Well put. Though I think the fight for place in pack still happens, it just becomes more complex in periods of prosperity because it is no longer about survival, which is relatively simple (food, shelter, security, etc.). The pack (society) no longer needs its individual members to provide simple things like that because they have been institutionalized. Instead, it becomes about striving and thriving to go beyond survival, which, it seems, is not what we've evolved to sustain for long periods. While prosperity provides the luxury of mixing and furthering ideas to take strides forward, we also create a ton of poisonous byproducts that eventually lead to a collapse of the societal golden age.
We love talking about generations, and I'd wager in most societies with a golden age, there was a generation (maybe 2 as TV may have accelerated the process) very like boomers, born into prosperity, who rebelled against their greatest generation's fearful pragmatism earned by first hand memory of the previous collapse. A prosperity generation was probably succeeded by a generation like gen X, who could see the mishmash mess created before them, but were still a little too comfortable to do much but mock it in youth and try to emulate in adulthood, which didn't work, and worked even less, for successive generations. The fallacy was seeing the actions of the boomers DURING the period of prosperity as the CAUSE of the prosperity rather than the result. The length of human lives and the difference between integrating information perceived directly vs. indirectly passed down through story virtually ensures that we will continue moving in cycles like this. Each generation had a slightly different struggle, depending on where on the curve they were born, and perhaps now we've completely exhausted avenues for establishing place in pack other than grabbing attention with a big truck or diarrheal flow of tiktoks. A collapse resets that, taking us back closer to the survival mode our neurological tools are more suited to handle, eliminates some of the byproduct buildup, and hopefully retains a few of the advances. Not that we should want a collapse, but we don't appear to have found another process for progressing.
In fact, I'd wager Musk's purchase of Twitter (backed by a ton of other wealthy, powerful people), was specifically to play a propaganda role in a long term effort to manage the collapse in such a way that they retain wealth and power through it. They may end up having to repeat similar actions to the wealthy and powerful people managing the previous collapse, which might surprise them.
