Excuse the vulgar title, but it is probably a good description of the social realities that are found in a society experiencing cascading, interconnected problems it can't collectively solve.
There is a repetitive mechanic which makes things progressively worse, which is possible to spot if you stop for a minute. Our social tendencies, being closely coupled with our lingual/symbolic systems, tend to look for identifiable problems which can be immediately diagnosed, oftentimes in the immediately manipulable relationship with an individual or class.
As the increasing effects of a ubiquitous and intensifying strain are felt, we locate failures and dysfunctions in the closest proximal causes we can identify, blaming complex problems on the behaviors and actions of individuals that are often suspect to our own standards of behavior and action, standards which are usually formed by the outlook of our own personality, or the shared personality of conventional society.
And so to convention it is the deviant that causes problems, to the deviant it is convention, to the liberal it is the conservative, to the conservative it is the liberal, to the teetotaler it is the alcoholic, to the homophobe it is the homosexual, and so on. It is difference crashing into itself.
Which is not to say all causes are equally to blame - or equally innocent - after all, top-heavy things must fall, and the fall of the system will proceed in a certain direction. The better you apprehend that direction, the better you can fare.
