forces [Discusses erosion of arms control]; Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) [Foundational for cognitive biases relevant to strategic literacy]. ↩︎
10. See, e.g., reports on US-China tensions impacting climate cooperation or pandemic data sharing. ↩︎
11. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye Jr., Power and Interdependence, 4th ed. (Boston: Longman, 2012). [Discusses cooperation challenges under complex interdependence, even with low trust]. ↩︎
12. See, e.g., Pew Research Center reports on political polarization in the US and other countries, accessed April 23, 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/. ↩︎
13. Francis Fukuyama, Trust; Samuel C. Woolley and Philip N. Howard, eds., Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). ↩︎
14. Simmone Shah, “Trump Is Bringing Project 2025’s Anti-Climate Action Goals to Life,” TIME, March 25, 2025; CNN, “Trump announces US withdrawal from World Health Organization,” March 10, 2025. [Use current dates reflecting latest available info on policy reversals]. ↩︎
15. Barbara Geddes, Politician’s Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). [Discusses impact of electoral cycles on long-term policy]. ↩︎
16. Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018). [Critiques focus on short-term value extraction]. ↩︎
17. World Health Organization, reports on pandemic preparedness funding gaps; Future of Life Institute, reports on AI safety funding, accessed April 23, 2025, https://futureoflife.org/; Climate Policy Initiative, “Global Landscape of Climate Finance” reports, accessed April 23, 2025, https://www.climatepolicyinitiative.org/. ↩︎
18. Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown Business, 2012); Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. ↩︎
19. American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 2021 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure (Reston, VA: ASCE, 2021); World Economic Forum (WEF), Global Risks Report 2025 (Geneva: WEF, January 2025) [Use latest edition]. ↩︎
20. See, e.g., reports by InfluenceMap tracking fossil fuel lobbying, accessed April 23, 2025, https://influencemap.org/; reports on lobbying by tech companies regarding AI regulation. ↩︎
21. OpenSecrets, data on lobbying expenditures and campaign finance, accessed April 23, 2025, https://www.opensecrets.org/. ↩︎
22. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010). ↩︎
23. George J. Stigler, “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 2, no. 1 (1971): 3-21; Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). ↩︎
24. Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); IPBES, Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (Bonn: IPBES Secretariat, 2019). ↩︎
25. Cross-reference Principle 4.8 “Foundational Equity and Justice (=)” (page 19). ↩︎
26. Mazzucato, The Value of Everything; Ostrom, Governing the Commons. ↩︎
27. See reports on WHO funding challenges, or analyses of austerity impacts on public health infrastructure in various countries. ↩︎
28. Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, and Elisabeth Lloyd, “The ‘Alice in Wonderland’ mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science: simulating coherence by conspiracism,” Synthese 195, no. 1 (2018): 175–96; reports from organizations like the Center for Countering Digital Hate on vaccine misinformation. ↩︎
29. Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie, The New Fire: War, Peace, and Democracy in the Age of AI (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022). [Discusses potential for AI-driven disinformation]. ↩︎
30. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow; Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (New York: Crown, 2015) ↩︎
31. American Psychological Association, “Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Inequities, Responses,” 2021, accessed April 23, 2025, https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/10/mental-health-changing-climate. ↩︎
32. Edelman, 2025 Trust Barometer; Putnam, Making Democracy Work. ↩︎
33. Margaret Levi and Laura Stoker, “Political Trust and Trustworthiness,” Annual Review of Political Science 3 (2000): 475-507. ↩︎
34. See studies tracking public trust in science, e.g., Wellcome Global Monitor, accessed April 23, 2025, https://wellcome.org/what-we-do/our-work/wellcome-global-monitor. ↩︎
35. Keohane and Nye, Power and Interdependence. ↩︎
36. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). ↩︎
37. Adam Tooze, “Welcome to the world of the polycrisis,” Financial Times, October 28, 2022; National Academies, Mental Health and Well-Being in the United States(2024). ↩︎
38. Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2012); Thomas Homer-Dixon, Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World on the Brink (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2020). ↩︎
39. Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). [Discusses institutional decay and adaptability challenges]. ↩︎
40.  Zolli and Healy, Resilience. ↩︎
41. Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1999). [Classic work illustrating bureaucratic fragmentation]. ↩︎
42. World Bank, World Development Indicators database, accessed April 23, 2025, https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators [Data on government capacity, resources, infrastructure in developing nations]. ↩︎
43. Andrew Guzman, How International Law Works: A Rational Choice Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). [Discusses limitations based on state interests and lack of enforcement]. ↩︎
44. Ord, The Precipice, Chapter 7 (“Institutional Failures”); Nick Bostrom, “Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards,” Journal of Evolution and Technology 9 (2002), http://jetpress.org/volume9/bostrom.html. ↩︎
45. Ord, The Precipice, 355-369 ↩︎
46. Ord, The Precipice. [Frames the moral urgency and calls for action]. ↩︎